Chapter Eight
General Hammond was surprised to see Jack return with four people in tow instead of only two, but he said nothing and waited for his Colonel to explain.
Jack wasted no time. “Sir, this is Commander Klem Sache and his second-in-command, Lieutenant Commander Zac Tomaz. Circumstances have changed on P3X-888. The Hun forces are organized and fighting back for control of Huna. They’re now in control of the Stargate and are asking for our help. They also want to negotiate peace terms with our two Segaran friends here.”
Hammond quickly assimilated the new information and then nodded gravely. “Let’s move this to the briefing room,” he ordered. “Commanders, it is a pleasure to finally meet you. Please follow us,” the General addressed the Hun men. The two Segaran diplomats were ushered ahead of Jack, looking hesitant but resigned with the role they were about to play.
-----
Sam was staring in revulsion at the set of knives displayed on the table between her and Daniel. The one Adros had already used on her still lay there, sticky with her blood and no doubt intended to remind her that the man was quite capable of using it again.
The Segaran was distractedly fingering the tools of torture while gazing at his victims menacingly, talking in an almost offhand manner. “It is only fair to establish the rules of the game, and I am nothing if not fair. I will ask a question and the person addressed will answer. If I don’t get a satisfactory answer, the other person will get punished.”
Sam looked at Daniel, who returned her look with dark concern. This was exactly what she had tried to avoid. They were about to experience “step three” of the Segaran interrogation procedure.
Adros casually picked up a sharp blade from the set and tried its sharpness on his finger. “Ouch! It’s perfect!” he glibly said, sucking his bloody finger and smiling at Sam, then at Daniel.
Sam noticed that Daniel looked worried, but she hoped her eyes were screaming her loathing. She wasn’t surprised when Adros slowly strolled to her side, still holding the knife as he used his free hand to caress her bruised face.
Sam forced herself to stare at a point behind Daniel’s head, forbidding herself from reacting to the threat. She clenched her fists behind her back, straining against the handcuffs in vain.
The pacing man smiled and placed himself behind her, where she could not tell what he was doing, still holding her face softly between his fingers. The glinting blade came into Sam’s view, its edge just grazing her cheek, not close enough to cut yet.
“We will start with little warnings, such as a little cut here,” he said, placing the blade on her chin, “Or here,” the blade stroked her other cheek lightly, “Or here,” he emphasized, and Sam felt the knife rest on her chest.
She made the mistake of glancing at Daniel and saw her own horror reflected in his eyes. Her friend did not dare say a word, clearly afraid that the man would cut her.
“If I start losing my patience, we will proceed to make some real damage.” Adros then let go of Sam and strolled to Daniel’s side. “We could start with an ear,” he drew a circle around Daniel’s left ear with the blade, “Or a nose,” He pricked Daniel’s nose lightly, making the archeologist close his eyes against his will, “Or a couple of fingers,” Adros concluded, looking again at Sam with a grin.
He then approached her again, against her will drawing her eyes to his, as mesmerizing as a venomous serpent. “Dr. Jackson, what were you working on when we so rudely interrupted you?”
Daniel did not hesitate. “I was working with Dr. Trenis on a translation.”
“Interesting,” Adros replied, sitting on the table and facing Sam, the knife still in his hand. He continued to address the archeologist at his back, seemingly eager for the young man to slip so that he could inflict some pain on the woman sitting before him. “What did the translation reveal?”
“Nothing. I… I wasn’t able to…” Daniel stammered and gasped as Adros’ knife flew to Sam’s chest and sliced the top of her blouse open, eliciting an involuntary whimper of alarm from her.
“I’m telling you that we had not been successful yet! It’s the truth, I swear!” Daniel shouted at the man, sounding desperate to stop him.
Adros caressed Sam’s newly revealed cleavage with the blade, as if savoring what he could do with it and still not looking at Daniel as he spoke. “All right, I believe you, Dr. Jackson.” He seemed almost reluctant as he removed the knife from Sam’s heaving breast and turned to Daniel, walking to his side in a couple of steps.
