Heart's Desire (11 page)

“We should wait until it quiets down for the night. Then we can figure out a way to get out of here without attracting a lot of attention.”

“I'll think about that,” Carter said. “I don't suppose you have a hacksaw blade in the sole of your shoe or anything?”

“I left my hacksaw in my other shoes,” he said. “Which is to say, no. I don't know how long we were out
—”

“I make it late afternoon,” she said. “Local time. I'm not even sure anymore what time it is back home.”

“So let's try and get some sleep,” Jack said. “It's likely to be a busy night.”

He stretched out as well as he could and closed his eyes.

“I still don't know how you manage that,” Carter said after a while, cutting through his drifting thoughts and jerking him back from the edge of sleep.

“What?”

“Napping while we're stuck in a prison cell.”

“Practice,” Jack said without opening his eyes. “It helps not to talk.”

“Right,” she said a little ruefully. “Sorry, sir.”

He opened his eyes some time later at the rattle of the overhead hatch. It opened, but the light from above was faint. He raised a hand to fend off several unidentified objects that were tossed down, and then the hatch was slammed shut.

“A canteen of water, some kind of bread
—
at least, I think that's what it's supposed to be
—
and a bucket,” Carter said. “Wonderful.”

“I knew we should have paid for the first class upgrade,” Jack said. He waited while she drank, and then drank thirstily himself, trying to make out the sound of footsteps above over the drone of the propellers. They waited a while longer, until it had been some time since he'd heard any sound he could identify as other than mechanical. “All right,” he said. “What do we do?”

“I've been thinking about that,” Carter said. “These walls are sheet metal, and they're not that thick. If they're something with a low tensile strength like aluminum, which is possible if they're trying to keep the weight down, we might actually be able to cut through if we had a knife.”

“Maybe,” Jack said. “Would you build cell walls somebody could just cut through? You can figure somebody's always got a knife.”

“I'm not sure this was actually built as a cell,” Carter said. “It looks more like some kind of cargo compartment. Besides, we 
don't
 have a knife.”

“Somebody's always got something,” Jack said, prying the rubber silencer off one of his dog tags and carefully finding the edge he kept sharpened. He tried it on the wall, but the line it scored in the metal felt like only a faint depression, and it came away significantly duller. He tossed her the tags, and heard her catch them. “Try the wall on your side.”

“No joy,” she said after a moment. “Maybe if we used the bucket as a hammer
—”

Jack shook his head. “Too much noise.”

There was the sound of Velcro, presumably Carter searching her pockets again. “I still have a magnesium firestarter,” she said after a while. “We could maybe burn through with that in one spot, but that's not going to get us out. There are already holes in this wall.”

“Not to mention that smoke is going to attract attention fast with a big flammable balloon up there.” He looked up at the very faint light filtering in through the cracks around the hatch. “The hatch closes with a bolt, right?”

“Looked like it,” Carter said.

Jack stood up, reaching up to feel around the edges. “Hand me back my tags.”

Carter pressed them into his hand, and he wedged one into the crack, sliding it along the side where he thought the bolt must be until he met resistance. “Yeah, right here,” he said. He couldn't get enough play to budge the bolt, though, even with the sharp edge of the tag. He closed his eyes, trying to visualize how the bolt lay. “What I really need is a stiff piece of wire, something to catch the end of the bolt. I don't suppose you've got that in your shoe?”

“Umm,” Carter said.

“'Umm'?”

“Yes, actually, I do have a stiff piece of wire that might work,” she said a little reluctantly. “You just have to promise not to look while I… cut it out of my underwear.”

“Right,” Jack said, doing his best to sound perfectly casual. “It's dark anyway.”

“And you're still not looking, right? Hand me those tags back. I need something with a sharp edge.”

Jack held them out with his eyes closed, and kept them closed while trying hard not to imagine anything he shouldn't be imagining.

“All right,” Carter said after a minute. “I'm decent.”

She handed him a piece of flat wire bent into a double curve. He tested it, slipping it through the crack around the hatch, and pulled it back out to bend it into something more like the right shape. “I think this may do it,” he said, slipping the end back through.

“Practical uses for underwires in survival situations,” Carter said. “I should write a memo. You know, most of them are also conductive, and in a real pinch you could probably improvise some kind of weapon out of one, although that's more of a stretch.”

“We're not there yet, but I'll keep that in mind,” Jack said. The end of the wire caught the bolt and then skittered off its end. “Almost.”

“Duct tape?”

“Duct tape
,
” Jack said. He wrapped the end of the wire with the sticky side of the tape out and then tried again. He felt it catch and stick this time, and levered it carefully, feeling the bolt start to give. “Come on, you…”

The bolt gave suddenly, sliding easily now as he pulled the hooked wire back through the crack. He tested the hatch cover and felt it lift as he pressed up with his fingertips.

“We're in business,” he said. He wasn't sure what to do with the piece of wire. “I'm not sure this is going back where it came from.”

