by Jamie Duncan
“What?” he said, drawing away from her.
Immediately, the character of the light in the chamber changed, dimming to ruddy, pulsing threads spidering across the walls, writhing with sinuous motion. He could feel it on his skin.
The compassion in her face was gone, but she tried to keep it in her voice. “Shhhh,” she said, leaning closer, following him as he backpedaled away from her. “It’s such a small thing.” Her fingers fluttered in his peripheral vision, one hand at each temple. So cold. “It’s such a small thing, this bit I took. And I will give you everything. You want to see. I will help you.” When he sidestepped her, circled around Aris to stand by Jack, she hunched her shoulders and turned in place, following him like a bird or a reptile, something predatory. The light traced itself across her body, was fractured against her scales, multiplied, and flung outward again, and Daniel could feel each flake like it was shrapnel, a thousand ghostly cuts.
“I’m hungry,” she said coldly, her voice deepening. “And it is such a small thing.”
Jack stepped between them. Momentary jealousy and anger stabbed through Daniel as Jack blocked her from view. He knew Jack was yearning for her just as Daniel was, but his hands were closed into tight fists, even the broken one with its bandaged finger angled outward, and his neck was stiff, unbending.
“If it’s such a small thing, then you could’ve done without it,” Jack said to Lorelei. “How ’bout you tell us why the Ancients locked you up in here.”
“They were unjust and afraid.”
Daniel nodded. “Because… why? Why do you do this, bring us here?”
“I am what I am.”
“And what’s that?” Jack demanded, holding out his arm to keep Daniel from getting closer to her.
“A repository of knowledge,” Daniel said as the realization took shape in his head. He had to grope for it, though, and he felt like he was abandoning his best friend. She looked stricken, betrayed, and he almost gave up, but Jack’s elbow pressed into his stomach and Daniel frowned, dragging his convictions into the light. “She gathers. She records. She takes.” He thought of all the glowing panels in the maze, thousands of them, memories gathered, recorded. “What happened to them? The beings you gathered from?”
Before she could answer, Aris came up on the other side of her. “I’ll give,” he said. “Show me the weapons, like those others, the ones on that satellite, how to find them. I’ll give you anything you want.”
She kept looking at Daniel and Jack. Although her face didn’t change and her head didn’t move, Daniel could feel her focus shifting from one to the other of them, because each time her attention drew away from him, the ache flared up in his chest, and the loneliness leeched into him like ice water seeping under his skin. She might be taking anything, and he couldn’t see it and couldn’t stop her.
“You have nothing I need,” she told Aris.
Even in the erratic light, Daniel could see Aris shaking with sudden rage. “I brought them here. Me. I brought them and I deserve something.” He jabbed the air above his head viciously with one finger. “Do you know what’s going on up there? I’m not leaving without something.”
“Then bring them a little further,” she demanded. She raised her hand and pointed at Daniel and Jack. “Them. There is so much there.” She twitched her head to the side, again, like a bird, and Daniel was transfixed by the reflection of Jack’s set features in her eyes. “In them are the memories of generations. In them is the knowledge of vast beings, these Ancients, these others, the serpents. These things are worthy gifts.”
“Yeah, not going to happen,” Jack said.
He leaned backward against Daniel, shoving him toward the door, and Daniel knew he was thinking mostly about keeping Daniel’s knowledge away from her. Even so, the cold of loneliness and jealousy in his skin warmed under that protective gesture. But Sebek strained against it. Keen pain slivered its way through Daniel. He opened his mouth to say something to Jack, an apology maybe—as if there were anything that could cover this, the sick irony of Jack being forced to protect what he hated—but Sebek exerted enough control to grind Daniel’s teeth together, and to add a sharp jab and twist to the sliver for good measure.
“Bring me out of this place. Bring me out. Bring me out there.” Lorelei advanced on them, but Jack held his ground.
“I said no.”
“I can compel you,” she said, her feral smile a promise.
