Chapter 3 - City of Marduk
The
alien warriors stood no five paces away from him, up on the dam that
also served as a road between the villages and irrigated fields. He
could see him clearly through the tall, thick plants. The peasant
struggled and twisted in his arms, forcing him to apply an even more
iron grip on the young man. One rubber gloved fist closed his mouth
tight, the other both of his arms behind his back. The fear and
adrenalin gave him strength, far more strength than he normally had.
Strangely enough, his mind was calm, as was the breathing under his
mask. If anything, he felt detached from what he did and what was
happening around him. He saw, he did, he realized, but he felt
nothing. Beneath him, he youth's eyes were widening, the twisting was
getting more erratic. Realizing as much with a more scientific
interest than anything else, he spurred his muscles further into
action, raising the young man from the ground like a piece of wood so
that his twitching limbs did not splash on the water they stood
in.
On the dam, the Jaffa warrior had moved to the opposite side
of the fields. He did not take his eyes off the grey-armoured man and
his comrades. There had to be comrades; there always were. That much
he had painfully learned during the past hours. Hours? Had it really
just been hours? It already felt like he had been on the run for
days. He unconsciously touched the holster on his right side. The
weapon was armed and ready, but it was his last clip. His other three
clips now were contained in half a dozen staff carrying bodies.
He
was so intent on watching his surroundings that it took him some
moments to realize that the struggling had stopped. Wide, dead eyes
stared accusingly at him, and accusation that did not touch him.
Slowly, he let the body slide into the knee-deep water and squeezed
it between a truss of really large plants to hide it even more. There
were still voices coming from the dyke, among them the thrice-damned
'Jaffa, kree!', but they were moving away from him, slowly.
Waiting
till they had almost become inaudible, he scurried back to the narrow
elevated path that ran through the fields, ducking low. His feet
swiftly carried him further towards his goal, faster than the enemy,
he dared to hope.
Three of them had remained outside the
palace, darting into a side road at a wink of Ishkent Riever before
the rest of the troop had entered the massive inner-city complex.
Using their binoculars it had not taken them long to figure out
trouble was brewing, a feeling the became very obvious once the jets
raced past their heads and made the city folk flee in horror. Then
those warriors had poured out of palace, and before he and his
comrades could even figure out what was going on the shooting had
started.
It had been a random razzia, the grey-clad warriors
unleashing those glowing energy bolts from their staffs into the
panicking people like the fists of an angry god - or a sociopathic
four year old throwing a temper tantrum. By ill luck, the enemy found
them before their radio operator could set off a call to the second
team.
From that point on, it had been a running battle. Tamati had fallen two blocks away from the city gates, struck by three bolts in the back. Goyathay had died holding them back at the gates, killing them like an angry god with aimed automatic rifle fire until all his clips had been spent. With his dying breath he had taken some with him with the grenades he had left him. He prayed the sacrifice had been worth it. Maybe an hour, and he would be back at the artifact. The people there would know what to do.
xxxxx
Enheduana. That was the name of the planet. In the light of their captivity and torture, such trivia was easily forgotten. They had been stripped of their gear, beaten, tortured and questioned. How much each of them had told their capturers, nobody could say. Still, before being taken, the man named 'Catoose Nanook' had broken a seal on that metal briefcase he had been carrying, and Patar Tane had smiled when the contents of that briefcase had gone up in hot magnesium flames.
The torture had been harder on Zech Wapasha and his civilian friends. While the soldiers all had been more or less distraught when they had been thrown back into the pits, their intense training as commando troopers and parachutists in the army's special operations division had steeled them against the horrors of the interrogation chambers. Nothing like this could be said about the scientists that had come through the gate to Enheduana. All were in a state of shock. Most had been bruised and beaten and had suffered some injuries none could really see right now. More so, the harsh treatment and the application of that thrice-damned hand device that inflicted great pain and forced the poor soul it was used on to follow the will of the user had wreaked havoc on the state of mind of pretty much all of them.
Most were seeking solitude, a state not easily achieved in the crowded and stinking pits full of people. Some were crying uncontrollably, others just stared at the ceiling. Tane's soldiers did their very best to help them while trying to hide their own bruises and haunting memories.
"Are you allright?" He had not noticed Ishkent Riever stepping besides him. The man seemed as calm as ever, his empty eyes still showing not a hint of emotion. His face was badly bruised, though, his thin lips burst at three different spots. If he felt much pain, he did hide it well.
"I'm afraid, but not too badly hurt," he said in a voice as steady as he could manage. "However, I fear for the others." The shock of torture and captivity had hit him less hard than most of his colleagues, even if only slightly so. The conversation he had had that evening about why their ancestors had buried the artifact had unconsciously prepared part of his mind that some things they might find would be less than pleasant.
Enheduana. He had learned the name from other prisoners in the slave pits of Marduk, and there were certainly enough of both, slave pits and prisoners within them. Their crimes ranged from imagined 'blasphemy' to not being able to pay taxes to real crimes like assault and theft. For that, they were to be slaves to the 'gods', to that illustrous couple beneath the canopy that resided atop the large ziggurat. The heavy hitters apparently, the rapists and murderers, were less lucky than that. Those were left to rot in the sun, in iron cages high above the ground, without food or water.
