Macdonald was flopping head-down from Teal’c’s shoulder, out cold but still breathing—barely, though he seemed to be getting better with increasing distance from the hidden doorway. They’d briefly considered leaving him in the kitchen, then discarded the idea, because they couldn’t be sure whether or not it would be a death sentence. So Sam had relinquished her comfy perch on Teal’c’s back and gone back to doing the hop, heavily leaning on Daniel.
The steps seemed to be getting higher as they climbed, making it harder and harder to jump, and the stagnant air in the passage had had several centuries to heat up undisturbed and unventilated. Sweat matted her hair, trickled down her face and neck, her back, soaking the fabric of the sari until it clung to her limbs like swaddling clothes and strangled her movements.
This was crazy. Absolutely impossible. They’d never make it. She and Daniel were injured, and their only able-bodied man, Teal’c, was lumbered with transporting a half-dead Marine. Or maybe Macdonald was dead. It hardly mattered. They’d all be dead before long. They’d die right here. They were dying already. The smell of rot—gangrenous and putrid—wove invisible tendrils through the air, tightened the mesh until it became a blanket of stench that followed her wherever she went. Like Daniel.
Daniel?
When she stole a look up at him, she knew he was the one causing it. Of course it was him. His face was a mass of frothing flesh, skin sloughing from it in pale, rubbery folds to reveal the decay underneath. Nausea racing up her throat, she tried to push him away, but his hold on her tightened. Where his fingers clamped her bare waist, her skin had begun to blacken and split. It was him. He’d been in league with Nirrti all along. How else would he have known about the door? He’d lead them into a trap, just as Janet had done last night.
What door?
“The hidden door,” she whispered around the thick need to scream or throw up. “The hidden door in—”
“Sam?” The voice was hollowly resonant like that of a Goa’uld.
Nirrti rising through the remains of Daniel.
Do not speak aloud.
“Do not speak aloud,” she parroted.
“Sam?” The cadaverous grip around her hardened some more and forced her closer to that terrible decaying face. Rotting lips pulled back into a skeletal leer. “Sam, who are you talking to?”
“Let go of me!”
I could help you, sang the voice inside her mind. I could help you, but I do not know where you are.
Up above, Teal’c had turned, and his face, too, was melting, the tattoo beginning a cockeyed slide from his forehead. “We must be quiet, Major Carter.”
Tell me where you are. Let me help you.
“We’re on—”
“Shh!” hissed the Daniel creature.
Do not speak aloud.
We’re—
“Teal’c’s right, Sam. We’ve got to be quiet.”
“I know what you’re trying to do!” She shoved him away, hard, fought to retain her balance, watched him stagger into the moisture-coated wall, trip down a step, and nearly fall. “I know what you are! You can’t stop me!”
Where are you?
“Daniel Jackson!” the Teal’c thing crowed from an oozing mouth. “Do not let her—”
Sam never heard the rest of it. All she heard was a high-pitched whine as the blue, spinning discharge leapt at her like a giant spider from its lair. Blue tentacles feathered over her body, their delicacy wholly out of proportion to the agony they caused. Nerves wailing and sending muscles into an uncontrollable spasm, Sam collapsed. The last thing that registered before she blacked out was Daniel, wide-eyed, zat held out in front of him.
When she came to, the zat was gone and Daniel was cradling her head. The real Daniel, not the obscene thing she’d seen.
The real Teal’c was towering a couple of steps above them, Macdonald still slung over his shoulder. “How are you feeling, Major Carter?”
“Like crap, thanks.” Sparks of blue pain kept sizzling through her body, rising and ebbing and shoring up the walls of her mind against a pressure that squeezed in relentlessly. She wouldn’t last much longer, and Daniel couldn’t zat her again. Not without killing her. “Nirrti,” she breathed.
“She tried to get to you, didn’t she?” asked Daniel. “Did you—”
“No, I didn’t tell her where we are. At least I don’t think so. I didn’t get a chance, thanks to your blessed tendency to interrupt people.”
“Make sure you tell Jack when we see him.” Daniel grinned, bruises spreading in all directions.
Answer me!
