"Tie them and put them in the cage."
"No!" Briseis snapped that out, furious. "I tell you, I saw it happen once. We tied a young boy, tied him well, and for all that he broke free in the night, he slaughtered a dozen before we could bring him down - would you pen innocent children in a cage with these two? Could you?"
"That won't happen," Daniel said softly. "We're not going in the cage. And we're not going to hunt."
"Daniel, maybe that's the best choice. In the morning you'll be ..."
"Fine? The same? No. We won't."
"Daniel's right, sir," Carter said. "I'm not going through it again. You don't know, Colonel. You don't know"
Her eyes were haunted. He looked away from them, saw Daniel with the identical expression, and raised his hands helplessly. "Right. Can't leave you, can't tie you up, can't lock you up, can't kill you..."
"What?" Daniel had an odd look on his face.
"I was going to say, without being brought up on charges..."
"No. Back up. Cant kill us..."
Oh, he wasn't going to like this. Wasn't going to like it at all. "Daniel..."
"I have an idea."
"No, you have a stupid idea. I know, because I've seen that look before, and I'm not going to - "
"No, you're right, it's not even an idea, it's sort of a plan. I have a plan." Daniel looked surprisingly smug about it. "Want to hear it?"
"No."
"Jack?"
"If it involves what I think it does..."
"That's exactly what it involves."
"Then no. Don't want to hear it." He leveled a finger at Daniel. "Eves."
"What the hell are you two talking about?" Carter asked, mystified.
"We're having a strategic discussion."
"About what?"
"Daniel, don't say it..."
"Dying," Daniel said.
He'd told him not to say it.
It couldn't properly be called a plan, really. A plan had simple, executable steps, and some kind of desirable outcome.
This had a half-assed wild logic to it, but it couldn't be called a plan, and there was no way Jack O'Neill was going to risk everything on speculation as to what an eighteen-year-old kid from a provincial Greek planet had seen in a dark room, when he was scared half to death.
"It was a sarcophagus," Daniel insisted.
"You don't know that. In fact, Daniel, there is no way you can know it, so stop trying to convince me. If you were a superhero, your special power would be to leap logic with a single bound..."
"Jack, this Goa'uld has been on this planet for a thousand years. Of course she has a sarcophagus! If she'd just been looking for a new host - " Daniel looked briefly, horribly sick. "Then I was lying there waiting. It would have been easy. I think she went back for her sarcophagus."
As logical leaps went, it was - once Jack looked back on it - not as much of a superheroic bound as it had looked on the far side.
"Fine. Maybe she has a sarcophagus. Even if she does, we're talking way too many ifs, Daniel." One finger up. "First of all, you commit suicide, which frankly just stinks as plans go, I don't care how you dress it up..."
"The collars come off after death. We know that. We've seen it." Daniel had that stubborn look. The one Jack dreaded. "And if the collars come off, she can't control us, and we can be assets instead of liabilities."
"Oh, yeah, sure. If you're not too dead to revive. If the sarcophagus even works, provided it's even there." He resumed the count. Two fingers up. "Let's continue to examine this brilliant plan. Second, we have to actually get into this place without, oh, inconveniently dying." Three fingers. "I don't need a third. This plan sucks." He dropped the first and third fingers.
Daniel's brows pulled together in a fiercely focused frown. "Got a better one?"
"Yeah. Kill `em all."
"Jack, this will work."
"What is it about killing them all that doesn't work? If Eseios and his buddies will step up - "
"Which they won't," Daniel countered. "I know from experience, they can't be counted on, not for this. If you try to plan on them, you'll end up fighting everybody."
Carter leaned forward. "Sir," she said, and caught his eyes. Hers burned with earnestness. "I think Daniel's right. And I think you have to trust us, and we have to trust you."
"This isn't about trust! I'm not letting you just -" Jack couldn't even say it. Couldn't even believe they were having this conversation. He tossed a rock angrily across the compound, watched the puff of dust it skimmed off of the open ground, and limped away. Daniel let him. When Jack looked back, SG-1 was calmly unpacking NIREs and doing the usual compare-and-trade to try to get the combination they most liked. Pretending it was just another normal day, and butter wouldn't melt in their mouths.
