Heart's Desire (28 page)

 
His shoulders ached more sharply by the time they'd reached the wall at the top of the ridge, and he would have suggested they stop and rest a minute if he hadn't suspected it would make Reba start threatening to shoot something again.

“Those coordinates have to be right,” he said. “That section of the tablets isn't ambiguous at all. The device was five streets
—
well, ways, pathways, anyway
—
down and to the south of the north wall, on this row of buildings. It should be here.” He paced around the front of the building he'd investigated before. “In which case either it was here, and it was removed, which I think is unlikely, because if someone had made that kind of find it would have been hard for them to keep quiet, or it was never here, and it was…” He turned a slow circle, noting that in several places they'd tumbled stones that had been standing when he'd first been here. “Where?”

“That's what I want you to tell me,” Reba said. He heard the sound of her arming her zat again.

“Yes, and stunning me will definitely help me figure this out.”

“I wasn't planning on stunning you.”

He set his jaw and tried to ignore the possibility that she would simply run out of patience and kill them both. It wasn't helping him think. “Down and to the south. Why say both? Unless the word order… it could be ‘to the south and down.'”

“I fail to see the difference,” Teal'c said.

“Maybe it doesn't mean downhill,” Daniel said. “Toss me a rope.”

Reba did, although he wasn't sure how hard she'd try to hang onto him if he fell. He made his way cautiously to the very edge of the chasm that split the courtyard, edging around that side of the building, bracing himself on its stones and willing them not to choose this moment to fall.

“Here,” he said.

Reba crowded behind him, and he fought to keep his balance. “Where?”

“Don't
do
that. Here. I think this used to be…” He crouched carefully and could see that he was right. “See? There were stairs carved in the rock here, stairs leading down into some kind of tunnel or underground room. And then when the courtyard split apart, part of the rock on both sides crumbled
—
you can see that the rock edges on either side don't fit together
—
and most of the stairway was destroyed. Leaving just this little edge of the stairway, which shows where it used to lead… somewhere.”

Reba backed up a step, considering the gap in the rock. “You think there's still something down there?”

“I think there very well might be.” The remains of the steps were no more than an inch or two wide, and while they might widen lower down, they also might have crumbled entirely. “If you want to find out, someone's going to have to climb down there.”

Reba hauled Daniel back from the edge unceremoniously and turned to Teal'c. “Can you climb, Jaffa?”

“Oh, no, I was…” Daniel began, and then hesitated, unsure whether arguing that he should investigate for himself would make him sound overly concerned for Teal'c's safety or merely greedy about being the one to get his hands on the device. Neither was likely to persuade Reba.

Before he could come up with a reason that might, Teal'c was already answering. “I can descend the cliff, if the ropes are secured well.”

“Good. Find out if there's a safe way down there. And don't get the idea that you can make off with the treasure yourself. We'll be waiting at the top.”

“He doesn't know how to work the device,” Daniel said. “I'm still the only one who knows that.”

“All the more reason for you to stay right here where I can keep an eye on you.”

“Let us not waste any more time,” Teal'c said. He sounded out of patience himself, or perhaps just not enthusiastic about the climb. “I am prepared to descend.”

Please be careful
, Daniel wanted to say, but he couldn't risk saying a word.

T
eal'c braced himself against the cliff face as he slowly worked his way down the remains of the broken staircase, resisting the urge to test the rope yet again to see if it would truly hold his weight. He was at least grateful that he was not attempting the climb in the armor of a Serpent Guard. He remembered one particular battle on an icy glacier that had ended in pursuing the enemy down a treacherous icefall, in which more than one of Apophis's Jaffa had lost their footing and fallen to their deaths.

This was probably not the best thing to bring to mind while descending a sheer cliff. He steadied himself, shifting his hands before reaching out carefully to find the next foothold with his foot.
 
He kept his eyes on the rock in front of him, because looking down was unpleasant, and looking up of no value.

If O'Neill were here, he would say that Teal'c was a pilot, and so should be entirely used to heights. Teal'c had pointed out more once that there was a significant difference between flying in an aircraft and falling from one, but O'Neill seemed constitutionally incapable of understanding it.

It was easier to think of O'Neill than to think of Daniel Jackson waiting above. He had said what he had felt he must say in order to keep them both alive. Teal'c was well aware of that, and also aware that this particular story had been the first to come to mind. He would have understood it if Daniel Jackson had sworn revenge against him for Sha're's death, perhaps better than he did his forgiveness.

He had not expected to be forgiven. Or, to be more exact, he had not thought of what killing his friend's wife would mean after it was done, only of immediate necessity. He had been unwilling to allow Amonet to kill Daniel Jackson, both because he was a friend and because his skills were irreplaceable in their fight against the Goa'uld.

That was probably a good thing to bear in mind at the moment, because it was easy to feel that, as this was Daniel Jackson's plan, he should be the one currently dangling over the edge of a cliff, trusting himself to a rope held by someone who had not an hour ago threatened to kill them both. O'Neill had the knack of imposing his own will by argument alone, but Teal'c had found that nothing short of flat refusal to proceed would serve him when Daniel Jackson felt he knew the best course of action.