The command splintered into her mind in a shower of ice, and Sam felt her skin contract in response to the cold. “Teal’c! She’s getting through! You’ve got a gun. Do it!”
“I cannot, Major Carter. Any shots fired in here might deafen Daniel Jackson as well and would give away our position as surely as you would if you let Nirrti succeed. You know what she is attempting to do, and you can and must fight her.”
“Then leave me here. Go! That’s an order!”
Carefully, Teal’c lowered himself into a crouch to slip the sergeant off his shoulder. “I shall—”
Daniel’s hand on his arm stopped him. “No. He might come in handy. I’ll carry Sam. It isn’t far now.”
“As you wish.”
“Out of the question. I gave you an order.” They weren’t even listening to her. Trying not to cringe in another blast of arctic—Antarctic—cold, Sam glared at Daniel. “Who the hell put you in charge?”
“Teal’c.” With that he hauled her up in a fireman’s lift and started heading up the stairs. “Let’s go!”
I demand to know where you are!
No longer the gentle wheedling that promised help and safety. It was a constant battering, brutal and determined, and the pain was icy, eating its way outward from the bone, freezing nerve and muscle, and wrapping Sam in a glacial cocoon she couldn’t—
She had to escape!
“Daniel!” She croaked it out, barely able to speak. “I can’t stop her. I—”
“Of course you can.” His voice was impossibly calm, even through the ragged breaths of exertion. “Tell me about HAARP. Macdonald cut in just when it got fascinating.”
He was about as interested in HAARP as he was in butterfly farming, and Sam knew it. But it would keep her mind busy, and maybe it would be enough. Staring down at stone steps bobbing away beneath her, she started talking. “HAARP’s a giant radio transmitter array in Gakona, Alaska. It’s run jointly by the Air Force and the Navy, and it emits high frequencies into the ionosphere to study the Van Allen Belts and create ionospheric lenses—the broad idea is to microwave the bad guys’ satellites. It also does ELF. Extremely low frequency transmissions for radio contact with subs.”
Do not dare to mock me! You shall be punished for your insolence! Where are you?
“Sam? Sam! What are Van Allen Belts?”
Eyes closed, she focused on invisible magnetic fields, incandescent with the dizzying dance of aurorae and horseshoed, one inside the other, around a blue and white planet. It was cold up here, bone-crushingly cold, and there was a funny rattling noise. Almost like—
“Sam? Van Allen Belts!”
“They’re…” Trying to speak, she realized that the rattling noise came from her teeth. “They’re named after Dr. James Van Allen who was in charge of the first Explorer missions. The Geiger counter aboard Explorer 1 picked up the inner belt in 1958, and—”
The bobbing motion of Daniel’s steps stopped suddenly, and she opened her eyes. They’d reached a landing. To the right was a door, similar to the one in the kitchen and guarded by the same type of statues. Ahead, another twenty or thirty steps up, daylight filtered through a carved screen. Daniel contemplated the door for a few moments. Eventually he shook his head.
“Don’t know what’s behind that,” he muttered and signaled Teal’c to continue all the way up to the end of the staircase.
Twisting her neck a lit
tle, Sam stared up at the screen and the bands of light that flowed through delicate arabesques of stone or wood. Dust motes glittered in the beams, rose and fell and—twirled into blackness. The shadow was shapeless, but it made her instincts holler loud enough to drown out even Nirrti’s voice rampaging through her head.
“Take cover!” she yelled, her shout steamrollered by a staff blast that slammed through the screen, trailing a flurry of shrapnel that peppered her face before she managed to turn her head.
Daniel dropped flat, and they slid down a couple of steps. She rolled off him, allowing him to shuffle free and zat the jagged remains of the screen. The shadow danced away, unharmed. He swore, and started crawling up the stairs to get a clear shot. Behind him, Teal’c shucked off Macdonald’s limp body, flung up his staff, and returned fire, pulverizing carved filigree.
From the doorway below came the frantic hammering of something hard on stone—Nirrti’s guards trying to find the release mechanism and get through. Sam had no idea whether she’d unwittingly betrayed her whereabouts, or whether Nirrti knew the layout of the fortress well enough to hazard a guess. It hardly mattered now.
