Heart's Desire (20 page)

“I slept for a while,” she said. She smiled a little. “But I've got a new toy to play with, here, so you can't expect me to leave it alone for long.”

Squinting down at the nearest rocky slope, Jack could just see the tiny shapes of some kind of sheep-like animals
—
probably sheep
—
scattering for cover as the airship's shadow passed over them. “You know, if we hadn't been kidnapped, this would be fun,” he said after a while.

“It would,” Carter said. “Kind of like a vacation.”

“Well, that was the theory,” Jack said. “We sure can pick them.”

“What was the theory?”

“That we could all use a softball mission this time,” Jack said. “You know, sitting around, drinking tea…”

“
That's
 what we were doing here? All that time you were insisting that we should keep looking for something useful to trade for
—”

“We found something,” Jack pointed out, although he was beginning to suspect that mentioning his intentions might have been a tactical error.

“Only by Daniel accidentally tripping over it.”

“He does that,” Jack said. “We needed some light duty.”

“If your leg was still bothering you
—”

“It was fine for drinking tea,” Jack said. “Daniel's still off his game after losing his wife.” He hesitated, but went on, “And it's not like you had much fun on Ne'tu.”

“I'm fine, sir,” Carter said, every syllable clipped.

“I'm not saying you're not,” Jack said evenly.

“With all due respect, sir, that is exactly what you're saying. I assure you, I'm every bit as capable of handling this kind of thing as any other member of the team. I'm an Air Force officer. Sir.”

“I know you are,” Jack said. He gazed out over the rail again, searching for the words that would convince her this wasn't about her being a woman, because it wasn't. It was about the dark circles under her eyes, which she'd damn well earned the right to have at this point. “You always planned on going into the service, right?”

Carter looked at him for a moment like she was trying to figure out where he was going with that, and then nodded. “That's right.”

“But not in a combat unit on the ground.”

“That wasn't an option,” Carter said. “It still technically isn't.”

“You're not in a combat unit, you just shoot people,” Jack said. “We all know how that works. What if it had been?”

“It wasn't an option,” Carter said. “When I joined the Air Force, I wanted to be an astronaut, or maybe a fighter pilot. But the kind of things you spent most of your career doing, special ops work… I honestly never thought about it.”

“It's a rough job,” Jack said.

“I know that, sir.”

“You're learning that. You have to do the job to really understand the kind of things it does to you. The kind of things it requires from you. The deal you make with the Air Force is that you give it everything, and make no mistake, the kind of work we're doing will take things from you. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“I know we can get hurt out here,” Carter said. “I've always known that.”

“What I'm saying is that we're 
going
 to get hurt out here. There's no way to avoid that. The best you can do is take care of yourself when something comes along that really shakes you up.”

“I thought ‘just deal with it' was the Air Force motto.”

“It's ‘Aim High.' I see how those two are easy to confuse.”

Carter looked down at the instrument panel and smiled a little. “Actually, sir, the Air Force doesn't have an official motto.”

“I thought we got a memo about the ‘Aim High' thing.”

“It's our unofficial motto.”

“That figures,” Jack said. “We could suggest ‘just deal with it,' if you want.”

“Seriously, sir, I'm okay,” Carter said. “It's just that when Martouf used the Tok'ra memory recall device on me, it made me remember a lot of things that Jolinar went through while she was on Ne'tu that… weren't very pleasant.”

“Prisons aren't fun places,” Jack said. “You can trust me on that one.”

“Yes, sir,” Carter said.

“I trust you to handle this,” he said, waiting until she looked up and catching her eye to let her know that he meant it. “I'm not going to think you've lost your edge if you say you could really use some time sitting around drinking tea.”

“I don't think that's in the cards right now,” Carter said.

“We might have some tea aboard.”

“We probably do. It's the sitting around that I'm not so sure about. I did find a barometer, and it's been falling pretty sharply.”

“You think we're in for some rough weather?”

“I'm afraid so,” Carter said. “You should probably go get some sleep yourself while you can. I'm going to have to wake you if the weather gets really bad.”

“Do that,” Jack said.

He left her at the helm and walked the length of the ship back to the aft rail, leaning on it to examine the sky. It definitely seemed to be darkening on the horizon. “Hey, Carter,” he said on his way back, before heading down the lower deck. “What happens if we get hit by lightning in this thing?”

“We probably have lightning rods to help channel and discharge the electrical energy,” Carter said.

He raised his eyebrows at her. “Probably?”

She looked up at the bottom of the canopy, which it wasn't exactly possible to see around from where they stood. “You want to climb up there and check?”

“I'll live with ‘probably,'” he said.

“I thought you might, sir.”

T
eal'c woke at the crack of thunder, aware at once that the ship was being buffeted by turbulence in the air. He climbed cautiously out of his swinging hammock and shook Daniel Jackson's shoulder to wake him.

