by Jamie Duncan
Kanan.
It was Kanan she was after, but there was nothing left of the Tok’ra but a scum around the edges of Jack’s memory of Ba’al, an oily residue of Kanan’s motivation, his actions that had led only to his host’s capture and torture. Mostly there was a blank space scored and pitted by Ba’al’s repeated attempts to find out what Jack knew, to harrow Kanan from Jack’s memory. For Jack, Kanan was only a thing he’d grasped at and never really found. He was a nightmare, insubstantial and still clinging to the waking world as a shudder of unease, lingering resentment. What she could find was only that Kanan wasn’t evil, that he really did believe in symbiosis, but still, he was superior and thoughtless and ultimately Jack was his machine. And she found that Kanan carried in his blue blood everything any snake in his line ever knew. The thrill of elation that passed through the invader in Jack’s mind was followed by a sudden frustration that exploded outward as dark, seething anger.
And then she was gone.
Jack slumped forward over his knees, barely caught himself with numb hands before his forehead cracked against the floor. He lowered himself down and gingerly rested his cheek on the cold stone.
“Where is it?” Lorelei hissed, her voice like a serrated blade across Jack’s brain.
He felt Daniel’s body moving away from him. Near his head were a pair of heavy black boots. Aris.
“There is nothing here,” Lorelei said, the edges of her voice jagged. Jack felt a swath of cold slash across the rubble in his head. “There is promise but no… no… no—” Her voice staggered around in the debris, aimless.
“It is here, in us.” Sebek’s voice.
Jack pulled his hands in under his shoulders and started to heave himself up.
Sebek was still talking. Daniel stepped around Jack. “And so much more. We can take so much more from this vessel. He carries the knowledge of the Ancients. Those who imprisoned you. Those you hate.”
Her hiss sizzled across Jack’s vision. As he straightened, sitting on his feet now, the room heaved. That may have been in his head, but one look at Daniel, whose feet settled into a broader stance, said that he felt it too.
“We can take it,” Sebek said, his voice oil-smooth, insinuating. “You can tear it from him and we can share this, this and all that I know, all that you know. We can rule. We will be great.”
Jack managed to raise his head, lift it past the tipping point so that it lolled back on his boneless neck. Daniel’s face was ecstatic, his eyes bright in the lurid light. His skin was reddened, his face glistening with sweat. His hands were held out to her. Sebek was offering Daniel to her.
“Nnngh—” Jack said before his momentum started to carry him backward. Aris caught him with his knee and shoved him upright again.
Lorelei’s head gave that same oddly birdlike twitch as she assessed Sebek. “I know the host will be a machine to you. I will not be a machine to you.” Her chin came up and then fell again as she aimed those lifeless eyes at him. “I am what I am. No less.”
“More,” Sebek promised, and his smile was wide and ugly.
Jack struggled to get up, but his muscles were jelly and Aris held him in place. He pushed Aris back, knocking him away, but he barely had the strength to get to his feet. Walking would take more muscle than he had to spare; the heavy gravity anchored him to his place. There was no way he could move. Sebek was moving, though, stepping toward that grotesque thing, and she extended her arms to him in a parody of embrace. Her form nickered, disappeared, then reappeared on the other side of the room, her back to the far wall which pulsed with deep blue light. Her arms were spread wide. The winding tendrils of light in the walls converged on her there, pierced her, ran through her. They pulsed like a heartbeat. She was color and light.
“Do not deny me,” she crooned. The sound of her voice was a flare of pleasure, stripping will away. Jack focused on hating her, on the threat she represented, and the desire to join her receded. Sebek took one more step, then another, and stopped, his foot inches from the floor, frozen in mid-stride.
“Stop,” Jack shouted. “Yes, Daniel, fight her, damn you! Fight this!” His words were felled and flattened by the force of her attraction, which battered him back even as she tugged Sebek to her with invisible strings. The deep red flush on Daniel’s skin turned impossibly deeper. He was panting now, a sign of the struggle Jack hoped to God was going on somewhere inside Daniel, a battle for his life, or what was left of it. If she took the Goa’uld genetic memory, or Daniel’s ascended knowledge, they were all screwed. He needed a weapon. Anything.
