Aboard the Boat of a Million Years, Hathor stood enveloped 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 interplay 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 imprisoned 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 pinnacle 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 exactly awe. It was more like worry. Abruptly, Hathor was jolted from her mental throne of god hood. 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 work on 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 reported. "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 interesting 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 unearthly beauty of final defensive fire, the deadly glowing networks that tracer bullets weaved for themselves in concentrated fields of fire. He'd expected it to be his final memory, considering the stunning 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 survivors 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 rifleman 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 spaceship 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 logical 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 approach 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 vulnerable. 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 jeopardizing 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 person 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 five. 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 precariously 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.
Already, a steady stream of photos, diagrams, and translated material was flowing through the StarGate. Now the tech people were becoming more ruthless. Memory cores were being yanked out of computers. In some places whole computers were being torn out. Where the pieces were too big to remove, circuits would be dissected in place while everything was minutely recorded.
Barbara Shore was down with the engines, an area they had been very leery of screwing around in. Those hulking mechanisms were putting out a tremendous amount of power—somewhere. Now a special team was measuring components, checking for a dozen types of radiation, shooting film and stealing every conceivable file from the engine-room computers.
Storey hoped it would be enough to let them create a duplicate drive when they got home.
Professor Pete Auchinloss had completely gutted the dormitory classrooms. In the end, with the help of some requisitioned muscle, he'd taken every single teaching computer he could find.
Storey wasn't exactly sure he agreed with all this slash-and-burn scientific investigation.
But even he found himself getting annoyed at one of the more timid technicians who was trying to remove one of the circuits controlling the metamorphosis of a wall.
"You need both the circuit and what it controls," he said, stopping his trolley load. "Have you isolated what that is?"
"Ah, more or less," the other man said, indicating an area about four feet square. "It's the size that's the problem."
"No, it isn't." Reaching into the front dolly, Storey brought out a blast-lance. "Stand back, now."
With the weapon's head almost touching the wall, the bearded technician cut loose the indicated area.
"Just give it a moment or two to cool down," Storey told his dumbfounded coworker. "Then add it to the next load of stuff coming through."
Beyond the gates of Nagada, Daniel Jackson saw a city in flames, topped by a sooty, red-flaring pillar rising high into the sky.
Daniel halted in his tracks. He wasn't exactly a religious man, but he recognized hell when he saw it.
Incredibly, there was activity on the catwalks. People ran back and forth, shouting down into the compound below. A knot of figures clustered on the wood and rope bridge. Was that Skaara up there? And Sha'uri?
Daniel sucked in a deep breath. "Hello, the gate!" he cried as loudly as he could.
"Gate's closed!" one of the guards yelled back. "Try again tomorrow—if it ever comes!"
"I bring word from the Earth camp," Daniel responded. He threw back the hood of his Abydan robe. "And I want to talk to my wife," he added in English.
The shouting on the towers and catwalks gave way to gasps as Daniel was recognized. Within the organic noise of surprise, Daniel also heard the sharp metallic clicks of firearms being readied.
Nobody said this would be easy, he thought.
He stood with his hands out, showing empty palms.
"Put up those rifles!" Skaara's voice cut across the confusion. "And open those doors. I'll hear what he has to say."
A voice rose in protest—Sha'uri's. But she was pitching her arguments for her brother, not for the whole area. Even the sound of a hostile Sha'uri had an odd effect on Daniel's heart rate.
By the time the gates had screeched their protesting ways open, Skaara had reached ground level. He faced his erstwhile brother-in-law, matching his empty-handed pose.
Daniel, however, could not ignore the pair of snipers with their rifles trained on his head, ready for the least hostile move.
"I'm not going to bite you," Daniel finally said. "You think you can get those gunmen to aim somewhere else?"
A single word from Skaara, and the pair desisted. Things might be bad in Nagada, but Skaara obviously had bloomed into a real leader.
Maybe it's because he's the only hope these people have, Daniel thought.
"I appreciate you not having me shot on sight," he said. "Are your radios still working? Have you made out anything of what's happened tonight?"
Daniel gave a concise report of what had happened during the night—and what the huge ship signified.
Then, not knowing if any of his story had been spread, he gave Skaara a brief account of what had happened to him from the day of the assassination attempt.
"I'd hoped that Sha'uri would also be here. She really ought to hear some of this."
The look Skaara gave him said, Don't ask for what you can't get.
"She didn't want you to come in," he said. "When I insisted, she left."
Twenty pounds seemed to settle in Daniel's chest. "There's nothing to blame her for. Did they tell you at least that Faizah was actually Hathor?"
Skaara nodded. "That did not make it easier for my sister."
Daniel forced his hopes aside. "What's happening with these fires?"
"One of the many rival chieftains set some blazes to burn out an enemy—and his efforts have spread far beyond his plans. So far we've kept the flames from our enclave, but—"
"And Kasuf? How is he?"
For a long moment Skaara gave Daniel an enigmatic look. "Come," he finally said. "I'll show you."
They walked into a large whitewashed building—a hospital, Daniel realized as he came inside. Most of the big structure—a former warehouse, Daniel figured—was devoted to open wards.
There were, however, a few private rooms for the very serious cases.
Daniel couldn't repress a gasp at Kasuf's still condition. He took a lax, cool hand in his. "Old friend," he said, "it grieves me to see you in this case. And that's not just because you're the only one who knows I didn't shoot you—"
"B-but you weren't," a papery voice interrupted Daniel. The hand he held squeezed faintly against his, and Kasuf s eyes opened.
"The one who shot us wore a ridiculous yellow mop on his head. He was a bigger man than you—a Horus guard, with Ra's sign tattooed on his face."
Daniel stared at this sudden reprieve, hoping that Skaara had heard all that the whispering voice had said.
Kasuf's son, however, stood in the doorway. "Dr. Destin," he called. "Doctor!"