“That's all right,” Carter said. “Let's just move on.”

“Now comes the interesting part,” Jack said.

D
aniel tilted the metal tablet, angling it to catch the dim light. It was dark now outside the porthole windows, dark enough that he couldn't tell whether they would have showed stone or sky, but one of the crew had lit a couple of fine-meshed lamps as the light faded. Safety lamps, he supposed, which accounted for why they hadn't all been blown up yet. Or set on fire.

He wasn't clear which was more likely, only that it was hard to keep visions of the Hindenburg out of his head as he bent close to the tablets. They were definitely Ancient, but in an abbreviated form he'd only seen references to before. Making sense of them meant interpolating vowels and in some places whole words, but he was beginning to think he had the trick of it.

Nearby, Teal'c sat cross-legged, eyes closed in kel'no'reem. It made sense for him to restore himself now so that he could watch while Daniel eventually slept, but Daniel was also aware that watching him work out translations in a language Teal'c didn't read was probably intensely boring.

He was anything but bored himself. If it weren't for his awareness of the danger they were in, he would have been thrilled; they had so few texts in Ancient, and this one used several words that were new to him but that he could guess at from context. He wished he had something to write with.

And then there was what the tablets actually said, which if he could possibly be right…

The last part was the most straight-forward, and probably the part that had been missing from other copies, the latitude and longitude of a particular point on the planet's surface. It was probably too much to hope that whatever system of longitude was still in use there could be matched to the Ancients' in any meaningful way, but given a general area to search, the latitude should narrow it down. Given that she'd studied other inscriptions left by the Ancients, Reba might even have worked out the longitude problem; it would only take having the Ancient coordinates for a single known point to do it.

The part before that was a set of directions leading to a particular point through what sounded like a maze of streets and pathways. Apparently there had been a complex of buildings laid out in a grid, although it wasn't clear to Daniel whether it had been a city or some kind of temple complex. Either way, it had been a special place, and the reason for that was what its innermost chamber held.

That was the part that Daniel had spent the last hour checking and double-checking, wracking his brain to remember every scrap of the language of the gate builders that they had found so far. He'd wondered if he was making some kind of elementary error at first, but now he felt confident in his translation, and suspected that he knew where Reba had gone wrong with hers. He could feel his heart beating faster, and told himself firmly to keep his expectations reasonable, but he couldn't entirely repress his excitement.

“Daniel Jackson,” Teal'c said, opening his eyes. “Have you made progress in translating the tablets?”

“Actually, yes,” Daniel said. “I see why Reba was interested. It's this part, here
—
it's very easy to mistranslate it as 
a treasure greater than the heart's desire.
 ‘Treasure' should be, umm, not ‘thesaurus'… ‘thessera,' right, but here it's ‘artefacta.' It doesn't mean something found, it means something made by a skilled creator, a… look here, it's clear from the rest of the context that whoever wrote this was talking about a device.”

Teal'c looked as directed, although his expression made it clear that the words carried no meaning for him. “A device greater than the heart's desire?”

“Not quite. A device for
finding
‘whatever your heart desires most.' It sounds to me like the Ancients built a device that was intended to let them find anything they wanted to find. Some kind of… super-scanner that works at immense distances, from world to world or maybe even throughout the entire galaxy.”

Teal'c raised an eyebrow skeptically, and Daniel held up a hand. “All right, I know how it sounds, but we're talking about the 
Ancients
 here. They built the Stargates, they obviously had access to knowledge and a level of technology that we can't even begin to understand. Is it that much more of a stretch that they could have had a way of finding things that we don't understand either? I mean, think about it, they must have had some way of finding uninhabited planets where they could put the Stargates, right?”

“You have said before that you believed them to have explored the galaxy in ships,” Teal'c said.

“We don't 
know
,” Daniel said. “We still have no idea how the Ancients did most of what they did, and we can count the number of original Ancient artifacts
—
in the modern sense of the word
—
that we've ever found on the fingers of… well, not many hands. An actual functional Ancient device for locating things…”

Teal'c frowned. “You cannot be certain whether the device is functional, or indeed whether it is actual.”

“Well, no, of course not,” Daniel said. He felt that wasn't the point. “But it might be. And if it is, I think we may be able to find it.” Teal'c still looked as though he disapproved. “All right, what?”

“Surely most people's greatest desire is not for a physical object, but for some event or state of being.”

“Well, that depends, doesn't it?” Daniel said, trying to keep his voice even. “Anyway, that part is probably just a poetic way of saying it'll find whatever it is you particularly want to find. You have to admit that would be a huge discovery.”

“If it is real.”

“Which I think it very well could be,” Daniel said. “The tricky part is going to be getting Reba to believe me and go look for the thing without handing us over to the Goa'uld first.”

Teal'c still looked deeply skeptical. “If you are successful in locating this… device… what is to prevent her from taking it from us and using it for her own personal gain?”