Chocky's Dawn
by Chaoseternus

Note that italics indicates telepathy.

New Years Day, 2004.

New Years day was always a time, in theory at least, for new beginnings, for shucking off the old and starting fresh with the new. It often didn't work out that was of course, we humans do tend to be creatures of habit but this year would certainly be something else.

New Years Day was, auspiciously enough, the day that the final determination meeting would occur. This was the final chance to delay, the final Go/No Go (Wait) for the project.

Of course, it was a Go, we had little choice in that, the question was when?

The answer was simple, as soon as possible.

We knew of Anubis of course, not just from the reports the SGC was required to send to HMG which were inevitably copied to us but also through the lone agent we still had within the mountain and the assessment was that he presented a clear and present danger to the security not just of the United Kingdom, but of the Earth itself.

A military build-up was a necessity.

Were we ready? Not really, Thundersdawn station herself had no ship to ship armaments in her design nor shields as the SGC controlled those technologies and refused to share them. Her only protection was large sheets of armour plating which would actually be one of the last things installed on each section and an array of the Type II Pulse Lasers, well, actually Type IV by the time she was launched.

We also had no operational warcraft and that included fighters. We planned on Thundersdawn being the initial construction point for our first generation of warships of course, but having no fighters certainly wasn't part of the original plan.

Still, we had to go, grab some sort of lead whilst the opportunity still existed. The SGC already had two operational Prometheus class warships, Prometheus herself and the Iwo Jima with construction started on a third, Independence and funding secured for what would become Persephone. Hammond was already attempting to secure funding for the SGC to have its own orbital facility and was gaining much ground in that area, if they launched first with the technological edge they maintained…

No, we had to go; we had to seize the day.

The date was set, 22 nd of February 2004.

Strange as it may seem, considering how often we have suffered delays and disappointments since, the 22 nd was the day Airhead 1-4-9 launched, carrying the first components of what would become Thundersdawn station into orbit with it, followed swiftly by airheads very cautiously and slowly lifting the Shunter space tugs into orbit, a task that it was later discovered 'bent' the airheads, causing structural damage, the weight being too much for those early models.

The night before I would be lying if I said I slept, it wasn't that I couldn't because that would imply that I had been given the opportunity to try, which I hadn't. Even up to the last minute, beyond that to be honest, we were still creating the administrative plans for the construction, rewriting to account for the loss or injury to several vital craft and components, rescheduling launches to account for civilian traffic making late flight plans through the area, deciding how best to protect the launches given how few aircraft the RAF had managed to spare with cleared personnel for that purpose, inspecting the bases hastily augmented defences which at that point at least, turned out not to be necessary…

We barely had time to breathe, let alone sleep.

But, that was the start of our grand adventure. The rest, as they say, is another story.