Stargate Nothing Beside Remains (Multicross/SI)

[Rhyse]

Prologue.
PYX-338 - 2004

The foundation for the palace had been lain when his great, great grandfather was barely even a baby; and the final stone had only been cemented into place when his father had been dying of the wasting sickness – a summer ago. Sethehet, their God of the highest storm, had been living within it ever since the magic that allowed it to remain warm and lit during the winter had been completed. Jakar himself had only ever been inside two times – to take their offering of lamb and grain when his father had grown too ill to do so – and each time he had seen something new and wondrous. The first time in the palace he had seen a man brought back from the dead; a farmer had been hit with lightning, and to show that the great enemy Zeus had no true power the God Sethehet had restored the man to life. The second time he had entered he had been lead away to the harem and witnessed a goddess turn his uncle into a Jaffa as reward for their villages great tribute to Sethehet.

The palace had been a place of wonder for him; had been. Now it leaked smoke from the highest windows, with the harsh screech of the new Gods birds of prey buzzing above them. The smell of burning thatch had reached them even at the bottom of the winding path that lead to the town around the palace. It had been barely even a day since the sounds of fighting had ended. Still, they had followed the orders of their priest Omari and journeyed to the palace to pay tribute to their new master. Jakar had tried protesting, arguing that Sethehet was their master. The bruise from the backhand the old man had delivered had yet to fade away.

"Jakar, come here!" Omari called from further up, waving a wrinkled hand to summon him away from the cart. For the briefest moment he felt a spiteful desire to refuse, to sit and stay with the cart and ignore the old man waving at him. It didn't last long, as angry as he was with Sethehet's killers and the priest himself; he didn't want to miss anything important going on. He was a young man; with all the curiosity of a child and all the desire to prove himself as an adult. So he handed the reigns to his sister, jumped off and jogged to the middle of the priestly gathering.

"Omari, who is ..." A tanned priest gestured to Jakar, a sneer of faint dismissal gracing his aquiline features. Jakar knew of him, he was one of the few priests that traveled around the various villagers they traded with. A wandering priest that served as the hand of the High Priest of the Palace. He had never spoken to the man, but the man had often looked at his village with thinly veiled disgust. Those that lived in town seldom enjoyed interacting with those that did not.

"My apprentice, Sadiki." Omari snarled, suddenly alive with aggression towards the younger man. If Omari was surprised, or even afraid, he didn't show it. Simply offering a shrug in response.

"So be it. Boy, Omari tells me that one of his tribe has been to the palace before. Are you he?" Sadiki didn't bother to look at him while he talked, instead he fussed over his servants attire. Pushing and pulling at their golden decorations, and ensuring that not a single drop of the ceremonial offerings were spilled.

"I am." Jakar confirmed, only then did the Priest turn to look at him properly, with a blank expression rather than one of disgust. The village boy felt suddenly very small, not unlike when his father would shout at him for damaging their harvest, or mishandling the newborn lambs.

"Hmm, you are not dressed for it. We we will have to fetch you new robes if you are to be presented today. If this new God is as generous as Sethehet then we may receive some at the palace. If not, then you will learn to make your own." He nodded, as if the matter were entirely settled. Jakar opened his mouth to protest and say he was not Omari's apprentice, and that he definitely wasn't going to be dressing in the priestly robes when a Jaffa by the gate slammed his staff into the floor. Silencing the clamor of people with the lightning like crackle of power.

He was bald headed, with a silver skullcap adorned with a disk fanned by what looked like rays of light. Perhaps the new symbol that would be worshiping, Jakar thought. In his free hand he held a pronouncement from the palace.

"The great and merciful Sulis commands that no more than fifteen others may enter the palace tonight. All others must seek lodgings in town before the mid of night; any found outside after that time shall be cast from the city and flogged outside the walls!"

"Curses, we might not make it in." Omari muttered, eyeing the people ahead of them. Sadiki ignored him, instead standing on one of the larger rocks that dotted the roadside to better see over the throng of carts carrying goods into the palace's entrance hall. He began counting how many were ahead of them.

"Fifteen more tonight. That means, one, two, three, four..." He trailed off, darting his eyes across the crowd before a wan smile settled on his face. The wandering Priest nudged Omari in the side and grinned like a man half his age. "We'll be getting in tonight. We may even be the first to meet Him."

"Good, good. My bones are not as strong as they used to be." Omari groaned, grimacing at his clicking knees.

"Bah, you spent too long as a sitting priest that's why. Sethehet commanded the skies, your bones ache because you settled."

"Settled! I did no such thing! I helped raise a generation!"

Jakar let their conversation fade away while they approached the gate to the palace. Their new god awaited, and he could only hope he was as noble and great as their last had been. For all their sakes.

-==-​

"Another one?"

"Another one." Scotta confirmed. I let out a quiet groan, rubbing my eyes to try and chase away the ache that had taken up residence behind them. Marcus - the smug bastard - simply shot me an easy smile, walking over to the door and waving in the next 'tribute' from the outlying villages. I pulled myself up in the throne as much as I could and switched to my 'Godly' voice. Glowing eyes and all.

"Announcing priest Omari." The servant outside the door called, banging his wooden staff against the floor. The priest walked into my throne room, head bowed in supplication and his angular features schooled into a blank mask. Two servants followed him, and all three of them held a wooden bowl in their hands. He stopped in front of the steps to my throne, all three of them dropped to their knees and he began to speak.

"Oh, great and powerful Sulis! We bring tributes of Salt, Earth, and Water to pledge our lands to you!" The priest held up bowls of each material as he spoke. I kept my gaze as imperious as I could at the display, letting my eyes glow slightly brighter at the end to try and give off the impression of being pleased. I was about ready to waive him off with another 'Grovel and be humble, mortal!' when he waved in about a dozen other priests. Scotta shot me a look. It seemed that this guy was the real deal then, an actual Goa'uld cult leader. I really wished he'd arrived earlier, when I was a little more away and hadn't already dealt with over a hundred petitioners trying to weedle things out of me.

"I have gathered the leaders of all sixteen of the tributaries. They bring each a box of the Mineral to pledge their continued service." Boxes of Naquadah were brought in by the priests attending servants. Each one was carried between four of the priests servants; Scotta checked the contents of each and lifted up a fistful of the shiny black mineral. I had to actively work to keep the excitement from my face as I beheld the entire reason for killing the Goa'uld in charge and taking his place.

"You have done well Omari. I accept your pledge with great pleasure." I stepped down from the dais and touched the Naquadah myself, enjoying the slight tingle from my well attuned nerve endings. When I had melded with the Tok'ra Ser'val, he had made me fundamentally more in tune with the mineral that allowed Goa'uld technology to function. If I breathed deep enough I could even taste the stuff on the air, tiny particles of it suffusing the already incense soaked room.

"Scotta, see to it that these men and their retinue are granted guest quarters for the night. It would not do to have my High Priest languish in poverty tonight."

If looks could kill, then Omari would have been immolated on the spot, I thought with no small amount of wry amusement. When I had - admittedly - blithely announced that he was now my 'High Priest' the hook nosed man behind him had shot him a searing glare. I probably should be more careful. Or not, I only really wanted this world for the naquadah. Their little party politics didn't matter so long as I got that.

"As you will it, oh great and powerful Sulis." Scotta said, with a dead straight face. Knowing full well how much the 'god' act grated on my nerves. He waved over a servant and relayed the command to them.

"All other petitioners are to be to sent away. I am done speaking for tonight." I commanded the servant at the door, he bowed his head in supplication and acknowledged my command with a grovelling tone.

"Of course Lord."

"You will also leave." I added as an afterthought, gesturing not only to him, but to the two Jaffa that had helped escort the Priests into the throne room.

"Of course Lord." They all bowed in unison, filtering out and closing the throne room doors behind them.

Once we were alone. alone Scotta plucked a piece of fruit from one of the many tribute baskets, taking his knife he began cutting wedges away from it and setting them on a plate next to him. While he did so I divested myself of the heavy Goa'uld robes, stripping down to just a pair of loose fitting trousers and a thin shirt, to better ward away the sticky heat of the night.

"You know, when you showed me World and invited me to help you take it. I had assumed it would involve a lot more ... hands on work." My right hand man opined; pouring himself a glass of the green coloured wine the locals had produced.

"You don't like our new palace?"

"Oh no, the palace I like. This ... fucking around for some black ore is what I object to."

"Black ore? Ha. This." I pointed to the naquadah tribute. "This is the key man. We need this more than we need the soldiers, the palace or even the ships. I need this to turn our little joyride into something that we can use to move real quantities of men around the place."

Scotta waved me off, chewing thoughtfully on a slice of fruit while he mulled over my words.

"We took this place easy enough." He eventually replied. I was reminded - not for the first time - that Scotta wasn't actually a modern man, despite the ease in which he took to dressing and speaking like one. He was, at heart, a Gaul, from literal antiquity compared to me. Probably closer in culture to the masses of slaves and Jaffa milling around in the town below us than he was to me.

"We barely took this place. Even with surprise on our side, even with the Nish'ta doing the heavy lifting and even with those ASREV's giving us the skies. The Goa'uld we beat, was barely even considered a speed-bump by a System Lord, and the System Lords are getting ground down by the Tau'ri. Fact is, we need more logistical capacity before we even think of properly expanding." I walked away while I talked, taking us away from the throne room and towards the Al'kesh parked on top of the palace. Scotta followed, cutting away slices of fruit and silently chewing on them while he listened.

The servants that seemed ever present in the palace were notably absent from my ship; instead two blonde haired men guarded the entrance. Both of them held staff weapons and bore the same crisscrossing blue tattoos that Scotta held hidden under his robes. Unlike the soldiers enforcing order in the town, they were human. Men I'd picked up in my first few jumps through the multiverse. As we passed them, they bowed their heads to me, and nodded respectfully to Scotta.

"I understand the need to get more men, but why the desperation for this mineral?" He asked as we entered the most important room in my small 'empire'.

"Because we are tied, like a dog on a lead to the mirror." I put my hand against its cool surface, reading the data it was pouring out with the naquadah in my blood. Ser'val had been a gifted Tok'ra. A true scientific prodigy; with his knowledge interfacing with the Ancient Quantum mirror had been childs play. He had already done the hard work of grafting it into the systems of the Al'kesh and granting the ship the power to run free in the multiverse. But his death when blending with me had left his work half finished.

