Retaliation (20 page)

The short, skinny guardsman turned to his strap-ping comrade.

Then both leveled their blast-lances and began firing.

Two-armed Horuses were the first targets of choice.

Guards in slings were attacked hand-to-hand by other members of the levy. The fight ended surprisingly quickly, with the “fresh meat” overcoming their elders before even any word got out over the mask communicators. The newcomers began removing their hawk-masks. Some hit the tumbler button at their necks to redeploy the mask’s material. Others were pulling off plastic replicas. None of the men was tattooed with the Eye of Ra. With a rush of energy the StarGate cycled again. But this time the emerging figures didn’t look like Egyptian gods. They wore baggy chocolate-chip BDUs. A Marine sergeant led his men down the rampway with a queasy salute. “Guess it worked, sir!”

Lieutenant Kawalsky grinned. “I’d say it did. But more important, have you brought the pants for Feretti and me?”

He self-consciously tugged at the waist of his kilt. “I’ve never gone into combat wearing a dress before.”

By the time Lieutenant Kawalsky had buttoned him-self into his utilities and donned the other equipment of a twentieth-century fighting man, the StarGate had cycled more troops into the hall. The dead were moved aside, prisoners cuffed. Kawalsky was ready to arm himself. He shrugged on a backpack-sized box of insulated plastic. An ar-mored cable emerged from the lower rear of the box, connecting with a vaguely gunlike device, also of black insulated plastic. From a slightly bulbous “nose,” a fifteen-inch

“barrel” ran to a trigger and pistol grip, beyond which extended a rudimentary stock. The weapon had the same weight and looks as a flame-thrower-except what should have been the nozzle was plugged with a solid, flanged cylinder of golden quartz.

The lieutenant flicked a safety on the grip, and a thin whine warned that the weapon was charged. He turned to Feretti, who had also donned a uniform and carried one of the new weapons. “Guess it’s time to take this show on the road.” The invaders from Earth organized into four-man fire teams armed with two standard-issue M-16 rifles, an M-203 M-16 with a 40mm grenade launcher, and one of the new weapons. They filtered out into the connecting hallway, then to the chamber of the matter transmitter, now cleaned of the rubble that had blocked the terminus at this end.

A squad of walking-wounded Horus guards en-tered the apse-like room from the end that opened onto the Grand Gallery. They were unmasked, and consternation showed plainly on their tattooed faces as they leveled their blast-lances. Feretti, in the lead, squeezed his trigger. His weapon snarled rather than crashed, but the energy bolt that hit the leading guardsman did an equally efficient job of frying him. The Horuses froze, staring, giving the rest of the fire team the opportunity to mow them down.

The colonnaded gallery beyond was thronged- pale, emaciated slaves pushed wooden carts of sup-plies up the gentle incline, which in turn led to a steeper ramp. Horus guards supervised. They turned at the sounds of the firefight, and the orderly pattern of the procession disintegrated.

The Horuses fought like madmen to contain the newcomers, taking cover behind columns, carts, even the goggling slaves. The crash of blast-lances rang out against the rattle of riflefire and the snarls of the Marines’ blast-rifles. The riflemen kept the Horuses’ heads down, the grenade launchers offered a touch of indirect fire, and the energy weapons dueled directly. The combination worked. The Marines cleared the gallery and fought their way to the pyramid entrance against stiffening resistance.

It wasn’t accomplished without losses. Kawalsky saw one of his energy riflemen caught in the power pack by an enemy bolt. The battery went up in a flare of incandescence, and the man went down.

But as they slugged it out toe to toe with the Horus guards, Kawalsky at last felt he was fighting on a level playing field.

Feretti grinned, triggering a blast through a wooden barricade. “So what do you think?” he asked.

“From now on we call ourselves Space Marines?” High above, the command deck of Ra’s Eye echoed with blasts and the occasional blam as technicians and Horus guards exchanged potshots. The Horuses still seemed content to keep the scientific contingent pinned down, with the occasional nuisance attack thrown in. The defenders replied only sparingly, hoarding their ammunition.

This morning the water had stopped again, despite all of Barbara Shore’s console fiddling. She sat at her desk, ignoring the crash of blast-lances and the iso-lated gunshots. Two technical translations sat side by side. One had come from Sha’uri, the other from Faizah. Both dealt with similar technical operations from the crew-training programs of Peter Auchinloss. So why did they seem to contradict each other?