“Major Carter,” he addressed Sam now. “What were you working on when we so rudely interrupted?” he asked, waving the blade in front of Daniel’s eyes, seemingly undecided on where he would like to inflict his first cut on the man.
Sam licked her lips quickly, but hurriedly answered. “I was working on trying to activate what looked like an energy weapon,” she lied, hoping Adros would swallow the bait. He looked back at her with interest. “Really?”
‘He bought it!’ she thought, giving Adros a level stare and hoping to keep his attention. “I have seen similar weapons before, from other outposts such as the one here, and I was able to activate one once.” Sam swallowed, sinking deeper into her lie.
Adros was actually salivating at the possibility, she could tell. “Do you think you can activate the one you were working on?” he asked her, forgetting about the knife in his hand momentarily.
“Possibly… I’m not sure, but I think so.” She hoped her acting was good, or both Daniel and she would be feeling the sharp end of that knife soon. She could almost see the wheels turning in the Segaran Commander’s brain. He had sat on the table again, silently considering the possibilities of such a weapon.
She knew that he was thinking that, if he mastered a powerful weapon and he could extract from Daniel and her the information necessary to dial Earth, he could bully the SGC into giving him all the information he wanted. He, of course, had no idea that an iris existed to prevent him from doing such a thing.
“Sam,” Daniel said, believing her deception and clearly worrying about the consequences.
Adros moved quicker than Sam ever thought he was capable of, and slashed at Daniel’s chest in rage, cutting through his shirt and leaving a long, bleeding gash behind.
“AHH!” Daniel cried, taken by surprise and grimacing in pain.
“I will NOT do anything if you keep hurting him, I promise you that!” Sam shouted at Adros, the defiant look on her face again.
The man turned to her with a malevolent look, and she quickly added, “I will cooperate. I realize you are in control, Adros. I admit that!”
Adros stood, a smile of satisfaction spreading on his face. “Well, see how much progress we can make when we are more forthcoming?” he declared. “Now, the only thing I still would like to hear is how to contact your friends back on Earth so that we can chat. What is Earth’s Stargate address?”
He was addressing both Sam and Daniel, and they looked at each other, not sure about what they should say. Angry at their hesitation, Adros slashed at Daniel’s arm, leaving another, this time deeper, oozing wound on his bicep.
“AHHH! Stop!” Daniel reacted to the unexpected attack, shutting his eyes in pain and helplessness.
“All right!” Sam cried, “I will tell you! Just don’t touch him again!”
She knew that their GDO codes would have been changed the moment they became prisoners. She was also hoping that she could buy enough time for the SGC to send some help before they ever had to dial Earth.
Adros smiled again, approaching Sam with a gloating look on his face as he leant toward her, his mouth close to her ear again and the knife back to stroking her breasts under her blouse.
She watched as Daniel strained against his bindings. She knew, as well as him, that the Segaran was going to hurt her just for fun, despite what she had promised.
Sam’s breathing was short and rapid, terror and hatred making her heart race. She knew Adros wanted very badly to use his knife on her, and she also knew how that knife felt when he did.
“I knew you’d come around, my dear. Although, I must say, I wish it hadn’t been so soon,” he whispered with a malicious smile, his lips almost touching her ear.
He pulled away to look at her face, blatantly savoring her fear. He then slowly and perversely pricked the tender skin of her breast with the point of the knife, right above her heart and just deep enough to draw blood, eliciting a shudder from Sam that only seemed to incite him to dig a little deeper.
Sam was willing herself to remain silent, her eyes closed in concentration, but a whimper of pain escaped her lips as he sank the blade further into her flesh, blood trickling down her cleavage and soaking her blouse.
“Please, stop! She told you she’d cooperate! What else do you want?” Daniel yelled at Adros from across the table, sounding horrified.
Suddenly, a very excited Segaran soldier burst into the room. He was almost hysterical. “SIR! We are under attack!”
