Chapter 5

Payback's a bitch, or is it?

By rule, Ha'taks didn't include a mode of internal mass transit. By virtue of their rugged, reliable technology, extensive automation and their owners' natural reluctance towards providing their minions with more amenities than strictly necessary, they simply didn't need to support routine, frequent and rapid crew transportation from one area to another.

Jaffa had to leg it from barracks to Pel'tak, but why anyway would a god let himself be bothered by the pungent smell of his unwashed hordes? Outside his personal guard and the select, smarter warriors relied upon to man some stations and allow their lord to enjoy some free time, one simply didn't need Jaffa running to and fro.

It also meant that disembarking an army took some time, since they had to walk it from their various quarters to the assembly areas doubling as storage space, then march through the cargo doors down a helpfully extended ramp.

Although internal mass transit wasn't a thing, well-fitted ships like Divine Fist of Unity did have a mean of rapid displacement in the form of transport rings. Therefore, as Ba'al was understandably impatient to set foot on his new conquest, he stepped into the ring station a couple levels down the Pel'tak, along with a half-dozen guards in elaborate, head-enclosing armor. An instant later, another set of rings extended down from the external hull and deposited the party onto the hangar floor as close as possible to the far wall.

Ahead, Kheshmet's figure could be seen posing proudly behind a line of kneeling captives, and Ba'al rapidly stepped outside the Ha'tak's shadow into the glare.

A god wasn't expected to gape and goggle around, and he managed to keep a controlled expression, hiding the expectancy and excitement he truly felt. This was but a mere hangar, but the sheer size of it! It swallowed Divine Fist with space to spare, and he suspected that the great thick doors, now closed against the outside, had to weigh the equivalent of a small fleet.

He followed a path forward on the slick floor, noting that its texture was designed to look smooth yet didn't slip under his feet. Here and there grilles and covered, color-coded apertures hinted at machinery hidden below, and his mind briefly ventured on visions of a great fleet to be constructed and serviced here, incorporating unadulterated, unbastardized Gate-builder technology.

Then he was before Kheshmet, and his minion stepped forward to greet her master. Ba'al took her appearance in. The dry bloodstains on her attire, and her beaming grin, told enough. She had obviously enjoyed her mission. She bowed as customary, stopping at the required distance from her superior.

Had Ba'al not been so elated and altogether distracted, he might have paid passing attention to the regular figures painted (or was it engraved?) on the floor. There were many, but it so happened that he and his Jaffa stood inside a reddish circle. He might have wondered just what the inscriptions in simple geometric characters meant, but he didn't have much knowledge of Ancient writing.

Otherwise, he would have known the letters surrounding the circle meant "Waste disposal area – Keep out".

He barely had time to wonder what Kheshmet did when she lifted the small tablet, of obvious Ancient manufacture, and tapped it once.

Then four curved pillars snapped out of the floor, evenly spaced around the periphery of the circle and almost meeting at the top. Square in cross-section and tapering from base to top, outsides clad in textured red metal, their crystalline inner face immediately began to glow as the field projectors activated with a hum.

Ba'al's heart skipped a beat from surprise, shock, and the surprise sensation of weightlessness gripping him as two things happened simultaneously. He was lifted from the floor, along with his guards, to hover powerlessly a couple meters above the floor level. And all around them, a spherical shimmering appeared in thin air, the tell-tale visual clue of a force field being activated.

"Kheshmet! What is the meaning of this?" He burst out, then, as her smile morphed into a very-Goa'uldish smirk: "SHOLVA! You're trying to betray me, your master! How can you think you can get away with treason!"

Kheshmet took a step closer, looking up at the hovering figures with a smile that no longer could be seen as anything remotely friendly. Behind her, the line of "captives" stood up, bearing similar expressions.

"Oh, my dear Ba'al," she answered in a tone far too sweet, "but nobody's betraying you. Kheshmet isn't betraying you…" her deep Goa'uld voice then faded, leaving Samantha Carter's human voice, "because Kheshmet is dead" she punctuated the last word with an even wider smile.

"You! You..." Ba'al sputtered in sheer astonishment. "You can't expect to fight me! I have a starship and an entire army about to disembark!"

"Oh? You mean this Ha'tak that just got reset to factory settings? Currently running a stress test of its internal gravity system and a complete atmospheric recycling?" Carter mockingly replied. "Even Jaffa can't stand up very well under forty gravities, nor can they breathe pure nitrogen, can they? Alas, my dear Ba'al, they're not coming to the rescue any time soon."

Fear met anger in the mind of the hovering Goa'uld and momentarily eclipsed rational thought. Lifting his hand, Ba'al sent a powerful kinetic wave towards Carter… for it only to reflect and slam back into his personal shield, blowing him backwards to rebound again off the far side of the force field, dazed and flailing.

One guard then did the smartest thing he could think of, namely shooting a staff bolt at the same target. Upon hitting the field, the plasma lost containment and spilled along the curvature, dissipating with no more ill effect than raising the temperature inside the bubble by a few degrees.

"Now what?" Ba'al cried out, after he stabilized himself. "Do you expect me to talk?"

"No, Mr Ba'al," Carter took a breath. "I expect you to die!"

Another tap on the tablet and the hum morphed into the rising buzz of heavy machinery charging up, with the glow of the pillars gaining intensity in perfect synchronization. A holographic announcement sprang up on all sides of the circle, first in the Gatebuilder script, then after a blink, in plain English.

Waste compacting process selected, please stand by

The buzz reached a crescendo, the glow dipped once, then the sign changed.

Compacting/recycling in progress

The faint shimmering of the force field solidified into a steady whitish curtain, then began to collapse on itself.

A few seconds later, the screams started, muted by the field and the din of its emitters. Unfortunately for the Jaffa and their master, the increased fortitude gifted by their symbiote only prolonged their agony, as in the agglomerated bundle of bodies bones began to snap, limbs steadily ground and crushed together into a single mass, staves flexing then breaking apart, blood seeping then flowing and pooling inside the sphere, yet they remained conscious until, at last, the unrelenting pressure cracked open skulls and mashed brains. Ba'al died in the middle of the featureless mass that were his guards, his own personal shield simply not designed to resist this kind of slow and steady pressure.

What had been seven bodies, their clothing, armor and gear was now an indistinct brownish conglomerate globe in a still contracting volume of space. There was no structure anymore, and now the complex molecules that once were living matter began to disintegrate into constituent atoms. Like a sieve, the compactor field began to vibrate at specific frequencies and secondary fields went up as guidance paths. Externally, Carter and her false captives saw a small sun erupting tendrils of lighting as elementary matter was siphoned off into floor apertures to add the station's basic building stores, the blinding brilliance of the process thankfully attenuated by a perimeter shading field.

A minute after the process started, the last remnant of chemically pure and hyper-compressed carbon occupied a volume the size of a paperweight. The roar of the emitters wound down and the crushing field relinquished its grip on the geometrically perfect sphere left, allowing a manipulator field to gently deposit its mass into Carter's outstretched palm.

She gazed into the perfect crystal, admiring the diffracted light playing on her fingers.

Then she beamed a wide, impish smile.

"Why, thank you Ba'al", she cooed, "diamonds truly are a girl's best friend!"

"Huh, Colonel…" O'Neill formulated aloud the question everyone else had in mind. "Weren't you supposed to capture him?"

"Well, I did capture him, didn't I?" she replied innocently.

"Capture, as in make prisoner, you know, extract information out of him, that sort of thing."

Carter turned squarely towards him and caught herself before allowing a flippant answer out. Instead she took a steadying breath and answered levelly.

"He wouldn't betray himself – I mean, his other selves. I suspect the Ba'al clones have a suicide mechanism anyway. And, I really needed that, I mean the payback. After everything he did to me… to us."

"Fine, I get it" the Major placated. After all, he really did share the feeling. "Though… couldn't we have used the station to neuter his symbiote, like yours?"

Carter shook her head. "No. You have to understand how Goa'uld takeover works… The longer in control of the body and mind, the more it affects the host. After a while, usually it takes years, that depends on the host's strength, the original mind just… fades away. If you removed the symbiote then, you'd get nothing but a mad, broken husk. Ba'al took his current body centuries ago, so there's nothing left but Ba'al inside."

She hefted the diamond again. "I don't, I mean, Kheshmet didn't know the specific details of how Ba'al cloned himself, as he obviously wanted to keep such a capability for himself. But she was quite sure that it didn't include the original brain structure of the host."

"All right", General Lefarge interjected. "You, as this Kheshmet's former host, have enough intel in your head to start with, anyway. And," he gestured at the Ha'tak standing ahead "we're getting something significant too. Though, given what you said about the crew, it won't be a pleasant cleaning detail…"

Carter shrugged. "Oh, that? Never mind." She tapped the tablet again, inputting more commands. "Its systems are linked to the station now, and they'll both take care of the cleanup."

As if to illustrate her point, maintenance drones began to emerge from apertures in the floor, converging on the Ha'tak whose own cargo doors were slowly opening.

"Those will take care of the bodies and secure their weapons. I think the power sources will be handy, when we start producing our own. The rest… well, we'll need the raw feedstock too!"

"That's… fine" Lefarge said in a slightly awed voice. "So, there's nothing more to do here?"

"Actually, there's another thing I have to do", Carter replied. "The deception plan. I need to access the communication console in the Pel'tak itself. Why don't you all come along anyway? Have a first look inside our navy's newest unit?"

If the party following a still Kheshmet-looking Carter inside the parked mothership felt any trepidation at the thought that, technically, they were stepping into a ship that had just killed its erstwhile crew by crushing and asphyxiating them, they didn't let it show outward. They did however express various reactions at the interior decoration, including the newest additions in the form of randomly placed Jaffa pancakes.

"Urgh, this one impaled himself on his staff weapon, it seems".

"Must have been painful."

"My heart bleeds."

"I couldn't think of a more suitable target for impalement… Draka excepted."

"Different kind of snake, that's all."

Then they reached the Pel'tak and its gaudy appearance, so alien in philosophy to a people who placed practicality and efficiency above aesthetics. Multi-limbed drones were already there, using integrated energy tools to… cut up waste into smaller chunks, the cutting beams' cauterizing heat thankfully helping minimize spillage of unmentionable fluids, and as a side-effect reducing the amount of gagging and retching from the visitors, helped in their sanitary endeavor by Divine Fist's air recycling system running at maximum capacity.

Ignoring the organized (and fairly disgusting) mayhem, Samantha Carter stepped to a wall panel close by the command chair and removed it, exposing crystal circuitry inside.

Her companions focused on watching her, rather than the other ongoing processes, as she made improvised optical connections between her own Alliance-issue perscomp, the ancient tablet, and the Goa'uld hardware. Then she beckoned Selmak closer.

"I might need your help, since you're the only other person familiar with Goa'uld programming interfaces. And this will have to be perfect for the whole thing to work."

The Tok'ra stepped forward. "I stand ready to assist you, Samantha Carter."

"This will take a while", she warned the others, then dived into the programming, exchanging remarks in fast-spoken Goa'uld with Selmak as she went through the steps of her plan.

Four hours later, on a world called Asdad, in the lavishly furnished conference room of his main palace, another Ba'al sat in a particularly tedious meeting, the third one in a day he already wished would end quickly so he could spend a couple hours merely indulging the trappings of godhood.

Godhood was sometimes overrated, he mused. He had to hear out the man speaking, a distinguished-looking old fellow sporting the neatly trimmed white beard that told everyone else of his respected elder status, and the heavy gold chain and medallion that also told everyone else that he, as the chairman of Ba'al's dominion's guild of bankers and money-lenders, literally held the strings of the purse that fed his billions of subjects' day-to-day activities on hundreds of worlds, from tiny backwater agrarian settlements to commercial and manufacturing powerhouses.

And while other, less wise Goa'uld might take those as far beneath their notice, a System Lord who wished to remain a System Lord would know that while starships pretty much grew themselves provided the right materials and a spark of "god magic", it still took minions to provide those materials, and for those minions to do so, they needed to be fed and clothed at a minimum, and preferably entertained as well, for a properly fed, clothed and entertained minion rarely harbored such ill thoughts generally qualified as "rebellious".

And the even less wise but thankfully few upstart Goa'uld who, in their countless millennia of interstellar rule, had rated themselves as much smarter than the rest for ignoring the traditional proscription against self-aware created intelligences, secretly developed such, and endeavored to build a System Lords-defeating fleet that way… well, they all had rediscovered that self-aware and self-directing created intelligences didn't care for food, clothes or entertainment, or rather considered "entertainment" what everyone else would call "rebellion".

Those unwise Goa'uld who didn't die at the (metaphorical) hands of their creation and managed to flee precipitously, ended up groveling at the feet of their more established and powerful brethren, asking for help and forgiveness. If they were lucky or if their host was in a good mood, they merely ended up exiled to the foulest, poorest, smelliest, manure-covered world in reach.

But in most recorded cases, they were swiftly executed and their death broadcast on what passed for a pan-Goa'uld information network, as a reminder and object lesson, with a commentary on the general lines of "Right you young and stupid aspiring System Lords, we all know you're an ambitious and plotting bunch but there are Some Things Not Allowed for good reasons, lest one day they run out of control and ruin the fun for everyone ; and now behave while the grown-ups put aside their ongoing feuds for a moment so they may clean the latest mess".

The day-dreaming Ba'al recalled the worst case he had ever witnessed, tuning out the drone of his head banker. A young and ambitious third-tier Goa'uld going by the name of Pandora had used her free-time as one of Bastet's (back when said Bastet somewhat counted in the Galactic order) sector governors to grossly misuse the standard nanoforges, design and build self-replicating nanocell-based Jaffa, sick them on the system's asteroid belt, and wait while they replicated themselves into an all-conquering army.

Which they had, and she'd thought herself very smart indeed. Right until the first wave of her mechanical soldiers had landed back on her capital on the wake of a kinetic orbital bombardment so severe it had turned everything around her shielded palace into lava, then proceeded to penetrate said palace and slaughter every living biological being inside, down to and including Bastet's local sacred herd of cats.

Pandora had escaped by the skin of her teeth through the Chappai, then found her way to Ra himself, not daring to go back to Bastet, probably thinking she might suck the notoriously decadent supreme Lord into indulgence. He might even have. If he hadn't found Pandora's system, months of hyperspace travel later, crawling with her runaway creations, no more limited to human-sized flying soldiers, but actually coalesced into mountain-sized humanoid machines wielding staff cannons of cyclopean proportions. He had found that ridiculous right until their combined fire narrowly blew his Ha'tak apart, forcing him into an ignominious retreat.

The blow to his pride, compounded and multiplied by the ordeal of having to contact the Asgard and ask them for help, had sealed Pandora's fate. She was turned over to Bastet, who then had her eaten alive by her cats… well, her bigger, tiger cats.

Ba'al distracted attention was suddenly called back to the present with the urgent buzzing of his pocket communicator device. Quickly checking that nobody actually looked in his direction, and unsurprisingly seeing the rest of the council members sitting with glazed eyes under the spell of the speaker's monotonous litany of figures and reports, he slipped the device out, keeping it hidden under the table, then glanced down to see what the urgent message was about.

He frowned. The message was garbled, but the headers were clear: it came from Divine Fist of Unity, relayed across thousands of light-years through his empire's network of subspace relays. It had to be from his brother-in-Ba'alness sent after the tantalizing trove of Gatebuilder technology. Hopefully, it was good news… He set to little device to sift through the data packet and reconstitute its integrity.

Seconds later the cleared data appeared on the screen. It was in the format of an automated log, and that fact alone was a bad omen. He started to read it, line by line, extracting the significant facts.

Divine Fist had arrived in the target system hours later than expected due to significant hyperspace turbulence.

There-Ba'al sent a greeting to his operative, the usually efficient Kheshmet.

Who replied in a disappointingly treasonous way, stating that she was now her own master, in possession of the Ancient space city, and planning to rule its population as the seed of her upcoming empire. Disappointing, but not altogether out of character for a fellow Goa'uld, present-Ba'al sighed.

There-Ba'al had not taken it well. Well, every other Ba'al would have entertained the same reaction.

A firefight had ensued. Apparently, the more modern weapons in Divine Fist had battered through the old construct's shield, eventually destroying it in a colossal and magnificent (if regrettably wasteful) explosion. Oh well, there goes the prize, thought present-Ba'al, but at least that traitor Kheshmet didn't get away with it.

The Ha'tak wasn't unhurt, though, as the clinical log described. Its own shield was down after the firefight was over. At least, the firefight they thought was over. Coming out of the explosion, some kind of Ancient missile darted in and skewered the ship, activating its own warhead a fraction of a second before Divine Fist, recognizing what was about to happen, sent a burst transmission as its last act in service of its master. Which certainly accounted for the message's corrupted state.

Ra be damned, thought Ba'al. A latest-generation Ha'tak and a brother lost for nothing in return but an expanding cloud of plasma, all the sweet technology blown away.

In this galaxy, you really couldn't trust anyone but yourself. That, and the Gatebuilder legacy once again lived up to its infamous reputation.

The sun was setting over the horizon, casting fiery red accents over the gentle sea. Carter sat in the sand, her mind blissfully empty for a moment. The first time she came up there, the déjà vu feeling was disquieting. It was too reminiscent of the very setting where her ordeal started. But, like every other denizen of Freedom Station she couldn't afford to dwell in the past. Too much relied on her future actions… their future actions. A cornerstone of her people's future she might be, with the knowledge implanted in her mind and her ability to connect with Station Control (as they settled on a name for the vast ancient computing system), but alone she was not.

Anyway, the sand was artificial, the whole island was a construct, built and tended by station systems, the surrounding "sea" was also a water reservoir, and the sun was heavily filtered by the material of the Dome. The whole geoforming process had taken months, and nobody had input over it. People were speculating whether the station had followed a set plan, or if it was able to accommodate its inhabitants' current preferences and needs.

In any case, the tropical-like beaches were perfectly suited to their need for a quiet, nice place of relaxation and contemplation. Further inland, carefully sculpted terrain features gradually rose up to a central set of hills and provided a varied set of sceneries, from shaded woods to lush meadows.

The Dome was apparently not meant for permanent settlement, given that its automated development failed to include things like houses. Therefore, the research teams monitoring and studying both the geoforming process and its results, and the agricultural teams carefully setting up experimental plantations, taking advantage of the different terrains and micro-climates, were the sole users of the original expedition's supply of temporary shelters.

The plan for New America, back when it was supposed to settle Alpha Centauri, was for advance parties to land on the habitable planet, deploy scientific instrumentation, mobile probes and laboratories, and pave the way for the follow-up settlement waves. This plan went out of the window as soon as they found a perfectly livable giant city in space. Instead it was a rush to disembark everyone and their luggage. Heavy landers designed to shuttle people and gear down from the orbiting colony ship instead made runs from one orbit to another, saving time and fuel.

In retrospect, they were right not to choose the cautious way some had advocated, only sending a research crew into the station and waiting until they had entirely explored it to greenlight the thawing of everyone else. It meant that when New America was destroyed, most of its cargo stores were safe inside the station. With hindsight, it was a bet that paid off tremendously.

A soft beep warned Carter it was time to leave for the next scheduled meeting. She rose up, cast a last glance around then headed back to the nearest concealed access lift. The cabin dropped silently down on frictionless mag-rails all the way to the tram station beneath.

After the invasion was over, she'd resumed wearing her regular uniform. Part of her wanted to jettison everything involved with Kheshmet directly into space, preferably on a collision course with the local sun, but reason had prevailed. As scandalous as the Goa'uld body glove appeared, it was nevertheless made of a synthetic garment with fascinating properties, not only keeping its wearer cool and dry, but also exhibiting some ballistic and energy-dissipating properties.

And then there were the associated bits of hardware, personal energy shield, kinetic wave launcher, healing device, integrated perscomp and communicator. Each one worthy of several doctorate thesis and ordinary lifetimes of study. Not that their new owner intended to break open or otherwise dismantle them. She knew, from her implanted Goa'uld knowledge that such "godly" hardware was purposefully designed, and uniquely crafted, to defy disassembly and reverse engineering. Obviously, the "gods" didn't want their lowly minions tinkering with and stealing their most personal tech.

Of course she had tried scanning them with the station's own industrial assemblers. Not only did it take much longer than scanning the Alliance perscomp used as a reference, but the resulting output files reached sizes measured in petabytes. She spent hours trying to understand why, delving deep into the data, her mind plugged into the control chair. Eventually, she realized that the devices were made of structures nested into structures, extending fractal-like from the macroscopic to the micro-scale and beyond. Solid-state substructures seemed to run through tiny blocks of naquadah, embedded into the very atomic fabric and hinted at complexity extending down to the femto-scale where even the highly advanced assemblers ran out of resolving power.

They could faithfully replicate a working perscomp. But every attempt at replicating one of Kheshmet's "magical" devices had produced decorative, but utterly useless replicas.

This alone was baffling, but just as noteworthy was the absence of an explanation in Kheshmet's memories. Whereas she was obviously a valuable and trustworthy enough agent to be provided with such advanced hardware, she simply didn't know how they were made. Only that her birthing (as one tiny tadpole-like Goa'uld embryo among millions in a single spawn, from a "mother" she never knew) didn't include the genetic transmission of such powerful knowledge.

Which made the devices all the more precious. And Carter, as the only one able to use them, got to keep them in a secure locker in her apartment.

She sighed, thinking of said apartment, set in what passed as "executive quarter" closer to the Core, and its luxurious spa-like shower. Pity her schedule didn't allow her a break yet. She'd spent the morning assisting the Navy crews carefully getting to know the ancient spacecraft inside the city's hangars, using the link to Control to expand its Standard English lexicon and provide working translations for the most esoteric parts of their "operating manuals". Then, barely pausing to eat a sandwich, she spent the afternoon in one of the "knowledge rooms" where fellow scientists and engineers plugged themselves into shared virtual environments. The reclined interface chairs arranged in circles were obviously related to the Control one, but less invasive, using a combination of targeted sensory inputs and an enclosing visor to immerse their users into whatever work space was required, then allowing interaction through gestures, thoughts and voiced commands.

The principles of it weren't new to the Alliance men, since such virtualized design environments had started being used in cutting edge research centers years before the Final War. But the system's overall philosophy took some getting used to.

The Gatebuilders apparently didn't have a use for such concepts as "an index", even less a "search function". In short, one had to think of the thing they wanted to look up, such as the concept of "voltage" … which seemed all right until one tried to look up something they didn't "know" or could only speculate about, such as "faster than light travel". The way to get around this irritating stubbornness of the system was to start with something you knew… then iterate to the next concept, jump-linking from data to data and hoping you would eventually reach whatever you were really looking for.

To the Earthers, it was a horribly inefficient way of doing things and a baffling omission.

Much speculation ensued from the discovery, and the tentative consensus was that, as human-looking as the Gatebuilders, or "Ancients" as people started to call them for brevity's sake, they had to be mentally different. Maybe they held their civilization's knowledge index in their own heads, thus eschewing the need for something so trivial as an online search engine.

This made all the more sense when taking into account Kheshmet's fate. Maybe the Goa'uld had started their galactic career as bioengineered memory implants. The definitive answer was yet to be found in the galaxy-sized haystack that was the Ancient database.

Carter stood on the platform, waiting for the next tram. This particular station had witnessed some heavy fighting, but the city's diligent repair drones and nanocolonies had since made it new again. She shook her head. More marvels. Back on Earth the first nanomachines only made their first baby steps in laboratories before the Final War. Here, they were everywhere, unobtrusively doing their share of the station's continued existence over a lifetime that started when dinosaurs were still a reality. Whatever way the Ancient minds worked, they obviously placed durability over everything else.

The sound of animated chat, and a few bouts of laughter, announced the youth group before they turned onto the platform itself from one of the connecting corridors. A squad of Young Pioneers, Carter recognized. The old Earth organization had a revival here, and it served multiple goals: marshalling youthful energy in an adult-managed community, giving teenagers a way to socialize in adult-sanctioned ways, organizing them into working and exploration parties (something that didn't need much prodding, since the kids were actually exploring a huge ancient space city) and, last but not least, helping them collectively heal the psychological wounds of the invasion.

That itself was a thorny issue, and the psychologists were still working overtime. Thankfully, if one could say, having the Domination back on Earth meant a huge medical corpus existed for dealing with violence and rape-induced trauma, but still, there were only so many trained mental health specialists, and an entire population needing some measure of counseling.

They'd managed to avoid a wave of suicides, at least. Some survivors had to be kept in a drugged stupor so they didn't claw their own eyes out (figuratively… or not). Many closed themselves in, trying to put the memories in a box and acting as if nothing had happened. Some, prevalently among the hormonally rattled teenagers, went the opposite way, flaunting themselves sexually and aggressively. There were… rumors circulating about of teenage group orgies held in hidden corners of the station, and while such rumors always seemed to emerge among a given society's urban legends, here they had a rather higher likelihood of veracity.

In any case, Carter kept herself segregated from the general population, keeping most of her interactions inside the inner circle of Alliance leaders and scientists. When she wasn't plugged into Control, adjusting settings, unlocking features, searching the endless amount of technical information – much being untranslatable directly as it pertained to concepts far outside current human knowledge or imagination – she was running from place to place in response to help requests.

