A/N: Completely scrapped things and started over. Instead of Dostya getting displaced, it's Samantha Clarke, and it's NOT a parallel Earth. The old vote still holds more than true enough anyhow, which was four votes for infiltration and three votes for almost landing on the FE crew.

This will eventually dovetail with "The Furling Legacy"

Chapter 1: Forced Recall

Ylisse Outrealm Gate Island, Archanean Calendar Year 2609

SG Universe, Unknown Planet, Unknown Time…

Samantha Clarke groaned as she woke up from her Armoured Command Unit's desperate forced recall. For a moment, she was ashamed of herself panicking and using her override codes as the General of the UEF to force an attempted recall despite not having a lock. Who knew where she could have ended up, perhaps right in enemy hands? Even the inertial control system had partly failed, resulting in her being knocked out.

…Wait a second…

This was not the out-of-body experience that people tended to describe about their time as a psionic residue, as told after they were resurrected i.e. pulled back into a repaired or cloned body. Sure, maybe such thoughts came from mental damage from the process (which wasn't exactly mentally healthy to use frequently), but still…

She was alive?

…

…

HALLELUJAH!

…

The ACU was almost completely non-responsive though. The screen in front of her stated that numerous vital systems were off-line, and that all her add-ons were being reclaimed to effect emergency repairs. So she would be limited to Tech 1 for a while, after the ACU repaired itself enough to actually move. Most of the torso plating was destroyed from barely having teleported out during the impact of that Chronotron Cannon Overcharge bolt which would surely have killed her if it had the time to fully strike her with her structural fields almost completely depleted as they had been. It had been amazing that she actually managed to teleport here…

Those musings lasted only an instant before Clarke began to survey her surroundings, or as much as the ACU's crippled sensors could tell at the moment. Unlike the usual instantaneous scan of most of a large continent at least, the fried sensors, which were relatively low on priority of repair, could only see 520 meters (26 grids in ACU combat lingo) away in adequate detail. It could not detect more distant mass concentrations at present, but was adequate for scanning the coastlines, forests, etc. of the nearest hundred kilometers. Due to how she didn't even have her ACU moving, she dared not broadcast a call to Coalition Command.

Probably only three mass deposits on this island, ugh… She thought as she detected the three nearby Mass Deposits… and the odd Quantum Gateway, as her ACU identified it, that she'd probably gated from. It was far too small for her ACU to have fit, but as ACUs could gate to the proximity of a gate easily without the usual shockwave, well…

She felt vaguely sorry for the little critters of the forest as their trees disappeared one by one while her ACU brought itself back to reasonably functional status. She felt much sorrier for the nearby village, who probably would have been flattened by her Quantum Wake if not for the presence of this gate.

…The village which had what looked like a mix of straw huts and other pre-Enlightenment Age buildings, but which seemed to be a small port town, probably servicing the Gate?

…What the hell had she managed to get herself into?

With a lurch and an extremely dampened groan of servos and joints, her ACU, which had decided it had repaired itself well enough, lurched into action and began work on what she'd queued up. Samantha barely stopped it in time. It wouldn't do for the natives to find themselves running into an effectively invisible building when going to maintain the Gate, presuming of course that they were some sort of slave population to powers advanced enough to use the Gate… or maybe vacationers on a back-to-nature resort world? They'd be puzzled enough about the massive clearing in the forest.

Regardless, she had to build her base off the beaten path, even if her expanding sensors told her that there were only five mass deposits on the island. One was directly on the road to the village, while the other was inside the village and therefore a no-no unless she wanted to make contact with the natives. She reclaimed even more trees to start filling her ACU's stores back up, still pouring it all into repairs for the war machine for now. After all, her cannibalizing the remains of her Zephyr Amplifier and Bubble Shield Generator had only provided about 1000 mass of 3800 originally invested, and even eating up the tattered remnants of her Tech 3 Engineering Suite had only granted her 600 more mass, a quarter of the original investment. The ACU's extremely extensive repairs required 13000 mass, almost three-quarters of the unit's standard tonnage (18000 mass, or 36000 tons). This was testament to how well Structural Integrity Field technology had held it together despite most of the armour having been boiled off, taking from internal structural supports as they became capable of being reduced safely.

She would feel safer if she was up to at least half health before reducing the regeneration to baseline passive levels, so that she could wait ten minutes, then get started on base construction. However, it was now time to move out of the area in a way that didn't betray which way she went, because a local patrol was coming to investigate the small earthquake she'd set off when she showed up. Her ACU's feet spanned about 25 meters of land from the outside of one foot to the other, so she had to escape by lumbering behind the gate and over the rocky peaks that laid further inland. Trees grew in the wet coastal lowlands, but further inland—which her ACU's slow speed of 35 meters per second took a few moments to ascend—there were mountain peaks and rolling hills. The island seemed to be mostly uninhabited except for the village which almost certainly served as a traffic hub for Gate users, which was great for Samantha's purposes.

Well, it was time to get started.

A/N: Now my only problem will be explaining how Samantha can remote control her avatar, since Aeons use Psionics and Cybrans can spin off subroutines to deal with that…

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