06 - Siren Song by Jamie Duncan, Holly Scott - (ebook by Undead)

eyes
closed. One of his hands rested on his stomach above his pouch, fingers kneading
it slowly. There was a faint crease between his eyebrows.
    “Well, it’s not like you had to do it a lot in your former life,” Jack said,
and Teal’c smiled at him, ever so slightly.
    Sam wasn’t too enthralled by the idea of another audience with a Goa’uld
either. Taking the Colonel’s cue, she rubbed her neck and rolled her shoulders.
There was a whopper of a headache looming at the back of her skull, and the
pulsing shudder of the mine wasn’t helping. Probably dehydration, she told
herself, or low blood sugar.
    The single MRE packet Aris had thrown into the makeshift cell with them lay
beside her, open and empty.
    For his part, Aris was finishing his second MRE and starting on the third. He
tapped Daniel on the shoulder and asked, “What’s this one?”
    Daniel gave it a distracted glance. “Uh, macaroni.”
    “Is that good?”
    He nodded, his eyes fixed on the text. “If you like chicken.”
    Sighing a little wistfully, Sam pressed her index finger onto empty foil and
picked up a crumb of granola.
    When it was halfway to her mouth, the Colonel said, “Are you going to share
that with the rest of us?”
    She met his eyes and put her finger on her tongue. He turned away with a
small frown, and she felt a tremor of satisfaction, even though her brain was
throbbing and too big for her head. The nice little fantasy about daiquiris and
nachos she started to build was interrupted by a kick to the side of her boot.
    “What?” she snapped.
    “What, sir,” he corrected.
    “Whatever,” she muttered under her breath and went back to cleaning crumbs
off of the wrapper.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Whatever, sir .”
    The Colonel was scowling down at her. “What’s behind that door?” he demanded.
    She looked up at him and shrugged with one shoulder. “I don’t know.” I don’t have X-ray vision, she added to herself. “Something the Ancients don’t
want anybody to get at, obviously.” There was a sort of sickly pulsing in her
eyeballs, and her mouth tasted like bright copper.
    “Like what?”
    Another shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s quarantined. Maybe there’s a really
nasty bug in there. Like the one that killed them off.”
    “A weapon,” Teal’c said, without opening his eyes. “Something of great power
that they wish to safeguard for their return.”
    O’Neill aimed his finger at him. “Yeah. I like Teal’c’s idea.”
    “You would,” she said, this time not quite far enough under her breath and
the Colonel’s scowl came back to the power often.
    On the other side of the force field, Aris was choking down his stolen
macaroni and cheese while watching his prisoners. Daniel was oblivious, still in
the same pose, only now one of his hands was following his eyes across the text,
like he was trying to snatch the meaning out of the air in front of him. The
rumbling vibration of the crushers was making her butt numb, but the Colonel was
standing up near the shield and Teal’c’s legs were sticking out and she had no
space at all for her own legs and everyone else had dibs on space and good ideas
and she was empty, full of nothing but “yes, sirs” and “I don’t knows”, like
somebody else lived in her head, their orders, their intentions—
    “You would ?” Another kick on the side of her boot.
    She glared up at him. His orders, his plans, his intentions. “Maybe it’s not a weapon. Who knows why the Ancients would lock
something up? Maybe it’s somebody’s garage for all we know.” She was tired of
saluting by reflex like her arms didn’t even belong to her, like somebody inside
was pulling strings, like Jolinar was using her voice and looking at Sam in the
mirror and thinking “me”—
    Rolling onto her hip, she leaned over low and retched up one third of an MRE.
    The Colonel crouched in the narrow space and brushed her hair back with the
good fingers of his left