The light was pounding now, like the worst migraine Daniel had ever had, and the red threads writhed along the walls, and the floor seemed to lurch and sway and the color was as loud as her voice, became her voice, the same words winding and jerking, splitting, doubling back on themselves, alive. They hissed and wailed in Daniel’s head, around and around, echoes chasing echoes until he had to put his hands over his ears, and still he heard it, insistent, inescapable. Inside his mind, he ran.
“Yes,” Sebek said. “Yes.” And Daniel could only watch as his own hand closed around Jack’s wrist, yanked hard and twisted his arm behind his back. He felt Sebek’s quick, hot flash of triumph as Jack crashed to his knees, and Lorelei laid her hand on Jack’s head.
Daniel couldn’t cover his ears when Jack screamed.
The ground heaved under her feet, and Sam dropped a crystal. Another explosion topside. She hunched her shoulders against the sand and small stones that pattered down around her, took the crystal from Teal’c without looking at him, and slotted it into place.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she repeated in a whisper, breathing dust. It was more than she could stand, the need to go faster, the need to get in there, the need… pure need. It yawned open inside her, bottomless, cold, so physical that one hand folded into a fist at her breast as if she could grab that need, hold onto it, and keep it from expanding, from swallowing her. Her whisper turned to a wordless panting. She knew that there was something… something on the other side of the force field that she needed to find, someone, but that concern was barely a pinprick of light in the vastness of wanting. Sam forced her hand back into motion and used it to realign the crystals inside the Ancient panel. Someone was crying, a pitiful wail of need and longing. It could have been her. She couldn’t tell.
Sam barely registered the sound of staff fire behind her, but she knew when Teal’c left her side and stood at her back—his shadow fell across the panel and she had to lean in closer so she could see. She vaguely heard him shouting orders. The wall a few feet to her right exploded in a cloud of vaporized stone. Sam shielded the panel with her body while heat and shrapnel peppered her back. Another shot, to the left, this one connecting with the force field. The flare of light blinded her.
She kept working by touch alone.
A second shot to the field and now seething static crawled across her skin. A third. The crystals under her fingers were hot. When her vision recovered, she could see them as floating blocks of color. Blue, green, white, red. The crystals flickered, went out, flashed on again, all white.
Behind her, someone’s shout was sliced off abruptly. Another began, furious, raw-voiced, and it joined with the crying in her head, louder and louder, until it threatened to crack her apart and she had to open her mouth to let it out.
The ground shook again. She staggered, put out a hand to steady herself, and connected with the shield. Sam let out a screech as her arm passed through. Searing pain, as though she’d been flayed.
Sam sat on the shuddering floor and looked at the arm. It was blue to the elbow where a sparkling line circled her flesh. For a second, before the shield steadied, she had seen each of her bones glowing white through her skin. When she’d tried to pull herself out, she’d almost passed out from the pain. With a deep breath, she got her feet under her and stood, dragging her arm up with her. It was like sliding through blades of glass, but there was no blood.
Gouts of dirt erupted from the ground as another blast hit near the base of the shield. The rocks and sand shot through the flickering barrier like fireworks, tum
bling across the stone floor on the other side, and each grain sent out a ripple of light like a knife stabbing through her. One direct hit from a staff against the shield and… well, she didn’t even want to imagine it.
Teal’c was down on one knee, steadily firing his staff up the ramp toward the access tunnel. There was no cover for him, but he was unharmed so far. Aadi and Brenneka were on either side of the ramp, flattened against the wall. Brenneka darted out and got off a wild shot, then threw herself back to escape an answering blast from the top of the ramp. Hamel was lying face-down in the middle of the floor.
The whole vault chamber was full of choking dust so that every staff blast and zat discharge seemed to expand outward in a halo of soft-edged light. In the haze, it appeared to Sam as though everything were moving in slow motion, dreamily. She watched a bolt of heated plasma slice through the air from the ramp to the wall right beside the shield panel, and the sparks rained out like music, danced on the floor around Teal’c’s kneeling form, and died. The shield pulsed. Along its surface she could see the deadly wave of distortion coming toward her.
She lunged to the side, forced herself through the resistant shield with a shout that was part battle cry, part scream of pain. She was being torn apart in layers—skin, muscle, bone—and when she hit the ground on her shoulder and skidded through the gritty debris on the other side, she was numb, stripped of nerves.