He swallowed a curse that would have shamed a Marine drill sergeant, and walked over to where Pylades was sitting, talking quietly with Briseis. They both fell silent at his approach, shading their eyes to look up at him.
"Show me what you saw up there," Jack said, and sat. "Draw it."
The kid enthusiastically began going through it, step by painful step, describing everything in each room so thoroughly that Jack felt as if Pylades might be some long-lost relation to oh, say, Daniel. "I don't need to know the color of the walls," Jack interrupted. "Just the entrances, exits, who's in the rooms. Right? Tactical information."
Pylades drew a floor plan in the dirt with a stick that had probably once been part of something expensive - it had flecks of gold leaf still clinging to one end. Every room seemed to have at least two exits, some as many as three or four. A nightmare, so far as either attack or defense went. Too many angles, too many places to hide.
The only good news was that Artemis, bug-eyed crazy that she was, seemed to haunt the front part of the structure. Throne room, second room in. Some kind of temple with an altar - or sarcophagus - and that black moon symbol, behind it. Past that - Pylades just described an open area.
"What's there?" Jack asked. Pylades didn't look at him.
"Sacrifices," he said. "We go soon, right? To get my sister."
"Yeah. Soon. Okay, what's here?"
"I don't know. I didn't go so far."
"Here?"
So it went, one question after another, drawing out the details a little bit at a time. Not that it helped. Pylades didn't have a strategist's eye; he couldn't say exactly how many Jaffa there were on the steps, how many in the first room, how many in the big throne room. None in the temple proper, or so he said, but of course that might change depending on the Goa'uld's moods, phases of the moon, whatever.
A big shadow fell over them. This time, Jack shaded his eyes and squinted up.
"Teal'c," he said. "Join us. I'm getting a tour of the local sights. You know, up the hill."
Teal'c squatted down, and Jack ran him through it, point by point. Pylades watched in fascination. Maybe the kid had a grasp of tactics, after all. "Again?" Jack asked.
"I have it," Teal'c said. Just like that. One fast run-through, and he'd remember every detail. That was the way his mind worked. Jack had never shown him anything more than once, except weird little cultural details that Teal'c thought were plain stupid and not worth storage space. "We should rest while we can, and leave before twilight. Eseios has said his men will escort us to the base of the hill, then go before night falls."
"Big of him," Jack grunted. "Considering we're fighting his war."
"It is not easy to discard one's gods. Especially those who walk among you."
"You did."
"I took a hundred years," Teal'c replied. "And when I turned against Apophis, I still did not strike at him directly, only at my own kind. Do not judge them harshly. They are doing what they can."
"Yeah. Killing each other instead of the enemy."
Teal'c set it aside. "Will you speak with Daniel Jackson about his plan?"
"His plan bites, Teal'c, so no."
"It has tactical advantages none of the other a
pproaches -
"I said no." Jack kept it hard, cold and abrupt. "First of all, we have to fight just as hard, but carry dead weight along with us. Second... shit. I don't even need to count it out. Just no."
Teal'c said nothing. He stood and walked back to the fire where Daniel and Carter were finishing up their meal. They were swapping oatmeal bars for cookies, looked like.
"It's a bad plan," Jack told Pylades, who hadn't actually spoken.
«Why?"
"Because it is. Why doesn't anybody believe me?"
He stood up, dusted himself off, and limped back over to the rest of the team. When Daniel tried to talk to him, he gave him a dangerous look and dug into his Smoky Beef Frankfurters, and dared anybody to bring up the damn plan.
Carter speculated about the construction of the theater. After a silent period of monologue, Daniel joined in, and the science talk flowed back and forth, leaving Jack to brood.
Jack bedded down with his hat over his eyes for a one-hour nap, leaving precise, instructions with Teal'c about when he expected to be woken. Daniel waited until Jack was breathing heavily before he walked over to Briseis and Eseios's patchwork tent. Pylades was with them. Crouching down, Daniel looked at the diagram that Pylades had drawn - the wind had already blotted out most of it - and then up at Eseios.
