Stars of Iron Snakepit Vol 2

by Dark Schtroumpf

This is the continuation of Snakepit, a Draka-SG crossover. AU, Earth here is Drakaverse Earth post-Final War. Consider a distant parallel universe to the original SGverse. Will earn its M rating.

7. Chapter 6-1

Hello readers, this chapter isn't actually finished, but since I seem to be writing rather large ones (and taking time to do so...) I was thinking posting in "installments" might provide pleasantly more often updates here. So there's the beginning of chapter 6, as written so far.

Chapter 6

Planet Tolla, capital of the Tollan Empire, 2015 Earth calendar

Two men waited in the hilly wilderness, a hundred kilometers away from the nearest settlement. They were lying prone in a shallow dug-in hole in the chilly ground. A multispectrum camouflage blanket covered them. From the sky they would look just like another patch of frosted grass and hardy flowers carpeting the rolling hills. Behind them a mountain range's snow-capped tops rose out of the misty blue horizon.

A low sun cast diffuse shadows through a thin layer of haze.

Silence complemented the typical winter Tollan setting, here out of the way of civilization. There were no ground roads out there. Nobody who went to their luxury winter lodge would use such pedestrian transport. Not when your civilization had flying cars as a commodity.

And their target had just such one holiday residence tucked in one of the pristine valleys acting as a magnet for Tollan high society, a loose collection of luxury chalets sprawling around a small and exclusive resort complex, away from the more crowded mass-tourist areas of the range.

The unmarked, ordinary aircar with a faulty transponder had landed them four hours ago during the nightly snowfall. That was only ten hours after the secret meetup in one of Tollania's largely automated industrial districts, in another anonymous warehouse full of packed goods. Security there relied entirely on automated sensors.

Very conveniently these had encountered an untraceable intrusion at the time, such that the recordings for the half-hour the meeting had taken, arriving and exiting included, would merely show empty alleys around an empty warehouse and the moving transponders of the ubiquitous freight handling robots. The few cameras and sensors that would have recorded the unexpected visitors had their raw take edited on the fly by the intrusion program hijacking their firmware, leaving nothing but blank walls, closed doors and empty rooms.

The two men of the cell came in. They knew each other by codenames only, never interacting in life outside of those times they worked together in the Human Liberation Front's clandestine branch. Or one of its branches, if one wanted to be exact, a rather autonomous branch which the overwhelming majority of its nominally parent organization (itself not really a unified and homogeneous entity) had absolutely no idea even existed. And whose larger proportion of sympathizers would openly and sincerely condemn the actions, yet harping on how the Tollan Empire's past and current wrongdoings might understandably push less-discerning minds to such ends.

Another man came from another side of the building. Of him they knew nothing except that he was a trusted supplier for the tools needed by the Struggle. Like them, his appearance – the unremarkable face – was an illusion provided by the kind of hyper-realistic facial masks a customized matter-printing program could generate. An illusion that would be discarded after use, never to be seen again. An illusion that nevertheless could trip automated recognition algorithms into spurious and above suspicion search results.

Word and counterword. A long narrow box exchanged hands silently, and the trio left their own way.

The box was now lying between the two prone men. The one on the left was continuously scanning the distant sky in the direction of far Tollania. The direction their target would be coming from. Soon, expectedly. They knew the date and time from a source whose identity they ignored, but assumed worked in the target's loose entourage. A disgruntled employee maybe. One with sympathies leaning the right way in any case. Towards getting rid of the damn Empire and their Draka allies, bringing a new era of equality and justice to all regardless of their origin.

The high-powered sight suddenly stopped its back-and-fro motion. A second later, the observer tapped his neighbor's shoulder.

"It's them. I've got a positive ID" he whispered. With quick and precise motions his companion opened the box and hefted a long tube out. Getting on his knees with the camo blanket out of the way he flipped a telescoping sight open and assumed a shooting position, tube supported on his right shoulder, sight in front of his eye. A faint whine came out of the missile launcher as it came alive.

It wasn't Tollan Army issue. In fact, it wasn't out of any standing armory. Its components had been printed a week ago from blueprints their supplier would never share. Its provenance would be untraceable. There were no identifying marks on the micro or the macroscale. No rare isotope mix to extract a tell-tale spectral signature from. It was, all things considered, a primitive weapon. Chemical rocket motor, aerodynamic guidance kit with basic imaging electronic seeker, blast-fragmentation warhead. All things easily producible with the kind of industrial matter printers any sufficiently advanced civilization possessed. All it took was the right feedstocks and the right designs.

And their unknown supplier had enough of those.

"In range." The shooter quietly said. Their targets was flying at an acute bearing. It would pass a kilometer on the right of the strike team, a couple hundred meters high. Except it would never fly that far.

The aircar's two occupants had no idea of the danger. Nasty words on anonymous globalNet rants were not a serious cause for alarm. And realistically, nobody could threaten them. And Tolla was a peaceful, civilized society, notwithstanding a few hotheads here and there, mostly out in the outer worlds, ranting about how they used to be independent before the Tollans rescued them from the Goa'uld.

No, their minds were firmly set on the perspective of skiing and partying and sex. A lot of sex. Not that the quantity would change, but the settings and the partners would. Sex in a hot jacuzzi surrounded by magnificent snowy mountains and beautiful naked people never got old.

A civilian aircar, no matter how luxurious, didn't mount the kind of sensors a military design did. Yet a proximity alarm suddenly rang out in the leather-and-precious-veneer cabin. Eyes widened, mouths parted and hands snapped out of their reciprocal fondling.

The woman, with her superior reflexes and eyesight, spotted the incoming missile. She didn't have time to grab the manual controls.

The missile hit the aircar nose on, smashed through the panoramic windscreen, flew past the passengers and exploded inside the rear luggage compartment. The back of the craft tore open like a metal and composite flower shedding petals and the car plunged towards the ground trailing black smoke.

The passengers were already mortally injured by the shower of tungsten shrapnel that scoured their cabin. No safety feature, even had they not been destroyed by the explosion would have saved them. Their carriage tumbled down uncontrollably and crashed at terminal velocity on the cold hard soil, smashing itself into further pieces, scattering debris and body parts in a wide plume.

The strike team watched the aircar destroy itself. A quick scan through the sight showed the scorched impact site and the scattered wreckage well enough. Nobody could survive this.

Without a word, for they were professionals, they jogged back to their own aircar, hidden under another blanket in a dip of the terrain, and quickly alighted before any emergency service crew could arrive on scene. Flying low and fast they melted inside the mountains.

An hour later a Tollan constabulary officer stood at the edge of the still-smoking crater along with an emergency response team. He'd immediately realized there was nobody to save, yet the team began deploying their firefighting and rescue gear. The aircar's registration and passenger manifest scrolled before his eyes in augmented reality display.

Shit. An aircar accident was unfathomable. And this had all the marks of not being an accident.

The face and name of the dead passengers hovered in his vision. The woman's face and name were famous enough, having come up often enough in the people's newspages during the past three years.

Ann Rayner, the Draka-born socialite and entrepreneur, and her Tollan husband. Shit, shit, shit.

Right on cue, a screaming sound came from the sky. Raising his head the Tollan policeman saw the military-model orbital shuttle dive towards the site at supersonic speed then abruptly decelerate in a whine of abused inertial compensators and come to a perfect hover a stone throw away.

He noticed the dragon-crest on the shuttle right before its side hatch sprang open and four Drakensis soldiers ran out of the craft. Mouth agape, and suddenly shivering, the Tollanite stepped aside reflexively.

"Get away, Tollan" the harsh-toned words in the strange drawling accent were warning enough. The Drakas had come for their own.

Luna, Solar System

A klaxon blared throughout the operational areas of Dante Base. In the middle of the crater the scheduled mag-train for Abydos was silently coming to a halt with the passengers inside pressed down their seats or clinging to their armrests under the harsher-than-normal deceleration.

Inside the transit hall a wormhole established right before the "plug" of dense metal automatically swung down to obturate the stargate's aperture. Yet an identification signal came through immediately, and the plug lifted itself back up in seconds with a hiss of hydraulics while the transverse separation bulkheads closest to the stargate unfolded from their resting position along the side walls. The room finished reconfiguring for a standard transit as the turbopumps hidden in the engineering spaces below injected massive quantities of stored air mix into the shortened chamber, bringing it from the near-vacuum of a mag-transit to the less-frequently used pressurized "foot passage" configuration.

All of this took less than ten seconds, then the travelers emerged from the shimmering event horizon. Four personnel in the uniform of the Draka consular protection service came through carrying a white emergency cryopod between them. A transit officer met them at the base of the shallow ramp. "Code Four evac" was the only word needed. The highest priority medical evacuation, reserved for cases desperate and important enough to warrant the use of the Domination's sole working sarcophagus device.

"This way".

The officer led the foursome through a side door into one of the adjacent rooms, past multiple layers of unobtrusive security. The four pod-bearers stopped in the middle, and the officer activated the ring transport controls to send them straight to the receiving set, several kilometers away into the main complex.

Five minutes later, Ann Rayner's remains were carefully lowered into the Goa'uld healing device at the heart of Dante Base's medical wing.

Mars orbit, Solar System

Anton de Polignac, ranking Merarch in the Citizen Special Force, listened to his own breathing. Truth be said there was hardly anything he could hear save the quasi-subliminal hum of his baseline life support. Ensconced in a deep space infiltration module, he was flying along the direct transfer orbit from Phobos to Deimos. Hours ago he and the other three operators of his strike team were dropped by the system defense frigate Tigershark right before it crested Phobos' horizon as seen from its smaller satellite brother. The next-generation frigate herself had continued along her own stealthy return trajectory, which would push her through a series of complex orbital maneuvers towards her eventual rendezvous vector with the strike team, after they completed their mission.

He was at the tip of the irregular four-men echelon formation, with no less than three hundred meters of separation between elements. He was suited in a semi-rigid long duration stealth EVA set, its outer skin covered in the same metacoating as the stealthy frigate and currently doing its best to make him invisible, or more accurately unremarkable to automated surveillance.

He was connected to the insertion sled in front by various service umbilicals and harness attachments. The sled itself, a torpedo like faceted cylinder clad in the same metacoating, had its front-mounted disk-like stealth shield deployed, hiding sled and operator behind its shadow. The target-facing side was cooled to a fraction of degree of zero Kelvin, with the sled's inboard subspace thermal sinks currently dumping all excess heat into the void between dimensions.

There wasn't much to do. All non-essential systems were powered-down during their ballistic approach. The virtual display projected through his implant showed the trajectory as a series of gates. He was right inside. No need to correct using the sled's cold gas thrusters. A timer counted down towards the next action point. Hours and hours to go still.

Anton reviewed the mission steps in his mind for the umpteenth time. Then he put himself to sleep again.

At T minus five his implant woke him up. Through it he ran through the checklist for the next phase: the zero-zero intercept burn. Through his implant he commanded the sled to run through its self-checks. While the hardware did so he opened a window to the long-range camera nested at the tip of the sled.

Deimos sprang into his vision, a dark irregular lump of matter on the blackest background. They were in Mars' shadow for the close approach. But Deimos wasn't the pristine moonlet it had been. From it sprouted the new orbital shipyards using it both as anchor and particle shield, like a shiny metallic and geometric tree. From the distance he could only resolve the larger structures, wide hollow construction slips, dot-like pressurized tank farms, cylindrical crew spaces and boxy industrial modules, the dark glint of kilometer-wide standby solar panel arrays. The complex spread across miles and miles of space, most of it still under construction or final adjustments. Already the complete sections were pumping out new frigates and drone fighters to bolster the Solar System Defense Grid.

As the sled powered up all dormant systems Anton was aware of a regular pinging: the shipyards' proximity radar being picked up by his electronic warfare receiver. A regular pinging was good. His rig's stealth features returned a near infinitesimal return at this distance, and the zero-zero intercept would mean a steadily reducing doppler return. After all it wouldn't do to be zapped by an anti-collision laser.

The timer reached zero. Anton reflexively tightened the grip inside his gloves, though his suit was rigidly locked to the sled. Following the loaded navigation program, his cold jet thrusters flared to life and in his virtual display he watched his velocity decrease steadily.

The team was still under strict emission control and he didn't have a visual to his rear sector. He had to assume, or hope, that his three followers went through their own slowing burn. He wasn't sure he would spot one overtaking him anyway.

The burn stopped, having shaved a significant fraction of his speed. He would be approaching the shipyards with a differential measured in tens of meters per second.

Minutes passed. An hour. Naturally the final approach was the most agonizingly slow part of the journey. The yards steadily increased in size. Now he could resolve minute details if he cared to zoom in, but his eye was irresistibly attracted to the heavy construction slip where the first new generation cruiser's keel was laid up. Its length was huge. It would dwarf its predecessors when completed. Even in this very early stage of construction it looked like the skeleton of an immense marine beast, bones of dull metal-composite arranged in a complex structure mixing geodesic and organic shapes to spread the colossal static and dynamic loads it would eventually bear in battle.

Another burst of cold gas and the stealth shield folded along the sled's body, at last allowing Anton direct vision forward. He was coming up to the yards' outer works, still kilometers away from the core trunks. But he was inside the perimeter.

"Check in" he vocalized softly, even though he could scream at the top of his lungs in vacuum without risking detection this way. His team's terse replies came back through low powered, wideband radio bursts.

"Two" "Three" "Four". All accounted for. He allowed himself a smile. They fell in line behind him as he navigated his sled through the vast spindly structures at a leisurely pace. He knew his path and destination from the painstakingly detailed briefing, weaving a route through volumes of space less likely to be scrutinized by internal sensors, cameras, or EVA workers.

He reached his target twenty minutes later: a collection of skyscraper-sized pressurized hydrogen tanks set in their long support frame like peas in a pod. And incidentally a mere two hundred meters from the heavy slipway where the cruiser laid open. The quatuor spread out to set their nuclear demolition charge on separate tanks, working quickly and efficiently.

Ten minutes later they fell in line behind Anton again for their outbound journey.

Several hours later they rendezvoused with the frigate at a point hidden from sight of the shipyard by Deimos itself.

Twelve hours later the charges detonated, the tanks of hydrogen adding their mass to the runaway nuclear reactions. The heavy construction slipway was vaporized along with half the shipyard's mass, leaving an expanding sphere of cooling plasma in its place.

But only on the screens and displays of those involved in the exercise. Inside the shipyards themselves, a facility-wide announcement told everyone they were now dead, and should carry on doing whatever they were doing. Except the security crew, who were in for a rather embarrassing debriefing.

Back in Tigershark's operations compartment Anton de Polignac grinned. He hadn't had so much fun since a long time ago.

Tollan Empire

Like every workday morning Stavros Merrick woke up in his single bedroom flat with the rising dawn glowing gently through the tower's floor to ceiling bay windows, taking care not to disturb the person still sleeping on the other side of the bed. A Tollan student from Serita, the other inhabitable planet sharing Tolla's star system, met the previous evening in one of the capital's many clubs where such congregated. Raven-haired and fair-skinned with an amount of body jewelry that made exploring her anatomy something like a treasure hunt, and intricate tattoos begging to be traced with caressing fingers. Which he had done, extensively before moving on to the juicier bits.

At 23, Stavros Merrick was an oddity. Normally a Citizen his age would be Drakensis. But he was 6 when the Final War happened and his parents were on the losing side. Yet they arguably ended among the winners, despite their not making it to the New America. As owners and operators of a sizable Belt mining and refining business they found themselves on the better side of the deal allowing the colony ship to escape the solar system.

His parents were awarded metic citizenship with the provisos that they continued operating their facilities and ships for the benefit of the Domination. Which put them, at least in financial terms, right next to the landholder elite.

The distances involved meant they didn't partake much in Draka society save the occasional visits in-system. Nor did they have much affinity for it.

Their children were another thing. Stavros and his siblings were sent to Draka educational establishments – special boarding schools with provisions for their being homo sapiens not born in the Domination. First on Mars and Luna, then to Earth. Adapting to their new society was strange, in some cases difficult. It helped that Stavros was still young and malleable enough, and that Draka bioscience helped a long way towards bridging the physical gap in addition to adapting to full, constant Earth gravity.

Then puberty hit and Stavros, for all that he loved his parents, felt the pull of Draka values irresistibly aligning with the discourse of his raging hormones.

By the time he was 18 there wasn't much question where his allegiance stood. Naturally he was sensible enough to understand his parents not being as enthusiastic about their new world, and knowing well enough that their well-being and safety depended on them not rocking the boat. Whenever he visited them he adroitly straddled the line, even going to the extremity of not bringing his personal servant along.

Something that came unexpectedly handy later, when his ability to function well by himself put him ahead of more standard Citizens: going "outworlds", that is outside the Domination borders meant not bringing any serf along.

He eventually graduated out of Archona University with a dual degree in business administration and planning, and advanced physics. Having completed his mandatory, if shortened given the circumstances, military service with honors, he then accepted a job offer from Faraday Electromagnetic Combine. Like any able Citizen he had his pick of choices. But no other offer promised to send him outsystem, not only outsystem, but out of the Domination itself, as part of the expanding Draka representation in the Tollan Empire. It had started as a temporary military expedition – and how he'd cheered when the pictures from the Tollan campaign came back to Earth's networks! Then it became a permanent presence, and business followed.

True, there was no massive exchange of bulk goods. None of the parties needed such when they had all the raw materials they needed in their own systems. In any case, the stargate was not optimized for such, even using cargo trains.

But there was a steady transfer of Tollan industrial hardware, fabricators, decontamination gear, specialized field emitters to push forward the reclamation effort after the Final War. Draka luxury goods including advanced biocosmetic and life-extending treatments went the other way, followed by works of art that attracted the eye of rich Tollan individuals thrilled by their exotic origin. It was not just the distance. After the so-called Tanith War, the Domination and its citizens exuded the kind of dangerous aura that made well-bred daughters wet themselves for the bad boys. As the years passed and more data inevitably filtered out about Earth's history that aura only grew, and reactions to it solidified.

Some Tollans rolled with it, indulging in the kind of tourism only the Domination could provide. Others, the majority, took the benefits of their relationship with distance providing a convincing bulwark against (un)founded fears. And others in the Empire took it as the vindication of their long-held preventions, if not barely hidden hostility, against what they called Tollan imperialism.

Not that those were very present in the heart of the Empire where Stavros lived and mostly worked. Though the few who were tended to be vocal about it. It didn't matter much to him. As a Draka citizen he didn't fear anyone trying to rile him up. At worst the offender would get a good beating, the Legation's instructions were clear enough: "you may act in self-defense, but try not to inflict permanent damage".

There were a few times when he had to test his unarmed martial skills. Quite unsurprisingly it always had to do with a girl he had his eye on, and local guys – or worse, the girl's regular partner – taking exception to it and failing to recognize him as a Draka early enough, or simply believing they could match him.

In any case, if Draka education was good at one thing it was building an overflowing amount of self-confidence, along with the means to back it up.

Which went a long way towards explaining why the small notebook where he kept a trace of his conquests was almost full already.

The raven beauty whose hair spilled on the pillow was the latest. She was sleeping on her side and the silky sheet hung the curve of her hip. Stavros felt a pang of lust, then checked himself. He did have work to do at the legation.

Striding to the next room he used the autokitchen to fix himself a copious breakfast. As the appliances chugged along he took personal care of his coffee. Black beans from the Domination, brought along with the small Italian-style coffeemaker that followed him from Archona U. A birthday gift from his friends there, always conjuring up fond memories.

The small of coffee wafted out and a couple minutes later the girl came out of the bedroom. Naked and yawning, then her eyes went down to Stavros' still undressed state.

Oh well. It was still early.

The Belt, Solar System, November 3rd 1998

Serenely hanging in deep space, the typical spindle-and-donut shape of Merrick Mining and Manufacturing Ltd's main operating base was dwarfed by the sheer infinity of its environment. Yet by manmade standards it was a large structure, one of the largest privately-owned pieces of artificial real estate in the Belt. Its kilometer-long circumference housed in comfortable spin gravity the hundreds of technicians and engineers, along with their families, who operated 3M's prospector ships, mobile mining platforms, zero-gee refineries and fabricators as they fed resource-rich asteroids into the Alliance's global economy. Out of the central spindle sprouted the irregular shapes of backup solar collectors, heat exchangers and radiators, service modules and docking ports, with a large spacecraft hangar at both ends.

Mass launch facilities made orbital transfer almost cheap, yet the bulk of the company's clerical functions existed in office spaces on Earth. There was no point in wasting valuable spaceborne real estate for accounting offices, HR or marketing departments. Secure electronic communications linked Earth-based business perscomps and Merrick Prime's central mainframe.

The space station was the company's tip of the spear, where value was actually created by the best minds and hands they could hire. Inside the Operations Center taking up a slice of the habitat ring, upper management could coordinate and monitor the survey and industrial works with communication lags counted in seconds instead of minutes.

Besides, space was the new frontier, and Adrian Merrick traced his DNA all the way back to the settlers who followed Lewis and Clark in colonizing the North American continent. Spaceships instead of wagons, and Draka instead of Indians. The Belt was firmly outside of the "safe" Cis-Lunar zone, and private Alliance businesses were considered fair game by the Snakes. They knew it, Alliance military knew it, and the kind of high-energy tech anyone needed just to exist in deep space was too easily weaponized.

The station was plugged into the vast Alliance coordination datamesh reporting known Draka movements in space. Any move by the Snakes against 3M interests would be reported in time to take appropriate measures, if interception by Alliance military failed to stop them – so far, a scenario that had stayed theoretical. Not that the Snakes hadn't tried at the beginning of the gold rush into the Belt. Daring raids and skirmishes had flared in the void, but soon enough the "civilians" had shown enough teeth –nuclear mining charges, industrial heavy lasers, mass drivers and even skillfully handled drive exhaust plumes - to deter anything short of a dedicated military effort – one that couldn't be hidden, and would meet a proper military response by Alliance cruisers, corvettes and gunboats.

It was all balanced on a razor's edge, Adrian thought. Yet he felt safer up there – that and his pilot of a father had infected him as a boy with the flying virus. Now space was his home and playground. And he'd make sure to pass the virus on to his boy Stavros.

