07 - Survival of the Fittest

by Sabine C. Bauer - (ebook by Undead)

  “I dream of Earth. Strange dreams. I’ve never been there, but I dream of it. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.” This was getting weirder by the second. Hammond decided that the man was confused and played along because he didn’t know what else to do. “Where are you from, Marine?”

  “I was made here.”

  Made? Here? And perhaps the kid wasn’t confused at all. “Who made you?” Hammond asked.

  “My goddess.” The specter of a smile flickered over his face, died when smiling, too, required too much effort. “The goddess made me. All of us… even those who were sent back. They’ve returned. They shouldn’t have. She has commanded us to destroy them, and we will.” Then the obvious seemed to percolate through, and his face folded into a mask of suspicion. “You’re not with them. Who are you? What do you want?”

  “We’re three powerful lords, and we have come to revere the goddess and to offer our services.” Hammond hoped that tricking a dying man would count as venial sin at worst. “If you could tell us where to find her, we’ll present her with our gifts.”

  “Take the stairs. The stairs to the sanctuary,” the kid breathed. His eyes rolled up, lids stuttering shut.

  “Where are these stairs?” It took all of Hammond’s self-control not to shake the man. “I asked you a question, Marine! Where are the stairs?”

  “Left… left…” The kid’s body shuddered and went slack.

  After a moment of stunned silence, teeth glinted white in the darkness; Maybourne was grinning. “Three powerful lords? With gifts? Nice going, Huggy. Gold, myrrh, frankincense, and a couple grenade launchers. So he was made, huh? Figures.”

  “How?”

  The white gleam broadened. “As I was about to point out before King Balthazar over there whacked the crap out of me—again!—this goddess is the proud momma of twins.”

  Harry was right. The men looked identical. And it was a fair assumption that the goddess, so-called, hadn’t stopped at twins. Clearly, Bra’tac was thinking along the same lines.

  “How many of them do you believe there are, Hammond of Texas?”

  He never got an answer. Somewhere in the city, reassuringly far away, the stillness was shattered by bellowing machineguns and the sizzle of staff blasts. Evidently the Jaffa who had returned and the Jaffa of this goddess had found each other. If the two dead men in the corner were anything to go by, it would be a very short battle.

  “We’d better get going.” Hammond wanted to find those stairs.

  “Indeed.” Bra’tac was already on his way out the door.

  They reached the junction without incident. Straight across, the alley curved toward the base of the fortress they were trying to reach; a right turn would have taken them closer to the battle noises and the bursts of muzzle flashes and staff fire that occasionally lit up the night sky. To the left rose a flight of stairs.

  “I suppose that’s what he was talking about,” Hammond said softly.

  “I don’t know.” Harry shook his head. “Direction’s all wrong. He mentioned a sanctuary, right? What if he went all metaphysical in his last moments, talking about a place of worship where he met his goddess in spirit?”

  “Then we return here,” Bra’tac decided. “But I, too, believe that he meant a way of meeting his false god in person.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Gause’s Rule: Two species cannot live in the same way in the same place at the same time.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  He looked young and scared, his face recurring no fewer than five times among the Jaffa who were guarding this level. He also looked oddly exhausted; not something you’d expect to see in Jaffa with new symbiotes. They all showed the same signs of fatigue—reddened eyes, sallow faces, labored movements—and a part of Janet’s brain snapped into diagnostic mode. If Teal’c were presenting in this state, what would she suspect? A problem with Junior, obviously, but she’d seen the symbiotes these guys carried. They were healthy. So—

  “Hey! I asked you a question!”

  “Sorry. I was a little surprised.” And a little suicidal. She couldn’t afford to lose focus, tempting as it might seem. Janet vaguely pointed upward. “Lady Nirrti wants to see the Tauri. She must have notified you.”

  This was the tricky part. Success or failure of Colonel O’Neill’s idea hinged on one crucial assumption; that fear or arrogance would prevent the Jaffa from admitting they’d lost touch with their deity—especially if Janet made them believe that her direct line was still up and running:

  “Lady Nirrti did inform you, right?” she snapped, to drive it home.

