Retaliation (23 page)

“Calm down and report what you see. Over.”

“I’ve got a twenty-foot gap in my line, thanks to that goddamned thing up there! Half an infantry platoon, bing! gone! melted! On the outskirts of it there are people-oh, God, that guy’s whole body is smoldering!” More bolts lashed out, degrading the signal. Then, even as the blasts continued, Charlton’s voice came in more audibly. “. . . big bastard is down at the other end of our line, still pounding the piss out of us. Noth-ing we have reaches that high. The Avenger rockets are gone, and so is one of our LAVs with the heavier blaster. Whenever an energy weapon comes into play, that area gets plastered.”

Charlton’s delivery was hectic, as if he were trying to get as many words as possible out before he got destroyed.

Then unexpected hope came into his voice. “Wait! It’s turning away!” But although the bombardment of the mine de-fenses ceased, the monster ship’s fusillade seemed to intensify as it traversed a path toward the high desert. New reports came in, terror-stricken or coldly factual, as energy weapons cut their way through O’Neil’s patrols, opening a lane of advance for the assembled Horus guards.

O’Neil turned from the high-tech Ragnarok outside to Colonel Felton. “Ask Charlton if he can get out of there before they hit him again.” “Charlie Mike Actual!” The Army colonel spoke Charlton’s call signal into the microphone. “This is Mike Bravo Foxtrot. What are your chances of staging a withdrawal?

Over.”

“This is Charlie Mike. Situation’s bad.” Beyond Charlton’s voice they could hear the noises of troops being shouted and chivvied into line. “I looked into it, but we’d be sure to be caught out in the open. I think-“ His voice grew a little grimmer. “I think we’ll be able to hurt them more if we maintain our posi-tions. Over.”

“I concur,” O’Neil said, but the words tasted bitter in his mouth. Then the reception went bad again as the Boat of a Million Years returned to attack Charlton’s positions. The young lieutenant’s radio politesse disintegrated almost as quickly as his defenses.

Felton again fought a losing battle for making nice on the communications net. After several seconds of almost continuous static, the lieutenant’s voice came out of the speaker. “Oh, shit! Here come the Whorehouse guards!” Colonel Felton was getting good and steamed. He must have thought the junior officer was deliberately ignoring his commands. “There’s no need for profani-ty, Charlie Mike. Over.”

At the same time the younger man’s frantic orders were being broadcast along with his report. “The fuck-ing wire is gone! Just shoot! Shoot the sons of bitches!”

Beside himself, Felton snarled into the microphone, “Listen, mister. This is the net, not a toilet. You’re looking to get yourself written up!” Finally, Jack O’Neil burst out. “What the hell are you going to do, Felton? Give him a posthumous reprimand?”

The Army man stood, jarred into silence. Obviously, he’d been paying so much attention to the form of Charlton’s report, he hadn’t really been thinking about the content.

The speaker rang with the sounds of close combat. The crash of blast-lances seemed almost quiet after the devastating blasts coming from the spaceship. Charlton’s voice came through clearly. “Shoot, damn you! Shoooot!”

Thunder roared again, then there was silence.

“The poor bastard!” Felton blurted.

Then, with a look of horror, he clapped his hand over his microphone.

Aboard the Boat of a Million Years, Hathor stood en-veloped in a cloud of virtual reality. Reproduced around her was a miniature simulacrum of the ground below the starship.

Where Hathor walked, the starship moved. Where Hathor pointed, the starship discharged its secondary batteries.

It was a heady experience for the goddess. She felt like a giant presence, bestriding the field of battle.

Yet at the same time it was frustrating. The inter-play between commander and ship fell far short of perfection. It was as if Hathor were attempting some incredible feat of precision work with her hands im-prisoned in large, awkward, unyielding gloves.

When Daniel had escaped, Hathor had intensified her efforts to develop some sort of interface with the computer that ran the ancient craft. That computer had files allowing it to understand Hathor’s court speech. At least she didn’t have to write each order for the control device’s execution. But faced with a flood of requests for directives, Hathor had in the end decided to proceed with most of the ship working on automatic systems.

