The woman known as Faizah let the unconscious Daniel Jackson slump to the loft floor as she continued to examine the medallion he wore. She had seen it often enough around Ra's neck in the days of the First Time, in procession with the other gods, in attendance at Ra's throne room... from the times she'd shared Ra's bed.
All of Faizah's wide-eyed, youthful mannerisms faded from the beautiful face. She was Hathor again.
How ironic! In all the time I spent among my enemies, preparing them for the slaughter, I discover this just before the death stroke.
Hathor thought back to a night in the Nile valley, millennia before, when she had discovered that this Eye of Ra was more than a mere decoration.
She had gone to offer herself to the god king when she found Ra leaving his chambers with an unwontedly surreptitious air. So she had followed him out of the palace, into the night, to the place of the StarGate.
There he had removed the medallion from his throat and pressed it to the heart of one of the constellations that decorated the huge ring. The great torus had revolved of its own accord, each of the chevrons automatically falling into place. But they were not lining up with the constellation coordinates carved into the glowing crystal!
The medallion was a special key, coding the Star-Gate to a destination it would never reach in its normal operation!
A swirl of energy had gouted from the ring, stabilizing into the familiar gateway. Ra had vanished within.
Hathor had not dared to follow. The danger of discovery was too great, and Ra always thought that the best protector of his secrets was the cold, cruel grave.
But Hathor had always remembered the incident, the secret destination. And now chance had dropped the key right into her hands.
"I wish to God I'd never heard of Ra's Eye!" Barbara Shore shouted, her voice echoing through the engine room of the out-of-commission starship. Standing beside her, Sha'uri glanced from the gleaming crystal constructions of the actual engines to the copy of an incomprehensible schematic. Peter Auchinloss had discovered some sort of training programs in the ship's computers. But even when Sha'uri managed to translate the symbols, Barbara was swearing.
"So this junk here just refers to what the readings should be on the board?" The physicist tapped a disgusted finger on the section Sha'uri had laboriously succeeded in making some sense of.
"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 counterattack 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 gunfire 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 holstered 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 before 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 Marine 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 StarGate, and they're massing troops to break out."
They reached the main corridor of the grounded spacecraft, now full of smoke from fires ignited by internecine 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 technical 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. "If 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 remember 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 accommodate the dead Marine.
The noncom stared at her. "How—"
"My job is to discover how this thing works," Barbara 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 another 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 technicians 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," another 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 convenient! 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 flashbang. That may be effective no matter what may be lurking in there."
A blast-bolt shattered adobe as one of the militiamen 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 ONeil 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 unflattering photo of him.
As for the rest, they were items Daniel usually carried around on his person—nail clippers, an automatic 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.