"Without naquadah, I cannot modify this device, we would be stuck travelling between the same ten worlds. Eventually the Tau'ri will move their sights away from the major Goa'uld and onto smaller kingdoms - onto us. Or if not them, then the Lucian Alliance, or the Ori. With a hundred Ha'taks the Goa'uld lasted barely a decade against the Tau'ri. We wouldn't last a day."

"Why not stay in one of the other worlds then?" A fair question, but one with an uncomfortable answer.

"Because only this world has the right conditions for growing. An established population, a good technology base and thousands of planets to exploit. The others don't offer that." I pulled away from the mirror and turned to face Scotta. He set down the pit of his peach on the table next to him. He was staring at me with a tight expression.

"So ... Empire building on the backs of slaves?" He asked.

"Yes." I answered. "For now."

-=-=-​

This was largely inspired - loosely in terms of story, heavy in terms of concept - by Vexmaster's Galactic Imperium. But I should also say that that fic is absolutely atrocious. Fun idea, lunatic execution; not a terribly fun read and a wasted concept in my opinion. I've been mulling this one over for about a year and a half now and only really had the time to put pen to paper (both to plan it and actually write bits of it) very recently.

The 'in media res' start is not my favorite, but I find the starts of any multi-cross like this to be pretty terrible. I have a vague plan to flesh out how it began with character flashbacks rather than an info dump. But 'man finds spaceship, hops around toyboxing for a bit' at the start would have set kind of a shitty tone, when I actually want to mostly look at everyone except the SI.

Any criticism, of questions are greatly appreciated. Parts of this chapter are probably going to be touched up and cleaned up tomorrow as well.

 

[Rhyse]

Tohoku Class Cruiser - Deng Xiaoping.
2003 SG time.

The Alliance Cruiser cut through the black of space; her pulse drive slowly spooling down, letting her mass return to normal to let her slide into a smooth orbit around Newhall. Normally an Alliance presence this size and this far out was considered a waste of resources, time and energy. But the recent unrest born of the revelations about Miranda had pressured the Alliance Parliament into more aggressively supporting new colony movements. Where before a town would be set up and succeed - or fail - under their own merit; now the plan was to put a Tohoku in easy reach of a dozen smaller worlds to offer onsite support wherever it may be needed. Which was why Captain Tsai had been dragged away from a comfortable anti-piracy run and thrown out into the rim to watch over toothless colonists.

As the ship gently moved to an orbital speed, it began bleeding transports and probes down to the world below. A hundred colony vessels and their attendant tenders were being deployed to Newhall. The Alliance was attempting to mend the blunder that had been Miranda by putting in more support for the outer colonies.

The Tohoku class wasn't bleeding edge tech anymore, but it was still considered a solid warship by the Alliance navy, inside of the middle tower was the primary command structure, nestled in a tungsten bunker shaped like a cigar it held living spaces, food and enough independent resources to last a year floating free from the ship itself. Even if the cruiser were to somehow be killed, the 'spine' - as the naval engineers called it - would probably survive long enough for rescue boats to reach the wreck and save the command crew.

It was a spire set into the heart of the ship, a command deck at the top, with stairs leading down to a lower decking containing fire control, navigation and communications. Below that lay military flight command, civilian flight command and ship-wide communications. They were spread out like a flower petal, the bottom deck arrayed so they could see the one above it, and the command deck sat in the middle, giving the Captain access to his entire domain. Said Captain - a tall man in his fifties , with sharp Asian features and graying short cropped hair - was stood talking to his executive officer. They had received a priority one communication from the Alliance naval outpost orbiting the protostar Penglai.

"A bulletin came in over the Cortex just before we received it. AST Lightflash has been attacked. We're to launch two patrol boats and a rescue tender to investigate." The XO said, holding out the datapad to the Captain.

"Attacked? By who?" Tsai asked with a raised eyebrow. He took the datapad from his XO and read over the details. Unknown vessel, unknown attackers, zero survivors registered by the shipboard VI. The only things they ripped from the systems were the production details for intercept missiles, gunships. Physical theft was limited to an uncounted number of missiles, and six refurbished Alliance Short Ranged Enforcement Vessels. ASREV gunships. Enough firepower to worry local police, but nothing serious for any real force.

"Unknown sir. Best guess from InOPs is pirates looking to sell stolen plans and equipment to some outer rim warlord."

"Hmm, if so, then we'll probably have to deal with them after they get cocky and show off military hardware. Any camera footage?" Tsai asked the XO.

"No Sir." He shook his head.

"None? How old is the shipyard?" He looked up from the datapad with an incredulous expression. Surveillance within the Alliance was routine, common and all encompassing. To not even have cameras aboard a vital piece of infrastructure was unthinkable.

"Prewar sir; under the Dolos doc-"

"Yes, yes. Complete system isolation, I understand." He pursed his lips for a moment, then nodded. "Alright, get the flight chief to prep two boats and a rescue tender. Have we got any gunships in flight?"

"Yes Sir, Scimitar flight is currently on planetary recon flight. They're three hundred thousand out right now."

"Good, tell them to maintain current patrol, then have half link up with the patrol boats. Just in case."

"Understo-" The XO was cut off by the chief sensor officer flagging up an anomaly and calling up to the command deck.

"Captain?"

"What is it?"

"We have a ship inbound. four hundred thousand kilometres. Looks like high pulse." He seemed unsure of his own estimate, pulse drives were what separated planetary vessels from a true deep space boat; but running with one active meant that ships could easily overshoot entire planets by millions of kilometres if they ran them for even a few seconds too long. It was almost unheard of to keep a pulse drive active within a million kilometres of a planet.

"High pulse? This close to the planet? Hail the Scimitar flight leader, order them onto an intercept course." The Captain called down to the Flight Officer handling Scimitar Wing. After a moment he looked to his executive officer. Tsai wasn't a particularly superstitious man - the Alliance had no real state religion, and his long years of service had stripped away the glamour of the unknown - but he had learned to trust his gut. Something about the ship moving towards them set an uneasy feeling in his stomach. A feeling he wasn't inclined to just ignore.

"What are the chances of this high speed mystery ship having nothing to do with the bulletin?" He called out to his XO.

"Captain?" The XO walked away from the other command staff, standing by the very edge of the command deck with the Captain.

"I'm asking for your opinion Nick." He replied in a subdued tone. His Executive Officer looked away, then shook his head.

"Low, I reckon." The XO answered quietly. Tsai gave a curt nod back.

"Yeah, me too." He looked over to the cluster of men dealing with their helm and maneuvering controls. Saying in a more authoritative tone. "Nav, Get me a course estimate on that ship."

"Aye sir."

He waited patiently for the computers to calculate where the ship had come from; at a high pulse speed there wasn't much room for a course change on the ships part. Even a racing vessel would have trouble changing direction by more than a few degrees every million or so kilometres. So it didn't take long for the navigator to confirm his suspicion. The estimate indicated that - not accounting for any theoretical slingshots - the ship had been cruising away from Beylix.

That put it within a hundred thousand kilometres of the Lighflash.

"XO, issue combat readiness, seal our compartment. Second Flight Officer, order all civilian flights grounded, get me a clear battlespace asap." He barked orders out, shifting to a 'command' stance with both hands clasped behind his back, his eyes locked to the holographic display showing their airspace.

Both men confirmed their orders and set about implementing them. Bulkheads at the base of the CIC hissed and sealed shut; keeping the entire deck cut off from any of the other sections. Sound from other decks was cut off as air was vented around them. The CIC slowly cooled of all conversation as the crew realised that they might actually have a fight on their hands. The same thought was on everyone's mind: Who would be crazy enough to pick a fight with a Tohoku cruiser? It was a floating fortress.

"Huntington, any word from Scimitar flight?"

"Yes Captain, Scimitar lead reports vessel ordered to stop with no response. They're moving to combat forma-"

Ten rapid beeps rang out from the flight control console, interrupting the Officer as he was speaking. Huntington jerked as if he'd been physically struck, he turned away from the console to speak to the Captain.

"Scimitar flight transponders zero ten Captain."

Zero out of ten signatures, zero out of ten birds still flying. Captain Tsai leant forward and clenched a gloved fist on the railing of the command deck.

"Get me a visual. Bring us to alert one and ready all weapons. I want that to know who we're fighting, and then I want it dead."

"Aye captain. Vessel onscreen now."

The mystery ship had turned to face them, it was drifting through the heat bloom of the ten dead gunships; a saucer shaped distortion against the dark of space. At this range, with the protostar behind Newhall, the enemy ship was a smear of black on black to the naked eye. Thermal was distorted by the detonated reactors, giving them only the vaguest profile to work from.

"Arm torpedo racks five through eight."

"Five through eight, armed."

"Fire." He intoned, staring unblinkingly at the enemy sensor profile.

The ship trembled ever so slightly as thirty long range sprint torpedo's slid out of their firing tubes and leapt away towards the unknown contact. Captain Tsai carefully resisted the urge to nervously rub his chin - a holdover from his tense days as a gunship pilot - instead he held them clasped behind his back, knuckles white. On the CIC's central screen, the missiles crept across the distance between his ship and the contact; ETA displayed as four seconds. Three seconds. Two seconds.

"Package delivered."

"Kill confirmed?" Tsai asked tersely. For a long moment no one spoke, waiting for the thermal flash of the missiles impact to fade. Then, the screen flashed with the same contact. This time closer by another thousand kilometres.

"Not confirmed Captain. Target is still under motion. Pulse speed maintained."

A strike package like that would have wiped out a city block, or even swatted down a wing of cruisers with a few lucky hits. Instead the enemy barely slowed down? The tightness in his stomach clenched harder. A sick feeling blossomed with it. The torpedo's didn't even have an effect. His eyes narrowed as he wracked his brain, why? Ablative armour might shrug off the canister and shaped charge warheads, but the kinetic ones would cut straight through it. Hollowed layer armour could maybe catch one or two smaller torpedoes, but those were thousand pound anti ship missiles, a clever engineering trick couldn't stop a kinetic impactor the size of a car hitting at nearly a hundred thousand kilometres a second.

