Heart's Desire (16 page)

“The Goa'uld have ships that can travel in space. I've been on one of them.”

“So. Well, we were always told so. We promised each other that if she chose one of us to be her slave, whichever she chose would ask for the other to come as well. We would be together on Asherah's great ship, and serve her all our lives, and see the stars. We used to lie awake in the dormitory talking about it when we were supposed to be asleep. Making plans.” Her eyes were far away, and he recognized the softening in her voice, the sound of someone talking about a time she had been happy.

He could imagine it too clearly, little girls raised to dream of their future enslavement the way some girls played at weddings. The Goa'uld could twist anything to their own ends, any impulse of friendship or faith. He knew that, and knew that he couldn't afford to let his feelings about it show. He was an anthropologist here, he told himself, and these were just the interesting customs of the local people. It had nothing to do with him.

“We were little fools,” Reba said.

“What happened?” he asked as gently as he could when she didn't immediately go on.

Reba's expression hardened. “She wanted a new host, and she took Saba. And then she went away without saying a word to me. I never saw Saba again. I ran from the temple before the next festival. I didn't want to see her and know she wouldn't speak to me. That she'd look at me as if she didn't know me.”

“I'm sorry,” Daniel said after a moment. It felt inadequate, especially when he knew that his next words had to take the hurt he saw in Reba's eyes and drive it home like a knife. “After that, do you really want to trust her to make a fair bargain with you?”

Reba let out a breath. “Never mind being sorry,” she said. “And never mind Asherah. You believe this thing, this device of the Ancients, could be real?”

“I do,” Daniel said. “The Ancients built amazing things. The Stargates. Repositories of information that we could never begin to understand if we had a hundred years to explore them. I don't know how I would construct a device that can find whatever a person using it wants to find, but I don't know how to do a lot of things that the Ancients could do. For that matter, I don't even know how to build this airship.”

Reba put her head to one side. “And what is it that you want so badly to find?”

“I didn't say there was anything I wanted to find for myself.”

“You didn't have to.”

He shook his head. “That doesn't matter.”

“It might.”

Daniel hesitated, but he couldn't think of a reason not to tell her some part of the truth, except that it still felt like something he wanted to clutch painfully tight to his chest. Apophis already knew he was searching for the Harcesis child. He'd pried into Daniel's mind when he had him captive at Ne'tu, asking him in Jack's voice where the child was, twisting words of comfort and encouragement in hopes that they would lead Daniel to tell him everything he knew.

It was probably a good thing he wasn't that easily comforted. He shook his head, dismissing the memory. It took an effort to focus on what he needed to say, and he began to wonder just how long it actually had been since he'd last slept.

“My wife is dead,” he said abruptly, the words hanging bare between them. “Before she died, I have reason to believe that she sent her son… away to a safe place, but I don't know where that place actually is. I need to find it. To find him.”

Reba considered him, as if trying to decide whether she believed him. “If you find this thing for me, and it does what it says, I'll let you use it to find the boy,” she said. “If you can do that without taking it away with you. The device stays with me, and you're still mine to ransom back to your friends.”

“And we don't get sold to Asherah.” She nodded. “That works for me,” Daniel said. “I'd also like to get out of this cell.”

Reba shook her head. “What do you expect, a palace guesthouse? You won't find better accommodations on the ship, except my own quarters, and I don't like you that much.” She looked amused despite herself. “I expect I could find you a pair of hammocks to sling, and give you some time to take the air, although I won't be to blame if you let the wind sweep you overboard.”

“That sounds good,” Daniel said. “I'm sure we can manage.”

“Just you,” Reba said, all amusement gone. “The Jaffa stays locked up nice and safe until you keep your part of the bargain.”

Daniel turned to look at Teal'c, who he couldn't imagine was actually still asleep.

“We have little choice,” Teal'c said, climbing to his feet as he spoke. “It seems the best of our alternatives.”

“I'm glad you see it that way,” Reba said. She drew her zat and held it on Teal'c as she opened the cell door. Daniel met Teal'c's eyes for a moment, hesitating. They could probably overpower Reba and take her weapon if they moved fast, but they'd still have the problem of how to get down.

Teal'c nodded, turning up his hands in an almost imperceptible gesture of acceptance. He didn't look happy, but then Daniel didn't expect that he would be.

“How about returning our belongings?” Daniel said.

“Don't push your luck,” Reba said, and then sighed. “If there's anything no one had a use for, you can have it back.”

“That's very generous of you,” Daniel said dryly.

“I know,” Reba said, and locked the cage behind him.

J
ack made his way carefully down to the middle deck. Now that he was out of the wind, feeling was returning painfully to his face. He dropped to one knee, zat leveled, as he heard footsteps coming up from below, and then relaxed as he saw it was Carter.

“I got back a lot of our stuff,” she said. He stood, trying to ignore the way his knee protested the movement, and held out a hand to catch the stun grenade she tossed him. He tucked it away in his jacket, along with various other gear she handed over. He still wished they'd insisted that tac vests counted as appropriate ceremonial dress for the treaty signing, but this was an improvement.

