by Jamie Duncan
But when she tried to focus on it, there was a stirring at the back of her neck, in her throat, her brain, that familiar, alien coiling claiming her. She could feel it cutting the ties between herself and her body. Jolinar had taken her roughly, and the threads had been sliced clean through.
“No,” she murmured under her breath.
Not sliced clean through. Sam had remained herself. She’d gotten to be herself again. It had been only temporary, and Jolinar had forced her only because she’d been desperate. That’s what made all the difference.
Only it didn’t, not where the feeling was concerned. She covered her mouth with her hand. Forget this. It’s a distraction. Focus. In the distance, she could make out the shape of something, someone, waiting for them. She wanted to see the face. But what she kept coming up with was Jolinar looking at her in the mirror, using Sam’s eyes.
“Nearly there,” Hamel announced in a whisper.
Teal’c was watching her, one hand gripping the rope, the other ghosting over the bandage under his coat.
“Okay?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Here.” Hamel shook the light stick, and it guttered and went out.
Instead of total darkness, though, there was a tentative yellow light ahead, enough to show them that the wall on their right was broken by an intersecting tunnel. A few more pulls on the rope brought them to the edge of a sloped landing, where the narrow passage opened up into a small lagoon. After nosing the boat forward until there was enough of the prow exposed to allow them to crawl out, Frey held it steady while Hamel anchored it to a loop of wire in the wall. Water lapped against the hollow sides until the men let go and the boat turned into the current and stilled in the pull.
Crouching next to Teal’c at the mouth of the tunnel, Sam peered up into the shifting light. Torches, still a good twenty, thirty feet away in another cross-passage. No sound except the thudding of the crushers, more a shudder in the chest than a noise. She wondered how close they were to the active sections of the mine. Had to be pretty close if someone bothered to leave the lights on.
When Hamel crawled up beside her, she leaned close to his ear. He smelled like the river—empty, cold. “How far and how many?”
He nodded toward the light. “This place is well-hidden. Jaffa don’t come this way.” He paused to chew the edge of his stubbly beard. “Usually.”
“Then who left the torches?” Teal’c asked without moving his eyes from the tunnel.
“The Order. Word must have spread.”
Sam wondered if that was good news or bad. “Any chance there’s more up there willing to fight?”
“Not much. But they won’t interfere.” Again, that pause. “I don’t think.”
“Just as well,” Sam conceded, her voice pitched low as she rose and motioned Teal’c ahead of her. Fewer people to worry about.
Hurrying to keep up with Teal’c, Aadi kept his zat closed and clutched close to his chest. Rebnet followed his lead.
Behn startled her by clapping her on the shoulder as he passed by. “Now we kill Jaffa,” he said with a satisfied grin made more than a little ghoulish by the shifting light.
“Not until I say so,” she reminded him.
With identical grunts of assent, Frey and Hamel followed, but Eche hung back, hesitating. His usually pale eyes were wide and dark. His tongue passed nervously over his cracked lip.
“Someone should stay with the boat,” Sam said.
The relief made him seem a little boneless as he nodded.
Sam squeezed his skinny arm and smiled. “Get back inside it and keep low. Play out the rope until you’re in the dark. We won’t be too long, I hope.”
He nodded again, smiled wanly, part gratitude, part apology. At the top of the slope where the rest were waiting for her at the mouth of the intersecting tunnel, she turned back, but Eche was gone, and so was the boat. She didn’t pause for long. The rope anchored in her ribs yanked her forward.
“Let’s go,” she ordered, and they were moving.
The torches were jammed at irregular intervals into crevices along the new tunnel, leaving long swaths of darkness between them. Hamel urged the group forward at a pace that Sam would have thought imprudent if she hadn’t actually felt like running toward the vault. She set a part of her mind to work on that problem, the how and why of it. The rest of her attention remained focused on any dark patch large enough to hide a Jaffa.
But there were no Jaffa. At least not in this tunnel. The next one, though, was a problem.
