The Age of Ra

by James Lovegrove

  ''We reckon the Setics are going to get involved after all. Chang's making noises about sending several battalions-worth of reinforcements down through the Caucasus and Persia.''

  ''The gods have changed their minds?''

  ''Set, apparently, has. Or maybe it's just politics. All the sabre-rattling that the Horusites and the Hegemony were doing. They've stopped now, but it seems to have galvanised the Setics into action. Suddenly it's high priority for them that the Lightbringer is stamped on, most likely so as to prevent the Hegemony taking matters into its own hands. Last thing anyone in the region wants is an Osirisiac invasion of Arabia.''

  ''Something is going on up there,'' said Nonomura, pointing to the starry heavens.

  ''Something always is.''

  ''But don't you feel it? I do. Everything seems uncertain, shifting, one day this, the next day that. It's as though the Pantheon is no longer setting the agenda. They're trying to keep up with events down here. Mortals, for once, are influencing the gods rather than the other way round. The Lightbringer has reversed the order of things.''

  ''Is that why you've defected to his cause?'' David asked. ''You think we're the winning team?''

  Nonomura chuckled, and his men chimed in. ''Oh no, Lieutenant. We're not here for that. The Lightbringer hasn't a hope of success. The gods are too powerful to let him win. We're here to die, simple as that. This whole enterprise has an air of glorious futility about it. It looks like being as pointless and meaningless a sacrifice of life as it is possible to imagine. So naturally we want to be a part of that.''

  David frowned, then held his cup out for a refill. ''That doesn't make any sense, but then maybe I need a bit more alcohol inside me.'' In truth, he was already buzzing from the sake and was starting to relish the clarity and calmness that being drunk brought.

  ''It makes sense to any Anubian, with or without the aid of alcohol,'' said Nonomura. ''We live to die. Life has no goal for us beyond taking us to the point at which we leave it. We despise life. We endure it while it lasts, but death is where we wish to be. Our ruler is Anubis, so why would we not want to be closer to him, in his realm?''

  One of the Australians, a lanky giant with dyed black hair and skin that had seldom seen the sun, said, ''We all wind up in Iaru eventually. It's just that some of us want to get there sooner than the rest. You know what they call us in Oz, me and my type, the ones who go along with the Asians? We're the 'can't wait, mate' brigade.''

  ''But surely,'' David said, ''if you're keen to die, you at least want your deaths to mean something? To achieve something?''

  ''Forgive me, but that is Osirisiac thinking,'' said Nonomura. ''You are with the Lightbringer, you have come this far with him, so I can only assume you're aware that there's a good chance you may perish fighting on his behalf.''

  ''I'd prefer not to, but yes, it may well happen.''

  ''And if it does, you'd like to sell your death as dearly as you can. You don't want to throw your life away.''

  ''Of course.''

  ''There's the difference,'' said the Asian. ''For us, a good death is a cheap death. We show our contempt for life by dispensing with it as we might a... a...''

  ''A pair of old underpants,'' said the Australian.

  ''Thank you, Gunner Coburn,'' said Nonomura. ''Not as elegant a simile as I was looking for, but it'll do.''

  ''No worries.''

  ''So,'' David said, ''you're here effectively to commit suicide?''

  ''Yes. In the vainest and most fatalistic of circumstances. The moment we learned about the Lightbringer, we knew we had to come and take part. The Nephthysians are going to slaughter this little army of yours. You're doomed. That appeals to us greatly.''

  ''You're not even going to try to fight?'' David felt cold disgust snaking through him, counteracting the heat of the sake. ''So what's the good of you? You've brought us seven abso-bloody-lutely lethal helicopters and you're just going to, what, crash them into the enemy the moment you see them? Thanks a lot!''

  ''No, no, please don't misunderstand, Lieutenant. We will fight. We will fight till every last one of our bullets, missiles, and ba bolts is gone. That is the only honourable and fair thing to do. But after that our lives are forfeit. Then we will crash our aircraft into the enemy, and take as many of them with us as we can.''

  ''Oh.'' David unclenched. ''Well, that's more like it.''

  ''Your enemy isn't strictly speaking our enemy,'' said Nonomura, ''so we gain nothing and lose nothing by killing them.''