Aris had a weapon. And he had a knife.
“Are you just going to stand there?” Jack said, turning on Aris, who was watching with a mix of rapt fascination and horror. “Don’t you get it? Do you want that thing loose on your planet?”
Aris turned to look at him, and it was as if Jack’s presence barely registered with him. “She can’t really leave here,” he said, his eyes narrowing as though he was struggling to make out Jack’s face. “She’s not real.”
“She looks pretty damn real to me,” Jack said.
Daniel let out a low moan, a sound that wasn’t Sebek but all Daniel. His entire body jerked, arms contracting in, palsied and curled to his body, hands rigid, legs bent at the knees. He fell backward, convulsing.
Jack willed himself forward, but he only managed a single step before he was on the ground, where he could use the floor to help him. He crawled, but the air was quicksand, and he was sinking. “Come on,” he gasped, pinned by his own weight. He could sense that thing behind him, could hear her sickening, inaudible song, like pressure rising in his ears, like falling too fast from high altitude. Daniel turned his head, and when he met Jack’s eyes, an agony of fear and despair stared out at Jack. White foam bubbled at the corner of his mouth. Daniel lifted a hand and smeared it away with his fingertips, looked at it and back at Jack. As clearly as if Daniel had said it out loud, Jack knew he was dying—the host, deteriorating, unable to withstand the pressure of that thing’s attention.
“Don’t,” Jack whispered, unsure of who it was meant for. “You’re killing him.”
The thousand-pound weight on his chest lifted and his lungs filled with air, and he could move. He slumped to the ground, trying to get his bearings, but Sebek was up and moving, his eyes a flash of yellow determination, fixed on Lorelei’s shifting shape. Jack sat up and twisted to look at Aris, who moved to put himself between Sebek and the wall.
“Now’s your chance,” Aris said, his blaster leveled at Daniel. He lifted the knife from its holster and tossed it to Jack.
In his hand, the knife was cold, and a trick of the light stained the edges red. Jack’s grip on the hilt was sure, and he saw Daniel’s pleading stare, heard his own promise to his friend echoing back to him from so long ago. He couldn’t let Sebek give anything away. Not his own knowledge. Not Daniel’s, either.
He couldn’t let Sebek give Daniel away.
His eyes flicked to Aris, then to Sebek, and for a moment, they all stared at one another. Lorelei’s vacant crooning had begun again, but she was slithering toward them now, although she was still there, against the wall, and the sensation was ants, bugs, a million spiders creeping over Jack’s body. He planted his left foot on the ground, ready to shift his weight, and glanced up at Sebek, trying not to see Daniel there and unable to see anything else.
One quick cut, one twist, and it would be over and this would be ended. He wasn’t close enough, but it was his only opportunity. All he needed was a little luck. Aris stepped back.
Jack lunged.
Sebek was stronger in Daniel’s skin than Jack would ever have given him credit for. He grappled for the knife as his mocking smile disappeared behind his efforts. Jack bashed out a foot and caught Sebek’s kneecap; Sebek barely paused as he struggled to keep Jack at bay. They danced across the room like broken marionettes, light playing over them. Over the rasping of his own breath, he could hear the sighing of metallic tendrils releasing
Lorelei’s physical form, one after another, as she disengaged from the wall. And there were two of her, then, one solid and real, the other like a ghost, an insistent yearning in Jack’s head, in his mind’s eye. As the last connections hissed free, the projected Lorelei flickered like a fading signal. But she stepped nearer and nearer—real or an illusion, he couldn’t tell—and the sharp echo of her voice
give up give up give up give up was blood filling Jack’s ears and eyes, drowning all sound and sight. His hands slipped on Daniel’s sweaty skin and Sebek pushed him, throwing him aside with some reserve of strength dredged up at a dear cost to Daniel. Jack caught his balance and turned to see Sebek hurl himself at Lorelei, the real one, grasping at her like a lifeline, twisting his hands against her parody of skin.
