Hydra Page 16

  “So there are.” Jack nodded, the very picture of defeated obedience. If Mendez had had a clue about Jack O’Neill, he would have been more worried about the version in front of him than the one out there floating rogue. Daniel was grateful for small favors. “When do we leave?”

  “As soon as we have intelligence as to their whereabouts. We expect that soon. Delta and gamma teams are checking last known and future departure coordinates.” Mendez glanced at each of them. “Just to be clear: your mission is to terminate them. Leave no functioning trace.”

  None of them asked the obvious questions. None of them voiced the bizarre pain of being told to commit murder on versions of themselves, their teammates. Daniel thought maybe they were so far down the rabbit hole it no longer mattered. Mendez certainly seemed to be waiting for the challenge, and when it didn’t come, he stood up from the table. “Get your comms checked,” he told them. “We can’t seem to hear anything on comms from your team.”

  “Will do,” Jack told him, and Daniel nodded to Sam. Suppressing the comms from outside monitoring was the best idea she’d ever had.

  What do you think the thetas are after? Jack said via comms, as they watched Mendez leave the room.

  Power source, Sam answered. Daniel turned to her, and she caught his look and added, It makes sense. It’s the only thing we can’t do without, the only thing keeping us in check. We’ve been working on an independent source. You all know that. She must have figured out a way to rig something up. Something temporary, to keep them going until…

  Until they get whatever they’re after, Jack said.

  Daniel frowned. Which means she kept it from the rest of the teams for a reason.

  Such deception can only mean they have treachery in mind, Teal’c said.

  They fell silent, processing a billion pieces of the puzzle, listening to intermittent chatter from the rest of the teams, with whom Sam hadn’t shared her method of suppressing comms. It seemed there was a lot of information being kept close to the vest, which was…unnerving.

  We’re going to need a plan, and a good one, Jack said. One of us will have to —

  I’ll do it, Daniel said.

  You could have let me finish.

  Like I didn’t know what you were going to say? Daniel fixed Jack with a look. Jack shrugged.

  When the opportunity comes up, you be ready, Jack told him. All of us need to be ready, in case…

  In case Daniel Jackson cannot complete the task, Teal’c said.

  Our priority is contacting Earth then? Sam asked. Are we going to carry out the mission we were given? Kill the thetas? Do you really believe they’ve gone rogue?

  Jack looked at her steadily. Guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Dunamis (P3N-113)

  October 31, 2002; two days after the theta invasion of Eshet

  For someone who spoke for her people, Yagwen didn’t do much talking. Or any, in fact. She sat cross-legged at a low table in her tent and watched them file in after Asha. Like her acolyte, she wore a veil of beads over her eyes. Her hands moved restlessly over the table, collecting and throwing bones, sorting them into groups according to some system Daniel couldn’t fathom. Outside the tent, the robed women were gathered around what seemed to be an altar, their heads bowed as they rocked slowly, their hands folded under their chins. As Yagwen sorted her runes, their voices rose and fell in wordless lamentation.

  Asha took up a position at Yagwen’s shoulder. “Yagwen. These are the off-worlders.” She knew their names — Daniel had introduced them all on the way — but she seemed disinclined to introduce them as individuals.

  Daniel opened his mouth to speak, but Yagwen held up her hand, then gestured for him to sit. While he settled down, she brushed most of the bones into a pile that Asha scooped into an embroidered bag. The bag disappeared inside her robe. Only three bones, one an impossibly fine needle point, still lay on the table when Yagwen smoothed the cloth around them with her broad, gnarled hand. Daniel had to squint in the dim light that filtered through the heavy canvas of the tent to see the runes against the cloth’s intricate pattern of leaves and birds. Behind him, Jack shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, his sigh mostly suppressed but still warm against the back of Daniel’s neck. The other two bones, one the barbed circle of a vertebra, the other an odd, tiny hook, disappeared under Yagwen’s palm as she shook her head, her mouth turning stubborn and thin. Unable to see her eyes, Daniel could still imagine the glint of anger there.

