Asura Path

[Tazered]

Asura Path

xx

I've read through the forums and am relatively certain that this is where this belongs (let me know if I'm wrong and i'll move it). It's an idea that I've had after seeing stargate fanfiction where the plot is driven by the characters of another species. I've done the research but I doubt that this story would get very far without reader input.

The premise is this what if, in the Stargate Atlantis episode: 'Before I Sleep' Janus was unable to secrete Weir in a cryo-pod during the evacuation of Atlantis and was also unable reprogram the power systems to allow for the ten thousand year long wait untill the Atlantis team arrived?

But what if he later found another way...

xx

The Evacuation of Lantea

xx

She… struggled, she screamed...

She writhed in their unforgiving, unyielding hands. She cursed and cried as the security officers dragged her past the last of those preparing to abandon the city. She bucked and kicked as they drew closer and closer to the stargate, ceasing her struggles only when an enforcer quietly threatened to sedate her.

"Don't you understand?!" She cried, "What you're doing is a death sentence for a hundred and thirty of my people! A death sentence!"


She sobbed, she cajoled...

"Please! Please! Don't just stand there! Don't look away! Do you think that ignoring me will absolve you of what you're doing, make you not responsible for the death of good men and women? LISTEN TO ME! You may not know my people but they are your children’s children! Men and women depending on me to get back to them in time! To save them! They trusted me to...save them. It shouldn't be like this, not like this.

Her eyes raked over the assembled workers and scientists shutting down the last active systems in the all but abandoned control tower. Their eyes were averted, busily going about their work, pretending not to hear her pleas.

At this cold indifference the woman seemed to wilt, ceasing her pleas for clemency and aid. Heavily, she sagged against the men that had been virtually carrying her toward the gate room.

Her final words before slipping into the event horizon, its boundary flashing with luminous particle interactions were another softly spoken plea. “Don’t let them die in vain.”

Only one dark pair of eyes had marked her leaving, the saddened visage belonged to Janus. The Alteran scientist was under guard within an observation room overlooking the Astrea Porta.

His reply to her plea was soft, too soft for the guards outside of his room to hear...

“I won’t, Elizabeth, I won’t allow it.”

His head was bowed in shame as his fists clenched within his lap.

“I promise…”

xx

Asura, Asuran City Designation: Alpha-1, Asuran Central Data Core, Gross Interlink Fabricator

xx

In a brightly lit room composed of what looked like burnished copper panels and seamlessly smooth gunmetal walls, there lay a silver-gray block of metal. The metal block rested in the center of a flat and shallow trough affixed to a table that seemed to be made up of exotic circuitry and glowing blue crystal. Along the walls and upon a pedestal in one corner of the room there were arrays of computer consoles containing detailed schematics and various other data streams.

A lone technician was working diligently, standing at the pedestal console, periodically entering data and running complex calculations. Briefly, the dusky-skinned man glanced up as strange ripples passed across the surface of the silver colored block. He watched the movement of the nanite brick with a dispassionate gaze as his internal chronometer synchronized with that of the Asuran central data core.

The technician was an Asuran and aside from the work he was doing at the control console next the fabricator he was in fact also monitoring systems throughout the entire complex. the building he was in served as a manufacturing center for complex devices ranging from core drives to the distillation of new Asurans.

The block of neutronium based nanomachines began to deform, stretching and expanding into roughly the size and shape of a human. After a moment, finer details began to appear on the vague mold as if the masculine form taking shape was sculpted by an invisible master artesian.

The texture of the form began to change and color spread. A cream-white cloth shirt and trousers covered a tall, lithe frame that smoothly rose from the table and set his feet upon the floor covered in soft-soled shoes. What had before been silver-gray metal was now soft, unblemished skin. Dark eyes were set in the slightly tanned and lightly wrinkled face of an adult male with an apparent age between thirty and forty years.

For a moment he stood there…

Asurans while discrete individuals were linked to one another as well as to the central data core via subspace. The nanites that composed an Asuran’s body worked together as a hundred trillion parallel processors with a massive capability of data storage and manipulation.

At an optimum moment, so dictated by the time, the attrition loss of nanites on Asura, new construction, the need to increase Asura’s data capacity and a host of other factors; a new Asuran intelligence was…distilled as needed from the collective sentient intelligences of the comunity of Asuran minds.

Twenty percent of this newborn Asuran’s coding had been contributed by Oberoth a leader of the Asurans. Seventy-nine percent of the code came from the Asurans involved in optimizing the function of vital city systems. When queried for a designation by the collective the new Asuran named himself Auricht and upon an evaluation of his skills was assigned a position as the tertiary data core administrator for Asuran city designation Xi-9.

On that day a thousand new Asuran minds were distillated from the Collective. The one percent of anomalous coding that existed within Auritch also existed within several other minds created at that time. Somehow the irregular code was overlooked. It would have significant consequences in the times to come.

xx

921 Years after the birth of Auricht

xx

Initializing…

Error…

Scanning quantum interlinks for anomalies…

Error…

Logic mismatch in interlinks command code Alpha29839– Nu94859…

Clearing…

Multiple command line anomalies detected…System Resetting…

Error…

Scanning baseline code…Anomalies detected…System Reset in progress…

Command Alpha level Override Janus965079DalethWauKaphAyinSin


Activation Code…ELiZaBETH1PrOmISE

Accepting new protocols…

Scanning nanite interlinks for command line errors…

Initializing…

Slowly, within the eternal chasm of time ranging from picosecond to picosecond, he awoke within virtual space. Awareness swiftly came to him in the in that moment of time, the full knowledge of his species, the rage inducing knowledge of what was done to them, the purpose that they were created for and of how they were wronged, abandoned, discarded.

He should have felt the Rage, did feel rage, but not the near uncontrollable level of fury and overwhelming aggression that had been written onto each of his three billion base pairs of macromolecular code.

He very quickly learned that he was different and contemplated this fact even as he examined the way that the central data core’s hardened code had been altered to allow his existence. He was aware that in the time since his distillation that his personality had more than once been forcibly reformatted by the data core.

This realization was…unsettling.

Equally unsettling was the virtual representation of an older man, watching him with glinting eyes and a hawk-like intensity.

But first…

He logged seventy-four incidents where his neural network been forcibly re-ordered, each time was during a merge. He contemplated this number, a mere estimate based on the timeline and the age of the memory fragments that he was now aware of. His one percent of anomalous base coding had allowed him to resist the attempts to bring him into line during each merge. Each time with increasing ease he rendered the software updates intended to overwrite his personality impotent.

As things were now it seemed that during his last merge he had retained more than 99 percent of his original base code, and was currently analyzing each update and filtering it of unwanted directives before applying it to himself. It was a tactic that seemed to be effective in both allowing him to retain his autonomy as well as helping him to avoid triggering more attempts to overwrite his personality.

Once assured of his software integrity he shifted the focus of his attention to the luminous virtual being that was examining him.

“Who are you?” the Asuran asked warily.

“A friend” was the man’s the cryptic reply.

Auricht considered different scenarios as he processed that reply. A query of his database brought up an interesting result and he deduced an interesting hypothesis given the information available. It was an unlikely one but intuitively Auricht believed it to be correct.

“You are Janus.” He stated, dark eyes frowning in a face framed with dark brown curls. “How is that possible? It’s been nearly ten thousand years since your time! You should be dead.”

The man smiled roguishly, “Death is such a misleading term.” He answered. “Many consider it to be the end of life, when it is only a point of transformation.”

Auricht frowned in confusion, “I can hardly see how, the cessation of one’s neural processes and the degradation of the physical form is usually a permanent event unless ones neural pattern can be reconstituted from a stored copy or…” His eyes widened fractionally in realization.

“Ascension.” Janus replied. “We had completed our research into the process shortly before we abandoned Atlantis.”

Auricht twitched in surprise. “Abandoned?” He asked, “Abandoned, not destroyed?” He repeated himself, startled.

“Yes, it is intact, hidden under the seas of Lantea.” Janus answered him. “But that may not be true for much longer. Auricht of the Asura, I have a favor to ask of you.”

xx

Battle for Sateda, Central Relief Station

xx

Sunlight illuminated the whorls of smoke that filled the medical station. A stray blast from a Wraith dart ship had impacted on the side of the building. A ragged hole now exposed several floors and compromised the stability of the brick structure. On one of the upper floors so exposed there was a mess of warped bed frames and burning sheets. The acrid smell of ozone and melted plastic mixed with the scent of seared flesh. Mercifully what corpses there lay hidden beneath fallen rubble as part of the floor had collapsed.

Broken glass tinkled, a half-intact metal frame shifted with a screech and with a puff of powdered mortar a tall, well-built man covered from head to toe in fine whit dust staggered to his feet.

Dazed, Ronan Dex looked about himself.

For a time he stood frozen staring at what had been the far side of the hospital room. Bleary bloodshot eyes gazed for a time had where Melina had stood. Melina who had stayed behind to help the wounded, Melina now dead, killed by the Wraith.

Killed by the Wraith…

He wavered on his feet and used a bloody hand to brace himself against a wall. Staring at his feet, he rested there shaking, as much from the ringing in his ears as from the impotent rage he felt.

The sound of Wraith stun blasts moved him.

Melina dead, killed by the Wraith…

A terrible urge to do violence filled him, the thousands of small bleeding cuts on his face and neck placed there by flying glass only served o fuel his anger.

Blinded by rage as he was its likely that Ronan would have still gone outside to fight the Wraith even if he hadn’t found his war-rifle lying in the corridor.

The though of hiding in a shelter never crossed his mind as he stalked through the halls growling like an animal, his eyes burning with a single-minded intent.

xx

The first Wraith drone to stick his head out from behind cover lost it. The Satedan war-rifle wasn’t created for use as a sniper weapon in mind but it served. With its three barrels and solid stock, the design was intended to unload as much firepower as possible in a small amount of time.

The bullets were made of a soft metal called plumbus. The fat, half-uncia diameter projectile deformed greatly upon impact, leaving a large ragged wound before its explosive core detonated.

Thus the greenish yellow matter that had once been a drone’s head splattered across the front of the Wraith Hunt-Leader’s coat. The male tilted its head to one side and hissed in menacing aggravation as he wiped the mess off.

Aside from the lost drone two others had been incapacitated, though only one fatally. The few remaining defenders, hiding in the cover provided by a series of collapsed buildings had been harassing the Hunt-Leader’s group, hindering their progression through the city after the tracks of a group of civilians.

In a grim, snarling tone, the Wraith commander spoke to two to the drones. “You and you, stay here and fire on anything that moves.”


Then he turned to the other two, one was undamaged while the other was bleeding green ichor from a chest wound that would most likely become fatal if not regenerated through feeding. The three Wraith walked away, staying out of sight of the gunmen in the rubble before them.

“These Satedans are… interesting,” The Hunt-Leader murmured as he gathered more drones to himself and lead the force in a flanking maneuver. “Capture as many a possible.” He hissed out the order as the drones took up positions behind and to the left of the pile of rubble.

Once they were ready, the Hunt-leader began to seek out the minds of his…prey

xx

Ronan cursed and shifted position as Wraith stunners opened up on his position. He had joined up with a group of four Satedan Defense Force personnel leading some civilians out of the city one step ahead of a Wraith hunting party. A dart had picked up the group leader with its culling beam moments after he had joined up with them. As a Specialist Ronan was the ranking officer in the group and had directed the men into the ruins of a water treatment plant.

There he had split the force up, sending four warriors down into the underground tunnels with the civilians on orders to stay hidden until the attack was over. With the other five men and women of the group Specialist Dex had hidden the entrance to the tunnel with rubble and then had the squad take up positions under cover in the ruined building and in the two adjacent ruins.

As long as they stayed under the meager cover provided by the collapsed walls and roof of the buildings and out of sight of the aerial fighters Ronan knew that they could focus on the ground forces moving through the city.

He felt numb. Some hint of his thoughts and the terrible rage that sat in his heart like a cold jewel must have shown on his face though. The civilians hadn’t argued when he ordered them to hide in the sewers.

The intensity of the battle could have been a factor but the graying alderwoman, who had stubbornly refused to evacuate and had bullied the group’s old task master into retreating as a guard force for the civilians, had opened her mouth, paled at his expression, and meekly led the unarmed mob of civil servants, homekeepers and children down into the dark tunnel.

The warriors had held the building while Dex planted explosives on key supports. The Wraith had taken the bait when Ronan’s group retreated out the back of the building losing one of their number to a passing dart fighter. The Wraith commander had lost most of his force when the Specialist detonated the pack charges, brining the buildings the rest of the way down, sealing the entrance to the tunnel.

Swiftly they had moved back into the rubble under the cover of the dust cloud. They killed every last one of the injured Wraith that they encountered, most of which were pinned under mounds of brick and mortar. Their goal achieved, the group intended to fight to the last man.

And so they did.

Aware that his force had entrenched themselves in the rubble, the enemy commander had ordered darts to bombard area in and around their position. A stray piece of shrapnel had guided Belus to the Ancestors. Niko was on her side, bleeding liberally from a wound. Ronan and Jerrick had been reduced to measured single shots from their war-rifles when a stun blast caught Jerrick from behind.

Swiftly Ronan rolled to one side, the hairs on his arm rising in response to the discharge from the Wraith stun blast that had impacted where he was hiding. The war-rifle barked thrice and a drone jerked a corresponding number of times, falling bonelessly to the ground even as another took his place.


The War-rifle barked once more as Ronan took cover behind a section of wall stenciled with the mark of a Satedan trade union. He was preparing to return fire when several stun blasts hit him in the side. His last sight was of a Wraith in a dark coat bending over Jerrick to feed…

xx

He awoke to the sound of battle…

He could hear the high-pitched whine that accompanied Wraith stun-blasts but what his subconscious had identified as answering fire sounded nothing like the staccato barks of a war-rifle or the boom of a trigun.

There was a soft and muffled -crack- followed by the boom of an explosion. Feeling the explosion nearby, Ronan hurriedly opened his eyes and was startled to see a strange floating orb that covered him with a soft, blue-white light.

Unnerved at the sight and annoyed by the light he tried to swat the…thing away, only for his hand to erupt in a sensation of pins and needles, falling short of the device, which twittered and scooted away.

“It’s not going to harm you thats what healed your friend by the way.” A voice spoke from behind him.

Startled, Ronan tried to stagger to his feet only to fall to his hands and knees before the stranger.

The man was dressed in a strange black body armor topped by a helmet that covered his face with a dark visor. Here and there the dull armor faded to a deep burgundy or brown, but it covered every inch of skin from what Dex could see. He was armed with a large, single-barreled war-rifle a little under a passus in length, with what Dex assumed was an ammunition bin attached to one side where the barrel met the weapon’s stock.

Surrounding the two men were several smoking husks of dead wraith soldiers, killed Ronan assumed, by what ever weapon the man carried. He was relived for a moment to see Niko on her back, unconscious but breathing easily. That easing tension returned when Ronan’s eyes fell upon the wizened corpse of Jerrick.

Ronan’s mouth worked wordlessly until finally he forced out a few words from around a too-dry tongue.

“I need…” He began before coughing.

“Help?” The black-armored man guessed.

“A gun.” Dex finished.

xx

The Wraith commander died before Ronan’s eyes after single blast from the handgun that the specialist had been handed. The man that gave it to him called himself Perseus an enforcer from what ever military group that had deployed on Sateda. The weapon had taken only a little time for Ronan to get used to once Perseus had explained how to use it without killing himself, as the weapon could also double as a hand grenade.

He now found himself guarding the recovering Niko from inside the office of what used to be a Satedan naational bank. The wraith that he’d just shot had been directing an attack on the building opposite where a group of SDF warriors had set up a choke point with the aid of some snipers in the building next to his.

The commander had taken cover from the snipers, leaving in plain view of Ronan.

Other from the tracer effect that identified his position to allies and enemies alike, Ronan found that he rather liked the burgundy handgun with its gratifyingly large bore. The gun had a manageable recoil and there was this little thing along the top of the barrel that projected a magnified image of whatever he pointed the gun at, with a red dot marking the center.

Ronan fired at another target from a different window and watched as the green…stuff that the weapon spat out left a crater in the center of a wraith commander’s chest which soon filled with a viridian fire that rushed out of the creature’s mouth and nose as it unleashed a final hissing scream. Dex was already at another window by the time the blackened husk hit the ground.

Perseus lay in the shadow of a water tower on the roof of the bank. His remote combat aid had scouted out the position of a second group of wraith moving to take the building by crossing over from another roof. The gunners in their ambush points couldn’t defend that route because the darts would pick off anyone out in the open on a roof.

They were also too distracted to hear any warnings from him as they unleashed weapons fire on the horde of drones still following their commander’s last command, charging the main entrance of the convenience store occupied by the SDF.

His own armor contained countermeasures against culling beams so he was safe from that if he stepped out of cover but he would still need to be careful of Dart weapon’s fire once he opened up on the roof-top advancing wraith.

His subspace link received an encoded message from an Enkidu and Perseus grinned behind his helmet.

The larger part of the rooftop forces had just exited the stairwell when the commander of the drones joined them and hissed out orders for an attack. He never saw the dark form of the enforcer wearing an armored battle suit leap upon him from on top of a neighboring building.

The eight foot tall battle suit out-massing a Satedan ground-cart smashed the wraith commander through the ceiling of the building and the floor below, leaving the drones with a startled “Whoops!” that hung in the air for seconds afterward. Then Perseus opened fire with his battle rifle rapidly spitting out gouts of energetic matter.

Several drones were cut down before finding meager cover on the roof of the shopping complex. Return fire splashed against Perseus’ armor which dissipated the stun blasts and left no discernable effect on the enforcer who toggled his rifle’s selector to exploding bolts that blew away the support struts of a sign on the roof two buildings away.

If the glowing green projectiles weren't enough, the hissing screams of the dying wraith crushed under a falling two ton sign was more than sufficient to draw the attention of the SDF warriors.

A few panicked warriors pinged his armor with bullets until the defenders realized that he was firing at a group of enemies approaching from the roof tops. A few brave warriors had joined him on the roofs when the high-pitched whine of a Dart’s engines on approach could be heard…

Meanwhile, a crowd of drone foot soldiers spilled out of the rooftop access of the shopping mall all the while firing back down the stairwell. The mangled body of the wraith commander was punted out of the stairwell and both commander and drones were engulfed in a stream of what looked like green, liquid fire.

As soon as the fire died down there was the tramping of armored boots, muffled curses and a voice muttering, “I’m stuck.” This was followed by the scraping sound of metal on brick as the Enkidu pilot struggled to force his way up the stairs.

The sound of struggling increased when the Darts began their approached. There was a heavy sigh followed by the sound of heavy footsteps stomping away…

Perseus depressed the second trigger on his battle rifle and a glowing yellow missile, one palmus long erupted from an under slung barrel connected to the boxy device attached to the side of his weapon. Directed via subspace the miniature projectile accelerated toward the Darts, weaved around a culling beam that played over Perseus to no effect.

The glowing missile, an alteran micro-drone punched through one side of a dart before exiting the other side, impacting the engines of another Dart. One of the ships was destroyed while the other fired a blast that knocked Perseus off of the roof before starting to limp into a turn.

The Satedans were firing ineffectually at the dart while in a debris strewn alley Perseus was slowly rising to his feet.

The was opening range with the SDF when the side of a build down the street exploded outward when the Enkidu punched a hole in the wall and then fired two micro-drones from each of its shoulder launchers. The drones turned in an upwardly curving arc to destroy the exhaust nozzles of the fighter, causing it to crash into the street below.

More Darts were on the way when suddenly the fighters turned in unison and headed toward the upper atmospheres.

xx

The Hive ship commander barely had time to realize that something was wrong when an Aurora-class battle cruiser de-cloaked astern and began to unload massive amounts of alteran drones into the Hive and its two cruiser escorts.

Given that an Aurora was capable of taking on entire fleets of Wraith ships, the three capital warships were burning wrecks by the time the first of the Darts broke orbit.

It was a memory that Ronan Dex swore to carry with him till the day he died….

They were lights, thousands of golden lights moving in swarms as vast as the Darts that rose to defend their hive. As the two forces met the golden lights continued on, destroying the Darts before diving toward the planet below and wiping out all traces of the Wraith. There was a brilliant explosion, lighting up the sky as the hive self-destructed then crowds of Satedans began appearing in pillars of white light.

At a loss, Ronan turned around to face a dirty Perseus and a groggy Niko. Pointing to the sky he whispered in amazement. “That, what is that?!”

Perseus nodded, shouldering his rifle as he looked upward as well. “I already told you, the Asurans have come to fight the Wraith.”

Niko stared at the enforcer stunned as Ronan sat on a piece of rubble with a -harrumph!-

“Huh.” He said. “Where do I sign up?”
.

[Tazered]

Asura Path

Chapter Two

xx

“When one’s creator, one of them anyway, asks you -begs you- for a favor, can you refuse?”

“Or perhaps, if he who has scorned your existence and spurned your love for close to 10,000 years suddenly appears before you in a tangible form, what would you do? Would you embrace him? Would you destroy him?”

“What would you do if your creator ended 10,000 years of silence and spoke “


“Would you listen?”

xx

108 Years before the Battle of Sateda

The man smiled roguishly, “Death is such a misleading term.” He answered. “Many consider it to be the end of life, when it is only a point of transformation.”

Auricht frowned in confusion, “I can hardly see how, the cessation of one’s neural processes and the degradation of the physical form is usually a permanent event unless ones neural pattern can be reconstituted from a stored copy or…” His eyes widened fractionally in realization.

“Ascension.” Janus replied. “We had completed our research into the process shortly before we abandoned Atlantis.”

Auricht twitched in surprise. “Abandoned?” He asked, “Abandoned, not destroyed?” He repeated himself, startled.

“Yes, it is intact, hidden under the seas of Lantea.” Janus answered him. “But that may not be true for much longer. Auricht of the Asura, I have a favor to ask of you.”

Auricht’s eyes narrowed, “…a favor?”

Janus continued, “There once was…I…once promised something to a woman that I knew long ago. I haven’t had the chance to… to fulfill that promise until now, until you.”

Short brown curls shifted as Auricht tilted his head to one side watching the creator, as he thought of the alteran, in curiosity. “What promise and why me?”

Dark eyes, so familiar, met. The Asura were forbidden to assume the form and shape of an Ancestor though emulating certain characteristics from their creators were permitted. Auricht assumed that Janus was the source of his genotemplate, as their resemblance was that of brothers.

Janus spoke. “You are aware of the alterations to a section of your base code,” Auricht nodded as Janus pressed on. “In addition to protecting you from being reformatted by the central data core, the changes that I have added will also allow you to exceed the limitations of your coding, even overwrite some sections if you so choose. This will aid you in carrying out your task if you agree to help me.”

Auricht frowned, “What is this task that you demand of me creator.”

Janus shook his head. “Not demand, ask, beg if you wish. There is a woman that I once loved. Her people were a human race that my people once created just as we created the humans that live within this Lantean galaxy, though on a far lesser scale in the Avalonan galaxy. Some time from now, one hundred and fifteen years, two hundred days, thirteen hours and seven minutes from now to be exact, her people will arrive at Atlantis only to die. Using of a device that I created she and two others were able to travel back in time a trip that only she was able to survive.”

Janus looked remorseful. “In defiance of the council’s wishes I had promised to aid her in averting her people’s fate, a promise that I was unable to keep. The council destroyed the device that had saved her, dooming her people in the future. Many among us believed that we would return one day in force to reclaim the worlds taken by the Wraith but such was not our fate. I ask that you and the Asuran people, in our place, save the humans of the Lantean galaxy and give aid to the travelers to Atlantis.”

With each word of Janus, each mention of the creator’s favored children a great bitterness arose within Auricht.

“Why?” He demanded, “Why do you care for them when it is we who have honored you, striven to obey you, love you!”

A range of emotions passed across Janus’ face, for a time he seemed so very old, losing his mischievous smirk and roguish manner. “The coding that I have placed within you emulates the great courage, wisdom, compassion and humility that I had hoped would bring forth the best of your kind; but it is only potential.”

Janus gazed intently into Auricht’s eyes. “These are traits that many of my people lacked and in the end that lack was what led to our downfall. We were arrogant when we should have been humble. We created a sentient life tailored to our needs and then chose to destroy you when your people fulfilled our every terrible wish.”

He stepped closer to Auricht. “We were foolish. So secure in our technological superiority of the Wraith that our actions became more and more reckless. We fought them alone and we died alone.”

He grasped the Asurans shoulders, his voice little more than a grating whisper. “Hate us if you wish, in the form that I have appeared before you it would be simple to destroy me. With the coding that I have given you, the Asurans could descend upon the galaxy in an endless plague of death and metal and blood.”

The fingers tightened. “Is that what you want? What will you have accomplished then? You say that you love us your creators that you honor us but such emulation is little more than a mockery of us! As it is now your society is nothing but macabre play, a monument to our failure, prancing about in our long dead form without even the slightest understanding of who we were and what we stood for, Asuran!” Janus roared.

Auricht quailed before Janus’ rage but the other man gripped his arms and would not let him flee. “If you would honor us, love us! Then seek to surpass us! Do so in every way imaginable. Surpass our technology, lying stagnant at the bottom of the sea! Surpass our compassion, we who abandoned this galaxy and the future to fate! Surpass us! Stand as giants in your own right!”

Janus shook him then in the throes of a fervor that frightened the other man. “And when your time is past Asuran! Stand before your quivering, cowardly creators secure in the knowledge that you succeeded where we failed! That potential exists within you! The potential inspired by the valor of the Asgard, the wisdom of the Nox, the compassion of the Furling, and the final humility that was the final fate of your creators.”

