CHAPTER NINETEEN

 

 

Teal’c’s shout should have catapulted him up the stairs. The tone had been flavored with That’s an order! But Daniel had a pretty good idea of what was going on behind him—besides, he couldn’t see the steps for dust.

Nobody gets left behind.

Another staff blast zipped past, close enough to singe his hair, and Daniel fired wildly in the direction where the flare of light had come from. What was the range of a zat? Further than expected, obviously. He heard a scream, and a dark, blurry shape toppled from the gallery above. One of the blurry shape’s colleagues took exception. The next plasma bolt damn near charbroiled Daniel’s toes. He returned fire, simultaneously with Teal’c, who came storming up the stairs, snagged Daniel’s arm, and hauled him along.

“Which part of Go! did you fail to comprehend?” wheezed Teal’c, never breaking stride.

Daniel didn’t bother to reply, too busy trying to keep up and struggling to draw oxygen from air laden with dust and the fried-wattage reek of energy discharges. A new blast dented the wall behind them, sent stone heads popping from the frieze. Whoever was doing the shooting was in serious need of target practice—then again, even the biggest dud hit the ten-ring once in a while.

Their only chance was to reach the gallery and the cover there. How many steps? Thirty? Fifty? And did it even matter? They’d been rumbled, and—

The floor evened out, and Daniel almost tripped because he’d been expecting another step. A few meters ahead was a corridor. But the guys upstairs weren’t stupid; their fire now zeroed in on the entrance, ready for Teal’c and Daniel to run into the blasts.

Teal’c let go of him, swung around, staff already flying up, and loosed two bolts. One hit home. It bought them five seconds. Daniel darted for that inviting patch of shadow and safety, was about to dive right into it, when he heard the shout.

“Daniel! This way!”

He couldn’t see worth a damn, but he recognized the voice. He also recognized that it came from the next corridor along. So he ran on. A plasma bolt tore into the doorway behind him, ripped free a spray of stone and mortar. Amid a barrage of rapid Goa’uld, Teal’c fired back. Daniel could make out a really juicy curse, knew that he was the addressee.

Sorry, Teal’c.

“Keep going! Next hallway! Cover me from there!” Daniel dropped into a crouch—for all the benefit that would bring; he was the proverbial fish in the barrel—and zatted blindly at the guards above. They were moving along the gallery now, headed for the downward staircase. Not good. At least the nice thing about Teal’c was that, in situations like this, he could be relied on not to stop and discuss the issue. He sprinted past, straight toward the entrance. With Jack it would have been different.

The thought cut like a knife, and Daniel was almost grateful for the staff blast that singed the other side of his head. He ducked, kept zatting people he couldn’t see, thought he’d got a hit—somebody hollered—and then Teal’c had reached the entrance to the corridor and began laying down cover fire. Daniel shot up, swayed for a moment, disoriented by a head-rush, and ran for the doorway. Propelled by the heat of another plasma bolt, he flung himself through, dived for the floor alongside Sam, landing hard.

“Nice to see you,” he observed to Sam’s left foot.

“Amen,” replied her top end.

“Get up, Daniel Jackson!” Teal’c was heaving Sam up to sling her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “More guards are on their way. They will arrive shortly!”

“Crap!” Daniel muttered into the floor.

A hand hooked under his armpit, pulling him up relentlessly. Jack? He looked up, winced. He didn’t recognize much else, but he recognized the coif and had a dizzy vision of Jack applying at a USMC recruitment office and getting turned down on the strength of his hair being incapable of conforming to a proper crew cut. Not Jack. A Marine.

“You heard the man,” Not-Jack grunted and shoved him along the corridor. “Move it, mister! Go, go, go!”

Daniel lost track of just how long they were running or where. Directed by the bellows of the Marine who never bothered to introduce himself, they ran left, right, straight, and hallways blended into rooms blended into other rooms, until they arrived in a small, gloomy chamber. Not-Jack finally let go of him.

“Who the hell are you?” gasped Daniel, and every syllable felt like it might rip out a bit of lung.