  “Of course.” The guard actually blushed. “Just being careful. A couple of prisoners escaped.”

  “Not my problem, and I don’t see what that’s got to do with Lady Nirrti’s orders to me. Now can I pass? Lady Nirrti doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  He stepped back, glaring at her. As far as Janet was concerned, he could glare all he liked, just as long as he let them go. She gave the Colonel a push, hating the necessity.

  “Move!” she snarled, trying to sound like a good little Goa’uld minion and hating that, too.

  Colonel O’Neill shuffled on, timing and degree of reluctance just right—then again, he’d had more than his fair share of opportunities to practice the skill. If… when they got home, she’d have to find a way of dealing with the fact that it had fallen to her to make this last experience a particularly memorable one. The thought made her want to howl, so she shoved it down to fester in her subconscious and concentrated on the guards again. One of them was swaying as she passed, hanging from his staff weapon, barely able to prop himself up.

  They’d passed the second corridor, coming up for the third. Suddenly the first guard called out. “Wait!”

  In front of them, two Jaffa stepped out, effectively blocking the gallery. From behind came footsteps. Just one set, though, so it might be alright, might be just another goddamn query. Don’t lose your cool, Doctor.

  Aiming for a mix of fury and boredom, she turned as slowly as she dared. “What?”

  “That!” Number One Jaffa was pointing at the staff weapon she carried. He wasn’t as dumb as all five of him looked. “Where did you get that?”

  “Where do you think I got it?” she barked, feeling her fingers lock around the staff, knowing her knuckles were going white. “Lady Nirrti ordered me to take it. Seeing as you’re hunting escaped prisoners, obviously you don’t have any men to spare for an escort. You don’t expect me to accompany someone as dangerous as the Tauri unarmed, do you?”

  Face scrunched in a frown of concentration, he mulled it over. Higher reasoning functions weren’t among the intellectual makeup Nirrti had allowed her creatures. Neither were the original’s memories. After all, the clones might start to think. Seconds stretched away, interminable and simmering with impatience. Any moment, Nirrti might stop being otherwise engaged and decide to really send for Mrityu and the Tauri. If that happened, they’d be up crap creek without a paddle.

  Finally he nodded, and the two clones blocking the way scooted back into their corridor like the birdie into its cuckoo clock. Janet prodded the Colonel again. Under the watchful eyes of the Jaffa they rounded the gallery, reached the bottom of the stairs, and started on their way up.

  “Nice job,” whispered Colonel O’Neill. “I had no idea they did acting electives at med school.”

  “They don’t.” Janet fought an urge to swap hands on the staff and wipe her sweaty palm. The Jaffa were still watching. “Chalk it up to panic.”

  Up here the walls showed a lot less damage—the battle must have been confined mostly to the level below, and whoever had started it was still alive and out there. A reassuring idea, and Janet clung to it. To such an extent that she practically collided with Jack O’Neill, who’d stopped dead in his tracks.

  “Showtime,” he muttered.

  Two levels up, a troupe of five Jaffa was coming toward
them, and the fact that they were pointing rather excitedly put paid to any notions of a chance encounter. Up crap creek without a paddle.

  “Stop!” hollered one of the Jaffa upstairs.

  “Time to run, Doc.”

  Staggering and stumbling, the Colonel scrambled up the last steps to the fifth level. In his wake, Janet wanted to recite every article she’d ever read on cardiac conditions. That temptation went out the window when the first staff blast broiled past them—a hit would kill him a lot quicker. The boys downstairs had woken up, and within moments she and Colonel O’Neill were hop-skipping through a crossfire of plasma bolts.

  He tripped, fell hard. “Keep going!”

  Not likely! Janet stayed in front of him, swung around the staff—too damn unwieldy, not designed for people her height—and fired blindly through roiling smoke and dust-laden air.

  “Keep going!” he hissed again.

  “Shut up and get up! Sir!”

