SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (28 page)

“I am sure you do.”

“It is Nat. Thanks for asking.”

“I did not ask.”

“I know. It’s called sarcasm.” She peered at him. “Are you simple or something? I mean, did the fire melt your brain and leave you stupid?”

“That’s quite enough of that, young lady.” Jubal Kane leaned against the doorframe, an intense smile on his handsome face. The Kelani possessed an almost magnetic charisma, Teal’c realized, feeling the brunt of that seemingly easy smile for the first time. He had misjudged the man. He was a born leader, like O’Neill. He had that same affability that masked a fierce intelligence and ruthless cunning. Jubal Kane was a man you wanted on your side in a fight. Looking at him, whip-lean and hard, Teal’c could not help but wonder how much like his brother he actually was? To look at, one was in effect a shadow of the other: the black and the white, the bloated and the athletic, the compassionate and the cruel. But for a childhood of love instead of festering hate he could have been looking at Corvus Keen. “How are you feeling?”

“I have been better.”

“Truly. I don’t understand how you’ve recovered so quickly, third degree burns across more than eighty percent of your body should be a death sentence.”

“In another, perhaps. But I am Jaffa.”

“I’m not going to complain. I would much rather you didn’t die.”

“As would I.” Teal’c pushed himself up to his feet. He was decidedly unsteady. After a moment he accepted the girl’s hand and allowed her to support him.

“I can’t begin to thank you for what you did back there, for my mother.”

“Then do not,” Teal’c said. His bluntness surprised the man. “I merely repaid my debt to her. We are even.”

“Not yet. You may have repaid her, but there is a debt still between you and I. Kiah told me about your friends. I know where they have been taken. I can help you find them. Let me do that, then we can call it even.”

“That is not necessary,” Teal’c said, raising a hand to forestall Jubal Kane’s objection, “but it is most welcome. I believe they have been taken to the encampment to await the death train.”

Jubal Kane nodded. “Six wagons and three trains shipped out this morning heading to the Rabelais Facility. The camp is empty now. I believe that is where we will find your friends, if they are still alive.”

“Then that is where we will go,” Teal’c said. The little girl squeezed his hand. He squeezed it back.

It was an effort to walk. Breathing was hard; every inhalation felt like death by a thousand cuts as the air itself stung his smoke-damaged lungs.

“You don’t look so good,” Nat said.

“I will be fine,” Teal’c assured her. He could feel the symbiote compensating for the weakness in him. What his body needed was Kelnorim, but he did not have the luxury of time so any real healing would have to wait until O’Neill and the others were safe.

They joined the rest of Jubal Kane’s crew in the main room. “Nadal, move your hefty buttocks and let Teal’c sit,” Jubal said. Nadal made to move but the Jaffa shook his head. “Thank you, I will stand.”

“Another stubborn fool,” the Kelani muttered. The man was fat and he did not carry it well, but there was a hardness to his eyes that the warrior in Teal’c appreciated. For all the extra weight, Nadal was a fighter. There were too few of them in the Kelani ghetto. “Well I for one am not too proud to park my backside down in a soft chair and enjoy it.”

Teal’c looked at the others, recognizing Jachin, but not the fidgety stick insect of a man who sat across from the corpulent Nadal.

“We have business to discuss, gentlemen,” Jubal Kane said. “Nat, go play in the street.” He ruffled her hair as she screwed up her nose. When she was gone, he continued: “All right, we’ve got one question to answer, so that shouldn’t be too difficult. My friends, tell me, how do we stop a train?”

“Is that supposed to be a riddle?” Sallah asked, scratching at the scrag of beard that had grown through his sallow cheek.

“I can think of a few ways,” Jachin offered. “Short of hijacking the train or parking a truck across the tracks, we’re looking at damaging the rails themselves. Given the momentum of a packed train at full speed we’re talking about very little damage. A simple explosive charge would do it. Hell, a sledge hammer and a little time would.”

“Okay, let’s put it this way — can you do it?” Jubal Kane asked.

