Chapter 21
Altair, Underground Complex
Harlan watched the Aldorien engineers swarming the aged facility he'd called home. He'd marveled at the range of tools they brought with them, from deceptively primitive to almost disturbingly advanced.
He turned towards Wallace, the other synthetic eyeing the teams on the screen with an impassive stare, arms crossed.
"Comtraya!" Harlan said to the companion next to him. "They are fixing things, no?"
Wallace raised a skeptical eyebrow. "We'll see," he said.
~ No Paradoxes ~
"Oh god, there's two of them," Madison said with a groan.
Radomil gave her a look. "I don't see what the problem is, you're going to get your own duplicate too," he said.
"But there's two of him," Madison repeated.
Across the room the synthetic Rodney opened his eyes. "Right then, shut up I've got things to do," Synth-Rodney said.
"Do I really sound like that," McKay asked.
"Yes," Madison said.
"Well, your turn," McKay said, ignoring her.
~ No Paradoxes ~
Aldores, General's Quarters, Central Tower
The intercom chirped in James Patchkirk's quarters, he rolled over and looked at the alarm clock. Five in the morning, he muttered under his breath, tapping the button on the comm.
"What is it?" he called out trying to remember which officer was on comm duty.
Lt. Orlov was a member of the Russian addition to the crew, who took over comm on the night shift, a bright young man who reminded everyone of the actor Anton Yelchin who played Chekov in the Abrams Star Trek reboot.
"Sir, watchtower reports the Aschen Primary just went nova," Lt. Kir Orlov said.
Patchkirk sighed, trouble of dealing with that particular group of genocidal sociopaths, was there was no good way of dealing with them. Everything they knew about the Aschen came from the contact they had with their client races and the one Aschen ambassador. For all he knew the Aschen homeworld knew nothing of the actions their leaders went to in order to support the continued growth of their society.
Taking the Aschen out, by way of an exploding sun, there were a few possibilities neither of which Patchkirk much liked. Most of them stemmed directly from the decision to travel back in time. And right now the foremost possibilities was that either their arrival had somehow changed the course of events in such a major ripple that the Aschen made a powerful enemy, or someone from his expedition had taken it upon themselves to take them out.
"I'll be right up," Patchkirk said.
~ No Paradoxes ~
Aschen Prime, high orbit of Aschen primary star, thirty minutes prior.
"Well Mr. Anderson?" Rodger Casey said to the other agent sitting next to him.
The small cargo ship which they were using had been tucked away on one of the three earthships, cloaked and unaccounted for, was hidden there by their sponsors for just such missions as this. They'd used the chaos of the asteroid rain to slip away for just this sort of mission.
"Just doing a few last minute checks on the forcefield," John Anderson replied.
"And you're sure we have enough time to get away?" Rodger asked.
"Plenty," John replied.
The cargo door opened and a tractor beam pushed the active gate out, towards the star, as soon as it cleared the ship, Rodger cut power to the beam and yelled, "punch it!"
The gate slowly fell towards sun as their little cargo ship raced into a hyperspace window and reappeared well outside the system.
"Did it work?" Rodger asked.
John smirked. "Any second now," John said.
The screen flared as the sensors were temporarily blinded by the flash of the Aschen primary going nova.
"And there it is," John said.
"Good let's get back to Home Plate," Rodger said, hoping nothing had gone wrong while they were away.
"Give the sensors a moment to readjust, the nova temporarily blinded us," John replied.
~ No Paradoxes ~
Aldores, Medical bay
"To put it simply, lieutenant, you got lucky," Keller said as she finished applying an epidermal regenerative compound to one of the many patients that came through the medical center daily. "I expect you to follow the safety guidelines when working from here on, understood?"
The lieutenant nodded sheepishly, wincing slightly his left shoulder and arm covered in a chemical burn.
Keller dismissed him with a bottle of the medicine and instructions to apply every six hours, until the tube was empty. Her only patient left for the day was their guest tucked away in an isolation chamber.
After months of submitting requests, they'd finally assigned a team to her lab. Doctor Keller glanced at the computer screen where their most recent scan was displayed. There was definitely a multidimensional component to the way the plague attacked the body.
"You're sure this will work?" she asked, as the team of engineers finished assembling the bulky device.
"It's a phase interdiction field generator," Captain Thomas Matthis replied. "It'll work ma'am. Just need some more calibration to properly target your little beasties."
"Just get on with it," Doctor Keller said.
