Retaliation (19 page)

She took the stylus and wrote the glyph for what?

The image changed. Now a little pyramid hung before them.

“What else?” Hathor inquired sarcastically.

Hieroglyphs flashed at great speed. Apparently, members of Ra’s race were faster readers than humans.

The top point of the image abruptly removed itself, leaving a truncated pyramid shape. Daniel gave it a sharp look, recaptured the stylus, and wrote larger. When the image grew three times its previous size, he was sure. Pointing at the hollow pyramid point, he said, “When I first saw that, I thought it was the biggest spaceship I’d ever seen. It’s Ra’s flying palace! And all this time it was just the dinghy or lifeboat for ... this, whatever it is.” “Ifs an immensely powerful starship from Ra’s homeworld,” Hathor said.

“Hidden, but accessible if he needed it. Who knows how long it’s been waiting here?” She snatched back the stylus and began asking spe-cific questions. Daniel wasn’t too happy about their drift.

Dimensions-huge. Speed-incredible. Ra had been poking around in a “palace” that had barely a quarter of the speed and range of the mother ship. Weapons-lots of them, all powerful. Hathor thought for a moment, then sketched in the word crew? Daniel had expected another little 3-D movie. In-stead, one of the control panels came to life. First came hieroglyphs for numbers-in the hundreds. Then came the glyph for sleep, with some sort of odd modi-fiers. But there was no animated discussion. The pic-tures over the console looked real. They showed hundreds of figures lying on simple-looking contour couches, either asleep or dead. When they zoomed in, Hathor stepped back, her teeth bared in a grimace. The crew ...

people were aliens, though they didn’t seem related to the initial talking head. They were furred, about the color of cinnabar, with sharp, Wiley E. Coyote snouts and odd, floppy ears.

Staring until his eyes watered, Daniel savored the solution to one of Egyptology’s thorniest questions.

No wonder no one had been able to find a match for the typhonic beast in Earthly zoology. The original didn’t come from Earth. The sleeping, red-furred alien was the living image of the enigmatic god Set.

“Setim!” Hathor spat the word, ignoring Daniel Jackson’s look of surprise. She knew this stiff-necked race of old. They’d been Ra’s first servants, inhabitants of Tuat-the-world. They were the builders, the crafts-men-the ones who had probably fabricated the Star-Gate that had brought her and Daniel to this treasure trove.

Those red devils had also been a nearly insuperable obstacle in the human godlings’ quest for power.

Only the fact that Ra’s bodily form was that of a young male had opened the door for the likes of Ptah, Sebek ... and herself. It had taken long, hard years of intrigue, but finally the Setim had made a misstep-and the human-kindred godlings had enjoyed the sunshine of Ra’s full favor. Hadn’t she fought against them, the rebels of Ombos? Hadn’t they nearly killed her? But her campaign against them had finally triumphed. She covered a world in blood, but the race of Set was no more. Except for these sleepers ... What are they waiting for? Sha’uri knelt by one of the barriers blocking the starship stairwells, waiting for the inevitable attack of the Horus guards. The free folk aboard Ra’s Eye held only four decks with barely fifty people, including noncombatants. A determined rush could probably sweep them up in an afternoon’s work.

Why had the Horuses not begun the job?

Sha’uri left her watch feeling tired, hungry-and thirsty. There was space enough to sleep, though little pri-vacy. More serious was the question of rations. Pool-ing all their food, including MREs and Gary Meyers’ hoard of snacks, they could survive a day or two of siege, perhaps more. Worst of all was water. They had no supply, except that which was in their bodies. Wise in the ways of a desert world, Sha’uri knew the ways of “recycling.” Could the pampered Earthers live with that? Perhaps they would rather fight and die quickly.

Arriving upstairs in what the besieged were already calling the “living room,” Sha’uri found her compatriots toasting one another with a variety of containers-and drinking water!

“How-?” she gasped.

Barbara Shore gave her the feverish smile of the sleepless worker. “We kept copies of all our technical translations up here-and we had a breakthrough. It’s amazing the way life-and-death decisions can really concentrate your mind.” “We started on that old program for initiating cir-cuit repairs,” Peter Auchinloss said. “After trial and error and correcting a couple of errors in translation, we made it work. We’ve even been able to divert the ship’s emergency power to plumbing and such-but we’re storing all the water we can while it’s running.”

