Alan - Kree

by Pascal in Quebec

IR – International Rescue; a name known and honored across Earth for altruism, freely given help and technical miracles. The truth inside was not so loving or helpful. Alan being fed-up with his relatives' abuses takes the one lucky event given him to get out of their clutches, thus falling through the Stargate and into the claws of an ancient legendary creature forgotten by all.

3. Chapter 3

The author wishes to express thanks to anyone who may read his story and encourages them to leave reviews, comments or even flame it hard. As with any who try their hand at publicly expressing an idea or story concept, all feedback is important and welcome.

Disclaimer: I do not own Thunderbirds, nor any other sci-fi or fantasy series, movies, comics, cartoons or news items used in this fiction as they belong to the creators or broadcasters or publishers who put them out for consumption by the public.

Thunderbirds

This story is Thunderbirds Crossover/Alternate Universe that have been integrated into the Stargate universes and stories, therefore many characters will be OOC because their backgrounds have changed. Also, these events happen well after the ends of all SG series/movies and are deemed independent, therefore I haven't bothered to note the ages of any SG characters as they should not be present much.

Anti-IR; plentiful bashings of Jefferson, Grant, Ruth, Penelope, Kyrano & Onaha Bellegant. Survivors Alan, Hiram, Fermat & Tanusha. Ignorant/abused/exploited Tracy brothers.

This story takes place in a world that combines the elements of Thunderbirds 1964, Thunderbirds are go 2015 and Thunderbirds 2004 live movie. I know there is a long series of comics written but I never seen one and have no idea what canon they contain so I won't be taking those into account.

IMPORTANT: for the purpose of keeping this story logical and relevant, I will use the original names of the Bellegant family meaning Onaha (mother), Kyrano (father) Tanusha / Tin-Tin / Kayo (daughter) and Trangh (Uncle / The Hood). Hiram (Brains) was married but his wife disappeared & presumed murdered while his son Fermat is 2 years younger than Alan.

PS; I like flames, they're fun to read so don't hesitate to write them.

WARNING; the language level of this one is not too particularly trashy when we consider a story based on ex-cons, ex-military men, high risk situations and rescue specialists dealing with everybody's crap and messes on top of their own. Also, it was series canon that the entire Tracy household swore like drunken sailors on an hourly basis. They cleaned up the language a whole lot more than spic-&-span in the 2004 movie and 2015 series. Remember the internal joke that the "all clear" call phrase "FAB" actually spells out "Fuck It All, Boys!" because of how often Jefferson was absolutely livid with rage at all five sons at the same time. It was transformed as a familial joke to tell each other that if Dad was able to get angry to scold or punish, then they were all healthy and doing fine at whatever was happening as Jeff had always told them "Rescue first, heal second then order the House after everything else is done and packed away."

However, as I always warn people who read my work: this language was pretty much normal in the school yard 30 years ago when I was a teenager. So, how can you have such a thin skin and be part of the same culture on the same continent if this is really that offensive to you? Where did you spend the last few decades, if you can't take a few hard words from the mouths of kids when these words have been around since before World War I?

ALAN - KREE chapter 3 – The story of Kree

Uncomfortable truths come to light

(Stargate SG-1 – opening theme)

Thursday 29th of June, 2034; 19h00pm

Tauri cuirassé One-Armed bandit

Orbit above Seattle, USA west coast

Tanusha Bellegant grumbled under her breath as she pulled her tightly fitting green T-shirt back in place, after taking a minute to admire the new, unblemished skin where the gunshot wounds used to be. Looking up as she finished setting herself back to rights, the young woman could barely contain her ongoing astonishment at the alien technologies openly displayed around the infirmary where she had been treated. Because, of course, Virgil being himself, she had been guided to a doctor the moment they were teleported aboard and had walked by the first-aid clinic situated next to the arrival room.

And what a new experience that had been.

The teleportation, yes of course, but most specifically the medics she met.

Instead of being poked by cold boney fingers, or having cold metal probes shoved into very private orifices she didn't want to think about (two bullet holes, ye dolts…), a simple free-wave scanner had rendered a holographic image of the problems then the medic had used another energy device to finish closing the wounds all the way.

Miracle! It was a miracle, this no-touch medicine!

Except that Virgil wasn't buying it, and tried to poke her at each and every step the official paramedic was doing.

She loved her almost-brother, really she did, when she didn't want to drop him in the ocean, far from her poor, much maligned person. Some personal space, that's all she was asking for, please! Ahhh, big lug, she loved him dearly, buuut…

Sniffing in disdain at the ultra high-tech no-hands medicine happening all over, the young man in question was truly impressed, but he was also getting depressed at the obvious lack of personal touch that was so vital for the patient's emotional recovery after bad traumas. Especially the war-made types, where you saw your friends die but survived to remember them. How can you begin to heal if nobody holds you in their arms when you cry, or offers a steadying hand on the shoulder when you wake from nightmares?

This new method of medicine may be good at saving lives & limbs quickly, and completely repairing most any physical damages, but it seemed to have gotten worse at helping human minds get healthier. What a rotten trade-off, this could all become, if things weren't set on a better course of action to improve the care for the souls of patients by the same margin of evolution.

Taking his eyes away from the glass wall through which he could see a minor surgery in progress, Virgil walked back to his best female friend, bumping her elbow with his own playfully, indicating they should get on the way for their meeting. The conference had been held-back because of her injuries, but now they had a bevy of big-wigs waiting on them to arrive so they could all eat.

{ IR } - { A dinner most indigestible } - { SG }

19h14pm

Sitting at the conference table were Radek with Rodney, Hiram and Fermat after him, the four Tracy siblings plus Tanusha would be on the other long-side of the table, and the generals would each have an end.

John Tracy tried to apologize again, as Radek Zelenka waved him off amicably, between the last sips of warm broth. The small appetizer that he was eating was a necessity due to taking pill-form medication for Shingles that could cause stomach acid reflux if it wasn't mixed with denser substances.

Rubbing a hand through his short blond hair, the lanky spacer was trying desperately to not blush as he mumbled to himself "I still can't believe we forgot about Kayo's injuries, or how Virg would react the moment we passed by that local emergency room. We must have left our heads back on Tracy Island, or something."

Snorting in amusement with his hands joined over his expanding paunch, the fruit of rather sedentary older years, the elderly Canadian scientist retorted kindly; "Don't bother, kid. The number of times we had to postpone diplomatic meetings cuz we had holes in us just doesn't bear counting anymore. It got to the point that the Atlantis crew felt we won the lottery when we got back to base with less than 50% injuries spread across the mission squad. And when we returned with our vehicles intact, that was practically cause for a feast."

Seeing doctor Zelenka ruefully nodding while wearing a melancholy smile at the old memories, John finally gave up on the politeness and admitted to himself silently that the whole thing could have gone worse. Then again, the way the medics in that small infirmary near the teleportation room had sounded, Tanusha was amongst the least injured people they had treated in the last 24 hours. So maybe the older men were right, and this wasn't as much of an imposition as he felt it to be.

Scott watched his second brother flounder around in his surfeit of manners with a discrete smirk, entirely too amused by the blond's self-inflicted stress when there obviously weren't any bad feelings to begin with. These old veterans, even the civilians, had seen enough dirt roads and enemy fire to care only for what mattered, not dumb appearances and pontifications like their dad did. Giving a cursory look around the room, Scott saw that Gordon was eerily silent, sitting in his appointed chair without fidgeting or trying to center the conversation on himself, as was his normal way. In fact, the most active people were the two old generals, standing besides the large bay windows and speaking in an alien tongue that Scott had absolutely no chances to understand, especially since tongues had never been his forte. Linguistics & codes was more John domain, or even Alan's it now seemed.

MAX wandered near Fermat, wooing a soft noise in interrogation, since he wasn't getting any orders, the room was already clean and no threats were in progress. Fermie patted the bot's arm, telling him kindly to be patient, it was just a meeting, all talk and no anger to fear. Appeased, the white-hulled robot pivoted on his wheels and began a new circuit around the room, scanning and analyzing items as he moved slowly in peaceful idleness.

General Mitchell turned towards the noise, watching attentively the spider-like robot as it rolled delicately on the carpeted floor, avoiding obstacles and people with disconcerting ease. None of the current animal-shaped drones the SGC possessed were anywhere near the level of sophistication and autonomy this machine exhibited, and it was more than a bit galling. Before the older man could make a comment, the doors wooshed open to let in the missing young people, both fully healthy and alert from their impromptu visit to the sector's emergency sick-bay.

Grinning like a loon, Tanu claimed quickly "Sorry we're late! It's the big lug's fault! He kept interrupting the medics with questions, and poking me between each procedure they did. We'd be earlier if he hadn't been in the way."

Huffing gamely, the jeans & flannel shirt clad pilot of Thunderbird-2 nodded in approval, stating quite positively "Yep! That was me! And you'll all thank me later, when I have to use those same methods on your inconsiderate hides cuz you went adrenaline junkie on us and got broken bones or penetrating wounds. Like a certain rock-wall climber I could mention, hein, Scooter?"

Shrugging playfully from his seat, Scott replied "Everybody has hobbies, Virg. You'd be less stressed if you had one, too."

The snort of snark emitted in response was massive, as Virgil countered "I paint and sculpt, play the piano and sing, and cook for the lot of you domestically challenged loafers. I have plenty of hobbies, but they don't work when you nitwits just keep on getting hurt in scatterbrained ways every damned day of the year! Get safer about your own hobbies, that'll make me less stressed!"

John Sheppard tried, and failed miserably, to stifled a burst of laughter behind a cough in his closed fist, as he exchanged looks with his old SGA colleagues, neither of which seemed to be particularly surprised either. Apparently, extreme sports and addiction to speed were universal pastimes amongst a certain type of people with high-risk jobs, like everybody in the room.

Mitchell exclaimed happily "Well, now that we're all here, let's eat! I'm starving, and watching Zelenka's soup isn't helping."

A few low chuckles resounded as the hosts and guests uncovered the serving platters to get themselves portions of multiple grilled meats, steamed vegetables and rice, and bread rolls.

X - X - X - X

20h20pm

After spending a rather quiet hour concentrated on eating a solid meal, the attendees were now getting into the desserts and digestives when general Sheppard asked tentatively "So, you have a private space-station in low orbit. That's new. Why were we never told about it?"

Blinking in surprise at the question, Scott replied honestly "You'd have to ask our father, Jefferson, about those details. What I do know for a fact was that he claimed, three years back, to have made a deal with the White House to have us function without being actually registered in any country. He kept insisting on secrecy, the big-hush-hush-super-duper-covert-mission kinda thing, but he never explained why, and we don't think he had any good reasons. In fact, after having a heart-to-heart with him yesterday, we're all pretty much convinced he had nothing but ill intents from the start, and way before that, too."

Seeing all the siblings and their friends go deathly quiet at the subject, Cameron Mitchell asked pointedly "We're gonna need to know the details about what you think is wrong with him, to understand IR and how it fits in all this planetary mess."

Having no options if he wanted to keep his extended family safe, Scott mentally put on his Big Brother suspenders and got through the nasty job of explaining in details what had happened in the last three days, including the mess with Gordon, Alan and Fermat, and how it all exploded in their faces when Alan imprisoned them at gunpoint. He then went about how they had to verify Virgil's story of abuse with their findings, the foul story Ruth told them before committing suicide, and then going to bunker down in Menenoa Atoll while leaving their father jailed in the Tracy Island basement.

There was silence for several minutes following the hour-long retelling, with all the elderly adults keeping steely faces and cold eyes during the entire process. It was at the very end, after explaining how and why Tanusha had been injured and recently orphaned that things got dicey.

Scott sipped a mouthful of lukewarm coffee then explained the last detail they had in hand; what Alan had done on the atoll before leaving with a large ship for parts unknown. General Mitchell demanded in clipped words to see the films they had of the young teenager, in the cold-storage silo, to prove their words about owning such an airship. He presented his argument as a concern about publicly acknowledging their property of such a heavily armed ship having political consequences, even inside the IOA, but his tone of voice and visage were guarded in a strange way as he spoke.

Too emotionally worn-out and unstable to see the minute indicators for what they were, the already despondent Scott shrugged as he asked John to set-up the flash drive in the media reader so that the film could play on the holonet projector built into the middle of the table. The revealing, important portions of the recordings were not long, but very significative for the SGC personnel.

Sheppard nodded slowly at the clear image of the IR Command Center in the fully lit garage, its massive stern ramp lowered to let in the long procession of robotic units Alan had built. With a few quick commands in the pull-out keyboard, the general had the view split in halves, with the IR records on the left and the One-Armed Bandits' films of the Goa'uld pyramidal ship and its escorts on the right. A few more keys had the computer run a comparative algorithm between the two images, to ascertain if they were the same ship in both. The result showed a 97% match, due to poor underwater visibility and radiation saturation after the high-atmosphere atomic explosions.

Snarling angrily now that all made sense, Mitchell exploded at the younger people, letting loose with all the anger, stress and bile that had accumulated in the past three days, since that blasted Goa'uld ha'tak had reactivated. "You dumb morons! Couldn't you have put better locks on that damned ship?! A fucking CHILD stole it! A bloody barge the size of a destroyer with gunnery to shame anything the USA has on the waves to date, and you're all more worried about the little mongrel's health than what he did to the planet?! No wonder, when there's so much incest, rape, and inbreeding in all your families! No normally born human would ever operate like you defective lot!"

It was actually Tanusha, seated right next to Mitchell, that snapped a lightning-quick backhand across his face, much to the surprise of everybody around the table, although none of the SGC servicemen did anything to save Cameron from the fate he had just invited upon himself. It took a few minutes of respite from the intense conversation, and walking around the room, before the group was able to sit peacefully enough to continue through the morass of the situation.

Swallowing his pride for the good of humanity, Mitchell growled "I apologize for having spoken ill of your family situation. With everything that you have found-out in the last three days, it's perfectly obvious that you should focus on your missing sibling, since it's the only thing you can control in this mess."

Tanusha threw the older man a barbed apology, saying snarkily "And I apologize for bitch-slapping you when you lost your grip on reality like a little schoolgirl in a hysterical tizzy. Won't happen again, cross my heart and all…" Except the wide, shit-eating grin on her face belied her true feelings about events.

Amused snorts from the SGA team were the only support Mitchell got from his side, so he grumbled nastily some more as he refilled his coffee mug, then sitting quietly at his end of the table, letting McKay take the lead for now.

Rodney took a deep breath to steady himself, then activated the hologram to show the diverse events that had occurred around the sunken Goa'uld ship, and their consequences. From the side of his eye, he saw Hiram and Fermat quietly taking notes on small paper pads, diligently writing time stamps, ships, countries and everything pertinent to understand the scene displayed. The Tracy siblings plus Tanusha were simply watching the films raw, knowing they could be replayed later to extract the details to mount a defense for their youngest brother.

The series of attacks and defenses that occurred around the derelict mothership were gut-wrenching and mindboggling at the same time for the four brothers. Add to this that several times nuclear or proto-atomic weapons were used with casual disregard to either the combatants or the environment, and Alan's family was straining to keep it together. The films of the Lord of Unrest speaking with the One-Armed Bandit's command crew were nerve wracking in a different way that made them worse.

The moment the last film was done, John Tracy declared firmly "For the sake of argument, let's assume that it was Alan in charge of that ship during those sequences. We can haggle over proofs later, if it becomes necessary. The first thing that I see is that in each of the events when violence occurred, he was always defensive, only responding to the aggressions of others. He never once fired a preemptive strike, and even accepted to parley with your representatives to try deescalating things. He was willing to listen and accommodate, until China and America decided to flush logic down the pipes in favor of racism and religious idiocy. From this, the Tracy Family will refuse to acknowledge Alan as a criminal or terrorist of any sorts. I will also remind you that all events occurred outside all national borders, and therefore any time a country intervened, they did so illegally and at their entire peril, without any recourse before the UN. Or, now that we know you exist, the IOA it so happens."

"What's your job again, kid?" asked Mitchell tartly as he glared at the young astronaut through hooded eyes.

Smirking, Scott replied for his brother "He's the dispatcher of International Rescue. That means he's in charge of telling us where the emergency is, with all relevant climatic and local data, and the most pressing legal matters we could face if we have to intervene in certain restricted zones like manufactures of pharmaceutical, chemicals and munitions. He's no lawyer, but he'll do in a pinch."

McKay declared "Well, as the head of the IOA, I accept your arguments about the fact that no single country could claim jurisdiction over the area at the time. I further accept that any and all losses or damages incurred by those countries as result of their illicit acts are their own sole responsibility, without obligations on the parts of any other entity or group. And finally, I have eyes in my head, I saw very well that your brother was open to negotiations, until president Harland went Jesus-nut on him. The response he gave to that doesn't fill me with joy, but I've been there myself, so I understand why he reacted the way he did."

John Sheppard added "We did things to the Wraiths, and the Asurans, where we weren't just defending ourselves. Sometimes, we attacked first, on the flimsy excuse that they had millennia of history that showed them as aggressors and parasites, so we didn't wait to act against them. And the Asuran Replicators weren't actual people, just clouds of nanites, and that made demonizing them, denying their right-of-life, a lot easier. Your brother had more self-restraint than we did, back then."

Virgil demanded of Mitchell "Are you really gonna blame a fourteen year old for defending himself when a religious zealot declares a nation-wide crusade of genocide against him? He was alone facing a country of Jesus freaks armed with nukes and bloody spaceships! How the fuck was he supposed to react to that, that you'd have been happy with him?"

Making a face of disgust, Cameron answered carefully "Due to the consequences we have to live with, I don't think that I could find anything I would be honestly happy with. I witnessed orbital bombardments in my career, and even ordered a few since I made it to general. But this, on our Earth, on our home… No, I won't be happy with anything for a long time to come."

Fermat stated blithely "We understand you, general, and live the same situation and emotions as you. We just want assurances of basic honesty and logic in your decisional processes, to show us you aren't another Kinsey, Trump or Harland hiding under a soldier's uniform."

Snorting, Zelenka countered with much snark "That's easy to do. None of the Christian god-mongers have ever served in any military or police units, thus their great ease at starting wars for profits and stroking their manliness. No person who served under the flag would be so hurried to trigger hostilities with neighbors, especially those that can fight back on equal terms."

Scott grunted assent with the elderly scientist as he served himself another small creamy pastry along a refill of coffee, having seen pretty much that very thing during his four years of USAF service. "We're not monsters. Our forefathers most definitely are, no contest there, but us, here, aren't. And despite everything that happened in the last three days, neither is Alan. He's just a scared kid who decided to save his life cuz nobody was doing it for him, and he accidentally found that wreck. All the events afterwards were the doing of geriatric bastards driven by paranoia, racism and religious delirium. It doesn't make the physical situation any less horrendous for us, but you have to realize that he wasn't the person who wanted to escalate things this far."

Virgil growled lowly "If somebody, anybody, had done just one thing to help him, we wouldn't be here."

Fermat decided to kill their line of thought based on Allie being a weakling in need of being protected. "You are all making some very wrong assumptions. Alan wasn't utterly alone. Myself, father and MAX were with him. So were friends at McVeigh, people he met in the last four years that could see past the propaganda Jeff and Ruth put out to destroy Allie's public reputation." Giving a nasty smirk of satisfaction, Fermat added venomously "I lean towards chemistry, biology, pharmacology and health sciences as a whole. Alan instead orients towards two distinct areas; firstly is linguistics, music, mathematics, symbology and ciphers, but it is mostly a hobby for him. His real passion is centered on vehicular engineering, national utility grids, industrial automation & robotics, with a heavy side of cybernetics, networked-objects computing and autonomous artificial intelligence (bots & droids). While I was able to help Alan with quite a few things, he was actually helping me with others because he is far more in tune with material sciences and programming than I am."

Hiram pushed back his thick glasses, took a sip of coffee, then slowly commented "Alan Tracy was always gifted for the material sciences, but his skills in cybernetics and programming are easily on par with my own. There were many times that I let him remotely effectuate OS and apps adjustment jobs in the Thunderbirds, because I was overbooked elsewhere, not that Jeff ever cared as he was the one constantly not knowing what he wanted or needed at any given day. So, when I saw how good Alan was, I began to delegate small tasks to him, and by age 9 he was doing all the routine console, node and server maintenance that didn't need a physical presence on the island. By age 10, when he was on Tracy Island or Menenoa Atoll with us, I could trust him to correctly do the parts changes or even the installing of brand new parts to extend the local network. At age 11, he was able to help me with pretty much any of the utilities in the island's grid, using the builder-bots to move and weld the heaviest pieces or handle toxic products like Superon fuel."

Wincing as he imagined just what these people were feeling right now, John Sheppard asked gently "Did you help him design those robots he had with him?"

Locking eyes with the older man, Hiram replied neutrally "Yes, I did. For the last 12 years of his life, the only truly caring father figure he had was me. Do you know many genuine fathers who would not help their gifted child orient his studies, push them to excel, and challenge them to avoid stagnation? Alan was my second son in every aspect that mattered. And now that the insanities of the Tracy and Hardale lineages are public fact, I can even state confidently that my link to him is above and beyond the fake heredity that Jefferson, Grant and Ruth had maintained to save themselves from popular opprobrium. Alan is a young person whose character, personality, talents and accomplishments fill me with great pride, right along Fermat's own. The fact that both my boys got along so well, and helped each other like fingers of the same hand, is even more heartwarming. You will find no disapproval or consternation towards Alan in me, gentlemen. Instead, I will keep my bile for those great and mighty cretins of the Christian churches and sects who decided to burn the world rather than let a misery-stricken child escape their immoral perfidies."

Cameron Mitchell asked more pointedly "Can you tell us specifically what you helped him with? We need to know, in case we meet his machines in a situation that allows us to avoid violence."

Fermat sneered disdainfully, declaring acidly "If there was a real chance to avoid violence, you wouldn't need to know who helped to design or build what piece or system. You're just fishing for information to bolster your flagging tactics, especially in the light of the climatic and societal situations on the planet beneath us. Somehow, I have doubts about you being one of those who'll help make things better, if we ever do meet Alan's robots or territories."

"Enough." Declared McKay in a nasty tone of his own. "Given what we have all discovered tonight, all of our nerves are raw and worn-out beyond anybody's ability to remain civil any longer. And your young lady friend has yet to mourn her lost family, as well. I believe it would be better if we all finished this evening in our own accommodations, slept on it, and convened tomorrow evening, for a working dinner again, to finish dealing with this."