He quickly poured over as much of the sensor data as he could understand on his command console. A low drive signature, high velocity, low thermal output and a saucer shape. It was something out a science fiction novel. Or, or, or, or. His mind raced, it was automated. During the war the Alliance had toyed with the idea of deploying automated weapons platforms, hardened against weapons fire and wireless intrusion. He never thought they'd deployed the dammed things, but it could be from some left over black ops that went bad. Without the need for crew, it wouldn't need air, or wasted space on bunks. They could run it at a high g burn and hide the heat inside the frame. When it wasn't maneuvering, or firing it'd look like so much space junk floating around the place.

If it was anything like the proposals that he'd seen during his time at fleetops then they wouldn't be aiming at a target the size of a ship, they'd be aiming at a target the size of a person, a combat rated VI sitting in the middle of a hundred foot of armour layers. EMP hardened; essentially immune to canister and kinetic strikes. Only one option, he thought. Only one real option.

"Scramble squadrons Dragon and Sphinx. XO prep for close in engagement. Load anti-capital strike package. One megaton by ten. "

The order sent the CIC into a frenzy. The Deng Xiaoping - like all Tohoku class vessels - carried a compliment of variable yield nuclear warheads, both for her heavy guns and long range torpedo's. Originally equipped with a hundred warheads during the rim insurrection, after the war its armaments were stepped down to a mere fifteen. Each of them tied to authorization codes held by only the fire control chief and the captain himself. To use them near an inhabited world, even one as poorly populated as Newhall, was considered almost unthinkable after the war.

Almost.

"Chief Lester. Your key." The captain intoned, he moved down from the command deck and into the clusters of CIC computer banks, down to the control systems for the torpedo rack ten. The only one rated to deliver nuclear payloads. The use of physical keys for authorizing had been abandoned during the war due to the commonality of nuclear deployment, but to load the warheads still need a command code directly entered into the CIC console.

"Aye sir. Key confirmed, ready to authorize." Chief Lester confirmed after tapping in his code, half not believing that this was being done.

"Good. Midshipman, you're weapons free." Captain Tsai took a second to squeeze the weapons officers shoulder; partially to encourage the officer, partially to steady himself.

"Aye Sir...fir- Ahem. Firing for effect, confirmed ten radiological's away. Five seconds to impact."

"Comms, warn Newhall spaceport to prep for radiation. Just in cas-"

The fire control officer interrupted the Captains order, his voice trembling as his brain processed what the sensor suite was telling him.

"Impact confirmed ... Target is ... target is still active Captain."

The CIC was dead silent. That payload had contained a combined rating of a megaton, each warhead carried a variable yield warhead with a standard setting of one hundred kilotons for anti-ship duty. Each of the warheads could have obliterated an entire city, or slagged a warship the size of the Deng Xiaoping by itself. To have all ten fail to kill the target was a scenario that even the most paranoid wargame instructor had never run. Yet it was happening.

Tsai took a breathe, a moments hesitation before he began to give the order to switch to main battery fire. He never got to say the words.

"Incoming!" The PD Network officer yelled suddenly.

He got a split second to see the flash of yellow streak on screen from the dark of space before it struck the base of the cruiser with a thunderous boom. Lights in the CIC flickered and dimmed, replaced by the dull red emergency systems. A trail of flashing LED's on the floor began showing the way to the escape pods.

"Damage report!" The Captain barked out.

"Main systems are not responding Captain, we're dead in the water."

That ship was still out there, and it was going to hit us again, the Captain thought with a grim certainty. Their control from the command deck had been severed by the first hit, but that just meant that secondary control points would be issuing orders now to each weapons cluster. A dozen distributed command systems would be trying to shoot that ship out the sky. In a sane world that would mean that all he'd had to do was wait for that ship to be turned to scrap, then deal with the indignity of the engineers cutting him out of his own dead command deck. But ten nukes had failed to stop the enemy ship; the CQC guns wouldn't do any better.

"Issue a general evacuation order. All hands to pods or escape ships."

"Sir?"

No Tohoku Class had ever been lost, in combat or otherwise. He was going to go down in history as the first man to ever issue such an order. His family had a long and proud naval tradition. They'd been officers aboard the first ships to leave Earth, captained ships during the anti-piracy patrols of the early settlements, and he'd been in command with his father during the insurrection. It was a stain to flee his ship like this.

"I said ..." It would stain his career forever. "I said issue a general evacuation order. All hands to pods or escape ships. Do it." He had a responsibility to his crew to keep them alive, shame to his career be dammed.

"Aye sir."

The ship shook three more times from weapon impacts as they made their way down to the lower decking pods. Most of the lower ranked crew slid into single man escape rockets that would drop them off onto Newhall. He and his command staff made for the larger escape shuttle set into a launch tube. While they were loading the ships physical log back up he took a moment to stand and take in his ship, possibly for the last time.

"Sir, we're loaded and ready for launch." His XO said behind him. He barely heard him.

He could stay behind? Plenty of captains went down with the ship during the war. It was the honorable thing to do, there was no coming back from losing like this; Naval Intelligence would probably have him hung for incompetence. But they needed to know, a treacherous and cowardly thought tickled his mind. Naval Intelligence would probably hang him, but they needed to know what happened here. He needed to live to tell them about the ship that killed his own. Stay and die with honor, or go and live with the shame?

The choice was taken away from him when his XO grabbed his arm and began pulling him into the escape pod.

"Sir, please!"

With one long look back down the corridor of his beloved Cruiser, he sealed the escape pod door and hit the launch button. As they were rocketed away, he saw another flash of yellow strike the reactor module, turning his ship into a rapidly expanding ball of burning gas and twisted metal.

-=-=-​

Alliance Naval Intelligence Prison - Londinium.
2004 - SG Time.
Ten months after the destruction of the Deng Xiaoping.

"You are saying that a vessel, barely larger than a patrol boat managed to not only destroy the Lightflash shipyard; but also your own vessel?"

"Yes, I have been over this with you eight times now." Captain Tsai ground out, the frustration of his imprisonment plain in his angry demeanor.

"And you are still claiming that this mystery attacker was capable of doing so with five shots of an-" The Operative across the table checked his notes. "- Unknown energy weapon that did not register as a plasma packet?"

"Yes, look. I know it sounds insane; but check the records they clea-" The Operative held up his hand, silencing the disgraced Captain.

"I believe you; the Alliance believes you captain. Don't worry about that."

"Then what more do you want with me? Why am I being held here!" He demanded. The Operative didn't answer, instead he reached into his bag and retrieved an opaque plastic bag, he pulled out what looked like a knife and showed it to the Captain.

"Do you know what this is?" The Operative held out the thin black dagger. It looked almost primitive, instead of any plastic or rubber wrapping around the handle, it was bound with cloth. The blade did look very sharp however. Maybe he's going to use it to execute me? The Captain thought grimly.

"A knife?" He answered tonelessly. The Operative nodded, ignoring the petulance in the Captains response.

"It was retrieved from the Lightflash, most of the systems there were automated; but a small crew of engineers was needed to maintain the more complex systems. The enemy you encountered had previously boarded the Lighflash and killed that crew. We know what they took, but we don't know how. Not really; we recovered a body that bad been launched into space by the stations destruction; and this was in its chest."

"What's special about it?" Tsai asked, growing irritated with the rambling Operative talking about anything except why he was still being held.

"I am told, and you will have to bear with me here as I am not a materials scientist." The Operative smiled, looking over a report on what looked to be a spectrograph analysis. "That it is comprised of a mineral that does not exist within this, or any, solar system we know of."

It took a moment for Tsai to understand what the man was saying, when it clicked he jerked back as if he'd been slapped. Eyeing the Operative like he'd lost his mind.

"You're saying it's..."

"Alien, yes."

That's impossible. He didn't say it, he didn't need to. The Operative could read the thought on his face as plain as day. a Captain of a Tohoku class cruiser didn't believe in anything as farcical as aliens. He especially didn't blame the loss of his ship on them. Insurrectionists? Maybe. A left over weapons platform from the war gone haywire? Sure. Newhall had only recently had anything bigger than a patrol boat come near it. Stealth systems developed during the war had yet to be beaten, it was entirely possible that his ship had been attacked by some long forgotten automated platform. It simply couldn't have been...

"Aliens, Captain, yes. We had an Ocula class on patrol nearby. Not close enough to join you in battle, though it would have done little good, but close enough for the surveillance suite to get us a good look at the battle; and your mystery combatant."

The Operative placed the knife onto the table, and removed a hologram emitter from his bag. It displayed the data gathered by the Ocula class that had been covertly monitoring them. First showing the entire battlespace, then shrinking down and moving to show a red dot representing the enemy contact moving through the wreck of The Deng Xiaoping. The hologram rewound, explosions shrunk down to pinpricks dotted across a vaguely saucer shaped profile.

"Ten contact nuclear detonations. Low yield yes, but still nuclear. There is no material in the 'verse that can withstand a contact detonation with a nuclear bomb Captain, yet your enemy did just that. Before that." - He rewound even further, more explosions emerged in reverse, shrinking down to a cluster of sprint missiles striking across the saucer. "- You hit it with twenty kinetic warheads, followed one and half seconds later by five canister warheads, followed by five shaped charge warheads."

With a button press the hologram played out in slow motion, each warhead striking in sequence. The kinetic ones either flattening then exploding, or glancing off entirely. Same with the canister warheads, they detonated a half kilometre away and sprayed the saucer with hyper-velocity shrapnel that was deflected off into space. Finally the shaped charges detonated. The thermal radiation bloom from them painted around the ship, showing that it wasn't simply saucer like, but literally was a saucer.

"A Crete class carrier wouldn't have withstood that. Nor, for that matter would any vessel in our fleet. That wasn't ablative armour being burned away, or some clever hollow or layered system. Those warheads bounced off the surface of this thing. It didn't even notice them. Hell, from that we can pick up from the weapon degree it didn't even look to have slowed down."

The Operative closed the hologram down, causing the Captain to jump slightly, he had been staring at the outline of the ship that had killed over a thousand of his men. It hadn't even slowed down? It was irrational, he knew, to get angry now; when the enemy had already done its work and left. It didn't stop the hot flush of hatred that spiked through him.

"What happens now?" He asked, wondering when the boot was going to drop onto him. Strangely the Operative didn't seem to be gearing up to be putting him in the ground. Instead he seemed almost apologetic when he smiled awkwardly.

