Heart's Desire (35 page)

Drey'auc had been the greatest comfort, reassuring him that he was doing the right thing even when he had sometimes doubted himself. She had borne it patiently when she and Rya'c had lived in virtual confinement at Cheyenne Mountain, and helped Rya'c to bear it patiently as well. O'Neill had helped, persuading General Hammond to let Drey'auc and Rya'c leave the mountain from time to time to learn of Earth.

He thought Rya'c might actually have been sorry to leave Earth; he had been learning its customs with the ease of a child, and had played with O'Neill's son as he would have with a brother. O'Neill had taught Rya'c the game of baseball, and shortly before they had left Earth, Rya'c had been attempting to persuade him that he should learn to play hockey, as it was a more fitting game for warriors.

But Rya'c was nearly a man, ready to begin a warrior's training in earnest rather than continuing the studies of a scholar among the Tau'ri, and in any event Earth was not lost to them. Now that peace had come, they could trade with the Tau'ri through the chappa'ai and visit them as allies and friends.

“They will be wondering where you are,” Bra'tac said. “Go, find your wife and son and enjoy the evening. There will be time enough for work.”

“Are you not celebrating?” Teal'c said.

Bra'tac looked up again at the stars, his mouth twitching in a smile. “I never truly believed this day would come, my friend,” he said. “The best that I ever hoped was to lessen the damage done to our people by Apophis. I dreamed of no more for you. I thought that if our freedom was even possible, it would come in the time of our descendents many generations from now. It was you who had the dream, Teal'c. You who carried it like a spark in the darkness.”

“Only because you trained me well,” Teal'c said. “Without your example to follow, I would never have come to believe that the Goa'uld are not gods.”

“You went beyond me,” Bra'tac said. “As every teacher hopes that his student will go where he cannot follow. And now, look. I look up at the stars, and see world after world of free people.” He smiled again. “I am in awe, my friend. Forgive me if my heart is too full as yet for celebrating.”

“Should you change your mind, I am sure there are many who would wish to honor you today as well,” Teal'c said.

“Perhaps that will persuade me in time. That, or the night growing cold. Go on, now. Drey'auc will be wondering how you have lost your way in a building you served in for years.”

Inside, the clamor of voices was no quieter. Warriors stood about telling stories of their recent exploits to admiring audiences, and children still ran through what had once been one of Apophis's audience chambers. It had been a solemn place, and one that many people had had reason to fear.

Now the serpent mask of Apophis lay on his throne, cracked in two and blackened by a staff blast. A little knot of children were gathered near the steps of the throne, and as Teal'c passed, he could hear them daring one another to touch Apophis's mask.

“It is nothing but metal,” Teal'c said. He rested his hand on it, and beckoned one of the boys to him. “See? It can do nothing to harm you, and neither can the dead false god who wore it.”

“You should all be in bed,” Drey'auc said, and the children scattered, ducking through the crowd. She shook her head. “They'll run around until dawn, and then fall asleep wherever they are.”

“It will not harm them for one night,” Teal'c said. “Where is our son?”

“Taking a turn to guard the palace,” she said. “For the sake of ceremony, mind you. Bra'tac said there was no real danger, but that it was a task to set the boys to that might keep them out of trouble tonight.”

“That is well,” Teal'c said. He brushed her hand with his. “Will you be long occupied here?”

“Look around you,” Drey'auc said, spreading her hands in cheerful exasperation. “I have no idea when this night will end.”

“Surely it is not your responsibility alone.”

She smiled, the smile that had first caught his eye long ago. “Are you trying to tempt me away, my husband?”

“Am I likely to be successful in the endeavor?”

“You are,” she said, the same smile in her eyes.

Outside, there was more than one couple embracing without shame in the street, caught up in the joy of the night, but he waited until they were inside their own front door before he turned to Drey'auc, and she came to his arms, her hands tightening on his sleeves.

“They all believe in you tonight,” she said. “But I always have.”

“Always,” Teal'c said. He felt a shiver go through him as he spoke, and reached to close the door behind them. Outside the night was growing cold, but within these walls it would be warm.

S
am sat back to consider the device she'd painstakingly assembled on her lab bench. The only thing missing was a power supply, but with a little luck and the crystals they'd found on PX2-551, she ought to be able to put one together. She reached for one of the crystals, angling it experimentally to see if it would fit, when someone cleared their throat in the doorway.

“What is it this time, a better mousetrap?”

“Dad,” Sam said, swiveling around on her stool. “I wasn't expecting you this afternoon.” Someday he'd learn to call first, she thought.

Jacob Carter shrugged. “Your mom and I were in town, and I thought I'd drop in and see my baby girl.”

“It's an artificial gravity drive,” Sam said. “You just happened to be passing through Colorado Springs?”

“General Hammond did want to ask me about a couple of things.”

Sam shook her head, smiling. “You just have to keep your hand in, don't you?”