Sam, deposited on the floor by Teal’c but looking a hell of a lot better than she had the night before, was saying something. Her words dissolved into an odd electric sizzle that filled Daniel’s ears and turned into high-voltage cotton wool inside his skull. The next thing he realized was that he lay flat on his back and his head hurt worse than ever—a possibility he’d have denied categorically before… before whatever had just happened.

The pressure of hands on his shoulders nailed him to the ground. Probably Sam’s hands, given that the very large fuzzy blob by the door had to be Teal’c, keeping watch. Bingo. Sam’s worried face bobbed into view. “Stay put, Daniel. You passed out.”

Great! Dollars to donuts the Marine was smirking. Daniel groaned. “Sugar high must have worn off.”

“Uhuh. You’re concussed.” Sam patched a smile over the worry lines. “I kind of forgot how dreadful you look.”

“Thanks. Love the costume,” Daniel retorted and suddenly remembered that he wasn’t concussed enough to have missed the obvious. “Where’s Jack?”

The smile disappeared, nudged aside when she shook her head. The unknown soldier piped up in her stead. “Colonel O’Neill is doing us all a favor.”

“That paragon of tact over there is Master Sergeant Charles Macdonald. USMC, in case you hadn’t noticed. What he’s trying to say is that Nirrti’s… busy. In her lab. With the Colonel.” Sam took a breath, then added, “You can imagine what it means—though I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Golden doors at the end of a golden corridor. Daniel squinted up at her. “The lab’s two levels down, right?”

“Yeah. How do you know?”

“Educated guess.”

It was nothing of the sort. What had forced him to a grinding halt outside that corridor was the fact that Daniel had sensed something—he’d sensed Jack there for a second—though how or why was beyond him. Then again, Jack had had the combined knowledge, abilities, voodoo of the Ancients downloaded into his brain. When the Asgard had siphoned all that stuff out again, who was to say just how much they’d missed in the race to save his life? Or what they’d seen and not told Jack or anyone else about? In any case, Jack being Jack, he wouldn’t have opted to communicate in ways whose existence he’d deny until he was blue in the face. Not unless he had no choice. Daniel struggled to forget the bone-deep distress rushing in on him at that moment and recalled something else.

He pushed himself up on his elbows. “Nirrti’s not in the lab anymore. Teal’c and I saw her leave.”

“You sure?” A sliver of hope, barely acknowledged, brightened Sam’s face. “We need to get in there to—”

“Sam, we can’t get him out yet.” Daniel could barely believe he heard himself say it, but if they didn’t knock out the transmitter first, they wouldn’t stand any chance at all. Neither would Jack. “We—”

“It’s two birds with one stone, Daniel. Nirrti has way of controlling people’s minds—including mine. If it weren’t for Macdonald here, I’d swear blind that I’m a leg short. She’s controlling Janet, and she’s probably controlling the clones as well. We’ve got to take out whatever helps her do it.”

“I agree.” Breathing slowly through his nose until the nausea subsided and the room stopped rotating, Daniel sat up. “Except, you won’t find it in the lab.”

“Why not?”

“Because the lab’s too deep inside the building. We’re looking for a transmitter. Teal’c figured out how she does it.”

At Sam’s questioning glance, Teal’c moved in two steps from his post by the door and plunged into an epic tale of naked plant guys and sound frequencies and deaf Marines. She listened quietly. When he’d finished, she sat staring into the middle distance for a while. Eventually, she said, “HAARP.”

“You mean as in plinkety-plink?” Macdonald mimed strumming a set of strings.

“That’s a lyre, not a harp,” Daniel commented tiredly, foregoing the eye roll in the interest of protecting his head.

Sam didn’t even twitch. They were too used to Jack, compared to whom the sergeant was a rank amateur. “I mean as in High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program.”

“I thought we’re talking low frequency, Major,” Macdonald cut in.

“Fm getting to it. The assumption is that they’re conducting experiments to prove the viability of certain technologies Nicola Tesla discovered, including mind control. So—”

Macdonald snorted. “Tesla was a fruitcake!”

Pretending she hadn’t heard him, Sam carried on. “It’s definitely possible to impair rational thought and induce certain moods—aggression, paranoia—through radio frequencies. We all know that. Sergeant Macdonald and his men started killing each other.”