But right now, he was worried. The space grapevine had been abuzz for a couple days with higher than usual Snake activity and Alliance military had upped its readiness state to Defcon 4 the previous day. It wasn't by far the first occurrence – that kind of flare-up happened every year. But his latest conversation with the Space Force coordinator had left him with a bad feeling. His "we're monitoring the situation, can't tell you anything definitive right now" line was colored with an underlying air of unease. Adrian could bet his left hand that something serious was brewing. As a result, he'd instructed his own men to raise the company's state of awareness. His operators were poring over comm traffic and monitoring their sensor picture with elevated care. If anything blew up, he wanted to know as soon as it happened.

"Daddy!" The high-pitched cry made Adrian raise his attention from the holographic plotting table to the ops room hatch.

"Hey kiddo. School finished?" he replied with an instantly composed face, banishing his worried frown. His boy nodded enthusiastically and went to rapid-fire kid-telling of the day at school. Eventually ending in "Daddy, can we go to the spaceships?". Of course. Going to the central spindle with its zero-gee thrills and the panoramic windows overlooking the docking bays never grew old.

"Sure thing, kiddo" he smiled, then waved to the watch coordinator. "Barb, hold the fort while I'm away, will ya?" Barbara Talbott waved back with a smile even as she continued tapping commands on her console.

Father and son went the familiar path through the curving corridors of the ring, white walls highlighted by the bright touches of color-coded signals and system schematics. At the junction, they took the ladder up, feeling centrifugal gravity fade as they "climbed" towards the spindle. Adrian felt his usual pride at seeing his young son negotiating the transition with the ease of a veteran spacer. But then Stavros had spent most of his life in space too. His mother Dimitra had returned to Earth for the term of her pregnancy in order to spare her unborn child the hazards of space radiation and zero-gravity. Six months after Stavros' birth mother and child flew back up the gravity well.

Some people went through pregnancy and birth in space. The new drugs allowed that. But Adrian and Dimitra had both preferred to do things the more natural way. Not least because those drugs were originally developed and perfected by the Domination. As far as they were concerned, the less they had to rely on Draka-invented biotech, the better, though they didn't go as far as some of the radicals eschewing any bio-enhancement, including the correction of common genetic defects.

As a result, young Stavros was a healthy, lively child. One who would eventually inherit his father's empire, Adrian hoped. That would entail going back to the inner system for higher education – Merrick Prime's small school could only go so far. But that laid in the future. His family had years to enjoy life together before the boy's eventual leaving the nest.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single boy in possession of a ball, must be in want of a partner. And it was a similar truth that fathers universally found themselves, willingly or not, the target of that ball. And dodge-the-ball was even better in zero-gee. And Stavros had, to his delight, mastered the concept of curving the ball. Fortunately, after the denizens of the station discovered how a particular viewing chamber over the "North" docking bay became the local kids' preferred playing ground, a generous layer of foam insulation was liberally applied to said room's surfaces. Which, over the ensuing years, saved many bruises indeed.

Adrian twisted mid-air to avoid – narrowly – the kinetic missile expertly launched his way, then froze. A two-tone gong sounded – general broadcast.

Barbara Talbott's voice followed. "Attention, attention. We just received a system-wide warning from Alliance Command. They're going to defense condition five!"

Adrian propelled himself to the nearest intercom panel and punched the link to Ops. "Merrick here. I'm on my way."

"Stavros," he said in a gentler but serious tone "I need you to go home with your mommy. Can you do that alone?"

"Sure, Dad!" then as an afterthought "Dad, are we in danger?"

"No, son. Merrick Prime is safe and if it comes to war, our fleet will crush the bastards before they can say ooof!" He smiled reassuringly, in his fatherly role.

Truth was, he wasn't so sure. Every scenario he was aware of – as a civilian – predicted widespread, catastrophic destruction in an all-out war against the Snakes. The Alliance was confident in its technological superiority, but nobody sane underestimated the Domination's martial commitment. And if the losing side decided to throw asteroids in spite… it could spell doom on Earth.

Nobody sane wanted that. In the last decade the politicians had sounded confident that the Domination, faced with growing internal contradictions in the face of rapid technological progress, would have to drop its insane policies and start behaving like civilized human beings. Adrian had his reservations about that. He'd seen Draka behavior in space. They just didn't strike him as the kind to meekly acknowledge defeat and reform themselves into nice proper individuals. Evilness was too ingrained in their system for that. If they had to go down, they'd likely drag everyone else with them.

He was never happier to be far away from Earth right now.

"So?"

Talbott turned towards Adrian as he strode through the hatch.

"Official dispatch from Alliance Command, boss. Gist of it, the Snakes seem to be ramping up for war, they're evacuating their cities and plantations and setting their forces to full war readiness. Also, long range surveillance arrays caught a fast ship leaving Aresopolis towards Ceres. Folks are speculating about a high-ranking Draka defector"

Adrian nodded. Someone high enough in the Domination's chain of command… the potential for a catastrophic – in Archona's eyes – intelligence leak might push them into aggressive action, that is, even more aggressive than usual.

He sat at a console and perused the dispatches. The official ones were written in the customary terse style of army bureaucrats, but something in the wording, Merrick senior felt, sounded even grimmer than such previous happenstances. Reading between the lines his gut feeling – the same feeling he'd learnt to trust in his business ventures – told him this was serious.

He brought up an up-to-date summary of 3M's asset dispositions, studied it for a while.

"Okay, Barb, dust off our war contingency plan. I want every station chief or ship captain updated on it, and acknowledging reception in two hours. Also, call a meeting with all department heads the same time. Hopefully this will balloon down, but if doesn't, I want 3M prepared to support the war effort in space."

November 4th, 1998

"The fuck'r they doing?" The man's incredulous and vulgar outbust didn't warrant a talk-down, for Adrian held the exact same thought. The station's infosystem was collating reports received from 3M's own assets and the rest of Belt, showing them consolidated in the holotank central to Ops. It wasn't real-time, strictly speaking, but as close as light-speed lags allowed. Events happening in Earth-Lunar space took minutes to reach Merrick Prime's communication arrays. But it hardly mattered.

His technician's question might as well have been "the fuck they're not doing", he thought. Once the first shot was fired, the Alliance response had become increasingly sluggish, uncoordinated. Perfectly operational battlestations did nothing to defend themselves and died to Draka missiles and particle beams. One after another, democracy's assets were falling, and communications on the military nets were down to incoherent, garbled fragments.

The enemy wasn't going off lightly, but their losses were dramatically lower. In fact, they seemed to be suffering more from self-inflicted damage – sabotage, maybe? – than anything Alliance space forces did.

Earth itself was suffering, that much was clear. Freshly recorded pictures showed dark rolling cloud masses spreading from nuclear and orbital strikes over the continents. Merrick pondered that it must be hell down over there. So far their own sector seemed clear, but elsewhere in the Belt, the Draka appeared to be pushing hard toward Ceres, exploiting the lack of proper military opposition. It would be hours before it came to blows with the stations and ships positioned there, though. Adrian didn't fancy the chances of civilians fighting against a Draka battlegroup.

"Medical emergency! Medical emergency in sector 2B!" panicked shouting came through the intercom. Everyone in the ops room raised their eyes. Merrick senior remarked how Barbara Talbott's face seemed overly flushed, her eyes glazed. He was about to ask if she was well when she let out a blood curdling scream, her eyes going wide with shock, as though she'd suddenly glimpsed something monstrous in the room.

"They're coming! They're coming for us! Aaaaaaaaaah!" she started screaming and flailing, stumbled out of her duty chair, eyes darting left and right. The man closest to her tried to reach her, but his "are you okay?" question was overridden by her screaming "Nooooooo! You're one of them! You're a ghouloon! I can see through your fur!", then she bit down on the man's outstretched hand and tore out a strip of flesh.

"What the hell!" Cries of shock and disbelief rose across the room even as more alerts came through the intercom.

Adrian was frozen in shock for a few seconds, taking in the view of his trusted aide going berserk, blood running on her lips, trying to claw out the man's eyes until he finally landed a heavy fist thump on her head in a reflexive defensive action.

"Hold her down!" he shouted, and ran to the closest first-aid box.

Talbott only stopped resisting like a madwoman against the hands pinning her to the floor when her boss delivered a heavy tranquilizer dose with the hypospray directly on her neck.

He exhaled as the woman finally relaxed in a drug-induced stupor, eyes vague, mumbling incoherent sounds.

He suspected the other medical emergencies had something to do with Talbott's condition. As quiet came back to the ops room and his employees eventually prosecuted each alert he was vindicated. Half an hour later he was standing inside the station's hospital bay, being briefed on each sudden case of madness by his chief surgeon. A dozen men and women were lying down for treatment. Four of them were collateral victims, brutally attacked by one of the mad persons. One of the afflicted was clinging to life with gruesome, self-inflicted wounds.

It would have been much worse if the station hadn't been in a high state of alert with quick response teams stationed in every sector and every personnel wearing their locator/monitor bracelet. This way every case was dealt with quickly enough to limit the damage. But there was no explanation so far as to why these particular people were affected, or how. Blood testing didn't reveal anything like a psychotropic substance as the cause, but then the station's medical hardware, while state of the art, wasn't a supposed to fit the role of a proper research institute.

"Okay, keep them under watch and inform me of any change", he concluded.

November 17, 1998

"They what?"

Then the cacophony started.

The theater was the largest room in Merrick Prime's habitat ring. The place for all-hands gatherings, be they leisure or business. Adrian Merrick stood at the lectern, in the front row, his wife, Dimitra, and his department heads. Next were his employees, stratified according to their status in the company, ship captains in front, lowly mining rig operators at the back – if one could call the highly skilled and highly paid specialized workers "low status".

"We can hurt them!" Henri Lafleur shouted, the head of his deep space tug operation. "We're almost finished rigging L684. We can start boosting her next week!"

L684, the metallic asteroid that was next for processing. Drive collars were attached and fueled, with the final settings, test runs and adjustments left to do. The rock's million-ton mass would normally be sent to Cis-Lunar space, where 3M's orbital refineries and fabricators benefitted from an abundance of free solar energy.

But now, three quarters of those were slagged, and the rest captured by the Snakes.

L684 final journey would normally be a gentle, leisurely zero-zero transfer orbit with minimum propellant expense.

But now, 3M's space cowboys had installed triple the normal amount of plasma thrusters, with a proportional increase in propellant tanks – ensuring a continuous burn all the way. There would be no mid-course reversion maneuver, no braking burn. Thrust all the way to impact, baby. With the African continent as a rough target. The impact would be enough to thoroughly fuck up the Domination's heartland, and if it damned everyone else on Earth to starvation, well… better dead than serfs was the word.

At least if Merrick allowed the plan to proceed. He still had reservations about such an extreme, planet-killing act, and he knew his peers elsewhere in the Belt making such preparations shared his hesitation. But they held that card in reserve. After last month's clashes, the frontlines had solidified across the Solar system.

The Alliance military was virtually no more, if one excepted that huge colony ship and its auxiliaries, who had revealed their existence at the start of the war. Earth, Mars and Luna were held by the Snakes. But those were crippled too, by the comp plague, and unable to operate a peak effectiveness. Their assault on Ceres had shown it – sure, they'd managed to destroy the large Alliance base, but only shreds of their initial task force had escaped alive.

Now both sides were back to watching each other… like stone dogs. Such was the irony. The madness striking Talbott and others was eventually explained, only hours later, as the message from that General Lefarge was repeated and filtered through the civilian infosystems. And in the days that followed as more data shone a light on the Domination's deadly bio-sabotage. It seemed that luck and distance, coupled with the fact that the bio-contamination effort was primarily aimed as the Alliance space military, had lessened the impact on Merrick's space workforce as well as the rest of the civilian Belt.

"And we'd kill Earth. Along with everyone on it. And then down the line, we'd die too, because we're still far from being entirely self-sufficient." someone else countered.

Closed, captive ecosystems like those on space stations were fragile things, always balanced on the verge of systemic collapse. Their continued viability depended on regular access to a wider pool of resources, much to the chagrin of those who advocated for a purely space-based, autonomous Belt.

Adrian replayed the Archon's message in his mind. Von Shrakenberg's focused, patrician face, the blue eyes boring straight at the camera, as if to speak to his very soul, with all the power of persuasion that came from being the single most powerful man in human history.

"This Final War was always coming. We knew this, and while both sides made preparations, in the end, the Race prevailed, because there was never a chance of us losing and surviving the aftermath."

He'd then talked, at length, of the damage inflicted on Earth. Expounded, in detail, the consequences of continuing the fight with extinction-level energies. How saving the planet, and the sentient life she cradled, would require a united effort by all her remaining children, bar those who would set off for the long journey towards another star.

"I know how hard this must look for yo', citizens of the Alliance. Your side lost the greatest struggle in the history of mankind. Hundreds of millions are dead, mo' are dying every day trying to hopelessly delay the inevitable. Some of you, in the belt, are making preparations to send planet-killing rocks against Earth, which our remaining space force might or might not successfully intercept." The Archon had chuckled mirthlessly. "A Draka can actually admire that level of commitment. I do. But all you'd achieve is mo' destruction. Yo' couldn't win the war that way – just make the ruins bounce harder. What I intend to offer you is an alternative that can be accepted by both our sides."

His expression became harder. "Make no mistake, the Race won this war. The State will rule over a united Earth. My people wouldn't stand for anything else." His eyes and the lines around his mouth then softened fractionally. "But we recognize it's a new beginning, in a way; and there's precedent in the history of the Domination for accepting… newcomers, ones freely bringing their skills to the Race." A pause for emphasis, several seconds of that iron-willed gaze. "I, as Archon of the Domination of the Draka, am extending this offer to all remaining Alliance soldiers and civilians on Luna and beyond: join us willingly, with all the rights of a free citizen bar voting, what we call Metic citizenship. In time, your children will grow up as full citizens. But" he held a finger up. "there's a condition. That colony ship constructed in secrecy, christened 'New America', and its auxiliaries. They have to actually fulfill their goal, that is, leave the Solar System to colonize a new world instead of pointlessly continuing the fight in space against us."

A smile, cold but with a gleam of something like genuine amusement in the eyes.

"A rather… reasonable condition, I'm sure you'll all agree. And that way, something of your past society will continue to exist, maybe thrive, but never be in a position to threaten the Race on Earth."

The finger folded into a fist, which rapped on the table. "Need I explain the alternative? You may choose to continue the fight. You'll hurt us, but there's only half a million of you, with no planetary support. We will win such a fight, eventually. And then, your only choice will be death, or the Yoke. Yo' want my honest advice? If yo want death, then just be done with it. Eat a bullet, space yo'self, swallow a pill, doesn't mattah. Just don't drag anyone else who'd rather choose life. Even if it's not the life you first dreamed about.

Shrakenberg, out."

The heated debate went on as people interjected objections at each other. Adrian let it on for ten minutes, then pounced on a lull.

"Gentlemen – and ladies. I won't take this decision for you all. We're going to have a vote tomorrow, on whether to accept the Archon's offer. Until then, feel free to discuss."

He stepped down from the dais, keeping his own inclination to himself.

March 15, 2000

"Do you think they will keep their word?"

Adrian continued staring away, past the tough vitryl window into space. In the distance very far away, the New America's antimatter main drive traced a ruler-straight incandescent line against the black sky. It appeared near unmoving at first glance, to the naked eye, but as minutes passed the head of the plume – the starship itself, despite its mammoth size was invisible at such a distance – minutely moved against the background.

He felt Dimitra's warmth next to him, floating in zero gee in one of the hub's observation bays. She'd dutifully seconded him during the critical past months. The vote on Shrakenberg's offer had resulted in a heavy majority of "Ayes" – even more than he expected. It seemed that all but a few die-hards wished to put the war behind them and adapt to the future, especially when they could be spared the worst fate.

The die-hards were offered a way out. In part to soften the feeling of guilt among those who stayed – the "we're caving in to the Snakes while others want to fight" effect would be easier to smother when the brave – or reckless – ones were gone. And in part to make sure the latter didn't try anything funny against the former.

No last words had been exchanged before the hatch closed between station and intra-system shuttle. Eyes spoke eloquently enough. Adrian's "good luck" had died on his lips against the reproach and contempt in his former associates gazes.

Next, he'd ordered to halt 3M's plans to attack Earth. He wasn't a fool though, L684 remained ready and poised, a trump card in his hand, just in case. He'd sent a terse message to the Domination space forces, informing them that 3M's remaining personnel intended to accept the Archon's proposal, and cease fighting except in self-defense. There was a short acknowledgement, and then they were left alone as things moved across the solar system. It seemed everyone had more pressing things to do than exchange correspondence.

Those who openly accepted to surrender and escape the Yoke were more numerous across the Belt, but nodules of resistance remained and solidified as the "Nay" voters – at least those who didn't choose to go with the flow, sense of duty fulfilled by their having voted for continued action – joined the rare private outfits who'd majorly chosen war to the hilt or the New America network of support stations and facilities.

For a while the balance hung precariously – then one of the resistance groups tried to implement their own asteroid-chucking plan on the eve of the New Year. perhaps pushed over the edge by images captured from the North American invasion sites and "bootlegged" away by an anonymous would-be reporter who died not long afterwards.

The kamikaze's drives were picked up by remaining Draka platforms, and a running battle started days later between the handful of armed civilian crafts escorting the rock and an ad-hoc battlegroup cobbled together from assets in range by sheer luck, a couple of surviving Iron Limper corvettes and their stingship squadrons, still suffering from the preemptive lobotomy of their compsystems and running on backup manual controls.

The fight took place light-minutes from Earth. Both sides fought with gallant ferocity – but in the end, armed civilian ships were no match, on the offensive and far from their Belt support, against the Domination's latest space superiority platforms even in their diminished state.

The rock was intercepted before it was on a final unyielding vector to collide with Earth, either directly or with help from the planet's gravity field. Its drive collars shot up by Draka railguns and lasers, it couldn't correct its trajectory either. Eventually it sailed past Earth at a safe enough distance.

The resistance faction blamed its military for not supporting their attack, despite the latter's being out of position to do so. Bitter words were exchanged. As channels were closed in exasperation the infomesh linking the Alliance space began to break down.

The Domination watched from a distance, vigilant against repeated attempts, but focusing their remaining strength on dealing with the – literal as well as figurative – fallout on Earth, and trying to isolate and purge the elusive dataplague.

Then a general broadcast had swept the system, coming from the New America's commander.

Peace. If such a word could describe a solar system where large parts of Earth were still experiencing bursts of fighting. If the lucky new "metic citizens" could live with themselves, knowing that down there, their people wouldn't have such a lenient fate.

Yet they would, because life had to go on.

After what seemed like minutes, Adrian answered his wife.

"They have to. They need us. And… however repulsive their morals are… they do have a sense of honor" a twisted one maybe, he thought "and their Archon gave his word. So, yes, provided we honor our side of the agreement… so will they".

"Yes, our side of the agreement", Dimitra echoed bitterly. "We'll have to follow their rules. We'll have to become like them! Our son will become one of them!" Her voice broke. Perhaps more than her husband she felt in her bones, in her guts, the weight of it. Her own grand-parents were refugees who fled fleeing the Draka conquest of Greece, escaping with nothing more than the clothes on their back, leaving their parents behind – with the latters' blessing. It was family history for her, more than for people like her husband. She loved him, but his ancestors had been on the "winning" side of the American War of Independence. As the first Drakia colonists from the losing side set foot in Africa, then expanded, generations of Merricks lived and grew happily in freedom they were sure would be everlasting. After all, the good guys always had to win in the end, didn't they?

Dimitra made an effort not to feel bitterness. At least, a small, almost shameful voice spoke deep in her mind, they wouldn't go under the Yoke, and would be spared the worst rigors of a new ice age on Earth, wouldn't they?

"Draka ship approaching" the PA announced.

Right on time. One of their corvettes, decelerating to a distant station-keeping position. Probably had stingship support, invisible to the station's sensors as long as they didn't do high energy maneuvers or opened fire.

It was time to meet the Snake representative… well, Adrian caught the thought. That name would have to go. Or he'd have to call himself a traitor.

The corridors leading to the spindle's landing bay were empty. Adrian inwardly chuckled. It seemed that everyone else was content to let him deal with first contact. Dimitra was off to his quarters with Stavros. In truth, he was happy none of them had to be there. To see him extending his hand. I do what I have to do for my family. He repeated that thought like a mantra.

He watched the small, bright white short-range capsule dock at one of the bay's collars. It was expertly flown, his professional eye noted. Not that he expected anything less – he surprised himself at that, fully realizing how he'd just expressed admiration for the Draka. His eyes narrowed. So what, he told himself. They did win that "Final War", didn't they? What would be worse, that we– the Alliance- lost against a bunch of fools?

He composed himself, a hand on a stabilizer bar to stop himself drifting. His mouth suddenly felt dry as the hatch's tell-tale indicators lit up to indicate a full pressure seal. Then with a soft electronic chime, the round cermet door hissed and opened.

His heart jumped in his chest when two Draka soldiers – in their mirrored space armor – floated out with speed and precision and took positions on both sides of the opening, not quite aiming their gauntlet guns at him, but evidently ready to do so with lightning speed.

Checking the place, he figured. Seconds later, they must have sent a go-ahead signal, another man emerged. Adrian did a double take. Not man, woman. Their form-fitting suit was quite unambiguous despite the faceless helmet visor and the lumps of support gear bulking up the suit's outlines.

The visitor paused in front of him, aligned "upright" in the zero-gravity space. Mute, as if studying him, which she certainly was.

Right. I have no time for mind games, Adrian reflected. His self-pride reaffirmed itself. He might not be a soldier, but he was a successful businessman, with a net worth in billions –Wall Street going up in atomic smoke notwithstanding. This was nothing more than a particularly delicate business meeting, he encouraged himself.

"Greetings. I'm Adrian Merrick, owner of this station and CEO of Merrick Mining and Manufacturing." He didn't know whether to extend a hand or not. He knew the Draka had a different form of salute. But he'd probably look silly trying to copy it. So he extended an open hand, looking at her levelly. I'm not cowering, I'm not. They could kill me in an eye blink but I'm not cowering. I'm not a serf. I'm not going under their Yoke.

The visor peeled back, then the segmented helmet folded away and out. Adrian nearly gasped. The face was young looking, chiseled, evidently the Draka's so-called New Race. And extremely beautiful. He'd seen those in pictures and vids, of course, and some of the vids shared by lonely crewmen of his were quite explicit… but this was the genuine article, in flesh and blood. He caught his own reaction with a bit of self-conscious shame. Well, good thing Dimitra's not here.

