Retaliation (16 page)

“It looks that way,” the young Abydan woman admitted. “What a bunch of crap,” Barbara complained.

“Not what you did, but what it means. I thought maybe we’d get some idea of the underlying principles behind these engines. But this is cookbook science. It’s like a recipe-‘add yeast to the batter, and it will rise.’ But it doesn’t explain why the batter rises.” “Should we work on this some more?” Sha’uri asked.

“Nah. It will just tell us what buttons to push to make the ship lift off. Unless we find a program that tells us how to fix what’s wrong, or how to ask the ship to tell us what’s wrong, this stuff is useless.” Still, Barbara pored over the copy. “If we just knew what more of these squiggles meant. I wish Daniel were around here. Or even Faizah. That girl is a pain in the ass, but you’d almost think she’d been reading this stuff before.” Sha’uri stood so still that Barbara looked up. “Sorry, darlin’. I know neither of those names makes you really happy right now.” With a nod, Sha’uri gathered up their papers. “I think it must be impossible for things to get much worse right now.”

A voice echoed down the huge, virtually deserted engineering section. “Sha’uri!

Sha’uri, are you down here?”

“Who’s that?” Sha’uri called back.

A young militiaman came in, his bearing stiff and uneasy. “Baki sent me.”

Sha’uri nodded. Baki was one of Skaara’s friends.

“We received word on the radio.” The messenger pronounced the unfamiliar word carefully. “It said-“

he gulped. “It said Nakeer has been shot. So has Kasuf.” “My father!” Sha’uri fought a weird, giddy feeling, as if the ground had been cut out from beneath her feet. Her face hardened. “Who did this?” The messenger wouldn’t look at her face. ‘The name they said,” he temporized, “is Daniel-your husband.”

The rest of the message seemed so unreal that this announcement seemed like a fantasy. Finally, she said to Barbara, “Something is very wrong.” After hearing Sha’uri’s explanation, the physicist nodded. “And it’ll take a trip into town to find out what the hell’s going on.”

Moving like a sleepwalker, Sha’uri followed the others toward the main ground-level corridors. She would talk to Lieutenant Charlton about getting a lift to Nagada. Where would her father be? Would they perhaps bring him to the camp, to the hospital here? Perhaps Charlton could help her get some answers___ She was so preoccupied, she never even heard the hooting of the alarms in the distance.

“Hey,” Barbara said, abruptly stopping. “That’s the attack warning. There wasn’t any test scheduled for today.” She turned to Sha’uri. “Was there?” The messenger swallowed loudly when she referred the question to him.

They got their answer a moment later in the crackle of gunfire.

“I think we’d better get our asses in gear,” Barbara announced. They arrived at one of the barricaded side passages off the main hall and heard the militiamen there shrilling in panic. “Baki is dead! Who commands now?” “What do we do?”

“Our orders are to hold this post.”

One man, who’d climbed up on the barrier for a look outside, shouted, “The hawk-heads come! Quick!

What do we do?”

Out in the hall some Abydans gave one answer. They were pounding toward the StarGate pyramid, firing rifles and blast-lances.

The women climbed the makeshift fortification- most of its components were blasted debris dragged in from outside. It seemed the impromptu counter-attack had swept back the Horus Guards. At least none were in sight. Sha’uri stared in consternation, however, at the number of militiamen who hadn’t joined the fight.

“Where are you going?” the contentious would-be warriors behind her called as Sha’uri began climbing down into the hall below. Barbara moved to join her. “Hey, it’s a woman!”

“The killer’s wife!”

“An Earth woman!”

The messenger joined them, not sure what he should be doing. Sha’uri shouted down the hall, “Why aren’t you joining the fight? Do you want to stand here in little packets until the hawk-heads come to gobble you up?” “It’s an Urt-man plot to draw us away!” a voice cried in rich farmer dialect.

“Like the way your Urt-man husband killed Nakeer!”

“Kill the traitor bitch!”

“Kill the Urt-man woman!”

The other sentiments on what should be done to them were even uglier. Barbara leaned forward. “Those guys by the front door don’t sound too friendly,” she said in a low voice. “There are still Marines in there.” She nodded toward the StarGate pyramid, where ripples of gun-fire still resounded. “I think I can trust them more,” Sha’uri said. Her fellow Abydans had degenerated to shooting at one another from their barricades. The women ran for the entrance to the pyramid. The messenger disappeared, felled by a stray blast-bolt.