“You will be our host, and we will live forever in you,” Sebek rumbled, and his mouth opened against her mouth, into her scream, her desire. His body stiffened, and Jack shuddered as the rustle of scales scraping together filled the room. Daniel’s body tipped slowly backward, his hands sliding away from her face like a lover left behind, and he fell to the stone, fresh blood coating his parted lips and trickling from the corners of his mouth, over his chin. He gave a strangled cry and coughed. Jack stumbled to him, hunched his shoulders away from Lorelei as he knelt by Daniel and turned him onto his side. Daniel choked out a mouthful of blood. Jack didn’t need to look to know that Sebek had left the premises. Daniel was going to die here, bleed to death from the back of his throat, torn open by the thing that could have saved him.
Lorelei’s face was tilted up, and her soulless eyes were fixed on a point above them. She stretched out her arms, and when she spoke, her voice was amplified, a Goa’uld times ten. “Now we are nearly complete,” she said, the sibilance of her voice an aural house of mirrors. Her repulsive joy made Jack’s skin crawl.
Daniel reached up a hand to his throat, then gripped Jack’s arm. He choked out another mouthful of blood, but, miraculously, it appeared to be less than before. “Daniel,” Jack said, and was rewarded by a quick nod. He grabbed the back of Daniel’s t-shirt and pulled him across the ground, away from Lorelei. Then he turned his rage on Aris. “What’s it going to take?”
By way of an answer, Aris pointed his weapon at Jack. “Take Jackson and go,” he said, still watching Lorelei’s ecstatic rapture.
“You still think this thing can be useful to you? Are you nuts?” Jack hissed. There was a part of him—the part interested in self-preservation and in getting Daniel the hell out of there—that wanted not to care, that wanted to leave Aris and that thing down there together. The other part of him, the part interested in keeping the galaxy safe from über-Goa’uld, was stronger. “Shoot it now, damn you! Or give me that thing and I’ll do it.”
“Don’t make me tell you twice,” Aris said, aiming the weapon directly at Daniel.
Lorelei turned then, and the pressure surged in Jack’s brain again, the feeling of freefall. “There is more in you,” she said, staring at Daniel. “Much more. You may give it to us now.” She stretched out her hand toward Daniel, and Jack knew with awful clarity that Daniel had two things that might interest her—all his knowledge of Earth’s defenses, and his ascended knowledge. Either way, she was going to leave him a husk, burned out, useless. Dead.
“Oh, hell no,” Jack said. He hauled Daniel bodily to his feet and slung Daniel’s right arm over his shoulder. The motion made Daniel retch, and he spat and choked out blood. Full-blown nausea, overpowering, and the stench of rotted flowers assaulted Jack, and he felt his own body weaken, even as he tried to support Daniel. He took a step toward the door, but his legs gave out and he pitched forward, falling half on top of Daniel. He was heavy again, sinking into the floor, and the sounds surrounding him were children screaming and worlds dying, and he wasn’t responsible, he didn’t want to know, he had to get moving and get them out of there.
“Sir!”
Carter’s voice. Another bit of his imagination breaking free. He got a knee under him, forced his arms to lock and lift his body. He heard the sound of zat fire, and something like an unholy scream that shivered down his body.
“Sir!”
When he raised his head to disavow the phantom voice, he saw Carter crouched at the doorway, staring at him with urgent concern. If she was a hallucination, she wasn’t the nice kind, all pristine and beautiful, because she looked like she’d rolled in ten tons of dirt before charging in like the cavalry. Teal’c was with her—no, not with her, coming toward Jack, loping across the room as if he couldn’t feel the world sitting on top of his body. Jack fell back down to the ground, and rolled over onto his back.
“Teal’c,” he gasped. “Get Daniel out of here.”
“O’Neill,” Teal’c said, pressing a zat into his hand.
The familiar shape of the weapon in his grip worked its own kind of magic, recalling a sense memory of his own that was a solid point of reference in the kaleidoscope of color and sound and the crushing weight of wanting and horror. Jack rolled onto his shoulder and then up onto his knees. Aris was still there, between him and the creature. His blaster was still aimed at Daniel, but he turned slowly—everything seemed to move so slowly—and aimed the gun at Sebek-Lorelei instead.
“Get out or give up,” Aris said to them.