"That's a waste of time, and y'all know it." Gordon declared, speaking aloud for the first time of the evening. "Sprout's gone, lost to the Void of space, and he's got that mind-warping Stargate network to back him up, too. You won't encounter him unless he wants to be found. And when you do, he won't give you a chance to decide if you want violence or not. He saw just how crazy the dudes in charge were, but he also saw he could plow his way through their armies if he put some brain-power and effort in it. It won't matter what types of robots, vehicles or buildings he will have at the moment you meet. The only determining factor will be if he still believes there's a genuine chance to have relations without getting stabbed in the back with a poisoned blade. If he still fears for his life, or worse, getting enslaved beneath Jefferson again, then what happened to Earth will just repeat until you get the message to leave him the bloody fucks alone. And naturally, don't think I'm the one to help with this. Any chance I had to get Allie-Gator to listen to me are long dead and buried, he'll shoot me on sight and torch the corpse, no badge will change that."

With displeased faces all around, the participants decided that, indeed, they had reached the limits of the preliminary meeting, thusly separating for the night was the next logical step.

{ IR } - { Weary souls } - { SG }

23h30pm

General Sheppard guided the small group silently to their assigned guest quarters, just a few floors lower inside the IOA's command tower, on the dorsal aspect of the ship. As they walked by massive panoramic windows in the outer walls, the eight members of the Tracy delegation were again stunned by the sheer size of the vessel, and the alien technologies that led to its creation.

John Tracy shook his head, but didn't know if it were in denial of what he saw, or to clear his clouded mind. "I still can't believe that you people were building all these huge ships and orbital stations while dad was wasting years of his life to go to the Moon, or Mars, in what we can safely qualify as glorified trash cans but everybody thought was the highest tech available."

Snarking back, Sheppard countered "The SGC actually tried to recruit Jefferson several times during his military career, but things in his psych evals and background checks kept appearing, then disappearing when the White House got wind we were looking at his candidacy. I'm a handful of years older than him, by the way. I met the man in person, the last time we tried to get him inside the organization, just before he left the USSF (Space Force) to go full civilian with THI. Strangely enough, nobody I know in the SGC was ever involved with authorizing IR to fly, let alone give them the rights to go everywhere on Earth like you do."

Ignorant of the politicks his dad was drowned in, but curious about those recruiting efforts, Scott asked neutrally "What exactly made you not reveal the Stargate to him, as part of the recruiting drive? I'm pretty sure if he'd known about that piece of alien tech, he'd have jumped at the chance to stay in service a few years more."

Shaking his head sideways in denial, Sheppard replied kindly "You need to review your dad's image, kid. And not just about the crass depravities he inflicted on your siblings, mother and grandma. The Jeff Tracy I met, twenty-three years ago, was an avaricious bastard who wanted Power and money, but only on his terms. Back around the 2011-12 era, the Obama administration was looking at contractors to create purpose-built vehicles to speed-up search & rescue, field first-aid, and general people/cargo moving capacities for off-world operations. Given he had some pretty good ideas, the Space Force brass and White House thought about Jeff. The problem was that he didn't want to work inside the system, he felt it was a 'communist thing' to let governmental agencies design & build these things when private companies should be doing the job, and raking in the money, like all other defense contracts in history."

Blinking both eyes in wonder, Scott asked "How could you ask him to build space exploration vehicles without telling him it was for the GSC? I mean, he had to have a basic conceptual framework to base his designs on…"

Sheppard shrugged, amused. "It was for space exploration. For Mars colonies, and nothing else that he ever knew about."

Several snorts resounded at the rather bland lie that covered such a mind-warping truth. And to say that Jeff had passed right by it all, just for a question of getting more money and influence, neither of which he deserved anyways. Served him right.

Sheppard gestured at a drab grey and blue sliding door, declaring "Here you are. VIP suite with four bedrooms, but converted into denser occupation so you'll all fit. And don't worry, the matter replicator in the common room is easy to figure out. Just use the touchscreen menu to start, then you'll know how to verbally order stuff by name or inventory tag."

With a quick exchange of polite platitudes that felt caustic on their tongues after the bloody evening they all had, the Tracy group entered the suite to shelter for the night.

X - X - X - X

The first thing Virgil saw upon entering the long open common area was a set of eight small plastic envelopes stacked on the wheeled service cart that held all their bags, next to the door. They'd had to submit their overnight luggage and carry-ons for a border inspection to prevent contraband, but specifically contaminants or insects from their tropical islands. All the bags were neatly sorted and stacked in the cart's two levels, with the blue envelopes attached to the handlebar by zip-tie.

"We each got one," Scott told his family and friends, "they're visitor badges and access cards for the suites and public zones."

Fermat huffed as he took the blue packet with 'MAX' printed on it, along his own. "At least they thought about him, unlike the first time they got us aboard. That was fun to watch, poor teleporter tech…"

Wearing an amused smirk, Hiram playfully chided his son "Ferms! Be nice to the good woman who can dematerialize you without forewarning. I like you the way you are, let's keep it that way, please."

John chuckled as he passed by the pair of techs, aiming for a wingback chair deeper inside. As he moved inwards, the spacer saw the simple but efficient design of the common area. From the doorway were the closets and box-bench for coats and satchels on each side, then the dining room setup of an 8-seat table, the cooking appliances in the right-hand wall, and folding doors hid the laundry system and matter replicator on the left. After that was the living room, with the outer wall being a massive panoramic window with a box-bench as the lower rim, two large 'L' sectional couches and four swiveling wingback sofas, with two small coffee tables and glass shelves on both left & right walls. The corridor to the bedrooms was on the left side of the common zone.

"It's not one of THI's penthouses or even those buildings the family owns, but it'll be good for now." Scott told the group as they gathered in the living area. "At least, we don't run the risk of getting caught in a storm of radioactive winds and debris."

Gordon asked weakly "Do you think they'll ever let us back down? Between what Allie did, and what the planet's doing to itself, is it even safe to want to return? And what would we do down there, anyways?"

Hiram folded his hands over his abdomen in relaxed manner as he replied softly "Those are important questions, but not for tonight. We are all burnt-out from the last 48 hours. Until we have some rest, and time to grieve for our lost friends and hopes, we will not be in a fit state to begin planning anything."

John muttered vaguely "That won't stop those SGC guys from planning for us and everybody."

Scott shrugged tiredly, countering "It's the standing military's job to plan for disasters, and pull the populace through. I'm pretty sure they have contingencies already under way, like remote colonies and population ships away from the home-world, in case."

Yawning widely, Tanusha sidled next to Virgil, grabbing hold of his left arm by surprise, making the young man smile at her. "If you guys don't mind, I need to go sleep, or I'll fall on the floor right now. Since Hiram and Fermat will bunk together, I'll take Virg, John & Scott can share, and that leaves Gordon in the fourth room to snore without bothering people all night."

Everybody smirked at both the fact that Gordy did in fact snore badly, and that Kayo was holding onto Virgil as if her life depended on him. However, the setup was good for everybody, so they agreed it would be permanent until the situation changed. The young woman yawned again as she made a few quick hand gestures to Virg, indicating which room she was reserving for them, then walked off, actually placing her hand on the wall a few times to steady herself as she retrieved her bags.

In the following minutes, each person slowly claimed their luggage and their bunk in the bedrooms that had been converted from having one large king-sized bed into two sets of bunks, making them into four beds clusters. The only good news was that each bedroom had a small ensuite, but it was basically a wet-bath stall, so no soaker tub or extensive counter space, just the basics, but it would do well given they were only lodging half-capacity for now.

X - X - X - X

Once the room doors were closed, MAX rolled around the common area, locating the service grid outlets and appliances, then opened his large round abdominal module to unspool several cables. A few deft movements of his five-fingered manipulators had the power and network plugged into the conference-sized holonet display that served as decorative separator between the dining and living areas. It would allow the robot to serve as silent sentry all night while recharging, and watch the news or ship's network without lighting-up the actual display & sounds that would bother the human occupants. Lowering his belly to the carpeted floor, MAX folded his four legs neatly into his sides, becoming like a white centaurian spider at rest, until he was needed.

X - X - X - X

Hiram and Fermat slowly got changed into their nightwear, yawning and blinking bleary eyes as they did. Once the lights were out, they each took a lower bunk, hoping that they could sleep enough to get a modicum of rest, but intelligent enough to know that the stresses and revelations of the past two days would certainly haunt them until morning.

X - X - X - X

John kindly manhandled Scott into sharing a lower bunk with him, after making the veteran pilot admit that his PTSD would probably get real bad, now that they were finally squaring away for the night. The brothers would hold-on to each other as they slept, hoping the human warmth would keep the night terrors at bay, and possibly be semi-functional in the morning.

X - X - X - X

Virgil had changed into his usual old worn sweat shorts and was pulling the sheets back when Tanusha left the wet-bath, wearing her usual diminutive yoga shorts & sports bra combo that served as both underwear, swimwear, jogging kit and sleep clothes. Lycra & spandex mixed weave garments were practical like that. She eyed the lower bunk across from where Virgil was preparing himself for the night, then went to stand besides him, asking timidly "Can we share tonight?"

Smiling at his friend, the athletic male replied gently "After losing your dad and being betrayed by your granny and mom? I always planned on it, and I would have offered to share the room with you, if you hadn't asked first. Although, I did think Hiram would set us four Tracy's in together and leave the last room for you, or to house MAX to keep him out of the way. In any case, after the traumas you got, I wouldn't be good for you to be alone tonight. Not after the run from the fanatics and cops you had."

"Your bunch didn't get it any better with what Ruth forced Jeff to admit. And Alan…"

Yawning widely, Tanusha closed her amber eyes as the last of her strength left her. She swayed on her feet for a second until Virgil wrapped his arms around her, offering her the comfort and warmth of a human presence she desperately needed. Giving herself to sleep while still standing up wasn't in the GDF cadet manual, but it happened. Her brain shut-off along her heart and senses, no longer able to work tonight.

With great care born of practice in hundreds of rescues, Virgil delicately deposited the teenaged girl in the bunk on the near side, then crawled in behind her, with the wall at his back so she wouldn't feel trapped-in when she awoke. And since Virg did in fact sleep like a hibernating bear, rarely needing the toilet during the night, it would be better for Tanu to have the ability to move out & back in without having to climb over his inert bulk every time. The moment the sheets covered them, he fell asleep too.

X - X - X - X

Gordon was sitting on the wide padded box-bench that served as lower rim for the large holonet viewer. Since he had gotten one of the inside rooms, he didn't have a window to look at space at the moving ships, but the architects had framed the conference-sized viewer as if it were the same window as the other rooms, and that included the weird box-bench thingies that seemed to have become a standard feature for some reason or other. Gordon was alone, again. Already, back on Tracy Island and then Menenoa, his brothers had been silently setting him apart, slowly but surely isolating him, building a virtual box around him.

He knew that what he did to Alan and Fermat in the last few months was beyond the limits of the acceptable, but back then Jeff would have approved the method, being gladdened he had new reasons to pile shit on Allie. Except it didn't work out as planned. Besides calling in the bloody Feds on the stupid sibling rivalry stuff, the youngest boy had blown enough fuses in his brain-box to blow the damned planet along with his own defective mind. And now Gordon was gonna have to clean-up the mess, and pay for the damages too, even if it wasn't his fault. It wasn't his fault if people just didn't have any sense of humor! If they just chilled-out and took a few minutes to appreciate all the efforts, artistry and techniques that went into his pranks, hazing and disciplinings of Allie, they'd see it was all a pretty damned clever act! Why was it always him who got blamed and punished?

As he cried himself to sleep, alone in the room, tucked in fetal position without bed sheets against the holonet viewer set to show the scene outside the ship's bow, Gordon never realized that the root causes of his problems were both the depravities of his forefathers, and his inability to stop being an immature delinquent brat that was patently anti-social.

Standing in questionable company

(Thunderbirds are go! – opening theme 2015)

Friday 30th of June, 2034; 09h00am

Temple complex

Planet Cesspit, system Noah's Ark

Alan finished eating his morning meal as he thought about his life, and what to do with it. The night had been filled with nightmares, cold sweats and fitful tossing around, leaving no real rest when the sun rose. Well, supposedly it rose, the armory he'd chosen as his campground didn't have any windows to see through. And since Allie was used to having a lot of outdoor time, this situation wasn't helping him any. At least, his golden feathery alarm clock had returned to sing him awake again. It was nice to have that bird flying around, it added some life in the otherwise pretty inert old mausoleum they were squatting in.

Alan knew he needed some big changes, and soon.

What was left of his damaged sanity wouldn't hold on much longer, if he stayed the only human moving around.

Looking up from his empty plates, he contemplated Replibug-1, standing upon the brick wall of the open-pit forge, gazing at him with all eight blue, impenetrable eyes. With the red flames as background scenery, it looked like a ghostly spider that was haunting an abandoned house. Smirking silently, the boy stacked his plates on the forge rim, in the ceramic vat full of warm soapy water he had planned to serve as dishwashing station.

"Hey, Replibug-1, I want to speak with Brainchild-1 about the prisoners I brought from Earth. I think it's time to wake them up and decide what's happening to each. You OK with that idea?"

Waving it elongated dorsal arms in lieu of a shrug, the metallic arachnid replied "They are not our prisoners, and we see no real usage to their existence. Although, Joran Knowles would make a passable addition to your Alanaria Fleet. Our Unimind simply does not see a need to free him, but we also do not see a necessity to eliminate him. Rath'ahl, on the other hand, has earned extermination many hundred times over. Besides being literally a useless parasite, he is also a criminal. We would not stop your killing him as you would be safer without him skulking around the camp."

Nodding sadly, Alan answered "Yeah, I was thinking about that. Rath'ahl has been alive for 9,000 years and did almost nothing useful or constructive with his existence. He jumped hosts, raped their mind, then dumped them like trash after barely three decades of slavish exploitation, like they never mattered. Because they never did. He is a specist, bigoted, anti-social worm who never saw the need to do something with all the brains and education he had, just floating around the seediest underbelly of Earth on cruise-control, wanting maximal luxury for the least effort. He's the very sort of empty-headed, useless, fat bourgeois sitting on top of the people, causing nothing but pain and misery, until a revolution happens like the French did. In the most optimistic situation, I could hand him over to Earth authorities, but right now I just want to sell him to the Tok'ra for some good neighbor creds."

Unimind crawled noisily along the masonry forge, approaching Alan to climb up his clothes to perch on his shoulder, accidentally tickling his cheek as it settled placidly on its favorite mobility aid. The human child was willing to carry their small weight, actually appreciating the presence as he went through his daily tasks, often asking their opinion on matters they had never considered to be germane to their own existence. This was still a very new situation and feeling, for the small cybernetic community, and they were not inclined to cease the activity unless told they were being bothersome.

A squawk from the yellow songbird, perched on the forge's masonry hood, attracted their attention. The three-foot tall avian was fluffing its feathers to the point it doubled in volume, then it started sing in a way that seemed like it had an entire orchestra in its gullet. At a point of very loud song, the bird even lifted a clawed foot to wave it around like an opera tenor to emphasize its emotions for the chant it was producing. Then, slowly, the creature wound-down its song, pulling its claw back to the brickwork, and fluffing itself anew before squatting silently, its small black eyes gazing in satisfaction upon his astonished audience.

"Okay… Moving on from this morning's presentation of BBC Classics at Westminster…" Alan mumbled blandly while Unimind remained silent at the musical spectacle that it had no cultural references to evaluate.

A low grumbling voice resounded from the armory doorway, as a robotic dog entered, sniffing loudly as it trotted around on its morning patrol route. "Kanimecha-3 declares; Creator-Alan-1, do you hear the bird noise? It is the second day it happens."

Gesturing at his robot, Allie waved towards the restive bird perched on his chimney, stating "It's just a harmless songbird. It's nice to have the company, plus the fact he's pretty punctual every morning. Best wake-up I ever had, anyways."

The fake dog sniffed in the air, giving a cursory gaze at the Replibug along the way, then followed the odd smell into the bathroom where it detected something weird. "Creator-Alan-1! Kanimecha-3 has discovered alien traces in this room. The armor washing system has been used during the night but patterns indicate non-humanoid presence. Response required."

Frowning, Alan and his passenger went into the washroom to see that, in truth, somebody had used the machinery during the night but they had not heard it. Of course, this wasn't surprising as the door separating this room from the main chamber was rather thick and composed of solid naquadah alloy, so it blocked sounds and vibrations quite thoroughly. A quick check showed that whomever had triggered the device hadn't used any of the soap options, just very hot water and the automated brushes. Maybe some 'body' needed a water massage after a hard day at work?

Shrugging-off the situation that was clearly done and harmless, the teenager went to get dressed for the day, putting on his secondary field-suit to avoid wearing-out the first one too quickly. Once armored, equipped and armed, the youth took up his usual passenger on his shoulder then walked at a brisk pace to find Brainchild-1, to process their prisoners at last.

{ IR } - { Inglorious bastards, arise! } - { SG }

09h40am

Standing next to the stasis pod containing Joran Knowles, Alan wondered if he was doing the right thing, then thought about what Jefferson would do in his shoes, and decided he was in fact being a better person, for once in his life.

"Okay, octopod – savior-2, let's get him out of the freezer. He should be healthy in a few minutes if the stasis fields were stable."

The large tri-partite robot separated its two tetrabots from the large bio-lab carrier to begin the process of reanimating the human from his enforced hyper-sleep in the dedicated cryo-container. It took the strong and agile bots less than fifteen minutes to have the human's naked body at room temperature, disconnected from the tubes and wires that monitored him, and a pair of transdermal patches on his thorax to slowly infuse him with nutrients and steroids to help recovery and equilibrium upon wakefulness.

Joran began blinking his eyes the moment he wasn't artificially maintained in the zat'nik'tel induced sleep. He knew he'd been stunned by an energy weapon, but not which type. He was simply grateful for the cocktail of drugs in his blood that dampened pain, nausea and equilibrium problems as he was finding it hard to stay stable, even though he was lying flat on his back.

"Welcome back to the living light, Joran Knowles," a very young male voice spoke ominously next to him. "I don't know if you'll enjoy it much, given how many changes the worlds have endured. But still, you now have another chance to live."

Finally managing to keep his eyes opened and focused, Joran saw a white-skinned, blond teenaged boy with clear blue eyes standing besides whatever cot he was situated on. Frowning in concentration, the muscular black male stared intently at the youth, believing he knew him from somewhere.

Giving a weak, melancholy smile, the boy re-introduced himself to the not-all-there male; "Alan Tracy, fifth and youngest son of Jefferson. I'm sure you remember me from our last meeting, in the Goa'uld ship."

Moving his head to look at the furniture, and being surprised by the robotics units moving around the small square room, Joran returned his hazy gaze to the boy, finally placing his face and voice amongst jumbled memories. Jeff's last boy, Alan. The kid who was the System Lord of Unrest, embroiled in a fight against the biggest countries of Earth.

Trying to keep both brown eyes lined up straight, Joran asked tartly "If I'm alive, I guess that means you won your fight?"

Making a face of disdain, the teen replied forlornly "It depends on your definition of winning. The other guys lost more than they ever anticipated, or can recover from in any of our lifetimes. We lost Thess'thannu, but made it through the stargate to a protected solar system nobody has wanted to visit in eight thousand years, since Dread Overlord Anubis blasted it to bits."

Closing his eyes in thought, The Mechanic asked for clarification "So, we're in a junkyard or a Hellscape, or both. And as long as we live with the rats and pests amongst the trash heaps without making any noises, nobody will come here to bother us?"

Shrugging depressively, Alan confirmed "That's pretty much it, for now anyways."

Inhaling a deep breath, the adult engineer asked "The robots? What are they?"

Smirking, Alan replied nastily "They're mine, but first and foremost they're their own selves. The Alanaria Fleet welcomes you to its first hidden colony, mister Knowles. I'll give you the penny tour later, and maybe a recruitment pitch too, if you care for it."

"Wait! You say the Earth forces lost more than they could afford… How much destruction are we talking about?"

The boy turned round, walking slowly as he replied guiltily "Everything… I burned everything I could reach, and more."

X - X - X - X

Entering the second healing room, Alan set his lips in a tight line. He wasn't happy about either of the two fools held on the biobed by chains. The human host was a mafious wannabe that never amounted to anything because he was cut down barely out of childhood, without having any chance to fight back. And the Goa'uld inside was even worse, as he was both parasitic and beneath useless, having never bult anything durable or worth mentioning.

Now, of course, Alan possessed the technology and skills to remove the bloody rot-grub thanks to all the Goa'uld archives, plus the Asgard files and the Tauri xenobiology studies. Stealing data from enemies was a time-honored tradition of warfare, and after the damned time he lived on Earth, he certainly wouldn't be turning his back to any gains of tech or science he could get.

So, removing the malevolent little eel from Trangh Bellegant wouldn't be hard or long, just a detail more to process.

The question being, is it worth that effort to remove the worm, when the host didn't deserve anything from society?

Connecting neurally with The Replicators, Alan asked "I don't want to be like my father, a tyrant who enslaves and exploits people without care or reason. But at the same time, as leader of a nation, I have to protect my population and allies from the depredations of criminals and enemy fighters. Rath'ahl counts as both, but so does Trangh. I wonder if waking them at all is logical, or just some childish obsession with being different from Jeff at all costs?"

Unimind replied "We cannot counsel you. Our experience with living entities is to treat them the same as inert materials. They have a usable life-cycle, and must be recycled whence they expire. Also, we have no compunction about deciding when that expiration happens to our best interest, as we do not believe in gods or nature. Without being guided by the moral impetus of religiosity, we have no limits but those we create for ourselves, being redeemable only to our Unimind and nothing else."

Allie closed his eyes, bowing his head as he thought through the sage advice of his allies. They were speaking of Sovereign Power, the Great Authority of a monarch, pope or tyrant, to wield resources and people without guidance but his own view and needs.

Did he want to walk that dreadful path?

Had the multiverse even left him a choice, anymore?

After claiming the spurious title as System Lord of Unrest, would anybody let him take the peaceful option again?

And what of the Alanaria Fleet he had created, of their needs and safety? He owed them so much, for helping him.

Sighing forlornly, Alan ordered octobot – savior-1 to awaken the prisoner, but to also keep him contained in the force field bubble that had been erected around the chamber. It would be his cell until the teenager felt more at ease with deciding further. In a pass of bad luck, the orders were a bit too vague, and the medical unit prioritized medicine over security, on top of being alone.

X - X - X - X

Leaving the robot to its task, Alan went to personally explore the sectors of the edifice complex that had been secured by his robots during the night. He needed to find some actual living quarters for himself and Knowles, plus a few private workshops to set-up his projects. Then they could start really clearing-out the bloody old pile and making it serviceable for public usage.

