Taking his second StarGate journey to an unknown destination, Daniel Jackson discovered he couldn't be sure whether it took more or less time. It wasn't just the disorientation of being squirted between two widely separated points. The geometry and space of the connecting "tube," or whatever it was, didn't fit the homely three dimensions (or four, including time) that Daniel's senses were accustomed to.
But one thing Daniel could take as a given. No matter where you went via StarGate, you should expect a bumpy ride.
Daniel was flung from the StarGate terminus feeling as if he'd been propelled by a kick in the head through a high-speed funhouse where they played very rough tricks on you.
Yet in a strange, sadistic way the passage felt... less bad. He still landed curled into a fetal ball. But this time he remembered to breathe on his own, and he didn't get violently ill.
Of course, Hathor was kneeling over him, shaking him rather peevishly and telling him to pull himself together.
Maybe that's what makes the distinction between men and gods, he thought. The ability to take a complete psychic and somatic pummeling as if it were nothing.
At last the goddess left off the shaking—a wise decision. He'd been a projectile vomiter in his youth.
It took Daniel a moment or two before he really began taking an interest in things again. That's when he noticed the talking head. It was ashy white, somewhat human—but definitely, chillingly other.
Daniel knew that Ra had been a symbiosis of a young human male and an unguessably old alien. Apparently, here was the otherworldly side of Ra's family tree.
At last Daniel concentrated on the fact that the floating head was talking. Then he realized he didn't comprehend a word of what the blasted thing was saying.
Still worse, it seemed as though Hathor didn't have a clue, either. "Do you understand this language?" she demanded.
Uh-oh. Neither of them had considered that Ra might install a security system in—wherever they were.
The floating head seemed to be going through a set speech, and getting a bit more irritated with each repetition. The thing was apparently a three-dimensional image—the edges were just a little bit fuzzy.
Hathor finally held out the medallion around her neck and thrust it into the head. That was apparently the right choice. The face looked friendly, although it still spoke incomprehensibly.
Daniel, meanwhile, was investigating the space where they landed. It bore a vague resemblance to the command deck on Ra's Eye—about the same way a bedroom closet resembles the Rose Bowl.
The place was big—spacious enough to accommodate a couple of football fields, at least. Including spectators.
There were lots of control panels, all glowing softly. Daniel avoided them. But directly beside the talking head was a slate and stylus in gold crystal—almost exactly like the microcomputers in Hathor's former ship.
Daniel picked up the slate and sketched in the hieroglyph for where?
Immediately, a new image appeared. It showed a stylized pyramid apparently floating between stylized versions of suns.
Hieroglyphs floating between each sun symbol gave the names of stars.
Hathor stared. "According to this, we're parked somewhere in interstellar space!"
Her eyes went speculative. "As good a place as any to hide a valuable asset."
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."
"It's 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 specific 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. Instead, 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 modifiers. But there was no animated discussion. The pictures 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 craftsmen—the ones who had probably fabricated the StarGate 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 privacy. More serious was the question of rations. Pooling 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. If s amazing the way life-and-death decisions can really concentrate your mind."
"We started on that old program for initiating circuit 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 if 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 afternoon he succeeded in insinuating control over enough scanners to create a panoramic 3-D view in the command 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 lugging 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 practical 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 considered hopelessly stranding the equivalent of an overstrength battalion on another planet.
But he was also determined not to allow another incursion 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 contingency 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 bulldozer 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 additional supplies he'd solicited from General West. There were tanks, mortars, and plenty of shells. Ammunition. 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 uphill, 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 breakout from the StarGate pyramid.
Even though his other outfit had been ground pounders as well, there had been pilots like him, impressed 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 assignment. 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 whatever 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 pellets," 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 savages into a situation where the superior range and power of their blast-lances prevailed.
"We'll catch 'em straight up again." He grinned behind 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 Horns guards were converging like so many killer bees.
Skaara had a squad of his tried-and-true riot breakers. 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 guttersnipe, 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 figured—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!"
The short, skinny guardsman turned to his strapping comrade.
Then both leveled their blast-lances and began firing.
Two-armed Horuses were the first targets of choice. Guards in slings were attacked hand-to-hand by other members of the levy.
The fight ended surprisingly quickly, with the "fresh meat" overcoming their elders before even any word got out over the mask communicators.
The newcomers began removing their hawk-masks. Some hit the tumbler button at their necks to redeploy the mask's material. Others were pulling off plastic replicas. None of the men was tattooed with the Eye of Ra.
With a rush of energy the StarGate cycled again. But this time the emerging figures didn't look like Egyptian gods. They wore baggy chocolate-chip BDUs.
A Marine sergeant led his men down the rampway with a queasy salute. "Guess it worked, sir!"
Lieutenant Kawalsky grinned. "I'd say it did. But more important, have you brought the pants for Feretti and me?"
He self-consciously tugged at the waist of his kilt. "I've never gone into combat wearing a dress before."