Barbara smiled. “Now Peter’s threatening to patch in some of the outside scanners!”

Auchinloss was as good as his word. By that after-noon he succeeded in insinuating control over enough scanners to create a panoramic 3-D view in the com-mand deck.

What they saw, however, sank the tiny group’s morale. The camp was completely overrun by the enemy. Everywhere they looked, they saw Horus guards.

Most disturbing, though, were the images from the mouth of the StarGate. First, guardsmen began lug-ging out odd shapes of the crystal-gold material that underlay all of Ra’s technology. Others set to the work of assembly. Within hours, familiar forms had begun to appear. The enemy was beginning to import a udajeet flotilla through the gateway.

Auchinloss turned in chagrin from his largest prac-tical triumph. “Back to basics,” he said. “It would be a lot more useful to have motion alarms on the decks below us.” He frowned. “We’ll want to know when we’re getting company.” “Well?” General West looked up from the report he’d been pretending to read.

On the third go-around, it made even less sense that it had on the first. The junior officer shook his head.

“No change, sir. We’ve received no shipments from Abydos for fifteen hours now. No messages, either.” “Then we have to assume the Abydos StarGate is in enemy hands. Are the demolition teams at work in Creek Mountain?”

Cold sweat beaded at the back of his neck as he con-sidered hopelessly stranding the equivalent of an overstrength battalion on another planet. But he was also determined not to allow another in-cursion by extraterrestrial warriors. If Horus guards showed any chance of success in trying to force Earth’s StarGate, West would rather bring the missile silo down on their heads. His aide nodded. “Proceeding according to the con-tingency plan, sir.”

West’s eyes sharpened. “And the counterforce?”

“Armed and preparing for jumpoff, sir-as per the contingency plan.” Jack O’Neil looked more like a construction laborer than a commanding officer as he stood on the upper terrace of the Nagada mine.

Whitish dust covered him from head to toe, except where streaks of sweat tricked down like miniature river systems.

But he smiled with grim satisfaction as a bull-dozer cleared the last of a seeming talus mound from the mouth of an artificial cavern blasted into the rocky wall.

Here at the rally point, he had cached and buried some of his excess battalion materiel as well as addi-tional supplies he’d solicited from General West. There were tanks, mortars, and plenty of shells.

Am-munition. Medical supplies. Food. He’d opened a little space between himself and the enemy. Their infantry army was now up against the longer range of his tanks, mortars, and artillery. If he hadn’t stopped the Horus guards, he’d slowed their momentum, bloodied their noses.

With his shrunken command he could survive on the cached supplies for long enough-he hoped.

The Horus guards couldn’t keep maintaining the losses he was giving them. Sooner or later they’d be overextended. Then he could punch back to the base camp, restore contact through the StarGate.. . .

The bastards had to overreach themselves. They had to! The Army M1A2 tank scuttled along the hollow between two sand dunes, its tracks chewing up a cloud of grit. The big war machine came to a stop, turret traversing as it took an azimuth from a forward observer. The heavy gun fired once, then the tank was on its way again, threading through the sandy terrain, always keeping a new dune between itself and the slowly advancing Horus Guards. “We used to call it scoot and shoot, or hip-shooting in the Gulf,” the tank’s commander told his gunner. He licked dry lips. “ ‘Course, in those days, we were moving forward, not back.”

Six dunes away, a company of Horus guards flung themselves to the sands at the screech of an incoming shell. The explosive didn’t land on them, but two dunes over.

The guard Reshef pushed himself up, trying to brush the grit off his chest and legs. It stuck there, thanks to the pig sweat of this eternal hell of jog up-hill, flop down, tend the dead and wounded, jog on. “Ammit eat this nonsense!” he groused. “I’m an udajeet pilot, not some marching flunky. My place should be in a nice, cool cockpit overhead, blasting those thrice-damned moving guns.”

P’saro, whose service involved house-to-house searches and riot suppression, snorted. “These magic fellahin have some special weapon that blows most udajeet drivers like yourself out of the sky!”

He managed a laugh as they stumbled up the next ridge of sand. “Only the ones with experience against the weapon will fly in this campaign. Or so I hear.” Reshef’s grip tightened on his blast-lance. He didn’t like being in this unit. It had been amalgamated from the ruins of several other formations after the break-out from the StarGate pyramid.

