Rebellion (11 page)

Skaara said. "You're the one who knows the StarGate best. We know you could find the keys to other worlds-Ombos, Wefen-perhaps even Tuat, the home of the gods. Then we could take the struggle to those living enslaved-and bring them freedom!" Daniel stood almost slack-jawed in dismay. This is what happens when you get the reputation as the local wise man, he thought. Often enough before the advent of UMC, he'd stolen off to the pyramid and the hall of the StarGate. In daydreams he'd manipulated the enigmatic twentyfoot-tall torus. The face of the Abydos gate was carved with completely alien figures, representing constellations as seen in the local sky. Some Sha-'uri had taught him.

Others had been lost in the tides of local history. Nonetheless, Daniel had fantasized about shifting the chiseled figures into new configurations, opening the doorway to unknown worlds. But it had been mere fancy. Daniel hadn't even experimented. And with the coming of the Earthlings he had avoided the portal. O'Neil would have had a stroke at the idea of opening the window of Earth's vulnerability any wider. And, of course, UMC would want no interruption on its EarthAbydos lifeline. Even if he had experimented, there was the problem of finding the right constellation configurations out of the quadrillions of possible combinations. Daniel's probability math was a bit rusty, but he quickly figured that he'd have better luck guessing the numbers for a multimillion-dollar lottery. "Skaara." Daniel took a moment, trying to let the young man down as gently as possible. "You were there when we found the pillar engraved with the cartouche holding the coordinates for Earth. From our troubles then you must know how hard it is to find the routes between StarGates." Skaara's face fell.

"But, Daniel," he said, "your wisdom-" "I'm merely a scholar," Daniel quickly interrupted. "I'm not Ra. And I'll tell you honestly, I could spend all the rest of my life trying to find

StarGate coordinates for somewhere, anywhere, and not find the key to another world." Bitter disappointment showed on Skaara's downcast face.

Daniel uncomfortably cleared his throat. The people here should know better than to bestow him with infallibility. Surely they'd seen enough of his klutziness in dealing with the real world. Children still did imitations of his chicken impersonation from his first meal with Kasuf.

The people of Abydos had had no knowledge of barnyard fowl. Their feast food of choice was a pigsized lizard, broiled whole in its skin. To Daniel the delicacy had tasted like chicken. In trying to convey that message to Kasuf, he'd resorted to pantomime. Even today kids flapped their arms and called "Bwark! Bwark!" when he walked by. So why, with such knowledge of his shortcomings, did Kasuf, the Elders ... and now Skaaraexpect him to be unerring in his answers? The answer left a cold hollow in the pit of Daniel's stomach. They're facing greater unknowns than their culture has ever dealt with before. They need to believe.

"Besides," Daniel finally said, "you may not need to take your struggle to other worlds. We may have more than enough struggle around here before too long." Beneath the base of the renovated battleship, Ptah watched his vacuum-suited technicians moving like a flock of ungainly storks. He had cut local gravity control to facilitate the installation of the ship's drive units. The minuscule pull of Tuat the-moon had allowed his skeleton crew to hoist and maneuver the huge

instrumentalities for lift and stardrive. But they weren't used to movement in near zero G, and gladly fled when he announced that he was personally taking on the job of tuning the drives. Ptah turned in annoyance to find his head technician still standing beside him. "I realize my idiom is sometimes antique," the godly engineer said. "What part of my instructions did you fail to comprehend?" "Lord," the technician replied, "I know that it was in a test such as this that your corporeal form was almost destroyed. I thought"-he swallowed his words-"I wish to serve you by attending to this task myself." "Ah."