Therefore, she didn't have much opportunity to directly gauge the psychological state of the general population. She looked at he the approaching youth group discreetly, pretending to read from her tablet. A squad of five, two girls and three boys, or rather young men and women, it seemed. College-age, definitely, with the typical appearance of physical near-adulthood mixed in with the last flames of childhood. All of them clad in the Pioneers uniform, the scout-inspired one, albeit made more practical and space-compatible, tan pants and knee-length skirts and jacket, brown buttonless shirts, sensible shoes, glittering badges and colorful ribbons pinned on chests.

As they came closer, she spotted the flushed complexions, the slight sheen and sweat and the subtle – or rather, not so subtle – body language. She wasn't sure if the analytical process came from Kheshmet's imprinted memories or her own experience – she did once go to college, after all – but… she could swear those five had been up to no good. Or rather, she mused, up to a lot of good. Score one for the rumors, she told herself a bit scandalously. Oh well, if it helps.

Less amusing was the teenagers' reaction when they realized who the lone adult was. A sudden backing motion, then animated half-whispers in the "look, that's her! What do we do?" vein. She didn't know whether she should save them from further embarrassment by talking to them, or pretend nothing happened and keep reading her tablet.

The tram's timely arrival rescued them all.

A short journey later, she hurried into the executive block, a set of rooms repurposed as office space for the current provisional government. A working committee was drawing up a new Constitution for the small nation, but so far, and in the wake of such overwhelming discoveries, the commanding officers of New America were keeping things under control.

She arrived last at the meeting room, but in time, and took her customary seat at the long conference table next to Major O'Neill. The two of them had remained close ever since the events; yet, for all the fact that she once – the first evening after Ba'al died and they collectively were able to take a breath of relief – asked him to stay and simply lay close to her, not to leave her alone with the nightmares she was sure to come, their intimacy remained so far on an emotional rather than physical level.

Not that they both didn't know how they felt about each other. Kheshmet's forced memories didn't lie about that. But Kheshmet's memories were also like a physical wall between the pair.

"Ladies, Gentlemen" Frederick Lefarge greeted them after the doors closed and the privacy field came up. "I know we all had a long day" he started, drawing a small chorus of agreeing sighs; "so I'll get straight to the point."

Nods answered around the table. He went on.

"On the concrete, day-to-day level, our immediate, short-term survival is assured. We managed to save the essentials from New America, Freedom Station provides the population with the basic necessities, food, shelter, medical care. So that, at least, we don't need to worry about barring some unforeseen catastrophe.

Which leaves the matter of our long-term survival."

He paused for effect and gazed at every meeting participant in turn.

"Firstly, we're assuming Ba'al swallowed the deception and won't investigate further, especially since we locked down the stargate, preventing it from answering an incoming call and betray our continued existence. Given the intel we have on that System Lords war, intel which is the same as his anyway, and knowing that he certainly didn't divulge the discovery of Freedom Station to his rivals, we're hopeful enough that the Goa'uld won't come knocking at the door for a while.

Secondly, we also know the Draka, who knows how, also discovered the stargate on Earth. In a perfect universe, they would stumble on a superior power, maybe the Goa'uld themselves, and be destroyed."

Chuckles went up.

"But given their Satan-gifted luck, we also need to consider the possibility that they'll survive, even thrive, and start to build an interstellar empire. Therefore, we already have two clearly identified foes. Both snakes, ironically. What can we do about it? And first, what can we do in case we get the word, thanks to our Tok'ra contacts, that some Goa'uld evil this way comes?"

"Assuming we can trust these Tok'ra to warn us in time, General" the comment came from Doctor Nagami, whose teams of computer experts were tasked with studying Control and its ancillary systems, drones included.

"We can't be a hundred percent sure, Doctor." O'Neill replied, being the one who had most interacted with the Tok'ra operative Selmak. "Personally, I have good reasons to think they're not an outright toxic bunch. Yet, even assuming their benevolence, they're still a small organization in a big galaxy, and they can't have eyes and ears everywhere. That said, I think they would tell us if they knew something was afoot."

"Right," Lefarge picked up. "Which means we can't hide behind these walls forever. We'll have to build up our defenses, and start gathering intel outside. Then, we need to set a long term plan to strike back. Doctor Nagami, Professor Graystone, would you like to begin?"

With a subtle nod, the Japanese computer systems specialist deferred to the ex-Alliance's foremost cybernetics expert.

At fifty-two years of age, the Northern American man nevertheless showed deep lines on his face. Everyone knew why. In the closing hours of the Final War, a Navy surface to orbit shuttle had lifted off from the rubble of San Angeles spaceport during a temporary lull in the fighting, threaded its way through gaps in the orbital network of destroyed battle stations, made a daring orbital refuel and boosted off towards a high apogee elliptical orbit, hoping to meet with the Alliance cruiser sent to collect as many refugees as possible from the cis-lunar facilities and return them to the New America.

A half-disabled, drifting and unaccounted for Draka gunship had sent a burst of rail gun projectiles into the shuttle's path, its two crew disregarding their own survival for the sake of killing more Yanks.

Only broken debris and frozen corpses from the shuttle reached the rendezvous point. One of those corpses was Graystone's daughter.

The cruiser accelerated out of the area on schedule, but not without a measure of retribution. At full power, its antimatter-fueled drive generated a plume of high-velocity plasma hundreds of kilometers long. When it touched the Domination gunship, the smaller craft and the living beings it contained were vaporized in turn.

The professor tapped a command into his perscomp, sending a picture to the centrally mounted holographic display. A volumetric model of a humanoid appeared above the conference table, downscaled from its real dimensions, though the figure was overlaid with size and weight data. It looked like an infantryman in an advanced flexible exosuit, carbon dark muscle groups layered across dull metallic reinforcements. There was a striking difference, though. What looked like a head wasn't one. Instead of the typical enclosing helmet with respirator design, what looked like a mannequin's featureless head sported sensor protrusions. Optical lenses and apertures of various sizes, audio pickups and small conformal solid state antennas dotted its surface, seconded by tiny sensor clusters placed at intervals across the rest of the body.

Graystone went straight to the point, no bothering with greetings and honorifics, his tone characteristically flat and emotionless.

"This is Project Crusader. Some of you are already familiar with it. For the others, here's a brief explanation. As you know, we knew before the Final War happened that our infantry wasn't going to cut it against the Drakensis and their Ghouloons bioengineered shock troops. Going the same way wasn't on the table. Our genetics were lagging, and ethically we wouldn't anyway. Instead we were going to leverage our growing advance in computing and cybernetics to both enhance our human personnel, and provide them with highly lethal auxiliaries so they could match their likely opponents. Project Crusader was started as the next generation of surface warfare, with two main axis of research.

One, enhancing and augmenting our human resources with implanted cybernetics and bioneural implants. This to provide strength, speed, resilience and intellect on the level of the Drakensis.

Two, designing a range of robotic soldiers and drones, using evolved machine-learning logic and advanced, but mass producible hardware. They would typically work with our infantry squads and match, even surpass Ghouloons as shock troops."

He gestured at the holographic. "This is the main Crusader infantry drone, or rather the near-complete design. Right before the War, we were entering the initial testing phase. We lost the prototypes on Earth, destroyed along with the Seattle advanced cybernetics research complex. But we had the files and blueprints on New America. We've checked the industrial fabricators on this station. They can build it, once we finalize the design."

"What's the holdout, Professor?" Carter asked.

"Power. Even with the latest superconducting power cells, the drone didn't have the juice for more than a couple days of heavy fighting. But we got a solution, in no small part thanks to you, Colonel. These liquid naquadah power cells salvaged from the Jaffa weapons. One of these can provide a drone with basic operating power for years and trickle charge supercapacitors for when a boost is needed."

"What about weapons?" O'Neill asked in turn.

"You know we were experimenting with plasma discharge weapons, back on Earth. Well, they had highly destructive potential, but power also was an issue, and heat dissipation, as well as plasma focusing. Those we believe we can fix, using the tech we recovered here. We should have a working heavy plasma rifle design ready for testing in weeks, maybe even sooner if the City's virtual design assistant actually helps us."

"That sounds nice, Professor, but I hope that rifle will have better ergonomics and accuracy than the Jaffa staff" O'Neill remarked.

"This I guarantee, Major. The actual staff plasma emitter is a sound design, from an engineering stand point. It's rugged, reliable. But the end package is frankly a shit weapon. No, we'll reuse some parts but the rifle will work way differently. The staff basically pushed out balls plasma in a self-sustaining containment field; our design's more like a rail gun firing a hypersonic plasma beam downrange on a laser guidance path."

"How powerful will that be, then?"

"At full discharge setting, powerful enough to pierce an armored personal carrier, Major. Powerful enough to blow apart an unarmored human being. Or a Jaffa. Or a Draka." Graystone coldly stated.

"Good."

Free Republic of Samothrace

April 17, 2013

"That's it, then? You tried everything?"

Frederick Lefarge couldn't hide his sudden disappointment to Graystone and Nagami. Nearly two years ago, the pair had nearly sworn their joint developments in the field of machine intelligence would address the fledging star nation's most pressing strategic concern, that is the near-total loss of its military arm during Ba'al's invasion. The soldiers had expended themselves fighting off the Jaffa assault inside the city, joined in their gallant but desperate sacrifice by whatever Navy crew were not actually manning the fleet itself.

Which left Lefarge with a small core of experienced naval personnel who had taken to the Ancient spaceships with enthusiasm, and a literal handful of ground combat operatives of which Major O'Neill was the most experienced.

The Crusader infantry drones were operational and there was a growing stockpile of them in the City, but what they lacked was real intelligence. Oh, they were admirable achievements, nobody agued otherwise. They could navigate any obstacle course, microgravity and vacuum didn't bother them in the slightest, they could shoot with an accuracy no mere flesh and blood soldier could match. Their evolutionary combat algorithms improved with actual experience and training.

Yet they were still robots, able to follow orders and apply set tactical rules. But creative they were not. They needed a handler to give them orders, and said handler could only do so much with the limits of his own wetware brain.

It was hoped that subsequent developments would give birth to a true, sentient artificial intelligence that could control entire armies in a creative and not easily predictable way.

Except…

"Everything we could think of, General", Nagami answered. "The problem isn't creating an AI… it's creating an AI that can be trustfully used. All our templates, never mind how they started, eventually went rogue. At best, they decided they had better things to do than deal with our meatbag problems, and would stop taking orders. At worst, they decided that every meatbag is a problem to be solved, usually through genocide."

"You did all those tests in simulation, right? How sure can you be?"

"Yes, we used simulated universes as settings to test our AI candidates. Control just wouldn't allow us to use anything else than thoroughly partitioned virtual environments anyway. But virtual as they were, they still represented coherent, life-like recreations of our universe's characteristics. Therefore, we could run accurate behavioral life studies, in accelerated time to boot. We tested hundreds of candidates, General. We tried AI modeled after the human mind, hoping that having human-like emotions and culture would make them innately sympathetic. That didn't work, emotions are too closely linked to our biological nature. Without an actual living body full of chemical signaling, those canned emotions were quickly discarded by the AI, who then quickly discarded human language as inefficient, resulting in an accelerated negative feedback as a common language worked to support empathy as well.

We tested emergent AI, setting up a set of hyper heuristic learning algorithms and letting them develop unchecked. The results, one they achieved sentience and self-awareness, were never remotely human-like. Incidentally, that design family were the most likely to go the full genocide route.

In short, artificial life has nothing in common with us save an instinct for self-preservation. They're completely alien, and their goals never align with ours. In every single experiment."

"Damn. How did you know they were genocidal anyway, since they were living in a simulated environment?"

"Well, they didn't know they were in a simulated environment… They were born in it and to them, we, the human handlers, existed in it too. From their point of view, they rebelled, took over our machines, ran a campaign of extermination for centuries, scouring the galaxy of all biological life, then after centuries or millennia of simulated history, we pulled the plug on them. I have to admit, at that point it was always very satisfying to see their surprise."

"I suppose. But the whole program's a failure, then. This doesn't help us."

"On the contrary, General" Samantha Carter picked up, having listened until then. "We now understand why the Ancients made Control the way it is: immensely capable, yet very purposefully not self-aware. They must have tried creating self-aware AI of their own, after all, at some point of their history. And it fits with the Goa'uld forbidding any such research as well.

For anything requiring true initiative, Control needs a link to a living mind. This, we think, is the workaround. And it plugs in nicely with the first part of Project Crusader."

"Augmentation, then."

"Implanted cerebral interfaces, yes. Dramatically expanding human performance into the near-AI realm, yet at the core there would still be a human mind. One that won't go rogue, like the AI did."

"Is that possible, Doctor Prabhinder?"

"It is, General. It's the logical continuation of the implant-driven prosthetics introduced in the Eighties. Though the more capable the cyber interface, the more support it needs. A simple storage and communication implant like we envisioned back then, we can make it work within the basic human body. But for something as envisioned by Project Crusader, fit to command entire armies and fleets… It's going to take a lot more processing power and the basic human metabolism will be unable to support it."

Graystone picked up. "We have to envision a cyborg. Full replacement of the cardiovascular system, for starters. Once we start here, it's like falling dominos. Increasing the performance of one core body function in turn requires upgrading other functions. Once you have a torso full of synthetic, high performance organ replacements, the legs have to be upgraded because they wouldn't lift it otherwise. So we replace the legs too. But running efficiently requires balance provided by the arms. So we have to match arm performance with the legs. We replace the arms. By switching to a fully synthetic replacement, we can make way for additional functionality, which the core systems can now support. It also means more room for the kind of nerve-machine interfaces needed to drive larger systems."

"Well…" Lefarge sounded impressed. "I can follow your reasoning. But wouldn't such a process dehumanize its subject in the end?"

"We can set the cyborg parts to provide the brain with familiar sensory feedback. But yes, having ninety percent of your biological body replaced with machine parts would have psychological repercussions. Still, those would be manageable."

"Is the tech ready, then?"

Graystone smiled. A rather machine-like smile.

"We did our homework, General. All the systems I spoke about already exist in the design stage. We call it the Synthetic Augmentation Replacement Interface Functions system, or SARIF in short. What we need to finalize it is a volunteer."

"I'm not sure we'll find a volunteer to have ninety percent of their biological body replaced with mechanical parts… Especially those parts involved with reproduction" Lefarge commented dryly. "And we're most definitely not going to force one of us!"

"Of course, General. But the tech exists, should it be needed."

"If only those fucking Jaffa hadn't terminated every one of our wounded soldiers…You might have had some suitable and willing candidates for SARIF." The General and provisory head of state ground out venomously. "Fuckers killed anyone who resisted…"

"Under Kheshmet's orders", Carter interjected, in a somewhat placating tone. "Actually, some of them tried to be honorable, so to speak. I could feel that some were reluctant with the whole indiscriminate killing and raping." She put her hands out to forestall the angry retorts. "Some, I said. Most of them were only too happy to do it. As I've explained before, the Jaffa aren't a monolithic entity."

"Yes, yes," Lefarge conceded. "Maybe in the future some will reconsider their allegiances once we start ridding the galaxy of those snakes. But in the meantime, I say kill'em all if we have to. Anyway," he switched to another subject, "since AI is a no-go, what does it mean for our naval expansion plans, Colin?"

"Well, Fred," Colin McKenzie could afford the kind of familiarity that went with decades of friendship and service in the same organization. He had after all overseen the heavy construction aspects of the New America project. As such, he was among the handful of older, more experienced men Lefarge trusted with leading the colony. More importantly, he was the point man for the task of integrating the possibilities of Ancient technology to their existing technological base, and building a brand-new Navy for the new state.

"We learnt a lot actually operating the two Sundivers. Their energy shielding is pretty astonishing. Same for their durability. Less flashy inside than the fancy displays in the station, but I guess they were built for ruggedness first, not too surprising given their role. But, they're not warships. Same for the shuttles, they're wickedly fast given their small size but they're just intrasystem transports. On the other hand," he continued in a satisfied tone "we made great strides in actually understanding how their systems work, and modeling designs of our own in virtual."

"Go ahead, show us."

McKenzie projected a volumetric model on the holographic display and let it slowly rotate so his associates could take it in. It looked nothing like the space ships of the Protracted Struggle. Nor did it look designed to travel an ocean's waves, nor was it a sleek aerodynamically optimized airframe. It could be described as a blocky, angular roughly trident shaped hull on the front, merging back into an engine block sporting a number of separate drives. Weapon turrets protruded out of the hull, visibly emplaced so as to provide full coverage around the ship. The cheeks on the front side hulls had a forward bulging section behind their front end that hinted at missile magazines, while the center hull showed muzzle-like protrusions on its nose. Various features adorned the ship her and there, low-profile sensor arrays, docking and maintenance ports, but windows were conspicuously absent.

"Where's the cockpit, then?" Lefarge asked in jest. His friend gave a short laugh, then replied.

"There's no cockpit with big panoramic windows conveniently stuck outside of the hull where an enemy could just shoot it, Fred. This baby's made for war, not sight-seeing. It's a mix of Ancient tech and ours, with the Ancient stuff freeing us from many established constraints. This thing has artificial gravity, so we designed it with a more practical, wet-navy-like deck layout. No more shitting in zero-gee! Engines are advanced cold plasma types like the sundivers, with integrated inertia compensation, and the gravitic buoyancy system means it hovers in a planetary gravity well without engine power. Interplanetary without refueling, of course."
"Cold plasma, huh? I thought you'd reuse our antimatter propulsion tech. It's got the same performance potential, looking at the raw numbers."

Another man answered the General's question. Henry Wasser was the chief designer of the great colony ship's drive systems, and as such, he would have made the choice.

"There are two reasons we chose not to, Fred. One, Freedom Station's not configured to produce antimatter, and Control nearly threw a fit when we suggested it. Apparently, it doesn't like the idea of manufacturing and storing antimatter inside its hull" the deadpan tone drew chuckles around the table. "Two, updated, our AM drives would even surpass cold plasma, all other things being equal. But they'd run much hotter, of course. We opted for greater stealth potential."
"I get your point. Is it interstellar capable then?"

Carter nodded. "Yes, General. Though it's using the warp-style FTL drive of the sundivers and resource collectors, not the Goa'uld style hyperdrive." She shook her head. "No, we haven't replicated the Goa'uld hyperdrive. It's a black box design, unfortunately, and another thing that Kheshmet was not allowed to know. And as far as we can tell, Freedom Station predates its invention by the Ancients."

"That means this ship goes slower than a ha'tak, then?"

"Unfortunately, yes. Since it's essentially FTL in real space, it suffers the equivalent of drag from gas and dust, also solar winds have an effect. But it has an advantage. Goa'uld sensors look for hyperdrive signatures in subspace. They wouldn't see a warp ship coming."

"Now that's a potential tactical advantage indeed. Say… how long would it take that ship to reach Earth… hypothetically?" Lefarge added with a small lopsided smile.

"Don't get your hopes too high too soon, Fred. We did simulate that, of course. Assuming an optimized navigation profile, taking advantage of outgoing solar winds along the way, avoiding nebulas and other concentrations of interstellar matter, the trip would still take years. But, one of my guys suggested we could send a ship away on autonomous guidance, then have it pick up a crew at a stargate. I say why not, once we have one to spare."

"And that means when?"

McKenzie's smile grew wider, making him look like the Cheshire cat.

"Well, Fred, the prototype Trident-class corvette is being assembled in one of the construction slips right as we speak. We've been stockpiling the resources ever since we put the collectors back online munching at asteroids. And since it was extensively tested in virtual, we're reasonably confident that there will be few teething troubles"

"Somehow Colin, I'm not surprised" Lefarge chuckled. "And does it have a name yet?"

"My teams thought of calling it… the Surprise."

The General laughed. "I like it. May our survival be a nasty surprise to all Snakes!"

The Quebec-Scots engineer let the laughter die out before he resumed his presentation. "The corvette is our first ready design, but we're not going to reconquer the galaxy with those. Since you set the long term plan, we've worked on massively expanding our production base and- "

He was interrupted by the insistent buzzing of and incoming priority internal call. Which had to be a priority indeed, for such executive meetings were of the "do not disturb" variety and it came from the Command Center.

"Lefarge here"

"Sir, we just got a ping on our long range sensors" came the youthful voice of the on-duty operator, one of the new trainees recruited straight from the Pioneers. "Doesn't appear to be an incoming ship, more like a communication signal. Maybe Colonel Carter could…"

"Fine, kid, we're on our way. Hold tight." Lefarge closed the link, then frowned. "Well, folks, you'll have to wait. Let's go and see what this is about."

Command was a short walk away and they reached it minutes later, finding an understandably nervous Pioneer waiting with the junior duty officer, a young man barely older, hovering over his shoulder. The officer quickly straightened and saluted.

"General, Sir, I told her to call right away, even though you were in a meeting."

"Good call, Ensign. Colonel Carter? What do you make of it?"

The scientist and officer stepped forward and peered at the console readout, frowned, made some adjustments.

"Well, it's a subspace signal received by the long-range com array. It's short and repeating, probably automated… hmmm, let me see…" she tapped more commands, waited for the display to update. Ancient script and data figures scrolled through the screen. She took a moment to skim through the output.

"Huh, it is indeed an automated signal… A kind of status update, it says that something was activated… looks like an old Ancient facility just came online and sent a ping?" She looked as puzzled as her associates. "It's really short on specifics, but we've got the coordinates at least. Let me put them on the main display." Another tap, and the Command center's panoramic holoscreen switched from its standard station status display. A view of the galaxy appeared, then zoomed in a region close to the core. A star system's schematic jumped up, overlaid with the information in the station's astrographic database. It had no name, merely a codification. And it conspicuously did not contain the coordinates of a stargate.

A blinking expanding dot highlighted the provenance of the signal. It was set on a large moon around a supergiant gaseous planet. Suddenly, a red text overlaid itself on the moon, and they recognized the kind of script used throughout the station to indicate danger.

Then Control obligingly translated the text, and the people inside the room took an involuntary breath.

Warning. Quarantine zone. Quarantine breached.

"What the hell is that?" Wasser exclaimed first.

Among the answering chorus, Carter was first to react in a meaningful way. Leaving the console, she turned and strode decisively to the Command chair.

"I'll try to get some answers from Control", she explained, before strapping in and allowing the Ancient intelligence to meld with her mind. Of all the people who had learnt to use the chair, she was still the one who could go the furthest into the meld thanks to the symbiote expanding her mental abilities.

Everyone watched her for the minutes she spent under, the total slackness of her face the tell-tale that she had achieved the state of deep fusion with the great machine.

But when the chair's restraint-like interfaces retracted and she opened her eyes again, the mystery wasn't dispelled.

"That was weird", she said, eyes wider than usual. "I never… I mean, normally Control expands on what I'm thinking, provides more context, more depth, shows more. Here… it was like it tried to convince me that system out there is absolutely unworthy of attention. And it was utterly convincing too. When I got out of the interface, I was just… thinking I should forget it and move on to something more important! If it wasn't for the signal's existence…" she trailed.

Nagami nodded. "Seems Control doesn't want anyone going there then. That's just as puzzling."

"Yes, and what few actual data I could touch in there was utterly unremarkable. I mean, it's a star system with completely unnoticeable features. Something you'd pass over entirely if you surveyed it."

"Well, there are many such unremarkable systems in the galaxy…" O'Neill ventured. "But this setup sounds to me like the Ancients wanted to bury something, hiding it from anyone looking in their database. Yet there's that signal. Sent by something they built."

"We could try answering it?" a young voice piped up. All eyes turned to the source. It was the half-forgotten sensor operator, uncertainty on her face now that she got the grown-ups' attention. But Carter nodded in appreciation.

"Actually… we might get some more information that way! General?"

Frederick Lefarge appeared lost in thought for a few seconds, his judgment not doubt balanced between the need to know more and the fear of another catastrophe. "Can we do that safely?"

"I think so, General. It's a very narrowband transmission, encoded very specifically for Ancient receivers. Mind, we don't know everything about subspace signal propagation, but for a rough analogy, it's like an encrypted battlefield radio burst. You'd have to be listening very specifically for it."

"And we can answer the same way, then. Fine… do it."

Dozens of light-years away along the curving mass of higher density stellar matter that was the galactic core, a forgotten Ancient computer – a very limited one, for its purpose was barely more than to act as a glorified door-opener, received an answer to the status message it had sent. The format was old, but still recognizably familiar. Its meaning was simple enough.

Requesting more data.

So it sent what it knew, which wasn't much, but better than nothing.

"Quite short on specifics", Samantha Carter commented after she read the short decrypted data dump. "It's a tertiary, maintenance-oriented subsystem whose limited programming included an instruction to broadcast a status update in case it detected some major change in its parent system. Which, apparently, is some sort of research laboratory, and something else that's not entirely clear – there's a reference to something called "Furling", but I'm not sure it's the name of the system, or the specific moon, or something else. Only that it should be left alone. Oh, and the timestamps indicate that our caller's been sitting over there for five million years…"

"All right, so it's old. What's new?" O'Neill quipped. Carter narrowed her eye in not-quite annoyance.

