A/N 03-02-2014:

Readers, I just wanted to say in advance that I'm sorry that it took so long to get this post out and that it's so darn short compared to my usual chapter length. I came down with a nasty virus and was out of action for a while this month, plus work got busy so I couldn't devote much time to writing. That said, I didn't want you to think I'd abandoned the story, so I wanted to get something to you.

I hope you enjoy, and again, sorry for the brevity.

Chapter 37:

War has been called many things by many people: 'politics by other means' by philosophers, 'hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of absolute terror' by those who have lived through it, or 'barely controlled chaos' by those who have tried to plan it. It is the last of those descriptions, and other manifestations of a similar sentiment, that have spawned the phrase 'what can go wrong, will go wrong' and its more familiar personification 'Murphy's Law'.

As a career soldier Victoria Shepard was well familiar with Murphy's Law, but she recognized it as simply a vehicle for giving voice to the real truth of warfare; that it was a complex chain of events where breaking or changing any link, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, could vastly change the outcome. Chaos theory in the truest sense of the word. That was exactly how the engagement within and around Lord Ba'al's space station unfolded, and what gave SG-1 the opportunity for escape after the joyous reunion of Commander Shepard and her beloved.

It started, trivially enough, with a Jaffa pilot who didn't get enough sleep; or kelno'reem as the case may be. The night before SG-1 and Lord Yu's assault on Ba'al's space station, in his squadron's common area, a rather rowdy celebration of another young Jaffa's entry into fatherhood continuously interrupted his attempts to meditate. So, when the pilot for Lord Ba'al's space station's reconnaissance picket pre-flight checked his stealthed al'kesh, he failed to notice a minor leak in one of the auxiliary power units' emission shields.

This first link in the chain could have been broken then and there by the al'kesh's crew chief, but that Jaffa was preoccupied by the series of battle drills his air-group commander had set for that day. His Jaffa engineers, his human slave assistants, and he would be practicing the rapid movement of armaments, fuel, and ships from one of the adjacent flight bays, and the loading of a death glider in his stand which normally served al'kesh. All of it, he was told, to simulate maintaining flight operations in case one of the glider bays was put out of action. Thus, the crew chief was so busy marshalling human slaves that he didn't notice coolant dripping out of the al'kesh's APU until he stepped in a puddle of it twenty minutes after the medium bomber had sortied. Radio-silence with the stealth recon ships meant he couldn't warn them, even if he thought it were that serious, so he made a note of it to fix it upon their return.

As a result, the scouts leading Lord Yu's forces detected the stealthed al'kesh. Oshu, First Prime in the service of the goa'uld System Lord Yu, immediately recognized the purpose of the small vessel, to give advance warning to Ba'al's space station of his approach, and ordered its destruction. Unfortunately for Lord Ba'al, the al'kesh's pilot was so fatigued from the previous night's frivolities that he was too slow in reacting to the onrushing death gliders and just barely failed to get the warning out to his lord's space station. Thus, Oshu and his task force completed their approach undetected.

Ironically, it was this delay in the detection of Lord Yu's forces, and the subsequent battle alert, that gave Liara T'soni enough time to overcome the influence of the goa'uld Athame on her mind, and help her mate free SG-1 from their Jaffa guards; completing that link to the chain.

The drills themselves, of course, were the next link as they littered the space station's largest death glider bay with munitions and fuel and left loading hatches to the next glider bay open. When Thor transported Commander Shepard's distraction into the glider bay it was a tinderbox aching for a spark; much like the Japanese aircraft carrier Shōhō at the Battle of the Coral Sea, the sinking of which Victoria would re-quote to Jack O'Neill, 'scratch one flattop'.

Arguably the most obtuse contributor to the day's events was as much a random quirk of nature as a seemingly unrelated action or event. The Reaper-Shepard Gestalt, it seemed, had sent Victoria and Liara to a universe that had never known element zero, just its doppelgänger naquadah. Consequently, the life of the planet Shepard and Liara called Thessia never developed a resistance to it. More specifically the goa'uld, whose biochemistry was fundamentally incompatible with eezo, were able to develop and supplant the Asari as the dominant life in the galaxy. This incompatibility with the eezo that permeated Liara's Asari body rendered Athame ill and incapable of suppressing Liara's efforts to overcome its domination of her mind.

All of these unrelated events left Lord Ba'al's already heavily damaged and burning space station open to attack by Lord Yu's forces, and provided Liara T'soni the opportunity to break free of the goa'uld Athame's influence and free her beloved from captivity.

But there were two last things that provided Shepard, Liara, and SG-1 the opportunity to actually escape. It was two quintessentially goa'uld-type behaviors; their predilections towards stealing technology and towards betrayal, that provided the final links to the chain that bound Ba'al and Nirrti to their fates, ending Ba'al's plans of mastering the Mass Effect and Nirrti's dreams of unlocking the Asari genome as the true future host for the goa'uld…

A/N:

A bit of a cliffhanger, no? Hope that at least partially makes up for this being a short posting... ;-)

Fear not, the next one ought to be the usual length, I hope...