“Don’t remind me,” Macdonald said bitterly.

“But we didn’t start killing each other on PJ2 445,” objected Daniel. “Though I got pretty damn close to throttling Jack a few—”

“No, we didn’t, because what we ran into was around ten Hertz; mood swings and migraines only. For thought control you’d have to be able to hook into brain frequencies—probably Theta waves, which are in the seventy Hertz range.” Sam scrubbed a hand over her face. “I think Nirrti’s piggybacking a mind control frequency on an ELF wave. In other words, we’re looking for two transmitters, not one. I also think that the second one will be on her person. In close proximity it may still work after we’ve taken out the ELF transmitter.”

“Wonderful,” groaned Daniel. If anybody hit him with any more good news, he’d start screaming.

Sam shrugged. “Not nearly as wonderful as the fact that we have to get to the top level somehow.”

Okay, that didn’t qualify as news, good or otherwise. He and Teal’c had already figured that one out. They’d also delivered proof positive that the central stairwell was to be avoided at all cost. There had to be another way. Nirrti had built neither the city nor this fortress. The Goa’uld didn’t build, they adapted. So Nirrti had adapted this place to her requirements. But what about the folks who had built it? Early Cambodian, at a guess. Hindu at a further guess. So what did that mean?

Daniel studied the room. It was small, unadorned, and two opposing corners still held beds made from rough wooden planks and sprung with woven rope that had frayed and sagged to the floor. Not exactly palatial. Plain. Poor. Servants’ quarters. Obscure. Out of sight. Set apart. That was it! He scrambled to his feet, vaguely noting that his headache hadn’t become any more bearable.

“Are they still looking for us, Teal’c?”

“They are not,” Teal’c replied, one eyebrow lifted in a delicate enquiry. “They appear to have retreated toward the stairwell, presumably planning to trap us when we return.”

“Good.” Daniel opened the door, took a peek. The hallway was as unprepossessing as the chamber they were hiding in. Either side there were more small doorways, more servants’ chambers. The far end of the corridor opened into a cavernous room. It couldn’t be that easy, could it? On the other hand, they were due at least one break. Without turning around, he asked, “Teal’c, would you mind carrying Sam again? It’s quicker this way.”

He slipped into the hall, listening, almost sniffing the air for company, but it was quiet, as Teal’c had said. His bare feet ground over a layer of dust that cushioned the stone tiles. Nobody had been here in decades—centuries maybe. Daniel smiled.

Furtive footsteps behind him told him the others were following. “That way!” he murmured.

“Where are we going?” Macdonald, sounding petulant.

“To find the second staircase.”

“There is no other staircase!”

“Yes, there is.”

Okay, so it was conjecture, but he wasn’t about to admit that to a Marine.

The hallway led into an enormous kitchen. For a moment Daniel’s imagination populated it with men and women, sweating in the blazing heat from clay ovens and the open fireplace, shouts and chatter and clanking of pans, thick wads of steam and the sweet scent of exotic spices. Then the images faded, leaving behind long-cold

f

stoves, a black and empty fireplace, copper pans dulled by grime and silently dangling from racks.

“See?” asked Macdonald. “I told you there’s nothing here.”

Slowly, Daniel turned full circle, squinted past Sam who was perched on Teal’c’s back. It had to be here. It was the most logical place. Everyone came through the kitchen. One of the great constants of the universe.

Yes!

There they were. Across the room two tallish, fuzzy shapes sat in front of an otherwise plain wall. As he approached, gray patches solidified into the forbidding faces of the dikpals. This time it took him less than a minute to release the door mechanism. The stone slab swung aside to reveal a steep, narrow flight of stairs.

“Okay, I bite.” Sam peered at him over Teal’c’s shoulder. “How the hell did you know?”

“Going by the cultural pointers all over this place”—Daniel gave a sweep of the arm meant to include fortress and city—“I figured the people who built it had a caste-system; strict social hierarchy from princes and priests all the way down to laborers and servants.”

“So?” asked Macdonald.