Nails clawing at steps, Sam hauled herself past the sergeant and alongside Teal’c. “Give me that gun!” she gasped. “And any ammo you’ve got left.” For an instant, just long enough to flag up his conflict, his eyes flitted away from the hole in the screen and the potential targets beyond and bored into hers. Sam didn’t blame him. She’d have the same doubts. “I know what you’re thinking, Teal’c, and we both know you haven’t got a choice. I’m compromised alright, but they’ll be coming through that door any second now, and our six needs covering.”
A minute inclination of his head conceded the point, then he tossed her a Desert Eagle—a testosterone-driven doomsday machine of a gun, lifted from one of the Marines, she supposed—and two clips, one of them only half full. Great! If she didn’t run out of ammo first, the recoil from the .50 caliber would probably knock her senseless. At the very least she’d get her wish and be deafened. Then again, it was guaranteed to punch extremely large holes—and there might be a way of marrying up the effects. She tore a couple of strips of fabric from the sari, shoved them at Daniel. “Plug your ears!”
There was no time to check if he’d understood. Below, the door exploded in a hail of stone—they’d given up on finessing and used their staff weapons—and she fired at the first shape that materialized through the smoke. Though expected, the recoil slammed into her wrists with punishing force. Bring down the weapon, aim again.
Mouth yawning in a cry she could no longer hear, her target was tumbling down the stairs. The guard behind him ducked back, startled. Part of her registered that Nirrti’s psycho-vise no longer clamped her mind, filed it away. Daniel and Teal’c were right. Next to her, Macdonald shuddered, chest flaring as he sucked in a breath. His eyes popped open, and his lips formed words—What the hell…?—face slipping into a grimace of surprise when he couldn’t hear himself. It was wiped off by a plasma bolt slamming into the wall above his head.
A blind shot, badly aimed—the shooter had angled the weapon around the doorframe and hoped for the best. The staff still pointed at them, tip gaping on the charge building inside. Suddenly, Sam grinned. Taking into account distance and the oomph the Desert Eagle packed, this might just work.
“Run!” she bellowed at Macdonald, hoping he would get it, hoping that Teal’c at least would still hear her.
He did. He slapped Daniel’s shoulder, and together they started scrambling up the stairs, covering one another and the sergeant on their heels.
Sam fired at the open tip of the staff weapon. The round tore into flickering brightness and struck, the abrupt release of kinetic energy superheating the weapon’s core for just a fraction of a second. A fraction of a second was all it took. The core—barely enough naquadah to coat the tip of a needle—detonated in white-orange violence, burying staircase, doorway, and guards under an avalanche of debris.
A roiling, bubbling ball of fire funneled up the stairs toward her, but she’d already flipped around, was racing toward the top, two steps at a time, flames licking at the bare soles of her feet—both feet, both, a leap of faith taken when she’d felt Nirrti’s control shatter. She’d had no time to count toes. The sari caught fire, and she ripped away burning fabric as she ran, flung herself through the hole in the screen, thumped sideways into someone’s body. Flames shot past her, tongued across a terrace, swept two Jaffa clones over the parapet. Limbs flailing, mouths screaming silently at the ringing in her ears, they fell as the blowout lost steam and retracted at last.
Gun up and ready to fire, Sam rolled into a crouch. A colonnade, sturdy wooden pillars providing sparse cover. Ten meters to her left, arcade met parapet; to her right it marched around a corner. In front, past the columns, stretched clear space, maybe three meters wide, and beyond that, thin air, the roofs of the mined city, treetops, and a fat red sun, setting. No hostiles in sight—though they probably wouldn’t be long. She checked on her team.
The someone she’d landed on was Daniel, moderately singed and goggling at her from one good eye. Teal’c and Macdonald were peering out from behind a couple of pillars, equally dumbstruck.
Dr. Jackson regained a modicum of countenance, pulled the last intact shreds of sari from his ears, and mouthed, Wow!
“What?” she snapped, looking at Teal’c for enlightenment.
