Heart's Desire (30 page)

“The radio signal's definitely getting stronger. In fact, if you'd slept any longer, I was planning to go wake you up so we could talk about what we're going to do if we actually find Daniel and Teal'c.”

“I take it you mean the part before ‘go home and take hot showers.'”

“I mean the part where we find the other pirate ship. They have a full crew aboard, and given that Keret and the captain of the
Heart's Desire
seem to have some recent history here, she's likely to think that we're here to try to steal her treasure. Or her prisoners, which happens to be true.”

“Did you figure out if we're carrying weapons?”

“We've got several harpoons they use for boarding or to damage the canopies of other airships, and the staff weapons mounted on the rail that I disabled earlier. The problem with using the staff weapons is that there's a not inconsiderable chance of causing an explosion on the other ship. Keret says they usually don't use them except as threats, because they don't want to lose the chance to capture another ship and its cargo.”

“Neither do we, especially if the cargo is our people.”

“That's what I figured,” Sam said. “So what do we do?”

“We're pretty sure they're aboard this Reba's ship?”

“I think so, from the way the radio signal strength and direction have been changing. It looks like they've stopped for the moment, though. It's possible they were damaged by the storm, or that they're taking on supplies.”

“Or else Reba found her treasure,” Jack said.

Sam looked skeptical. “Keret says he doesn't believe there's any such thing.”

Jack shrugged. “This place is apparently full of ruins that were here before these people's ancestors showed up. I'm inclined to believe that if one of the locals thinks there's something significant to find, then there's something, even if it's just some kind of Ancient pencil factory.”

Sam smiled a little bemusedly. “Daniel's wearing off on you.”

“God forbid,” Jack said. “No, the thing that's important right now is that if she thinks she knows where this treasure is, she's going to stop and… what? Look around, at least. Maybe set up a dig. We know from painful experience how long that can take.”

“Which will at least mean that her ship isn't as heavily guarded.”

“And which gives our people a chance to escape so that we can pick them up.”

“Assuming that the crew doesn't raise an alarm and keep a close eye on their prisoners the moment they see us coming.”

“Assuming that.” Jack frowned. “All right, if they've stopped, we should be able to triangulate their signal and get some idea of where, right?”

“We've already done that.”

“Good. I'll go up and see if Keret can suggest an alternate route that would get us nearby but hopefully not put us down on top of the
Heart's Desire
.” He put down his coffee mug and regarded the stairs unenthusiastically.

“Or I could go up and do that,” Carter said.

He started to say that wasn't necessary, but he knew there was a time to conserve resources that weren't inexhaustible. “All right, you go up and do that.”

“Yes, sir,” Carter said, and trotted up the stairs.

She came back down after a while looking cold but not half-frozen. “Keret says that if we circle around and don't take the easiest set of passes between us and the
Heart's Desire
, we should be able to approach from the opposite side of a high ridge. Of course, that's assuming that Reba did take the easiest route in the first place.”

“Which she might not have if she assumed she was being pursued.”

“But she might have assumed we'd assume that she'd assume…” Carter trailed off, looking like she'd gotten tangled up somewhere in the middle of that sentence.

“We can make ourselves crazy that way, but it doesn't change the fact that basically we've got two ways to get to where X marks the spot: the short way and the long way. Unless you want to flip a coin…”

“We figure they went the short way, and we go the long way. Anyway, both of those are relative terms. At the speed we're traveling right now, even if we go the long way, we'll be there in a couple of hours.”

“I'll go keep an eye out for the big X,” Jack said.

D
aniel crouched to investigate the skeletons more closely, careful not to crush any of the smaller bones underfoot. “Well, what happened here?”

Reba nudged one of the skeletons with her foot. It wasn't quite a kick, but Daniel had to bite his tongue not to snap at her to be careful of the site. Who these people were and what happened to them was probably important, but it wasn't as if he was going to be stopping to document the find properly.

It was lousy archaeology. He was resigned to doing a lot of that these days, work that he could just barely justify calling archaeology rather than treasure hunting. He took pictures of visible features and sketched sites
—
when no one was shooting at them
—
but the kind of slow excavation and preservation that so many of the things he saw deserved was usually impossible.

That was perversely easier to bear when it was because people were shooting at them. He had to admit that surviving was a bigger priority than sticking around to take pictures of an archaeological site that currently happened to be inhabited by angry people with guns. He'd had the chance to learn that lesson long before he ever saw a Stargate.

It was the times when they could have excavated properly if there were only enough time and enough money and enough interest from a military hierarchy that could be myopically focused on the question ‘can you shoot people with it?' And when they did find something you could shoot people with, or that Sam said would somehow advance their knowledge of science, the orders were usually ‘grab it and go.'