It took too many precious seconds to find her limbs again and to get them to cooperate with each other so that she could crawl back toward the barrier. Through the shimmering light, she could see Hamel stirring, drawing his knees up under him, groping for his zat. The side of his face was blackened. Aadi was still crouched low in the corner where the ramp met the wall, and he was pointing at her.
Teal’c and Brenneka turned as one.
Sam saw Brenneka’s mouth open—“Go!”—before Brenneka spun away, rising from her shelter, staff coming up, laying down cover fire.
Following her example, Aadi sneaked the zat up above the edge of the ramp and fired blindly. Hamel half-crawled across the foot of the ramp and rolled off of it into shelter beside Aadi.
Teal’c hesitated for a moment, but it felt like hours to Sam, who watched from the other side of the barrier, still caught in the adrenaline-rush and the memory of pain that distended time and twisted space. But it was more than that, too. It was taking too long to move forward. She had to move forward. Even the fire in her skin couldn’t warm the icy desire in her chest. Hurry, hurry, hurry.
Once he was moving, Teal’c wasted no time. He flung himself at the barrier, passing through in a corona of intense blue light. Sam held up her hand against it, the bones of her fingers ghostly in blue skin. He tumbled past her and landed in a panting heap, but he was down only for a second before he heaved himself onto his knees and raised his head to look back at the vault chamber.
It was quiet on their side of the barrier, no sound at all except the rasp of their breathing and, from somewhere far away, a child crying. On the other side of the shield the battle raged on silently. Staff blasts gouged holes in the stone floor. Zat fire crackled through dust-filled air. Another shot hit the shield. Sam saw it coming and flattened herself, arms around her head. Teal’c did the same, throwing his body over hers. The passing light scoured them. Teal’c didn’t shout out loud, but she could feel it shuddering through him.
When they raised their heads, the shield was flickering. It rippled once, and again, then disappeared for a second before flaring back to life. A distant part of Sam’s brain hoped that, by the time they’d made their way back with the Colonel and Daniel, the shield would have fallen completely. But that was a distant part of her brain. Most of her didn’t want to consider the idea of leaving. Only going forward. Only that.
She was turning away from the barrier when she caught sight of Hamel, lurching up from cover, one foot on the ramp. His zat was gone. A Jaffa was standing over him, eyes gleaming red above the cruelly smiling crocodile’s snout of his helmet. The staff weapon was angled down at Hamel’s head. It crackled, ready to fire. But before it could, Brenneka leaped out from the other side of the ramp, swung her staff in a low arc and connected with the Jaffa’s legs. Someone with Teal’c’s bulk and power might have been able to sweep the Jaffa onto his back, but Brenneka wasn’t Teal’c. The staff snapped out of her hands and spun away with enough momentum to bring it to the edge of the shield. The Jaffa planted the heel of his staff on the ground, twisted with more grace than should be possible in his heavy armor, and caught Brenneka by the throat. She kicked at him as he lifted her off her feet. Behind him, Aadi was straightening, arms stiff, zat aimed. The Jaffa jerked Brenneka sharply, twisting his wrist, and her head lolled back, eyes open, as her body went as limp as rags.
Aadi was screaming something as he fired.
“No.” Sam took a step toward the barrier but was brought up short by Teal’c’s strong grip on her arm. “Aadi!” she shouted and waved him toward the vault. He didn’t turn to her or stop firing.
When she stepped forward and touched the field, she let out a yelp as pain sizzled up her arm into her neck. For now, there was no going back through the shield.
“They cannot hear,” Teal’c said. The ground heaved again, and rubble crashed silently beyond the tunnel mouth, belching a new cloud of black dust. “The tunnels are unstable. We must go on if we are to find the Colonel and Daniel Jackson.”
Hamel picked up the fallen Jaffa’s staff and fired over and over up the ramp, Aadi at his side. The dim shape of a Jaffa stumbled away from the rock fall and was caught by Aadi’s zat.
“We must go,” Teal’c repeated with a tug on her arm.
