I raised my mask before I left the cargo compartment to conceal the tears that I knew had yet to dry, blinking as the holographic interface overlaid itself over my vision. I wasn't precisely sure how it managed to do that now that I no longer had eyeballs - I didn't have corneas upon which to overlay the images. Either my mantle was forcing the light to obey my new physical limitations or Heka had designed this armor with the physical body of an ascended Goa'uld in mind. The armor was old tech, made back when Heka had actually been Heka. Like most old Goa'uld stuff it was about as annoying as it was useful.

Goa'uld devices came in two varieties. The stuff they made for themselves and the ritual objects intended to be used by servitors. The latter was, broadly speaking, idiot proof. It was designed to be so simple and durable that it could be handed to a primitive warrior without any comprehension of written language and still be used effectively. Anyone with two brain cells and an understanding of "point this at the other guy" can use a staff weapon with marginal efficacy.

Stuff that was made by the Goa'uld and for the Goa'uld, however? You've got a better chance of catching the wind with your bare hands than understanding what possesses them to design it that way. It is almost always impractical, absurd, inefficient, and dangerous - and almost invariably custom made. Given their propensity for using technology and ritual magic almost interchangeably, I don't even know how someone would magic could even begin to replicate it and I can't figure out how someone with magic would even be able to try.

The genetic memories of the Goa'uld made them savants, knowledgeable in just about anything you could hope to know. It also meant that their version of "user friendly" required an array of PHDs to understand how to use the damn thing once you have access to it. While I understood the words that the device displayed, I was still trying to get used to the rapid flow of information that was projected at all times. Mostly, I suspected it was my lack of formal schooling rather than anything else. Warnings about atmospheric conditions and chemical pathogens were extremely precise, giving specific metrics and measures of the world around me that didn't translate to much of anything even though I understood the words.

I had figured out that warnings in red were generally bad. So that was at least partially useful. The armor generally provided me with warnings about imminent physical danger about three seconds after any such warnings could actually be acted upon. Bob was pretty sure that was less a design flaw and more my "lemming like sense of self-preservation" and "propensity to be places sane people aren't."

I mention this because it was at roughly this moment that a display I hadn't previously seen appeared in my field of view as I exited the cargo hold. A little red box shimmering in the center of my field of view and obscuring my vision as a loud chirruping klaxon repeated "unknown contact."

I tripped over my own feet, grabbing Ammit's arm to steady myself as I swore angrily. "This useless piece of crap."

"You doing ok there Warden?" The Eater of Sin snorted. "Enlil's flying isn't that bad."

"My flying is impeccable." Enlil groused. "It's this damn relic that's the problem. There is so much dust in the systems that I don't even know how it cleared the doors to the Hangar."

"Well, do the weapons and cloak work?" Ammit inquired, observing me idly as I flipped open my wrist device and wrestled with the controls, trying to figure out which of the icons manipulated the cursor in my HUD.

"Of course they don't work properly. This is a space ship, not a Jaffa weapon. Proper maintenance of the older model hulls was a daily concern, not a matter of generations." Enlil groused, flipping several switches as he spoke - earning another blaring red "system inoperable" warning in my vision as he did so. He turned to the Colonel and switched to his mangled English as he pointed to something in front of the Russian. "Press red button. Triangle."

The Colonel compiled nervously, pressing the triangular button as though worried it might explode the craft if he did so incautiously. Justifiably so, considering the bright sparks that erupted from a wall as he did so. The Colonel said a number of extremely uncharatable, but probably justified, things about Goa'uld technology - pairing them with physically improbable suggestions relating to Enlil's mother before gritting his teeth and asking, "Did that work?"

"Obviously not." Enlil replied in English, his voice uncharacteristically cheeky as he addressed the slightly singed soldier. "Press again."

"Will that work?" Growled the Colonel.

"Probably not." The Babylonian god's eyes flashed with malevolent mirth at his former torturer. " Try anyway."

"Enough Enlil." I commanded in the Goa'uld tongue as I finally found the while cursor and made it dance across my vision. "What is the the status of the ship?"

As I selected the "System Inoperable" warning, it became immediately apparent what was going on. The older model armor could apparently communicate remotely with the ancient ship. Complicated explanations of precisely how busted up the ship was flitted across my vision as Enlil provided plain language explanations for the PHDese that was bouncing around my field of view. "Everything is broken that's our status. We have a hyperdrive, basic atmospherics, and that's about it. There are no shields and no outgoing teleporter - the cloaking device will only work for a few minutes once I turn it on and I'm not sure if it will ever turn on after that."

"Blood of Apep." Ammit groused. "Do the guns work?"

"It's a Scarab class gunship. Obviously the guns work. The rest of this ship could be a smoldering hulk and the guns would still work." The man's thick braided beard clicked as the interwoven jewelry shook, agitated by obvious mirth at the very suggestion. "The Scarab was basically just a way for Ptah to make a weapons system fly. This isn't so much an armed transport as a gun that Ptah decided to build a ship around."