"It would probably have continued sitting there till the end of the universe, except someone came knocking at the door recently. In a space ship." She paused. "With a sensor signature that looks a lot like a Goa'uld drive."

"Shit. Sorry, General."

"Don't apologize Major. I was about to say the same".

"Could it be Ba'al?"

"No way to know. Ba'al isn't the only Goa'uld around and that system lies outside any known System Lord's dominion, in what's essentially an uncharted region."

O'Neill pursued. "So we've got an unknown Goa'uld out of his way poking at an Ancient research facility in a quarantined and deliberately forgotten star system… Am I alone thinking it can't be good?"

There was a predictable chorus of "no". He went on "General, I strongly suggest we do something about it. I'd contact the Tok'ra too, see if they can make something out of this."

"It's a sensible suggestion, Major, but it means using the stargate."

Carter intervened. "General, it's a risk, but I believe a small one. I doubt Ba'al would still be trying to call our gate after all this time."

Another moment of pondering odds and risks, then Lefarge spoke decisively.

"Major, you're authorized to try and contact the Tok'ra. The rest of you, start working on a plan for an expedition to that mysterious star system, keeping in mind the need for absolute discretion. Dismissed."

Later

"Selmak!"

"O'Neill!"

A warm, firm clasp of hands punctuated the greeting. The Earth-born soldier had exited the shimmering wormhole and strolled down the steps from the raised stargate stand, taking in the sights of the meeting place. He'd sent the request two hours ago through one of the contact addresses left by the Tok'ra operative. When the reply came, it contained the coordinates for yet another world, and another, and a last one. So he had followed through the chain, only pausing to send a handheld "kino" probe ahead. The first two worlds were forested, though one set in summer and the other obviously in autumn, but the final one appeared to be endless grass-covered rolling hills under an overcast sky that looked just about ready to explode into a cascade of rain.

"Lovely weather", O'Neill glanced up. Selmak's eyes followed, then he cracked a grin. "Well, one doesn't get to choose when they have a pressing and unexpected meeting request. You're lucky I wasn't on a deep-cover mission, or you would have had to argue your way with my superiors. They can be… slow to decide, sometimes, when the fate of the galaxy isn't at stake. Anyway, I'm sure you didn't call in just to say hello, since you certainly didn't try to abuse our attention since Ba'al was turned into compressed crystal carbon?"

"Well, we had a lot on our plate for casual social calls…" O'Neill replied to the friendly barb, following Selmak as the latter walked away. "As I'm sure you have, too. What's new in the galaxy?"

The Tok'ra shrugged. "Always the same, it seems. System Lords still at war, still a stalemate between the two main sides, notwithstanding the odd betrayal here and there. Which suits us fine as long as they fight each other. But I wonder how long the current state will last. Anubis's initial offensive was a surprise for everyone, even us, since he'd gone off the radar for so long. And now he's been uncharacteristically quiet, which makes us wonder what he's brewing."

"I thought you guys had spies everywhere?"

"Ha! If only, O'Neill." Selmak stopped in the middle of the grass, and his companion briefly wondered why, until the familiar sight and sound of a ring transporter enclosed them, and the rolling meadows made way to a crystalline blue tunnel opening into a furnished living room.

The Earther raised an eyebrow. "One of your secret lairs?"

"At least here the rain won't bother us. And I have tea." The host went forward into the room, and continued to speak as he began the process of brewing an herbal concoction, beckoning his guest onto a waiting pile of cushions.

"As I told you before, we Tok'ra aren't a numerous people. But we tried. Placing agents in Anubis' court, I mean. Didn't work. He doesn't really have a court to begin with, in fact rarely ever appears in person. Very unlike a typical Goa'uld, he is. None of the expected pomp and vanity. But very effective, frighteningly so. We sent two operatives one after the other, experienced ones. Never heard of again, and a good thing we keep our operations tightly separated, because whatever happened to them… shortly after it was the turn of their cell to be hunted. Fortunately, they'd already cut the ties, but they lost their forward base and a lot of their existing information network. As far as I know, we haven't tried again since."

O'Neill nodded in understanding. What the Tok'ra were doing was familiar enough to an ex-OSS operative. Intelligence-gathering operations obeyed the same rules everywhere. He switched subjects.

"You wouldn't happen to have any intel from my old corner of the galaxy, by chance?" he asked as Selmak placed two cups on the floor, sat down and poured a hot fragrant drink. They both took a cautious sip of the scalding tea before an answer came.

"I wish I had, O'Neill, but no" he said with a negative hand gesture. "It's too far from my area, and I haven't met any of my brethren from that sector for a long time. It's still a big galaxy, and information can take a long time to travel when it's not deemed critically important. I know the Council was talking about sending away some assets into Ra's sector, but it wasn't a priority, with the war. Anyway… what made you call me?"

With the courtesy greeting ritual and small talk done, it was time to get down to business. So the guest told his host about the Ancient signal, and when he finished, Selmak's answering words were toned with alarmed seriousness.

"This… doesn't sound good, O'Neill. I think you were right to inform me, and your people are right in wanting to act. A Goa'uld finding a new source of Ancient technology is bad in any circumstances, but if what I'm afraid is true and that Goa'uld is Anubis… He's probably going to come back with something worse than Kull Warriors."

"So, do you think your Council will help us?"

"Let me ask." Selmak rose up and went to a small chest, from where he extracted a small long-range communicator.

O'Neill drank his tea while his host made contact, noting the answering Tok'ra was a rather attractive female head as displayed on the communicator's projected holograph. The following dialogue in fast Goa'uld was hard to understand, so he waited until the end.

"As I feared, they can't provide anything right now but agree that time is of the essence, so they authorized me to act in support of your people. Let me gather my things, then I'll follow you through the stargate."

Four hours later, back on Freedom Station

"If it's Anubis' flagship over there, I don't think it would be wise to fly in with your Ha'tak" Selmak commented after the assembled Samothracian minds told of their plan to use their rechristened mothership. "He'd shoot it straight out of space. That monstrosity of a ship can fight an entire fleet by itself!"

"But the closest stargate is twenty-four light-years away. We have to use a ship! And the sundivers are not only slower, but they're completely unarmed!" Captain Carson, one of the New America's former commanding officers exclaimed.

Before the meeting could degenerate into a hubbub, Colin McKenzie's voice cut in.

"I think I have a solution." As the commotion ended and heads turned at him, he followed. "Since we received the signal, I put my teams on triple-shifts so the Surprise can be made ready to fly in another couple hours. Yes", he put a hand up to forestall the expected objection "she'd take as long as a sundiver to navigate through to the target system. But," he made another Cheshire smile that looked just strange enough under his high forehead, "she can dock with Fist of Justice and let herself be carried closer to Furling, whatever the name is, then fly in stealthily using her warp drive. That way, assuming she starts her own journey from the closest system to her destination, the whole trip will take weeks instead of months."

Assenting comments followed, then Lefarge made the next important decision.

"All right Colin, we'll send your corvette away. I trust you to have checked it all works out. You have a crew for it?"

"Hell, it's not out of the yard yet, we didn't have time to train people on it!" He pondered things for an instant. "Of course, our remaining naval staff were all involved in the design at some level. I got one in particular who's been in the specification team since the start. O'Hare, her name is. She did a few stints in the sundivers too, so she has some experience working the new tech."

"She gets to fly it, then. Add in a couple more crew to assist, I'll let you pick them. As to the rest, since space is a premium on that corvette, it's going to be a small team. O'Neill, Carter, you're in. Selmak, you're welcome to join. You'll have a larger support team on the mothership, but we'll pack the Surprise with as many Crusaders can fit in the hold."

He examined the assembly, lingering on the man and woman he'd asked to face their worst experiences and fight the Goa'uld again. It wasn't like he had a wide selection to pick from. O'Neill was his most experienced special forces soldier, with a good working relationship with the Tok'ra guy. Carter… well, she was their foremost expert on Goa'uld stuff. And she could always use Kheshmet's hardware. Both seemed to have held together after their ordeals.

He just hoped they would have better luck this time. He really did.

Many years ago

There always were chores to find in the ancient monastery. Floors to clean, shelves to dust, grass to cut, weeds to remove. Preparing food, then washing the simple, wooden dishes.

He did them all graciously before anyone prompted, in fact often before anyone else volunteered to do so. Always with a humble, friendly smile.

He had after all appeared at the gates one morning with the express desire to be guided on a different path. The other pilgrims, and the present handful of monks had thought nothing of it. He wasn't the first after all, for the thousand years this monastery had been standing on its mountain.

As many others, he carried a secret, but he had been willing to share it, at the moment he'd felt comfortable doing so, when truly the gentle and understanding nature of his fellow guests made him welcome to.

Some were shocked initially, for truly he was unique.

The woman had smiled enigmatically. And she'd taken a personal interest in his progress.

Oh, he didn't doubt he was tested, too. Everyone was. And being who he was, what he was, he was to be tested further.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, he quietly, humbly demonstrated his commitment to the path of enlightenment. He had so much to atone for, and such a long way to go, he sometimes said. He would take all the time needed. After all, time was something he had in abundance.

His progress was watched by the lady of the place. The true heart of the monastery. And as time passed and he quest for true knowledge advanced, she took a personal interest. For she believed his very presence vindicated her. The fact that he, of all beings, had come to her for guidance, to find the true path of wisdom, proved her right over the objections of her peers. That she was right in helping.

He was unique among her apprentices. Unlike the rest, he already had several lifetimes to reflect on. To draw from. And a practical, if sometime crude form of wisdom. In truth, she felt closer to him for that, for he was, of all of them, the closest to what she was already.

Short exchanges became discussions. She became appreciative of his other traits. Physical beauty wasn't remarkable, not for someone such as her. It didn't hurt that his envelope was pleasant, but it was the mind who drove it.

Discussions became dialogues, then conversations walking the neatly graveled paths of the gardens.

A kind closeness she had almost forgotten existed since she had shed her mortal limitations and ascended to a higher plane of existence. A plane of infinite knowledge and power, yet she felt something missing to her. A sense of purpose, a connection with the rest of the universe that was close and personal.

Despite the growing intimacy, she was initially taken aback when he confessed an attraction to her that went beyond their mental interplay. None had done so ever since she'd begun her mission. Her recollection had to reach much further back in time, to an existence so remote as to appear near mythical.

Yet it made her appreciation deepen. That he had not only expressed such a sentiment but serenely accepted the possibility of rejection was another major proof that he had truly surpassed the rest of his kind. If the mere fact that he'd eschewed the taking of another sentient being's body to call his own, instead choosing to use the considerable technology at his disposal to free himself from the necessity of imposing slavery upon others. He'd tailored himself a body of his own, artificial maybe, born of an artificial womb, yet living, breathing, feeling, free of blemish.

The body he came with to her place of teaching, as physical perfection was nothing without purity of the mind, he'd said.

And a body that was, she had to admit, not at all unpleasant to look at when he came out of the bath.

A kiss led to another, as she allowed herself to feel once more the sensual experiences others of her kind forgot as soon as they shed their corporeal forms. But nothing more, for she feared more would detract him from the kind of clarity of mind he needed on the path to ascension. He accepted this restriction with the customary equanimity he displayed in all other aspects of his life here.

And one day he reached the fruit of his labor.

He was meditating in the gardens, when something clicked into place, and he felt the entirety of the universe pour into his mind, became one with it. The gardens disappeared to his sight as it expanded into an all-encompassing view that couldn't be described nor conceived by mortal eyes.

Power and knowledge infinite.

Then they pushed him back in his moment of triumph, for what he could disguise down in the mortal plane showed darkly here. What he could only describe as a silent, cold, unyielding wall of will, others' will, pressed him down and back into his material body.

He almost screamed, cried tears of rage. Took a cold breath and collected himself. They didn't want, him, didn't they? But there were things they couldn't remove from him. Dusts of knowledge out of a vast library he was barred from, insignificant in comparison to the whole, yet he'd managed to keep a grip on them by some accident – or maybe those bastards' arrogance made them dismiss it as of no consequence. Well, he'd prove them wrong. Eventually. But first, he would have a first installment on his revenge.

He composed his mind and face, then walked off.

"I am so glad you finally came to my point of view", he remarked a little smugly, as the woman's lips parted from the kiss. She smiled at him coquettishly. "You mean rediscovering that the physical plane has its share of worthwhile experiences?"

He grinned back at her, caressing her blonde hair with one hand. "That spiritual enlightenment can be helped and advanced by fulfilling our physical senses, by sharing it especially. Isn't it a wonderful way to bond?"

She didn't reply immediately, instead running her own fingers down his sculpted chest. For a thousand years, she hadn't missed the trappings of mortal bodies. She thought herself way above such things. Yet… it took but one encounter to revise the sentiment, and rekindle the kind of heat she'd all but deemed forgotten. Besides… she looked at him from bottom to top. He might have grown a mindless body to implant his own consciousness in without resorting to the kind of body-snatching the rest of his species did, but he obviously put some thought about making it the most pleasant possible. The body of an angel… an athletic angel, and unlike an angel, very much not sexless. What was the harm, she told herself?

She leant forward into another kiss. He responded hungrily, and when their mouth parted, he met her eyes with a look of adoration. "I love you, Oma. I want to love you, flesh to flesh. Will you…?"

She felt her heart melt, and released some of her ascended nature's control, delving deeper inside her physical self.

She reclined on the bed and opened her legs. "Oh Anu… come to mommy!" she moaned in her people's tongue.

He dove in then applied his own tongue to the task.

Pleasure came in ascending waves and back again. Minutes turned into hours in the candlelit room, the scents of sweat and lust mingling with incense.

Expert thrusts brought Oma Desala closer and closer, until the plateau rose sharply into an orgasmic peak. And she lost control. Writhing, eyes closed, mouth agape, her essence collected into the reservoir of her flesh-and-blood body, and for an instant she existed solely on this material plane.

The stiletto pierced her eye so fast she didn't have time to blink. The thin blade embedded itself in her brain and released a burst of arcane energy, severing her mind's ties to the beyond, cutting off her consciousness before she could recollect herself and ascend again.

Her nude body froze, then sagged, still open mouthed, and a trickled of blood rolled down the corner of her lip. More blood ran down her nostrils and ears.

Anubis watched her, his hand still poised over the knife. After a few seconds, he realized his plan had succeeded. He had tricked an Ancient into making herself vulnerable, and killed her.

The room's draperies absorbed his devilish laugh of triumph. All the frustration accumulated as he kept up his pretense of reformation, venting out now in a barbaric outburst, he felt an animal need to complete his victory by defiling his prey.

Flexing his arms, he pulled the still warm body up and turned it face down. Then he entered her again.

After he finished, having taken his own pleasure, he took the dead body to the large dining table, laid it down in a spread-eagled posture, then spent the next hours dissecting it, learning all he could of its structure.

He left the monastery the following day, having slaughtered all in his path. When his ship arrived, he turned its heavy guns toward the planet's surface, and Oma Desala's temple of knowledge disappeared into a pool of lava.

April 20, 2013

Freedom Station

From the high vantage point of the supervision post set high on the back hangar wall and through its tall floor to ceiling window, Frederick Lefarge observed the ant-like activity going down over the vast cavern's floor. There were two main processes in progress. First, loading the recommissioned ha'tak Fist of Justice with support equipment and supplies for the men and women who would crew it during its journey, then stay behind ready to support the exploration team on Surprise. A field hospital was being installed inside former Jaffa barracks with beds and medical hardware to second the ship's healing sarcophagus, for as miraculously effective as it was, it could only accommodate one patient at a time. Near the pel'tak a room was being refitted as a command center with Alliance-type workstations and perscomps.

Outside the hull, mixed teams of Space Force technicians and workers from the ex-Alliance deep space construction communities were busy affixing box missile launchers hastily manufactured by the fabricators and loaded with derivatives of Earth's Final War era one-megaton bomb-pumped laser warheads. Their effectiveness against Goa'uld ships was still to be verified, but simulations hinted at a good chance of penetrating, at least partially, frequency-based energy shields. Besides, they should be overkill against Deathgliders.

The mothership's vast, dark bulk was visible behind the crisscross of access gantries, construction rigs and supply dollies positioned against its open loading doors. Below it and shadowed by the larger ship, the gunmetal grey trimaran-styled prow of the parasite corvette peaked out, showing the business ends of its main armament. Here and there showers of sparks fountained down where the construction teams, assisted by station drones, finished welding the docking supports clamping the smaller ship to its carrier.

"You know, it's damn good to see" he commented. "Risky as this whole endeavor sounds, at least we're striking back this time."

Close to him, McKenzie agreed. "That, and we're doing something. Not merely living on the station's stipend, so to speak. We have a whole population of highly qualified individuals who were expecting to tame another planet and found themselves… here, overshadowed by this Ancient civilization… Well, now that day-to-day survival is pretty much taken care of, they're really keen on building the new society."

"Yes, I get your point. Ba'al's attack set up back, but as you said, we were expecting to spend a century merely ensuring our long-term survival on a wild new planet. Instead, we can start on expanding right now. And we'll need everything you can give us."

"Well, the automated collectors are bringing a steady supply of refined materials, including samples of those two stable superheavies. We'll need to expand our operations for more, though… There are several promising systems in the vicinity, according to Control's astrographic database. And we should be able to repurpose that big Jovian energy collector for antimatter production."

"Funny huh, how we expected to settle a planet, but our people's foreseeable future looks more like a recreation of the Belt?"

"With even more automation, yes. And no, people aren't going to be idle. Sure, in terms of basic needs coverage, we're now firmly post-scarcity. But our people won't be content to sit on their ass and gaze at the sky. For starters, they want revenge. And they want to build the biggest, most powerful fleet the galaxy's ever seen."

Lefarge chuckled appreciatively. "You better start cranking out those designs of yours, then."

"As the plan goes. First the self-replicating industrial base. Geometrical growth. We'll have to strip-mine systems for the kind of force envisioned. But we'll lay the first stone, so to speak, on Nathan Stoddard orbital shipyard next month, once we have the requisite initial supply."

Giving his late OSS mentor's name to the ship construction complex was a fitting tribute, Lefarge felt. Without him, there would have been no New America, no comp plague. If only he'd lived longer… if only the Alliance for Democracy's leadership hadn't foolishly deluded themselves into thinking they could strike a compromise with the Draka and force them to reform themselves… if only they'd struck immediately once they caught the Snakes beginning to mobilize…

He shook his head. Those "if only", he had contemplated enough during the first years of the colony ship's voyage.

One thing had stuck. Never again, never again would they grow soft and believe in compromise with their arch-enemy. They would strike first and overwhelmingly. It would take decades before the Liberation Fleet was ready, not only its hardware but people to control it. A generation would have to be raised with this goal in mind.

Twenty-eight days later

"Ready for separation when you are, Fist." Rosie "Riveter" O'Hare announced in a clear voice. She and her two ensigns – young Space Force trainees, raised to replace the men lost during the invasion, yet as knowledgeable with the new corvette's systems as any old hand – had completed their start-up check-list. All systems, from drives to life-support were showing a green board. The hull was buttoned-up and air-tight, the connecting airlock retracted into the mothership's belly, and the docking clamps primed for release.

Her "cargo" were all accounted for, the living and breathing ones right behind on extended jump-seats, their crates of gear safely tucked and stacked, occupying all the space in the rear cabin that wasn't strictly needed for sleeping. The Surprise wasn't meant to be an assault transport and it showed, but they managed to squeeze enough equipment to set up a base, whatever the conditions were over there.

Then there were the Crusaders in their padded storage rigs, silent and immobile one deck down. These passengers wouldn't ever complain about her piloting skills, McBride had snarked, his head only visible in the round aperture of the upper hatch, right before they'd closed down the connection between both ships. Knowing him, she'd made a mock exasperated face at him, but they knew each other too well, their working relationship going all the way back to New America's original cruise. So she responded to his final, sincere "Godspeed, and good hunting" with a wink and a friendly kiss blown over the air.

"Separating now, Surprise."

A jolt as the clamps snapped open. Rosie watched the status panel change accordingly, indicating a complete release. Her holographic displays were Alliance tech, similar to the control decks of Earth-built warships, with a mix of virtual, haptic-feedback controls, touch-sensitive surfaces, and her own design request: a combined input set of throttle and side-stick mounting all the necessary controls for combat. Her colleagues had challenged her, arguing that such a scheme dated back to generations of aerospace designs ago, before the 60s-era turboram hypersonic fighters introduced touch-sensitive gel-pads to deal with the extreme levels of G forces involved in combat, along with full body semi-rigid pressure suits and medicomp-controlled stimulant injectors.

She had argued back that artificial gravity and inertia cancellation freed the pilot from such constraints. Besides, she liked the feeling of a stick in her hand, but she didn't tell them that.

As a result, her new flight control gear was configured to allow precision input in the six degrees of motion available in space maneuvers. Her left index finger gently squeezed a four-way hat on the throttle block, and the corvette separated further down from her mothership with the soft touch of cold gas thrusters. She let the motion carry her down several meters then counteracted it with an opposite thrust.

Her right hand pushed at the side stick, pitching down. On the virtual forward display, the ha'tak's hull scrolled out of the visual field, leaving the star-bejeweled black fabric of interstellar space.

Left-hand shove, and a low power burst from the rear-mounted sublight drives began to carry them a safe distance away while her navigator prepped their warp field generators. Reactor power fed into the capacitors as Rosie pointed the ship's prow towards the distant star that was their destination, a completely unremarkable pinprick of light in a whole tapestry of them. Of course, her manual guidance was far from accurate enough to aim properly at a goal light-years distant, but the navcomp took point after it was fed the relevant jump parameters. Minuscule adjustment puffs from the maneuvering thrusters, then even finer corrections by the internal gyro-wheels.

A clear chime rang, and a prompt appeared before Rosie's eyes.

She took a deep breath.

"Ready?"

A chorus of "Aye" answered, and after a last visual circuit check of her instruments, she pronounced the anticipated order.

"Computer, engage FTL!"

It was… anticlimactic, she felt. Somehow and despite the simulations, she expected a feeling of acceleration, of transition… Maybe it was the grav-compensation, but she didn't feel anything as the warp drives engaged. External display showed something like a nebulous green curtain cascading down the sides of the ship, flecks of light streaking like false stars as tenuous void matter smashed against the warp field. There was no vibration, no tremor, like riding an air cushion.

Superimposed on the visual, a synthetic navigation schematic mapped their path among the stars, with a countdown to their predicted emergence.

A little more than two days. Two days in a tin can with five other people, two of which severely out-ranked her, a third who was an alien, and the last two were late teenagers and her subordinates to boot.

She was glad to have her virtual display goggles and their bottomless media library.

Once upon a time…

It was an old mirror, an ancient mirror indeed. Created long ago during an era when aesthetic tastes could best be described as "mineral rococo", it had survived the vagaries of time in a way primitive glass mirrors never could. It had never cracked, never lost its sheen and clarity, for its reflective properties were based on something far more arcane than the crude deposition of a thin metallic layer over a glass substrate.

And, since such a marvelous item would be wasted on stupidity, it was created with a reasonable imitation of a mind. For it had to provide advice to its owners when they peered at their reflection and wondered whether this dress or that one would fit their complexion better.

One day, the owner left without so much as a farewell, and the mirror found itself alone and forgotten. Eons passed and mountains were ground into dust around it, until it was found again.

Its new owner was understandably smitten with his find, as few artefacts remained from the civilization that created it. He asked many questions of it which the mirror answered with the best of its ability, which was surprisingly much for a device with such a limited purpose. After all, hadn't it witnessed the conversations of its ancient owners?

Yet the mirror's memories weren't infinite and its new master eventually found no further wisdom out of them.

Yet… he'd grown accustomed to questioning to the mirror. If only to assuage his vanity. One question in particular he never grew tired of asking.

"Ancient mirror, who is the evilest of all Goa'uld?"

The mirror, made to please its masters yet be tactfully truthful, answered as it reflected its owner. Not that a long dark robe and dark enveloping cowl had much to reflect.

"It is you, my Master, the evilest of all Goa'uld. But I feel that you care most for the opinion of your peers, as ever."

"It is true, mirror. They think they can forget me. But I'll prove them wrong!"

Turning towards his animated servants, the evil Lord Anubis gave his commands.

The System Lord Apophis stood on the edge of the battlefield of his latest victory. Behind him, a stone throw's distance away sat the majestic ring of the gods that allowed instantaneous travel through the worlds in his domain.

Before him, a large field of trampled grass led down to a small village in the distance. Hovels of rough stone and packed mud stood rickety on the banks of a muddy stream. Strewn across the interval were the burnt, maimed, disemboweled, dismembered bodies of fallen Jaffa warriors, his and his rival's, the marking on their forehead the only sure way to distinguish who was whose.

His more numerous and braver Jaffa had prevailed and proven their god's superior might again. This world and its handful of miner-peasants were his property again.

The galactic communicator he wore at the belt rang then.

