Free Retaliation by Bill McCay Page A

Abydos. He’d invested his riches in the car-avan trade, making further profits, then moved into a consortium of traders buying food from the farmer clans. His business was booming.
    Not only did the food trade make his wealth grow, it allowed him to save his silver and deal with the remaining weapons prospectors in kind-salvaged guns for food. Ipy had changed since the days in the mines, and not for the better. Always lean, he was now almost skeletal, his skin almost black from the sun. The prospector’s wife looked half starved as well. The best-fed member of the family was their twelve-year-old son, who merely looked pinched and famished. Eyes gleaming, Ipy carried a long bundle wrapped in the tattered remains of a cloak. “Everyone said there was nothing more to be found where Hathor blasted the boxes that moved-the ay-pee-sees,” Ipy said proudly. “But everyone is sometimes wrong, so I looked there, thinking, ‘If I find anything, I’ll bring it to my good friend Gerekh-‘ “ Gerekh cut off the flow of self-congratulation and flattery. “So what did you find?”
    “These!” Ipy let his bundle down on the counter with a metallic clatter. He unfolded the threadbare cloth to reveal an M249 light machine gun, complete with bipod, and an M-16 rifle, its butt charred and scorched. With a frown Gerekh pushed the machine gun aside. “This one will have few buyers, if any. It eats up bullets and who other than the Earthmen can afford to feed it?”
    “I have people to feed, too,” said the desperate Ipy.
    “We shall see what can be done,” Gerekh replied, examining the other weapon. “It’s fouled with sand-the barrel is full of it.” At least he’d taught the scav-engers to leave their finds alone. Some idiots like Ipy had managed to destroy valuable weapons by at-tempting to clean them up for a better sale. Reaching under his counter, Gerekh brought out a loaf of day-old bread, a small sack of grain, a smaller sack of flour, some beans. Perhaps enough to keep a family of three going for a few days. Ipy and his wife exchanged tense glances. “And for the useless gun ...” Gerekh added a couple of handfuls of beans and some overripe fruit. Inwardly he rebuked himself for showing favor to an old friend.
    Ipy scooped up the pitiful supplies-another lesson Gerekh had taught his scavengers. Unlike other mer-chants, he didn’t haggle. Putting up a hand to forestall the speech of thanks tumbling from Ipy’s lips, Gerekh said, “Always a pleasure to do business with an old friend.” “And we will be back to do business again next week!” Ipy assured him. Gerekh repressed a wince at the thought of the family subsisting for so long on such scanty fare.
    “Perhaps luck will smile on you,” he said to the poor, deluded scavenger. “If you find a weapon of the Horus guards, come to me immediately. I could be very generous.”
    Indeed, for a working blast-lance he might offer enough to feed them well for two or three weeks.
    In spite of the fact that he was the teacher, Daniel Jackson had a strange back-to-school feeling when-ever he initially faced a class. He’d awakened before sunrise from the final exam nightmare-a ludicrous dream where he was forcibly taken back to college to make up an examination in a subject he’d never heard of before.
    Daniel put the nightmare down to the dinner he’d cooked the night before as an attempt at domestic har-mony. The mess of beans and onions had been made palatable only by a heavy lacing of tabasco sauce bummed from the Marine base. That would be enough to give anyone bad dreams, he supposed.
    For the last couple of days, the first wave of new students had trickled in from far-flung communities of farmers. There’d been quite a scramble to secure student accommodations, since a sizable reality gap had set in between the planned numbers and the actual arriving students.
    Today’s classroom reflected part of the improvisa-tion in the program. It was an outdoors