Heart's Desire (38 page)

“Not all dreams are true,” Sha're said, but her voice was sad.

“Was this one true?”

She turned to him, looking up at him. He thought he had never loved her more than at that moment. “You already know,” she said. “You know what you must do.”

“No,” Daniel said. “No, I won't. Because if I remember whatever it is, I'm going to lose you, aren't I? Aren't I?” He drew her back when she would have pulled away, looking searchingly into her face. “Tell me the truth.”

“You can never lose me,” Sha're said. She put her fingers to his lips, tracing the line of his mouth as if committing it to memory.

“It's not worth it,” Daniel said. “Whatever it is I've forgotten, I don't care. I don't care about anything but you.”

“That is not true, my Daniel,” Sha're said, very gently. “If it were, you would not have searched the ancient writings when we were on Abydos. Or unburied the chappa'ai and spoken of how we might travel through it if you could learn its secrets.”

“It would have been better if I hadn't. Sha're…”

Sha're shook her head, and pressed her hand to his heart. “If you had not, you would not have been my Daniel. But you are, and you know that this is a dream.”

“I don't want it to be,” Daniel said desperately.

“Neither do I,” Sha're said. She smiled shakily, and he cupped her face in his hand for a long moment, feeling her face warm against his palm. “You must wake up now,” she said. “There is not much time.”

“For what?”

“To save your friends,” Sha're said, and then he was standing in a room bathed in crimson light, his hand pressed against the warm curve of carven stone.

“Sha're!”

She was gone. She had never been there at all. He put his hands to his face for a moment, struggling to accept that he would never really touch her again. Then memory flooded in, impossible to ignore. Reba, and Keret, and his momentary distraction.

He turned to see Reba still sprawled on the floor, her chest moving softly as she breathed; stunned, not dead. Keret was standing with his zat still in hand, his expression that of a sleep-walker. He didn't glance at Daniel, but his eyes moved as if he were dreaming, or as if he saw something that wasn't there.

Daniel looked around, and wasn't surprised to see that Jack and Sam and Teal'c were also standing stock-still where they had been when he'd activated the device. He quickly took the zat from Keret's unprotesting hand, tucking it into his own waistband, and then went to check on his teammates.

He waved his hand in front of Jack's eyes and shook him by the arm, but Jack didn't move or speak, his eyes looking past Daniel to some internal world of his own. The others were no better. He considered the idea of trying to carry one of them out of the chamber, in hopes that its effects would wear off when they were removed from its proximity, but when he tried to lift Sam, she stayed standing like a statue, making it hard for him to lift her except by putting his arms around her waist and lifting her feet off the ground.

Wrestling her out of the room that way would be hard, and wrestling Jack out would be harder. Moving Teal'c that way would be a challenge, and getting any of them back up the cliff presented an interesting problem. He supposed that if he went up, he might be able to persuade Reba's men to help hoist them up like sacks of grain, but if the effects didn't wear off with proximity, and he had to persuade them to lower them back down instead of just leaving them all as more trouble than they were worth…

“Okay, this is a problem,” Daniel said, pleased that his voice was mostly steady. He was still shaking, he thought for a moment, and then realized that it was the floor that was shaking. The device was vibrating, rattling against its housing in the wall and sending dust and chips of rock showering down from the ceiling.

Maybe more of an immediate problem than he'd thought. There was no way to tell how stable this chamber was. This whole hillside was riddled with cracks and fractures in the rock that wouldn't take much added stress. Even if the roof of this room stayed up, it wouldn't help if their route back to the surface collapsed.

As if in answer to the thought, he heard an ominous rumble like thunder, although they were far too deep into the hillside for it to actually be the sound of an oncoming storm. It was the sound of rock moving, somewhere too close by for comfort. They had to get out of here.

He couldn't move all of them while they were still under the influence of the device, at least not quickly. He wasn't sure how he'd escaped from its influence himself, and couldn't afford to wait and see if they could do the same. He had to turn the thing off. The only problem was, he hadn't found instructions for that. He had hoped it would be obvious.

He probably should have thought that through a little more. He hadn't been thinking clearly, and when Reba had fallen, all he had been able to think about was Sha're. And yet when he'd gotten what he thought was his heart's desire, he'd immediately started prying up the loose corners of the fantasy world he'd constructed, unsatisfied with anything but the truth—

 
And if he didn't put all of that aside now and think fast, a ton of rock was about to fall on his head. Right.

He pressed his hand against the carved heart again, careful to touch every chamber with his fingers, hoping that it would be as simple as that. The red light still filled the room, and when he glanced back, none of the others showed any signs of stirring.

“Okay, not that simple,” he said. There was another clatter, and loose rock and dust showered down from a corner of the room. Maybe it was a sequence, some kind of code. He could probably figure it out if the roof stayed up long enough. Another threatening rumble made him less than optimistic that it would. Of course, there might be a mechanical means of disabling the device, one that Sam could probably figure out if she weren't currently staring blankly at the wall.

“Have I mentioned that now would be a really good time to wake up?” he said, but the only sound was the distant thunder of tumbling rock.