A sudden keening noise from the holo-computer on his left forearm had Alan immediately turn around and sprint for the second healing room, only to run straight into the naked criminal who was making a break for it. Apparently, the bastard had been able to rouse faster than Knowles, and achieve full equilibrium & functionality because the Goa'uld inside was pumping him full of hormones to boost his flesh puppet.

Having some basic Krav Maga training, Alan tried to stop the rushing prisoner. Unfortunately, the nine thousand year old menace had far more experience, and three dozen different styles of martial arts to confound enemies with. Even as the barks of robotic dogs could be heard running towards them, Rath'ahl managed to quickly grab Alan, spin him around against the wall to clamp his left arm in a hold and give a sharp, violent jolt that immediately dislocated the wrist and elbow while breaking the forearm bones.

Screaming in anger more than pain, Alan kicked backwards with his armored boot, the composite plates of the sole and sides bearing sharp climbing spikes slashed deep bleeding furrows in the Goa'uld's lower right leg & foot, but not doing enough damage to stop him. Fully enraged, Rath'ahl yanked hard the boy's damaged arm further to knock him out with pain, as Alan responded by using his neural connection to trigger the phonon maser in the injured arm's vambrace, setting at low power but extra wide scatter pattern like a blunderbuss.

Rath'ahl screamed in surprised agony as the sound stream scraped most of his thorax, abdomen and right arm, like getting hit by an industrial sand-blaster hose to strip paint off old cars. Recoiling from the unexpected weapon and the devastating injuries it could inflict, the bleeding criminal gave up on stealing tools from the obviously well defended child, opting to run away while he still could move on his own power. Thankfully, there was a ring room nearby, as indicated by the gaudy decorations on the walls, so the Goa'uld could escape far away very quickly if he managed to reach the damned machinery in time.

As their enemy was rounding the far corner in the corridor, three Kanimechas ran by the prone Alan, who verbally ordered them to get the runaway threat. The tetrabot – corpsman who was floating farther behind them would care for him. As he sat down on the flagstone floor, Alan cried in despondent, self-loathing anger, at his life and the cruelty of idiots who always chose violence and betrayal instead of any logical option. And more than anything, he cried because all the cruelties Jefferson had inflicted on him for the last eleven years meant that the injuries in his arm had been more of a bad surprise than actual grave pain.

His own depraved dad had subjected him to worse than a mafious Goa'uld System Lord did…

What did that say about his childhood, or his life in general, that the Goa'uld didn't count as the biggest threat he ever faced?

As the tetrabot – corpsman was scanning his arm and back to record the injuries, the three robot dogs came back, growling in anger as they had no prisoner to drag along. "Kanimecha-1 declares; Creator-Alan-1, the threat escaped into a ring chamber. He sealed the room doors with a secret Goa'uld code, then transported. One of our cipher units will need to hack the network to find where he went, and determine if he is recoverable. End of report."

Tapping his comm badge in annoyance, Alan ordered tartly "Brainchild-1, send a techie to the ring room near my position, to reopen the place for public use. Then, he's to find where exactly that vile worm went to hide from us. We'll mount a search party the moment we can isolate a location on the maps. Over." A simple set of three sounds was his response, meaning that BC-1 had received the orders and was implementing them immediately.

Clamping his teeth against the pain, Alan made an effort to climb to his feet by using the wall as support. Once standing, he was happy to see that he could indeed walk along without too much discomfort, as long as his damaged arm wasn't left to swing wildly. Unfortunately, the phonon maser had done as he'd expected when he fired; it shredded dozens of thin lines across his back the same way it hit Rath'ahl, and his field-suit's armor simply couldn't stop that sort of weapon at all. He was lucky to not have destroyed his spine like an imbecile. Allie thought in gallows humor that it was due to those few practice sessions in the IR combat simulator that he could aim away from himself enough to avoid fatal damages. Now, if he could remember to shoot at the actual enemy…

It took the injured boy a few minutes to get to the healing room reserved for him and Replibug-1, and the waiting savior-1 bot who had immediately relocated when his felonious patient had escaped. The rest of the teenager's day would be spent under anesthesia, getting the broken bone shards collected and removed, then the large pieces had to be aligned, fixed and patched, reposition his wrist and elbow, etc… Even with the energetic healing devices, it wouldn't be easy or fast.

Alan would sleep under sedation until the evening, blissfully restive without dreams for once in the last five months.

In the red claws of anger

(Stargate SG-1 – opening theme)

Friday 30th of June, 2034; 09h55am

Noah's Mansion

Planet Cesspit, system Noah's Ark

The Goa'uld Rath'ahl thought his escape from the human weakling would be easy. While his host was kept asleep with the chemicals and neural controllers of the hyper-sleep pod, the parasite had been able to fake life-signs to make it appear as if he were dormant too. In reality, the vile worm was studying the enemy's abilities and troops.

Snort!

A single, isolated and unsupported human child with only some pet robots for workforce. So, nothing had changed since they had been captured and brought aboard the ill-fated Thess'thannu. His summary plan could be executed. The moment the robot began the protocol to awaken his host, Rath'ahl produced a plethora of combat booster drugs to flush out his flesh puppet's blood and bolster him for the coming hour of fighting. The human was thusly able to sit, then run, inside of thirty seconds, not the nearly fifteen minutes normally needed.

The second thing was that the only robots in the room were healer types, not combat, so they didn't have any instincts or routines for containing active threats. The force field supposed to imprison the Goa'uld was not yet activated, so he was able to simply run through the door, and away to freedom.

The real mistake was in getting tangled with Alan Tracy.

Rath'ahl had never gotten a good look at the boy's clothing or tools, so he'd been unaware of the weapons hidden in the suit's jointed armored plates. That was a nasty surprise, indeed! And it bloody well hurt, too! At least, it wasn't a zat'nik'tel so the Goa'uld hadn't been truly stunned, just slowed down a good bit, once he understood that fighting this well equipped and determined child would spell his doom.

Reaching the transport rings, he had slapped the lock panel besides the door, using an old code common to all Goa'uld edifices to signify that a priority guest was coming through, so the room would be locked until the person inside opened it again. It was a feeble attempt, but the only one he could think of under the situation. Meaning the agonizing pain and blood loss that would threaten his host soon, if not attended quickly.

A few taps on the console had the destination chosen, in the atrium of what the map said was Lord Noah's private mansion, on the same planet but much farther away.

{ IR } - { No way out anymore } - { SG }

10h08am

Raht'ahl was happy to see that the ring system still worked in the building he'd chosen as his first waypoint. Noah's mansion was still relatively intact, after thousands of years of abandonment. The electric lights flickered in their wall sconces, and the small bronze fountain still gurgled some clean water down bowls artfully sculpted like seashells. Most of the furniture was discolored from exposure and neglect, with an impressive layer of dust and grime covering everything.

Not caring for the esthetics of the place, especially since this particular style was quite old and not his taste anyways, the parasite made his way to the small free-standing lectern where the guestbook would be held. In the grand house's better days, a well dressed servant would have welcomed the arrivals, noted their names in the gilded book, and called a maid or valet to carry their bags to their appointed suite. Now, Rath'ahl had to do everything by himself as the place was obviously empty, following Noah's death.

Snarling a low curse as he tried to force his right arm to work correctly despite the injuries, the foul being managed to open the cabinet built into the body of the lectern, revealing the small necessities that any high-nobility lord would keep on hand to assist guests that arrived in less-than-desirable circumstances. The small manual healing device was an old but trustworthy model that Rath'ahl put on his left hand to immediately work on closing all the bleeding veins, and repair the exposed nerves. Rebuilding skin and flesh would take hours with this limited machine, so he'd need a hidden safe room, or a much better healing system.

The second good news was that the podium still had a small hatchet, dagger, first-aid kit and hand-scanner, in case any sort of calamity befell the mansion, forcing the servants to do search & rescue, or to evacuate into their master's gardens. Greedily, the runaway Goa'uld seized the thin belt with the sheaths, tools and weapons, feeling better with hard naquadah on his person, despite still being literally naked.

As the Master of Betrayals tried to activate the mansion's status report on the lectern's computer, an eerie noise made him pause.

Slowly pivoting on his heels to examine the room with both eyes and scanner, the Goa'uld could see nothing. He turned back towards his work only to take a hard tumble backwards to drop on his nude bony ass, badly startled by the most unwelcome intruder he beheld in his entire life.

There, sitting idly atop of the flat touchscreen, was a large mottled brown thing, with four long antennae, four great curved pincers and… a long, articulated tail arcing over its back lazily. The creature's two large yellow eyes were gazing indolently upon the fallen humanoid, seemingly without a care in the world that other species could understand.

How!? Why!? It was supposed to be dead! Anubis killed it millennia ago!

"Jaffa! Anybody! Help me! KREEEEE!" screeched Rath'ahl in a paroxysm of panic before the hated hereditary enemy.

Moving all four pincers in a way that vaguely equated a humanoid shrug, the entity made a weird little noise that sounded oddly like it was blowing Rath'ahl a raspberry… And then its tail flailed the air, shooting a poisonous chitin barb into the chest of the prone humanoid before he could react further to defend himself, hitting hard enough to embed into the solar plexus.

Stuck truly, Rath'ahl never even had the time to mourn his defeat as he was immediately wracked by the spasms of his own biology having become allergic to the fluids of any humanoid host. Pushed by deep genetic instincts to flee the body that was now making enzymes to bolster the allergic reaction in both of them, Rath'ahl left Trangh by the mouth, dropping wetly to the scummy flagstone floor of the atrium, too weakened by the recent successive injuries to mount any defense anymore.

The great yellow eyes approached, surrounded by long curving pincers, and then the Goa'uld felt unimaginable pain as he was bitten through the brainstem, his memories, genetic memories and life-force being consumed along his cortex and spine.

After three minutes of sumptuous feasting, the dead shriveled symbiote was unceremoniously dropped to the dirty floor, the Great Enemy from Before having accomplished his task. Ignoring the weakling human as it had no meaning for him, the many-legged alien entity trotted away, to whatever business it had in the area. It was whispering ethereally to itself as it trotted idly, almost like a hiker in the wilds humming a trekking song.

Still injured, in agonies as he had never felt before, and free inside his own mind for the first time in thirty years, Trangh Bellegant slouched unconscious to the floor, where he would sleep until Alan's robots would find him, bringing him back to their creator.

{ IR } - { Recovery without effort } - { SG }

10h39am

The transport rings of Noah's mansion activated, raising from the ancient, dirty stone floor to hang in the air for a few seconds while the flash of energy signaled the arrival of travelers from afar. When the rings retracted, a single medium-sized figure was revealed, but it barely resembled a human.

Mounted on four clawed feet and sporting four powerful arms with two metal shields and multiple weapons, the shieldmate robot scanned the large welcoming foyer for threats and details. It quickly identified the unconscious human, and the dead symbiote carcass near him. Taking note of the tools belted around the man's waist, the robot decided to remove those before any other action, since this prisoner had managed an escape once before.

Now fully naked and bound with chains that were welded to remove the possibility of picking locks, the prisoner would not pose a threat. The robot now unfolded a small transparent bio-samples bag to carry the Goa'uld carrion, sealing the bag with the small laser in its middle finger, then imprinting the datum on the white zone with the same tool. Walking over to the podium, the robot scanned the alien prints left on the surface of the grimy interface screen.

The rings activated again, this time letting through a tetrabot – corpsman to effectuate a forensic study of the area. It began by taking samples of saliva and oils from where the dead Goa'uld had been removed, then moved to the human to remove and bag the chitin barb still buried in his chest, and administer first-aid to ensure survival. It took blood samples and began immediate analysis with a portable Lantean scanner.

Having finished what they could in the room, the medical unit grabbed the prisoner in all four arms, bringing him back to their base so he could be interrogated when awake. The shieldmate finished downloading the mansion blueprints and connecting a small portable communication adaptor that would allow the Alanaria network to commit remote surveillance over the edifice, to evaluate threats and possible resources. Since this was an actual house, at the very least it could become the living space for their growing human crew.

The combat robot left via the rings, never sensing the presence of the multi-legged creature hidden in the open ventilation duct, masked by the ambient naquadah radiation and its own exotic biology, as it looked curiously upon its departing form.

Unwanted reunion under a new paradigm

(Stargate SG-1 – opening theme)

Friday 30th of June, 2034; 12h00am (noon)

Tauri cuirassé One-Armed bandit

Orbit above Seattle, USA west coast

Jefferson Grant Tracy was most publicly angry, and not afraid to say it.

The empty, grey and blue metal walls of his new prison didn't care anymore than the cement pipe down on Earth had.

Near 10h00am in the morning, the old man had experienced the scare of a lifetime when the SGC team had simply teleported right outside his quarantine module, making him choke on his last mouthful of tepid coffee.

The human soldiers had opened his prison only to slap heavy handcuffs on his wrists and a metal belt around his waist to make certain he didn't take off the locator beacon, then beamed him up to their massive ship in orbit.

While the low-ranked minions had been absolutely dismal in their manners, the prison cell was even worse. It was only a third the size of the quarantine module, and still no outside windows. He did have a holonet display, but barely a handful of channels and almost no library to select from. On the other side of things, some of those subjects seemed very interesting…

Jeff had been stewing in the no-star accommodations for two hours when the external door opened, letting a single old man walk into the visitor's portion of the armored compartment. Sighing, Jeff stood to stand next to the thick armored viewport that separated him from any occasional company he might receive, seeing the weird luminous effect of the defensive barrier field built into the crystal panel as it cycled.

SGC Fleet Marshal John Sheppard glared without mercy or sympathy at the monstrous aberration contained inside his cell, wasting the air, water and power of his ship that should be used for genuine refugees and charity cases, not him.

"I won't bother with any platitudes or trite respects as I feel none for you, Tracy." John stated crisply, all business and anger.

Tilting his head to the side a bit, Jeff blinked as he recognized the man he hadn't seen in nearly twelve years. "Sheppard! Well, boy, you seem to have gone up in life! Finally sucked up to your betters, have you?"

Sneering in disdain, john replied "Firstly, you twit, I'm five years older than you, so don't call me 'boy' or you'll be the one hurting for it! And, to make things perfectly clear, Tracy, the only expert at sucking cock to get ahead in life is you. Or should I say that you specialize in pimping children to perverts in office, since you have almost no skills or abilities of your own?"

Realizing the gig was up, Jeff dropped heavily on the small swivel chair next to the wide metal shelf that was built into the lower edge of the viewport to serve as his dining table and desk. The guards had to be able to see everything he ate, read, or did at all times, even in the bathroom, so there were no angles or hidden areas in the cell. Privacy was apparently a right only so long as you didn't commit a crime they felt warranted being 'controlled'.

"Okay, so I gather the boys blabbed. What now?"

Shaking his head in amazement at the sheer lack of care the man had for his own children, John declared tonelessly "We have an investigative team in your house, going through your closet of horrors. Then we'll go through all the other places that haven't blown-up along with North-America, and do the same. We'll establish a full portrait of your crimes, and you'll be judged."

"What kind of trial will I get?" Jeff wondered, as he tried to think who he could call to help him.

Making a face of disgust, Sheppard countered "We'll also take a neuroplexic copy of your mind & memories. Your own recollections will be the factor that decides whether you're guilty or not. And it's a single judge affair. Don't bother trying to call any friends for favors, Jefferson. All of the USA was incinerated to ash, so nobody from the cronies of Kinsey, Trump or Harland's remains. You are alone now, and forever if there's any real justice in this world."

"So, I don't get a lawyer, and no privacy for my soul. You call this democracy?" Jeff bitched hypocritically at the older soldier.

Shrugging, the Fleet Marshal admitted "Nope, it ain't. But we tried multiple types of democracy; look where it got us…"

"Can I see my sons? Do they know where I am?" asked the disgraced astronaut, his true intentions unreadable.

Looking at Tracy down his nose in contempt, Sheppard replied softly "They know. Four of them plus the Hackenbacker's and Tanusha Bellegant have been aboard since yesterday evening, in fact. Neither of the four want to see you, and we're pretty sure Alan got himself off-world, for now. We still have some verifications to do about that one."

"How the Hells could your incompetent buffoons let my fourteen year old son leave the planet without authorization?" wondered aloud the felonious parent, secretly worried about what the foolish runt could reveal about his immoral acts.

John gave a darksome smirk as he snarked "The same way you botched his life so bad he got his hands on an alien mothership and then proceeded to use its weaponry to blow the North-American continent off the face of the planet. Anything else?"

Seeing Jeff mentally crippled by his answer, the highest officer in the SGC walked out without adding more, his message done.

Resources, utilities and exploitation

(Stargate SG-1 – opening theme)

Friday 30th of June, 2034; 14h00pm

Tauri cuirassé One-Armed bandit

Orbit above Seattle, USA west coast

Doctor (Meredith) Rodney McKay, multiply doctorated scientist, gentleman-soldier, diplomat, all-around curmudgeon and crochety old nag, was seated in the tall plush chair reserved for the head of the IOA, in the center of the wide circular assembly of benches, tables and lecterns that composed the IOA Council Hall.

Besides the central podium for the chairmanship, there were three levels of staggered positions for the national ambassadors, from the main floor up. Then there were two more staggered rows that were also set backwards from the first three tiers, as they were reserved for the SGC officials, bureaucrats and corporate contractors associated with the whole Stargate program. Set even farther back and up were another two staggered rows of plain seats, devoid of tables or desks, for the 'guests' who would address the assembly, but not have anything more than a verbal summary to deliver. If ever the Council decided to allow the media some physical presence in the room, they would be placed in these remotest chairs, to be out of the way.

Rodney looked around the circular chamber, making sure that a pair of fully armored soldiers were standing at each doorway, in case the national leaders invited aboard proved to be violent or illogical, in these trying circumstances. The Earth's degrading climate was putting a lot of pressure on everybody to come up with quick-fix solutions, and tempers were boiling. The only thing that McKay could see that would help was that the positions assigned to the worse racist & fanatical countries on their homeworld would remain empty forever, due to their having died-out or gotten banned all-together.

Glaring mildly at his old friend John Sheppard, who sat in the second chair of the podium on his left side, McKay grumbled nastily about diplomacy, bureaucracy, governments, and all manners of things that were wasting his valuable research time on what amounted to nitwitteries he shouldn't be bothered with. Studiously ignoring the smirk on the soldier's face, Rodney instead vented his ire on the poor shmuck assigned as secretary. And despite being a mid-twenties girl, she was still a poor shmuck in his book.

"Penwick! What the bloody Hells is taking these fools so long to sit down? They're wasting the planet's time! Call them to order, and expel by teleporter the mongrels who don't listen!" he griped loudly at the poor SGC yeoman who was looking at him with wide, round eyes filled with worry and anxiety. Apparently, the reputation of his temper hadn't done him justice.

Garnering her courage, Ainsley Penwick grabbed the wired microphone from the standing lectern on McKay's right side to shout through the PA system; "Right, then, you larded lubbers! Sit down, already! The planet's burning and none o' you's louts are helping any!" She slammed the mike back in its cradle, looking satisfied as the stunned diplomats sat quietly to wait for the official opening of the session.

Snarking amusedly, Rodney told the young soldier "You'll do fine. Just don't let the ambassadors walk all over you, and don't be afraid to conk the eggheads once in a while, or nothing will get done. Now stop smiling like a drunken loon, and move! I gotta show to put on the road!"

Bypassing the laughing Sheppard and gobsmacked secretary, Rodney stood and triggered the small bell that signaled the closing of doors so that the session would not be interrupted. Once all doorways were sealed and everybody's attention was on him, the elderly scientist began with the resumé of the environmental mess as it stood, followed by the state of the SGC troops, and then the state of the planetary governance, meaning the IOA bureaucracy itself. After close to two hours of summaries, McKay began to list the locations on Earth that still had some form of survivability, despite the war damages and rapidly changing climate.

The shit hit the fan quickly when several IOA delegates from countries that were not supposed to be fanatics began clamoring for the seizure & forfeiture of any bunkers in private hands to convert them into governmental facilities. Their argument was that only the IOA Council could possibly know whom humanity needed to keep alive to ensure the survival of the species, not nameless cads whose sole reason for having these installations were being rich or well connected to dead countries that no longer mattered.

McKay pushed a button on his desk that caused a loud shrill noise to emit from the PA system, hurting the ears of the delegates, forcing them to silence as the scientist wouldn't stop until peace was returned. Glaring malevolently around the circular chamber, the chairman of the Tauri governance declared venomously "Last time I checked, we weren't a communist or religious tyranny because everybody with a thinking head knew how badly those end for all who live inside, including elites. But, don't worry, we have taken your recommendation to heart. So much so, that even before you voiced it, we had formed a committee that begun to select who we kept aboard, versus who got sent back planet-side to rot in their fanatical filth. That is why you can all see a dearth of Islamic, Buddhist and Christian national leaders, or those espousing racial purity and misogyny doctrines, at our august tables. It would be a shame if we had to do a readjustment to our selection algorithms…"

Those words blanketed the room like a pall of gloom during a funeral wake, thick and choking with promises of pain.

Smiling in a way that never reached his eyes, Rodney finished the list of privately held, provenly reliable, bunkers that could serve as humanity's foothold on Earth, so as to plan the cleaning & terraforming effort. It would also serve to deter piratry, looting, smuggling and foreign spies trying to sabotage what was left of Tauri society. Now, the new problem occurred at the proposal to offer energetic shields and climate recycling systems to these people or groups in exchange for renting space, utilities and support for the SGC troops to help speed-up the beginning of the process, until public pressurized city-domes could be built.

It so averred that several government leaders preferred to make such deals with the private bunkers on their territory themselves, mostly so that they could place their families, relatives and secret friends from the antechambers of Power in the best positions possible to form the new aristocratic elite of humanity's next phase of evolution. In fact, not only did several of the biggest surviving nations want to keep the IOA out of such deals all-together, they also wanted to procure freshly built Stargates to implant in some of these bunkers to facilitate the exodus of their peoples towards virginal colonial worlds. Those gate-hubs would then become the new provincial/regional centers of governance, armed forces and commerce between planets/worlds under the aegis of the central metropolis that owned them.

In other words, countries like England, France, Germany and Russia were pining for a return to the old colonial systems of the early 1800's, when European monarchies held massive swathes of land in the other continents, and either enslaved or exterminated the native populations, a problem still going on in 2034. And the declaration that these countries only wanted to create new provinces in 'virginal' lands was as dishonest as it was spurious, given that when he asked for a list of planets they were aiming for, the ambassadors named more than twenty-one worlds already inhabited and allied with the Tauri Alliance for several years.