  She continued firing, not caring whether she actually hit anything aside from masonry. The whole point was buying him a few seconds to regroup. Behind her she sensed movement. He’d given up on being stupidly heroic and concentrated on rising instead. And then some.

  “Give me the staff!” He tugged at the end, sending her next blast wildly astray.

  To her utter surprise, a clone came tumbling from the sixth level. Janet grinned. “Nice shooting, sir. Now quit distracting me and find cover.”

  Obviously he realized that resistance would be futile. Hugging the wall, he headed for a corridor a few meters down the gallery. Janet sidled along on the outside of him, still firing, trying to make herself as tall and bulky as she possibly could to shield him from the blasts. It wasn’t fair really; a mother hen had wings to spread, she had a goddamn stick she could barely—

  Stairwell, Jaffa, the corridor entrance just behind her exploded into a fiery, liquid plume of agony. The plasma bolt knocked her off her feet and into the Colonel, who caught her and dropped backward into the passage, cushioning her fall with his body. Her shoulder was screaming, and the world around her flipped in and out of existence like a slideshow; the pain-flooded images after each spot of black changing subtly. She held on to one where she sat slumped against the wall, Colonel O’Neill wresting the staff weapon from her, anger and concern ghosting through his eyes.

  “Dammit, Doc! A simple I’m sorry would have sufficed!”

  “We gonna do something about them, Jackson, or what?”

  “Or what,” muttered Daniel.

  The sergeant ducked around the corner, let Daniel’s zat sing out twice, and snapped back into cover. From across the terrace came the thud of a falling body. Originally, Macdonald had grabbed a Jaffa’s staff weapon. When it turned out that firing very long and top-heavy guns was trickier than it looked, he’d grudgingly swapped arms with Daniel. “Hey! I asked you a question.”

  “Or what!” Daniel mouthed in his direction.

  A few minutes earlier a group of Jaffa had peeled off from a unit that defended the marquee on the opposite side of the terrace. All guns blazing, they’d risked a suicidal dash across open space. Two hadn’t made it, and now lay draped between statues and flower pots. The remaining five had disappeared inside the building. Clones on a mission, which wasn’t a happy thought, given that Jack was still trapped in the lab and Janet, presumably no longer under the influence of Nirrti, holed up God only knew where.

  He heard a soft scraping noise behind him, whipped around, saw Sam dangle from the roof over the colonnade and lightly drop to the ground. Crouching low, she threaded between the pillars and over to Macdonald’s and his position.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got any spare clips for this elephant gun?” She brandished something silver and enormous at Macdonald.

  He shrugged. “Can’t hear you, ma’am.”

  “Nah, didn’t think you’d have any. Next staff weapon’s mine.”

  Daniel got that urge to roll his eyes again and nudged Sam to make her look at him. “Where is Teal’c?” he mouthed.

  “Covering us from the roof.” She risked a swift look around the corner to scan the vast pillared patio that formed the transition from Nirrti’s quarters to the roof terrace and outdoors. The whole place seemed to have been transplanted straight from a glossy magazine article on gracious living in tropical latitudes; warm light from garden torches, gently babbling fountains, orange and palm trees, marquee by the parapet to watch the moonrise, eight-o’clock martini optional. The only thing marring the picture were the bodies. “Funny,” muttered Sam.

  “What is?” No reply. He nudged her again. “What is?”

  “It’s almost like they want us to get back into the building. I mean, there’s what? Two? Three guards there. The rest of their defense is concentrated on the marquee.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m guessing that either they’re being a tad careless with the life of their goddess or—”

  “There’s something in that tent Nirrti wants protected at all cost,” Daniel finished simultaneously with her. “What do you suggest?”

  “Either way we have to try and find out. And we need to get Nirrti anyway, because we need the ribbon device.”

  “Why?”

  “It activates the ring transporter in the vault, and that’s the only way out of this joint.”

  “Actually, no.” Daniel shook his head. “Teal’c and I found the back door.”

  Eyes widening, Sam grinned. “Of course you did. What was I thinking? I—” The grin died abruptly, replaced by a frown.

  “Sam? What’s the matter?”