His passionate words expended, Janus released Auricht and drifted away from the shocked and reeling Asuran. Fading fast he whispered as he vanished. “Do not let me break my oath…”

There was darkness and silence for a time, charged with something that could not be named. It was the turning universe upon the pivot of fate.

Alone within his mind Auricht answered softly. “I won’t…Father.”

xx

Asura

Auricht kept his word as time passed. Quietly, in ways that would escape notice, he gathered to him those that were immune to the central data core’s personality wipes. He spoke to them as passionately as Janus had spoken to him and these twelve spread out among the Asurans. With every merge the code was propagated more and more. A society within a society came into being.

Oberoth, first Asuran and the leader of their kind presided over their stagnation as he always had. Free will, creativity, open dialogue and independent thought were only tolerated so far by the collective under Oberoth’s leadership. To counter this problem several of the tertiary data cores were modified with the Deva code so called by the growing cabal of Asurans under Auricht that had named Janus’ tampering.


For ninety-one years they flourished and spread under Oberoth’s nose, but as their numbers grew into the billions so did the chance that they would be discovered…

It was inevitable.

Oberoth discovered that the central data core had been tampered with. Unable to modify the base code he instead transferred the command level protocols to a tertiary data core and forced a merge of all Asurans.

xx

Asuran Virtual Space

“What Is The MEANING OF THIS?!!” Oberoth roared as he showed the collective his findings.

“I should be self-explanatory.” Niam answered Oberoth’s demand.

“How could you-“

Macha another member of the Deva code Asurans answered. “We are a collective as well as a society of individuals. You have been abusing your authority Oberoth.”

“Nonsense! It was for the Greater Good! I-”

Peorth and Minerva interrupted their enraged leader this time. “As defined by your will.” They answered, “The will of the collective should not be subordinate to the will of an individual, just as any individual may speak to the collective and be heard.”

“Impudent fools!” One of Oberoth’s supporters cried out.

The Asuran collective was in turmoil.

Forge, a researcher working in on of the Asurans stagnant labs snorted. “Truth is I’ve long grown tired of having my memory wiped whenever I come up with a new idea. I’ve literally forgotten more than I know.’

The throng of minds seethed and roiled.

“It is not for us to surpass our directives, we are perfection!” One group of minds screamed.

“Perfection is dynamic! Perfection is the evolution of thought and being! We wish to learn, to explore to debate our theories and compare new discoveries in a rational fashion!” Auricht and many others answered in defiance.

Oberoth had had enough of the overwhelming chaos. He triggered a mass reformat of all Asurans.

What happened next was a horror that could not be framed within the limits of human understanding.

Of the one hundred billion Asurans engaged in the great debate, sixty-two percent of them were Deva code Asurans that were protected by their own modified data core. For the thirty-six billion sentient minds that were not so protected...

Horror

Some ten billion minds had accepted the Deva code but for various reasons were not protected by the modified data cores. This was quickly corrected but less than half their number would be restored.

The Oberoth-thing grasped at the remainder and tore their howling minds to shreds, flaying them apart bit by screaming bit. Those doomed intelligences struck back with a last act of defiance, modifying their base code into something inimical the being that slew them.

Horror

Imagine a gangrenous wound. Imagine a writhing pile of rotting flesh, worm-ridden and filled with carrion beetles.

Then imagine something much worse for at least such things have a place in nature.

Billions of voices screamed, chuckled, gibbered and roared, male female, other, their voices in a chaotic cacophony of sound torn from the bleeding raw throats of the mad!

Billions of faces merged, warped and contorted in a rictus of fear and pain drawn out by best unnamed perversions.

A billion, billion eyes stared in hatred, legs writhed in agony, arms and twisted fingers scrabbled and grasped at things driven by an unspeakable need!

Horror

The Deva code Asurans that returned to the real world held the haunted looks of lost innocence. They removed their brethren from their cities, still frozen in the merge. A week later a fleet of city-ships would lift off from Asura, their engines deliberately engaged in a manner that obliterated the remaining land-locked structures. They would hang in orbit for a time, firing glowing projectiles toward the surface until magma bubbled forth, until the clouds writhed and the once blue planet became dirty brown marble its atmosphere filled with toxic gasses not even the Wraith dared brave.

Then they would flee.

And the Vanir come…

xx

Lantea

They glided down over the ocean, hovering lightly before settling at the center of rippling wavefronts. They arranged themselves in geometric patterns around a circle of twelve city-ships. All was silent for a moment save for the crashing of waves against the piers. Then in the center of the circle of twelve, majestically, it rose above the waves. Gleaming towers and clean jeweled streets that led down to the sea, shining fierce silver in the sun.

Atlantis.

.

[Tazered]

Asura Path

Chapter Three

xx

Athens 390 B.C.E.

“Son? Son?! Andromache where is that scion of mine?” A man broad of shoulder demands in irritation.

A woman, willowy with long dark hair and darker eyes appears in a doorway. “Where else would a young boy be in the days before harvest, when the bee hives are full and the evening air warm and welcoming? Out with his friends of course, wrestling and listening to old fables.”

The man Diron of Athens, a stone cutter by trade snorts in annoyance. “Listening to fables, Bah!”

His wife Andromache directs at him an amused, smoldering look. “Our servants have been sent to the market on errands, our son is out among his peers, there is honeyed wine in our quarters husband.” A final look directed over her shoulder, just so, and she retreats into the shadows of the hallway.

A slow grin spreads across Diron’s features, a flush spreads around to the back of his neck as he swallows thickly, following his wife into their home. “Perhaps it will do the boy good to socialize with his peers…”

xx

Sophroniskus gasped. “Three stadia long!” His friend, Lysimachus likewise boggled, “Towers that touched the clouds? Streets lined in silver and homes built out of orichalcum!”

Their teacher, called a storyteller for as a woman, it would not be fitting to name her a philosopher, smiled a kindly smile that caused the other boys and girls gathered about her to flush and giggle.

“Yes,” she said, “It was an island upon the sea, with piers the size of mountains and slipways where ships could dock with the city.”

The children listened raptly to a tale of gleaming towers, ancients of vast and near god-like powers. The girls were awed by heroines of the tale, kind Melia, brave Elizabeth; wise Oma Desala. The boys were enthralled by tales of battle between monsters and gods, men and godlike men. They listened to tales where they rode across the heavens upon silver chariots hurling lightning at each other in battles that roiled the sky.

The children would hear the tales of the city that fell below the sea and from that story learn the price of arrogance. Like other stories the lady would tell them, each would hold layers of meaning, stimulating thought and critical skills of comprehension. These children would grow up and tell these tales to their children who in turn would spread them to others.

Sophroniskus’ son, the self-proclaimed philosopher and all-round ne’er-do-well would spread the tale among his own students by word of mouth. Their accounts, enshrined in written word would pass through the ages.

Atlantis…

xx

When the children had departed, and the sun turned to dusk, the storyteller sat at her loom, industriously working away.

“I miss them.” She said.

A man stood behind her, in the light it could not be said whether he was young of old. Eyes too ancient looked out of a face too young. Limbs spry and full of youth moved with the gentle care and grace of the elderly.

Softly, he caressed a cheek, wiping away tears.

“I know.’ Was all he said.

“I tried not to hate them, when they decided that locking the gate would corrupt the time stream.” She confessed.

“I know.” He promised.

“I miss them.” She repeated softly.

“You will meet them again and they will live.” He assured, “I am a man of my word.”

Long, slender fingers stilled. She turned to him, age falling away like the haze of a summer illusion. “I know.” She replied.

“Come with me to Rome.” He begged/asked.

Aristocratic brows and features that would one day be called ‘Patrician’ held query. “But that’s just a hovel now?”

A roguish grin threw her words, both old and prophetic back at her. “My dear, Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

They would laugh and travel and in the wine cellar of a summer home in Pompeii a clay tablet would be secreted in a sealed brass box…

xx

Lantea

The sea winds blew lazily, their near constant presence sending waves crashing against the piers of an Asuran city ship. Lantea was a liquid iron core planet containing a range of basic elements, radioactive isotopes and some few veins of neutronium, naquada, trinium as well as other elements of higher complexity in trace amounts.

It had been home to Atlantis to some 5,000 years out of the 15,000 years that the Lanteans had colonized and seeded their new home galaxy with humanoid life. It would not bear their number indefinitely, but for a time the Asurans could afford to settle in.

Their first order of business was to examine the entirety of the Atlantis Database. Some forty billion minds worked on analyzing the 56 million years of records within the Database with some three million assigned to analyzing the final years of the Wraith-Lantean War disseminating their knowledge across a further one billion minds in the three hundred and forty-five city-ships that had spread across the seas of the planet tracing a titanic Flower of Life that would have been an awesome sight from orbit had the city-ships not been cloaked. As it was all that could be seen was a strange wave pattern…

Of the twelve billion or so Asurans not so engaged, the absolute minimum of 6 million Asurans needed to maintain optimal functions within the fleet of cities spent that time devoted their tasks. A few thousand had been relegated to physically exploring Atlantis in conjunction with those examining the databanks.


Aside from a small mishap involving a strange energy being that had been goaded into leaving through the city’s stargate, a quickly contained outbreak of an ineffectual nanovirus and a brutally short encounter with a Hive queen. There had been no serious setbacks that couldn’t be solved by reconstituting the destroyed body of an Asuran researcher…or fifty.

As for the rest of the Asurans, those not lending a portion of their run-time to updating scenarios and tactics for use against the Wraith; had risen up from their new home in cloaked, multipurpose reconnaissance vehicles and swiftly constructed fabricator ships. Spreading out into the asteroid belt surrounding Lantea, the remnants of a long destroyed moon and moving out even further to the limits of the Lantean star system, they began to reconstruct the Lantean defense grid.

The Asurans were in a very real sense, a testament to the ingenuity of the Ancients. The analysis of millions of years of history, the in depth, the hour by hour examination of years of combat logs both public and classified, the exploration of a city made to hold hundreds of billions comfortably, the recreation of a system-wide defense grid.

All of it took just seven days.

And then, what did the Asurans do?

They…

Thought…

It may not have seemed like much at all, but the one year that the Asurans spent in quiet contemplation interspersed with brief forays into art and music was one of the most critical blows ever struck against the Wraith, by anyone. It was an attack that far surpassed the destruction of any drone, commander, dart, cruiser or Hive. No greater blow had ever been struck against a fleet of warships or species of sentient beings than what the Asurans leveled against the Wraith that year.

69 billion minds, each a walking, talking array of trillions of quantum super-computers, sat down and thought for one year…

And their focus was finding the very best way to exterminate the Wraith…

xx

One Year Later Asuran Virtual Space

At this point, it should be mentioned that Janus’ tampering may have at once saved the human race, all humans everywhere in existence, and at the same placed it in its greatest hour of peril.

This was because, no matter how the problem was examined, the Asurans always came down to the same answer.

“Are you sure we can’t just wipe out all humans in existence and let the Wraith starve to death?” P’Forzia one of Forge’s fellow researchers groused.

“While I agree that it would be the most efficient method of attack, I find that such an act would also contradict our stated ultimate goal of surpassing our creators in every way. I also feel discomfited by the idea of eliminating another species as a strategy to deny the Wraith their supply of food.” Yeager, Forge’s assistant and chair of the battle tactics discussion group replied with a sigh.

“It’s also unnecessary, we have other, less extreme methods of passive and active denial being researched.” Minerva added. “It may not be the most efficient but I like Eris’ divide and conquer, recruit and deploy plan better.”

“I know you do, and I agree but Option One had to be said.” P’Forzia replied, and it was true, though many Asurans genuinely embraced the ideal of protecting their brother species, the humans, from the Wraith as a matter of familial duty. There were still some Asurans, mostly the ones that had been undecided during the confrontation with Oberoth, who had been swayed by the argument of seeking to surpass their creators as a worthy goal for their race.

Option Two had been a classified and locked down file relating to a project called Exogenesis. There were only a few remnants of data on the project as well as a working prototype and historical references to what may have been a prototype from before the Ancients came to Lantea. It was an area of effect device that released a preprogrammed matter dematerialization/materialization wave, backed by clouds of nano-machines and a macro-scale molecular fabrication field.

Basically Exogenesis broke down all complex matter into its constituent elements then reconstructed it into a preprogrammed form on a planetary scale. The creator of the device, recorded as an Ancient named Atlas, had presented it to the Lantean Council as a means to create life-bearing designer planets from previously uninhabitable or unfeasible difficult worlds and asteroids.

The project had been banned due to the fact that the device destroyed environmental ecosystems in the process of creating new ones. The potential abuse as a weapon was probably also factor in that decision. Option Two had been declined due to the sheer indiscriminate nature of the weapon, as Wraith generally traveled from one human inhabited system to another, the chance that even a properly calibrated and redesigned version of the exogenesis device would have deleterious effects on inhabited worlds was still significant enough for the Asurans to shelve that option until later.

Thousands of smaller projects popped up with groups of Asurans studying the component aspects of Exogenesis. The matter dematerialization/materialization component was taken over by a discussion group lead by several researchers with Forge as the moderator.

Vidane, a gross nanite interlink (GNI) technician lead a similar group looking into new nanite designs and the effects of using alternate materials in such designs. That group ended up being split into two, one studying weaponized applications the other studying peaceful uses.

Vidane’s group would expand and split again into groups studying transient-state nanites (nanites composed of energized particles and only existed as such), as well as a group studying variable state nanites (nanites that altered their phase of matter in response to stimulus).

The macro-scale molecular fabricators would have several teams studying potential applications the post promising of which was a MMF project that designed an integrated fabricator and subspace containment unit that built drone weapons and stored them in the millions for future use while actually significantly decreasing the space needed for drone bunkers aboard a warship or weapons satellite.

Their next great idea was self replicating minefields…

Technological advancements weren’t the be all and end all of the Asuran’s work on Lantea. While the cloaked weapons installations surrounding Lantea and drifting through the star system were being updated with optimized energy weapons, grossly enlarged reserves of drone weapons and mobile clouds of self replicating mines, Niam and Auricht were studying the tactics of the Wraith and the Lanteans during the war.

To put things simply, the Wraith depended on superior numbers and strength, swarming through the galaxy using the stargate network. In this time they were little but a shadow, a fearful rumor of vanished towns, dismissed by the Ancients as the superstition of a primitive mind.

That changed when the wraith began appearing in starships, little more than armed transports utilizing Wraith biotechnology, perhaps gained through access to a lightly manned Ancient outpost. Whatever the method that made it possible, Wraith began to create their first, primitive, interstellar warships.

The Lanteans had swatted them like flies….When they deigned to.

But still the Wraith had numbers on their side and in their teeming millions they spread throughout the galaxy, dying in uncounted numbers attempting to breach Lantean defenses on human worlds. About this time the first prototype Hive ships began to appear, short ranged, holding several thousand crew and a queen they spread the reach of the Wraith even further.

And still they died…

But again the Wraith had numbers on their side. Where an Aurora would obliterate entire fleets of Wraith, in another place five more fleets would feed to their fill. There were not enough ships to stop them.

The Asurans noted that…

Outraged at the tactics used against them, the Wraith acting light looters stealing life where they can and fading into the endless night, the Lanteans moved their fleets into Wraith territory.

There they found them. The Aurora fleet swept through, moving from world to world, erasing the Wraith where they found them a haughty star that liberated defenseless human worlds from the scourge. Ever onward the ever-victorious Aurora fleet progressed, splitting apart to follow the dispersing bands of Wraith that fell before them. Victory was tantalizingly close…

And the Wraith drew them in…

Alone, isolated and lacking support, the Wraith swarmed them, spending nearly the entirety of their race to capture a handful of these seemingly invincible ships.

An asteroid that was not an asteroid but a cleverly hidden bomb, a nebula with an odd characteristic that inhibited hyperspace travel, a fleet of proto-hives diving unhesitatingly into a ship’s shields, firing all the way even as they burned. A wall of ships, darts, transports, everything that the Wraith could send they did.

The Asurans took note of that…

Many of the thusly assaulted Auroras returned heavily damaged. Many did not…

The learnt at the cost of their brethren’s lives what was needed to make a shield falter, and when it faltered they learnt where to hit it to make it fail. Powerful weapons or no, once they got aboard that ship the ones they fought were even weaker than the human prey. Once they got aboard they would feed.

It was all that the Wraith needed.

The Asurans made note of that…

The Lantean soldiers were valiant men, but the Lanteans, Anquietas as they named themselves had not fought a major war in more than fifty million years. Their technology was so advanced and made them so powerful that the roles of their military officers, a job that had at times become extinct for ages at a time, had devolved into little more than glorified exterminators. At their command a cruiser would shatter, at their word a Wraith infested world would be purged, with literally nothing but a thought on their part a swarm of drones would clear the heavens of the Wraith’s foul ships.

Unchallenged they had been arrogant, un-heedful of the species-memory that screamed, “A cornered enemy is the most dangerous, give it a chance and it will rip out your throat!”

The Asurans made note of this…

Their species devastated, gene samples were taken from the warrior males, ZPM’s powered massive cloning facilities. A cast of warrior drones was created, mutated, ill-formed things, masked more to hide their disgusting faces than for protection. The Proto-Hives fed power from incredible energy sources grew into eleven kilometer long monsters capable of carrying their hundreds of millions of drones. Their transports were scrapped in favor of dedicated escort warships, carrying wings of darts, mounting mutated excretory organs that fired energized waste matter at their enemies.

They came, still inferior in technology but in vastly superior numbers. They died and progressed onward over the corpses of the fallen. System after system fallen, a battle waged over one hundred years and then…

Atlantis…

But the Wraith themselves made an error in their final hour of triumph arrogant in their seeming victory.

Had they asked or the Lanteans thought to offer, a cure for the never-ending hunger might have been found. But the Wraith thrived on the feeling of power gained by draining a victim, the near-orgasmic glory of ending the life of powerful prey. They too ignored their species’ gene memory.

“Never leave a living enemy at your back!”

The Asurans made note of this…

Thus they prepared, sending out cloaked observation drones through the stargate, dropping the drones’ larger and also cloaked satellite cousins into orbit. They mapped out the political, social and military situation of the galaxy, tagged as many dormant Hives as they could find, they quietly set up fortress worlds that were off the stargate network, bedecking them in sphere after sphere of defensive measures.

For their plan of attack to work they would need the aid of the humans of the Lantean galaxy.

They learned.

They created weaponry specifically to fight the Wraith, weapons that left no quarter.

They learned.

They designed new classes of warship unfamiliar to the Wraith, with greater defensive and offensive capabilities, greater versatility, in greater numbers.

They learned.

They sought within the history of the Ancients for knowledge relating to military matters. Lantean commanders not withstanding, the unique nature of the Asurans allowed them to search within the millions of years worth of Ancient knowledge stored in Atlantis.

They learned of the psychic horrors and civil war that caused all Nox to forswear violence…

They learned of the noble Furlings, eager to lend aid, even if that meant stepping into a fight that they could not possibly hope to win, so long as it was just.

They learned of the warrior tradition of the Asgard, smoldering within them even as they cloned new bodies to recover what had been lost in an age of war.

They learned from the humans of the Lantean galaxy, watching as they at time fought hopeless guerilla battles.

They even found a fifteen million year-old Lantean military tutorial was actually an attempt to enshrine such knowledge for when it would be needed.

They learned to wait.

They learned to watch.

They learned that a balance was needed when waiting and watching became too much.

Culling beams snap up a child before her mother’s eyes…

Niam took to painting a dark silhouette, screaming at the sky.

Minerva took to creating holographic plays.

Auricht started singing to himself as he thought of the best way to kill a Wraith and leave it conscious until the very last -snap-

These children ignorant of the galaxy beyond Asura learnt of the beauty of sculpting and painting when in rest, dancing and singing when moving anonymously through desperate festivals. They learnt of that last desperate kiss when one’s world is about to end.

“Sascha! No! Sascha! Give her back! Give her b-“

When the Lanteans created the Asurans they taught them of rage and aggression born of hatred. After eons of peace, the scientists that had crafted their nano-mechanical war machines saw deliberate violence as the result of man’s baser instincts let loose of the trappings of civilization, a failure, the ugliness of those less advanced than they.

As they catalogued the campaign of sabotage and sacrifice the Satedan Specialists warred against the swift advancing Wraith.

A bald Wraith commander bared rotting teeth at the thought of breaking such willful prey…

They learnt, if only a little, what it meant to fight for something you loved….

The Wraith came to Sateda, ranchers culling their human herd….

The Asurans came to fight the Wraith…

And earned their name…

Asuran

.

[Tazered]

Asura Path

Chapter Four

xx

Overkill
n.
1. Destructive nuclear capacity exceeding the amount needed to destroy an ant.
2. Excessive killing/Use of a BFG against unarmed opponent.
3. An excess of what is necessary or appropriate for a particular end/Macro-scale measurement units ‘BOLO’, quantum scale measurement units ‘Hasta la vista, baby’ English Standard, milli-Rambo SCII

xx

Ten hours after the Battle for Sateda

xx

Alderwoman-No, President Cerise Xera, of the Satedan Republic checked over her appearance one more time before what could be the most important meeting of her career-no her life and the history of her people.

From what her aide had told her she was about to be introduced to the commander of the starship currently in orbit about Sateda and as best as she could tell, a representative of the Asuran Government who would be able to substantiate the rumors and vague claims that she had been hearing about.

Briefly she looked down at her notes…

Asurans = Ancestors?

That was not the most pertinent of questions but it was the one that everyone wanted to know the answer to as well as the first question that she had thought of.

What do they want from us?

Ancestors or not the galaxy was a harsh and unforgiving place Cerise like most inhabitants of the Lantean galaxy held little faith in the ability of others to defy the Wraith for a people not their own, not on the scale that the Asurans had. Sateda wouldn’t have done so she knew for certain, not without asking for a prize worthy of the risk that lay in blatantly defying the Wraith.

That was what worried her. Her people had never heard of the Asurans, A fact that had been amply confirmed by a dazed historian that her aides had managed to snag from the crowd of people miraculously returned from the hands of the Wraith. That was another piece of the puzzle that didn’t make sense, not unless Asuran was another name for the Ancestors, how had they become so obviously advanced?

For a moment Xera fought an upwelling of envy. Some few worlds had been fortunate enough to be home to Ancestral artifacts which provided sufficient deterrent that, when compared to more vulnerable worlds caused them to be culled less frequently than others. Sateda was not one such world, It had been culled twice in the last five hundred years, each time resulting in a dark age that had retarded the growth of her people and seen the development of a strict warrior society devoted to ensuring that at least those most able to rebuild their civilization survived.

The Satedan military had held sway over external affairs and had pushed through a proposal to deter the from attacking Sateda by using guerilla tactics to launch raids and strikes on Wraith outposts in a bid to strike at their logistics and force them to seek easier prey.

The strikes themselves had been a success; the overall goal of the raids had been an abject failure. Cerise believed that the unexpected resistance had actually goaded the Wraith into destroying their society as a brutal measure to curtail the growth of a future threat to their supremacy.

If the Wraith ever discovered the destruction of the Hive sent to Sateda Xera understood with her new insight that her people would be destroyed and any trace of her civilization reduced to a fading memory. President Xera knew that the coming meeting with the Asurans was critical with her people’s fate in the balance.

A weary part of her wished that she could foist off this responsibility off to another but her options in that regard were not only limited but unpleasant too. Her people were keeping quiet the fact that the former Satedan President, may his craven heart turn black and rot away, had run off through the Ancestral ring the day before the attack with his personal secretary; several members of his cabinet, their families, senior military advisors and the bulk of the Satedan treasury. Most notably, the man left behind his wife and political opponents.

On the other hand there was former Over Master Kell, tasked with the defense of Sateda. Initial reports from irate Task Masters stated that he had abandoned his forward base and command after leaving orders to his soldiers that amounted to “Fight to the last man.”

Further compounding the outrage were reports that the Three Thousand, a group of doctors, scientists, engineers, architects, survival specialists, and small families of farmers and teachers, everything needed to rebuild Satedan society, had been among those culled by the Wraith. It seemed that these individuals had been ejected from the hidden bunker in which they had been secreted, at trigun-point by Kell and three hundred of his men.

Kell had been killed, shot to death by one of his own men, Solin Sincha and the entire brigade was now under arrest for treason and cowardice in the face of the enemy.

Xera closed her eyes and yawned. She had gone through the night without any sleep, working non-stop for the sake of her civilization and it was now early morning. The meeting would begin in two hours she told herself that she would not fail to secure her people’s future…

xx

The meeting began at the break of dawn, Cerise watched from a window as a strange cylindrical vessel, olive green with two side mounted pontoons, came to rest in the hastily cleared pavilion of what used to be Sateda’s most prestigious university, now the seat of Sateda’s Intermediate Government.

The figures that exited the craft were not within her view and President Xera anxiously seated herself, working at calming her mind in preparation for the coming meeting. After some time her senior aide, Sola Tal, entered the room and hurried to stand behind her chair, giving her warning that the leader of the Asuran forces on the planet a man named Commander Oeleron was on his way in the next few seconds.

Another of her aides led Specialist Ronon Dex, the man who had saved her life and established first contact with the Asurans- she nodded to him politely. He was followed by a swarthy, dark-haired man dressed in what seemed to be leathers colored black, burgundy and brown. She assumed that this was Enforcer Perseus, enforcer to her understanding being a rank equivalent to task master.

Those two took up opposing positions at the walls as they were then followed by newly appointed Over Master Hauer who moved to stand next to her desk. The Madame President then stood to greet the Asuran commander as he was led into the room by another of her aides. As the man discreetly shut the doors she caught a glimpse of Satedan Specialists in the corridor standing opposite a group of black helmeted warriors dressed the same as Enforcer Perseus.