And that
was
treasure hunting. He was the first to admit that it had to be done; all questions of advancing human knowledge on Earth would be moot if the Goa'uld leveled the planet and enslaved the surviving population. It was just one more stone dropped into the water, one more thing to weigh heavily on his heart.

The ancient Egyptians
—
and the people of Abydos
—
believed that the heart of a dead man was weighed against a feather, to see if the dead person was too weighted down by sin to be able to enter the afterlife. There were times when he wondered if grief and tiredness and a litany of petty dissatisfactions might not be all it took to outweigh any lightness of spirit that he had ever felt
—

“We're too late, aren't we?” Reba said. “They must have found something to fight over, but unless we're very lucky and they're very unlucky, the winner walked out of here with whatever it was.”

“Surely the discovery of a great treasure would have become known, especially if it had been the cause of so many deaths,” Teal'c said.

“Maybe,” Reba said. “Men fall out over prizes all the time, and if whoever won the fight was bright enough not to tell anyone what they found…” She shook her head. “It's a rare pirate who can resist the urge to brag forever, though.”

“Including you?” Daniel asked absently.

“If this thing is still here for us to find, I'll have reason to brag.”

“I don't think these people died in a fight,” he said. He hoped they also hadn't died of some kind of incredibly virulent space plague or toxin, because he didn't even have rubber gloves with him, let alone proper hazmat gear, but there was no point in worrying about that. “I don't see any broken bones or obvious signs of wounds, although I suppose it's possible that they were strangled or stabbed and that at this stage of decomposition we just can't see the marks anymore.”

“Perhaps they were zatted,” Teal'c said.

“It's possible,” Daniel said. “It's a weird placement of the remains, though. They're not lined up, not like someone buried them or like they were lined up against the wall and shot. It's like they were clustering around a specific point, so maybe they were fighting over something, but…” He shook his head. “The thing is, these remains aren't anywhere the same age. There's no way this was a single fight. I'd say from the earliest to the latest deaths we're talking hundreds of years difference. Maybe more.”

“Some kind of trap?” Reba said.

“Maybe. In which case we should be very careful about how we go from here.”

“Should you be standing on the same part of the floor where they apparently died?”

“Probably not, but it didn't kill me when I did, so that's probably not the trigger for the trap,” Daniel said. All the same, he stood up very cautiously, listening for any noise that might suggest a mechanism working in the floor or behind the walls. “Assuming it is a trap.”

“It hardly seems likely that so many visitors to this spot died for coincidental reasons,” Teal'c said.

“Well, no, but it's still possible that these bodies were brought here for some ritual or practical purpose. I don't think it's that's likely, because people tend to either pile bodies in a heap or lay them out neatly, and this is… not exactly either one. More like everyone who was standing in this part of the room eventually just… fell wherever they were standing.”

“Perhaps we should not remain in this part of the room,” Teal'c said.

“You may have a point. Let's look around, see what else we can see.”

 
The other three walls of the chamber were the same featureless stone they'd seen so far, but when he played his light across the wall against which the skeletons were lying, he could see that it was heavily inscribed with line upon line of Ancient. Some of it he recognized from the tablet, but some of it was new to him.

“Have you seen this inscription before?” Daniel asked.

“No,” Reba said, and he could hear his own excitement mirrored in her voice. “No, not all of it. The beginning, there…”

“But not starting here. This might be more directions, or…” He squinted at the inscription. “I think these might be instructions.”

“For getting at the treasure without springing the trap?”

“That would be logical, wouldn't it? That way, if you can't read Ancient…”

“That's not very nice,” Reba said.

“Well, I expect they thought that anyone seeing these carvings who wasn't an Ancient was one of their enemies,” Daniel said.

He kept playing the flashlight's beam up and down the lines of the inscription, trying to get a sense of how hard it would be to translate. It used the same abbreviated forms of common words that he'd seen on the tablets, but he thought he was starting to understand how they were constructed. It wasn't any worse than trying to read some of the Air Force forms full of abbreviations he still had to look up.

“It's still a bit careless.”

“We have no idea why they abandoned this place,” Daniel said. “For all we know, they had to leave in a hurry. They might not have had a chance to come down and disable the trap. If it is a trap.”

Reba looked at Daniel sideways. “How long does it generally take you to commit to a theory?”

“Theories aren't facts,” Daniel said. “When we find something, we'll know for sure what it is. Until then, we need to keep an open mind. It's too easy to get hung up on a particular idea of what you're going to find…”

He trailed off as the flashlight beam reached the center of the wall.

“Does that count as something?” Reba said.

In the center of the wall, framed by the inscription on all sides, the stone had been carved into the shape of an enormous heart. It was more anatomically detailed than either a Valentine's heart or the Egyptian iconography of a heart, with the chambers and major arteries clearly drawn, although within them curled lines that might just have been artistic detailing, or might have represented blood, or smoke, or the spirit.