06 - Siren Song (28 page)

Vividly and without warning, the image of Sha’re flashed through his
thoughts, a burst of light that brought with it the heat of her body and the
fresh-scrubbed soap scent of her skin. This must have been what it was like for
her, trying to reach him—to thrash and push against invisible bonds, working
all the time, from within, fighting for moments of dominance, every thread of
information she gave to him, in the last seconds of her life. He shuddered under
the weight of her memory, and Sebek staggered, knocked off balance by Daniel’s
attempt to bury the thought of his dead wife. Instantly he turned inward to see
what Daniel was hiding, crashing through all the futile roadblocks until-he had
all of the memory: all the things that hadn’t been true, all the cues and clues,
dissolving into the sight of her pale, dead face inches from his own. Sebek’s
satisfaction was clear as he discarded the image as unnecessary, and Daniel let
himself see Sha’re as she had been, so beautiful, before she’d been taken as a
host. He could hear her voice, soothing him, before he locked the image away.

Ahead of Sebek in the passageway, Jack was walking slowly. In the dim light,
Daniel could make out the fuzzy lines of his torso, but Aris was nowhere to be
seen. Daniel couldn’t tell where the bounty hunter was, because he didn’t have
access to all his senses, but he thought Aris must have been behind them all
along. Daniel was able to sense things Sebek was shielding from him, a dull,
distant perception, like sound dampened by cotton. Frustration seeped through,
and a simmering anger, something Daniel interpreted as hatred of Jack, of
Daniel, of his own weakness. He shied back away from those thoughts and watched Jack as well as he was able.

At each turn, Jack stopped, then chose a direction. It looked as though he
had no idea where he was going, and Daniel had no way to help. Even if Sebek had
allowed him that much control, at this juncture Sebek wasn’t interested in
knowing any more about the walls or the writing or the secrets at the heart of…
wherever this was. He only wanted to
arrive.
Jack was moving only
because he had to bide his time. Daniel had no idea what had happened to Sam and
Teal’c, and he knew it was on Jack’s mind as well.

Jack slowed at the corner, as he had at every other corner. He rounded too
close to the wall and his flashlight crashed gently into the wall, gashing the
edges. The dent obliterated a panel of glyphs, slashing across them like an
eraser. Daniel would have snapped at Jack to be careful, since they didn’t know
what they might need to make their way out again, but he had no voice to do so.
Still, the thought ran through his mind.

Too late, he realized that his concern was loud enough to be felt by Sebek,
who lifted Daniel’s hand. In an instant, the flow of naquadah in Daniel’s blood
burned and ignited, coalescing at the point of power in the palm of Daniel’s
hand, and he watched helplessly as the energy burst from the hand device, hit
Jack squarely in the back and sent him sprawling to the ground, still and quiet.
Daniel’s outrage was a small, silent thing in the back of Sebek’s consciousness,
and Sebek squashed Daniel’s protest that they needed Jack, that it wouldn’t do
any good to harm him now. “Get up, human,” Sebek said coldly, without bothering
to inform Jack what his transgression had been.

Sebek glanced at the damaged wall, and Daniel replayed the scene in his
mind’s eye: Jack’s hand, moving, striking—he’d seen Jack do this, or a version
of it, a hundred times, a dozen different ways of leaving a trail for himself to
follow, or a trail to lead others to him. He’d shown Daniel how, in his first
year on the team, and told him that it was always crucial he leave a trail if he
was captured. Daniel had
done it,
more than once.

Sebek mustn’t know.

Daniel tried to forget the realization, erase it from the places in his mind where Sebek was always watching, but too late; it was impossible to
remember every moment that his fleeting thoughts could be so easily captured by
Sebek. He stared at Jack, who was pushing up slowly from the ground as if he was
tired.

“So,” Sebek said, with a trace of harsh glee. “You formed a plan of escape.
You could not truly be so stupid as to believe we would not discover it.”

Jack’s eyes narrowed; Daniel had the impulse to squint, to see more clearly,
but he wasn’t able to control his body. Jack raised his hands in a mock gesture
of supplication. “You caught me,” he said, still staring at Sebek with contempt
clear in his expression. “Good for you.”

“We will not tolerate insolence,” Sebek growled, and Jack snorted.

