Rebellion (26 page)
An instant later, they were gone. The battle to reach the bridge finally resolved itself into alternate slogging and slugging matches. The raiding party would haul itself up another flight of stairs to engage in increasingly more desperate battles with increasingly more frantic Horus guards. Daniel was panting, his legs were numb, and he suspected he was developing a blister on his thumb from triggering his blast-lance. The numbers of the boarding party had dropped as more of their members had fallen. They were down to the core group of original adventurers: O'Neil, Kawalsky, Daniel, Sha'uri, and Skaara, plus a scattering of Skaara's boy militia members. The ranks of the Horuses had thinned as well. Both attackers and defenders were now armed with blast-lances, though the practical-minded O'Neil wasn't averse to using home-grown technology-like hand grenades-when the enemy was too well barricaded.
They were encountering breastworks on every level now, as the numbers of upward-leading stairways decreased. There was also less room for the Horus guards to run, as floor space became measurably more and more constricted. Daniel dazedly realized that they must be near the top. The deck they were on was essentially only a large room with a few structural members. Four stairways, one in each corner, gave access from the level below. But this floor's version of the Alamo was constructed in the center of the room, a square bastion comprising furniture, equipment cases, and what appeared to be control consoles torn from the floor. Less than a half-dozen hawk-masked guards fired blast-lances at the intruders, who were shooting back from each of the four stairwells.
"What are they defending so hard in there?" Daniel muttered as he sent THREE consecutive pulses through a gap in the wreckage which one of the guards had been using as a firing slit. "The last way out," Kawalsky replied. "I think it's a circular staircase there in the middle of the room." Two of the guards fell, then THREE. Their remaining fellows were firing almost wildly, attempting to keep the intruders' heads down.
"There should be more of them." O'Neil almost seemed to be complaining.
"Unless they're preparing a real greeting upstairs." A muffled cry came from the deck above, and the guards still on their feet bolted up the circular stairs. All THREE were cut down as soon as they rose above the level of their concealing barricade. O'Neil advanced with care-they'd had experience of guardsmen playing possum to leap up and drill the unwary. But the THREE masked figures in the square of furniture were definitely dead. The Marine colonel cautiously reconnoitered the circular stairs. Nobody shot down at him. "Everybody stay in your corners," he warned. Then he took their last two grenades and tossed them up. Daniel watched as O'Neil leapt for cover on the far side of the barricade. Then the grenades went off with a flash, a bang, and a spray of shrapnel that would have diced anybody on the deck above.
"Now!" O'Neil yelled. He was the first up the stairs. Kawalsky was second, but somehow Daniel moved his numb legs quickly enough to be third onto the starship's bridge. The place was empty-except for a gorgeously formed female standing in the cyclinder of blue radiance that indicated a matter transmitter in action. The woman's lithe body was clad in a warrior's kilt and pectoral necklace, and her face was masked in a gold-crystal helmet in the shape of a cat. It was over. The last udajeet of her forlorn hope attack had been blown from the sky. The last crew person evacuated-those in the engine room had their own matter transmitter. Even the last Horus guards had disappeared for the StarGate in a rush
of blue radiance-except for the small blocking force below, who probably wouldn't be able to disengage in time anyway. Hathor called to them, and saw the THREE cut to ribbons before they could reach the top of the stairs. Now she was the last aboard Ra's Eye. She pressed the gem control on Khnum's necklace, and was bathed in azure radiation. Outside her blue cocoon, flashes erupted on the bridge as the invaders prepared their way with some sort of bombs. Still Hathor held off her transit until the raiders actually confronted her. They stared, which was only to be expected. But Hathor was staring as well. The third invader to enter the bridge was a kind of man she'd never seen before. When Ra's telepathic call for subjects had gone out, it had drawn most heavily on the populations nearest to the site of his proposed capital.
ProtoEgyptians, Berbers, Nubians, and the inhabitants of Arabia and the Near East heeded his summoning. It never reached northern Europe. So, despite her travels to other worlds of Ra's empire, her brushes with alien races who had also served Ra ... Hathor had never met a man with fair skin and blond hair. "Who-?" This unlikely vision spoke in a language close enough for her to understand. He stared at her cat mask.