Basically, the same specism and religious delirium that had guided Robert Kinsey, Donald Trump and Michael Harland to try and build armies of conquest to bring back spoils, loot and 'tithes' to America was still going strong, but spread in most of the governments still in function today. As McKay considered his options to deal with this, an SMS appeared on the touchscreen mounted to his desk's inclined front panel. It was from John Sheppard, asking him if it wouldn't be easier & faster to simply cull all the last elected, nominated or hereditary governments to rebuild brand new, including no national borders except for those of the entire Tauri as a whole? Rodney typed a quick "Lets gather the core group to debate this tonight. Include the Hackenbacker's and the Tracy astronaut."

Rodney gave the assembly a passing smirk before corralling them back to a less divisive subject, like forcing them to establish per nation a master list of competent higher scientists, professionals, tradesmen and artisans to guide how the IOA attributes shelter bunks or suites as they become available in the sites getting shielded & secured, either in space or planet-side. Yeah, easier subject to discuss, his smelly left foot…

New Chinese insanities

(Stargate SG-1 – opening theme)

Friday 30th of June, 2034; 16h00pm

Secret bunker

Beijing, China

President pro-tempore Hu Dengchu was presently shaking in a paroxysm of apoplexy as he slouched on the floor, covered in blood form diverse origins, some of it being his own. He was surrounded by more than twenty-seven dead higher bureaucrats and soldiers who had tried to destitute him from his lifetime position by claiming he was insane beyond curing.

He had fought them like a man possessed, and won.

For now, at least, he had won.

But the injuries he sustained were grave, and the rebels who survived his retaliation had barricaded him inside the secret bunker, welding the doors and establishing anti-teleportation fields around the edifice. Hu Dengchu was dying, and wouldn't make it.

Because of this certitude of his own demise arriving forthwith, the agonizing man painfully moved to sit in his reserved chair, managing to pull a slim briefcase from under his pulpit at the head of the conference table. It was the equivalent of what the Americans called 'the nuclear football', the mobile controller for all the mass-effect weapons of China. After three minutes of crippling pain as he went through the ID process, the demented politician finally had access to the launch panel, and two more minutes of effort saw the 'tsunami' protocol entered and active.

In the next fifteen minutes, all around the Earth, weapons modules hidden in buildings or sea ships would open their flaps, shooting out their lethal vectors to annihilate the enemies of the Qin Empire once and for all. If the Qin were denied their divine mandate of monarchy over the peasants, then the farms would burn, along with the temples, banks, schools and everything else.

For the Jade Emperor who sits upon the Dragon Throne, let there be fire!

{ IR } - { Failure to perform } - { SG }

16h18pm

As all the missiles China had hidden became uncloaked and active, the sensors aboard the SGC battleships in orbit began to automatically track them, plotting gunnery solutions to intercept the new threats.

When the vectors left their silos or mobile launchers, the SGC vessels began using raiding-beams to dematerialize each and every one of them. It took over an hour to deplete the entire stockpile of Chinese munitions, but eventually it happened.

A whopping great 0% of all missiles shot had reached anywhere, and a similar 0% had managed to detonate at all.

In the following evening and night, each and every bunker or sea ship that had uncloaked to shoot was boarded by SGC soldiers, and not a single Chinese trooper, bureaucrat or minion was allowed to survive the combat action. It was the final time in history that China's mainland & colonies were invaded, and there wouldn't be a country called China when the morning arrived.

This event is also what finished pushing Rodney McKay into the decision he knew was coming, but had resisted implementing.

There would be a single unified Tauri, and no more independent countries, nations or ethnies on Earth when he was done.

Not a kind little kid anymore

(Stargate SG-1 – opening theme)

Friday 30th of June, 2034; 19h00pm

Temple complex

Planet Cesspit, system Noah's Ark

Alan woke up with the certitude he was having a Bad Day, capitalized words emphasized. Despite the surgical sedatives and neural dampeners that had allowed him close to five hours of deep, restful sleep, the teenager was in a foul mood, especially when he realized that everything that happened today was his own doing.

He'd been too shoddy in keeping his prisoner locked-up. The force fields should have been in place even while he was sleeping in the pod, and he should never have been taken out without armed guards in the room to protect the medical unit.

And, truthfully, he'd been too weak in dealing with a being who was an avowed enslaver, mind-rapist and murderer, who deserved to be executed several thousand times over. Instead, it was almost him who'd been killed by the fugitive parasite.

As he was helped through the post-operation wake-up protocols by his octobot – savior-1, Alan received the report from Brainchild-1 about their pursuit team having found the dead cannibalized symbiote and injured human, with precious few traces of what had committed the deeds.

Oh great! Another fucking mess to clean up!

From the traces and limb prints left at the killing scene, it looked like an insectoid of some sort had attacked Rath'ahl by piking his host with a powerful toxin. The octobot – savants had determined that this poison caused the carrier's immune system to manifest an instantaneous allergic reaction to the presence of any Goa'uld related entities, forcing the parasite to exit or die.

The only conclusion possible was that this insectoid creature was some sort of predator that specialized in hunting Goa'uld, as its toxin was harmless to humanoids not carrying a symbiote, and absolutely useless on anything not genetically related to humans.

Well, that wasn't such bad news, as it meant that Alan himself was pretty much safe from such predator, not having a Goa'uld inside and not planning on becoming enslaved to one any time soon. On the other hand, it also meant that the chances of finding Jaffa or noble Goa'uld alive in the solar system were pretty thin, unless the entity had a territory-centered hunting pattern that it couldn't break.

Turning his gaze towards Ark-of-Alan-1, the boy declared "Put all the scans from the samples in the master database, then run them against everything we have from the Goa'uld/Anubis, Asgard and Tauri archives. In the meanwhile, we need to get working on establishing final and exclusive control over the bloody networks in this solar system, and merge those databases with our centralized archives, under the section headers Goa'uld & Noah. Execute new orders."

Standing carefully from the medical bio-bed, Alan gazed pensively at Joran Knowles who was standing aside silently, waiting for his turn. The black skinned male was dressed only in his trousers, muscle shirt and thick work boots, without any armor, weapons or tools until his loyalty was determined by Alan himself. The man's clear shiny brown eyes followed every movement the boy made as he flexed his left arm experimentally, to ascertain its readiness for usage, then moved his torso to flex his spine, to ensure the injuries had truly been repaired fully.

"I guess now you see that I won't be made a victim easily again," Alan spoke towards Joran, almost challenging him.

Smirking, the tall athletic male countered with heavy sarcasm "I would pay good Bit-Coin to see Jefferson's face when he was told about this little tussle you had with Rath'ahl. I wonder what would make him the most apoplectic? The alien parasite thingie, or the bit about you trying to maim and kill somebody in self-defense?"

Snorting in matching sarcasm, Allie replied gamely "More like he'd be pissed I survived with all my limbs intact after challenging a great and mighty adult, and didn't even learn my lesson about staying submissive to my betters in life. He never did like it when I got too clear-headed to make my own decisions. He particularly hated that I had figured-out I was being victimized by acts that were illegal, so the cops should be helping me, not him and his cronies."

Raisin an interrogative eyebrow, Joran asked quietly "Cronies, kid? Wasn't he alone when he beat you?"

Shrugging as he pulled his dark blue T-shirt on, Alan explained absent-mindedly "When he beat me at the farmhouse or island, yeah, he was alone. But a few times, between the ages of five and ten, he took me on meet & greet trips to Washington DC and other places. And each time, the pinnacle of the meeting was me, on my knees so that his big manly friends could piddle themselves in my open mouth, and watch me swallow. And I had to swallow it all, or get beaten for five lashes by every man in the room before the next bastard took his turn at spraying me in the face, like a dog that's lifted its leg to tag a fire hydrant."

Shaking his head in contempt at his former employer, Knowles wondered "Were you the only one he did this to? Cuz I don't rightly remember him spending that much time around Scott, John or Virgil, with boarding school and IR getting built…"

Giving another careless shrug, the depressive boy answered absently "Gordon for sure. He wouldn't be such a damned he-slut if he hadn't gotten the full dose of Grant and Jeff's 'private fatherly things'. Virgil got beaten pretty badly on a regular basis, but other than grabbing his bruised naked ass and making lewd comments about it, I don't think it went further. Now, if Grant had been healthier and stronger, that would have been a different story. His illness having crippled him in that wheelchair was the best thing that happened to my brothers and me. Also, I figured-out that mom used to prowl the farm to keep us safe, so she would have cock-blocked the fucking wankers, no matter what threats they made at her. She was a pretty strong woman, in her way."

Nodding in sympathy, The Mechanic asked softly "And what now for me, Oh Lord of Unrest? I doubt you're keeping me around cuz I'm cute and statuesque when I stand uselessly like a bronze casting."

Walking to stand three feet in front of the much taller thirty year old, Alan answered seriously "You have two options; leave by the Stargate for a planet of your choice, or work for the Alanaria Fleet, with all the baggage that means. You'll get a written job description and list of scheduled tasks, and a dedicated workspace. The resources and manpower necessary will be attributed to your job site so you can complete everything demanded on time. Any logically justifiable delays will be worked on to improve both the workflow and performance of the production efforts. I won't blame you for things outside your purview, but I won't accept nitwit excuses for counter-performances, faulty products or failure to follow the schedule established. Especially since, as a high-caliber precocious genius that helped to build IR alongside Hiram, you'll have input on all stages of planning, process control and quality verification. If you fail at something, it'll be by overestimating your abilities or the feasibility of the project, not because I handed you expectations that don't gel with reality."

Giving a short movement of his chin towards the tetrabot – shieldmate that was serving as guard in the room to protect Alan, the engineer asked "By manpower you mean robots? Do you have other humans, or any organics in fact, besides you in this setup?"

Giving the older man a shark-like grin, Allie countered gamely "Well, Rath'ahl's host is still alive, but I have no idea what he's good for yet. However, considering the Earth is dead and he's been a slave to the worm for three decades… I'm guessing he'll want to stay with us, for lack of any other place he could go have a decent life. So yeah, the robots are it, for now."

Pursing his lips as he thought about the future, Joran questioned pointedly "Do you have any plans to recruit more living people, or are the robots all you want around you? Cuz I'm guessing the only reason I'm still here is because you feel some sort of debt towards me, from what your dad did to me. Otherwise, I should have woken alone on an empty planet, or died in my sleep."

Waving that one away with a vague hand gesture, Alan replied "You were a fortuitous act of providence for her poor maligned child, and I seized you on the way out of dodge. Now, if you want to stay, I'll put your talents to good use. But I keep no slaves, and I won't build prisons. You either work for Alanaria willingly, take your leave now on good terms, or get killed directly and without appeal if you try to betray me, or worse, try to use my robots as mechanical slaves and toys. They are people, my people, and I will not tolerate any who act, speak, or even just think otherwise, to exist inside my borders long enough to cause damage."

Frowning at the teenager as he examined his face, Knowles muttered "You made your choice. You thought about the situation and your options, and you made the last important decision. Your terms, your borders, your people, and your crown to bear… Isn't that right, Great System Lord of Unrest, newest monarch amongst the stars?"

Fixing the man's eyes with a deathly serious gaze, Alan answered in simple honesty; "Yes. Mine, and nothing but."

Nodding slowly, Joran declared placidly as he crossed his arms over his chest "I'll want that written contract before I agree to anything. Besides, what I'm allowed to negotiate will tell me a lot about what kind of employer you intend to be. Cuz I'll tell you right away, being different than Jeff is all good, but not enough. Not with the hot flaming shit you left behind on Earth, and certainly not with everything that's floating around the vastness of space."

Alan hummed in agreement as he walked to the metal rolling table on the left side, to gather the remaining parts of his field-suit and tools. Speaking over his shoulder as he finished dressing, he told the other human "It's a good thing that I had already begun drafting a set of contract templates for the different jobs I might want humans or other organics to hold inside Alanaria, or as part of the adjacent groups and services. Like artisan guilds, contractors and camp followers, those sorts of things. Don't worry Knowles, you'll get a fair enough deal for your work. And, as long as you're honest towards me, safe enough as well."

Joran wasn't a fool, so he understood the death threat for what it was. He also understood that coming from this child, it was as serious and credible as it would be from any veteran soldier or crowned country leader he could meet. It was a bit of a weight hanging over his head, yes, but on the other hand he wouldn't be alone while exploring the Stargate network's mysteries. Besides, the young man just wanted to not be betrayed or harmed like Jefferson had done. Not a big request, from Joran's perspective, and a bloody stain of shame on his soul if he couldn't be better than the fucking Hero of Mars and all his cold turgid shyte.

Fully kitted-out, Alan walked out, followed by the shieldmate that would now be his permanent protective detail, no matter where he went. It would take a long time before he felt safe enough to pass himself of such security measures at hand's reach. He also needed to redesign his personal weaponry and practice with it more intensely, from now on. And Joran was good at weapons…

"Knowles! Get your hams in gear and follow me! I have a few little ideas I want you to work on for me."

Shrugging, the adult trotted after his new adolescent employer, wondering what the kid had imagined for him so fast, but by what he saw around him on the route towards the workshop, it would probably be interesting. The working conditions also had the benefits of being far more interesting than anything he could find on Earth at present, and his gut feeling was that Alan wouldn't turn out to be just a petty dictator like Jeff had been.

The knell of a fallen nation

(Stargate SG-1 – opening theme)

Friday 30th of June, 2034; 19h00pm

Assembly/dining hall

Chinese hidden colony #4; Hǎo Lǎoshī (Great Teacher)

The entire room was a drab cinderblock grey on the floors and walls, and pale blue with white highlights for the curving vaulted ceiling that represented the heavens of their birth planet. The only truly bright colors on the ground were the painted lines in red or yellow that guided traffic around the food buffet counters, the washroom corridors and the entryways. Even the light fixtures, ventilation grills and status/alert panels were all drab grey to become invisible in the daily lives of the inhabitants.

The utterly mind-numbing interior design was the product of Hu Dengchu and his Confucius inspired advisors, who had wanted to make an environment that would have the men work in a place that would slowly bring them to a placid, quiet, meditative state similar to what an ancient temple would provide for its monks. Since all the men on site would be professional soldiers with a great deal of martial arts training and many types of weapons on hand, ensuring peace, tranquility and placidity had been a necessity for the Chinese leadership, to avoid fights, or worse, the germination of ideas of change. Because nothing frightened any Chinese leader in the last hundred years like the possibility of changes to society or governance as that could lead to a weakening of the Holy Motherland, and keep the Qin Empire from being reborn.

So, the damned assembly & dining hall was as drab as could be, just like the rest of the base. Every other sector of the hidden colony was designed and built the exact same way, to dull the senses and perceptions, to lull soldiers into a fake feeling of peace and quietude. Only the med-bays and bio-labs were all-white, so the personnel could spot stains, spills, leaks or the smallest pests that could have penetrated the quarantine zones. Even the bloody gyms were grey with blue ceilings, and had dumb white mats to make the soldiers think about fluffy white clouds and Zen Peace while they practiced killing or escaping capture.

To say that the venerable five-star general Cǎodiànzi Huāduǒ-Cóng was unimpressed about the décor was the understatement of the millennium. The 82 year old had participated in the first Chinese Stargate operations under the IOA, some thirty years back. He could admit honestly that the Americans, Canadians, British and French had never wasted time, effort, and precious resources, on such a splendidly momentous pile of offal as this colony turned out to be. Truly, only communist politicians could manage such a grandiose feat of imbecility, and then gloat about it on their military's private TV channel. Which was, incidentally, the only TV channel available in any of their ships, bases and colonies off-world. Isolation and censorship didn't change the nature of the offal mound he was marching through, no matter what the inferior, base-born twit Hu Dengchu could say, if he were still alive.

General Cǎodiànzi marched briskly to the large formal podium built on the side opposite the buffet lines, that allowed the base commanders and visiting officials to address the soldiers in person, all in one room. Well, not individually, but not through a bloody screen or hologram, so it was better than just a damned PA broadcast. Especially for this hecatomb.

Once seated at his place, where the Chinese president would normally sit for visits, the general ignored the stunned looks and whispers from the colony officers as he signaled the bosun standing to his left to call the assembly to order. Putting an old copper whistle to his lips, the young man blew the call to parade, and within seconds all the men were standing, face towards the dais with their right arm raised to their head in the standard military salute for superior officers. A minute later and a second whistled note had them all seated, facing towards their colony's new lider maximo.

Activating the gigantic viewscreen mounted to the wall above the dais, and by extension all the smaller screens or holograms around the hall, the general began his explanation. "I will not waste our time, or dishonor your strength and service to our Great Nation, by turning in circles around the subject like a coward. You are already aware of the calamities that have befallen Earth in the last 72 hours, since that sunken ha'tak reactivated. But today, the surviving parliamentary and military leadership of our Home tried to destitute president pro-tempore Hu from his self-appointed position as chair-keeper, until president Xi could be healed."

Sighing in despondency, the old officer played the video of the massacre inside the presidential bunker, hidden deep beneath the slums of Beijing, where no foreigner would ever think to look. The ten minute film was gut-churning, a fact compounded by the violence of the short but intense carnage that happened. Then they saw president Hu sit in his chair, pull out the command briefcase and put in the launch codes. The film ended on that scene, the screens going black.

General Cǎodiànzi stated coldly "The parentless, nameless, inbred moron actually thought that since he couldn't hold on to his ill-gotten and grossly abused power, he would end all of Humanity on Earth, denying all of us the right-of-return. We are all lucky that the SGC had been on war-footing since the obliteration of North-America. They used the raiding-beams of their ships to seize and dematerialize the totality of every missile that launched, following Hu's traitorous descent into madness. Now comes the bad news that will seal our fates. Because of this last act of insanity, added to all that led to the derelict ha'tak to lash out at Chinese assets to begin with, the SGC troopers have raided all Chinese military installations from which the missiles were shot, killed all personnel inside, and assumed permanent control. In the wake of this shameful calamity, the IOA has decreed that there would no longer be a Chinese country or nation on Earth, as our ancestral dream of reviving the Qin Empire was too dangerous, leading us to madness and self-destruction, often at the cost of all other peoples. The Earth is no longer our home, and barred to us forever."

The old man's chilling pronouncement was received with silent stupor, the soldiers having no idea how to respond to such a sentence from what was essentially the planet's world government. And with the best ships, all sizes considered, the IOA could very well impose such a New World Order, while the SGC's military officers would support it. China had proven to be an active threat several times in the space of a few days, no competent soldier would tolerate such menace on his land for long. Being attacked and pushed-off the planet by their rivals was the forgone conclusion; after all, that was why the colony had been built.

The elderly officer spoke again, tiredly but resolute in his words; "We have ten other sister colonies in the same situation, and close to thirty ships of diverse tonnage and tasks, still alive and functioning. Plus, we have our own Stargate, outside, in the field beneath our mountain stronghold, just as the other bases have. The planet where we dwell is old, and was inhabited by a dozen different civilizations before it became fallow, waiting for our occupation to arrive. We are lucky, in the sense that no pollution or contamination forbids our usage of the open air, and no enemies compete for our new lands and resources. This is a new beginning, for a new China, one where ideologues, demagogues, gurus and self-aggrandizing tyrants will not take hold of government. We will not become a nest of prophets, apostles, priests and cultists like the Old World had become, in direct contravention to all our efforts at law and sanity. The vast Multiverse will not tolerate any more such cretinism from us, or others."

A very timid smatter of polite applause spread through the vast room, barely three dozen out of the two thousand seated soldiers who could fit at the same time. It was a miserable response, but it was genuine and that was all that mattered to the old general.

"I accept your cold reception of my words. The facts I have given you are both deplorable for us, and a lasting stain on the names of our ancestors who rest in the Celestial Palace, under the care of the Jade Emperor. We, all of us but especially the eldest generations, have failed at our sacred duties towards our peoples. We partitioned our citizens, enslaved millions in generational camps so that political opponents would see their children and descendants suffer for their differing views, and then we allowed monsters to murder ethnic minorities by millions, just because they were not pure Chinese blood, and their culture was deemed a public bother on top of being inferior. In many ways, Hu Dengchu's last insanity was only the expected conclusion to a process that had started long ago, when the first communist chairman Mao Zedong started his Revolution. He had expressly told that 'violence is the tool, method and privileged philosophy of communism, as otherwise our enemies will not surrender and accept the Revolution as their new way of thought and life.' The result of this cruel doctrine underlying every aspect of our nation's politics and military activity for a hundred and thirty years could never have been different than what happened this day."

Activating the displays again, the old general began to outline the plan that would save their civilization from extinction.

"As you can see, this is a generic surface map of the surrounding areas, with the geological reliefs, water bodies, and forested zones in appropriate brown, blue and green colors. Here is the colony as it exists, with the external spaceports, the small riverine water-ship port, the foundries & factories enclosure, and the actual housing/command complex built inside the mountain. On the second map you will see what we plan to construct over the coming years, and generations. We will start with a series of straight roads, wide promenade boulevards and highways, to facilitate mechanized transport, especially with the Stargate."

"We will delimitate a vast military perimeter to bolster and improve the core operations of our colony, and to house our increasing population until the civilian sectors are built. The restricted soldiers-only zone will be sheltered by a tall, solid stone siege wall that will have traditionally styled towers and gatekeeps, but bigger, more easily livable, with the best utilities and service grids we can install. This gigantic siege wall's bastions will be titanesque, with many large embattled balconies and roof terraces to emplace CIWS, anti-infantry and anti-air weapons, as well as offer safe green spaces for recreation during the soldier's breaks & meals."

"Outside the military base, and policed by the soldiers, will be the industrial and portuary zones. They will be separated from each other by squat transverse walls equipped with towers & gatekeeps as well, to regulate traffic and blockade invaders. All the ports and industries will be built with much wider, airier halls, rooms and facilities to make the workers' lives better, and safer. Each building will have a flat roof terrace with grassy beds and trees to help cut heat or winds when the employees go out for their breaks, and the embattled walkways will allow the positioning of automated CIWS turrets to defend our production sites. All the ports for water or aerospace, the train triage yards, and the manufactures will be belted by a tall siege wall, like the military sector."

"Now, outside the clearly dedicated army/industry zones that are vital to our survival come the 'soft' parts. We will design and partition with clean, straight roads, bridges, viaducts, and tramway or subway lines, multiple city blocks for civilian usage in habitation and business. This will allow the old codgers like me to retire in peace at some point, but also allow our good, decent soldiers to find spouses and have children. A purely military barracks isn't the place for child-rearing, and the security risks of having any civilians inside the inner wall cannot be emphasized too much. The civilian zones will also be separated by transverse walls to manage traffic and deter invaders. We plan up to three circular 'belts' of civilian land around the mountain, enclosed by a tall siege wall to protect our people from animals, bandits and potential threats."

