Retaliation (21 page)

“Daniel was there?” Sha’uri said. “Why-1-“

“He ran away/’ Skaara repeated. “The next we know, he was seen with Faizah at the Freedom faction’s headquarters. Then they went to a ware-house on Spice Lane. We found clothes and some of Daniel’s things there.” His voice got lower. “There was also a bed.”

Sha’uri merely looked off into the middle distance, saying nothing. “When we arrived there, we were attacked by a Horus guard,” Skaara went on. “We think Faizah was ei-ther working for them or actually is one. Some stragglers from the fight in the camp saw a man who looked like Daniel with a squad of Horuses.”

Sha’uri’s face was the color of parchment.

The usually loquacious Barbara opened her mouth, then closed it. “I-I don’t know what to say.”

Sha’uri brought her gaze down from the middle distance and looked at her brother. “I want to see my father,” she said.

A truckload of quartz mineral vanished through the StarGate on schedule. The next truck out would be in a half hour, with an incoming truck due ten minutes after that.

So, when the energy fields in the portal began to cycle, the hall went crazy. Alarms shrilled.

Techni-cians were pulled out of the room altogether. Fire teams gathered behind fortifications more reminiscent of Fort Knox than ancient Egypt. Military policeman Phil Garber fiddled nervously with his M203. Colonel O’Neil had banned the use of blast-rifles around the StarGate-no one knew if the two types of energy got along together. After the hor-rifying discovery of the claymore victims, the new anti-intruder weapons would be bullets and flash-bangs.

The StarGate filled with the rippling energy of the transfer field. Something emerged.

Because the brown-robed intruder came through in a humiliating pratfall, the fusillade passed right over his head.

Daniel Jackson choked, coughed, and, still on his belly, raised his hands.

“Uh, guys?” he said. “We’ve got to talk.”

When I was a little girl and Father picked me up, he seemed so tall I could reach up and touch the sky, Sha’uri thought. Now he seems . .. tiny. It had been a shock to see her father still and gray, his body invaded by tubes. But Dr. Destin had been a kind man. His services and supplies were being donated by the Marines to help run the first Earth-Abydan hospital. Following Destin’s advice, Sha’uri visited Kasuf every day, the first task of her morning. She’d just sit for a while and speak to her father, generally relating the events of the previous day: people who offered or needed help, jobs accomplished or deferred.

Sha’uri had not returned to the base camp after coming to Nagada with Skaara. After one look at the chaos in the city, she had given up translating to help those rendered homeless and helpless by the disorder. In fact, except for her daily sessions with Dr. Destin, Sha’uri rarely spoke English at all anymore. Her conversations with the doctor usually dealt with finding supplies and beds for an ever growing patient population.

They hardly discussed Kasuf s case. What more could be said about her shrunken, still father?

Stepping out of the oil warehouse turned clinic, Sha’uri surveyed the tiny enclave that now made up her world. Nagada was very much a divided city, with gangs of former militiamen or outright criminals constantly fighting to extend or defend their turf. The markets in food and silver both had collapsed.

Acquir-ing supplies was now an equation based on the num-ber of clubs, knives, and guns on a given side.

But in a small patch around the town gates, some semblance of order still survived. The Abydan militia might have dwindled to skeleton strength as a mili-tary command, but it was still the most potent force in Nagada. Skaara had sent some contingents-the more doubtful ones-to the mines, trying to restore some production to justify the supplies Colonel O’Neil was sending him. With the rest of his people-old friends from his herding days and those eager young volunteers who had first joined his cause-he defended the helpless and battled chaos.

Sha’uri saw her brother stride from the barricades that marked the boundaries of the safe zone toward the city gates. It was later than she realized. The sun was fully up, which meant the gates were about to be opened. Sha’uri fell in step with her brother as he went to join the gate guards. Although he moved with all his usual energy, she could tell at a glance that he’d spent a sleepless night-again.

The cares of his position as the last defender of Na-gada had whittled fine lines and hollows on the young man’s face. Sha’uri felt a chill as she detected a sudden resemblance she’d never noticed before.

Her hand-some little brother was coming to look more and more like Kasuf.

“Dr. Destin said you must get some sleep,” she greeted him sternly. “What kept you up this time?”

“Our old friend Gerekh was trying to sneak some people in to raid the food stores,” Skaara replied.

