Retaliation (17 page)

O’Neil’s men had given a good account of them-selves, driving the enemy back. But the Earthers were understandably skittish about landing anything too heavy in the doorway of their only route home.

This wasn’t a situation where the Americans could pound the enemy with rockets and artillery to weaken their hold on a position. It would be a Pyrhhic victory if such a bombardment managed to collapse the damned pyramid on top of the StarGate.

But the Horus guards couldn’t be allowed to remain where they were. They held a military man’s dream-a tactically defensive position that achieved a strategi-cally offensive purpose.

O’Neil had to regain the StarGate, or his forces would die on the vine, deprived of the supplies a modern military force required.

The last time around, he had managed to force entry by a weak frontal attack against an even weaker ene-my. This time he’d been loaded for bear. But so had the other side.

His attack had been shattered, not from the door, but from the wrecked hangar dock high up in the spaceship. Horus guards-hundreds of them-had used the blown-open deck as a firing platform on the advancing ground troops. When every available mortar, artillery piece, and tank in the camp had leveled suppression fire at the summit of the ship, the Horuses had launched a counterpunch on the ground.

They’d cut through the remnants of the attack force, then crashed into O’Neil’s defensive perimeter ...

and breached it. Up close and personal, energy weapons beat rifles. They sliced through mortar barrels.

And if the hand-held blast-lance took too long to burn through the armor on an M1A2, they proved horribly effective against the treads-and the tank’s weapons.

And, as one harassed sergeant put it, “There’s just too many of the bird-headed bastards.”

A confused, swirling battle expanded through the camp. There were secondary positions-fighting holes, sketchy trenches. O’Neil did his best to rally his people wherever it looked as though they could stand and fight. He steadied a company-sized formation, mixed Army and Marines. A line began to build.

Blaster fire resumed from the starship’s upper deck. And considerably less counterfire was available. He still had mortars, but his artillery positions were ominously silent-overrun.

Colonel Felton, the ranking Army survivor, had been ordered to draw off with his remaining tanks. He’d been patrolling the high desert-which O’Neil had considered a good tactical and political maneu-ver-it kept their contact and potential friction to a minimum.

I just hope they’re not driven all the way out there before this is over, O’Neil thought.

An Apache chopper came swooping down, mini-guns blazing, to launch four rockets into the open deck.

For a moment it was like a reenactment of history, when a crippled udajeet had crashed and exploded up there. Gouts of flame-and, if one looked closely, bits of Horus guards-flew out of the opening. Enemy fire from on high stopped. But blast-bolts tore through the gunship. It corkscrewed wildly, crashing into the lower slope of the pyramid ship.

Then, through the smoke of burning tents, O’Neil glimpsed what seemed like a phalanx of Horus guards advancing on his position. He glanced over his shoulder, trying to spot the next viable position for a withdrawal.

The base camp’s berm-its original outer defense- was frighteningly close.

Once again Skaara stood on the rope bridge between the watchtowers of Nagada. This time he turned his back on the cityscape, with its rising plumes of smoke and hectic flashes of gunfire, to look outward, toward the Marine base camp. Through his binoculars, a light show flashed over there, heavier and more dramatic. It was punctuated with the dull booming of artillery. He chewed his lower lip, feeling more like a kid than ever. His father was in an improvised field hospital under the care of Dr. Destin. The proposed medical evacuation to the base camp had been termi-nated with the attack out there. Sha’uri was out in that maelstrom of fire, too. He hoped Colonel O’Neil was taking care of her.

And he, the cocky mastadge herder, held the great-est physical strength-in terms of actual rifles-in the city of Nagada.

The question was, what could he do with them?

Most of his units had been spread through the city, trying to pacify violence.

In the process, they seemed to be burning everything down. He glanced at the two young men on the bridge with him. Sermont was quiet, almost withdrawn.

Nabeh, one of the original boy commandos, gawked back and forth from the burning city to the flicker of blast-lances on the horizon.

Poor Nabeh would never rise to command. He did not have the intellectual capacity. But he had a loyalty that would shame a number of Skaara’s nominal sub-ordinates, who were now out freelancing with their commands. When Skaara had burst out in frustration, shouting “What will I do?” Nabeh was the one who’d replied.

