Rebellion (25 page)

There was a bullet hole in the guardsman's chest. Daniel turned to Sha'uri. She was frowning at him. "You could have gotten killed!" "I knocked his spear away. "Not from him," Sha'uri said, looking frightened. "From me! My bullet must have gone just past your head!"

"Did it?" Daniel frowned, trying to remember. "I guess I didn't notice.

There were other things on my mind." When the couple caught up with the main group, Daniel was carrying the blast-lance and a rifle slung over his shoulder. Sha'uri carried the other boy's rifle and her pistol. The procession had stopped because yet another Horus guard had ambushed the point men. A black man in Army fatigues with sergeant's stripes lay dead on the floor. So did another of Skaara's militia. The main group had come up in time to riddle the guardsman with bullets. "I think whoever's commanding this tub has personnel problems," O'Neil finally said. "That guy seemed to be fighting just fine," Kawalsky objected. "So did the guy who nearly killed Sha'uri and me," Daniel added. "Individually, these guys are formidable," O'Neil agreed. "But there don't seem to be many of them. I began to suspect it when there wasn't an infantry sweep to clear out our base camp." "That would have been standard operating procedure Kawalsky admitted.""Instead, we were allowed to save equipment and reconcentrate some of our forces, while the enemy tried to harry us with airpower." O'Neil frowned. "I'll bet most of the ground pounders on this ship went to take the StarGate-and they're still holding it."

"And the rest are playing guerrilla war with us, trying to pick us off one by one." Kawalsky looked disgusted. "That's only if we play their game," O'Neil said. "Or, we could make them play ours." "How?" Daniel wanted to know. "We head someplace where they have to stand and fight us," O'Neil replied. "We've seen that things at the bottom of this ship seem on the grungy side. That leads me to believe that the bridge is probably up near the top." He checked his rifle. "Shall we go and find out?" They'd risen more levels than Daniel wanted to count. Kawalsky and O'Neil climbed like machines. Skaara scampered up with a boy's boundless energy. Daniel grimly forced himself up a step at a time. And Sha'uri wasn't about to be left behind. Some more members of the assault team had been lost, but several surviving members had picked up Ra-technology blaster weapons from dead crew warriors. O'Neil had been right about two things. The accommodations had gotten nicer the higher they went. And the defense mounted by the Horus guards had grown fiercer. The attackers had just passed through a deck with inhabited crew's quarters, after climbing through several floors where the apartments had been empty, neglected, and dusty. Daniel could smell destruction wafting down the stairs from the deck above. He caught the stench of smoke, seared metal, and a pungent chemical odor. They mounted the stairs to find a flight deck in ruin. Burned-out hulks of udajeets stood stranded in slimy pools of chemical foam. The flames must have been fierce enough to affect the quartz-crystal that made up the walls, ceiling, and floors. In parts it was discolored, even cracked.

One wall showed discoloration around the spreadeagled silhouette of a human figure. "This must be where the glider crashed," Daniel said. "At least it's pretty much open space except for the structural supports,"

Kawalsky joked. "Sort of like a municipal parking lot." But even as he spoke, Horus guards materialized from behind several of the wrecks, aiming blast-lances at the intruders. "Damn!" Kawalsky complained, "I hate when they do that!" The hawk-headed guards had set up their ambush well. They'd caught the raiders away from the stairs, out in the open.

And there were more of the Horus guards. As O'Neil had predicted, the enemy was assembling more and more warriors to stand and fight. But there still weren't enough to stand before the numbers of the invaders.

O'Neil and Kawalsky led Marines and militia kids in flanking movements, their bullets and blast-bolts driving the masked warriors back. Even in victory, however, Daniel noticed that O'Neil looked puzzled. "Why were these guys fighting so hard over a wrecked deck?" he asked. "Maybe we've been using this particular stairway too long," Kawalsky suggested.

"So they've been getting prepared for us." "Let's find a new way up,"

O'Neil'said. They set off more carefully across the open, scorched deck-point guard, flankers, the main body following with their guns ready. The Horus guards fell back sullenly, sniping with their blast-lances. O'Neil frowned. "They're trying to draw us in that direction." He nodded after the retreating warriors. "Straight into another ambush," Kawalsky said. "Which way do we go instead?" O'Neil chose a direction at random, and. the raiders set off. But Daniel lagged behind, his attention caught by another of those plaques with hieroglyphic technical notes. But this one was on the floor, cracked and half-incinerated by one of the larger structural members, Did this mean that the circuits which had been behind it were now revealed?