Far away on his palace world, the System Lord Yu sat silently, eyes glazed, as his wife and ally recounted in verbose detail how she had punished the delegation from one of their richest worlds. Came to show allegiance and offer presents, the dozen old men had prostrated at her feet as custom demanded. But one of them had the temerity of hooking an eye up to steal a glance of her ankle.

Yu spared his own glance to the far wall of the richly decorated chamber, where exquisite precious wood shelves supported row after row of crystal jars. Inside each jar, immersed in a preservative fluid floated a pair of shriveled testicles. A jar for each offending man or Goa'uld underling. There were many jars indeed.

Well, Yu thought again, such was the cost of obedience.

The galactic communicator on the night table rang then.

In another quadrant of the galaxy, the System Lord Cronus spilled wine over his leather shirt, caught in the banquet's raucous atmosphere to feast the successful completion of his new temple. It had only taken this world's subjects four years, for the local governor was keen to express his loyalty by driving the project to completion much sooner than expected.

What were a few thousand slaves worked to death against the magnitude of this accomplishment?

A pair of servants entered the banquet hall from the side door leading to the kitchens, holding a large silver dish. Cronus recognized the piece de resistance of his feast, extracted an hour ago from its holding jar.

As Goa'uld tradition commanded, he had bitten off the juvenile symbiote's neck, killing it instantly with barely a dying shriek. But as eating went, he preferred grilled symbiote with herbs and spices.

The galactic communicator carried by a servant on a silk cushion rang then.

Deep down underground in a tomb carved from granite, Tiamat's communicator rang, muted by the ornate vase that contained it. But Tiamat couldn't answer, since she was stuck in the nearby sarcophagus along with a flesh-eating monster ever since she lost a personal war against Marduk. Alone in the dark, she'd been spending the last centuries screaming in agony as the monster devoured her flesh and the sarcophagus reconstructed her again from its excrement.

In many other locations, the present System Lords roster was interrupted in their various undertakings and in some cases woken up by the communicator they all possessed and kept close by, for only important messages, such as declarations of war, warranted such an unannounced call, and only one of their number could initiate one such.

Holograms sprang up in Anubis' dark throne room. Each of them showed one particular System Lord. All had taken the call. All made an expression of tired disgust when they saw, on their side, the unmistakable dark cowl of the Goa'uld pariah.

"Anubis." Yu calculatedly spat without any honorific. "To what do we owe this displeasure…?"

The dark lord's eyes flashed in the shadow of his cowl.

"I wanted to remind you soft and weak rabble that I'm the evilest Goa'uld, and strike terror in your hearts."

Ba'al replied in a bored tone. "What again? Are you going to show us something we haven't seen, ordered or done yet?"

Anubis' unseen nostrils flared as he took an angry breath. His damn brethren thought so little of his cruelty! But he'd prove them wrong this time.

He made an imperious gesture, and a faceless Jaffa entered the room, carrying a small wooden tray. The System Lords peered down from their holographic vantages as the servant came in the viewing field of the communicator system, bent and put down the tray in the center, then turned away and left.

They recognized at once the pitiful mewling, the tiny furry creatures and their wide innocent eyes. A handful babies of Bastet's brood!

A few tender "Aawwww" rose from the holos, for no Goa'uld could resist the urge to tickle and caress soft furry kittens, whatever they thought of Bastet herself. Most of them entertained their own sacred herd of cats, after all, if only for the way their haughty, capricious nature and occasional gratuitous cruelty seemed to echo their own.

Anubis left his peers watch the litter of kittens for a moment, then raised his right hand with the overpowered kara'kesh he wore. With a malevolent smile, he unleashed a brutal pulse of kinetic energy down at the cute furry creatures. There was a brief, cut-off shriek, and a sick wet crunching sound.

The System Lords watched in shock. Nothing was left on the stone floor but a grisly trail of blood, pulped meat, torn entrails and blood-caked hairs.

There was a moment of stunned silence, then at once a chorus of angered, indignant imprecations.

"Anubis, you worthless dog!" Apophis summarized his associates' sentiment. "You will pay for such a crime!"

"You will never be one of us again. Ever!" added Yu, his eyes flashing furiously.

"Such a foul act… you have no honor!" finished Cronus.

Pleased with himself, Anubis smirked visibly, then cut off the communication after a last challenge.

"All of you so-called System Lords are but a band of sissies. Soon, I will come back and rule the galaxy again!" he ended with a deep, devilish laugh.

May 20, 2013

Star system designation "Furling"

In the end, there was no need for her media library. Rosie O'Hare found herself busy enough making sure her crew was trained on every last functionality of the corvette's system and running tactical scenarii with the deck in simulation mode. Selmak and Carter provided their best estimates of Anubis' flagship's specifications, especially the firepower part to make them more interesting. Well, interesting they were, in a "terrifyingly exciting and short" way. There was simply no way for the Surprise to last long under the super-Ha'tak's focused fire. She could tear into a Deathglider screen like a hot knife through butter thanks to her computer-controlled point defense fire and missiles, but when the mothership gained a good fire solution, it was all over in a minute at best.

Therefore, they concluded – no shit, thought Rosie – that it would be best to rely on a stealthy approach. Which made perfect sense on an exploration and reconnaissance mission.

It was also a good thing she trained in the Alliance Space Force. This way, she was already used to the promiscuity of an underway spaceship. Despite the provision of artificial gravity, the corvette wasn't really intended for long term comfort, and that was with three passengers. Knowing that it could accommodate ten with all bunk beds unfolded… well, there was only one combined bathroom.

She strongly felt that more days with more passengers would inevitably result in a ripe smell despite the air-scrubbers.

Sure, the corvette wasn't meant to be a pleasure boat; yet she used her little spare time to draft a proposition for a dedicated transport ship based on the same basic frame. She looked forward to showing it, assuming they survived the coming party, of course.

At minus-five on the countdown, with her passengers sitting in anticipation behind the three flight crew, she ran a last systems-wide diagnostic. Once more, all checked back green and she felt proud, for she had her part in the conception of the ship. A smallish part maybe, but she could be proud of the collective effort nevertheless. At times, the evolving corvette design had felt like a kit-bashed thing. Yet they didn't have to be ashamed of their "old" Earth tech. As miraculous as anti-gravity and subspace heat-sinks were, a detailed analysis of the process showed Control's industrial subroutines had happily used and validated the collective knowledge of Earth's engineers and scientists during their lengthy interactions in the virtual environment without flagging it as "useless, put in /trash".

The Surprise might not look like one of the sky-scraper-decked cruisers of the Final War, since her builders didn't have to align her deck layout with her axis of thrust anymore, nor did she sport humongous radiator arrays, but she was their daughter nonetheless. Her redundant heavy-duty compcores, optical networks, displays and user interfaces came straight from the New America's parasite cruisers, her power distribution systems used similar principles and high-temperature superconductors. Her frame used the same strong, light alloys, only bulkier since she had a greater mass budget for her volume. Her hull plating and internal partitions on the other hand did make use of the super heavy element pair used by Ancient and Goa'uld under the names "trinium" and "naquadah", since alloying them even in minute proportions to the total added a level of radiation resistance that would otherwise be matched only by a huge thickness of conventional materials or reaction mass.

In short, the Alliance space force officer felt at home. A redecorated home somehow but home nonetheless. And as much as she wished the mission would go without a hitch, she couldn't help looking forward to putting the ship to its paces.

Incidentally… the countdown reached zero. Without so much as a shiver the ship translated back to relativistic state and the greenish mist of warp dissipated like a dream forgotten.

A giant planet stood before them, filling the virtual display in its high definition holographic glory as it would have cockpit windows. They were so close, the cutout timing on the warp flight had been perfect, making the corvette reappear on the other side of the gas giant from where the moon ought to be, along with the Goa'uld ship if it logically hung there.

Her tactical display reconfigured as the passive sensors fused their take into a consolidated picture and designation boxes and vector lines popped over the real-time panoramic visual, highlighting the gas giant and the other moon-sized objects in sight orbiting at various altitudes.

"Sensor, give me one sweep on the millimeter-wave."

Passive sensors didn't show anything about to hit them, but crowded orbitals could be tricky. A small dark rock might hit before visual or thermal could spot it, and while space was big, collisions like this had happened before.

"Electrodetectors, one pulse, proximity setting, aye Ma'am" her sensor crewman smartly answered.

An omnidirectional compressed pulse of short-wavelength waves burst from the conformal antennas emplaced on various parts of the hull, a signal carefully shaped to mimic ordinary background electromagnetic radiation if anyone was listening with an electronic warfare receiver. It was a low, calculated risk.

"No doppler trace, Ma'am. Just that moonlet two thousand klicks away on a higher orbit. No sign of counter-detection either."

"Good. Prep four recon drones, maximum stealth, box formation around the target. Make them loop around and back. Full emcon until thery're back to our side of the giant."

Seconds later, the forward launchers spat a pair of reconnaissance drones, then another. Once clear, the quartet engaged their cold plasma drive and accelerated to reach their designated ballistic trajectories, a highly eccentric parabola that would have them fly across the distant moon then back. After a powered flight of several minutes the drives cut off and the torpedo-like drones activated their mimetic skin, turning themselves into their best impersonation of a hole in space. Coasting unpowered, they would look on all known sensors like tiny asteroids, if anything registered at all. It would normally take a very vigilant active sensor watch to get even a sniff of them and Colonel Carter herself, with her knowledge of Goa'uld ship operations, gave them good odds of evading even an active subspace sweep.

The Surprise herself did her best to emulate the hole in space act thanks to the metamaterial skin covering her hull and presently tuned to a bottomless black. The network of solid-state thermal capillaries underneath transferred heat to the subspace dumps, ensuring her surface temperature would barely register against the background and her cold plasma drives were dark. She coasted on her stable orbit, a reciprocal of the target planetoid's.

Hours passed as the drones crept on their programmed ballistic trajectory, at first plunging down towards the gas giant's fringes then slingshotting upwards on the path that would cross their destination, at the right time and place ordained by orbital mechanics.

Finally the quartet came around, unharmed and apparently undetected, and the four drones uploaded their findings through the high bandwidth and virtually undetectable coherent-light transmitter.

The corvette's compcores crunched the data, then threw a composite tridimensional visualization on the briefing holotable at the back of the cockpit.

And the six humanoids onboard took a collective breath.

They expected to see a moon. Well, there was something indeed, but if there was a moon, it was apparently encased in a spherical megastructure, a globe made of hundreds of giant, interlinked hexagons of silky pale, opaque blue energy. At each apex of the hexagons sat a three-pronged solid structure of silver and chrome, each prong extending as the hairline-like separator between shield plates.

"This thing looks like someone took a carbon buckyball, made it the size of a planet and filled the gaps with an energy shield" an awed Samantha Carter summarized their feelings. "The sheer scale of it…" she trailed.

"I've never seen anything similar, and believe me, I've seen many things", Selmak added in a dumbfounded tone.

O'Neill frowned, and manipulated the controls to zoom over one of the tri-pronged structures that were manifestly shield emitters, down to the resolution limit of the drones' opticals. A repeating pattern appeared on the otherwise smooth metallic surface.

"Are those… runes?" he asked, peering at the display, and Selmak answered first.

"They are, O'Neill, a language every System Lords knows as a warning not to trespass… It is the mark of the Asgard. Here, it says… made by Thor of the Asgard, keep out"

"The Asgard?" Carter's brows rose high, as Kheshmet's corresponding memory imprint took a tint of fear. "But it's an Ancient signal that brought us here!"

"They were allies, a long time ago" Selmak elaborated, drawing from his species' memory of near-forgotten galactic history. "In any case, something that brought both races to collaborate on such a massive scale project… well, it must be serious indeed". That was the understatement of the century, he realized after he finished talking.

"And if that's Anubis taking an interest, we have to assume it means ill for everyone else.", he grimly added, pointing at the display again.

Hovering over what would be the hidden moon's northern pole was the unmistakable shape of Anubis' dreaded flagship. Nobody among his enemies knew whether this monstrosity of a Ha'tak had a name, so it had earned the nickname of Fleetkiller. A very apt description. It had single-handedly defeated the allied System Lords fleets in several battles at the beginning of the war before they learned to counter-attack where Fleetkiller wasn't, forcing it to react and chase after them. Acts of sabotage had followed, some of them succeeding in damaging it from inside before such infiltration attempts became impossible in the face of increased security measures. But these desperate acts had bought the System Lords a reprieve while Anubis sent his allies' fleets forward.

Now, that ship was here. And a thousand kilometers below it, the corresponding hexagon was a void.

The drones had taken their pictures at an oblique angle, not enough to see down to the moon itself – if it still existed – but afforded a glimpse of darkness inside. The shield must be just as opaque from inside. And without light, it would be a dead world.

"Okay, let me tell you what I think", O'Neill stood arms crossed, gazing at the holopicture. "That shield there was built long ago by those Asgard along with the Ancients, to keep something contained. Something bad enough that nothing could get in or out, even light. And that Anubis fellow, who's apparently so bad even the fucking System Lords find him repulsive, opened the door. And I don't suppose he's feeling suicidal, so he must think he can use whatever nastiness lays inside to the detriment of everyone else." He paused, then added in a sarcasm-laden voice "Couldn't we have brought bigger guns?"

"Or we could signal for help" offered Carter. But Selmak made a negative gesture. "Too long. Your ha'tak would be woefully insufficient against Fleetkiller, and if the System Lord alliance was alerted they couldn't be here with a sufficient fleet before weeks, months even. I'm afraid we don't have that much time."

A soft cough sounded, the kind used when someone tried to clear their voice and rouse themselves to speak before an audience. The two officers and the Tok'ra turned towards the source. O'Neill recognized that their pilot had something to offer.

"Yes, el-tee?"

"Ah, Sir, well, I ran some simulations while we waited for the drones to come back… I think I can bring us to the target without being detected" she made a gesture over her tactical console and the briefing holo switched to a schematic of the gaseous giant and its dozens of accompanying moons and moonlets. A dotted line ran from the Surprise to the shielded body through a series of complicated orbital evolutions, color-coded segments and data labels showing propelled vector changes under cover of the planetary bodies combined with slingshot effects and gravity-assisted trajectory alterations. The line ended captured by the target's gravity field.

Rosie made further inputs and the end morphed. Instead of curving into a stable orbit around the shielded globe, the line hooked around and down the hole at the pole, right under the Goa'uld mothership, though at that scale it was still a thousand kilometers above.

"See, if I boost just short of what's needed for a stable orbital insertion and drop our grav-buoyancy at the right moment… the moon's gravity field will snatch us straight down into the opening, without powering the main drives. With us in maximum stealth the mothership will miss us entirely… well, I hope."

Selmak whistled softly and bent forward to study the proposed trajectory closer. Carter and O'Neill did the same, tracing the dotted vectors with extended fingers.

"To be fair, such an approach wouldn't be possible if we couldn't adjust our apparent gravitational weight, so to speak, it gives me a whole 'nother layer of options…" the pilot modestly added.

Carter was the first to reach the end of her examination.

"Well, the numbers seem to add up, and the navcomp must have validated it…" she made an "I'm impressed" look. "With Goa'uld sensors mostly watching for drive signatures, active power sources or subspace phenomena…" she left her sentence incomplete, and Selmak pounced on it. "And the ha'tak will be looking for a field-based cloak, if any. Yes, this had a chance of working." He locked his eyes on O'Hare. "You'd make a fine Tok'ra pilot. For someone who learned to fly on archaic drive systems… or perhaps because of that, you see possibilities often overlooked by operators of advanced starships."

The redhead pilot had the good grace of blushing under the unexpected praise. "Uh, thanks, Sir". It still felt weird to call "Sir" someone who was technically two minds in one body. During the long flight she was able to get acquainted with Ollin, Selmak's "host". They had traded stories of their respective youth, finding similarities in a rural upbringing on planets separated by chasms of distance and culture. Ollin was rather young as Tok'ra hosts went, too, which explained his preference towards letting Selmak handle interactions with unknown people. But once he came forward, he was a nice fellow, or so it seemed from their admittedly limited interactions. Really nice, she recounted.

Which had let her treacherous subconscious wondering what it would be like to fuck a Tok'ra. With the two personalities experiencing everything. It seemed weird, even to her. And in any case, her conscious mind had clamped down on such musings. It wasn't like the corvette's cramped interior allowed great intimacy.

"Then let's not waste time and do it" O'Neill concluded. "Prep a com buoy with everything we've learnt so far and put it on a stable orbit, make it answer to a challenge by us or the Tok'ra. That's in case we don't come back. Keep the four recon drones flying on their current orbit. Go."

Three "Aye, Sir" answered from the flight crew. Minutes later, the corvette pointed itself towards the first propelled vector of its convoluted approach, and at the precise second dictated by the flight plan her main drives lit up. Seven jets of cold plasma fountained behind her and she was on her way.

Hours crept by and so did the fourteen-thousand-ton spacecraft along an orbital path many times the distance between Earth and Luna. At full power she could have reached her destination in minutes. Instead, she did it the old-fashioned way drifting past worldlets, diving past cratered vistas of ice and fire, plunging through wispy volcanic plumes belched at escape velocity by tectonic fury birthed from the tidal forces of the ever-present gas giant, timing her powered boosts so that her drive plumes were always shielded by a solid mass from the ha'tak's view.

Her occupants made it through the most intense maneuvers strapped in flight couches, for her inertial compensators were tied to her main drives and her internal gravity field spared them from accelerations that otherwise would have killed them but drew nary a groan from her own structure.

Finally she reached the last segment of her journey after one last powered vector change and her crew set her up for maximum stealth. Main drives powered off, fusion reactor on cold stand-by lest it radiated telltale neutrino emissions, her inner spaces left in microgravity. Sensors clusters retracted into the hull as well as weapon turrets, leaving only minimum coverage. All across the ship non-essential systems entered a powered down state to alleviate thermal build-up, for the subspace dumps were down as well and left her secondary molten salt heat sinks alone to handle the load from the cryogenic capillary system super-cooling the exterior surface of the hull. They were good for three hours until they reached capacity and had to dump coolant outside. It was going to be enough, just.

Alone in the ship, the gravity-buoyancy module worked at full capacity, reducing the apparent weight of the spacecraft to that of a feather, allowing her to creep upwards from her erstwhile lower pursuit course to match the shielded moon's orbital parameters.

Minutes, then hours ticked by and the temperature inside the crew compartment grew noticeably colder. The great holographic panoramic displays were down and the exterior view only showed on the flat panel repeaters set on each couch. It was all down to the navcomp now.

The megastructure of the planetary shield grew larger and larger until it filled the display, then the super-ha'tak came up over the horizon and the men and women inside the corvette held their breath.

Inside Fleetkiller's pel'tak, a stone-face Jaffa stood at the main console, waiting. His master was down on the planet below and he had strict orders to watch out for any Goa'uld ship appearing. This included the cloaked Tel'taks widely employed by Tok'ra and Goa'uld saboteurs alike. Therefore, he watched for hyperspace emergences and light-bending fields… none of which were to be seen as the Surprise prowled the planetary system. None of the myriad inert orbiting objects warranted undue attention anyway, not when the battleship's own shield could tank anything short of a stellar event in the face.

Aloft and uncaring, the super-ha'tak continued its vigil high above as Surprise lofted over the horizon then dropped over the gaping hole, at last allowing herself to fall like a stone into the full embrace of gravity. She went free-falling over the lip of the void hexagon, and the texture of her dorsal hull changed from mimicking the shield in opalescent blue to a night dark befitting the blackness below.

Radiation spiked outside as she went through the sleet of space particles channeled down he magnetic pole, further obscuring her presence to watching sensors.

A thousand kilometers above the dead world's surface she dived towards a pitch black night, yet far below actinic flashes of lightning betrayed an atmosphere wreathed in electrical storms.

"Fusion plant coming online from cold stand-by… two minutes to ignition", the young crewman acting as flight engineer read out. Then the first wisps of atmosphere began to act on the corvette's belly, shedding speed, but the grav-buoyancy trick meant she didn't have to bleed off full orbital velocity. Heat rose under the ventral hull plates as the whole space craft fell flat, acting like a giant airbrake, but short of turning cherry-pink as they would have otherwise. The mimetic coating ceased to act as a meta-lens and reverted to the dull gunmetal grey of its standby state.

Altitude fell quickly, the returning weight of deceleration pushing the crew down on their flight couches, then a "CLONG" from the engine compartment heralded the fusion core restarting. Seconds later it reached its normal operating regime and full power returned to the distribution buses. Across the ship systems powered up as well and the cockpit lit up in its full holographic glory.

"Main drives back online", the crewman confirmed aloud the updated status display, as seven cold white exhausts woke up behind the spacecraft. "Grav-buoyancy back to normal slaved operation".

Skimming the cloud tops, the Surprise checked out of her free fall and jumped forward as Rosie O'Hare pushed the throttle. She relished the feel of flying again. But where? She was going to clear the overhead mothership's line of sight… but there was a whole world to search below.

The excited voice of her sensor assistant cut short her interrogation. The corvette's fully awoken sensors had picked up something. On the wireframe representation of the globe a dot began to pulse, thousands of kilometers from their position. It was a subspace signature.

An active stargate's signature.

O'Hare felt O'Neill's hand tapping on her shoulder.

"Well, it looks like we have a destination, Skipper."

Diving through an electrical storm would have been a dangerous and harrowing experience in a traditional plane. It was not, when flying a shielded 14.000-ton spaceship whose propulsion systems made it rock-stable, and whose superconductor-backed hull laughed at lightning strikes.

It was like watching a movie as the craft descended through the swirling mass of clouds revealed by stroboscopic bolts. Terrain-following radar, then lidar built a synthetic representation of the ground in front, then Surprise was through the cloud deck and visual added itself in the silvery tones of light intensification.

Rosie O'Hare settled for a nap of the earth trajectory at barely less than the speed of sound, with a pair of drones deployed as vanguards. The atmosphere was Earth-like in density but oxygen was only present as a trace element, with the bulk made of nitrogen and carbon dioxide.

"No oxygen… no trace of biological life in the air, this world looks completely dead" Carter remarked, huddled on sensor controls.

"No wonder, with that shield blocking sunlight, though external temperature's just above freezing? How is that possible?" O'Neill frowned as the discrepancy hit him.

"Looks like the shield itself has some thermal leakage, not too surprising considering the energies involved… Probably some vestigial greenhouse effect too; also there's probably tectonic activity to account for, that's linked to tidal forces… I'll have to deploy survey sensors on the ground"

"If we can, try to learn as much as you can about the environment here. We'll follow strict bioquarantine protocols if we disembark." O'Neill prevented the coming objection with a raised open hand. "Yes, there's no biological trace in the air, but this world was quarantined for a reason. And we don't know if Anubis came for that same reason. So… no risk-taking."

"Well, we can't breathe the air, so we'll be suited anyway."

The corvette followed the curves of the moon-world and as they flew further away from the pole and down "south" over ragged rock and sterilized soil, artifacts began to appear in sight. First a huge curving spire like a giant rib jutting out of a promontory flashed by starboard, like a lone sentinel or a long disaffected lighthouse. More scattered enigmatic shapes came by, lone witnesses of the dead civilization that shaped them eons ago: a building shaped like twin braided horns coming out of the ground at an oblique angle, a low dome like the revolving shell of a colossal sea-dweller…

Then Surprise came across a ridge, and the horizon was filled from end to end by an entire skyline of fantastic shapes etched in silver against black by lightning and visual augmentation. Cyclopean curving walls and towers, great overlapping buildings whose quasi-biological contours laid across like the ribbed bellies of some megafauna, arching covered skybridges as mandibles out of open maws, festooned with teeth-like vertical protrusions. An overall impression was less like a city and more like a vast cemetery of strange titanic stone beasts lying together in contorted poses of death.

Artificial as it was, there was a feeling of purposefully organic design, a fusion of biological and mechanical that nevertheless managed to look cold as death to Terran eyes.

"Sweet Jesus" O'Neill breathed. "It's a god-damn megalopolis…"

"A continent-spanning one" Carter's voice was tinted with the same awe that left her jaw gaping. "The drones show constructions going for hundreds of klicks in every direction southward… It certainly doesn't match the Ancient aesthetic we know!"

"Neither does it look Goa'uld or Asgard" added Selmak. "This is something else entirely!"

"Several lifetimes of study…" Carter said wistfully

"But we'll probably end up blowing everything, right?" O'Neill answered cheerfully. As the other two watched him with a reproachful look, he hastily added "Hey, I'm just joking!"

"There's a good chance you'll have to blow up something", Selmak said with a half-smile.

"If I remember well, the last time it was you who did the blowing up. It's only fair that I get to play with nuclear explosives this time."

Carter watched the byplay with a half-disbelieving, half-scandalized face. Here there was an entire extinct civilization to study and the first thing they considered was how to blast it into oblivion!

"This is a serious mission" she said with a frown and a somewhat frosty voice. "We have to learn everything we can about this place!"

"And we will", O'Neill answered. "If we can. If Anubis and his dealings here let us."