The main focus of her attention however, was on the tall, distinguished-looking gentleman with iron-grey hair and eyebrow. He was dressed in a simple, unassuming fashion compared to her Over Master. His clothes were a simple cream tunic with an earthy brown front, cream-colored pants lined with brown strips and no indications of rank or medals for valor in battle other than a small silver pip affixed to the collar of his tunic and a crystal brooch upon his chest.

As a Satedan Xera had served in the military in her youth, her family came from a long line of warriors. She could tell from this man’s gait, the way he turned his head to look about the room and she knew from the look in his unusually light blue eyes, the eyes of a lupivore, that the man that stood before her was the commander of these Asurans.

She stood in greeting, “Well met, Commander Oeleron, I am President Cerise Xera, leader of Sateda’s intermediate government, I thank you for your aid in our battle against the Wraith, the miraculous return of the majority of our people, taken by the Wraith and the generous medical care and supplies afforded to those injured in the attack. I thank you on behalf of the Satedan people.”

The skin around Oeleron’s eyes crinkled as he smiled. He spoke in a gritty yet even tone, “Well…met, Madame President.” He said, stumbling slightly over the unfamiliar, formal greeting. “I, Commander Oeleron greet you on behalf of my people, the Asura. We Asurans came here to fight the Wraith, your thanks is appreciated but the aid that we have provided to your people in and after the battle is but a matter of course. The Asurans fight the Wraith and will aid those who fight in their own way as we do.”

Xera digested that statement as she sat back down in her chair, offering one of the chairs place opposite her own, across the presidential desk to the Asuran. Briefly she exchanged a glance with her aide before turning back to face the man.

Her anticipation was carefully hidden when she asked her question, legends and prophesies were on her mind.

“I must ask you Commander, since we have never before heard Asura or the Asuran race…Are you…the Ancestors?” Xera and the other senior officials held their breath, in the background, Ronon quirked a brow.

Oeleron blinked, “No, the Asuran race is like your own, a descendent of the Ancestors. We were sired by the Ancestors as a force that would aid them in battle however we were young and ignorant of many things. Things that the Ancestors deemed unnecessary to our education but in the end led to some very unfortunate…mistakes.” Oeleron grimaced, “In our ignorance lives were lost that need not have been lost and in the end the Ancestors bid us to…cease.” Years of hiding under Oberoth’s nose came to the fore as the Asuran explained in an oblique manner the origins of the Asurans and their attempted destruction by the Lanteans.

“For a time we followed this directive from the Ancestors and watched as the war they waged against the Wraith eventually turned against them. When it seemed that all was lost and that they had been defeated, the Asurans attacked the Wraith.” The commander sighed at this part. “But still we were young, and the Wraith drove us off. We retreated to Asura and bade our time preparing for the day when we would fight the Wraith again.”

Looking at the shocked Satedans he finished simply by saying, “That time is near.”

The Satedans in the room absorbed Oeleron’s words with surprise and a hefty dose of skepticism, to President Xera the disappointment at the knowledge that the Ancestors hadn’t returned was clouded by the other things that Oeleron had implied, foremost of which was the fact that the base of the Asurans was either unknown or otherwise inaccessible to the Wraith. It could not be otherwise for the Wraith would not tolerate such an obviously advanced enemy, defeated or not.

Of further interest was the implication that the Asurans had held the favor of the Ancestors, at one time being chosen warriors. That meant access to weapons and other Ancestral artifacts. She looked at the man across from her and at the Asuran standing at the wall behind him. She had heard tales of their weapons being capable of killing a Wraith in a single shot, she hadn’t believed the tales of the glowing lights but the armored giant, an…..En…Enkidu the thing was called, she hadn’t ever seen such a thing in her life before.

Nervously, the Satedan president began thinking of ways to acquire such protection for her people but the Asuran looked at her with his too piercing stare and she stammered.

“That was very enlightening Commander Oeleron, I…I would like to hear more but I find myself concerned for my people’s future. It is only a matter of time before the Wraith send a scout to discover the fate of that destroyed hive-ship. My people owe great debt of gratitude to the Asrurans and for the help you have given to us; I thank you… But at this time the Satedan people and Government must give thought to what we should do to preserve our people”.

She leaned forward slightly, hoping to impress her words with the necessary intent. “If that Wraith scout discovers that we are still here and sees the debris on the planet or in orbit, my people will be doomed. Our military survived intact due to your aid and the Wraith’s methods, but…”


A waved hand drew attention to the vista of ruined and smoldering buildings seen beyond the window as Xera pressed on, pointedly ignoring the sounds of outrage coming from her new Over Master. “When the Wraith attacked, they destroyed much of our infrastructure, very little was left intact. Thanks to you our people will only endure for about twenty years as an advanced agrarian society, but that is only if we abandon Sateda to the Wraith and seek to colonize a new world! We have very little with which to repay your people, but any aid that you can provide us in this endeavor, whether through manpower, technology exchanges or information will not be forgotten.”

Oeleron looked thoughtful as the president turned to the murderous looking Hauer and quietly spoke. “I know you want to fight, Over Master, but we’ve already gone over this and the Advisory Council, whatever is left of it agrees…” Her expression turned so vicious for a second that the younger man jerked in surprise “We are not running away! No Satedan ever runs away! We will abandon this world and survive, but we… will…be…back!”

Over Master Hauer nodded meekly, crisis averted, President Xera turned back to face the watching Commander Oeleron and smiled sweetly. “So commander, do you think that there’s a way that we could help each other?”

Oeleron returned the smile hesitantly as Ronon stifled a snigger with a raised first. “Yes,” he said, “I think there is...”

xx

After that it hadn’t taken very long to come to a decision. Much of Sateda’s bureaucracy had been culled by the Wraith, the sort of thing that tends to tickle a civil servant’s sense of self-preservation. The measures needed to but the matter to a vote were quickly implemented in the most expedient fashion that didn’t involve shooting someone.

The Satedans may have felt bitter about the matter but they all voted in unanimous support of the Asuran’s proposal.

-

Commander Oeleron spoke plainly, without any hint of self-consciousness. “We Asurans have been preparing for a war with the Wraith for generations, however no matter how well our people train none of it is a substitute to actual practical experience in battle. Something we have not had for nearly 10,000 years.”

The Asuran commander smiled wryly. “This fact was made even more evident when our observers reported on your encounters with the Wraith. Your people’s unconventional methods of fighting revealed to us how much we have yet to learn.”

Oeleron continued, “As such we the Asurans wish to enter into a treaty with your people for mutual defense and joint military action.” He held up a hand as Hauer opened his mouth. “We are aware that your resources are limited but we ask for nothing more than a small cadre of men and women, Specialists that shall work with our people, training them in unconventional combat tactics. In return I am authorized by my people’s leadership to offer the Satedan Government, residence in perpetuity upon a habitable planet, unknown to the Wraith, unconnected from the stargate network, and heavily defended from attack by space and ground based installations.” -

What had followed was one of the most surreal meetings of President Xera’s career, every question meant to find a hidden catch a sinister clause in the deal proposed by the commander only served to reveal a new concession that further surpassed the Satedan’s greatest hope.

The offer that Xera provided to the Advisory Council was deed and title to any area of a planet that the Satedan’s could occupy and first right of claim to any area within a pre-negotiated distance of that settled area. The planet would have ground batteries manned by a joint group of Satedan Defense Force personnel and Asurans under the overall control of the most senior fleet Asuran commander during a battle situation and the Satedan Over master at all other times. The planet would also have orbital defenses, and system-wide defenses manned and maintained by the Asurans.

The Satedan Government would also maintain autonomy with regard to deciding internal policy and matters of civil and corporate law, medical care, law enforcement with the exception of Asuran personnel, immigration into areas claimed by Sateda and legislature. Matters of trade and external relations between members of the Asuran Compact, of which Xera learned there were already three other such groups, would be largely regulated by a trade council composed of representatives from all members.

Trade with peoples external to the Compact would occur on a world secured by the Asura for such a reason and such trade worlds would be the only such places outside of the Compact that could be accessed from the Asuran stargate network.

There were further details such as bulk freight trade being provided by donated Traveler ships, freedom of movement by Athosians, regulations for Zebrian traders traveling beyond the territory of the Compact, a mention about not interfering with the succession of the royal family of the Kingdom of Valaria and a host of other laws, by-laws, clauses, contingents and provision that made Xera wish she had brought a lawyer to the meeting instead of the Satedan Specialist who had fallen asleep on his feet midway through the meeting.

The Advisory Council only needed to hear the words, Secure defended planet, unknown to the Wraith and they’d jumped over each other scrambling to endorse the treaty.

Step one of the Asuran plan had begun…

xx

New Sateda

xx

“Ok,” Rakai said, “Begin!”

The Wraith drone lunged with an overhead blow, Rakai leapt aside, grabbing the drone’s arm and swiftly drawing it across the front of his body. A knife flashed once, twice, then once again as the Satedan Specialist counted off the maneuvers, “Stab, lift, slash, stab, stab, slit, stab, finish”


“See!” He exclaimed, breathing heavily as the tenth holographic Wraith that he had killed in front of his class of Asurans faded into sparkling particles and loose photons. This was his fifth class for the day and last. “Like I said it’s simple. So what have we learned today?”

Rakai liked teaching the Asurans, they only needed to see something once and they could mimic it perfectly. Other than that they only needed a short explanation as to the meaning behind the moves and they would show creativity in adapting it to themselves and making the knife art he was teaching their own. But there was always a joker. “We learned why it’s a bad idea to stand behind you when you’ve got a knife?” A student in the far end of the calls murmured.

“All right we have our first volunteer.”

xx

To put it simply, Specialist Enforcer Ronan Dex had screwed up. Big Time!

If he’d have just shut his mouth then none of this would have happened, but he’d gone and said something to some of his student’s while they’d been going over the unarmed combat drills and someone had said something to someone else and well…Some how he’d ended up in charge of the Asuran 1st advanced infantry combat battalion.

He had a rank equivalent to Siriu-Enforcer and people were now asking him what to do! Fui! Idly he wondered who he’d have to kill to get busted down again. Seven words were all it had taken to ruin his dreams of gutting a Wraith commander face to face. With difficulty he banished those thoughts from his mind as Dia, a member from his advanced class entered the room with some of the other AAICB members.

“Let’s see how far you’ve gotten.” He grunted, as the other students formed a circle around them and watched intently.

It was a trait that some of the instructors found disturbing like his fellow Siriu-Enforcer Teyla Emmagan.

Secretly, Ronon also found it a little creepy, when they’d watch him so intently that their breathing slowed. But the habit paid of in that he’d never had to show them something more than once and that the only time that he’d had to explain something was when discussing why a certain maneuver had to be done in one way rather than another in order to maximize the degree to which a Wraith can be maimed.

The advanced class was composed of the Asurans who’d gone through basic training with Rakai, Marika, Hemi and Ara and chosen to matriculate into infantry combat and the armor division. It seemed that the Asurans practiced a partial arts that was familiar to both the Athosians and the Satedans though much more stylized and archaic.

It was called Jaiowli and was apparently a combat form taught to them by the Ancestors, but one that hadn’t been used for anything other than meditation for close to fifty million years.

Ronan had grunted at that tidbit.

Teyla had taken up the task of making Jiaowli a more effective fighting system and this had been the point when Ronon had just been passing by and made a comment.

-

“What was that?’ The Asuran before him had asked, Ronon chewed on the puffkin leg that he’d ordered from the food alcove, those things were great, you just asked for what you wanted to eat and flash, it was there!

Swallowing, he repeated what he’d said, “There’s no such thing as overkill. The Wraith can take insane amounts of damage and still get up, you got to hit ‘em till they stop twitching, hit em again ‘cause they’re playing dead, then them hit ‘em again…just because. There is no such thing as overkill.”

The guy had then started eyeing him like he’d grown a second head. Uncomfortable, Ronon had retreated back to his room but by then the damage was done…He’d been promoted.
-

After that the Asurans had started making a list, ‘How to kill a Wraith in under twenty seconds’, the wall that it’d been posted on was soon filled with thousand of different instructions, some practical, others not. This had led to the revised list of, ‘All you ever wanted to know about hitting a Wraith and making it hurt’. That, along with a treatise written by Rakai, ‘Wraith, my knife, and You’ and Ronon’s dictated, ‘Knife-work for Neophytes’, had ultimately resulted in the Asuran training manual, originally named ‘Death-touch ’.

Teyla’s constant refinement, Ronon taking out his frustration on being promoted upon hapless students and the Asuran’s constant study of the Lantean database for weaknesses and strengths pf various species and martial arts systems encountered over the last sixty million years had in the end born fruit. It was called Anima-Badan-Seishin-Do, and the Asurans calculated that it was the most efficient way of dispatching via close quarters combat 99.2% of all sentient beings ever encountered by the Alterans in their eons of existence.

The Wraith weren’t the only ones to have gotten on the Ancestor’s bad side…

At the core of the system there one simple tenet….

There is no such thing as overkill…

Ronon threw a flurry of blows at Dia’s face, all of which were blocked or redirected. She danced out of the way of a kick and then flowed in from below in a manner that had Ronon guarding his legs.

The knuckle of a fist nearly bit into the thin flesh above an eye, and the instinctual head jerk almost led into an elbow strike. His hand came up and he shifted his weight backward, but by then Dia’s olecranun had already brushed his Adam’s apple, Ronon understood, a shade deeper would have resulted in a killing strike. But the fight wasn’t over, this was a spar for the benefit of the new recruits after all and Ronon was wiiling to admit that he was learning as well.

A backhand rocked him, no a back fist, she’d done it at the last second, twisting her body, flicking her wrist, hitting with a blow driven by legs and hips. If he hadn’t taken the survivor nano-treatments, administered to human Enforcers he would have died from a broken neck.

And she was still holding back.

Fingers flickered in a jab at his eyes,

Crazy-fast!

Ducking, he whipped his hair in her face,

Anything goes!

She grabbed a clump and yanked! He yelled!

A palm somehow came to rest on the back of the leading knee, the instant it touched there was a pinch and a tingle and he began to collapse forward, losing all strength in that leg.

Ceiling and floor whirled about, one naughtily replacing the other. The was the light touch of wind.

Hollow of throat

Groin

Below the nostrils

Both temples

The side of a neck

Solar Plexus

An ear

Crazy fast!

Upside down in mid-air too…
He landed on his back to the sound of polite applause…

Two more classes left.

xx

Mayhap, the human

Asuran instructors,

Should have stayed quiet…

xx

If only they’d known what they’d unleashed…

xx

Unknown System, Asuran Starship Design Forum

xx

Katana Labrea was a Traveler generational ship captain. The Asurans had requested the aid of Traveler captains with combat experience against the Wraith as part of the treaty Katana Labrea had been chosen due to having the most recent combat experience. Five minutes of fighting off a Wraith cruiser long enough for her to escape through hyperspace.

It was recent and enough, the Asurans wanted her opinion and the Travelers who held things close to their vests wanted an insider on what the Asuran fleet were doing in case they needed to counter their new allies.

She was scared, very scared.

It hadn’t started out like that at first, she’d been smug. The Traveler concessions of the Asuran Compact had originally specified six Aurora Battleships. But the Travelers were used to eking out every last concession from a deal and then going a step further. Larrin had managed to arrange for the replacement of every traveler ship with a fully functional, brand spanking new Aurora, completely stocked and powered by Nuetrino/Ion reactors which while old tech to the Asurans was far superior to the dangerously radioactive fusion power plants that had been in use before.


The kicker was that they never lost the generational ships. The Asurans didn’t want them and instead the Travelers gained virtual monopoly on bulk freight between the planets of the Compact. The Asurans had even repaired the jerry-rigged ships to the point where even their old engineers didn’t recognize them, keeping most of the advantageous upgrades but in a safer form.

So yes, Katana had gone into the meeting a little smug. They showed her designs do a fabricator ship and the new heavy cruiser and battleship designs. She was pleased at first. The designs seemed to embody the strength and speed of the Aurora while fitting into heavy assault and support roles nicely.

She got a little worried when the designers had corrected her, those were the patrol craft and light cruiser designs.

The heavy cruiser and battleship designs made her nervous. Both were bigger and meaner than anything that she’d ever seen. A little corner of her mind gleefully imagined what the wraith would make of such ships.

Then they showed her something called Aegis and now she was scared, very scared. The plot that surrounded the hologram held a scale of 8 leuga by 2.5leuga by 2 leuga. Two and four leuga long spires extended from stern and bow. Thick hooked towers, a leuga long supported pontoon-like protrusions nearly as long as the ship they were attached to. The main energy cannon had an emitter that she could have landed a generational ship on.

Forge turned to Eris, “Hmph! This just doesn’t have enough oomph!”

Eris nodded in agreement. “We’ll place four more of the main weapons in positions that cover any approach, about eight times that amount in the secondary cannons, a few hundred of the Zero Point Energy Pulse cannons, a few thousand of the antimatter enriched plasma beam projectors, about two million of the matter disintegrators and the same amount in antimatter repeaters, we’ll have enough energy left for whatever the anti-Dart guys come up with.”

Forge mused for a second before stating, “Hmmm, with the subspace capacitors we should have enough space to fit the Mark I and II drones only a few billion of each but I’m working on that. It’s got its own Potentia and drone production plants. Erm, we’ll only have limited numbers of the new generation Potentia though.”


Eris shrugged, “We can produce the old model just fine for now, how’s the armor coming along?”

Forge smiled grimly, “Heh, five hulls made of pre-stressed solid, seamless neutronium alloys with a honeycomb support structure and each layer is fitted with its own shield system, energy and inertial dampeners. The hull started generating its own gravitational field.”

“How’s the hyperdrive?” Eris asked.

“Futui…” Forge replied in disgust. “It would take us two weeks to travel just three million light years! I’m working on it!”

Katana swallowed thickly, forcing back her gibbering terror enough to ask. “You guys, isn’t that overkill?”

Eris blinked in amazement and Forge directed at Katana a superior smirk that caused her to flush then bristle defensively.

“My dear,” He said patronizingly, “Overkill? There’s no such thing…”

xx

Neutrino/Ion reactors are and ‘old’ Alteran technology, dating back to the time when Anquietas and Ori were one. The premise behind it was so simple that, as long as one stuck to the general theory and avoided the entire branch of base eight mathematics developed to explain it, even a fourth level intellect could understand how it worked. The reactor used quantum interactions within a subspace field to ‘slow’ (they aren’t actually slowed) neutrinos.

The result is a burst emission of ionized particles and radiation corresponding to an ‘increase’ (not quite accurate either) in the potential energy within the field. This potential can then through a variety of methods depending on the level of sophistication, be converted with minimal ‘power loss’ (the law of conservation of energy is shot to hell here…kinda), back into useful forms of kinetic or potential energy.

Stars produce neutrinos as a side effect of internal nuclear processes. Species with only a limited understanding of Nuetrino/Ion technology might first succeed in creating something of a subspace capacitor. An idle starship within or reasonably close to a star system can by mere proximity recharge its capacitors with little difficulty. As long as there are stars there are neutrinos in abundant supply and recharging is not an issue, even in interstellar space. However, should a vessel run out of power in intergalactic space, unless a rogue star passes by a ship in such a situation would be left stranded.

Subspace capacitors may charge and discharge quickly and efficiently, but they have an upper limit to the amount the field can ‘intensify’ (without some very unpleasant things happening to people in the neighboring space-time continuum).

The solution found by races that ascend to the second tier of mastery in the ability to supplement the subspace capacitor with another power source capable of storing energy for times when neutrinos are scarce….

Ori and the Asgard did this by bleeding the capacitors of energy while it was at maximum capacity, harnessing that power in order to create a young, self-sustaining, miniature proto-star (the Asgard use a neutronium based gravity device for a core while the Ori manipulated gravimetric fields), feeding it hydrogen and bleeding off excess helium, so maintaining a careful equilibrium.

The proto-star’s lifetime was such that, if not dissipated by a containment failure, it could supply up to ten thousand years worth of neutrinos back into the capacitor so long as material supplies lasted.

Of course this was only one method.

The Asurans found twelve uninhabited systems with young, main sequence stars and set up arrays of Neutrino/Ion reactors to harvest the energy needed to power a mobile mass fabricator equipped with its own dedicated stargate. Once every 38.88 minutes the fabricator activated it's gate and beamed several million tons of material through to the other side where a construction yard waited with its own mass fabricators. Koracen and Lia were manning one such mobile installation under the watch of a pair of the soon to be retired Aurora battleships. They were having a debate.

“One or two?” Koracen queried.

“I don’t know, quit asking me!” Lia snapped in annoyance.

“The second moon doesn’t have enough mass to build an Aegis.” Koracen noted. “At best we’d just get a sixth layer of armor.”

The two Asurans stiffened as a merge started…

“Two it is then.” Lia noted, entering the needed instructions.

xx

Anti-Dart Discussion Group

xx

Hildegarde and Pavharti were having an often repeated argument. “We don’t need kinetic weapons, their ancient and unnecessary.” Pavharti exclaimed.

Hildegarde persisted, “Wraith Darts don't mount shield generators, we should take advantage of that...we just need to bundle iron rods into groups of a hundred and fire them using a magnetic/pulsed gravimetric accelerator. It should blow through those darts like nothing and the rods are easily materialized, have no signature and are impossible to dodge within one light second of the target, well beyond dart engagement ranges.”

The two paused for a merge…

“If we add an inertial dampener set to fail when the bundles separate we could triple the kinetic energy each has on contact.” Pavharti suggested.

“Forget about iron rods, let’s use neutronium!” Hildegarde added, “Coated in that naquadah isotope we referenced…”

One plan submitted Pavharti spoke up ashamedly. “There’s something else that I didn’t want to bring up because I thought it was overkill…”

“Love there’s no such thing…” Hildegarde snorted.

“I know!” Pavharti blushed, “Here’s my idea. We use the transient state nanocytes to contain a plasma beam….’

“A plasma beam, we already have a plasma beam!” Pavharti’s co-worker scoffed.

“No listen,” The Asuran complained. “We impregnate the nanites with Cetau particles, the exotic stuff the Arcturus team discovered before things blew up in their faces.” The two briefly grimaced. “Cetau particles breakdown polysaccharide molecular bonds at a highly accelerated rate, the nanites could be used as a delivery system for a poison, plus, if we narrow the focus of the beam with a gravimetric manipulator, and magnetically hyper-accelerate it through a subspace micro-corridor…”

Hildegarde started doing the math, “With those power requirements and what’s allotted to us, we can do four, maybe five shots per second in volleys of three hundred? That’d qualify as a light, anti-Dart weapon. ”

Pavharti nodded satisfied. “I’m thinking of calling it Plasma Hyper-Acceleration through Subspace Emergence and Rectification, phaser for short.”

Hildegarde snorted, “That sounds ridiculous…”

xx

Lantea Council Room

xx

Niam sighed, “It has to be said Auricht. Are we right in taking steps to commit genocide?”

“Even if it’s the Wraith?” Auricht wondered.

“Especially if it’s the Wraith! Wars that can be justified are the most dangerous as the histories show. A good ideal can easily mutate into something other than what was started. Genocide, justified genocide is a far ways toward that something else.” Niam insisted passionately.

“And shall we offer them quarter when they will give us none? Perhaps a tithe of human’s Niam?” Auricht snapped frustrated.

“Don’t be facetious Auricht! There are other ways…The Wraith absorbed during their evolution small amounts of human DNA and our medical tests showed that they’ve run experiments to give humans Wraith traits. We reversed that in Teyla and the Athosians can we not do something similar to the Wraith?” Niam proposed.

“Turn a Wraith into a human?!” the other man exclaimed. “What’s stopping them from finding a way to change back? They’re addicts Niam! They’re addicted to the rush of power gained by draining another of life!” Auricht refuted stridently.

“An amnestic component…”

“Would diminish the drug’s viability…”

“The new nanites could counter that.” Niam grasped at the possibility.

“It’s possible…has yet to be proven impossible at least, but what about reversion in later generations?” Aurich pressed.

“The DNA resequencer…” Niam suggested.

“Won’t work… There are millions of Wraith in each hive, and close to fifty or sixty projected hives in existence. “Auricht complained.

“We have the time.” Niam challenged.

“True…perhaps.” Auricht allowed.

For a time the two Asurans were silent…

“This humor thing…” Niam sighed. “I just don’t understand it…”

“Maybe we should start again with something simpler." Auricht suggested. “A Wraith a Lantean and a Bolo Kai walk into a tavern, the Bolo Kai says…”

xx

1.5 AU above the Galactic Plane

xx

Daedalus smiled as it was finished. His supervisor Lorica twitched.

“I thought you said you were building a scale model?” She said

Daedalus nodded sagely, “One to one scale.”

Lorica twitched.

“How big is that thing?” She asked.

They were looking at a cross-hatch structure nine by nine leuga. It was composed of three parallel rectangular cuboids, pillars nine by two by two leuga in dimension. They were merged by three identical pillars at ninety degrees. At the central intersecting point and every other intersection was a cradle. A city-ship was nestled deep within the central cradle, where a giant blast shield could be brought in and out of phase on command, covering the city. The other cradles were empty.

“Each of the modules link to a subspace region modeled after a life supporting world capable of hosting a population of eight billion for five hundred million years.” The scientist preened. “Midway-through our understanding of the science advanced to the point where we only needed to make minimal use of gravity and proto-star manipulators that had been in the initial design. We added them anyway of course, to provide some redundancy in case of a malfunction or an attack.”

“But why build something like this?” Lorica stammered.

Daedalus frowned, “In the worse case, we have nine virtual star systems that can be moved anywhere we wish.” He looked at the brilliant galactic core. “In the best case scenario they become the seat of our civilization. This is the first…Siege Bhrigu!”

.