“You’ll do the right thing,” he said.

Skaara hoped his friend was right. He’d called the militia away from riot duties.

“If there’s fighting in the Marine camp, that can only mean that Ra’s people are back,” he said, explain-ing as much for his own benefit as for the others. “We should be there to help. And maybe, maybe, our people will turn to fight the common enemy instead of trying to kill one another.” That hope had already been dashed. Massing in the growing darkness below were less than half of the troops he should have been able to expect. Skaara could only hope they’d be enough.

The last leg of the trek to the command deck on the good ship Ra’s Eye had been the most difficult. On the one hand, Sha’uri and Barbara Shore had managed to gather in all the technical teams in the pyramid ship’s upper stories. But the climbing refugees had also been harassed by increasingly more aggressive Horus guard patrols.

“They’re attempting something up here,” Peter Auchinloss said. “But it doesn’t seem to involve wiping us out.”

“More like keeping us away.” The Marine noncom, Corporal Vance, looked suddenly sick. “The udajeet landing zone-that busted-up deck. If they set enough people up there ... well, they’d overlook the whole camp.”

As if in counterpoint to their climbing, a low, irregu-lar percussion beat seemed to whisper through the stairwells. “I’ll bet that’s the lanyard pullers trying to shut the bastards down,” Vance said hopefully.

They’d almost reached the command deck when a jolt severe enough to knock them off their feet rocked the ship. Vance cheered up a little. “Something got a direct hit!” he crowed.

A couple of decks down from the command level, the climbers found the beginnings of a defense system being built. Marine and Army technicians were lugging anything large, heavy, and movable into impromptu bulwarks at the stairs. Sha’uri shuddered to see the spalls and scars on the wrecked cabinets and consoles being piled in place. She’d probably put some of those marks there, with a blast-lance or grenades, while storming these same locations on her last rise to the top.

But if they were first greeted like a relieving army, the newcomers found the atmosphere more and more tense as they scaled the last flight to the command deck.

Barbara and Sha’uri arrived to find a knot of trans-lators on one side of the room. Mitch Storey lay on the floor, his nose bleeding. And Gary Meyers was using his considerable bulk to tear down the barricade Skaara’s people had erected around the top-deck con-nection of the matter transmitter.

“Meyers!” Barbara burst out. “Are you nuts? Take that stuff down, and the bad guys will be able to beam themselves right up here!” “I’ve already composed a suitable surrender note to send down.”

Meyers waved a piece of paper cov-ered in hieroglyphs. “I think we can expect better terms if we submit quickly, before the flood of military types who’ll be rounded up when the camp outside falls.”

“I see Mitch Storey disagreed with your evalua-tion,” Barbara said. Meyers drew himself up, trying to play the male in charge. “As the ranking civilian-“ “Not anymore,” Barbara interjected.

“You can’t seriously hope-“ Meyers stepped forward.

Sha’uri sidestepped, aiming her blast-lance at the academic’s fat head.

Barbara aimed her pistol at a somewhat lower and more delicate spot. “This from the guy with all those pictures of conquering pharaohs bashing in the heads of the submitting kings!” she said. “Just step away from there, darlin’-“ But inside the partially demolished barrier, a cylinder of blue fire leapt into being.

Someone was trying out the matter transmitter. “Oh, shit!” Barbara succinctly stated.

Corporal Vance shot up the stairs, digging into one of the heavy satchels he wore bandoleer-fashion across his chest. As he approached the transmitter, his right hand came out with a grenade, his left hand latched onto the pin. “Don’t stick it into the blue light!” Sha’uri cried. “It will tear your hand off and send it downstairs!”

Vance waited until the figures in the transmitter were almost clear before he pulled the pin. The grenade handle clattered to the floor as he tossed the weapon. “Down!” he yelled.

Gary Meyers made a mess, vomiting where he lay on the deck. That was understandable, though, considering the mess Vance’s grenade made of the assault team trying to beam in.

Crouched on the interior berm that separated the motor pool from the rest of the base camp, Lieutenant Charlton did his best to add to the perimeter’s rate of fire. The problem was, there were just too many damned targets out there, and not enough rifles on top of the wall. A Marine dropped into position beside him, resting his M249 light machine gun on its bipod.

