Heart's Desire (24 page)

The one mercy was that the gate builders had apparently wanted to make the Stargates idiot-proof, and most of the time they were. The times they weren't were the problem. Which he was probably thinking about because one of those times had left them stranded in an ice cave in Antarctica, and right now it felt about that cold.

A flash of lightning strobed across the sky, illuminating the driving snow and the dark shapes of mountains, and then a crack of thunder followed it far too quickly for comfort. He'd flown in worse, and for that matter parachuted in worse, but that wasn't any guarantee that this was going to end well.

He still felt a sneaking sense of exhilaration at their sheer speed, the wind whipping snow into his face. With the pull of gravity still making the deck seem to slant sharply down under his feet, it felt a little like sledding, although he was pretty sure he'd never gotten away with sledding in a driving storm with thunder crashing wildly around him as a kid.

 
He flipped open the cover of the speaking tube, hoping Carter would be able to hear him over the howling of the wind. “How's it going down there?”

“It's going!” she yelled. “The power interface is a little
—
whoa!”

He thought he heard an electrical snap in the background, but was distracted from it by his feet once again going out from under him as ‘down' re-established itself as being somewhere in the direction of the airship's canopy. He let himself flip in the air, hanging onto the controls, and managed to wrestle himself into a position where he could still make himself heard below.

“Carter!”

“We lost one of the crystals! I'm trying to re-route power!”

“Now would be a good time!” Jack yelled. Snow swirled disorientingly around him, but as far as he could tell, the airship was rising sharply. He wasn't sure why it wasn't flipping in the air, its gondola tumbling below
—
or above
—
its canopy. For that matter, he wasn't sure why it wasn't just rising smoothly the way a Goa'uld ship would. The Goa'uld didn't usually make their passengers tumble around like loose socks in the dryer. “Any time!”

“I'm working on it!” Carter said. “Keret, get over here!”

“This is my ship you're wrecking!” Keret's voice carried clearly enough, although he was pretty sure Carter was object of his wrath. “I can't replace that crystal
—”

“We don't have to replace it if we can work around it!”

“How?”

“I don't know!”

“Figure it out, kids!” Jack yelled. They were still gaining altitude, the dial that he guessed was an altimeter spinning wildly and the snow swirling and seeming to rise in driving sheets toward the sky. But that was really the ground, which they were rapidly leaving behind them.

That was good in the sense that they'd be less likely to run into anything. It was bad in that they were rising into the center of the storm, and if they couldn't check their ascent, the drop in pressure would eventually be a serious problem. Jack was betting the airship wasn't equipped with oxygen masks, and they were already pretty damn high.

“Carter!”

“I know!”

There was a sudden blinding flash, and a tearing crash split the sky. For one heart-stopping moment he could see the lightning arc somewhere below his feet, up near the top of the canopy, and then the world darkened abruptly in the aftermath of the brilliant light. The control column he was clinging to pitched wildly.

We've been hit
, he thought, his eyes stinging. He braced himself for an explosion, or the roaring of igniting flame, but nothing happened except that they kept plunging upward, the air stinking of ozone for a few seconds before the driving wind whipped the smell away.

“What happened?” Carter called anxiously.

Jack squinted, blinking through watering eyes to try to see if there was any obvious damage. He couldn't see any, although the upper side of the canopy was out of view. Still, the canopy didn't seem to be deforming as he thought it would be if the lightning strike had ripped through its canvas.

“I think we just found out that we do have lightning rods!”

Carter's voice rose a notch. “Did we get hit by lightning?”

“Fix the drive!”

“I'm trying!”

Jack's numb hands were slipping on the steering column, the metal slick with ice. He spared a glance down under his feet, and then let himself slide, finding his footing on the underside of the canopy. He scrubbed snow out of his face with the back of his hand, but the icy glove wasn't much help.

Anywhere that isn't hot for our next mission
, he'd said after Ne'tu.
Just send us anywhere that isn't hot.

“I take it back!” he yelled, but the wind whipped the words away.

S
am scrambled up to reach the control panel, thinking furiously. The crystal that had shorted out was most likely burned out completely; she could see the dull gray scorch marks along its length. That meant she needed to rewire so that the ones around it were somehow bridging the gap and compensating for the missing crystal.

It would have been an easy problem given an hour. She glanced at the altimeter. She figured at their present rate of ascent, they had a few minutes.

“Give me a hand, here!” she snapped at Keret.

He was balancing easily on one strut of what had moments ago been the ceiling, watching her efforts to hang upside down on the pillar that housed the crystal with apparent amusement. “Where do you want it?”

“This is not the time,” she snapped.

“We're probably about to die. When would be a better time?”

