Chapter 53 A chance

President Adar of the 12 colonies of Kobol was thanking the Lords of Kobol that for once the vast distance that sat between the colonies and the outer rim of the area of space they controlled had worked in their favor. A task force of the Colonial fleet carried out an attack on Nysa before word of the bombing of Aquaria and the orders to pull back had reached them. They had carried out an attack on the Tau'ri controlled world of Nysa and had from all reports destroyed a Tau'ri capital ship and the Tau'ri had only a handful. This was a victory, a great victory that the was just what he needed to possibly make a peace deal with victory.

Once he got word of the victory he had released the image of the destroyed Tau'ri ship and it had been blasted across all the wireless channels, what he hadn't released was the number of battlestars had done suicidal runs on the single Tau'ri ship. They hadn't released the number of ships that had been destroyed and a large percentage had been battlestars. Battlestars formed the backbone of the colonial navy but there were other ships, cruisers, destroyers and transport ships, in fact the most common ship was the small Hoplite patrol ship but it didn't have much in the way of massive firepower. It was designed to be a patrol ship and with limited anti-fighter support. They had guns but their largest gun was the smallest gun on a battlestar, he still had a lot of them.

He turned his gaze down to the speech he was writing, he was going to offer a chance a slim chance for peace. He knew he was not going to get their cousins back in the fold but he had slim hopes that he could get Kobol. From everything they had seen in recon photos Kobol or Valhalla as the Tau'ri called it was thinly populated and was mostly a military world. The Tau'ri seem to have just started to colonize the planet and it would not be hard to stop and reverse it. They would of course give the Tau'ri time to pull out and if it saved millions of lives on both sides, he saw no reason why the Tau'ri would care about a single world when they control 20% of the galaxy.

"They can find another world, Kobol is holy to us and they want peace it is price that has to be paid." stated the President to himself.

It was snowing outside as the first snowflakes began to fall on Washington, DC covering the capital city of the United States in a light dusting of snow. The snow was not even deep enough to prevent grass from sticking through them. Winter had started to come earlier than normal thanks to all the Asgard technology removing greenhouse gasses which had caused warmer than normal winters in the recent past. Still the snow was coming earlier than expected since Thanksgiving was a week away. The people on the street where still celebrating the victory over the Colonials and the media was pushing the story about how much damage the bombing had done. Inside the White House, the President of the United States had different concerns on his mind.

"The Yorktown." grumbled the President of the United States as he leaned back in his chair in the oval office, in front of him stood two of the three highest ranking officers General O'Neill and General Carter. Technically O'Neill was the highest-ranking officer as commander of all Tau'ri forces and General Carter was the third as commander of the SGC. That was the official ranking but unofficially General Shepard who was commander Pegasus was the second highest officer but it was known that Carter would jump him to become Supreme Commander of the Tau'ri, General Shepard was happy in the Pegasus Galaxy.

"Yes, sir." Confirmed O'Neill "The Colonials did Kamakazie runs at the ship with 4 battlestars slamming into their shields at the same time and then detenting their nuclear warheads."

"The ship is savageable and is already being towed back to Valhalla to begin repairs." added General Carter as she stood beside her commanding officer and longtime friend.

"The Yorktown? How could this happen? Space is big and yet they rammed it with four ships?" inquired the President "Couldn't it have moved out of the way?"

"Sir…" said Carter as she looked at Jack.

"Sir, the Yorktown was sitting in orbit and was in all view sitting still," explained General O'Neill as the President looked at him. "It made landing the number of the Eagles we had to land easier."

"This was part of the plan?" inquired the President

"Yes, sir we had planned for the rest of the fleet we assigned to be there but the Eagle and Condor attack went off better than expected and they arrived ahead of schedule and they started landing the birds before the rest of the fleet arrived." explained Carter as the President shook his head.

"So because an operation went so well we have our only carrier crippled for how long?" inquired the President

"A couple of months at least sir." Confirmed Jack "The rest of the fleet should be arriving at Valhalla from the Pegasus galaxy within the next 3 to 5 hours, it will take some time for them to retool and rearm they rushed back here from their battle against the Wraith but they should be ready for deployment within 24 hours."

The President took a deep breath as he calmed himself over the damaged done to the Yorktown.