Even though his other outfit had been ground pounders as well, there had been pilots like him, im-pressed into the infantry. At least they could share complaints.

“Stupid way to run a war,” Reshef growled.

“Maybe you want to take it up with the Lady?” P’saro suggested in innocent tones.

Reshef glared at his supposed war brother’s back as they toiled upward. Everyone knew how Lady Hathor dealt with complainers.

Not that P’saro was so pleased with their assign-ment. He was used to working in large cities, with access to plenty of strong drink and willing wenches. Marching off into the waste to play catch-me-kill-you did not strike him as an excellent plan of campaign.

He shook his blast-lance. “Don’t think I’ve used this all day.” “Nothing bloody to use it on,” Reshef agreed. “In a straight fight our lances against their gunnis, or what-ever they call them, we win. Our blasts travel faster, fly straighter, and hit harder than those pellets they shoot.” “You just don’t want to be hit with one of those pel-lets,” another guard said.

“Especially from one of those fast-shooters.”

“I’d take my chances,” Reshef insisted, “man to man. But this sort of work, where they hide and throw things in the air to come down on you-“ “Can’t fire a bolt through a dune,” P’saro said. He’d heard about plunging fire from guards who’d fought mountain savages with bows and arrows. Sooner or later, however, the udajeets had helped herd the sav-ages into a situation where the superior range and power of their blast-lances prevailed. “We’ll catch ‘em straight up again.” He grinned be-hind his mask. “Then we’ll finish ‘em.”

“Umph!” Reshef said, skidding down a packed-sand slope. “If this doesn’t finish us first,” he added under his breath.

The mortar team had pushed its luck, staying for three shots in the same spot.

Now angry squads of Horus guards were converging like so many killer bees. Skaara had a squad of his tried-and-true riot break-ers. He beckoned to another militia group, the remains of Sek’s company, to slow the Horuses. A few grenades should cool their ardor while the gunners disassembled their mortar and packed it out of there.

It would have worked, except for the high whistle that came from the air, Skaara paled. Udajeets were back on Abydos.

What do the Earthmen need us for, anyway? Sek angrily thought as he led his rags and tags to the commanding position of a higher than usual dune. They had their long guns to play hide-and-shoot-except for those fools who’d been too lazy to get while the getting was good.

A little gurgle of laughter came from Gamen, the gunless wonder of the troop. He was a real gutter-snipe, had lost half the teeth in his head, and just loved grenades.

The little guy was running along behind the head of the dune, listening for the crunch of feet on sand on the other side. One hand was already in the satchel of grenades he always carried.

They didn’t know the udajeet was on them until Sek saw its shadow. Then it was too late. Heavy blasters crashed, and that was the end of Gamen. The secondary explosions from igniting grenades took two more of Sek’s people. “Why don’t you try that with the tanks, you great bastard?” Sek shouted, trying to aim his rifle. But the udajeet was gone.

“Bastards,” he said again. Trust the high-and-mighty udajeet pilots to pick on the fellahin. They fig-ured-rightly-that militia wouldn’t have any of the antiaircraft missiles.

After the great orgy of shoot-downs during Hathor’s invasion, the udajeet drivers had become very selective in their targets.

Sek looked at the four men who remained of his company. “It strikes me,” he said, “that a man could follow this trade much more profitably back in Nagada.”

The five men set off for the flanks of the battle, away from the main advance-and toward home.

Running through the dunes with a pack of enraged Horuses on his tail, Skaara saw the men pulling out.

Like sand through a sieve, he thought. My fighters either bleed to death-or they just bleed away.

The Horus guards at the Abydos StarGate were walking wounded, emblazoned with bandages on legs or slings on the arms not carrying their blast-lances. They also had loud voices, useful for hectoring latecomers to the war. One thing their voices did not comment on was the way Lady Hathor was stripping their world of Edfu bare of guards to prosecute her war here. But it was all too true that their side was down to the dregs and the rawest recruits. Probably that was why the latest levy staggered like drunkards as they cycled through.

“Call yourselves Horus guards!” shouted one barrel-chested veteran just beginning to thicken in the middle as well. “In my worst, puling days I didn’t look as sickening-as you lot. What did they do, take you right out of the creche? Where did you come from? Hey, you undersize specimen, I’m talking to you!”