  ''Adding to the meaninglessness of your deaths.''

  ''Indeed.''

  ''Well, you're all mad,'' David said, raising his cup, ''but I salute you.''

  The Anubians reciprocated, saluting him with their cups.

  David stayed with the Anubians a while longer, till a sliver of pre-dawn grey appeared behind Mount Tabor, levering sky and land apart. He got steadily drunker, and when the Australian, Gunner Coburn, started singing a song in praise of Anubis, he joined in. He wasn't familiar with the verses, but the chorus had a catchy tune and was easy to pick up:

  Oh, a knife to the heart

  Or a bullet in the back'll

  Get you quick-smart

  To the kingdom of the Jackal.

  The Asian Anubians sang along too with this death-affirming ditty, swaying to the rhythm and slurring the words merrily.

  When, finally, David stood up to leave, his head rushed down to his boots. The world whirled and wobbled, and he knew he was going to be sick. It was a matter of when, not if.

  ''Got to... got to go now,'' he told Nonomura.

  The squadron leader nodded vaguely, like someone dropping off to sleep.

  ''I'll see you around.''

  ''Yes,'' said Nonomura. ''Yes. We shall meet again in the Field of Reeds.'' The Anubian for farewell.

  ''Not too soon, I hope,'' David said, staggering away.

  Moving like a sailor on deck in high seas, he made his way back to the footpath that led up the mountainside. Halfway up, he stopped and puked, so violently it felt as though he was turning himself inside out. He couldn't recall when he had last been quite so severely, so incapacitatingly inebriated. Not since he'd learned the news of Steven's ''death'' and had gone out on a bender with a couple of friends in London and woken up in an alley with a policeman prodding him and advising him to move on or be arrested. Even the vomiting brought no relief. He cursed himself for being so careless and rice wine for being so beguilingly potent. He continued the uphill journey bent double, sometimes on hands and knees. He planned on crawling into his little camp bed before anyone saw him and catching a few hours' sleep. If war came today, he'd be in no fit state to face it without some shuteye beforehand.

  Gaining the summit, he looked around. Sunrise was still several minutes away. Everything was grey and bleary. He could see his little bivouac, perched with several others among the rubble of shattered, ancient houses. Not far. A few hundred paces.

  He blinked, and the sun was nearly up, and his bivouac was still a few hundred paces away. He stood up on the spot where he had briefly passed out. He tottered forwards. Then he passed out again.

  He half-opened his eyes, hearing voices. He was lying on his side, cheek in the dust. Two people were talking softly nearby, a man and a woman, in Arabic. Dimly David knew that he knew both voices. They were so familiar, it seemed absurd to him that he couldn't for the moment identify them. There was a time lag between what he was thinking and what he wanted to think.

  Steven. And... Zafirah?

  He tried to stand, so that he could see them. Standing, however, had become a skill as hard to master as juggling. The best he could manage was hauling himself up onto all fours, from which position he was able to peer over the top of an old stone rain-cistern.

  His brother and Zafirah weren't as close by as he'd thought. They were at the entrance to the command post, perhaps 200 yards from where he was crouching. In the dawn stillness their voices, though low, carried far.

  He could
n't make out their words, and anyway his Arabic wasn't up to translating. He focused on their body language. What did it tell him? Might it reveal what Zafirah was doing up here, talking to the Lightbringer at this hour?

  Zafirah looked perplexed, to him. Her usual swagger was gone. There was a hapless hunch to her shoulders. Afraid? Maybe. Almost everyone in the Lightbringer's army was tense, anxious, and understandably so. Attack was imminent. But somehow he didn't feel Zafirah belonged in that category. This was a fight she'd long been spoiling for, and if she harboured any fears, she was the type to keep them to herself.

  What, then? What was the reason for the stooped stance, the one foot toeing the other, the hands that didn't seem to know where to put themselves?

  And Steven. He was looking concerned. Conciliatory. His head was canted to one side. The patient listener. The man who cared.

  Then something he said made Zafirah wheel away abruptly. He caught her by the arm. He turned her back round. His head bent to hers and his voice dropped to an inaudible whisper.