Daniel stepped around the thick pillar-to encounter an equally surprised Horus guard standing with his blast-lance grounded. The masked warrior raised his weapon, but Daniel fumbled his into place and fired. The guard fell back, blasted. Then Daniel noticed a diminutive female technician working on the open circuitry. She whirled around, screaming. The tool in her hand, a biomorphic piece of quartz-crystal, cycled through several changes as she faced him. Daniel felt he had no choice. He fired his blastlance again, and the technician was gone.

Then he turned the energy weapon on the exposed circuits. I don't know what these do, Daniel thought as he triggered blast after blast into the incomprehensible circuitry. But whatever hurts this ship helps us. On the bridge of Ra's Eye, Hathor came to a decision. Her guards couldn't stop the incursion of the boarders. But there was another way to handle the problem. The enemy was already on the deck that wouldn't seal against vacuum. "Recall all warriors from Launch Deck Four," she ordered. "Lady Captain, there is also a technician-" "Notify all personnel!" Hathor said shortly. "Damage-control crews will seal the area." Then Ra's Eye would lift off, rise high enough, and the boarders would cease to encumber the ship-because they would cease to be able to breathe. At the same time the ship's main batteries would vaporize the plateau supporting the StarGate pyramid, the invaders sheltering there, and, of course, the StarGate itself. The situation had become sufficiently extreme to merit the extreme solution. "Engines, prepare lifting drive." Ra's Eye began to shudder as the landing clamps unlocked from the stone pyramid below them. "Gunnery, start energizing main batteries." "Damage control, prepare to seal off the deck." Hathor stood very straight. "On my order, she said. Energy and information hummed through the ship. But at a critical junction about halfway between the bridge and the engine room, the control circuitry had been blasted and scrambled. Machine-language orders were lost or misrouted. Energy jumped circuits. On the bridge, indicators began showing threatening fluctuations. Warning sirens began their howl. The ship was no longer shuddering but bucking wildly. "Lady Captain," the navigation crewman said, her face going pale. "The engines-they're attempting to respond to extraordinary power drains. Energy is being routed to systems with no power needs." Her hands fluttered over the photosensitive controls, which began dimming, then increasing to glaring with apparently no logic. "The systems won't-I can't-" The young woman shouted into her communicator: "Engines, shunt all power from SB-291 Do it now, before we have-" The lights in the bridge died, as did the holographic tactical display. Hathor finished the sentence: "-A power cascade." The hologram was gone, and there was only the dim phosphorescence of the emergency bridge controls. Yet somehow Hathor saw an image, half a face that had an unhealthy glow, giving her an eerie half smile and a farewell. It was the last face she'd seen on Tuat. It was Ptah.

CHAPTER 21

TO THE VICTOR ... The sound of Daniel's blaster-bolts brought the main body of the boarding party back at a run, weapons at the ready. They found him standing over two corpses, firing into an opening in the usually seamless crystalline quartz that formed the decks, walls, and ceilings of the enormous spacecraft they'd invaded. Within the opening, the crystal lattice showed a complex pattern of veins. At least it had before Daniel's blast-lance had gotten to work. Now the tracery of veins was spalled and fused. "We thought you'd gotten ambushed," Kawalsky said. "But it looks like the other way around." Sha'uri stared from the sprawled guard to the fried technician. "You shot her?" she asked.

Colonel Jack O'Neil nudged the dead woman's hand with the toe of his boot, and the tool she'd been clutching dropped to the deck. It was a piece of the biomorphic crystal that supported so much of Ra's technology. But the recombinant lattice structure had taken the shape of a cutter, its blade vibrating at nearly hypersonic speed. The colonel picked up the implement and scored a line in the usually impenetrable crystal of the floor. "Imagine what it would have done to flesh and bone," he said. After a moment's searching, he located the controls and stilled the blade, slipping it into his pocket. "Show's over," he said. "Let's find-" The deck beneath their feet began to quiver. And inside the circuit board, junction box-whatever it was-veins in the golden tracery began to glow. It was like watching a microscopic light show as energy impulses rippled and flashed through the tiny filaments. But as the energy pulses encountered the bubbled and fused mess that Daniel had created, they cycled madly, diverted from their proper paths. The fairy lights flashed and blinked as circuits began to overload. Some of the veins went from gold to red, looking like the heating filaments inside a toaster. The whole construction they stood within began to shake harder. Heat began wafting out of the circuit box. Almost unconsciously the members of the raiding party stepped back. The glimmering of the wrecked circuits took on a glaring hue.