“Nice,” he said. He glanced in the direction of the door to the sleeping quarters, which someone was now banging on. They'd had time to get good and mad by now, and if they had any sense they were currently planning to jump him and Carter the moment they opened the compartment door. “Everything under control below?”

“Pretty much,” Carter said. She considered the door. “So…”

“We zat the door just to knock anybody behind it back, open it, toss in the flashbang, and then…” He mimed repeatedly firing his zat.

“Open it, right,” Carter said. She looked at the handcuffs that were snapped through the door's handle, holding it closed.
 
“I probably should mention I don't have the keys to those.”

Jack drew out a concussion grenade and considered it, and then the door.

“In an airship?” Carter said, her eyes going wide.

He spread his hands. “I don't suppose you have a pair of metal cutters on you?”

“Actually, I might,” Carter said, rifling through her own pockets until she found them. “They were with the other stuff. They're not very big.”

He took them from her. “Haven't you ever heard it's not the size?”

“I don't think that's true of levers.”

“They're metal cutters, not levers.”

“Anything that works on a scissors principle is a lever. Well, actually, a pair of wedges connected to a lever…” She trailed off. “Probably not relevant.”

“Probably not,” Jack said. He moved in and cut the handcuffs free of the door, although the grinding noise of protest the tool in his hand made suggested he'd be buying Carter a new pair of metal cutters when they got home. He nodded to Carter, and she flanked the door on the other side.

Jack shot the door with the zat, its energy crawling across the metal, and was rewarded by hearing at least one unlucky person hit the ground on the other side. He waited until he was sure he wasn't going to give himself a jolt by touching the door, and pried out the nails jamming it shut.

He put his shoulder to it, just barely fast enough, as someone thudded against it almost immediately from the other side. He glanced at Carter to be sure that she was ready and then pulled the pin on the stun grenade.

Jack stepped away from the door and let it swing open, zatted the guy who came stumbling through it when it abruptly gave, and tossed the stun grenade in, ducking back against the wall and covering his ears against its piercing thunderclap, his eyes firmly shut against its flash. It was loud anyway, a crash he could feel through the soles of his feet. He moved in behind it, zatting anything that moved, with Carter backing him up.

One guy jumped Carter, knocking her to the deck, but she elbowed him in the face and then rolled free as he reached reflexively to shield his broken nose, zatting him as soon as she was clear. Jack let her be and concentrated on firing. In a matter of seconds, no one was moving but them.

Jack swept the room with his gaze, zat at the ready. Carter had her back to him doing the same. He didn't see anywhere for anyone to hide. It was a metal box with hammocks hung from rings in the ceiling, and they were loose folds of cloth that would have clearly showed it if anyone were still in them. The small metal lockers that lined one wall from floor to ceiling might have concealed a cat, but not a man.

“I should probably go fly the ship now,” Jack said, as the deck rocked alarmingly under his feet.

“Probably,” Carter said. “I'm going to try to bring us down by manually adjusting the gravity drive. Right now, the drive is keeping us neutrally buoyant. I want you to try to keep us as level as possible, and let me know if we're about to run into anything.”

“Other than the ground?”

“I think I can make this more of a landing than a crash.”

“That's what I like to hear,” Jack said, and headed back above.

They were still a comfortable distance from the cliffs, although they'd drifted closer to the western edge of the plateau, where the flat plain turned into a series of rocky cliffs and precarious hillside drops. That was not where they wanted to land. He wrestled with one of the rudders, and was rewarded by seeing their drift slow, although the airship rocked and shuddered as it fought the wind.

“All right,” Carter said, her voice tinny and distant through the speaking tube. “I'm going to start bringing her down.”

He could feel the shift in gravity, like stepping out of the water onto dry land and feeling his full weight suddenly returning. And then some.

“Am I supposed to be able to feel that up here?”

“No!”

“Well, okay, then,” Jack said. He shook his head. Off to the east, the sky was beginning to shade from black to blue, which at least meant that it ought to be getting warmer in the foreseeable future. They were sinking fast, still kiting westward in the wind. “Slow it down!”

“What's our altitude?”

Jack glanced down at the controls under his hands. One of the dials was undoubtedly an altimeter; he could barely see them in the faint pre-dawn light, and he was willing to bet that the numbering on them was at best in Goa'uld, which meant that given that best-case scenario he could probably recognize them as numbers.

He watched the ground rising toward them, trying to judge scale. “Maybe 500 feet,” he said. “You said you weren't going to crash this thing!”

“Just keep us level!”

“I'm more worried about keeping us going in a straight line,” Jack said, still fighting with the rudder. He put his shoulder to it to keep it from kicking back, at which point it whined alarmingly. He hoped those weren't important gears of some kind.

“Are we going in a straight line?”

“No! We're still pulling to starboard.”

“I can fix that, just let me…”

The deck tilted, and Jack swore and threw himself against the rudder before he realized that the deck wasn't tilting; he was tilting, fighting not to slide down the deck as if on a steep slope, but the deck was still parallel to the ground.