Heart's Desire (26 page)

“I don't think so,” Daniel said. “What we're looking for should be… well, I think right around here.” He looked at what he'd caught himself against, the broken wall of a stone building with part of its low roof still intact. The orientation of the entrance seemed wrong, but it was the only structure still standing at the coordinates specified by the tablets. It was possible that he was looking at a side door, and that the main entrance had been on the wall that was worst damaged.

He reached for his flashlight, and then remembered it wasn't in its usual pocket. “I don't suppose you have my flashlight with you? The little…” He mimed sweeping a flashlight beam across the entrance.

“The small electric light,” Reba said. “I liked that. I'm going to have to see if someone clever can make me more of them.”

“You don't have it with you.” She shook her head, and Daniel gritted his teeth and considered the building. The two pressing questions were whether he'd be able to see a thing once he was in the shadow of the intact roof, and whether the roof would collapse on his head if he brushed the wrong stone. He wasn't optimistic about either one.

“All right,” he said. “We need to go back to the ship and get something to make a scaffolding, to shore up this roof. I'm also going to either need my light back or something fairly sizeable that's reflective, even if it's just a polished piece of metal, to use to get some light in there.”

“No stalling,” Reba said. She had her zat in her hand again, and Daniel fought the urge to roll his eyes. He was frankly getting really bored with the same old threats, but that didn't mean that if she zatted him he'd be any less unconscious. Or dead.

“This is a very old structure that's obviously sustained some damage from whatever geological activity did that,” Daniel said as patiently as he could, nodding toward the gaping chasm a few feet from the building's most damaged wall. “It's not safe to go in there without providing some support for the roof and the uppermost wall.”

“That's why you're going to do it,” Reba said. She armed the zat pointedly. “It's cold out here, and you're running out of time to persuade me that there's anything here to find. Get to work.”

“Right,” Daniel said. He crouched in the entrance, trying to see if there was an intact interior wall. It looked like there might be, which at least meant more support for the roof, but which also meant that behind the wall, he'd have basically no light. “I'll just go see what I can find, which will probably be nothing, since I can't see a thing.”

“You do complain,” Reba said, and to his surprise extracted his flashlight from an internal pocket of her coat.

“Thanks,” he said dryly.

“Don't break it. I want it back.”

“I'll try not to let it get crushed by falling rocks,” Daniel said. He thumbed on the flashlight and ducked inside the small building before he could talk himself out of it. He ignored the voice that screamed in his head that he ought to know better, especially after watching his own parents killed by a falling cover stone that they shouldn't have stood under while it was being moved. He'd gotten used to ignoring that voice lately, and had actually thought he might have shocked it into permanent muteness somewhere around the time he was letting himself be fired like a missile from orbit toward a volcanic prison planet.

Still, apparently he still had some kind of sense of self-preservation, because his neck prickled with tension as he worked his way further into the stone building. The outer room was largely featureless, a smooth stone façade still mainly intact over the rougher building stones that made up the walls. There was nothing here that could conceivably be an Ancient device, no writing to be interpreted, nothing.

The archway into the inner room was visibly cracked. He stood back and panned the light around the small inner room. It was nearly as featureless, but there was a niche or basin of some kind set in the opposite wall. He set his jaw and stepped forward, careful not to touch the wall on either side of the arch.

The alcove in the wall had a smooth, curved basin, and there was a hole in the back of it. Plumbing was the first thing that came to mind. If he was looking at a pipe, there was no way to follow it down without disturbing the stones of the wall.

If it wasn't a pipe, though… He considered it, wondering if it could possibly have been a socket of some kind. If something had been plugged in there, and rested in the niche in the wall…

 
He ran his fingers gingerly along the dry curve of the stone, hoping to find something that moved when pressed, or any unusual warmth that might suggest a hidden power supply. The stone remained cool and unyielding under his hand. If anything had rested there, it wasn't there now.

He retraced his steps with the same caution, taking a grateful breath of the cold air as he stepped outside.

“Well?” Reba demanded.

“It's not there,” Daniel said. “There might have been something there in the past, but if so, it's not there now.”

Her hand tightened on the zat, and Daniel braced himself for its painful blast. Instead, she jerked her head angrily back the way they had come.

“I don't want to have to drag you all the way back to the ship,” she said. “You'd just better hope that my people can find your device when they search the place. If not, and you've been lying to me all this time…”

“It was here,” Daniel said. “It may just take more work to find it.” He was already glancing around, trying to see where he might have gone wrong in interpreting the coordinates from the tablet. “If you'd just let me
—”

“Move,” Reba said, leveling the zat at him. “And give me that light back. It's mine.”

“You have an interesting definition of ‘mine,'” Daniel said.

“It involves being the one holding the weapon,” Reba said, and he had to admit she had a point.

“I
think we've got something, sir,” Walter said, head bent over his computer terminal. Hammond leaned over his shoulder to see as the computer began reading out the data from the UAV. “That's definitely one of our radios it's picking up.”