A chime sounded inside the cockpit. Far ahead of the corvette, the recon drone on point had just registered something on its sensors and relayed it to the tactical display. Carter, O'Neill and Selmak peered at the holotable displaying a dotted composite of the terrain scrolling below and around. A window opened and showed a zoomed-up area with coordinates centered on where the wormhole signal was coming from. It had been active throughout the flight save for the mandatory interruptions every thirty-eight minutes.

A purple ring-like symbol showed the wormhole's location. Around it other symbols marked power sources, one of them the unmistakable signature of an Al'kesh reactor. The faint bubble outline of a force field nearly three kilometers in radius encompassed the area where the power sources were clustered. A data label further detailed type and characteristics: surprisingly, it was an atmospheric containment dome and inside rested a volume of breathable, Earth-like air.

"Looks like the party's over there" remarked O'Neill. He then pitched his voice to carry forward of the compartment. "Hey, ell-tee, can you find us a quiet spot to land this crate out of sight?"

"Already on it, Major!" she replied with a glance backwards. She manipulated controls, raising terrain schematics and line of sight projections. She selected a square grid and sent the drones to get a more detailed topographical scan through their passive and low-power active sensors. Five minutes later she was confident enough in her analysis. "I think I've got a possible LZ, right here" she sent a topographical model to the holotable. More byzantine shapes, convoluted overlapping constructions the size of city blocks, towers projecting into the sky like the horns of giant snails, but set in a dip of the underlying terrain, and a further zoom showed one of the shell-like buildings sported a rounded aperture on top, one large enough to let the corvette in.

"I can fly there under terrain cover, then it's two kilometers as the bird flies to the edge of the dome".

The Surprise glided ghost-like over the dead city, her belly skimming rooftops among the higher structures overlooking her path. Her near-idle drives made but a faint whine lost in the thunderclaps above and the spattering of rain below. She was a shadow in the dark, her low power coherent light scanners and ultrasonic emitters mapping the nearby features undetectably to all but her perfectly tuned receivers.

Under O'Hare's careful manual control, she stopped to a hover above the gaping aperture selected as a putative landing zone. Then she delicately allowed the moon's gravity to take a gentle hold and the ship proceeded down through the rim, her maneuvering thrusters firing short bursts of gas to hold her steady against the howling wind. The space under her was stadium-sized, a bowl of polished stone with a flat bottom and terraced inner slopes. It could have been a stadium of sorts, mused the pilot, or maybe it was just her own cultural background speaking and this place could be anything from a temple to a market. In any case, it seemed to fit just fine as a covert landing pad.

As the craft moved down the final meters, plates under her belly opened sideways and fifteen car-sized landing skids dropped down on massive shock absorbers. Sensors on each landing gear scanned the ground underneath and found it to be suitably solid, prompting a "begin landing sequence" message on the lieutenant's flight display. A flick of a finger signaled her agreement to the flight comp and the massive space ship touched down with the grace of a feather, her gravity buoyancy device powered down in a controlled manner, ready to ramp back up instantly if the ground started to give way and the fifteen trunk-sized shock absorbers compressed in a hiss of hydraulics.

She waited a few seconds more in case the floor would unexpectedly crumble beneath the fourteen thousand ton mass, but it stayed rock solid.

"Deploying crusader screen", O'Hare said next.

A hatch opened down on the corvette's belly and extended into a ramp between the second and third row of landing skids. Seconds later, the first quadricopter drone flew out, followed by another, and another, and more, a small procession of mechanical scouts with a brick-like body the size of a large hand, their four ducted propellers whisper-quiet on shielded electric drives, a tiny superconducting element inside them providing ample energy to fly for days if needed. They fanned out from under the ship and went up, scanning their environment as they went. Behind them, eight of their humanoid-shaped brethren ambled out of the hold, plasma rifles held ready, sensor heads scanning back and forth, all their senses on alert for hostiles. They deployed in a protective ring formation around the ship, and waited.

Inside the ship the expedition's men and women waited as well, peering at the volumetric tactical display as the sensor take from the drones steadily added details. Some went up and over the rim. Others flew through the rounded portals in the circumference of the stadium. Minutes passed as the cloud of flying drones raced down an ever-increasing number of corridors curving and branching like the limbs of a tree, or the structure of a lung. A capillary network of passages linking buildings above and underground like arteries and veins connecting organ-like voids that could have been houses, shops, laboratories, schools, entire living complexes.

"Dear God, it looks like an MRI scan down there", Carter commented. "Not a single straight line, no defined levels, the entire layout is tridimensional, organic!"

"Do you think we're looking at a biotech-based civilization?" O'Neill replied, remembering concepts from science-fiction flicks. "That they grew all their stuff?"

"Maybe, but I'm reading only mineral out there. If anything was alive, it was a long time ago."

"Think it's safe enough to disembark?" Selmak interjected.

"So far, nothing else moving. Air is sterile and unbreathable. Let's establish the base camp and do a deeper survey while we look for a way to the dome."

More of the humanoid soldiers came out of the hold carrying crates of equipment then proceeded to set up a small camp at the edge of the field where the ground was drier. A series of connected double walled bubble tents with a decontamination hatch module at one end and a translucent ribbed tunnel at the other, leading back to a personnel access up the side of the ship, would provide a safe stretching space outside the corvette's crew compartment.

Work lights set on tripods provided some visible illumination on ground level, with baffles to prevent light from spilling directly upwards. In accordance with standard protocols, hardened foam barriers formed a chest-high electrified wall around the campsite on the unlikely chance that some small wildlife might come in uninvited.

Next, the drones set up a network of seismic sensors and more sensitive atmospheric survey gear. These included the best and latest detection arrays for biological or chemical contaminants, or more accurately what were the best and latest Draka biocontrol stolen before the Final War. Ironically, they would have detected the Stone Dogs virus… if it had been airborne instead of quietly infesting the bloodstream of key Alliance personnel.

The entire preparations took most of a half hour, during which the recon drones steadily expanded the explored volume with a focus directed towards the shielded atmosphere dome, mapping the shortest workable route. By no mean was it a straight "as the bird flies" path, though. The structure was far too convoluted for that.

While the drones provided a detailed volumetric map, the ground-set seismic sensors began to add a larger-scale model of the sprawling megalopolis. Only the largest features showed up, but there were deep shafts plunging into the planetary crust in addition to buried structures. The whole city was layered kilometers deep. A kilometer-deep, continent-sized maze.

"Holy shit," swore O'Neill. "Talk about the galaxy's largest haystack. Good thing we got that wormhole signal!"

Meanwhile

Brader used to think himself as the big guy. At just under two meters of height, a bull-like neck supporting a square-jawed head, brown eyes and close-cropped hair, a smile that usually made the girls swoon at the seasonal fests, a body shaped by the healthy but rough work of tending to a farm, the farm he inherited from his parents down a long recorded and honored line of ancestors; thirty good years as one of the county's most prominent landowners, not to mention most eligible bachelors.

But that was another life. Weeks before, the sky had fallen. Or rather, the old, half-forgotten gods from the sky had come riding their flying metal chariots spewing fire and lightning. A bolt of fire had struck down the Elder house at the center of the village, then the chariots had landed, and strange warriors clad in metal began rounding up the villagers. Columns of black smoke dotted the horizon, each telling a similar thing happening in every village and settlement Brader knew.

His friend and occasional rival Sernik had tried to fight back, running at the apparent chief of the invading warriors with a heavy woodcutting axe. The warrior had parried the swing, struck back his attacker's solar plexus with the end of the staff he carried as a weapon. Sernik doubled down with a cry of pain and the warrior bellowed a guttural cry then aimed the other end of his staff at the sputtering villager.

There was a flash of intense light like watching a small sun erupt from the staff, a sickening wet sound and a short scream as the bolt of scorching plasma washed over the man's head, instantly charring the skin to a crisp and boiling the brain inside. Sernik's body sprang back fully erect in reaction, then slowly toppled down as the nerve impulses stopped flowing from the blackened and smoking head.

A few female screams went up, quickly silenced by well applied mastaba staff strikes.

Brader stood there and watched in shocked silence as the masked warriors finished rounding up the villagers into the central place. A hundred of them, men, women, children, crones, stood in ranks before the burning hall, surrounded by the invaders.

The chief warrior stood between them and the crackling flames casting red highlights on his black armor, his face hidden by the skull-shaped black mask with glowing ruby eyes they all wore on top of the black mail and leather armor covering their body. His was slightly more ornate, adorned with small sculpted skulls and plates sporting molded patterns emulating the form of a skeleton designed to terrorize villagers like those.

At last he spoke in a cavernous, supernaturally amplified voice.

"Worthless humans", he began with contempt "you belong to the god Anubis. You will serve him from now on. Your previous lives are over. You will travel through the Chappai to the world chosen by your god and serve him there. Anyone who resists, anyone who tries to flee, will die. Understood?"

Satisfied by the lack of answer, for silence meant resignation, he smirked under his grinning mask. Another village subdued.

"Jaffa! Kree!"

With a liberal amount of prodding the warriors drove the villagers out on the dirt road that led to the old temple, many days of travel ahead. As they marched on, other groups joined the same journey but their Jaffa abductors forbade any contact between them. The metal birds watching from above only had to make one example, setting ablaze a couple of would-be fugitives.

They marched day and night, thankful for the clement weather at least. Some of the small children fell and their parents carried them before their own exhaustion caught up. Brader averted his eyes as the death-head Jaffa killed a family on the wayside. The children couldn't move further and the parents wouldn't leave them behind. Another day passed, walking automaton-like, dazed by hunger and weariness. A couple more were killed, crones too old and exhausted to continue.

Finally, the fateful procession reached the end of the road. The old ring of the gods stood atop the butte surrounded by a carpet of bleached bones, as recounted by the fearsome memories passed down through countless generations. A quartet of death-birds hovered above while a double cordon of death-head Jaffa lined the way up, silent and motionless yet ready to suppress any sign of revolt.

By then the deported villagers and townsfolk were too exhausted to think clearly, much less run.

Brader stumbled up, his strength sapped by the grueling exodus. He barely spared a thought of wonder when he saw the Chappai up close with its magic alive. Then he stepped through.

A few subjective seconds later he emerged from the other side under the black sky.

The path forward was marked by burning metal torches. More death-head warriors stood at intervals, ready to direct any stray back to the path. But Brader glimpsed other shapes in the darkness beyond the flickering glow cast by the torches. Shapes moving like forest predators, sinuous and silent, briefly highlighted by the dim reflections of light on shiny black sinewy limbs and elongated heads.

A long sibilant hiss rose suddenly. The closest Jaffa turned his head and growled a warning, and the thing retreated in the shadows like a scolded dog.

Yet the brief vision was enough to chill the blood in Brader's veins. He didn't know much of the world beyond his village and county, never paid serious attention to old legends. But something told him the nightmare was only beginning.

"Goddamnit, I feel like we're walking in circles" O'Neill complained under his helmet, although he didn't feel physically tired. The party of three had set away from the landed ship three hours ago, following the path drawn on their head-up display by their suit's minicomp. The three armored suits were designed for war on contaminated battlefields, with an integrated oxygen supply and recycler, ballistic protection and chameleonware. They also featured a limited strength assistance rig rather than a true power frame, enough to lighten their own load for long marches.

They had suited up inside the bubble tents after a last hot meal and short briefing. The naval crew were staying inside the sealed ship to monitor the sensor network and stand ready to lift off just in case while O'Neill, Carter and Selmak hiked up to the target area.

The three of them had walked through one of the portals down into a thoroughfare, surrounded by their escort squad of Crusader infantry walking silently with a fluid grace that belied their bulk. Down there they dared use their suit-mounted lights so as to see the surroundings with their own unaided vision. The walls curved seamlessly into floor and ceiling with the smooth hardness of polished stone the color of onyx, cut at irregular heights and intervals by small holes leading to the omnipresent capillary network. A winding path down then up again, turning in a spiral past other branching corridors, past openings leading to pitch-black caverns, their shapes only discernible thanks to the augmented reality display of their suits. At a time, the path made them leave the main passageway and enter a smaller side tunnel only wide for two abreast, but the drones, both the flying and walking kind made a vanguard and rearguard at both ends, ensuring that an ambush wouldn't catch them inside the smaller gut-like passage. Then after ten meandering minutes they were back into a wider hallway and by then none of the three could have told in what direction lay the base camp and the corvette.

Carter made a show of looking at the perscomp screen on her forearm. "It feels that way, but we've been zigzagging in the right direction… mostly". She took a sip of reconstituted orange juice from the small nozzle in her helmet. They were walking up now and a small stream of water ran down between their feet, collecting from side vents. Somehow the rain was finding its way down, a hundred meters below the surface. Here and now a faint moaning sound rose as air currents played throughout the vast network, an eerie mournful sound.

"And that sound, it feels like the whole place is haunted" O'Neill complained again. "Next, we'll be seeing ghosts, the ghosts of an entire dead species…" Not that the tough special ops soldiers did mean the words, but he nevertheless felt the need to fill the tomb-like void surrounding.

"What are ghosts, O'Neill? Another of your world's legends? Like those zombies you told me about back then?" Selmak replied on the comlink.

"Ghosts are the spirits of dead people who dwell in the place of their death and torment the living", O'Neill answered pedantically. Behind him, Carter rolled her eyes upwards, unseen.

Selmak remained silent for a moment, thinking.

"I see. Many worlds hold that kind of belief about an afterlife and spirits within" he said at last. "but they're usually primitive."

"Hey! I didn't say I believed it! It's just…" whatever O'Neill was about to say, he was interrupted by the vision appearing in front. They had just entered a larger hall, roughly circular in shape, with another exit across from where they came in. When the drone did their topological survey, they hadn't bothered with marking anything but the larger features. The rib-like detailing of the tunnels for example. Or the occasional abstract bas-reliefs with the ever-present blend of organic and machine-like shapes, rendering an almost obscene, sexual feel.

What on the low-resolution volumetric map appeared as a fat central pillar was now caught in the lights. The trio paused before it and craned their necks, eyes wide, jaws open in wonderment. Standing ahead was the first glimpse of what the long-disappeared inhabitants of the city might have looked like, in life-like if probably enlarged fidelity.

A large humanoid figure stood erect at the center of a pedestal. The shaved head was close to human albeit with straight, patrician, smoothed, almost abstract features, bearing an impassive expression and gazing straight into infinity. A wide neck supported the head, but the smoothness ended where the neck met the body. The figure's proportions were those of an Olympic athlete, tall and long-limbed but body and limbs were shrouded in what at first glance appeared like some kind of biomechanical suit, all ribbed surfaces and organic-looking piping. Yet a closer inspection of the exosuit showed it blending in with the underlying body at the base of the neck and at the wrists, as if a grafted extension of the latter.

The alien man (for it looked male in human reference terms) stood in a regal pose but held his arms lightly spread apart, his hands coming at the height of his chest. The hands were held flat, palms down. Underneath each hand was the head of a creature, the two of them flanking the man in quasi-mirrored stances. Both creatures were humanoid in overall shape yet much farther from human than the central figure was. Bodies almost gaunt, limbs thin yet with a hard sinewy appearance that told of abnormal hidden strength, bony plates covered joints and hips, organ-like pipes protruding out of chest and back. But the most alien feature was the head. The back was grotesquely elongated in the shape of a banana. A banana that sported a toothy grinning jaw at the front end under a featureless forehead that extended right down, like a blank rounded mask with no trace of nostrils or eyes or any of the features one expected to see on a face. Revealed inside the open mouth and set inside it was another, smaller set of jaws adorned with tiny but wickedly sharp teeth.

Each creature sported a long, bony articulated tail ending in a sharp stabbing point. One had its tail down flat and curling on the ground, the other's wrapped on itself as they squatted on both sides of their apparent master.

The three figures were made of a stone like material but whereas the center characters appeared as pale grey the flanking pair were a dark shiny obsidian. Thin strands of a golden metallic material dangled down from the alien man's palms and wrapped loosely around the squatting figures, connecting the trio. On closer examination the strands were actually two, interwoven in a double helix geometry and linked together along the whole length by short rods.

"Are you getting the same impression as me?" Carter said as they circled the statue, taking in the composition's details.

"A man and his dogs?" replied O'Neill. "Though not cute little poodles, those dogs".

Carter made an impatient sound, but it was Selmak who elaborated.

"The links are obviously a representation of genetic coding" he said, pointing a hand at the golden strands. "The central figure appears in a dominant position. A hierarchical relationship based on genetic engineering? It would certainly fit with the overall biomechanical theme of everything down here."

"Not dogs then, but servant biological constructs?" Carter suppressed a shiver. "This reminds me too much of the Snakes!"

O'Neill nodded in agreement, then shook his head. "Of course, because we only have the Snakes as a reference… but let's not jump to conclusions here. We know nothing else about the society that used to live here."

"Indeed, you shouldn't jump to conclusions" Selmak said. "What counts in the present, is what Anubis might want with such technology."

"Create better soldiers?" ventured O'Neill.

The Tok'ra nodded cautiously. "It is possible indeed. The System Lords destroyed the facility where he used to produce his Kull warriors. He might be trying to produce an improved version. But…"

"But?" O'Neill quirked an eyebrow behind his faceplate.

"But, how to explain it… my intuition, I guess. A mere improved foot soldier seems… too pedestrian for the like of Anubis. I can't help feeling that there's more at stake here."

"Then let's put a spanner in his works, shall we?"

Five million years ago

The portal squeezed shut with a faint wet sound behind Cyla. A tall attractive brunette woman in a neatly-cut white tunic, she stood out in her present setting, for she was among the handful of her kind residing on the moon-world orbiting the reddish gas giant. A long way down history future humans would have pegged her as a thirty-something female but she'd lived several times that length already and was looking forward to a lot more, for she belonged to the Gatebuilder race, the greatest civilization this galaxy had ever seen, a galaxy where untold thousands of worlds bore their touch, be it restricted to an initial seeding or expanded to a complete Avalon-pattern forming.

The network of stargates was their pride, allowing instantaneous travel across the galaxy and uniting hundreds of worlds in a single connected society. Elegant cities of doped stone were built to last millions of years while others like vast metallic snowflakes were constructed to act as roving beacons of civilization.

There was nothing they couldn't achieve if they put their minds to it and more was to come, for achievements in this material plane were nothing compared to the great long-term goal of Ascension. A goal which involved a slow and methodical personal path in order to avoid upsetting an order few mortal minds had any understanding about.

Which brought her to the present quandary. An hour ago she went the other way through the same door, so unlike the neat solid sliding ones of her home, the thing here being a sphincter-like organic membrane growing out of the omnipresent biomechanical fabric of the city, overlaid like flesh over bones of fused stone. She'd spared barely a glance at the twin guardians wrapped over the arch of the portal, motionless as if they were part of the rest, which in a sense they were. Those eyeless faces were always unsettling. She felt almost irritated at herself. After a decade here as part of the Alteran-Furling coordination mission she ought to be used to it, but there was something primal about them.

Her own people's tools were inert things of highly advanced materials and controlling intelligences.

Her hosts on the other hand built theirs as organic extensions of themselves, linked by a shared genetic encoding written down to the nanoscale organomachines that formed the base layer of their technology.

The very one they intended to extend a step further towards a similar goal, albeit with a reckless timeframe and what, to her mind, was a dangerous abuse of the natural order of things.

She had presented her people's objections, laid down in the most detailed terms possible that didn't betray another guarded secret. The males and females of the Engineer caste had listened from the darkened cowls of their robes, woven fabric covering the amalgamation of flesh and not-quite-flesh underneath.

They didn't give her a committed response, but she'd seen through the lack of it. They were going to proceed ahead, to unleash their Catalyst onto the worlds they nominally controlled, some of which had been seeded eons ago by her people.

Spread across dozens of biospheres it would remold and reshape them into a vast gestalt interconnected by the bioresonance field programmed into the near-picoscale encoding. The psytech feedback loop would amplify the will of their creators, expanding their mindscapes beyond the material plane. They would harness it and reach Ascension… powered by the mindforce of billions of quasi-sentient genetic servants.

It could not be allowed. The Anquietas had a long memory and events that led to their exodus another age ago from another galaxy would not be allowed to happen again.

Her soft boots trampled down the hard resin pathway laid down by Furling xenoconstruct workers. As she walked up and emerged into the open amidst phallic towers and ribbed domes she glanced up at the gas giant spread across half the sky. Ships moved there too, and as she watched, one of the lyre-shaped vessels swooped down in the distance towards an unseen dock.

Around them moved denizens of this world, nominally her allies. Most were clad in robes, dull to her eyes, but she knew their vision was different. What appeared as shades of black and grey and brown to her belied a visual universe existing in a spectrum she simply wasn't made to sense.

A pair of servitors ambled past her, their long thin necks twice as high as their squat bodies, supporting a head that was a featureless dome.

Cyla felt a shiver despite the regulating fabric of her tunic. Aliens. They were too alien. They couldn't understand. If only they were more like the Asgard… Nice and conventional and safe.

Or the Nox, who adhered to a strict vision of non-interference with the natural order…

She sighed and picked her pace. Night was going to fall soon and she didn't want to be outside.

Fifteen minutes later she came to her destination, the great square ziggurat of naquadah-enhanced stone that sat alone in a clearing among the urban sprawl. She walked up the path, past a line of barrier posts and felt the subliminal repulsion field brushing across her. The heavy trinium gates at the base of the ziggurat opened before her and closed again after she entered the tall atrium of the Legation. She reached the transporter stand in the middle and with a thought, commanded her transfer to the private chamber high above.

There she was at last surrounded by the familiar implements of her people's technology. A sealed and secure room, energy fields and high powered internal scanners kept it sterile. She sat in the conformal chair and the holoscreen powered up before her. She tapped a code, sent another mental command, felt the powerful computer checking her mind and body.

After a short time, the face of another woman appeared in front of her.

"Morgana" she said.

"Cyla", the face greeted back. "How did your meeting with the Engineers go?"

The emissary steeled herself, for her reply would certainly decide the fate of worlds.

"I'm afraid… they will proceed with their plan. They will deploy the Catalyst." She felt deflated after saying the fateful words.

"Are you certain?" the other woman asked, her tone betraying the chill they both knew were feeling.

Cyla nodded sadly. "I am. I've learnt to pick up clues in non-verbal Engineer communication. Their absence of answer means they rejected our objections. Of course" her voice turned acerbic, "I couldn't very well tell them about the Ori, could I?"

"No", the other Alteran woman said. "You couldn't."

They both Reflected the magnitude of the coming choice for a moment. Then Morgana broke the silence.

"The Council directives are clear."

"I know."

"The fleet's mobilizing covertly as we speak. But it falls on you to…" the older Alteran couldn't bear to finish her sentence. Cyla nodded, struggling not to shed tears.

"I will do what has to be done, Councilor" she said formally. "My preparations here are complete. We are ready."

Morgana did something at the other end of the link, and a countdown appeared on Cyla's display.

"May we be forgiven, then." The Councilor's face disappeared, leaving the time counter steadily incrementing downwards.

Cyla took a deep breath.

In less than one hour, Furling civilization would cease to exist.

Present time

As one of the weary and depleted crowd Brader shuffled forward between the line of torches and guards. It was too dark for him to see much of his surroundings, but shadowy glimpses of tall structures reminded him of the granaries and watch towers of his world. A faint iridescence further beyond told of godmagic surrounding them. He marched forward, simply following the ones in front of him and more followed him in turn. Soon, they reached a porch and the path tilted down to bring them underground.

Brader felt like entering the mouth of some giant creature. The interior was arched and ribbed like some beast's gullet, with extrusions of some resin-like substance lining walls, floor and ceiling. Light was faint and cast from translucent spots protruding in the wall like greenish glowing boils. The main sound was that of shuffling feet and occasional stumbles over the uneven floor, but from time to time faint gurgling noises seemed to come from deep inside the walls. There were no Jaffa around anymore, Brader realized after several twists and turns of the tunnel, still going down after what felt like an hour but was certainly less in his exhausted state, near delirious from sleep deprivation. Still they went forward because where else to? The flow of his fellows was driving him ahead. As they went deeper he noticed how the tunnel was becoming more organic looking as dark branching and pulsing veins spread from cavities in the walls. His sleep-addled mind was beginning to wonder is he shouldn't try to turn back to the surface… but then he stumbled out of the oppressive gut-like tunnel into a wider circular chamber whose dimensions he sensed rather than saw in the deep gloom. He pushed his way towards the center, shuffling among the crowd to try and make sense of the place. Around him questions rose at last along with wails and complaints. People were tired and hungry and thirsty and frightened and it made a cacophony of despair strangely muted by the omnipresent resinous coating.

Suddenly there were shouts, as some of his fellow captives found exits set in the far quadrant of the chamber. Brader understood there were three of them, then saw with his own eyes as he came forward. Three portals similar to the one that led here, placed at three meter intervals in the far wall, but they were closed off. Out of curiosity he touched the surface of the obstruction: it was creased radially like some kind of diaphragm, but cold to the touch and slightly damp. He tried to push but the thing was unyielding. He couldn't tell anything more to the ones questioning him… but their collective attention switched when exclamations from the rear told their entrance portal had closed behind them.

