Rebellion (10 page)

From the corner of his eye Charlie caught the gleam of copper. He glanced around to see one of the miners' primitive digging tools fly outward to jam the elevator's tracks. Beyond he caught a glimpse of a miner-a burnt-dark face like a thousand others, registering shock as he realized that what they called "the flying box" was occupied. A clang, a screech, and the open-sided elevator jolted to a stop, flinging Charlie into the air. His frantic hands managed to catch hold of the framework he'd been leaning against a moment before. For one horrible moment it looked as though he'd be flying down the last five floors worth of shaftway without benefit of the elevator. But with a wrenching twist he managed to throw himself back into the cage of the now stalled car.

Charlie landed on the floor with a brutal thump. He pushed himself up dazedly on hands and knees, then glared over toward the ladder that had been occupied by the towel head who'd just tried to kill him. Of course, the rungs were vacant now. "Sabotage," Lockwood muttered as he raged around the UMC encampment, trying to track down Colonel Jack O'Neil.

He'd repeatedly asked the local military commander to post Marine guards to protect UMC's improvements to the mine. But O'Neil had laughed him off. Now, just as the site manager was about to move in his own security people, the damned Abbadabbas had wrecked the elevator-the one bit of modern technology he'd gotten up and running in their primitive cess pit. Still worse, his construction people told him it would take days before the blasted machine would be running again. They'd have to replace part of the track, importing it from Earth, and then getting it down those Stone Age ladders to the spot where the sabotage had taken place. His supervisors had no clue as to what had happened. The cause of the elevator wreck had been one of those local digging tools, something that by all rights should be in a museum of ancient Egyptian artifacts. The wooden handle of the mattock had been ground to splinters. But the soft metal head of the implement had smeared itself between the elevator car and its tracks. The havoc wreaked by some illiterate digger with dirt under his fingernails was as bad as the most sophisticated hightech saboteur. There was no way to trace the mattock, of course. Thousands of them were scattered across the mine workings.

And asking any of the workers in the area was equally futile. Lockwood moved in the best of his language teachers, the ones who had picked up the most of the local lingo. He might as well have sent in his dullest grease monkeys fresh from Earth. The Abbadabbas not only suffered memory loss, but apparently they'd lost all their language skills as well. Lockwood himself had engaged in a long, sweaty climb down the crudely built ladders to the sabotage site. He'd always considered himself to be in excellent shape, but after climbing five stories down and THREE stories up, Lockwood had been left panting on one of the mine terraces. Vernon Ballard, the new security chief who'd accompanied Lockwood, had been forced to climb to the rest tent and bring back water and salt tablets for the weak and sweating site manager. After Lockwood recovered, he'd climbed back to the surface, rested a bit in his air-conditioned office, then set off to complain to O'Neil. To his fury, the Marine commandant seemed nowhere to be found. Lockwood had covered the Marine encampment and his own establishment. No O'Neil. The UMC man was on the verge of setting off for the city of Nagada when one of his people reported that the colonel had been spotted driving a Humvee into the desert. The mine executive requisitioned one of the all-terrain vehicles and set off in the same direction. Moving through the deep desert was like riding a small boat across the heavy swells of a large ocean. The Humvee topped the crest of one sandy rise to reveal a vista of seemingly identical dunes stretching to the horizon.

"Where the hell could he have gone?" a frustrated Lockwood demanded of his Marine driver. "Uh, sir," the rattled grunt replied, "maybe they've gone to Hogan's Alley." Lockwood rounded on the man. "Take me there.

Now!" Hogan's Alley turned out to be a valley inconspicuously tucked between two dunes. Part of it was a firing range, using one of the sand mountains as a backstop. The rest of the valley had been transformed into an obstacle course. Lockwood stared down from the summit of a sand hill. "What is this place? Some sort of training ground for your people?" "Well-" the gyrene began, but he didn't need to answer. The ATV

was suddenly surrounded by a squad of homespun-clad young warriors who seemed to erupt from the sand itself, aiming an assortment of weapons.

Lockwood had a moment of terror before he realized that the guns had no ammunition clips, the crossbows no bolts. "Abba-" Lockwood quickly revised his terminology. "Abydos natives?" The squad leader, an intense-looking young man with the dark skin of someone continually outdoors, growled a brief, disgusted word in the native language. "You not in ex-uh-size!" He pronounced the English words carefully.

