SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (13 page)

She had cried then.

She hadn’t been able to stop herself.

And now the creature was working its distressing magic around Daniel. She understood why the Goa’uld had resorted to such primitive means of silencing it. Sam didn’t know if it was simply the act of silencing its wagging tongue that protected them from the Mujina, or if there was more to it, but she was beginning to understand just what the Tok’ra, Selina Ros, meant when she called the creature a weapon.

She pushed herself up and walked slowly across to where Daniel sat, and crouched down beside him. There was an emptiness in his expression. No, that wasn’t right, when she looked into his eyes she saw a ferocious need that frightened her. Without realizing what she was doing, Sam put her hands over his eyes and whispered, “Don’t listen to it, Daniel.”

“Sha’re? Where are you? I can’t feel you anymore. Don’t leave me.” It hurt to hear the desperation in his voice. The yearning. She realized again how lonely he was, and how much that loneliness had defined him of late. She soothed him, gentling her hand against his cheek until he calmed down.

“Colonel?” she whispered, not wanting to startle Daniel.

“Yes, Carter?”

“Sir, I don’t think we can risk bringing the Mujina with us as long as it can alter our perceptions so easily. I’ve had it inside my head, sir. It made me see things that weren’t there; things that I never want to see again. It could compromise us.”

“Major Carter is right, O’Neill. The creature planted suggestions in my mind as we fled under Goa’uld gunfire. A weaker mind would have succumbed.”

Carter didn’t want to consider the implications of what Teal’c suggested. That the Mujina could exert some sort of hypnotic suggestion on a susceptible mind was obvious — and there was no telling just how compelling those suggestions might be, nor how far the intended victim of them might go. She looked down at Daniel and shivered. That shiver had nothing to do with the cold of the cavern.

“Well, I think that answers the question why the Goa’uld chose to use the branks, don’t you? I’m guessing it’s a case of stopping its tongue from working stops it from being able to plant ideas in our heads.”

“But sir, strapping that thing on a helpless creature’s head… well, doesn’t that just make us torturers?”

“I’d say it makes us pragmatic, Major. Until I know differently I’m working under the impression that Old Silver Tongue here needs to be able to talk to mess with our minds so keeping him quiet is doing us all a favor.”

“Maybe we could talk to it?” Carter offered. “Make a deal? We’re talking about an intelligent life form here. Who’s to say it can’t turn the effect on and off?”

“It’s a deal with the devil,” Daniel said, looking up at the others for the first time since the Mujina let its influence on his mind slide. “Witchcraft. All of it. All of those superstitious things that were called magic and had people burned at the stake for believing them. It offered me my heart’s desire, Jack. Can you imagine how potent that is?”

Daniel looked at him, and Sam realized how stupid the question was. The colonel had lost his son and blamed himself squarely for his death. Of course he could imagine. They all could. They had all lost things.

“Why do you think the Ancients wanted to hide the Mujina away from civilization?” Daniel said. “I can’t believe it is capable of turning this thing on or off any more than we can switch off our pheromones. No, this is what the creature is, it’s
raison d’être
. It doesn’t make this thing happen, it is always happening. It’s a defense mechanism, just like the chameleon’s shifting colors that help it blend into its environment and become invisible. If there is no one around to react to its biology, there are no promises, no magic, if you like. It’s only when you put a third party into the equation that things become dangerous. It’s the way we react to it, rather than the other way round.”

“And that helps us how?”

“It doesn’t. But it pretty much guarantees it isn’t the kind of creature that can keep any kind of bargains it makes. It isn’t that kind of magic. And I hate to be a party pooper, but without a point of origin we aren’t getting out of here, so it is all rather academic right now.”

“You don’t need to tell me,” Jack began to take off his evac suit. “I’m all for getting off this rock, even if it means leaving the gate behind while we go find out where the hell we are. It’s not like its going anywhere. Hey, you, yeah, come on over here,” he called to the Mujina. The creature lay huddled in the corner furthest away from the gate. Sam couldn’t see whether it looked up but it seemed as though the shadows back there shifted slightly. “Give me a hand with this, would you?”