The newcomer's expression offered no clue – Adrian dabbed in card games occasionally, and this one had the perfect poker face, composed, obviously observant behind those slightly unnatural eyes. The yet-unnamed Draka spacewoman had to be appraising him too. He remembered press cuts he'd read years ago, usually with sensationalist titles, about Drakan "reckless genetic experiments", "self-styled masterrace freaks" or "unnatural, God-offending human-animal chimeras". Now he blamed himself for not giving more attention to the Domination's practical achievements in bioscience. He knew the "Drakensis" genome incorporated various physical and mental improvements, there was this talk about "symbiotic relationship" with their "Servus" engineered human strain bred for obedience – something he still felt revulsion against.

Her expression gave no clue as to her own opinion of him, though. He'd actually expected some kind of restrained hostility, arrogance at least, the typical popular culture Draka figure, colorful, even garish villains swaggering on top of scantily-clad cowering chattel slaves, whip in one hand and gun in the other. Yet she was lightly hovering in front of him, using just the tips of the fingers in one hand on the bar to stabilize herself with the skill of a veteran spacer. Not a wasted motion, he thought.

Then she spoke.

"Silfra Danielsson, tetrarch." She had a strong, yet clear and pleasant voice. Engineered like the rest, I suppose, Merrick reflected. A bit haughty, or am I imagining it?

She made a show of looking at his proffered hand. And surprised him by a cracking a small, not unfriendly smile. "That's not the proper Draka salute", she drawled in that peculiar accent, though he suspected she was making an effort to tone it down for his sake. "Yo're s'pposed to do lahk this" she clasped her gloved fingers over his forearm. Quickly overcoming himself at the startling, unexpected physical contact, he echoed the gesture, determined not to let himself be overwhelmed by the newcomer. Her grin grew fractionally wider, uncovering a pointy canine adorned with a tiny diamond stud, as if in approval.

"Service to the State!" she barked with a concurrent increase of the pressure on his limb, yet carefully staying at the 'uncomfortably strong, but not bone-crushing' level.

Adrian responded in kind. This was no different than the petty games of assert-your-business-dominance-by-crushing-your-partner's-hand he'd been involved with in his past life. And he even knew the correct answer. But the speed of it felt overwhelming. Never would he have expected the Draka representative to, well, so quickly establish him as "one of them", just one step out of the airlock. Was it a game? A way to gauge his reaction? Or just the way they preferred to act once their mind was set on a course of action?

But more, his American-bred mind was screaming that once he said the words, there would be no going back. Even more than a formal signature on an official piece of paper – or electronic format. It would be like stepping in someone else's skin.

The statement of betrayal, his guilty conscience chided.

He took a deep breath.

"Glory to the Race" he said quietly.

Silfra's eyes bore into his as the arm-clasp went on.

Well well, this one's not too stupid it would seem, she reflected in her own mind where contradicting imperatives were still engaged in a mental tug-of-war, even since Shrakenberg's proclamation. On one hand the man standing before her was technically a feral. His fate normally, as one of the defeated people should have been the Yoke and her Militant family upbringing certainly would have agreed. Yet she'd seen the destruction herself, knew how Earth had come close to the point of no-return. Her brother had led a reconnaissance into the radioactive ruins of London, she'd seen the helmet-cam pictures, the blackened skeletons of buildings and people alike, the survivors, those too unlucky to die in the blasts, stumbling among the wreckage with third-degree burns flaying their skin, eyes melted in their sockets, half-insane with pain alone, no solace to be found – until the mercy killing. The children were the worst – didn't matter if their people were the Enemy, children didn't deserve such a thing, be they serfs or not. She remembered weeping, listening to her brother's running commentary, his strong voice fighting to stay unemotional.

She told herself it was the price to pay for the advent of something greater and beautiful. The Final Society would be the end of pointless struggles among the majority of Earth's children. Under the Race's strong-willed guidance, a future of peace and harmony would open where everyone and everything would stand in their fitting and proper place.

They had to make it worthwhile. All the struggles, all the deaths couldn't be in vain. It was the Race's duty now.

And if it meant the Archon's fast-and-loose deal with the space-based ferals, well she wouldn't lose any sleep over it. And if they didn't respect the deal… then, she'd be first to sharpen the stakes.

So, she was going to treat Mr Merrick as a Citizen… a Citizen who had no clue as to how to be one. She wasn't completely unprepared herself fortunately. Everyone in this first wave of contact had received a thick briefing package. Cultural files on contemporary Alliance society. Case reports for every single Alliance defector in the past half-century with their handlers' notes. Psychologist's evaluations, behavioral advice. Every scrap of knowledge that Archona's best and brightest deemed relevant to this admittedly unheard-of situation.

And for Silfra, every known piece of data about 3M and its owner. Which didn't go far. They had a reasonably complete coverage of his business, since such data was public in the Alliance infomesh, but scant personal data. His wife's family background was probably the single most delicate point there. Her great-grandparents had been first-generation serfs, brought under the Yoke before the Eurasian War. Interestingly, the dossier on them – all occupying a single dactylographic page – ended with a "Fate unknown" stamp. Silfra heavily suspected recent doctoring as part of the "integration" effort – it made sense that those putative new Citizens might not enjoy discovering how parts of their family trees ended up on sharpened stakes, and Skull House had taken preventive steps. It was going to be annoying enough dealing with the live ones stuck on Earth who weren't part of the deal. The matter of it was expected and Silfra had an answer ready for when it came to it.

She finally released her grip. "Say, Citizen Merrick, shall we continue elsewhere than this hallway? We've got a lot to go through an' I wouldn't mind sitting down for the boring part."

A nod answered. "Of course. Please follow me."

She noted how her host's voice modulated itself into a crisp business-like tone in the perspective of, well, something like negotiating an agreement. That was good. She – no, the Domination needed its newly-minted Citizens to be effective at their tasks, or what was that deal worth?

She followed, her pair of guards in tow, navigating their way out of the spindle and "down" to the ring. Elevator doors opened on a gently curving corridor that must go the whole circumference, safety marking stripes on the periphery of the doorway, similar to any station belonging to the Domination, arrows painted on the facing wall underneath direction stencils. A datascreen, touch-driven, with station schematics currently showing, which she suspected allowed access to a station-wide service infomesh.

They took the left, counterclockwise to the ring's rotation, Silfra's sensitive inner ear told her. The place was bland, she found after walking past a section. This main corridor was painted in a pastel blue, neutrally pleasant on the eyes, but there was no… aesthetic effort. She would have expected to walk past a few hand-painted murals, or careful floral arrangements, but this place wasn't Draka. The Alliance's soulless, utilitarian philosophy showed itself in the complete lack of adornment in a public place, like their mineral cities.

Then she walked past an open doorway and glimpsed something like a worker rec room – she noted the couches and games, bar, gaudy antique juke-box, posters of bands with names she recognized from her cultural briefing. Interspersed were a few rather risqué centerfolds showing buxom, bleached-blonde models with thick bushes that would be totally out of style in the Domination, her mind reflected with a shudder of disgust.

The juke-box was silent, and so were the handful of rough-looking men sitting in the couches and high stools. She briefly locked eyes with one of them as she walked past. There was no denying the hostility barely concealed there, although mixed with curiosity. Those must be some of Merrick's miners and rock-drillers. Probably the ones most likely to cause trouble, she pondered as she went on behind Adrian Merrick. Mostly if they can't wrap their thick skulls around their new status. I might have to deal with them later. She smiled inwardly. She didn't expect her mission to be a lot of fun, and she'd been explicitly ordered not to go out of her way to raise trouble. But, still. She was Drakensis.

"…and that's the last of the platforms", Adrian Merrick concluded. Silfra Danielsson nodded absentmindedly, a glance at her perscomp's screen checking that its voice-dictation routines correctly transcribed the CEO's spoken report on the state of his space-borne assets. The man certainly had his house in order, she reflected. Of course, he'd lost a lot of his fabbing capacity, but this station itself featured a small, but complete satellite semi-conductor printing shop. One intended for routine maintenance, for sure, but nevertheless able to produce small batches of compcores with provided blueprints. Not at the military state-of the-art level, but sufficient for civilian applications. This alone made it worth its own weight in platinum.

On the other hand, they certainly weren't long-term self-sufficient on foodstuffs. The station's hydroponics could provide fresh produce but not cover its population's, transient or permanent, caloric intake. And stocks were already down despite rationing. Silfra made a mental note. Luna was out of question, they didn't have the slack and were themselves severely rationing, with the dome destroyed. On the other hand, Mars was untouched and might have some surplus. This wasn't up for her paygrade to decide anyway.

"That's for the production side of 3M" the man sitting behind his glass-and-chrome desk continued, with some hesitation in his voice. "Most of our clerical staff remains Earthside…"

Ah, the delicate part, thought the officer.

"Their offices were located in the town of Houston" she stated rather than inquired. He nodded. "Well, the town itself wasn't touched by atomics or kinetics, so the offices themselves are probably still standing, but communications were cut off a week after the war started…"

Not surprising, thought Danielsson. If they were emitting, they made themselves a target.

"Well" she answered carefully, "things are not exactly stable down there. At any rate the Domination doesn't have control over anything but the landing sites on the Eastern seaboard. Yet."

Her interlocutor waited for her to go on.

"In any case, there's simply no way to spare resources to check on your employees, Citizen Merrick. Not now, not in the foreseeable future. It's not just about them. Assets and resources are stretched thin in the Domination proper."

She paused a second but went on before Adrian could muster an objection, raising a placating hand.

"Of course, you can submit their identities for special processing, if and once our forces groundside can get to them." Merrick's eyes widened in realization.

"Yes, this means they will be processed as serfs" she said flatly. "Unless they have a direct family relationship, parents or children, with one of you lot. The citizenship deal doesn't extend to anyone else." She noticed the man's hand tightening over the desk. It was time to exert one of her New Race special abilities, she felt.

Merrick's pulse slowed down, the breath he'd been holding unconsciously released itself as Silfra's Drakensis soothing pheromones hit his vomeronasal organ. He didn't realize how, but her ensuing words managed to placate his temper.

"Special processing means they will be categorized as Literate class serfs and made available to your company or its partner combine. You know, such clerical roles are almost always taken by serf workforce anyway. Literate class means they'll be at the top of the serf caste, the most privileged ones, lacking nothing really."

Of course, this only applies if they're found alive and if they don't try resisting, she decided to leave unsaid. No use stressing the man. If she wanted to be realistic, given the latest War Directorate projections, it would be a long time before the Race established complete control over the ex-American territories, and the meantime chaos would mean many civilians dying of hunger, disease, and plain human violence manifesting when ordinary authority was gone.

"In the meantime, administrative support would be provided by a partner combine, which in your case would likely be Ferrous Metal or Faraday".

Not that they would need much outside of general accounting for now, she mused. Silly notions such as "marketing" were just an overinflated form of advertisement brought up by the ferals' wasteful "consumer society". There wouldn't be much opportunity for hiring either. She'd seen first-hand now how automated such non-Domination enterprises were. Those "miners" she saw were certainly not spending their time with a powered drill in hand! They were supervising and maintaining arrays of AI-driven machinery where Combine bossmen would have legions of specialist serf workers under their authority.

Which she couldn't help pondering in her mind. If the Stone Dogs hadn't worked as well as they did… or if the War had come a few years later? If the Alliance had continued to increase its machine might at geometric rates, gradually outgrowing the Domination's economic system into irrelevance with cold, robotic efficiency? The thought made her suppress a shudder. Soulless and wasteful as it was, there was no denying it was effective – up until the human element didn't matter anymore.

It made her remember that speculative fiction novel she'd read a few years back and found thought-provoking. It told of a near future where the Yanks made autonomous cybernetics systems responsible for the entire Alliance military under a single coordinating AI, which eventually went rogue and rebelled. The vividly graphic scenes where skull-faced "Exterminator" robotic soldiers ran amok among Alliance battlestations and military bases, massacring the humans and taking over the weapons she'd found highly thrilling. Then the nukes flying and orbital particle beams firing, targeted against Alliance and Domination cities indiscriminately, gutting both political entities as the rogue "Spacenet" AI managed to subvert parts of the Domination's own defenses – in a fashion that she found, in retrospect, far too close to reality. The novel ended with the remains of the Domination waging a desperate war for mankind's survival against Exterminator armies on Earth and in space, led by a plucky young Drakensis and his old Janissary mentor who sacrificed his life for victory at the last page.

At least the Domination was intent on not letting machines become mankind's overlords.

Merrick's miners Domination counterparts might have been serfs. Yet they lived meaningful lives, even those in sprawling industrial compounds. At the end of the day they had a community to look for, actual human relations, a living culture to participate in where artistic pursuits were actively encouraged in a system that, despite its faults, strived to achieve harmony with Nature. They didn't suffer under a hypocritical moral system that demonized free sex and pleasure, then sold it for money and shame.

Yes, Silfra decided, it was a good thing the Domination won, not only for the Race, but for the entire Earth. The exiles were welcome to try their luck at Alpha Centauri!

She saw that Merrick was still looking worried. She found it commendable that he cared for his people like a proper Landholder might over his plantation's hands. But he would have to deal with the new reality. He'd certainly never become a Citizen at the core, she reckoned. Too different an upbringing. But as long as he played ball in his corner of space, there wouldn't be much room for conflict. And his kid, on the other hand, was young enough to receive a proper education. She'd have to check on him later, she'd always liked children.

Adrian Merrick sighed, running his hand over his face. Silfra's words had hit, he really didn't relish the perspective of becoming the "owner" of his former free compatriots. But, he reasoned, at least he would be in position to make their lives as good as anyone could have in the Domination. Provided they could be found and rescued… making a further incentive to help the Domination's recovery effort, he thought wryly. They truly had him hook and sinker that way, didn't they?

Danielsson recognized her host's weariness and took the initiative.

"Well, we covered a lot in the last hours", she stated, reclining in her chair and putting the perscomp back in its storage pouch. "And I'll still have to make a first-hand inspection of the entire facilities, including access to the compcore. Security measures, you understand. We have to make sure there's nothing lying dormant in your network."

Glancing at the wall clock, she added "I'll head back to my ship for the night and we'll resume tomorrow, if that's good for you?"

Merrick looked at the young Drakensis. Unless their development was drastically different, she couldn't be more than her early twenties. Yet she commanded a warship – admittedly a small one, and in the past discussion she'd shown hints of remarkable acumen, asking the right questions, understanding his answers and following logical inferences as to the workings of his business. Moreover, as the first representative of the Domination he was meeting face to face, she was exotic and fascinating, he had to admit.

He spoke almost without thinking.

"Actually, you don't have to. I have some empty quarters, you and your escort could stay onboard for the night, would spare you the bother of going to and fro?"

Silfra raised an eyebrow. This was… unexpected. As charming as she could be, she'd assumed a Yank would rather have her outside as soon as possible!

She pondered the offer. On one hand, it would indeed save her some time, and the perspective of a true shower in rotational gravity was too good to pass. On the other hand… she'd be stuck inside a space station full of ex-ferals who had no reason to love the Race, offered citizenship notwithstanding. She shrugged inwardly. If she couldn't deal with a bunch of ex-Alliance civilians, she might as well resign her commission and join the Papist Red Cross as a nurse. And if they tried something like opening her quarters to vacuum, the question of Merrick's loyalty would be answered for certain. And plan B would be in effect, that is storming the station and taking it by force. Would be a pity if her life was the price, but dying was a known and accepted risk wearing her uniform, wasn't it?

"That would be convenient, yes" she answered. "Though my colleagues will go back along with today's data" she removed the memplate from the perscomp and threw it negligently over her shoulder. It sailed up in the reduced gravity until the closest guard reached and grabbed it with a gloved hand.

"Very well… Tetrarch." He tapped a command on his desk's integrated display. Seconds later, his executive assistant appeared from behind a concealed door. "Raul, we're done for tonight. Please show our guest" he indicated Silfra "to VIP quarters, then accompany these two gentlemen back to their capsule, will you?"

His right-hand man nodded, the turned towards the Draka. "If you will follow me?"

She rose from her chair, at the same time as Adrian switched on the general address channel.

"Adrian Merrick speaking, we have a special guest aboard, Tetrarch Silfra Danielsson. I expect everyone to show her proper courtesy." His voice took on some steel. "Remember, we all made our choice. We knew this day was coming. As of now, we're officially part of the Domination."

Silfra met his eyes. "And welcome aboard," she whispered, before she turned and left.

The door slid shut behind her and Silfra Danielsson eyed the "VIP cabin" critically. It was hardly something she would call luxurious back home, but considering the constraints on a space station, she deemed all fifteen square meters of it… acceptable. It even managed to feel spacious, with all the fold-out features tucked in. She recognized the layout and labels for the bed and table currently hidden behind wall panels, inspected the bathroom cubicle and purred with contentment at the sight of a proper gravity shower, cursorily perused the integrated kitchenette and its rows of lyophilized meals and sundries. There was even a fold-out gym! She stripped out of her suit then experimentally played with the pulley and spring-loaded apparatus, went through a series of energetic upper and lower body repetitions. Far from a proper workout but just enough to work out a small sheen of sweat and dispel the kinks in her body after sitting down for so long.

She then eyed the bathing cubicle's door, and again her discarded suit laying on the floor. Damn! I don't have a change of clothes, she suddenly realized. She bit her lip. She was not going to put on the vacuum-rated, heavy garment again so soon. She picked up the underlayer and sniffed it. Not too rank, even to her sensitive Drakensis nose, thanks to the smart fabric and its tailored microbiote. She considered putting it on for the evening, then remembered it was a literal second-skin. She might as well be naked, at least when her hosts' sense of propriety would be concerned. This wasn't the Domination where she could reasonably waltz around in the nude in the barracks.

She was beginning to settle for being stuck in the cabin when the door buzzer rang. Glimpsing Raul's middle-aged, balding head on the screen, she reflexively hit the open button, and was rewarded through the open door by a pair of saucer-wide eyes. Oh Loki, I am nude, she chided herself. Poor man's going to pop an aneurysm right now if his pulse is an indication! She reminded herself that the man, as courteous and obliging as he'd shown himself on the way, was not one of her serfs but one of those ex-feral new-citizens, a high-ranking one in 3M's hierarchy, at that… and she was giving him one hell of a culture shock. She inwardly shrugged. Heh, they'll have to adapt to our mores anyway, not the other way 'round.

To his credit, Adrian Merrick's right-hand man quickly recovered. With Silfra's statuesque, sweat-glossy body right in front of him, he managed to direct his stare up there at her face rather than the apple-round, upturned breasts perking at his eye-level.

"Ah, Miss Danielsson, after I walked your escort back to the docks, it came to my mind that you didn't pack an overnight bag. Therefore, I took the liberty of bringing something so you could get out of your suit." He produced a shrink-wrapped bundle. "Not much to look at, my apologies" he made a self-deprecating face. "It's a company overall. But it should be your size."

Silfra took the offered bundle and offered a genuine smile in return. "I would say this is perfect timing, Mister…"

"Pereira, Raul Pereira."

"My thanks, citizen Pereira. I was going to take a shower, as it were." He took the hint and winked. "VIP quarters have unmetered hot water. I'll leave you now, but you can reach me on internal coms if you need any further assistance."

He turned heel and left, and Silfra wondered behind his receding silhouette whether his offer of further assistance had any double entendre. From a house serf it'd be a given. A "normal" Citizen would make his interest and availability clearly known. Here, she couldn't be sure, and anyway Raul Pereira wasn't exactly a ten on the scale of hotness with his receding, greying hairline, gaunt frame and charcoal grey suit.

As she turned on the hot water and lathered herself in scented foam, she pondered how likely the newly-minted citizens would take on the Domination way of life. They'd probably always be awkward around serfs, she mused, but grow accustomed to the fact, perhaps even take the step to owning one. She suspected that easy sex would be, as usual, the most powerful incentive for men. Women could always appreciate the help from efficient house serfs, at the least.

Stuck in space light-minutes apart from the Domination mainstream, they'd have some leeway – and anyhow they were going to be busy.

Taking full advantage of the unmetered hot water, she emerged twenty minutes later in a cloud of steam that quickly dissipated in the aircon vents. She checked herself in the mirrorscreen, as much for vanity's sake as to control her external physical state. She'd lost a tiny bit of muscle tone, she assessed with a pout. She still had the body of an Olympic-level pentathlete, with just enough of a fat layer to provide pleasant feminine curves on top. She cursed micro-gravity again. No matter the genemods, dietary supplements, booster drugs and exercise regimen, space was still the most challenging environment for homo sapiens, drakensis or not, though the Biocontrol geniuses were promising "uncompromised microgravity adaptation" in future gene upgrades.

A casual observer would miss the difference, she told herself. But she didn't. Maybe once the current business in space was done, she'd request a transfer ground-side. There would still be plenty of action pacifying the feral territories – those Yank stay-behind units were making life interesting for the Draka occupation forces. Fighting with her boots on the good old mudball would be fine for a change. And she'd be back among proper Draka and mores, notwithstanding her current mission being quite exotic, intellectually.

The shrink-wrapped packet was still there on the deployed table. She ripped it open with a hooked finger and extracted the light grey fabric, unfolding the overall at arm length. Her eyes narrowed.

It was ugly, something like what factory combine serfs would wear. She made a sniff of dislike. She didn't suspect a deliberate insult though. It was just that those Yanks had no damn taste and she couldn't expect the place to sport a tailoring shop. At any rate, it was clean and crisp.

A few deft flicks of her layer knife got rid of the 3M badge sewn on the chest. There were limits to what she could tolerate after all, she thought.

The kitchenette was the next target. She needed to feed her New Race metabolism, and she rummaged through the silvery foil packets. Hmm, spicy chicken curry, just like home.

She wolfed down the first reconstituted meal, then tore through a Hungarian goulash recipe. As eager to criticize as she felt – the Domination's cooking repertoire was deep and wide, having integrated so many cultures under the Yoke – those lyophilized dishes were quite tasty. Merrick certainly had the means to buy from the best suppliers, she supposed. She noted down the name of the manufacturer – if it still existed, they would be an asset worth preserving.

She capped it with a soft chocolate cake in custard, microwave reheated. She let the aromas melt in her mouth contently, washing it with sips taken from a tiny Bourbon bottle found in the attendant minibar.

Score one for citizen Merrick's hospitality, she decided. She was going to empty the kitchenette contents when she returned to her ship. It didn't exactly count as the pillaging expected in victory, she chuckled, but close enough.

It took more than the tiny dose of alcohol to give a Drakensis a buzz, but it did whet her appetite for… well, she had an entire night-shift to herself, and she didn't need so many hours of sleep. She decided it was time to take a stroll in a space station full of ex-enemies.

