Retaliation (2 page)

No one saw them emerge through a hatch on the level above. Khonsu shrank his falcon mask back to its necklace configuration, slipped on the captured robe, and adjusted its hood to shade his features. He took the lead as the intruders headed for the nearest stairway.

A pair of guards were clattering upward as he ar-rived at the landing. “Hawk-heads!” one cried in his Abydan peasant ac-cent, thinking he spoke to a comrade. “They’ve broken into the ship. Keep an eye-“

That was as far as he got before Khonsu was upon them. He dropped his blast-lance. This was close work, best done by hand. Khonsu had no illusions as to why he’d been taken on this mission. He was Khonsu the killer, trained in the arts of silent death.

One fellah was down, his throat crushed. The other dodged Khonsu’s blow, turning to flee. Khonsu caught him by the scruff of his cloak and hauled him back. The man was in midair as the killer seized him by the leg. The figure twisted convulsively as Khonsu brought him down across his left knee. The spine cracked, and Khonsu broke the neck for good measure as the body dropped. Quickly he stripped the dead Abydans and passed their robes to his companions. Then came a stiff climb toward the zenith of the pyramid ship-to Launch Deck Four. Once this had been a hangar for part of the udajeet contingent carried by the battlecraft. But one of the antigravity gliders, crippled in the fighting with the Earthlings and their Abydan allies, had crashed into the open docking space, creating chaos inside-and jamming the deck’s huge hangar doors in the open position.

While Neb and Khonsu kept watch, their leader pro-duced a metal spool wound with an almost filament-thin thread. The Horus guard found a flame-blackened but still sound conduit near the open doors. The first few inches of thread unwound from the spool turned out to be a preformed loop. A gentle shake teased the loop open. Then the spool went through the loop to create a simple hitch around the heavy pipe. Khonsu and Neb each did the same, finding a suitable belay. They backed toward the open bay doors, paying out the monofilament cable until they stood right on the brink.

The invaders clapped handle-like devices to their spools of cable, then leapt backward. Khonsu felt his spool unreeling with an angry whir. His feet hit the sloping golden surface of the pyramid ship, and he tightened the brakes on his hand grip. The filament quivered under his weight but held. Khonsu knew better than to touch the thread that bore his weight. Under this tension the thin line would probably slice through fingers and bone like a razor. He caught a glimpse in his peripheral vision of Neb kicking aloft.

Releasing the spool’s brakes, Khonsu leapt off, too. Again-and again. In a quick series of huge rappelling bounds, infiltra-tion team reached the base of the stranded spacecraft seconds before warriors came boiling out of the ship’s square-arched entrance. Khonsu tossed away the now useless spool and twitched up the hood on his drab cloak. He wanted to make sure it covered his warrior’s sidelock and the blue tattoo round his right eye. Oth-ers of the fellahin carried blast-lances. He and the other Horus guards blended into the milling crowd. The first step of their mission had been accomplished. Now, on to the city of Nagada.

Colonel Jack O’Neil listened as the bedlam outside the hall of the StarGate began to die down. More guards arrived to bolster the defenses for the interstellar por-tal, until at last O’Neil felt free to leave with his aide, Lieutenant Charlton, and a shadow-General West. Armed with rifles and flashlights, the officers traced the path of the intruders until they reached the adit now blocked by the hulk of the starship Ra’s Eye. The entrance was blocked not just by the usual bar-ricade, but by arguing troops, both American and Abydan. There was more here than just the transition from tunnel to spaceship. It represented a demarca-tion line. Within the pyramid the expedition from Earth held sway. But the derelict vessel had been taken by an ad hoc force composed mainly of Abydan militiamen. The Abydans had claimed Ra’s Eye by right of conquest-and had pressed their claim by oc-cupying the ship.

This corridor leading to the outside world had been garrisoned by armed militiamen and barricaded at each end-from possible attack from the StarGate, and from the Earther base camp that occupied the rocky plateau which supported the StarGate pyramid. The militia garrison stood as a tangible symbol of the ten-sion between the Elders of Abydos and the U.S. gov-ernment as represented by General W. O.

West.