The phase interdiction field was part of their most recent attempt to cure the Alteran female ensconced in the stasis chamber. She'd survived for thousands of years under the Antarctic ice, the plague going dormant with her body. To completely cure her though they'd need to take care of the virons, that were, for lack of a better term, out of phase.
Thomas pressed a button on the control panel and the group collectively held their breath as the emitter on the machine hummed with power. A moment later it pulsed and the field expanded outward from the device, going through the walls covering a thirty meter sphere.
It didn't seem to do anything until Thomas reached over and started slowly turning a series of dials on the control panel while staring at what looked like a bulkier android smart-phone.
The captain's 'tricorder' was one of the more recently approved projects building on an existing earth technology to duplicate the technology shown in fiction. The glass was replaced with a self-repairing polymer, and the capacitive touch approach was abandoned in favor of tapping into the newly added sensor suite instead. Capt. Matthis' tricorder had been further specialized to his job bringing a whole suite of delicate sensors that helped him pinpoint the exact numbers he needed for this calibration.
Doctor Keller was fixed on the viewscreen watching the sensors and video aimed at her patient as the individual virions flickered in and out of the sensors. Ten minutes into the calibration she glanced over at a bioscan and called out to the captain, "Shut it down."
~ No Paradoxes ~
The Jackson was a diplomatic carrier, at least that's what it said on paper, in reality it was a modified Daedalus hull, and the shields had been replaced with ones that were near Atlantis strength. And just because she was considered a diplomatic carrier, didn't mean she was lacking in teeth.
The majority of the rail-guns, which required ammunition, had been replaced in favor of an earth version of Asgard energy turrets. Internally a large portion of three of the decks in the middle had also been redesigned to resemble more a cruise liner than a ship of war.
With the smaller amount of external weapons, the compliment of fighters had also been increased. Those too saw a change from the earlier F-302. Although the Asgard had abandoned that approach to war when they started cloning, that hadn't stopped a few of them from continuing their own designs.
Deciding to copy an existing approach they'd seen with the Eurondans they located a suitable mental interface in the combined Asgard-Alteran database.
Taking the existing solutions the Asgard had provided the Aldoran design team worked all of it into a relatively inexpensive single person fighter that managed to balance versatility and safety.
Added to these elements would be unmanned drones which would be slaved to a nearby manned fighter. While there had been some misgivings about the system due to the vulnerability to electronic warfare. An existing Asgard solution had again been located, the solution would regrettably slow construction time by a considerable amount and would make transferring fighter compliments to another ship difficult, but would provide near instantaneous relay of commands, via quantum entanglement.
The final improvement was a beaming relay, which in simulations showed an eighty-nine percent retrieval rate for pilots in the event of catastrophic failure, which is another way of saying, in the event they get blown up.
Their final safeguard was an upgrade they'd sent out to the Milky Way sensor net, in the event the vessel would be lost, the network would attempt to beam the crew out and forward them to the nearest stargate to return to Aldores. It was a safeguard they hoped to never need, and it would also probably burn out the probes involved.
Jackson, Bridge
Major Gen. Kowalski leaned forward in the chair; this sector of space was between Edora and the now rapidly dissipating Aschen primary. And they'd been getting odd readings from the sensor net for the past few days.
"Anything out there?" he asked the sensor technician for what must by the fiftieth time in the past hour.
"A few unexplained blips on the edges but nothing concrete yet sir," Lt. Sanjin Vogt replied, the lieutenant was being remarkably patient with the constant interruption.
~ No Paradoxes ~
Hyperspace, Unnamed Goa'uld cargo vessel
Roger Casey busied himself with a novel he'd downloaded to a tablet before leaving. Not that he'd admit to reading this particular novel, he wasn't the type to go for vampire novels usually but something about this one kept his attention. He'd almost closed the book when the author revealed that her vampires contrary to the usual accepted myth did not spontaneously combust in sunlight, sparkling instead.
John had only given the title a cursory glance before handing it back in disgust returning to the controls to monitor their progress.
Roger was halfway into the book when the ship shuddered and he felt his stomach flip as they dropped out of hyperspace.
"What happened?" he called out.
Mr. Anderson rapidly tapped a series of commands on the control orb, "Something knocked us out of hyperspace."
"That ever happen before?" Roger asked shuffling into the cockpit.
"Seems there's another reason this area of space has been avoided," John said. "According to the goa'uld logs, something in this region makes their hyperdrive unreliable. Forcing the drive to compensate would significantly reduce the operational lifespan of the drive."