Rebellion (6 page)

O'Neil left the UMC men to enjoy the lizardly monster that tasted like chicken. Instead, he sought out Daniel. "Watch these guys," he warned quietly. "Their company is connected with the CIA-and they're very used to manipulating things in the Third World." "Well, this is the Fourth World," Daniel responded, but his voice sounded a little hollow. "Why are you acting as great white hunter for these characters?" O'Neil didn't meet Daniel's eyes. "Orders," he replied briefly. The next morning, it was Martin Preston's time to take center stage. "I want to examine the mine workings," the UMC engineer said. "It's hard enough translating the expected tonnage of material from the ancient Egyptian system of weights and measures. How do we know these estimates are on the money?" "They are reduced somewhat from what the locals delivered for Ra," Daniel admitted. "But then, he was liable to kill them if he didn't get enough of the stuff." The UMC men set off with an escort that included O'Neil, Daniel, Kasuf, some other Elders, and Skaara. "I understand this is a pit mine," Preston said as they made their way across the desert into an already scorching morning. "I suppose you'd call it that," Daniel replied. "They bring the ore up from a deep hole in the ground." Ahead of them rose a large, billowing shape-a homespun tent erected on posts as tall as telephone poles. "That's the Tent of Rest," Daniel said. "The workers need both shade and water under these suns." Beyond the tent were the works themselves. A thin line of men and women waited to descend one ladder while a matching line rose from the deep, dust-streaming ravine. The members of the climbing line each carried satchels full of quartzose ore. The satchels on those waiting to descend were empty. Kasuf spoke, and Daniel translated. "They're working with a skeleton crew right now. Most of the miners have been diverted to crop planting and irrigation work." Daniel gave the advance man a lopsided smile. "That's something else they couldn't do in the face of Ra's slave driving." Preston stood at the lip of the ravine, his mouth wide open as he took in the mining operation. The walls of the ravine extended downward for hundreds of feet, with rough ledges carved out at irregular intervals. The only access between levels was by sturdy but crude ladders, built with two lanes for climbing or descent.

The structural members were trunks of whole saplings with the bark removed. The rungs were peeled tree branches. Bearers moved in an antlike stream up and down the ladders, picking up chunks of ore. On the ledges, but often on ladders themselves, workers swung rough picks or mattocks, physically chopping the ore out of the surrounding rock.

"My God," Preston breathed, staring downward. "They told me it was crude

... but this is downright primitive." Sure, O'Neil thought, he's used to seeing Third World mines run on leftover nineteenth-century European technology. This is more like the technical level of sixty centuries B.C. The mining engineer frowned, still staring downward. "Something wrong?" O'Neil asked. "This isn't natural," Preston said. "Of course not," the colonel responded. "They've been digging here for about eight thousand years." "That wouldn't account for this ravine." Preston leaned farther out, making O'Neil hope the man had good balance. "Okay,"

the colonel said, "so there was a fissure here in the first place, and the locals have just enlarged it." But Preston gave him a negative head shake. "There's no natural reason there should be a canyon here in the first place-no water, and this couldn't be done by wind erosion." He exchanged glances with Draven and O'Neil. "Look, I know enough about geology-I'm a mining engineer, for heaven's sake." Preston's eyes returned to the abyss. "It's as though the hand of God gouged a chasm in the rock right where the ore would be. And these folks have been digging and enlarging it ever since." "Not God, but an alien with the powers of a god," O'Neil said somberly. If Ra had weapons to gouge a planet's crust, maybe they'd been lucky that he hadn't expected much trouble on Abydos. The terrestrial visitors had considered Ra's pyramidal spaceship damned huge and impressive. What if that turned out to be a mere yacht? In that case, what would a space battleship look like? "What do you mean, the warships aren't available anymore?" The honeymoon was definitely over in the alliance between Hathor and Ptah.

She was crouched over a worktable in his shop, her clenched fists resting on scarred stone. The creation of a space fleet had been the crowning glory of her influence over Ra. He preferred to exert force through his StarGates, and was reluctant to allow spacecraft even to trusted subordinates. With the StarGates, rebels had nowhere to run.

