Heart's Desire (14 page)

“Then do that,” Jack said.

“I have to go below,” Carter said. “I'd have to do that anyway to stop the engines. You're going to have to fly this thing.”

“Great,” Jack said after a moment. He frowned at the controls. “Okay, these are probably the rudders.”

“Which would make these the elevators. Probably. See what you can do to keep us level. Your perception of the horizontal is going to be off, so you're going to have to go by eye.”

“I can do that,” Jack said.

“Hopefully with the controls active, the ship will stop whatever automatic routine is kicking in.”

Jack played with the controls tentatively, feeling the airship shudder but not able to tell whether he'd made much difference to its attitude. The weird pitch of the deck abruptly leveled, and he caught at the rail to steady himself.

“Are you going to be okay?” Carter said.

“Go,” he said. “Do what you can to secure these guys so they aren't going to give us problems when they wake up.”

There was a coil of rope with one end tied to the rail, and he cut it loose and used it to tie up the two pilots, leaving them behind the minimal shelter of the bank of controls. They were in his way, there, but they were also out of the wind.

He was already wishing for gloves, the wind whipping across his knuckles, although the controls themselves were warm, as if conducting heat from somewhere below. He held out for a few minutes, and then let go the controls just long enough to crouch, wincing, and strip the leather gloves from one of the pilots.

With gloves, the wind was bearable, although he wished he had his hat back. He could see the shadow of the airship running along the floor of the plateau, a crisp black shape floating across the rocks far below.

And now slightly less far below. He pulled back on the elevator controls, but the airship shuddered rather than perceptibly responding. He tried the other direction, experimentally, and winced at the sound of grinding metal.

“Okay,” he said. “Any time, now, Carter.”

S
am dragged the last of the airship's engineering crew out of her way and handcuffed him to something she hoped wasn't a vital mechanism. She was glad she'd found several pairs of metal handcuffs in her hurried searches of unconscious crew members. Before that she'd been very near running out of both rope and patience for tying people up.

She should have asked Jack for the duct tape, because at this rate she was going to run out of handcuffs. She'd used one pair to fasten the door to the crew quarters more securely closed, apparently without waking anyone inside, which was a small mercy. She didn't think it would be easy to take the door apart from the inside, but she wasn't sure how long it would withstand being battered at or zatted.

Next problem, that was the next problem. The first problem was figuring out the engines, and then how they were going to land. The engine controls were a maze of levers and dials, and for a moment it seemed hopeless. She ran her fingers over the levers, trying to trace their connections to the systems they controlled, and slowly their configuration began to make a certain kind of sense.

That dial had to be measuring propeller RPM
—
at least, she wasn't sure what else it could be measuring
—
and that was probably a throttle control. She traced the Rube Goldberg tangle of levers and gears with her fingers. She could shut the engines down, probably. She wasn't at all confident of her ability to start them again, especially safely, but she'd have plenty of time to figure that out if they could manage to put down somewhere.

She mentally crossed her fingers and began what she sincerely hoped was a reasonable shutdown procedure. She was rewarded by hearing the engine's dull roar quiet, its numbing shuddering under her feet going still.

That would surely not escape the attention of the sleeping crew. She searched the machinery, hoping that the gravity drive would be obvious. None of the rest of what she saw bore any resemblance to Goa'uld technology, and so it should be clear enough when she stumbled on it—

She nearly stumbled into it, backing up against a metal pillar that rose between the engines and the more open galley area of the deck. It was engraved with lines and whorls that suggested the shape of a tree trunk, with stylized leaves near the ceiling. Another Asherah, maybe, some kind of symbol of the goddess or of fertility that these people used as a good-luck charm, like the figurehead of a sailing ship on Earth.

It was warm to the touch, warmer than she expected. She looked closer, and saw the outline of a separate metal panel set into the center of the pillar. She felt around its edges until she found a catch, and the entire metal panel slid outward to reveal a bank of crystals that she could definitely recognize as Goa'uld.

The problem was that they weren't connected to anything she could recognize as a Goa'uld interface. She'd learned some common labels in Goa'uld by now, things like ‘on' and ‘off' and ‘danger: electrical hazard,' but here they'd apparently cobbled together an interface out of electric wires and manually flipped switches. It looked like a remarkably bad idea in action, and made her wish for rubber gloves, but she thought she could see how flipping the switches would direct power to one subset of the board's crystals or another.

That would have been great if she'd had any idea which ones she needed to power at what levels. She considered experimenting, but hesitated. She didn't like either the prospect of sending herself suddenly slamming to the deck as the ship plunged downward under several g's or of overloading one of the crystals and having it blow up in her face. Both seemed like definite possibilities.

She bit her lip, aware that the knowledge was probably there in her head somewhere. Jolinar had spent her very long life working with Tok'ra and Goa'uld technology, and she'd left a lot of her memories behind. The trick was actually getting at those memories. Sam had been fighting off unwanted flashes of Jolinar's past ever since Martouf had used the memory recall device on her, and now when she tried to conjure them up at will, any relevant memories that might be in there stubbornly refused to surface.