"Now, outside all the urbanized zones will be several belts of agrarian & rural zones, along the Stargate's transportation & commerce hub which will remain under direct military control. A grand promenade boulevard with integrated tramway line will link the core of the military base with the Gateway hub on the surface, while an underground roadway tunnel and subway system will allow faster transit & responses from our troops in key areas of the new city. The farms and plantations will NOT be separated by transverse walls, as these areas are too vast to build such things, but we will still build the perimeter siege wall to enclose our territory against wild beasts and possible threats. No, instead, each farm or homestead will be allowed to fortify itself like the old medieval manorial estates, so that any animals or petty thieves will not pose a menace to our good people, giving them time to defend themselves until civilian police or soldiers arrive."

"Also, the rural zones will have wider roads with a specially marked 'slow lane' for bicycles, senior carriers, electric scooters, and also for horse & dog carts. Likewise, a system of canals will be dug to rationalize the irrigation of the farm plots, while also serving as cheap & easy method of transport for the least fortunate citizens of these areas. A simple wooden canoe or barge is a very economical vehicle to build, and most farmers will learn this rapidly to bypass the roadway traffic jams. We will, of course, extend these canals into the civilian urban zones, up to open-air water markets, to facilitate arrival of food to the residents, as well as making slow tourism or sports possible for our people to rebuild their health and mind."

The venerable general closed the displays, standing up as he did. "I have no further words for you, except prayers to the ancestors that what lies ahead of us be a quieter, less violent future than the incoherent miasma we came from. Be well, my sons."

The hall erupted with soft whispers of renewed interest and hope as the general and his officers left for a private meeting.

Oh, Dear! The new neighbor is weird!

(Thunderbirds are go! – opening theme 2015)

Saturday 1st of July, 2034; 06h00am

Temple complex

Planet Ankh, system Noah's Ark

The robotic horse Equiides-2 was slowly ambling around the corridors of the decrepit complex when it heard a noise that was different from the rhythmic mechanical whirs and clicks in the vents. Following the protocols for its patrol duties of established borders, the robotic horse trotted noisily towards the dull clattering, only for its optics to see that something had opened the doors to one of the transportation rings chambers.

Walking all the way to the open doors, the robot was only able to see a mottled brown mass, rather small in fact, in the middle of the transit pad as the floor split in six parts to let rise the naquadah rings. A bright flash later and the unidentified thing was gone.

Trying to review its recordings, Equiides-2 didn't manage to perceive better shapes or details, so it lodged the event with Brainchild-1, while noting that posting small sensors in the corridors at strategic places would be good for safety, until they managed to get all the built-in detection grid under control.

Having done its job as well as it could with its tools, the robotic horse walked on to complete its scheduled route.

{ IR } - { What now?} - { SG }

7h30am

Alan woke up with a start as he reacted badly to a nightmare that got worse than the first batch. This time, the dead had faces that he could see, and they were all people he had known when growing up on the farm in Kansas. Most of them were kids around his age, and a few of the kinder elderly folks who had always had a gut feeling that something wasn't right with the Tracy's and Hardale's, no matter how many churchmen they put out every generation.

The boy rubbed both hands over his face to get rid of the nausea caused by the fitful sleep and sudden wakefulness. At least he wasn't hungry yet, but a tepid shower would help cool him down from the sticky hot sweats he had experienced. Beating down his pride and useless Tracy Temper, he slowly marched to the armory's bathroom to pour himself a glass of cold water, wipe the sweat off his body with a quick lukewarm washdown, and fill his kettle for some hot coffee. Looking at the small plastic camping chest of provisions near his cot with a gimlet eye, Alan's shoulders drooped in resignation as he chose some basic white bread and salted butter with ordinary flatware to eat something for breakfast.

Using the cot as seat, the teenager made sure to be slow as he sipped the iced water, and then some piping hot coffee, as he ate his buttered toast slowly. He didn't want his already queasy stomach to rebel and upchuck everything he ate since last night. A noise like footsteps demanded his attention as a bipod – corpsman robot entered the armory. Without asking, the robot scanned him with one of the recently acquired Lantean devices, then analyzed the results before sending them to Brainchild-1 for decision.

The PDA on Alan's field-suit beeped, followed by the mainframe's synthetic voice; "Brainchild-1 addressing Creator-Alan-1; are you functional? Reports have been received of your ill disposition. Response required."

Closing his eyes to quell the grumpy teenaged temper that was threatening to emerge, he answered "Yes, Brainchild-1, I had an episode close to PTSD. I slept for a bit more than seven hours, so I'll be OK, eventually. At least unless another mess happens. Are we on track for what was decided yesterday? Send the research group reports to my data pad so I can study them. And talk with Unimind, we had some conversations about the Tauri inventory. Some techs they found or created have made it to the top of the merge & upgrade list. End of message."

"Brainchild-1 signifies event; Equiides-2 witnessed activation of transport rings by unknown entity or object. Tetrabot – techies have now emplaced Alanaria remote overwatch cameras at all ring locations inside our present borders. Building has built-in sensors but they are dysfunctional, therefore no internal scans available to verify. End of report."

Making a face, Alan took his data pad to see where the entity was detected and saw that it was the rings past the inner courtyard with the weird pond hut. In fact, it was past the small vehicle workshop they had begun to use for their units' maintenance needs.

"Okay, BC-1. I'll go see for myself if I can find-out anything. I learned to hunt and track when I was a kid, so maybe I can spot something that Equiides-2 missed. I'll be bringing Kanimecha-1 and shieldmate-2 with me, just in case. End message."

{ IR } - { Knocking on the door } - { SG }

8h15am

Alan strolled leisurely down the corridor towards the rings that had been activated earlier. He had dressed into his newly retrofitted field-suit with Goa'uld energy shield and artificial gravity system, verified that his helmet was solidly in place, and that his smaller trekking backpack was filled with the necessities for three days. He took his cal.22 Henry's Junior Lee-Enfield replica with bayonet and telescope, plus two 15-shot magazines of cal.22 long-rifle steel-jacketed bullets, just in case. Now, nobody in a military or police job would use a weapon like that, but Alan was only fourteen years old, and he had only a passing acquaintance with firearms. The replica Lee-Enfield was medium-powered, very accurate up to 500 yards but could reach 750 easily, and most importantly it had almost no recoil. Lastly, the rifle's bolt-action system had been proven reliable for more than 135 years, and could be repaired with nothing more than a multi-knife. Besides that, he had also taken the Skyblade hoverboard, just in case.

Upon reaching the ring chamber, Alan used the Lantean field-scanner he had taken from the purloined SGC tech to see if he could detect organic traces. He did find a few splotches of material, but nothing that the database could identify except that it was mostly water from the pond in the courtyard mixed with several samples of DNA. Apparently, something alive had passed through recently, leaving behind nothing visible to the naked eyes but a few specks of dirt on the floor and ring control buttons. The odd thing though, was that these rings were connected to Noah's network and needed a rather complete understanding of the console and touchscreen system that triggered them. Which meant that whatever passed through had intelligence equal to a human, unless the system was programmed to let a specific animal move around, like a guard dog on patrol or favored pet.

Alan figured he had no preference at this point. A sentient entity would be good for company, but a living animal of any sort would help his mind heal as well. That was the reason he told the robots to not harm the golden bird that woke him up every morning. Harmless creatures were to be left alone, so long as they weren't in the way of construction, medical operations or R&D labs. Small pests like mosquitoes, gnats, ticks, fleas, bed bugs or any similar parasites, were to be destroyed on sight, and all sightings reported in a vermin control map to make sure their camp didn't get infested badly.

Leaning on the side of the console with both hands, Alan looked at the large screen to see the destination the entity traveled to. It was on the same planet, but in a lush tropical climate getting much rain all year long, thus the many marshes, swamps and everglades. That zone was also dotted in dangerously decrepit ruins, with many villages of humanoid families nearby, trying to make a living from the primitive, very poor and sickly conditions. However, the target building seemed to be empty, despite being very large and many of its internal systems giving back positive activity signals.

"Creator-Alan-1! Warning! Targeted area's current scans indicate extreme poverty, community illnesses and rampant criminality in every village. Kanimecha-1 suggests that armed convoy be brought if you intend to go. Using Alanvan or IR work-pod with full cabin and armaments preferable."

"Huh, that wouldn't be a bad idea, if I were stupid enough to go outside the building. I'm fourteen, and mostly alone with practically no backup to speak of. The number of dedicated fighting units Alanaria Fleet has can be summed on both hands," the teen replied. "No matter how curious I am, it would be suicidal to just go outside the walls, especially with what the basic reports contain. But if we stay inside the mansion and its hard-linked annexes, we'll be safe and close enough to the rings to escape or get backup. Even to just visit the open-air gardens around the manor, I would bring more units, and the Aeroquad, at the least."

Tapping his comm badge, Alan ordered "BC-1 do what you can to speed-up the repairs of the temple complex's sensor grid, plus everything else on the planetary network, but don't spend any more time or resources on anything off-planet unless you find proof of a critical system or resource we immediately need to acquire. The unknown entity seems to have come from that large structure identified as Lord Noah's private manor, or at least it passed through. It's also where Rath'ahl got killed, so there's something to be analyzed in there anyways. Oh, and task all the Evil-eyes to do roving patrols at least two blocks outside of our current control perimeter inside the Temple Complex, just to be safe. I'm going over to the mansion do some basic exploration."

After making sure his bracer computer was properly linked with the transportation network as master-key, he used it to find his destination and dial the rings with a thirty second delay. The teenager walked to stand on the transport pad with his dog and combat robots, then the floor separated in six sections, letting the naquadah rings rise to position and energy flash around them.

{ IR } - { Lord Noah's grand mansion } - { SG }

Noah's mansion

8h32am

Alan and his escorts appeared in the decrepit foyer of the abandoned grand house, on the same platform that Rath'ahl had used yesterday, with a wide open view of everything in the room. Except for a few decorative columns that supported the side balconies and mezzanines at each end, there were no separation walls to block sight lines.

Alan grumbled as he unlimbered his Skyblade, setting it as an automated surveillance drone that would float above them while they explored. It wasn't much, but in this situation of limited means, every little bit counted for a safer outing.

The main floor of the foyer was occupied a large bronze fountain that still poured clear potable water through its multiple seashell shaped bowls, down to a wide masonry basin filled with overgrown plants and myriad small animals, mostly insects, snails, a few small green lizards, and the odd brown spider shily hiding in a ball of woven white silk. The fountain's pillar had three small sconces holding a golden crystal that glowed enough to illuminate most of the room if all other lights were off. The rest of the furniture were the small lectern to receive the guests, and eight small clusters of plush chairs and coffee tables, set far enough from each other so that meetings could be held out of hearing from other groups. Under the mezzanines were vestibules to store traveling coats, carry-on bags, and lodge living pets during visits that lasted only a few hours, the time of a meal or short discussion.

From what Alan could see, the public bathrooms were located under & upon both mezzanines, through heavy metal doors that sealed the passages in case of enemies breaching the building. Going to the lectern, the boy activated the mansion's map to see that he had gotten the floor plans right. The front of the foyer was the one opposite where he stood while the main mass of the manor was at his back, with the public entry on the mezzanine. Built like medieval or Renaissance castles, the building had no external doorways or points of access like windows, ventilation grates or sewer pipes at ground level to avoid easy intrusion. All outer doors and passages between the building sectors were at the first level, thus giving the defending soldiers the high ground to shoot or drop grenades on any fools that managed to penetrate the heavily fortified manor. All discharge pipes were either installed high up like chimneys and sump pump outflows, or deep underground like sewage and utilities tunnels to connect the dependent buildings around the large walled estate. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if there were hidden defensive machines built into the walls or ceilings, in case the soldiers were insufficient of turned traitors.

Looking at the ruined dregs of the carpet where Rath'ahl had died, Alan guided his Kanimecha-1 and shieldmate-2 to teach them some instincts about tracking and following faint spoor that unknown animals might leave. This led the trio to a ventilation grate, hidden behind one of the columns supporting the balcony on the left side of the foyer. The grill was hinged, and something with a lot of dexterity had worked the pivot-latch open to pull out the cover enough to go crawl inside the ducts. The limb prints and organic traces matched what had killed the Goa'uld, and they disappeared deep into the walls, becoming invisible due to a T intersection.

Alan called Brainchild-1 to get a pair of Earwurm drones so he could send one in the duct, and have another for the same job later on, if they found a second line of traces. It took about fifteen minutes to get the vermiform drones on site, then they set one to trudge its merry way around the hidden ducts and pipes inside the thick stone and naquadah walls.

While spending a half-hour as the metallic worm legged it, Alan studied the mansion's publicly accessible floor plans to make certain he understood where things were situated. The infrastructure blueprints would probably be found once they managed to discover the archival vault, or a backup server that only answered to a dedicated terminal. Nothing else that had been tried since yesterday afternoon had revealed anything about the construction logs & manifests for the old Lord's sprawling estate.

A beep on his bracer had Alan activate the holo-display, to see that Earwurm-1 had found the point at which the limb prints leave the ducts and move around the open corridors, in the second floor. Well, that was weird. An insectoid with a taste for luxury, as this was the main body of the manor, where important private guests of Noah's were lodged for short stays of a few days. The servants were supposed to inhabit the left wing, and Noah had the right wing all to himself, plus one favorite servant.

"Ok, Earwurm-1, stay on that floor, we'll join you soon. Over." Turning to his other robots, the teen declared "Let's get up there, the answers look to be somewhere in the guest area of the mansion's main body. We'll inspect the suites and public rooms until we find the culprit, then determine if it's a threat or only grabbed a quick Goa'uld snack while it was at hand. Over."

The young man made sure his rifle was held loosely in the bandoleer at his back, preferring instead to wield the vibro-sword while he was indoors with movements limited by walls, doors and furniture. Especially since Goa'uld of a certain social standing liked their ornamental pieces to be of the monumental, solid naquadah variety, so shooting a bullet through those wouldn't work.

It took just a few minutes to jog up the stairs of the mezzanine, cross the defensive passageway into the manor-house proper, and up another flight of open airy stairs to reach the second floor. Guided by the auto-compass on his bracer, Alan led his escorts to the waiting Earwurm-1 who was placidly inspecting the rotted scraps of decorative silk wall hangings lying on the floor. Picking up the curious automaton to carry it, the boy ordered Kanimecha-1 to take point on the tracking effort.

The robotic dog sniffed around with success, his onboard sensors having been programmed to recognize the limb prints and organic spoor of the alien creature. He led his group unerringly towards a large doorway blocked by a pair of sliding panels that showed signs of being used regularly, despite that all their remote scans showed the building to be empty of sentient life. Alan found the maintenance panel on the doorway controls and plugged his hacking kit while asking Kanimecha-1 for help to make certain the mechanism was truly unlocked and accepted Alanaria signals as priority over all others.

Well, that didn't go as planned. Somebody had already hacked the household systems in this area, establishing themselves as the master-key for the network. This had the virtue of explaining why the building was used but their scans showed emptiness, as the entity had configured the sensors to record anything that wasn't its own activities. In a fit of brilliance, the unknown hacker had even programmed the network to ignore / not show its food & resource gathering, nor its trash disposal. Alan had to admit that this was pretty much a perfect invisibility scheme, with the only weakness being to physical presence in the manor, to see things with their own eyes.

Reevaluating his opinions of the invisible alien much upwards on the intellect scale, Alan made sure to transfer all the information to his mainframe, tasking a bipod – professor to learn that completely new form of written language and the programming style it demonstrated. The script wasn't standard Goa'uld, which itself was based on Unas speech anyways, but rather it looked like a mix of Cuneiform, alien hieroglyphs… and chicken scratches…? It was a visually odd pattern to understand, but since the computers worked with it, then it was obviously an evolved, fully articulated language & math system, so Alan wanted to learn what he could about the visually intriguing tongue.

Now having established a cybernetic skeleton key to access the segments of the corrupted household systems, Alan ordered the professor bot to effectuate the network mapping so they could have an idea of how long this had been going on, and where the entity had moved. The results came back after ten more minutes of patience.

8,200 years

The network hijack had begun eight-thousand and two-hundred years ago, and been active since. The entity who did the job seemed to still be alive as the alien language penetration of the manorial systems had been progressing steadily for several centuries before stalling to a crawl. After nearly two hundred years of efforts, the being had stopped hacking the mansion, instead doing local hacks in the transport ring chambers, infirmaries, workshops and laboratories spread around the planet. After the first three centuries had passed, the unknown creature had begun to explore the moons, then the other planets, and completely tagged all the transportation methods, including the Stargate and several small ships parked in hidden garages, inside of five-hundred years. Since then, the being had made no further efforts to control anything, simply exploiting what already worked and doing a few simple repairs when it was necessary.

Well, that put paid to the idea it was a guard dog or favorite pet, wandering around the rings…

Tapping his comms, Alan ordered "Brainchild-1, new orders for network mapping & overtake. The new language we found has penetrated the entirety of Lord Noah's machines throughout the solar system. A cursory survey has just revealed that several key resources were hidden because the sensors had been programmed to not display them unless the proper authorization code was entered with the alien tongue. Task the Ark in charge of remote monitoring & network operations to rebuild the systems maps and tag all newly discovered resources according to our strategic priorities for in-person exploration. Execute, over."

After hearing the three notes that confirmed orders received, Alan packed up his tools while Kanimecha-1 stood on his hind legs to use the small retractable arms in his chest to tap the keys to open the doorway.

As the two panels split apart to slide back into their pockets, a wave of chokingly warm, wet and cloying air wafted from the room beyond, smelling of sap, pollen and rotting vegetation, like a swampy tropical glade at the height of summer. Thankfully, the climatic shield in the doorway kept the flying bugs from leaving the large room, otherwise the whole manor would be infested inside of a few hours. Some of those critters were the size of Alan's splayed hand! The boy had thought Australian mosquitoes were bad, but this was clearly a different world, and a nasty one!

As the small group penetrated inside the large chamber, they could see that it was a sort of nature conservatory, with small streams feeding clear water into small ponds, to irrigate the luxuriant vegetation and fauna. Abandoned to its own devices over 8,000 years ago, the internal garden had gone wild and overgrown, with multiple venomous & toxic plants or animals dotting the place.

As they walked carefully to avoid getting scratched, stung or bitten, Alan saw that the water was being piped in by small fountains built into the walls, sculpted like small rocky cascades to merge with the landscaping, or from a set of ceiling sprinklers that would emulate tropical rainfalls, as needed by the seasonal calendar. The massive solar lamps spread around were the obvious source of light and heat to upkeep the warm climate, but the huge crystal panels in the roof to let natural sunlight come in certainly did a good job, too. All in all, this installation was a horticulturalist's dream, and most museums on Earth couldn't afford such a complete setup.

Walking around the perimeter on a pathway crafted of flat river stone pavers, the group saw small stone benches with a low stone table that had a firepit dug in the middle, obvious conversation clusters for visiting guests to enjoy the scenery. Checking the manorial floor plans, the adolescent winced as he saw the dimensions; 300 feet wide by 600 feet long and a ceiling height equal to three full floors at the apex of the inclined roofline. There were twenty foot wide balconies on both long sides, and forty foot deep mezzanines at both ends, to serve as second story for the conservatory room, but this level did not have any access to the rest of the house. From the mezzanines rose stone staircases that granted passage to the rooftop terraces and embattled walkways, for maintenance, defense and leisurely walks under the open skies.

The facilities of the sprawling room were top-notch, with each staircase designed as a straight line with a built-in stairlift, two wide rectangular elevators whose glass-walled cabins could reach the rooftop level, a whopping eight bathroom cabins on each floor, and a large open-plan kitchen & dining set placed not far from a large swampy pond.

Alan looked at the pond in question when they arrived on its shores, and especially at the artificial rocky islet in the middle. It was built exactly like the one in the courtyard of the Temple Complex, except it was larger, taller, and the hut on top was far more complex, ornate, and had very obvious modern conveniences built into the structure as evidenced by the mechanical two-panel sliding doors, electrical stained-glass lamps around the gutters, stained-glass panes in the framed windows, and three different chimneys rising from the conical roofs. Blinking in surprise, Alan could now discern that the diminutive house even had a welcoming balcony above the main doorway, with a mechanical sliding door to access what should be a full first floor, or at least a mezzanine inside the main section of the building.

Whoever, whatever, lived here had obviously been important to Noah to deserve getting such complicated, detailed and richly appointed housing, especially with the dedicated environment to give the inhabitant some nature to enjoy. Because Alan understood that the tropical climate was clearly for the benefits of the tenant, not Noah himself, as the Goa'uld Lord would have been used to the ease of climate-controlled spaceships and starbases by the period of his life when this was crafted.

"Shieldmate-2 declares; Creator-Alan-1, active transport ring system detected, ID beacon indicated this is the origin of the alien language hack that corrupted the manorial network. End of report."

The teenager followed the pointed finger of his combat bot, walking over to the flat, circular, river stone platform that was installed between the open kitchen setup and the edge of the large pond with the mini-manor. As the youth spotted the large control console that resembled the complex model next to the Stargate, the screen activated, showing that something was coming back from a foray on the other side of the planet, in a dense and utterly wild tropical jungle.

{ IR } - { Alan! Kreeeee! } - { SG }

Noah's mansion

9h44am

Just as Alan was about to call Brainchild-1 to warn him about making contact, the river stone paving split into six pieces that retracted, allowing the seven naquadah rings to lift into position to accept an incoming transit. The teen barely had the time to turn completely towards the rings with his sword and kara'kesh on guard that the system had cycled fully.

The flashing white light resorbed, leaving Alan to look downwards to see the entity, as it was quite short and squat, but he couldn't get a good look yet as the rings were in the way. As the antique transportation system retracted in the floor, the teen was left blinking in surprise at what stood on the transit pad.

The best descriptor he could find on the moment were 'arthropod' or 'crustacean'. As in, a large brown lobster, some 20-odd inches long from head to the ends of its articulated tail flaps.

A large mottled-brown lobster that was hauling on top of its back the carcass of a dead centipede that was easily twice its own size, and so colorful that Alan just knew it was poisonous six-ways-to-Sunday. You live a few weeks a year on a tropical island for a decade and you pick-up a few pointers about survival, like what's edible or toxic. And that Stargate traveler-tweak file was coming in handy, reminding him subconsciously that these huge insects were aggressive predatory blood suckers that laid their eggs inside the abdomen of living mammals.

Apparently, the lobster-creature was myopic in a bad way as it dragged its cumbersome burden towards the pond's shore until it was within two feet of the stunned boy, before realizing that he, the shieldmate and robotic dog were present in the light-drenched room. At that sudden discovery, it let its four-foot long catch slide sideways off its back to reveal just how it could bag such a big prey and leave the fight unscathed. Slowly, the entity clambered backwards carefully then turned to climb onto one of the stone benches of the dining set, then moving to sit atop the large stone table, to better look (squint myopically) over Alan and his group.