"Exercise?" Lockwood repeated in bafflement. "What's going on here?"

His answer came as another squad of young native men appeared to engage the first group in mock combat. Suddenly, the dunes seemed to be covered with struggling figures. A platoon-sized war game was underway, the two teams of Abydos natives battling not merely with zeal but obviously with well-trained skill. The first ambush team was taken down with a speed and adroitness that took Lockwood's breath away. Still more astonishing, however, was the referee who appeared to listen to the first squad leader's complaints. Lockwood had studied his files carefully before taking over the Abydos operation. He immediately recognized Lieutenant Adam Kawalsky, O'Neil's second-in-command on the initial Abydos reconnaissance, from photos in those files. The lieutenant was serving as a junior officer in the present expeditionary force. He patiently listened as the intense young man who'd led the first group of Abbadabbas complained in broken English about the accidental triggering of his ambush. "Not in ex-uh-size!" he complained. "Sorry, Skaara," Kawalsky said. "You should have seen that before committing your forces, um, before you moved in." This young Skaara character showed not only spirit but discipline. He accepted Kawalsky's ruling with a smart salute. Lockwood turned to view the rest of the battle and spotted another referee-Feretti, the other survivor of the reconnaissance team. And standing on another dune, binoculars in hand, stood Colonel Jack O'Neil, observing the whole training exercise.

General West maintained a small office in the Pentagon, a working space whose size grossly undervalued his true influence in the military establishment. For the general, however, this seemed to be S.O.P.-standard operating procedure. Eugene Lockwood could appreciate the appearance of being only a small cog in the large Pentagon machine as useful camouflage for West's true, if somewhat shadowy, power. The pokey little room didn't even boast a window. But West kept a formidably dragonish WAC posted at a desk outside his door to discourage unwanted visitors. Lockwood had traversed a million light-years by StarGate from Earth to Abydos. He'd moved forward in terms of civilization eight thousand years, from ancient Egypt to an ultramodern missile silo in Colorado. He'd survived a jet trip to Washington. But as he drove through the Virginia countryside to the Pentagon, he glanced at his gold watch, hoping he'd budgeted enough time to make his official appointment. Lockwood negotiated his way through the Pentagon labyrinth with the ease of a true bureaucrat, arriving at West's office precisely on time. The female Cerebus led him in with a growl. But Lockwood faced far worse attack after the WAC had closed West's door. "Problems on Abydos?" the general asked, riffling through some papers on his desk.

Lockwood noticed the UMC logo atop the sheets. The military man had been going over his supposedly secret progress reports! "We've had some setbacks," Lockwood chose to admit. "Our language-acquisition program has not progressed as quickly as we'd hoped, in part due to native antagonism generated by Daniel Jackson, your former expert who remained behind on Abydos." West nodded, his slightly fleshy face carefully blank. A bureaucratic in-fighter from way back, he wasn't about to accept responsibility for someone else's snafu. "I was more concerned about your failure to install more modern mechanisms in the mine workings." West riffled through more reports, penetrating Lockwood's careful wording. "On this side of the StarGate we're gearing up for serious use of that quartzose material. But your actual production is far below the estimates that UMC presented us at the beginning of the project." He's trying to hang me with my own projections, Lockwood thought, trying to keep his own poker face. But he hadn't come to Washington to defend himself from this general's annoying questions. He was launching an attack of his own-not to mention setting up a scapegoat for the mine's production problems. "We have more serious problems than supply bottlenecks and delivery delays. The locals have started a campaign of sabotage." Lockwood paused for a second. "And I personally have seen them engaged in paramilitary training-apparently with the approval and aid of Colonel O'Neil." West shuffled a new set of papers.