Sighing, Barbara raised her head to look out the “window”-the holographic view piped in from the grounded ship’s sensors.

The whoop she let out drowned all the sounds of conflict downstairs. Troops were pouring into the base camp from the open maw of the good ship Ra’s Eye. Troops in homely chocolate-chip cammies from the U.S. of A.! My God, what did Ra’s people use this ship for? Daniel Jackson wondered as he roamed the seemingly never-ending corridors of the gigantic derelict. Dragged along by Hathor, he’d seen titanic batteries of weapons, food supplies sufficient for an army, enigmatic devices la-beled “colony equipment.” With an almost brazen sense of ownership, she re-ferred to the enormous vessel as “my ship.”

That was enough of a name for her. When Daniel had suggested that the sleeping crew might have a better claim, he had come very close to getting killed. She had contented herself with propelling him across a room with whirling kicks. Daniel had tried to keep his mouth shut after that.

He wished, however, that he knew the real name of the ship. When he inquired of the ship’s computer about any logs, he’d been referred to an on-board library instead.

Hathor immediately appropriated the place, soak-ing up more about the ship’s capabilities and how to use them.

“I had the computer identify the nearest star sys-tems,” she told Daniel the next morning. “Abydos is actually very close. Ra must have had this ship run out here when he founded the colony-fortunately for your Earth. His flying palace would have taken four years to get there. Had he decided your world was im-portant enough to punish, he could have been there much sooner-and with power enough to obliterate the planet.”

Hathor scowled. “But Ra was always too subtle for his own good. Instead of moving on the Earth rebels with irresistible strength, he sent Anubis and some Horuses in secret-with his key to the StarGate.”

“I thought you were busy sleeping the sleep of the gods,” Daniel said. “But it must have happened so.

Barbara Shore men-tioned the bodies found fused into the soil. And the Eye of Ra was found there, with the cover stone.” She held up the medallion she still wore around her neck. “Who knows what other tricks this little key may do?”

Daniel decided to derail that train of thought. “I’d say Ra did pretty well by being subtle. He had a ten-thousand-year track record. Performing your grand gesture could have been done only at the price of revealing all his hidden power-and the crew here.”

“With the help of the computer, I could run this ship alone, even now,” Hathor insisted. In the beauti-ful mask of her face, her eyes were ugly. “Perhaps I’ll direct my ship to Abydos-as a test.”

The look promised that straightening out the mess on Abydos would merely be a dress rehearsal for what she’d do to Earth.

Daniel left her to her studies, visiting the taunting door to freedom on the huge command deck, the StarGate.

I’ve got to figure how to get you to work before Miss Per-sonality moves this big boat, he thought. If Hathor moved Ra’s ship, the change in its spatial coordinates might render his only way out of here useless. Daniel had two possible destinations. The six-figure coordinates for Earth and Abydos were engraved in his memory. But at this blind location he had the same problem as he’d had on arrival at Abydos. He needed the seventh coordinate, the one for his departure point. If only he knew the name of this damned ship! Maybe then he’d be able to puzzle out its location on Ra’s wheel of fortune. Ra’s wheel. The ancient Egyptians believed that the sun’s wheeling progress through the heavens was Ra’s eternal journey, a never-ending boat ride-Ra’s boat! Every Egyptologist knew about the Boat of a Million Years, Ra’s solar yacht.

Wild hope filled Daniel as he picked up one of the slate computers. Taking the stylus, he inscribed the hi-eroglyph for the Boat of a Million Years. A holographic image appeared, showing a pyramid-shaped craft. It was the same animated show the computer had played when he’d asked what this place was.

Okay, now he knew the name of this ship. Where did that fit on the StarGate? He ran through the thirty-nine symbols that had haunted him for weeks when he’d started with this project. Even worse, Ra could have been subtle again. The coordinates for this place had literally fallen between the cracks of the carved symbols. Suppose the Boat of a Million Years was also represented by the line between two symbols?

That depressing thought stirred a memory. The Boat of a Million Years had been carved on the cover stone that hid the StarGate. Daniel recalled the image to his mind’s eye. The boat had floated in midair, between Geb, the god who represented the earth, and Nut, the goddess whose arched back held up the sky. Between Earth and sky.

