The Age of Ra

David levelled his ba lance, training it on Wilkins's back.

''Who are you really, Colonel Wilkins?'' he demanded softly.

'''Home by midnight','' said Wilkins. ''That's your abort code. Mission compromised. Right?''

The paratroopers closed in on him and his men.

''I'll ask again,'' said David. ''You're not Cobra Force. You're not even Americans. Are you Nephthysians? Setics?''

''The answer to that is fuck you, Dave.''

''Brave talk, but you're surrounded and outnumbered. You have twenty fully charged god rods aimed at you. I suggest you try and be co-operative.''

''What was it?'' Wilkins said. ''Where did I slip up? How did you rumble me?''

''The accent's pretty good,'' said David, ''but you pronounced the name of your base 'Ky-ro', not 'Kay-ro' as the Yanks do. And you said the Osirisiac Hegemony, when most Horusites call it the Parent Hegemony. Either of those, on its own, I'd have passed off as harmless. An idiosyncrasy. But together…'' He shrugged.

''Well, don't I just feel like the big shit-eating idiot. All those years at the Baghdad Special Ops Academy watching crappy Hollywood movies, and I blew it with a couple of careless mistakes. Thing is, Dave, I'm not the only one who's been careless.''

''What?'' said David.

''Look up,'' said Wilkins, adding, ''sucker.''

The rim of the valley was fringed with soldiers. They stood silhouetted against the stars. David could make out the distinctive jutting rectangle-and-semicircle insignia on their helmets and the baboon heads that capped their lances. Well, that settled that. Nephthysians. They were all fucking Nephthysians.

Wilkins's grin was bright and sickle-shaped in the gloom.

''You're surrounded and outnumbered,'' he said in a passable imitation of David's English accent. ''You have forty fully charged god rods aimed at you. I suggest you try and be co-operative, or else we'll zap you all to the Field of Reeds.''

David's response was to fire his lance at Wilkins.

Wilkins, however, had anticipated this and sprang out of the way. A beam of green ba light, pure godly essence, crackled out from the lance's mouth, striking the man who was standing behind Wilkins. It seared a hole through his chest and he fell to the ground, shuddering in death.

Wilkins rolled and came up firing. Golden light blazed from his Horusite lance, but it was a wild shot and missed its target, scorching the step at David's feet instead. David leapt back and took cover behind a column. McAllister joined him, firing as he went.

The Nephthysians started shooting from above, strafing the valley floor with purple beams. The paratroopers scattered, loosing off retaliatory shots. Wilkins's bogus Horusites also scattered. Shafts of light criss-crossed the valley at all angles, a cat's cradle of lethal, coruscating power. Men were shouting and screaming, their faces lit up by the rippling exchange of fire.

David took aim upward and shot at the origin points of the purple beams. His vision was laced with multicoloured afterimages, like slashes across his retinas. A ba lance firefight in darkness was inevitably short-lived. After a while your eyes became dazzled and you were firing more or less blind. It would come down to hand-to-hand soon. He was prepared for that.

He scored a hit. A Nephthysian shrieked and plummeted from his vantage point, hitting the ground two seconds later with a crunch. David then winged another, whose own blaster shot went astray and lanced through one of his colleagues in the valley. Enemy fire came David's way but struck the column harmlessly. At this range, the blaster beams could not penetrate solid stone.

A few of the paratroopers had retreated to the mouth of the Siq and were putting up a strong resistance from there. They took it in turns. One would shoot, eliciting return fire from the Nephthysians. Then the next paratrooper would aim a blast at where the enemy shot had come from.

The air was alive with the lightning-smell of ozone, along with a tang of burnt flesh. David sensed a lull was coming. The shooting was getting more sporadic. He slung his lance back over his shoulder on its strap and unhooked his hand weapons from his belt. Sergeant McAllister followed suit.

Colonel Wilkins, or whatever his name was, barked an order to his men in Arabic. All lance fire ceased. Then David heard the slithering sound of ropes being dropped, uncoiling as they fell. The Nephthysians on the valley rim were about to come down. This was his and his men's chance. They had to take out the handful of Horusites and flee down the valley before the additional Nephthysian soldiers weighed in with their greater numbers. It was the only hope they had of getting out of this clusterfuck alive.

''Crook and flail!'' he called out. ''Crook and flail!''

He and McAllister launched themselves from behind the column, hand weapons raised. The crook was a baton tipped with a crescent-shaped titanium blade. The flail was two lengths of ash wood linked by a short chain. Brandishing the one, whirling the other, David and McAllister made for the Horusite impostors. The other paratroopers were close behind, howling a war cry.

Colonel Wilkins and company rose to meet them, maces aloft. As the two groups engaged, David was appalled to see that they were more evenly matched than he had hoped. Only about half of his stick had survived the blaster fight. He knew they had taken casualties but not so many.

Then there was no time to think about any of that. There was only the immediacy of close-quarters combat, the brutal intimacy of standing toe-to-toe with an opponent and trying to kill him and not be killed, two people as physically near to each other as embracing lovers yet with the very opposite intention. David clinched with one of the Horusite commandos and let his training take over. The flail provided a diversion, preventing the man from swinging his mace properly. The crook meanwhile raked and slashed. Blood jetted, oil-black in the moonlight. The man went down, throat sliced open, gargling and drowning.

David spun to his left. One of his men, Private Langley, was being beleaguered by a pair of mace-wielding foes. Langley had lost his crook. A mace crashed into his chest and David heard ribs crack like far-off fireworks. He wrapped his flail around the attacker's forearm and tugged him off-balance. His crook blade sank into the man's eyeball and plucked it out like a plum from a pudding. A second, sideways jab with the crook cut short his scream.

Langley was on the ground, hissing with pain, struggling to get up. The other fake Horusite straddled him and lifted his mace with both hands to bring it down on Langley's head. Had he been a true Horusite soldier, more experienced with the weapon, he would have gone for a shorter-range blow to stun his victim first and then delivered the skull-crushing coup de grace. As it was, he left David with a split-second window of opportunity.

David came in from behind the man and snapped the flail up between his legs. As the man collapsed to his knees, whimpering, David hooked the crook through his turban into the side of his head and yanked. The man's head jerked back. Most of his ear came away, along with a tangle of unravelling turban cloth. In an agonised frenzy the man aimed a backwards blow with the mace, which David was able to evade. Then Langley coshed him with his flail, knocking him sideways and concussing him.

David's blood was up. His heartbeat was pure pounding timpani. He looked around for Colonel Wilkins. The bastard needed to get what was coming to him, from one commanding officer to another.

Wilkins was clashing with McAllister, warding off the sergeant's dual-weapon assault with deft use of the mace. He, at least, knew how to wield one. Something else he'd learned at the Baghdad Special Ops Academy no doubt.

Then David saw that the other Nephthysians had arrived. Some were already in the valley and rushing to join in the melEe; the rest were on their way, abseiling down.

Now he and what was left of his stick didn't have a prayer. Their only option was a tactical withdrawal.

''Retreat!'' he yelled, stowing his hand weapons. ''That way! Down the valley!''

He lunged past McAllister, barging Wilkins aside with his shoulder. McAllister came with him, running full tilt. The remaining paratroopers followed.

David had considered making an exit via the Siq, but it was too narrow, with too many potential bottlenecks. Wilkins might anyway have posted guards at the far end, and the paratroopers would be sitting ducks, coming up the gorge two by two.

Instead, all they could do was plunge deeper into the dead city and hope to find another way out.