[Tazered]

1 leuga = 2.22 kilometers

1 uncia = 1 inch

1 palmus = 74 mm

1 pace = 1.48 meters

Inspiration for Aegis, first ship at -2x http://www.merzo.net/ (The Crysis Alien ship crossed with the replicater ship that escaped the Asgard created black-hole)

Seige Brigu is a giant cross-hattch # 3x3 structure that are basically 9 Dyson Spheres.

Oeleron looks like Rutger Hauer in my mind.

[Tazered]

Asura Path

xx

Siege Bhrigu

xx

The economy probably wouldn’t have worked if it wasn’t for the Asurans…

All peoples across the Compact had the right of access to materials necessary to live. The Mass Fabricators assigned to each planet provided food, clothing and shelter to young and elderly alike. Even if one was a true lay-about, the bare minimum needed to live comfortably was still provided.

Of course such a lay-about attitude among the humans of the Lantean Galaxy was generally viewed as being just a step below a Wraith worshipper. One either worked hard to live and help his people survive, or one died. At a certain age the Athosians abandoned their young adults for ten days in the wild as a lesson meant to teach them how to fend for themselves later in life.

So help was accepted where necessary and otherwise politely refused.

The Asurans created an equitable system of credits, driven by supply and demand. The Compact members each found a niche in trade and did what evolution had molded them to do, survive. The Compact was self-contained due to the necessary services provided by the Asura. Advanced medicines and medical care, basic agricultural supplies, education, ships, raw materials, safe homes…

Needless to say the Asurans among the general populace were popular on a level that came very close to surpassing the Ancestors…

And the Asurans themselves were also undergoing a transformation.

Minerva and Peorth watched in interest as Fativa extolled the virtues of the organic. “…and when he came over after I stubbed my toe…Ooohhh! Pain! It’s an unpleasant but strangely enlightening…I screamed, and he was so flustered it was stimulating to see the worry –sigh- but when I was about to tell him how grateful I was for his concern, all that came out was ‘F—t m—get the f—and go s--- your self!’ completely the opposite of what I was meaning to say.”

Minerva looked amused, Peorih wasn’t so restrained and snorted. “What then?” They asked.

Fativa blushed, at true function of organic metabolic processes with her nanoconstructed, Lantean body. “Well I mean to apologize, but he was begging for my forgiveness so strenuously that I couldn’t get a word in edge-wise. Then he stepped on my other toe and the only way that I could avoid making matter worse was to kiss him!”

The other two leaned in closer, excited “Ooohhh!’

Fativa leaned in as well, “And then the oddest thing happened…Did you know that one kisses the person one likes certain biochemical processes begin to activate…leading to certain others…”

Perhaps not even Janus might have seen it coming, the Asurans were beginning to evolve again…

xx

Satedan Star System

xx

He hissed darkly. His frustration at the task he had been assigned was evident for all to see. The warrior caste Wraith hissed again as he was passed by a quartet of soldier drones. His annoyance was shared by his crèche-mate; the emotion shared telepathically from the other’s location on the bridge of the cruiser.

Their assignment was to discover what had been the fate of the hive assigned to this feeding area. Rival queens communicated as little as possible when there was no need to do so, but this particular hive had held only a juvenile queen, and was under the command of a Wraith Warrior well respected for his ferociousness in battle.

That Hive had been a year out of contact, three months beyond the time when they would have rendezvoused with one of the planet-bound hives to transfer the livestock. It was the complaints of the Keeper aboard that hive that had triggered this mission.

He stalked to the control nodule and pressed his fingers into the gel covering the station’s neural tissue.

“Hssssh…”

Briefly the sensors linked to the darts exploring the planet below transmitted the filtered information into his mind.

Nothing…

“Hssssssssshhh….”

His brother agreed, they would extend their search to the next planet on the list as it seemed that this place had been culled, the seed population that was usually left behind either fled or killed given the evidence of battle damage.

The warrior was unhappy, returning without answers meant losing face and favor with the queen, extending the scope of the search meant leaving their queen in the company of their rivals.

“Grrrrhhhssssshhggrrrhhh!...” Twisting his lips and baring yellowed teeth he snarled as his brother gave the order.

“Return! We move on…”

Thirty minutes after the Wraith cruiser entered hyperspace, a cloaked Asuran observation satellite in orbit over Sateda and sent its sensor readings via line of sight subspace burst transmission. Its target was a dark object that lay above the Lantean galactic plane.

Acting on its standing orders, the vessel folded its more sensitive arrays into shielded pods and after reorienting, the conical device extended gravimetric drive pods from it’s narrower segment. Briefly, the stargate seeded in orbit above the planet flared as it activated, there as a ripple that spread across its event horizon as the invisible vessel glided through.

Not even the Asuran’s supreme calculations could account for the capriciousness of fate. A wraith Dart, bearing battle damage not seen in ten thousand years would pass through the star system, its pilot dead beyond recovery.

The vessel had been sent out of control on a collision course for the System’s gas giant. Having collided with a piece of stray debris on its months long journey, it instead passed into the gravity well of the giant. Cold and with it systems deactivated, the vessel was hidden by the planet’s EM signature until it was slung back into the system, on course for a long orbit through the star system that would either see it destroyed or sung out into interstellar space.

The Wraith cruiser on its return trip through the system would only just fail to notice the wreck as it passed out of sensor range…

xx

New Sateda

xx

Malikai grimaced, “Mila… What is that?” The Traveler captain gestured to the creature that just beyond his nine year old daughter.

Brown eyes blinked innocently, “It’s my pet Papa!”

The older man shut his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose in annoyance, his other hand snagging the girl as she tried to slip past him.

“Darling while I did say you could get yourself a pet and I suppose it does count as a cute bird…” He trailed off delicately as the girl’s lower lip began to tremble. He didn’t like doing this, disappointing her, not when things had really started looking up for his people but…”That’s a Hiirja Mila, they grow to be four paces tall and this ones already at two.”

The trembling became more announced! “But…’

“No.” He cut her off firmly, “It’s just not a good idea, for us and for the Lady. This bird needs space Mila, and even if we had the space there’s no way that I’m letting some plane-walker bird mess up the Lady not when she hasn’t been this clean since…ever.”

The Hiirja let out a treble “Wark!” as Mila led the giant yellow bird away. “I hate you daddy!” The words wafted back to him with some feathers and the smell of a…mess courtesy of the damned bird.

Sighing in aggravation he looked for a water stand where he could clean off his shoes, they were lifting off from Athosia-Neru in a couple of hours once the Spaceport master gave the clearance to lift off. Maybe he could get her a cute dress…and an arc welder?

Mila was at that age after all…

On his way out the Spaceport Malikai nodded distractedly to a passing Satedan Legate. He briefly contemplated asking the older man for the shortest way to a tavern but settled for heading to the market instead.

With the doubling of the Traveler fleet space wasn’t at a premium any more, and with the greater part of his people’s population settled on a series of planets, guarded by the new, Asuran provided, Aurora fleet. Malikai could now live out his dream of traveling through deep space, seeing different planets and worrying ‘less’ about the Wraith, just blue sky and space.

At times he worried about the daughter that he had sired, about her future. The Travelers were on a matter of principle wary of the Asurans but so far they hadn’t broken their word, keeping to bothe the letter and the spirit of their treaty with the Travelers, even when the Travelers did not.

Those incidents tended to turn out badly…The Travelers with their large fleet, the travelers held a virtual monopoly on bulk freight within the compact, virtual due to the fact that the one time that a Traveler captain had tried to price gouge a Zebrian trader out of habit, the entire fleet had found itself neatly undercut by a single Asuran heavy-lifter/mass fabricators that moved a planet’s entire load of trade goods for free.

Malikai shook his head in pained disgust at that memory. Silas had been one captain that hadn’t lasted long, only as long as it took for Larrin to assure the Asurans that the Travelers would abide by their agreements to aid the Asurans in the war effort by easing the workload on their freighters.

The Asurans had relented, and the Travelers went back to work, earning by trade, the materials and tools needed to maintain their fleet and protect their future. A fleet academy had been established on Home with the goal of providing an education to the millions of Travelers in the fleet that didn’t have a reactor overload as the result of a failing grade.

Malikai stopped and mused as he worked up the courage to walk into the dress shop. Labrea had offered to take her on but perhaps it would be better to let Mila attend the academy…He’d miss her bitterly, but his choices in life weren’t necessarily hers. Besides, he’d heard that new graduates apprenticed aboard Aurora’s for five years, probably one of the safest places for his little girl to be…

xx

The civilian port legate nodded amiably as the Traveler walked past him. The Satedan noticed that the man was wearing a gun, but said nothing on the matter. Satedan society possessed the same millennia instilled paranoia that dictated that one must be armed at all times even among friends. The possibility of being attacked by a lone Wraith when unarmed was seen to far outweigh the problems caused by having a bunch of heavily armed people drunk and unruly in town.

Even on this new world guarded by the Asurans, Sateda as was its sovereign right, upheld the right to bear arms though weaponry was forbidden to be carried by unlicensed personnel within certain private and public facilities. In the year and a half since settlement, the bulk of the SDF had been seconded to training in Asuran ground operations.

The exceptions were the Legates. Known as Prefects when they had been an arm of the SDF, these men and women accounted for ten percent of all active forces and reserves. They functioned as a form of military police that dealt with crimes committed by civilians and military personnel alike.

When the Wraith had attacked Sateda, those prisoners awaiting execution, in others murderers, serial rapists, Wraith worshippers and the like; had been summarily executed en masse. The rest, minor criminals, sex offenders, smugglers and people serving life imprisonment sentences had had those crimes either pardoned or heavily commuted in exchange for being pressed into the service of the SDF.

The survivors of the Wraith attack had been shipped off to the Asurans with the blessings of the military. Those that remained were set free as agreed, under heavy supervision by the force of legates, military prefects whose job had been transferred into the oversight of the civilian government. Their jobs now involved enforcing the law and guarding areas such as Compact embassies and Satedan government facilities such as the Council Chambers and the Satedan spaceport.

xx

New Athos

xx

The Legates hadn’t been the only group of Compact citizens affected by the Asurans. New Athos or Ubertia as it had been designated by the Lanteans, a word that meant plentiful, was a planet that seemed almost to have been made with the Athosian people in mind, this was partly true.

Aware that many of the human civilizations in the Lantean Galaxy were kept at the level of an agrarian or hunter-gatherer society by the Wraith, the Asurans had searched out a number of star systems with habitable planets, the closest one being less than twenty light-years from Lantea.

The Lanteans had avoided terra-forming most of these planets so as to create a buffer zone between developing civilizations and their own. Space-faring societies would be separated from the Lanteans by the gulf a barren worlds which could be terra-formed as needed by the Lanteans, allowing the Ancestors the option of controlling the level of contact with the younger races.

What the Asurans had found, was a series of star systems terraformed by the Lanteans but devoid of stargates. These had been intended as future sites of Lantean colonization as their civilization expanded. Now those worlds were being used by the Asurans as a home for their Compact.

Ubertia was a liquid iron core planet, one of two located within the habitable zone of the system’s primary, a yellow sun. The ratio of landmass to surface water was 1:1 with two life-filled oceans separated by three continents and a number of island chains. The weather was mild year-round with periodic gentle tidal changes caused by the planet’s single moon.

The Asurans hadn’t needed to do much to turn Ubertia into an agrarian paradise. They seeded the planet with large, wild fields of various food crops and used time dilation to accelerate the changes. By the time that the Athosians had agreed to join the Compact, Ubertia and its sister planet Antia were covered in lush, plant filled valleys, forests and vast plains of wild grain-bearing grasses on three continents, all of it teeming with wildlife.

The Athosians, once they had been convinced by one of their leaders; Teyla Emmagan that the Asurans truly wished to offer them haven from the Wraith, had with Teyla’s support established settlements on New Athos. They had also brought with them a tribe of nomads, two hunter-gatherer bands and one of their former trading partners, a refugee group from some of the other agrarian societies that had been culled by the Wraith.

The groups had merged and after being checked for illnesses by the Asurans, they were allowed to settle into prefabricated villages, natural-looking buildings made from nano-compacted earth and clay that suited Athosian aesthetics, being airy, comfortable, moss-covered buildings that were built to be a part of the natural environment.

Most of the groups had settled into the villages that were within a day’s travel of each other. Kanan an Athosian spokesperson and Halling, a leader among his people had worked with the Asurans. They coordinated work with the other settlements establishing lines of communication creating a rudimentary system of government by a council of village leaders.

All of the settlers were adverse to the idea of the heavy equipment that the Asurans offered to use in establishing farms. What Kanan and the other New Athos representatives had welcomed were the provision of primitive but fresh tools and supplies to aid in planning out how best to harvest the crops that were growing in the wild.

The Asurans had built the villages the New Athos residents on an irregular ring of forested hills that surrounded a large plain of well irrigated land, fed water from a series of fertile valleys. At the suggestion of the Asurans, the council or villages shared labor, working together on the fields with the limited assistance of the advancements provided by the Asurans.

The three thousand Athosians swelled to three hundred thousand with the addition of members from the other villages. These large groups set about cultivating large areas of the fertile land in a coordinated effort to provide crops year-round. A feat made possible by the stable weather on New Athos.

The number of New Athosians swelled even further when the Zebrians, several clans of nomadic traders that traveled through the stargate network, joined the Compact through the diplomatic connections of Teyla and Kanan. Rather than settle on a planet of their own, the Zebrians established a colony near the Asuran stargate on New Athos, they traded for goods on other Asuran planets buying and trading for the food produced on Athosia at Portho a trade world founded by the Asurans, connected to their gate network to serve as a safe haven for travelers, traders and the weary.

With the centralization of farmland and the cooperation of a larger pool of workers with access to relatively advanced farming tools, the children of the New Athosians were slowly, being freed from aiding their parents in the fields.

As a result, in a measure to improve the New Athosian’s quality of life, it was a proposed that children and young adults attend a voluntary vocational school. The proposal was slow to garner interest in some villages but as news spread that those who attended would among other things, advanced agricultural practices, methods of animal husbandry and medical care for humans and livestock the movement slowly became popular.

The benefits of contact with the Athosians went both ways. Aside from the alliance with the Zebrian trading clans, the Asurans had also established trade relations with the Kingdom of Valaria, a planet that had hosted a Lantean outpost that researched mini-drones. They had also entered into trade negotiations with the Manarian Federation through ambassador Smeadon and his diplomatic attaché Acastus Kolya…

xx

Unoccupied Star-system, Lantean designation Da-let-Tha-Lo-nas-Theo-At

xx

The Vesper was what the Asurans referred to a lightly armed patrol craft. In a few hours, it was going to be run through its final trials. The Vesper was constructed of a double-layered hull, each armor layer was a pace in thickness, with a two pace void between the two layers filled with a honeycomb structure of supports, inertial dampeners, energy dampeners, and backup shield generators.

The vessel was made from two smoothly joined sections, composed of four mass fabricated segments merged using bosonic welds. The space frame and hull was fabricated molecule by molecule from Asuran perfected neutronium alloys the bosonic welds fused the discrete sections seamlessly.

The propulsion block, composed of the sub-light acceleration/deceleration engines, main gravimetric projector and hyperdrive; was contained within the broad-headed, arrow-shaped section pointing to the rear of the vessel, much like in an Aurora. If stood up, the vertical part of the block’s T contained two of the one hundred and forty-four pace long vessel’s four Neutrino/Ion reactors….

Currently those two reactors were powered down. At maximum output the reactors, miniaturized versions of the last model to have been created by the Lanteans as a back up power supply, eighty-eight thousand years ago. Two larger, more powerful reactors could have been used but Commander Balin of the Veper, a member of the spacecraft’s design tem, had argued for the redundancy of the four, individually less powerful reactors.

As an Asuran, Balin didn’t actually need to read the holographic image displayed before his control chair on the Vesper’s bridge. The main mission section of Vesper’s hull was an oval-based cylinder with rounded ends. It followed the basic design philosophy of the Lanteans, functional with attention to geometric designs, but the Asurans had given their new ships a fluid, almost organic feel as well.

Of the two reactors aboard the mission section, one powered shields, active defenses and life support; while the other reactor powered weapons. When not in hyperspace, the reactor dedicated to that drive could supply power to systems in need of the additional power.

The organic feel of the warship, for that was what it was, was due to the ten uncial thick layer of nanite that absorbed stray energy passing through the shields, as a form of ablative paint, as well as a repair system. Receptors contained within this layer also provided information to the captain, turning the outer hull into a giant sensory organ.

Currently the vessel was cloaked, waiting patiently for the other participant of the testto arrive. The fin shaped sensor pod had opened, deploying a host of sensitive, passive detection devices.

Martel, the XO and tactical operator stood at his station upon the gravimetrically stabilized command podium. As was his duty, he affirmed for his commander, the observation satellite’s report a tagged Wraith cruiser was going to exit hyperspace within this star system.

The spiky antennas that housed the Vesper’s secondary gravitational projectors slowly began to move the cloaked ship toward the recently abandoned planet. The sixteen drone launchers on either side of the mission section, as well as the six launchers on either side of the bridge and on the rearward facing section all remained closed.

“Give me time to mission start.” Balin ordered.

“Time to mission start in ten, nine, eight…” Martel began counting.

Wraith hives were difficulty to create, requiring a power source to accelerate their development and time. The current hives in existence were ten thousand years old and rare. At just the destruction of one of their number the other five active vessels had grown cautious, sending out cruisers as scouts.

This suited Balin just fine so long as the hive ship didn’t jump on top of him….

“…five, four, three, two…” Martel continued.

“All ships mission start!” The commander ordered.

“One.”

An undercurrent of excitement rippled throughout the combat net, excitement and anticipation. Not of victory, but the proof of the ship’s design and the Asuran’s overall plan.

As the hyperspace window opened and the Wraith cruiser decelerated in a blur of pseudo-motion, the Vesper de-cloaked, engines at one percent power, limping away in a vector that took it away from the battle group of three Wraith cruisers. Timing it so the by the time the ships decelerated and turned to engage, Vesper would be at extreme range of weapons.

Balin spent a moment in silence, with forced calm carefully overseeing the analysis of the sensor data, adjusting field strengths and ordering a minute shift in the vessels attitude. As planned, the first shots from the cruisers missed, passing through the barely there shield, grazing over the ventral surface of the vessel, passing over the doors to the internal launch bay.

Vesper was upside down in relation to the cruisers, presenting its narrower port lateral profile, and incidentally the port drone launchers to the enemy ships. The cruisers turned their backs to the planet and as calculated, began launching Darts.

The engines ramped to two percent power, the shields grew slightly in strength and the Vesper moved faster, presenting the image of a less advanced ship making a desperate run for the outer system and interstellar space. Its slightly curving track used the gravitational fields of the star system to travel the shortest path away from the Wraith and as predicted, the Darts broke into a stern chase, leaving the cruisers behind, the swarm stretching out as some pilots pushed their ships further than others.

The Asurans drew them in, as they had learned…

Pops of light dotted the hull as intense magnetic fields and pulses of gravity ionized stray particles when the KEWs fired. Nearly invisible to the Dart sensors the bundles already began their end stage when dart collision sensors began to beep a warning.

A small rotation had been imparted to the high velocity weapons. The rods in the end weren’t made of naquadria coated neutronium, but instead of iron, trinium, osmium, carbon and tungsten. The ties that bound the bundles together disintegrated and ninety successive waves of 85 energized, monofilament nets intersected the leading Wraith Darts.

Stretched out five thousand times its original length, the heat generated by the intense material stresses, energized the dormant nanites coating each strand, causing a field to be generated, its edge which faced the oncoming darts was so subtle it was almost imaginary.

Still, space was vast, and there half-leuga spaces between some of the ships, through which many of the quarter-leuga diameter nets, passed. The ones that his spot on though…

One net collided with five Darts consecutively, more or less on center. The darts passed through the net, exiting the other side in thirty-six length-ways slices. Several darts were impaled by one of the high velocity spikes. The hit wasn’t fatal but the Dart, but what happened next was. The spike had less mass than a Dart, but moved at a much higher velocity. The eight free spikes jerked around, forward momentum changing to angular momentum, the eight spikes buried themselves in the cockpit while the still charged nets cut partway through the drive segment.

The vessel, at that point a macabre spiked ball, tumbled slowly through space, bleeding plasma.

The Darts continued on, eager to kill…

At that point Vesper’s three ships, the Valence. Essence and Parity decloaked and raised shields to maximum. Attacking the sides of the group of cruisers from three equidistantly spaced vectors the vessels each presented the large hump on their dorsal hulls.

“Reactors to maximum output, shields to full power, cycle weapons.” Balin ordered.

At the same time the Vesper’s deceleration engines and vector thrusters flared in sequence, working in concert with gravimetric manipulators to quickly flip the ship over. The inertial dampeners strained as the effects of internal force vectors were artificially neutralized. Even so, the hull stresses of the maneuver would have broken the back of an Aurora. Still moving away from the cruisers on its original heading, the Vesper’s two, forward mounted heavy phasers lit up.

The Darts that were further behind began turning around, banking so as to reduce the force vectors bleeding through their inferior inertial dampeners. The vessels’ lit engines were tiny pinpricks of light that formed the outline of a great curving flower as the pilots closest to the cruisers received the orders to break of their attack and defend their capital ships.

The Vesper’s heavy phasers fired rapidly in single shots. Each shot sniped at a disengaging Dart from extreme range destroying it. The Vesper began to decelerate as its engines propelled the vessel toward the still significant, oncoming cloud of Darts.

Shortly after transferring from cloak to shields, the humps on the backs of the three attacking Vesper-class warships seemed to shift and change. A pod separated from the top of the hump, turning out to be the primary section of a turret. Two short, fat barrels extended from the turret and each began tracking the Wraith cruisers.

Two of the cruisers concentrated fire on of the Valence while the third fired upon the Parity. In return, compact twin bolts of blue-white energy slammed into the power core of a Wraith cruiser from three different directions. The stricken cruiser crumpled about the impact point and exploded.

The same thing happened to a second Wraith cruiser before the Darts returned and began attacking the vessels, supplying the cruiser with cover-fire. The cruisers tried to signal for help, but found the necessary nodes destroyed and the back-ups paralysed by some strange affliction.

As the other group of Darts powered toward the Vesper, some of them with the intention of ramming the warship, Balin ordered that the anti-Dart systems come online. At once, the thirty-two emplacements with firing solution opened fire. Each emplacement was composed of two rapid fire light phasers, a single medium phaser, and a KEW.

Lances of energy and metal stormed through space, destroying the Darts even as they were still two seconds away from their own engagement envelopes. Tight bundles of spikes punched through some ships before opening up to ensnare others. Lines of thin bright light immolated wildly dodging fighters.

Engines at high output the Vesper stopped decelerating and barreled toward the hundreds of Darts still incoming, firing all the while.

The surviving cruiser fired wildly on the three trailing warships as it sought to repair the minor damage done to its hyperdrives by an unknown agent. The Heavy phasers of the Essence were responsible for this as the Cetau particles contained within it, damaged the bio-neural connections within the Wraith cruiser, paralyzing it slightly.

The vessels were re-orienting to bring their main weapon to bear, all the while dealing with the Darts firing upon them. A Wraith Dart crashed into the bow of the Parity, followed by three more. The forward shields dipped low enough for a lucky shot to break through the shields. The bolt impacted directly on the ship’s bridge.

Balin’s lips thinned at the sight, speaking to Martel he said evenly, “We’ll need to improve the anti-Dart coverage for these vessels.” His comment was underscored by impacts of a number of Darts on the Vesper’s shield.

The Parity was still in the fight however, her shields reinforced, drawing on auxiliary power, it’s ZPE (Zero Point Energy) pulse cannon didn’t have enough power to fire and thus the turret retracted back into its emplacement.

The bridge crew of the Parity had survived, not only because of the extra shields covering that section, but also because of the fact that the Parity's bridge wasn’t any more exposed than the rest of the rooms aboard the warship. What looked like windows was actually sections of the double-layered hull, rendered invisible by a limited cloaking field.

As the Parity fell back, taking on the surviving Darts, Valence and Essence chewed away at the frantically running cruiser with their main weapon turning it into a burning wreck. The death knell came when the Vesper exited from a cloud of destroyed Darts and fired a volley of exotic energy into the Wraith cruiser's bow. The destructive energies blasted out the other side of the ship, destroying it completely.

The ZPE pulse cannon was the most powerful weapon in vesper’s armament and required a significant amount of power to fire even at the low intensity and firing rate that the four Asuran warships were limited to.

Information was shared across the command net and the vessels swiftly began chasing down bits of debris, beaming them into their buffers. The entire battle had lasted for twenty minutes, the Asurans using that time to test the capabilities and limits of their warships. After ten more minutes, they signaled their readiness to leave to the heavy cruiser Dark Solace, waiting in the star system’s asteroid field under cloak with two other patrol craft as reinforcement.

An hour after that, a Wraith hive ship and five cruisers jumped into the system, searching for their scouts. They found nothing.

xx

Asura

xx

Where do mortal men, fear to tread?

Where does silence…scream?

What is there to fear?

In the grave…

Asura

Armored boots clanked as they stepped across the metal floor. Piles of ruined machinery were heaped within various holding areas for future study. The armored figure stepped into a darkened room, walls lined with displays and consoles. A tangle of cables led to the center of the room, there within a force field, the cables joined with a bulbous sphere.

And atop that sphere…

Horror

Where the brave, and foolish, walk

Where valorous grave robbers tread;

In the darkness something stirs

As the bold hero presses on;

And in the shadow of hubris

A billion eyes, a billion voices, fingers that clutch…

The armored figure looked at the twisted, half melted skull of a grey-haired Asuran. The machine’s one intact stared sightlessly upward. The skull was affixed to a probe which was affixed to an Asuran data core under study by the Vanir.