Studying the station map revealed that a third of the ring was reserved to residential purposes. The living quarters ranged from single-occupant cabins to family apartments – those belonging to those higher-ranking personnel who actually lived there most of the time. Interestingly, they were distributed across two residential sections separated by the recreation decks. It probably made sense to separate the two populations, just as in the Domination serf and citizen spaces would be separated. For all their talk of universal freedom, their society was no less stratified, she thought.

Then she remembered the rec room she'd walked past before and smirked.

She crossed the atrium outside her cabin, drawing stares from the middle-aged 3M families lingering in one of the few cross-deck open spaces and its greenery. Children briefly stopped their running and catching games to ogle her with round eyes. Murmurs and whispers she could easily catch with her enhanced hearing.

Variations on "Look! That's her!" mostly. A "she's the snake!" hissed by a middle-aged wife was quickly answered by a nervous "sheesh! Do you want us to be killed?" from the husband, then an irritated-sounding "and we're all snakes now, remember? What do you think the folks on Earth would call us now, huh?" that made the offending woman turn red with displeasure but shut her up quite effectively.

Silfra's temper flared at the insult she wasn't meant to hear, but she held her reaction in check. Thoughts like this are to be expected, she reasoned. But it could lead to unfortunate consequences.

It would take a complete fool to think the Krypteria secret police would not turn a hawk-like eye on the new Citizens, ready to catch and punish the first sign of disobedience or subversion. Maybe a little lesson could benefit that one.

She altered her path and hastened her pace, semi-gliding elegantly in the reduced gravity, and watched as the couple realized they were her new destination. Cold sweat bead on skin turned white, a couple of step backs, a nervous hand reaching to her partner's in support, she clinically took all the signs of their distress. She saw the man's mouth open, ready to offer a stream of apologies, she expected. She was in front of them before he could emit more than a "Please…", and held her palm right in front of them with her most frightening smile.

"Now," she began in a falsely sweet voice, letting her drawling accent dripple heavily for effect "Ah' know yo dinni't intend me t'hear that. Not familiar with the New Race yet, are yo. Well, yo bettah stop being ignorant from now on. I'd be perfectly in mah rights to ask for duel… as yo husband so eloquently said, we're all Race brothers and sisters now. And there's but one accepted outcome for insults between Citizens."

She drew herself high, towering over the couple, tasting the woman's obvious terror, the scent of fear, the wide stare and quavering pulse. Then another smell hit her nostrils. A wet puddle was spreading at her offender's feet.

She rolled her eyes. Stupid cow pissed herself. Well, better that than a bullet through the brain, assuming there's a brain behind those bovine eyes.

"Now, considering the circumstances, I'll be indulgent and go my way. But." She bent forward, putting her cold blue-grey stare inches away from the other's face. "You only get this one chance. You better behave in the future, else you'll suffer a nasty death." She tuned her voice louder for the benefit of everyone else in the atrium. "You all accepted the Archon's offer. Means you get Citizen personal rights, but also the duties. You don't insult another Citizen lest you want to fight them. You don't criticize or undermine the basic tenets of the Race. You'll have to learn what's acceptable and what's not – I suggest you start studying quickly. I'm the first proper Draka you meet, I won't be the last."

Her gaze swept through the small scattered crowd. She was satisfied by the faces she saw. They weren't pleased, but they'd listened. They certainly weren't all stupid, since they were where they were.

She exited the atrium in perfect silence.

Of course, the rules of dueling were a tad bit more complex. If only because age differences, then the genetic gap would make some fights utterly one-sided. Social conventions and peer pressure meant that actual duels were restricted to equal opponents, and trying to fight outside one's level would reap, at best, ridicule, at worst active scorn – including challenges from acceptable opponents in return.

All in all it was sensible enough, Silfra reflected, and went a great way to keep Citizen society courteous.

But those people back there didn't need to know all that right now. They needed to focus on surviving the initial learning curve and a bit of fear should provide a healthy impetus.

She whistled the old Dixie tune as she walked down the next corridors, daring passersby to raise an objection to her choice of melody. The odd people she went past merely recoiled from her ambulatory presence, usually with the same "oh shit, that's the Draka" expression. She still felt it was hilarious. At any rate there weren't many people "outside". Apparently, the station denizens were content to stay inside their quarters after "sundown" and enjoy their own recreative pursuits by themselves. It was different again. At home, most Citizens would usually congregate socially in one of the larger halls, mingle among the integrated hydroponic greenery, listen to live music or watch performances. And there would be serfs as well. Their absence here felt like a void – physically, even, she missed the new Servus and the cozy, restful fullness they brought.

Her steps eventually took her down to that recreation room door. It was open and she heard, from a distance, music mixed with the tones of raucous chatter. She recognized a classic, from the sixties era, one of those songs that managed to cross the border back when the new "rock'n roll" style swept through Alliance and Domination alike, its lyrics innocuous enough with their thinly-veiled sexual overtones underlying the superficial romance theme – those had no chance to be scandalous in the Domination!

She turned past the threshold, ready for anything.

A dozen of 3M's people were hanging in the room, chatting or competing on classic games of pool and darts. She spotted the small bar at the back and its wall collection of enticing bottles. Now that was a place that wouldn't feel too foreign back home.

She decided to act naturally and just walk towards the wooden (or wood-looking) bar.

It took a few seconds for the patrons to realize someone new had entered the place. Predictably, the volume of the conversation dropped abruptly. A dozen stares converged upon her figure, appraising. Rather un-homelike, the small crowd was all-male – was there some sort of stigma against women coming here, she wondered? These people really needed to get pleasure serfs.

"Greetings," she said nonchalantly, "is this a place where a hard-working gal can find a drink?" She'd picked the corny line from an old movie. It sounded less dramatic than "Hello, I'm a bored, restless and somewhat horny Drakensis, are you folks up to the challenge?", she sniggered inwardly.

"Drinks ain't free" one of the men growled, holding his pool cue upright like a spear, "not for you". She focused her eyes on him. In his middle-to-late fifties, she estimated, thickly-built but healthy, skin gone paler inside artificial environments like this yet showing an underlying outdoors tan, lined like a sailor – she took an instant liking to the man. He reminded her of some old grizzled Janissaries, the kind it was perfectly okay for female Citizens to lust over.

"Oops, that's too bad, I forgot my purse", she purred back. She pointed at the cue. "Say, do you fancy yourself good with that thing?"

The spacer cracked a grin. Others chuckled. "Now we're talking". He chucked the cue and Silfra caught it one-handed. He went on to gather the balls into the triangular rack. Chalking the tip of her cue, she noticed everyone congregated around the table now. She was going to be the highlight of the evening, which suited her just fine.

"Open table?" she asked. A nod answered her. "Aye, and I'll even let you start."

Her opponent's tone was confident… arrogant, even. She chuckled. "Maybe I'll let you finish."

She took position at the head of the table and bent down into position, stick in her right hand, the shaft resting on the bridge formed by the fingers of her left. She felt the fabric of her coverall stretch over her bottom and the gazes converge there, and resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She was all into the focus now.

She struck the white cue ball for the break shot and with a flat "chtack" sound the triangular shaped assembly burst apart, scattering the rest of the balls. Her opponent next sent an isolated ball straight into a waiting pocket, drawing a round of cheers, and narrowly missed the next.

It was Silfra's moment.

She pocketed a ball. Then another. Moved around the table. A masterful ricochet sent two balls in two different pockets.

By then the cheers were superseded by incredulous murmurs.

She continued pocketing balls with mechanical precision, ending the last with a flourish – a curving shot from the other end of the bed, hitting with just the right angle to nudge the target into the closest hole.

It was less like a game and more like an execution, she felt. The level of physical control of Drakensis combined with her own practice at the game left no chance to a mere human, unless he was a master of trick shots. She rested her hands over the tip of her cue stick, standing in a languid posture and enjoying the stunned looks.

"So, do I get a drink now?"

"Screw that, it was cheating!" one of the watchers objected. "I read about your kind, genetically augmented, it's not fair!"

Silfra restrained a gesture of annoyance and a lashing, dangerous reply at the man who'd accused her of cheating. But at the same time, she couldn't deny the truth: it was indeed unfair. But she had other arrows in her quiver.

She smiled at the crowd.

"Aw, fair enough, I've got a built-in lead. What if I did it blind? Would that be enough?"

"What, you got X-ray vision or something?" her opponent joked.

"Nah, just very good night vision. So, want to take a bet?"

"Fine, if you manage to pocket all the balls blindfolded, I'll buy you one!"

This time, a few hoots welcomed the challenge. Silfra supposed they were finally warming up to her. In a way, the always sober part of her mind pondered, this was just as fruitful a lesson she was issuing as the erstwhile wife-chastening. Witnesses would talk about it, and the following day the message would spread all across the station: the Race's superiority was the genuine article.

She allowed one of the onlookers to tie a heavy cloth over her eyes. Now they could try hitting me if they feel like continuing the War, she reflected, the thought sending sparks of delicious danger-thrill in her nerves. Unless they cut my throat, though, they have no chance.

But there was no such treachery. She stood pool in hand at the head of the table again. She touched the rail to assess her initial distance and exact location by touch. Breathing deeply, her mind lapsed into battle-trance. This was just a game, but the kinesthetics involved were altogether similar to what fighting other Drakenses at the palestra involved – a perfect knowledge of her body's position inside its environment and then using her heightened senses to "see" the changes. Even and especially fighting blind as they did practice.

Her heartbeat pulsed deep and fast to hyper-oxygenate her blood, then stabilized to a slow metronomic rhythm.

She fell into position, stick in hand, as if she were starting a bout of fencing. She felt every vibration, every change of pressure, the tiniest breath of air against her skin. Her sensitive ears, with their bat-derived echolocation ability, twitched, the motion visible through her short-cut hair, drawing a few gasps from the assistance. Good, they're starting to understand that I'm not merely human now.

She struck the first shot with deliberate smoothness. Time slowed, she was in the Dance, albeit not the lethal one that left eviscerated and broken bodies behind.

She felt the balls scatter through her remaining sensorium. The rush of air around each one, the inaudible – but not for her – sound of them rolling on the soft felt, the doppler-like effect across her ears built a sightless picture.

She heard the hushed incredulous "fuck!" when she pocketed her first ball and paid it no more attention, repositioning herself with an economy of motion.

Near-religious silence fell in the room. The juke-box had gone through its song and nobody bothered to put on another one.

She continued her methodical lesson. As balls disappeared inside the pockets it even became easier to keep track of the remaining ones and she allowed herself a few flourishes to cap the game. The final ball dropped and she removed her blindfold with one hand.

"Satisfied?" she smirked.

"No shit, you've got some nice tricks" said her challenger with a nod of appreciation. "Just for the fun of it," he pointed at the dartboard on the wall, "care to show what you can do with those?"

"Sure."

The first dart thunked on the board. "Bullseye."

The second one displaced the fist. "Again."

The third dart hit the bullseye again. "Figures" the man said. "I guess there's no point challenging you further, is it?"

"Not unless you want to lose money betting", Silfra replied cheerfully.

She sat herself on one of the high stools and he went around the bar to fetch a bottle. "Whiskey good enough for you? Scottish" he stared at the label "well, I guess it's one of the last, huh?" She watched him pour one and hand it over. "Oh by the way, they're actually free" he grinned apologetically. "More accurately, they're on the boss' account. One of the perks of working here." He caught her inquisitive gaze. "In exchange we ain't stupid about it. Only when off-duty, and we never forget we live in a space station."

"Back home we have a saying, 'the dumb serf finds his way to the airlock alone'… though in fairness it's happened to some Citizens as well."

"Hah, serfs, yeah, 'tis going to take some getting used to, that" the miner stated. "No offense" he hastily added, getting a chuckle in return.

"Absolutely none taken. As you say, you'll have to get used to it. It's why I'm here, after all."

He raised his glass and looked her in the eye. "By the way, name's Hammond. George Hammond, of Texas."

Silfra raised her own and clinked glasses. "Silfra Danielsson, but I guess you already knew that" she added with a twinkle.

They both drank a swig of the smooth amber fluid. Hammond found himself staring into Silfra's eyes, her blue-grey stare not dissimilar to his.

"Y'know, if someone had told me two years ago that I'd share a drink with a Draka, I'd have dismissed them as fools" he remarked.

His drink partner chuckled again. "I can relate" she simply answered. "From the other side."

"Well, I can't honestly say I don't sometimes wish things had turned out differently" Hammond went on thoughtfully, his eyes staring in the far away. "But," his eyes came back to focus at Silfra, "there's one thing I'm glad of, at least".

The Drakensis arched a brow in silent questioning, and he continued in a dry tone. "I'm up here, and my bitch of an ex-wife is down there" he gestured vaguely behind him, meaning on Earth. "Guess I'll never have to send her half my paycheck in alimony again!"

Danielsson giggled. "Are you sure you wouldn't want to buy her back as a serf this time?" she teased.

"Fuck no!" Hammond snorted. "You guys can have her and that swanky-ass lawyer she hooked up with, same bastard she hired for her divorce".

"You mean she was still getting an alimony from you after she went for a richer man?" Silfra asked in surprise. "What kind of justice is that?" she couldn't help adding. Her cultural files didn't go deep in the ex-Yank law system. She merely knew that it was uselessly diverse and complex, unlike the unified code of law enforced across the entire Domination.

George Hammond spread his hands and shrugged eloquently. "The kind of justice where the side with the most expensive lawyers usually wins."

Silfra made a dismissive handwave. "Not the way we do it, to keep things short. Anyway, law always bored me at school." She took another swig. "Did you have children?" she asked, then beat herself internally. Maybe they're dead and I just made an awful reminder. To her relief, he shook his head. "Nope. She didn't want any. She was quite obsessed with her body, said she didn't want to bother with brats running around and ruining her life".

The Domination-born woman couldn't help gawking in astonishment. But then, she reminded herself that feral society had actively rejected the kind of surrogate gestation widely used and accepted in the Domination. She shook her head at the madness of it.

Refusing to have children on such a petty justification? Forsaking one's duty to their society, passing on the torch to the next generation, bringing up new Citizens…? Such conduct was anathema to the Draka. Those who didn't have the "parental instinct" at least used to donate their gametes, if surrogate pregnancy and serf help weren't relieving enough. The New Race on the other hand had a healthy compulsion to reproduce built-in.

She studied the man again. At the close of his best years (though Domination healthcare meant that was less true than for the generations before), he'd been denied offspring. What a sick society, she told herself. Even as a serf, in the Domination he would have been allowed, encouraged even, to pass on his genes – with suitable corrections now, of course. Watching one's children grow up was one of the greatest joys in existence, everyone knew that. She felt a sudden pity for him and all those like him, growing up and living in such a society.

Yes, it's a good thing for people like George Hammond that we won, even if they don't realize it yet.

"Well, it's not too late", she offered, leaning forward and touching his hand lightly in a soothing gesture. "You're a Citizen now. You could even have children on your own, with an egg donation and a serf brooder." She caught the look of recoil in his expression. He'd have to rid himself of those silly ingrained prejudice of course. "Not saying you have to do it now, mind. Just know that it's possible, if'n when you feel like doing it."

The Texas-born man spread his hands flat on the table. "Yeah, it's a lot to wrap one's head around, if you get my drift. But I'll keep it in mind. Anyway, I guess nowadays young people in the Domination are all like you?"

She nodded. "Yes. None of the new generation are Old Race, as we say. The last ones probably will be these kids already born among you folks, like your boss' son. And even then… Virunga's always moving forward and coming up with new tricks. Who knows? They might never be fully Drakensis, but they won't necessarily remain baseline homo sapiens either."

She grinned, showing her sharp, diamond-studded incisors. "Old and New Race are not interfertile anyway," she leant further forward, her arms crossed underneath her chest, pushing up the cleavage she knew was showing through the zipper she'd deliberately not closed all the way up. "If we were to have intercourse, the result wouldn't bring offspring… just pleasure."

Hammond's face turned reddish at his brain processed the blatant come-hither subtext. He suddenly felt very hot.

"Huh, are you always so… direct?" he managed to articulate.

A crystalline chortle came in reply. "My dear, you have a lot to learn about the Race", she winked impishly "are you up to take another lesson tonight?"

She didn't miss the stares as she towed her prey out of the room, incredulity mixed with envy and a few scandalized whispers that made her giggle in petto. That's right, folks. Watch and learn.

The cabin door swooshed close and she relinquished Hammond's hand to hit the controls for the bed unfolding. He stood there, a bit dazed, and she took the initiative. Facing him, she unzipped her overall and wiggled out of it, letting it fall around her feet. A seductive smile on her lips, she brought herself against him, put her arms around his chest, one hand on the back of his neck – she was barely taller than he was – and kissed him greedily. She felt him thaw at last, breaking out of his hesitancy. His tongue darted to meet hers, his hands came up against her sides, roughed and callused as they were, and she shivered in pleasure. Without breaking lock, she began to unbutton his shirt and finished by tugging it out of his belted slack. He shrugged out of it and resumed stroking the silky skin on her sides. Next her fingers moved to unclasp his belt, then the buttons holding his denim trousers, and those mimicked her overalls.

She ran her hands through the greying hairs on his chest, stroking the muscles up there, then down to trace the line of his abs underneath the soft cushion of fat, un-citizen-like as it was, but cozy, she thought absentmindedly. He reciprocated by groping her breasts with one hand, the other going the other way to her buttocks, quickly kneading the round globes, finding the unyielding muscle underneath. A finger daringly edged its way in-between the cheek and found the source of her wetness. She purred and hooked a leg around his to allow him easier access, then gasped happily when the tip slid inside her. In response, she ground her pubis against the hardon she felt through the material of his boxers and started moaning.

Hammond went on fingering her for several minutes, feeling her juices progressively coat his hand. Her tongue in his mouth sent electric jolts down his nerves and made his penis twitch against the fabric.

She suddenly extracted herself, put her hands on his shoulders, pushed down urgently.
"Taste me"

He crouched eagerly. It was not master-serf play, she told herself. He'd followed her of his own free will. He wanted her as much as she wanted him for the night.

She swung a leg over his shoulder to spread herself. His face so close to her sex, the full scent of an aroused Drakensis hit him, thick with pheromones and intoxicating. His vision swam, his head felt dizzy for a second, like taking a swig of an especially high-grade spirit. The smooth, bare flesh facing him suddenly was the most erotic thing he'd ever met. He breathed her in, deep, relishing her fragrance, then pushed his face in.

She ground her hips again and moaned, animal-like, when his tongue came in contact with her inner labia, then slid up to her clit. She was fully in the heat now, her arousal like steam pressure rising.

The mouth clicked again, and again, against her soft flesh, then a pair of fingers found again their way inside her vagina, deeper this time, running across her special spot on each stroke. Her eyes were closed, her hands over his head for support, narrowly remembering to keep some weight on her leg that wasn't draped over his back. That leg quivered with the mounting ripples of her coming orgasm, yet he easily supported her above-normal weight in this gravity. His left hand wandered, alternated between long curving strokes on her back and twisting and teasing her sensitive nipples.

Her climax didn't come without warning. She felt it rise through each stroke, reach the familiar plateau, finally push her mind over the edge in the most delicious agony.

Her whole body shuddered powerfully in consecutive waves. At the end of them, she sighed contently. It was a nice starter.

She recovered, looked down into Hamond's upturned, lustful gaze. She could smell herself off his face. She bent down to kiss him again, and rose again with him, not breaking the kiss. Hers hands reached down and with a sharp tug ripped apart the boxers, drawing a yelp of surprise from her partner. She winked, then closed a hand on a rock-hard shaft. Deft fingers stroked him from glans to base and he suddenly jerked as warm fluid spurted in her palm. She restrained a laugh at his subsequent look of surprise and embarrassment. Men! Always acting like it's a competition, somehow.

"How long was it since…?" she asked gently.

"Too damn long" he sighed. "Before I came up here. The occasional wank don't count", he managed to chuckle, quickly recovering.

Shitspawn, now wonder they'd be cranky. How on Earth… Note for my report: find a way to bring up pleasure serfs to those lonely new citizens, Silfra reflected. Maybe a roving bordello?

She dragged him to the bed and made him sit, then standing up at arm's reach, she began to tease him, running one hand over her body while making a show of licking her glazed fingers. Her analytical mind-corner couldn't help analyzing the taste. Hmmm, tangy. Quite thick indeed, and… I guess he recently ate canned pineapple? Along with processed cheese, industrial ham and… reconstituted tomato paste? Weird.

"Next, I want your cum inside me" she breathed languidly, setting down on her knees between his spread legs. "But first…" He was semi-erect still, the unexpected release clearly not enough to satiate his pent-up desire, not with a horny New Race girl ministering him. She took him in her mouth, keeping eye contact all the way. He became rock-hard again in a matter of seconds. She went on, stroking the base of the shaft, massaging the balls, sucking like she'd learned back in her sex-ed courses. She enjoyed giving as much as receiving and his girth stretched her lips pleasantly.

He was panting heavily after a couple minutes of this treatment, and she could feel the faint shudders in his shaft that heralded an approaching climax. She straightened back and wordlessly lifted/pushed him further inside the bed, then climbed on it after him. A shove on his chest and he laid flat on his back with a half-dazed smile on his face.

"Now I'm going to ride you, you big horse"

Hammond briefly wondered if that was some Draka slang or if Silfra meant he was hung like a horse. But the question became rather irrelevant when she lowered herself on him, straddling his hips, then used her hand to guide him in. In one smooth stroke, she buried his cock to the hilt, and Hammond's mind exploded. She was hot. As in, noticeably hotter than any "normal" woman down there. Increased metabolism or something like that, he reasoned. And the muscles! She felt not merely tight. It was as if her vagina had muscles rippling and gripping up and down along his shaft… which was probably the case, he chuckled. He had to give it to the Domination. Their genetic witchery was something to behold.

He watched Silfra bounce energetically up and down, taking time to admire her physique from top to bottom. Blonde hair in a rakish androgynous cut – short on the sides, almost shaved, longer on top and combed sideways to fall over her left cheek – over a heart-shaped face with delicate yet chiseled features, a pair matching pair of golden studs on each ear lobe, with more rings of various sizes seemingly haphazardly scattered on the helices in an extravagant-looking display of bling. A tiny drop of ruby over a nostril, the symmetrical diamond-studded tooth. Going past the smallish but full breasts, another emerald stud nestled in her navel, surrounded by these clear-cut abs. These people really like their rocks, he mused. Figures somehow, the Domination started in South Africa, with all those mines down there. They must enjoy wearing their riches on themselves. But I'd expect tattoos along?

