SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (21 page)

Daniel’s stomach churned; it felt like the drum of a washing machine tumbling around inside him, wringing his insides out. The next stage would be the shakes. They were classic withdrawal symptoms. He had no idea what they had been pumping into his body but he felt every hair follicle and every nerve ending creeping and crawling like they wanted to come out through his skin. He knew all it would take was one more hit to make the pain go away, but that kind of thinking wasn’t going to help any of them.

A woman walked among the crowd carrying a pitcher of water. She gave out barely a mouthful at a time, and only to the children and the old. Beside her walked two men with a huge platter of moldy cheese chopped down into cubes less than the size of a fingernail in any dimension. They rationed it out one piece of cheese per person. Desperate people pawed at them trying to get a second mouthful. One of the men kicked out, his booted foot catching the Kelani under the chin and snapping his head back. He lay sprawled in the dirt unmoving. More Kelani just climbed over him reaching out hungrily. Before they could pull the cheese man down a gunshot rang out. A second and third were fired into the air. Everyone in the square froze, eyes darting, frightened. Daniel half expected to see a blood-red rose flower in the side of someone’s temple but the bullets had been fired into the air — this time.

Sam sat beside him, her back pressed up against the wall. She was shivering. It wasn’t cold. He scooted up closer to her and put his arm around her. The gesture made them look like any other Kelani family frightened of being torn apart. She scratched at her arm where they had hooked the drip into her. He wanted to sooth her but he barely had the strength to hold himself together. She looked like hell. Her hair, lank and unwashed, had begun to clump into greasy ringlets. Her eyes had taken on a dark sunken look and her skin was flaking. She was living with ghosts. But then so were the others. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten a proper meal. He knew he wasn’t alone. The hunger showed in each and every haunted face in the crowd. There was something utterly desperate about all of them. They didn’t know what was happening to them or why.

He must have looked at a thousand faces, but none of them were Teal’c’s. They hadn’t seen the big Jaffa since he had rescued them from the maze. It had taken eight of the guard to bring him down, and even then he had maimed more than half of them with his bare hands. Teal’c was the immovable object being bombarded by the irresistible force. And for a moment it had looked as though he might hold his own forever, battering them back even as they threw themselves forward. And then a tranquilizer dart fired from long range had buried itself in the Jaffa’s open palm as he went to swat it away. He weakened heartbeat by heartbeat as the sedative mingled with his blood, his symbiote fighting to neutralize the drug. Still he didn’t fall until a crushing blow struck the side of his head. There was nothing any of them could do to stop the guard from taking him away. Jahamat had come to taunt them after that, goading and kicking O’Neill as he delighted in telling them that they would never see the Jaffa alive again because Iblis had chosen him.

Iblis.

It had taken a little while for the significance of the name to register.

Iblis. It that causes despair. The enemy of man.

According to the Qu’ran, Iblis was the name of an Islamic demon prince with an army of fiery demons at his beck and call. “The Companions of Fire,” he said softly, trying to remember everything that he had heard in relation to the demon. Sam looked up at him, not understanding. In four years they had encountered enough so-called gods and devils across the galaxy to know any such mythic resonance was no coincidence. Daniel hoped beyond hope that he was wrong, even as he became more certain he was right — Iblis had to be a Goa’uld. Had to be. It was an essential part of their psychology: the aggrandizement, the fraud, it was all part of their psychosis, and Iblis was no different.

Islam was outside of Daniel’s comfort zone, he was much more familiar with ancient Egypt, the Sumerian myths, Babylon and Mesopotamia and such, but he knew enough without having to go back to the books. The story went that Iblis had refused to bow the knee to Adam because he was formed of clay, a lesser being, and had been cast out of heaven for it. Fallen, he had been given the name Shaitan for his hubris and set to wandering the world as penance. The Arabic epithet Shaitan translated roughly into ‘evil’ or ‘devil’. Indeed, the role of Iblis in the Qur’an bore some startling similarities to the devil figure of Judeo-Christian faith, Iblis being the tempter of both of God’s first children to eat the apple, earning their expulsion from Eden. Part of the demon prince’s vengeance on God was a promise to corrupt as many of Adam’s descendants with lies and half-truths as he could before judgment day.