“The leader of the team carried a fortune in silver, but the watchmen didn’t stay bribed. There’s nothing the silver can buy anymore.”

He shook his head at the irony. “It seems that when things reach their worst, people’s choices become ..

. simpler. We disarmed the thieves and sent them back-more mouths for Gerekh to feed. He’s choking on his silver now. And the connections he made in the food trade were mainly in the nearer hinterland-the farm communes that are held or being raided by the Horus Guards.” They reached the gates. A squad of men pushed the huge, creaking wooden portals open while another squad covered them. But there were no enemies outside this time. The small stream of people who entered, farm folk by their accents, didn’t carry weapons or much of anything else.

These wanderers represented a new responsibility and worry. They were refugees, driven from their farms by the actions of the Horus guards. The hawk-headed invaders had been pushed into the high desert but refused to surrender, carrying on a guerrilla war. To support themselves, they preyed on the farm folk. Sha’uri brought the newcomers to the tented awning where they cooked communal meals, then joined in to help serve out the food. Beside her, enthu-siastically stirring the pot of grain meal, was Skaara’s old friend Nabeh. A strained-looking, heavyset man pushed into the line. Sha’uri noticed that his robes were the green of a farm Elder where they weren’t covered in a coat of mud.

“Burned out,” he said to everyone and no one at once. “Important men used to detour to come to my steading for the crops. Paid good silver. Burned out. No house. Crawled my way out through the fields.”

That explained the mud. “But I have important friends in Nagada.”

One of his “important friends” was a Nagadan El-der who’d gotten himself murdered over some shady business. “He’ll be happy to help me out. Used to come and visit when the city weather got too warm.”

She’d seen it happen often. People whose lives had fallen apart tried to carry on as if everything were normal, having normal little chats with no one in particular.

This gentleman, however, was blocking a line of hungry people. Sha’uri broke up a fresh loaf of bread and spread some fruit preserves on the pieces. “Why don’t you have some bread and sit down?” she suggested. “I’ll bet you could use something to eat.”

“My wife always puts up our preserves,” the man said, glancing around for his better half. He was alone.

With the way the Horuses were going, chances were likely that his wife had been in the house when it burned. “Wouldn’t like me eating other people’s preserves. Yes. We finally got a good orchard going-“

The line was becoming unmanageable.

“I’m sorry, Elder. Could you step out of the way for these people? They’re very hungry.”

“Not the way to treat a person of my rank,” the man harrumphed. He drew himself up, preparing to bawl out a supposed scullery maid, and actually looked at her for the first time. The man gawked. “It’s Kasuf’s daughter, isn’t it? How many feastings-“ “Please, Elder.” She couldn’t remember the man’s name. The Elder turned nasty. “This is what happens. Your home burned. Your wife-“ He looked around again, momentarily lost. “And you’re insulted by some child who marries a murderous Urt-man. That fellow with the freakish hair. Killed Nakeer-your own father.”

Sha’uri stood quivering. Nabeh grabbed the man’s arm and gave him an ungentle shake. “Listen, old man. Sit down or go away.”

Muttering, the man left.

With a deep breath Sha’uri released her hold on the pistol butt she was gripping beneath her shawl. This was not the small weapon that had served her so well in the past. That had disappeared from the home she’d shared with Daniel. Skaara had found her another one. In the Nagada of today, one needed to go armed. Just as one needed to pretend things were normal.

She had come close, so terribly close, to shooting that fat fool right in the middle of the food line.

If this kept up, she’d soon be walking around and talking to herself as well. “So what surprises did you find hiding in that batch?” Barbara Shore asked of Professor Gary Meyers.

The bulky man shrugged helplessly. “Faizah was very good-“

“Hathor,” Barbara corrected tartly. Daniel Jackson’s news had hit the technical section like a bomb.

“She certainly had the gift of tongues.” Meyers reddened.

“I mean, she was masterly at the art of technical dis-information,” Barbara clarified. She pointed at the technicians clustered around one of the command center’s consoles. “After boiling her bullshit out of the training program, we think we can get this bucket’s long-range sensors powered up.” As usual, the Egyptologist’s eyes glazed over at what he had been heard to call “the science stuff.”

Barbara returned to the business at hand. “So what can you tell me about your reading there?” The trans-lations in question had been handled by the crack team of Faizah and Meyers.