"Let me be plain Captain. The book on this, officially, is closed. You are going to be shuffled around to some rim world placement for the next five years, I don't know which one, and while there you will speak of nothing that happened. Your ship suffered a malfunction with its pulse drive; this in turn caused critical damage to the Lightflash which was lost with all hands. A tragic incident that will not be held against you."

"You're just letting this go? I'm not even being punished for this? I lost an entire cruiser, at least half of my crew died and I couldn't even scratch this th-" Captain Tsai jumped to his feet, slamming his hands down on the table.

"Captain!" The Operative barked suddenly, taking the wind out of the irate officers ranting. After a moment of silence the Operative gestured for the Captain to sit back down.

"Captain, I was sent here to ascertain two things. One: Were you responsible for the destruction of your vessel. After reviewing this data, and your own testimony; I can say that you were not." He swept up the data pads and began packing them away with a neat efficiency. While he did so the Captain stared at him. He had walked into the interrogation room fully expected to leave it in a plastic bag after being declared both insane, and a traitor. Instead the Operative didn't even seem to care.

"What was, erm, what was the second thing?"

"Pardon?" A delicate eyebrow reached upwards, the Operative paused in his packing away and politely questioned the Captain.

"The second thing, what was it that you were sent in here to find out?"

"Oh yes." He chuckled gently. "Would you like to avenge your vessel?"

"What?"

"I just told you the official story, and the official outcome of your career. You cannot change the first, but you can change the second. How about it?"

"Okay, what do I need to do?"

The Operative smiled at him from across the table, and that same feeling of unease he'd felt on his ship returned in full force.

-=-=-​

First space battle I've ever written. This is just going over how the SI got the ASREV's they used to gain air superiority over the Goa'uld he attacked. Also to set up some other things as well. I always notice that in a lot of these sorts of stories, the worlds they visit never really react, or do anything in response to the completely outside context problem that a world jumping megalomaniac presents. I always disliked that. If a Star Destroyer crashed on Earth and we fought a brutal ground war against the Empire soldiers within for eight months, it'd probably change the way we view warfare, space, and literally everything else. Humans in fictional universes wouldn't be any different.

Any feedback is appreciated. Pacing felt a little off with the start of the fight. Not sure if I should have written them maybe pursuing the Al'kesh rather than it coming to them.

 

[Kilvanya]

Using a Ha'tak? Or using retro fitted not fuck stupid version thereof?

 

[UberIguana]

Some charts to give an idea of the scale of the ships involved:

Spoiler: Stargate and Firefly

Spoiler: Source for the above (big pic)

 

[Rhyse]

Using a Ha'tak? Or using retro fitted not fuck stupid version thereof?

It's a souped up Al'Kesh rather than a Ha'tak that the SI is using.

 

[CrazedGamma1721]

I'm Really Liking The Story. Can't-wait For More To Come Soon.

 

[Rhyse]

I sealed up the back of the Quantum Mirror with the micro-manipulator, handing it off to an attending servant. He stowed it away in a toolkit without a word, then left at my dismissive wave. Only when I was sure that I was alone in the lab, did I let my shoulders slump and a weary sigh leave my lips.

Six months.

I'd been stuck playing God for six very long months. Consolidating power had been as simple as going 'I am god', then waving the Kara'kesh at the few people stupid enough to challenge me. The only real drama had been Sethehet's first prime leading a handful of Jaffa through the gate rather than submit and swear loyalty to me.

Other than that small fight; running an entire planet was surprisingly boring. The priestly caste handled most of the administration, and the caravans of 'tributes' came in each week, same as they had before I'd taken over. Without the priests going out to each village, most of the planet probably wouldn't even know that their 'god' was dead, and a new one had taken over.

Most of my time had been spent building the tools, to make the tools that would let me upgrade the quantum mirror. Currently I could move around the 'shallow' region of this portion of the multiverse. Accessing one of the many infinite permutations of the Stargate world was literally as simple as pushing a button and watching the mirror switch to its couplet mirror. Going from my own world to this one had taken well over fifty jumps, and most of them had been spent trying to find a 'nexus' - as Ser'val had called it - a bridge point between multiverse clusters.

A Goa'uld micro-manipulator could take apart the more rudimentary circuit systems; which was life saving for me, I'd had to make hasty modifications to it during my third jump to avoid suffering an entropic cascade failure in that particular universe. However, the further into the 'guts' of the device I dug, the more and more advanced it all became. Crystal circuits gave way to some sort of advanced neural gel matrix, which was sequestered into clusters of what I was pretty sure were smaller quantum singularities. Beyond the crystal circuits I wasn't able to make any changes. It's why the naquadah was needed, to try and continue Ser'vals experiment to turn the quantum mirror, into a quantum drive.

So far the biggest bottleneck was power distribution. The singularity that composed the 'mirror' of the device did its work by emitting a form of radiation that expanded outwards, then contracted inwards; pulling whatever it had encompassed through the mirror and into the other universe. My modified Al'kesh could use the subspace bubble it generated for hyperspace travel as a carrier to let that radiation cover the entire ship. In theory I should be able to just rig up a handful of naquadah generators and boost the size of that bubble to carry more things with me.

I'd tried that on the eighth jump. The ISS had come with me as a single station; but when we arrived at universe nine it did so as a mass of high speed neutrons. Simply boosting the power wouldn't work, it would require an entirely novel system to act as a carrier for the radiation; and the best bet for that would be the hyperdrive of a Ha'tak, or possibly Destiny's realspace FTL engine. The former would take time to get a hold of, the later would take a miracle to get. Once I had either, I could start to properly modify them to act as a carrier wave for the radiation.

I shrugged on my 'God' robes - a gaudy set of golden silks, dotted with bright blue and green gemstones. - and left my workshop for the Al'kesh. While I walked, various streams of servants moved passed, bowing low in the case of the natives; and offering a somber nod in the case of my Gaulish soldiers. I was never sure if the Gauls actually saw me as a god, or some sort of wizard, or something in between the two. Scotta definitely knew I was just a human with advanced technology; his lack of understanding regarding how that technology worked added a lot of weight to his respect of me sure, but he wasn't going to bow down and start worshiping. Nor would his three brothers.

His tribe though? I'd seen at least a few of them praying at some of the altars that the townsfolk had set up. Not sure if they were doing it out of real belief, or simply following the common practice of the people we'd conquered. I had no real desire to be 'worshiped', Ser'vals memories held literal centuries worth of experience being worshiped as a god. Most of it was incredibly boring and mundane; with the minutiae of running a fiefdom being handed off to various assistants and Jaffa slaves, with the occasional burst of frantic activity as he was discovered as a spy or forced to fight.

While I walked I surveyed the most recent logistic reports on my datapad. The gold tips of my kara'kesh let me switch to various windows without moving my fingers across the surface. I idly considered trying to rig up some sort of brain to computer interface that let me directly download the information. Ser'val had seen attempts at doing so before; the results weren't ever good, but it could make an interesting side project. Though, I already had far too much work to do, I thought grimly. No time to mess around with personal projects.

The data wasn't particularly reassuring; enough Naquadah to keep up our supply of new Tel'taks. One every two weeks or so with the current rate of production. But not enough to properly dedicate to create a Ha'Tak grade reactor, let alone all the required subsystems to keep the mammoth vessels functional. It was an irritating little niggle; the issue wasn't actually the input of new ore. The villages could churn the stuff out from the rich surface veins very easily, even with the poor quality hand tools they used. The problem was purity; the surface veins had very little naquadah that was suitable to be enriched into weapons or reactor grade material. All of that was held in much deeper veins, the Al'kesh scanner had detected enough to easily build fifty or sixty Ha'taks, but it was all unreachable.

I found myself once again toying with the idea of hopping back to one of my Earth's to grab some trained deep miners. However, I'd chosen tribals and relatively primitive people to recruit for a reason: They were used to being controlled. The average miner would have a family, be used to a system of freedom, and probably not be too interested in helping a tinpot dictator from space. I could use the Nish'ta? No, I had less than fifty vials of the little parasite left; what I needed was some way of educating the population with useful skills, without contaminating them with a mindset that could see them turn against me.

While I'm making wishes, I may as well also wish Hathor, Carter and Dr. Keller were relaxing in my bedroom rather than it being occupied by a fancy, but cold bed. I shook my head of that particular distraction and put down the datapad. Ruminating on some optimal - or fantastical - scenario wouldn't get me anywhere. Being realistic I had been getting comfortable; I had expected that taking this mining world would give me access to enough material to simply upgrade and move on. It was a childish fantasy to be true, and one that was never truly going to happen. To build a warship required more than a single worlds worth of illiterate slaves and time.

Producing new Tel'taks to act as trade ships was a mundane, but entirely necessary evil. I had hoped to maybe expand to a few more minor worlds nearby, we had dialed over fifty other worlds from the addresses listed on the palace computers. None of them had returned anything but tales of empty towns, bombed out ruins and looted supply depots. The Lucian Alliance was expanding, and fast. We'd yet to see any of their representatives come to us directly, but some of the few lonely traders that had dialed in, most definitely would lead the Alliance to us before long.

That was a problem. Not just one of comfort either; I couldn't just up, leave and start again somewhere else as we were. The Al'kesh needed her engines and reactor refitted or the next few jumps we made could push us into the territory of 'Explosive reentry'. Not only that, but I'd cycled through well over a hundred variations of the Stargate worlds before settling on this one. The rest all held significant ... difficulties. Most involved galaxy wide open warfare between over a dozen warring factions, rather than the uneasy cold war that this one was settled into. If worst comes to worst I could cut and run; but there was little doubt in my mind that if I started doing that, It'd be years before I managed to find somewhere else to settle again.

I had - of course - attempted to try and move people into the ruins that the Alliance had left behind. The first small expedition triggered a booby trap that sank the entire island the stargate was located on. I'd sent a Tel'tak after a few days of no contact; when the Jaffa had done a fly-over, they'd found the atmosphere filled with radioactive fallout. Samples were taken and brought back to my workshop, six cylinders of particulate that still sat in the corner of the lab. Analyzing them had shone little light on what had occurred beyond 'booby trap'.

