Heart's Desire (31 page)

“That's something,” Daniel said. He reached toward it from the side, trying not to step on any of the fallen bones.

“Daniel Jackson,” Teal'c said, alarm clear in his voice.

“I'm not going to touch it,” Daniel said. “I just want to see…” He stopped with his palm inches from the stone, sure that he felt the air near it warm against his skin. He moved his hand away, but the rest of the wall was cool. “It's warm,” he said. “If this is the device, or a control panel for the device, I think it still has power.”

“Y
ou think that's where Reba's gone to look for her treasure?” Keret said, looking skeptically up at the ridge. They were approaching slowly, keeping low in the valley between the mountains that towered on either side.

Sam squinted, shading her eyes to see. “I can't see anything there.”

“I've never heard of anything there. Not that old ruins are rare enough for anyone to have mentioned them, particularly.”

“No, wait.” The ridge was cracked and split by numerous fissures in the stone, but Sam could just make out lines that seemed too regular to be the way wind and shifting earth had tumbled natural stone. “Is that a wall?”

“Might be,” Keret conceded. Behind them, Jack came out on deck, coming up to the rail to see for himself.

“No sign of the
Heart's Desire
, but the radio signal is very close,” Sam said. “I'd say the radios have to be on the other side of the ridge.”

“They might have anchored there,” Keret said.

“Assuming they didn't throw the radios overboard. Or…”

“That's a cheery thought, Carter,” Jack said, giving her a sideways look.

“Sorry, sir.”

Keret shrugged. “There's no way of knowing, unless you want to go over the ridge, which takes away the point of coming from this direction in the first place.”

“No, let's take a walk and see what we can find. How do we anchor this thing?”

“On this hillside, with only the three of us? Can't be done,” Keret said.

Sam looked at him sharply. “You never said that.”

“Maybe if we took a couple of hours to drive in a mooring ring, and tied up to that, and the wind didn't shift direction and batter us against the hillside while we were wandering around looking at old rocks, maybe we could do that,” Keret said. “Excuse me if I don't feel like taking the chance with my ship.”

Jack looked at Sam. “Carter?”

“I don't know, sir,” Sam said. “My experience with landing these things is limited to when we put down before.”

“Which was on a big, flat plateau,” Keret said. “Do you see one of those around here?”

Jack frowned, looking tired. Neither of them had gotten much sleep to speak of in the last few days. “What are you suggesting?”

“You two go find your people,” Keret said. “I'll stay here with the ship.”

“And cut and run if the
Heart's Desire
comes over the ridge,” Sam said, shaking her head.

“You'd prefer us all come back and find out that Reba's men have this ship as well? If I have to leave, I'll come back for you two. You saw yourselves how hard it was to fly this ship with only two of you. How far do you imagine I'd get on my own?”

“I don't know,” Sam said.

“We don't have the time to stand here and argue about it,” Jack said. “We can't hold him at gunpoint and climb at the same time.”

“Speaking of weapons…”

“You took my thunderbolt already,” Keret said. “I admit it, I did pick up a knife from the galley, just so as not to feel quite so entirely unarmed.” He slid his sleeve back to show the knife handle. “If you're really afraid I'm going to drop it on you once you're down there…”

Jack shook his head and patted Keret down for weapons despite Keret's protests. “He's clean,” Jack said. “What did you do with the zats we took off his crew?”

“I found a pack to put them in, along with some of our supplies,” Carter said. “We can take them with us.”

“All right,” Jack said. “Get it and let's go.”

When she came up with the woolen pack slung over her shoulder, Keret was guiding the airship closer to the rocky slope of the ridge, adjusting its course carefully. They'd already restored the gravity drive to its usual settings, although now that she'd gotten used to its forward pull, the deck still felt like it was tilting, only in the other direction. She hoped that little side effect would wear off promptly.

“I can't get you any closer without getting overfriendly with the rocks,” Keret said. “There's a ladder stowed by the harpoons if you don't feel like going down hand over hand.”

“Very civilized of you,” Jack said. He found the rope ladder and unrolled it, tipping the end of it over the side. The bottom end skidded slowly across the rocks.

“Can you hold the ship steady?” Sam said.

“You want me to stop the wind?”

“Never mind.” Jack was already climbing over the side, lowering himself down pretty nearly hand over hand, clearly reluctant to trust his weight to his injured knee. She waited until he'd made it down to the rocks below before she started climbing down herself.

The ladder swayed treacherously under her feet, still drifting across the rock face. There was a large fissure in the rocks approaching faster than she wanted to see, and she climbed down faster, managing to scramble off the end of the ladder before it swept off the solid rock and out into empty space.

“Whoa,” Jack said, catching at her pack to steady her.

“I'm good,” Sam said.

Jack smiled sideways, a flicker of good humor coming through his tiredness. “At least we didn't have to parachute.”