"How many Battlestars did we destroy?" inquired the President

"In total we have destroyed 84 colonial warships in the past few hours, I admit not sure what number of them are battlestars but I know over half of them are." explained O'Neill. "We estimate the casualties from their ship only losses to be around 126,000 military personal, that isn't counting fighter and bomber losses and the KIA on the ground. We lost under 2,000 people in total that includes the Eagle's that where shot down along with the KIA from the Yorktown and the Melbourne."

"I just don't understand why we haven't just beaten these colonials into the ground with ease." said the President as he turned slightly to look out the window.

"Sir, you have to remember our fleet compared to theirs is small very small." stressed Carter "They have thousands of ships, most of them are small patrol ships and a lot of the bigger ones date back 40 plus years but they still fire nuclear shells with a rate of fire almost equal to our railguns. They have more ships firing more shells."

"Their nuclear shells are weak but if they are fired so fast that the blows add up into something that can do damage to our shields." explained O'Neill. "Kind of like how a single rain drop hitting an umbrella will do nothing to it but if hundreds of thousands of the same raindrops hit the same umbrella it will break under the force."

"I see but our ships can cut through them with ease." countered the President "We have all this technology."

"Technology that we still doesn't fully understand," explained General O'Neill "The Asgard dumped their entire history and all their technology onto our laps and we are still trying to piece together the Ancient technology as best we can. We do not fully understand it all, it would like putting a WW1 biplane pilot behind the controls of an Eagle fighter. They may understand some of it but not everything."

"Add to that we are trying to integrate multiple nations with multiple military personal and styles into a single system. The colonials have already done that, we are in the process," explained General Carter "We are in the process of issuing the same uniforms to everyone."

"Sir, getting everyone to either agree to take up waffenfarbe on the new uniforms and what colors was took three months of one and off debating." stated Jack as the president raised an eyebrow, he had no idea what the General was talking about.

"Waffenfarbe are colored patches worn on the collars of uniforms to tell at a glance what a persons job is." explained Jack "Also it says what color your shoulder marks are on the dress uniform. It is used my some nations in Europe like Germany, Finland and others. They want it on the new uniforms and we are honoring it because it will make ID personal jobs easier and it brings in a tradition from that part of the world. "

"You have got to be kidding me your debating this?" inquired the President

"Sir, the military is just as political as civilian governments and we are trying to merge the militaries of some many nations, you have seen how hard it is to get everything in order politically together on the civilian side." Explained Jack "We have the same issue, it isn't like you can merge so many militaries together fast. We had this planned out over 5 to 6 years and we are trying to do it as fast as possible while fighting a war and growing the number of people in the military."

"So they have more ships then us, they have a better integrated military and command system." stated the President "If we had more time we could overrun them with ease."

"Yes, sir." confirmed General O'Neill "Add to that they are religious nutcases who believe if they die they got to heaven."

"So all we need is a pause button to freeze the Colonials while we build ships and get everything else done." said the President with the shake of his head.

"Sir, that may be an option." Said Carter as the President looked at her. "Sir, we have all but frozen time before in a time dilation field which speeds up or slowdowns time in the effective area."

"You can do this to an area the size of the 12 colonies of Kobol?" inquired the President

"Sir, I have been looking into the possibility and if we use some of the technology that the Ori used to power their supper gate. It may be possible to power it, then we may be able to slow down time within colonial space to a ratio of…."

"Carter just give us a general number." Ordered O'Neill

"Sir, if my math is right then we could slow down time within Colonial space so that a month to them would be just over a year to us." Explained Carter "The area we have to cover is just too large for us to cover any better."

"So you can buy us years of time with this?" inquired the President as Carter nodded. "Why wasn't this an option in the first place?"

"Sir, no one thought it would go this far and to make it work we will have to power it with a black hole which means using one of our black hole bombs on a target large enough to sustain a black hole." explained Carter. She knew that for safety reason the black hole bombs they had which was small mini black holes contained in time dilation fields to slow down their life span and kept them from growing too large didn't have the mass to sustain themselves without being close to a large amount of mater. Drop it in space and it would die out in a few minutes because it would not have enough matter to support itself but drop it in a star and you got a very large boom. "That would mean moving some very large asteroids maybe even a small planet into the right position. It can be done but until now no one had even thought it was needed."

"Well it may be needed now, I want teams looking into this." ordered the President as Carter nodded. "General if this works how long can you keep the black hole going?"