"Hathor?" he finally said. She tapped the tumbler switch on her necklace, and her helmet mask disappeared. "Know, Golden Man, that I am Hathor," she said. "We shall meet again. And you and yours shall suffer for this humiliation you have given me. The matter transmitter finally cycled, and she was pulled downward to the StarGate room, down below the surface of Abydos, faster than the speed of light. "Who the hell was that?" Kawalsky said, slackjawed. "Hathor," Daniel said. "Depending on which legends you follow, she's either the goddess of love or slaughter." "Well," Kawalsky said judiciously, "I guess she's got the build for either job." The matter transmitter was silent. "I want as many people on that medallion as can fit safely," O'Neil said, stepping over to the Khnum statue. "I guess this is the Down button." He glanced at the group crowding the beaten copper plate. "And leave room for me."
They arrived in the room of the stone pyramid devoted to the matter transmitter just moments after Hathor had vanished. But as they marched on the room of the StarGate, Daniel heard male voices raised in argument. "The bitch has left us here to die!" one man cried. "Destroy the StarGate, and we're trapped here. If the invaders don't kill us, thefellahin will tear us limb from limb!" "And if we follow Hathor-well, that's suicide, too," another voice replied. "And it may be more unpleasant than a soldier's death." The Horus guards didn't have time for any more argument. The raiders stormed the room and blew them away.
Then Kawalsky moved to cut the power leads for the light blast-cannon aimed at the StarGate's base. "I guess they were supposed to trigger this when we arrived," O'Neil said. Daniel nodded. "Except they got too involved in arguing about their own survival." The colonel checked his blast-lance. "Jackson, you and Sha'uri stay here to direct the next wave. Kawalsky, myself, and the others will be going right through. If we come out right on the bad guys' asses, they won't be able to do too much damage at Creek Mountain." Daniel grabbed O'Neil's arm. "If you step through there, you won't be going to Creek Mountain. You won't end up on Earth at all." He pointed at the carved symbols clamped in the seven chevrons which dotted the outer ring of the gate. "Trust me, I know the coordinates for Earth. And that's not what the gate is now set for." Daniel began patting himself down. "Anybody got a pen and paper?"
he asked. "We've got to get a record of this combination. Then I'll set the gate for home." He glanced around at the Abydans in the room-the vast majority. "I mean, planet Earth." Jack O'Neil stepped through the StarGate to deliver his report, and nearly got his head blown off by a platoon of Marines with nervous trigger fingers. On the other side of the silo blast doors, General West had a regular crisis center going. "You beat the invaders?" he demanded. "I'd say they didn't have enough numbers or machines to rate as an invasion," O'Neil said. "A scouting force maybe. Although if we hadn't been there, what they had would have been enough to reduce Nagada to rubble." "But you beat them," West repeated. "I regret to report that General Keogh died in action," O'Neil said formally. "We took heavy losses-especially in our armor and vehicles. But in the end the enemy was forced to abandon their position and retreat through the StarGate." "Through the StarGate?" West frowned. "But they didn't come here." "No, sir."
O'Neil held out a scrap of paper, hastily scrawled upon. "This is important intelligence, sir. The coordinates for a new StarGate location." He hid a grin. "Jackson says we have to stop thinking of the StarGate as an intercom and remember that it's attached to a whole network. This is a new number we can dial." "If we don't disconnect the phone," West growled. O'Neil glanced around the room and finally saw the traces of fighting. Bullet holes pocked one wall, and the ceiling was fused from the discharge of a blast-lance. "But if we disconnect now, sir, we'll lose the chance to examine the starship the enemy left behind on Abydos." West's eyes tracked his like a pair of antiaircraft cannon.
"A working starship?" he demanded. "Temporarily incapacitated," O'Neil admitted. "Certainly beyond the capacity of an Egyptologist or combat Marine to figure out. You may have to reorganize the StarGate investigation team to make sense of it. And they'll probably need more physicists-and maybe some people from NASA." He allowed a little excitement into his voice. "But think about what we could find, sir-technology a quantum leap ahead of ours. There's a deck full of those antigravity gliders-undamaged. Incredible computers-and just imagine the data they've got stored. Technological processes, information on other star systems-" "Heavy weapons," West interrupted.
O'Neil nodded. To each his own. "How soon can we start moving this ship over here?" West wanted to know. "Ah, sir," O'Neil replied, "maybe you'd better inspect the site before you make plans." West frowned but nodded. "Maybe I should make an on-site evaluation." Then you'll see that the spoils of war won't fit in a truck, O'Neil thought. The problem, he saw, was that the general was still thinking in planetary terms. Once you've been out through the StarGate, your scale of reference changes forever, O'Neil realized. Like it or not, you see a bigger picture.