Jachin grinned. “I might not be much of a fighter, but I know my way around a detonator. Trust me, I can do it.”

“That’s all I wanted to hear.”

They listened to him as he outlined his plan for derailing the Rabelais Death Express.

Daniel Jackson lost himself listening to the music of the train, the driving pistons and the belching steam and all of the other rattles and creaks in the dark. It wasn’t exactly an orchestra of hope but that was because he knew what it meant — they were hurtling down the rails toward their final destination. With that in mind, the driving clatter of the iron wheels hitting the cracks in the tracks was more akin to the melancholy of a funeral dirge.

All around him the stink of desperation sweltered. Strangers
pressed up against him. Their misery was palpable. The selection process had stripped them of their dignity and any illusions they might have had. They might just have been riding down into Hell.

Why don’t they fight back?
It was an obvious question and it rang in Daniel’s mind. They allowed themselves to be ushered onto the death train and herded like lambs to the slaughter. There was a fatalistic resignation to it all. And now, in the filth and the dark, all he could smell was defeat. This was their lot; this was what Fate intended for them. That hurt Daniel more than any of the slings and arrows of supposed outrageous fortune Shakespeare had railed about. How could this kind of treatment ever simply become ‘acceptable’? And of course, how many other trains like this one were there out there in the night? Ten? One hundred?

He wanted to rally them into rebellion.
Maybe Jack could say something to whip them up? What though? If knowing that their loved ones were being sorted out for death wasn’t enough to make this worm turn, what on earth could be?

On earth? Daniel grunted. It was a bitter sound in the blackness. And in the echo another thought resurfaced:

What if we don’t make it home?

Daniel had thought it — or variations on it — a hundreds times or more. How could he not? Each time they stepped into the gate there was a very real chance none of them would return, they all knew that, but this was the first time it genuinely felt as though it might be true.

And curiously, he wasn’t scared.

He pushed his back up against the hardness of the wood side.

Outside, beyond the carriage, Daniel heard a bang — a short, sharp detonation. It took a moment for his brain to register that it was an explosion, and a moment longer to understand the implications of it. He felt the shift in the train’s momentum shiver up through the timber all the way from the wheels to the roof, and then the screech as the wheels locked and the roll became a slide. His balance was pulled away from him by the unexpected slide, he clawed at the straw and hard wood lining the bottom of the carriage but couldn’t stop himself from pitching back.

And then the world around him descended into chaos.

“
Jack?
” he called out. It was buried beneath the sudden rage of impact as something wrenched one of the carriages further up the train off the rails. The violence of the derailment tore through the prisoners. They were so tightly packed into the death trap that they couldn’t protect themselves, they couldn’t so much as raise their hands as they twisted and fell, slammed into the wooden sides even as the walls ruptured lethally. Then the world lurched away beneath him, hurling Daniel upward as the wagon jack-knifed. His face slammed into the splintering roof and he reached out, trying to find something to hold on to. Metal and wood contorted violently, twisting into a web of jagged pains. Around him the screams were contagious. Daniel could hear so many more sounds, the gut-wrenching sobs of the injured; the angry barks of the guards trying to make sense of the accident and instill some sort of order; the grating of the train’s wheels still spinning on uselessly and the melancholy wind that blew through the wreckage.

Daniel fell into a sharp hardness of bodies.

Hands pushed at his face and chest. He smelt the heat of blood. Felt the hot dribble of it into his face. He pushed back against the bodies, trying to find his feet.

The carriage lurched again, and for a moment it seemed to hang there, suspended by the thinnest of threads, then the weight shifted and the entire carriage yawed. It was a graceless topple, the slide into oblivion only arrested by the sudden and shocking implosion of jagged wooden spars and metal braces that bled moonlight and agony as the forces pulling at the wreckage finally tore it apart.

Daniel fell.

