Heart's Desire (9 page)

Outside the bars, they seemed to be in some kind of bigger room, or maybe compartment was the word if they were on a ship. There was light filtering in from windows set deeply into two of the walls, and when he paced the length of the cage, he could see flashes of blue sky and wisps of cloud out the windows. No one was watching or guarding them, although he thought he heard the sound of footsteps overhead.

The immediate problem was being in this cell. He felt their options would be increased by being out of it. “I take it that door is locked?”

“It is.”

“The bars?”

“A possibility,” Teal'c said, inclining his head in a nod. “I did not wish to take the risk while you were unconscious and unable to aid in our escape.”

“I'm up,” Daniel said. “Let's see if we can get out of here.”

His part in that consisted mainly of standing back out of the way as Teal'c wrestled with the bars, straining to bend them enough for them to be able to slip free. He'd been spending a lot of time in the gym since he joined SG-1, but Teal'c still sometimes made him feel like the ‘before' picture in an advertisement for someone's patented workout routine.

Daniel had thought he was in reasonably good shape before he joined the team; scrambling through ruins and carrying around excavation equipment wasn't exactly a sedentary activity. Then he'd started working with Jack and Teal'c
—
and for that matter Sam
—
and discovered their definition of ‘a nice little stroll.' Between not wanting their nice little strolls to be an exercise in suffering and being highly invested in running faster than their pursuers when they had to sprint for the Stargate, he hadn't needed much encouragement to make the most of the SGC's workout facilities.

Which still didn't make bending metal bars with his bare hands his job. He took the opportunity to take stock of their surroundings instead. A spiral staircase made out of what looked like bamboo ran up and down from one corner of the compartment. Several of its stairs seemed to have been mended and patched, suggesting frequent use.

Most of the space on all sides seemed taken up with shelves and doorways into smaller compartments. He could see coils of rope and a couple of coats and loose wool wraps hanging on hooks, but nothing that looked like an obvious weapon. Many of the shelves held what looked like machine parts of various kinds, though, which suggested he could at least find something heavy to hit people with.

Teal'c's shoulders strained as he tugged on the bars. It looked like he was actually getting somewhere, albeit slowly. Hopefully the bars wouldn't be solid iron, not given the need to reduce the airship's weight.

“I wouldn't do that if I were you,” a woman said from behind them. Daniel turned, inwardly wincing.

The speaker was standing outside the bars on the other side of the cell, considering them. She was a handsome woman, tall and boyishly built, with dark hair that fell in long curls nearly to her waist. An affectation, he thought, one that didn't match her practical clothes, a dark leather coat and dark wool trousers tucked into the tops of her stained leather boots.

“Do what?” Daniel said, turning with his hands open. Beside him, Teal'c abandoned his attempts to bend the cell bars and turned reluctantly as well.

“Try to escape,” she said. “This ship is crawling with my men, and unless you can grow wings and fly, I don't know where you'd be planning to go.”

“I hadn't gotten that far,” Daniel admitted.

“I see that.” She turned her attention to Teal'c, looking him over with an expression of interest that Daniel didn't much like.

“You should release us,” Teal'c said. “Our friends will be looking for us, and it will be unfortunate for you if they find us.”

“Also unlikely,” the woman said. “But believe me, I have no plans to hold onto you any longer than it takes for me to get a good price for you. You may as well get comfortable in there in the mean time, because I'm not about to let you run around loose as long as I have you aboard.”

“I think we've gotten off on the wrong foot here,” Daniel said. “Let's start over. I'm Daniel Jackson. This is Teal'c. Whatever you're trying to accomplish here, there must be a better way of doing it than kidnapping us.”

“My name is Reba,” the woman said. “You're aboard my ship, the 
Heart's Desire
.”

“Pleased to meet you.” He couldn't entirely keep the note of sarcasm out of his voice. “So, were we just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or what?”

“More or less,” Reba said matter-of-factly. “I was actually after the metal tablets with the writings of the Ancients.”

Daniel blinked. “You know what they are?”

“Better than you do, I think,” Reba said. “There are other copies of the texts. Incomplete copies. The ones I saw were hidden away in one of the temples of Asherah, high in the mountains.”

“Aren't we high in the mountains?”

“Higher,” she said, looking unimpressed. “When I worked out what they were describing, and figured out that the copies were incomplete, I knew I had to find the original tablets. We were hoping to find a less dramatic way of getting our hands on them, but when we heard the High King was planning to trade them to the Tau'ri, we went for dramatic.”

“What's so valuable about the tablets?”

She shook her head a little. “And why would I possibly want to tell you that?”

Daniel repressed the urge to say 
Actually, I have no idea.
 “I might be able to help you interpret them. You said yourself you haven't seen the full inscriptions before. As far as I can tell from just a couple of looks, they're using a very abbreviated form of the Ancient language, almost a code, but I'm sure I can work it out.”

“I'll work it out myself when I have the time,” she said, which suggested that she expected it to be a challenging task herself. While that was disappointing in the sense that he would have liked to meet someone who was more fluent in Ancient than he was, it did suggest that his help really would be of value to her. “I ended up getting my hands on something better.”