All of this was a distraction from taking the next step downward. He gripped the rock with his fingers, clinging painfully hard to the spurs of rock he had found, and reached with his foot for the next step.

It wasn't where he expected it, and for a moment he could only flatten himself against the rock, trying to hold fast. He risked a glimpse downward. The stairs ended, in what might have been a switchback that had crumbled when the rock split. He would have to work his way down the bare rock from here.

Teal'c had to trust to the rope, leaning out over open space and holding onto the rope with his hands, walking his way down the wall. It was at least a faster means of descent, although ascending would take longer. More than once he was held up when whoever was above failed to play out the rope fast enough, and once the rope went abruptly slack, and he slithered down several meters, unable to arrest his fall, before it went jarringly taut.

He braced himself for a moment to catch his breath, ducking his head as loose pieces of rock continued to rattle down from above. When he looked down, he could see what looked like a ledge several meters below him, much wider than the stairs. It was hard to tell whether the rock opened above it, but he thought it was possible.

He continued his careful descent until he ran out of footholds. The rock below him did open up into a tunnel or cave that penetrated into the rock face. He tugged on the rope for more slack, and pushed himself off from the cliff face. He swung out and then back, catching himself on the tunnel's roof and scrambling down until his feet touched the tunnel's floor.

It was clearly manmade, its walls squared and dressed in finished stone, although the opening was uneven as if the tunnel's original mouth had fallen away. He took a deep breath, grateful for solid ground under his feet, and then shrugged out of his makeshift rope harness. He extracted their flashlight from his pocket
—
Reba had threatened dire consequences were he to break it
—
and shone it down the tunnel
.

He could see nothing except that the tunnel continued for some distance and ended eventually in a right-angle turn. Curiosity warred with his reluctance to let go of the rope, but after a moment he let it swing free. He walked down the tunnel to the bend where it turned the corner, and followed it some distance further, far enough to see that there must be a maze of tunnels under the ruins of the city above.

The air was fresher than he would have expected so far from the entrance, although he had seen no air shafts set into the rock, which suggested that some of the turnings he passed might end in passages back up to the surface. It was tempting to see if he could find another way of ascending, but he knew Reba would be growing impatient.

It would be all too easy now for her to believe that Teal'c was looking for a means of escape and intended to leave. Not that he would do such a thing, but Daniel Jackson's story had made it seem plausible. It was what Teal'c would have done if they were truly enemies.

Instead he retraced his steps back to the entrance and refastened his rope harness, grasping the rope and beginning to haul himself up it back toward the top of the cliff. At least his find would provide Reba with a reason to be patient with their search a while longer. It would take some time for them to descend to the tunnels again, perhaps the time that O'Neill and Carter needed to find them.

What O'Neill and Carter would do if they came upon the pirates gathered at the top of a ravine with Teal'c and Daniel Jackson nowhere in sight, he was unsure, but they would, as O'Neill was fond of saying, cross that bridge when they came to it.

He looked up, mentally measuring the distance back up to the top of the ravine, and began hauling himself higher.

“I'
ve got your helicopter, sir,” Walter said. Hammond set down the sandwich that someone had brought him and went to look over Walter's shoulder. Below them, their usual ramp was being rebuilt under Siler's direction with a sturdy platform stretching level from the gate to the room's front wall.

“Good work,” Hammond said. “Where are they coming from?”

“The Colorado National Guard is lending us one of the Kiowas they use for drug enforcement,” Walter said. “I wasn't sure what you wanted me to tell the pilot they're sending along.”

“I'll take care of briefing him when he gets here,” Hammond said. “I expect this one will come as quite a surprise.”

He shook his head. That was one more person who was going to have to know about the most closely guarded secret on the planet. And he was going to have to explain, one more time, why it was necessary to let down that guard enough to add one more person to the increasingly long list who knew that the SGC wasn't a facility for deep-space radar telemetry.

That was going to be half the challenge in getting Janet the new personnel she was requesting. It wasn't only their budget that kept increasing in size, but the number of people exposed to information that would be incredibly valuable to any news organization on the planet, let alone to other governments.

Still, right now they needed a helicopter and a pilot who wasn't feeling his way around an unfamiliar craft, and that was all there was to it. He had wide discretionary authority to grant security clearance to essential personnel in emergencies, and he intended to use it. It was a pity that they probably couldn't come up with a reason why adding a physical therapist to the staff constituted an emergency.

He left Walter checking on the helicopter's ETA and headed down to the gate room, standing back out of the way as another metal panel was carried in.

“How's it coming?” he asked Siler.

The man turned and shrugged. “We're working on it,” he said. “They're getting the crane into position so that we can use the silo entrance up there to bring it in.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the ceiling. “The tricky part will be setting it down, but it'll fit nose to tail in the space we've got.”

“I'm afraid this may be a little conspicuous,” Hammond said.

Siler shrugged again. “It's not like bringing in the Stargate wasn't,” he said. “We'll call it some kind of readiness drill.”