Sam pulled the sleeve of her jacket down over her hand and swiped tears and sweat from her stinging eyes. She nodded and turned to face the hallway behind them.
The erratic light of the failing shield lit their way to the first fork in the path. Sam stood at the crossroads where the two new hallways diverged and peered first down one, then down the other. They looked identical. Narrow, low-ceilinged. The walls were covered with the same glyphs as the vault door, except these seemed to be writhing. It took her a moment to realize that this was an effect of the ugly red light in the walls, which pulsed and flickered like a stuttering heart. After just a few seconds, looking at it made her dizzy, so she looked at Teal’c instead.
Teal’c crouched, fingering the jagged line scratched into the wall. He looked down the passage to the left. “This way.”
As soon as he said it, Sam knew he was right, as surely as if a voice had told her she wasn’t going to die after all. The relief was so intense that tears prickled in her eyes. All she had to do was follow that feeling, now. She set off down the hallway at a run.
If someone had told Jack way back when that a time would come when he’d prefer being ribboned to death to the alternatives, he’d have raised an eyebrow, but he wouldn’t have discounted it. In some part of his mind, he’d always known that the universe had something way worse in store for him than that. For a while he thought he’d felt it when the human-form Replicator, First, had stuck his fingers in his head and picked the locks on all boxes where Jack kept the really painful stuff. If he’d been capable of anything coherent enough to pass for thinking, Jack would have remembered the Replicator’s probing as a gentle thing, say, a nine on the agony scale. What he felt as that creature with the mirrored eyes touched him—there wasn’t even a scale for this. First had been incisive, slicing and winnowing his way to the core of things, elegant. Even Ba’al had been a gentleman by comparison. This was Jack the Ripper, if Jack the Ripper had been a wolf. With rabies.
Jack knew he was screaming—it was a fierce column of fire somewhere at the edge of his awareness—and that was a good thing. Screaming meant he wasn’t really gone, that he hadn’t been shredded, or atomized. He still had something that could feel pain. So he willed himself to keep screaming.
Daniel wouldn’t like it, though.
Daniel’s
grip had twisted his arm, brought him to his knees, held him there like a sheep on an altar, offered up to her. Sacrifice. Appetizer. Bargaining chip. Daniel wouldn’t like that part, either. A slow-moving slither of darkness wound through the jagged, livid landscape of Jack’s mind: regret. Jack should have killed him sooner, before he had to watch his own hands give Jack up to… whatever the bitch was doing to him.
She was eviscerating him. Vivisecting him. If it had been a physical thing, he’d be looking at his own limbs stripped of flesh, his heart there, hanging from bloody shreds in the cage of his bones. She clawed through the meat and matter of him, leaving behind tatters of thought, guts, gored memories, dreams torn open and undone as she dragged herself through his mind. God, she was… huge. She went on forever and ever, scales scraping across his surface thoughts with a hiss of protest, scouring. And for all the reptilian suppleness of her, she was spidery, a million probing, inquisitive limbs everywhere, scuttling into crevices, prying open every closed door, tearing out the contents and dissecting them with dexterous fingers, moving on, moving on, moving on, looking for something.
What?
Distantly, he felt Daniel’s fingers like handcuffs around his wrists. Sebek was laughing. I’m sorry, Daniel, Jack thought, but the apology barely had a chance to form before it was threshed and discarded, and Jack was left with only the slowly widening pool of loss, wordless, congealing. It had a sound, a long, low note fading under the frenetic staccato of her searching.
For what?
Jack would give it to her, tie it up in a bow and write best wishes on the card if it only meant that he could fall down and Daniel’s hands wouldn’t have to hold him anymore. No. He wouldn’t. He would never, never, never. But the spidery thing skittered through him, let him hear Sebek laughing, and told him in its sibilant, insistent voice that he would. He’d give it up if it meant that Daniel didn’t have to be an accessory to this anymore.
All at once, there was a pause, a gasp of triumph he felt as an electric shock along his spine, jerking his head back against Daniel’s thigh. She crooned with the joy of discovery, and it was blue-black cold fading to pus-green around the puckering of an old wound.