Even in the back of Hathor's mind was the possibility that in case of defeat, she could take off with her flotilla and establish herself as ruler in some other corner of the universe. Ra did not take kindly to argument, but Hathor had stuck to her point. The Ombos rebels had considerable technology-and they would doubtless have the StarGate targeted. A spaceborne STRIKE proved much less expensive-and it had been successful. Catching up on history since her internment, Hathor had been baffled that the fleet hadn't been used to put down the revolt on Earth. Now she knew why. "Where are the ships?" Hathor demanded. "I'll show you." Ptah turned to a panel and flipped some controls. A holographic image swam into existence. Thoth gave a nervous start when he recognized the scene. It was a supposedly secure crystal-domed gallery where so many clandestine meetings had taken place. Ptah manipulated more controls, and the viewpoint shifted. They now appeared to be looking through the dome at the surface of the moon outside.

Hathor frowned. "What happened to the spaceport?" she demanded. She saw only a single docking station, a rawlooking pyramid of medium size.

Where the others had stood, there were now two pyramid-domes, obviously representing permanent installations. "Look more closely at the additions to the palace," Ptah advised. Hathor examined the image more carefully and realized that despite accretions at their bases, the two new edifices were based on the superstructures of a pair of her old battleships. "After leaving you to your rest, Ra briefly utilized the ships as escorts for his flying palace," Ptah explained. "The only practical purpose he put them to was on Abydos. Ra used the main batteries to gain access to a deposit of the crystal-element." Ptah gave his erstwhile wife a sidelong glance. "But your toys, like your ambitions, troubled Ra. While you slept, he finally decommissioned the vessels." Hathor nodded in silence, well understanding the head god's purpose. Demolishing the ships would deny malcontents any viable chance of escape. "How long would it take to make those vessels spaceworthy again?" "One of them was completely gutted," Ptah said. "The other at least retains a command deck." He glanced at the technicians in the workshop. "We use it as a training center, preparing backup crews for Ra's yacht." "How long?" Hathor persisted. "We could probably refit the drives on one ship. There's also the question of hull integrity. Many access ways were cut in the inner hull, connecting passages within the stone pyramid with companionways in the ship. It would mean a serious patching job. We'd have to remount the offensive batteries, reconnect the fire-control computers, restore life support ... it wouldn't take as long as building a ship from scratch, but a recommissioning effort would require considerable time." They stood in silence for a moment, until Ptah finally gave in to the pressure of the dark eyes on him. "The better part of a year," he said at last. "THREE months," Hathor told him flatly. "It should take me that long to establish my position here. I sincerely hope you can manage your work as swiftly. Your immortality depends upon it." She gave Ptah a smile as artificial as most of his body. "How unfortunate, after surviving as long as you have, that I should lose you over so trivial a matter, husband."

The task of turning a pleasure dome back into a battleship was difficult enough, given the lack of dock-construction facilities. Ra had done away with them millennia ago, and Ptah wasn't one to cry over spilled milk. Still worse from the engineer god's point were the delays attributable to political obstacles. Several of Hathor's rivals maintained suites of apartments in the former battlewagons, or housed their troops in barracks within the construction. These warrior gods were not about to move merely to oblige a strange woman they considered an enemy and an upstart. They'd doubtless become more hostile when they learned the aim of the alterations. In a couple of cases Hathor managed to achieve her aims by negotiation. She even managed to foment a brief internecine war between two wouldbe successors by intermingling their troops in the same barracks. Other faction leaders were more astute or intransigent. They wouldn't move, forcing Hathor to come to blows with them. She was still husbanding her faction's resources and trying to avoid large-scale combat, so she engineered arguments and duels. The net result was several new openings in the godly hierarchy, an attendant swelling of forces in fealty to Hathor, deeper enmity from the surviving warlords, and a clearance of tenants from the old battlewagon. Briskly done, Ptah had to admit. His former wife had lost none of her skills during her long sleep. She was, in fact, well on the way to achieving supremacy on Tuat well within the threemonth timetable she'd established for herself. The job of battleship reconstruction was not going as smoothly. Ptah's efforts suffered from shortages of trained personnel.

