06 - Siren Song Read Online Free

wall and
stared into the middle distance. The brain was working. Jack could practically
see him feel around the edges of the gaps in his memory. He looked away.
    More sparks showered out of the control panel, and Carter jumped back and did
a few more tight circles before shifting crystals around again.
    Teal’c closed his eyes and was quiet, resting while somehow remaining alert,
waiting for opportunities to present themselves. Not for the first time, he
reminded Jack of fire, banked low and hot in the centre.
    Jack drummed on his knees. “Slo-ow motion Wa-alter,” he sang under his
breath. “That fire engine gu-uy.”
     
    By Sam’s watch, they’d been in the cargo hold for a little over eighteen
hours. The Colonel and Daniel had “I-spied” every single item in the room—which
wasn’t much, besides a couple of empty storage cases and themselves—but when
Daniel had started with “I spy with my little eye something that means ‘gift of
the Nile’,” the Colonel had gotten testy and made a new rule outlawing the
hieroglyphics in Goa’uld tel’tak wallpaper. After that, the game had
deteriorated into an argument regarding the relative cultural value of
Hammurabi’s Code and The Simpsons, and she exchanged a quick glance with
Teal’c to make sure he’d be ready to move if they had to intervene and wrestle
the two of them to their separate corners. Eventually a remarkable detente was
forged over the structural similarities of strip comics and petroglyphs, and Sam
dropped her head against Teal’c’s shoulder and let herself slip into a shallow
doze. In her dream, the stars were stretched in long, solid bars, rainbowed as
their light passed through the prism of hyperspace, and the tel’tak rode along those rails toward some distant point of blackness.
    Falling into the gravity well, she woke with a jerk. Daniel was watching her.
    “Bad dream?”
    She shook her head, then rolled her shoulders, wincing as her spine crackled.
Beside her, Teal’c was asleep sitting up. The Colonel was over next to Daniel,
on his back, his cap over his eyes.
    She braced a hand against the wall and levered herself up. One step over
Daniel’s legs took her to the tiny bathroom—at least Aris had left them with
facilities, and she even had some water in her canteen. Their kits and all of
their gear, including the rest of the water and the MREs, were in the forward
compartment with him. The toilet had no tank and used some kind of chemicals in
any case, and there was no sink in there, either. No use in thinking about their
out-of-reach canteens, so she returned to the cargo hold and, with a pat on
Daniel’s shoulder, went back to fiddling with the door control panel.
    After a few minutes, Daniel came and stood next to Sam, arms folded across
his chest. He leaned forward to look around the panel door. “Not making much
progress here,” he observed quietly.
    “Actually, I think he’s got the system completely cut off from this side,”
she said.
    “But the sparks—”
    “Mostly for show, to string me along.” She switched a blue crystal for a red
one with the same lack of results she got the last time she’d tried that. “And
to tick me off.”
    “If you know he’s got it rigged so it can’t be accessed at all from in here,
why have you spent the last day working on it?”
    With another shrug, she pulled out the red chip and replaced it with a clear
one. “Because if he rigged it, he must have rigged it somehow, and if I
can figure that out, maybe I can get around it.” A little more fruitless
twiddling, and she added, “And besides—”
    “It gives you something to do.”
    “I never was good at ‘I Spy’.”
    “Nor was I,” Teal’c said softly. He rose and rolled his shoulders. Then he
stepped to the middle of the room and began to work his way through the fluid poses of a training exercise, loosening muscles
stiff with waiting. Sam paused in her work for a little while to watch him and