Lies and half-truths. It was hardly the Goa’uld way; it suggested subtlety and cunning as opposed to braggadocio and arrogance. But then, perhaps this Iblis was a different monster, being that he chose to hide himself behind Corvus Keen, opting for the shadows over sunlight?

Daniel used the distraction to take his mind from the hunger. He ran through the pantheon of gods the Goa’uld were known to have drawn upon, trying to find parallels to the demons and angels of Islam. Oddly, perhaps, Shaitan was almost completely analogous to the Christian concept of Satan: a whisperer who urged men and women to commit sin. What that meant in terms of this Iblis, Daniel shuddered to think.

Around the square he saw the occasional muzzle flash as the sun caught the sniper’s steel, reminding them that all around them guns were aimed silently at their heads and chests. At the first sign of trouble death would rain down from on high. It was a far cry from the world any of them had been born into. At every corner stood a dozen or more of Corvus Keen’s black and silver Raven Guard, ostensibly to keep order and see the refugees were railroaded onto the trains that would take them to the Facility.

Daniel shuddered, his head racing with all of the parallels. Over the heads of the prisoners he saw the funnel of steam and heard the clash and hiss of a huge old train rolling in. Everything about this sent a murmur of trepidation through the Kelani packed into the square. A few stood, craning their necks trying to see, more seemed to sink into themselves as though they hoped they might somehow become invisible inside the crowd.

Guards came forward and slammed back the rusted iron bolts holding the drop-down sides on the carriages in place, and stepped back as the wooden panels fell with a bang. The sound rang out across the square, as deafening and more damning than any retort of gunfire.

The segregation was as quick as it was ruthless, soldiers walking through the clusters of tired and frightened people, picking out one or two from each group and dragging them toward the train. They took young and old. Something about the selections disturbed Daniel. On the surface it appeared as though there were no rhyme or reason behind the choices but it was so random it had to be deliberate. A few minutes of watching them and he knew what it was that bothered him about it — they were weeding out the weaker ones, the youngest of the kids, the older men, the women, anyone lacking the physical strength they would need to survive a labor camp. And with that realization came a second one: he was looking at a death train. These grandfathers, mothers and sons were being culled.

To his left a blonde haired woman played airplanes with her baby son. She was a pretty young thing with a scarf tied in her hair and no make-up that he could see. She smiled and made burbling noises as she held the boy up to the sun and then brought him back to her breast and hugged him tightly. She knew. Daniel wept quietly then for all of them.

Whistles blew sharply; the piercing sound cut above the hubbub of the prisoners. Guards grabbed more bodies — they weren’t people to them — not caring now as men pleaded to be taken with their wives and sons. For a minute he thought that the Kelani might fight back. By sheer weight of numbers they could have turned their callous execution into a bloodbath and taken more than a few of the Corvani with them, but they didn’t fight. They allowed themselves to be separated and stood weeping and reaching out as the carriage sidings were lifted and the bolts slammed into place. Tiny slits no more than an inch wide had been cut into the wooden sides. Fingers reached through desperately clawing at the air and in the darkness behind them eyes without hope stared out at everything that had been taken from them.

A different kind of whistle sounded then. The train engine vented a raft of steam as it lurched backwards. Pistons pumping, the iron wheels began slowly to roll and as they did more and more steam curled up around the base of the engine, wreathing the entire underside of the train. When it finally moved away the train looked disturbingly like some kind of mythological beast, an iron and wood dragon. It was every bit as lethal as any imaginary creature that had bubbled up from mankind’s subconscious fear of the dark, because the death it was transporting them to was real and final and not fairy tale at all.

With the crowd thinned the last of the resistance seemed to bleed out of the Kelani. Guards changed shifts. The sun fell and rose and fell again, the bite of the night cold almost blessed relief as it reminded them they were alive. Not that many of the left behind wanted reminding.