"Ptah loves his guns. Between that and the armor I'm not too worried about what is on the planet. " Ammit manipulated a control panel on the wall, summoning a chair from the ceiling. It descended to a comfortable height for a man to sit in it, as a readout indicating the current charge and functionality of the attached weapon appeared in the bottom left of my HUD next to an icon of a horned scarab.

As I looked from the undersized chair to the extremely oversized Demoness, I wondered how long it had been since she'd been forced to come to terms with the host she'd lost. Hosts were a sore topic for me. As someone who'd been nearly forced into the hell of having my body taken away from me, I couldn't imagine a worse hell. But there wasn't really a way for me to take away the hosts from the Goa'uld without taking a thinking being a casting them into an eternity of paralytic limitation from what they'd been.

In the belly of every single Jaffa on Nekheb was a Goa'uld who would one day want a host - Hosts that I wouldn't be able to give without unmaking a person. And for every Goa'uld who wanted a host there would be a Jaffa who now needed an infant Goa'uld to survive. The sincretic species demanded entirely immortal practices for their very survival. I didn't lack for willing hosts, but I knew they didn't understand their situation enough to properly consent to having been forced into that position.

It wasn't a problem for which I'd been able to find a solution. It wasn't one that I was even sure a solution for existed. Ugh, why had Ammit and Enlil been so damn human? I could have just done away with the Goa'uld or slain them after leaving their Jaffa wombs if I hadn't spent so much time with the all too human monsters.

It would have been so much easier if I wasn't one of them. At the risk of devolving into another bout of melancholy, I decided to focus on the ship. "Was this your personal ship?"

"Used to be." Ammit ran her hand over the chair wistfully. "Suppose it's yours now Warden. It can't be mine seeing as how I signed the treaty saying I wouldn't use the weapons Ra prohibited."

She paused in her examination of the chair, looking at one of the icons on its arm. She tapped it twice with a long talon, squinting at a display that hadn't been angled to be viewed easily by people not sitting in the chair. "Odd, nobody should have… Oh, no wonder - Heka. I'd forgotten about Heka."

"He seemed a bit memorable to be forgotten." I replied dryly, double tapping the remaining red warning icon with my cursor. I grew sick to my stomach as a rapid-fire series of warning and indications sped past my vision. Whatever it was trying to tell me, the mask's HUD hadn't been designed to properly display it. It was showing the information to me as raw data, incomprehensible in piecemeal. I leaned heavily on my staff as I grew dizzy from the shifting colors, grasping Muminah's hand as she reached out to me.

Ammit looked back at me from the display on the chair, smiling her wide, crocodilian grin. "Kid - you try to see this that way, you're going to go insane. We've got computers to read that stuff."

"What did the lunatic do this time?" Enlil inquired, craning his neck around the seat to get a good look at me.

"He tried to read the sensor feed as base code in read time." Ammit scoffed. "All the sensor readings at once."

"Do we actually have sensor readings?" The Akkadian arched his brow, looking back at the console in front of him. "I can only get basic instrumentation to work."

"Safety measure from the court of Ra. The weapons and sensors only work if a control computer with the proper identification codes is onboard. Even if the rebels could get a ship, it wouldn't shoot or be able to leave the atmosphere." Ammit waved in my direction. "The Warden's computer counts."

"I'd love to be flying with more than my eyes to guide me." Enlil groused, tapping the crystalline dome next to him. "If you wouldn't mind."

"Uh, sure." I walked up to the dome and put my hand on protrusion of black stone that had clearly been made to fit the hand devices of the Goa'uld. It wasn't necessarily the way to activate the sensors but it seemed likely. Even for mundane tasks the Goa'uld favored placing the "on" switch in whatever way most clearly said "this is mine, worship me."

To the surprise of nobody who has ever dealt with the Goa'uld, it worked. With sizzling whirr of activating holographic crystals, the dome shimmered and displayed an image of the Scarab class transport zipping over the Egyptian desert.

Egypt has a lot of desert. I know that doesn't exactly come as a wild, out-there concept to anyone who has heard of the place but even people who know that most of Egypt is a desert don't understand what that means. Well over ninety percent of the country is desert. If you're a living, breathing human person and you're not living in Cairo you'd better be living along the nile. Because if you're not, then you're either a Bedouin or probably soon to be dead of exposure. There is a whole lot of nothing in Egypt.

So, when you see something in a place where there is generally nothing, it's significant. And when you have 2300 cubits wide by 2200 cubits long flying at an altitude of 70,000 feet - that's a whole lot of something where nothing ought to be. I was still a bit hazy on the Cubit to foot conversion rate but 50 by 300 had been considered sufficient to house "two of every animal" by some sources.