A couple of bursts cleared up the local target problem admirably. Then the weapon ran dry, and the gunner retreated behind the sand wall to load a new drum.

That might have been a wise decision. Blast-bolts flurried around Charlton’s position, turning the sand into patches of greenish glass. “You guys just about ready?” the lieutenant called over his shoulder to the men manhandling fifty-five-gallon fuel drums up the inside of the berm. A combat engineer made a noncommittal noise as he finished setting the demolition charge to the side of a barrel.

“I hope that was an affirmative grunt.” In the near distance Charlton could see the enemy massing for a new attack. This was the thrust that would take them over the wall.

The young officer sighed. He’d held this position as long as he could. Anything that could roll out of here had, taking precious men toward the rally point. There was nothing more to defend.

The Horus guards came on, almost undeterred by Charlton’s skeleton defense.

■

“All right, now\” the lieutenant shouted.

The fuel drums went over the top and rolled down the berm’s sloping side. One of the Horuses fired a blast-bolt, igniting one of the barrels prematurely. Charlton hugged the ground against the concussion and the sudden wave of heat. He slithered back down to his retreating command as the other improvised bombs went off.

Okay, they had to abandon this position as well.

But at least they were exacting a heavy real estate tax for every foot the invaders took.

Crouched in a “hasty”-a quickly scratched fighting hole atop the main berm of his ruined camp-Jack O’Neil watched as the exodus of vehicles from the mo-tor pool ended. Judging from the sudden rush of flames over there, young Charlton was either pursu-ing a scorched-earth policy ... or he’d been overrun.

Long shadows flickered grotesquely against the sand wall. Even the radio operator silently monitoring transmissions looked up as Charlton and his scratch force ran to join O’Neil’s troops.

“I think my farewell present will keep those bad boys busy for a little while.” The lieutenant climbed to his commander’s position with a hangman’s smile on his thin face. “If s the extra-crispy recipe for southern-fired hawk.” Joining the two men in the hasty, the young officer peered off into the darkness in the direction of Nagada. “Where the hell is the local militia?” he muttered. “Skaara has to know there’s trouble out here. You’d think he’d get up off his ass-“ O’Neil cut off his subordinate. “From what we heard before we lost radio contact, there’s big trouble in Nagada, too. I suspect the civil disturbances Kasuf and Nakeer were trying to avoid have just escalated into a full-fledged civil war.” He shook his head. “If so, we can’t expect much of anything in the way of aid from Skaara-no matter what he’d like to do.” Charlton’s face set in worried lines. “It’s just that if we had enough warm bodies on this line, we could make the position look too expensive for the Whore-house guards to attack right away.”

“Where did you pick up that endearment?” O’Neil asked. The lieutenant shrugged. “Just another insult yelled in combat.” He returned to his theme. “I’m sure those birds are stretched pretty thin. If we forced them to back down, we could arrange a more orderly with-drawal in the night.” “You forget, those masks have night-vision equipment that’s better than our goofy goggles,” O’Neil said.

“This way they’ll see we don’t have enough men to hold the line.” Charlton looked worried. “I know we’re trying to get most of our remaining forces to the rally point. It’s just that this plan is-well, risky!”

“And therefore better suited for a brave young lieu-tenant instead of his crotchety commander?” O’Neil inquired.

“I just worry about the men. If you go, Colonel Felton ends up in command.” The radio operator abruptly spoke up. “Message from the pickets, sir. We’re being joined by a force from Nagada.”

“All right!” Charlton said sotto voce. “I just hope Skaara’s brought enough dancers to the ball...”

Both sides were disappointed at what they found. The newcomers were neither fresh nor numerous enough to dissuade an attack by the Horus guards. And the Abydan militiamen were visibly shaken to see the forces they considered their powerful allies so gravely reduced and literally pushed to the wall.

Skaara’s youthful face looked more like a death’s-head mask. “The city is falling apart,” he admitted.

“But the more serious danger is still here.” “I suggest you fall back on the mines,” O’Neil said formally.