S
am finished noting down the results of the last of her tests on the gravity drive, and frowned. It was performing just as expected. Almost perfectly as expected. For a first trial, that was a little strange. She would actually have felt better about seeing some strange results, a few spikes in the power consumption or some sign of incompatibility between the power source she was using and the alien power crystals.

She opened a few more files on her computer, flipping back through her last few experiments. All of them had worked just as smoothly. They'd really been remarkably successful reverse engineering all the Goa'uld technology they'd found so far. Even the hand devices, which at first she'd suspected might require some kind of protein marker specific to the Goa'uld in order to use, hadn't been that hard to modify.

For a moment, she couldn't remember exactly how. It was a funny thing to blank on; she remembered working with Janet on the problem, and their mutual excitement at the idea that they might be able to heal damage that couldn't be cured by any current human technology. She searched further back through her files, hunting for the records of those experiments.

They'd had no success in their first handful of trials, and then they'd tried injecting trace amounts of naquadah into the user's bloodstream. That had apparently created the energy signature that the hand device was looking for. It seemed a little strange when she thought about it, but it had clearly been the right idea.

What she couldn't find was any indication of how they'd originally come up with the idea. She frowned, and called up to the infirmary, asking for Dr. Fraiser.

“Hi, Sam,” Janet said after a minute. “What can I do for you?”

“Do you remember when we first started working on the hand devices?”

“Of course,” Janet said. “Believe me, I'm not likely to forget it. It's made such a difference in what we can do.”

She was right, of course. While they were lucky not to have encountered hostile forces in their exploration of the galaxy, there were still some accidental injuries that might have been a lot more serious without the ability to heal them easily. Jack's recent knee injury, for instance, or… she had the hazy impression of a mission somewhere hot, with air that stung her throat, but she couldn't pin it down.

“I'm not sure what's the matter with me today, but remind me
—
what made us think that injecting a naquadah solution would make the Goa'uld hand devices start working for us?”

“We already knew that it was possible for someone with trace amounts of naquadah in their bloodstream to detect a Goa'uld symbiote,” Janet said. “It seemed reasonable that it might also allow some amount of control over Goa'uld technology.”

“And we knew that because…”

“Because of Cassie,” Janet said, sounding surprised that she didn't remember. “The people of her planet all naturally possess trace amounts of naquadah in their bloodstreams. That's how they were able to detect the Goa'uld who were trying to infiltrate their people and infect them with what could have been a deadly plague.”

“But we were able to stop it in time,” Sam said. “I knew that.” She and Janet had both formed a special bond with Janet's youngest patient on that mission, and they'd visited numerous times since then. It was always great to get to spend time with Cassie, and to see her growing up happily with her parents.

Sam shook her head, unable to shake the sense that something was wrong. She could clearly picture Cassie in her mind's eye the way she'd looked the last time Sam had seen her, but when she tried to remember talking to Cassie's parents on her last visit, she couldn't even clearly imagine their faces.

“We're just lucky that it didn't actually require a protein marker that could only be left by the presence of a Goa'uld symbiote,” Janet said. “That would have made it pretty much useless to us, unless we felt like letting someone become a host.”

“Probably a bad idea,” Sam said.

“Is everything all right?” Janet asked. “You sound like you're worried about something.”

“I really don't know,” Sam said. “I'm having a hard time remembering things today that I feel like I should be remembering. Everything from what I said to Cassie's parents the last time we visited to how you found out about the naquadah.”

“Hmm,” Janet said. “You know, you've been putting in some pretty long hours lately. Maybe you should take the rest of the day off, get some rest.”

“I guess,” Sam said. “I really want to take another look at these numbers I just ran, though. And tomorrow we're supposed to
—”

“I know,” Janet said firmly. “There's always something, but you also need to take care of yourself.”

“Colonel O'Neill was just saying that we needed a vacation,” Sam said. “He actually suggested that we all spend the weekend up at his cabin.”

“I think that's not a bad idea at all,” Janet said.

Sam smiled and shook her head, even though she knew Janet couldn't see. “Don't you think it might be a little… I don't know, inappropriate?”

Janet sounded amused. “Do you want it to be?”

“I am not answering that question,” Sam said. Now she was glad Janet couldn't see her face.

“I think Teal'c and Daniel count as chaperones,” Janet said.

“Be that as it may,” Sam said. “I'll think about taking the afternoon off, I promise. My mom and dad are in town anyway, and I was planning on taking off a little early so I can have dinner with them.”

“Have fun,” Janet said. “And come by and see me if you're not feeling better tomorrow.”

“I will,” Sam said.

She should have felt reassured. It ought to be a good thing that Janet didn't think her apparent memory lapses were a sign of anything other than overwork. Instead, she only felt more unsettled, and couldn't stop herself from questioning the conversation they'd just had.

You've been putting in some pretty long hours lately
, Janet had said. But had she? Of course there had been missions, but as far as she could remember
—
and as far as she could tell, flipping back through mission reports
—
a lot of them had been routine. She'd spent a couple of days checking on the progress of the new X-301s, and she'd spent a couple of evenings in her lab, but it wasn't like she'd been pulling all-nighters lately.