She often found herself wondering how the ur-Ra had dealt with the monstrous ship in all its complexity when the last of his (its?) fellows had perished. Perhaps that had been the reason Ra had used this vessel’s pinnace as his portable palace. Doubtless, it had been a simpler entity to master. There was, of course, an alternative to all this jury-rigging and computer interfacing. Hathor could simply lift the field holding the ship’s crew in stasis. But every time the thought even crossed her mind, it was swept back by a wave of revulsion.

It would take more than a little inconvenience to make her free that brood of red-furred monstrosities.

She surveyed the miniature battlefield below her, bringing any knots of resistance under close scrutiny.

Would it be worthwhile to neutralize them with another blast?

“Lady.” The voice of Khonsu seemed to come from the rift of the mine itself. “The enemy’s defenses are failing. Do you intend to cease firing? Shall we deal with them hand-to-hand?”

An odd note surfaced in her deputy’s voice-not ex-actly awe. It was more like worry. Abruptly, Hathor was jolted from her mental throne of godhood. She had the power, true ... but in her hands it was presently administered in a clumsy form. The Boat of a Million Years was not built for workon planets. It handled progressively more sluggishly the deeper it was brought into an atmosphere. But from the height where she was working, the necessary scale of the simulacrum made her finger too large a pointer. Her single-handed gunnery was sloppy, blasting her servants as well as her foes.

“Move forward,” Hathor ordered. “I shall be watching.” Hathor refrained from any more firing as her people closed in to capture the remaining points of resistance.

“Lady, we are taking many captives,” Khonsu re-ported. “Should we eliminate them?”

“No,” she said decisively, her voice echoing inside his hawk-mask. “Let the fellahin be separated from the Earthmen. They know their duties already. Set them to work mining the quartz mineral.”

A mighty warship and a rich cargo would both be useful weapons when she returned to Tuat the throne world.

“Utilize the Earthmen to load the mineral onto your udajeets. You’ll have to ferry the loads up to me on the ship.”

The airlift was an unfortunate necessity, since the monster ship could never land. But it would be inter-esting to receive Khonsu’s assessment of the wild Earthmen’s potential as slaves.

“Lady, must we bring some of the new slaves up to you to unload the cargo?”

She conferred with the computer. “It will not be necessary,” she replied.

“Automatic devices can take on your loads.”

Lieutenant Charlton’s last memory was the un-earthly beauty of final defensive fire, the deadly glow-ing networks that tracer bullets weaved for themselves in concentrated fields of fire. He’d ex-pected it to be his final memory, considering the stun-ning blast of energy that had lanced down near his position.

Instead, he’d awakened to find himself with a couple of sergeants and a good portion of the sur-vivors of his command watching him. “What’s this, Sarge?” he asked a grizzled veteran.

“Example time, I think,” came the reply. “They want us to load that wheelbarrow thing with these rocks.” He nodded at a generous pile of quartzite ore. “Three of us, and three straw bosses.”

A trio of Horus guards strolled up to them. One jerked a thumb at the wheelbarrow. The noncoms watched the officer. “Do we do it, sir?” Before Charlton could answer, a cocky young rifle-man stepped out of the crowd.

“Hey, don’t you clowns know about the Geneva convention?” Charlton suspected none of the guards spoke English. But one took exception to the tone. The Horus’ blast-lance came down, and there was one less prisoner. “No!” The young officer stepped forward, his hands out. This, it appeared, was a different form of defiance. But compassion wasn’t a burning offense. The guards merely beat Charlton to his knees- quickly, humiliatingly-and very painfully. Daniel Jackson had clung to the summit of a dune, watching the progress of the Boat of a Million Years as it cleared the way for the Horus guard attack. It had been like watching the Moon suddenly set off in a homicidal frenzy. Whole formations of troops had been wiped out with as little ceremony as a human would use in stepping on an anthill.

Daniel knew there were still friends and foes scattered across the sands between here and Nagada. He jogged on through the darkness, hoping he could handle whatever he found. The snarl of engines warned him at almost the last moment. He scrambled aside just before being run down by a convoy of Humvees.

They were heading back toward the base camp, running without lights. One of the vehicles stopped, and the Marine gunner leaned over his twin machine guns, raised his infrared goggles, and said, “You’re heading the wrong way, chum-the Old Man is pulling back all outlying units into a smaller perimeter.”

“I’ve got business in the city,” Daniel replied.