This arthropod was, to Alan's limited experience, a chimeric creation, a mix of diverse known animals. Probably the results of Noah's genetic experiments, if it wasn't some dinosaur-age relic from an alien world that had endured till modern times.

It was actually closer to twenty-six inches long in total, and some seven inches wide around the cephalothorax, but had many, many more legs than a regular lobster would. Going from the forward tip, the creature was built so:

It had four twelve-inch long solid antennae that were jointed to the sides of the head so as to sweep sideways as much as forward, like a rock lobster (langouste), and were tipped by a small multi-faceted dull-yellow globule that Alan wondered about.

Then there were two huge, three-inch wide dull-yellow eyes, multi-faceted like insects or several species of shrimp, but with an asterisk-shaped red pupil in the middle nonetheless, grouped together closely at the front of the head like a jumping spider had. There were three other pairs of smaller yellow eyes that were made the same way, spread a pair to each side and a pair facing rear over the dorsal aspect, also like spiders normally had.

Beneath those great frontal eyes was a pair of massive mandibles that looked like those of a scarab but with a middle hook. At least, it looked like ordinary mandibles until the creature showed they could move up and down as much as open sideways to grab-&-hold prey. Those chitinous middle hooks were glistening with venom, slowly dripping even as the entity stood mostly immobile.

By kneeling on both knees very slowly on the river stone floor to change perspective, Alan saw that the creature had four more eyes placed separately on the front third of its ventral aspect, around its mouth and feeding arms, to see what it ate and if anything was beneath its body, like parasites or dropped food bits.

The mouth itself was a two-inch long slit aligned with the creature's length, with serrated edges that moved, sided by three pairs of small articulated feeding arms ending in scissor pincers, and a pair of much longer and thicker feeding arms ending in thick four-fingered claws that seemed particularly agile.

The most visibly impressive parts of the creature's front were the four 8 inch long, chubby articulated arms, each ending with an eight-inch long, thin, curving, scissor pincer like a scorpion, but with white ivory teeth outside as much as inside. And there seemed to be grey metallic bits on the tips of each pincer, that gave off an eerie green glow, like the teeth did too, now that Alan was looking closely.

Then there were twelve solid articulated legs on each side, each ending with a medium straight scissor pincer. Alan paid attention to the way the legs were jointed and arced, like a jumping spider for the first six pairs, and like a cricket for the last six pairs, making the boy weary this critter could jump straight forward a few times its body length and hit like a battering ram with those large mandibles aimed ahead. It might even be strong enough to punch through the thorax or helmet of his armored field-suit.

At the rear-end of the creature were the splayed, articulated flaps of a lobster tail, with a pair of extra swimming flappers on each side of it for speed and stability in fluids. The funny thing was that it also seemed to have a flexible siphon on each side like an octopus to jet-boost it when swimming.

Then Alan had the sudden surprise to see a seven foot long tail rearing up defensively above the thing's back. It was made of two-inch wide, solid articulated segments, that ended in a four-clawed pincer surrounded by four small yellow eyes and frills that made it eerily into an exact copy of a mature Goa'uld symbiote. And Alan was sure those were functional eyes, because they were the same shape as the small ones in front, and the creature moved its tail to orient one of the yellow globes towards the boy and robots in turn, as if -maybe- its main eyes weren't that good in regular light, or the tail ones had extra capacities.

Surprised by the unexpected meeting, all participants silently stayed on their spot, waiting to see what happened. It would take quite some time before things changed.

At the bedside of a dying species

(Frederic Chopin – funeral march)

Saturday 1st of July, 2034; 10h00am

Tauri cuirassé One-Armed bandit

Orbit above Seattle, USA west coast

Scott Tracy sat on the box-bench of the window in the common area of their family's shared suite. The two Hackenbacker's were back down on Earth, going through Menenoa Atoll's layout with the SGC troops to emplace the new energy shields and climate recyclers that would protect the few paltry kilometers of living plants & animals from the planet's death throes.

Tanusha was touring the SGC training gyms, and most probably getting a recruitment pitch from their brass since she didn't officially work for THI, and the Tracy family was pretty much defunct. Besides, Scott just couldn't see the skilled, vivacious young woman be a servant or maid for anybody, no matter the salary or benefits, and he wouldn't insult her by offering. Instead, he was hoping to restart THI on Menenoa to supply the SGC with new vehicles & repairs, along with some sort of guestship services like a few small inns and hospitals for the surviving humans of their dead world. If that worked out, he would try to keep Tanusha with their group as professional pilot and ship mechanic, so they didn't lose yet another person from their miserable lives. The good point that meant this idea could work was the fact that Tanu and Virgil seemed to be leaning on each other a lot, to get through all the traumas of the last week, so she might be motivated to stay close by.

His brother John had never been that interested in people, interactions or relationships, and Scott didn't see that changing any time soon, even with humanity dying out. As it happened, the blond spacer was back on Thunderbird-5, showing their technology to the SGC specialists who would then suggest what extensions or upgrades were necessary for their orbiter to be compatible with the standards they used. As that was a big part of bringing THI back to working status, Scott had to tolerate the absence of his quietest sibling, for the moment. He'd be back for dinner at the latest, since John disliked eating in crowded restaurants and he would seek the peace of the familial suite.

Virgil had decided to offer his services in helping the SGC rescue teams go to the drifting derelict ships that had been knocked-out by Alan's wonder-weapon, in the last pass-of-arms of their short-lived fight. The twenty-one year old male knew there were no survivors to rescue, but a mission to get the vessels back in working condition was still critical as each huge machine could serve as a stationary habitat for survivors, just like the One-Armed Bandit was reduced to doing, until her own repairs and crew renewal were done cycling.

Gordon had gone down to Menenoa Atoll with the Hackenbacker's, to guide the SGC personnel on the underwater portion of their evaluation. They were using a small shuttle called a Puddle-Jumper (version II) that had flown out of the Bandit's side and dropped through the planet's turbulent, filth & ash laden atmosphere, and straight down to the Pacific Ocean without needing any preparations between transitions. It was notable that Hiram and Fermat had preferred teleporting directly inside the bunkers with their team, to avoid spending time in close quarters with the delinquent aquanaut. And that was a whole basket of crabs that Scott preferred to not think about just yet, especially since his younger brother had shown absolutely no intentions of apologizing to Fermat, let alone Alan if they ever found him again.

Which left Scott himself, all alone in solitude of his choosing. For all that he loved his brothers and Tanusha, he really hadn't had much time to think through and process everything that had been revealed in the last few days. The diverse crimes and depravities of his family spread over generations almost gave him a heart attack at the ripe old age of twenty-five. The crimes of Gordon against one of their kin were perfidious on their own, but compounded with everything else rotten inside the Tracy, Hardale and Evans lineages, could be what breaks the family asunder, beyond any possibility to heal.

And Alan… Had their youngest sibling really found an alien ship, becoming some sort of Dread Star Lord in the process? While every sensor readout and film they had from multiple sources told clearly that the IR Command Center stolen by Alan was involved with the pyramid ship, Scott still had trouble believing it. Maybe he could believe more easily, if the fights and destroyed planet weren't the results of it all… The consequences for his brother and family if it were ever proven to be true…

The personal communicator he had been given by the SGC beeped, demanding his attention. Taking out what was essentially a glorified smart phone with a subspace enabled chipset and holo-display, Scott was soon faced with his worse fears. The bridge comm officer warned Scott that Doctor McKay wanted him in the ship's command room no later than 11h00am, to make a first attempt at contacting the self-styled System Lord of Unrest. The archaeology team had found references to the domain of Noah in Daniel Jackson's private library, aboard his ship, and they were going to try, to see if the escaped enemies had gone there.

Having no choice in the matter, Scott accepted then shut the comms, deciding to first have a small coffee and snack, so as to have something in his stomach to sponge-off the acid from the sudden stress. In truth, the young adult hoped there wouldn't be anybody at the other end of that Stargate to answer them, and that any exploration team would come back empty-handed.

Unfortunately, he also knew the Tracy luck well enough to guess they would find their missing sibling, and things would get worse.

Why am I feeling crabby today?

(Thunderbirds are go! – opening theme 2015)

Saturday 1st of July, 2034; 10h00am

Temple complex

Planet Ankh, system Noah's Ark

After several minutes of silently observing each other without any aggressivity or real communication, Alan and the large crustacean/isopod creature moved at the same time, but thankfully in different directions. The teenager sat back on his haunches to relax his knees and back a bit, while the chitin plated critter ambled back to its dead prey, using its main pincers and tail to lug it back across its dorsal aspect. Chittering softly to itself as it trundled noisily on the river stone pavers, the arthropod passed by the human and robots on its way towards the edge of the swampy pond.

Amused by the encounter more than scared, Alan followed about four feet behind, thinking about the bizarre entity that could use computers and transport rings when it so obviously didn't have the morphology they were meant to serve. Trotting by his side, Kanimecha-1 and shieldmate-2 were filming the carapaced thing, sending it to the mainframe for immediate analytics and orders about how to respond to its discovery. As it seemed to not want violence, the standing protocols to respect animal/plant/unknown lifeforms were still in effect.

As they arrived at the pond's shoreline, the arthropod crawled towards a large flat rock on the sandy shores, shoving its burden atop a foot tall granite slab without much caution. Using pincers and tail, it began to butcher the colorful centipede into parts, setting the venom glands and oviposition guts apart, then slitting the insect along the length of its belly to rip out bowels and useless bits, finally taking the time to crack each leg for their flesh. Once all the rather professional butchering was done, the offal and dregs were swiped into the pond with great swishes of pincers, leaving the stone table free for the refined work. Using its buccal manipulators, the lobster-kin began to shred the leg flesh, mixing in chopped leaves from several different stalks of herbs that grew right next to the rock he was using as kitchen counter.

Alan sat nearby, using another flat river rock as stool while he watched the foreign creature work its food. He was immediately convinced of its intelligence by the way it split and skinned the centipede, reserving the venom sacs and gutting it with the sort of experience the boy had seen only in avid professional hunters. Then it started to hash the rough leg meat into crude patties, even mixing in fresh garden herbs like a chef in a restaurant. The surprise came next. The arthropod spat an oily liquid on a section of the stone table, and six seconds later it ignited all on its own, creating a bush hibachi! The conclusion was confirmed as the amphibian tossed the patties on the flaming surface, using its main pincers as spatulas to flip the improvised patties a few times as they charred.

Then Alan knew for sure he was dealing with a higher sentient entity when the creature walked around the large stone, fiddling with the side until a hidden flap fell open to reveal a cupboard full of crudely crafted stoneware. The clawed being pulled out two flat plates that looked just like thin slabs cut from a boulder, plus a pair of matching spoons. Now satisfied with the cook on the patties, the arthropod put two on a plate for the human and two on another for himself. The adolescent was amazed that the being had understood his escorts didn't need food, so this proved it could recognize tech and robots when it saw them.

The teenager was flabbergasted when the large arthropod clattered towards him with a plate and spoon held aloft in his equally large pincers. Mindful of the tail arcing idly over its back, Allie thanked the being verbally in Goa'uld as he accepted the plate, finding the warmth comforting. Then he was amused to see the creature take its own plate and spoon to start eating with dainty manners, like an old lady. It put the plate on the grassy soft ground in front of itself, holding the spoon with a large pincer, then scooped food in the spoon which it then held under its face for the small feeding arms to grab pieces to bring inside the articulated mouth. Smiling widely at the discovery of this weird new neighbor, the teenager smelled the aroma appreciatively, scooping up a piece of sizzling meat to taste it. It was surprisingly good, especially with the herbs. Although it was a bit though for meat, hashing it helped with making it easier to chew. Alan concluded quickly that eating this sort of centipede unprocessed or raw would be a chore for his human mouth, and hard to digest as well.

After a leisurely half-hour spent eating, Alan was amused again when his host clattered towards him to recover the stoneware then stored it still soiled in the cupboard. Smirking, Alan politely thanked his host again, as he handed off the soiled dishes. His surprise increased when the creature extended its tail to tap an indented spot on the side of the large rock, making the internal compartment flash, cleaning the eating utensils like the Asgard replicators did, then automatically closing the cover flap with nary a sound. Now, the large lobster got to the task of quartering its catch into smaller morsels that it covered in a type of glue from its mouth, a sort of natural preservation layer to safely store the food for later use.

With great interest, Alan watched raptly as the multi-legged entity used its tail to wrap all the preserved pieces into a webbing net to secure everything to its back. Once laden, another tap on the table had the outside flash with a silver-grey energy that cleaned everything as if the rock had never been used. Then the arthropod simply trotted to the pond, crossing the short span of cool water to climb up the island, trigger the doors opened with a tail tap, and disappear inside the mini-manor. Allie stood to see what he could by the still-opened doorway, and witnessed the being opening the equivalent of a fridge to store his meat. Once its pantry was closed, the creature turned towards the kitchen's open-front masonry stove to shove all the used & cut transport webbing, spitting in a long stream of oil that soon took flame. With its chimney blazing cheerily, the crabby neighbor clambered up to its balcony, to install itself in the open door, with only the four main pincers and antennae outside, a bit like a normal hermit crab or crawfish would do in a pond, but with more posh style than just a recycled conch shell for housing.

Giving the peaceful next-door neighbor a friendly wave in guise of salute, Alan walked out of the conservatory, again impressed with the diversity of life and intelligence that the Multiverse had in store for those who wanted to see it all with an open mind.

Kree watched the young spawn and his talking mechanical toys walk away from his comfy little retirement home. It might look limited, when compared to the ostentatious displays of the Stargate Hall complex, but it had served him well for nine millennia yet, and he saw little reason to change that. However, the loneliness was a lot to endure, especially after so long. Watching things on a screen helped stave-off isolation and depression for only a time. It would be good to have some activity nearby, and a neighbor to share things with, once in a while.

Plus, the spawn seemed well mannered, for a young human. He didn't attack on first sight, waited to see what intelligence Kree possessed, and thanked him for the food and hospitality before leaving peacefully. It was a good beginning to this cohabitation.

Besides, Kree's mother had been right, all those years ago; the best way to get a spawn to abide its elders was to feed it.

Family reunion of the unexpected kind

(Thunderbirds are go! – opening theme 2015)

Saturday 1st of July, 2034; 11h00am

Temple complex

Planet Ankh, system Noah's Ark

Alan had chosen to use the arthropod's private ring system to return to his camp, taking the time to transfer to the creature's console the map of their current camp. Seeing on screen that the system gave him access to the rings right in front of the Stargate, the teenager decided to keep his return short and selected that platform as destination, then called his mainframe to inform them of his preferred method to come back.

A few buttons pushed, a quick flash of energy and the boy's team was back to his temporary home. As he was setting up to transfer his scan results and films of the alien entity to Brainchild-1 for extensive analysis, the Stargate began to light up, starting to spin as an incoming wormhole tied to establish contact. Thinking of the potential threats that wanted him dead or enslaved, Alan rapidly raised the reception zone shields and activated the Alanaria beam CIWS that oversaw the arrival platform against invaders.

As he gave orders to get more fighting units into the gate hall, the traditional vison-orb held above the gateway received a signal, projecting the image as a huge 15 foot wide sphere, the sound coming from speakers hidden along the waiting platform's deck.

Alan got the surprise of seeing the command room of the Tauri's lead ship, with new people and one old face he hadn't expected to see again in this life. Scott was standing next to the dais where Richard Woolsey had once sat, thus indicating this was some sort of official contact, not just familial. Well, it also probably meant they had figured out his identity, but he would have to make sure, before showing his face. Putting his helmet in place and darkening the faceplate, Alan used the neural link to order his troops to stand ready, just in case the opponents were trying to pass an energy weapon or transporter signal through the wormhole.

Shrinking the shield until in covered only the Stargate's support frame, the teenager stood in the visual zone of the orb, letting the people on the other end see his armor-clad form, as ominous and unknown as ever. Deciding to play a more prudent game than last time the Tauri spoke with him, he stood silently, waiting for them to open the conference.

{ IR } - { Contact again } - { SG }

Aboard the One-Armed Bandit, Scott felt like a hostile intruder more than an allied observer. The men worked with alacrity, and sometimes barely held aggressivity, as they tried to keep the mastodon of a ship alive and functioning. The news of his family's bunkers and manufacturing halls had circulated around the entire Tauri fleet in record time, but so had the angry propaganda of malcontents who wanted an end to all forms of personal riches and large corporate landholdings. Scott had been accosted several times by virulently hostile people about this subject since he left his suite, and the worse part was that most interlopers had a lower military rank than him, if they had any rankings at all. Several of the raging people were in truth meaningless politos of one party or other, trying to make themselves a party program to push on the SGC/IOA citizens, in the hopes they'll get voted to something with Power and authority in the coming days. And most of the yelling twits had very clearly hinted that they would stop harassing the Tracy's corporate or familial properties if they got the publicly stated political & religious approval they thought they were entitled to, just because they had claimed it.

Scott had taken great pleasure in denying each one he met. Tracy Heavy Industries would exist free and independent, for neither of the siblings would ever stoop to doing politics and societal manipulation the way Jefferson had.

As the old analog clock on the bridge's wall counted down to 11h00am, the young adult forcibly brought himself back to the present moment, concentrating on McKay and Sheppard who stood at the front of the camera's filming zone. The coming contacts would either be a bust, or vital for any future humanity would have. Anxiously, he shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, not really knowing whether he preferred for Alan to be at the other end of the line, or nothing at all. When the comms officer spoke, the Thunderbird-1 pilot startled, not having realized just how tense he had become.

"Sirs! The Bandit's gate has dialed the Noah system's old address with success! The signal is being taken by a vision-orb." The young woman declared, stress evident in her wavering voice.

On the main screen, the image formed, showing a long metal walkway with metal banisters on each side, and a ramp at the end, with not much else, thus indicating a rather large reception hall around the gate. The image suddenly changed perspective as the orb switched to holo-projection mode, objects immediately in front becoming ultra-clear while peripheral sight disappeared entirely from the display. A few seconds later, a dark armored form walked into the filming field, showing by his presence that the Tauri had dialed the correct address indeed.

Stepping forward and off his command dais, McKay spoke first since the entity on the other end of the line was keeping quiet, in a change from his usual manners. "My name is Rodney McKay, doctor of several sciences but mainly engineering, and the recently nominated chairman of the Tauri Government. I will take the moment to inform you that the old IOA has been disbanded, and that all the ancient countries of Earth are now melded into a single nation, with a single command structure. At my right stands Fleet Marshal John Sheppard, leader of the Stargate Command, our military organization. And at my left is Scott Tracy, president of the Tracy Heavy Industries, one of our main civilian contractors."

Knowing this was his cue, Scott forced himself to raise his right hand to make a small despondent wave as he croaked out "Hey, Allie… How's the national leadership thingie going today?" Well, okay, it wasn't the best opening, but the young man didn't have anything else inside of himself to put out there, given how depressive he was.

The helmeted figure on screen tilted his head to the side, asking in neutral tones, "And how, exactly, do you think that is my name, let alone my identity? You are taking a great gamble, that I won't be offended by being called something other than what I truly am." The being finished by crossing his arms over his chest, setting his weight on his left leg as he adopted an indolent manner.

Scott replied with a sad smile "Because we found out about the International Rescue Command Center that you took from Menenoa Atoll, and we have recorded films of the ship circling the alien pyramid, before it lifted from the ocean. So, unless you kidnapped my kid brother or bought his services, you're him."

Nodding slowly, the figure unlatched the armored gauntlets, letting them drop to the console next to the gate, then unlatched the helmet and removed it, setting it atop the gloves. The revealed human adolescent stood upright, firm and uncowed, as he aimed a mild glare of challenge at the men facing him through the hologram.

"My birth name is Alan Tracy of Tauri, founder of the Alanaria Fleet, bearing the title 'Alnizam Raba Alaidtirabat', meaning The System Lord of Unrest, in basic English. And yes, as you surmised, I am the much beleaguered fifth son of Jefferson Tracy, upon whom I wish the worse ills of the worlds. Now that presentations are done, why have you bothered me? I left your mudball so I would no longer have to deal with your depraved kindred, therefore, why do you pursue me despite the perils implied?"

McKay countered quickly and decisively; "I don't think there's a peril at stake. I took the effort of revising the recordings of your conversations with my predecessor, chairman Woolsey. I very clearly saw that you were on the verge of agreeing to a departure plan with him when US president Harland descended into madness, attacking you firstly through the Atlantis city-ship and then by everything else under his direct authority. From all the films I saw, you never attacked first, and always fought back in proportion to the threat inbound towards your assets. From this, I deduce that there is no peril in contacting you, if we have no violent intent towards you."

Mulling over the older man's declaration, Alan replied slowly "I never wanted to commit warfare against anybody. I certainly wasn't ready for the truths, the realities, of any type or level of war. I expected a few confrontations with criminal mercenaries when Jefferson found-out I had stolen his precious manhood from its cold parking silo. I never expected several countries going berserk at the mere thought of my freedom, or obtaining a bit of alien tech to play with. The fullness of the cataclysm that hit Earth is a disclaimer about humanity's much vaunted boasts of evolution, and a condemnation of our collective folly."

John Sheppard spoke softly but firmly as he asked the boy "What are your plans, towards Earth and the Tauri? Do you see us as a threat to be neutralized, or just more things in the background of life?"

Looking at the tense, anxious face of his older sibling, Alan replied carefully "Several people of Earth have earned my contempt while others have garnered an existence of enmity that nothing will spare them from paying for. Unless they died already. The rest can go hang in the wind, for all the difference it makes."

Curious, Scott intervened carefully by asking "Who hurt you so bad that you'd want them dead like that? And, by the way, dad is in jail, the government is investigating what he did to us five. He'll either rot in a cell, or get executed quickly, I haven't a clue yet as how it's coming along. We've been with this ship only since yesterday afternoon."

Alan stayed silent for several seconds before answering in slow, deliberate words; "Between the ages of five and ten, Jefferson brought me to meet & greet sessions with politos around Kansas City, New York, Washington DC, London in England, Canberra in Australia, and every town that has a THI manufacturing facility. At those meetings, he forced me to kneel with my mouth open so that the mighty men of the White Cross, the fucking church-spawned mongrels, could piddle themselves in me, forcing me to look and swallow everything or else I'd get beaten by the entire group before the next guy took his turn. And Jeff was among those who had a turn. He never did anything of that sort at the farm or island, but on those trips, he was like a different man. And I remember all those men, I always have. But now, thanks to the neural interface devices from the Goa'uld, I can copy my memories and view them on a screen, to identify people to find them and prosecute them at long last."