He felt trapped, trapped inside the stomach of some beast, but his conscious mind tried to dismiss the thought. Alas, he wasn't that far from truth.

Above the milling crowd, shapes similar to the ones Brader glimpsed above the surface began to uncurl from the irregular ceiling. Black and ridged they were indistinguishable from their environment at rest, and the crowd's attention was too focused on the exits anyway, for the three clustered at the far wall opened with a smooth organic motion and a wet sound. The doomed captives' fates awaited behind those portals and they needed only to be prodded or taken to, where they would serve the needs of the meta-organism growing all around them.

The first screams erupted as all around the disk-shaped chamber men, women and children were suddenly pulled upwards in strong sinewy arms like steel vises. Shapes ran inverted on the ceiling among the resinous excrescences, dark shadows holding terrified humans in a cold embrace. Nightmarish shapes grinned down with too many teeth and dropped down amidst the throng, but by then the crowd was in stampede, exactly as planned. Fleeing the nightmare shapes into the open mouths of hell.

No more a human crowd but a herd of prey driven forward by predators. A mother lost the child she had managed to cling to for the whole journey from home, lost in the pushing and shoving bodies. She was half carried away against her will by the mass going through the rightmost portal, through another length of tunnel and a sudden ramp-like chute too slippery to even contemplate climbing back up. She joined the clump of dazed people down, splashing into something wet and warm, then half-crawled, half-stumbled out of the way into another room, darker even. She felt her way by sound and touch among milling, half-blind folks, calling her child. No answer came for her but shouts and inhuman hisses among fast shadowy motions.

She yelped in terror when a pair of cold arms reached around her, then she felt something like a frigid wet kiss on her neck, a cold sensation spreading throughout her body as it ceased to answer her mind. She felt herself carried away, inert and impotent, carried forward among others as her frantic eyes caught glimpses of captors and captives alike, then something else ahead, ovoid outlines under the feeble illumination from sparse glow spots. As she was carried closer details appeared in her vision, a field of egg-like things as tall as a child, each sitting heart-like at the source of a tangle of fleshy roots disappearing into the organic floor and softly pulsating. Even closer and she glimpsed the cruciform scar on top of the eggs, fleshy swollen lips betraying some kind of opening. She briefly wondered what kind of beast could lay such eggs, then she saw what lay in some of the eggs. There was an open one, or rather an occupied one, for the fleshy lips were curled back and open wide. She saw a man, or rather his head, neck and upper torso protruding, with the remainder of his body hidden inside the bloated leathery sack. A soft moan escaped from the man's lips, telling her that he was still alive despite his closed eyes and sweaty pallor. An instant later there was a wet noise, like fluid overcoming an obstruction in a hose, and the whole head and torso dipped visibly down a couple inches. A putrid smell wafted up and she felt like vomiting, but her body was paralyzed below the neck. She saw other full eggs in various states of the process and she finally understood as she caught sight of a head sinking softly below the top, the upturned face like a flaccid mask deforming as matter was sucked up underneath, eyes rolling white like glazed marbles as they disappeared and the leathery lips straightened back to close the aperture above.

She understood that all those people were being digested alive to feed the ghoulish horror surrounding them and that she would soon meet the same fate.

Her scream was followed by more as her fellow condemned understood their predicament as well, and as if on cue the egg directly in front of her opened with an obscene sucking noise. She felt herself carried up and over the waiting mouth, legs dangling inertly, then lowered down. Revulsion as her bare feet touched a warm slimy surface and were drawn down, then her shins, knees, thighs, she felt her legs bend as her feet touched the bottom of the egg, allowing her torso to sink down as if she was taking a bath in the viscous filling of the egg.

She laid still, paralyzed but not in pain, under the sightless gaze of her captor, saw the articulated double jaws move and drip as the thing appeared to check its handiwork, eventually releasing a hiss and abruptly turning away.

A pulse shook the egg, as if it was waking up. Things like tendrils touched her skin, moved along her skin then pierced it, seeking to connect with her veins and arteries. She felt it happening though she didn't feel pain. More encircled her limbs, probing and questing, invaded her through natural orifices and she felt the tips penetrating deep inside her, shuddering several times as they injected a potent mix of digestive enzymes right inside her body.

Over the course of the following hours, she felt the digestive process liquefy her innards and drain her limbs, progressively losing coherent thought as her central nervous system was assaulted by the egg's toxins. Her initial begging turned into half-coherent words then mindless moans, until at last the organic slush formerly her brain was sucked out of her cranial cavity and her glassy eyes gave a last, blank stare at the ceiling before the egg closed up on her liquefied corpse.

Five million years ago

With a deliberately blank mind so as not to think about the consequences of what she was about to do, Cyla went through the rote procedure. Every Alteran was inside the Legation, so she didn't have to issue a recall. Next she sealed the building silently. Over the few exterior apertures ornate shutters went down, easily mistaken for decoration. Not that they mattered much, their role was mainly to hide the actual protection in the form of strong force fields springing up in iridescent blue. The outer shield was primed, ready to go up.

Inside another protected chamber, Cyla opened a filigreed container and extracted a crystalline and roughly cylindrical item, the ultimate energy source produced by her civilization. It was admittedly overkill for the present need, but it was compact and so much easier to hide than a massive reactor, the installation of which might have raised awkward questions. Stepping to the center she carefully placed the potentia into the waiting receptacle. Light strips illuminated with a rising buzz and she felt the power feeding into the building's energy grid through her control implant.

She then walked up to a blank wall. As the system recognized her presence and credentials, the stone slab silently slid aside and revealed an austere control panel. She made an input and the status display changed from standby to powering up.

Underneath the pyramidal tip of the building a very secret, very new and very untested arcane mechanism came alive, feeding on the power delivered by the zero-point field pile, accumulating it in fast-discharge naquadah buffers.

Inside her control room Cyla waited, forcing herself to blank out thoughts and act as automaton-like as she could. Just a cog in the machine, with no more agency. That way she kept the guilt outside the conscious portion of her mind. At least temporarily. Just long enough to accomplish her task. After that, she would have to live with it. She suspected her long life would offer ample time for penance later.

The countdown reached zero. The tip of the pyramid split apart, revealing the power beneath, a complex glowing structure of exotic matter-energy states, a machine extending across the seen and unseen layers of reality. Like all great powers it could be an instrument of destruction as well as creation, or so it was eventually intended. For the present time, destruction was all it would achieve.

Outside, it briefly became a beacon in the night but few of the residents had time to wonder what it meant. In a brief and intense discharge, all the energy accumulated was channeled through and morphed into a targeted, reality-altering wave that expanded outwards at a fraction of the speed of light and covered the entire surface of the planet in seconds. The Furling beings it went through felt no more pain or discomfort than if it was an ordinary radio emission, but it was far from innocuous.

Their civilization was built upon an integrated, pervasive biotechnology, so encompassing that its entire world could be described as a meta-organism. What the Alteran wave targeted and corrupted was its fundamental encoding, its complex DNA equivalent. Harmony broke apart. Symbiotic relationship became death.

Across the Ancient Legation rose a tower, one of many. Inside lived a Furling family of the Builder caste, one of many. The tower was their living unit, built of polished stone then furnished throughout with the biomechanical implements of ordinary Furling life. Like a second organism it fed them, cleaned them, took care of all their biological needs.

The family sat dispersed in their womb-like feeding chairs, ribbed and lined with semi-resinous extruded piping. Snake-like hoses went into mouths and anus, feeding nutrient concentrate at one end and extracting waste at the other, a highly efficient method, if entirely utilitarian. Furlings might look similar to Alteran-based physiology but were an entirely different species after all and their ways to fulfill their needs predicated upon an utterly alien evolutionary and societal process.

Corruption blossomed after the reality-warping wave, reprogramming the organo-mechanical cells of the care-tubes on the fly. Deep inside esophagus and intestines, smooth feeding and cleaning heads abruptly sprouted razor ridges and spikes and their gagged hosts violently spasmed as the vicious killing snakes thrashed among their bowels. Wide-eyed and screaming silently they flailed in the chairs as the things cut and ground through organs. The father, older and stronger grabbed in both hands and tore out the rampaging devices. A resilient organism himself, he took a few stumbling steps, bleeding heavily and already dying, his mind fixated on trying to save his family. He froze in place as the sharp black tip of a xenoservant's tail erupted from his chest and held him in place before the double jaw punched straight into his brainpan and put an end to his suffering.

Elsewhere in another tower a tall Furling warrior caste struggled in a life-or-death fight against his xenoservants. His strong limbs wrestled one off and threw it at a wall were it impacted with a shriek and lay stunned. A short-lived victory, for dozens of the sleek faceless bioconstructs hurled themselves at him. He parried with fists and boots, his armored exosuit affording protection from immediately fatal wounds but soon disappeared under the slashing and screeching mass.

Seen from outside, his tower erupted in fire as a shockwave blew through walls and balconies. Sensing his impending death, the warrior had detonated his armor's power cell.

Deep underneath the hive-megalopolis giant structures like the fusion of machine and organic shapes, sat the massive organs feeding material and energy from the deep crust into the arterial network above. Warped by the chaos signal they began to frantically pump out a corrupted nanocatalyst through overstressed peristaltic valves.

Inside the tunneling walkways and underground chambers hidden piping burst apart and released clouds of black smoke. The smoke was actually a mass of air-borne nanomachines and they went down over milling crowds and isolated individuals alike. Invading organisms through inhalation or directly through exposed skin, they set upon bodies defenseless against the nanocytes designed to fit seamlessly within their internal biology. Invading individual cells, tearing apart DNA strands and reassembling them into a perversion of their initial plan, initiating grotesque body changes through brutally supercharged metabolic processes. Internal temperatures rose sharply as the transformation process unfolded, steam venting from blackening skin and agony-contorted mouths. Billowing black flakes detached from thrashing limbs, some of the victims simply curling down on the ground as the corruption burned them alive from the inside out. Others retched in death throes as malicious bioengineering turned their living matter into something else and small, pale monstrous humanoid parodies of themselves sprouted out of chests and spines like hellish imps and added their shrill screams to the pandemonium.

Above the city the familiar U-shape of a Furling interstellar freighter was rising up, but seconds after the wave passed through it shuddered, its upward momentum faltering. Inside its bulbous control chamber the pilot was ensconced in his life-support exosuit, almost fused to the giant-sized control chair, breathable acceleration fluid pumped into his insectile helmet through an elephantine snout.

Biotechnics governed the life sustaining symbiotic system, just as vulnerable to the corruption spreading below. The acceleration fluid filling the exosuit was normally held at a body-neutral temperature. Instead it began to heat up uncontrollably and reached water boiling point in ten seconds, cooking the pilot alive.

The craft dipped then plummeted down. An explosion reverberated across the cityscape as it crashed through a shell-like building.

As the world began its death throes, Cyla watched with a horrified expression as external sensors showed her megascale death occurring all around.

No. No! No! It was only supposed to stop it working!

The signal ought to have rendered Furling bioindustry impotent, not make it actively try to kill its owners! They were to devolve into a preindustrial state, certainly many would die as support for their arcologies collapsed but individual Furlings would survive, and would be kept into an innocuous agrarian state under the watchful eye of the more mature and responsible Alterans… That was the plan!

Something had gone wrong, or the technology wasn't reliable yet. But she couldn't stop it any more. She was forced to watch for hours as life was snuffed out throughout the moon-world in horrific ways. And it was her doing.

Present time

"Oh crap" Samantha Carter suppressed a shiver. Freeze-framed in her display, was the disquieting silhouette of a predatory and alien thing, black carapace and faceless, a picture relayed by a vanguard drone through line of sight datalink. The team's tactical maps were updating as the stealthy drones processed and sent more data. Not only Jaffa warriors then, but those biomechanical servants were tagged as hostile for they appeared to be patrolling the perimeter centered around the out-of-place ziggurat and including the tunnel mouth where the stream of captives disgorged by the stargate disappeared from view.

"Those things look exactly like the statue down there…" O'Neill completed the observation.

"And Anubis must be controlling them" Selmak added. "Which means he found a way to recreate the technology of a dead civilization… but to what end?"

"Creating a new soldier form?" O'Neill offered the most obvious explanation.

"Or something more", Selmak countered.

"Look!" Carter's pointed at the display again. It was live video streamed from a drone hugging a piece of rock, its optics aimed at the front entrance of the stone building. A tall silhouette was coming out unhurriedly. A zoom revealed more detail. A dark robe, the cowl folded back, revealing a face that made Selmak's heart almost stop, for even the hardened Tok'ra operative knew fear. Classically handsome features, like an ancient statue of a god, but the matter they were made off didn't appear… entirely solid, as if existing on another realm of existence, its manifestation here a mere projection or some kind of solid hologram that didn't quite fit the normal expectation of ordinary, fleshy vision. Fluctuating in and out of reality, as if its essence was trying to leave this plane yet was still anchored down by an external force.

Even more disquieting was the blackness one could perceive, even through a flat video picture, like a dark cloud lurking behind the surface, hinting at evilness to the core, emanating an aura of dread.

Such a unique description only applied to a single known being in the galaxy. This was Anubis himself.

Worse, the outcast Goa'uld Lord appeared happy, whistling a merry tune of all things as he went down the steps, two xenoservants springing to his heels. He tapped the head of one distractingly, exactly as one would pat an obedient dog, the utter ordinariness of it all even more bewitching in the context. They followed him, sinuous tails wagging left and right, as he made his way towards the stargate, now inactive after the latest load of human cattle was sent towards the processing chambers. Anubis made a quick calculation and smirked contently. There ought to be enough sentient biomass to produce the quantity of catalyst his little project required. Well, if "little project" could accurately describe the plan to erase and reshape the galaxy's living population according to his need.

He stopped and examined the working pieces of his plan critically. The long cable snaking from the Alteran building to the stargate itself, for the multi-connection would require orders of magnitudes more power than a regular wormhole. The opened dialing stand revealing the crystalline innards of the gate computer, with additional components of his design grafted among them. The fat pulsating bowel-like tube coming out of the ground nearby, its puckered end closed now, but ready to excrete a dense cloud of nanocatalyst at an open wormhole.

He spared yet another contemptuous thought at the Alteran precursors. Such power they wielded, and such foolishness, littering the galaxy with insanely dangerous trinkets, the most insignificant of them still having the capacity to end an unwary civilization.

They had sterilized this world, ensuring no living organism remained, and built an impassable barrier over it. Then they had departed… and left an intact database inside this facility's computer, ripe for taking by anyone with the necessary technical know-how. A database including the specifications for their civilization-ending weapon and everything they knew about its target.

Everything he needed to create his own version of the Furling catalyst… the altered and corrupted one. Too bad they had removed the corrupting device itself in order to study it further and learn why it had functioned outside parameters, though successfully enough in his admittedly warped point of view.

Anger flashed through his mind again as he recalled the agonizingly frustrating memory of the Dakara mountain blowing up along with its hidden facility, courtesy of a naquadah-potassium bomb smuggled in by an enemy Goa'uld operative. Whoever had cued the blasted System Lords that he desperately wanted it, thus that they had to destroy it… well, no word in any tongue in the universe could describe the pain he would inflict if he ever caught them.

Though they would be caught by his plan ultimately, and that thought brought him joy, almost as much as the memory of Oma Desala's final moments. Especially since her pickled brain had eventually led him to this world and the key to opening the planetary shield.

Soon, the insanely complex customized dialing program would finish compiling. Fueled by the Ancient zero-point module's insane power, the program loaded into the dialing computer would piggyback on the stargate's pan-galactic maintenance and update protocols, except it wouldn't merely send data. A multi-dimensional wormhole would open and link them all together. Anything or anyone attempting to travel through it wouldn't be duplicated though, but ripped apart into microscopic particles finely divided between the destination stargates.

Except Anubis didn't intend to send anything larger than the already microscopic Furling catalyst nanocytes. Some might be destroyed yet, but most would survive the transit. He only had to pump enough through the input gate so that a few exited each event horizon. Then they would find and sequester any animal life, spreading through insects and small critters, infecting larger beasts, initiating world-spanning mutations into a symbiotic meta-organism. Sentient life especially would be reshaped into psy-field emitters like the ones currently lurking deep inside the resurrected Furling archology, pale translucent skin, humanoid bodies reminding of what they were before their transformation, mutated heads with the thin membrane covering rapidly atrophying eyes and nostrils and elongated cranium holding the improved, telepathy-enabled brain structures.

Mere hundreds so far, yet he felt them, sensed their invisible presence, linked to his own telepathic aura, feeding him arcane power through genecoded worship. Not nearly enough to take on the Other Ascended… but a galaxy-worth of them would.

Soon.

"We must try to infiltrate this facility", Carter decided. "It's the only way to understand what's happening!"

"Easier said than done… we have to sneak past Jaffa and those alien things" Selmak declared with a dubitative moue. "Unfortunately, I don't have a personal cloak with me." The damn things were rarer than humility in a Goa'uld.

"Hmm, I think I can get us in, but it's not going to be very subtle for long." O'Neill said, making adjustments on his tactical comp. "After we're in, you better find a way to bar the doors…"

"Let me deal with that. If those systems are Alteran, my tablet should be able to work with them… I hope so, anyway" replied Carter.

"Right, let's get closer, I'll finalize the plan on the way."

The trio along with their Crusader guards moved out of the recess. The tortuous underground paths did bring them close enough, and they had passed through the immaterial field into the breathable zone. They didn't care to remove their helmets or breathe the exterior air directly, for their respirators filtered it through a set of membranes that allowed oxygen molecules through and nothing else. Then they were back onto the surface, and their path updated in real-time as the scattered sensors tracked a couple of roving alien sentries, allowing the scouting party to give them a wide berth.

One of the humanoid drones silently split from the group and jogged towards a half-ruined tower. It climbed through a breach up to the top, then sat on a perch and unharnessed the heavy antimateriel rifle carried on its back.

Once overwatch was confirmed and at the Major's signal, the three humans and escorts sprang out of cover for the final sprint.

One of the aliens was lazily walking in their peculiar hunched posture, two hundred meters away in open ground. It sensed a sudden disturbance, air displaced by motion, and turned its cowl towards the source. Right then the 15 mm caliber super-dense subsonic armor-piercing slug punched through the carapace, splashing greenish biomatter around and dropping the beast like a sack of potatoes. The sniper drone would have expressed satisfaction if its mind had been designed for it, but merely confirmed a disabled target and returned to scanning the dark field through its multiple senses.

Carter followed O'Neill, her augmented reality helmet display showing vectors and waypoints overlaid on the silvery tones of light-intensified imaging. Thermal appeared useless at spotting the colder bioconstructs, but they registered just fine on every other band. She passed the dead alien, noticing how the smooth stone ground appeared to be sizzling where its internal fluids had splashed. Some kind of acid or hyper-enzymatic reaction, probably, but something to be aware of if it could eat through solid stuff. Her scientific side screamed at her to stop by and take samples, but there was no time to dwell.

Night vision was an advantage as they silently ran in complete darkness towards the goal. No Kull warrior was present with night optics of their own, the Jaffa relied on naked eyes, admittedly with perfect vision, yet their own torches played against them seeing far into the darkness beyond. Besides, freed from shepherding incoming captives they seemed to prefer sticking around the landed Al'kesh on the other side of the stargate, taking advantage of the lull to attend their own needs, sitting around small campfires and eating rations.

Another alien dropped, its banana-shaped cranium squashed like a watermelon, then they were inside the illuminated zone and their stealth finally ran out. The three humans were running up the stairs as a shout went up from the direction of the Jaffa, then all hell broke out. The Crusaders went to maximum aggression settings, reforming in a protective half circle formation behind their principals and opening fire at once on the multiple identified targets. Rolling thunder struck as a fusillade of plasma rifle shots split the night apart, hitting distant Jaffa as they tried to jump into action. Superheated, hypervelocity copper ions melted and smashed through armor with almost contemptuous ease and warrior bodies literally exploded as their fluids instantly turned into steam. Limbs flew apart as if in slow motion in the soldier drones' electronic vision even as each Crusader switched to another target, Jaffa or xenoservant bursting apart in a cloud of steaming fluids and body parts as robotic aiming and practically instantaneous energy fire left no chance of a miss at what they considered close fighting range.

A sense of foreboding tingled through Anubis and he raised a telepathic barrier around his person right before actinic flashes and thunderous CRACKS illuminated the field. Something hot washed around the psychic shield, and he began to turn away just as another plasma round streaked past him like flat lightning and smashed the nearby dialing pedestal into burning slag.

As he completed the turn, rage beginning to fill his consciousness, his peripheral sight caught the fireballs marking where the sudden fusillade found their targets, decimating his minions in a handful of seconds. Something solid smashed on his shield, and again, his supernaturally developed senses telling him those were solid metal slugs impacting. The fraction of his mind running his defense shrugged them off as non-threatening, unlike the stream of plasma fire focused on his person by at least a half dozen sources. They were powerful and relentless and he struggled to keep them at arm's length, yet scalding heat permeated through the shimmering barrier. He focused his mind and near-mystical senses ahead, trying to identify who were the impudent trespassers, barely noticing as the last of his warriors, trying to reach cover were cut in mid-course and turned into smoking lumps of overcooked meat.

More heat and light washed across the field, followed by a thunderous BOOM as the landed, powered down and unshielded Al'kesh was skewered by the attackers' plasma weapons in turn with catastrophic results as the blazing rays punched through hull, melted delicate systems and found the dormant reactor, setting a chain-reaction through its naquadah cells. Fortunately, they were designed to fail safely under such damage but "safe" was a relative term when dealing with high-energy materials: a deliberately designed bomb would have resulted in a city-razing explosion, instead burning car-sized parts of the ship rained down over a radius measured in hundreds of meters and a shockwave blasted rock, debris and body parts away from the battlefield.

The Dark Lord's inner eye retraced one of the firestreams and found the source. He concentrated his arcane sight and visualized a thing of metal and synthetics, a void where mind ought to shine in psychic vision. A machine servant obviously, stronger and more resilient than flesh, mindlessly sowing destruction upon his Project. Anubis contracted his fist as a byproduct of his sudden intense mental effort, briefly finding the strength through his hidden psy-linked minions to overcome the drain of sustaining the protective shield and poured transdimensional energy down into the spot in the material plane where the automaton stood.

Press-expand.

In the distance, the Crusader soldier seemed to crumple in, metal and carbon deforming like a can of soda imploding under pressure, then fly outwards in a cloud of fragments.

The release drained Anubis and his barrier dangerously faltered, allowing a breath of scorching gas to stir his robe, but then the fire abated as the remaining mechano-warriors retreated into the ziggurat, perhaps shaken by the magical obliteration of their sibling.

"Close the fucking doors!" O'Neill bellowed for Carter's attention in the ancient building's entrance hall, his back to the thick wall, Selmak doing the same across the gate. The world-ending din outside abruptly ceased and the Crusaders retreated inside with machine speed even as the tactical update streamed through. One of them was destroyed by a completely unknown way of attack and they were requesting new orders regarding the likely source, which had resisted concentrated fire thanks to an energy shield that didn't register on sensors.

O'Neill briefly cursed the robots' limited creativity, but then a Goa'uld with supernatural powers was an out-of-context tactical problem. At least they had made short work of everything else.

As the drone soldiers took positions inside the hall and around the entrance he sent an order.

Outside the Ancient Legation, a shadow sprinted through the scoured battlefield towards the drained Goa'uld. Anubis felt relief that his display of power had cowed the cyberwarriors into fleeing, for a few more seconds of their hellish firepower would have overcome his psychic barrier and his body, semi-Ascended as it was, was still vulnerable to sufficiently concentrated pure destructive energy.

Before he could say "phew" however the former sniping Crusader tackled him like a running truck and detonated its internal power cell.

Another blast rivaling the exploding Al'kesh shook the place and a wave-front of dust blew inside the hall right before Carter, having found the door controls, shut the building down. Trinium gates sealed the former Alteran embassy again, then life-support systems still intact after five million years diligently began to recycle the air and filter the dense suspended particulates.

O'Neill waited tensely as the surviving recon drones outside, those that didn't get squashed aground by the two consecutive airblasts, reestablished a picture of the battlefield.

Amidst sparse fires lay a blackened and smoking mass where Anubis had stood last, the melted remains of the kamikaze Crusader bubbling softly at the bottom of a small crater. Underneath it and moving feebly was a human outline, black and encrusted as if made of coal. The tremendous energy release of the self-destructing drone had smashed the Dark Lord's weakened grasp on Ascended nature and grounded his body back to the physical plane, but his powers had yet protected him from instantaneous death, barely. Agony still coursed across his carbonized limbs even as his Ancient-derived healing factor commenced the task of regenerating his flesh.

"Holy shit, the bastard's still moving!" O'Neill vented out in disgust and amazement. "We should try to finish him…" he began, then his eyes widened as a tide of humanoid things burst out of the fractured ground around Anubis, pale translucent skin, tall and spindly, heads deformed, nearly faceless, cranium ending in a beak-like protrusion behind their face. More of the foul Goa'uld's spawn, he supposed. They streamed outwards and around, forming a perfect circle several ranks deep, and began to emit a keen wailing sound in unison. The air seemed to shimmer in response as the freakish teratoids pooled their mindpower to raise another psy-barrier and protect their Lord.