There were three at the intersection, one in a crocodile helmet. From where she crouched in the shelter of the corner, she could hear their voices—one mechanical and echoing—but not what they were saying. She arched an eyebrow at Teal’c, who, standing over her, edged his face an inch around the corner so he could see.
“A disturbance in the city,” he breathed, his lips hardly moving as he leaned back and bowed low next to her ear. “They do not know of what nature.”
“Okay, maybe good.” Then, she twisted on her heel to pull Hamel closer. “How close to the vault are we?”
“Very near. Up there,” he hooked a bony finger past the guards, “and down a short passage.”
“More Jaffa, probably, then.”
He nodded.
Behn hissed between his teeth, and Frey cuffed him in the ear. Rebnet shushed them both and Frey cuffed him, too. Behind them, Aadi stood silently, his eyes glittering, watching Sam closely.
She turned back and studied the guards. The one with the helmet was the priority; they needed to blind the other Jaffa, stop them from sending backup. She was giving the “go” signal to Teal’c when the sound of boots—lots of boots—in the tunnel made him pull back and flatten himself against the wall. She held out an arm to stop the others as if she were a mother in the driver’s seat protecting her kids from a sudden stop.
Six more Jaffa came around the corner.
Sam cursed in her head. Frey cursed out loud, and this time it was Behn doing the cuffing. A guard at the edge of the now-sizable crowd turned his head toward the sound, and Sam knocked her temple against Teal’c’s knee when she ducked back around the corner. They waited. She pulled the knife from her belt and rose to the balls of her feet, nipped the blade in her palm so it was aimed down in her fist. She would have to go for the throat, above the cowl, or the seam where the chainmail shirt came together with buckles under the arm. Footsteps came closer as the augmented voice of the helmeted Jaffa rose and rattled around in the narrow space, echoes on echoes, giving orders that all seemed to be depressingly about standing between Sam and the vault. Teal’c was perfectly still. Hamel’s fingers stretched out, curled around the zat, stretched again. Even in the dim light she could see that his knuckles were white when they finally closed in a tight fist around the weapon. Frey’s breathing whistled softly in his chest. The others didn’t seem to be breathing at all.
Boots scraped on the stone a couple of feet away. In her mind’s eye she could see the intersection clearly, all of the Jaffa facing the one with the helmet, away from their hiding spot. If this one came around the corner, maybe they could take him down quietly, gain a little time. Going back wasn’t an option. Even the hint of that thought made the rope knotted under her ribs jerk insistently. She caught her group with a meaningful glance and laid her finger over her lips. A Jaffa-shaped shadow slithered up the opposite wall. She held her breath.
The explosion was muffled by the stone of the mountain, putting it somewhere up near the surface, but it had enough force to make the guard stumble. His bracing hand gripped the corner right beside Teal’c’s face. Aadi dropped to his knees, shoulders hunched against a stream of dust and small stones that rained from the ceiling, and Frey hunched over him, deflecting the debris with his back. Sam covered her mouth and nose against the dust while the ground rose up; once, and settled heavily as the shock-wave passed. Some part of her hoped that this wasn’t a fluke, but she had no reason to believe it. Still, it was
a nice coincidence. The timing was impeccable.
In the silence that followed, it took her a second to realize that the pounding of the crushers was gone. Someone had blown the plant, she guessed, and the naquadah in the ore had added a hell of a kick to the bomb. If she was right, they’d be damn lucky if half the mountain didn’t come down on their heads, or worse. But, if there was any luck left in the universe after they’d used up all that credit, the explosion would make a really nifty diversion.
To prove that the universe wasn’t quite as perverse and annoying as she’d begun to suspect, the shouting started, followed by a booted exodus of Jaffa in the direction of the mine entrance. She raised her eyebrows at Teal’c, and he leaned a quarter inch around the corner, raising one finger at her. Sam did a silent cheer.