The Marine shrugged. “An okay place, if you like snake pits. Except for the front door, where that Skaara guy runs things, they’ve got gangs running the whole joint. Battles in the streets over turf that may not exist by morning.” He gave an apprehensive glance at the sky and lowered his voice. “You hear about this killer space-ship the Whorehouse guard has helping out? Damn thing knocked us flat at the mines. They captured a bunch of our guys and have ‘em doing the rock-pile rag! Even loading it onto those hawk-head planes! Then they fly it up to the ship!”

Daniel frowned. Hathor could have all sorts of logi-cal reasons to seize the mines. On his way to being jailed, he’d seen the energy weapons Earth technology had built. Cutting off our supply of quartz would make good sense to Hathor, he thought.

But there was only one reason he could see for Hathor to start stockpiling the wonder mineral. That would be if Abydos ceased to exist. He hoped his thoughts didn’t show on his face as he waved good-bye to the gunner. But some of Hathor’s vague threats about whole worlds began to echo in his head.

Daniel began to jog, then run toward Nagada.

It’s just too goddamned much, Colonel Jack O’Neil thought as he surveyed his shrinking defenses from the best vantage point in the area-through the fused-open hangar doors of Launch Deck Four. He’d pulled in his mobile forces from the high desert once it was evident that the Horus guards had gotten through. His patrols watching Nagada had also been brought back. There seemed no good news from the city itself. O’Neil’s night-vision goggles registered high infrared radiation from Nagada. The place was burning. Whether from aerial attack or internal arson, he couldn’t guess. Troops of all sorts had to swerve widely in their ap-proach to the base camp to avoid the captured mine, where the Boat of a Million Years loomed like some sort of monstrous cloud over a wound in the earth.

A defense line was stabilizing to block any advances toward the camp, and patrol action was picking up.

The Earth troops were firing their blast-rifles only sparingly. Prodigal use of energy weapons tended to get a force targeted for one of those baleful gouts of destruction spurting from the hellish form overhead.

O’Neil watched in pain as another blast lashed out. His people on the front lines were especially vul-nerable. Their position would, paradoxically, improve as the lines were pulled closer and closer to the camp. Merely from his own observation, the colonel could see that Hathor’s aim was lousy.

By the time the battle reached the camp, she’d probably have to cease firing. Otherwise, O’Neil figured, Hathor would be jeopar-dizing the very things she was fighting to capture- the salvageable spacecraft-and the Abydos StarGate. Oddly, O’Neil felt at peace with himself. He’d sent a full report to General West through the StarGate, warning of the enemy’s new spacecraft and giving his best estimates of its abilities.

He’d also begun evacuating his troops.

The wounded were the first to go. O’Neil had then tried to remove the technical team, but almost to a per-son they had resisted the idea. “If this is our last shot, we want it to mean something/’ Barbara Shore had said. “We’re gonna bring back this tub’s technology if we have to rip it out of the walls before we go!” O’Neil had put Colonel Felton in charge of getting people through the StarGate in a timely fashion.

The Army officer might be a bit of a stick, but he was efficient.

That left Jack O’Neil with the job of getting enough warm bodies out of the desert to him ... without weakening the defenses so badly that the enemy could get in and disrupt the withdrawal.

O’Neil felt tired. He was a fighter-he hated the idea of having to run. But so many of his people had been sacrificed on this world already. Most of them had died fighting against impossible odds. The fact that in the end victory had been pulled from defeat didn’t make them any less dead. A grim smile tugged at the corners of the colonel’s mouth. Not so very long ago, he’d have welcomed the chance to go down fighting. Back then it seemed like the answer to all his problems.

Now he had a life again. He wanted to live. But he was a warrior first and foremost. If he had to give his life, he would.

He just hated the idea of taking other people with him.

“Watch yourself, sir!”

Mitch Storey couldn’t believe he’d just yelled that at the commander of the expeditionary force here on Abydos.

But Colonel Jack O’Neil stepped aside as Storey and a couple of technicians steered a pair of dollies pre-cariously piled with technological loot along the deck.

As the clock inexorably ran down, the technical team members began to look less like researchers and more like vandals as they charged through the ship Ra’s Eye, trying to record and transmit as much of its astonishing mechanisms as they could.