Just as they reached the torn stone entrance, a pair of combatants reeled into sight. A Marine officer and a Horus guard both clung to the shaft of a blast-lance, wrestling for control of the weapon.

Sha’uri darted forward, seeing the Marine’s hol-stered sidearm. She pulled out the pistol, making the Marine totter. The Horus guard yanked his lance free, leveled, and fired. The Earthman went down. But be-fore the warrior could turn, Sha’uri put two bullets into his chest from the side.

Barbara Shore froze, staring big-eyed at the two dead men. Sha’uri shoved the pistol into the scientist’s hand and scooped up the blast-lance. “If you’re going to throw up, do it later. We have to find help now.”

The stone hallways only echoed worse. Sha’uri had no idea how the battle was going. Four Marines came hustling up the final incline that led to the spaceship entrance. Two were all but carrying a wounded comrade. His uniform was still smoldering from a blast-bolt.

“Ladies, you’re heading the wrong way,” the Ma-rine noncom leading the group said. “In about two seconds, more hawk-headed bastards than you ever saw in your life will be storming up here.”

“What about the militia who came charging in?” Sha’uri demanded. “Horus guards suckered them in, then cut them up,” the Marine replied, shepherding the women ahead as they climbed the incline. “We were able to use the distraction to break contact. What’s left of our people are pinned down. These guys have the Star-Gate, and they7re massing troops to break out.” They reached the main corridor of the grounded spacecraft, now full of smoke from fires ignited by in-ternecine blast-lance attacks. Miners and farmers cursed at one another as they fired.

The noncom paused. The only way out of the ship was a hopeless battle zone. Sha’uri dashed to the first cross corridor. It was used as a checkpoint for the tech-nical staff. The barrier was open, and there were no guards. “This way,” Sha’uri called. “If we can’t get out, we’ll have to go up.” She turned to Barbara Shore. “You have people working on the upper levels, especially the command deck.”

The Marine looked dubiously from his wounded man to the empty corridor. “They’ll be able to come after us,” he warned.

“I know,” Sha’uri told him. “I’ve done it myself.” She bared her teeth in what might be mistaken for a smile. “But we can make it hard for them.” The wounded Marine stopped climbing halfway up the first flight of stairs.

“Isn’t there an elevator?” the worried noncom demanded. “You might just as well hope that this damned thing could fly us home,” Barbara Shore said. “It’s a broke-down hunk of junk!”

After five flights of being carried, the wounded man’s head lolled. Only the whites of his eyes showed.

“He ain’t breathing,” one Marine announced.

“Carry on,” came the order. “We don’t abandon our own.” “You’ll have to, unless you want the Horus guards to catch up with us,” Sha’uri said.

“I’m not going to leave him out for those bastards,” the noncom doggedly insisted.

“All right.” Barbara Shore poked her head out to check the deck they were passing. “Let’s see if I re-member this.” She approached an apparently blank wall. Her fingers danced over a set of nearly invisible studs set in the wall. The seemingly solid crystal shifted to create an oblong port, revealing some sort of circuit board. There was just enough space to accom-modate the dead Marine.

The noncom stared at her. “How-“

“My job is to discover how this thing works,” Bar-bara said. “Some things we’ve figured out. Now, put him in there and mark the spot.” Her voice was ragged as she glanced down the stairwell. “Just hurry!”

They settled into the stiff climb to the levels where Barbara’s technical teams were working. Auchinloss and some military computer techs were at work in what looked like a classroom on a dormitory level.

People got thicker up toward the top-translators, technicians, and military techs.

From the next level up, they heard a yell and the distinctive discharge of a blast-lance. The Marines readied their weapons. Barbara carried the dead man’s rifle. Sha’uri hefted her blast-lance as they charged up the stairway. It appeared to be a classic meeting engagement- the computer people coming down the stairs, a squad of Horus guards ascending. The Horuses had spotted the Earthers and charged across the deck, trying to catch and contain them. They weren’t prepared for a flank attack from an-other stairwell. Caught in a crossfire, they had tried to turn on Sha’uri’s party, only to be cut down by her blast-lance.