She raised three fingers and lowered them one at a time, counting down. On three, she stepped across the narrow side tunnel to the opposite wall, getting a good view of the intersection as Teal’c lunged around the corner, fell to one knee with the staff level and crackling. But the lone Jaffa was looking the other way and only turned at the sound of Sam’s zat whining open. By then it was too late for him, and he collapsed with the clank of armor on stone. Sam keyed the zat a third time and his body disappeared. Through the soles of her boots, she could feel the tingle of the dissipating charge.
. Just as she was waving the rest of the crew forward the wall beside her head exploded under the impact of a staff blast, sending slivers of molten stone into her hair and the skin at the back of her neck. With a shout, she dropped to the floor, discarding her zat and the knife to bat the shrapnel away with her hands. Thankfully, her jacket took the worst of it, but she could feel the peppering of tiny burns, hissed as her fingers closed on one larger piece of heated stone and flicked it away. Then Teal’c was stepping in front of her, shoving her back into the wall hard enough for her shoulder to crunch and her teeth to snap down on her tongue. Crouched behind him, she couldn’t see what was happening, but she could hear zat fire and Behn’s voice, a wild, crowing laugh.
It took her only a second to get her groping hand on the lost zat, then she was leaning past Teal’c’s knees, firing toward a corner further along the passage where three Jaffa were darting in and out of cover. A second staff blast threw up dirt and stone a few feet away, raising a strangled yelp from that direction. Someone fell—Frey, she thought—and a third blast hit its mark, making the body jerk and dance a little in her peripheral vision before it went still.
A quick look over her shoulder showed her Hamel firing from the cover of the tunnel they’d followed up from the river, and Behn, miraculously unhurt, standing in the middle of the intersection firing as fast as the zat could load a charge, his mouth open wide in an unvoiced battle cry. Aadi was nowhere to be seen.
“We’ve got to retreat!” she shouted at Teal’c, pushed off the wall and got herself to her feet. As soon as she’d said it, the floor seemed to rock forward and back, leaving her unable to tell if it was her own dizziness or the shock wave of another explosion. Inside her head a voice snarled, No retreat.
She squeezed off another shot, and this time one of the Jaffa went down, sparkling with the discharge. Behn cheered and shot the man twice more before a near miss knocked him on his ass, his zat spinning away. The look of affronted surprise on his face was almost comical.
“Go!” Sam ordered.
He blinked owlishly while another blast filled the air between them with debris. When the dust cleared, he was on his back, one empty hand flung out toward Frey’s motionless body.
With one step, Teal’c was beside him. He bent and in a single, fluid motion, heaved Behn up by the arm and dragged him across the intersection into the narrow tunnel. A second later he returned, covering Sam so she could make a dash for relative safely. She threw herself against the wall and tried to catch her breath. Beside her, Aadi crouched with his zat open and his eyes closed.
“Where’s Rebnet?” she panted.
Without opening his eyes, Aadi pointed with the zat back the way they’d come.
“Great,” Sam muttered.
At her feet, Hamel was leaning over Behn, his ear to Behn’s mouth, listening for breath. The dust drifted in the air as Hamel bowed his head to Behn’s chest with a silent sob.
Sam laid a cool, sweaty hand against her stinging neck and turned away. “This is not going as well as I’d hoped.”
“It never does,” Teal’c answered.
“We can’t go back.” The admission made her feel better, as though any other option was literally too painful to consider. “We have to break through here.”
“True.”
“A stun grenade’s probably not such a good idea.”
Teal’c shook his head. “This is a contained space. We would be affected.”
“Yeah,” Sam muttered. Their banged-up state all but guaranteed that they wouldn’t recover as fast as the Jaffa. She chewed her lip and bounced her head gently against the wall, trying to shake something out of the tree. “We have to get them to come to us.”
“They will not.”
“We could surrender,” she said, with a small smile at Teal’c.
Hamel’s head jerked up, and he glared at her over his shoulder. “You will not.”
“Kidding,” Sam said, and the smile died on her lips.
“They will know if we do not all step out together,” Teal’c objected.