“Oh, there’s that word. Insolence.” His face scrunched, as if he smelled
something foul, and then he said, “If you weren’t running around in Daniel’s
head, you would never have figured it out. You’re not too bright, for a snake.”

Sebek’s impulse was immediate. He raised Daniel’s hand, but something stopped
him—the image of the former host, ravaged and burned out, seared across
Daniel’s mind, leaving a scar—
fear
—behind it. As much as it made
Daniel cringe to do it, he summoned up the same image Sebek used to torment him:
Jack saying
no
as the snake burrowed into his neck, and then Sebek’s
remembered satisfaction at the sensation of bringing a new, strong host under
his control. Sebek lowered his hand.

“If you attempt any other tricks, we will kill you where you stand.”

Daniel barely contained his relief before it rippled out across Sebek’s
attention.

Jack regarded Sebek for a long moment. His gaze shifted to Aris, who was
standing where Daniel couldn’t see his face, then back to Sebek. “Listen,” he
said. “Do you have some kind of plan? Or are we going to wander around in here
until we starve to death? Because we are getting nowhere.”

The Goa’uld tilted his head to look at Jack, and suddenly he was pushing and clawing his way through Daniel’s thoughts again, raking out the
pieces he’d examined before. Daniel let him have them without a fight. There was
no point; he could take all that, and more besides, and Daniel still wouldn’t
know how to read the walls. After a moment, Sebek said, “We will continue until
we reach an end.”

“Fabulous plan,” Jack said. His eyes were dark, and there were
bruised-looking circles beneath. “But what if I won’t keep walking?”

“Oh, you will,” Aris said. Jack glanced back at him, and something shifted in
his expression, so subtle that Daniel almost didn’t catch it. His jaw tightened,
and he looked back at Sebek, into his eyes. For a moment, Daniel felt as though
Jack could see through Sebek, down to where Daniel was locked away. Then Jack
turned and sketched, easing tired muscles. He rested a hand on the wall, above
the gash.

The wall turned to light beneath his touch.

All the glyphs within three feet of them were ablaze, patterns of cool white
and yellow fading back and forth across the dark background of stone. Jack
jerked his hand away and stared at it. “Huh,” he said, and looked down at his
hand, as if it were a foreign appendage.

“Why have you concealed this from us?” Sebek said, furious, but Daniel was
watching the play of illumination over the symbols. If he could discern some
kind of pattern…

“I haven’t concealed anything,” Jack was saying. “Well, okay—I was hiding
something, but not
this
.” Daniel knew it was true. He’d seen Jack
touching the walls on and off throughout this entire nightmare, and nothing had
activated because of it, until now. But why now? The technology here wasn’t
Ancient; it was something quite different. Shallow golden light fanned across
Jack’s face, then across Daniel and Aris. Sebek turned to it, entranced by the
possibilities of what it might signify, but he didn’t interfere with Daniel’s
examination of the text.

“Whoa,” Jack said. Sebek gave him a cursory glance, in time for Daniel to see
Jack raise his hands to his face to press the heels of his hands against his
closed eyes.

White light, and the illusory face of Oma Desala. Grief. Peace. Resignation.
Sam, crying; Jack, watching him with haunted eyes. A sense that beyond what he
could understand and perceive, there was knowledge waiting for him. A chance to
do good.

Sebek slapped at Daniel’s head, keening a sharp cry as the memory ripped
through Daniel’s consciousness: Daniel’s thoughts at the moment of his ascension—moments he hadn’t dwelled on, because he couldn’t bear to think of them. Sebek
thrashed within Daniel’s body, and Daniel felt them falling, felt the jolt to
his knees as they landed on the hard ground. Violent nausea welled within him,
and confusion—Sebek’s confusion. Daniel wanted to take control, but he was
lost, swimming among the glittering fragments of his life. There was no air,
nothing to breathe, or maybe it just felt that way. Daniel’s chest felt crushed,
and Sebek’s shrill wail filled his head until he could hear nothing else.

Slowly, the onslaught of memory eased away. Sebek retched, his misery
apparent. Daniel had a moment of vicious satisfaction. So much for Goa’uld
healing, in this place. He watched Aris dragging Jack upright, saw them exchange
words, but he couldn’t make them out. Sebek lifted Daniel’s body and got to his
feet, turning his attention back to the wall. The bright fire behind the symbols
had faded, and now glowed like banked-down coals. Sebek took a step forward,
then another, with Daniel’s hand outstretched. Daniel could feel the pull of the
thing, the compulsion to touch it.