"No permanent tattoos for us New Race", she said with a grin. "Our immune system will just eat them in time, unfortunately."

She grinned wider. "You were subvocalizing at the end" she dropped to answer his astonished look. "I'm not a mindreader though," she added, "just very good at reading minute clues in one's expression. And yes, we do like our gems" she finished with a wink. "Maybe you should try it, get some style on? I could see…" she panted exaggeratingly "a nice platinum ring would feel nice on that cock." The crossed-eye look on Hammond's face at her suggestion was hilarious, she told herself. It was definitely a fun job breaking in these newcomers to the Domination.

Besides… She came hard seconds later and lost herself in the pure joy of orgasm.

"Ooooh gods that's good" she moaned, sitting on her partner. "D'you want me to continue or…?" He surprised her by rising up and pushing her aside with a devilish grin so she ended up on all fours. She yelped happily. It was nice of him to take point now, although she probably wouldn't let him do that if he wasn't nominally a Citizen. But it felt kinky as Loki's balls to let him manhandle her, in prelude for the more dominating style of penetration he was obviously gunning for. She arched her back at the same time as his hand grabbed her length of hair, not too roughly but firmly. She twisted her neck and stared at him fiercely.

"Go on, take me from behind. Make me your bitch for the night!" Her deviant-sounding words aroused her powerfully. She could kill any man with her bare hands. Had, actually. It made the submissive play all the more thrilling. And it was safe to do with another of the Race – it just couldn't be done with a serf, especially a Servus. Not only did it run against the social order, but it was simply, physically impossible to feel dominated by one of the gentle, built-for-obedience beings. She couldn't, they couldn't.

Hammond piled into her, hard. He went full stroke, deliberately taking himself almost entirely out then slamming in powerfully. The cabin resonated with the wet smacking sounds of flesh hitting flesh, of his grunts and her answering moans as his shaft spread her insides time after time. He pushed her head down and she bit the pillow on a particularly fierce push, the angle allowing his cock to mold her innards around his full length and girth. It felt brutal, the way she enjoyed it too. She strongly suspected that he was, in a way, hate-fucking his past allegiance out of his mind. He was fucking a Draka and becoming one.

His strong, workerlike fingers kneaded her flesh, met the steel-strong bundles of muscle underneath her buttocks, ran forward to cup her breasts as they shuddered in cadence with his hammering. She bit her lips when he twisted her nipples again.

Another orgasm hit her, irradiating from her bottom to her entire body. Her inner muscles spasmed around him, and it pushed him over the edge as well.

He came with a groan that grew into a growling, drawn-out shout as his own body shook with orgasmic tremors. She felt the shaft throb, the glans grown larger than ever in her depth, as he emptied himself in long pulses.

Hammond felt like his climax lasted an eternity. He emerged dazed and dazzled and collapsed on his back at Silfra's side.

"Fuck" he exhaled, eyes wide. "Didn't think I still had it in me to come twice like that"

Silfra propped herself on her elbow, laying on her side facing him, a mischievous smile painted on her face, eyes laughing.

"That's what you get when your society isn't all stuck-up about sex" she couldn't resist observing.

"Fuck" he repeated contemplatively, staring at the ceiling.

Thirty seconds later, he was asleep and snoring, and Silfra sighed dramatically.

Two years later

"Silfra!"

The high-pitched, joyous squeal was the first thing Tetrarch Danielsson heard when the inner lock of the hatch opened. The station's atmosphere hit her nostrils an instant later, the familiar smell of close-circuit biospheres across space, with its own particular undertones, a specific bouquet of aromatics unique to each place. She remembered it from her last visit a year before, when atmospherics had started to show a small but growing imbalance in air composition, carbon dioxide inching up, nothing to immediately worry about but needing some corrective action, she'd brought up a small team of enviro-techs to fix it with better designed (obviously) recycler plants for the hydroponics. Just a small thing, but understating the larger Domination's willingness to support its new additions.

It felt cleaner now. The biomods had taken root and effect, she could smell the faint tell-tale undergrowth scent built in the ecology. Though the locals with their ordinary noses would miss it for the stronger smells of ozone, lubricants and people.

She answered with her own toothy grin and spread her arms wide. "Stavros!" The excited kid bumped straight into her in zero-gee and she wrapped a foot around a handlebar, tensing the rest of her body to avoid being catapulted back into the airlock. "OOf!" she exclaimed in mock dismay, but couldn't contain her own laugh. Small children had that effect on her. She stabilized their newly docked-together orbital assembly, then ruffled the dark hair playfully. "You did come back!" Merrick junior shouted gleefully.

"Of course I did, I made a promise, didn't I? To you and to your mother alike". Two years ago already, she reflected. She'd eventually met Adrian Merrick's family – the boy had taken an instant liking to her, and vice-versa, while the mother was initially guarded, however she tried to hide her feelings about the whole set-up, then thawed out when it became clear that Silfra genuinely enjoyed playing with her son – with a New Race's energy to match a bouncy 6 year-old to boot!

She'd gone to length explaining his mother how the Domination's education system worked and how it would accommodate their son – and the rest of the unaugmented youth, to ease them into their respective Citizen generation, patiently filling in real-life details and anecdotes from her own upbringing, the best to assuage a mother's worries. She could tell Dimitra Merrick would never be a staunch, enthusiastic Citizen, but like every mother she wanted her offspring to live the best life they could. She'd played on that chord well enough, and added her personal promise that she would keep an eye on young Stavros – as much as her own duties allowed, naturally.

So there she was, two years later, to pick him up. At eight now it was time for him to join a proper, ground-side school. Real gravity to exercise on, be it the lighter Martian one, for it would be Mars, as one of the few relatively untouched-by-war dominions, and large enough to support actual schools. Luna was still too busy with their own problems, including managing their own new metics, and had nothing to spare. And Mercury, well… was Mercury. Not exactly the most kid-friendly environment, where merely standing on the surface during the day would get you vaporized in seconds.

Earth, last, was still reeling in her new ice age. The Domination territories were barely pulling through, and that was with a population that actually planned and prepared for such hardship, with deep shelters and massive emergency food stores and a State that still existed. In North America ice covered all of former Canada and the northern half of the former United States – recon flights had shown vast columns of refugees heading south, many dying on the way, then ground reports, sparse as they were, telling of bloody fights between starving desperate crowds and local groups in whatever organized fashion existed – many of them no better than neo-feudal, usually born from whatever small groups of surviving military personnel remained on the surface. Whatever food they had, they hoarded and defended savagely. Estimates counted millions dead in those southbound "death marches", with the survivors ending up, ironically in a state not much removed from slavery. It was a general collapse of civilization – not exactly helped by the Draka military shooting at any group that seemed to be doing too well. But that was information restricted for the civilian public, especially the new citizens. For them, the official word was "we can't spare anything" and "we're only shooting at active pockets of armed resistance".

Silfra's mind was mixed about the whole setup. On one hand letting millions of potential serfs die from cold and hunger instead of properly Yoking them (or killing them quickly if they made a fuss) felt slightly callous, Militant or not. On the other hand, the State didn't have many options. It was true there was no slack for mobilizing a proper large-scale invasion and subjugation. Letting nature take its course and pare down the feral herds to a more manageable size could be argued for as well. There was no perfect solution, Silfra told herself whenever she thought about it.

At least she did good work up there, running troubleshooter and generally liaising with her assigned batch of metic spacers. Not all of them were as… pleasantly manageable as Merrick's bunch. The worst were the Mom-and-Pop, Bible-thumping family businesses, still believing in their thick skulls that they were spreading God's gospel in the sky. Hard-working and thrifty, you had to give them that. But it took all her personal self-restraint to stand those dour-faced people. The reciting from the Bible before every meal she could just tune out. The regular lectures to children against the sins of fornication and adultery she actually argued against – with restraint, as Citizens were actually free in their religious beliefs… And she couldn't exactly stand against them in what was their own house, after all, as long as they didn't directly oppose the basic tenets of Drakan society, namely the right and duty of the Race to lord over the rest of the species.

At least the children and teenagers would be getting out, and the first ones to cross into Draka-led education, the late teenagers, had indeed turned out enthusiastic about their new society's mores. A few of which she had even directly contributed to loosen up, memories that never failed to curl her lip in remembered mirth. Which brought her back to the moment. Alas, she wouldn't hook up with Hammond this time, unlike last year – she was in a hurry, and he was off the station on duty anyway.

She was playing glorified school-bus driver in her armed-to-the-teeth corvette – which she found self-deprecatingly rather funny, and had several others to pick up on her list.

She eyed the luggage – several bags and a sturdy chest. The parents were floating in the background, with the faces of parents who were letting their son go away for months, most probably years before they were reunited in the flesh. Even with regular messaging and the occasional vid – bandwidth was still rationed – the separation would hurt. And they would find their offspring changed by the Domination – for the better, she told herself.

Dimitra's chin was quivering, obviously trying to refrain from crying. Adrian made a brave face. Little Stavros was all excited now with the perspective of going on a space ship – a warship! – but it was going to be some tough moments when the reality of separation became tangible. But she would be there to hug him, and later he would have the best teachers and carers in the world. He was going to grow up well, she was sure of it.

For now, she'd always found best to avoid long goodbyes, so she wouldn't tarry here.

"I see your bags are all set, good! I hope you didn't forget anything? We're not going to turn around if you forgot your favorite toy, you know?" she asked in half-jest, half-seriousness.

Stavros nodded gravely in turn. "We checked and triple-checked, Silfra! I'm ready!"

"Outstanding" she drawled, "now be a good lad and kiss your parents goodbye, then we're going on a trip!"

"Whee! I'm going to Mars!" the boy squealed and cartwheeled in the air, then shot towards Adrian and Dimitra to plant kisses and receive a last, lengthy hug. He then swam back and took Silfra's hand on the fly.

"Let's go! Bye Mom! Bye Daddy!"

Only when the hatch hissed shut, did Dimitra and Adrian Merrick release the tears held in their eyes.

Present time – 2015

Stavros was late. By and large, free citizens didn't want to be slave to anything, including strict times, but at the same time allowing oneself to routinely be late was a lack of self-discipline. Yet he didn't take an aircar either. He much preferred to cycle his way on the grounds of the capital through the quiet lanes running between perfectly manicured gardens, parks and lawns, shaded by trees with the massive man-made glass and stone towers rising like mountains in the distance, breathing in clean fresh air. He had but faint distant childhood memories of cities in North America made of such skyscapers – visions of urban canyons, of walls so tall and close-seeming he could only glimpse a sliver of blue sky. The cities of the Domination were different too, much more low-slung, the highest common buildings reaching no further than six or seven stories, like old European cities he'd seen in books and vids. Public edifices and monuments rose out of it as they should.

He rode faster than usual but as usual there was little competing traffic and his space-age bicycle, motored by his Draka-standard physique could reach rather breakneck speeds when he pushed himself hard. He didn't need that though, and compromised on a brisky yet comfortable rate that wouldn't see him arriving in urgent need of a shower.

Passing one of the parks named after some past Tollan public figure he slowed down to shoot his customary glance at the early risers exercising themselves at various open-air strength-training stations – stationary ones to train targeted muscle groups, and the running fitness trail with its army-inspired obstacles. This was one of his "spots" – not too close from down-town that other Drakas would routinely go there, making it his very own hunting ground, on addition to be a welcome place to keep his personal fitness state up. In the afternoon on his way back, there would be no shortage of hot young fit things flaunting their goods and he would have no trouble picking up some company for the evening if he cared to.

Another five minutes and he reached the cluster of glittering towers where the Legation offices were quartered, past a gossamer fly bridge spanning one of the city canals lined with the expected shops and restaurants. Aircars were swooping down to deposit their human loads on scattered aprons and plazas under the gentle spring sun. Busy Tollans going to work like him – he wondered what proportion of those was really doing "make-work" jobs in an economy where actual production was almost entirely done in automated factories and advanced, specialized expert infosystems were able to automate a high number of previously "white-collar" tasks. Yet people had to feel useful, even though basic needs were all comfortably taken care of by a universal allocation scheme. He remembered the courses at Archona U and comparative analysis of the competing economic systems of Earth – with the inescapable conclusion that techno-capitalism as practiced by the Alliance for Democracy was bound to create massive social unrest eventually, from the sheer number of people made redundant by technological progress, and how it would lead to such systems inevitably betraying themselves by either applying State-imposed limits to growth, or directly subsidizing the livinghood of increasingly unemployed crowds.

Which made the Domination look wise in the end – since it was purposefully set up to keep humans in the loop. Even if the majority of these humans had no say, but really where was the difference?

The foot of the Legation building came into view at last and with it an unexpected sight. Down the marble stairs leading to the tall glassed doorways milled a small crowd, kept out of the way by a shimmering light force field, with a group of Tollan constabulary officers on the other side.

Shouted slogans reached Stavros' ears as he slowed down. His command of the local language left no ambiguity to the tone and content. They were protesters. Chanted cries of "Draka go home" echoed the painted slogans on improvised placards. He stared at them in turn. "Slavers out", "Slavery is evil", "Down with human oppression" and such targeted the Draka, he saw that. But interspersed were attacks on the Tollan state as well. "Tollan imperialism must stop", "Free the colonies", illustrated with crude drawings of military-style boots stomping on planets.

Stavros temper flared. One of his own was recently killed in a cowardly terror strike and these… rabble had the gall to demonstrate their hostility at the gates of the Legation? And did these idiots forget how Drakas died to actually liberate them from Tanith's Jaffa armies? Were these people paid by the Goa'uld or what?

The part against the Domination and slavery he could comprehend, intellectually. At least they made sense. But accusing the Tollan "Empire" of being an oppressive state? He wanted to laugh at the sheer folly of the accusation, at least in the present time. The Empire was far from autocracy. Its ruling bodies were democratically elected, with representatives from every planet. All benefitted from a large amount of personal freedom, and peace – recent events excepted of course but it wasn't the Tollan's fault! Nobody was starving, disease was a rarity, really what could go in those people's heads that they could fancy themselves oppressed, he wondered?

He spotted the Human Liberation Front tags on the protesters. So her they were, no longer simply talking trash on the infomesh but taking it to the street… with no risk to themselves, of course. He closed his fists reflexively. The thought of getting close and personal with them flashed through his mind. But no, that would be exactly what they wanted, he reasoned.

But still, he told himself as he went through the building's doorway, flashing his ID card at the security guard –a rather token gesture and presence when the real security was provided by automated sensors, of course – well, if those morons don't get the Yoke first, I'm almost hoping the Goa'uld will get them!

The Draka Legation occupied the last five levels of the tower, a lofty piece of prime estate, at no cost thanks to the post-war agreement. Stavros enjoyed the view from his office's floor to wall window -even as a junior aide he did get his own room with a view, well, technically he shared it with another employee. It never grew old. The city's expanse spread below and beyond, dotted with more of the glittering spires favored by the locals, rising out of the green-encrusted grounds. Air traffic flittered on invisible rails, present enough to be noticeable yet not so dense as to become an eyesore. Stavros had to give it to the Tollans: their style was different but it did have its own harmony.

He heard someone enter the room behind him and glanced back to see his workmate wearing his familiar congenial smile, a steaming mug in one hand and a pot in the other.

"Oi Stavros, mate, yo' almost late again. What's her name?"

Stavros made a rueful smile. "Actually… I don't think I got her name". The other Draka guffawed. "Aw, come on, you don't have eidetic memory as I do but still… she not good enough to remember?"

"On the contrary, Maurice, some of the things she did are pretty memorable" the human one smirked. "I have her infosphere address anyway. If'n yo want to get in, I'm pretty sure she wouldn't mind a threesome" he added with a wink.

"Hehe, tell yo what, maybe I'll take you on that" Maurice von Dietz replied, putting his own mug on his desk and nonchalantly flicking off a strand of blonde hair from his brow. He proffered the mug. "Hey, fresh coffee?"

Stavros nodded. "Sure." As Maurice poured, he went on with the day's prime gossip. "Did you see this rabble down there?"

"Yeah. Loki-cursed fools. It seems every civilization has them. But I guess Rayner's attackers aren't dumb enough to hang in that crowd, waiting to be picked out. Unfortunately." He ended somberly.

Stavros took his own mug, emblazoned with the crest of an old Iron Limper corvette – Silfra's. A gift of her from years ago, when he got old enough to start drinking coffee – and actual coffee was to be found at less than exorbitant prices, and that being the genemodded hybrid plant grown in space, not the genuine Earth article.

"They're getting bolder" he stated.

"Means all the easier to stomp on flat when the day comes" Maurice shrugged. "It's not them we have to worry about" he went on a more serious tone and Stavros raised a brow. "It's the smart ones. You'll be getting the mail as everyone else later, but Haverly's going to up security measures" he commented, mentioning their chief of security, a notoriously uptight Krypteria officer – of course, the official diplomats were skull-hunters too. The only ones not belonging to Skull House in the legation were the ones seconded from the business sector, like Stavros. Which meant his office mate was one of them too, despite his outerwards laid-back attitude and cover as an "artistic agent".

"Really? I guess it makes sense, considering…"

"Considering they managed to off one of us, yes, even if technically Rayner was off service and acting on her own." He made a little frown at the end, expressing his parent service's… ambivalent attitude towards the late Drakensis who'd gone nearly native. On one hand, she'd been stepping perilously close to treason, under the old conventions, openly consorting with a feral. On the other, she'd never actually turned her back on the Domination, and her status and activities here did serve the State's interest in building trust and cooperation with the Tollan Empire. Ever since "contact" it was the sobering realization that the Domination, still basking in its "definitive" victory on the homeworld, was actually small fry in a vast dangerous galaxy, that rationalized the present bending the rules when it counted, such as here on Tolla.

"Still, she was one of us. And as far as we know Tollan intelligence isn't close to catching the culprits. Which indicates a high and worrying level of sophistication. Even…" he trailed, hesitant to continue.

"Let me finish for you" Stavros offered. "They're suspecting an outside party?"

"If an outside party wanted to push our two policies apart, yes, this would fit quite well. Of course, this is all speculation so far. Maybe it's entirely internal, Thor knows the Tollan empire is wide and numerous enough that rifts could appear in their society entirely naturally."

"I take it that's not your interpretation?" Stavros commented between two sips.

"Doesn't fit any natural pattern, not like that. We've been running deep analysis on the public infosphere. Separatist sentiment was steadily decreasing long before we arrived. It was pretty much become irrelevant, something only expressed in fringe communities out there, barely above noise level. And it started to pick up three years ago and spreading quite fast – apparently randomly, but the pattern-matching algorithms we used to run on Alliance society picked up indications that it's coordinated, somehow. Common narrative elements, memetic suggestions, that kind of thing. Nothing we could take home with certainty, if it's indeed a concerted attack, it's a very subtle and sophisticated one, and also very effective. I'm not sure we could make something like this if we wanted. It's weaponized propaganda on a level never seen on Earth – 'course, the Protracted Struggle was anything but subtle" he finished with a shrug.

Abydos, winter 2016

Anton de Polignac watched the pale body floating in the suspension tank's oxygenated hydrogel at the heart of Science Directorate, Advanced Bioresearch Division's newest and most cutting edge facility, right on the edge of the New Alexandria hospital.

Tiny muscle spasms betrayed electrical stimulation, working in tandem with advanced growth factors in the artificial bloodstream. The body was hairless save eyebrows and the halo of auburn hair floating among the strands of optical fiber connecting the waiting nervous system to the machine's sensory interface, keeping the brain inside in a fugue-like dream state through the growing implant nested inside. They were long past basic nerve system adjustments, it was all fine-tuning now, ensuring the brain perfectly meshed with the new body.

Ann Rayner had been in a sorry state when her remains were rushed to Dante Base's sarcophagus. This time, it seemed the device's magic would fail – there simply wasn't enough left of her original biomass. Yet, it had somehow managed to repair the head – though that wouldn't have helped much in the absence of a fitting body to support it.

Which merely presented the Directorate's biowizards with an interesting challenge. Standard organ-printing and stem-cell tools and techniques already meant limb amputation was not definitive any more in the Domination. Entire organs could be grown with perfect genetic compatibility - even improved if need be, rid of any congenital defect, to replace failing ones.

Rebuilding an entire body and fitting the head onto it was only the next step, one that mainly took time – they didn't want to rush things too much and risk replication defects creeping in.

It had taken the best part of the past year to slowly print it, cell after cell, bone after bone, organ after organ – though technically much was done concurrently, either in the main tank or in the satellite contraptions before being fitted into the main construct by augmented-reality, tele-operated surgical robots.

Then the most delicate part was reconnecting the nervous system to the brain, from the spine up, while keeping said brain mercifully unconscious all that time.

"She's almost ready for decanting" stated the head of the medical team with pride. "We'll transfer her in a convalescence room once reanimation is complete. She'll be free to wake up on her own."

"Good."

White fog. Dreams, some of them too vivid, of pleasure and pain. Fantastic landscapes and foreign cities flew past her inner eye. Finally, Ann Rayner opened her eyes again. Her vision focused and she glanced past the white-painted ceiling. She was lying in a bed – a hospital bed, seeing the monitoring hardware surrounding it with a low-key, almost subliminal buzz.

A familiar face. Anton De Polignac was lazily reclining on a chair next to her, reading a full-color Diskarapur Armory catalog. His gaze rose from the print towards her as he noticed she was awake. He casually flicked the publication back on the nearby bedtable and started to open his mouth.

Despite a dry throat, Rayner cut him short before he could say hello.

"Anton" She coughed lightly, then shook her head minutely. "Don't tell me I died again?"

A second passed and he replied with a straight face.

"Yes. I'm beginning to think the War Directorate should fashion a new medal just for you."

The resuscitated woman blurted a laugh that finished in another set of dry coughs and Polignac proffered a glass of water. She wordlessly drank it empty.

"Thanks for that. The glass of water, I mean, though I suppose I should thank you for reviving me, as well? What happened?"

"What's the last thing you remember?" he inquired in a careful way.

A long moment passed as she frowned in concentration.

"Ah… I was in the aircar with…" she frowned deeper "with Lancor. Then…" she shook her head again. "Then something happened".

Anton nodded. "Your aircar was hit by a surface to air missile. Neither ours, nor Tollan army manufacture. Completely untraceable. Tollan authorities believe radical separatists did it." He stated matter-of-factly.