Even by stripping all other projects in the empire, he had little more than a skeleton crew available for refitting. He hated to admit it, but the lack of technicians was perhaps a sign that Ra's empire was running down. Certainly of late, the sun god had paid more attention to his warriors than to the constructive side of his governmental establishment. Perhaps it was past time for a successor. But Ptah might have wished for a leader a bit more flexible than Hathor. She'd have no problem making an example of him, in the expectation of encouraging the next Ptah to meet the deadlines she set. The fact that she'd be losing an invaluable technical resource, trained by Ra himself, would not matter at all to her. At least not in the short term. So Ptah was forced for the first time in a few thousand years to devote himself to short-term planning. His technicians worked twelve-hour shifts. He himself got his hands dirty, performing

manual labor while simultaneously managing everyone else's work. When he bothered to check into it, he realized he was getting by on only a couple of hours' sleep each day-one of the advantages of a mechanically assisted body. Even so, the project fell inexorably behind schedule.

Ptah stood in the ruins of an arcaded hall, welding a steel plate across what had been a delicately fashioned archway. Rough welds stood out like scar tissue against the inlaid metalwork of the arch. The craftsman in Ptah cried out against the quick and dirty job. But the plate, ugly as it was, did serve to seal off yet another passageway entrance. While the ship's structural integrity hadn't been compromised by all this peacetime construction, the multifarious openings to adits in the former docking station had turned the vessel's inner hull into a sieve. All such orifices had to be closed. Ptah put down his arc welder. Well, at least that joint should hold against hard vacuum.

Although they wouldn't be able to test for leaks until the engines were up and calibrated. Then there'd be the navigation tests and, finally, physical disengagement from this rock. The odly engineer shrugged that prospect aside as being far distant in the future. He was consulting a holographic plan to see which leak next needed caulking when one of his foremen came down the companionway. "What are my people to do when they're scheduled for two jobs at the same time?" the man complained, pressed beyond tact by exhaustion and the exigency of work. "We can either install those new secondary weapons mounts, or test the fire control for the main batteries," he said bluntly, "We simply can't do both." "Install the new weapons," Ptah replied after a moment's thought.

The foreman stared. "Half those fire-control circuits are original with the ship," he reminded Ptah. "We just patched them into new consoles.

And there aren't any backups." This was unlike his usually perfectionist master. Ptah insisted on redundant systems and extensive cross-testing. But the engineer of the gods only shrugged. "I tried to get a year, expecting to finish the job in half that time," Ptah said.

"But I have only a quarter of a year, which I estimate to be half the time I really need." His ghastly face gave the foreman an even ghastlier smile. "Under those constraints I am expected to present Hathor with a ship that can fly and shoot. I will do so. We must do so." He sent his dubious craftsman off to execute a mass-production job. Given Ptah's already papery voice, the foreman wouldn't be expected to catch his master's muttered comment: "I simply won't warrant how long it will do both." Eugene Lockwood had made himself a reputation in UMC as a site manager who got things done. He prided himself on being equally at home in an office or on the bottom of a mine shaft. But though he tried to keep it off his almost handsome, boy-next-door face, Lockwood found it vaguely off-putting to be working in an office at the bottom of a mine shaft. Or, to be more specific, in the bottom of the missile silo that housed the StarGate to Abydos. He was eager to establish himself on this new planet, to get hands-on. But there were a few million administrative details to be settled on Earth before he could get to work on his new assignment. A major annoyance was dealing with UMC's technical advance man, Martin Preston. Because of his expertise in primitive mining techniques, Preston had been moved to Lockwood's management team as a consultant. Lockwood just hoped the old boy didn't expect his advice to be taken seriously. "You've got to see these people at work to believe it," Preston was saying for about the dozenth time. "I've looked at photos," the manager said dismissively, depriving the engineer of eye contact by looking through some reports. Preston didn't get the hint.

"Pictures don't give any real hint of the scale of the operation," he went on. "And they're doing it all by brute-labor methods. No steam hoists. Not even tracks and ore cars." "Right, right, you've pointed this out." Forgetting himself, Lockwood directed an impatient glare at the engineer. "The people at corporate level tasked me with THREE