Right now that tension seemed to have reached nearly flashpoint dimensions. The sides could be easi-ly told. O’Neil’s men in desert BDU’s confronted militiamen in brownish homespun robes. The primi-tive clothing clashed with the modern assault rifles in the militia members’ hands, but that contrast was the same from the Montagnards of Vietnam to the mujahadeen of Afghanistan. In this case, however, the weapons in some of the Abydans’ hands made the modern assault rifles look primitive. The golden shafts of gleaming quartz looked like blunt spears. But O’Neil had seen demon-strations where those blast-lances blew holes through armor plate. He’d helped capture a few, which he’d sent via the StarGate back to Earth. The Abydans had many, many more, plundered from the inoperable spacecraft.

And now they were using the blast-lances to guard that vessel. As O’Neil pushed to the front of his Marines, the young man in charge of the Abydans began to berate him.

“You let hawk-heads through to attack us,” the young officer accused. “Grabbed one of my men.

Probably killed him.”

“Where did they go?” O’Neil demanded. He got a shrug for an answer. “They disappear into wall. I send out men to look-“ “You don’t have enough men to search this whole ship,” the colonel said flatly.

The tip of the pyramidal bulk that made up the spacecraft Ra’s Eye rose more than seven hundred feet into the air. Along its base, each of the four sides measured almost twelve hun-dred feet. Lieutenant Charlton had once calculated that the deck space aboard the vessel probably equaled half that of one of the World Trade towers.

“You not bring your people inside here!” The young Abydan’s grasp of English slipped under stress.

O’Neil simply climbed the barricade, setting off down the corridor. He was quickly joined by Charlton and West.

“I will send to Skaara!” the furious young man yelled. It was the only threat he could use. He knew his po-sition couldn’t hold against a determined assault from O’Neil’s troops.

Jack O’Neil knew the militia leader when Skaara had been a simple shepherd. The colonel had be-friended the young man when the original reconnais-sance team had arrived on Abydos. Skaara had responded by organizing his friends into a group of boy commandos to rescue O’Neil and the other team members when they’d become the prisoners of Ra.

From that original resistance cell, Skaara’s militia had grown to company size and beyond, attaining almost Frankensteinian proportions during and after the attack by the crew of Ra’s Eye.

But the two commanders, Earther and Abydan, knew each other. O’Neil could imagine Skaara’s reaction. “Call to Skaara on your radio,” the colonel said coolly. “I bet he’ll tell you to help us search.”

O’Neil emerged to find a half-panicked mob of militiamen milling around in the midst of his camp and shook his head. He could only hope that the infiltrators were still aboard and not hidden in that churning mob. Three intruders did not a major invasion make. But , the very smallness of the force set off alarms in O’Neil’s head. His background was covert work. And this fire drill had all the hallmarks of infiltrators being inserted. Maybe Hathor or whoever was heading up the opposition was looking for some intelligence-this threesome could be the Horus guard equivalent of recon Marines. Or they could be up to some sort of deadly mischief. It seemed unlikely that three operatives-even high-tech ops-could jump-start the wrecked starcraft. If fixing the good ship Ra’s Eye had been that easy, Hathor’s crew could have done it themselves.

On the other hand, there were lots of sensitive systems left behind in the hulk-technological secrets that Ra’s successors might prefer to deny Earth scientists. Selective sabotage or wholesale destruc-tion-either strategy might be a possibility.

“Charlton, we’re going to need additional security details. I want a perimeter established around the ship. No one to get in or out-“ O’Neil flicked a quick glance to West, but the gen-eral said nothing, leaving everything in O’Neil’s hands-and if necessary, on his head. “And let’s get our own message to Skaara. We’ll have to search that sucker deck by deck, and I’d rather do that with his approval-and presence, if possible.” Skaara put in an appearance well after the ship had been surrounded and sealed off. Several militia offi-cers were still arguing about O’Neil’s trespass aboard “their” ship when he arrived.

“I’m sorry, Colonel,” the handsome young man apologized. “There’s some trouble brewing in the city that needed my attention.”

When he got the full story on the Horus guard in-cursion, he blistered his own people and opened the ship right up.

“The devils disappeared into the wall right here,” a militiaman explained, pointing at an apparently blank wall of golden crystal. “This stuff changes shape,” O’Neil said to Skaara. “Remember when we were fighting our way to the command deck? Jackson found someone working on circuitry through a panel that had opened in the wall. Maybe there’s the same sort of thing here.”

Charlton didn’t look happy. “That could mean the whole ship is honeycombed with secret passages. A lot of people will lose most of their night’s sleep pok-ing around in here, sir.”