“Well, ever since I found out about the Stargate program, it is a little hard to resist checking up to see what you've found out lately by exploring other planets.”

“This is pretty interesting,” Sam said. “We were visiting this planet where the locals use airships for transportation. It turned out that they were using anti-gravity technology that's very similar to what Ra used in his ships. I've been reverse engineering the drive, and I think it'll really be an improvement to our X-301s.”

“They're pretty hot little ships already,” Jacob said.

Sam grinned. “Teal'c and Colonel O'Neill certainly had fun testing them.”

“And they're still in one piece, which is saying something.”

“You mean the ships, or Teal'c and the colonel?”

“Yes,” Jacob said dryly. “So show me your antigravity device.”

“I'm working on the power supply right now,” Sam said. “I've got to make sure that the incoming power is compatible with the crystal array we're using to adjust subjective gravity.”

Jacob pulled up a chair so that he could inspect the device as she pointed out the work she'd done so far. Sam wasn't sure how much of her explanation he was following, but he still seemed genuinely interested. But, then, that was her father.

Or, at least, it was her father now. There had been a time when she'd started to feel like her father was only interested in her military career, and to despair of ever explaining to him why she found science interesting for its own sake. That had been before her mother's accident.

It had been a close call, a car crash on a stormy afternoon that could easily have killed her mother instead of merely sending her to the emergency room for stitches and a cast. It had scared Sam and her brother, but she thought it had scared their father even more. He'd been determined after that not to lose an opportunity to connect with his wife or his kids while he had the chance.

She could still remember when he'd come into her room while she was working on her science project, an elaborate display of model rocketry.

“This is nice, Sam,” he'd said. “It looks really good.” He'd fingered the nose cone of one of the rockets, tracing its shape with his fingers. “Is this stuff just interesting to you because you want to be an astronaut?”

Sam had hesitated, not sure what answer he was expecting. “That's not the only reason,” she said. “Not even really the main reason. It's the physics of it, and the whole process of creating and testing designs based on the physical limits of the various materials that it's possible to work with and the forces that are going to be acting on them. It's…” She had trailed off, feeling suddenly self-conscious. “I think it's interesting. And it's just cool that we can go into space.”

“Yes, it is,” Jacob had said. “Tell me what's interesting.”

She'd given him a sideways look. “Are you sure?”

He'd nodded. “I have time.”

She wasn't sure now how much of his interest was professional and how much was because it was his daughter's science project, but she wasn't really going to argue either way. It helped her to talk through the process of assembling the power supply, and by the time she finished, she could see how she was going to have to fit the pieces together.

“I'm hoping we'll have a working prototype in a few weeks,” Sam said.

“That's moving pretty fast,” Jacob said.

“We do that around here. If you'd told me three years ago that we'd have our own fleet of starships by now, and be working on fighters with anti-gravity devices…” Sam trailed off, feeling strangely uneasy for a moment.

“Sam?”

“Nothing, I guess,” Sam said. “Just thinking that things could have gone so much worse when we started the Stargate program. For all we knew, the galaxy could have been full of Goa'uld like Ra.”

“As far as we know, they were dying out when we first encountered them,” Jacob said. “Right?”

“That's what we think,” Sam said. “We've found a lot of their technology, but very few actual Goa'uld. Colonel O'Neill keeps coming up with worst-case training scenarios involving having someone on the base actually taken as a host by a symbiote, but I think that's pretty unlikely.”

“Which is good to hear, for your father,” Jacob said.

“Hang around here enough, and he'll come up with a training scenario where you're the Goa'uld host.”

“No, thank you,” Jacob said, tapping his temple. “I think having one of me in here is quite enough.”

She couldn't shake her sense of unease. “I guess it just gets to me sometimes that it could have been so different. We could have had someone taken as a host the moment we stepped through the Stargate, you know? Or contracted some kind of strange space disease, or run into some kind of device that turned out to be… I don't know, addictive or something, or had hostile aliens try to invade Earth
—”

“But you didn't,” Jacob pointed out.

“But we could have. We weren't very careful when we started the Stargate program, and we didn't know half of what we know now. The number of things that could have gone wrong
—”

“You know, Sam, there are always a million disasters that could have happened. The important thing is, they didn't. You've got to think about everything that's gone right. You're discovering some amazing things out there.”

Sam smiled. “I know. We've been… really remarkably lucky.”

“That's not a bad thing.”

“I know that, believe me.”

“So, up for going out to lunch with me and your mom? She's hanging out back at the hotel, since she doesn't exactly have the security clearance for this stuff.”

“I would love to, Dad…”

“I sense a ‘but' coming.”

“But, I really would like to keep working on this thing for a little while longer. Can we make it dinner?”

“Okay,” Jacob said. “But if you're still in here at dinnertime, I'm dragging you out into the fresh air.”

“Dinner, I promise,” Sam said. She turned her attention back to the power supply, and began assembling the pieces she'd collected into a configuration that she thought ought to work. It actually seemed strangely familiar.