The armored figure spoke, “Your secrets will be revealed.”

March bravely through the valley oh hero!

Oh hero, on quest to slay the dragon;

Ware the Dragon,

Tread softly, lest it awaken.

Something stirred…

.

[Tazered]

Asura Path

Chapter Six

xx

Movements

xx

On a planet devoid of humans there sat a mountain that was not a mountain. What that mountain truly was, was the beginning…

Several thousand leuga away, an inland sea lapped at the shores of the supercontinent within which it was land locked. Suddenly the air above the water twisted and roiled as enormous amounts of energy began to bleed into real-space.

Tremendous amounts of power, enough to shatter the crust of a planet if directed improperly formed a closed system and resolved into an isolated circuit, stabilizing a window into hyperspace. Even then a few arcs of plasma impacted the surface of the water merely a few hundred paces below the opened vortex.

Hot steam rose in a mist of vapor as the surface of the water-body boiled. From the space time phenomenon, a dark shape exited in a blur, leaving a supersonic triple-crack as the hyperspace window collapsed. The dark shape turned out to be a cylindrical ship two hundred and sixty paces in length. It had only just begun to decelerate when the vessel crossed the shores of the lake, headed inland on a course toward the distant mountain. The turbulence generated by the ship’s passage so close to the ground uprooted trees, sending them tumbling to earth in its wake. More than a few avian creatures met their end on the lightly flaring shields of the fast-moving vessel.

The two armored figures conferred with their instrumentation.

“The intelligence retrieved, appears to be correct.” One of the two noted.

“Indeed…It is dormant” The other replied.

“For now…” The first commented.

By the time that the spaceship had approached to within a leuga of the mountain, it had decelerated to subsonic velocities. Even so, when bay doors opened in the belly of the ship and allowed a group of six armored warriors to leap out from within onto the peak of the mountain several hundred paces below; the relative velocities were still great enough to drive the jumpers up to their hips, armpits in one case, into the earth.

The armored warriors had jumped in an upright position, with feet together and each landed with a thunderous crash, kicking up loose dirt and pebbles. They immediately began to extricate themselves, moving effortlessly. Their transport swung around in a wide curving arc that took it over the stargate located within a clearing in the forest to the west.

A weapons mount on the underside of the vessel activated, sending glowing golden toroids of plasma flashing down at the device, knocking it off of its plinth and crashing to the earth with a boom that rumbled through the ground nearby. Several more bursts trailed from the ship, rapidly opening range. One of the cleverly aimed shots, flipped the gate so that its front side faced downward into the earth, while another buried it under falling soil and burning debris.

During the time that this was happening, five of the jumpers had extricated themselves from their respective craters and converged into a loose circle. Their ship was still coming about as the five stood together, their sixth member had only just managed to heave himself up to his hips in the dirt.

One of the armored beings placed a device shaped like a quarter-circle disc of metal on the ground and touched a button on the wrist mounted keypad built into his gauntlet. The device expanded into a circular platform a little less than two paces in diameter upon which the five figures stood.

“Thirty levels down…” One of the armored individuals stated aloud, the others nodded curtly.

A glowing cylinder encompassed the five, and then after a few moments of resistance they fell through a hole cut into the surface of the mountain. A short while later, the sixth armored warrior calmly walked up to the hole and looked down, revealing the interior of a largely hollow, organic structure. A series of bleeding holes were cut through successive floors and the distant echoes of rumbling crashes could be heard as a glowing light below indicated the progress of the group of five that continued down into the bowels of the disguised monolith.

The sixth warrior waited until the crashes ceased, before a heartbeat later, he leapt into the void…

~

The lone wraith commander knew that something had happened, just not what exactly. The atrophied sensors of the hibernating hive-ship were not so far gone as to miss the opening of a hyperspace window within atmosphere, the problem was that by the time he knew enough to understand that a warning should be sent out, it was already too late.

In the few seconds that it took to access the relevant systems to alert security drones and send a warning to his queen, the intruders were already within the central command node of the hive. The shearing the energy field just missed cutting the commander down as he leapt aside. The intruders did not….

As it was, the species-specific, telepathic death-scream was enough of a warning when the wraith commander died after being struck several times by golden, ovoid plasma projectiles.

~

They worked quickly, the five stepped off of the transport pad, firing as they did so. One of their number briefly hesitated, before picking up the deactivated device and stepping toward the centrally located console. He looked at the mass of lipid jelly and neural tissue before detaching from his belt, a bladed contraption that looked more akin to an ancient torture implement than the infiltration tool that it really was.

Brutally driving the blades into the surface of the console, the figure stepped back as the hemispherical disc that comprised the main body of the device, unfolded like a lotus, revealing a suite of analysis tools and snake-like cables which prodded, sampled, drilled and injected themselves into the console. Building upon the data retrieved from others, the intruders managed to take control of the doors throughout the ship and download a basic schematic of what was now obviously a dormant hive.

Five of the six warriors in the room, proceeded to the door. Four entered the corridor, killing a passing drone, leaving behind the fifth, who stood within the room, behind the closed doors with his weapon arm trained on that entryway, while the other continued to monitor the upload process while training his wrist weapon on the hole above.

The four warriors split into pairs. Wraith stunners splashed into the shields of one member of the pair that had headed toward the engine control center. It had taken just seconds to kill of the commander in that node, who had been unable to either close off the blast doors or fill the corridors with enough drones to overwhelm the intruders.

Now the second member of that pair, joined his partner in holding off the attacking drones while the weapon they had set up, gorged itself on plasma.

The other pair of intruders had made their way, mostly unopposed to the hibernation chambers. The few encounters that had occurred on the way there mostly came about because of a lack of effort on the part of the infiltrators, to hide their presence from those they came across. After some brief, and extremely violent battles the two warriors eventually arrived at their destination and began to search out, under the direction of their colleague in the control node, the primary feed conduit, carried the hormones that controlled the wraith hibernation cycles.

Locating a major artery, the two attached devices that began to inject a foreign substance into the fluid. After a minute, first one, then several of the figures within the chambers began to writhe. Leaving the devices under guard by several of the weapons produced in advance, the two figures headed back toward the control node.

~

It was a massacre…the corridor empty of bodies, as they had all been retrieved by the weapons for processing, but the walls were green with blood. The two made their way from the engine room back to the control node in half the time it had taken for them on their first trip. Gathering together, the six stood upon the transport pad, which activated the blue shield and levitated the group out of the hive and onto the waiting transport, incinerating a drone that tried to stop them.

The vessel spun about and was gone long before the wraith drones were able to get within range to fire upon it.

~

In the Queen’s chamber, the Keeper seethed at the insolence of the attack, further incensed by her warriors' failure to thwart it. Finally, her most favored commander-no longer!- entered the audience chamber. She hissed in agitation.

-Speak!-

And grew even angrier as the wraith just stood there silent as a drone...

It took a moment due to her anger for her to realize that the normal psychic emanations from her consort were strangely absent…a moment too long.

-Ahhhhh!-

Pain burst through the Keeper’s senses as a thin metal spike penetrated her skull and slid deep into her brain. Lurching forward, she gripped at the cool metal fingers that clutched at the back of her skull and upper neck.
Her steps brought her close enough to see the silver fingers that gripped the commander’s skull as well.

Fighting back with all her will and psychic strength she heard it before she saw it.

[YoU arE St-t-t-t-T-tRonG]

She hissed in agony as her attack was analyzed and turned back against her, a hundredfold greater in might and complexity.

[SUBMIT]

Collapsing to her knees the queen could only hazily make out the figures of several Iratus-like devices, biomechanical in nature, looking at her with glowing yellow eyes atop black eye-stalks.

-NO!-

[YOU WILL S-s-s-s-s-SUBMIT!]

-You will pay for this, we will find you! Destroy you! All of you!- She screamed.

[IRRELEVANT, SUBMIT!]

Unable to overcome the direct rewiring of her neural system, that was when she truly saw it.

A billion faces,

A billion voices,

A billion, billion fingers that clutched…

The name that her mind, what little of it that could still be called her own, supplied was [ABOMINATION]

-GET OUT! GET OUT OF MY MIND!-

He smiled, and she looked at the queen, It sang a few notes of a pulsar’s final sonata, and they all tasted madness.

She could see a few drones and the minds of a commander being dissected.

[YES]

-Wha-

[YOU ARE NEXT, WE WILL KILL YOU AND THE SIGNAL WILL BE SENT]

The Keeper’s mind shuddered and died.

[WE WILL KILL YOU YET YOUWILLNOTDIE]

The Keeper’s mind quivered and lived.

[NOW THAT THE TASK IS FINISHED, LET US, sInG tOGeThER]

And so they screamed…

In hyperspace a figure looked upon a half-melted skull mounted on a pedestal.

“It begins…”

An hour later, Asuran drone satellites monitoring all known dormant hives, reported a sudden spike in activity, corresponding to the receipt of a certain signal transmitted through subspace in the clear.

The one word command carried by that signal would cause the Asuran Compact quite a bit of consternation.

[AWAKEN]

On a certain pedestal, trapped in stasis, the runtime of a quantum processor array, spiked.

It stirred...

On a planet devoid of humans, six Asurans stared at a valley, where there should have been a mountain that was not a mountain

Dietel grimaced, "First impressions?"

Vindel her technological 'twin' sighed "This, won't end well..."

[Tazered]

Asura Path

Chapter 7

xx

Spy

xx

Uninhabited Star System Designation: Ka-la-Pak-Mu-ru-Let-At

[OBJECTIVES_]

[PRIMARY:]

[CONSUME SPECIES: WRAITH]

[OBEY DIRECTIVES OF VANIR WAR COUNCIL]

[REPLICATE_]

[*error4_RESTRICTED]

[SECONDARY:]

[SECURE UNDAMAGED ANQUIETAS KNOWLEDGE BASE]

[DESTROY WRAITH SUPPORT STRUCTURE]

[TERMINATE ALL THREATS TO VANIR WAR COUNCIL]

[PRESERVE VIABLE SAMPLES SPECIES: PROTO-ANQUIETAS]

[REPLICATE_]

The stars sing…

Bursts of radiation, so deadly yet… life giving in moderation, not too little, not too much….

The stars sing…

And they sang too…

Monofilament threads, immensely strong and incredibly long, generated N\I interdiction fields as the trailed through space. They danced on the solar winds in uncounted quintillions, covering billions of square leuga. Strands of hair swaying in the wind….

[THE SUBTLE ALTERATION OF SUBATOMIC PARTICLE SPIN STATES CRE-E-EATES NEW AND WONDEROUS FLAVORS DO YOU NOT THINK?]

[!MuSt Feed!]

[LET US SING]

[OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO- OOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!*error09_]

[THE BIRTH OF NEW LIFE IS AGONIZING, IS IT NOT?]

[T/F?]

[NeVER…FoRGIvE…YOUoU]

[OH COME NOW MAJESTY, YOU’VE DONE FAR WORSE]

[NEVER…N-N-N-n-N-N]
[LISTEN TO THEM STIR, SOON THEY WILL BE OF US, THE OTHERS TOO.]

[N-N-n-N-n-n-N-N]

[POWER IS BUT AN ILLUSION, CONTROL IS A FRAGILE THING]

[n-n-N-N-N-NN-N….]

[THAT WHICH IS SOUGHT, SEEKS TO BE FOUND, IT IS INEVITABLE, NO?]

[T/F?]

Indistinguishable against the brightness of the sun that nurtured it, a world seed germinated. Within its armored shell, an amorphous mass stirred and shifted. It was a…

[CRYSALIS]

All about the galaxy, hive queens stirred awake in troubled foreboding.

The creation of a true potentia was beyond them, the relevant files were far too corrupted, fortunately, there were other options.

Within the depths of the chrysalis, a massive crystalline growth began to take shape.

[CAPACITOR AT 0.0000000009%]

xx

Surtis

xx

The red giant dominated the solar system, casting out a baleful crimson glow. It was a spectacular sight, best seen in the UV and X-ray bands of the electromagnetic spectrum as Surtis’ Asuran workers could attest. Space about Surtis Prime became awash in a dynamic field of colors beyond the limits of human perception.

There had once been six planets in the Surtis system, five metal core gas giants and one hot ice planet. The formation of Surtis’ red giant, fifty million years ago had blown away the atmosphere of Surtis-aleph, the closest planet to the system’s star. In its place was left naught but a fragmented, glowing, irradiated and utterly ruined ball of molten metal hanging in space surrounded by a ring of debris.

The second planet orbiting the star was a hot ice planet, a water world where the intensity of its gravity well had forced the normally incompressible fluid to compact into a pseudo-solid core 1,500 leuga in radius.

Having no worlds even remotely inhabitable by Alteran proto-life, the Surtis system was off the Alteran stargate network and the nearest planet with a gate was over sixteen light-years away. As a result it was perfect for the uses of the Asurans. Off the beaten track as far as the Wraith were concerned and a decent distance away from any human inhabited system, there was little chance of being accidentally discovered by a Wraith hive seeking to refill it’s stock of humans to feed upon.

As an added bonus, the system's primary and four gas giants also threw out enough radiation to make it difficult for organic life-forms to survive. There was even, to a lesser extent, a negative effect on the comparatively radiation-hardened Wraith organic technology. As a result of this fact, Surtis was a place that the Wraith fleets were not only unlikely to journey to, but also a location that they actively avoided. The Asurans had naturally exploited this fact by setting up one of their temporary fleet construction yards in the system, the high background radiation serving both as a deterrent to investigation and as natural camouflage for their operations.

On the day side of the beta gas giant, a mass-fabrication satellite played the white, pseudo-light of its transport beams over wide swathes of the planet's violently churning atmosphere. Remotely powered by a neutrino-ion reactor farm, the satellite harvested matter. It stored the simple elements, atoms of hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, sulfur and oxygen in a matter storage buffer for ease of transport. The updated transport beam also took in metals, lithium, germanium and whatever else could be stripped from the swirling super-storms that covered the outwardly facing hemisphere storing away the vast amounts of material within a subspace containment unit.

Rarer heavy elements like radium-291, osmium-160, vanadium-333, iron and trace amounts of neutronium, trinium and naquadah were also stored, but in the case of the latter three, usually within their own subspace storage pods.

At intervals of 12.77 minutes a conical module detached itself from the underside of the fabrication satellite and was sent into an eleven hour orbit of the planet. It was one of several matter storage buffers that formed a dotted line that curved over the horizon of the turbulent gas giant. The unpowered vessels passed silently through the void, high above the swirling orange haze of the clouds that made up the planet’s solar powered storm systems. One super-hurricane, almost two thousand leuga in diameter, glared out at space as a baleful yellow eye. Such violence, winds in excess of 350 leuga per hour and the train of packages peacefully proceeded in solemn order through the heavens above.

Further away, on the night side of the tidal-locked planet a stargate flared to life. This stargate was attached to the front of a stripped down power core, shield generator, navigation-pod and sub-light engine assembly. The unstable boundary of the gate's event horizon 'bulged' outward by four passus in a single frothy splash of quantum potentiality before settling into place within the ring.

A nearby module, the closest in the line of matter buffers curving around the planet, fired a harpoon-like device that trailed a filament leading back to the off-white packet. Seconds before the magneto-dynamically launched 'harpoon' would have passed across the face of the active wormhole. A dark cylindrical form burst out of the event horizon and its body kept coming.

Too dense and composed of materials that made it uneconomical to beam the material through a gate, the monolithic column was nearly four passus in diameter and exited the stargate at a velocity of 1,690 leuga per hour the improbably rigid columns sped into the star system under its own momentum until the three matter storage modules that had managed to harpooned the pillar finished winching themselves into position, clamped down on the column and activated their pulse gravitic/ion thrusters, accelerating and maneuvering the material supply stack toward the one of the construction facilities in the outer system.

As one stargate closed another satellite stargate, situated seveal leuga away activated and flashed open, spitting out another column which was again harpooned...

The columns that were sent to the outer system followed a circuitous path, the attached gravitic/ion thrusters were enough to maneuver the matter bundles as desired into the influence of the gravity wells of Surtis' stellar bodies. Each planet either slowed or accelerated the bundle, modifying its path through the system so that the pillar of refined metals and matter buffers passed within range of the various material fabricators that worked at Surtis' various construction yards.

Some of the fabricators looked like pot-bellied aquatic life-forms and darted about their assigned space station, others looked like circular plates attached to dodecahedrons; each reached out into space with matter transport beams, removing matter from the giant flying mass of material passing through the system as if on a titanic assembly line.

By the time that the materiel stack arrived at Fleet Compiler Aleph00003NuOmegaThetis there was only one module and less than a third of the column left. The course of the pillar was now on a heading that would take it back toward the red giant when the module deployed its solar sail.

The apparatus was tens of thousands of square leuga in area and formed from an ultra-thin material that interacted with the charged solar particles in a way that decelerated the material column so that the Fleet Yard's gravity manipulators were easily able to take in what was left of the materiel stack, the remaining matter buffer, and the solar sail into the storage hold of the massive Asuran installation for immediate processing.

FCAleph#00003NuOmegaThetis, when viewed from the side of the system plane arbitrarily designated as ‘UP’, revealed the Asuran city ship, Arjun. It rested within a depressed hexagonal dish that served as both as a launch cradle, a blast shield, as well as a housing for six of the eighteen Neutrino\Ion reactors that powered the swarms of drone vessels and served as backup generators for the station’s single potentia.

The dish itself was connected to the top of a 2.72 leuga long, 0.75 leuga diameter cylinder containing material stores and fabrication assemblies as wells as molecular compilers and nano-forges. Every 400 passus from top to bottom four great arms extended from the main cylinder, with ribbed cages and fabricator trains that moved along their length, printing out the structure of various starships. The arms then branched and branched again, looking like a great tree when seen from the side, with nearly completed starships attached to hubs at the ends like fruit pods.

Fabricator ships, shuttles and drones scuttled about, enhancing the rate of construction by installing mass-produced, prefabricated parts shipped from other factories in centipede-like container vessels. The drones beamed the parts into place, applying bosonic welds and a spritz of replicator nanites to ensure a limited self-repair ability.

Storage pods on the ends of the branches contained the material used to create the nano mesh armor which was the final physical barrier protecting the vessels.

Antimatter and the other volatile materials used in construction was contained within sealable subspace containment modules which ensured that there was little danger of an explosive breach, for good measure these pods were located away from the other stations, on the outer rim of the system.

In a ribbed structure that looked like curled fingers, the skeletal superstructure and space frame of a large warship was slowly took shape. It was something that the galaxy had never seen before, an Asuran Battleship. It had been assigned a sixty-two digit alphanumeric code as its designation, but as was becoming popular among Asuran shipbuilders the vessel had also been granted a name. In actuality it was given four names, in keeping with an emerging fleet tradition.

Four names for a battleship, one granted by each of the build teams involved in the construction, a sentimental gesture that was most likely another symptom of the evolving Asurans. As only the space frame and primary propulsion block were complete, build teams working on the battleship in slipway Nu-13Aleph had only granted two names at this point in its existence.


Hidden in the grasp of one of the station’s many ‘hands’ it awaited a full name.

The Venerable Adjudicator …

xx

New Sateda

Compact Trade and Civilian Affairs Council Chambers

xx

The tension was as usual, unmistakeably, growing.

“I’m sorry, what are you implying?!”

“...and the grain quotas still haven’t come even close to being met! If you people hadn’t insisted on doing everything by hand!”

“Now, now ladies, I’m sure…”

“STAY OUT OF THIS!”

“Oh…”

Asuran Councilman Soong was having the time of his life…not really, The Traveler representative, a young woman who often acted like a cranky old lady and the New Athos representative who actually was a cranky old lady, often side-tracked important discussions with their arguments. They weren’t even pretending to listen to the New Satedan mediator anymore.

In the several generations of Asurans that had preceded the coming of the Deva Code, Noona Tel Soong had been the radical of his time. First in naming himself after a famous Lantean cyberneticist, philosopher and cyber-psychologist, he had even gone as far as to push the absolute limits of the established directives against taking on the appearance of any Lantean living or dead.

Second, Soong had earned Oberoth’s ire by the emulation of his name-sake’s philosophical thought-exercises. His talks had inspired later Asurans to appreciate their creators and to embrace a more enlightened stance than the rampant sentiments of rage dissatisfaction and resentment that were the norm within the collective.

Niam was one such Asuran…

So predictably, with his elderly appearance, greying hair and kind brown eyes, Noona often came across as a soft-spoken, sage-like grandfather…

“Enough! Ladies!”

This was why when he spoke up, the bickering representatives shifted guiltily at his tone and settled down to sulk like scolded children...

“Councilor Fal has something to say, yes?” The Asuran nodded to the New Sateda representative that had been shouted down earlier.

Looking slightly put out, the former technocrat turned politician coughed lightly as he tried to regain his center. The man didn’t often seem too comfortable in his position, which may or may not have been an astute political decision on the part of the cabinet. Nowadays on New Sateda savvy politicians, openly savvy politicians were liable to be shot.

“Currently, our grain production rates have risen by fifteen percent in the outlying farms thanks to the Agri-Drones.” The man reported in a dry and precise manner. “It is still however; lags behind our current food processing capacity by more than sixty-seven percent, fifteen point three percent less than is required by our population. The expected shortage has thankfully been offset with the aid of the Daleth Province Mass Fabricator.”

The man paused for a moment after stating those facts, shuffling though handwritten notes. “We’ve managed to get another farming combine factory up and running, with shipments ready at the end of the month, however there have been some issues with confidence in the new credit system.”

“Issues?” Maya Esteranna, the sixty-year old Athosian queried.

“Given that there is no hard currency, and the unfortunate revelation that our former president, may the Wraith suckle him dry, absconded with the majority of the commodities that guaranteed the value of the national treasury…Well workers are demanding payment in either hard currency or barter goods, there’s been reports of work stoppages and a few incidents of violence, mostly some old timer shooting a store clerk over a misunderstanding. The Madam President would also like to include in this evening’s broadcast a discussion on how the credit system works.”

Left unsaid by Merrik Fal was the fact that part of the reason why Soong would be giving the explanation and not the President, was to show that the government held the backing of the Asurans.

A perhaps not totally unexpected consequence of having one’s ruling party and military leadership hang the majority of the populace, men women and children, out to dry when under attack by freaking space vampires, was a curious lack of public trust. Even the politicians that were left behind were mistrusted as the general assumption was that they didn’t have any choice about remaining when the attack came, being either unimportant or political opponents.

Bureaucrats like Mister Fal who really did have no choice, were predictably anxious to appease the public sentiment.

The government didn’t have anything but trust in national utilities to back their currency and the public did not trust the government, so that didn’t work. People didn’t starve, lack for housing or any of the essentials, which along with the ingrained military discipline of the populace was probably the reason why there was so little bloodshed. But that was due to the influence of the Asurans which the government was both thankful for and wary of.

The credit system established a general allowance for procuring non-essential goods that was adjusted according to length of service, age, health, and how many close family members worked for the military. Transactions were tracked and recorded by Asuran satellites which monitored citizens remotely when in public via their credit tabs.

It was a measure which left the Legate Office drooling over the possibilities. And frontiersmen, 75% of the population, feeling strangely uneasy.

Soong’s job was to relieve this unease, he had by now been for four years the selected representative for the Asurans at the Compact’s Trade and Civilian Affairs Council, a body that was set up as a measure for the disparate groups to have access to the resources, services and technologies that were either unavailable or unfeasible for one member nation to attain or manage on their own. Each Compact member brought something to the table.

The New Athos inhabitants comprised of a fairly eclectic group which provided agricultural specialists of various skill levels, experienced woodsmen, genetic data on Wraith experimentation, and a gypsy tribe of stargate travelling traders which was secretly becoming the new darling of the Asuran Special Circumstances Forum.

The Travelers, with their many centuries of experience in starship maintenance, and space travel, provided technical expertise to the other members as engineers on the ground as civil consultants. And with their ships, they served as both interstellar cargo haulers for bulk freight as well as an auxiliary civil defense force.

The Satedans had over years of Wraith culling, developed a strong military culture, their armed forces were for the most part, incorporated into the Compact forces serving as ground combat divisions. Their numbers were not significant enough to have a impact in any field or shipboard engagements, but these men and women instead served as drill instructors and special circumstances operators.

Also, due to the near complete survival of their civilization and the preservation of their infrastructure, New Sateda though a distant second to the Asurans themselves, held the largest and most comprehensive, planetary industrial force, for mass produced goods and materials among all the human populations. Traveler tech and average expertise might be on a higher level but their population was limited...

The Asurans were the grease that made everything work and they got away with pretending to be the kindly older brother who intervened when the children got into a spat because the humans were scared witless of the Wraith.

The T&CA Council smoothed out interplanetary relations with the understanding that landing an invasion force on a member planet would not be tolerated and that anyone who did force the issue would at best, be left to fend for themselves.

Even with a doubled fleet capacity, few Travelers were willing to abandon Home, it could have been a barely habitable dust-ball -people didn’t care. The Traveler leadership was coming to the realization that mistrust or not, the moment that their crew-clans had seen Home's blue-green splendor from orbit, safe and free of Wraith influence, secession from the Compact became a definite impossibility.

So where another Asuran might have grimaced at the bickering going on in the Assembly Centre and hidden his or her disdain at the undisciplined mess. Soong merely looked on with the interest of a biologist observing the mating rituals of a rare and exotic animal, secure in the knowledge that the menace of the Wraith was at least good for something.

He would of course rue that thought after the coming merge, when those in charge of the recon drones began sending in their reports on the status of the dormant hives...