  “I’m not sure.” A line of goose-bumps raced up her arm and across her shoulder—a bit of a impossibility, given the sweltering heat that still infused the air and radiated from the stone around them. She swatted at it as though it were a spider. “Almost like somebody’s touching me.”

  “I think you’ve just found Nirrti!”

  Incredulity clouded the woman’s eyes. “We kept that invisibility belt when we were stupid enough to let her go the last time, Daniel.”

  “So what if she has a spare? For when the other one’s at the garage for a service?”

  The woman stared, blank-faced and unable to hear him, just as Master Sergeant Macdonald was. They had been deafened, which explained why Nirrti had lost control of them.

  In a blur of monochromatic distortion the Jackson creature whirled around, fumbling with his staff weapon. The swing sliced right through her, would have struck her had she been in their phase. She wished she had killed him while she had had the chance, wished she could afford to force him into butchering his companions. But, now that the transmitter was gone, controlling the clones who defended the marquee required all her mental energy—and it was more important. It was her route to safety. Her fingers flexed inside the ribbon device, wanting to reach across phases and boil the Jackson creature’s brain within the shelter of its skull. It almost appeared as though his return had started this… entropy.

  Nirrti stifled her craving, knowing that, here and now, revenge was impossible without revealing her presence. There were few things more satisfactory than vengeance, but the chance to breathe another day—with satisfaction merely postponed—was one of them. Her left hand, clad in the ribbon device, reached out and stroked gold-tipped fingers across the woman’s neck one final time.

  Then she abandoned the humans to their fate, headed past the pillars and into the building. Her rooms were in tatters, small fires springing up here and there, shimmering tongues setting ablaze the silken hangings and licking at wooden columns. On the viewing mirror a silent battle played out. In the alleys and squares of the ruined city her and Simmons’ Jaffa had found each other and clashed with what violence was left in them. Not much, not that it mattered now. They would die one way or the other.

  Walking unscathed through flames, she stepped out into the central stairwell. She would begin again, that was all. She would regain the stars, no longer be hunted like an animal f
rom planet to planet. She would recoup everything Lord Yu had stolen from her and more. She would own the stars, rule them. The only thing she needed was—

  Her rage should have shaken the fortress to its foundations, and perhaps it had. For a moment the skirmish three levels below her ceased, and though they could not possibly have heard her furious scream, the Jaffa, the very men she had dispatched to bring her the Tauri dead or alive, looked around in confusion. Whoever had engaged them made no such mistake. Two plasma bolts in quick succession streaked from a corridor and across the void, killing a clone. Through the strange optics of the phase shifting device it seemed like a shining mirage, and for the briefest of moments, before he ducked back into the safety of the hallway, the Tauri glanced up and straight at her as though he knew she was there. The Tauri!

  Nirrti felt the stars slip from her grasp. Bereft of a hak’taur, yet again, and again it was he who had cheated her. There would be no third time. She would make sure of that, would make him rue his paltry triumph as he was buried alive.

  Her anger tightly controlled now, she spun around, hurried back through the blaze in her living quarters—a strange sensation, cold fire, but it was a fitting simile for her state of mind—out onto the terrace, and toward the marquee. A staff blast strafed past and struck a Jaffa, a copy of her First Prime. He dropped into her path, hands clenched over a smoldering hole where his pouch should have been, pain contorting his handsome face. Pain and bewilderment, because he had been promised near-invulnerability and was dying all the same. She passed through his body—a gesture of farewell from his goddess, she thought—and entered the marquee. It, too, was ablaze, but it did not matter. High above her ha’tak orbited the planet, an impervious refuge.

  Caressing the ribbon device, she stepped into position, pressed a crystal. The last thing she saw before the brilliance of the ring transporter enveloped her were the humans and their shol’va, gawping at transporter rings that had mysteriously sprung up around nothing. An instant later, Nirrti arrived on the ha’tak’s bridge, swept past a line of kowtowing Jaffa and positioned herself in front of the control console. Fingers spread across its glowing surface, she entered a simple command, and a red lance of energy issued from deep within the mothership.