Heart's Desire (32 page)

“Well, no, but I just…” Carter trailed off. “Did you hear something?”

He thought he did, the indistinct sound of distant voices. They made their way forward in silence, and the voices grew clearer, but still not clear enough for him to make out who was speaking or what they were saying.

They rounded a corner, and he thought he saw something, too. He held out a hand to stop Carter and motioned to her to turn off her flashlight.

In the sudden darkness, he could clearly see the light coming from a doorway far down the corridor. The light shifted like someone moving around inside, and he could see from here that it wasn't the warm flicker of torches or a lantern; it was the cool glow of a flashlight.

D
aniel Jackson and Reba were still examining the inscriptions when Teal'c heard a noise from outside. He turned, quietly making his way along the wall, and was taking up a defensive position near the door when he was greeted by an unexpected and welcome sight.

“O'Neill,” he said gratefully. “Major Carter.”

“What?” Daniel Jackson spun, turning his flashlight on O'Neill and Major Carter.

“Hi, kids,” O'Neill said. He was holding a zat, covering Reba with it even as he smiled in greeting. “What did we miss?”

“Oh, we found this amazing… well, I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I think it's a device used by the Ancients to locate things, and if I can just translate these inscriptions
—”

“I take it these are your friends,” Reba said. She had her zat drawn as well.

“Reba, Colonel Jack O'Neill and Major Carter. Jack, Sam, this is Reba. She's the one who kidnapped us.”

Major Carter was also covering Reba now, of which Teal'c was certain she was aware. “Maybe we could renegotiate that,” she said.

“You think?” O'Neill said. He armed his zat. “Daniel
—”

“Whoa, wait. Actually, if you could not stun her yet, we're kind of still working on these inscriptions. She actually reads some Ancient, which is a big help in trying to figure out some of these abbreviated verb forms that…” He trailed off at O'Neill's expression. “Let me guess. ‘Let's go, Daniel.'”

“Let's go, Daniel. Our new friend Keret is out there playing hide and seek with this lady's ship, and despite what he promised, I don't trust him to stick around forever.”

 
“You brought Keret here?” Reba threw up her hands in disbelief, startling Major Carter into arming her zat. “Don't waste your shot. You don't have to blast me. You can just wait until Keret turns up to blast us all and take the treasure for himself.”

“Keret doesn't even believe in your treasure,” O'Neill said.

“Is that what he told you? He can't be trusted. Believe me, I know that from personal experience.”

“How personal?” Major Carter asked.

Reba shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“No,” Daniel Jackson said. “But deciphering these inscriptions does.”

“We can handle Keret,” O'Neill said. “But we need to get out of here. Daniel, come on.”

“No.”

O'Neill's eyebrows went up.

“I mean, please, not yet. I translated the tablets from the palace. They're copies of this inscription, which was left here by the Ancients. According to the inscription, this device can be used to locate anything that you want to find.”

“It's, what, some kind of tracking device?” Major Carter said, stepping forward with interest lighting her eyes.

“More than a tracking device, a kind of… universal locator for anything that exists. Now I know that may sound impossible, but…”

“I don't know,” Major Carter said. “We know that on a fundamental level, everything in the universe is connected in ways we don't even begin to understand. The part that I'm not sure is even theoretically possible is identifying things in a way that would make it possible to search for them. It's not like there's some great cosmic index of all the individual objects that exist.
 
If you wanted to find, I don't know, all the naquadah in the universe, then maybe you could do that, but…”

“We could find all the naquadah in the universe?” O'Neill said, looking suddenly more interested.

“I'm just saying I think that's not theoretically impossible.”

“That would be useful,” Daniel Jackson said, his eyes on O'Neill. “Wouldn't it?”

“Obviously. How likely is that?”

“I don't know. I need more time.”

“We could come back.”

Daniel Jackson's eyes flickered to Reba. “I think now that people have found this place, there's a pretty good chance that if we leave and try to come back, whatever is here may be gone.”

“We could deliver those with knowledge of the device to the proper authorities,” Teal'c said.

“Assuming we can capture her crew, and Keret, and get them all the way back to the capital, sure,” O'Neill said.

“And then the High King will come looking for the same thing, and Reba will lead him straight to it as part of a deal for her freedom,” Daniel Jackson said.

Reba smiled a little. “You're beginning to get a feel for how things work around here.”

“You think he'd want this thing, Daniel?”

“Who wouldn't? Everybody wants something.”

O'Neill let out a breath, considering. “Okay,” he said finally. “See what you can make of this stuff. You've got an hour.”

“Jack
—”

“The clock is ticking. You want to argue, or you want to translate?”

Daniel Jackson turned back to the inscription without further protest, although his shoulders were set in angry lines.

