Heart's Desire (15 page)

“Let me go, and I'll put you off the ship right now.”

“I bet you will,” Sam said. There was a hard, cold knot in her stomach, some part of her that urged her to zat the man again to silence him, and didn't care whether it had been long enough since the first shot for him to survive. Or maybe not a part of her. It felt a lot like Jolinar, which meant it wasn't anything she needed to think about at the moment.

“On the ground, I mean. There's a town not far from here. As long as you don't mind a hike.” He was smiling, and Sam had to fight the urge to kick him. That wasn't her, she told herself. At least, she was pretty sure it wasn't her.

“Sorry, this isn't my stop,” Sam said. She tucked as many useful things as she could into her jacket and headed for the door.

“Let me go, you
—”

She slammed the cabin door on the words, and then staggered as she felt the airship gondola rock, the wind catching at it now that the controls were unmanned. She steadied herself against the cabin wall and headed for the stairs at a run.

D
aniel Jackson stood at the bars of the cage that imprisoned them, the tablets tucked carefully in one arm, his eyes on Reba. Teal'c was still less than confident that his approach to dealing with her was wise, but he could say nothing now to make the woman suspect as much.

“I have good news and bad news,” his friend said.

“That's bad news for you,” Reba said. “If you can't translate the tablets
—”

“Oh, I can. I mean, I've already done that. No, the bad news is that they aren't referring to a treasure in the sense of ordinary valuables. They're instructions for finding a device, something created by the Ancients that's supposed to have the power to
find
a fabulous treasure. Or whatever it is you desire most.”

Reba let out a breath. “If you're lying
—”

Daniel Jackson spread his hands. “Why would I do that? If it really were a literal treasure, that would probably be more motivational.”

“Yes, it would,” Reba said. “Apparently I'd be better off selling you to Asherah.”

“Wait!” Although Reba had begun to turn away, she hesitated and then turned back, still listening. “This could still be incredibly valuable to you. If you had a way to find all the treasure you wanted
—”

“There can't be that much treasure on this planet.”

“You don't know,” Daniel Jackson said. “From the number of tablets in the High King's collection, there must have been extensive Ancient settlements on this world once. There may be storehouses of technology that could be of tremendous value, here or any other world. Not to mention precious metals, or whatever it is you're looking for.”

“Mainly metals,” Reba acknowledged.

“You could find those.”

“Could. May. You don't know anything.”

“I know you believe these tablets reproduce the authentic writings of the Ancients, and so do I. In fact, I suspect these may be originals, actually left by the Ancients as some kind of signpost to help people who came later find this device of theirs.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Maybe they wanted it to be used. Maybe they were trying to be helpful. Maybe… I don't know, but you believe there's something there, and so do I, and I know exactly where you can find it.”

Reba shook her head, her long hair brushing her waist, her fingers brushing a leather sheath where a long knife lay against her thigh. “And then you'll just walk away and hand it over to me, because you like to be helpful too, is that right?”

“We're
your
prisoners. And I like surviving. I'll help you find the device, you can use it to find whatever you want, and you can still ransom us back to our people. Just don't hand us over to Asherah.”

Reba looked tempted for a moment, seeming as if she would agree, and then she shook her head, her expression hardening. “Sorry,” she said. “I like long chances, but that's too much of one for me. I'd rather stick with a sure thing.”

“No deal with the Goa'uld is a sure thing,” Teal'c said.

Daniel Jackson nodded. “He's right. If you try to trade us to Asherah, there's no guarantee that she'll hold up her end of the deal. She's more likely to take us and send you away with nothing, if she lets you go at all. Believe me, it would be a very bad idea for you to trust
—”

“You think you know so much,” Reba said, her expression suddenly stormy. “What do you know of the gods?”

“I know they can't be trusted,” he began, but she was already stalking off toward the stairs, swinging herself down the staircase and out of sight. “Great.” Sitting down next to the bars he settled the tablets down carefully. “That really went well, don't you think?”

“I do not,” Teal'c said. “But perhaps you can persuade her to reconsider.”

“If I can get another chance to talk to her before she turns us over to the Goa'uld.” Daniel Jackson let out a frustrated breath. “They really have a racket,” he said. “'Trust me, I'm a god.' Sometimes I wonder why we don't try that.”

“Because it would be wrong,” Teal'c said calmly.

“I mean, other than that.”

“Because one day the slaves of the Goa'uld will rise up and destroy them all.”

“Yeah, that's nice to think.” He leaned back against the bars. “There's no point in hoping that Asherah won't realize how much you're worth, is there?”

“She is unlikely to be unaware of the fact,” Teal'c said. “Before his death, Apophis offered a sizeable reward for our capture. It is likely that any of the system lords would pay an equally high sum for the traitor who helped to kill Apophis.” It might not be equal to the value Apophis would have placed on him in his rage at his First Prime's betrayal, but there were many Goa'uld who would take pleasure in providing an object lesson to their Jaffa in the price of rebellion.

“Which is true whether or not they know that Apophis didn't actually die when he tried to invade Earth, because we just killed him again.”