  David watched as Zafirah leaned in with her ear close to Steven's mask-veiled mouth - intimately close. He watched as Steven murmured to her, still holding her. He watched her body start to unstiffen. She relaxed. He thought, although he was too far away to be sure, that she even smiled.

  And now he thought, or imagined he thought, that Steven's hand was caressing Zafirah's hair.

  And now he imagined, or thought he imagined, that Zafirah was pressing her cheek against Steven's face. Had the mask not been there, this would have been a kiss. A lingering touch of lips to cheek. Even with the mask it was still a kiss, of sorts.

  Then Zafirah was walking away, confidence restored. She strode straight past David's place of concealment. She didn't see him. He didn't make his presence known. She disappeared down the footpath. Steven turned and ducked in through the command post entrance.

  David slumped to the ground, his sake-soused brain struggling to digest what he had just witnessed. It couldn't have been what it had appeared to be, and yet it couldn't have been anything else. Steven and Zafirah in a clinch. Well, not quite a clinch, but as near as made no difference. An embrace too close to be that of just-friends. She had been unsure about something, and Steven had soothed her, as tenderly as a lover would, and they had parted with a kiss.

  And where had the pair of them been immediately before that conversation? Indoors? In the command post? Alone together? Was that why Zafirah had needed soothing? To set her mind at ease over something that had happened in there? Something they had done?

  It was all leading to one conclusion. David kept trying to reinterpret the evidence, direct it onto a more innocent track. Again and again it steered itself inexorably back towards that same conclusion.

  His head swam. The rim of the sun crested the horizon, Ra on the rise. He wanted to get up, go and confront his brother. His eyelids were as heavy as old sash windows. The hard earth felt extraordinarily comfortable beneath him, soft as a feather bed. Steven, the liar. Steven, the traitor. The dawn sky was red. Blood of Apophis, shed by Set. Just a few minutes' rest. Steven, the devious, selfish bastard. Fucked her. Fucker.

  ''Fkrrr,'' David mumbled, and lapsed into unconsciousness.

  And came awake to the scream of jets and the crackle of explosions. A Nephthysian Locust passed a couple of hundred of feet overhead, its roar making the whole of Mount Megiddo tremble. Cluster bombs tumbled from its wings. Rippling patches of ba swelled and popped across the plain like blisters.

  David scrambled to his feet, suddenly and brutally sober.

  Battle had begun.

  25. Bombardment

  Cluster bombs were a notoriously imprecise and inaccurate form of antipersonnel hardware. Each tennis-ball-sized bomblet had so little mass that it tended to float down rather than fall and was subject to the whims and vagaries of the wind. The primary purpose of cluster bombs, over and above than the taking of life, was to cause panic and disarray. This, at Megiddo, they did not achieve. The Lightbringer's forces were so thinly spread out that the hails of bomblets mostly missed. Crops were destroyed but precious few people. The Freegyptians were amazed and relieved, and consequently kept their nerve. As the planes rumbled into the distance, they steadied themselves to meet them on their next run. The Scarab tanks lofted their blaster nozzles. The Anubian C39s took to the air.

  On their second sortie the Locusts were joined by some weightier air cavalry, a brace of Russian-made Typhon bombers backed up by three Serpent attack helicopters, also from Russia. The Typhons, named after the strange doglike beast that was symbolic of Set, were fat, cumbersome things that looked about as likely to get airborne as bumblebees. But then their role wasn't to flit around and look elegant. It was to carry fusion warheads. Lots of them. And deliver them.

  The Locusts bombarded the Lightbringer's lines again, but this time the Scarab tanks were ready. Ba spat into the sky in rippling four-shot sequence from their blaster nozzle quartets. The heavy-calibre machine guns were also brought to bear. Tracer rounds marked the trajectory of their bullets in lines of glowing dots, much like the patterns made by the tanks' phased ba fire. The air above the plain was filled with criss-crossing stitches of light, and not all the Locusts came through it unscathed. Planes reeled away with wings and tails alight. One spun cartwheel-fashion, crashing into the side of the valley. Another hurtled past Mount Megiddo and pancaked explosively on the far side, ploughing a fiery furrow through fields.