“Still moving?”

“Negative, sir. It's stationary, or close to it. Near this mountain ridge here.”

“That's good enough for me,” Hammond said. “How's the weather?”

“Clearing between the gate and the site of the radio signal,” Walter said. “Let me see if I can get a visual. The UAV's right at the limits of its range.”

The signal swam into view, grainy at first and then sharpening. Hammond could see the jagged peaks of mountains, the white flash of snow and the darker shapes of rocks. Near the bottom of the frame, he could just make out something brighter, an unnatural shape that caught the eye.

Walter's hands were already moving swiftly over his keyboard, sharpening the image and zooming in. As the UAV passed over the ridge, for several seconds its video transmission clearly showed the shape of an airship anchored at the ridge.

“It looks like there may be some kind of man-made structures in the area,” Walter said.

It didn't look like the kind of place where there was any reason for people to live, Hammond thought. “Up there?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“All right. The best information we have right now suggests that our people are up there. Let's go get them.”

“Yes, sir,” Walter said. “How, sir?”

“I've been thinking about that,” Hammond said. As far as SG-1 was from the gate, he couldn't send in a rescue team on foot without it taking weeks for them to get there, and he wasn't betting on the local authorities being very cooperative. Besides, if the High King's airships weren't any faster than the pirate ships that had taken SG-1, they could wind up playing hide and seek for a long time. “Get Sgt. Siler up here for me, please.”

Siler turned up promptly, still carrying a tool kit. “Yes, sir?”

“I've been thinking about how to extract SG-1,” Hammond said. “I think we're going to have to do it by air.”

Siler frowned at the gate, sizing up the problem immediately. “There's no way to get a light plane through without disassembling it completely. Putting it back together on the other side would take time. We could do it, but not quickly.”

“I was thinking a helicopter,” Hammond said.

Siler considered the gate again. “That could work, sir,” he said.
 
“We'd still have to break it down, or else use the crane to get it in here.”

“We got the gate in here, and it weighs considerably more than a Kiowa, even fitted out to transport casualties,” Hammond said. “Which I'm hoping we won't have, but let's cover all our bases.”

“We don't have a Kiowa, sir,” Walter said. “Would you like me to call around?”

“Try the National Guard,” Hammond said. “Tell them we've got a situation involving limited space for takeoff and landing.”

“It'll go through the gate, but the other side of the gate has steps down,” Siler said. “We're going to need to build a platform for it to rest on when we put it through.”

“How long will that take once you're on site?”

“How fast do you need it done?”

“That depends on whether we're doing it against the protests of the local authorities,” Hammond said. He broke off as the sirens sounded for an unscheduled offworld activation.

“It's Saday, sir,” Walter said. “We're getting a radio transmission.”

As unlikely as it was, Hammond hoped for a moment to hear that SG-1 had made it back to the gate on their own. It wouldn't be the most unlikely escape they'd pulled off, not by a long shot.

“It's from Walat, sir.” Hammond had left a radio set with the High King's minister of trade, not feeling inclined to drop in for another visit himself.

“Put him on,” Hammond said.

“Great General Hammond of the Tau'ri, I bring you the greetings of the High King, the great Bull of the Heavens, glorious among rulers
—”

“My greetings to him, too,” Hammond said, without much patience. “Has he found SG-1 yet?”

“The goddess Asherah has departed on her tour of the temples of the high places, but she has not yet left our world. If the pirates are bold, we may hear from them in the next few days, but if not, I am certain that once the goddess departs
—”

“If Asherah isn't anywhere near the Stargate, you won't have any objection if we look for our people ourselves,” Hammond said. He mentally crossed his fingers. If the Goa'uld had left a ship sitting next to the gate, they'd have a problem. If they'd just strolled through, they might not.

“That is out of the question.”

“I wasn't asking a question,” Hammond said. “I was willing to be patient while there were Goa'uld in the capital, but you say they've moved on. Did they leave Jaffa to guard the Stargate?”

“It has never been necessary,” Walat said unhappily. “Our own men guard the gate, but if Asherah were to return earlier than is customary
—”

“Has that ever happened?”

“I will consult the records,” Walat said, sounding relieved by the idea. No doubt he could make ‘consulting the records' take as long as was necessary to get the Goa'uld entirely out of the way.

“I'm going to take that as ‘not in as long as we can remember,'” Hammond said. “Now let me tell you how it's going to be. My team will be ready to move out in six hours.” He could see Walter's eyebrows go up at that, but the man didn't protest, and Hammond had every confidence that he'd find them a spare helicopter in less time than it took most people to order a pizza. “If you can tell me by then that you've found my people, it'll spare us some considerable trouble. If not, we'll go find them ourselves.”

“This may have serious consequences to future trade between our people,” Walat said huffily.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Hammond said. “We'll just have to get along somehow. Hammond out.” He motioned Walter to cut off the radio signal, and after a long moment, in which Walat was probably waiting for a better apology, the wormhole's blue flare sputtered and died.