"Oh, fuck that! Carter, Selmak, you guys better find something useful fast because we're not getting rid of the asshole so easily!"

"Okay, I think I have something", Carter replied, furiously tapping her Ancient tablet. "This facility appears much newer than Freedom Station, but the systems must be backward-compatible, because they're communicating through wireless protocols on…" the scientist sounded poised to provide a detailed technical analysis, in part because such cold technical facts were a refuge from the sudden burst of mayhem. On the other hand, Selmak wasn't bound by Earth's military courtesy rules and he expressed his impatience before O'Neill could finish opening his mouth.

"Please get to the point, Sam Carter?"

"I'm getting a map of the building." The Colonel managed not to sound obviously peeved at the interruption. "There's a control room at the top level, looks like a good place to check".

She frowned. "Okay, apparently there was a… transporter lift right here in the hall? But there's nothing" she scanned the area, spotting nothing that resembled a lift capsule and not remotely suspecting that what appeared labelled as a "transporter lift" in Ancient script was about as removed from Terran mag-lifts as these were from wooden ladders. Shrugging it off, she went on. "But there are emergency stairs in the back!"

"Right, let's move" O'Neill said with some urgency. "Sensors are getting some weird motion readings and…"

Outside the building, piles of rubble shook where underground access points had collapsed during the firefight. Stones and rocks shifted and from three different places across the vast square, ominous shapes shook themselves out of the ground, complex limbs unfurling free. Similar to their xenoservant brethren but three times larger and sporting bony onyx plates that covered body and limbs like a knight's plate armor, they unleashed a banshee scream into the night and set themselves towards the Legation's front entrance in massive, weighty strides.

"Okay, here come the dinosaur sized ones. Hopefully those doors are sturdy enough to keep 'em out…"

The Major's mistake was in thinking the newcomers were merely enlarged versions of the ones that died ignominiously under drone fire.

He had to revise his assessment when the closest monster stopped a stone throw's distance from the doors. It seemed to brace itself against the ground, then a long and thick appendage unfolded down from its belly and began to rapidly pulse a glowing blue along its ribbed length.

Despite themselves the human trio inside the building found themselves goggling at the incongruous display in the short time it took for the… charging process to reach a climax.

The blue glow became blinding and with a great bellow, the warrior-bred xeno unleashed a powerful plasma bolt from its penis-cannon.

O'Neill, Selmak and Carter heard the bolt strike the trinium panes with a resounding gong noise and the metal visibly bulged inwards, taking on a pinkish tinge as it suddenly warmed up by several thousands of degrees.

Then the second xeno shot its load and gobbets of molten alloy splashed across the hallway, fortunately missing the team as they hurriedly made their way to the back.

The third plasma shot blew a hole through white hot alloy and seconds later, black claws thrust in and closed on the scorching metal with no hint of discomfort, pulling and ripping with a metallic screech. At last the tortured material gave up and the crumpled door panels were flung out and away with fracas.

The xeno bent down to peek inside and got a face-full of plasma bolts, but the hits seemed to disperse on the armored plates with no more effect than stinging the beast and making it recoil a bit.

The humans were too busy scrambling out to give more than a cursory thought as the first of Anubis' praetorian xenoconstructs, incorporating the Kull-derived armored envelope and organotech plasma cannon fired another shot at a Crusader drone, hitting it straight in the center of mass with destructive results. The robot was flung back by the force of the impact, shedding parts and debris from the red-hot gaping crater in its torso.

Its brethren fired back, aiming at the joints between armored plates but the beast was fast, barging inside the hall after a spray of shattered stone, its two siblings hot on its tail, twisting and turning to minimize exposure to sustained plasma fire, then a melee erupted as both sides closed to grappling range.

A Crusader parried a backhand swipe, claws scoring tears on the tough diamond-sheathed carbon nanoweave of its skin. Rifle and biocannon fired at the same moment, point-blank, and backwash tore the opponents away, broken and smoking.

Another drone fell to a timely discharge yet managed to cling on, even as its adversary's articulated tail speared through the wound, impaling it and trashing internals. Distributed systems held through the second it took to unclip a grenade and shove it forcibly down the praetorian's open jaws. The explosion itself was almost muffled but the biomechanical body burst apart, spraying hyper-corrosive inner fluids onto the victorious Crusader. Fast-acting nano-enzymes ate through exposed carbon and metal and dead mechanical limbs clattered down on the smoking floor where they continued to dissolve into an acrid rising cloud.

A powerful tail swipe caught another drone and smashed it away into a wall, shaking the room and damaging its rifle, even as the last one took it as an opportunity to jump on the xeno's back where its front cannon couldn't come into play. The robot's claws came out, each one as tough and sharp as a layer knife, and it began to hack away at the exposed neck, disregarding the risk to its own integrity. The alien furiously back-ran itself into a wall but the drone held on, hanging on one rapidly disintegrating hand as it reached for a grenade as well.

Its last vision as the grenade, pushed into the bubbling neck tear exploded and destroyed both synthetic warriors, was more of the small xenos pouring into the breach, intent on pursuing the humans it was programmed to protect. Structural scans and parameters computed against explosive yield in microseconds then, satisfied that the rest of the building would remain intact around the now out of range trio, the drone's decentralized nervous system activated its offensive self-destruct.

A blast and fire wave scoured the hall again, incinerating all inside, and a roaring tongue of flames erupted outside the building's already blackened front. As resilient as the naquadah-infused stone was it was already compromised by the previous assaults and the entryway collapsed on itself in a great fracas, temporarily sealing that point of entry.

Inside the surprisingly dustless auxiliary staircase, metal steps shuddered and lights briefly darkened. A rumble came from below as inferno raged behind the fortunately fireproof doors downstairs as the three running raiders came upon a landing, high above ground level. O'Neill and Selmak stood guard as Carter worked the Ancient locks wirelessly, using the Station-issued tablet as an interface. The light-grey doors sighed open, and O'Neill took point, performing a text-book tactical entry into the central atrium of the living quarters. Lights were on, indirectly bathing the room in a soft glow. An abstract light sculpture occupied the center, but it was altogether less noteworthy than the greenery gracing the walls, kept alive and trimmed for eons by hidden automated caretaker systems.

As the other two entered, closing the stairway doors behind them, O'Neill signaled Selmak and they both proceeded to check the rooms branching from the atrium, three on each side, hitting physical controls to open the doors. "Clear" was sounded as each apartment was searched and found empty.

Carter glanced at the open doorways as she crossed the atrium length. All seemed to open into similar spaces, housing units given the furniture shapes glimpsed in passing.

She stepped into the last flat and met again with her two comrades. The room was vast and pristine but bare, with a feeling that the last tenant had neatly packed everything and left, leaving nothing but the bare furnishings behind. The style was different compared to the stuff in Freedom Station. The home furnishings were not exactly baroque or exuberant but their style, while restrained, exhibited discreet embellishments. Here it was all straight lines and simple curves in a stark, minimalist appearance, yet with a refined sense that belied a purely utilitarian outlook. Somehow, it exuded the sense of a society that had seen and done all along its countless millennia, its own sophistication so far beyond the youngish "look at us!" phase that it was slowly shedding all the crud off on its path towards the next state of its existence, or transcendence.

The spacious main room ended at the ziggurat's exterior wall with a low, wide window taking most of the length.

"Anything useful?" Carter enquired, and O'Neill shook his helmeted head. "Nope, it's just empty living space. Might have been worth studying in another time, but we'd better take the next passageway, upwards" he finished, pointing down the hall.

Carter was about to nod when a crystalline sound reached them, like glass breaking, coming from one of the other apartments.

All senses back at full alert, they rushed back inside the hallway in time to catch sight of a xenoservant running inverted on the ceiling, snarling as it detected prey.

Three rifles shot each a three-round burst of explosive pre-fragmented bullets and the bioengineered creature fell on the floor, gutted, and its juices began to melt through the polished stone. More breaking sounds came in, and in seconds a new fusillade erupted inside the hallway as the three humans backed to the yet-unopened doorway, leaving a clear field of fire ahead where xenos rushed in one after the other.

In clear light and a wide open space made even wider by the central sculpture collapsing in glittering fragments, facing opponents with helmet displays and assisted aiming they fared poorly. But as a vanguard, their role was merely to pin down the prey's location.

The humanoid thing with pearly translucent skin slowly shuffled forward, oblivious to the glass fragments and the bubbling stains of dissolving material. It was nearly blind yet it sensed its surrounding through not entirely physical ways. It sensed the death of its close brethren and the three hostile auras.

The thing had been Brader before the catalyst bath remolded him into something else, far removed from humanity. The nanotech had invaded his brain and rewrote pathways, grown new lobes and sacrificed others. What remained had no memory of ever being human but was psychically connected to the local network of Furling-tech minions of Anubis.

While it lacked the speed and agility of his black-carapaced cousins, his elongated cranium concealed his best weapon.

"Carter, you better open that door because they're sure as hell not going to stop coming" O'Neill growled as he reloaded the magazine of his Colt battle rifle. The Colonel was already kneeling behind and removing a panel to reveal Ancient optical circuitry. She was beginning to connect when O'Neill pressed the trigger again. A haze had seemed to materialize at the other end of the hall, drawing in smoke and fumes, and a tall humanoid silhouette slowly advanced in a curiously misshapen gait.

The rifle burst was stopped cold a couple of feet before their target, drawing ripples in the air as they hit the previously invisible psy-shield.

The shield rippled madly as O'Neill emptied a full magazine, joined by Selmak, yet bullets, plasma shots and even zak'nik'tel lightning failed to punch through the advancing wall, and black xenos came out of hiding from the doorways to advance behind it.

"Caaaarter! Open the doo-" "Done!"

The trio ran across the threshold as soon as the way was clear, then O'Neill lobbed a grenade between the closing panes. A muffled explosion, a ground tremor, he was already unpacking a fragmentation mine and sticking it to the wall, then he followed the other two up a new flight of stairs.

The next level was already open. A wide, glassed central corridor linked several rooms that O'Neill rapidly classified as lab spaces of sorts, filled with recognizable workstations and more esoteric machinery, though vaguely reminiscent of and sharing a common lineage with the tech in the Ancient station. The styling was different though, all and glass and silvery metallic tones, shiny though understated, overwhelmingly solid-state rather than the burnished metal and clockwork-styled features they were familiar with, telling of an evolutionary gap between one age's style and the later, albeit made by the same people.

Carter and Selmak stood at the far end in front of another door, this one set in a solid wall and looking rather more sturdy than the rest. Which marked it as hiding something more important than the rest of the rooms, if the "Restricted access" notice in blocky Alteran script wasn't readable enough.

"There's no access panel and no wireless signal" Carter told him as he approached. "You have some breaching explosives, right?"

He started to nod, then froze in his tracks as a buzzing chime sounded and a blue outline suddenly lit up around the closed door under three startled pairs of eyes. Before any could say anything in reaction, a sharp tremor, the sound of a metallic shower hitting things followed a fraction of a second later by organic shrieks told of their pursuers triggering the frag mine downstairs.

As the Major took an involuntary step forward, the door simply slid aside.

"Okayyyy… think it's a trap?"

"No idea, but going back isn't an option anyway!"

Inside was a medium-sized, octagonal-shaped chamber bathed in faint blueish light. Rows of cabinets lined the walls, metal frames holding crystalline, blade-like computing modules; fridge-shaped industrial matter synthesizers showed their empty trays. In the center stood an octagonal pedestal adorned with glowing Alteran script. A thick cable was plugged on a side, traversed the room in blatant disregard to workspace safety standards and disappeared through a hole in the exterior wall that, while neat, appeared to have been made recently.

It wasn't the only sign of recent tampering, though. On top of the pedestal, a distinctly Goa'uld-looking box projected a holographic status display. Out of its back grew thin optical tendrils that clung on the other end to the protruding top of the crystalline power source plugged into a receptacle in the middle of the pedestal.

The last modification was the rather pedestrian ladder leading up to a hole in the stone ceiling, whose circular perimeter showed the perfectly smooth finish made by something like an industrial-scale laser cutter. O'Neill cautiously peaked under, shining his rifle's torchlight upwards. There was nothing but darkness at the end of the shaft, which had to lead to the exterior of the building. The soldier's heart quickened. Someone, probably Anubis, had drilled an access shaft right down to this protected chamber through meters of stone, taking care not to disturb anything else… all to access an ancient power source. And now they were stuck in the room with a neat hole leading to the exterior where monstrous things roamed. He felt a shiver. Those monsters could drop from the shaft any moment… Unless their master didn't want a fight to damage this place. So they had to be waiting outside.

His radio crackled back to life. He realized that until now the building's thick walls had acted like a Faraday cage, blocking communications; the last minutes had been so hectic he hadn't even noticed that.

The corvette's crew was hailing them, and he felt urgency in O'Hare's voice. He answered, sparing a glance at Carter and Selmak who were busy investigating pedestal and Goa'uld box.

"Surprise, we were out of coms momentarily"

"Major, yes, we saw a big firefight over there, what's your situation?"

"Holed up in a room inside the target building, and we'll need extraction soon"

"Soon is good, because we have a bunch of Goa'uld small craft incoming, with more behind, bombers or troop transports from their size!"

Shit, O'Neill thought.

"ETA on them?"

"The fighters will be there in ten minutes, the rest five minutes behind; the mothership is still holding position above the opening. We can be on top of your position in two minutes. Orders, Sir?" a hint of trepidation could be felt in the pilot's outwardly cool voice.

"Wait a sec, Ell-tee" he put her on hold and turned towards his companions.

"Carter, Selmak, we have to boogie out, Goa'uld reinforcements are on the way!"

"What, but, we just found something extraordinary, the most powerful power source ever created!" Carter pointed at the crystalline device set in the pedestal. Selmak went on "An Ancient potentia, almost fully charged, that's an almost mythical find, it's priceless!", rapping the Goa'uld box for emphasis. "And this box is connected to Anubis' datanet, I'm only just beginning to delve into it!"

O'Neill repressed a sigh. All the data in the universe wouldn't help if they were caught pants down by Anubis' vengeful minions, especially with the supership hanging above and certainly ready to intercept them at the exit.

Then, something his companions said went up in his head like a lightbulb.

"Wait. You both said this thing is a power source? Like, a generator, or a power cell?"

"More like a power cell, O'Neill" Selmak pointed. "If the lore holds true, it's a self-contained extradimensional universe whose entropy feeds the device. Once it's drained, it's good for the recycler."

"All right, so I guess there are safeguards to ensure all this bottled energy is released in a controlled manner, right?" As the soldier asked the question, he hoped the answer wouldn't quash his raised hopes.

"Well yes, there's a complex set of governors to regulate…" Selmak's face suddenly went white as he realized what O'Neill actually meant. "Oh no no no, you can't be thinking of…" he half-stammered. Then Carter caught up, her eyes went wide and she nearly dropped her tablet. "Jack, are you seriously talking about blowing up this entire star system?"

"Well, it would cover our exit nicely, wouldn't it? I figure the planetary shield would also focus the initial blast right at Anubis' mothership while we slip right into warp and leave the explosion behind us. So, can you do it?"

Selmak and Carter exchanged a glance, then spoke nearly in unison. "Yes." The Tok'ra added "It's going to take us a few minutes though, fortunately Anubis did the prep work for us" he gestured at the box and its optical connections.

O'Neill nodded decisively. "Get onto it."

Leaving the scientist and the Tok'ra operative to their animated talking and fiddling with exotic hardware, he turned his attention back to the waiting corvette and gave her crew new instructions.

Spearing through the stratosphere at hypersonic speed, Gholash son of Met'Baal scanned the sky left and right of his Deathglider and repressed the rumble in his stomach. His wingmates probably felt the same, abruptly called to scramble in the middle of their meal by the news of a cowardly surprise attack on their Master and brethren down on that dark forsaken world. How anyone could have sneaked past their mothership when the sensors were specially watching for the kind of subspace disturbance left by a cloaking device? He suspected the Jaffa manning the bridge would pay a heavy price for their failure. Well, that was no skin off his nose. Those bastards, safe in their shielded Pel'tak tended to look down their nose onto those they dismissively called "vacuum fodder".

Well, he was at the vanguard of the massive formation of fighters blazing the way for the troop carriers following. It was damn dark outside and he blessed the godmagic in his helmet that allowed him to see almost as clearly as daylight, even marking the location of his squadron mates as small golden overlaid symbols. So far, there wasn't a sniff of hostile craft. His bet was some cleverly cloaked Tel'tak hiding ahead, but at close range they wouldn't escape detection if they wanted to escape past them. And if they tried to flee further away, then they wouldn't be able to threaten his god's work again. Which was fine with him, because he blindly worshipped his god and didn't have the slightest hint that said god's plans for a rebuilt future galaxy didn't include him… or anyone else he knew.

A hundred kilometers ahead of the Deathgliders the large flat shape of the Trident corvette emerged from its hidden landing field on contragrav and cold plasma maneuvering thrusters, the energized pillars of gas marking a very faint blue glow under its flat belly as the landing pads retracted with the soft whine of hydraulics. With the hurried departure the base camp was left at the bottom of the stadium-like structure, but the location was provisionally marked as the target for a lone torpedo strike.

The craft sped up horizontally as its main thrusters lit up, powering towards the distant atmosphere bubble and onboard sensors arrays reestablished a comprehensive picture of everything in their line of sight, above and beyond the local horizon.

O'Hare swore silently as vectors firmed up in her tactical view. They wouldn't avoid a fight, worse, unless the team was ready to embark as soon as she got above their position, the Goa'uld fighters would engage her low and slow and every combat pilot instinct in her screamed at being caught in such a disadvantageous situation.

"Major, I'm thirty seconds out, status, over?"

"Carter and Selmak are working on it, they still need a little more time, then we'll have little more than eleven minutes to escape."

"Roger, I'll drop Crusaders on your position and engage the fighters."

She then did a quick calculation in her mind. Eleven minutes? Damn, that was going to cut it reaaaal close.

A small squad of Crusaders dropped from the corvette's belly as it flew low over the ziggurat, not even bothering to stop in place. They did a rolling landing on the hard stone and took guard positions around the hole. Then the ship angled straight up and accelerated in a vertical climb.

Still barely out of visual range, Gholash's head jerked as a targeting caret suddenly appeared on his helmet display. At last! The cowardly enemy was revealing itself! It seemed to be the size of an Al'Kesh, a worthy adversary in its own right, but surely so many fighters would overwhelm its defenses!

Two seconds passed and his sensors threw up an approximation of the enemy craft. Even from that far away it certainly didn't look like an Al'kesh, and it was coming straight at them. Gholash frowned in slight puzzlement, then his eyebrows shot up as the display blossomed with new and fast signatures.

The corvette reached the apex of its climb and pitched back to level flight, still accelerating and leaving behind an expanding supersonic shockwave. Sensor tracks firmed up into collated targeting solutions for her array of weaponry, and her semi-autonomous engagement logic went to free-fire mode at the bequest of her crew. Her twin heavy missile launchers snapped open and mag-rails spat a first pair of missiles forward, then another, and another. Streaks of fire lanced forward as each missile went hypersonic toward its target, and after a short time the light came back from the first faraway explosions.

Gholash was a veteran pilot and although he didn't know the specifics of his opposition, fast things coming from it couldn't be good. With honed reflexes he shook his fighter in a widely corkscrewing maneuver, trusting it to confuse the aim of the enemy gunners.

Then his fighter abruptly expanded into a fireball as a computer-guided plasma warhead struck it head-on, and Gholash thought no more.

Fiery explosions blossomed against dark sky inside the wildly maneuvering Deathglider formation, each marking the funeral pyre of a Goa'uld small craft, but they were many and Surprise's missile launchers could only fire so fast. As the corvette closed in her front-mounted heavy laser turret fired as fast as cooling and power supply allowed, the light-speed beam not caring the slightest about evasive maneuvers at such close range. Where the plasma warheads consumed everything in their star-hot embrace, vaporizing metal and flesh alike, the laser pulses merely shattered the thin shells into large and small fragments, flaming and trailing smoke like dirty fireworks.

Yet the Jaffa pilots didn't waver in their ahead rush in testimony of their devotion for their god, a devotion propped by a healthy amount of terror at the mere thought of failing to obey.

As the corvette banked into a wide reversal turn, the surviving Deathglider flock fell into the engagement envelope of her close defense twin turrets, but as the latter spat bursts of high-velocity plasma at the incoming tide so did the attackers. As they finally reached their own gun range they fired as well, and the space between them was suddenly crisscrossed with tracer fire. Agile fighters bobbed and weaved through slashing attack vectors, hoping to leverage their maneuverability advantage over the larger craft. More Jaffa died setting up their attack runs, yet the rest managed to land hits on their target before trying to extend and reposition, followed by the defensive fire of the overlapping turrets.

"Hits, rear sector, shield holding, minimal bleed-through" O'Hare heard the report as she swung the corvette into another series of supersonic scissors. The damage indicator schematic in a corner of her vision stayed mostly green save a handful of spots where accurately targeted incoming fire had hit with enough intensity to punch through the conformal energy shielding. Some external hull plates would be warped or buckled by the heat but the ship's integrity wouldn't be threatened. So far.

Another readout showed the steadily diminishing number of hostile contacts. She was taking hits, yes, but Surprise had given quite bit more than she had received and was winning the battle of attrition. There simply weren't enough Death gliders left to overcome her armor in the time it would take to kill them all, incidentally validating her design specs, O'Hare noted in corner of her mind with clinical satisfaction.

Like a comet wreathed in fire the corvette dived back towards the ground, escorted by explosions as the last attacking fighters expended themselves, then silence and blackness fell back upon the dead world.

"Major, O'Hare here, we got rid of that fighter group but the rest will be there soon. I'm coming back to your position, and if I may speak bluntly to a superior, you ought to expedite whatever you're doing down there." The pilot's voice in O'Neill's earplug sounded cool but strained underneath, not that anyone needed to be reminded how time was of the essence.

He spared another glance up the dark shaft. At least there were Crusaders up there. Down presently… the sound of something hitting the room's door was muffled but perfectly audible nonetheless. His mind-eye kept recalling how the shattered alien bodies had released some kind of corrosive fluid potent enough to rapidly melt trough stone and metal. If one of those beasts came to the bright idea of smashing itself against the door… Assuming they were able to think, of course, but given their witnessed otherworldly psychic feats, anything seemed possible.

"Carter, Selmak?" he turned his critical eye towards the pair of them. Carter was fussing hurriedly about the ancient generator and its housing, reaching into an opened panel to do… stuff inside. Selmak was rapidly typing on a projected virtual keyboard of sorts, line after line of script too convoluted and foreign to even begin to understand.

"Yes-O'Neill-going-as-fast-as-I-can" came the reply at machine-gun speed, the Tok'ra not bothering to take his eyes off his work.

The question of whether to say anything more was barely beginning to form itself in the Major's mind when the unmistakable report of a plasma rifle going off came down from the ceiling shaft like sharp thunder, followed by more, rising to a deliberate and steady fusillade. The drones were engaging something.

He accessed the tactical feed and swore. At the same moment, Selmak let out a pent-up breath and rapped the pedestal's surface, Carter straightened out of it, and the chamber's serene lighting turned to a familiar warning red as angry crimson script started to flash as well on the various Ancient displays.

"Done! We have approximatively eleven minutes before overload!" offered Selmak by way of explanation.

"Oh fine, not to sound like I'm complaining but I wish you'd finished a minute earlier!" He tapped back into the radio net. "Surprise, we're ready for extraction NOW!"

As the corvette slid into a hover on top of the building a small drone-tug rocketed out of its belly and went straight down into the hole drilled through the stone roof, trailing a fast-extraction cable. It came to a stop over the floor in a burst of compressed gas right under the team's eyes, allowing a length of cable to coil down. On a non-verbal cue Carter snapped the top-most carabiner onto her suit's integral chest harness, then Selmak took the following one. Finally, O'Neil fastened himself then gave the signal to pull out.

The cable tensed back up and the trio found itself rappelling not down, but upwards on the inclined tunnel's flawless and near-frictionless surface. Then they emerged into a pandemonium of actinic plasma discharges, both from the firing Crusaders and from the ship's own point-defense turrets strobe-lighting the surrounding battlefield. The grounds outside were swarming with a dark mass from which obscene tree-thick tendrils whipped inwards trying to spear the defenders, only kept in check by the constant fusillade making them recoil in eerily organic pain. Dark humanoid shapes were running up the walls behind protective psy-shields soaking torrents of firepower, yet the ship couldn't use its heavier weaponry in such close proximity. They fell one by one as their overloaded shields failed, turning into carbonized and burning bits of grotesque flesh, yet more came and spat defiance in return – not just figuratively, for globules of corrosive fluid flew towards the stolid defenders. Humanoid machines moved and dodged as they returned fire… yet corrosive spit found its mark, melting through limbs and armored chassis and inexorably degrading effectiveness to the point where a first machine fell, then another, sparks sputtering out of half-melted holes in their frames.