  The Typhons entered the fray shortly afterwards, with their Serpent escorts strafing the ground madly, trying to clear a path for them through the thickets of flak. By this time, however, the C39s were aloft and out for blood. Squadron Leader Nonomura and his men closed in on the Serpents and...

  ... the only word David could think of to describe it as he looked on from the mountaintop...

  ... pulverised them.

  The Serpents never stood a chance. The C39s took them out with almost arrogant ease. Beams of black ba knocked out their tail rotors, sending them into a terminal spin. Heat-seeking missiles finished them off, like the punchline to a cruel joke.

  The Anubians then turned their attention on the Typhons. Thicker armour made the bombers a tougher proposition than the Serpents. So did dedicated defensive gunnery.

  The leading Typhon already had its bomb bay doors open and was starting to empty its payload onto the plain below. Two of the C39s attacked its flanks. Red ba sparked from the bomber's mid-fuselage blaster turrets. One of the helicopters bulged with scarlet brilliance and disintegrated. The shielding on the other held out, and it retaliated with a ba bolt of its own that blew the offending turret, and the gunner within, to smithereens.

  A third C39 - and somehow David knew it was Nonomura's - tackled the Typhon head-on, flying in reverse and disgorging vast amounts of ba and rocketry at the plane. Anubians did not have access to fusion weaponry, being under the aegis of only one god, not two. But what they lacked in quality of destructive capability, they made up for in quantity. The sheer amount of firepower emanating from the gunship was breathtaking, an almost solid barrage of conventional ordnance and divine essence leaping from it to the front of the Typhon. Bit by bit the bomber's nosecone was flayed, metal skin flaking off in shards till the ribs of the airframe showed through. Its windshield shattered, turning from clear glass to white ice. The Typhon lumbered on, but its bombs were no longer falling. It itself was falling, gradually and inexorably losing height and speed. The C39 continued to hammer at it all the way down, till the Typhon, now rotating around its longitudinal axis, scraped the ground with one wingtip and instantly slammed flat onto its nose, teetered, then keeled over onto its back with a tremendous, dust-billowing thump. Nonomura's C39 sprang triumphantly away into the sky.

  The second Typhon, similarly harried by Anubians, tried to get out of its predicament by gaining altitude. This, though, enticed a C39 to nip in under it and blast upwards at its belly. A shot penetrated into the bomb bay. What happened next was as
inevitable as it was spectacular. A huge tonnage of Setic-Nephthysian fusion warheads ignited at once. The ensuing ball of light spanned a quarter of a mile in diameter, scarlet shot through with shimmering bands and vortices of purple. The ball erupted then contracted in the space of a couple of seconds, engulfing not only the Typhon but the C39 that had triggered the blast and also another of the helicopters that had been attacking the bomber. What remained, after the dazzling sphere was gone and the echoes of its deafening detonation had faded, was a surprisingly small amount of debris and wreckage, which rained down to earth, trailing ribbons of smoke.

  The Locusts returned in a third and final wave but were warier this time around, chastened by the punishment they had taken previously. They came in at greater altitude, which further hampered their accuracy. They dropped whatever was left beneath their wings to drop, then hightailed for home, with the four surviving C39s giving chase. Nonomura's men secured three more kills before the much faster jets poured on speed and disappeared over the horizon.

  David, still blinking to clear the gibbous blue afterimage of the exploding Typhon from his vision, surveyed the scene. As the smoke that shrouded the plain thinned, he saw carnage. He saw bodies spilled around patches of scorched ground. He saw a Scarab tank cracked open, eviscerated, like a beetle crushed underfoot. But, to his eyes, the damage seemed considerably less significant than it could have been. The troops were still in their lines. There were still four C39s left, now descending, their vanes making whorls in the smoke. The Nephthysians had tried their damnedest, but the Lightbringer's army had held out.

  If only he hadn't known that the air raid was only the beginning. A softening-up exercise.

  A ground assault was on its way, soon. Very soon.

  26. Armed

  The Lightbringer got swiftly out there, crossing the plain, assessing the state of play, seeing what had been lost and what was still intact, redeploying his resources, shoring up gaps in the lines, and, wherever he went, strengthening his troops' resolve with a few well chosen words, a congratulation here, an encouragement there.