“Indeed,” Teal'c said. “The best that we could hope for is that she intends to drive a hard bargain.”

“While we sit around in prison.”

“It is more likely that we will be interrogated for the knowledge we possess.”

“And there's a cheery thought,” Daniel Jackson said. “Right, so, we have to sell Reba on taking us to find this artifact. There's no other good way out of this.”

“We could attempt to escape this cell.”

“I still don't know how to fly this ship. Do you?”

“It is nothing like any Goa'uld vessel I have ever flown. Still, if the alternative were being handed over to the system lords to suffer perpetual torment at their hands, I believe I would be willing to make the attempt.”

“Maybe that should be plan B. If we can't talk her around…”

“How long are you intending to wait?”

“I think we should have a little time. She surely can't fly this ship straight back to the capital, not without tangling with the king's airships. She's going to have to wait until Asherah starts her tour of temples, and try to meet with her somewhere along the way.”

“It will be harder to escape this cell in the daytime,” Teal'c said.

“It probably will, but on the other hand, do you really want to try to fly this thing for the first time at night?” He pressed on, seemingly encouraged by Teal'c's lack of an immediate reply. “Just give me a few more hours to see if I can talk Reba around,” he said. “If not… then I guess we go with plan B. Break out of here and either learn to fly this thing fast or start looking for parachutes.”

“I would prefer not to jump from this airship, even equipped with a parachute,” Teal'c said. He had pointed out to O'Neill on more than one occasion that the entire purpose of aircraft was negated if one left them in mid-flight.

“Me, too,” Daniel Jackson said. “That's why I'm still hoping plan A will work out.”

I
t was still quiet in the cell, from which Daniel guessed it was still some time before dawn, although between getting zatted and the time difference between wherever they were and Colorado Springs, he'd lost any internal sense of time. Jack and Teal'c always seemed to be able to keep track of local time effortlessly; he never had figured out how they did it, one of many mysteries about the two of them that still eluded him.

Teal'c had offered to keep watch while he slept, but he didn't feel tired, running on adrenaline and probably thoroughly jet-lagged to boot. It was a familiar problem, one that he'd gotten used to in the days after he first returned from Abydos. For a while, every time he lay down to sleep knowing that Sha're was in the hands of Apophis and that the sun was still high on Abydos, getting up and drinking more coffee had seemed infinitely more attractive.

Thinking about that made it hard not to think about his more recent return from Abydos, after Sha're's funeral. He'd come home and found a bed in one of the guest rooms and closed his eyes and slept. He wasn't sure if that was a sign that he'd changed, gotten so used to horrible tragedy that it no longer kept him awake staring at the ceiling. Possibly it was just that it had finally been an ending. Never one he would have wanted, and one he still wasn't sure how to live with. But an ending.

That was the point of funeral rites, of course, to bring some kind of closure to the grieving friends and family, to delimit the boundary of a life… He shook his head and tried not to let his mind wander along those lines. Composing academic essays in his head was his usual refuge from thinking too much about Sha're, even if he was fairly sure that since her death he hadn't had a single original idea worth ever writing down. It wasn't one he could indulge in here in the field, though, not when they had more pressing problems to worry about.

He tried to keep his mind on the present. Teal'c had stretched out to sleep, sensibly resting while he could. The moonlight came in patchily through the small windows set in the hull, fading and strengthening as distant clouds slid across the yellowish moon.

He looked up sharply at the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. They were light, hesitant, not someone stomping on their way to some necessary task. Maybe someone who also couldn't sleep. It was Reba, as he'd hoped, and she stepped off the stairs and crossed the deck to stand on the other side of the bars, looking at him as if trying to see within him.

“I'm telling you the truth about my translation of the tablets,” he said quietly.

“You may be,” she said. “But what if the Ancients lied?”

“I can't see any reason for them to do that,” Daniel said. “The only question is whether the device is still there, and I can't make any promises, but I think it's worth finding out.”

She shook her head. “Now you're an expert on the Ancients, too.”

“Not an expert,” Daniel said. “A student of their language, and I've learned a few things about them, but… no.” He considered her, and decided it was worth playing a hunch. “You asked me what I knew of the gods,” he said. “What do you know of them yourself?”

“More than you,” Reba said. She hesitated, and then shrugged. “My father was an unlucky farmer, just like Keret's, but a more pious one. Or maybe it was just that he couldn't afford to raise me until I was old enough for anyone to want to pay for my bond. He gave me to the temple of Asherah when I was practically a baby.”

“You were raised in a temple?”

“Brought up to serve the Queen of the High Places and to love her with all my heart,” Reba said. “Her temples here are kept by humans, you understand. Her Jaffa can't be bothered to keep temples in such an out of the way place as this. But we loved her as well as any Jaffa priestess ever could.”

Daniel nodded, choosing his words carefully. “I'm sure you did.”

“I had a friend, Saba, and we hoped Asherah would choose one of us to serve at her side one day. We were children, what did we know? We wore our best clothes for the festival and trembled when she came near us. I learned to read the ancient writings that talked of ships bigger than these, ships that could sail the stars.” She looked at him, a question in her eyes that she wasn't willing to ask, and he nodded.