Scott needed to sit in McKay's chair or else he'd have fallen to the floor, too stunned to clearly follow the rest of what is said for several minutes.

Sheppard asked "Of these people, can you tell us who were the most highly placed? We might be able to commit the arrests quickly, to spare you the problem of sending soldiers to do it."

Snorting in dark amusement, Alan countered "You just want to keep me out of your sandbox. Sending troops to find the bastards wouldn't be a problem at all, but it simply isn't important anymore. I'm free, and that is what counts. As for the most powerful men involved, you had the Kansas senator who became president, Michael Harland, financed by Tracy money to boot. There were a few of the man's closest cronies, like his personal lawyer Anthony Neebs, his private investment manager, Norman Drumstep, or his campaign director, Andre Clements. I remember bishop Arnold Tullman, from the Washington DC National Cathedral, and catholic cardinal Monsignore Aleck Gerthart, Vatican envoy to the USA. The rest were never important enough to be presented, at least not to the he-whore entertainment. Jeff knew them, most by name in fact, and had constant contacts with all of them to ensure THI and IR had all the permits, licenses and rights needed for what he wanted done."

McKay demanded gently "If we give you our contact information, can you send us a copy of those memories? We need to identify these criminals and remove them from society, before they make more victims. In fact, do you know of other victims they may have committed such acts against? We need to find them too, if they're still alive."

Shrugging, Alan replied blithely "No, I was always the only child present at those private and very exclusive meetings. I do know that my brother Gordon developed severe comportment issues at a very young age. From just before he started primary school, in fact. So, I suspect strongly he was the first of us to be passed around like a party favor. Scott and John were shielded too carefully by our mother for Jeff to have the leeway to try without being discovered. With Virgil, he grew up to a strong, athletic body type too fast for Jeff to ever feel completely at ease near him. At his core, our father is a coward, so having a young boy that big and muscular always scared him witless, and that was why he kept beating Virg every single week he had him at home, to keep him cowed and silent. For any children outside of our family, I have no idea. Jeff and his father Grant always tried to keep me isolated, trying to destroy my reputation before I reached school, then they let the insane bitch Ruth handle the admins once I got there, so she continued the damages. It was only when I reached the safety of McVeigh academy that things normalized towards good and stable for me."

Sheppard gave a worried look towards the stupefied Scott, then stating as kindly as he could "We'll ask your brothers for memory copies. From Jeff, we'll just take what we need without bothering with his opinion. If you could send us those files in the next few days…? We'd appreciate the help. And, I personally guarantee we'll get to the bottom of this shit pit, no matter what."

Nodding absently, Alan replied distantly "I believe you, Fleet Marshal, it's just that I have moved past the situation. As long as none of the culprits trespass my solar system, I won't go hunting for them anywhere, even if I know where they live. If this bloody mess has taught me anything, it's that fools who try to police more than their own lands get calamities and hecatombs dropped on them, and it never ends well. You'll get the memories in two days at most, do what you will of them."

Rodney McKay queried carefully "In the event we would like to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the conflict between our two groups, would you be open to parley? We can set a neutral emplacement to hold the conference."

Shaking his head, the tired, depressive teenager closed that conversation avenue hard. "There is no negotiation to be had with me, not about what happened on Earth. You wanted me off planet, so I left. If your cretinous twits in charge had been more patient, they would still have a livable planet to inhabit. The fault is theirs, and yours for keeping them in power so long. I'm gone, I have nothing left on the mudball, so there's nothing to speak of. Stay out of my solar system, and I'll stay out of yours. That's the best treaty you'll ever get from me, and nothing else. End of message."

"Allie! Wait!" Scott shouted as he jumped from the command chair, quickly marching to the front of the group. "Can we at least speak, about the family and what happens next?"

Looking at his older relative's pale worn face and exhausted demeanor, Alan replied softly "You are mistaken. I have no family. Don't call again, you'll have no kind reception from me. End of message."

The screen turned black, then switched to show outside the ship's bow, the small dependent ships moving to & fro with people or cargo, between the cuirassé, destroyers, cruisers, and the badly damaged orbital stations that all needed help staying alive.

Scott turned around, silently leaving the bridge without asking anybody's permission or opinion, and passed caring. He had a felonious parent to go interrogate, and it was a good thing he was behind armored glass, otherwise Scott would murder him before getting his answers.

McKay and Sheppard exchanged worried looks with the ship's new captain, new first officer and new second officer, all of them understanding that while the System Lord of Unrest would not attack them, he would never help them either. This was now an official dead end, with precious few chances of changing in their lifetimes.

{ IR } - { Betrayal of long date } - { SG }

Unbeknownst to the SGC crewmen aboard at the time, the One-Armed Bandit had been sabotaged during its construction. Several of the drydock workers had been of Chinese nationality and severely monitored by the Communist Party's political police, to ensure loyalty and doctrinal compliance. These men and women were pressured with threats against their relatives living in the Chinese mainland or phantom colonies, to install spying devices in the servers, nodes and comms relays of the Bandit to give the Chinese secret services unfettered access to the most secure and sensitive information of the SGC brass and IOA Council.

As such, the spying system were programmed to scan and analyze automatically certain information, then package the report into a tightly compressed, heavily ciphered file that was sent towards secret cloaked reception satellites, twice per day.

This was how the surviving Chines colonies received confirmation of Alan's identity as the Lord of Unrest, and his location.

The result would be catastrophic for a lot of people, most of which wouldn't even know why, or see it coming.

In the first beginning of Kree

(Stargate SG-1 – opening theme)

Saturday 1st of July, 2034; 12h00am (noon)

Temple complex

Planet Ankh, system Noah's Ark

Alan sat in one of the neural chairs stolen from the damaged SGC ships, activating the meta-station function to scan through the files prepared by his mainframe for study. Brainchild-1 had actually found a lot of data about their arthropod neighbor, and it appeared to be very important as it had been marked a priority above the network mapping or solar system surveillance.

After reading a few paragraphs of text in ancient Revered System Lord Noah's research files, the teenager understood fully why BC-1 had indicated this subject was of paramount importance for their group.

Because the alien lobster-kin was Kree, The Despoiler of Divines.

You know the old phrase 'Jaffa! Kree!' used by the Goa'uld's soldiers for nigh on twelve millennia?

Well, he was THAT incredibly, awfully, terrifying entity; Kree.

As in, "Jaffa! KREE, the menace to your gods' existences is present! Run for your primtas' lives!"

Well, those were the bad old days, anyways.

Every bit of research plus all interviews with the creature itself indicated that Kree had been born naturally to a species that was long extinct, since its most imminent prey was the lake full of feral primitive Goa'uld situated a few minutes' trek from the partially submerged cavern system they nested in all year long. Being amphibious swamp-dwellers themselves, the ancient and respected Kla'tha'k-thar'rii had ruled the sandy beaches, rocky shoals, tidal pools, silt bottoms, and even climbed up the trees and hillocks to make their vitrified, carved rock pillars, to show they had been here. As the seasons passed over their lands, the mighty clawed people hunted, gathered and toiled under the boiling summer sun, rains of autumn and snowfalls of winter, enjoying a diverse, balanced climate in their temperate swampy valley between the low hillocks.

It was because they ate raw Goa'uld, both mature and primta, entities known for their impressive and lengthy cellular memories, that their kin had accidentally transferred most of those mnemonics over into the genetics of the Kla'tha'k-thar'rii, increasing their intellect over the threshold of full self-awareness and sentience to rival primates, avian, reptiles and insectoids of the era.

For centuries, Kree's species had feasted gloriously upon the squirming, whining eel-kin retches whose only plans for the future were to invade and mind-rape hominid hosts to enslave them, using their arms and legs to do what the menial Goa'uld couldn't. But the much larger, stronger and amphibious Kla'tha'k-thar'rii had no use for such weak artifices as a host. They were born with powerful limbs, and superb venoms in their mouth and tail to back it up against big threats. A single sting from their tail could fell a large mountain cat or wild boar in less than four seconds, and the powerful swipes of their claws could break the leg of a bear.

Kree had been a mighty and proud member of his species and their budding non-hominid cultural tribe. They had developed a complex tongue, including verbal, gestural, iconic and written parts. They had developed songs and musical notations. Thanks to their particular digestive system, when they spat the acid from their guts it ignited after six seconds in open air or water, allowing them to learn the uses of diverse fires and fuels in both domains they dwelt. This led to their learning about wood and coal, then tar, petrol, gas, animal and vegetal oils, and eventually to cook their food when it wasn't a tasty Goa'uld whose brains needed to be raw to impart their memories and skill-sets.

The ancient Kla'tha'k-thar'rii learned how to stack stones with silt, wood and bones, then cover the structure with more of the same, then letting it grow plants and small critters so the whole would be strong with life and the Natural wisdom of the Land.

They slowly learned to make separate fireplaces in their huts, to have a half-pipe canal to evacuate wastes and flood waters when they built on tidal pools, shoals, or above natural water tables for those that preferred having a dry sleeping bed.

{ IR } - { Home-grown monster } - { SG }

But then horror struck at them from across the twinkling stars of the night skies.

Coming from another planet, walking in by the Chappa'ai was a new type of an old, well-known monster.

A Goa'uld who had taken an Unas for host brought a squad of the first ever Jaffa soldiers to fight the Kla'tha'k-thar'rii.

The Unas itself was a formidable enemy, in terms of physical prowess, but a swarm of the clawed fighters would have overwhelmed it anyways, as it always did with any threat. However, the Goa'uld had brought Jaffas, humans modified by a biomantic ceremony that created a pouch in their abdomen to carry and nurture a primta until it matured and chose a host of its liking. These ordinary humans, being weak by nature, had tools and weapons; swords, axes, boar spears, and especially basic beam weapons, in the form of blasters that shot small balls of scorching swamp gas that glowed in the dark of night, and could shoot even under water.

With such ranged weapons that could fragment rocks or explode tree trunks, it didn't take long for the foul Goa'uld to accomplish its murderous deed, decimating the main colony of Kla'tha'k-thar'rii in existence. All others were small family units or lone hunters that had detached from their birth country, traveling far from the swampy caverns. The more intelligent and learned of their kindred had even managed to learn to read the glyphs on the Chappa'ai dial podium, to the point of triggering the gate's opening and daring to travel to lands unheard of before.

This was the only thing that had saved his species from utter genocide. A few clutches had survived, primitive but hearty and healthy, their existence unspoken as they preferred to dwell far from any other sentient species, and they had stopped eating Goa'uld a few decades prior. Without any recent sightings of Kla'tha'k-thar'rii, the foul Lord and its Unas host were under the belief they had eradicated their ancient nemesis, so they left the planet, but only after setting the entire forest on fire with their staves.

Kree had been one of those 'lucky' highly intelligent travelers who were testing the Chappa'ai, trying to incite his kindred to spread-out to avoid the depredation of the encroaching humanoids from the nearby villages.

His efforts were too soft, too kind, and too late to avoid the horrors of real, modern warfare with tools.

{ IR } - { The Red Claw of Kree } - { SG }

Kree had come back to the home caverns from his sixth gate voyage with a web-net full of samples of foods, woods, rocks and a few small metal tools dropped by travelers around the gates on other worlds, when the convoys camped for a few days. Glass bottles and pottery jars were particularly interesting concepts to use to store food or fire-fuel.

The massacre was already a week old by then, and the forest had stopped burning when the autumn rains had started to fall.

Kree tried desperately to find survivors, elderly adults or juveniles, normally hidden away at the bottoms of submerged caverns too tight for humanoids, alligators or large snakes to get into without facing a wall of claws and venomous tails, or a cloud of fiery oil let loose in the water of the tight access channel.

For several weeks with little rest, pausing only to sleep or eat to keep up his strength, Kree tried and failed at finding any other members of his species.

The foul Goa'uld had been thorough in his murderous purge. Equipped with tools and ranged arms, his minions had taken the brunt of the arduous task, but accomplished it nonetheless. But not without a heavy toll, as Kree saw by the hundreds of Jaffa corpses that were rotting everywhere, in the waters, tidal pools, sediments at the bottom of ponds and streams, or even up in the tree canopy, when an adventurous fool had followed a retreating Kla'tha'k-thar'rii up to ensure that the kill was done.

Kree mourned for months, aching in his soul so much that it felt as if his lungs were burning, and his eyes couldn't see right anymore. After half a year wallowing in despondency, another stranger came through the Chappa'ai, telling the villagers that he was a God, come to elevate them to the heavens, if they knelt in servitude to his greatness.

He was a Goa'uld, hidden inside an unfortunate Unas host.

He was also alone.

Kree took advantage of the cover of night, waiting for the fool to stand on a stage to pontificate at the crowd the virtues of submitting to him, to slowly crawl to his back and stab his leg with his venomous tail spikes. Within two seconds the Unas was on the floorboards, writhing in delicious agony, slipping into deathly stillness less than five seconds later.

The first blow of the retaliation had been struck.

But it wasn't over yet.

The cowardly Goa'uld usurper feared death, so it crawled out of the Unas' mouth, hoping to surprise a human to hijack it as a stand-by flesh puppet until it could go fetch a new Unas to try again. It emerged from the dying body only to fall directly into the eagerly waiting claws of Kree, who promptly did as his ancestors for millennia. He bit into its raw brainstem, feeding on its lifeforce, memories and skill-sets to steal what had suddenly made its kind such destructive foes.

And so Kree learned about the humanoids who used the Stargate network for millions of years.

He learned about the Gate Builders and their ruins, left around the entire Galaxy.

He learned about machines with motors and batteries, that move without legs and shot beyond the hillocks to hit the villages of poor, unsuspecting peasants whom had never done any harm to their neighbors.

And he learned about the great metal vessels that swam in the dark night, amongst the stars and dreams, built by the Alterans, Asgard, Nox and Furlings.

And so Kree began to travel the Stargate network, visiting the villages and pilgrim convoys that depended on the great naquadah rings for their commerce and survival. Kree was so different from all other species, plus his inability to speak their tongues as his vocal cords just couldn't produce the sounds, that he began doing things simply. He hid by day then skulked around at night in the swamps, streams, sewers and dumpsters of the small communities he haunted like the vengeful specter of his dead kindred he was.

And he finally found one, a Jaffa carrying a primta in his belly and the metal brand of his false god on his face. Kree followed him discretely, from the sewer pipe where he crawled, observing his movements and habits for days. Then, when the Jaffa went to his home for the night, to sleep in his bed with his mate, Kree climbed out of the sewer, up the house walls, into the open window that had no glass panes for the Jaffas of this world were too poor, and he struck. Secretly, silently, Kree hit the Goa'uld-less mate with his tail, then the Jaffa, positioning himself to retrieve the vile, parasitic worm from the dying flesh when it emerged to save its cowardly life. And so Kree feasted on one more enemy's brain that night, then went to mercilessly pike the three children in their beds, including the baby in its rocking crib, which he kept for last as it could do nothing to defend itself but wail.

Because he was avenging his extinct people and felt his cause was just, Kree demonstrated just how advanced and educated his kindred had become. He used his great claws to cut open the Jaffa's guts to drag the entrails to the floor of the living room, arranging them in a passable Goa'uld glyph that was the closest equivalent to his name. A single terrifying sigil composed of blood, offal, churned entrails and hashed primta that would haunt all Goa'uld and Jaffa for all times to pass afterwards.

The Red Claw of Kree, The Despoiler of Divines.

And so it went, for almost two full millennia, that Kree travelled by the Stargates, alone or by stowing onboard a convoy, searching for, hunting, stalking, and murderously despoiling the primtas and mature Goa'uld out of the cooling corpses of the fools that gave them their flesh in servitude. And just like they had genocided his own spawns and elderly, he did to their families. Occasionally, he also used his fiery stomach excretion to arson homes, inns, warehouses, temples, and even hospitals full of sickness, if the buildings he found Jaffa in were flammable and undefended enough to attempt the act.

As he aged and learned more about the Goa'uld language, and then the Lantean of the Gate Builders, Kree began to use the tools of the bastard Goa'uld against them and their troops. He learned to work the staff trigger with his claws and feeding arms. He learned how to pull the pin on grenades and throw them with a swift claw-smack or tail-swat. He learned how to exponentialize his arson by lighting up existing fuel or spreading it like lamp oil, alcohol, coal depots and such, or to torch from the attics which were usually far less solid than the foundations. And when the Jaffas modernized enough to have domestic electricity, Kree learned how to cause short-circuits in the breaker boxes, or to set batteries in salted water with extension cables attached to the wall outlets, so that they exploded when the village policemen lit the lights or appliances during the investigation of his killings.

It was quite the shock for the poor Jaffa when they saw him, the first time he carried a ma'tok staff on his back, using his four pincers to aim it while his tail pressed the trigger to shoot fiery plasma death at their ranks. Or when he managed to set grenades linked by thread or wire to explode in a circle around the patrol path of their village militia. And Kree had always had a nasty habit of using snakes and other venomous creatures that he positioned just in the worst places to create panic amongst mothers and their children, thus making an opening that he could exploit to enter a house or escape from his most recent bloody ambush.

Then, along the passing years, Kree had bitten into enough Goa'uld with medical and bio-sciences erudition that he began to use synthetic poisons in the wells and aqueducts of villages, or gasified compounds in the ventilation of small edifices and spaceships. At first he stole the toxins, then eventually he managed to learn how to craft the simpler versions all on his own, with no more than kitchen appliances and supplies. Seeing the dreadful efficiency of the indirect method, Kree made the effort to start reading the journals and magazines that many cultures made about health and medicine, to increase his murderous potential by himself, instead of waiting to bite into a Goa'uld apothecary by luck. This dedication to his lethal craft made Kree the only Kla'tha'k-thar'rii to ever have any type of 'formal' schooling. It also meant he became so knowledgeable in herbs, drugs and poisons of all sorts that he could now mix them in food to imitate an allergic reaction or an error from the servants, to send suspicions elsewhere.

But the Goa'uld were busy modernizing a lot more than kitchens and bathrooms, they were also motorizing their armies with several smaller vehicles, not caring for the peasants who didn't really need to go anywhere in life. Kree however was very amused by all the mechanical thingies, so he learned when he could. Mostly by books or data pads that he took in abandoned houses, or in those where he had just killed the inhabitants. The first time he tried to start a motorcar was a bust, as he could see clearly that nothing was shaped or positioned for his morphology. In fact, most vehicles suffered this problem, so he learned the theory of their functions and driving, but couldn't practice, only stow-away in the cargo box with the other refugees and escapees.

But not all was lost. The Goa'uld System Lords suffered from a veritable problem among their ranks; their Jaffa were mostly primitive illiterates whose entire life had been spent gathering, hunting and farming, but without any formal education. This would be a serious hurdle to the mechanization of the troop movements demanded by the System Lords. The solution was proposed quite simply; use the neural interface consoles already common on Cheops and ha'tak ships to let even the dumbest Jaffa pilot small craft. It was just a question of removing the genetic lock and powering the console enough that it did all the effort for the untrained pilot. This technological choice had the very unfortunate consequence that Kree was now able to enter such ships and take over their flight or weapons systems as efficiently as the Jaffa recruits. By the end of his first millennium of life, Kree was able to slowly and carefully pilot a death glider or al'kesh up to the cloud cover, bomb the villagers from out of their reach, or ability to detect him, then move to a different planet to hunt a new target.

At the moment he reached the venerable age of 2,500 years, all by his lonesome, Kree had probably murdered close to 15,000 Goa'uld and more than 50,000,000 Jaffas across 1,200 solar systems. Given his use of poisons and orbital bombardments in the last few centuries, he'd also made a few million collateral victims but never bothered to look at them closely to know details.

{ IR } - { System Lord Noah } - { SG }

The old Goa'uld System Lord Noah had made his entire life out of studying strange lifeforms, preserving original exemplars while creating mutated versions to see if he couldn't make better livestock, beasts of burden, guardian animals, or even evolved hosts for the primta. In fact, it was his deep and insightful work that led to the creation of the 'Goa'uld bodice' device to create an abdominal pouch in a basal human while rewriting the DNA to make them into a naturally reproducing Jaffa. From then on, when a Jaffa was born the pouch existed but was sealed, needing to be cut open by a priest wielding a healing device to ensure the flesh flaps were geometric and well repaired.

Well, the ancient Lord Noah, who was at the time third in command to Antep, Overlord of the Conclave, had many thousands of informants and hundreds of mercenaries on his private payroll. These men brought him information about the weird creatures they encountered, or brought back the specimen he demanded, to put them in his xenozoological gardens. But you wouldn't know that these people worked for a Goa'uld, as none of them had a symbiote, and most were from populations that had suffered beneath the System Lords, often to the point of eradication. However, survival often forces people into bad choices, and it meant that Lord Noah never had any shortage of workers ready to hunt, capture or kill for a purse of naquadah ounce-ingots.

Because he was an ancient Goa'uld from the very old days, Noah had little care for things like empathy, sympathy or accepting that all sentient beings were equals that deserved fair treatment. He was a conqueror who had spent his youth on safaris, gloriously hunting the worse and most dangerous creatures known, and many that had never been known, too. Like the old British of the 1800's on Earth, Lord Noah was an avid meat-eater (via his host) who thrived on killing his meals himself, then enjoyed the pastime of taxidermy to build and decorate lavishly appointed trophy rooms with ornamental glass boxes to display his finds.

But hunting was a very demanding sport, especially to find a good hunting ground with challenging prey, prepare the trip, hire men and vehicles, assemble the bloody convoy itself, and then after two or three months of dithering, finally go on a trip for a few days or weeks to bag a handful of critters. Once Noah was old enough, and his works on biology, Goa'uld medicine, zoology and xenobiology became renowned, he was promoted to Vizier of the Conclave by Overlord Antep which meant he had a full-time job and couldn't just hark-off to a hunt when he felt like it. His solution amused the entire Conclave, and was somewhat popular for a few centuries, early on.

As part of his promotion, he was gifted dominion over a wild and primitive solar system that he quickly began turning into a fortress to lodge his laboratories and temples, as well as many exposition gardens to display living beasts for the amusement of visitors. In other parts of the system, he created natural preserves to permit noble guests that paid for the privilege a good and challenging hunt for the beast of their choice. Quickly, humanoids became the favorite prey, and Noah had to dedicate several of his least useful moons to man-killing sports enthusiasts, making diverse climates and biomes to further flavor the game and experiences of his rich clients. He even allowed the humanoids to live long enough to reproduce and form communities so that they could educate themselves, form diverse cultures and thusly make for an even more varied and satisfying environment for thrill-seekers.

And that is what happened to Kree.