“Not exactly how I imagined it in my head, sir,” Sam grinned, helping him with the seals that he couldn’t reach by himself.

“What are you thinking, Jack?” Daniel asked.

“We dress our new friend here in the full space suit get up, helmet and all, and keep the visor down. Maybe it’ll help. It certainly can’t hurt, can it?”

Teal’c said nothing. He merely raised an eyebrow at the notion. His silence spoke volumes.

He stripped the outer layer of the evac suit quickly. There was a tear behind the knee of his BDUs where the staff blast had smoldered through the fabric and burned into the skin. The wound was a mess. It needed treating or it would fester. Together they helped dress the Mujina. “No offense, pal, but the less people who see your ugly mug the better,” Jack said, securing the helmet in place. He brought the smoky visor down over its face.

“I am infinite,” the creature said through the helmet’s speaker relay. “I contain multitudinous life. I am you and he and she. I am they and they are I. I am all your dreams. Your hopes. Desires. I am the song of your heart. I am all of these things and more. I am a reflection of you. What you see is what you are.”

Daniel chuckled. “I think he’s saying that you’re just as ugly, Jack.”

“Ah, nice, a sense of humor. Thanks Doctor Seuss, you’ll fit right in. Okay, how about we get out of here? Daniel, the torch?” Jack held out his hand for the mag-lite. He spun his wrist, sending the thin beam roving all around the ice cave, high and low. The walls coruscated with an eerie inner glow as the torch’s beam played over them. “This way.”

They followed Jack as he led them through the darkness toward the surface. At every turn or fork in the subterranean passage he took the one that led upwards. It was a reasonable assumption to work from. Of course there had to be a reason for the gate being hidden away in the deep instead of up there, closer to the heavens. Sam kept the thought to herself.

It was almost like a game, following the bobbing light — a willow-the-wisp leading them on a merry dance through the dark. She hadn’t quite regressed to the point of worshipping the light yet, but there was something fundamental about her need to see it. “Follow the light and everything will be all right,” she said to herself. They walked in silence, each wrapped up with their own thoughts on their current predicament. Sam couldn’t help but run the probabilities in her head as she walked. There was comfort in numbers. Sometimes she went so far as to dream in calculus, the numbers forging a connection between her and the infinite. Science was her truth. Unfortunately, that also meant she grasped the enormity of the problem they faced if they ever wanted to get home. Not only could they be anywhere in the universe, they could conceivably be any
when
as well.

A little while later she felt the gentle kiss of the slightest breeze against her cheek. It was the first sign that there might be a way out of this subterranean darkness. It was growing noticeably colder, too.

A minute later she saw the first chinks of day bright.

They started to run toward it, scrambling up the shale. Sam’s feet slipped and skidded on the loose stones. She hit the light and stopped dead in the cave’s mouth. The world, for as far as she could see, was white. Vast featureless expanses of snow stretched out beneath her. There was nothing but whiteness as far as the eye could see.

It was a heartbreaking vista — and not one she had ever wanted to see again, not after the last time when they had stumbled out of the second gate onto the polar ice. There was no sign of any cavalry coming to their rescue. She bit back the bitter disappointment. It wasn’t the time for self-pity. Not if they wanted to find a way off the ice. Not if they wanted to find a way home. This was Fat Lady territory. Sam could hear her doing her vocal exercises.

“Okay, this isn’t exactly what I was hoping for,” O’Neill said. “I was thinking more like air cars and post-industrial cityscape. This is all rather… isolated. Carter, run a scan for life signs. I don’t know whether to hope there’s something out there, or really hope that there isn’t.”

“A yeti or two, maybe?” Daniel said.