She inhaled sharply. "Lancor…"

"Dead, for real unfortunately. Orders were to bring you back" he spread his hands in front of him placatingly "it took the Legation by surprise and they reacted as fast as they could… didn't have time to plan a comprehensive rescue." He shook his own head. "Not that it would have mattered much. Your husband's body was in irretrievable state – I know, I know! For you, we still had a reasonably intact head to work with. His was…" he paused, unsure if she wanted to know the specific details of her late spouse' final moments.

"Go on. I can take it" she simply said.

"His cranium split apart on impact with the ground. His brain was scattered about and burnt in the fire. Your own head was fortunate enough to be cleanly separated and roll away from the crash site."

It took five minutes for Rayner's burst of hysterical, nervous laughter and tears together to subdue. So she had cheated death again, and lost someone she deeply cared about in the same act. She was back in the Domination. Back to square one, a dark corner of her mind said. In an act of pure will, she pushed away the despair and loathing threatening to eat away at her soul.

"I want them dead" she eventually ground out, staring intently into her brethren's eyes.

"If'n when we or the Tollan catch them, death will be something they'll wish for" he promised. "But it's been more than a year and they don't seem closer to catching them, or whoever helped them with the missile."

She mulled the statement over, then her own state. She eventually spoke again.

"What's with me? Are you going to let me free?"

"Who, me? Or the Domination?" he asked theatrically, then spread his arms. "You're one of us, if it need' sayin'. Still a Citizen. You're free to go anywhere you want so. But." He held a finger up.

"You're officially dead. For the record, we weren't sure the whole reconstruction thing was going to work out, even if the white coats seemed pretty confident. And… Skull House thought it best that whoever did it, thought they'd succeeded. In case they try again, see."

He inhaled. "As far as legal matters go, your Tollan possessions were dealt with according to local law, meaning they went to your husband's family, minus the community share that was split between the Tollan state and the Domination. And obviously on our side too, we had to declare you legally dead."

"Fuck!"

"Which means you're officially a ghost" Polignac continued cheerfully. "Hear me out." He smiled genially. "I knew something changed in you after the sarcophagus revived you not once, but twice, back then. Your eventual… eloping merely confirmed it. Actually, having your detailed medical records, including brain scans was quite instrumental into making Skull House reconsider their initial… judgment in your case" the last sentence came out dryly. "We knew you weren't the perfect little Drakensis anymore, but your conduct wasn't detrimental to the Race, in the end. Whatever misgivings you might have… you kept it for yourself and avoided undermining the State."

Rayner lowered her gaze. In a low voice, she answered. "I never wanted to betray my country."

"I know!" Anton exclaimed, with a two-hands flourish. "We know, well, those of us with need to know. And with these facts in hand, I have an alternative that, I trust, would benefit everyone."

"Go on" Rayner sighed.

He bent forward.

"Look, after the April's Fool incursion… we basically stopped exploring our stock of gate addresses. There's no way to know if the next one was going to be worse."

She nodded as she remembered, a bit too vividly, the frightening day where some alien energy entity had somehow teleported itself into Dante Base and started to subvert its contents, incidentally killing its occupants, serfs and citizens alike, including her own self. Only the commander's ordering an emergency evacuation and activating the facility's self-destruct had flushed the thing out on the crater's surface where heavy weapon emplacements were finally able to destroy it.

They'd only dialed the place afterwards to send a reply in the shape of a gigaton-range warhead. Afterwards, high command had placed a veto on further blind exploration. Arguably, the windfall from their previous sorties – from the Goa'uld tech recovered, along with the symbiotes themselves, to the Tollan alliance and of course Abydos to settle – was more than enough to keep the Domination busy for decades.

"Now we're integrating Goa'uld and Tollan tech, and incidentally trying to catch-up on the theoretical science behind it." He threw his arms up demonstratively "and we have a long way! I've been following the publications – even our former Alliance eggheads are struggling and they were already ahead of us in advanced physics! Hyperspace, subspace, higher dimensional physics and space-time shenanigans, Thor's balls, it makes my head dizzy trying to understand it all!"

The ghost citizen nodded again in agreement. They were both Drakensis, with a high IQ built-in and a faultless memory, yet the conceptual theories and their insanely complex mathematical universes obtained from Tollan sources were beyond even the – by the time of the Final War – esoteric quantum physics Earth's best minds were beginning to unravel.

"Except now that someone's believed to be attacking the Tollans from within… Archona's afraid they might come after us next?" she offered as she quickly grasped the implications.

"Basically, yeah. Could be the Goa'uld, or someone else entirely. We just don't know; we don't know what's happening out there. We know there's this huge area of space that's nominally the System Lords' domains, and so far it's covered in the fog of war."

Rayner reclined back in her pillow, a thin smile on her lips.

"So the Race needs to recon this area… and you just happen to have someone who's believed dead and possesses the necessary skills."

A clap of hands answered her statement. "Can't hide it from you! I'm soooo glad the damn sarcophagus didn't muddle your deductive abilities!" the base commander ended chuckling.

"Assuming I say yes…" and as she said that, she knew what her eventual answer would be, damn it, how could she, as a daughter of the Race, pass on such a challenge? She was basically hard-wired for such! "How would I even begin? It's not like I could simply walk into some System Lord's palace and ask them 'hey, I'm a good fuck, wanna trade for your secret nefarious plans?' "

"Ah, don't worry about that – I've been giving it some thought for a while, even before you were… made available. When you were living on Tolla, I trust you must have heard of the Serrakin sector?"

She had, of course. The only known non-human polity, Goa'uld excepted, and one that managed to exist, even thrive, about right at the core of the Goa'uld quadrant. Mostly known through indirect relations – there was no convenient gate address to access them as far as the Tollan knew, and the sole direct contact between representatives of the two polities in centuries past had not exactly established a cordial relationship.

It was assumed their survival as an independent power was as much due to their own formidable defenses as to their convenience, to the System Lords, as a "neutral" area of space which could provide assets and services they couldn't, or didn't want to cultivate inside their own domains.

And most importantly, it was believed to be an information trading hub. And information was the single most precious commodity in an interstellar setting.

"We – meaning High Command and Skull House believe it's the best place to start trawling for intel. We need to build a current picture of the entities and actors, who they are, how they work, how we can take advantage of the way the System Lords set up their domains. And above all, safe gate addresses. We think, and so do the Tollan, that it's the single most precious thing the Goa'uld are after. And accordingly, what we need to acquire or trade for as well."

"Hmmm. Makes sense, but still… am I supposed to acquire all of that by myself and my admittedly considerable charms?"

Polignac shook his head. "No, of course. We'd set you up with stuff you might trade… but his includes your own self. Your skills, actually. We think the Serrakin sector is the kind of place when someone with a Drakensis' set of abilities might be highly sought after. While the core Serrakin systems are believed to be… policed, the surrounding area of space along the various System Lords borders are thought to be a more… grey area, if you get my drift."

"Sounds dangerous. I like it."

"And you'd be acting independently in a completely foreign society – which you conveniently proved adept at."

She allowed herself a lopsided smile at that.

"What kind of assets did you have in mind otherwise? Weapons, trade goods, technology?"

"Well first, yourself." He gestured at Rayner's prone form under the bed sheets. "You have a whole new body, and it's not a carbon-copy of the former." He interrupted himself as a serf orderly came in with a food tray and resumed after he was gone and the patient began to tuck in the heavily-loaded plates.

"The biomodding group has been quite busy designing the next set of Drakensis combat upgrades and their new Tollan computers allowed them to advance their schedule quite a bit… by decades, I heard. So you're now state-of-the-art in the flesh." He began pointing at relevant areas on Rayner's form. "Secondary heart, self-sealing lungs, partitioned peristaltic system, you'll have a lot of trouble dying from blood loss. Improved bone density and composition, subdermal ballistic armor – you're bullet-proof now; increased muscular burst strength and endurance, higher grade hemoglobin, improved night vision and accuracy, along with a baseline human appearance to better blend in. Integrated neural interface implant – it's still growing itself inside your brain, but you should be able to start using it in days. Faster nerve pathways, time perception and reflexes in combat."

"Nice" said an arched eyebrow. "So I'm stronger than you now."

"Up until I go through the upgrades myself… but it's going to be through the ordinary procedure, targeted surgery and cellular regeneration. It's going to take a couple years for the whole cycle to be done" he added with a moue of distate. "I heard the subdermal armor growing feels like ants crawling under your skin… for months. I'm not looking forward to that."

"Eh, you're welcome to try my way" Rayner retorted with dry humor.

"Brr, thanks but no thanks" Polignac mock-shivered. "Anyway, I left the best for last." He paused to build up tension, and his partner stared at him with a "will you stop the histrionics please?" look.

He dropped the bombshell. "Okay, you're part-Goa'uld now."

Ann Rayner's loud "WHAT?" carried through the room's wall, making her monitoring hardware beep in alarm and startling a serf nurse in the adjoining corridor.

Anton giggled happily then offered further explanation. "To keep it short, we carried over their highly effective immune system. It was that better than what we already had designed. Both against diseases and bioweapons, and for DNA repair. In addition, we were able to pinpoint the genes allowing for interacting with their restricted technology."

After a long silence, the newly-rebuilt Draka exhaled a measured reply. "Well, I can see how this could come in useful."

Two months later

The unmarked military aircar dropped into one in the myriad valleys crisscrossing the humongous mountain range cutting the Abydos supercontinent in half. It was set apart from the routine airway linking New Alexandria and the settlements sprouting up on the fertile lands southwards, in the middle of untouched and untamed rocky wilderness. The vehicle touched down on the bottom of the valley, in the shade of a towering outcrop of granite.

"So, what is this place?" Rayner commented as she disembarked along with her commander.

"One of the new launch centers for system defense" Polignac dropped, heading to a spot in the near-vertical rock face.

"Pretty remote" she said critically, "must have been a bitch to set up". She watched her companion silently use his implant to open a camouflaged hatch. "Didn't sense that" she added.

"That's normal, your implant's not on the whitelist. Only select personnel have the key."

They entered a concrete corridor extending into the mountain. "As to your observation… with the new tunnel boring machines we bought from the Tollans… which they reverse-engineered from the device left by Tanith" Anton shrugged as an explanation. "It wasn't so troublesome. Just took some time."

They reached a heavy vault door. This time, the Merarch had to submit to more automated security checks before it opened.

"No real guards?" Ann commented skeptically.

"The fewer people involved the better. We even used targeted memory removal on the serf workforce afterwards. Beats killing them" Polignac chuckled and Ann didn't raise the issue. Indeed, in past eras, serfs involved in such a secret project would very well have been terminated, in a humane and painless way naturally. It was better to have a hole in your memory than an actual hole in the brain.

The door opened into a massive artificial cavern, lit up by distant overhead floodlights.

"Wow."

In a space large enough to admit an ocean-going superfreighter, she could discern overhead, suspended on launch rails the new tri-foil shapes of Mongoose drone fighters, stacked end to end like bullets in a magazine. Support machinery hummed in the distance. Electrical and data lines plugged into the drones' fat faceted barrel bodies – she also heard the faint gurgle of fluids being pumped from life-support ancillaries.

"So that's true? They're using organic brains?"

Polignac nodded. "Avian-derived, yep. Interfaced with command-and-control cyberware."

"Why not go all-cyber though?"

A pause as the man considered his response.

"We could have. Would have made support and maintenance a bit easier, honestly. But prototype testing found the performance higher than we managed using pure comp hardware. There's a level of… call it tactical intuition, creativity – constrained by tactical parameters of course, only hybrid systems manage to reach. Swarms of such drones are faster to adapt to changing conditions on the battlefield." He shrugged. "As to life-support, well they're quite hardy systems, their actual biological component is tiny enough. They can withstand an absurd amount of acceleration and the recycling systems are good enough they can operate forever… as long as they're supplied with energy."

"So they're alive, in a way" Ann said dreamily.

"Barely, but yes. Sleeping, dreaming in a group virtuality. This way we can run them through tactical simulations without ever leaving the mountain."

"Neat." She chin-pointed at a looming, dark, vaguely pyramidal shape sitting on the cavern's floor at the very back. "And I guess this would be my ride."

Anton started walking towards it and she followed.

"Hull number AL-7X. One of those Alkesh bombers our good man Vöhn stole from Tanith. X for experimental."

An ached eyebrow welcomed the precision. "Is that supposed to make me feel safe?"

Chuckling, Anton went on. "Eh, don't worry, we tested it extensively. We didn't modify vital systems, in any case. Power plant, engines, hyperdrive, primary flight systems are the genuine thing, scrubbed for hidden Trojan horses naturally."

They reached a ramp at the base of the waiting spacecraft and climbed it.

"What we did…" he opened the hatch "was tear out the main armament. Those plasma torpedoes are worthless in my opinion; we can do much better with the underlying tech – but that's not the point. With that removed we could both enlarge crew quarters and make them suitable for long-term stay, and provide a usable cargo capacity."

A short, softly-lit corridor led to the ship's interior. They found themselves in the ring-transport room that also served as a vestibule. The flight deck opened on one side. Across from it, another hatch led to crew quarters, and Polignac led her from one to the other, describing their modifications and special features.

"Flight controls are a mix of Goa'uld" he pointed at the red globes "and ours" she noticed the Earth-made readouts and comp interfaces, all of them dark and powered down. "I take it you did study the technical manuals I sent you?"

She nodded affirmatively.

"Good, you should quickly find your mark. Talking from experience, they're really easy to fly, the Goa'uld made them very fool-proof – quite sensibly given the quality of their troops…" He tapped a control and a schematic sprouted up on one of the screens. "We removed the main armament, but we wouldn't send you out in a defenseless ship. We kept the rear-mounted defensive plasma turret, albeit with our own automated targeting system instead of hand controls. We were also able to cram in a couple of forward facing gun complexes and a compact missile bay in the belly, using the former torpedo launcher aperture. All concealed, though it won't stand up to a close sensor scan."

Rayner's eyes lit up at the display. The trepidation she'd felt increasing during the last two months as she recovered from her "rebirth" and adjusted to her new body, enjoying the hospitality of Alexandra Jourdain in the developing plantation she jointly owned with Polignac as a married pair was morphing into a proper sense of excitement. The Domination was sending her off into the great unknown… but she'd be doing it in style.

She dropped the backpack she'd been carrying into her new quarters next. It contained the few personal effects and souvenirs she'd cared to recover from her past life.

"As you can see, we tried to make it as cosy as we could in the space constraints" Anton explained. Ann nodded appreciatively. She liked it. The mixture of fine woods, leathers and "modern" fixtures was tasteful enough that she didn't mind the perspective of spending a significant share of her coming years inside.

"You're getting a nextgen autodoc-cum-cryopod, and a personal armory with integrated fabricator to replenish ammo and common supplies, provided you find suitable feedstock."

It made sense. She'd be on her own for a long period of time. Hopefully she'd be able to find safe gate addresses where she could be resupplied from the Domination, but she couldn't count on it in the foreseeable future.

"And we stocked your cargo hold with goods you might be able to trade – from refined naquadah to coffee, tobacco and chocolate". He shrugged and spread his hands. "Hey, it worked for our distant ancestors. Anyway, you have the cargo manifest in your perscomp."

They found themselves back in the vestibule.

"Well. Castor will pick you up in a couple days when they finish unloading her. She'll be doing the roundtrip back to Earth then Tolla next. I'm afraid you won't be able to do a stopover on the homeworld… you'll be stuck in a sealed hangar bay until they drop you above the Serrakin sector. Only the captain will know about your presence for security reasons."

Ann couldn't say she relished the perspective of sending the coming months stewing like a stowaway in one of the Domination's pair of Ha'taks, without even the liberty of interacting with her own people in the crew. That cryopod, she suspected, would soon make itself useful.

She stared at her commander. He stared at her, keeping his face straight. He was sending a subordinate, and, if he cared to admit it, a friend, into the unknown on a mission that was as dangerous as potentially bountiful. His façade finally cracked, and eschewing the formal Draka arm-clasp, he hugged Rayner tightly. She reciprocated and they stood in silent embrace for a while, then disengaged.

"Well. I won't tell you to be safe, huh" he said a bit woodenly. "Try not to die, though. As good as this autodoc is, it's not a sarcophagus."

She made a small laugh and gazed at the ground, as if to kick a stone that wasn't there.

"Eh, that would be a mission failure. Besides, I died thrice now and thrice's the charm, as they say."

"Farewell, Annie. And give them hell" he finished fiercely.

She merely smiled in response, and he left her at the heart of her new ship, among the silent and deadly sleeping drones.

Tolla

Stavros grunted and kept counting in his head. Ninety-eight… Ninety-nine… Hundred! He kept in position for a couple seconds, his chin just over the traction bar, arm muscles bulging, abs hard keeping his torso at a sharp ninety degrees angle with his straight extended legs. Then he dropped lightly down on the short grass and took deep steady breaths. His mind unfocused from the exercise, he let his gaze wander around.

Again. That girl out there, her eyes crossed his stare again. Did he imagine it or did her eyes linger just a fraction of a second longer this time…? He knew, without undue hubris that he made a striking sight in his skin-tight exercise shorts, bare torso and arms with the sheen of sweat delineating his perfect musculature. Just one of the perks of being a Citizen, he smirked inwardly. None of the other fitness freaks exercising in the open-air park came close. Some tried. He was always amused to see them bulking up with oversized muscles only good for showing off. Grotesque, he shrugged. And unhealthy.

But the girls… Tollan society enjoyed a high standard of health, both mental and physical. It was near unheard of to find morbidly obese, or the other way, malnourished people. Not like the old feral countries of Earth, from the pre-War pictures and videos he'd watched in History class. It was almost embarrassing that his parents had shared a citizenship with those fat slobs, wasting their days pursuing caloric intakes fit for an entire compound of serfs.

He stared at her openly, an engaging smile on his lips. She was light blonde with a tanned caramel skin, foxy features and a firm petite body. A new one too. Well, it's her first time coming here and she already noticed the best thing around, he congratulated himself.

She smiled back. It was so easy.

Her name was Nalenda, he learnt later as they made their way to her place. She was indeed new in the city, having moved in from a small town on the other side of the planet for her first job. She was a woodworker, doing jobs for exclusive designers and architects, she told him. This caught his attention – she actually made things. He was looking forward to seeing some examples at her flat.

She led the way on her own cycle and they reached a residential area of lower buildings scattered between tree-lined alleys. It wasn't somewhere he knew already, but then Tolla's capital was vast and sprawling. At worst, he'd take an aircar back.

Nalenda's apartment was small – by his standards, but tastefully furnished, if sparsely. He took his time admiring the skillful, intricate cabinet works and their colored veneers. He didn't even need to pretend; the girl was genuinely talented. She wouldn't have trouble finding commissions in the Domination if she ever wanted.

Then she beckoned from the shower, and he lost interest in the woodwork.

Her bed creaked alarmingly. She didn't mind, her head cradled in the hollow of his left elbow, her face close to his, almost cheek to cheek. She was panting with the occasional louder moans as he gave her what he expected to be the most memorable fuck of her life.

She came again, her face reddening, then he allowed himself his own release. He felt at the top of his game, perfectly in control.

He was extracting himself from her when the taser bolt hit his back, and he convulsed back onto her suddenly widened eyes, before the current coursing through his nerves made him unconscious.

It was black when he opened his eyes. Rough fabric rubbed on his nose and he understood he was hooded. His limbs were bound tight, his arms behind his back – he was lying on his left side, naked, on a hard concrete floor. The surface had had time to reach temperature equilibrium with his skin, but this didn't tell him how long he'd been out.

Then he cursed himself as he replayed latest events in his mind. A goddamned honey-trap, and he'd fallen straight for it. He felt like kicking himself, if he hadn't been immobilized. At least the sex was good and whoever was behind this was so kind as to let him come first, he told himself self-derisively.

There was suddenly the metallic noise of a bolted door being unlocked. Low-tech, he thought. Wherever this was, it made sense that it would be in the proverbial boonies. Feet shuffling, then hands grabbing him, carrying him out. He let them. He couldn't do much so far. If they wanted him dead, they'd done so already, right?

His presently diminished sensorium told him at least four people were involved. From sound, he could tell they were in tight confines, a corridor probably. A turn, a short flight of stairs, another doorway – he prepared mentally for trying to fight it out whenever they released his bonds, even momentarily. A hiss and a cold sensation spreading on his neck. Bastards. He felt himself loosen against his will, a powerful muscle relaxant or paralyzer. So they were taking no chance. Helpless, he felt himself being lowered on some kind of hard chair, the bounds shuffled to keep him in an upright seating position, arms attached behind his back, legs splayed. His head lolled, then a hand almost gently pushed it back on some short padded headrest.

The hood was ripped out and he squeezed his eyes shut to prevent light from blinding him. A set of spotlights blazed in front of him in a classic "interrogation room" pattern. It felt like some myriad scenes in movies – but it was his own skin in the game now, and he didn't relish the helpless feeling.

His vision adjusted. He sensed two of his captors must be behind him. Now there were three silhouettes forward. One of them advanced into the circle of light and he recognized Nalenda. Ah, so she's not an innocent collateral. Unlike him, she wore clothing – not the track suit either, but a plain-looking, utilitarian, even, dungarees lookalike. Probably took a shower as well if the faint soap fragrance was an indication.

She bent forward, her face hard, an entirely different person from the erstwhile "girls-want-to-have-fun" character. She looked at him with something between contempt and repulsion.

"Not so cocky now, slaver!" she hissed. He felt like shrugging rather than answering with words, but he could do neither in his paralyzed state. She raised a foot, poked at his limp manhood with the tip, made a short nasty laugh. "It was so easy to entrap you. Just had to act like one of those dumb slaver-lover bitches."

Didn't seem too hard to spread your legs, honey, he wanted to say. It probably wouldn't ease his case, he consoled himself. Reminding her that she did indeed come as the "slaver" fucked her was probably bound to enrage her anyway. He didn't need that right now, not until he knew that crew's intentions.

"You've been preening on our worlds even since the imperialists caused that war" she went on, and Stavros felt a strong urge to roll his eyes. So she was one of those loonies who thought it was somehow the Tollan's fault they had antagonized their Goa'uld neighbor. It felt like a bad joke. How could people with a nominally functioning brain blame the victim? Didn't they know what standard Goa'uld behavior was? It wasn't like they'd discovered the rest of the galaxy the last summer!

