Retaliation (25 page)

The infrared image O’Neil was getting showed hands and faces. Either it was an elaborate charade, or...

“Get a patrol out there,” he abruptly ordered his radioman.

“Sir?” Feretti said uncertainly.

“I don’t think that’s an attack,” the colonel ampli-fied. “I think they may be friendlies.”

In minutes, he was getting the report from a corpo-ral out in the field. “It’s a refugee column from Nagada, sir, led by somebody named Sha’uri. She’s talking in English, asking you for passage to Earth.”

O’Neil watched the long, ragged collection of people toiling their way across the sands. Of course Sha’uri would have avoided the road. It led to the mines, which were in enemy hands. And between the fires and the Horus guards, there probably was only one safe destination around for the small portion of the Abydan population in her care.

“Sir?” the radioman asked. “Corporal Sanders wants to know if he should try to turn them back.”

O’Neil straightened. “Hell, no,” he said abruptly, turning to his history-minded aide. “We might be bugging out of here like we did in Vietnam. But no way are we leaving the people who sided with us hanging in the wind.’” “Get the motor pool. I want everything we have with wheels ready to move-immediately.”

He was about to cause one hell of a logistical prob-lem, but that would be Felton’s headache.

All O’Neil had to do was maintain security while everybody got away. Daniel Jackson aimed his blast-lance and burned a hole through a Horus guard’s pectoral necklace. In spite of being in the biggest fight of his life, Daniel felt queerly at peace.

Sha’uri had rejected him, and he was in the fore-front of a suicide attack. He couldn’t exactly say that all was well with the world. Perhaps it was just that the world seemed well lost.

Skaara had led the advance on the most obvious route, the old mining road from Nagada. Incredibly, they hadn’t encountered any Horuses until they rounded the switchback that led down into the ravine of the mines themselves. Daniel and the contingent of Abydan blast-lancers he’d joined charged, weapons flaring. The Horus guards dropped their quirts and unlimbered their weapons, but they were overwhelmed in a moment. Following the momentum, the militiamen charged downhill until they encountered another knot of men in the darkness, this one larger. Daniel himself had aimed his lance, poised to fire, when he yelled in Aby-dan. “No! No! Hold your fire! These are friends.” They faced a bedraggled collection of prisoners, both Abydan and Earthling, pressed into mining duties. White dust clung to robes and BDUs alike. One of the Abydans stood with tears in his eyes. “When the others told the hawk-heads how things fared in the city, the Horuses said that none would dare come out to rescue us.”

“Well, it looks like they were wrong,” Daniel said. He moved along to the American contingent asking in English, “Anybody in charge here?” “I guess I am-just barely,” a weak voice replied.

Daniel had to look hard for a moment at the battered face before he recognized Lieutenant Charlton.

“You came along at a good time. The guys were covering for me-“ “Man who can’t do his work gets killed,” one of the Marine ex-captives explained. “The bastards made that pretty clear.”

“But our friends in the funny hats didn’t like the fact that the men were looking out for me, and decided to make an example of us,” Charlton went on. “I think they were going to toss us off the top of the mine.”

“Okay,” Daniel said. “Everybody in favor of mak-ing them pay-raise your hands.” By now Skaara and the main body had joined them. Anyone with weapons to spare shared them out. The blast-lances recovered from the defunct Horus guards were also distributed; then the enlarged force contin-ued downward. The Horus guards were actually pretty thin on the ground for the number of prisoners they were over-seeing.

But when hope raised its ugly head ...

In the forefront of the fighting, Daniel several times saw Horuses suddenly drop in their positions with a pickax through the back, or being battered to the ground by men wielding shovels. He also saw the sickening spectacle of work gangs being blasted down just seconds before they could be freed. In some cases he saw men walk into the blast-bolts so their buddies could take down the guards with their bare hands.

From the floor of the valley came a labored whistling sound. It took Daniel a moment to recognize-until he connected it with the shape rising into the air. The twittering was the sound of a udajeet with overloaded engines. The antigravity glider must have been heavily laden with quartzite ore, because it literally wallowed in the air as it spun to turn its guns on the upper mine galleries.