Ptah's voice was almost gentle as he inquired, And how many times have you calibrated stardrive units of this size, worthy servant?" "I-"

Again, the technician's voice failed him. "Never have I done the operation, sire. But I have studied the relevant instructions-" "There will be numerous guards aboard this conveyance when it sets off for Abydos, not to mention their leader, the great goddess Hathor. I do not think we should risk their lives on inexperience, even inexperience that has studied the relevant instructions. Go. Enter the docking station, proceed to the next dome, and continue with the fabrication of the external controls. I wish all to be in readiness when I return." With a bow and a worried frown, Ptah's lieutenant made his exit. The calibration of the drives was a grueling chore, best undertaken in minimal gravity and near-vacuum. Perversely, Ptah found his cyborg body was far better suited to the labor. His mechanical arm could control tool movements to millionths of an arc. His flesh body had failed in a minute adjustment, triggering a flawed circuit that should have been inert. The drive unit had blasted for a nanosecond-with Ptah and his crew deep within the killing radius. Ptah made his final connections in each of the four corners of the empty pyramid. Then he entered the docking station, making his way to the external control center. His servant had done well. The center was already in operation, a holographic image of the docked battleship hovering over the heads of the operations crew. "Disengage from the docking station," Ptah ordered.

On the image above, close-ups appeared of the clamps that had anchored the battleship to the stone structure for millennia. The refurbished mechanisms retracted smoothly. "Energize drive." Ptah's voice sounded almost dry as he gave the order. Hands danced across control panels. An eerie glow lit the golden quartzose sides of the pyramid ship. It seemed to leak from within. "Lift!" Ptah commanded. The glow from the ship intensified as the vast bulk of the vessel rose gracefully into the air. Lethal radiation reflected off the polished stone of the docking station. Thanks to the lack of atmosphere, there was no thunder to accompany the drive's operation. But dust and debris from the renovation project blew away at the dreamlike speeds of low gravity. And even from the distance of the next pyramid dome over, Ptah and his technicians could feel the shaking transmitted through the moonlet's stony crust. Its glow almost too intense for human eyes, the resurrected battleship climbed smoothly into space until even the holographic imaging system recorded it as one more star in the black satin sky-albeit a balefully glaring star. "At this point stardrive translation would be effected," Ptah announced. "But that test will await the arrival of the ship's full crew. Bring the barque back to station and dock." He cast a glare around at his jubilant navigation trainees. "And try to be careful not to scratch anything." Ra's empire had never been a participatory democracy. But in the absence of a head god, the warrior godlings had taken to the expedient of council. Hathor arrived at the meeting chamber with a small retinue-and last, as befitted the leader of the most powerful faction on Tuat. In the intervening months, she had expanded her power by co-opting rivals or killing them in single combat, and elevating members of her clique to fill the vacancies. Some dangerous adversaries abandoned the cockpit of Tuat's politics, retreating to the safety of their home fiefs. They had not been eliminated, but they had been neutralized as long as Hathor kept tight control of the StarGate on the surface of Tuat-the-world.

Success had left Hathor with a host of restless allies ready to turn on her at the slightest misstep, as well as one major enemy. Ram-headed Khnum had fought a rear-guard action against Hathor's march to power.

With Hathor's every victory, Khnum's ranks swelled as frightened lesser gods joined his confederates. And when Hathor killed a great god, there were always some members of the conquered god's factions-favorites of the deceased leader, or very loyal followers-who turned to Hathor's main rival to gain their revenge. Hathor didn't mind having all her enemies in one camp. Her last duel had delivered her a majority on the council.