He could do nothing but listen as Nalenda went on monologuing about planets being forcibly integrated into the Empire, deprived of their independence, forced to adopt Tollan mores and culture and language, how the Tollan army and navy made sure none of the distant worlds could ever rise above their subordinate status.

"Like they needed further encouragement by you bastards!" she almost screamed in Stavros's face, so close he could feel her spittle land on his nose. "You think everyone's blind to your machinations! But we know! We know! We've seen you for what you are, yes!" she half-cackled. "Videos, books from your homeworld! Warmongers, slavers, that's all you are!"

Well that was a given, he thought. It was not even like the Domination had tried to pass as anything else. With increased trade and tourism there was no way to hide either polities' respective pasts. They'd both symmetrically downplayed their conquering streak at the beginning of the alliance, with the Tollan side – ironically – upset that the Domination might feel threatened by the Imperial Navy. In both cases, distance and local history were brought forward as moderating factors. "Even if we felt like conquering you – which we don't, honest! You guys are simply too far away!" crossing "Sure, we fought and conquered every competing polity on our homeworld/home system but hey, we were set up by our planet's history. You people have nothing to do with it. Why should old local grudges be a factor on our shiny new relationship?"

The difference, Stavros knew, was that the Tollan had actually mellowed from their distant past, and the Draka most certainly hadn't. Their basic ethos, as formalized by old Elvira Naldorssen was still "we'll dominate because we can, and we must". Of course, this first century of the Final Society ended up rather more shaded in ambiguity than initially set. His own case was a proof of that. The present Domination had a lot more in common with the one that was just starting out in Africa, and the gates of citizenship, tight as they were, were still reopened. In his position at the Legation, he'd borne witness to Tollan individuals making inquests as to the possibility of emigrating… and a few cases that did, those who brought something of value – in science or technology – while not being so high-level as to upset Tollan authorities. Truth be told, even a middling Tollan engineer held as much value to the Domination as an Alliance Nobel prize.

And that was but the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. The recent-years resurgence of the so-called "Militant Tollan Movement" could be at least in part attributed to Drakan cultural influence, with the next Curial elections predicted to see the former crystallizing as a formal political wing.

Really, he couldn't deny Nalenda some vindication. But she was going quite a bit overboard, he thought.

On the other hand, feeling was progressively returning to his limbs as she rambled on. Whatever substance they'd injected him had to be dissipating. But he was still tightly bound.

He must have made some tiny motion, because the local woman suddenly paused in her tracks.

"Ah, you're recovering from our little anesthesia! Good… I need you to feel what's coming next" she said with a cruel smirk. Reaching aside, she brought back a rolling tray into her captive's field of vision. "I'm very keen to see what my woodworking tools can do on your flesh."

Stavros bravely lifted a skeptical brow. "So… you went to the trouble of kidnapping me just so you could indulge on some sick torture fantasy of yours? Really?" he let the words drip with sarcasm. "How does this make you any better than those you criticize, then?" he went on, trying to push Nalenda's buttons. She made a shocked face at her helpless captive's audacity, then slapped him with all her strength. It stung, but was nothing compared to Citizen combat training, he felt. As long as she kept talking…

"We are better because our motives are pure!" she exclaimed. "We fight for justice, equality and freedom! If it means spilling the blood of oppressors, so be it!"

"Fine, I get that, but how exactly do you think torturing me will advance your goal? Assuming you cut me in little pieces, do you honestly think either the Tollan Empire or the Domination will look at your work and say 'oh, this Nalenda woman seems perfectly right, why didn't we think of reforming our ways before? We should totally serve her power on a platter!' You know, in my homeworld's past, this kind of thing was attempted too many times to count, and it. Never. Worked. Out." Especially against the Draka, he left out.

He saw the logic of his words try to worm its way into the radical woman's brain. He got the distinct impression that she'd never actually considered the point much. Which he thought a bit puzzling, considering the clean and professional way she and her crew had managed to abduct him in Tolla's capital city, which spoke of a fair amount of preparation beforehand. Maybe she wasn't actually the brain of the operation… He logged it in his mind, in case he made out of this predicament alive.

He saw her grab a businesslike, sturdy powered multitool. It looked like a large cordless drill… but she made a point of tapping the screen controls and he watched in sick fascination how the tip morphed under his gaze into a variety of shaped implements, from drill points to cutting and milling heads and an assortment of specialized shaped in-between.

"It means you slavers can be hurt, can be beaten! Maybe I'll insert this up your cock then activate the large-bore drill" she stated with dream-like anticipation. "Or maybe your eyes first… or your tongue… no, not your tongue first, I'll need you to speak" she drifted then corrected herself. "We prepared a statement for you to read."

Ah… so that's it, he reasoned. She produced a positively antique sheet of paper and waved it. "We're going to record with an offline camera and insert it into the globalmesh later. The constabulary will never be able to trace the recording location" she explained in a satisfied tone. "Know this, nobody will find and save you, we even swept you for locator devices."

Figures, but it's a pretty poor incentive to make me cooperate, still. He sighed, accepting the pain in advance. He then read the printed statement.

It was mostly the same political drivel she'd spouted at him, only written in a more elaborate manner, in the style of HLF propaganda texts. There was a more personal section at the end, where he was supposed to "confess his crimes and oppressor privileges", whatever that meant, and call for the immediate withdrawal of all Tollan forces offworld. There was even a line about freeing the oppressed people in the Domination which made him want to snort.

"Fine, I'll read this" he said. There was no way it was going to be taken seriously when he was clearly under duress. His people and Tollan authorities would be looking for him then – if he was dead already it wouldn't matter, but if he was still alive, there was a chance of rescue. He didn't mind dying in combat but he'd rather avoid dying stupidly in the present situation.

Nalenda gestured and one of the men – hooded and unrecognizable - set up a small camera nub on a stand in front of him. Another one held the paper at arm length in his outer field of vision. At Nalenda's go-ahead, he began reciting the text in the worst monotone, setting his face to fit the tone, a perfect picture of not even remotely being engaged in what he was currently saying. She watched him with an increasing look of irritation, then anger.

"What are you doing?" she ended up screeching. "Nobody's going to believe it!" Well that's the point, he inwardly smirked. "Am I a joke to you?" she went on in a dangerously peeved tone. Save the "I can torture you to death" part, honestly, yes, wench, he kept for himself.

He wisely didn't answer that out loud. Instead "I'm not a professional actor; besides do you truly expect watchers to believe I came up with that speech myself?" he offered reasonably.

"Then I'll give you some more motivation, slaver" Nalenda ground out, powertool in hand. She set it as a long, thin drill bit and positioned it over his knee. "I heard this is excruciatingly painful" she smirked venomously, and clicked the device on.

Stavros set himself to sustain the coming pain. It was going to be atrocious, and he hoped his Draka neurofeedback training would be up to the task. In any case he was not going to give her the satisfaction of pleading for mercy.

The drill whirred, but what caught Stavros' attention was the man in the background who until now has watched the proceeding silently and without betraying a hint of emotion. A subtle straightening of his posture, like someone receiving a sudden communication. Time stretched out. The 'o' of the captor's mouth opening to speak, words lost in what ensued. A seismic tremor waving up from the hard ground up his bare feet. A shockwave passing through the air – WHUMP – tripping Nalenda back. The man's hand going to a slit in his plain dark clothing, as if to grab a weapon concealed there. Single, shrill ion-pulse shots in rapid succession, distinctly Tollan. Body impacts, fizzling, the sound of bodies collapsing sack-like, his captors going down, feet beating behind, Nalenda's face frozen in surprise before a lightning-bolt zat' shot splashed over her torso, her falling on herself like a cutstring puppet.

He sat very still as black-armored shapes filed in the room. One of them stopped in front of him, poked Nalenda's limp body with the tip of a boot. "Separatist scum" a male voice spat out in Tollan behind the faceless, insectile helmet. He wore the insigna of the elite Tollan Army Shock Squads, Stavros noticed then, upright dagger on twin symmetrical lightning bolts. Rescue! He let out a breath, and the faceless man holstered his pulse gun.

"Stavros Merrick? I'm squad leader Cenor." Other men cut down the ties binding Stavros to the chair, and he rubbed his free limbs with relief.

"Well, squad leader, I'd say you're right fucking on time" he ended up laughing, half-glee and half-nerves unwinding.

Minutes later he was out and he saw the place of his captivity for the first time. A derelict concrete building, open to the elements and near-entirely submerged in reclaiming greenery, set among other such shapes in what had to be one of those ancient industrial suburbs long abandoned to Nature by the local civilization. Such places dotted the wildlands around the capital megapolis, long-forgotten, emptied of anything valuable or dangerous yet not worth the trouble of erasing for good. A rather logical choice, he reasoned.

Tactical aircars were landed around with drones hovering lazily in the distance. He was sitting in the back of a mobile emergency medical shuttle with attendants checking his health and scanning him for any untoward substances. A familiar voice greeted him as von Dietz's face came in sight. "Stavros, man, you had us a bit worried for a moment there."

The former prisoner made a sheepish face, remembering how he'd allowed himself to end up where he had. Then "How...?"

"Thank your friend Silfra" Maurice began explaining. "We'd never have noticed your absence until the next day… if she hadn't sent you a message during one of the scheduled data transfers through the gate. As it happens, her message bounced because your 'mesh terminal was off." The security man referred to Stavros' personal globalmesh terminal of Tollan manufacture, which the captors had likely taken off him. "And that raised a flag at the Legation. So I tried to call you… things went up from there. Haverly went to his high-level contacts in Tollan security. They quickly caught on, retraced your route after you left for home, tracked you down to a flat rented by some local wench. Then curiously useable records ended – the local sensor and communication grid was apparently subverted, not for long, but enough of a window to allow the captors to escape without an electronic trace. So we knew something was very wrong, but the trail was cut."

"Shitspawn" Stavros commented. "How did you find me in the end?"

The Drakensis shrugged. "Tollan sec' determined an approximate radius where you were likely to be held and flooded it with search drones. Wouldn't have found you quickly though. They had a stroke of luck." He grinned. "Turns out that crew had done their work real well, sanitizing the area and their escape, making sure you didn't carry a locator beacon. But then a drone passing overhead caught a wireless transmission where there shouldn't be. Some so-called "smart" tool was trying to phone its manufacturer home… and behold, said tool was registered to a certain absconded girl you were last seen in company of."

Stavros' eyes widened in realization. Nalenda's power tool! She'd thought of everything but in her anticipation to torture him using her woodworking implements, she'd forgot her multitool was actually designed to link through the globalmesh!

He burst out laughing, then calmed down and Dietz resumed.

"We had a location then, and the drone did further recon as the strike team was dispatched. They were initially planning a covert out-phase insertion, but there was a local anti-phasic field, so they did a dynamic entry, old style, like we trained them to" the Drakensis ended with a note of pride.

Stavros digested the implication. This technology was definitely not something a ragtag insurgent group would possess. In fact, as far as he knew only the Tollan military… and the Domination had reverse-engineered examples of such field emitters. There had to be someone or something far subtler and more dangerous than some country wench turned radical.

The intervention squad was coming out of the building with the former captors-turned-captives – the four men on emergency stretchers, Nalenda being prodded forward, walking unsteady as one just recovered from a zat blast would.

The two Draka walked towards them, ignoring the protestations of the shuttle's staff.

"Looks like the tables have turned, wench" Stavros threw. "We'll see how you stand up to interrogation by actual professionals soon."

The young woman's face contorted in rage and she opened her mouth to spit at him.

What landed on Stavros' face wasn't spittle. Five loud wet muffled explosions melded into one as the heads of the entire abducter crew blew from inside. In a fraction of a second gore covered armor and clothing and exposed faces.

Nalenda's decapitated body collapsed a second and last time in the ensuing stunned silence.

"Fuck!" sounded a second later in both languages and a variety of voices.

Several hundreds of kilometers away, in the middle of a similar decayed and green-eaten suburb, at the bottom of a deep, shielded basement level, a non-descript man cursed in a foreign guttural tongue, then collected himself in the soft golden glow of a monitoring hologram. Nearby computer readouts told of distant nanorelays dissolving into microscopic dust, having fulfilled their purpose in the same way as the micronized explosives inserted in the remote, human operatives' brains. A waste, he thought. Such a carefully planned and executed operation compromised because of a stupid human and her chatty gadget. Torturing the captive like that wasn't even in the initial plan! He could have done many better things with him after that video statement… The mind-engramming hardware tucked in a corner of the basement had only needed subtle tugging on the insurgents' thoughts to set them into carrying out acts of sabotage and providing them with the necessary procedures and techniques. Programming the foreigner's strong-willed mind, on the other hand would have been a worthy challenge and prize.

In any case, the less time he spent in the sensor-rich central regions of this planet the better. Even with his exquisitely-tailored infiltration programs, the fruit of centuries of experience, he could but subvert civilian mesh for so long, to say nothing of dedicated military-grade Tollan hardware.

Scratch one asset cell, the master spy told himself. Plenty more where those came from, and other plans were already set in motion.

July 2017

Space was so vast, Karol Palme told himself again, and like the umpteen prior times, he suppressed the urge to roll eyes at himself. Truth was, being offered captainship of Castor – one of the twin Ha'tak inducted in the Race's service along with its "brother" Pollux – was supposed to crown a long and distinguished career in the Domination's space force.

He'd marveled at the magical-like technology it contained – but then the excitement wore down. Artificial gravity was fantastic – but then it felt just like walking at home. Reactionless drives – awesome, but you missed the visceral, seat-riveting oomph of a pulse-drive going off under your butt. Hyperdrive? Incredible. But then all you got to see was the swirling blue-purple tunnel as the ship bore its way into a higher-dimensional realm of physics that could only be accurately described through dry, esoterically high-order mathematics. It could be described as hypnotic. But as time went by it simply became tiresome.

No wonder the previous owner spent most of the transit time inside his sarcophagus, he mused. Not that we're doing it much differently. Technically, the ship could make the journey entirely on automatics, but good old human military paranoia still prevailed. Gone were the inflated crews from the early days, swollen with scientists and engineers eager to monitor the ship's systems as they functioned in order to hopefully reverse engineer them. One of the motherships was always present near the home world while the other one went away. The latter made runs between Earth and the handful systems it claimed to control and settle – namely Alpha Centauri and Abydos, then the long to-and-fro Tollan transit.

For all intents and purposes he wasn't captaining a warship… he was captaining a freighter, with a minimal crew. And that crew took turns in cold sleep, ready to be awoken at short notice since the tech had advanced considerably since the first applications of it – like the New America. Of which, incidentally, nobody had an inkling of what fate befell it. The first hyperdrive-capable, native Earth ship sent to take light-lag scans along the Yank colony ship's projected course had found nothing. No trace of a catastrophe whose light would be visible, no debris field – of course space was still vast, but they'd combed the path – nothing.

The most likely scenario was Goa'uld foul play, since the disappearance happened in the same timeframe as first contact. Palme felt ambivalent about that. Sure, those Yanks were the enemy. But still, the thought that they were somehow captured – most likely, for the lack of a huge explosion – and sent somewhere for whatever benefit the Goa'uld could derive from interrogating them… somehow it felt like stolen victory.

And the practical consequence of this thought as the "official" conclusion, as far as the Domination's military was concerned, was a drive to fortify the Solar System against an extrasolar invasion that rivalled, even surpassed, the Protracted Struggle.

When Castor last left the system, shoals of the new drone fighters accompanied the massively upgraded crewed stingships of the Final War on controlling the planetary orbits, while new-construction frigates took the mantle of deep-space patrolling.

These mobile assets were backed by comprehensively improved fixed defenses in the form of refurbished battlestations and planet-based weaponry.

Castor and Pollux had played a crucial role. Not only were they, in the initial years the core of Earth's space defense as the most powerful warships by far. Their contribution went beyond their own guns. One Ha'tak by its lonesome had instantly restored Earth's space launch capability to beyond pre-war level, by simply landing and filling its cargo holds and bays to the brim. Then as the Domination's best minds, aided by their pilfering of Goa'uld knowledge, began to unlock the power hidden in the ship's self-repair and fabricator systems, and it wasn't long before those started to churn out components needed to restore the system's space-based industry.

By themselves, the captured Ha'taks had accelerated the projected recovery process by decades. And then there was the Tollan trade… So Karol Palme gladly accepted his boredom, for the payoff of his trans-galactic journeys was a rapidly strengthening Domination. Though not rapid enough if the Goa'uld came in force, he reminded himself soberly.

Yet at times boredom vanished and the universe's magnificent vastness was allowed to awe him. Like now, looking out the bridge window. The ship was flying above the galaxy's ecliptic, just "high" enough that the Milky Way made for a magical carpet of brightly colored stars underneath, framed by the inky blackness of intergalactic space above. It had come out of hyperspace right at the programmed time he alone had input in the navigation computer, in accordance with his sealed orders. And he was alone in the bridge, with the handful other "live" crew currently off-duty.

On a physically separate and single-purpose communicator screen, a short message displayed itself.

Ready for deployment.

"Down" in the vast mothership, snug inside a secluded and locked launch and maintenance bay, sat the squat bulk of the hitchhiking Alkesh. During the long journey it laid silent, most systems bar life-support unpowered, waiting in standby. A few hours ago, Ann Rayner was awoken from her cold-sleep slumber, stepping out of the autodoc's capsule into the softly lit interior. A solid meal and brisk exercise helped remove the kinks – real or imaginary – from spending months in immobility while automated start-up routines powered up and checked all systems.

A strong coffee mug in one hand she sat in the command chair as the last minutes of the deployment countdown ticked by, her readiness message sent and acknowledged. It felt a bit lonely, she couldn't help thinking. She was being sent off into the unknown without fanfare, with a literal handful of beings in the Domination cognizant of her existence and mission. She could just disappear into the cosmos, she mused. Or build herself an empire, maybe. She shook her head. No, she didn't see herself as a queen. As a normal Drakensis, she might have, perhaps. Her present self didn't. Yet she was still built to fight and conquer, this was written in her genes. The coming challenge thrilled her to the bones, if she was honest with herself. She just needed to not die this time, she told herself ruefully.

The wide space doors opened without a sound in the depressurized bay, revealing a starry milky tapestry – without any external reference it seemed both strangely close and so far away.

She breathed in deeply and placed her hands on the reddish control globes. The ship's brain responded to her nerve impulses, and she received feedback in her implant, a weird disembodied sensation she would take getting used to. There was a feeling of translating part of her being through and into the ship – she reasoned that it was a pretty good way to set up highly advanced technological vehicles to be used by primitively educated operators like the Jaffa. She willed it/herself to move and AL-7X smoothly unstuck itself from the bay's floor. She felt the small upwards acceleration and deceleration, elevator-like, the inertial buffers purposefully letting in just enough in every flight regime to provide a degree of physical feedback.

Forward. The grey-bronze walls of the mothership receded until she crossed into the void then all she could see through the side windows was black over the glowing galactic disk.

She steadily built up separation from her former transport, then watched it depart in the blue flash of a large hyperwindow, back into the remaining months of its journey. Now she was more alone than anyone on Earth had ever been, floating at the edge of the galaxy, a tiny speck of animate matter in a radius of hundreds of light-years. Again that dark part of her mind whispered she could go back into coldsleep and never wake up until the death of the universe. She dismissed it. If she felt suicidal she would have saved everyone the trouble of wasting a precious starship, she told herself firmly.

It has to be isolation – being so far away from everything, into dark empty space, gets on the nerves. Classic psychology. Let's get back to… well, civilization, maybe. Whatever's down there. Back to the worlds of the living.

She raised a navigational readout. Her destination was already pre-loaded inside the database – nothing more to do than check and triple-check coordinates and hyperdrive parameters, then hit the activation key. The Milky Way was swallowed inside the blue-purple swirl of hyperspace again. She glanced at the timer. There was no escaping the rules of exotic physics: her ship was much slower than the Ha'tak with its transgalactic-rated hyperdrive, even with all the tuning and refurbishing done by the best minds in the Domination. AL-7X was rated as about a fifth faster than its siblings, still insanely fast by pre-Contact standards, but it would take her another number of months to dive back into the thick of the Milky Way.

She silently watched the supralight tunnel for several minutes, then rose up and walked back into her stateroom, discarding her clothes as she went. She didn't even feel bad going back into cryo so soon. Maybe spending so much time inside a sarcophagus had inured her to that.

She shot a last glance at the old-school, framed photographs on a shelf. Her parents, long dead now, Thor bless their souls. Her smiling husband. If Goa'uld foul play had indeed killed him, she vowed to avenge him.

The autodoc's lid closed down, and she went to sleep.

Even in a multi-planetary and technologically advanced polity one could find so-called "techno-holiday havens" for when the sophisticated denizens of said polity fancied returning to an earlier and inevitably "more authentic" way of life, when men were men and cut wood themselves to put in a stone fireplace instead of setting a temperature preset on some smart-home interface, then settled for a quiet evening of doing whatever they figured people "back in the day" did in such freetime, which as often as not included reflecting at length over such existential matters as "what is the meaning of my life?" and "why is the universe such as it is?", such lofty introspecting grandly benefitting from the vista of a night sky as minimally troubled by artificial lights – both on the ground and above – as could be found.

And despite the customary population growth that went with a society discovering the scientific way and basic germ theory onwards, Tollan planets never, by luck or wise planning, became the kind of overpopulated and artificialized environments found in other corners of the galaxy. Which meant a such-minded Tollan citizen could always find such a place where they might spend some time "off the grid", with the underlying thrill of putting their life at risk through the mere fact of not having orbital dropped rescue at their virtual beck and call. Exciting and wild.

Those particular forested hills tucked in a remote corner of a sparsely-populated archipelago on Serita fit that definition. With the closest sizable settlement thousands of kilometers away and the pervasive connectivity taken for granted practically everywhere else limited to a paltry gigabits of satellite bandwidth, it was a place where one could live out their fantasy of remoteness for a while, until they grew bored and went back to civilization – until the next time.

Such remoteness made it very palatable to the men waiting inside the squat, sturdy stone-and-log house, sitting on separate chairs in the main room. They were in no way related to the official "owners" of the place, the sole link being the stealthy, virtual tracking agent lurking in the infomesh informing them of said owners' whereabouts – just in case the latter decided on a hunch to make use of their remote property, or have acquaintances benefit from it.

There was, after all, nothing to steal that couldn't be easily replaced, and no use for an alarm system that would go against the very philosophy of the setting. The two men – who answered by the names of "Horax" and "Corax", in reference to obscure characters of ancient Tollan lore – were therefore able to gain access to the interior with no more hindrance than lifting a locking bar meant to keep animals out.