Sparks began to fly. An irregular rhythm punctuated the trembling of the pyramid ship, as if the floor beneath them were trying to buck them off. The boarders stumbled away, and just in time. An arc of energy spat out of the opening with almost the force of a blast-bolt. Kawalsky glared at Daniel. "What did you do?" he demanded. Daniel was trying to put as much space between him and the flaring circuits as he could. "A little sabotage-I thought."

The arhythmic tremor in the deck and walls had reached almost earthquake proportions. The whole construction seemed to heave up for a second.

Then it slumped back down, hard enough to make everyone stumble. The sourceless illumination that usually lit the decks cut off and died. At least on this particular level, light from the suns of Abydos filtered in through the vast openings of the launch decks. "I think," O'Neil said, "that the ship was preparing for liftoff, which would have been very unhealthy for us on an open deck if we'd gone high enough. Let's get out of here." They took the first upward-leading staircase they could find. At the top, they found the way half blocked by a thick panel of quartz-crystal. "Like a blast-door," Kawalsky murmured. "More likely an airtight seal," O'Neil said as he ducked under. The slab was poised to come down, as if the power that had actuated its movement had abruptly been cut off. Away from the open hatches of the launching deck, the corridors of the ship were pitch dark. The ever prepared Colonel O'Neil produced some flares. "I hope some of the rest of you brought a few," he said. "These aren't going to last us all the way to the bridge." The bridge of Ra's Eye was a scene of controlled turmoil as Ptah's technicians strove mightily to overcome the effects of their leader's scrimping and the damage done to one of the main junction circuits. "There are no backups," one of the crew cried, almost wailing.

"We can't reroute those circuits. The transmission net won't stand it.

If we try, we'll blow out other junctions!" "Lady Captain," a voice came from the engine room, "I fear that has happened already." "Damage Control," Hathor said, trying to come to grips with the situation, "how long will repairs take?" A brief silence answered her. "Lady Captain, it will require at least as long as we took after the last mishap." The crew person's voice halted another moment. "Perhaps longer." There was a brassy, burning sensation in the back of Hathor's mouth, as if someone had poured molten metal in there while she hadn't been looking. With a start she realized this must be the taste of defeat. "Scanners," she said, trying to keep her voice level. "What's the situation outside?"

The interdiction fire from the secondary batteries had been halted asRa Eye attempted to lift off. And, of course, there was no power to resume firing now. "Lady Captain." It was the voice of a frightened underling delivering more bad news. "Enemy forces are climbing the plateau. More are boarding us." For a second Hathor felt as though the whole weight of the battlecraft were pressing against her shoulders. Not enough crew to resist, not enough power to escape. Balked by ancient machinery and her erstwhile husband's malice. He never understood what there was between Ra and me, she thought. Hathor jerked her chin up. Perhaps she might explain-when she came back to kill him. "Engines," she said crisply.

"Can we divert enough emergency power to run the matter transmitters?" A moment's silence as technicians frantically calculated. "Yes, Lady Captain." "Then do so. All inessential crew will be withdrawn to the StarGate. All warriors will continue to assemble on the upper decks, concentrating on slowing, if not destroying the first group of boarders." She hesitated. "I will consider volunteers for a udajeet mission to discourage the enemy forces on the plateau from boarding." A forlorn hope, she thought. Hathor turned to her bridge crew, nervous technicians all. "I'll require all Engines, Power, Communications, and Damage Control personnel," she said. "Navigation, the rest of you-you can go as soon as we power up the matter transmitter." The crew members other than the ones she had chosen immediately made their way to stand on what appeared to be a huge medallion of beaten copper set in the quartz of the deck. A similar disk stood vertically aligned overhead in the ceiling. "Engines!" Hathor called. "Has power been diverted to the matter transmitter?" "Yes, Lady Captain." "Then prepare for the beaming of the first party." She stepped to the statue of Khnum that loomed over the transmitter circle. A golden necklace hung around the figure's neck, with a milky bluish gem set in the middle. Hathor pressed her fingers against the jewel. From the medallion overhead, a brilliant blue radiance covered the crew members. Four metal rings seemed to float down to encircle them. And a pulse of blue light, intense as a laser, swept around the circumference of both copper medallions until the escaping crew members seemed encased in a tube of shimmering blueness.