  Standing at her side, Asha was unreadable behind her own veil of beads as she said flatly, “You will not return the kei.”

  Daniel bowed his head and stared at the bones on the cloth, the skeleton of some alien animal honed and worn into meaning.

  “No,” Jack said. “Sorry.”

  Yagwen swept the bones up and threw them again.

  With a pointed glare over his shoulder at Jack, Daniel added, “Not yet. We — ” He looked at the bones, tilting his head as though that might make a difference. “You know that others will come to take it from you. We only wish to protect it and to learn from it.”

  Asha replied in that same flat tone. “Its protection was entrusted to us by He-They.”

  “Yeah, and a great job you’re doing there, by the way.”

  Daniel didn’t bother glaring at Jack again. Instead he sighed. “We understand that. But there’s something bigger going on here — well, out there, actually.” He waved a hand toward the Stargate. “The kei is important to that.”

  “You are not safe while it is in your possession,” Teal’c added from his place by the door.

  There was a faint chiming of beads as Asha turned to him and raised a hand to silence him.

  Sam stepped into the light and picked up the argument. “Yagwen, you saw what these — ”

  She looked at Daniel for help, and he interjected “People,” earning a glare of his own from Jack.

  Sam chose to avoid the issue, saying, “You saw what they can do. Teal’c’s right. As long as you have the kei in your possession, you’re in danger. We can help. All we want is information about the device.”

  Another throwing of the bones. Asha leaned low over Yagwen’s shoulder and peered at them. As she did, her beads swung open a little and Daniel caught a glimpse of her perfectly white, blind eyes. “We see little difference,” she said, turning her head as if she was looking at each member of SG-1 in turn. “You. Them.” She cut her hand through the air, dismissive.

  “For one thing,” Jack answered, “the bad guy has brown hair and I have, well, not brown hair. Oh, and also there’s the fact that he’s a robot.”

  “I don’t think that’s what she meant, Jack.”

  “I know what she meant, Daniel. The point is we don’t have time for this.”

  As Jack was heading for the door, Daniel pulled the device out of his vest and peered at it. It was oval-shaped, palm-sized, cool to the touch even after being carried next to his body, and a deep black that seemed to suck the color out of the tent. Sweeping his thumb over its surface, he could feel the raised markings there. In the light from the door, where Jack was holding up the flap to usher Sam and Teal’c out of the tent, the markings resolved into something familiar. “This language is similar to that on the control device for the quantum mirror,” he said.

  The tent flap fell again, and Sam’s shadow wavered across the table and its scattering of bones. She took the device from his hands and turned to Jack. “Sir.”

  “Fine,” Jack said, but raised his wrist and tapped his watch. “Ticktock.”

  To Yagwen, Daniel said, “Who was He-They?”

  Yagwen gathered the bones and closed them in her hand.

  “Please.” He looked to Asha for some help and got nothing. “Lives could be in danger. Please tell us what you know.”

  The bones fell again.

  “He-They was a wanderer who came to us many generations ago. He-They entrusted the kei to us an
d warned us never to let it leave this place. He-They said that it was a thing of terrible power, that it could fold the universe. Or tear it asunder.” Asha held her hands palms up and then folded them together with the precision of a ritual gesture. It was the same gesture the women outside made as they mourned the dead. “Then He-They broke into pieces. All who looked on the fragments were struck blind. It is we, the descendents of the blinded, who tend the place of He-They. We are those who see.”

  And she did seem to see, Daniel thought, as she stared at him through the screen of beads and the opacity of her eyes.

  “May we see the place of He-They?”

  Yagwen’s hands closed into fists on the cloth, but she nodded.

  “I will take you there,” Asha said. “And then you will go. You will take the kei because you have the might. We who have no might will hope that it will someday be returned.”