Daniel aimed his blast-lance at the cockpit, sending bolt after bolt before the pilot could fire on the advancing tide of troops. His fire was quickly joined by oth-ers. In seconds the udajeet was wheeling helplessly downward to crash and explode. Two more udajeets rose, not bothering to attack. They just wanted to es-cape. Neither passed the gauntlet of the mine terraces. Men came climbing up from the lower levels. The Horuses down there had been overrun. Judging from the blast-bolts, the only resistance remaining was on the far lip of the mine, in what remained of the Earthlings’ prepared defenses. Daniel began climbing again, aiming to come around on the flank of the Horuses positions. Even as he joined the battle, he saw squads of masked guardsmen rushing across the dunes to reinforce their brothers. The forces were locking in the deadly embrace of hand-to-hand combat when the sky went dark overhead.

Then a lash of unfettered energy fell on the combatants.

Rebels, Earthmen, and Horuses alike were blasted. Daniel found himself knocked flat on the rocky lip of the ravine. Just a little bit farther, and his troubles would have been over.

The two sides recoiled apart at the almost godlike scourging. Daniel raised his voice over the terror-stricken cries. “Don’t fall back!” he cried in English and Abydan. “It just gives Hathor a free target! Keep after the Horuses! She can’t keep blasting her own men!”

Skaara joined him, and together they managed to get the attack moving forward again.

Daniel didn’t know how they succeeded. It was like advancing into an incinerator. It was the former pris-oners who turned the tide, swelling the front lines, ignoring Hathor’s gigantic energy flail in their intent-ness to settle scores with the Horuses.

Then the Boat of a Million Years was turning away from them, stabbing gouts of energy down into the desert.

What the hell could be out there?

But Daniel didn’t have time to wonder. A Horus guard, his blast-lance shattered in half, leapt from be-hind some rocks and tried to club Daniel down. The guy was too close for Daniel to shorten the grip on his own lance and blast him. So he swung the shaft of his weapon crosswise across his chest and tried to parry the guardsman’s blow.

Things didn’t work out the way they usually did in Robin Hood movies. The shock nearly tore the blast-lance from Daniel’s hands. The Horus rammed into Daniel, taking them both to the ground.

Daniel’s blast-lance was still across his chest, held there by the weight of the guardsman, who was trying to strangle him. Hands like steel clamps tightened around his throat as he tried uselessly to push the masked figure back. So this is it, Daniel thought, faintly wondering as his view turned red, then black at the edges.

Then there was a searing flash across his eyes and a loud explosion in his right ear. The Horus flopped ingloriously off him.

And Jack O’Neil was helping Daniel to his feet, a 9mm Beretta pistol in his hand.

‘Thought you could use a little help there, on the way to your ride.” “R-ride?” Daniel slurred, staring around. The only Horus guards he saw were busy running for their lives. Everyone else was piling into a wild assortment of vehicles before the Boat of a Million Years managed to blast them all. “Yes. We’ve already picked up Sha’uri and her refugee column. She told us about this diversionary attack you talked Skaara into. Of all the stupid-“ “It let Sha’uri get away. I’m not such a Delta Foxtrot Bravo,” Daniel said.

Going into battle without the annoyance of having to survive had been a bizarre comfort for him. But now, having to deal with hope-he hung back as O’Neil led the way to a waiting Humvee.

The Marine turned back, frowning at him. “What they hell are you waiting for, an engraved invitation?”

He grabbed Daniel and hauled him along, tossing him into the vehicle’s rear compartment, already full of fugitives.

Their jouncing trip across the dunes was in-describable, combining all the worst aspects of a StarGate transit with the ill effects of being jostled by elbows and kicked by combat boots, with the atten-dant smells of unwashed humanity. The driver was apparently attempting to outrun the pursuing starship while selecting the most spectacular bumps and rough spots as he leapt and dodged among the dunes.

But, of course, the Boat of a Million Years couldn’t be outrun. In fact, it always seemed to be right over them, blasting something in their near vicinity. And then there were those pesky collections of Horus guards they kept driving through.

At one point Daniel found himself having a conver-sation with Jack O’Neil’s knees. The colonel had taken the gunner’s position on the mounted M240 machine gun. He hosed bullets at everything that moved at the rate of two hundred rounds per minute.

“Sorry about the bumpy ride,” O’Neil said, squeez-ing off a burst at something outside. “We’re not just racing Hathor, but her whole army. It’ll be tight, getting back to our perimeter before it’s overrun.”