“They haven’t seen Aadi.” Sam couldn’t believe that she was even suggesting it. But it was either this or going in damn-the-torpedoes, which meant that someone else was going to die for sure. She turned to appraise the kid. His eyes were wide, but his mouth was a grim, determined line. He looked, well, about as old as he was—in other words way too young for this stuff. “Can you do it?”
He nodded.
“Okay.”
“You must not panic,” Teal’c told him. “Wait for your chance. Wait until they are both in view. You need only fell one of them. It will be enough for us to take advantage.”
Aadi nodded again, swallowed hard. “Just one. Yes. I can do that.”
As Sam swiveled on her knees to poke her head around the corner, she said to Teal’c, “Tell me this is a bad idea.”
“It is adequate to the circumstances and our resources.”
“Thanks for the pep talk.”
A faint smile was Teal’c’s only answer.
She held out the hand with the zat in it, made a show of deactivating it and tossing it away. “Hey, guys,” she called. “You got us. We’re coming out.” On the floor between her and the Jaffa, Frey was staring at her sightlessly, the hole in his chest still smoking.
With a deep breath, she stood and stepped out into view. Slowly, she held up her empty hands. When no one shot her, she looked over her shoulder and nodded. Teal’c and Hamel both came forward to flank her, their zats closed and held over their heads.
“Drop them,” one of the Jaffa ordered without showing anything but the end of his staff.
Teal’c and Hamel complied.
The Jaffa strode out into the centre of the intersection and brought his staff to bear. “Slaves and traitors,” he mocked, as he raised the staff to fire.
He never got the chance. A low shot from Aadi’s direction caught him in the legs, not fatal but enough. He crumpled as Sam and Teal’c lunged left and Hamel right, Teal’c coming up with his zat. Before he could advance on the remaining, hidden Jaffa, a staff blast whined and the Jaffa stumbled out from around the corner, clutching his chest. The expression he wore was eerily similar to Behn’s as he slumped to his knees and pitched forward on his face.
“What the hell?” Sam said, rising and activating her zat.
Brenneka swung around the corner and aimed her staff at the other fallen Jaffa. Two shots made sure he would never get up again.
When she looked at Sam, her grin was wicked with triumph. “And now we will go get your friend, this Nitori. Before I change my mind.”
The planet
Jacob knew as Heramos was a tiny hunk of barren rock Sam had once said was designated P44-007. This had led to a few truly awful James Bond jokes on Jack’s part, and some juvenile mocking by both Sam and Daniel, and then Teal’c had proven he knew more about James Bond than any of them by quoting lines from the recent movies. For Jacob, the memory was fresh in his mind while he tapped in the access code and decloaked the hidden tel’tak the Tok’ra had left behind on that world, one of many conveniently scattered around the galaxy.
Malek had been strangely quiet since they had stepped through the Stargate and left Hammond staring after them in the ’gate room. Even more interesting to Jacob, he hadn’t attempted to contact the High Council and tell them what the mission status was, or where they were headed. Jacob wasn’t sure whether he should be suspicious of the silence or grateful that Malek seemed content to let things follow their own course.
Be suspicious, Selmak said, confirming Jacob’s instinct. They weren’t required to report back—Tok’ra in the field often operated for months, even years, without apprising the Council of their whereabouts or activities—but Malek had been overanxious to do so all along. Now, he was carefully running a status check on the ship’s controls, and aside from a small frown creasing his forehead, there was no sign of that earlier firm resolve.
“The vessel is in good condition,” Malek said, settling into the pilot’s seat without asking Jacob if he would prefer to fly. “We have sufficient fuel for a journey twice the length of what we have planned.”
Jacob sat down in the other chair—what he thought of as the copilot’s seat, although Selmak was always amused by that reference, since no ship could have two pilots—and swiveled to look at Malek, who seemed absorbed by his task. “Malek,” Jacob said. “Stop that for a minute.”
Malek immediately pulled his hands away from the panel and folded them in his lap, but he did not look at Jacob. Another thing that could be taken two ways: either he was ashamed of his single-minded pursuit of his mission, or he was planning some deceit. Jacob had no idea which, but he liked to think he was a reasonably good judge of character.