“So suppose you’re a prince, Sergeant. What happens if you come down the stairs and the stable hand, who’s on the way up, bumps into you?”

Macdonald shrugged. “I smack him?”

“Spoken like a true Marine. And no. You run to the nearest priest for a round of ritual ablutions and spiritual cleansing, which is both expensive and time-consuming and should be avoided whenever possible.”

“By having separate servants’ corridors and stairs!” Sam exclaimed.

“Exactly. It explains the tunnels Teal’c and I found, and if I weren’t such an idiot, I’d have realized it hours ago.” Fuming with annoyance at himself, Daniel gazed up the seemingly endless staircase. “We should—”

A loud thud made him whirl around. Macdonald had collapsed, gasping for air, his face contorted in a bluish rictus.

“What the…?” breathed Daniel.

Teal’c looked impressed. “O’Neill predicted that your explanations would have this effect one day.”

 

“I want you to tell me what’s wrong with them, that’s what!” Simmons’ minion snarled.

“There is nothing wrong with them!”

How many times had she said this? Two? Three?

Nirrti had lost track of the conversation. Mrityu’s suffering, a constant groundswell in her awareness, proved to be more of a disruption than anticipated. It was pleasurable, and normally Nirrti would have welcomed it, but she could not afford to indulge under the circumstances. The man staring at her from the viewing mirror was at least as shrewd as his master—and twice as insolent.

“Look, you think we’re stupid?” He spat the words as though he wished to spit on her. “We’ve run a whole battery of tests, and the results all say the same. You screwed up somewhere, and you’d be better off admitting it, because I doubt the Jaffa you kept are doing any better than ours.”

“You lie so that you can justify your invasion of my territory!”

The man smirked. “You wish, lady! And this isn’t an invasion. We…”

A wail of anguish from Mrityu blotted out his words, and Nirrti found her attention distracted yet again. Was it merely more of the healer’s yammering, or had the Tauri died at last? She hoped the latter was the case. That way she might get a reprieve from all this pitiful emotional turmoil, amusing at it was.

The creature in the mirror looked at her keenly. It seemed he had asked a question and expected an answer.

“I will not tolerate your invasion,” she said.

“Yeah, you mentioned that.” His smirk deepened. “This conversation is getting a little circular. Not quite up to our usual acumen, are we? But I’m a nice guy, so don’t mind repeating myself. It’s a search party. You’ve got a bunch of people running around who shouldn’t be there. I’m guessing they stayed under your radar so far. ’Cos you would have mentioned it if you’d noticed, right?” He stared and waited. Finally, receiving no reply, he continued. “So, as I was saying, we want them back.”

She stared at Simmons’ crony, teased a smile of sincere regret from the memories of her host. “I fear the intruders are dead. The planet is most inhospitable, and I suggest you recall your men before they meet the same fate. After all, you claim they are unwell.”

“And I fear that’s not just a claim. It’s a fact!”

For the first time his mask of superiority slipped to reveal anger, even alarm. He was telling the truth. If that was the case, and assuming the humans, in their elemental ignorance, had contrived to actually obtain reliable test results, then the Jaffa were defective. All of them, including hers. The most obvious explanation would be an error during the cloning process—but cloning was too basic to make mistakes. It would be tantamount to committing an error when adding up two and two. Besides, had she made a mistake of such magnitude, the clones would not have been viable at all. No, it was impossible. He simply was a better liar than she had given him credit for.

“Show me records of your tests, and I might believe you,” she demanded, bored the moment she said it. Why did they insist on these rituals? Mrityu was quiescent now. Had the Tauri died? Nirrti wanted to return to the laboratory.

Simmons’ creature must have anticipated her request. Without a word, he held up two sheets of paper—paper!—for her perusal. The scribblings on it meant nothing, might have delineated the pedigree of his favorite dog. Nirrti pretended to study them and, for a moment, allowed her boredom to show.

“Very well.” She had to be seen to comply, even if Simmons’ threat of withholding the symbiotes was ludicrous. She could clone her own, had been cloning them, because she did not trust the human scientists. But it would be unwise to let these people know that their ploy meant nothing to her. As long as they felt in control, they were harmless, could be manipulated. “I shall study the problem,” she said. “Once you have withdrawn your troops.”