"Depending on how much material we move near the location before we set it off forever but I would estimate that we could keep it going for between 3 and 4 months within colonial space." Explained Carter

"That would give us 3 to 4 years to prepare for war, building ships, training men and integrate everything we have to do." said O'Neill with a smile.

"More like 4 to 5, like I said each month for them is just over a year for us." explained Carter as a knock at the door caused all three to turn toward the door, it opened as an aid walked in past the two secret service officers who stood by the door in their black suits.

"Mr. President." said the Secretary of State as she walked in before noticing the two generals standing in front of the desk. "Generals."

"Madam Secretary." said General O'Neill as Carter nodded her head.

"Mr. President, we have intelligence coming from Valhalla, that the Colonial President is going to make a speech in an hour or two to offer us peace terms." explained the Secretary of State

"So maybe our nuclear strike has had some good, I was amazed that they didn't fold up after the bombing." Added O'Neill

"Well they think we have their holy world of Kobol, remember all the problems we have had between Israel and Palestine." added Carter before pausing for a moment. "Problems that we are still having."

"That is the thing, from the leaked news it seems that one of their conditions for ending the war will be that we hand over Valhalla." Reported the Secretary as everyone looked at her as if she was stupid, they knew she was just giving them a message but they could not help it.

"They think that we would give up Valhalla?" stated the President

"They seem to think that if they allow us to leave in return for giving them Valhalla that we would take it." explained the Secretary of State "That being said it may be worth it, they want to talk about smaller issues such as treatment of POW and rules of engagement."

"Sir, we don't know if they have one of the Russian Spetsnaz as a POW or if he is KIA." Reported Carter

"Even if he is KIA we would want the body along of those other spetsnaz who died. We can give them the dead we have of theirs in return." advised O'Neill "We have several thousand POW of the Colonials from their attack on Valhalla."

"Talking never hurts, depending on their conditions I see no problem in holding talks," confirmed the President

On the fields of Valhalla, Major Jager moved away from his Leopard III tank toward the Colonial Pallas tank. It was clear that the Pallas was a heavy tank, very heavy in fact and it became even clearer as he got closer. The intelligence book said that the average armor thickness was 13 inches which was about the average thickness of the Panthers front armor but that was how thick the armor on the Pallas was at the rear where it is generally thinner. The thickness of the armor to the front was almost 17 inches with additional placement points for attachable armor for a grand total of 24 inches of armor in the front. Side curtains protected the tracks and even the back, overall it was by far the most armored tank Jager had ever seen even in museum pieces. He moved to where top members from intelligence was looking over a manual that had been found in the tank.

"Sir." Said one of them as Jager walked up. "What can I do for you today?"

"Tell me about this damn thing," ordered Jager "I know it is slow and heavy but what else?"

"Well sir, it uses an auto loader because it fires a massive shell," stated the intelligence "Is model fires a 203 mm gun and that seems to be the common gun size"

Jager's eyes, a 203 mm shell would weigh 146 kg, a 280 mm shell would belong on a battleship a gun of that size would be horrible on a moving tank. The 152 mm of his Leopard was large enough to do the job and as they gave him more numbers it became clear that the colonials where going for size for some reason. The colonials for going for size was missing speed and while their Pallas tank fired a much larger shell then the leopard it had a lower muzzle speed and that made up for the size in the Leopard's smaller round.

"Another example the colonials go for size while we go for speed." Stated Jager

"They also don't use sabot rounds for armor pricing or fin stabilized rounds so we will outrange them." Stated the officer as Jager blinked, Sabot rounds, which had been used since just after ww2.

"Damn they are really behind the times," stated Jager as he wondered what else they would discover when they got these tanks and other weapons back to the base.

Elsewhere on Vahalla an honor guard from each member of the Tau'ri had formed up outside the Stargate. Each group was only about ten members each but the two largest groups where members of the Chinese and Indiani Army. Standing outside the stargate stood General Rag-Sigh in his full indian army, he lowered his head a bit. He had knew that this day was a long time coming but he still didn't like it. The Stargate activated causing him to look up, seconds after the blue vortex settled two figures walked out. One was a slightly taller than average Chinese woman with black hair under her cap and even darker eyes set in a face that looked innocent. Even so the metals and ribbens on her chest told everyone she was not a person to mess with. Beside her was a white man in a colonel's uniform with a his deep blue eyes looking out at the area around him.

