06 - Siren Song Read Online Free Page B

himself. All the same, anger glowed under the ashes.
    She plucked at his sleeve to make him look at her. “Sorry,” she said
earnestly. She could see him reading her thoughts in her expression. “I’m not
blaming you. I don’t.”
    “Yes you do,” he said with a brief smile that held no irony, only affection.
“It’s okay. I get it.” He gave his own original question serious consideration.
“On Kelowna, I don’t think I actually made a choice. I think circumstances made
the choice for me.”
    “You would have died in any case,” Teal’c said. “But you died saving them.
That is a choice.”
    After considering that argument for a few moments, Daniel finally nodded.
“Then Aris Boch isn’t as right as he thinks, is he?” He looked past Teal’c to
the far side of the hold.
    “About what?” Sam asked.
    “About us. Even if we do what he wants, we’re not choiceless. Not in the way
that counts.”
    Sam turned to follow his gaze as he spoke and found the Colonel watching them
with dark, unreadable eyes.
     
    One year after Jack O’Neill had rejoined the Stargate program and formed
SG-1, General George Hammond’s staff aide had given him a doomsday clock as a
gag gift, a gentle poke in the ribs because of the program’s naysayers. It stuck
up from his desk like a ticking time bomb, and Hammond had hated it, from the
screaming red of the digital display to the way the numbers flashed once a
second. Whenever he’d had teams offworld, he found himself staring at the
numbers, thinking about casualty reports and the letters he’d written to the
families of soldiers he’d sent through the ’gate. It hadn’t been long before the
clock went into the drawer and the aide was dismissed.
    Even so, Hammond often thought about that clock. Especially when his people
were late reporting in.
    Hours inside the mountain never seemed to match up with the hours worked in
the normal world above, especially when there were several teams offworld
operating on the local time of their destination planets. It wasn’t unusual for
teams to return in the wee hours of the morning. Hammond carried a list of all
the away missions in his head and, as if that bright red alarm were flashing in
the back of his brain, he knew when a team was even a few minutes overdue.
    This time, it was SG-1.
    2300 hours came and went, but he waited a few extra minutes to be sure.
“Anything?” he asked Sergeant Harriman, who was haunting the control room with
him, two ghosts augmenting the skeleton nightshirt crew.
    “No, sir.” Harriman checked his watch against the ’gate system’s internal
clock. “Ten minutes overdue.”
    Hammond looked through the heavy bulletproof glass at the silent grey mass of
the ’gate. “Dial it up,” he said. “There might be a problem on the other end.”
    “Yes, sir,” Harriman said. A moment later, the floor shuddered as the ’gate
slowly came to life. Even after all these years, they still had those initial
tremors during the massive energy draw. The Stargate was a marvel to Hammond. He
understood its purpose, its function, but the fact of its existence still
provoked wonder in him, from time to time. He watched the wormhole blossom and
settle into a calm event horizon.
    Harriman wasted no time. “SG-1, Stargate Command. Do you copy?”
    They waited. Moments like these, the tension in Hammond’s gut tightened until
he felt twisted into knots. He narrowed his eyes against the glare from the
event horizon while Harriman tried again. “SG-one-niner, do you copy? Colonel
O’Neill, please respond.”
    Hammond listened to a few seconds of silence, then said, “Keep trying to
raise them, Sergeant. And let me know if you do.”
    “Right away, sir.” Harriman glanced up at him. “Should I call in any
additional teams?”
    “SG-14 is already prepping for their departure in three hours. If need be,
we’ll scrub it and move to rescue operations.”
    “Understood, sir.” Harriman went back