“I don't mind parachuting,” Sam said. She didn't much like it, either, but admitting that was one of those things she wasn't in a position to do. It was one thing for Teal'c to imply that you would have to be a crazy person to enjoy jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, but that wasn't a good Air Force attitude for her to have. And no one was going to think that Teal'c was just being a girl.

Jack considered the slope up to the wall, which was still a disheartening distance above them. “How do you feel about climbing?”

“I packed a rope,” Sam said.

“Good,” Jack said. “Let's hope we don't need it.”

“Y
ou know,” Jack said, “when I woke up this morning, I said to myself…” He gritted his teeth, wrestling himself up a nearly vertical boulder. “Rock climbing, that's what I'd really like to do today.”

“I'm sorry, sir,” Carter said from below him. He found a stable place to stand and braced himself with his good leg, tossing the rope down to her, and held it as she scrambled up the same rock. “We're getting close, though.”

They were at least getting close to the stone wall that seemed to mark the lower edge of the ruins, although whether that meant they were getting any closer to Daniel and Teal'c, there was no way to know. It was a painful hike the rest of the way, but it didn't involve any more serious climbing, and Carter coiled her rope and tucked it away in her pack again.

They had just reached the waist-high wall when Jack heard the sound of voices. He motioned Carter silent at once, and they both dropped behind the shelter of the wall.

The voices were faint, a conversation between several people much farther up the slope. He motioned Carter up, and she crouched to peer over the wall, and then dropped down behind it again.

She signaled three, maybe four people. Not SG-1. He pointed along the wall, to a point where it looked like they could cross while remaining in the shelter of a largely intact building, and Carter nodded.

By the time they reached it, Jack was reconsidering whether having a firefight might not have been a better decision than anything that required crouching. He straightened gratefully once on the other side of the wall, and motioned Carter toward the next building up the slope that promised to block the view from above.

He was already looking for the next piece of cover when Carter caught his arm, pointing out what looked like the top of a stairway half buried in rubble. She extracted a flashlight from her pack and shone it down there, but it revealed nothing other than that the stairs extended down and out of sight.

There was no obvious sign that anyone had been down that way, and in fact Jack thought not; it would have been hard to climb down the stairs without leaving visible footprints in the rubble. He shrugged and leaned cautiously out from behind the corner of the building.

Just past the building they were sheltered behind, the ground was split in a deep crack. It looked crossable here, if not comfortably, but further along the slope it widened to a ravine a good three meters across. No chance of crossing that with the tools they had on hand.

He froze as he saw movement on the slope above the ravine, ducking behind the corner and peering out cautiously. They were dressed much like Keret's pirates, two of them sitting on the ground near the widest point of the ravine, and another leaning on a fallen stone. It was hard to tell from this angle whether there were others sheltered behind the ruined building they were loitering around.

A metallic gleam caught his eye, and when he looked at the edge of the chasm he could see that there were metallic anchors of some kind pounded or drilled into the rock, with ropes fastened to them and hanging down into the ravine. He backed around the corner and leaned in to talk in a whisper.

“It looks like somebody climbed down there,” he said, nodding toward the ravine. “I see two ways that could have gone down. One way, Reba's headed down there, and her ship's lightly guarded with Daniel and Teal'c aboard. The other way I figure it, Daniel and Teal'c either escaped or made some kind of deal, and they've gone looking for this treasure too.”

“Why would they do that if they'd escaped?”

“This is Daniel we're talking about,” Jack said. “If there's some kind of Ancient treasure hoard down there, you do the math. Anyway, there's no shelter out here. If they did escape, getting underground would be smart.”

Sam glanced at the stairway. “You think this connects?”

Jack shrugged. “No way of knowing.”

“It might,” she said. “I mean, they wouldn't build a treasure chamber so that you had to climb down a cliff to get there. Would they?”

“That's a Daniel question,” Jack said. “This could be somebody's basement, but let's check it out.”

Piecing their way down the stairs around the rubble wasn't easy, but it was easier than the climb had been. At the bottom of the staircase, a squared-off tunnel ran past the crack in the rock and into the distance further than Sam's flashlight beam could reach.

“Well, it's not a basement,” Sam said.

“Let's take a look around.”

The crack was narrow enough here to be an easy jump. Or, at least, it should have been one. He stumbled on the landing, expecting for a moment to end up going sprawling, but Carter steadied him.

“I could scout ahead,” she offered.

“Negative,” he said, taking an experimental step and gratified when the worst his knee did was hurt rather than buckling.

“You're on your way to the infirmary when we get back, you know. Sir.”

“Not the kind of vacation I had in mind.”

“You could always apply for actual vacation time,” Carter said, playing her flashlight over the walls ahead of them.

“I have,” Jack says. “They keep cancelling my leave on the theory that saving the world is more important.”

“It might have been a better bet than trying to find us a non-stressful mission.”

“Yes, but that wouldn't have gotten
you
to go on vacation.”