"That can't be right." Enlil muttered to himself as he fiddled with the sensor parametrics, refining specifically what the device was looking at. The crystalline holostructure focused on the massive object hanging in the sky, moving towards our position at an alarming rate as we moved eastwards. I noticed that in spite of his assurances that it couldn't be true, he accelerated the Scarab and descended closer to the dunes. "The sensors must be malfunctioning."

"They're not." Ammit disagreed, looking at the Russians pensively. "Warden, which of them is the best shot?"

"Kincaid." I replied immediately.

"The scowling one who is bound to the Scribe?" Ammit pointed to the mercenary, switching to English when I nodded. "First Prime of Scribe. Get in turret."

"Turret?" Kincaid looked at the chair speculatively. "Lady, I haven't got a clue how to operate that thing."

"The chair shoots. It needs eyes and a mind." Ammit looked worriedly at the massive red shape on the sensor as it matched, and more troublingly surpassed, the Scarab's increase in velocity. The sensor distortion was diminishing as it closed in on us, the power blocking it from view decreasing with proximity. "We will need best shot. Just think as you shoot with weapon. It will reply in kind. Unless you prefer to rely on aim of Russians."

Kincaid was across the room and strapped into the chair before the last "s" of "Russians" left her lips. A helmet marked with a golden scarab slid down over his head and bright lights flickered into his eyes, shimmering with the same blue-green luminescence of my own HUD. He let out a long whistle, apparently impressed.

"This is just… cool." He pivoted the seat as he looked left and right, looking through the ship's hull as though it weren't there. "Oh - hell, uh… there are a lot of… things coming at us."

"It will shoot what you wish it to shoot." Ammit fiddled with the controls. "I have enabled it to work for non-Goa'uld."

"What am I shooting, exactly?" Kincaid's eyes were focused ahead of him, looking past Ammit and to whatever it was that the ship was projecting into his eyes.

"Everything that isn't us." The demoness replied worriedly. "We have no shields so even a single one of them will be enough to kill us."

"What the hell is that?" My brother asked, looking at the massive shape that appeared on the sensors. "It's freaking huge!"

"That, I suspect, is Buyan." Ammit replied in English to my brother, her voice deeply worried as the sensors showed us a gigantic snowflake-like island flying through the sky. It was still blurry but I could see angular protrusions built around six central spokes that jutted out upwards and downwards like crystals of ice.

"The Island fortress of Koschei." Hissed one of the Russian soldiers, looking at the other Soldiers incredulously. "It's real!"

"Was the actual Koschei kidnapping people and shoving them in bags not sufficient to convince you of that?" Inquired my brother, doing his best to inject bitter sarcasm into a language that wasn't his own and making a half-assed job of it for lack of practice.

"Isn't it supposed to be in Russia?" I groaned as there was a whistling whirr of something bright and white that soared past the scarab and exploded against the dunes in a small mushroom cloud of flame and magical power that set my teeth on end. Stars and Stones - someone had created a supernaturally charged cluster bomb.

"That's the thing about Buyan. It moves." Ammit replied dryly as Kincaid opened fire. The Scarab's weapon arrays fired bursts of plasma so fast they sounded like a blender, sending bursts of plasma as fast as Kincaid could recognize that he ought to be firing at a target. Not that there were a lack of targets. A swarm of similar glowing projectiles were moving from the belly of Buyan, a whirling tornado of supernaturally powered missiles heading for a tiny, unshielded transport.

"Enlil, aim for the Nile." Ammit kneeled next to the chair, opening up the back of it and pulling out several crystals from it. "I'm going to remove the safety control crystals to see if I can get us a couple more shots."

"Won't that make the guns explode?" Enlil said between furious Babylonian swear words and barked orders for the Colonel to manipulate controls on his side of the craft. Colonel Zhukov was a surprisingly apt co-pilot, following the god's orders unquestioningly in light of the apparent danger.

"Not before the Gate Builder weapons do." Ammit twisted a purple crystal and the blender like hum of the Scarab's weapons reached a fever pitch. The high-pitched whine of the emitters barely matched the flurry of energy bolts that showed on the sensors, plasma pulses merely a stop-gap between us and death. "Warden, that crap you pulled with the mortal Airship. Can you pull that out of your ass again?"

"I can open a Way." I replied, confused at Ammit's desire to enter the Nevernever. "Is there a specific place you had in mind?"

"We ruled this place for thousands of years." Ammit smiled as the Nile came into view. "We know it, on this side and where it borders. It is ours Warden. It is ours."

"Was yours." Elil corrected, even as he dived the ship towards the rivers of the Nile.

"They won't try to murder us." Ammit replied, before amending her statement. "Probably. They probably won't try to murder us."

"Probably is a hell of a lot better than this." The transport shook as a projectile whipped by us, too close to the hull for comfort. I placed my hand atop the sensor dome, focusing my mind on the open air in front of the transport right above the surface of the Nile as I said, "Aparturum!"

Hopefully the Sky Beetle would fair better in the Nevernever than the Russian helicopter had managed.

What?

Even I get lucky sometimes.