Give up, give up, give up, the monster sang in Jack’s head, only now her thin voice, the keen blade of ominous yearning, was weighted down by the symbiote’s arrogance. Jack could feel it bearing down on his chest, cracking ribs, breaking skin. But he could also feel Daniel shuddering as he curled against Jack’s legs.
“Get him out of Here,” he told Teal’c again, and this time Teal’c stood and began untangling Daniel so Teal’c could lift him. “Carter,” Jack called. “Monster.” He pointed with his zat.
“Sir,” she answered steadily from behind him. “It’s a machine. Some kind of cyborg.”
Jack was about to point out how much that didn’t make a difference, but, like the zat in his hand, her voice seemed to have the power not only to ground him but to shape the sense of the place. The rib-cracking weight receded, like the monster was pausing to suck in a deep breath before the next attack. In that moment, the room changed again, the next layer of illusion swept away by Carter’s words. The writhing tentacles and tendrils that laced the walls rippled and resolved into regular patterns, the straight lines and sharp angles of circuitry, panels tricked out with flashing lights, status screens. It was so shockingly mundane that a laugh ripped from Jack’s mouth.
But one look at the cyborg, at the new Sebek, was enough to bring the weight down on him again. The beautiful mermaid was gone. There was still a creature with them, still vaguely female, still humanoid, still wearing a skin of glass scales, but this thing was a parody, a nightmare. Her body was emaciated: tendons—or whatever passed for them—roped around her limbs, the mirrored skin stretched taut over a sharp-edged frame so that the face was skull-like, the full-lips that had come so close to kissing Daniel thinned and stretched like a slash in tight canvas, the mouth toothless, sunken under the blades of angled cheekbones. The eyes were enormous, bug-like, reflecting the room, inverted, distended, a world seen through a fever dream. The body was waspish and fleshless. The arms were too long, ending in multi-jointed fingers like the legs of a spider, all of them—he couldn’t count them—restlessly moving, reaching out. They scrambled and skittered across Jack’s brain. He knew absolutely that the touch of those fingers on his head would tear him to shreds from the inside out. What he’d felt before, when she’d reached out to him through her apparition, would be nothing compared to what the touch of her real hand could do.
He raised the zat and fired. Light flared across her glass body, swirled and arced, and her whining scream climbed up and up until he was sure it would slice him like wire across a throat. He squeezed his eyes shut and focused on the hardness of the floor against his knees. The ground lurched, and he had to put a hand out to catch himself, grinding his teeth against
the stab of pain in his finger, but he held onto the zat.
When he opened his eyes, Sebek was still there, unharmed. The creature’s gashed mouth was wider, smiling, and then wider still, laughing. There was nothing inside but darkness.
Aris had shifted his blaster to him, but then, after a second’s hesitation, he aimed it back at Sebek. Jack wasn’t sure whom he was protecting from whom. The expression on Aris’ face told him that Aris wasn’t sure, either.
“It will kill you and you’ll have nothing,” Jack said, amazed at how even his own voice was, that it carried through the surging, leaping light in his head.
“Not your concern. Get out or give up,” Aris repeated, but his own voice was brittle, faltering. He was falling into the blackness of that open mouth. The blaster wavered, swung on Jack again.
“We have your son,” Teal’c said.
Aris went still.
Behind him, Sebek continued toward them on spindly legs, one shuffling step at a time bringing him closer. Daniel was over by the door, next to Carter, a huddle of pain at her feet. Coming back toward Jack, Teal’c strode across the floor as though it weren’t quicksilver and coals and slithering. He lowered the staff weapon and fired, over and over. After the first shot, he went down on one knee, and his face was a grimacing mask of determination. The percussion of the blasts ricocheted and rolled around the room, echoes like fists pounding on Jack’s skull.
The light that erupted from Sebek was palpable, shoved against them, threatened to bowl them over, and the high-pitched wail drew its razor-edge through Jack’s brain again. And again, the ground lurched under him. And again, when the flare settled, Sebek was unharmed and laughing.
Teal’c growled.
Aris blinked at him as though none of it had just happened or had happened in a dream he was waking from. “My son,” he said tonelessly.