A second world we sent a team to, had gleaned the 'secret' of what had happened. The Alliance had buried small - but incredibly powerful - explosives wrapped in radioactive jackets. The charge itself was probably a fairly small naquadria bomb, or a naquadah/potassium explosive, hard to spot with standard Tel'tak sensor suites and strong enough to flatten a city. We'd found dozens on every world I'd sent teams to, and after a second device had detonated in an area we'd designated 'safe' I'd ordered the effort to expand by taking over ruined planets halted. Without the already existing infrastructure, most planets were useless to me as they were. Even the ones with surface naquadah deposits would require at the least half a year or more worth of work to show a decent return. Tel'tak scouting parties were still running daily surveys on relatively close worlds, I was banking on some of them finding the ruins of a Goa'uld power struggle, rather than the carefully picked over carcasses that the Alliance was leaving behind them.

It was an age old dilemma faced by countless businesses, states, and people. Do I build 'tall' by trying to increase the infrastructure of the primitive surroundings I was in? Or, should I keep looking elsewhere with the hopes of striking lucky? It was a conundrum that I was literally being paralyzed by. I was once again pondering it as I sat down on my 'throne' in the Al'kesh, staring at the half assembled computer banks that were hanging out of the bridge console.

The only way to clear my head was with work; same as it was when I was back on Earth. Bury my problems by burying myself in work. I sighed through my nose, leant down to the toolbox next to the throne, and began - yet again - to pull out the tools I needed. The work I'd done on the quantum mirror had solved some of the multiverse navigation problems Ser'val had been grappling with. Not enough to solve the tall vs wide conundrum, but all game changing innovation is based on the shoulders of incremental upgrades.

Time to get to work.


-=-=-=-

They broke through the thin cloud layer base first. The Tel'tak thrummed with a low roar as it dove towards the white capped mountain in the middle of the planetary desert.

"My Prime, the city is visible." The pilot called out from the control seat. The co-pilot next to him began signalling the landing crew in the city itself. Both of them were relatively new

Scotta emerged from the backroom of the Tel'tak, sipping at his water flask. He'd forgone the more comfortable Alliance BDU's that he normally wore, in favour of a sleeveless set of Jaffa armour. He sat down next to a sensor console behind the co-pilots seat; looking over the various sensor data streams they had pointed at the city. The most immediate pool of data came from the artificial mountain that the Goa'uld had built to make the planet livable.

The scale of the project had staggered him when he'd first seen it on the datapad. To build an entire mountain, flood an entire valley and turn a desert into a jungle was godlike. The Goa'uld Chicomecoatl had previously ruled the planet. Sutler had provided them all with a brief outline of what they might have found when they scouted the world. At worst it would be a nigh unassailable fortress. The peak of the artificial mountain that dominated the horizon had contained an advanced fortress shield. Against a dedicated Ha'tak force it wouldn't last longer than a day; but anything smaller than a fleet could be halted for weeks. The city was a hive of defensive guns and strong-points, at any one time, a Jaffa army fifteen thousand strong was garrisoned within the mountain and city proper.

What they had found was not that. Tau'ri soldiers had managed to kill Chicomecoatl when she was visiting members of her domain. Without her, the administrators had been easy prey for agents of the Lucian Alliance. By the time Sutler had approved a scouting party, the Alliance had control of most of the city, and the mountain fell soon after. Sutler gave them the go-ahead for trade a few weeks after the fighting had died down.

It wasn't the first time he'd been off-world in a shuttle, but it was his first time visiting a - theoretically - non hostile trade hub. The few times he'd set foot on other worlds so far had either been to scavenge trap filled ruins, or to ambush wayward groups of Jaffa for press-ganging or simply robbing. Despite his experience, he was still apprehensive. Scotta wasn't a superstitious man, but he trusted his gut; and right now his gut was telling him something wasn't going to go well on this world. While he ruminated over his strange feeling, an 'incoming call' light began flashing. The Jaffa pilot tapped it and cocked his head to the side. Scotta could barely make out the tinny squawks from the Alliance ground crew, coming from the pilots headset.

"My Prime. The ... 'ground crew' demand to know what we carry." The Jaffa pilot ground out, working his mouth around the unfamiliar term that Sutler had introduced to them. It was mildly amusing watching the Jaffa - All of whom seemed addicted to traditional, semi religious terms - try and integrate the Alliance gunship pilot training manuals.

"Then tell them?" Scotta said without looking away from the console. He was searching for anything that might slap them out of the sky; it wasn't unheard of for incoming shuttles to simply be blown away by the poorly trained tribals that the Alliance pressed into service.

"We bring food, and precious goods." The pilot barked at the pyramids control crew. After a few moments of silence, Scotta picked up several weapons locks finding them, then dismissing them. It seemed the ground crew were satisfied with the terse statement. They were probably used to dealing with the taciturn and belligerent Jaffa by now, that they - like him - simply let the gruff tones wash over him now.

"They've set up a proper sensor grid. Detection first, then detection and destruction. I think we just passed into the second one." He noted down his rough guess as to where the Alliance sensors had picked them up.

"Yes my Prime. Behold." The darker skinned Jaffa co-pilot sent a packet of recorded data to Scott's console, confirming what he had suspected.

The Alliance Guard had made their presence known, the Tel'tak had flown over miles of farmland that ringed the outer edge of the city. As they'd done so, the ship had pinged over a dozen heavy anti-air plasma batteries locking onto them, along with at least fifty Death Gliders that they'd seen lurking on various hastily built landing pads. Sutler had warned them that the Lucian Alliance expanded quickly once the Goa'uld had left; but hearing about it didn't compare to seeing it. The Goa'uld Empire had stretched across most of the galaxy, thousands of worlds; a concept that he had trouble truly contemplating. The Alliance Guard was stripping entire worlds bare of their resources and concentrating them on fortress worlds like Tamoanchan.

"First Prime. We approach their docks." The Jaffa pilot announced, shaking Scotta out of his thoughtful observation of the land below. He slid the observation console back into the wall, and moved to stand behind the pilots seat. Ahead of them a pyramid was processing the multitude of trade vessels. Two of the four sides of the structure had been stripped away, showing that underneath the white marble exterior; there were dozens of hanger decks filled with variously sized clamps and hauling equipment.

"Good, bring us in." Scotta patted him on the shoulder, the pilot he'd drafted to fly the Tel'tak had only ever made planetary or Cheops runs. In principle the Cheops run and this pyramid landing were essentially the same. In reality, he'd never had to share airspace with over fifty other ships when he was pulling in.

After a few tense moments of guiding the Tel'tak towards the bottom deck of the pyramid, they settled into a free cradle with only a small rumble from touchdown. The pilot gave a very subtle huff of relief, shooting his copilot a look that the man returned with the most ever so slight upturning of his lips. Scotta squeezed his shoulder again. After the months he'd spent around them, he had learned to tell when the Jaffa were relieved, or happy.

"Well done. Well done. Join the others in unloading, then stay with the ship. I don't want the Tel'tak left unattended."

They'd been hauling cargo primarily through the Chappa'ai for the last few months; first in dozens of small trips a day, then - as the Alliance began centralizing - in longer and longer single convoys. Eventually even dialing the planet stopped working; the Alliance were running their gate almost every minute of the day and night. That meant a backlog of trade goods had begun building up in the city. After their only warehouse had been filled literally to the ceiling, Sutler had finally relented and assigned some of the naquadah they'd been mining to build more Tel'tak shuttles. He was in no hurry to see one of their newly built shuttles stolen from the docks by the Alliance.

While they tended to the cargo, he shouldered a pack, took a handful of gold coins, and picked up his staff weapon. He was after three things now that the ship had landed: A strong drink, a filling meal, and a taste of one of the dusky skinned women of this world. From what he'd seen, they wore paint similar to his own. Where he wore pale blue lines, their women had thick stripes of red across their eyes, he looked forward to seeing where else they were painted almost as much as he was looking forward to discarding his heavy armour.

After he'd had his fill of food and women, Scotta had decided to simply relax in the hazy food hall beneath the pyramid. Around him, Jaffa ate quietly, Alliance guardsmen reveled, and various strange looking aliens moved warily through the many humans around them. It was in this rowdy atmosphere that the Pict was found by the Tau'ri.

-=-=-=-​

It was a six man team that found him, dressed in black fatigues, cradling a mixture of various weapons. Scotta sighed into his drink when the woman of the group looked over the hall and spotted him. For a brief moment he had maintained hope that the team would just ignore him like they did with the other Jaffa, that died when the woman began whispering to the hard faced soldier next to her. It was fully buried when the man nodded and they all began to walk over to him. He took a long pull of his pulque as the team - tried to - subtly spread out around them. The woman sat down directly across from him, plunking down a leather-bound book on the table and shooting a friendly smile his way. She spoke after a few brief moments consulting with her book.

"Greetings from the land of the Tau'ri, we of the wormgate have traveled long time to speak-talk with you. I am Doctor Angela, of the States United American." The words sounded like his native pictish tongue, but they were mangled, almost beyond belief. He couldn't speak, stunned into silence by the poor attempt at speaking to him. Once that moment passed he took another sip of his drink and then responded, in English.

"Where did you learn that language?"

"I had rather hoped to speak with you in Gaulish. I recognized your markings, you see a cul-"

"That was your attempt at my tongue?" He cut her off with a raised eyebrow and a disapproving frown. The woman seemed to literally deflate at his blunt question. The frizzy haired blonde slumping slightly in her seat.

"Yes?"

"It was atrocious. Who taught you?" He asked; before she could respond, the salt and pepper haired man behind her tapped her on the shoulder.

"Ma'am."

"Ah, yes, sorry. This is Colonel Madison, of the United Sta-"

"USA Airforce, yes; I know. You are British, he is America, the others are Russian, American and ... some other, irrelevant countries." He yet again cut her off, leaning back into the seat to enjoy the affronted looks on the other members of the team. Dr. Angela looked uncomfortable at the curt dismissal, but Colonel Madison let slip a amused chuff that he quickly covered with a sharp cough.

"Well, if you know about us, then you should also know about our outreach program?" He had to hand it to the woman, she certainly didn't let anything get her down. The women of his tribe would often go silent when he spoke and remained that way until he left. She barely let his sarcastic barbs shake the suddenly luminous smile she had plastered on her freckled face.