“And what would that be?” Daniel asked. He had a sudden sinking feeling that she meant them, and considered how best to tread the path between raising unreasonable expectations and making them sound expendable. “Our people will be willing to make some kind of reasonable deal for our safe return, it's true, but I don't want you to get the idea
—”

“I'm not interested in dealing with the Tau'ri,” Reba said. “All I've heard about your people is that they have a reputation for being unpredictable. I like known quantities.”

Daniel felt he had to ask, even though he was pretty sure he wouldn't like the answer. “Who's the known quantity?”

“Our beloved goddess Asherah, of course,” Reba said. “I intend to offer to sell her the 
shol'va
 Teal'c, the troublesome Jaffa who's been inciting rebellion against the gods. I think she'll find him a very marketable property.”

T
he hatch in the top of the small metal compartment rattled, and Sam looked up sharply toward the ceiling, and then at Jack. It was too dark to see his face, but she could see the sharp shake of his head, and his ‘hold-up' gesture.

She wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the idea of trying to jump whoever was up there when they were probably armed and she wasn't, so that was just as well. She leaned back against the wall of the compartment instead, shielding her eyes with her hand against the light as the hatch opened.

“Get them out,” Keret said from above, and rough hands reached in to drag her up and onto the deck. As she tried to shake them off, to no avail, she could see stone rather than sky through the small windows set in the walls. They were flying low, then, through mountain passes, probably trying to lose their pursuers that way.

The compartment they'd been dragged out of had to be near the front of the airship, she thought, quickly trying to judge its size; most of the deck was taken up with some kind of barred cage stacked high with cargo, with doors leading through a bulkhead to some kind of closed compartment to the stern.

She saw Jack glancing around as well, marking the two spiral staircases to port and starboard not far away from where they stood. It might have been worth making a break for one if there were any way of freeing herself from the grip of the two men who held her. Still, she watched Jack, not wanting to miss his signal if he was planning on making a move.

“I thought we'd be having this little chat soon,” Jack said, smiling at Keret in a way she didn't think Keret was stupid enough to interpret as friendly. He looked entirely at ease, not struggling against the men who held him, just waiting to hear what Keret had to say. She wished she thought she looked half as relaxed. “Let me guess. This is the part where you ask if there's anyone who's willing to ransom us.”

“And is there?” Keret said. He was wearing Jack's sunglasses pushed up on his forehead like aviator's goggles, which Sam could see Jack take note of even if he kept quiet about it.

“There might be,” Jack said. “If you'll give us back our radios so that we can get in touch with our people, we can probably work something out.”

“You mean you can signal someone to rescue you,” Keret said. “I'm not that stupid.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Jack said.

“Let me make this very simple,” Keret said. “If no one's going to ransom you, then I might as well dump you over the side right now.”

“You don't want to do that,” Sam said quickly.

Jack just shook his head, as if he'd heard it all before. “What happened to the rest of my team?”

“They're probably locked up in Reba's hold right now,” Keret said.

“'Probably,'” Sam said. “He didn't make the rendezvous, did he?”

“No,
she
didn't,” Keret said. “It hardly matters to me. I wasn't planning to waste my time chasing her imaginary treasure, anyway. You're worth more to me than some useless old tablets.”

Sam frowned. “The ones being presented at the ceremony? What have they got to do with treasure?”

“Reba's got it through her head that they tell the location of a fabulous treasure,” Keret said. “Probably a bunch of old pots and more useless carved rocks, but… there's a story told to children about a cave up in the mountains somewhere that hides a treasure greater than any man could possibly desire. Supposedly it can only be found if you know the way to the mountain's true heart.”

“Open, Sesame,” Jack said. Keret looked blank.

“You think it's just a story?” Sam said.

Keret shrugged. “I think there's no such thing as more treasure than any man could desire. I expect Reba's on her way to go wander around old ruins right now, and I say let her go.” Jack glanced at the men holding Sam, as if reading something in their expressions that Sam couldn't see, and Sam realized that this little speech might be as much for the benefit of Keret's crew as anything else. “We'll turn a profit off the two of you in the mean time, and be waiting to have a word with her when she heads back this way.”

“Then I suppose you'd better find some way of letting General Hammond know where we are so you can ransom us,” Jack said.

“I'll handle that part,” Keret said. “I'm just wondering whether it would be more effective to return you both unharmed, or to use one of you as an example to make it clear that the ransom for the other had better be generous and prompt.”

“You really don't want to do that,” Jack said. There was a dangerous note in his voice, although he still stood easy, not making any move that would inspire them to wrestle him into submission. She wondered about that, wondering whether he'd been hurt in the fight or in his fall from the cliff and hadn't bothered to mention it, but there wasn't any way of finding out, so she filed that.

“We'll see, won't we?” Keret said. “Better hope your Great General makes a good first offer. In the mean time…” He gestured to his men, and they started to manhandle Sam back toward the hatch in the deck they'd been dragged out of.