With his strength returned, at least as far as it could with so little food to fuel it, O’Neill had taken to going out amongst the prisoners, talking to them. At first Daniel had thought it so utterly out of character for the Airman he had followed him. Unlike Daniel, Jack wasn’t interested in their stories or their grief, he was interested in what little strength remained inside them. Some of the Kelani took to calling him “the steel man”, possibly because of his graying hair but more likely because he simply refused to be broken. He planted a few words here, a few there, and let them grow inside the men. They were simple words. The message was all about hope. He didn’t lie to them and tell them everything was going to be all right; no one would have believed him if he had. Instead he told them simply that they would have a chance, and when it came they had to be ready to seize it. Daniel knew O’Neill well enough to know at least part of the message was no more profound than that these men would get a chance, somewhere between here and the Facility, to own their own deaths and not meekly be herded along to the experimental laboratories, the shower blocks, or whatever other hideous fate awaited them. It didn’t need to be profound. It needed to be truthful. These men needed to hear the truth because lies couldn’t help them run away from what was happening to them. Only the truth could set them free — even if that freedom meant accepting the reality of the genocide going on all around them. He didn’t promise them that they could save their loved ones or that their wives and sons would be fine. Far from it, in the most subtle of ways O’Neill planted the seeds of revenge.

Daniel saw the Mujina twice over the coming days. The effect the creature had on the crowd was fascinating and horrific both at the same time. The Kelani looked to it as salvation. Daniel saw only death’s hungry eyes looking back at him. The first time, the Mujina stood at Jahamat’s side, though for its second visit it stood beside a bloated slug of a man in black and silver who treated everything as his domain. This had to be Corvus Keen, Daniel reasoned, struck by the way the man embodied every cliché of corrupt incompetence. Of course, logic dictated that the man did everything in his power to nurture that misconception — truly incompetent men rarely rose to hold such power and they certainly didn’t hold on to it for any length of time. The fat slovenly embodiment of greed and excess was nothing more than a layer of cunning used by Keen to lull both friend and foe into underestimating him.

Both visits seemed to serve the same purpose, for the man with the creature to gloat.

Each time the Mujina left them something died within the Kelani.

That something was hope.

It was a brutal game the creature played, lifting them up and then crushing them. It took a certain kind of malice to be capable of it.

They would never look at Jack in the same way that they looked at the creature from the flames of Vasaveda. He was a leader but he wasn’t a beacon. He didn’t blaze in the same way. But, Daniel knew, he would never fail them. That was O’Neill. He was a genuine hero in a world of false Messiahs.

In the darkest part of the night, Daniel heard something. It was no owl, no matter how much it wanted to be. Beside him O’Neill cupped his hands over his mouth and loosed a wolfish howl. A guard came up behind them and gave the colonel a savage kicking. O’Neill lay on his side, taking it. No amount of blows could rob the smile from his face.

Another train rolled in that morning, and two more during the course of the day. The guards were every bit as ruthless as before as they weeded out their selections. There were two kinds of train servicing the station. There was no telling whether the train that rolled was meant to transport the soon-to-be-dead or the damned that were destined for the Facility.

Finally they were chosen.

Teal’c was alone.

The Mujina had seen to that. The black and silver clad soldiers stood lined up against the wall like a firing squad, watching him without so much as a twitching eye. The old rifles were held almost carelessly. Did they think so little of the threat he posed? They did, Teal’c realized. He considered his options. He could make a stand here — their body language betrayed their arrogance; these people were not used to their captives making a stand. It was all about controlled aggression. A burst of pent up fury. He could break free of his guards and in three steps ram the flat of his hand into the face of one, taking him down, and before the second could react have him lying on the floor bleeding out of his ear, larynx crushed from the force of his elbow. Then in another two seconds he could almost break two or three more before a single gun came up to aim at him, but what would be the point? There were a dozen more. These soldiers were lazy because they could afford to be. In the turrets along the high walls the dead eyes of trigger-happy sharp shooters followed him. He could feel how much they wanted him to try it, to make a move. Losing five men was nothing to them. But for the Jaffa to die here was not glorious; far from it, it was nothing short of foolish. So he would let them live, for now, even if it meant taking their pokes and prods and abiding the scorn and distaste of lesser men. It was not a fight for now.