  Jack grunted as he ducked through the tent door and then straightened, squinting into the late afternoon sun. He didn’t turn around as Daniel stepped out behind him. “Don’t even say it,” he said as he examined the lenses of his sunglasses and then, deciding against them, let them fall against his chest again. He watched as the small crowd that had gathered outside the tent shuffled backward away from them, leaving them in a wide, empty circle. All of the faces wore variations on the same expression, a mixture of anger and fear. “It wasn’t us,” Jack said testily.

  “No,” Daniel said, as he watched the people shrink from them. “But it’s us now.”

  Teal’c came to stand beside him. “Our intentions seem to make no difference.”

  Daniel shook his head. “Not to them.”

  With a grunt that Daniel couldn’t quite interpret, Jack walked up to the crowd and between the people as they scrambled to get out of the way.

  When Asha followed him, all the assembled people bowed their heads and covered their eyes with their hands until she had passed. She moved easily in her bare feet across the rutted mud of the camp, stepping surely around obstacles and guiding the team away from the tents and the cooking fires toward the woods. She slipped ahead of them into the shadows and became a ghost in her white robes, a mist drifting between the trees.

  “Asha.”

  The acolyte stopped and turned to Sam.

  Sam’s hand came up to gesture at Asha’s eyes. “The blindness. You got it from looking at He-They? Is there any danger to us?”

  For a moment it seemed like Asha was considering a lie, and Daniel figured she was entitled to spin a yarn to scare them away, but she shook her head with a sigh. “You will be safe there. No one has been affected since the breaking day many generations ago. We are born with the eyes of He-They.”

  They waited. After a moment, it seemed Jack decided to believe her. “Lead on, McDuff.”

  Asha tilted her head.

  “I mean, after you.”

  Without a word she turned and continued on.

  They hadn’t gone very far along the narrow floor of a ravine when the ground twisted under Daniel’s boots. He dropped to a crouch for balance. Fingers curled into the loam and needles of the forest floor, he watched as the shadows and the bands of sunlight cast across the ground in front of him slanted more and more, like the sun was moving across the sky, time sliding sideways, too fast. “Um,” he said.

  “That’s weird,” he heard Sam say from somewhere beside him, just as Jack’s hand closed around the shoulder of his vest and pulled him to his feet.

  Daniel swayed for a second, keeping a tight grip on Jack’s arm until the world stopped seesawing under him. When he opened his eyes, there were two Jacks looking back at him, a double exposure, two left arms united at the hand still curled into the fabric of Daniel’s vest. He blinked and then there was only one.

  “Weird? Always with the technobabble, Carter,” Jack said as he gave Daniel a pat and let him go. His words were out of synch, and his voice continued after his lips had stopped moving. He blinked hard. “That’s so not right,” he added and split into two again. “There’s two of you.” He swatted a hand beside Daniel’s face, trying to grasp a ghost.

  “He-They,” Daniel said.

  Nodding, Asha pointed at a slash of shadow in the side of the ravine. Her rising arm was ghosted by a fugue of arms, each mirage moving just a fraction slower than the one before and, as she went still, collapsing together like the folding wing of a bird. “Yes,” she said, and led the way.

  Jack — both of him — followed, leaving Daniel to steady himself with a hand on the smooth bark of the tree next to him. With a snap that he felt in his eyes instead of hearing it in his ears, the world aligned again and there was only one of everyone. He waggled his fingers in front of his eyes and counted only the regular five. He looked through them to find Sam watching him. “How many fingers?” he asked and turned his palm toward her.

  “Four and a thumb,” she answered. “This might just be perceptual, maybe some kind of energy that’s affecting the brain.”

  Jack stopped and looked back. “Dangerous?”

  Sam shrugged. “Hard to say. But Asha doesn’t seem too badly affected and she’s been here all her life.”

  Jack pursed his lips, assessing. “Brain rays,” he said finally as he continued trudging up the path. “Terrific. Remind me to requisition some tinfoil hats.”