“I can fix it,” Sam said. “Assuming I can reach it.”

Keret got his hands under her, bracing her as she craned her neck to see. She wrapped the rope she was still clipped to around the pillar and pulled it taut, hoping that if the gravity suddenly reversed itself again it would keep her from crashing to the floor. If she pulled that crystal…

She had a bad feeling about that, but one that stubbornly refused to crystallize into a clear idea of what she should do instead. She gritted her teeth in frustration. She was sure Jolinar could have fixed this. She'd been good with the tel'taks, patching their systems to keep them in use even when they should have long since been retired, because they couldn't afford to lose them even when they were battered and scarred.

She could feel the memory threatening to swim up into consciousness, and knew she had a choice in whether to let it.

“You have no idea how to fix this?” she demanded.

“You broke it,” Keret said. “I don't even know what you did.”

 
You knew, Sam thought, knowing at the same time that Jolinar couldn't hear her, because she was only a handful of memories left behind like shadows in Sam's mind. She let herself slip into one, seeing a similar tray of crystals pulled out for repair, her own hands moving over them, the knuckles still pink with healing burn scars—

“Y
ou should give yourself more time to recover,” Martouf said, frowning at her in a way that made Jolinar turn her head so she wouldn't have to see. “You're not even completely healed.”

“These are superficial injuries,” Jolinar said.

“Which have taken this long to heal because of the damage to your lungs. The vapors on Ne'tu
—”

“You weren't there,” Jolinar snapped. “Don't lecture me about dangerous vapors.”

“I know I wasn't there,” Martouf said, and the regret in his voice made her chest ache treacherously. “You've said hardly anything about Ne'tu since you returned.”

“There's nothing to say,” Jolinar said, pulling out one of the crystals and stacking it neatly in a pile with the others that were burned out. They didn't have enough replacements on hand, but she could bridge the gap with what they did have until they had the leisure to grow more. “I escaped.”

“For which I'm grateful,” Martouf said. “You've said hardly anything at all since you returned.”

“I'm busy,” Jolinar said.

“You could be resting.”

“I am resting. And while I'm resting, these repairs still need to be done.”

“Just tell me you'll wait until you're fully recovered before you go out again.”

She looked up at that. “I'm fine,” she said.

“Jolinar…”

“Is there anything else?”

Martouf bowed his head for a moment, his expression shifting from naked worry to a less easily readable one. “Martouf is worried about you,” Lantash said. “So am I.”

*Let me talk to him,* Rosha said. Jolinar threw up her hands in frustration and bent her own head. She didn't have anything to say to Martouf and Lantash right now, except that she wanted both of them to stay out of her way for a while.

“We're just tired,” Rosha said.

“Which is why we were suggesting you rest.”

“We will. But this does need to be done, and it doesn't hurt anything for us to do it. Don't mind Jolinar.”

Jolinar didn't reply to that, working through the rest of the repairs in her head instead. There could be no privacy between symbiote and host, and she had learned long ago that it was better to let Rosha say what she would about her without protest, in return for the knowledge that in her turn, she could do the same.

“This isn't like her,” Lantash said.

“Yes, it is,” Rosha said. She sat back on her heels, putting the crystals aside for a moment and rubbing absently at the half-healed burns on the back of her hand. “You haven't spent as much time with her in the field.”

*Rosha,* Jolinar thought warningly. They'd agreed that there were parts of their time on Ne'tu that they wouldn't speak of, not to Martouf and Lantash and not to anyone who might tell them. Lantash would probably understand, Jolinar thought, but Martouf was too soft-hearted. It would hurt him to know how she had made her escape, and she didn't want to see his pain when he realized what she had done, or see his eyes harden when he understood how she'd betrayed him.

*It wasn't a betrayal,* Rosha said. *And he's not like that.* Now that it was done and they were home, Jolinar was all too aware that right now Rosha was the stronger of the two of them. Rosha was patient with their healing when Jolinar wanted only to be done with the reminders of Ne'tu that were still written on her skin. Rosha was certain they had done the only possible thing when Jolinar felt only the sick sense that if she'd stayed in Ne'tu long enough, every one of her principles would have been stripped away, leaving only the animal urge to survive.

*Even so.*

“She stops thinking about anything but the mission, past a certain point,” Rosha said aloud. “It's part of what makes her so good at surviving. But sometimes it's hard to put it down when the mission's over.”

Lantash looked at her sideways. “You're certain that's all?”

“That's all,” Rosha said. “We just need some time.”

“We'll give it to you,” Lantash said. He went out, leaving them in the quiet of the hangar.

*I hate lying to him,* Rosha said, as Jolinar came forward again, picking up the next crystal that she'd need to install.