“That’s got nothing to do with the problem!” he blustered. “We’ll withdraw our men once we’ve found what we’re looking for.”

“I told you these people are dead.”

“Including the Jaffa?”

He had tried to make it sound like a taunt, but she had lived too long, seen too much, not to detect the flicker of worry in his eyes.

Fool! He wanted the shol’va. Simmons wanted the shol’va. Why? Why would they need him when they had new Jaffa?

New Jaffa.

Here was the solution to the riddle, the connection whose existence he had so adamantly denied. The claim that she had committed an error was designed to hoodwink her—a ruse to deceive the goddess of deceit herself. In different circumstances Nirrti might have found a spark of admiration for the sheer gall of it, but not now.

That disgraceful travesty of a Goa’uld, who had let himself be captured by the humans, must have recognized the cause of the problem, while she had been blind to the most basic of facts. Unforgivable—if understandable. You acquired Jaffa and ensured they did your bidding; you did not concern yourself with the minutiae of their existence. They simply were. But as young animals needed to hone their skills by following their parents example, so Jaffa needed to learn how to coexist with their symbiotes. Failure to master that skill was lethal, for animals as well as Jaffa.

Simmons needed the shol’va to teach his Jaffa how to be Jaffa. It was almost grotesque enough to amuse, especially as, to her, the remedy would come so much easier. She would summon one of the Jaffa manning her last ha’tak to help train the clones properly. Simmons, on the other hand, would not get his wish. He would have to crawl to her for help.

Barely suppressing a smile, she said, “They are all dead.”

This time the man’s face gave away nothing. “In which case I’d like to see the bodies.”

“You shall see them,” she promised and cut the transmission.

His image dissolved at last.

She might have told him that her pet boars left no evidence behind; a truth, and he knew it. But it was far more satisfying to pretend to give in to his demand and decimate his and Simmons’ hopes. “Jaffa! Kree!”

Her First Prime, a mere shadow against the wooden paneling of the wall, eased away from his post by the door and approached. With less grace and strength than he should have displayed—or was it merely a trick of her imagination? No. When he stepped toward her, sudden light flooding his face, she found the telltale signs of exhaustion marking his features.

“Yes, Lady Nirrti.”

“Kill the Tauri if he is not already dead and kill the woman. Have their bodies brought here. Also, send some of your men to retrieve Jackson and the shol’va. If they are still alive, kill them and bring me the corpses. And do so before those fools out there find them.”

“Yes, Lady Nirrti.”

As he left, a warm breeze swept through the open door, stirred the silken drapes, and flooded the room with the scent of jasmine. Nirrti inhaled deeply, letting the fragrance ease her tension. Somewhere in the back of her mind the mewling of Mrityu blended with the ancient despair of the host. But she could not allow herself to drift into its music too deeply. She had to—

The door crashed open, driving jasmine and quiet from the room.

“Lady Nirrti!” Her First Prime was shaking, and this was not attributable to insufficient training. “Lady Nirrti, the woman has escaped. My men say Macdonald is with her, and so are Jackson and the shol’va.”

She almost laughed. Survival instincts were a peculiar thing. They would drive a creature on in search of continued existence, even when the quest itself promised nothing but death.

“They should not have taken Macdonald with them,” she said softly.

Master Sergeant Charles Macdonald? Where are you?

There was no answering thought. Impossible.

I command you to reveal your location!

When he still refused to answer, she let her rage slam toward his mind at full force. The agony of it should have guided her like a beacon, but instead of burning his mind, her thoughts ineffectually frittered into a cold, dark void. It might mean that Macdonald was dead. Or perhaps unconscious.

“Find them!” she hissed at her First Prime. “And inform the commander of my ha’tak that I may wish to leave.” Nirrti felt a knot of worry tightening in her stomach, and forced herself to focus on the woman, Carter.

 

Somewhere high above gleamed a little speck of brightness, though Sam doubted it was the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Once they reached that light, chances were that brown smelly substance would start hitting the fan at an unprecedented rate.

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 little, 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.”