"You know what I want," he said. "Can you help?"
"Your friend will not be pleased if I do."
"Yeah, well, he's grouchy. He'll feel better once it works."
"Do you believe it will? Work?" Briseis sipped at a cup of water. The cup wasn't glass, Daniel noticed; he doubted anything glass had survived around here. This was crude pottery, fired over low heat. They'd made it themselves. In a lot of ways, these people reminded him ofAbydos, of his people. His adopted people.
And in a certain light, Briseis reminded him of Sha're.
"I wouldn't volunteer for it if I didn't."
"Really." Her voice sounded flat and disbelieving. "I have seen this before, Daniel. Some can't accept what we are now. What we've become."
"I don't accept it because... because I haven't become it, not yet. Look, I'm sorry, but this is our choice, right? We just need a little help."
She exchanged a look with Eseios, who frowned and shook his head, jaw set and hard. "I've lost enough. Six men last night. These - they speak of killing the gods, and yesterday I believed that could happen, but today... today there are six who say it can't, from Hades. No."
"Husband-"
"I won't ask it."
"Some might go of their own choice, if it meant an end to this. You know it."
"I will not ask."
Briseis stared at him, then nodded and put the cup aside. She stood and walked away, graceful and composed in the cool afternoon light. She stopped a white-collared man, smiled, and murmured something to him with a hand on his arm. Eseios watched her with angry eyes, muttered something behind his hand and bit into a chunk of roughbaked bread.
"Your fault," he said finally, to Daniel. "Until you came, we knew the order of things. We were making a life for ourselves. You - you and your friends, you made the goddess angry. We'll all pay the price in blood."
Aggression and anger came with the collar. Daniel knew that, and he fought hard to choke back his instinct to fling back words in kind. Words, and then fists, and then more.
Blood, in the end.
"You aren't living," Daniel said. "You're existing. You can't give up, not while there's still hope."
Eseios spat out a pebble from his mouthful of food. "Tell it to the dead."
Teal'c woke Jack up exactly on time. Carter and Daniel were already packed up and ready, their weapons in Teal'c's possession. Jack checked the angle of the sun, the distance to the base of the hill, and signaled to Eseios that they were ready to go.
They had an escort of nine men and three women, all dressed in black Dark Company robes. As they walked out, the rest of the men, women and children stood in rows, watching them. Some spoke, some didn't; some invoked the gods, which more or less creeped Jack out, given the obvious.
Eseios didn't say anything to him at all. He was pissed off, and he set a deliberately fast pace up the hill. Jack sighed, set his coping mechanism a notch higher, and started reciting lines from The Simpsons in his head as he followed the Dark Company up the hill.
"Jack," Daniel said.
"What?"
Daniel nodded to the horizon. The sun was dipping low, the edge just starting to flirt with disaster. "Soon."
"Yeah. Yo! Dark Company! Little speed!"
"Um, with that ankle, I don't know if that's such a good - "
"Good, bad, it's still an order. Pick it up, Daniel."
Not that it was a problem for SG- l's two Children of the Wolf, who practically loped as night approached. Teal'c stayed with him as Carter and Daniel pulled steadily farther and farther ahead.
They made the overgrown trees just below the Acropolis when the sun was a semicircle, sliced by the horizon.
"Right," Jack said as Eseios stalked back, looking way too good at it. "Thanks. Better get out."
"We'll hunt the lower part of the city tonight," Eseios said. He nodded his men permission to go down the hill; they'd been holding back, because as they left it was a full sprint, all of them moving as a unit.
As a pack.
Eseios, the alpha male, looked into his eyes and said, "It is a good plan. You should listen to him."
And before Jack could advise him where to stick it, he was gone down the hill with the rest of them.
Only... not all of them.
Daniel and Carter were standing off to the side, which was fine; he had the zip cuffs, he'd tie them and move out fast... but there were two strong-looking guys in black robes still hanging around, and that was not fine.
He recognized these guys. Personal bodyguards, from the cell. Belonged to Briseis, or at least were loyal to her.
Their collars were white.
