"Take me to your leader," Andos said, watching Sheppard slowly getting up from being thrown on to the deck of Andos' starship.
"Oh great. An alien with a sense of humour."
"No, really, I'd like to talk to whoever is in charge of your, er, expedition."
"We're not letting you onto Atlantis."
"Then, I guess your leader will just have to come to me. We really need to talk."
"No way. We're not doing that."
"Okay. You be my messenger then. You look like humans. I'm a human too. You look like you've got good technology. So do I. I only shot at you because you were too close. I didn't try to kill you, in fact, I tried not to kill you. Here's the deal. I'm new here, and I'm friendly. From what I can see, you folks have no sense of what you can really do with the stuff you have on hand."
"That's because most of it is Ancient."
"Great. Call an archaeologist, reverse engineer it!"
"No, built by the Ancients."
"So?"
"Look, you folks have gotten the blueprints for alien stuff, you should be able to leverage your scientists to figure out how to use it."
"We're keeping the existence of aliens classified until-"
"Yeah, right. It won't cause a panic, but keeping it secret then having that secret burst will."
"No-one's going to be doing the talking."
"Maybe not. You've got my message. Go."
A few hours later, Andos was sitting in the jumper, talking with Director Woolsey. The previous conversation had not gone well. Andos had given up on trying to get these humans to see some sense.
"Director, while you may be very capable, let me remind you that I am the one who holds the advantage here. Despite your possession of archaeological relics, I will not hesitate to destroy your artifact."
"Are you threatening me?"
"Yes, director, I am. Your government is corrupt, and you really don't deserve to have whatever technology you do. I am going to be leaving, and I hope that you won't follow me. I was sent on a mission of peaceful exploration. I intend to enforce peace."
Andos's cruiser slowly spun up its drives, then its light-flare suddenly elongated and faded.
"Director, enemy ship has left the system."
Andos sat thinking. These humans weren't bad, just misinformed, but their government was. They were keeping modern technology out of the hands of their populace, and allowing other humans to be killed because they didn't want their citizens to have access to their old technology. Andos knew that he couldn't intervene in the human governments reliably, but he could protect the humans. The data they gave indicated that they planned on committing mass genocide to prevent mass genocide. Andos had a different idea, but this would take time, and time is something that he didn't have. But, he could make time. He had grabbed a copy of the human data, and had torn through the encryption protecting it. Time travel could not be used – it would kill a universe. He had to do something, however. He remembered an idea that his people once had. He would have to use it.
He set his ship on a course for an uninhabited system not on the Stargate network. He had work to do. His ship set down on the planet gently, under rocket thrust. It would not leave again. Andos had scanned the planet from orbit – it was a dead world, perfect for his plan. It has been an idea his people had for a long time, but due to the limitations of their physics, they couldn't carry it out. Now, Andos had the information and the engineering to carry out this plan. He just had to die first.
Then, he prepared a set of universal assemblers, and uploaded a program into them. He shut down his ship, save for the medical bay. He sat down into the surgical chair, and tapped a four digit code into the controller on the chair's arm. A cover descended over the chair.
Outside, on the planet's surface, a stream of drones in various shapes ans sizes flooded out of the ship, disassembling the two warp rings and laying them down on the surface. More drones of flooded out of the ship, and started disassembling and building. A clump of six drones, around human sized, slowly picked up a box about the size of a chair, and carefully disassembled it. Within the box lay a body, which was reverently placed into a rocket that had been built minutes prior. The rocket launched.
Among the larger drones were smaller drones, and the totality of the drone swarm ranged from a few elephant-sized drones down to a multitude of nanomachines. Together, they started to flatten the ground around the ship. They were fruitful and multiplied. The drones started grabbing materials out of the ground, powering themselves from the ship's engine core. They had a mission to complete, but first, they had to get the numbers to complete it. The swarm doubled in size every thirty minutes. It started eating the surface of the planet. Then, it started building. The planet's crust, half-scoured, started being forged into ships. A fleet was being born.
The seething sea of drones had settled down into a series of built-up buildings, mostly power plants, surrounded by an ocean of nanomachines. Each machine alone was hardly intelligent, but together, they were scary smart. The ships that left the planet were linked to the planet's surface through several bits of reverse-engineered Ancient technology. Subspace proved to be useful to an intelligence that had developed in a world where faster-than-light communications were carried out with messenger ships.
The combined Atlantis fleet completed their hyperspace jump into Asuras, and immediately began to fire weapons. The Asurans were prepared, and fought back. Suddenly, a fleet of millions of ships dropped into the system from warp space, and a subspace message was sent to both the replicator and Atlantis fleets.
"I'm back."