"General Leiong Leang." Greeted General Raj-Sing to the Tigress of the Chinese Army, she had been the first woman to become the head of the PLA and she had demonstrated her skills in the field with operations against terrorist groups attacking UN food convoys in Africa.

"General Raj-Sing." greeted the Tigress in a cool voice. "You know I do not take this post from you as Commander of Valhalla with any pleasure but with the attack by the Colonials it was decided that a change was needed even if you done nothing wrong."

"I understand, General." confirmed General Raj-Sing as he looked at the man standing beside the Tigress of China.

"Allow me to introduce my personal aid, Colonel Lee from the Royal Canadian Air Force." introduced General Leiong Leang. General Raj-Sing nodded his head and thought about why General Leiong Leang was picked to take command at Valhalla.

First, she was Chinese and it was safe to assume that the Chinese government wanted a high-ranking officer in command of Valhalla, that was true of every nation beside the United States who had the top three highest officers in the Tau'ri military. Even so, she was very skilled in large-scale operations with multi-national forces and had worked with other nations militaries in those operations. She was cold, calculating and very dangerous to anyone who got in her way. The only issue was she was an army woman and knew war from the ground not the sky that told him the answer. She was there because if they had to, she would be the one in charge of a ground invasion of a colonial world and as far as he knew no one was better than the Tigress when it came to that.

President Richard Adar came toward the podium with Admiral Nagata and Vice President Spiros flanking him on either side. He stood in what had been the ballroom of a hotel; behind him were the flags of each of the colonies of Kobol along with the flag of the Colonial Government. The Flag of Aquaria was put forward the most with black stands hanging from each flag as a sign of mooring. The hotel staff along with those standing there had been used to fill in the room to make it appear full. Multiple cameras had been set up and just in case the Tau'ri traced the broadcast, they had two armored SUV teams ready to head in different directions plus three teams of three vipers who would fly in opposite ways. It was all to confuse any Tau'ri who might be watching.

He took a drink of water and after making sure everything was ready, he nodded toward the head camera operator. He held up his hand and five fingers and slowly counted down until he pointed toward the President. With that, the light on the camera turned from red to blue a sign that he was now broadcasting live across all colonial space. The colonial intelligence knew that the Tau'ri where monitoring their wireless broadcasts.

"People of the 12 colonies of Kobol, we have all seen the images coming out of Aquaria and other worlds across our space. War has reached every world in some way or another, bridges destroyed, terrorist attacks done by Tau'ri forces they have even tried to assassinate the elected officials of the government. In fact the first act of their war was to destroy the Quorum building with no warning." Started the President "We have hit back; we have hit them back destroying what we believe to be one of six battlestars size ship they have. We have demonstrate that we can hurt each other. The Lords of Kobol do not want the blood of their children any of their children. Therefor in order to bring peace or at least reach agreements to make this conflict more respectable and possible work out deals for prisoners on both sides."

"We want to work out this out so that we can work together and form a peace that all the tribes of man can enjoy." explained the President "If the people of the Tau'ri accept this I hold that we hold a meeting on Libran in the Grand Hall of justice in 3 days. I personally along with a small group will meet with whoever the Tau'ri wish to send, they will have free passage and any ship they send will not be fired upon along as long as they don't fire first."

"We must all try to give peace a chance before the tribes of Kobol destroy each other and that will only benefit the true enemies of humanity, the inhuman cylons." Stated the President "May the Lords of Kobol protect and guild us all toward a brighter tomorrow."

The president waved the crowd as they cheered and clapped but not as much or as loudly as the President hoped, they would.

A couple of hours later the space around the edge of the home system of Valhalla was ripped open with a massive line of bluish vortex, each vortex was so close together that they merged together into a single large vortex. Out of those vortexes came first small Galahad class destroyers followed by Daedalus class cruisers. Next came the three battleships which had journeyed to the Pegasus front, the US battleship Missouri, the Russian Battleship Kursk and the Chinese Battleship Long Chun or Spring Dragon. After them came the large Hadrian class transports which carried the condor bombers and Eagle fighters that had not fit onto the other ships.

They powered toward Valhalla where the rest of the fleet minus those not assigned to defend Earth was located. They moved past the Yorktown, which was still in space waiting for engineers to study the damage done to the ship. They did not want to start the decent of the Yorktown into the atmosphere only to have it break apart and have large pieces of metal fall on the civilians of Valhalla.