"What does the
Commander plan to do?" he finally asked Riever.
"We are
still assessing our options, but I'd lie if I said we had many at our
disposal," he said in all honesty. "Right now we are
checking for an escape opportunity. The men are trying to find weak
points in the cages," he leaned closer.
Zech could see that
he was right. While the soldiers did look after the civilians, they
also made their rounds and checked the walls, the doors, the
materials used and their condition.
Their conversation was
interrupted when the door to the upper floor was pushed open and a
line of Jaffa come marching down, stopping in front of their cell,
which in fact was just a large, iron-barred metal cage lit by
torches.
"Bring me those that came through the chappa'ai!"
a tall warrior commanded in an imposing baritone. His skin was pale,
and a black tattoo adorned his forehead.
"The great Rustam
has ordered you to be questioned again! Step forward, and be brought
to justice!"
Slowly, the Maquinnan soldiers stepped in
front of the others, their features easily distincted from the rest
of the prisoners by the green and brown suits that they had retained.
Ishkent Riever also left the professor's side and joined them. The
lead Jaffa walked down the lined-up men, looking each into the eyes.
Apparently the man saw something he did not like in Riever's
utterly empty eyes. He barked an order to the others, and of the six,
four stepped forward and lowered their staffs, their ends buzzing
with the typical sound that indicated those rayguns were now armed.
Ishkent Riever's view darted to them just for the brink of a second.
The lead 'Jaffa' before him grabbed his staff and swung it into a low
curve to knock the Raevan soldier of his feet. Riever's expression
never changed. But in the middle of the warrior's swing, the gaunt
soldier drove the man's nose bone into his skull with his right hand
while his left grabbed the staff and armed it, lowering it against
the four grey-clad warriors besides him. The forehead-tattooed man
slumped down on the ground, blood shooting from his nose, and fire
shooting from Riever's staff, putting a smoldering wound into the
next man's chest.
Before they could even react, the other soldiers were on them, turning their lack of arms into an advantage against the clumsiness of the staff weapons in close quarters, taking the Jaffa down in deadly hand to hand combat. The two guards that had stood at attention on the steps to the upper levels rushed to their aid, and a Raevan soldier fell to the ground, killed by an energy bolt. Their advanced was met with fire from their dead comrades' weapons, taking them down.
For a few moments, there an
absolute silence reigned in the slave cages, before a wailing of the
other prisoners began.
"What have you done!" "They
will kill us all now!" "Gods, have mercy on us!"
"Rustam, bless us!"
A shot from Ishkent Riever's staff
weapon silenced them all again.
"You can all die and rot down here, for all I care. But join us, fight with us, and there is a chance you will be free again. Freedom or servitude, it's your choice!" He whirled around and destroyed the locks on the opposite cage, and the other soldiers did the same with the other filled cages.
"Choose!"
xxxxx
He could hear the battle long before he saw it. It was already late afternoon, and against the backdrop of the huge red sun the energy bolts from the Jaffa weapons' looked like angry fireflies to him, converging on the upper platform of the ziggurat where the gate was located, where they had arrived - and where it had all begun. Crawling through the irrigation trenches running parallel to the road that lead away from the temple site, he carefully approached the site of the firefight to take a look before taking action.
Apparently the vanguard of the alien warriors had made it there before him. He called himself a fool for daring to hope otherwise. After all, he had been hiding in the greens while they had the open road for themselves. Still, the vanguard, for whatever fervor its warriors had in their hearts, was stuck on the ground level all around the ziggurat, kneeling and shooting at the pillars and the men between and behind those from the edge of the square. A body clad in the brown and green NBC-suit of the Raevan Army lay sprawling in the middle of the steps, limbs twisted and head turned in a grotesque fashion. He did not have to strain his eyes to see what had killed him, though. The burn marks were easily visible where the energy bolts had eaten through the rubber and composite materials of the protective suit.
Much to his satisfaction, however, more than a dozen grey-armoured bodies accompanied it at the bottom of the steps, and half a dozen more lay silent in a circle the his left where a hand grenade had stopped them from ever being a danger again. Still, while they had obviously become more cautious, their spirits had not been broken. Less could be said for himself. He had clung to the illusion that all would be fine if he just reached the ziggurat and his comrades there.
Still, his frustration changed to anger, then to cold rage as the energy weapon's fire intensified once again. He chose the closest Jaffa. The alien warriors were all occupied with unleashing their weapons against the hardly seen Maquinnans while his comrades did their very best to suppress any Jaffa attempt to storm the steps with aimed automatic fire. The sounds of battle made it impossible for the Jaffa to hear him close in on him. Strong hands grabbed the grey-armoured warrior and yanked his head around with brutal force.
Having broken the man's neck, he pulled the body back into the field, hoping that nobody had noticed his stunt. With the ziggurat in the centre, it was hard to spot him. Then he moved on to the next man and pulled his sidearm from his holster.