“We’ll stick to the regular corridors first. But keep a strong guard on the exits. That includes lights and snipers on that open hangar deck near the top of this thing.”

The first sweep had barely begun when the searchers found two dead, stripped Abydans in a stairwell.

“That makes sense,” O’Neil said grimly. “It lets them blend in with the enemy-hide those tattoos around their eyes-“ “The eye of Ra, sir,” Charlton hurriedly added, with a glance toward West. “Just like the name of the ship.” “And it means that everybody wearing a brown cloak aboard this tub may not be friendly.” O’Neil turned to his aide. “Make sure nobody boards or leaves the ship with his hood up.” The searchers at last reached the ruined hangar deck, but the first sweep missed the monofilament lines.

Charlton broke into frustrated swearing when he got the report. “We’ve been doing this all for nothing!

The bastards were gone before we even arrived!” “We can’t be sure of that,” O’Neil warned. “Though I can’t imagine these guys hanging around to wait for our search parties. We’ll continue the sweeps, on the odd chance. At least we’ll be sure that they didn’t leave any boobytraps behind.”

“In the part of the ship we were able to reach,” Charlton added sotto voce as he turned to pass on the appropriate orders.

Skaara came up from the checkpoints he’d arranged to keep the intruders from sneaking through the lines. “So, our efforts were too late,” he said. “And our descriptions don’t give the best likeness,”

Charlton said. “Three men in brown homespun cloaks, with their hoods probably up. Doubtless they were still carrying their blast-lances.”

“But there are more than enough of my own people who would meet that description,” Skaara said.

“And you know where they were probably headed,” O’Neil added. “Nagada.” Skaara’s voice was tight. “They would have no trouble disappearing among all those in the city.” He shook his head, his expression saying 1 really need this. “It’s not enough to have people fighting in the marketplaces over food, and the disputes with Nakker and his farmer folk. Now we must worry about spies.”

He shook his head. “My people are halfway trained to fight, to mount guard. We know nothing of man hunting.”

“You could at least check for strangers,” O’Neil said. Skaara gave a short, barking laugh. “You have not been able to look around inside our walls for a while, Colonel-other than trips to visit my father.

Nagada is bursting at the seams. The streets are full of wandering beggars, people whose homes were destroyed in the fighting, fanners come to see the city. There are too many strangers passing among us.

Three more won’t stand out.” “You can narrow the description down a bit,” O’Neil said. “Three males traveling together, all of military age, all with good builds-if I know my Ho-rus guards.” “And probably with arrogance to match,” Skaara agreed with a mirthless smile.

“I’m afraid that’s the only way they’ll betray themselves.” O’Neil turned to Lieutenant Charlton.

“Perhaps if we can lend some people with counterinsurgency or intelligence backgrounds,” he said, waiting for West to speak up and kill the deal. “See who might be available. We’ll try to give you some help, Skaara. But we’ll have to improve our own security as well.” “If only that were the only help I needed!” Skaara burst out. He glanced at the strange officer and shut up. But when West began conferring with Charlton, the young man plunged on. “I wouldn’t trouble you with this, Colonel. But I need advice, and the ones I might have turned to for their wisdom are gone.” O’Neil nodded. Skaara was referring to the alumni of the first Abydos expedition, Kawalsky and Feretti. The colonel himself often found himself wishing they were still around, instead of getting mysteriously transferred back to Earth. For one thing, they had good relations with the local militia. Hell, they’d helped Skaara train his initial force.

But their help had been unofficial-and it predated the strained relations that now stood between Earth-lings and Abydans.

O’Neil had expected the problems Skaara outlined in controlling a loose-knit militia force that kept grow-ing. But he frowned when he heard Skaara mention a dangerous word for any military man-“politics.”

“There’s little enough I can suggest to help you, without getting Kasuf after you and West after me,” the colonel said. “You might work at developing some esprit de corps among your people-a sense of shared purpose. Maybe Daniel Jackson could help you with that.”

Which reminded O’Neil-where the hell was the sole Earth civilian on Abydos? “The only purpose our people seem to share any-more is finding their next meal,” Skaara said in dis-gust. “The other thing they’re hungry for is guns. There are still poor ones going out to sift the sands where your people fought the Horus guards. They hope to find some sort of weapon to trade for food.” “I know,” O’Neil said.