“What?” He protested, flinging an arm over his eyes, and then lowering it, frowning. “This ride's a little rough, don't you think?”

“We seem to be experiencing inclement weather,” Teal'c said.

“That would be my guess, too.” Clambering down out of his own hammock, he made his way cautiously to the bars, hanging onto them as the ship shuddered and rocked. “Hello?” he called. “Anyone? Hello?”

Teal'c had grown used to Daniel Jackson's assumption that everyone he met would be willing to talk to him, even people who had begun their first encounter by taking SG-1 prisoner or announcing that SG-1 would make an ideal sacrifice to their vengeful gods. It was true surprisingly often.

In this case, a man eventually tramped down from the upper deck, looking half-frozen even wrapped in a thick wool coat, his hair wild.

“What's your problem, then?” he said.

“Should we be flying in this weather?”

“It does seem unwise,” Teal'c said. He was not certain what would happen should lightning strike the craft in the air, but he did not much want to find out.

The man snorted. “We're running well ahead of the storm,” he said. “You may want to stay tucked into your hammocks, though. Don't want to knock your brains out if down doesn't stay down all night.”

Daniel Jackson turned to Teal'c as the man went off, raising inquisitive eyebrows. “What do you suppose…?”

Teal'c had also grown used to the tendency of the Tau'ri to ask for opinions when given their lack of reliable information, any opinion could be no more than a guess. He still found it unsettling. Apophis had little patience with speculation. Anything his First Prime thought important enough information to report had best be correct, or the consequences would not be pleasant.

“I suppose nothing,” he said, but just then the ground seemed to shift under his feet, tugging him inexplicably toward the bars on one side of the cell. The sensation ended as abruptly as it had begun.

“Whoa,” Daniel Jackson said, catching at the bars for balance. “What was that?”

“Did not Major Carter say she believed these craft were too heavy to remain in the air unassisted?”

“You think they have some kind of anti-gravity technology?”

“It would explain their ability to function beyond the capabilities of most aircraft of this type.”

“Well, I suppose that's good. I'd like to think that Reba knows what she's doing flying in this weather.”

“I do not believe that pirates are generally known for their caution and good judgment,” Teal'c said.

“Yeah, unlike us, right?” There was a bitter note to the words that Teal'c did not remember often hearing in his friend's voice before Sha're's death. Before Teal'c had killed Sha're, because Daniel Jackson would not have. He would have trusted to his last breath that Sha're could somehow break free of Amonet's control over her body and save him from Amonet's murderous attack, and Teal'c had not wished to watch him breathe his last.

“We take necessary risks,” Teal'c said.

“I just wonder sometimes how much we've actually gained from being out here, as opposed to…” He spread his hands wearily. “I mean, do you ever wonder how many people we've actually helped, in the long run, compared to the people whose lives we've just screwed up one way or another?”

“Many,” Teal'c said. “And there can be no freedom from the Goa'uld without sacrifices.”

“We're good at sacrificing things to get what we want. Just not ourselves.”

“We have been willing to sacrifice ourselves many times.”

“But it never seems to happen. It's always somebody else.”

“If it had not been, we could not be having this conversation,” Teal'c pointed out. “That proves nothing but that the dead are not in a position to regret.”

“Lucky them.” He seemed to see something in Teal'c's expression that made him relent. “No, you know I don't mean that. I'm just…”

“You are still in mourning.”

He shook his head. “We don't really have those customs anymore. Not in any kind of formal way, not after the funeral and… There used to be more elaborate customs about mourning, but I suppose people decided they didn't really need them anymore.”

“Perhaps that was unwise,” Teal'c said carefully.

“I don't know. I think it's good to get back to work and try to just… put things behind you. When… you know my parents died when I was a child, right?”

Teal'c nodded. He had spoken of it very briefly after their experience with the alien caretaker who had forced them to relive their worst memories for the entertainment of his charges. Teal'c had not seen Daniel Jackson's memory for himself, having instead watched O'Neill live out a failed mission over and over, fighting vainly to save a dead friend, but he knew he had watched his parents die, crushed by a falling stone before his eyes.

“So, after that things were… complicated for a while, getting settled in a foster home, and really the thing that helped most was going back to school and having things to do that took my mind off everything. You never want to hear ‘it's time for your life to get back to normal,' but at a certain point it is.”

Teal'c could not help thinking of the weeks after his own father's death. It had meant leaving his home for Chulak, then a strange world full of people who served a strange god, and had shaken the certainties of his young life up to that point: that his father was a great warrior, that his mother would not lie when she said his father's final battle had been unwinnable, and that Cronos could do no wrong. It was the last belief that he had abandoned, in what he now recognized was his first tentative childish step toward freedom.