“Hand over your weapon, and you can help Daniel geek out over this stuff,” O'Neill said to Reba. She looked like she was considering the offer for a moment, and then handed over her zat to Major Carter.

“I want this back when we're done here,” she said.

O'Neill shrugged. “Play nicely, and we'll see.”

Reba joined Daniel Jackson in inspecting the inscription, the two of them muttering together over certain lines.

“What's with the dead guys?” O'Neill said, shining his flashlight on the scattered bones that lay underneath the carved heart at the center of the wall. “Should we be worried about something?”

“Daniel Jackson believes there may have been a trap intended to prevent unauthorized persons from using the Ancient device,” Teal'c said.

“Daniel?” Jack said.

“Yes, I do, which is why it's important that we translate this,” he said without turning around. “We've been standing here for a while and nothing's happened to us, but I don't think trying to yank that thing out of the wall without reading the manual first would be a good idea.”

“You think the device is behind the carving?” Major Carter said.

“Or is built into the carving somehow. The stone in the carving is warm, and the rest of the wall isn't.”

“Huh,” Major Carter said, making her way between the bones in order to get a better view.

“Carter,” O'Neill said sharply. “Just as a wild guess, I'm thinking it's a bad idea to touch that thing.”

“Yes, sir. I got that far, sir. I wonder if this opens up somehow, if there's some kind of interface…”

“You mean like the one that grabbed my head that time?”

Major Carter nodded. “I promise, if something tries to grab my head, I'll get out of the way.”

“Those head-sucker things move fast.”

“I'll be alert for that, sir.”

Daniel Jackson closed his eyes for a moment, his jaw set, and then opened them and focused resolutely on the inscription.

“Perhaps we could assist the translation by remaining quiet,” Teal'c suggested.

O'Neill looked sideways at Teal'c. “As long as we've covered anything that we know about that could suddenly kill us or invade our brains.”

“That's all I know of,” Daniel Jackson said absently, his eyes on the carved lines in front of him. “If I find out about anything else, you'll be the first to know.”

T
he colonel's hour was almost up and he was getting visibly twitchy when Sam saw Daniel tense, running his fingers back along the last few lines he'd been working on. She watched him as he backed up, looking over the whole inscription, his expression changing from tense concentration to something much bleaker.

“What?” she asked.

“Well,” Daniel said, turning with a wincing smile. “The good news is, I've finished translating the inscription.”

“That's good,” O'Neill said, clearly waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“The bad news is, it's clear to me now that I mistranslated the inscription on the tablets. I was focusing on the system of abbreviation that they used, which, yes, was tricky, but it wasn't the only challenge in translation. Some of the language that looked very straightforward
—”

“Daniel,” Jack interrupted, not sharply but seriously. “What's the bad news?”

Daniel took a deep breath. “I don't think this is a device for finding things. Not in any literal sense.”

“You swore there was a treasure,” Reba said, reaching for the zat she wasn't holding anymore. She settled for folding her arms with a stormy expression.

“There is,” Daniel said. “At least, there is depending on your definition of ‘treasure.' I think this is a device for producing very realistic illusions.”

“Like the Tok'ra memory recall device?” Sam said. That was the last thing she wanted to think about right now, but she couldn't help making the connection.

“Maybe,” Daniel said. “More like whatever Apophis did when he made us see altered memories.”

He'd taken the form of her father. He'd played her most painful memories for her, over and over again until she'd screamed in her head, begging him not to make her relieve the moment when she learned of her mother's death one more time. And then he'd pretended to be her father. She hadn't told anyone about the dreams she'd been having since then, the ones where her father turned to her and raised the pain stick and smiled while she screamed—

“Only for much more altruistic reasons,” Daniel went on, and Sam dug her fingernails into her palms. She couldn't afford not to stay focused on the here and now.

Teal'c frowned. “You believe this to have been some kind of reward?”

“You probably could use it that way, and I'm sure that's what the Goa'uld would do with it if they had it
—
use it to dispense fantasies to their servants like some kind of drug. I think what the Ancients used it for, though, was as a kind of aid to self-knowledge.”

“Self-knowledge,” Jack said skeptically.

“A way for people to find out what it is they want most.”

“I know what I want most,” Jack said. “Right now, it's to go home and take a hot bath. Does this thing have any actual practical purpose?”

Daniel looked like he was trying to think of one and failing. “It would be interesting to study,” he said. “But I'm not sure it's worth the risk of trying to disconnect the device and move it. There are instructions here for turning it on, but not for removing it safely, and if that's what these people were trying to do when they died…”

Jack looked at Sam. “Carter?”

“I think Daniel may be right, sir,” she said. “Even if we found a way to pull the device out of the wall, if it's as big as that carving, I don't know how we'd get it out of here without any equipment. And I'm afraid it would destabilize this wall, which given how much the rock these tunnels are built in has shifted… I don't think we can take this thing out safely.”