They came bombing through the open and blasted gates of the camp and swerved with wild abandon through empty streets. The shimmering skin of the grounded spaceship Ra’s Eye grew closer. Then Daniel got a glance of Horus guards-lots of them-and O’Neil’s machine gun began thumping again. The rescue convoy returned just in time to save another group of troops-the Marine defenders drawn up in front of the entrance to the ship-and the StarGate. “Come on, Jackson,” he heard the colonel say. “Last stop.” Scowling in frustration, technician Sam Gomfrey glanced from his watch to the fire-control relay he was supposed to be removing. Time was running out. The research team was already supposed to be downstairs. He’d wind up personally carrying this sucker through the StarGate. It wasn’t his fault that a faulty dia-gram had left him searching in completely the wrong conduit. Lateness was why Gomfrey did something that nor-mally would have horrified his tidy technician’s soul. He chose a shortcut.

Instead of going for his tools, he unlimbered the blast-lance he’d taken away from a dead invading Horus guard and kept triggering it until he’d sliced the control node free of the wall. As he slashed away, his weapon’s heat and energy discharge caused other circuits in the conduit to curl and twist as though they were live things trying to get away.

Gomfrey finished his cutting job, swearing as he burned his fingers picking up the cannibalized circuit. He glanced at the irregular outline he’d cut in the wall, at the writhing circuits, and shrugged.

“Close enough for government work,” he said.

In conduit Sb-26, the circuits shocked by Gomfrey’s rough blaster work cycled through their various bio-morphic shapes. One of them, a balky multipurpose unit that had resisted the efforts of even the great technician god Ptah suddenly shifted into its power-shunt mode.

Energy began flowing through entirely new net-works aboard Ra’s Eye. Mitch Storey was panting after the climb from ground level to the command deck of the defunct star-ship. Sure, he understood that Barbara Shore needed a trustworthy person to check that nothing had been left behind. But did it have to be him?

The only thing more annoying was to notice that Corporal Tom Vance, who was accompanying him, didn’t seem to be breathing heavily at all. A quick search showed that the place had indeed been cleaned out according to plan-apparently, it just hadn’t been noted in the rush. Storey’s response was brief and profane. “Well, we won’t have to carry anything,” he said, heading for the central stairs. “But we’ll have to haul ass if we expect get out on time.” “You go on ahead,” Vance said, something catching his eye.

He’d spent enough time among the consoles here to spot something out of the ordinary. There were lights blinking on panels that had never lit up before. And a lot of those lights were on the gunnery control console ... From the first rank of Skaara’s attackers, Daniel Jackson now found himself among the last ranks of the StarGate’s defenders. The Marine guards had conducted a stubborn retreat, first into the gold-quartz halls of the spaceship Ra’s Eye, then into the stone pas-sages of the StarGate pyramid itself.

The bombardment from the Boat of a Million Years had ceased as soon as the last of the rescue convoy had arrived. Apparently, Hathor still preferred not to damage irreplaceable assets.

She was perfectly willing to spend Horus guards, however. Under relentless pressure the Earthlings had been pushed about halfway down the Great Gallery. Daniel was well into the zen of combat, not worrying what the future might bring, when he was suddenly seized from behind.

“Sorry, Doc,” Lieutenant Kawalsky muttered in his ear as he hauled the battling Egyptologist out of the battle line. “But the colonel wants you-now.” The hall of the StarGate, recently packed with re-treating troops and refugees, now stood almost empty as Daniel walked in with his escort. His promise to go gracefully with Kawalsky at least had protected his dignity. Just as well. Daniel wouldn’t have liked Sha’uri to see him being frog-marched in. Skaara was also on hand, as were Mitch Storey, Barbara Shore, Jack O’Neil, and a couple of military types.

Skaara told Daniel quietly, “Father has already gone on ahead through the StarGate. Dr. Destin believes he should survive the journey.” Sha’uri said nothing as Daniel came in. O’Neil evidently picked it up, glancing at the scholar with a sudden expression of comprehension. “I understand that you might prefer to be out fight-ing than in here,” he told Daniel. “I’d rather be on the firing line myself. But I have a report to make to General West, and frankly, I need you to comment on the capabilities of this Boat of a Million Years. We’ll probably be the last group to make it through-“ “But, Colonel,” Barbara Shore protested.