"So, you want to trade?" He hadn't heard about any 'outreach program' at all. Even the few traders who'd dealt with the Tau'ri that they'd met hadn't mentioned anything of the sort. Most were merely content to shrug and say that the Tau'ri paid on time, and offered novel goods to sell.

"Yes ... but not just physical resources, we'd like to assist your people advance your infrastructure and quality of life; since there is no Goa'uld subjugating your people. We're prepar-"

"How do you know there is no Goa'uld ruling my world?" He cut her off mid sentence, a frown marring his face at her words. If she took offence at the rude interruption, she didn't let it show. Instead she smiled brightly and put her pack onto the table.

"With this." She reached into her pack and produced a metal rod tipped with a green gem; she waved it towards him and the gem shifted colours to a dull blue. She then pointed it a Jaffa sat away from them and the gem flicked to a bright red.

"It detects the existence of active Goa'uld parasites in both Jaffa and Humans. We noticed that everyone from your world who'd come to trade here, didn't have any parasites." That wasn't strictly correct, Scotta thought; the Jaffa still had Goa'uld in them, and they'd been trading for containers filled with 'wild' Goa'uld to allow the young Jaffa to undergo Prim'ta when they came of age. It was simply that they didn't have any Goa'uld overseers.

"Here, take a look." She placed the device on the table between them.

Scotta picked up the thin metal stick with two fingers, eyeing it like it was going to come to life and bite him. He'd watched the show, all of Sutler's men had. None of the episodes had featured anything like this, it didn't mean that they'd mis-jumped and ended up on some alternative - doomed - timeline. It could be that they always had this technology and never bothered to show it, or that the months that Sutler had spent here had already changed things, or a dozen other little reasons. But it did mean that they might end up encountering more unknowns. Which was a problem.

"We're offering to show your people how to build things like this, become genuinely self sufficient from the Goa'uld." And the Lucian Alliance, it went unsaid, but the hint was there. He was tempted to just get up and leave, ignore them and take the Tel'tak back to Sutler. He wasn't ashamed to admit that he wasn't a leader; the plan was Sutler's. He didn't want to have to try and mess with it on the fly like this.

"I'll think about it."

"Maybe we can visit your world in the next few weeks? We're always looking to make new partners." Either she didn't get the hint, or didn't care. Either way it left him in an uncomfortable position. Sutler didn't really want to deal with the SGC this early on. Ideally they'd be secure in their position before anyone from Earth turned up on their world. What would Sutler do? He was under strict orders to not get into a fight with anyone from the SGC, but Sutler hand't said much about what should happen if they wanted to show up for a visit. When Sutler had asked him to be his 'First Prime' he'd assumed it would involve a lot more subjugation of his enemies, not the piss-arsing, playing nice with others that he'd been doing so far.

Still, he was empowered to make choices, Sutler had trusted him enough to let him in on the long term plan. It would be irresponsible to waste the opportunity to get off on the right foot.

"Hmm, fine." Better to make friends, than enemies. It's what Sutler had said to him when he'd freed him from Roman slavery. Better to have people think you good, then find you evil; than think you evil then find you good. "The Chapp'ai address is ..."

He wrote down their gate address on a piece of paper that Dr. Angela handed to him, hoping that in doing so, he wasn't completely screwing up Sutler's plan. In theory, the Tau'ri shouldn't be too opposed to his master. The Plan wasn't obvious to see when you looked at what they were building; by the time the Tau'ri had any idea what was going on, it would already be too late to stop.

He hoped.

=-=-=-=​

I have been extremely busy doing extremely inhumane things to flies in the lab. Also, writing this was, for some reason, akin to pulling teeth. Not sure why.

 

[Tel Janin Aman]

Best hope the SGC doesn't try to give your planet some good ol' America FREEDOM

 

[Rhyse]

Luna 2004

Deep inside the Lunar surface, a collection of steel domes squatted at the bottom of a dormant magma tube cavern. Each one was topped with a scaffold of beams and lifts, from which hung six half completed warships; forty metres long each. Mechanical arms ponderously shifted black armour panels from various floating storage bays onto the ships, where the ant-small figures of shipwrights could be seen attaching the panels to hull. While they worked, two men watched them from a free floating habitation block.

They were both sitting across from each other, soft leather sofas on either side of a glass table that housed a touchscreen. One of them - Archibald Davis - sat with a leg crossed in a suit that cost nearly as much as the state of the art hologram system he was observing. The other - James Campbell - was dressed in a much cheaper shirt and trouser combo; and was directing his friends view to various images, and the half finished ships lurking outside the window. While he gesticulated and boasted, the two finished testbed ships were gently coaxed into their docking cradles for the crews to disembark.

"As you can see, the first six production model Elizabeth class gunships will be ready in only four months from now."

"If current projections remain correct." Davis countered coolly.

"Which they are in line to do, especially now that we've involved the ADS Group, their engineers have been a significant boon already." The bespectacled project head stated smugly. He was already three gin and tonics deep and showed no sign of slowing down. By comparison his counterpart had taken only water, or juice from the bar.

"Oh?"

"The Americans have been slowly leaking materials and engineering advances they gleaned from the Stargate program into the open market. ADS Group has been the recipient of much of our share."

"Covertly I assume?" Davis only asked out of politeness; he knew for a fact that every company in the ADS groups had been so thoroughly infiltrated, that it was impossible they'd gotten so much of a sniff about where the new 'meta-materials' had come from.

"Naturally, until six weeks ago, they didn't know anything more than the average Dave on the street. Their new railgun designs are genuinely revolutionary; even compared to the American ones." His eye twitched over the computer interface, bringing up a new window showing test footage of the aforementioned railguns. "You were never much interested in the technical, so I'll save you a big talk on how exactly they work."

"Arsehole." Davis responded with grin, pouring himself a glass of orange juice from the bar. As he did so, he considered once again getting himself fitted with an iris interface like James had been. Complete and seamless integration into almost any networked computer; for a man like him it could be invaluable. His only concern of course was how new the technology was, a fear that his friend definitely didn't share.

"Guilty. Previous models, American models, use solid rails to propel the ammunition. It's not the most elegant weapon, which makes sense since they crunched it out in what was apparently an afternoons worth of design. -" Davis cut him off, sitting back down with his drink in hand.

"You could almost say it's incredibly impressive that they managed to adapt an alien power system, into a bunch of alien materials, to build enough guns, with enough power to take on a galaxy spanning empire." James only just resisted rolling his eyes at his friends defence of the American engineering. Of course what they'd done was impressive, but the man was only defending them for one simple reason.

"... Are you finished? I know your wife has your balls in her purse, but you don't need to suck up to the Americans quite so much."

"Hmm, fine, continue on your rant then." He raised his hand in mock surrender. His wife was a redheaded Texan schoolteacher. All the fire of Scotland, all the swagger of a Texan, and all the cool confidence of a woman used to dealing with rooms full of screaming children. He held no illusions of machismo grandstanding around his woman, damn right he'd defend her kind. Rather take the snide comments over her sharp tongue lashings.

"Thank you, anyway; ADS group had the materials, but not the power supply. They've been working for the last two years on a way of squeezing every last drop of power out of the conventional systems we'd been slowly feeding them."

"The fusion generator?" He queried again, trying to dredge up the relevant memories of what exactly they'd sent through to ADS.

"Just so, and as a result; the gas channel injection system has upgunned the railguns significantly." Now they reached the meat of the conversation; the reason why Davis had been bustled out of his comfortable London flat, shot out to the moon and stuffed down a magma tube.

"I've seen the Daedalus James, you haven't. Significant means something very different to me than it does to you. Pretty words, and numbers aren't going to matter a wit to me I'm afraid." His glass touched the tabletop with a strangely final sounding 'clink', as if to punctuate how thoroughly unimpressed he was so far.

"Fishing for test footage will get you nowhere." James stated smugly, quaffing another gin and tonic. His fourth of the evening. "I don't have any copies with me, it's all being stored with the chaps at BAE systems on Earth."

"Disappointing. Fine then, tell me these dazzling numbers I just know you want to bandy about." He supposed any information was a better starting point than nothing.

"With pleasure. The pyramid ships that we've been fi-"

"Ha'taks." The taller man corrected, leaning back and closing his eyes. He found technical information far easier to digest when he closed his eyes, why? He didn't know. There was probably some psychology paper explaining it; but he'd never bothered to go digging.

"- The Ha'taks we've been fighting can throw between fifty kilotons and two hundred megatons depending on the ammunition their guns use. The spinal mounts for the gunships, using a naquadah potassium warhead can land an eighty megaton directed energy blast roughly every fifteen seconds. Using just a solid shell, we can over-penetrate five of their armour plates before we lose shell cohesion."

"Hmm."

"Hmm?"

"The BC-304 can kill a Ha'tak every four seconds with it's plasma beam system." He swirled the dregs of orange juice around the glass flute. A tactic he'd picked up from his time working with the ministry of defence, pay little attention to the engineers pet project, deride it subtly; then await response. Most men typically became indignant fairly rapidly.

"There are only three of the dammed things active! We've got two test-bed gunships already launched, the other six are nearly ready for live trials. You cannot seriously be considered those wastes of space superior to our program?" James asked, his brow scrunched in irritation.

"Those 'wastes of space' have saved Earth on over a dozen occasions."

"Pure luck." A dismissive wave of his hand was all the response Davis received. Undeterred the man leant forward and spoke again.

"I would think skill and technological prowess would have more to do wi-"

"No, no I have to stop you there. The BC-304's are a dead end, we've been running trials, and sims and data harvesting operations from every battle they've ever engaged in. The BC-304 is a massive investment of resources for a ship that can only be in one place, defending one target. The navy is desperate for the battleship to come back when what we need are fast ships that can engage from multiple vectors."

"Does the data actually hold true for that, or do you just wish it did?" The tone of the conversation was changing, even to the mildly inebriated project lead it was obvious. This wasn't just a friend fishing for information, or a colleague come to take a curious look over what he was working on. It felt more like a gentle interrogation.

"What?"

"I mean, the Asgard, the Goa'uld, the Ancients and the Wraith all decided that bigger battleships were the way to go. We interviewed the Tollan engineers and they all agreed that in terms of space combat, the side with the bigger warships typically won. Concentration of firepower trumps quantity of ships."

"We inter- Oh my god!" He suddenly jumped to his feet, a thunderous look on his face. "You're here spying for the MoD aren't you!"