Sam ran the bio-scanner. The results, for the second time since they set out from Earth, made next to no sense. “Sir? I’m not sure what to make of this. According to the scanner there’s a small army virtually on top of us.”

“They must be
really
small,” O’Neill said, his sentence punctuated by the telltale snick of a round being chambered no more than a few feet behind them. Sam turned to see the muzzles of two old style service rifles pointing down at them from a ledge on either side of the cave’s entrance.

“Now that’s just rude,” O’Neill muttered. He turned slowly, raising his hands above his head. “I am Colonel Jack O’Neill, of the United States Air Force. This is Major Samantha Carter, Doctor Daniel Jackson and Teal’c. We come in peace. Do you understand? Peace. No guns pointing. It’s just not the done thing where we come from.”

“The weapon is old, O’Neill. I do not believe it poses a threat to us.”

“It’s not polite to mock the people pointing guns at you, Teal’c. They might take offense.”

“No offense was intended, O’Neill. I was merely stating a fact. The barrels show marked signs of wear. Statistically it is improbable that such a weapon could expel its projectile with any degree of accuracy.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” one of the four gunmen said, standing slowly. “Given that it would be really difficult to miss with the muzzle pressed up against the side of your pretty bald head.”

“See what I mean, Teal’c,” O’Neill said. “Upsetting the guy with the gun is a really dumb idea.”

Sam watched as the rest of the gunmen rose. They moved with military precision. Each covered the other so at no point were there less than three guns aimed at their quarry. In a curious sort of way their discipline was reassuring. It meant they were less likely to get flustered or fire off a round accidentally — so the fact that they were at least organized meant the chances of making it out of this mess alive were greatly improved. The first man came down from the ledge. He was tall, maybe six inches taller than Jack, and broad shouldered like Teal’c, but with a markedly less defined musculature. He moved with a natural grace despite the treachery of the elements. Sam saw that he wore some sort of rubberized boot, designed no doubt for gripping the ice.

He was well protected from the elements with a fur-lined animal-hide over his head and shoulders, and beneath what appeared to be a derivative of Arctic BDUs, white to blend in with the snows, and with enough padding to suggest some form of Kevlar lining or suchlike. He was blonde, blue-eyed, square-jawed and distressingly handsome. They all were, she realized, looking at them one at a time. They were beautiful people to the point of being almost comic-book idealizations of what the perfect man ought to look like. The sight of these perfect specimens of humanity coming down from the narrow ledge was unnerving. There was nothing sensual or erotic about them. On the contrary, the marked genetic similarity between each of them was enough for Sam’s mind to leap to a certain set of inbred conclusions.

“You do not look prepared for the elements, which is puzzling, is it not, brothers?” The soldier said to his companions.

“Most puzzling,” another one of their handsome captors said.

“It would suggest that they were not expecting this weather,” the first man continued, “but that only posits another puzzler, does it not, brothers? Given that there is nothing but the ice of the tundra for more than two hundred klicks in any direction. Quite the conundrum, wouldn’t you say? What is a boy to think?”

“Perhaps we parachuted in,” O’Neill offered.

“I don’t think so. You would have been seen. Believe me, with nothing to see for miles, even the slightest movement tends to draw the eye. Four parachutes in the sky are not going to go by unnoticed. Besides, no chutes,” he pointed at their kit, and offered a wry smile. “So unless you were planning on bouncing I can’t see you jumping out of a plane.”

“Nice,” O’Neill said appreciatively. “Good solid deductive reasoning and a smart mouth. I think I am going to like this kid.”

“Aside from the whole pointing a gun in our faces,” Daniel said.

“So, no parachutes,” the soldier went on, ignoring the interplay between his captives, “and if I am not mistaken no tracks around the mouth of the cave here, so what am I to make of that? It isn’t as though you could simply materialize out of thin air, is it?”

“That’s a bit too
Star Trek
,” O’Neill said.

That puzzled the man. He appeared to think about it for a moment, trying to work it out for himself, but eventually gave up.