That fact, and the report of the successful drive test, impelled her to make public her plans. Hathor didn't kid herself. She knew that a couple of godlings had established effective intelligence operations. At least two of Khnum's followers-and THREE of her own-were merely waiting for her to leave for Abydos. Then they would make their own snatches for Tuat. Such opponents didn't worry Hathor. The best of the would-be overlords' troops would accompany her to Abydos. No, the real problem was Khnum, and how he would react.... "My lords," she addressed the assemblage, "I have important news. Today at the third hour my people successfully demonstrated the refurbished drives on Dome Five, formerly the battleship Ra's Eye." A hologram filled the room, showing details of the liftoff. "Ah," commented ape-headed Hapi, one of the minor gods who knew of the work in progress on the old vessel. "And here we all thought it was a Tuat-quake, or a meteor impact." Khnum, however, surged through the THREE-dimensional representation, eyes wild with fury. He was a slender, handsome man, with whipcord muscles. They bunched across his chest and arms as he confronted Hathor. "I thought perhaps you were establishing your own fortress in that dome when you dispossessed the others who lived there," he began. Hathor smiled at the notion of pinning herself down on an airless moon under a dome vulnerable even to blast-lances. What could Khnum be thinking of "But to reactivate devices forbidden by Ra-" Here was the true problem among the wouldbe successors. Even as they fought to assume Ra's throne, they could not escape the playing field where the former head god had penned them. Oh, she understood Khnum's agitation. With a working spaceship at her command, the godlings' fief defenses-a watch or even a mine at the StarGate-had been sidestepped. Khnum might have the cream of his forces at his side, but the planet that formed his power base was now vulnerable to attack. Hathor ground on over Khnum's objections. "The battleship has been recommissioned to search for Ra and discover his fate. Although I will command the expedition to Abydos, I call upon all here to provide detachments of your best warriors for the effort. In that way we can field the largest possible force-and, of course, each of the gods here present will have observers on the scene." "Enough!" Khnum burst out. "Not only does the demon goddess threaten us all with her forbidden warship, she expects us, her rivals, to provide forces for our own undoing!" The ram god's hand went to his pectoral necklace, plucking loose one of the hanging decorations. The seeming doodad pulled free to reveal itself as the gold and jewel-encrusted handle of a throwing knife. The thin blade, however, was plain utilitarian steel. "Die, you usurping bitch!" Khnum howled, hurling the blade. Hathor moved with economical violence. She seized Hapi, the too wise godling who'd commented on her ship tests, and spun him into the path of the knife. It sank into his heart. Even as Hathor's human shield sagged, Khnum plucked a new jeweled dagger. Hathor raised her right hand palm out, almost in a warding gesture. But the move revealed that she, too, wore dangerous jewelry. A tracery of gold "ires ran around the back of her hand. They came together in her palm, creating the setting for a marble-sized mottled black jewel that glowed with a baleful light. Before Khnum could hurl his second blade, Hathor unleashed a rush of energy that hit the ramgod like a blast of cyclonic wind. He hurtled backward until he struck a wall, then oozed downward to a seated position. Hathor was on him before Khnum could even exert some semblance of control over his stunned muscles. He could only look helplessly upward as the hand with that damnable jewel came down in contact with his shaven head. Every one of Ra's servants knew of his punishment jewels, bizarre offshots of the technology from the StarGates themselves. But rather than reassembling one's component molecules across space,- the black gem rearranged body molecules. Ra had used the glowing stone to turn failed servants' bones to water. Of course, the process killed the recipient. Khnum was a strong man, but his whole body began to shudder and spasm as the gemstone exerted its awful effect. His eyes bulged as his very brain began to boil off. His arms, no longer under his own control, made little spastic motions. Air rushed from his lungs through a constricted throat in a bubbling, coughing rattle. As Hathor pressed the deadly stone ever harder into Khnum, the ram god's head became spongy under her hand. He drooped to the floor. Hathor dropped to one knee, maintaining the contact until at last the once great Khnum lay still and literally boneless at her feet. "I will name a successor at my earliest convenience," the goddess announced to the silenced assemblage. Her hand rose to give them one last glimpse of the deadly stone. Then she curved her fingers over what had been Ra's personal weapon. "See to the preparations for your guard detachments." There was not even a whisper of dissent as she left the chamber.

Jack O'Neil's first warning that a new commander had even been contemplated for the Abydos expeditionary force was the appearance of an Army one-star general in his command tent. "At ease, Colonel." The officer drew a thick envelope from the breast pocket of his olive drab battle dress. "Francis Keogh, brigadier general, U.S. Army." Keogh slapped the papers with more than necessary force on O'Neil's desk. The movement brought prominence to the West Point ring on the general's hand, its heavy gold sounding a muted timpani against the wood. "These orders second your troops to my command," Keogh went on briskly. "You will remain as second-in-command, under my orders." He glanced around the tent. "I believe we can leave the paperwork-signing for stores and all that for later." Keogh finally looked O'Neil in the eye-his own eyes were a surprisingly bright blue, set deep under massive orbital ridges on either side of a sharp, beak-like nose. In the intensity of their gaze Keogh's eyes were like a pair of lasers mounted in twin caves-with the jut of his nose acting as range finder. The general's face was craggy more than handsome, and his expression was not a pretty one. "I want two of your men-Kawalsky and Feretti-here. Now!" With a sick feeling in his gut O'Neil passed the call to the guard outside the tent.