Daniel’s eye went to the StarGate symbol that repre-sented the Earth. To the right was a sign that looked like a melted capital H. On the left was a symbol that he’d first identified as a throwing stick, an ancient, boomerang-like hunting weapon of the pharaohs.

Or it could look like a stick figure of someone arch-ing his (or her) back. Daniel leapt to the StarGate, spinning the inner ring and locking on the chevrons. Maybe this was a stupid idea, a StarGate wrong number, and the gateway wouldn’t form. Maybe it would send him somewhere fatal. Daniel shrugged as the low harmonics indicating an otherworldly connection sounded. Things couldn’t get more dangerous than the way they were here with Hathor.

And maybe, just maybe, he’d get home.

It had taken the Horus guards two days to fight their way from the captured base camp to the mines of Nagada-a distance Jack O’Neil could have walked if he’d wanted to take a healthy stroll.

And the Horuses had arrived in a bad mood.

Colonel O’Neil had spent those two days doing everything he could to create headaches behind those hawk-masks. He’d bled them with indirect fire. He’d crushed some of them with tank sorties. When the enemy’s udajeets arrived, his Stinger missiles had established a respectable shoot-down rate. Now, however, the enemy was in a position to fight close up and personal. And Jack O’Neil didn’t have any more rabbits to pull out of his beret. He’d just released the last ammunition reserves when he became aware of rifle fire where it couldn’t possibly be coming from. Somebody was attacking the Horus guards from the rear.

Had Kasuf made a miraculous recovery and led Nagada’s squabbling factions into battle? Radio contact from Lieutenant Kawalsky dispelled that myth. A grinning O’Neil told his men to spread the word: the cavalry has arrived. As the attack force came closer, O’Neil began to rec-ognize the old West touch.

He stared in disbelief through his binoculars at Marines with blast-rifles. There were even a couple of Marine Light Armored Vehicles, carrying bazooka-sized blasters instead of their usual 20mm cannons.

One thing had to be said about General W. O. West. When results were needed, he didn’t screw around.

The enemy guardsmen tried to hold, to fight in two directions, but the newcomers were just too much for them.

O’Neil would have liked to order a charge, to get some revenge, but his force was on the edge, too. He kept his people in their positions, acting the part of the anvil while the relief force hammered the Horuses.

The invading force of guardsmen shattered. Then came the pursuit, driving them into the high desert.

“Between them and the sand lice, caravans won’t be able to get through,” Colonel Felton warned.

‘These will be hungry days in Nagada.” “The problem is, the Horuses don’t know the mean-ing of the word surrender,” Lieutenant Charlton said. “As we rebuild the base camp, we’ll have to increase security against terrorist and guerrilla attacks.”

“We’ll have to do something else that General West isn’t going to like,” O’Neil said grimly. “All exits and especially entrances through the StarGate will have to take place on a rigid schedule.”

The colonel shook his head. “We’re not going to have another snafu like this.

Anyone appearing in the StarGate out of turn ... gets wasted.” Skaara found his sister in one of the lower levels of the starship Ra’s Eye, arguing over diagrams with Barbara Shore. Baffled military technicians looked from the pictures to the equipment they were trying to disengage from the circuitry in the wall.

“We’re trying to get a sample of a large-size blast cannon,” Barbara said.

‘There’s just some question that we’re getting everything.” She shook her head. “Damn that Faizah! If she ever gets that cute ass of hers back to work, I’m gonna kick it from here to Nagada. Her stuff always looks plausible, but something inevitably gets screwed up along the way.” Leaving the techs to take as much as they could, she shepherded Sha’uri and Skaara down the hall. “I know you want to see your father, darlin’. And from what I hear about things in Nagada, you could use a militia escort.”

“What’s left of it.” Skaara grimaced. “Now that the worst of the crisis is over, people are acting like worse fools than ever.”

“How is Father?” Sha’uri asked. “I got a wild mes-sage just before the Horuses attacked-“ “He and Nakeer were alone, talking when they were attacked. Father fell unconscious shortly after being shot.”

Skaara’s voice was tight. “He hasn’t revived.”

“People do come out of comas.” Barbara tried to sound optimistic.

“Who did it?” Sha’uri demanded. “Have you caught them?” Skaara wouldn’t look at her. “There are no wit-nesses. But our guards saw a man running from the room. A man with blond hair.”