Auchinloss and his people were glad to see some human faces-a field telephone warning from below had been cut off in mid-sentence. They were less happy facing the fact that they were cut off.

Sha’uri busied herself collecting blast-lances from the dead Horuses.

“We’ll need every weapon we can get,” she said.

“God bless Jack O’Neil for insisting that our techni-cians carry combat gear,” Barbara said.

‘That was really something,” a fresh-faced Army tech burst out. “I shot one of those guys.”

“Now you know how it feels to be a Marine,” an-other tech said, obviously stating his service. “We’re supposed to be riflemen first, button pushers second.”

“Congratulations are fine-later.” Sha’uri handed out her scavenged weapons. “But we have to hurry now.”

“Why? We won!” the fresh-faced kid said.

“We beat one squad-we don’t know if there are others coming “

Sha’uri tapped a dead guard’s helmet. “They have communicators in these-so their friends already know about us.”

“That beggar said he spotted a yellow-haired man around here.” Skaara frowned.

“So why would he ply his trade in such an empty area?”

“And why wouldn’t he stay with us?” one of the riot squad added. Skaara nodded. “There’s the warehouse. How con-venient! The door is even partway open.”

The squad spread out. “There’s no other way in,” his lieutenant, Sermont, reported. “Do we rush it?”

“I think that’s what we’re being asked to do,” Skaara replied. “No. We’ll try a flash-bang. That may be effective no matter what may be lurking in there.” A blast-bolt shattered adobe as one of the militia-men kicked in the door and tossed the grenade.

After the concussion grenade went off, blast-bolts began flying wildly. Four of Skaara’s special squad stormed in. Moments later, one of them returned. “You’d better see this,” he said.

Skaara entered to find one man lighting an oil lamp. The other two were up in a wooden loft area, working to suppress a smoldering blaze. One of the firefighters beckoned him. A Horus guard lay outstretched, dead. His blast-lance had already been appropriated.

“I think we’ve finally found one of those infiltrators Colonel O’Neil was after,” Skaara said.

One of his men shifted some of the bedding in the loft to smother the blaze. Skaara suddenly called for the lamp. He examined the objects the bedding shift had revealed.

The first was an Earth-style wallet, with a driver’s license for Daniel Jackson.

There was even an unflat-tering photo of him.

As for the rest, they were items Daniel usually carried around on his person-nail clippers, an auto-matic pencil, keys whose locks could be found only on the other side of the StarGate.

“This is everything he’d carry except for his glasses,” Skaara said. “Daniel was definitely here.”

“What was he doing with this one?” One of the warriors nudged the dead Horus guard with his toe.

“I’m more troubled about who else was with him,” Skaara said. There was discarded women’s clothing all around. He could smell a heady perfume from it.

The same perfume had rubbed off on the rumpled bedding.

Jack O’Neil slammed his last magazine into the sub-machine gun he carried. That was the problem with going with a non-issue weapon. When this went dry, he’d have to find himself a rifle.

Unfortunately, there were plenty to go around. Too many dead men were spread over the base camp.

The smells of combat were in the air-smoke, cordite, blood, voided bladders and bowels ... and the cooked-meat smell of human flesh exposed to “blast-bolts.

The bad taste in his mouth, however, came from the cold little voices whispering in the back of his mind.

And the word they were whispering was defeat. Since his arrival on Abydos, it seemed the other side had always managed to grab the edge. His exploration team took shelter in the StarGate pyramid-Ra’s people beamed down and nailed them. He built a base around the StarGate to protect it-Hathor landed a huge spaceship to cut off the pyramid completely. Battle intelligence seemed to indicate that the enemy forces, while superb, were small. So how could this seemingly inexhaustible river of Horus guards come pouring out of the StarGate?

When the Klaxons indicating an attack through the StarGate had begun to blat, O’Neil had scarcely be-lieved it. He’d thought he’d made the transit room too damned expensive for an enemy to storm through.

He’d never find out what went wrong. The people who’d been in that room were dead.

Even as troops moved into positions to cover the en-trance to the spaceship Ra’s Eye, most of the men fig-ured there was some kind of problem among the Abydans. That seemed justified when the brown-cloaked figures came running from the huge airlock.

But masked, kilted figures had emerged in pursuit.

The militiamen never made it to the safety of the American lines. They’d been cut down by the blast-lances of the Horus guards.