The Age of Ra

versus self-interest. Were you a dutiful servant of your country's armed forces or were you, when it came to the crunch, just a helpless, fallible human being?

If, David thought, he held out against Maradi and told him nothing, it was unlikely that this courageous stance would ever become known to the wider world. No one back home would ever be aware of what he had done. And the reverse was also true. If he sang like a canary, would anyone back home be any the wiser? Probably not.

Besides, it wasn't as if he knew anything vital. He had no information that the Nephthysians or the Setics couldn't have found out through their spy networks. Most likely he knew nothing they didn't know already. All he'd be doing was confirming their own observations.

''If I tell you as much as I can,'' he said, ''will you agree to let the other two of my men go, unharmed? Anything I don't know, they definitely won't know.''

''How noble. But alas…'' Maradi shook his head, with what seemed like genuine regret. ''That is not something I can offer.''

''At the very least, you'll finish them off as painlessly as you can?''

''Now this, yes, I think I can manage.''

''Promise?''

''You have my word.''

It was better than nothing. By complying with Maradi, David would gain mercy for McAllister and Gibbs. He wasn't selling himself completely for free.

''So?'' said the Nephthysian, cocking his head to one side. ''Shall we begin?''

Before David could reply, he heard a rumbling. Maradi heard it too. It was low and distant, like a continuous peal of thunder several miles away. It rapidly grew louder, going from faint to ominous. Now it had a distinctive droning, whirring undertone. Maradi got up and went to the cave entrance to peer out. He muttered something to the two men outside.

David got up too, carefully, stealthily. Keeping an eye on Maradi, he began backing towards the inner chamber.

He knew what the sound was, what was making it.

RAF Eagles.

Two of them, he reckoned. Coming in low. Hedge-jumping. Under the radar.

There could be only one reason for that.

The noise had risen to near deafening now. Maradi turned to speak to David. He saw him ducking through the doorway in the inner chamber. A look of understanding dawned on his face. He began to shout out a warning to his men.

Then the jets roared by, skimming the valley's rim.

Then there was light. Milky jade-green brilliance. Blinding. Filling the world. And a detonation that punched the eardrums like knitting needles.

The cave convulsed. David was flung against the rear wall by a pressure wave. He fetched up sprawled across the corpses of his fellow paratroopers.

For a time, he couldn't move. Think. Feel.

He staggered to his feet. The air was dense with dust. The inner chamber was more or less intact, but the cave's outer wall had been reduced to rubble. A ragged aperture remained, large enough to clamber through. David made for it. On the way he stumbled across something on the floor. Captain Maradi. The Nephthysian was lying on his back. His clothing was charred and tattered. Most of the skin had been burned off him.

He stirred.

Still alive. Just.

David knelt. Maradi blinked up with scarlet eyes. His mouth moved, wordlessly, or so it seemed.

''I told you I would kill you,'' David said. Or thought he said. His ears were ringing too loudly for him to hear even his own voice.

Maradi's expression was resigned — the irony of it.

David rammed the heel of his palm against the base of the man's nose, driving bone and cartilage upwards into the brain.

Outside, dust hung across the valley in a red-brown fog. Through its skeins and swirls David could see that the place had been devastated. This portion of Petra was more of a ruin than it had ever been. The temple facades were gone, a few spars of column jutting here and there from landslides of rock. The rest was red, cratered moonscape.

The Eagles had dropped dual-cell fusion bombs. Green Osirian ba in one half, white Isisian ba in the other. Within the casing, a thin dividing wall of ceramic that shattered on impact, bringing the two divine essences into sudden contact. The result: a violent melding of diverse powers and a half-kiloton yield.

Having delivered their payload, the jets were now gone. David doubted they would return. Job done.

He went in search of McAllister and Gibbs.

3. West

The desert hissed and shimmered. It was earth that had been flayed by the sun, a patch of planet stripped of all softness, peeled back to the bone. Wadis spoke of rain that came abruptly and in torrents, scored channels in the ground, then vanished, offering little relief. Plants here lived a half-existence, deep roots tapping for moisture while shoots were brittle to the point of crumbling. Snakes and scorpions raced from shade to shade.

Three men came walking. Two of them supported the third, who hobbled along on one leg. The other leg ended in a ragged mass of flesh, a thing that hung limp and useless and looked only vaguely like a foot. A belt was tied around the thigh in a tourniquet.

McAllister had insisted on being left behind at Petra. David had insisted that if McAllister didn't shut up, he would put a bolt of ba through his head. McAllister had asked him to do just that. David had hoisted the sergeant up by the armpits and set off.

They had no radio equipment. Theirs and the Nephthysians' had been buried by the bombs. They had no weapons except a single Horusite ba lance, which David had retrieved from the body of a dead Nephthysian. All of their own weaponry had, of course, been confiscated earlier, and the bombs had buried that too. They had no food or water. They had been deprived of their emergency rations and bottles by their captors.

All they had was themselves.

Getting far away from Petra was vital. The bombardment was bound to attract attention and the area would soon be teeming with Nephthysian troops.

They had to go west.

West would get them across the al-Jayb river and onto the Sinai Peninsula. Any other direction would take them deeper into hostile territory. West was their only hope. West, and the one neutral country left in the world.

''How far?''

This was Gibbs's question. David didn't know the answer for sure.

''Fifty, sixty miles,'' he replied confidently. ''No more than that.''

The sun towered down on them. David was already acutely thirsty and hungry.

They would never make it to Freegypt.

They kept going anyway.

Night was bitterly cold, the stars like flecks of ice.

McAllister groaned dazedly in the dark. David sat with him, trying to distract him and keep him quiet by chatting to him in a low voice. Sound carried at night in the desert. A whisper was a shout.