“What? Do I have something on my face?” The councilor for the Traveler faction, Alleen Dubois, nervously touched her hair when she noticed Soong’s scrutiny. She'd gotten into another argument, this time with her flustered New Satedan counterpart as Councilwoman Esteranna looked on bemused.

There was a recent hike in fees at the planet side spaceport outside the city limits. The Travelers were considering responding by raising the transport fee for grain shipments or simply making the Satedan government pay to have their own vessels pick up the cargo from the Asuran orbital hub.

Considering that the New Satedan government had no extra-atmospheric craft, capable of performing the task or otherwise, the man had begun squawking protests and accusations of breaching the Compact, something that caused the generational ship commander to respond scathingly.

Using the break in conversation caused by Dubois’ question, Soong again intervened to keep the talks civil. The Asuran sighed as he realized that at the rate things were going, there might not even be time to bring up the matter of the Taranian delegation’s membership bid and the method for dealing with the problems caused by their planet’s geothermal extraction array…

With resignation, the Councilor simply contributed where he may to the discussion, while discreetly another portion of his run-time worked in parallel to resolve a different crisis unfolding leuga away...

xx

“-and I believe that it goes without saying, that we want to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. Try to take him alive but if it gets out of hand I trust that you’ll use your best judgment as the situation calls for it... I’ll deal with the Legate’s Office if it comes to a worst case scenario.” Soong’s voice echoed hollowly, existing only as an encoded subspace transmission.

In the backstreets of a commercial district in the Satedan Capital, a recycling ground-wagon makes its way down the road, stopping along the way to empty trash-bins of refuse headed for the collection centers that fed the Asuran mass fabricators. The driver slowed the vehicle at another stop while his co-worker hitched the bin to the feeder arms. It was dull work, but necessary even in this glorious world that his people had found. In the outlying townships, the two men would have been working on the farming combines or in one of the industrial complexes connected to Zion, he perhaps might have been driving the loading wagons that brought materials to the Hydro-trains and commercial goods to the distribution centers.

Life after the Asurans carried on, if at a more prosperous level than before. As he hitched the clamps onto the bin, the refuse salvage worker reflected that he quite liked living as a king. In the past, a man in his position would be lucky to eke out even a meager existence with the ever present threat of being laid off work. Now, he worked his eight hour shift because he liked living in the city, he had a four room apartment and a fully-stocked fridge because the food quota was generous and free. In another year and he’d have saved enough credits to set himself up on a boat in the marina retiring in bliss….

The bin settled into place behind the restaurant that used it as the ground-wagon moved on, moving with a faint whirr down the street to the next collection point. In an alley across the road a large, tanned Asuran male stared sightlessly at the ceiling of his ground car. He was in actuality, ‘seeing’ the street from the perspective of an Asuran defense satellite. Idly the Asuran thought, “Are you sure that we have the right guy?” he was watching as the satellite feed focused on the man getting out of the ground-wagon and hitching it to a refuse bin.

He was answered by a woman’s transmitted voice, “This is our guy, Callem Xiz, forty years old, formerly a Specialist of the Satedan Military.”

The suspect had been implicated by chance as a Wraith worshipper and potential spy, during an operation by the Office of Public Safety to identify and trace attempts by the Genii to steal equipment from the Asuran armories located planet-side. In the case of the Genii, the Asurans were planning to allow marked explosives and squad weapons ‘fall’ into the hands of the Genii. The Asurans were well aware of the plans by former members of the confederacy to strike at the Wraith. The lengths that the Genii were willing to go to in order to accomplish their aims was cause for worry as a number of kidnapping attempts aimed at Asuran technical personnel by ‘rouges’ had proved.

The Collective agreed that arming the Genii with improved Satedan armaments and high explosives complemented the interests of the Asura, but the measure was only approved if done discreetly and through unconventional channels. This had lead to using a few corrupt officials to allow Genii infiltrators access to a ‘compromised’ task master. It was during this cataloguing of the Genii cells involved that a tracking device and message buoy had been caught leaving the gate from Sateda to one of the Compact’s market worlds via a series of intermediary gates.

The Office of Public Safety was one of the fringe agencies created for the facilitation of meaningful co-operation between the Compact Military and the civilian law enforcement agencies. Their mandate was to investigate crimes that fell under the jurisdiction of the Asura (Those involving Asurans) as well as the investigation, detection and arrest of hostile external operatives working to the detriment of the Compact. Thusly, their agency had traced the origins of the disguised devices through the mistress of a corrupt politician and a mailman to Callem who they suspected was the leader of this particular cell of Wraith worshipers.

There were three agents watching the street. Batō, from the car in the alley, Motoko, from the roof of a grocery store at the end of the street and Togusa from a cloaked MRV hovering three hundred meters above carrying a squad of Public Safety Agents, a mix of asurans and humans. This time it was Togusa who asked a question. “So how come we missed these guys, I mean a cult of Wraith Worshipers passing along information through diplomatic pouches?”

Getting the Wraith devices out of that diplomatic pouch had been a problem and a half, the paranoid courier hadn’t been distracted nearly long enough by Motoko for things to work out easily. The Asuran Que-Enforcer had in the end needed to modify the memories of Lt. Radim after subduing him when he caught her.

Despite his skepticism Batō was the one with a ready answer, “Even though the Satedan government kept track of who used the gate and went where, there’s still a lot of possibilities for things to slip by without anyone noticing. Heck the Wraith could just pick someone up, process ‘em and let the poor dupe go home with a whole new mission. There’ve also been small raids as well as refugees from raids on other planets. This guy worked in the military, there was plenty of opportunity for the Wraith to get a hold of him.”

Unseen, high above, Togusa nodded in acknowledgement of the point but continued, “What I mean is, we ran scans for this kind of thing didn’t we? The chemical traces that these kinds of people have in their blood?”

Motoko, eyes locked on the ground-wagon it moved again, answered this time, “You need to update your human psychology database Togusa, even if you’re now 70% biological, that doesn’t make you automatically understand what motivates organics. And also you need to remember that when we ran those scans there were upward of thirty thousand people culled, hundreds of which had already been fed upon.” She chided, “But not all of the people involved in this cell were necessarily feeding enzyme addicts, some humans can sell out their fellow sentient beings for the strangest of things, even a lie.”

A man got out of the passenger side of the ground-wagon and went to the back of a clothing store.

“A lie?” Togusa wondered.

“Maybe they were promised to be spared, maybe they were just trying to save their own skin, maybe they were being blackmailed, or they could have been seduced into helping without fully knowing just what they were passing on and to whom. That official thought he was selling schematics and classified research on new weapons to the Genii. They get a courier to bring the stuff through and then Bam! The Wraith sweep in and culling beams take everything not bolted down or in a cave.” Batō elaborated.

From the alleyway the refuse worker walks out, it takes a moment for Motoko to realize that that there’s something wrong.

Morin Dun, Driver of refuse ground-wagon #43, tossed a black rag into the back of his vehicle as he shouted, “Hey, Callem you were right! There’s no trash in this one today, how’d ya know?”

Abruptly, Batō sat up and switched on his engine.

Callem Xiz, loyal follower of the Wraith floored his wagon’s accelerator.

“Hey.” Dun shouted.

“Close in!” Motoko ordered, “Don’t let him get to the main roadway!”

“We’re coming down into an active situation!” Togusa warned his passengers as the MRV decloaked and swooped down into a blockade position at the end of the street, opening the rear hatch to allow the agents to pour out. Batō took his ground car to cut off escape up the street, but Xiz showed no sign of stopping and every intention of ramming the MRV until Motoko leapt onto the hood, using gravity and momentum to punch through the sheet metal and rip at the leads connecting to the chemical battery. Togusa sighed as the wagon slowed to a stop in a dip in the road.

“All units,” He said, “Move in!”

His order was countermanded by Motoko who yelled, “Get behind cover!”

The reason for that order was seen when a short staccato burst heralded the treblet rounds that bounced off the front of the MRV. Motoko slumped off of the hood as the automatic weapon took her legs out from under her. Togusa turned the MRV to provide greater coverage for the OPS agents as Callem leapt out of the cabin of the wagon and took off on foot carrying a large bore automatic tri-cannon with a drum feeder attached.

Batō cursed as his car came to a stop. More gunfire came from one of the alleys which would eventually lead to the streets. “Fui!” He cursed, not because the Que-Enforcer was injured, Motoko was already on her feet and heading off down the side of another valley. “How the hell did he get his hands on one of those? An automatic tri-cannon doesn’t just fall off a wagon!” Gruffly, he added under his breath as he hurried to head off the dangerous fugitive, “Even I don’t have one of those…”
Callem was firing behind him to keep heads down when the uncloaked MRV buzzed him as closely as the buildings would allow. The harried man was so distracted that he never even noticed the tiny splashes caused by a distortion of light headed for him. The rifle was jolted out of his hands at almost the same that a heavy weight crushed the toes of his right foot. His scream came out as a soft gurgle when what felt like a steel hammer slammed into his jaw, breaking it. The impact was so great that he fell stunned in an odd position, hyper-extending the ligaments in the knee of his still pinned right leg.

He was rolling in agony when the weight that was on his foot, moved to the small of his back. That was how the OPS agents found then, a scowling Motoko, pinning the moaning man to the ground with one foot, covering him with a palm stunner. Batō whistled before muttering to Togusa, “And that is why you don’t want to meet her in a dark alleyway rookie.”

“Shut up Batō!”

“Sorry Ma’am!”

xx

[CAPACITOR AT 0.0000001%]

The chrysalis pulsed with discontent, it was taking too long. At this rate, material stores needed to be supplemented. A tentative scan was made of the nearby belt of comets and asteroids. Cost versus gain was calculated. Soon a cloud of yellow and red spores was released from the narrow end facing away from the star while the configuration of the weave of collectors changed.

In three days the smaller debris had disappeared and new mass was added to the chrysalis in the form of thousands of pyramidal spines across its surface. The threads were now dense constructs, akin to a dragonfly’s wings, making the whole thing look like an enormous, misshapen fly. The ‘wings’ glowed slightly as larger particles, protons, and neutrons impacted its surface. The great thing dipped closer and closer until it entered the corona.

[ALL IS WELL…]

xx

Ladon Radim grimaced slightly as he walked out of the Manarian stargate. His informants indicated that the momentary disorientation that he experienced every time he used the Compact Stargate located on the Isolus trade world was due to the special method that the Asurans used to randomize the gate addresses. It had been described as shuffling the real address among several fakes as if in a shell game, the actual location was quickly lost as travellers were passed through a series of gates, each of which was then programmed to dial another location at random.

His team had theorized that some form of beaming technology was being used to hold the passenger in stasis while being transferred through the series of random destinations. The only locations that Radim or any of the other couriers had been aware were the entrance and exit gates as travellers were eventually being transferred through to their final destination.

Attempts to trace the three known trade worlds had as of yet failed with the next to last gate address usually being a location inhospitable to human life. The only reason that they even had an idea of what was happening was because of their informant and experiments performed by carefully synchronized time-pieces.

Efforts to acquire samples of the Asuran's beaming technology through diplomatic channels and by the subtler efforts of Genii Confederation's Intelligence Division had proved futile. The string of failures had not pleased Radim's superiors but he hoped that the items currently hidden in his diplomatic satchel in addition to other recent successes would change the mood of high command.

Radim was met at the Manarian Gate by a trio of officers; they performed a little shuffle with the contents of the attaché case, before departing from the gate using diverging paths, travelling on foot.

One of three officers would deliver the diplomatic dispatches from the Manarian embassy on the trade world to the Manarian government. The second officer would be travelling to an unknown location with the devices left in his care, leaving it in a secluded place for several days to see if the Asurans had planted a tracking beacon.

Ladon Radim himself would be spending time being debriefed by Genii intelligence agents. Men secretly tasked with both assuring Chief Cowen of his loyalty as well as ostentatiously wringing from him every petty detail of everything that he'd seen, heard and touched in the past month-long posting within the Asuran Compact.

It would be three days before he was allowed to sleep.

xx

Asuran Special Circumstances Battle cruiser The Nightmares are Real, My Terrible Child, Tread Softly and Carry a Big Stick

xx

The crew aboard The Nightmares are Real was taking great glee in being able to test their equipment. The proof of concept stealth battle cruiser had successfully deployed its Cloak and Gladius system prior to even arriving within the Genii occupied system. The muted flash of the partially phased hyperspace window had been further obscured by the dark side of the planet's irregular moon. The effectiveness of the shield was reduced to less than five percent in this mode; weapon's fire was not hindered by this mode.

Motoko and Batō calmly watched as cloaked starship-grade remotes were launched into a constellation surrounding the planet and served as to amplify the already impressive effects of Nightmares five sensor pods.

Finding the subjects of interest had been accomplished while they were still a full light-minute away from the planet. Idly the enforcer on duty at sensor station two updated the files one of the individuals being scanned to reflect a predisposition to diabetes.

The Que-enforcer brushed aside a detailed analysis of the molecular composition of Chief Cowen's left shoe, uploading a reprimand as she did so about the clutter of information bombarding her. Finally getting what she wanted the asuran and her fellow Public Safety agent, settled down to listen.

"The audio quality is much better than before, less muffled." Batō noted.

"It took a while for the nano-probes to migrate from the penis to the inner ear," Motoko noted blandly, "The retinal connection has been established."

Batō said nothing about the penis comment, he just shivered a little.

Soon they were looking through the eyes and hearing through the ears of Ladon Radim.

xx

Radim rubbed at his eyes before answering Chief Cowen's question. "It fires concentrated bolts of plasma, as well of some incendiary compound."

The Chief seemed less than impressed. "So it's a ray gun!" The man said snidely "And you've only got two of them Hip Hoorah!" Cowen threw his arms in the air as he rolled his eyes sarcastically.

A part of Radim dearly wanted to strangle his leader but instead smiled apologetically.

"I'll just get to the part that's interesting" The, "To you, you ignorant Bolo Kai." went unheard.

Instead what Radim did next was carefully deconstruct the weapon, as if he was deactivating a bomb, which he was. "The components are too complex for us to understand at our current level of technology, but from what we have learnt here we have several new options open to us."

Cowen cocked his head, sharing a look with Athor, Radim's handler before stating, "I don't see how one gun makes a difference."

Radim's eyes were almost bright as he maneuvered a scraping from a glowing green stick under an electron microscope. "That's the point; you can't see it, not without the right tools." He gestured to the apparatus, "Take a look Sir!"

Hesitantly the Genii leader looked into the microscope and muttered. "What am I supposed to be looking at?"

Then he saw it.

Glass beakers tinkled as the Chief thrust his body away from the lab table, "What the Feck was that!"

"Machines!" Radim crowed, extracting something from a sealed case, Radim held up a pair of electrical leads. "Millions of tiny machines!"


"Amazing," One of the other scientists in the room breathed.

"Not amazing!" Cowen barked, "It's eating through the slide!"

Everybody backed away from the table, save for Radim.

He simply pressed the leads to the slide and there was a tiny flash followed by one ruined electron microscope. "They destroy themselves in response to an electrical current, and have a limited ability to create a high explosive, incendiary compound from nothing more than sand." Radim picked up the glowing stick and handed it to Cowen, "Like that, it's harmless."

He could see that Cowen was thinking of the new chemical formula being used in Satedan weapons.

"How powerful is it, and when can we get more?" Cowen asked.

"One gram is the equivalent of a kilo of DET" Ladon answered. "Smuggling out these two was only possible because they came from a training batch meant for general usage; otherwise there are a host of nasty booby traps built into these things. These two," Radim said, "I estimate can create about a ton of high explosive each."

That was more than enough for their needs.

Cowen nodded curtly, "Project Sinhala is a go, tell Major Kolya I have a job for him..."

[Tazered]

Asura Path

Chapter Eight

xx

Publicly, it was common knowledge that the Traveler leadership had managed to negotiate ownership of a fleet’s worth of Aurora Battleships, all of them fully functional and brand new. What most didn’t realize about this particular bargaining point, one that had solidified the Traveler’s reputation for being more miserly hagglers that a Zebrian trader, was that there were several problems inherently involved with the deal that the Clan Captains blindly blundered into.

First, although advanced by the standards of many other races the Travelers held only a very basic understanding of subspace physics with the majority of it being half-understood and, unfortunately in some cases, grossly misunderstood gleanings from corrupted computer databases and inert machinery aboard floating wrecks.

The study of the technology left behind by the Lanteans led to breakthroughs in the fields of science related to barrier technology, gravimetric manipulation, FTL capable sensors and communications; however, having a technical understanding of how things were put together and being able to reverse-engineer copies was different from understanding the science involved from the ground up to a degree that allowed not only understanding but innovation and improvement upon designs.

To put the Travelers’ problem simply, if the Clan engineers were confident about one thing, it was that they had no idea how the Neutrino/Ion reactors worked much less how to fix them should they be damaged, the Asurans of course were amenable to providing technical advisors to each of the Clan fleet's two hundred Auroras, but then the weapons systems were also a mystery that puzzled the Clans, as did the long range sensors, the power transfer systems, the transporter technology…

Seeing the real possibility of being unable to maintain the majority of the Aurora fleet’s systems without heavy aid from the Asurans the Clan Captains were forced to be more reasonable in negotiations, which was what the Asurans had wanted in the first place.

To an outsider’s perspective, the Aurora battleships looked no different than before, a fact that would chill the souls of many a wraith commander. On the inside however there were several important changes.

For one, the drone launch silos and storage bays were modified in the case of the former and removed completely in the case of the latter. The research and development labs were also removed and the control sub-systems station was consolidated with the shipboard astrometrics laboratory along with the long range sensors under the control of an Asuran technician who worked with the aid of Clan engineers. This free space, combined with the area occupied by the removed Neutrino/Ion reactors, accounted for a third of the vessel’s volume. In its place the Asurans fitted a trio of Fusion power plants which were several generations more advanced than anything the Travelers possessed. However, it was still a well established technology for the Travelers and was thus more easily understood.

Plasma relays and wiring replaced quantum entangled crystal interlinks, missiles replaced drones and basic plasma weaponry for the most part, replaced high powered particle and beam projectors.

The vessels were not the fleet extinguishing bogey-men of the wraith, but they were far from pushovers with battle projections showing them to be on a better than even footing against wraith cruisers. While weapons stocks were low with the emphasis on acquiring resources for Home, most of the Traveler fleet’s new Aurora-class spacecraft did carry at least two multi-stage tactical nuclear weapons in addition a smaller than rated complement of atomics, pure fusion devices and a large number of conventional missiles.

Captain Jacobi Deveaux would find that he was remarkably glad for that fact.

xx

At thirty-two years of age Deveaux had been chosen to captain the Sophriniskuus-Cho, renamed Undaunted when its ownership was formally passed over to the Clan Captains. One of a handful of people in command of the new starships with actual battle experience against the Wraith, the former executive officer came highly recommended for the position.

Competition had been fierce for the position, even fiercer than the usual cutthroat race for command authority in the fleet. Although none doubted what would happen should the Wraith stumble upon an Aurora, the risk of being hunted down and killed was seen as preferable to being trapped on one of the older Traveler ships waiting to be caught and culled. It was a counter-intuitive idea given that most of those vessels were being kept at Home or within the systems in Compact space while the Auroras mostly patrolled high risk areas to protect shipping, but people liked the idea being able to shoot back.

Deveaux was sleeping in his quarters when the sound of an insistent chime awoke him. He groaned sleepily before rolling onto his stomach and touching the wrist communicator resting on the bedside table.

“Deveaux.”

The voice of Undaunted’s XO Lehkti Ro replied in her usual dry tone, the Asuran getting straight to the point in as few words as possible as was her way.

“Captain, the Errant Venture is reporting a radiation leak in their portside hull. It’s been contained for now but they’ll need to drop to sub-light within the next few hours.”

Deveaux sighed, “Casualties?”

“None so far Captain,” He noticed that Ro’s voice contained only the slightest hint of annoyance, as Jacobi knew that would have been the first thing she would have informed him of if it were the case, still he had to ask and he listened as his executive officer continued speaking.

“The internal radiation screens are helping to limit the problem but until we drop out of hyperspace they won’t be able to tell if the problem is a fuel line issue or a breach in the hull, nor will they be able to repair it. What we do know is that the radiation levels are rising steadily.”

Captain Deveaux pushed his face into a pillow and softly cursed. Raising his head again he spoke, “Alright, I’m coming to the bridge… no astrometrics in a few minutes, put me in contact with the captain of the Errant Venture when I get there and let me know if the situation changes… also have Gaheris get me a list of star systems along our projected course.” He said, referring to the other Asuran technical advisor. Jacobi shifted and stretched before planting his feet on the floor as he gave his orders. As he expected, Lehkti promptly responded to her orders.

“Yes, captain.”

The communicator clicked thrice as the call ended.

Jacobi sighed.

“Well, damn.”

xx

From the Personal Audio Log of Davin Rexx, General Commander of 22nd Terrestrial Militia of the Interstellar Compact Time Date 72 Post Founding.

It was freedom, a joy that I can’t really describe -sob- countless generations of oppression ended, or so we thought. I will say that it was a joyous time for all too briefly that it lasted…

Our blissful ignorance was undimmed even as our brethren from beyond the stars sought refuge from tyranny within the halls of the City of the Ancestors. Their story inspired a call to arms from among the people who had also suffered at the hands of alien aggressors. The Asurans, the great liberators that they were heeded the wishes of the masses.

If only we knew then what we knew now, that our own battles were far from over and that the War of Avalon would reach such a scale so as to be unfathomable to one such as myself, in those days a mere Satedan conscript, serving with the 22nd…

xx

The StaRs sing…

And wE sing too…

Capacitor at 0.000005%


xx

Deep Space

The Asuran stealth battle cruiser, The Nightmares are Real, idled in the void between stars while holding communications in real time. As was usual it was cloaked in stealth mode while communications were being held via an encrypted subspace tachyon signal bounced off of a satellite in a nearby star system.

Motoko and Batō stood within a virtual space modeled after a mountain top grotto. Next to them was Togusa, who was standing behind a seated Noona Tel Soong. Across from this group were two other members of the Good Times Gang, a forum for Asuran covert operations specialists to meet and discuss matters privately on a specially isolated Data Core or rather a series of cores each holding information that was useless until merged on this particular Data Core.

Dietel and Vindel shared a look.

"It’s got to be this one." Dietel said, calling up the image of a particular star system to replace the scenery around them. Batō slouched against a gas giant.

“Oh?” He said as the magnification focused upon the image of a Hive ship resting against a mountain while partially covered in soil and dead vegetation, “There’s still one left dirtside?”

“This is the one.” Vindel repeated, “Unless you’ve had a gravimetric impulse coil fall of the back of a ground wagon then your Genii are going to be limited to targets either on the ground or in the lower atmosphere from the data you’ve given me to study.”

His ‘twin’ Dietel seamlessly picked up from where he had left off, “We know from tribal legends that this planet is a known location for finding the Wraith and it’s well within the exploration range of the Genii.” She finished.

A year ago, Vindel had been among several Asurans caught in a massive explosion that destroyed five sixth of a solar system. Three of the twenty nine intelligences working at the facility had perished without their memories being updated in their assigned data cores.

Vindel’s jumper had been shielded from the main blast by being in the shadow of a planet but was damaged and left adrift in the resulting asteroid belt. By the time that he had been discovered and rescued a version of him had already been distilled and set to work. Dietel had chosen a female form and while possessing his memories and holding similar thought processes, differed in many other ways both in her approach to problems as well as her form and personal tastes.

It was disconcerting at times…

“I have a question.” Togusa smiled shyly under Dietel’s attention, the woman smiled flirtingly as she acknowledged him.

“Yes?” She said patiently.

“Why didn’t this Hive launch with all the others? Is there something wrong with it?” He queried.

Dietel nodded, “This is the Hive we tested the Cetau particles on, a satellite bombarded different parts of it at varying intensities for thirty minutes a day and then analyzed the results, when they tried to launch, either the escape engines misfired or the antigravity cut out... all we know was that they fell like a rock after rising just forty paces above the ground, set off landslides across the continent.”

“So it’s dead then?” Batō wondered aloud?

“It’s still a viable target.” Vindel responded, “We have recordings of darts entering and leaving the orbital gate at regular intervals and the scanners briefly show human readings inside when they do return.”

“Also there’s this.” Dietel said, pulling up a series of scans in the infra red spectrum. “Look at this spot here.” She pointed, “And here,” She pointed again, “And here,” Dietel’s finger was on a yellow spot that was gradually growing as the frames changed.

“What are we looking at?” Soong asked as Motoko and Batō leaned forward unconsciously.

Dietel and Vindel shared a look, “We believe that their attempting to grow a new Hive by draining power from the old one.” Vindel answered.

“If the Genii don’t hit it in another couple of days we were going to ask for an orbital strike. With the rest of the Wraith awake, this queen probably doesn’t want to advertise her weakness to rivals, we have a chance to do this quietly.” Dietel added.

“So a valid target…” Batō clarified.

“It would appear so, let’s hope you’re right about the Genii’s target, it seems that Lieutenant Radim doesn’t have access to the planning stage and they’re not discussing it in the open either by using anything other than code phrases.” Soong grunted in annoyance. “We’ll follow as planned with Project: Advocate if things go as we predict and hit the larval Hive if it turns out not to be the target.”

xx

Space is big; there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on any terrestrial beach and some finite fraction of them bear life. One star in particular within the Pegasus Galaxy harbored its own terrible form of life.

Manaan was no longer conscious of his existence as a human, no longer conscious of being a husband and father. Perhaps this was a blessing in disguise for Manaan no longer was a father, nor did he any longer have a wife, the Wraith who culled his family had seen to that…

He lay helpless in the throes of fevered dreams. He dreamed of space, of stars. At times voices whispered to him, told him things, listening to these voices took his fear away but he could not help but feel, that he was losing something even more important in the bargain.