"Yes, I've received a report from the colonel." Covering his ass, Lockwood thought. But it won't help him. "O'Neil has just become aware that two, ah, alumni of the Abydos reconnaissance have offered some help to the young locals who helped them escape the alien forces. The young men had organized a sort of militia, as the colonel had earlier reported-along with Messrs. Draven and Preston of your company." West shrugged. "Lieutenant Kawalsky and Corporal Feretti believed that organized activities would help release some of the young men's high spirits. It would also allow them to keep an eye on what this group got up to." "According to my briefing, there were barely a dozen of those shepherd boys," Lockwood objected. "I saw considerably more than that number engaged in war games." He leaned over the general's desk, pressing his advantage. "The colonel has consistently refused to guard the new mining machinery from the locals. Now he allows them to train and become more dangerous to my people." The mining man glanced sidewise at West. "I know you initially appointed O'Neil to the expeditionary force because of his experience on Abydos. Perhaps, though, he's had too much experience there-too many contacts. O'Neil is blind to any danger that doesn't come from outside the planet. With this Ra person dead, the possibility of an outside attack seems remote to me. The real problems on Abydos come from disaffected elements in Nagada, not from some bogeymen beyond the StarGate." Again General West nodded, his face still revealing nothing of the thought processes going on behind his bureaucratic mask. "It is true that O'Neil was sent to Abydos because of his familiarity with local conditions." The general's voice held a considering note. "But you raise a reasonable concern. Perhaps he's grown too familiar with the autochthones." "So what are you going to do about him?" Lockwood wanted to know. "I still need someone on site who knows the terrain and the people," West finally said. "But it behooves me to recognize your own requests for an additional military presence on Abydos. If we add counterinsurgency forces to our troop strength on Abydos, we'll need an officer of sufficient rank to take command."

Lockwood nodded as if he were hearing the judgment of Solomon. Behind this respectful facade, however, he nearly quaked with fiendish glee. Do it, West, he silently urged the general, kick the bastard downstairs!

On Abydos, Daniel Jackson finished another

lecture for his English class. As the students left the room, he beckoned Skaara over. "What's this I hear about some kind of fighting out in the desert?" he asked. Rumors were flying around Nagada about the perfidy of UMC, about destruction of mining equipment. If he hoped to be useful in his new position of adviser to the Elders, Daniel had to listen to them all and boil out the truth. After a week of fantastic stories the young academic was prepared to take anything he heard with a grain of salt. When Skaara began telling of the training ground in the desert, of the war games, Daniel's eyes went wide. This story went far beyond any of the apocalyptic tales he'd heard in the city. "You had maybe five friends who survived the fighting against Ra," Daniel said.

"How could you "A lot of other young men joined us," Skaara interrupted.

"More and more keep joining every day. By now we have more than a hundred training regularly. Some of your friends have helped us-the tall one who yells-" "Not O'Neil," Daniel protested. "No, the other one-Kawalsky." Even with his English lessons, Skaara had tough going with the lieutenant's name. "And the quick one-Feretti. They set problems out for us and judge how we fight one another." Daniel shook his head in disbelief. "You've got a pair of combat Marines training you?" "Even the one in the black hat came to watch us fight-O'Neil himself," Skaara said proudly. "But that snake Lockwood turned up. I think he hopes to make trouble for the colonel." When he saw Daniel's surprise at his use of the title, Skaara explained. "That's what the other two call him." Daniel tried to get the conversation back on track.

He'd just discovered that his brother-in-law had organized an army-however small, this was a first for the natives of Abydos. They might not have much in the way of modern equipment, but knowing Skaara, they certainly had spirit. They'd also benefited from the training of two Marines who'd fought shoulder to shoulder with them against Ra.

"Okay," Daniel finally said. "You've answered two of my questions-what and how. But that leaves one that may be the most important. Why are you getting ready for a war?" He was almost afraid he'd get a speech of the "kill the foreign devils" variety. Although, he privately admitted, some of it might be justified. In mere months UMC had generated more hatred than Ra had managed to stir up across the millennia. But Skaara surprised him again. "In the days of Ra, we had only rumors-vague traditions of other worlds beyond the StarGate. When you arrived, you made those traditions real-and you helped us destroy the god who sucked our blood for so long. We were free." "So what is it? Are you afraid some of Ra's stooges will come back through the StarGate? That's what O'Neil and all the soldiers are guarding against." Skaara nodded, a little shamefaced. "At first we were like boys playing at warriors. I did establish a watch on the great pyramid. But we had a dream-a larger hope. When you taught us to read the hidden writings, we learned more about those other worlds." He spread his hands, trying to communicate his feelings instead of just the words. "We have brothers out there, Daniel. They're still slaves to Ra, or the vultures who served him. Our brothers don't even know that the monster is dead. But we hope to change that." Daniel stared, wondering when Skaara's almost delicate features had hardened and matured with such purpose. "Change?" he echoed. "How?" "I didn't want to approach you until we were ready,"