-----
Jack and Teal’c were well inside the hotel now. They had used their zats numerous times as they had made progress through the hallways, checking rooms as they went. A few Hun soldiers followed them, impressed with the energy weapons and doing their fair amount of damage with their own projectile guns, very similar to Earth’s.
Jack’s mission was the recovery of his team. Major Ferretti and the other SG teams were working closely with Commander Sache in the fight against the few remaining Segaran strongholds throughout the city. Medical teams from Earth carrying loads of emergency supplies had also been deployed, and the air strike over Segara had been halted when the two Segaran diplomats had agreed to terms with Sache and his second-in-command.
Jack and Teal’c had finally reached the room on the top floor where Bregan had told them Sam and Daniel were being held. The diplomat was now in Sache’s company, downstairs in the lobby, and the Hun Commander was securing the building and its surroundings, as well as communicating with the Segaran President through the much-relieved Segaran diplomat.
Jack kicked the hotel door open, breaking it in two as he stepped into the room, ready to shoot. The room was empty.
The Hun soldiers poured into the room behind him and checked the bathroom, verifying that they were alone.
Teal’c came to Jack’s side as he noticed that he was mesmerized by something resting on the only table in the room.
Jack’s heart raced with dread as he stared at a set of seven sharp knives sitting on a dark piece of cloth, one of them bloody. There were also numerous drops of blood on the floor and on the table’s surface, and then he noticed the small pool of blood and the smears on the other side of the table.
“I’m going to kill that son-of-a-bitch, so help me God!” Jack said through clenched teeth.
“Indeed,” Teal’c growled behind him.
“Sir! We found this man trying to escape the floor!” a Hun soldier came in dragging a Segaran man in uniform. The man fell to his knees inside the room as soon as the soldier released him. He was bleeding from a chest wound, and Jack hoped that some of the blood in the room belonged to this poor schmuck.
Jack calmly pulled his handgun, pointed it at the wincing man’s head, and said in a deathly tone, “You have only one chance to tell me where the two prisoners were taken to.”
The man clearly understood that Jack was not bluffing. He took one look into the furious Colonel’s hard eyes and he replied instantly. “They were headed for the Museum of Archeology! That’s all I know!”
The Segaran soldier was shaking in fright, lifting his hands as if to ward off the bullet, and Jack forced himself to put away his gun reminding himself that this was not Adros. Still glaring at the kneeling man, he asked in a freezing tone, “Where the hell is the Archeology Museum?”
“I will take you, O’Neill,” Teal’c assured him, and turned to leave the room without further hesitation.
Jack dismissed the cringing Segaran soldier and followed his teammate.
-----
Sam and Daniel had been roughly shoved into a vehicle parked behind the hotel and joined by a soldier on each side. Adros and another soldier sat in the front seats as the Segaran on the wheel drove them speedily toward the same museum they had been working at less than two days ago.
Sam had no idea what she was going to do once they got there, but she knew she had a better chance of escaping there than she did at the hotel.
Daniel was probably thinking along the same lines, glancing at her during the trip and gasping in pain as much as she did with every rough turn and violent bump along the road.
They did not dare to speak since Daniel had been painfully jabbed in the ribs by one of the soldiers when he had started to ask a question earlier.
Sam could tell that Adros was fuming again. The soldier that had brought the bad news earlier had also shared that they had been unable to recapture the Stargate and that other skirmishes were not going well.
An irate Adros had turned on him with a snarl, stabbing the soldier in the chest for his trouble. Sam did not think the man would die from the wound, but he had been left bleeding on the floor of the hotel room.
Adros had then swiftly and brutally lifted Sam by the hair, his obvious preference, and dragged her out of the room as he shouted orders for the two remaining soldiers to bring Daniel along.
They had quickly run down the back stairs to the waiting vehicle in the alley. Sam thought she had heard the sound of zat guns from the stairwell and had been tempted to scream, but Adros had still held the bloody knife in his hand, and she had not dared to tempt him to use it one final time.
She just hoped Jack and Teal’c would make it to the museum in time to help them before Adros managed to kill them.
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