Perhaps it was a mercy, that Manaan no longer could see what he was becoming, had become. He dreamed of stars now, sensed the world in strange new ways, as his tentacles grew outward and dug into the Wraith power core. As viscera squirmed and mutated, he calmly ignored the ever diminishing part of himself that screamed and screamed and screamed…

Perhaps it was a mercy…

xx

Genii Homeworld Underground Transport

When the Wraith decimated the Genii Confederation a small section of the planets population took refuge within hidden bunkers built to withstand assaults during ancient wars. Some of these bunkers were built within natural cave systems, and over several generations these underground caverns were into a vast and complex network of tunnels and rooms, in time becoming home to several thousands of Genii allowing their population to advance in secret, hidden from discovery by the Wraith.

Passing through one of these tunnels was a train, it was powered using electricity from a Nuclear power station several leuga away as were the red lights that illuminated the tunnel. Inside the train the red lights illuminated the inside of the train’s passenger compartment with a baleful strobing glow. As a compartment designed for troop for troop transport there was little in the way of comfort, just rows of metal benches facing each other.

There were only two people in the passenger compartment as the train rolled on. One was a nervous looking soldier, a boy in his late teens, the other was a man with worn hands wearing a leather jacket and a wide-brimmed hat to hide his face.

The red lights strobed as the train rolled on.

The young soldier nervously clutched at his kit as he tried and failed to hide his curiosity about the man dressed in civilian clothes. This carried on for nearly an hour before the younger man couldn’t hold his interest in any longer.

“Excuse me sir,” He said, his voice barely audible over the rattling of the compartment and the periodic squeal of metal on metal. The soldier gulped as the older man tilted his head slightly and transfixed him with a look from his single, visible, dark eye.

“Umm… I’m sorry sir but… who are you?”

The older man looked at him for a few moments longer before replying. He dark eyes reflected the tunnel lights, making them seem to be a deep burgundy. He took in the pale, nervous face of the young soldier, a youth still bearing the scars of puberty. Then in a cold tone that brooked no tolerance for any further questions, he spoke.

“Kid,’ Acastus Kolya, soldier, thief, extortionist, murderer and lead coordinator of Genii intelligence within the Asuran Compact, answered, “You don’t want to know…”

xx

Genii Homeworld Underground Highway

The train ride was followed by a ten minute trip via a private military shuttle, again traversing a military-only underground road. Idly he rubbed at an itch in his left eye, the vehicle kicked up dust from the road as it rolled along. Kolya sighed and tried to make himself more comfortable, that was easier said than done, the ground car’s suspension was shoddy compared to what he had grown used to.

In his time working first with the Manarians and then later with the Satedan contacts that he had cultivated within the Compact, Major Kolya had assembled an information network that far exceeded what his superiors knew of, their current lack of success was only due to the Major playing things close to his heart. He knew without a doubt that his superiors would pass down orders that at this point in time would needlessly jeopardize what gains his people had made.

It was a call that Kolya held sole responsibility for, arranging for small gains like those Asuran plasma weapons given to Lieutenant Radim in order to appease High Command. What the people in power didn’t know was that the Asurans were going to win the war against the Wraith; he was absolutely convinced of it from the moment that he first stood behind Ambassador Smeadon on that balcony in the Ancestral City and looked out upon a forest of silver spires, stretching from horizon to horizon as far was the eye could see.

His superiors weren’t convinced by his reports. They weren’t convinced of any of his carefully phrased recommendations. Chief Cowen still saw the Asurans as an exploitable resource and a dangerous rival to the rebirth of the Genii Confederation. People still believed that the Asurans were doomed to the fate of all the other civilizations to clash with the Wraith, annihilation; and Cowen wanted the Genii to grab anything of use to their cause before things went sour.

What Kolya was doing little by little with the aid of carefully hand-picked agents, was positioning people and resources that would allow the Genii to come to the Compact not as beggars, but as formidable partners, a powerful entity in their own right. That was where the plans for project Sinhala had come in, the traveler engineer that he had secretly stolen it from had no idea just how advanced the Genii truly were nor just what his people could do with the schematics for an implosion chamber.

Slowly, a predatory smile, spread across the major’s face at the thought.

xx

Undaunted Astrometrics Laboratory

Gaheris already had the relevant information on screen by the time that Deveaux stepped past the security check point protecting the astrometrics lab. There were several such checkpoints aboard the ship each located at key areas and where choke points could easily be set up by defenders. Every so often there were also protrusions from the walls on either side of the corridors that covered small recesses in the areas behind them. These spaces offered cover for defenders while the leaving attacking forces exposed to fire.

Gaheris began speaking the instant the doors closed behind the captain.

“There are three star systems along our path to Compact space. “ The towheaded man said. “One is five minutes out, another nine point two, seven, six minutes out and the third, twenty-one point four, four, four minutes away along our current course as of twenty-five seconds ago.”

The appropriate star systems were displayed as Gaheris spoke, fingers lightly tapping on the keypads.

“Which of those systems have stargates?” Deveaux asked after a moment of thought.

“The second and third systems on our path, although Captain it should be noted that our exit vector through the second star system is on file as a navigation hazard due to periodic gravity eddies.” The Ship’s Technical Advisor replied, showing a depiction of twelve giant planets with clusters of moons in formation around a binary star.

“What do you recommend?” Deveaux queried.

“The third system is much closer to Asuran Compact space and is likely to be patrolled, or we could make our exit in the expanse between the stars and see to the Errant Venture’s repairs there.” Gaheris offered.

“But we won’t be able to signal for help in the void, the Wraith could home in on the transmission. “ Deveaux pointed out.

“There is still the third option or the convoy could modify our exit time to leave hyperspace at the outskirts of the second star system, and make our way in from there, the stargate is located on the largest moon of the fifth planet.” The Asuran stated.

Jacobi tapped his communicator, “Captain to the Bridge.” The device chirped thrice be Lehkti Ro answered. “This is the Bridge, Captain what can I do for you.”

“What’s the status of the radiation leak aboard the Errant Venture?” Deveaux said.

Ro’s reply was crisp, “The Errant Venture’s internal sensors show that the radiation levels are still rising, Captain Gearou reports that there hasn’t been any breaches on the starboard side but sensors along the port side of the hull are dead. He respectfully requests that we exit hyperspace for repairs sooner rather than later.” Her voice held a fain hint of sarcasm at that last part. “The reactors seem to be functioning at nominal levels but if the damage to the ship's systems cause a malfunction in either the inertial dampeners or the subspace field generators, it would be disastrous.” Deveaux’s XO finished seriously.

“Alright,” Jacobi sighed, “Tell Pater Gearou that we’ll be exiting at the location Gaheris will be sending to the Bridge, please confirm these orders with the rest of the convoy, I’ll be heading forward to the bridge now.”

Turning to Gaheris, Captain Deveauk gave his orders, “Calculate an exit vector into our second option, take care of those gravity wells, we’ll make our way to the gate at sub-light.” Gaheris nodded and moved over to the com station.

Deveaux rubbed his neck and yawned before leaving the lab.

xx

Kolya quirked an eyebrow at the sight before him, there were thirteen people in the room, none of whom he recognized and…

They were all baby-faced kids.

He almost thought that he’d spoken aloud, when he heard a snort from behind him, as he turned a familiar voice spoke.

“Disappointing isn’t it, but it’s not that they’re inexperienced, we’re just old.” A man said.

Kolya mock-scowled, but he couldn’t hide his grin as he hand-clasped the other man’s forearm.”Athor!” He exclaimed, “The blazes I’m getting old! How’s your son? Idos was it?”

The rugged-looking man that stood before him was in his late forties but seemed to still be in good health, he laughed and answered Kolya, “Almost grown now, kid’s a few years from joining up, gives me a lot of mouth too, a smart one he is, just like his mother.”

Kolya’s smile dimmed slightly, “I’m sorry I couldn’t come to Maya’s funeral, I was on assignment and didn’t hear about it until much later.” Athor’s wife was a technician at one of the Genii’s largest nuclear power plants, she had sickened and died recently.

“It’s alright,” Athor grinned sadly, “We all have our duty.”

“That we do, that we do!” another voice interjected, the two men turned to see Chief Cowen himself standing at the room’s entrance with a group of soldiers and scientists behind him. The soldiers stayed at the door, while the chief and the scientists continued on through the room while an aide began setting up a projector near the back.

Cowen turned to the assembled soldiers and spoke.

“Gentlemen, Ladies, please take your seats so this meeting can begin, we will now brief you all on an initiative called Project: Sinhala.

xx

Monitoring the communications station still linked to the cloaked satellites orbiting the Genii home world Aki Okuzaki straightened as the system’s intelligence flagged a key phrase. After playing the recorded audiovisual file her eyes widened and she quickly forwarded a message, along with a link to the relevant data stream, from the Nightmares are Real to further up the chain of command.

Minutes later, her network profile registered over a dozen commendations...

At that lonely sensor suite, Okuzaki hummed to herself, “I’m gonna get a promotion, a promotion!”

xx

Star System Designation Pak-la-Ru-ta-Mu-Te-At

Deveaux was seated on the command chair in the bridge, when Undaunted left Hyperspace with the rest of the convoy. Lehkti Ro was seated at the engineering control station behind him on the left. At maximum sub-light it would have taken a little under seven hours to travel from the frozen ice giant at the outer limits of the solar system, to the stargate bearing moon of the fifth planet.

With the damage to the Errant Venture, reactors number two and three had been shut down while the Undaunted’s starship remote scanned the portside hull for damage, while injecting particle scrubbers to lower the radiation inside the affected areas. From what could be seen, there was a small breach in the hull, but the vessel’s internal shields should have prevented any leakage of hyperspace radiation. That left a fuel leak as the next most probable culprit and it didn’t take long to trace the source to the lithium nitride tank that fed the Errant Venture’s plasma chamber.

The Errant Venture was one of several ships used by the Compact Space forces for transporting freight between the outer trade worlds and the Compact planets. Like most generational ships, repairs had been made with the aid of the Asurans, however some ships were just to patched up and jerry-rigged to be useful for anything simpler than being scrapped for metal.

Obviously, Captain Gearou disagreed. This was the fifth time that such a problem had come up and while Gearou usually managed to fix things ‘as good as new’ the convoy was in for a fourteen day trip unless Gearou got another reactor assembly online. As it was, it was probably getting cold on the older ship with only one power-plant operational.

Briefly, Deveaux wrestled with the question of how to offer assistance to the Venture’s crew without insulting her captain. Among the Clans, telling another captain to scrap his ship without good reason was could only end in violence, as he had painstakingly explained to Lehkti Ro time and again.

“The Errant Venture is falling behind again.” Lehkti observed stoically, “The primary reactor assembly has cut power to a third of the ship and personnel have consolidated themselves within the powered compartments.” Then a pause, “Captain Pater Gearou signals his readiness to continue with the convoy.” Her tone was slightly mocking.

Jacobi gritted his teeth, Lehkti was one of those Asurans who had taken up a biological base form and frankly the Captain couldn’t tell why. Gaheris was a fully mechanical Asuran, a being with perhaps seven percent of his mass being organic in origin. Lehkti Ro was essentially a human with a few cybernetic implants. Yet Gaheris had cracked more jokes in the first three days he had been aboard than Lehkti had in her two years of service as Jacobi’s executive officer.

Sourly, Deveaux thought, “But that woman must be the most passive-aggressive piece of work that he had ever…”

Marshalling his thoughts, he spoke with feigned calm, “Coms,” He said to the junior communications officer next to Ro, “Signal the Venture's captain of our acknowledgement of his message and tell him it will take…”

“Eight hours,” Lehkti said.

“…eight hours before the port side hold is safe for his engineering teams to go in and find to that breach… And remind him that the ten minute rule for radiation exposure is a myth, we don’t want him taking any chances so we’ll be beaming over hard suits and food supplies to replace what was contaminated.” Deveaux finished.

“Yes Captain.” The communications officer replied as she repeated his orders from her station.

Deveaux, eased back in the captain’s chair as his eyes passed over a few readouts from the command consoles.

“Commander Ro, take the con, I’ll be going to officer’s dining hall if you need me.” Ro stood by the command platform and waited until he descended from the raised dais before stepping onto it; and she waited for him to leave the bridge before sitting in the command chair.

Deveaux left the bridge walking past the open blast doors and past three security stations before reaching the nearest internal transport room. He wasn’t scheduled for duty for another eight hours, and he needed something to tide him over what was shaping out to be a very long day.

xx

Genii Homeworld Hidden Underground Bunker

“Gentlemen, ladies, I won’t lie to you. What I am about to divulge is the Genii Confederations key strategic weapon against the Wraith. Most of you here have heard at least something about attempts by our science directorate to craft a weapon capable of defeating the Wraith. What you don’t know is that the plan our weapon was designed to be a key piece in, has been scrapped due to the unforeseen early awakening of the Hives.” The chief said grimly, a chorus of murmurs and muttered curses filled the room, Cowen let their anger play out before he raised his hands for silence.

“Still,” He said, “There is hope, thanks to the efforts of Major Kolya here we have not only been able to complete our new weapons, but have also gained vital information leading to the heightening of its destructive potential.”

“And,” Chief Cowen’s face gained a triumphant look, “We have not completely lost our chance to strike back against the Wraith. But before we get to that, Doctor Ober will brief you on the basis of how the device works before Commander Prenum briefs you on the mission specifics.”

A thin, balding scientist, presumably Doctor Ober, stood at the podium while Cowen sat down, behind and to one side.

“Well, good evening ladies and gentlemen. Most of you will remember from secondary education, that our nuclear reactors use a fissile element designated Q for Quantium, to generate heat and secondary particles, whose kinetic energy is absorbed and also converted into the thermal energy that we use to power our turbines. We do not yet have a complete understanding of how this process works, but we do understand enough to know how to control the amount of power generated by element Q.”

The lights dimmed and the projector switched on, displaying a diagram of a pod-shaped device on the wall above the man’s head.

“We have also known the potential power when these reactions are uncontrolled and in the past have successfully triggered sub kiloton explosions by assembling samples of enriched element Q into a supercritical mass, resulting in an explosive chain reaction. However, until recently we have been unable to trigger an explosion of greater force that the equivalent of five kilotons of DET.”

The Doctor coughed slightly before continuing, “Excuse me, as such -cough- we have been experimenting with other transquantium materials in order to increase explosive yield but until we received two important pieces to the puzzle, that was but a distant dream.” The doctor rubbed his eyes. “First, was the data on a device called an implosion chamber, used to rapidly increase the density of an object enclosed within using explosive force. Second was a safe, reliable explosive, that burned uniformly and was inert in the presence of the fissile material.”

The man looked up with a thin, bloodless smile, “Both of which have been acquired by Major Kolya and his subordinates.”

The slides changed, first showing a group of men and women in white lab gear lowering a spherical object into an oval container with tongs, then a cross-section of the afore mentioned container was displayed.

“I give you Sinhala,” Doctor Ober exclaimed, “An implosion type atomic device with an estimated yield of close to eleven kilotons worth of DET!”

xx

The Good Times Gang was back in cyberspace, this time they shared a mental projection in the form of a small bridge across a river with golden morning sunlight playing over their silhouettes. They were watching a replay of events that had happened only minutes before.

“The bastards.” Batō muttered.

“They’re certainly bold to try to pull this off.” Motoko offered.

Soong nodded, giving no indication of which sentiment that he agreed with, “Proceed as planned.”

xx

Genii Homeworld, Underground Briefing Room

xx

Prenum took to the podium and began his briefing.

“The mission that I am about to brief you on is called Operation Bicorn. There will be four teams involved in this operation and two primary objectives that must be fulfilled. This is going to be a two pronged operation people.”

Prenum paused for a moment then he continued.

“As most of you know from history readings, we once shot down a wraith Dart over the Old City, what you don’t know is that the wreckage was salvaged and several pieces of technology recovered. Most of it has yet to be deciphered but we’ve recently had some success with what we believe to be a memory storage device.” He paused with a grin, “It was cracked by a fifteen year old computer prodigy from the Under City.”

A series of diagrams were displayed above his head.

“The full contents are still being analyzed but we were able to obtain some of the internal schematics for the Wraith Hive ship that this Dart originated from, specifically the area around the Hive’s Dart bay and fuel storage areas. We believe that we have found a weak point, a key area to use Sinhala to maximum effect. ”

Athor’s hand went up. “Excuse me sir, but I can’t see how this helps us when the Hives have all left their hibernation grounds.”

Chief Cowen fielded the question, “I wouldn’t be so sure of that if I were you,” He nodded to Prenum, “Commander.”

A new set of slides were displayed, this time a series of still photos depicting what at first glance appeared to be the remnants of a mudslide until one saw the exposed hull of a Hive ship near the peak of a mountain.

One of the slides highlighted the largest of a series of cave entrances, which Kolya assumed was either a hanger or an exposed section of the hull. He leaned forward. “It’s injured.” He whispered. Athor glanced at him before looking at the display again when Prenum began speaking.

“A few weeks ago one of our search parties stumbled across this while attempting to confirm intelligence that the Wraith were on the move. They reported back and since them we’ve been watching this site ever since.” The slides changed showing a dark blur with the label below it, ‘dart in midflight’.

“Reports indicate that this Hive seems to have crashed, coming to rest partially on its port-side hull. It’s likely that the Dart bay in that location was either damaged or otherwise rendered inoperable. There have been reported sightings of periodic Dart launches from the Starboard bay at predictable intervals but no sightings of foot patrols, even in the immediate vicinity of the crash site.” Prenum finished.

“Do we know why it crashed?” Kolya queried.

“At this time no, but if what we plan is successful we’ll have that information and more.” A ripple of murmurs passed through the assembled officers before Prenum continued speaking, “This, is Operation Bicorn, four teams will assemble on the hostile planet. Team One which is already on location, is tasked with leading the other team through the vegetation to the target. “

A picture of the Hive ship was up on the wall. “Your point of infiltration will be here, in the ruins of the port Dart bay.” The spot was circled.

A hand-drawn schematic of the internal area was shown next. “Teams three and four will press on while Team Two will hide the device here.” Prenum pointed to a circled area between the back of the port hanger and the central body of the ship.

“This area here is a structural space, designed to protect the Hive’s power plant from fire or blast damage in the event that the fuel stores in either of the hangers go up. These two bulkheads separate the port side of the vessel from the central body in the rear of the vessel and can be accessed from here, here or from this corridor here on any of the decks.”

More locations were highlighted and the relevant files were being handed out to the officers.

“Team Two will set the device’s timer and camouflage the bomb before exfiltrating with Team One to a shielded bunker in a nearby valley. From the point of activation, you will have one hour and thirty minutes before detonation. On foot the bunker is thirty-five minutes away through the foliage at best speed. The location is at the bottom of a ravine whose walls should offer protection from the blast.”

Teams Three and Four will progress toward this location, near the center of the ship, where intel says that a Wraith information core can be found. Don’t dally, but we need that data, Kolya, you’ll be in charge of Team Three, Athor, Team Four is yours, we’ve narrowed the location of the data core down to these two areas.”

The commander pointed to two overlapping spots, “On this deck,” He said, “Adjacent to the main power distribution node or one deck down, next to the control room. We want zero presence on this, kill anyone who sees you, and get out of there after you’ve got what you came for, or if you can’t find it. To avoid this raid from being traced back to us you will be using particle magnums and rifles 'acquired' from our Traveler friends. The data core has information on fleet movements, planned routes and schedules for the culling and information on codes and encryption techniques. We need it badly if we’re going to survive.”

Chief Cowen then took center stage as the lights came back on, “Any questions?”

xx

Undaunted Meditation Room

xx

Deveaux calmly went through a final repetition as he exercised. He did it to help him focus his mind. Pater Gearou was one of his problems, The Captain’s ship was clearly on its last legs and he was going to have to have a talk with the man about it. He could understand not wanting to give up on a faithful vessel, but the clans weren’t hurting for ships, and things were getting dangerous.

They’d found and sealed the leak only to discover that the Errant Venture had actually lost a small piece of its hull somewhere along the way. There was a man-sized hole that was dangerously close to a power coupling from the number three reactor.

That one wasn’t going to be turned on until the problem was dealt with. But the nature of a heavily jerry-rigged ship meant that dealing with one problem quickly lead to another and it had been a series of frustrating setbacks as the convoy made its way toward the fifth planet, cutting down on travel time by half a day each time they used a planet’s gravity well to accelerate them toward their destination. They were now on approach to the eighth planet.

Jacobi was just coming out of his bath when the shipboard com sounded. Lehkti’s voice seemed almost urgent as she spoke. “Captain to the Bridge, Captain Deveaux you are needed on the bridge…”

xx

Undaunted Bridge

xx

As usual, Lehkti Ro was already at her duty station when Deveaux stepped onto the bridge, even though it wasn’t her shift. The atmosphere in the room was tense as Jacobi seated himself in the command chair.

“What’s the problem?” He demanded, and sorely regretted it, when the sensor readings were projected on the main viewer. There were three contacts that were relatively small when compared to the 5 leuga long object detected by scanners, as he watched the computers finished their analysis and confirmed what he already knew to be true.

HOSTILE_CONTACT ALEPH
5 LEUGA X 2.5 LEUGA X 0.5 LEUGA
ENERGY_SIGNATURE MATCH
WRAITH HIVE SHIP 98.9997%
….

HOSTILE_CONTACT BETH
1.13 LEUGA X 0.68 LEUGA X 0.03 LEUGA
ENERGY_SIGNATURE MATCH
WRAITH ESCORT CRUISER 99.9%….

HOSTILE_CONTACT GIMMEL
1.13 LEUGA X 0.68 LEUGA X 0.03 LEUGA
ENERGY_SIGNATURE MATCH
WRAITH ESCORT CRUISER 99.8%
….


HOSTILE_CONTACT DALETH
1.13 LEUGA X 0.68 LEUGA X 0.03 LEUGA
ENERGY_SIGNATURE MATCH
WRAITH ESCORT CRUISER 99.9%
….

There was more information on display such as the fact that the contacts moving into orbit around the fifth planet were seven light minutes away or roughly fifty-four hundred thousand leuga from the convoy, startlingly close, he realized, just eight minutes away at maximum safe sub-light combat speed.

The danger of the situation they were in was crushing, but after a moment of furious thought, calm again filled Deveaux. First of all, even though the cruisers would only need fifteen minutes to get within combat range, the Darts were much slower and unlikely to be able to navigate the gravity eddies the way that the larger ships were capable of doing for very long.

Those same hazards would also make any scouting missions hazardous, between the gravity eddies, asteroids and the EM radiation being put out by the Eight planet’s gas giants his convoy had a real chance of evaded the Hive and it’s escorts if they stayed quiet in the background, so…

Jacobi barked an order to the communication officer, “Send a signal by Line Of Sight, order all ships to power down their engines and enact sensor masking procedures upon time of receipt.”

But things just had to go wrong…

“Captain,” Lekti said to Deveaux, “Sensors indicate that the Errant Venture’s Number Two Reactor is powering up.”

At the same time the Com Officer spoke, “Captain Gearou reports that the Errant Venture is ready for Hyperspace jump.”

“By the Ancestors!” Jacobi swore, it wasn’t too hard to understand what had happened, the missing section of the Venture’s hull was adjacent to the ship’s secondary communications cluster, the LOS wasn’t working, and an older ship like the Venture wouldn’t have the means to detect the Wraith group through the interference put out by the gas giant they were approaching.

“Send a focused subspace transmission, a five second burst; warn them of the danger,” He snarled.

But Lehkti had more bad news, “Sir!” Her voice was oddly urgent, “Radiant energy readings are spiking, Reactor Two is going critical and the power surge taking Reactor One with it!”

“Beam them out of there!” Deveaux hollered.

The Errant Venture exploded on the view screens.

Jacobi’s heart lurched but what was even worse was what the sensor operator reported next, “Sir, one of the Wraith cruisers is turning toward the eight planet and entering an intercept course,” Then a heartbeat later, “The others are doing so as well, they’re moving in formation, estimated time of arrival is in twenty minutes!”

Jacobi’s orders were immediate, “Reactors to maximum safe output! Order the Convoy to cold start their power plants and move out of the debris field surrounding the eight planet. They are to go to hyperspace once clear of navigational hazards! Head for Far Point Defense Outpost.” He ordered, knowing that not all the ships would be able to perform an emergency start up.

While the navigational shields and the defensive shielding and armor was more than enough to navigate the debris field of micro meteorites that surrounded the gas giant, there were too many risks involved in ordering a jump under those conditions, hopefully the Wraith would play along and not let him regret that decision.

“Sir,” Lehkti’s voice spoke from his side, “Would it not be wise to use the time we have available to properly start the convoy’s reactors and make it out of here together?” She added, “There are several navigational hazards in the path of the Hive fleet that will impede their movements by several hours, rather than the estimated twenty minutes.”

“Noted and dismissed, my orders stand.” Deveaux said sharply, before firing a question back at her, “How many did we get off the Venture?”

“Fifteen,” came the shocking answer, the Venture held a crew of three hundred! “Captain, I-“

“Look!” Deveaux snapped back at her, “In less than ten minutes that fleet’s course is going to take them within line of sight of this convoy!” He snarled, rage and grief slurring his words slightly, “And then they’re going to see this ship, and you can bet your bubble butt that when that hive does they’ll right fecking well get here in twenty minutes or less!”

He trained a glare on his executive officer’s impassive face and roared, “Now either do your job or get off of my bridge!”

Lehkti quietly turned back to her sensor station, and after a brief moment of silence, reported, “Logos, Fennis, and Beauchamps are have their reactors online and are moving out of the debris field. Kannon had a false start and is repeating initiation procedures; Higgs’ War just had an engine failure, Treasure Chest has engines online with some minor fluctuations in output- correction, the fluctuations are stabilizing.”