Teal’c’s right eyebrow climbed to a nuance she was sure she hadn’t seen before. The sergeant’s lips, on the other hand, were pursed in what could only be a wolf whistle, audible or not.
“Never met anyone in a bikini?” Sam checked above, decided it would do. If nothing else, it’d throw the clones a curveball—besides it was best to get going before her burns woke up and started to hurt. “We’ll take the high road, gentlemen. As soon as you’ve recovered.”
Courtesy of some broad-shouldered assistance from Teal’c and Macdonald, they climbed the colonnade in no time. Its roof had a slight slant, but not sheer enough to slip, despite the moss that covered the stone tiles. Above rose the roof of the fortress proper, much steeper and encrusted with ornaments and statuary. It spiked into a quartet of pagodas, all of them inaccessible, growing in height as they receded from Sam and her team’s position. Atop the highest perched Brancusi’s idea of a porcupine; a large metal sphere, bristling with silvery prongs and crystals that glowed blood-red and vicious in the evening light. A hell of a lot more compact than HAARP—which was the good news. The bad news was the distance.
“Teal’c? Can you take it out from here?”
His response was a tiny twitch of a smile, and the eyebrow gave another cock, this one familiar; Jaffa for You gotta be kiddin’ me! Suddenly the whole sophisticated communiqué collapsed in a frown, and he motioned them into a crouch. Company. She saw his fingers spell out the details: five clones on a search, heading for the staircase below.
Macdonald had been watching intently, taking in the information. His hand shot out, slipped the diving knife from its sheath on Teal’c’s thigh. Without interrupting that slick flow of motion, he rolled toward the edge and slid off the roof, knife between his teeth. Sam could only hope he’d done it as quietly as it seemed to her. Semper fi.
“Damn,” she breathed. “Daniel, try to cover him. I’ve got Teal’c’s six. Teal’c, you’re on.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was how the frog felt, come vivisection time—had lost all meaning—apart from lasting too long—and even if his life depended on it—for all his life was worth now—Jack couldn’t say how much—time had passed since Nirrti had driven a stake of light through his skull and nailed him in place—paralyzed but feeling—oh yes, he could feel alright—he and the frog. Vivisection.
Mercury beads of pain—hundreds, thousands—eddied through his body, and all he wanted was the unimaginable luxury of being able to scream—or go ribbit, whichever. He couldn’t. Neither could the frog. They couldn’t even twitch, he and the
frog. Muscles perversely relaxed—when he needed to tense up till tension broke bone—he and the frog couldn’t even twitch. All they could do was lie there and take it. Vivisection.
Eternal vivisection. Always hated sarcophagi—guses? Worst nightmare. Never found one when you needed one—don’t you dare die, Carter!—but it helped to imagine his body bucking in desperation—a little—little—Fraiser. How could she even hope to lift him into a sarcophagus? He’d explained to the frog that it wasn’t Fraiser doing this. Not that it mattered—no more—no more, quoth the frog—
When it stopped without warning, reality seemed to stop with it. Jack tumbled into a blank, disorienting void. He was dying now, wasn’t he? Supposed to walk toward the light, except that was gone. He held on to a croak—his croak, and the frog approved—meant to be a scream, squashed into croakitude by the tight-chested stumble under his ribs and the panic-stricken certainty that it would all start again and again and again.
A small hand slipped into his, and, remarkably, he felt his fingers curl in response.
“Colonel? Can you hear me, sir?” Fraiser. She’d asked that before, a mercury-beaded eternity ago. “Look at me. Look at me! Jack!”
Jack!
More than usually moribund then. She only used his first name when he was a hair away from folded flags and flyovers—kinda like Carter.
Determined to prove her wrong, he forced his eyes open and coughed up another croak. “I’m not dead yet, Doc. Stick with the sir.”
She looked like a ghost. The ghost of a raccoon, to be precise. Something or somebody had punched circles under her eyes, bruise-purple and shouting misery from a gray face. But that headachy squint was gone, and she seemed ready to fall on her sword. She’d also switched off his personal procrustean bed against milady’s orders. Unless he actually was dead and too dense to notice it.
“Janet?” he rasped. “Is that you?”
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