  “Or,” Sam continued as she turned away from Daniel and headed off after Jack and Teal’c, “the universe really is coming unglued somehow.” She went on to explain something about the space-time continuum, but Daniel’s mind replaced the words with something that sounded a lot like “doom doom doom” which throbbed in time with the low-grade headache that was gripping the back of his skull. As he fell into step with his team, he wondered if, had he known at the outset that he’d get to a place where brain-damage was the sunnier alternative to choose from, he might have been so quick to sign up for the program.

  Probably.

  He made a mental note to find a therapist with clearance.

  By this time the little procession had climbed over a low ridge, and the gash in the side of the ravine had revealed itself to be the entrance to a cave. Around it, the gray-skinned trees that lined the ravine like the pickets of a fence were contorted, bent away from the gaping mouth as though they had been blown back by a giant exhalation of breath and had frozen there, their whiplike branches and tiny silver leaves splayed on the ground like tangled hair. Without their cover, the clearing was open to the full glare of the late sun that crazed the red earth with shadows and livid slashes of light. When Daniel closed his eyes for a moment, the scene burned behind his eyelids, inverted. Daniel figured it was just his headache that made the sun seem to throb, but, given the whole ungluing universe scenario, he wasn’t willing to bet on it.

  A few paces ahead of him, Jack stopped, first cupping a hand over his ear, and then shaking his head a few times before looking up into the sky. Just behind him, Teal’c also paused and looked around, scowling. Daniel stepped forward and felt his ears pop. The sudden silence made him stop too. He stepped backward and his head was filled with the low rushing sound of the breeze in the leaves of the picket trees, the chittering of some reptile or insect in the hollowed-out trunk at the side of the path, and, distantly, the continuing keening wail of ritual lament in the encampment beyond the woods. He stepped forward and there was nothing. He cleared his throat to make sure he hadn’t gone deaf.

  “Some kind of perimeter,” Sam said, waving her hand in the air behind Daniel. “Not a force field. Or not one we’ve seen before.” She stepped around Jack and Teal’c to address Asha. “Is it always like this?”

  Asha nodded, setting her beads swinging. “For Yagwen, many years ago, there were voices, but it has been a silent place as long as I have known it. Some claim to have heard singing, but I myself have not. The silence spreads every season.”

  There was no singing now, but as they drew closer to the dark gap of the entrance, they could hear the now familiar sound of weeping. Barel
y high enough to accommodate a man of Daniel’s height, the crumbling sides and roof of the cave mouth had been shored up by beams which, after who knew how many generations, had been wreathed by the roots of the picket trees atop the ridge as though the forest itself were trying to pull the mouth open against the slump of time and fatigue. Daniel expected the cloying scent of rot and decay, but instead the dry breath seeping from inside the cave seemed sterile, faintly antiseptic like the air in a freezer at a morgue. That made the hairs stand up on his arms under his jacket, and he distracted himself from zombie thoughts by sliding his flashlight out of his vest and playing it along the dirt floor.

  Not that he needed it. Light leaked into the low passageway from someplace not too deep inside the cave, a slithery bluish glow that brought Daniel’s brain back to zombies again. He made another mental note to cancel his cable. Or to stop letting Teal’c pick the videos for movie night. Involuntarily, he cast a little glare in Teal’c’s direction. Teal’c raised an eyebrow but looked otherwise innocent.

  “Next mission, I’m putting in a request for a beach,” Jack muttered and set off at a lope to catch up with Asha.

  Daniel agreed and followed Sam, leaving Teal’c, walking backward, to watch their six.

  A few yards in, the passage opened out into a cavern about half the size of the gate-room, and the ceiling in there was high enough that Daniel didn’t feel like he had to hunch. Just at the point where the passage ended, three women, also in white with beads screening their eyes, were kneeling around a fourth who lay on her back on the sandy floor. Her own veil had fallen away from her face, and her white eyes looked fixedly up at the dangling and knotted rootwork that seemed to be holding up the roof. Pausing, Daniel noted that she was young, barely a teenager. Her neck was clearly broken.

  Raising their heads all in one motion, the three women gazed blindly up at him, unshrinking, although they leaned a little closer together to block his view of their companion.