For the same desire of discretion, they intended to leave a little trace of their passage as possible, though not exactly out of respect for the owners. As unlikely as tracing their passage here was, the less a trail, the better. After the present business was done, they would spray DNA-destroying enzymes on every surface before leaving.

They would then do the same to the rented aircar – their electronic trail was already sanitized.

A faint, near infrasonic vibration told them of another aircar landing outside. They exchanged a glance: their contact was right on time, as usual.

The man with the nondescript face climbed out of the landed craft. A long time ago he'd gotten rid of the instinctual urge to look up at the sky – there usually were eyes up there. A local-style hat made sure to render his features invisible to any device which might be observing the area. In the past some had questioned his quirks, usually staying so polite as to not use the word "paranoid", but thinking it loudly enough. He'd always shrug it off with a vague smile. The truth being his still being alive at all had all to do with careful ways and planning – all beginning with escaping his long past, first identity with his life back when the current System Lords had established their dominance over… lesser pantheons. That he found himself, much later, working for them was one of life's ironies, but he was long past early grudges.

One habit never died though, innocuous enough, he felt, after all that time, no one would ever make the connection. He lightly fingered the small silver medallion he wore underneath his clothing. The tiny owl was, after all, everything that remained of his former glory, and as much as he'd learned how vain such glories could be, there was no harm in allowing oneself a tiny bit of sentimentality.

He focused himself on the meeting ahead. Horax and Corax, professionals as always. His best assets in this system, found many years ago, then carefully groomed and nurtured using transplanted knowledge from many lifetimes of clandestine work.

And unlike him, they could operate in the open where his own person would stick out like a sore thumb at the first semi-serious bioscan. They could access all the places he couldn't, and act out those plans he'd carefully laid out and made preparations for, one electronic infiltration at a time.

He pushed the unlocked door, making the small act of faith that local authorities were not in fact waiting for him beyond the threshold.

They didn't waste time in effusive greetings. A simple nod was all it took. None party even thought of insulting the other's professionalism by asking questions so trite as "are you sure you weren't followed?" In this high-stake game, you either were a pro all the time, or you got busted quick.

They settled down on couches and the man put a small holoprojector on the low, rough wooden table.

"Our latest operations went well" he set off without preamble. "But the struggle cannot grow as long as the Empire's repressive apparatus is intact."

The pair of operatives nodded. Demonstrations, both online and physical, were nice to spread out awareness of the cause, but as their present mentor had told them once, "great upheavals in history were made by small determined groups leading the crowds", and they found it made great sense. The majority of people, even the ones sympathetic to the cause, were apathetic when it came to actually risking their everyday comfort. It always took some prodding to move them past the threshold of organized violence… and violence was the only reliable way to shatter oppression in the end.

Many in the outer worlds were chafing at Tollan rule, but the comfort it brought was stifling their fighting spirit. But operators like them, and others, in the highly secretive and compartmentalized Human Liberation Front clandestine branch had plans. Plans secreted from the unknown top of the organization – what one didn't know, he could never betray willingly or not – with a long-term view. Horax and Corax never met anyone beyond their immediate cell-leader – and that had only happened thrice. They could guess, from sifting the news, when events were likely to have been caused by other freedom fighters acting in the shadows. But all they knew for sure was their own contribution to the ultimate goal – getting rid of the Empire, and bringing freedom to all. And if it meant breaking a few eggs in the process, well, that was how things worked in the real world.

As to their present companion, all they "knew" outside his codename was that he was an extremely valuable ally, who had a knack for coming up with electronic wizardry and hardware to make the best plans work and escape tracking and retribution. After all, deep neural programming was great not only in the knowledge and ideas it could implant into one's mind, but also in making it so that said mind had no inkling or memory of being so programmed, wasn't it?

"Fortunately, there's a plan…" he went on, lighting up the holo with an accompanying presentation.

After he was done, Corax felt like whistling. Everything they did before was small fry compared to the scope of what "Argo" had revealed. Oh, he had no doubt that the man had the technical details right. But still… ambitious was an understatement there. Their own role was almost simple, procuring the right vehicle and the other "supplies", when their ally would be doing the intellectual heavy lifting, namely planting the right data in the right place past several layers of security. With a little physical inside help they would need to either recruit of coerce… Well, the hit would take months setting up. But then, the Tollan oppressors would know fear at last.

December 2017

How best to approach a star system settled by an unknown, vast and evidently armed civilization? This was the question at the forefront of Ann Rayner's mind as she and her ship figuratively sat, dark and quite in the outer reaches of the local Oort cloud, monitoring inwards with passive sensors.

An Alkesh hardly possessed the most exquisitely sensitive sensor suite in the galaxy, even improved and augmented with Terran ingenuity. Yet what came on both light-speed and faster, painted the rough but fascinating image of an extremely busy star system. Rayner studied the holoprojection, munching on a hot bowl of thick broth to settle her post-cryo hungers. The volumetric display showed all the classic space geography features, asteroid belts – the system had no less than three of them! Gas giants – five, with a smattering of moons, some of which appeared to largely deserve the planet moniker; an Earth-type planet in the goldilocks zone – obviously the settlement center of the system, given the energy signature and traffic patterns emanating from it; another couple small planetoids closer to the local sun. And some clearly artificial features, space stations or habitats, which were massive enough to be detected from such a distance. She suspected there were plenty other artificial structures she couldn't yet detect.

And the traffic! Similarly, she could only resolve those mobile objects giving out enough of a signature, but space drives were usually energetic enough, and there were a lot of those thrusting about without attempting to be sneaky. Most seemed to be high-powered ion drives of some sort, though there were some fusion torches as well, probably the local hotrods, going clearly faster than everything else in deep space where they didn't have to worry about incinerating everything in their trail. It was reminiscent of those new engine designs she'd glimpsed before leaving Earth, slated to power the massive cruisers under construction, mixing the efficiency of electric drive with the raw massive thrust of antimatter-spiked fusion.

From her present location she could count thousands of those… and they were only the ones active and powerful enough to be resolved from such a large distance.

But she had no way of knowing if those powered ships were military or not and even if she did, she had no intention of barging in unannounced, in a clearly Goa'uld-built spacecraft. Every standing polity had its laws, customs and procedures, and upsetting those was a bad way to initiate relations.

So she would take her time. If only the Tollans had more data to share than a rough location and a bad aftertaste… even just as basic language database… well, she would have to acquire all of that herself.

She called up analysis programs and set them up. They would sift through the raw sensor data, on every band, using pattern matching and inference, and after enough time present her with a better understanding, she expected. The electromagnetic spectrum was definitely busy, even with the inevitable attenuation and the relative small size of her receiving arrays. Of course, as she scrolled through output formats and oscilloscope-like waveform displays, all of it appeared as gibberish. She expected such an advanced civilization to use mostly digitally encoded data rather than relatively easy to decode analog formats, and without any starting clues, her computers would have to do it the hard way.

With her initial set-up done, she turned to her own grooming. Three hours of hard exercise – as static as it had to be, since Al-7X didn't exactly fit a running track, then wolfing more prepackaged food taken from the freezer hold. She had a full stock, enough to support her metabolic needs for a couple months before she had to switch on the food synthesizer… and its less pleasant-to-the-mind reprocessed feedstocks.

A bath followed – that was such an unprecedented luxury inside a starship, at least until the introduction of artificial gravity. Recycling the water wasn't a problem even with pre-Contact tech. It was nice they'd given her a refurbished Alkesh rather than a dinky Teltak, she smirked. The latter would have been definitely less palatial inside.

Wrapped in a fluffy bathrobe she sat crosslegged in front of her main comp terminal and its collection of flat and volumetric displays. Her programs had made good work already. The space traffic was being coalesced into schematic lanes and waypoints, making it obvious that there were rules at play into managing the system's volume of space, whether it was a centralized system or something else.

Electromagnetic scatter enough to fill a library, some of it tentatively classified as electro-detection or communication based on waveform analysis and comparison, but she didn't get more than that. The locals obviously had to use comp-science at least as sophisticated as Earth cutting-edge or better and even the civilian formats would be extremely complex to decode without knowing the corresponding algorithms and keys.

Rayner scratched her head. Maybe she would have to come in with a big "hello, I come in peace" sign. But then she didn't even have the words for that! Flying in sedately, broadcasting her presence and acting passive and unthreatening enough that local authorities would try to make contact rather than shooting first? Workable, but she hardly wanted to attract that kind of attention if she could avoid it.

Mindlessly twisting a strand of hair, she flicked through data pages, listened to audio representation of the carrier waves, watched processed, time-lapse cascading visual representations. She'd never been a scholar, but even "basic" Citizen education leaned heavily into sciences and mathematics, which her Drakensis mind was well cabled to understand. She altered program settings, input refined parameters as more data filtered in.

Still gibberish – or more like an abstract painting. There was definitely meaning, she just couldn't read it. It was… frustrating.

Then her consoled beeped and another cascade display opened up in front of her. One of the signal analysis programs had collected enough data from the sensors over enough time that… something had passed the alert threshold.

Rayner opened other display formats, observed the data carefully, then started a grin that widened as her brain took on the sight.

It was a weak signal, which explained why she hadn't remarked it sooner. It had taken hours for her receiving arrays to gather enough so that the underlying signal could be processed out of the radio noise.

It started as a basic repeating pattern. On, off, then incrementally went through the suite of ten digits – at least those people used base-ten! Which made sense if they were human-like with two hands of five fingers each… More patterns followed, each derivative of the former and building up. She unraveled it, her own mind working in tandem with the ship's intelligence. The local mathematical system appeared similar to the one she'd grown up using. And basic physical concept followed – starting with the hydrogen atom in its elegant simplicity.

She chuckled to herself, then spoke aloud. "Wotan, they got it – they built a first-contact package!" Something people had speculated about on Earth – but such a thing, like all things gathered under the "xenoscience" label was hardly given much concerted thought when more pressing matters, like the Protracted Struggle, oriented and monopolized scientific and technological progress.

Which said something about the locals, she realized. Not only did they speculate about alien contact, they'd actually experienced it… and made practical dispositions for.

It meant they were open to the possibility of opening communications with totally unknown entities rather than automatically assuming they had to be destroyed.

She took a deep breath and released the lock of hair she'd been twisting, and made a face as she realized it was irretrievably knotted. She shrugged it off. In fact, she felt like dancing a little victory dance, as foolish as it seemed. She allowed herself a compromise.

"Yeehaw!" she said aloud. "And I'm totally not going insane and talking to myself" she added sardonically.

Ida galaxy, very, very far away

Loki felt like taking a breather. Even since the victory over the Replicators, his species had been debating. Rebuild everything as it was before? As temptingly comfortable as the idea was, this was impossible. First, some lives were irretrievably lost, their originals killed and the backups corrupted or lost. Entire star systems laid in ruin, and most were sensibly forever quarantined lest someone disturb something that really ought not. However infinitesimal the likelihood of some viable Replicator particle waiting to be somehow reactivated, nobody wanted to take that chance.

Then there were the mental scars; never before had the proud Asgard race come so close to complete defeat and destruction. Many argued that pride had indeed brought upon them punishment in the form of the Replicators. It wasn't very logical, Loki thought. It had been bad luck, was all. But even beings as advanced as his species could lapse into emotional thought. It came along with sentience and life itself. That faction was advocating a return to pre-technological life… on the face of it, the proposition would normally get only polite laughs from the rest. But conjugated with the tantalizing prospect of rewinding the genetic devolution of their biological form… it held weight. Thor himself appeared ambivalent, though he seemed to favor the other way, at least intellectually: shedding biological bodies altogether and transferring their consciousness in artificial substrates forever. But then, wouldn't they become like the very thing that almost destroyed them? Long-term, would they lose what made them Asgard?

Arguments flew to and fro and nothing was decided yet. In his mind, Loki knew he could probably never resign himself to shedding the artificially evolved cerebral add-ons that made the contemporary Asgard brain able to achieve so much. Going back to the prehistoric Asgard physiology would feel like a lobotomy. He couldn't see himself drooling over some beast's meat on a fire… although what might come after such a dinner was titillating. Those old bodies had genitals on them…

Sighing, he tuned out of the general channel and switched his perception to a randomly chosen transdimensional monitoring device among the multitude planted across the Milky Way. Well, not that randomly. This was his pet project after all.

Sight and sound came in, encompassing, captured by the ridiculously miniaturized, and certainly undetectable at their target's level of technological development, spying array.

Anton de Polignac was sitting nonchalantly in his Lunar office, his back reclined as far as his chair would go, a foot dangling over an armrest, the other propped on the cluttered desk. Long fingers twirled a glass of some alcohol-laden beverage. Across the desk, sat in a visitor's chair and equally at ease was that other man… what was his name, Loki barely had time to ask himself before the answer surged into his mind from extended memory. Daniel Jackson. Interestingly, the latter didn't appear noticeably older than the last time he'd glimpsed him, a good decade ago. Obviously the Draka had chosen to make further life-prolonging treatments available to their "Old Race". Loki briefly wondered if they would eventually get to merge their two genetic lines back together. In any case, the work done at that Virunga place was quite fascinatingly clever, he had to give them that. Not that he'd ever reach out to them directly… There was no way he'd provide such a dangerous polity with information on his own people!

"…so, it looks we're pretty much done with the archeological finds, unless we stumble on something new. Sure, I got that plantation waiting for me in the South, but" Jackson spread his arms "I'm not sure I want to settle yet… I can't help thinking of this huge galaxy and every secret it must hide. If they're indeed thinking of reopening the Gate for exploration, as you say… count me in!"

"Yeah, I know what you mean" Anton nodded. "Been getting restless myself. I feel like I'm heading a Wotan-damned train station some days. Exercises and mock alerts only go so far… I miss the old days when we opened new gate addresses, went through them and found something to kill or enserf" he chuckled.

"Well, we didn't do that with the Tollan…" Jackson commented wryly.

"No, not that we could in the first place. They're too big, too far, and…" he dropped his voice conspiratorially "I kind of like them. Anyway, it will take generations before the Race grows enough, in sheer numbers and power, to take on something like a galactic power. And I'd rather deal with the Goa'uld before trying to yoke the Tollan… if we ever have to."

"Ah, I see you took your Progressives card" the other man chuckled. "Truth, I rather like them too. Been a long time since I last visited though" he added pensively.

"Thinking of the Tollan wench?" Anton prodded. "Elledia, right? I heard she was married, no?"

Jackson nodded again. "Five years ago, yes. Though…" he smirked wrily "didn't stop us fucking again at the Legation two years later, and again every time I'm over there. Still a looker even with the added years. She's using our cosmetics, actually."

"You know her father's…" a Tollan intelligence bigwig, he didn't have time to finish.

"Yes, and I fucked her anyway. Didn't betray any State secret doing so."

"You know, with you and her doing it… now I'm wondering who's the true father of her daughter."

Jackson made a face. "Eeeh… I've wondered about that too. She never gave me a clue. But those blonde hair…? Makes me wonder, yeah. Well, her official father's taking good care of them both, and I'm glad for that. Me, I have enough Abydosian wenches to keep busy" he boasted, keeping away his most inner thoughts concerning Elledia and her offspring. The truth was, he'd covertly tested that daughter's DNA the last time he'd seen them. A speck of dried skin was enough after all. Lyria was a Jackson indeed, but there was no sensible way to recognize it. If he did, the child would be stuck in a grey area – not legally a Citizen, yet not legally a serf either. No, better she grew up with an established identity. Even if it meant his only known child – he used birth control with the serf wenches, and the sperm donations were anonymous – was not his.

"What about you? Family life still awesome? Not tired yet of changing diapers?" he returned the question. Polignac smiled. "Serfs change the diapers, thanks White Christ, and no I don't feel like I'm seeing Alexandra and the kids often enough. She's doing great with the plantation, every time there's something new. She's finally got the vineyard going, with our first vintage in the bottles this year. You'll get some, of course!"

"I'd be offended otherwise" Daniel chuckled. "So, not feeling too lonely by yourself here?"

"Ah, I still have Jessica, y'know. Loki's balls, she knows how to pleasure a man… or a woman, for that matter!"

Asgard faces didn't have a lot of room for expressiveness. Yet, Loki's eyes ever-so-slightly narrowed, as did his tiny mouth. He tuned out the guffaws that followed. Yes, hearing his name invoked in relation with his non-existent genitals after listening to those two backward males talking about having sexual intercourse with the females of their species was really just what he needed. Not.

Hebridean System, Milky Way Galaxy

Ann Rayner contemplated the next move, her gaze staring emptily outside the flight deck as her mind worked. What she'd labeled as a first-contact package was actually just an introduction, transmitted outwards by emitters emplaced in the systems outer orbuts. The whole radio sequence built a common system for basic mathematical functions, but there was far more to communication than that. Which was why the sequence ended with a set of frequencies, directions, protocols and handshake signals for what was, arguably, the actual, much larger package. It would mean getting closer to shorten the light-speed lag, yet staying in the outer system where "unspecified arrivals" were told to take place, then transmit the handshake to a receiver located at the provided coordinates.

Everything was set up. Coordinates for the hyperdrive to jump the short hop inwards. The signal to be sent by her electromagnetic communications array. A dedicated data transfer channel to a secure, partitioned storage for the return data packet.

She gave one last look at the holoprojected system schematics, the tiny beads and strings of color-coded light symbolizing the worlds that awaited. Draka or not, she felt the butterflies in her stomach. Intimidating. Daunting. She breathed in. Pride. Yes, a task fit for one like herself.

She touched the activation key, and AL-7X vanished from its cold standby spot into the whirling blue-purple nebula of hyperspace for the short transit into the system proper. Using the hyperdrive for such a small – relatively speaking – distance was inefficient, but at this stage she gladly exchanged the additional wear against flying in the regular way, which would take her days. Besides, she had a fully charged and refurbished reactor and a pile of refined naquadah in her hold. It would be many years before her power plant and her hyperdrive needed extra maintenance.

The ship exited hyperspace on cue, and the system's primary shone noticeably brighter through the forward windscreen, though still a tiny dot rather than a solar disk. She was just outside the farthest gas giant's orbit, though nowhere near the planet itself. Far outside the navigation lanes she'd observed either, which was a good thing – she didn't intend to make a flashing, disturbing entry! She had no idea whether he arrival was witnessed. So far, there was no sign she'd been remarked. No obvious targeting lock, at least, out of the electromagnetic rain bathing the system.

Maybe they were waiting for her to make the first move, she told herself. Well, at least she wasn't acting in any way threatening. Her stealth systems were down, she was keeping station and going nowhere fast, if anybody was watching, they ought to give her the benefit of doubt, she reasoned.

She tapped a key – sending wireless commands through her implant just didn't feel like having the right weight, she still felt. Her challenge went out on the specified frequencies at the speed of light, the intricacies of subspace-based communications far too complex to be described in the welcome signal.

Seconds ticked by, then minutes as photons raced across the void. Ann waited, tapping her fingers on her flight chair's armrest, until she willed herself to stop fidgeting and mentally chastised herself for doing so. Drakas don't fidget, woman. We're ice-blooded, stone-cold bastards, it is known. She smirked whimsically at that. There was more to that than… - DING.

The communication chime knocked her off her self-criticizing train of thought.

With a combination of implant and typed commands, she delved into her com suite – indeed, gigabytes of data were pouring in and being routed to the secure memory. She whistled. Now that was some first-contact package.

The influx stopped eventually. Rayner spent the following hours analyzing the data's structure. It had to follow a similar logic to the first part, with a simple "hook" leading to unravel further complexity. She found the hook, which fit neatly into the mathematical system already provided. Iterative step after iterative step, she was able to program the logic into a rudimentary executable compinset, taking advantage of her Goa'uld compsystem's flexibility.

Once she ran it, it should eventually unpack the entire dataset in a readable format.

She considered the possibility of a cyber-attack. She was going to run alien code on her system, after all – but she felt the risk was minimal. Besides, she had barriers in place, and she felt unlikely that any malicious code could escape from the partitioned, virtualized computing space set up to contain it.

Let's do it!

The ship's complex, crystal-based photonic brain ran the calculations in the blink of an eye, decoding the contact package being a trivial task for a computing substrate designed to crush through multidimensional, exotic physics calculations. Raw, compressed data unfolded into neatly ordered structures, each layer containing the instructions required to decode the next one.

More hours, more packaged meals and more of her precious coffee later, Ann Rayner finished her initial review of the decoded package, laid out in a complex, rich database. Language files, with and enriched-media dictionary. The local tongue, its vocabulary, grammar and syntax, audio files for pronunciation, semantic linkages – all presented in a structure well thought-out for automated translators. An extensive library of data exchange protocols for things ranging from simple voice to virtual reality environments.

All laid out before her, everything she would need to start actually communicating with the local civilization. Impressive, she thought. This alone was already worth sending back to the Domination… whenever she could do so. Her subspace com didn't have the range to reach Earth and she couldn't count on a friendly ship flying by. Somehow, she'd have to find a way. An out-of-the-way stargate would be best, if she could access one – that was one of her first priorities.

She finished parsing the data for hidden logic bombs. There was none. Apart from the initial unpacking program, everything was purely information for her to adapt and use. So she slotted the files in her compsystem, then uploaded the language database up to her implant, and went to sleep for a much-deserved rest.

Next "morning" ship-time, Rayner allowed herself the luxury of a full, freshly made breakfast out of the Domination's old, mixed roots. Scrambled eggs, fried sausage and bacon, hummus and flat bread, bell pepper and tomato shakshuka – ingredients taken from her stasis hold, humming tunes to herself as she prepared them in the small but highly functional galley, clad in a skimpy apron that came with the ship and read "The dead must eat" in bold embroidered letters over a gruesome decomposing head with a hungry gaping maw – Anton de Polignac's particular sense of humor showing in this late parting gift. She felt great – better than she'd felt in a long time, actually. She was looking forward to what the immediate future would bring.

She took her time eating – sized to satiate her augmented metabolism, her meal could easily feed three or four ordinary humans.

Then, still wearing nothing but the apron, she sat at her console, belched – "Sorry, ship" she apologized aloud, and began typing her introductory message. It was addressed to the place that identified itself in the package as the latter's originator and the one to be contacted first, one of the numerous space stations dotting the system, though that one orbited closer to the Earth-like planet. Thanks to the database, she knew their names now. Dran Nya Station, orbiting planet Hebridan. The message was short and to the point.

Request docking instructions.