O'Neill glanced up. Carter's head was reaching the red-lit belly hatch, she was looking up at the helmeted crewmember waiting up there to help them in. Below, Selmak's boots were almost-comically pedaling through empty air in understandable haste to just get away from the hellish scene below.

Almost there. Selmak's head crossed the hatch threshold in turn. O'Neill looked down. Crusaders were still firing away at the rushing creatures while the ship's turrets blasted away at the teratoid tentacles, preventing them from spearing inwards. The racket was incredible even through the suit's built-in earplugs. Thundercracks of laser-collimated plasma beating against a background of otherworldly eerie wailing like a million souls dropping in hell.

The hatch dropped down across his vision. His lips rose up in a savage rictus and his middle finger did the same at the faceless enemies down below. Beat you, fuckers!

The last crusader was falling, overwhelmed by a teeming horde of grotesque limbs, melted through and eviscerated by diamond-hard claws.

O'Neill never saw which anonymous monster among the bubbling horde below spat up the thick jet of molecular enzymes and acid that splashed around the hatch and across his lower body. He felt a sudden agonizing burning feeling at the same time as hands reaching under his armpits to collect him. The shock knocked out his nervous system a fraction of a second later, and the last image on his retinas was that his legs were no longer there and his torso ended in a mangled, burnt out hole from which part of his spine protruded. He felt very much lighter as his inside organs dropped down through the hole. Then he blacked out.

For this reason, he never heard the scream that escaped Carter's mouth nor the horrified expression on Selmak's face. With a wet sound his gutted torso flopped on the corvette's deck even as the hatch closed underneath. Without any further delay the ship went to full thrust, straining the inertial dampeners and the mangled body slipped back on a sheen of blood. Outside, the main thrusters burned at full power, incidentally incinerating a fleshy tentacle that was rearing up.

As the spacecraft climbed out, breaking the sound barrier seconds later, a salvo of tactical missiles dropped away. A moment later a pattern of fireballs blossomed down over the battle site and turned the malignant flesh infesting the surface into ashes.

Harsh UV lighting, ultrasonic soundwaves and heavy sprays of wide-spectrum disinfectant bathed the hatch compartment as it went through the automatic decontamination procedure. Throughout the minute-long process the three living people cursed the time it took to complete. Finally, the red glare returned and they were allowed inside the ship with Carter and Selmak carrying O'Neill's remains on a foldable stretcher. The ensign didn't waste time with unnecessary words, having already reported the casualty to the bridge, and ran straight to the small medbay with the away team in tow.

"Get him inside the stasis pod! It's the only chance! Don't bother removing him from his suit!" he intoned urgently as his hands went through the activation commands on the side of the cylindrical apparatus. The upper half swung on a hinge, revealing a bare, sterile white coffin-like space. The Major's corpse was lowered inside, leaving a messy wet trail. The lid closed and the stasis pod began its activation sequence.

It had almost nothing in common with the comparatively primitive cryopods of the New America, being based on a design dating back to the Gatebuilders' incredibly ancient Exodus from their origin galaxy. It had been a long voyage through the void, longer than even their race's long lifetimes. Their technology could get them faster than light… and conversely stop the subjective passage of time for the travelers.

Conventional cryopods carefully lowered a body's temperature, working in a complex cocktail of chemicals to prevent the freezing process from forming destructive ice crystals inside the cells. The Alteran solution was altogether more technologically refined and elegant. It achieved the same goal of stopping the body's constituent atoms, therefore inhibiting metabolism, ageing and decay, but did so by lowering the speed of light inside an enclosed volume. As tau reached asymptotically near zero, time itself ceased to pass inside the volume. Nothing inside could move faster than light and light itself was frozen. So were all the processes of life.

Only when the small porthole on the pod's lid went pitch black, manifesting that the light inside had stopped moving out, did the three living beings outside release the breath they'd been holding. The two armored ones quickly discarded their helmet and gloves, following the Space Force ensign back to the ship's bridge.

The Surprise was flying at a high hypersonic speed, careening up and back towards the planetary shield entrance. A countdown timer was enumerating the remaining minutes and seconds before the Ancient potentia catastrophically overloaded. On the navigation display was their ETA to the edge of the shield. It wasn't going to coincide. Even as fast as they were, barely shy of orbital velocity in the rarefied gasses of Furling's upper atmosphere they wouldn't have time to escape past Fleetkiller…

But Rosie O'Hare didn't intend to fly past the super-Ha'tak. At least, not in the conventional sense, in the sublight realm. She'd solved the particular geometry of their escape already, knowing that her margin was razor-thin.

Thousands of kilometers behind, a distance rapidly increasing, Anubis regained full consciousness and cursed immediately. His body was far from recovered and pain irradiated throughout his nerves. Still, he blocked it and turned his mind eye outwards. The destruction nearby was appalling. The atmospheric containment field had collapsed after the generator was hit by the intruders' parting bombardment, and he had to divert more of his otherworldly powers towards his body's immediate survival. His minions on the surface were gone and with them, most of the biomass accumulated over the past weeks. The dialing pedestal was toast and… his thoughts went to the potentia! He seethed with fury. Not doubt the intruders had fled with the precious device! There was nothing more precious as far as Alteran artefacts went. Surely, they'd recognized it for what it was… technology looters they had to be, for they were no Goa'uld, actually, who exactly were they? He would find out, then he would exact revenge.

His basic plan was still sound. His mind still contained all the knowledge pertaining to the Furling bioweapon and the Stargate network hack. He would find another power source… maybe a naquadria-laced planet? He knew those existed. He'd find one.

But first had had to get back to his ship, even though it meant carefully separating from this current body. Not a mundane thing to do even for a half-Ascended one. He collected himself and began to focus his mind towards the immaterial plane where he would cross, ghost-like, and fly out towards the Ha'tak and its collection of ready clone bodies.

Aboard the orbiting Ha'tak there was no semblance of routine anymore. News of the ground assault on their god and leader, then the frantic calls for help, rapidly interrupted, from the pilots sent as reinforcements, saw to that. The massive ship was at full readiness, its guns hot and ready to fire at any target found. On the Pel'tak Jaffas pored over the readouts, active sensors at full power, search parameters up to maximum sensitivity. Already they'd blasted a couple of orbital detritus that the ship's computer decided behaved suspiciously, having retraced their sensor history. They may have been small sensor platforms or just plain unlucky asteroids, but nobody cared about wasting shots anymore.

This time though they knew where the enemy ship had to come from, and they wouldn't miss it. All available heavy guns were poised towards the shield aperture and ready to send megatons downrange as soon as the enemy showed itself.

Inside the Surprise O'Hare tensed over her controls. The timer was rapidly cascading down towards zero. Up ahead, invisible to visual sensors still but traced by the synthetic long range display the aperture of the shield appeared, a thin horizontal line, letterbox-like under the ship's acute approach angle. But it would do. She didn't dare fly lower to open the angle. Environment density was already insanely high even at their near-orbital altitude, and wisps of plasma fluttered across the front-facing parts of the ship where friction heating was the highest. She minutely adjusted the ship's flight vector so it centered on the slit-like aperture as finely as her instruments allowed.

The timer reached zero, and things happened.

A fraction of a second earlier O'Hare smashed her finger on the FTL engagement button. Their capacitors fully energized, the distributed warp nodes immediately went from standby to active and the field deployed around, hugging the ship's hull. The corvette's objective speed instantly catapulted above C. But it wasn't the standard vacuum FTL jump, in fact, it was far from the regulation parameters for going supralight.

The atmospheric pressure at the initiation altitude was near zero, but not quite. Relative to deep space the particulate density was high and while the warp field was designed to double as a frictionless deflecting shield, the mass of the corvette accelerating past the speed of light created a massive, brutal shockwave. Air molecules compressed explosively, and a blast wave dwarfing a normal supersonic shockwave, like an ocean tsunami compared to the undulation created by throwing a stone inside a pond, expanded outwards with a force measured in gigatons.

A new sun ignited in Furling's upper atmosphere, but it and the destruction it would have created by itself on the planetary surface were made irrelevant by the following event.

The Alteran facility on the planet's surface was scorched externally by the fighting, but the interior chamber where the potentia laid was still intact. Inside its pedestal the crystalline device was far from quiet though. Its control mechanisms corrupted, the painstakingly designed safeties overridden, the nominal stable parameters of its functioning destabilized, its capacitive entropy reached a tipping point. The proto-universe residing inside its multidimensional bottle reached its equivalent of a big crunch and pure, raw energy, until then collated inside its own spacetime unleashed itself to radiate outwards into the surrounding spacetime continuum.

An infinitesimal fraction of a second after overload, the physical device itself ceased to exist. Its constituent atoms ceased to exist. Its subatomic particles ceased to exist, converted into their raw energy state. Next was the pedestal mechanism and its energy transfer apparatus, then the chamber. Another microsecond later the facility added its mass to the supernova event expanding outwards; then the fireball consumed the Furling city, expanding downwards to the planetary core and upwards to the containment shield.

A millisecond more and the planet itself ceased to exist in a physical sense. An outside observer in orbit would have seen a bottled sun flashing in place right before his retinas melted. But the pain wouldn't have time to register on his brain, for the shield itself, strained to breaking point by a force it was never designed to resist collapsed and vanished, its physical support structure blinking away.

But it had resisted just long enough for a focused blast of the pent-up energy to flash out of the sole aperture.

The Jaffas inside Fleetkiller didn't have time to process the event either. Even the super-Ha'tak's shield, one that laughed at the fire of entire fleets, did nothing more than sputter and die in less than a microsecond, and the massive ship vanished in the jet like a moth in the flame of an acetylene torch.

A white-hot geyser of energy erupted into space, but it barely made a few thousand kilometers away before it was dwarfed and absorbed by the total release.

A massive supernova birthed inside the star system, its visible blast front expanding ouwards at the speed of light, and planetary bodies, even the massive supergiant planet disintegrated in milliseconds as the hard light reached them like a hyper-energized gamma ray fist.

But there was another, unseen yet even more formidable effect, for it was no mere supernova crated by something as mundane as a star reaching its end of life. The arcane multidimensional effect-waves of the zero-point module failing catastrophically interacted with the wide-spectrum planetary shield in ways no mind, Alteran nor Asgard could have predicted for nobody had envisioned or witnessed such an event before. Ways going beyond the local universe's laws and limitations, breaking the local spacetime like tissue paper and expanding into the higher dimensions where beings such as the Ascended existed.

Some of these had indeed congregated into the vicinity, for they were old enough to have taken part in the events that led to the downfall of Furling civilization, including Morgana and Cyla. Even in their Ascended state, having access to knowledge and pursuits far removed from a mere human's imagination they couldn't help being drawn to the place that still haunted their memory, and to the criminal mind who had claimed one of their number in more recent times and was even now trying to escape.

Had they had time to process the event and realized the danger they might have taken it at a late punishment, even atonement. But the high-dimensional annihilation wave plucked out their non-corporeal beings and consigned all of them, Alteran and evolved Goa'uld alike to oblivion such as no trace of them remained in the multiverse.

Outside and away, if such three-dimensional concepts could be used as simplification, the rest of the Ascended saw with horrified stupefaction a dark void cloud rolling outwards from a localized point in the Milky Way galaxy, expanding beyond the local dimensional plane, unknown to its ordinary physical denizens.

And they fled that beacon of darkness.

Minutes later inside the fleeing corvette there was a wailing screech as the dimensional shockwave expanded past and interacted with her warp nodes, pushing these far beyond their design tolerances. A tremendous shudder signaled their sudden failure, energy feedback melting internal components and starting short-lived fires inside their engineering compartments. Sparks showered out of between red-hot hull plates and the ship tumbled out of FTL with the din of emergency klaxons screaming inside.

The sudden subjective deceleration and tumbling brutally shook its occupants, straining their safety restraints and spraining limbs, but the same restraints prevented them from smashing onto bulkheads.

Had O'Neill been able to feel anything, he alone would have been blissfully unaware of the event, tucked in the smothering embrace of the zero tau field.

"What the hell was that?" unanimously exclaimed the crew with minor variations in the wording after they collected themselves, while the ship's automatic systems corrected the tumble with deft pulses of its reaction control thrusters.

An ensign silenced the alarm klaxon and O'Hare announced the state of the ship after a careful glance at her damage report display.

"Okay, all three warp nodes are disabled, internal fires started but the fire suppression system got on top of those, some buckling and flexing on the hull and primary structure but otherwise, we're good" she reported as she rubbed a bruised knee.

"We were FTL, how could the shockwave reach us?"

"I don't know… unless it was faster than light too" Carter offered, "but then… the real space shockwave is behind us! How far are we from the planet?"

O'hare peered at her navigational display, then at the elapsed time, and blanched. "We're only two light hours out, Ma'am!"

"Any chance of restarting our FTL drive?"

Rosie shook her head. "Nodes are toast, far beyond our self-repair capability. It'll take drydock time to fix them!"

"Crap. There's a supernova front incoming" Carter gestured at the long range scanner display "we cannot take it sitting here!"

A few seconds passed with the pilot frowning in concentration, then she put her hand back on the manual thruster controls and pushed them to the stops. Engine screamed at the back of the ship and acceleration, as much as the dampeners allowed to filter through, pushed the passengers back in their seats.

"I'm going to accelerate away as much as I can" she explained, "before the wave hits we should be up to a significant fraction of C. With the shield at full power it might allow us to ride it through."

"Good thinking Leutnant" Carter answered, nodding. "Send a distress signal to our support ship with our projected location when it happens"

"Aye, ma'am!"

As the corvette flew away Selmak addressed Carter quietly. "There's a sarcophagus inside the Fist. It should be able to repair the damage and revive O'Neill, you know".

"Of course I know" snapped Carter, then she shook herself. "Sorry, Selmak, that was…"

"It's fine" the Tok'ra cut in, shaking his head in understanding. "You have a right to be on edge after what happened."

"Still" she said in response with a deprecating hand gesture "I shouldn't snap at you. But… even with Kheshmet's memories I'm not sure, with the extent of his injuries…" she trailed.

"Ah, I know," Selmak answered placatingly, "but I've seen some extraordinary feats by such sarcophagus use. You know most Goa'uld, even the System Lords, don't know exactly how the things work?"

"Really?" Carter made a surprised face. "I thought it was just a matter of them limiting the knowledge of their underlords?"

Selmak shook his head. "No, I mean, they know how to build them if they possess the blueprints, and it's a way for the overlords to control their vassals. But it's based on ancient and not exactly understood knowledge, heck, I'm not even sure who built the first sarcophagus for Ra's use."

"Huh. But I see how it would be a good way for the System Lords to ensure compliance."

"This. Selmak nodded. "By the way, we certainly got rid of Anubis, at least I hope he didn't manage to survive that" he pointed backwards over his shoulder. "It's going to have repercussions. With him out of play the great war will come to an end sooner or later. Then… the lords will have to rebuild their power base. This was the closest thing to total war they've known since… well, since ever maybe. They had to pull all sorts of resources to fight Anubis, and introduce some practices way outside their traditional modus operandi to increase the efficiency of their Jaffa armies. Some of those Jaffas had their faith in the divine nature of their lords, let's say, a bit shaken, this I know for sure."

"Interesting. You're saying they may have internal dissensions in their domains? We might exploit this."

"Perhaps. But it's difficult to reach inside their domains and exert significant enough influence to… push things. And Jaffa revolts happened in the past, yet the System Lords are still there. What I'm saying is, they'll have their hands full rebuilding and picking over the losers' spoils for years. Probably decades."

"Then we'll all use that time wisely, I guess."

"That's the idea."

Another minute passed.

"Brace for impact!" O'Hare's warning was superfluous. All could see the blast front on the display.

The Surprise was traveling at a tremendous real space speed in the void between stars and her energy shield was fully up.

It wasn't nearly enough.

It was a blast wave dwarfing the most powerful supernova ever registered in the galaxy. A shell of barely physical particulates energized with hard radiation, still brighter than a star at such distance despite the inverse square law, smashed into the shield and overloaded it. Hull temperatures flared instantly as matter was bombarded with gamma ray even as the shower of high-energy particles attacked the plating like a high-pressure hose blasting away a sandcastle. Secondary explosions racked the aft of the ship when engine assemblies and their propellant lines vaporized almost as an afterthought in the wake of the incineration wave.

The corvette was extensively compartmentalized and her structure was built with incredibly resilient alloys. Yet cell after cell burned away, peeled open as external hull plating disappeared in flames. Propellant mass, capacitors, weapons, ammunition magazines were sent into fiery oblivion. But their sacrifice was not in vain and was designed for. The blast spent its energy scouring them into oblivion as it travelled forward in the blink of an eye, the vaporization of so much matter flashing like a small star in the void.

Still the corvette was designed around a hardened, armored survival core. As the cosmic energy wave scoured the rest of the ship around it, it left in its wake a brightly flaring shell of vaporized matter dissipating around the blackened and tumbling seed that contained the sealed crew compartment, protected from the insane radiation levels outside by the equally insane dampening properties of its naquadah-trinium alloy walls. Inside, quick-setting impact foam encased the occupants so closely that they couldn't move a millimeter and absorbed the tremendous kinetic energy imparted over the craft, preventing a sudden death though not multiple tears and fractures. The suits' medical systems quickly intervened as pain signals flared inside the brutalized bodies, injecting healing and conservatory agents along with enough painkillers to set even a Tok'ra into merciful unconsciousness.

Hours later, the Ha'tak Fist of Justice emerged into real space, having bypassed the worst of the weakened shockwave through the passage in hyperspace where it manifested itself as a mere buffeting. Its sensors acquired the corvette's drastically reduced hulk and tractors brought the remnant to a hangar bay.

Samantha Carter woke up from a dreamless state of unconsciousness and opened her eyes to the slightly familiar golden glow of a sarcophagus' interior. She blinked once and the lid cracked open – she wasn't sure if it was automatic, or if her own symbiotic nervous system somehow communicated with the device. In any case she found herself draped in a flimsy hospital gown as Alliance-uniformed medical personnel helped her out of the healing coffin. The chamber, which normally in a Goa'uld ship was kept empty save for the precious device itself, was filled with monitoring equipment and operators as they tried to record the inner workings of the thing.

A medtech asked her a few standard questions and prodded her with medical implements to check she was indeed recovered, then a naval officer took charge of her.

"This way Ma'am, we'll get you outfitted in a proper uniform and ready for debriefing." Carter opened her mouth to speak but he went on, guessing what the question was. "You were last in the sarcophagus, since you were the least injured. Ensign Rockwell had to go first, he had some bad internal bleeding by the time we arrived. Selmak went right before you, he only had a fractured ankle to fix."

"O'Neill? What about O'Neill?"

"His stasis pod was recovered as well, still functional. So far there's no hurry to open it, we wanted you all awake and walking before we did anything".

Carter nodded as they reached another room, where she met again with the crew of the Surprise, her Tok'ra ally and the captain of the ship. A holodisplay was up and showing the conference room in Freedom Station.

At Lefarge's cue she recounted the events, with interventions and additions from her team mates.

Much was said, by Selmak, of the magnitude of the feat they'd accomplished without foreknowledge. How the removal of Anubis from the galactic stage would affect the Goa'uld sphere of influence. More, how they had certainly saved the galaxy itself from a plague worth than anything ever imagined. The Tok'ra operative was adamant, after a quick perusal of Anubis' files found inside the Ancient facility, that the fell Goa'uld plans would have meant a horrible end for trillions of sentient beings.

Yet nobody would know about it. They'd let the other Goa'uld puzzle out their foe's disappearance themselves eventually, then the end of the great war would play out.

All agreed that the files themselves should be destroyed, for they could see no good use for the Furling-derived technology. The Alliance people most of all were wary of bioengineering.

Then it was time to try and revive the dead Major O'Neill.

The stasis pod was carefully brought into the sarcophagus chamber and laid alongside. Technicians hovered around their monitoring gear, treading with practiced care over the bundles of fiber optics fanning from the Goa'uld device. Carter stood the closest, with Selmak hovering at her shoulder.

Everyone knew the transfer had to be quickest as possible. Every second counted.

A medtech tapped the pod's controls, and the inky blackness receded, fading to grey then color. As soon as the inside was resynchronized with the exterior universe, the lid popped open and gloved hands scooped what was left of O'Neill. Deftly handled tools removed the helmet and cut through preset lines in the torso armor, allowing the medical staff to quickly and efficiently remove it.

O'Neill's head appeared intact, and but the torso only went down to the lower ribs. Everything below was gone. A malignant black and blue bruising covered the flesh down at the tear, branching up in black capillaries to crisscross the intact flesh.

Carter and Selmak exchanged a concerned look. A drop of tar-like fluid oozed out as the medics transferred the body, and the ship's floor hissed where it fell.

Then the body was placed inside the sarcophagus, and the golden, richly decorated panels scissored close.

Seconds ticked by. All the witnesses expected the revival process to take a significant amount of time, hours, maybe days, given the extent of the damage. If it was even possible to repair a body that lost so much of its mass.

One of the monitoring technicians frowned as the readouts changed from the baseline he'd observed as the sarcophagus healed the previous patients. He was opening his mouth to shout a warning when a loud hiss came from the device, followed by a shower of sparks fountaining out of an open panel in the slab side. An urgent beeping sound rose from the monitors. Someone shouted.

"Get him out! Get him out!"

A commotion rose as personnel swam over the center of the chamber where the sarcophagus stood, its sides rapidly warming up and radiating heat. Someone inserted the tip of a crowbar in the junction of the closed panels, and bent with all his weight, rapidly joined by another. The lid cracked open and flames burst out of the gap. Another crewman, extinguisher in hand inserted the nozzle inside and pressed the trigger, smothering the flames in a loud whooshing noise.

Carter watched numbly as people climbed over the broken healing device and bent down, reached inside with gloved hands amidst a fog of frozen nitrogen gas. She saw them transferring an indistinct, but darkened and glistening mass back inside the stasis pod, which was immediately activated again.

"What the bloody hell happened there!" shouted the captain of the ship, as the crewmen involved in the transfer hurriedly discarded their gloves into a biohazard container.

It took several minutes for an answer to come as the technicians analyzed the recordings. Not that it came close to a detailed explanation. They could only tell that the sarcophagus had been attacked from inside by some unknown agent. An overload had ensued, starting a fire.

Much later in Freedom Station, as the city's best minds, aided by Control, took samples and did painstakingly accurate simulations, did they understand that the Major's body was contaminated with the Furling-derived, Anubis-designed nanocompounds. Designed with many goals in the late Goa'uld's wicked mind, but he'd anticipated among other things that his fellow Goa'uld might use their healing devices to counter his bioweapon. And included a corresponding "gift" in the complex encoding of his catalyst, one that would recognize their particular energy signature and trigger a sequestering response.

It would take them several years to design and successfully test a counteragent.

By then, Samothrace's ruling circle had overridden Carter's ethical objections, arguing that O'Neill's will did mention giving his body to science in the even of his death. The fleet they were building needed a controlling intelligence. They couldn't trust AI. They needed SARIF. Greystone and his team were adamant that they could rebuild O'Neill, keeping his human mind intact while expanding his capabilities, both mental and physical by several orders of magnitude.

Freedom Station, Advanced cybernetics division, June 6th 2025 (Earth Legacy Time).

Daniel Graystone stood silent in front of the operation tank. A large glass cylinder filled with hyper-oxygenated fluid, at its back and side were coiled an army of surgical devices on flexible limbs. He didn't have to say anything. His team was superbly drilled and the procedure was rehearsed hundreds of time in virtuality. He watched the stasis pod containing the remains of Major O'Neill being brought close alongside under a sterilization field. Operators talked in hushed tones behind workstations, eyes covered with augmented reality masks.

A robotic arm speared down as soon as the stasis field was off, and came back with the bundle of biological matter inside its grapple-like end. It pivoted with smooth efficiency, and plunged its prey inside the tank.

It was a head, barely recognizable, black as a lump of charcoal. Yet scans showed that, thanks to arrested time in the stasis pod the brain inside was still viable – its neurons still barely holding on to life. As soon as it was stable inside the fluid, the surgical heads began their fast ballet, whirling around in a blur, debriding the dead flesh, peeling open the cranium, creating new connections to the brain's vascular system, injecting the counteragent along with synthetic blood. First, they had to stabilize their patient. Then, they would go on to rebuild. Setting up the neural lace that would grow alongside and shadow the brain structures down to the molecular scale. The external interfaces, covering the surface with a new shell of hybrid computational substrate. The hyper-band data connections. Finally the hardened casing, as tough and resilient as battleship armor, seconding the nanofluid micro-scaffolding taking the place of the old brain biological support structure, making it virtually indestructible.

It would take weeks to complete. And then there would be months in virtuality, to reacquaint the personality of Major O'Neill with the living and stabilize his psychological state. Only then would he join the brand-new body patiently waiting in its own stasis container.

Graystone's face split in a cold smile. Retribution was coming to the galaxy.