A long tooth of ragged wood tore through his upper arm as he came down on it and the press of bodies crushing down on him meant he couldn’t drag himself free. Another twist in the darkness drove him further onto the wooden stake. He screamed but it was only one more frightened sound in the all-consuming dark. He tried to think rationally: a few more inches and it would be all the way through his arm and piercing deep into his side! He screamed again, trying to yell for Jack or Sam or anyone who might hear and help, but like the first one it was lost amid the others. Voices cried out. Bodies kicked and thrashed. He felt himself being hit and kicked by people desperate to crawl over him and out through the ruined siding into the fresh air. Those less fortunate lay still, bleeding or already dead. Daniel struggled to push down against the floor — or was it the ceiling? The derailment had him utterly disorientated. It didn’t matter. He stared out through one of the broken panels. A full moon hung in the black sky. He fixated on it. Agony blazed through his arm as he tried again to move it.

And then he felt the first tear of wood entering his side and the pain put out the moon.

The Goa’uld, Iblis, raged silently.

He could not abide incompetence in those around him. Kelkus was dead. His disciple had paid the price for his own stupidity but that did not appease Iblis’ fury. The Shol’vah had escaped him, not once, but twice. It would not happen a third time.

No.

The time had come to step out of the shadows.

Iblis stood at the threshold of the vile bone mausoleum the Mujina had chosen for its nest. The place was rank with decay and old death. Ugly. Some few pilgrims still waited on the steps and among the graves clutching their offerings like the treasures they were not. It amused the Goa’uld that even in the face of such bleakness the humans managed to cling to their death rituals. Behind the corrugated iron roofs of the old factory buildings smoke belched into the black sky. Kelani bodies fueled the fire. Everyone in the Rabelais facility knew that, and yet still they found some cold comfort in building their graveyards and observing their rituals.

It was a suitable place to hide the ring transporter that allowed him to move freely between the capital and the various facilities he had instituted. It gave him a power the others could not grasp — the ability to seemingly be in two places at once. It was a simple deception, but the rumors it spawned were frequently amusing.

He heard the mewling of the Mujina, a desperate melancholy loneliness in its cry. It was like some wolf howling at the moon to attract a mate. Pitiful. Iblis had no interest in the creature tonight.

No, tonight he intended to visit Corvus Keen and put an end to this charade once and for all. Keen had made his own nest on the third floor of a derelict building in the heart of the old production buildings, close enough to the incinerators to smell the fires all day and all night. Even outside the air was putrid. There was so much death here, even just scratching at the surface. What went on behind closed doors thrilled the Goa’uld.

The bulbous body of a black rat fled into the shadows as he swept by.

He left the bone garden and came out onto what they laughingly called Main Street. The pouring rain drummed a maddening percussion on the corrugated roofs. Behind him the watchtowers loomed like specters. Despite its obvious decay the Rabelais Facility was perhaps the last truly majestic building in Corvus Keen’s Empire. It was a relic of better days. Five stories tall, row upon row of windows, some blacked out, some bricked in, others gazing blankly across the filth-strewn streets like the blind eyes in the face of a once noble patrician. The thick walls hid the screams. But lights still burned in the first floor laboratories, meaning the master of Rabelais was still at work. The man’s thirst for knowledge was impressive. The man’s thirst for pain, more so. He seemed to devise a new torture with every coming dawn. There were so many Corvani here who excelled, that it made Kelkus’ failure all the more galling.

Iblis wearied of this body. It was neither ugly nor beautiful, indeed it was utterly unremarkable.

He took the rusty old freight elevator to the fifth floor, the car rattling and wheezing as it struggled with his weight, and then walked down the deserted passageway toward Corvus Keen’s chamber. Bare bulbs flickered in and out of light, casting shadows across the floor. By the time he reached the forth bulb they were all dead. He wasn’t surprised that no one challenged him or blocked his way. It was a mark of his supreme arrogance — after all who would dare try to kill him? That was the way Corvus Keen’s mind worked. Where some might have fallen into paranoia and surrounded themselves by soldiers, Keen simply refused to believe anyone would have the temerity to try and kill him.