The 'Raevan Army Standard Type Six' was a large bore pistol, calibre .48, with a clip holding eight rounds. As with every side arm, even trained marksmen would find it hard to hit moving targets more than twenty paces away, but within those twenty paces the Type 6 had a devastating effect even on the armoured staff bearers. The round had a higher portion of lead than the high-speed rifle ammonution had. That meant upon impact the round started to deform as it entered the body. Horrific wounds were the result.
He was
less than two metres away from his target away when he pulled the
trigger. The Jaffa's face dissolved into a fine, red mist and bits of
splintered teeth and bone. Before the man dropped dead to the ground,
he had stepped aside. The next Jaffa had been too close to avoid
detection. When the warrior turned in surprise to his dead comrade,
he was already at him. Before the staff weapon could rise, he had put
two rounds into the man's chest, the bullets destroying the vital
organs beyond repair.
Throwing himself around, he evaded an energy
bolt at hair's width and emptied the remainder of his rounds into the
Jaffa who had unleashed it and went for the now faceless warrior's
weapon. Kneeling down, he took aim as fast as he could as now the
other Jaffa warriors were becoming aware of his presence. Lightning
bolts flashed by his position, accompanied by angry - and surprised -
shouts in an alien tongue. He had never had much sympathy for people
shooting from the hip, like many a 'hero' in the telescreen dramas
was shown doing. And with that clumsy staffs it was testament to the
Jaffas' training that they even managed to hit the broadside of a
barn shooting those things held like spears. He ignored another
flurry of bolts barely missing him and placed the rear end of the
weapon over his shoulder, peering down the shaft and carefully
levelling it towards the next enemy. The trigger was a simple button,
and he closed his eyes in surprise when the energy bolt materialized
at the front end. It raced across the square and hit another grey
clad warrior in the throat, almost decapitating the man in the
process.
In less than a minute he had reduced the remaining Jaffa warriors from twenty to fifteen, and with the suppression barrage against the upper platform gone, the Raevan paratroopers emerged again from their cover, taking advantage of the confusion below. High power rifle bursts cut the grey armoured enemies down, hand grenades tore them to pieces. It was all over in less than two minutes.
xxxxx
The slave pits were a massive complex, three underground levels connected by steps, locked by heavy iron-framed doors. It was place designed to instil despair and desperation into those kept their, and it was nigh impossible for a single person to escape from them, or even contemplate escape. As every prison, it was built to keep people inside, but there were few prisons that took the risk of armed prisoners outside their cells or cages into consideration, and if anything could be said about the Goa'uld, then that they were not exactly eager to go with the times.
Some of the prisoners from their level had joined them, though not many. After they had taken the next level in a raid that would have made any Raevan special ops drill Chief proud, the number of followers had swollen up considerably, especially when the news of their success had reached their level of origin again. Once they stormed the first subterranean level, the flood of unshackled slaves become a burden that slowed their advance and endangered their element of surprise. Their window of opportunity was closing one way or the other, as if would not take the rest of the guards long to realize that one of theirs with explicit orders of their lord and commander had gone missing. That, and they had to take care of their own civilians. Professor Zech Wapasha did relatively well, others... not so much.
At first, Patar Tane had been worried about the risk of infection when they had to hand in their gas masks and water purifying chemicals, but that worry had soon been replaced with the greater task of getting them back home alive.
The upper level
of the slave pits was a simple brick building, manned by only a
handful of guards. Two Raevan soldiers disguised as Jaffa warriors
entered the chambers first. It took the gathered guards a moment to
realize they were not looking at their comrades, a moment the
paratroopers used to gun them down indiscriminately and to secure the
perimeter. It was the first time luck shone down upon them when they
found their gear that had conveniently been stored in the anteroom.
The Raevan's rapidly got rid of their captured weapons and jumped
into their own kits, handing the Jaffa staffs to other
prisoners.
Others were already looting the gun lockers in the
guard rooms, coming back with staffs of their own and smaller,
greyish handguns. But with the fight momentarily over, nobody did the
first step.
Again, it was Ishkent Riever who took the
initiative.
"You can go now, go where ever you want. Hide in
the city, hide in the countryside. Or you can come with us. We'll
fight our way to the gate, the chappa'ai. Help us, and you can escape
to a place the false god can never harm you again!"
He marched outside, where the city of Marduk was still oblivious to the battle that would come.
xxxxx
The activation of the artifact had come unsuspected, and that had been the first hint of trouble Constable Tarvon Comalla had received. In military operations, surprises almost always meant trouble. The activation of the gate from the other side had been scheduled for almost seven hours later, giving the expedition a full day to establish themselves and then report back. Having them dial back now meant that things had gone awry, a feeling that was validated when the first men coming through the gate carried dead and wounded comrades and expedition members.
It took them all some time to tell their tales, time he knew he had to invest to know what he was dealing with, and still it was time during which he did not deal with the foe that had attacked his men. When they had finished, it dawned on Comalla that this would be about more than just trying to rescue some men. It would be a decision about war and peace between worlds.
"What do we do now, Sir?" the man that had escaped all the way from the city back through the artifact asked in a tired, but expectant voice.
"You ask me what we'll do?" he growled impatiently, then determination washed away his anger. "I'll tell you what we'll do, boy: We're going back in - with full force!"