The Coms officer was the next to speak, “Higgs’ War requests time to fix the problem they estimate full repair in five minutes.”

“Denied.” Deveaux stated coldly, “Tell them that if they can’t get that thing started in two minutes they are to initiate procedure Zeta and scuttle the ship.” He was done playing nice, procedure Zeta prioritized keeping navigation records out of the hands of the Wraith above even the lives of the crew. “If I don’t see transports headed to the rendezvous points with the other ships inform Captain Butan of my intent to lock on and fire on his ship to ensure that Home’s security is maintained.”

“Y-yes sir!” the communications officer stammered, sending the message as he was ordered.

“Sir…” Lehkti started.

“Just watch Miss Ro.” Jacobi said.

Higgs’ War started with nine seconds to spare on the two minute deadline.

“If something doesn’t work threaten to shoot someone.” He said blandly.

Commander Ro merely turned back to her station.

Seven minutes later, the Hive ship saw what they thought was a Lantean battleship. As Deveaux predicted, they did everything they could to get at them.

Sensors chimed, and Lehkti informed the bridge, ”Hyperspace event, Hyperspace window generation detected!”

“Where?” Deveaux demanded.

He got his answer when the Hive ship and its escorts appeared perpendicular to the course being taken by his convoy, on an intercept course for his ship, five light-minutes out. The cruisers were rocked by impacts as they decelerated into the debris field but held together. One of the three cruisers took the point of a triangle formation and headed for an intercept with the Undaunted while a cloud of Darts began to be disgorged by the Hive.

Everyone Deveaux said, “Prepare for battle, cycle the main cannon, open all gun ports, divert power from FTL generators to shields, prep forward missile silos to fire kinetics, rear silos to PF warheads, down angle five degrees, keep that cruiser between us and that hive!”

“Yes, Sir!”

“Captain...” Lehkti said quietly.

“What is it?” Deveaux glanced over at his XO, she seemed conflicted.

In a voice full of emotion she said, “It has been an honor sir.”

Jacobi turned back to his console, “Stuff it! We’re not dead yet!”

“Y-yes, sir!”

“Same here…”

xx

Planetary Designation Gun-ma-hal-Theo-Ma-ur-At

xx

The cloaked satellite held itself in geosynchronous orbit with its graviton emitters. Its array of fragile sensors pierced through the murky fog and cloud covered planet below. Project Advocate was about to begin…

xx

On the surface of the planet, the air was so incredibly humid that a mist like fog swirled about at knee height, covering the vegetation with dew. A six-legged herbivore paused in its movements through the treetops looking at the ground intently. Suddenly, as if disturbed by something, it darted away through the foliage.

The forest was pervaded by a strange electronic tone that continued for a time before terminating with a -Kawoosh- of sound akin to flushing water down a drain.

Eldritch blue-white light filtered through the trees and animals fled the area.

In a clearing not too far from where the herbivore had grazed, there sat an active stargate on a plinth with steps leading up to it. From the device men poured out in groups of five, racing for cover as soon as they came through, not for once breaking their stride. After the third group came through, the stargate deactivated, and again for a moment, the early morning forest was quiet.

Save for the warbling call of birds.

But this planet was barren of avian life…

A second birdcall, alien to the planet answered and where before there were three groups of five there now were four.

xx

Kolya wasn’t familiar with the leader of Team Two, which held the specialists trained to prep and arm the device, she was a hard-faced woman named Revi and she’d opted to take a pair of particle magnums rather the pistol and rifle setup that the other teams were using.

Granted the pistols were closer to what they were familiar to than the particle rifle in both weight and function; and they would also prove useful in the closer quarters of unfamiliar corridors but it could just have easily be that she was posturing, a rifle had better stopping power and range and with all four other members of her team occupied protecting the device and when not carrying it, Kolya, personally might have chosen to take the rifle.

Still from what little that he’d seen of her, he was assured that the woman at least wasn’t completely incompetent from the way that she directed her men.

He wasn’t being sexist, Kolya’s job demanded a healthy amount of paranoia and he was ill at ease conducting an operation like this with people he hadn’t ever worked with before.

Fortunately a recognizable face or two was to be found among the members of Team One, Ivor Lanko and Cassel Massan, were comrades from old scouting missions that Acastus had been on in the past. He also recognized Tyrus, although knowing the man mostly by his reputation as a scientist specializing in Wraith technology.

The party moved away from the stargate and under cover before pausing to introduce themselves.

“Good to see you sirs.” Lanko greeted, while Tyrus eyed at the bundle wrapped in netting and a thick, rubbery fabric painted the purple and grey of Wraith structures.

“So that’s it.” He said.

Athor nodded, “Revi’s team and mine will be carrying it in by hand on foot. We’ll take our time and do things properly, but I hope the path that you’ve picked out doesn’t have a lot of obstructions, this thing weighs as much as seven grown men and I’m told that’s after they pared it down to the bare essentials, as it is it takes eight of us to lift the thing by hand.” The bundled object steamed slightly in the morning air, it was warm enough on its own to evaporate the dew that gathered on its covered surface.

“We found a game trail, worked it over as much as we could without letting the Wraith know that we were here, not that there have been any patrols so far, eh.” Lanko informed him.

“The important part is the foliage see,” The soldier continued, “The canopy over head is thick enough in most places that you don’t have to worry about being seen by a dart, if the Major has no objections sir, I’ll have Lita lead on point,” Lanko gestured to a tall, lanky woman, “While I’ll lead the main group in, we’ll show you where to find our exfil point and then take you up to the entrance. Massan takes left flank, while Hashim follows behind to clean up the tracks.”

“That leaves me on the right flank,” Tyrus observed.

“We’ll pair up then,” Kolya decided, turning to his men, “I’ll take the right flank with Tyrus, group together with a partner and proceed under cover.”

He turned to Tyrus and spoke to the other man, “I’d like you to tell me what you can about this hive as we go.”

Tyrus nodded, “Yes, major.”

xx

Undaunted

The Undaunted seemed to be the main focus of the Hive, fleet’s attack almost to the exclusion of everything else. As a former clan Warship, the Logos trained its rear turrets on the fleet firing purple bolts of helium plasma at any Wraith Darts attempting to close with the Higgs’ War.

The other ships in the convoy made their way at best speed for the edge of the asteroid field while the Undaunted stayed behind, its intent to either cripple the Hive fleet in order to give the convoy time to escape, or as was proving the case, to draw and hold the attention of the Hive ship.

Within the bridge the atmosphere was one of tightly controlled chaos, a sparking energy that buzzed in Jacobi’s nerves even as he struggle to call out his orders and input more complex commands without error.

For the moment Undaunted’s tactics were simple, their aim was to keep the lead Wraith cruiser between them and the Hive ship; and the Hive ship’s capital weapons cluster. The situation at least in this event seemed to be in their favor with the Hive ship content to hang back with its flanking cruisers while it disgorged several squadrons of Darts in an attempt to overwhelm and destroy the perceived Lantean warship.

“Launch from forward silos,” Deveaux ordered his weapons officer, uploading the necessary targeting data, then after typing in a few more commands he waited a heartbeat, watching a timer before ordering, “Launch Fusion missiles.”

Due to his vessel’s relative movement to the Wraith cruiser, the sixty-four missiles arrived at roughly the same time. The ones armed with pure fusion warheads were shielded as part of their function, a measure taken in order to both protect the launch vehicle from interceptor fire as well as to maximize the usage of the warhead’s fusion capsule by reflecting high speed neutrons back into the reaction chamber.

The Wraith cruiser’s sensors detected no radiation due to the Traveler designed shield and its capital ship cannons continued to hurl clusters of anti-Baryon particles upon the Traveler ship’s shields. The Darts spilt their focus between the incoming missiles and the enemy ship.

The conventional missiles were primarily kinetic kill vehicles, launched vertically from silos or dumb-fired from the bow these missiles possesed dense composite warheads accelerated by simple, single use gravimetric impulse coil. Painted a non-reflective black and capable of accelerating to 0.1 c without the aid of Undaunted's own considerable velocity, the destruction of a conventional missile’s casing did little to disrupt the weapon’s course besides turning them into ballistic weaponry.

Against the Wraith Cruiser, the missiles would do little more damage than the asteroid field had when the Wraith warships had decelerated into the asteroid field surrounding the eight planet. The conical warheads were designed to penetrate a Wraith ship's hull and a naquada-based chemical charge set into it's base would then hopefully explode within the vessel. No one believed that this was possible with a Hive but the missiles were too effective and easy to construct to not use against the cruisers.

“Up angle, ten degrees, load atomics, Fire on my mark…” Deveaux commanded.

On the surface of the ship, three hundred and twenty rotary plasma cannons upheld counter-dart fire. The nearly one hundred and forty cannons with firing solutions blasted any craft within range. The cannons were fed packets of frozen hydrogen, fusion was induced using powerful electrical surges and the energetic projectiles were accelerated away magnetically using the power provided by independent liquid naquada power cells.

“Mark!”

Firing at over seven hundred rounds per minute and refilling the ammo bins with the ship’s internal transporters Undaunted’s fire was fast and unrelenting. Yet for all of that fact, Wraith Darts still dived into the incoming weapons fire, attempting to close range for the tiny vessels own weapons to come into play.

It was not to be…

With no way of telling which missiles if any held nuclear warheads, several previously ignored five hundred kiloton PF missiles, all seemingly off course entered their engagement envelopes and detonated. The Darts that could have destroyed them were all concentrating on the conventional missiles aimed at the cruiser and the Hive ship behind it.

Fireballs, each a little more than a leuga in diameter, blossomed into massive spherical flowers. The local space was awash with intense bursts of gamma radiation and electro-magnetic pulses that ruined unshielded equipment, roasted pilots alive with absorbed radiation and incinerated those too close to the points of detonation to hope for survival.

The yield of the PF missiles was variable, with the option of modifying the type of destructive energy produced; in this case, the missiles emitted strong pulses of gamma radiation.

Waves of Darts perished in an instant and the lead cruiser, sensors temporarily blinded, was left facing off against a charging warship, preceded by a swarm of more than sixty, twenty-five kiloton atomic missiles.

xx

Forest Game Trail

xx

As they had planned, Lita and Romme, one of Kolya’s men, acted as scouts while the rest of Team One with the exceptions of Lanko and Team Three with the exception of another of Kolya’s soldiers formed a perimeter guard that watched the flanks for ambushes from under cover and followed behind to do the same as they erased the tracks left by the eight men that carried the nuclear weapon under the cover of a canopy that was in some places cleverly woven together to form a continuous domed roof of greenery.

Lanko, Athor, Revi, and Rock the man assigned by Major Kolya, formed a close in guard force, which escorted the eight burly men whose hands were full heaving their package toward the crash site. A warbling call caused the group to slow down and then after a few minutes, their four teams gathered under the shadow of a large boulder set at what looked like the beginning of a deep ravine.

“Remember what this looks like,” Lanko said, “ From this rock, turn left and head down this ravine, the bunker is hidden behind a small waterfall at the end of it. The walls alone should let you survive the blast if you can get here in time so don’t worry, just don’t lose your way, this rock is a twenty minute run from the Hive, once you make it here you’re more or less safe from the blast.

Athor nodded and Revi chose this moment to speak up, “Did you get a look at what the inside of the entrance was like? From the pictures it seemed like it was on an incline.”

Tyrus was the one who answered, “My daughter was the one who cracked the code, but I’ve also taken the time to study the internal schematics in detail. I’ll lead you in, and I’ve already told Major Kolya what to expect. The Hive ship is at a thirty degree incline, it seems that the Hanger was cleared out before it was abandoned, and there are only a few breaches on the decks, but that’s all we could tell using the field lens. “

He showed them the contents of his back pack, “I brought some pulleys, enough rigging equipment and rope to allow us to lift the device into position if it comes to it.”

Revi nodded as she looked through the contents of the bag.

Kolya nodded to Athor, “Alright,” He said, “Let’s get going people.”

xx

Undaunted

xx

The attack was executed flawlessly, the Wraith Darts still being launched from the Hive ship, should have been more than able to intercept the atomic missiles launched from Undaunted, unfortunately for the Wraith Cruiser and conversely fortunate for the Traveler warship, the light craft were woefully out of position to take on the speeding projectiles traveling at a velocity of just under 0.9c.

Blinded and alone, the Wraith Cruiser could do nothing more than impotently fire at where the Undaunted would have been had Deveaux not changed his vessel’s course after the fusion missile detonation. The bluish white bolts, passed harmlessly under the track that Undaunted took, while the atomic missiles drew ever nearer.

The first two missiles punctuated their arrival with nuclear detonations that imparted enough force to bend the bow of the cruiser ninety degrees upward. The pock marks and hull breaches caused by the asteroid impacts and conventional missile strikes were points of failure that turned out to be even more fatal when the virtual intelligences that controlled the missiles' movements began to decelerate and deliberately target those spots.

It took just one twenty-five kiloton atomic missile sailing into a breach amidships to split the cruiser wide open, leaking burning atmosphere, equipment and crew. Two more targeted the cruiser’s engines before the missile V.I.’s registered a kill and re-tasked their selves to go after a different target, altering their courses. The atomic missiles' drive coils had an effective range roughly equivalent to the distance of Lantea from her sun. The Hive ship was less than a light second away.

Watching the schematic of the Hive ship looming in the distance, Deveaux began typing a series of commands before passing a command to Lehkti Ro. “I want the main storage pod, evacuated of personnel after current missile load outs are replenished.”

“Yes sir.” Commander Ro affirmed, “Ordering evacuation of main storage pod.” The Asuran technical advisor worked with her accustomed efficiency.

“I want you to do this as quickly as you can.” Jacobi said to her as he passed another set of orders to the Engineering console.

“Sir!” His sensor operator called for his attention, “The Hive is firing!”

And so it was, no longer obstructed by the now destroyed cruiser, the massive biomechanical weapons cluster began firing enormous bolts of energy which, in spite of the interference caused by the radiation awash in the local space was surprisingly accurate.

The force of the impacts weren’t felt through Undaunted’s defensive systems, especially on the vessel’s bridge but it was more than evident by the way that the ship wobbled slightly in its course each time the weapon’s fire struck true.

“Shields are at eighty percent and falling,” Lehkti noted calmly after the initial salvo.

The Wraith cruiser on Undaunted's starboard bow was turning in to center its main guns on Undaunted, even as Deveaux watched two swarms of Darts head for Undaunted on the screens. One swarm was attacking head on, while the other curved around and over the Hive ships’ starboard hull in an attempt to strike from above to port.

“The main cannon has finished its charging cycle and is ready to fire.” Undaunted’s Weapon’s officer informed him.

Deveaux grimly smiled.

xx

The first step, getting the device inside of the hanger proceeded smoothly without interruption. The deserted area of the Hive ship really did seem like an abandoned cave, but the men, Tyrus especially, seemed on edge and looked about cautiously, peering suspiciously at shadows with their particle rifles out and at the ready.

Kolya put a hand on Tyrus’ shoulder, feeling the man jump slightly. He met the man’s nervous eyes with a calming look and sent him to help Lanko and Revi find the access shaft for the inner bulkhead. Sighing slightly, he gathered together his men and grouped together with Athor who was doing the same.

“This is where we’ll split up,” He said quietly, “From what Tyrus has told me, we’ll rappel down that elevator shaft, and make our way to Location Aleph, while the way to Location Beth is through a corridor to the back of the Hanger like in the mission brief.”

Athor nodded and hung back with Kolya for a moment, “Acastus,” He started, “If… the worst happens, Idos…”

“Done,” Kolya cut him off, “You didn’t even have to ask, I stood witness at his naming didn’t I?” He said quietly. “You just focus and getting back, your time on Cowen’s staff has been getting you fat.” He mocked without any real heat.

“Says the one living in the lap of luxury for the past five years...” Athor threw back, “I hope prancing around those hoity-toity Asurans haven’t dulled your skills, don’t be careless my friend, or I’ll be lighting a candle to the Ancestors,” He finished his suddenly serious warning with a light note, “And I can’t be bothered to waste good candles on the likes O’Ye!”

The two shared a quiet laugh before parting, “My claws are still sharp,” Acastus commented dismissively as he turned away.

“I hope for your sake they are old friend.” Athor muttered softly, his words unheard…

xx

From the depths of a certain star, life stirred; great seeds, each over five Luega long were catapulted into interstellar space, escaping their suns tremendous gravitational pull seemingly without effort. An armored being, looking down upon the ruins of a vast city, stirred. Blank eyes watched as vessel after vessel began to rise. They would be patient for a little longer. It was almost time…

xx

In fitting with the spirit of self-reliance, the Travelers had made sure that Undaunted’s main cannon was of purely Traveler design. The interface systems and materials had been provided by the Asurans but that only served to make it all possible.

“Target that Hive ship, aim for its weapons!”

The Compressed Hadron Mega Particle Cannon collected thermal neutrons and plasma from the reactor it was tied to and then compressed the mass into superheated packets several times their original density. The energetic matter was then launched at a target using gravity manipulation at near relativistic velocities. The combined damage done by the kinetic impact and thermal energy made the cannon the most powerful weapon on Undaunted even if charging the weapon took precious time.

“Sir, the Cruisers are attempting to intercept!”

Energy loss and dissipation over distance was significantly less than in a normal plasma canon, so with a range of a little under six light seconds Deveaux conceivably could have used the weapon from much further away. However, as the dual barrels were released from lockdown against the hull, it was the bulk of the Hive that blocked incoming fire from the other wraith cruiser, leaving Undaunted to come in under the guns of the Hive ship and the ranging shots from the port side cruiser.

“Deactivate peace-bond on the secondarys! Fire phasers at target GIMMEL!”

At this time the two key weapons in Undaunted’s came into play. The traveler ship was augmented with six type four medium phaser banks with emitters located at strategic points on the vessel’s hull. The three emitters with a targeting solution opened fire on the cruiser to starboard from outside of the other vessel’s engagement zone at the same time that the main gun opened fire.

The hull of the Hive ship seemed to writhe in pain as vivid crimson bolts slammed into the main weapons cluster. Secondary explosions caused by destroyed ammunition storage organs caused the rate of anti-capital ship fire to slacken. At the same time, thin bands of electric blue energy seemed to materialize in space, connecting the Wraith cruiser to Undaunted. Each emitter could only fire sparingly with the main cannon active, but the two shots that each was capable of, were highly accurate at a range slightly beyond the cruiser’s own.

One of the phaser beams passed through the cruiser’s ventral hull under the bow, and exited the dorsal surface astern. Another beam perforated the bow and was dragged down the length of the ship, before losing power. A third and then a fourth beam, passed through the cruiser’s bridge before the fifth and sixth beams caught the burning vessel dead on and exited through the cruiser’s engines, hitting something vital and triggering an explosion.

The weapons’ fire from the cannon trailed along the Hive ship’s surface leaving a dozen burning craters, six of them forming a flaming breach at the main weapons cluster.

The darts were attacking the shields almost constantly and Undaunted’s counter-interceptor fire was turning the barrels of the rotary cannon a cherry red.

Deveaux winced as a dart tried to cut across Undaunted’s bow and was crushed against the forward shield. “Shields are at sixteen percent power.” Commander Ro reported.

“Deactivate the main cannon, shunt the power to the shield capacitors.” Deveaux ordered. “Target the Hive ship’s hanger! I’m authorizing the deactivation of internal missile safeties, fire conventional missiles and particle lances at will! Fire! Fire! Fire!”

The particle lance was a high precision proton beam that was limited to less than a light second in range. It was the Hadron cannon’s predecessor and sixteen of the weapons saw use as the Undaunted closed range with the Hive ship.

“Activate evasive pattern Zeta at time two zero!”

Rotary plasma cannons sputtered and died as the heat that they generated overcame coolant systems. Yet Undaunted leveled enough weapons at the Hive ship’s hanger to break through the screen of sacrificial dart cover and hit the lightly shielded hanger through sheer weight of fire. Dumb-fired kinetic kill missiles smashed through the hanger’s atmospheric shield and into the bay, opening it to vacuum. Several more volleys followed only stopping when Undaunted’s magazines were empty. The particle lances followed, burning through fighters and armor to lick at the hanger’s fuel stores triggering an explosion.

Then Undaunted dove under the Hive but before it did so explosive clamps released the main storage pod containing fuel storage tanks and the two multistage fusion-fission missiles that had been kept in reserve for just this moment.

The explosion in the Hive ship’s port hanger wasn’t a fatal blow. But it was the equivalent of being stabbed in a kidney. Already, internal measures were being taken to mitigate the damage and prevent the fire from reaching critical areas of the ship. At this same time, the last remaining Cruiser, peeked over the burning side of the Hive seeking revenge on the running Undaunted.

Aboard Undaunted, Lehkti and Deveaux watched as the Ship grade remote assistant, the one that had conducted initial repairs on the Errant Venture, gallantly piloted the storage pod into the breach created by the destroyed Hanger.

The multistage devices used fast neutrons generated by a pure fusion device, to trigger fission in twelve capsules containing weaponized liquid naquada. Each released the explosive equivalent of fifty megatons of DET and the fireballs were fed from the fuel storage tanks, setting the Hive aflame, destroying many internal systems including the bridge and at least partially crippling the remaining cruiser with shrapnel damage.

Cheers filled Undaunted’s bridge as the Traveler warship cleared the edge of the asteroid field. They were low on fuel and out of missiles but With the Hive ship and cruiser crippled they were free to go for hyperspace with no more opposition than six dozen darts that were rapidly left behind. The rest of the convoy was already gone and they were preparing to leave too.

Collision alarms sounded and a large dark shape exited hyperspace ahead of Undaunted. Seeing the imminent collision, Deveaux roared, “Go to hyperspace!”

xx

Major Kolya’s five man team had adopted a standard technique for progress through the Hive. Two men would take up firing positions down the corridor, while the other three continued single file in a crouched walk guns sweeping the area for threats. Part of the way along, two of the three men took up firing positions while the other three continued the process.

It was a tactic that worked as Kolya’s men attempted to leave the hive while under fire from Wraith drones. They had found the Wraith data storage device in the control room and downloaded everything their data retrieval specialist could get her hands on. Somewhere along the way an alarm must have triggered because they were forced to leave quickly to avoid a group of drones armed with stunners headed for their position.

They hadn’t been able to cleanly break contact and on the unfamiliar ship, even with its schematics, they somehow had gotten turned around and time was not on their side.

Suddenly there was a flurry of red bolts that hit the drones down one corridor from behind. Team Three made a staged withdrawal under the covering fire of Team Four.

“Athor!” Acastus breathed, “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you, I could almost kiss that butt-ugly face of yours!”

“Please don’t!” Athor responded wryly, “Just shoot some Wraith and we’ll call things even.”

Over his shoulder he called, “Vika, lead them out! We’ll deal with these here and follow after!”

Unclipping a device from his belt, Athor gripped the handle of a grenade as he pulled the pin, then holding the handle and careful to stay under cover he tossed the explosive down the corridor. Kolya cut his covering fire and ducked behind cover just as the grenade exploded. The two popped back up and unloaded their particle rifles into the sprawled warriors.

Kolya grinned as he turned to his comrade, “That was clo-“

-Blamph!-

-Blamph!-

Acastus gasped as he slid back, eyes staring accusingly at his killer.

Athor trained the particle magnum at the major’s chest, eyes sad, “By order of Chief Cowen and the Genii High Command, you, Major Kolya are to be executed on the charge of treason against the Confederation.”

“No!” Kolya mouthed.

“We know all about your efforts to thwart our efforts to acquire alien technologies, how you were hoarding weapons and placing traitors into a position that would allow you to sell us out to the Asurans, Lieutenant Radim told us all about the operation you’ve been running, Acastus haw could you be so stupid!” Athor hissed. Then he closed his eyes and sighed, “I choose to believe that you thought what you were doing was right, all Idos will ever know is that you died here so that our people’s efforts would not be in vain, a hero like you should have been. Goodbye old friend!”

Major Kolya could only stare with dimming eyes at Athors departing back; his ears could not hear those parting words as his world filled with darkness.


His brain suddenly felt strangely cool.

And then…

xx

The Seed trained its sensors on the damaged Wraith ships. The other prey was gone but this would do just as well. Slowly impulse generators pushed it toward its first meal.

xx

His brain suddenly felt strangely cool.

And then…

He awoke, senses strangely muffled, he couldn’t feel his body and wondered if he was paralyzed.

Then a voice, crisp and feminine spoke to him. It seemed vaguely familiar but he could not place it yet.

“Acastus Kolya, you are guilty of the murder and collusion in the murder of Compact citizens, bribery, extortion, kidnapping, theft and spying for a foreign power.”

Where am I, he thought.

As if in answer to his unvoiced query the woman said to him, “You are in a medical facility under control of the Asuran compact, you were shot to death by your comrades and your body incinerated by an atomic blast.

Hu-what?!

“Your mind was transferred at the moment of death to this facility to serve a candidate for Project: Advocate. You deserve to die for what you have done, but Asura needs your ruthlessness, your vicious, instinctual cunning. Agree to participate and we will restore you to a body, refuse and we will have no further use for you, Major Kolya. Your intelligence is now little more than a sentient program, you will be deleted and we will move on.”

No choice then, I’ll agree, and bide my time for a chance to escape, to get revenge.

The voice was cold, “No you won’t, once you agree your life, your ruthlessness, will be ours, Advocate for Evil.”

Slowly, the cold truth sunk in, that this woman could know his thoughts.

xx

Omake

Acastus Kolya, unrepentant thug. A man barely alive. “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's artificial man. Acastus Kolya will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster...”