“Come on, help me out here,” she muttered. Not that Jolinar could hear her. Jolinar was dead, and the blending process that might have made it possible for her to make more sense of her memories had never really been completed. She could hear the sounds of footsteps overhead, now, a dull clang that might have been someone putting his shoulder to the crew quarters door, and she could feel her heart pounding.

She tried to relax, trying to deliberately summon the memories, the disorienting feeling of being in a different body, the shape of her hands different as she looked down at them. That felt like exactly what she'd been trying to avoid doing since she left Ne'tu, though. She'd told herself over and over again that Jolinar's experiences hadn't actually happened to her. Those weren't her hands, they were Jolinar's host Rosha's hands, the hands of a stranger she'd never met—

A stranger. Jolinar was staring down at her hands, the hands of a strange man, larger and more awkward than the hands she was used to. Not Rosha's hands, because Rosha was gone, and Jolinar would never see those familiar hands again.

This man was a stranger, and would stay one. She refused to think of him as anything but a refuge, a temporary necessity. It was wrong, she knew that, but hiding within him was her only chance to survive. In time she'd make her way back to the Tok'ra, free this man to go back to his family, and find a new host for herself.

It just wouldn't be Rosha. The aching grief tangled with a gnawing guilt that made her long to cry, but she couldn't even do that. Without coming forward to take control of the body she had no tears.

Rosha would have shaken her head and asked her what she expected, taking an unwilling host? She would have been so angry, demanding control of their body so that she could throw up her hands and storm at Jolinar out loud. She'd say she couldn't believe Jolinar had done this, and that she didn't know why she put up with her. And Jolinar would have happily let her, if only Rosha were there.

If Rosha were there, she would want me to live, she told herself. The water in the pond was clearing, and she stared down at the face that looked up at her, a strange man's face that seemed to reproach her with its eyes. She fought the urge to come forward long enough to smash her foot down and shatter the reflection
 —

That was Jolinar, Sam told herself fiercely, shaking herself out of the memory with her stomach twisting with guilt and grief. It was Jolinar who'd taken that man as her unwilling host after her longtime host Rosha was killed, Jolinar who had been desperate enough to do anything to survive. It wasn't her.

She wasn't Jolinar or Rosha or the unlucky man Jolinar had used as a hiding place when she was being hunted by Goa'uld assassins, she was Samantha Carter. All she wanted to know right now was how to direct power to the crystals safely to adjust the gravitational force affecting the ship. She wasn't interested in anybody else's feelings right now, or for that matter in her own.

She stared at the crystals, willing them to make sense to her, and had almost given up when finally there it was, the memory suddenly coming clear as easily as if it were her own. She could name each crystal and explain its use, and could see at once how to cut the power completely. She hesitated, though, not sure that the craft would actually handle properly in the air if she did, given the weight of the gondola.

She ought to be able to bring it down to the ground by adjusting the strength and direction of the gravitational force affecting the hull. That was how Goa'uld ships landed, and they seemed to survive the process. She experimented, and felt her stomach drop as the tug of gravity abruptly grew perceptibly stronger. The effects should be confined to the external hull, but clearly they weren't, not entirely.

Still, it was tolerable. She'd have to find their radios, and coordinate the landing with Jack at the controls above. But then the crew of the ship would have the same problem, wouldn't they? They wouldn't have radio, but it was possible… She hunted quickly around, flipping the covers off various controls and dials until she found one that looked like it at least might be a voice-pipe.

She flipped off the cover. “Sir? Sir, can you hear me?” There was a bell and a lever next to it; she pulled the lever, hoping there was an identical bell above that might draw Jack's attention to the voice-pipe. “Sir! It's Carter!”

“Carter!” Jack said, his voice distant and hollow from the other end of the long speaking tube but still comprehensible. “Is that you, Carter?”

“Yes, sir!” she called. “Sir, I've shut down the engines, and I think I can bring us down using the gravity generator. But I'm afraid we may not have enough time to do that before somebody gets out of the crew quarters and tries to take back the ship!”

She could see one of the stunned engineers already beginning to stir, mumbling a protest as he tried to move his cuffed hand. She was pretty sure that if she were handcuffed to the airship's machinery, she could do a fair amount of damage to it without being able to free her hand. She hoped this man wasn't planning to try.

“If I come down, will the ship crash?”

She winced, wishing she didn't have to make that call. “If we have sufficient altitude and we're not in danger yet of running up against the cliffs
—”

“Carter!” he interrupted tinnily.

“Not immediately!”

“All right,” he said after a moment. “I'm coming down! Try to find our stuff!”

They'd lost a wide variety of gear when they were captured, including stun grenades, which would make dealing with the guys currently pounding on the door of the crew quarters a lot easier. Some of it had probably been divided up among the crew, but Sam thought she knew where to start looking. Keret seemed like the type who'd keep the best of it for himself.

“Hopefully not immediately,” Sam said under her breath, and headed for Keret's cabin.

He was conscious already, but still securely bound, sitting up against one wall and apparently trying to loosen his bonds against a corner of a shelf. He looked up at her as she came in.

“Good try,” he said. “You won't get away with it.”

“Watch us,” Sam said. She looked around, and saw the familiar shape of a penlight resting on the top of a small cabinet. She reached for it and pocketed it, and opened the cabinet it had been resting on, revealing a welcome assortment of their belongings.