"Daniel...?" He made it a dangerous sort of question. Daniel didn't look up. He was going through the pockets of his tac vest - they'd scavenged both vests and Carter's BDU shirt on the way back from the night's adventures - and was producing artifacts, folded notes, leftover digital tapes... "Okay. What the hell are you looking for?"
"Abaggie... ah. Here." He pulled it out and opened it, then sniffed the contents. Must not have liked the results, because he pulled the bag quickly away and held it at his side with a grimace of distaste.
"You two," Jack said, rounding on the two bodyguards. "You got names?"
"Menelaos," one said. Copper-haired, rangy looking.
"Philemon." Dark, olive skin, rippling with scars. Warrior's eyes. He was almost Teal'c's size.
"Menelaos, Philemon, sorry, been a mistake. You guys take off."
They didn't move. Daniel said, "They're here for me and Sam, Jack."
Which set him off like a Roman candle, and dammit, he didn't care. "No! We're not doing this, Daniel!"
Daniel reached into the baggie and pulled out a handful of shiny green leaves with sharp points, like holly. He counted out half and put them in Carter's open palm. "Sony. I don't know the dosage. It's probably pretty potent - "
Jack growled and came at him.
He never even saw Daniel move, just felt the blow that lifted him off his feet and threw him ten feet across the ground to slam hard into the ground. Saw stars. Coughed and rolled on his side, and felt Teal'c's strength levering him back up.
Daniel was staring at him. Daniel with a black stone in his collar and that fey and feral expression on his face.
Carter, too.
The sun was setting.
"Don't do that again," Daniel said softly. "This is hard, you know. I don't want to hurt you."
"Then don't." Jack pulled free of Teal'c's grip and limped forward. "Just don't."
"Jack, Artemis isn't just controlling us by dividing us into hunters and prey." His voice was coming faster, rougher, driven by urgency. "Christ, don't y
ou understand? She can make us believe. She can do anything, once she's close to us. I saw it. I felt it. Didn't you? Don't you understand this? You need us free."
He was begging him for an answer. Jack, throat tight, thought back to that second night in the ruins, that moonlight-splashed courtyard, Artemis's fingers digging in to the soft flesh under his chin. You will be punished enough, before I am done with you. She'd made him helpless out there. She'd made Teal'c blind and deaf
"You cant save us," Daniel said. "And she can't control us once these collars are off. And that's something she can't foresee. It's the only advantage you'll have."
"Ah God..." He couldn't breathe. Couldn't do this. "No."
"Jack."
"No."
And then Carter, who hadn't spoken at all, said, "Sir, please. I can't - I can't let her do this to me. I'd rather be dead, even if you can't bring me back. Last night - last night I tried to murder a child." Her voice wavered, then went rock steady. "I'd rather be dead, and you would, too, in my place."
He could have stopped them. He had the guns. All had he had to do was bark out an order and back it up with a bluff, shoot to wound, not to kill...
Daniel undid all that by saying, in a very quiet voice, "We trust you, Jack. We wouldn't be doing this if we didn't believe you could make this work."
For one critical second, he didn't move, and that was enough.
Daniel let his breath out in a little sigh, closed his eyes, and put the handful of leaves in his mouth.
Jack lunged forward, making a sound that didn't even qualify as speech, but Teal'c held him back.
Daniel would have broken his neck, anyway.
Carter chewed her own mouthful. Daniel chewed and swallowed, forced a smile, and said, "Minty. Look, I don't know how long this will - " His face changed, and went blank and slack.
Oh God no.
Daniel went down. His knees just folded, and then he was down, looking shocked. Teal'c released Jack, and Jack got there seconds before the first convulsion hit; Carter collapsed too, caught in Teal'c's arms on the way, and Jack sent the Jaffa a silent agonized glance as she started seizing violently as well.
It went on forever, and Jack heard his breathing turn ragged and tortured as Daniel and Carter died, and died, and kept on dying. He'd seen a lot of men die, hell, he'd seen the man he was holding in his arms die once already, but that had been war, battle, a sudden shocking thing.
Stargate SG-1: Sacrifice Moon Page 20