The ships moved past the Yorktown and formed up to begin the process of rearming the ships to fight the Colonials. They had not gotten a chance to resupply at Atlantis like they had planned so they now had to fill their armories with all the weapons they would need to take on the Colonials. The crew had been informed about the colonial ships and their weapons and the pilots had been practicing fights against Colonial Vipers in the simulators.

They all knew that it would take just over a day to prepare the fleet, even with beaming technology it could not be done an instantly. It would also take time to decide where would be the best place to deploy the fleet. The best news was that the Odyssey the only ship in the Tau'ri fleet with an ancient cloaking technology that is not a jumper had arrived. The other stealth ships mostly the still being repaired Akula had similar cloaking as Goa'uld which replaced the shield with the cloak. The ancients had similar technology only while the shield was totally down with the Goa'uld technology the ancient ones still had a slight shield. Not much but it would be enough to provide limited protection to the ship and would have likely saved the ship from the same fate as the Akula when a Raptor jumped into it.

News of the fleets arrive reached Earth within a couple of minutes thanks to the network of broadcasting stations which crossed the lightyears with only a few seconds of delay for military channels and a few minutes for civilian broadcasts.

"So we now have the forces needed to strike the Colonials hard," stated the Russian President as the leaders of the Tau'ri gathered together in the Oval Office.

"On the other hand we also have this peace conference offer by the Colonials?" stated the French President "They do show how central focus they are believing that we are part of their tribes of Kobol but we have all dealt with people like that before."

"Most of all when you live right next to one." added the South Korean President who along with other high ranking members of the governmental body of the Tau'ri joined the big 8 along in the Oval office "Even so this isn't North Korea we are dealing with but a group of worlds which may yet be reasoned with."

"Agreed and they say treatment of prisoners on both sides, this proves that they have the MIA Spetsnez." stated the Russian President "We should get him back using the Odyssey."

"We can save that for a backup, we can work out a deal to get him we have almost 5,000 of them as POWs." stated the British PM "Why show them that we have beaming technology behind the scene when we can use it to better effect. I recommend instead that we release the list of names we have as POW to the colonial government and their press."

"Agreed but we should give their government a bit of a warning about what we are going to release so that they can contact family members." stated the American President. "This meeting I believe it is safe to say we are going to give this a chance, just so that we can clear up any issues and settle this war down into something at avoids nuking civilians."

All the world leaders nodded their heads in agreement as the message was sent out to the Colonials that they would meet with them in three days.

It didn't take long for news of the Tau'ri decision to attend the conference reached the Colonial government but even with that news Adar found himself facing an issue he hadn't thought of.

"Sir, the Tau'ri have agreed to the conference but they have requested us to clear something up for them, does this peace conference mean a ceasefire between all Tau'ri and Colonial space and ground forces." Stated an aid

"Yes, of course it does." answered Adar before he noticed that his Sectary of Justice shaking his head. "What is it?"

"Sir, the Tau'ri forces which are on the ground like the one we have as a prisoner are considered terrorists. If we agree to a ceasefire with them then legally we are agreeing to ceasefire with terrorists and the Quorum can remove you." explained one of the best legal minds in the colonies. "You can agree to a limited ceasefire, other Presidents have done that in the past when dealing with terrorist groups but it is limited to the city that the talks happen nothing more."

"That will not work, they have to come on a ship and we can't limit it to a single city," countered Adar before thinking about issues. "What if I use the fact that they have to get here in a ship as a reason to have a ceasefire on and above Libran?"

"That could work and it would be easier for the Quorum to accept that." stated the Sectary of Justice as Adar nodded his head before going back to figuring out what issues they wanted to bring up first and the counterpoints they would use against the Tau'ri. They quickly agreed on the terms that they would sent to the Tau'ri for the meeting, there would be five representative from each side plus four guards. Each side would also be allowed to send two news camera crews to broadcast the meeting to each side. Adar himself didn't like that but his political advisors convinced him that if they held this meeting without broadcasting it live to the people there would be talk that they are hiding something and that would cause massive problems with the public.

Well I am back from my vacation and besides being driven up the wall by my young nephews, it was enjoyable time in Florida but I have returned. Now I hope you enjoyed this chapter and until next time please keep reading, Thanks Wilkins