"You can't spy for your own government, on your own projects." Davis countered, but didn't deny the accusation.

"Don't feed me that crap, they don't think I'm delivering results? Is that it? First they under-fund me, and now they send a goon to spy on me!"

"I object to the term goon." He tried to tap into James's vein of normally good humour, he instead found it dry.

"No you don't get to 'object'! You're here to try and cut me off at the knees without even seeing the ships at work."

"Fine; yes. I am a 'goon' from the MoD and I am here to cut you off at the knees, because you are eighteen million over budget. Those fancy new spinal mounts for the gunships cost more than the ships themselves. You've even admitted yourself just now that they need specialized shells just to meet half the firepower of a Goa'uld warship. For the price of these mounts we could have half funded our own BC-304."

"It's a dead end!" James's face had gone an unhealthy red colour. His objection wasn't shouted so much as it was hissed through clenched teeth. Davis remained thoroughly unimpressed.

"Look." He sighed. "James, I don't care. I really don't, I've been sent here to reign you in from spending anymore over budget. Your spending is what concerns me, not your theories on warfare. Now, I wanted this to go a lot smoother than it has -"

"Oh I bet." He'd made the transition from anger to sullen so fast that it would, under different circumstances be considered impressive.

"I did. Now, I have to take a call with the parliamentary spending committee in five hours. I'll need you there this afternoon to go over what you've spent so far. If all you can show them is some numbers on a graph and a complaint about the Americans ship then they are going to cut funding further."

"So, what, you're here to try and help me get funded? Pull the other one."

"Will you stop being a child!" He was a man slow to show anger; but even so, the behavior of the forty year old project head was starting to grate on him. He was - in effect - in charge of a weapons facility that would output enough firepower to flatten a planet, and he was behaving for the all the world like a denied teenager. "I am trying to make everything go smoothly. So you can either help me or get out my way. Pick." After stating his ultimatum, Davis stood and walked over to the window, choosing to look away from his seething friend and instead enjoy the rare view. A beautifully illuminated magma tunnel, an entirely alien landscape. James soon stopped his angry mutterings and joined him.

"Are they going to pull the plug?" He asked gently, not looking at his friend, and instead choosing to look over at where the two finished gunships were docked.

The two aquiline gunships lurked in their nest of tugs. Under the harsh spotlights of the engineering crew each curved line of their stealth composite paneling was visible; a tar black, dotted with small baffling systems that the Tollan had helped them design. On each ship the only break from the black colouring were the names of the ships - Elizabeth and Philip - printed in stark white on the right sides. The spinal mount barrels peeked out from underneath the jutting nose of ships, barely visible even when he knew they were there. Sleek, deadly and made to hunt in packs. His gunships would be wolves out in the dark of space.

"If you can't come up with something more substantial than what you've shown me? Yes." James closed his eyes at his friends subdued, but final tone.

He wouldn't allow his creations to be relegated to the scrapheap because some spending committee couldn't see their value. Nor could he let them be sidelined because he couldn't convince the pencil pushers of their worth. He'd always resented being forced to play the political game. In engineering the numbers never lied to you, or messed around with you after you'd already solved the problem. Dealing with the politics and niceties of projects was never his strong suit, but he needed to at least try.

"Fine. Fine! I'll get something more impressive put together, I have contacts at BAE; I should be able to get test footage at least."

"Good, politicians love seeing things they've paid for blow stuff up. Anything else?" Davis was all smiles again, moving away from the window, he sat down and began logging into the table surface. While he did so James turned to face him with a curious look on his face; somewhere between wary and happy.

"Where is the spending committee right now?" He had an idea, possibly a stupid one; but if it worked then they'd definitely secure funding

"Right now? Probably waiting for the Phoenix to pick them up. Then they'll be here in two days. Why?"

"The Phillip has already undergone FTL trials, if they're coming here, we can take them out and show off her capabilities first hand."

Davis was going to dismiss the idea at first. Putting members of parliament on a warship was never a good idea; especially not a new one with god knows how many issues. But it was fresh out of movement, firing and - as James said - FTL trials, then there probably weren't good odds anything would go wrong. The committee would be able to see what they were paying for up close, and James would get to at least see his toys in action; even if the committee moved to have the project gutted he'd have played with them enough to stop him having a meltdown. Despite his childishness, the man was a fantastic engineer.

"It's not a ... bad idea. Is the crew still on station?"

"Yes; both our own and the three Tollan engineers." Now both men were looking over personnel files for the two ships. The crews were scheduled to be on site for another three weeks. Plenty of time for a quick run down of all the systems. They were only on station currently to pick up extra supplies, and rotate in new people for shadowing.

"Hmm, about the Tollan, are they entirely needed?" Having the committee run into the aloof and often judgmental Tollan was something he definitely wanted to avoid.

"If you want the stealth system to work, then yes."

"We have cloaking techno-" He began to say, he'd seen it after all on the Odyssey.

"No, we have Goa'uld cloaks. They bend light around them, they'll spoof sensors for a while but they aren't completely effective. The Tollan cloak is a complete system. We can go to hyperspace next to a BC-304 and they wouldn't pick up a whisper."

"A bold claim."

"The Phillip tested it. We got within a kilometre of the Odyssey, then jumped away and they never saw a thing."

He paused for a moment to digest that particular tidbit of information. He hadn't read up on the specifics of the trials the ships had so far undergone; but he seriously doubted that it involved getting near to any currently active warships. Still, it had been done now, and all they could do was use the data the stunt had generated.

"Bring that up in the call, try to avoid mentioning flashing the Odyssey if you can."

James gave an easy shrug at his request. The tablet he was holding then took his attention away from Davis; he began the busy work of assembling a briefing for the call later. As an afterthought he flicked a finger and sent copies of all files to the tabletop computer Davis was now working at.

Davis loosened his tie, poured himself another glass of orange juice and began sifting through the information. Compared to when he'd first arrived via shuttle-craft, he was feeling a lot more confident that he would be able to both keep his friendship functioning, and do his job.

Confident, but not certain - he thought wryly when he came across a complaint logged by one of the Tollan. James was pestering them daily about installing ion cannon turrets onto the gunships.

This call was either going to go perfectly, or he was going to lose his job. Hmm.

"James old fellow. Any of that G&T left?"

-=-=-=-​

Just a quick one to show that Earth in this specific universe isn't the same as Earth in other timelines. The Lucian Alliance being more aggressive in their expansion, and more militant in nature bumped up the production of the 304's. Without Hammond dying, the Phoenix remained named as such.

The increase in production also warranted diversifying the production itself, with each country moving to try and develop their own novel systems and weapons over simply wholesale copying the American design. As well as this, they began giving out more and more information to individual engineering firms to try and outsource R&D into the private sector as much as was feasible. Disclosure in this universe is much closer than in OTL.

The stealth gunships that the UK is developing on the Moon look - in my head - similar to the Amun-Ra class stealthships from the Expanse, sans the large drive bell at the back because they have SG reactionless drives. Mainly it's the sloped, bulbous sort of shape, with the hunchback.

Spoiler: Ship Art

The actual 'battle theory' of SG space navies is also a weird one for me. Everyone seems to be investing in the idea of massive warships again, with fighter-craft relegated to CAS for planetary attacks, or taking down other peoples CAS fighter-craft, which is fine. Aircraft carriers rule the waves now because of the way ocean warfare works; but the same may not hold true in space. Especially if there's a minimum size a ship needs to be to mount an effective shield breaking weapon system on it. There's no midline warships for any faction after the Goa'uld Al'kesh is introduced; and Earth immediately jumps onto a Kriegsmarine like mindset of a space dreadnought race. The Wraith have cruisers sure, but those are still massive warships.

The Asgard I understand having little need for smaller ships, if they lose one to the replicators then the reps have just gained a massive trove of resources and tech, while the Asgard have these huge power hogging systems. So only investing in massive ships makes sense. But why doesn't Earth at least have some picket ships, or patrol craft? Or recon vessels? A 304 represents a staggering investment of resources, each one is a planet/system killer by itself, and the loss of just one of them practically cripples Earths force projection. Earth should have a gradient between 'Lol, we can blow up your entire planet' and 'We have nothing nearby for weeks'.

 

[CrazedGamma1721]

I Really Like Where This Is Going Can't-Wait To See More Soon.

 

[Rhyse]

Earth 2004.

Deep inside Cheyenne mountain, General O'Neill was meeting with the newest gopher sent from the Pentagon, to make his life far more tedious than it needed to be. Compared to the now aging General, Major Williams looked to be the ideal of stiff backed, square jawed military man. He even had the ever so slight sprinkling of grey across his temples, that leant him an air of refined wisdom to go with the bulky strength of his well muscled shoulders neck.

None of that - of course - reduced the tedium of the paperwork he was being forced to look over. It was near the end of their three hour briefing that the Major finally reached something actually interesting. The reports on the Luna shipyard project.

"The Brits have a program running, for moving away from our 304 designs."

"They've ordered two of them from us? Why are they building something new? The 304's work fine. We did tell them about our no refund policy right?"

"Yes sir. They seem to believe that they've identified a hole in our military production." Major Williams blithely ignored the older man attempt at a joke; he'd been told by Kinsey already about how O'Neill enjoyed a particularly irreverent sense of humour. He'd found that - much like the Senator - he was distinctly not amused by it.

"Seem to believe?"

"Yes General. They've commissioned production of smaller scale vessels from the Luna shipyard; from our contact with the MoD it looks like they're building some sort of patrol craft, or a ... picket ship. Naval terminology doesn't really translate well into spaceships. They're called gunships, but they're half the size of the 304's."

O'Neill fingered through the printouts of the British gunships. They reminded him slightly of some of the designs for stealth navy ships he'd seen before. All sharp angles, dark paneling and menacing looking gun turrets. For a moment he let himself quirk a small grin; the technical prediction based off of what BAE systems had built for the ship were unimpressive to say the least. Goa'uld hyperdrives, Goa'uld shields. The sensors were based off of a Tollan design sure, but that hardly mattered when the ships would get swatted down by the dozen if they tried fighting a 304. Only the ships power-plant was superior to their own design. A novel design from the Tollan; it generated slightly less than their own naquadah plants did, but seemingly without any detectable emissions. The Brits had built a first strike stealth warship? O'Neill felt his eyebrows rise at that realization.