No,
Daniel thought, as loudly as he could, and Sebek jerked his hand
back. Daniel communicated to Sebek that he mustn’t touch it, no matter what. No
time to worry about helping Sebek do whatever he planned to do, at the end of
this. Right now he was only concerned with making sure no one did anything
stupid. He wanted to speak to Jack, tell him not to touch the wall again under
any circumstances, but Sebek’s calculated strategy didn’t include warnings for
Jack. He moved closer to the wall, not touching it, but tracing the lines of the
symbols with his gaze. Daniel could feel it, too. They were close to
understanding… something.

Sebek looked at Jack, and then back at the wall, and he used Daniel’s mouth
to smile. Daniel knew then. Jack was not the guide.

Jack was the guinea pig, the test dummy. Daniel knew that Jack would be used,
one way or the other.

When he surged forward, wrestling for a moment’s control, Sebek crushed him
back, strangling his thoughts into silence.

Hammond was beginning to think that if the mess sergeant could mix up a vat
of coffee large enough, he might as well bathe in it and get it over with, since
coffee seemed to be coming out of his pores. It was par for the course, but the
stress of the search for SG-1 was beginning to tell on him, which was
undoubtedly why Janet Fraiser had attached herself to him early that morning.
Wherever he went, she seemed to pop up, bright and cheerful, urging him to eat,
to sleep, and to rest—completely without subtlety. Hammond knew a lost cause
when he saw it, which was how he’d ended up in the commissary, putting back a
sandwich and some coleslaw as if he was actually enjoying it.

Janet passed by on her way out the door and eyeballed his coffee. “You really
should cut back on that, sir.”

“Yes, I should,” he said, and pulled his cup a little closer, in case she had
any ideas of saving him from himself and tried to kidnap his caffeine. She shook
her head at him sadly, a promise of much lecturing to come.

“Mind if I join you?” Hammond looked up to see Jacob, tray in hand.

“Have a seat,” Hammond offered. “But watch out for rampaging doctors.” Jacob
smiled in the direction of Fraiser’s retreating figure and set his tray down on
the table. Hammond pointed at the greenery all over Jacob’s plate. “Not even a
cup of coffee to wash that down?”

“Not that I didn’t want some, but Selmak revoked my free pass,” Jacob said.
“At least if I sit with you, I can smell it. That’ll have to do.” He sat down
and leaned closer, as if to take a whiff of Hammond’s cup. “I came down to tell
you that there’s word from some of our outlying operatives. Aris Boch has been
sniffing around on a number of the bigger Goa’uld trade worlds, trying to get
information about SG-l’s recent missions. We’re fairly sure he was trying to
track them down.”

Hammond set down his mug. He’d been expecting the Tok’ra to stop cooperating
after his square-down with Malek—not that Jacob would refuse help
deliberately, but he wasn’t the one with control of the information flow. “Do
they know where he may have taken them?”

“Yes and no. Yes, in that they know where SG-1 isn’t, but no, in that they
haven’t narrowed it down to where they are. Yet.” Jacob picked at his salad for
a moment, pushing it around his plate without taking a bite. “I can give you
some educated guesses, though, if you’re interested in speculation.”

“You know I am.”

“If it really is Aris Boch who has them, I’d say he probably took them to his
homeworld, but we haven’t been able to get confirmation. We don’t have any
operatives on that world—the Goa’uld running things there, Sebek, isn’t much
of a power broker, so we don’t have time for him.”

“Any Jaffa operating on the inside?”

“We’re having some trouble getting concrete information out of the fifth
column as well. They appear to be having some of the same issues we are, with
security and trust. In their case, it’s trust of the Tok’ra.” Jacob took one
bite of his salad, then said, “If you have any contacts among the Jaffa, you
might want to try them.”

“We already did.” When Jacob gave him a wry smile, the one that said Jacob
had expected as much, Hammond smiled back. “You didn’t think I’d sit on my hands
and put my faith in Malek, did you?”

“I should hope not.”

Hammond shook his head. “They had nothing. Even less than your people did.
Most of them are buried so deep within the ranks of the Goa’uld they serve that
they don’t see or hear much of any use.”