“I can’t tell you what’s right or wrong,” he admit-ted. “I’m afraid I’m not very good at this, you know.”

Meyers shrugged, a changed man since the dogs of war had peed on his shoes. “I marked a couple of pas-sages-parts she really worked hard on.” He gave Barbara a wan smile. “I suppose whatever she says to do, you should do the opposite.”

Barbara couldn’t resist the chance to tease. “So, come on, Gary. What was it like?”

“What?” Meyers responded suspiciously.

“What was it like to date a goddess? I mean, as an Egyptologist, going out with the embodiment of good sex-“ “I feel sorry for Daniel,” Meyers replied irrelevantly. “Say what?”

“She went after him, and now he’s in trouble. What-ever you want to call her, she was very good.” He gave Barbara an embarrassed smile. “She’d laugh at my jokes, as if they were really funny.” Meyers shrugged his heavy shoulders. “And I really miss her back rubs.”

Corporal Tom Vance watched as Mitch Storey poked around the innards of the gunnery control con-sole. Although the Marine wasn’t a technician, he’d been seconded to the research team after spending the siege of the command deck with them. A strong back and a good attitude went a long way with some of the stuff they were doing now.

Vance watched in queasy fascination as the console circuitry squirmed and shifted like a live thing in re-sponse to Storey’s probing. “Just like the sensors,” the technician growled, re-moving a gold-quartz test instrument. In moments he’d restored the console to operating condition. “This end works fine. The controls are simple enough: you squidge around on this doo-jigger to aim-“ He ran a hand over a glowing panel. Overhead, the scanners’ view shifted to a schematic representation. The picture of a helicopter gunship flying by on patrol turned to a weirdly faceted geometric symbol. As Storey’s finger moved, a stylized eye followed the chopper icon.

“It’s simple point-and-shoot, with either your gun-nery teams or a computer doing the complicated stuff.

Hit here, and that helicopter would be wasted-if we had any juice.”

“Hey, Storey,” one of the other techs complained, staring up at the ceiling. “Stop screwing around with the sensors. We think we can get this thing up and running.”

Storey pressed his hand against the panel, which went dark. Overhead, the image of the helicopter reappeared to fly on, unaware of its brief role as target. “The chopper was completely safe, as long as these lights weren’t on,” the technician finished. “That’s our problem. We took one of those blast cannons apart- nothing wrong on that end, either.” He scowled. “The screw-up is somewhere in the middle. We know this bucket has power-it’s just going to all the wrong places.”

“There must be training manuals for the engineering people,” Vance said. “Don’t they suggest anything?”

“Not the ones we’ve translated,” Storey replied. “Then again, this may be something that can’t be handled by pressing a few buttons and looking at the dials.”

“You mean, they’d go out in something they couldn’t fix?” Vance stared in disbelief.

Oh, and tell me you play mechanic whenever your car acts up,” Storey retorted. “Actually, I do-‘cause I got one that dates back to before they started putting those damned computers under the hood.”

“I guess that’s as good an analogy as we could hope for,” Storey said with a grin. “This clunker has a short somewhere in the electrical system-and we don’t know enough about cars to track it down.”

“Damned shame.” Vance stared down at the con-sole. “I wouldn’t mind giving someone a taste of those headlights.”

Daniel Jackson paced the perimeter of his cell, run-ning one hand along the rough walls of golden quartz.

The base camp’s jug had been demolished in the at-tack of the Horuses. So Daniel had been imprisoned in what had probably been an equipment locker aboard the good ship Ra’s Eye. An entrance appeared in the far wall. Colonel Jack O’Neil and his intelligence chief, Colonel Felton, entered.

“O’Neil! If s about time,” Daniel exclaimed impa-tiently. ‘This dipshit here-“ The army colonel glared, not used to civilian imper-tinence. “You’d do well to moderate your tone, Dr. Jackson. Working for the enemy during wartime is considered espionage, and could carry the ultimate penalty.” “I wasn’t working for anybody!” Daniel turned be-seeching eyes to O’Neil. “You don’t believe this crap about me shooting Kasuf, do you? I hear you were given the murder weapon. Didn’t you check it-“ “For what?” O’Neil inquired. “I’m afraid Abydan criminology isn’t on to fingerprints yet. We have samples from several militiamen, some of the kitchen staff, Skaara, Sha’uri, and some of yours. Not to mention a few from