Major Williams wasn't privy to any of these thoughts The only indication that O'Neill was even actually reading the data rather than just ignoring him, was when the General grimaced, looked up and asked:

"Huh, the shipyards on the moon? weren't they supposed to be building, you know civie ships? How'd they start building warships?" The Luna shipyards were barely a year old; and had been established to prepare for eventual disclosure. The President had been rightly worried that when disclosure happened, the economy would take a sharp downturn without some sort of boosting effort. A fleet of purchasable civilian ships to get private asteroid mining, colony efforts and scientific research was presented as a fantastic way of doing that. The British, Russians, Chinese and Germans had all funded the project; and they'd each managed to get a portion of the complex sequestered away fro their own projects. He was starting to suspect that they - like the British - probably had their own little warship projects tucked away in their docks as well. At least the Brits were good enough to share information, he thought with a frown.

"When we green-lit partial disclosure to the ADS Group, they were able to outsource production of military sub-systems. They built all the components on the ground, then assembled them in orbit. I have the full report here if you want Sir?" The Major tugged out another manila folder from his overstuffed case. O'Neill waved it off with a frown.

"No, no, it's fine. I hate bolt counting."

O'Neill turned his back to the desk and started fiddling with something on his bookcase. After a few moments Major Davis checked over his notes. They'd already covered the spending proposals for the next quarter, and he'd passed on

"Sir?"

"That'll be all Major." O'Neill said without turning around.

"Sir." The younger man made to leave, packing away his files and double checking his uniform. When he was halfway out the door O'Neill suddenly turned around, he was holding a model of one of the BC-304's in his hand.

"Major?"

"Yes General?"

"How come the Brits are building warships up there and we aren't?"

"They don't have matter replicators from the Asgard, Sir. We can just beam material into place; they need physically assemble it. Space is better for that; we can just build anywhere."

"Ah, well that makes sense. You can go now."

"Thank you General."

The door closed. O'Neill sat down at his desk, shuffled through the reports that the Major had left; most of it was absurdly tedious spending reports that he needed to sign off on. While he was sorting them on his desk, he again came across the stills of the British 'Gunships' being built. He regarded the images; paying attention to the spacesuit clad workers caught in the moment of laying down the armour plating. All of with standard rivets, torches and sealant. A slight grin crept on his face, then he began gently whistling the theme of Star Trek.

"Replicators huh. Neat."

-=-=-=-=-​

PYX-338 - 2004

"I've been an idiot, a complete fucking idiot!"

I gestured to the stargate behind us. Scotta's eyebrows reached his hairline.

"Don't we ... need that?"

"Sure, this one. But we've got about a dozen dead worlds that don't need their gates. We don't need a Ha'tak's power distribution system. I can probably jury rig a gate to function as a quantum portal." I'd realised it when I'd been relaxing in the - now empty - harem pool. A long relaxing bath in perfumed hot water was pretty conducive for solving physics problems it seems.

"And you're sure it'll work? You do remember that space station you thought we cou-" I cut off his reminder about the ISS with a flick of the wrist. It wasn't the same as that little incident; for one, the gate was a largely inert lump of naquadah, not a space station. For another, I actually understood how the quantum carrier wave would interact with the wormhole.

"Yes, yes. I remember. But this is different, the maths checks out."

"People are probably not going to be happy if we start stealing stargates, you know." He'd given up on trying to debate the feasibility quick. Now it was onto the practicality of it?

"Fuck 'em. If this work, no, when this works; we can push the plan forward by decades." I had a computer pad in my hand, already double checking the numbers. It wasn't a quantum drive, sure; but it could - in theory - open a portal to other universes, a two way gate. I still needed a way to properly integrate the quantum mirror into a larger ship, but it would make a perfect stop-gap.

I turned to my First Prime.

"Scotta; I need you to take one of the Tel'tak's and get me a gate."

"Just ... any gate?" He asked warily.

"Sure, grab one from one of the worlds we visited that the Alliance bombed out, no one will miss one of those."

Scotta sighed through his nose, shouldered his staff weapon and walked away; I barely paid it any heed. When he got back I should probably get a plan sorted for when that SG team rocked up though. Scotta had said a week or so was their estimate? I could work with that. If he returned with a gate tomorrow I could have a working prototype integrated in about three or four days if my calculations were correct - and they were - which left me just enough time to kit-bash something to show the SGC? Yeah, it was doable.

-=-=-=-=-=-​

In terms of dialogue, I realise I have literally no idea how a Roman era Pict/Gaul would have actually spoken. I feel the dialogue suffers as a response. I also have a lot of 'small' world-building scenes that should establish things, but I don't really know how to integrate them into a decent sized piece of writing. The result is typically as above, a pair - or trio - of short scenes which seem to be a bit jarringly stitched together.

The only alternative I can see would be to just info-dump throughout other chapters. But I don't like doing that.

 

[Tel Janin Aman]

I thought you were going to steal the British ships the way you were talking about them.

 

[Rhyse]

I thought you were going to steal the British ships the way you were talking about them.

Interesting idea. But it was mainly going to show off some world building so it doesn't come completely out of left field when they show up later in the story. As well as introduce character POV's.

 

[Redegere]

You forgot to threadmark the latest chapter. It'll be interesting to see how his meeting with SGC goes, especially if they bring one of those goa'uld detectors with them when they do.

 

[NightWithMoon]

I'm a bit confused... maybe I'm reading it wrong and the enclosures are each 400 meters long each with six ships? Otherwise, if I'm reading it right it sounds like each of those new warships was 400 meters long? That's significantly bigger than a 304.
Also in a universe without shields smaller ships make complete sense. But once you add in shields - that all goes out the window. Especially if there doesn't really seem to be any sort of diminishing returns or ceiling for shield strength. Then going bigger means a bigger internal volume to surface area ratio, meaning more/better shield emitters and a greater energy throughput... should result in comparatively stronger shields for larger ships. Using my middle school math here: if you've got a sphere for a ship and a sphere for a shield that has some insignificant difference in radius. Then double the radius of both and you've suddenly got eight times the volume for only four times the surface area.
From there you have to start making up mechanics on how exactly your shield is going to work... as that could mean a shield that's overall 8 times stronger and 2 times stronger for any given 1 meter square area...
If you take this to the extreme comparing a tel'tak to a ha'tak (again simplifying to middle school math here) you'd get a shield on the Ha'tak which is overall 64,000 time the strength and 40 times stronger for any given 'panel'/spot.
If you add in any sort of regenerative or ablative feature to shields it get's even more lop sided in favor of big ships.
Of course that's all assuming a very soft sci-fi sort of universe... but I think Stargate fits that criteria fairly well.

 

[Rhyse]

I'm a bit confused... maybe I'm reading it wrong and the enclosures are each 400 meters long each with six ships? Otherwise, if I'm reading it right it sounds like each of those new warships was 400 meters long? That's significantly bigger than a 304.

Hrrghhh. Checked my notes, it's meant to be 40 metres ling, not four hundred. Not sure why I had that error.

Also in a universe without shields smaller ships make complete sense. But once you add in shields - that all goes out the window. Especially if there doesn't really seem to be any sort of diminishing returns or ceiling for shield strength. Then going bigger means a bigger internal volume to surface area ratio, meaning more/better shield emitters and a greater energy throughput... should result in comparatively stronger shields for larger ships. Using my middle school math here: if you've got a sphere for a ship and a sphere for a shield that has some insignificant difference in radius. Then double the radius of both and you've suddenly got eight times the volume for only four times the surface area.
From there you have to start making up mechanics on how exactly your shield is going to work... as that could mean a shield that's overall 8 times stronger and 2 times stronger for any given 1 meter square area...
If you take this to the extreme comparing a tel'tak to a ha'tak (again simplifying to middle school math here) you'd get a shield on the Ha'tak which is overall 64,000 time the strength and 40 times stronger for any given 'panel'/spot.
If you add in any sort of regenerative or ablative feature to shields it get's even more lop sided in favor of big ships.
Of course that's all assuming a very soft sci-fi sort of universe... but I think Stargate fits that criteria fairly well.

That's assuming that power generation, power distribution, and shield strength all scale with size. Which, I'm not. Otherwise there wouldn't be Ha'taks either. There would be the 'gigaTak'. Anubis wouldn't need his McGuffin power supply to power the actual giga'Tak that he built. I'm assuming that the Ha'tak is the largest practical warship that the Goa'uld can build at the time we see them, any larger than that and you start to have to give up on either engines, guns, or shields, or all three.

Besides that, the purpose of a military vessel isn't always solely to destroy things. It can be ground a support role, troop transport; fighter carriers, missile bus, observation, first strike, etc, etc. The X-304's can theoretically do all those things, but it doesn't particularly excel at any of them. About the only thing it's really actually good at is emerging from hyperspace, mag dumping its plasma beam weapon, and then leaving. If SG Command needs to seize a hard target, then their two options are 1) Gate in and walk to it under withering fire 2) Beam down near it - if it's shielded - or into it in groups of like 10-20 max; and take it that way. If they need to check out a dozen planets for an enemy vessel, they need to hyperspace to each one individually and poke around.

Don't get me wrong, if you can build a fleet of nothing but 304's, then it's going to be a big dick baller of a fleet, that's going to melt whatever gets thrown at it. But the combined might of Earths ship production capacity can build and maintain six of the things. That was fine in the OG timeline, because the Goa'uld got their shit pushed in before pitched fleet battles became a real problem for SG command. If they'd needed to defend anything more substantial than Earth they'd be fucked though. If the Goa'uld threw fifty Ha'taks at Earth, it'd be game over even with the fully assembled fleet.

They could mitigate this by sending out ships to snipe construction yards of the Goa'uld, or by taking apart the ships before they could assemble into proper fleets, sure. But that's still six - to eight if they got advanced warning - that need to go around the galaxy on continuous combat missions, each one needing the capability to destroy a Ha'tak, or defended outposts and construction yards. A dozen smaller ships, armed with cloaks, and naq enhanced bombs per 304 could range out ahead of them and destroy the less hardened targets, and then call for backup if they encounter something that needs a 304 to destroy. Distribution of roles - in my opinion anyway - is always superior to a 'do everything' vessel.