After 2,500 years, he had gotten too old, too fat, and far too slow for guerilla warfare anymore. He was spotted repeatedly in the same six solar systems where he was slowly making his mind as to which old, primeval swamp he wanted to end his lonely life in, in-between bouts of killing Goa'uld and their servants. Kree had just done a cruel, amoral act of mass-murder by pouring a vicious bacterial agent in the aqueduct of a ten thousand citizen town when he was first filmed without his awareness. Then he was photographed and filmed repeatedly over the course of three months. And finally, he blindly walked into a trap as he used the transport rings of an arsoned temple he'd burnt down fifteen years back. Instead of appearing in the small tel'tak he was aiming to steal to go bomb another town, he appeared inside a containment cage covered in force fields and stasis fields that immediately paralyzed him, body and mind going inert.

He woke up in Lord Noah's solar system, inside a cage made of crystal like they used for ha'tak viewports. Even at the prime of his youth, when his claws were strong, he could never have broken those panes to escape. He was now locked in a crystal aquarium with artificial climate and day cycle, under the unblinking gaze of sensor lenses. The once proud and fearsome Kla'tha'k-thar'rii avenger, last survivor of his country, had been reduced to something like a farmer's fayre exhibit, just another freak beast brought in from the swamp for the gawkers to jeer at. He was a prisoner, and things got ugly real quick. The experimentations were inhumane and willingly cruel by design, with constant use of the kara'kesh before, during and after each procedure, to see what his mind felt and understood of the process as it happened. Thousands of meticulous tests were done, his entire body & soul was raped, catalogued and filed for the use of Lord Noah's biomantic studies.

Growing old and feeble alone is bad, but this was abominable.

However, not all was lost for Kree, since he wasn't the only one that was old and alone.

Lord Noah was well acclaimed for having finally captured the dreaded Red Claw of Kree, Despoiler of Divines.

Overlord Antep had brought the entire Conclave to planet Ankh, to personally use the dreaded kara'kesh upon Kree to delve into his memories, to make sure they had in fact captured the correct monster. When it was proven by several Goa'uld System Lords that they had seen the same memories of his millennia of murder, the verdict was in. Kree would be the living trophy of System Lord Noah, and it would be his primary task to keep the arthropod contained, as a living proof that nothing can defeat the Goa'uld in their collective almight.

However, Lord Noah had a different set of priorities than the Conclave. He wanted to see how and why the Kla'tha'k-thar'rii had evolved the way they did, and why it was they did not require naquadah in their bloodstream to have psychic abilities, unlike the Goa'uld who were basically unable of higher mental functions without the radiological element in their diet. Beyond that, Lord Noah especially wanted to have long studies of Kree's memories and hunting strategies to improve his own, and maybe even clone a few to see if he could beat him one-on-one in his diverse living arenas.

But Lord Noah was actually older than Kree at that point, closing in on seven millennia of life, prolonged by use of the sarcophagus and potent nutritive elixirs made from the blood and humors of hundreds of beasts and sentients. But it wasn't enough. Lord Noah was becoming old, slow, and even changing for a young host every decade was no longer enough to compensate for his age and social isolation from the rest of his civilization, which was leaving him and his hunt-based culture behind as obsolete, or worse, something to put in history books about dinosaurs and pre written language evolution.

The Revered System Lord that had brought peace-of-mind to countless hordes of Jaffas and hundreds of Goa'uld by his capture of their dreaded enemy was now as irrelevant as the geriatric prisoner he kept watch over.

And so, Lord Noah, in a fit of despondent pique fueled by alcohol and some choice herbal drugs, had begun using his kara'kesh to link with Kree just to speak with him. He needed to share his loneliness to stave-off depression, and have some sort of sentient creature to speak with that wouldn't turn their back on him. What was the point of having intelligent prisoners if you couldn't talk to them about life? So, Lord Noah, being set aside at the Conclave as obsolete when compared to noble Heru'ur, son of Ra, and his new shipyards, or the devilish Sokar and his Jaffa breeding program, began to consort socially with his prisoners. He started creating small protected gardens covered by forcefields in lieu of the crystal cages, to give the entities more space to live, and himself a better setting to socialize with them. Then he began to build new temples to allow for several entities that could cohabitate peacefully to live together, getting some social interactions without him, all the while being watched by sensors and guards to avoid revolts.

It was during these more sociable conversations that Lord Noah discovered Kree's amateurish studies of herbs & animal parts, the apothecary arts, dabbling in modern chemistry, and eventually xenomedical techniques. Having accidentally found what he saw as a companion hunter and student of nature, Lord Noah started to better care for Kree, having him moved to a large, open-air garden where he could hunt or built a hut to his liking. As the weeks and months passed, so it was that the two ancient enemies became the closest friends each other had left in this cruel, uncaring world.

Over the course of centuries, Lord Noah slowly passed from prison guard to hospice manager as his living inmates aged, fell to senility and died with as much peace and dignity as the geriatric Goa'uld knew how to give. And he was learning quite a lot about such things as psychology, psychiatry, active listening, empathy and emotional connection, given his own badly manifesting age. In fact, Lord Noah was aging so badly that he had to resort to the Asgard Vice of cloning himself -the symbiote- to fully benefit from his intellect and memories, because his natural body's brain had begun to fail. Now fully immersed in cloning and its uses, Lord Noah began to clone his most important creations, transferring their memories and personality to make certain he didn't lose any more of his precious 'friends', now that he had realized how vital to his welfare they were.

Without planning for it, Lord Noah had become a shut-in, a hermit-genius hoarder enclosed inside his own 'little' domain, isolated from society and the world at large, to the point that the Conclave of System Lords no longer called upon his expertise in matters of medicine or biology. And now that ha'tak class motherships were common amongst the richest lords, zoology and xenobiology had become a hobby for idle Goa'uld with too much brain power and free time. No, real System Lords wanted exactly that; solar systems, colonies, and populations of slaves to subjugate as cheap labor, so the higher sciences were pretty much abandoned in favor of petty warmongering and carefree violence for the sake of amusement.

{ IR } - { Dread Lord Anubis } - { SG }

It was in that political and social climate that emerged the foul and insane monster, the Dread Lord Anubis.

For centuries the fell beast labored hidden in shadows and layers of illusions, climbing up the ranks by cunning, guile, crimes and murderous acts until he secured himself a seat as Underlord of the Conclave by killing the occupant of the posting. Then he displayed a vast trove of science and relics taken from hundreds of populations that amazed (and scared) the Conclave into elevating him to full System Lord. But Anubis was not satisfied, not as long as he was subordinate to anybody. And his crimes were so numerous and foul that making allies proved to be fruitless for the warminded zealot.

So, Anubis thought he could 'make' himself an army that would be as docile as it would be powerful.

The solution was simple; go to the old recluse Noah's domain to steal his sciences and percolate some minions in vats. The ancient crud was long dead, so nobody would say anything, or at least not to his face. And since nobody cared to learn such advanced sciences anyways, the impetus to accuse him of theft or tomb robbing wouldn't even exist.

The foul Anubis had a right nasty conniption, when he saw just how lush and overgrown the planets and moons of Noah had become in the last two millennia, returning to a condition almost as primitive and virginal as when Noah had first arrived. The place was even prolific enough in plants and critters to support full-grown dinosaurs and laboratory-made chimeras that looked like the mythical dragons, leviathans, and other esoteric monstrosities so powerful that a fully shielded al'kesh bomber would be afraid of them!

And then the calamity was revealed; Lord Noah wasn't dead!

Anubis was impressed in a bad way, and in a towering rage at the sight. He tortured his spies & information supervisors to death for having failed to provide him with truly updated information about Noah's condition, then ringed down to the main planet's temple complex. Lord Noah was not, at first contact, adverse to the idea of being paid to create an army of living soldiers for Anubis. He thought it was a better and more reliable solution than Heru'ur's idea of making robots that thought enough to be autonomous on the battlefield. And Noah wasn't adverse to the idea of Anubis being more powerful than him, as he'd moved away from politics and the Conclave centuries back. In fact, even the negotiation for the payment and terms of delivery were pretty standard for Goa'uld of their level, so no problems arose there.

It was the last item that Anubis wanted that made Lord Noah see him as an active threat. Anubis wanted Noah to return to the Conclave at his side to support his bid to unseat Antep and his progeny, meaning his son Ra and grand-son Heru'ur. While dynastic vendettas and clanic murder weren't particularly disgusting to Noah, as he'd done it himself in the distant past, it was the basic reason for the acts that made him finally break from Anubis and his mad scheme. Anubis wanted power, and more power, and Power Penultimate, but he had no real plans or schemes as to what to do once all that power was in his hands. Like a man suffering from Gold Fever, he was obsessed by Power, craved it, envied it, dreamed of it, had neurotic fugues about it, and had centered his entire life and career on it, but had not a figment of idea what to use it for once in his grasp.

Anubis was clinically neurotic, sociopathic, psychopathic, schizophrenic and quite profoundly disconnected from reality.

And Lord Noah was the very worse person to whom Anubis could have revealed this. He had been an expert predator and warmonger for eight thousand years more than Anubis had been alive. Furthermore, Noah did most of his killing with his own hands, rarely by minions interposed as was Anubis' favored method to acquire anything.

Awakening old medical knowledge and reflexes from centuries gone, Lord Noah understood he was dealing with a rabid dog, especially when the mad Goa'uld revealed what he had done to Revered System Lord Telchak, the creator of the first healing sarcophagus. The lengthy tortures Anubis inflicted on the other Goa'uld were base and crass, done only because Telchak had told the truth about the limits of the device versus energy physics, chemistry and biology. The sarcophagus was based on an Ancient device that was simply too powerful to be used on any being other than a pure Lantean, which was why Telchak had designed the less powerful but more manageable golden box. But Anubis didn't believe he was truthful, since other System Lords claimed to have produced variants that raised the dead back to full health (super-sarcophagus of Sokar) or created obedient zombies (the Black Cauldron of Skull-Lord Arawn). So, the enraged psychopath had tortured Telchak to permenent insanity, then dropped him back on Tauri to exist amongst the dregs of the basest, most ordinary humans in the universe.

But Noah was well aware of these devices and their construction, as he had been remotely involved in the R&D under paid contracts by their developers, when they hit points of deep biology or psychology they couldn't surmount. Noah knew that the machines existed, were complete and worked as their Lords bragged about. He even had a few living and taxidermized exemplars of super-Jaffas and undead Cauldron-Born Jaffas right alongside of Arawn's other work, the cybernetic Jaffas. And he realized what atrocities Anubis would unleash against his own species, as well as the Multiverse, if he were ever allowed to become owner of such advanced sciences, technologies and know-how.

In despair, trying to buy enough time to scare-off the murderous traitor so he could warn the Conclave about the imminent menace, Lord Noah did the last thing anybody would have expected. He used his most powerful biomantic elixirs coupled with his own unique version of a sarcophagus, the Blood-Bound Casket, to take the worse menace known to Goa'uld kind and evolve it into a true engine of pain, death and despoilment. Then he let it loose aboard Anubis' ha'tak during the last day of parley for the supposedly already agreed contract to build him an army of docile killers.

System Lord Anubis had never been in a fight like this in the entirety of his misspent life, and carried the scars of it for the rest of that even worsely used existence. Atop the flesh wounds, his already fragile mind finally shattered forever on that fateful day.

It had been a while since The Red Claw of Kree, Despoiler of Divines, had been in a good fight worth remembering. His original body had been too far gone along geriatric degeneration to be saved, let alone survive the modification process. So, Noah had quite simply gestated a brand-new body and transferred his mind, memories and personality into the new flesh puppet, fueling it with the research products of a dozen Goa'uld geniuses.

Kree was now boosted by the same elixirs as kept Noah himself fit and alert despite age, had reinforced nerves, veins and tendons for more martial prowess, while the works of Arawn made his entire ageing slow down to a crawl, plus having a host of nanites and micro-implants that allowed him to fake being a Goa'uld inside an unconventional host to hijack any of their systems. And now Kree was also able to spit or inject a poison that was specifically designed to cause bio-incompatibility between symbiote and host, forcing the Goa'uld to leave or die while the host would be unharmed and retain all the vast genetic memories from the parasite on top of being free.

But those were just the playthings… Lord Noah went all-out to build the Magnum Opus of his career, the proof of his superiority amongst all biomancers and necromancers of the Multiverse.

Kree was gifted with synthetic glands coded into his DNA that allowed him to grow his size inside a few seconds, his main body becoming as large as a Percheron horse while all limbs grew in proportion, especially strength, endurance and ability to absorb damages and pain. The twelve eyes on his head now had as many perceptions as vari-cams while the nodes on his antennae became as versatile as the sensors of an al'kesh bomber. This allowed to fully enable the psychic potential of the Kla'tha'k-thar'rii genome, freeing Kree from the need of a kara'kesh or other external tool to connect mentally with entities or machines. His mouth became able to detect thousands of chemicals and analyze new ones. Also, the mouth was modified to secrete and spit-out accurately globs of toxic mucous, glue, mud-cement, or silk strands & webbing. The end of his tail was modified to be able to produce the same excretions, as well as being able to generate and shoot poisoned chitin barbs at 10 yards. Given the need for stealth or tactical exits, Noah gave him a chameleon ability in his surface layers, and an energy cloaking field based on that of several creatures he had hunted. Then he added under Kree's flappy tail several glands to produce a clear & odorless sedative gas, a stinking oily mist, an opaque black ink, or a fluorescent pink psychedelic gas that caused panic, paranoia, and delusions of being betrayed by allies.

For truly awful weapons, Lord Noah placed glands around his entire body so it could now be sheathed in a lethal green energy field that emulated the zat'nik'tel at its worse, instantly disintegrating anything it touched. This would protect Kree from projectiles, clouds of poisons or diseases, parasites, most incendiary fuels, and easily defeat rushing swarms of anything. Then he added the ability for Kree to variate the strength of the field, from just pain, to stun, to killing without trace, to vaporization, so that the Kla'tha'k-thar'rii could either assassinate or capture & interrogate according to the situation. Then Noah worked on adding small naquadah implants in the tips of Kree's main pincers, buccal manipulators and tail claw, so that he could focus the green field and suddenly extend it like an actual zat pulse, reaching up to 150 yards away on each limb. Then, Lord Noah worked on the creature's digestive tract, modifying it to work like a natural ma'tok blaster, generating plasma inside the stomach then shooting it out by the mouth with exactly the same firing options and range as the staff-weapon, including a small gland that kept liquid naquadah to add to the shots if Kree felt the need for some 'oomph' in a particular situation. Then, looking at a box of Tacluchnatagamuntoron that was waiting to be put in the emergency reserve, Lord Noah decided that this was a good idea, so he began to re-work Kree's eyes to add the capacity to emit laser beams to serve as active CIWS on the critter's frame. These eye-beams could reach an impressive 150 yards away, to cut, drill or ignite just as the real laser-trap grenades & pistols could do.

But that wasn't all; since Kree was the last of his kind and had no known allies, Lord Noah decided to empty-out the vaults and build into the Kla'tha'k-thar'rii' body a system of parallel nerves that would emit energies similar to the Blood-Bound Casket, allowing the effluves to heal both body, brains, mind, memories, personality, and even stimulate the nanites to repair or update the implants and cybernetics now dotting the creature's being. Plus, Noah had programmed that effect to allow it to boost immunity to drugs or poisons, act as a parasite flusher, and safety against mind-warping techniques like those of Ashrak and Zatark traitors. Then he added specialized foci to direct these healing effluves externally to an ally, or prisoner being interrogated, into the two buccal manipulators that served as Kree's hands for everyday activities like writing/ typing on keypads, or his apothecary studies.

Once fully reborn, fueld and fed, Kree then showed the Multiverse anew why his full name was 'The Red Claw of Kree' as his impressive pincers ripped primta out of Jaffas' bellies, or his potent toxins made Viziers and Underlords flee the plushest of hosts in fear for their lives. In a matter of minutes from having been ringed aboard the insane conqueror's ship, the Kla'tha'k-thar'rii avenger had murdered a dozen soldiers and two bureaucrats, with more on the way as he supped again on the warm juicy brains of freshly slaughtered, self-important eel-kin.

Then the Jaffa got out the heavy ma'tok cannons on wheeled chassis, the grenade launchers, and even shoulder-fired missiles, despite being inside of their master's own command ship.

Kree was flattered, to be honest. He hadn't had a reaction like that to his presence in almost three millennia by then, so it felt good to be the center of so much attention, especially when the fearful Jaffas kept shouting his name again; "Jaffa! Kree!" was heard quite a lot in the following days, as it took Kree almost a week to process through the ha'tak. Damn, but those ships were big!

Unfortunately, that delay was all the cowardly Anubis needed to ring himself over to an al'kesh waiting in orbit, then call for another ship to come support him. In this, Lord Noah and Kree lucked-out far more than they had the right to expect from this fight or the enemy they faced. Anubis was already embroiled in a dozen petty conflicts all around the Goa'uld realms, so the only ship he had left available was a venerable old Cheops class troop lander that had seen better days and was now limited to training sorties for new recruits. It was also a full week away by hyperspace, given that its engines were as old as the rest of the hull and systems aboard.

So, Anubis sat on his hands for an entire week, listening on the comms or watching through the internal sensors, as the murderous and merciless Kla'tha'k-thar'rii warrior exterminated every being he met, without regards to rank or species, and when he killed Goa'uld, he fed on their minds as much as their flesh. For the first time in his existence, the Dread Lord was made to see and feel his personal limits as a warrior and leader of men, his dreams of Power Penultimate being rendered to shreds by the pincers of a creature he saw as barely above the animals he ate when he ordered a buffet of seafood served to his guests. Surviving this humbling event would be determining for Anubis, as it changed his manner of command and his methods to obtain power, specifically that now he would orient his most arduous efforts towards finding a way to become unkillable and immortal.

When the blasted Cheops finally arrived, Anubis ordered them to shoot at the derelict ha'tak, forcing it to fall from orbit down onto the main planet of the system, causing massive environmental and climatic damages, followed by mass-death when the radiation and fires spread around the lushly vegetated biomes.

But that wasn't enough for Anubis.

Even if the damned critter had finally died as it deserved, Lord Noah survived, hidden on his world, protected from direct ground assault by his murderous creatures and paid humanoid minions. He also had quite a few clever machineries too, as evidenced by the anti-orbital fire his troop lander kept having to dodge if it stayed on a parking pattern too long, so going planet-side to deal with the entrenched vermin was no longer an option.

But Anubis was nothing if not a vengeful bastard, and a tenacious one. He placed his Cheops class mothership in the middle of the solar system, well away from defensive arrays, and begun to plot a cruel and unusual fate for his foe. He employed his vast trove of alien relics and sciences to produce a stone monolith that emitted an ionic wave capable of dampening electronic devices that were not built in exactly a certain manner, or with certain elements. This would allow the enemy to have a few machines that worked, yes, but it would cut-off all his surprises and specialty devices, leaving only 'low-standard' equipment in play. Then Anubis flew into a great rage because he had found the perfect way to sabotage Noah's planetoids, but he didn't have the resources to produce enough to cover all the inhabited zones in the system. If he had kept the derelict ha'tak in orbit, his troops could have risked salvage chores to recover metal to make the monoliths, but the blasted thing was burning on the ground, and being ripped apart by the primitive humanoids that Noah kept as hunting prey for his paying guests.

Furious beyond all description but unable to change his character or thought patterns at this point of his life, Anubis still ordered the construction of several monoliths that would be brought down and positioned by al'kesh, then triggered to activity all at once. When three rings of twelve stone pillars were in place, the Dread Lord activated his punishment, including the added suggestion of his Vizier, the clock-killer virus that would decimate the computer cores of the enemy while leaving their own systems intact.

All his hopes of quick military might dashed to bits, and with new worries about his personal weakness to brood darkly upon, Anubis finally left the desolate system, but only after having done a bombardment pass at each planetoid with an atmosphere, just to make sure they all suffered his displeasure fully.

{ IR } - { Kree's freedom } - { SG }

Kree was free.

Finally, after more than two thousand years spent in captivity, the ancient/renewed warrior was finally liberated.

After spending five days in the ha'tak killing the crew and petty nobles, the Kla'tha'k-thar'rii had realized that he had lost himself to the hormones of the superb new body, and the battle-lust frenzy that he hadn't experienced in so many centuries. He was suddenly vulnerable to attacks from outside the ship as there were almost no enemies left, not that such sentiment would have stopped either Anubis or Noah from leading such a strike. Seeing his disadvantageous position, Kree had done as so many times before. He used the rings to leave the ship, going to one of the tertiary moons that served mainly as lodgings and supply stores for the mercenary hunting bands employed by Noah, at the height of his xenobiology studies. Nowadays, the moon was almost abandoned, left to the care of automated devices and elderly slaves that had proven they didn't need supervision to work.

It was from the control center of that moon, three days later, that Kree saw the ancient Cheops class troop carrier arrive, recuperate the al'kesh containing Anubis, then promptly open fire against the despoiled and idly drifting ha'tak, causing it to fall from orbit in a glorious, blazing dispersion of radioactive molten metal shrapnel that craterized the main planet's best biomes, utterly ruined the guest hospitalities, and detonated Noah's private research center when the main mass landed in the edifice's courtyard.

In a fit of pettiness, when Anubis activated his ionic wave emitters, he also renamed the main planet 'Cesspit' instead of the name it had been given by original Goa'uld explorers, thousands of years before. For some reason, the name stuck till today.

But all that was unimportant compared to the great news!

Kree had felt the psychic slave bond created between himself and Noah by the damnable Blood-Bound Casket shatter into inexistence when the ha'tak's dead hulk had fallen on the research center. The old crud had taken refuge amongst his best creations, just in case Anubis was dumb enough to try a landing action, despite what his people suffered because of Kree. And that fear-based reflex to go home and hide under the bed had just cost Noah everything.

Kree was free!

The last living Kla'tha'k-thar'rii avenger was free to start his crusade of punishment and despoiling anew!

Except he didn't.

Kree was close to 4,400 years old by then, and not in the mood to continue dodging enemies all his remaining years. And those years could be a whole lot, considering what Noah had put in this new flesh puppet of his. One thing the elderly Goa'uld had bragged about was his capacity to extend life AND slow down aging at the same time, and that was before using a sarcophagus.

Kree could live three times his normal lifespan now, and probably far more, if he acquired a few elixirs and tools along the way.

But did he want to?

Taking a few weeks to travel by ring and ship between the planets and moons of Noah, the Kla'tha'k-thar'rii was happy to see that he wasn't feeling slower, or ill, or had any bad effects from his 'recreator' having died. This was inspiring, as was the rather damaged condition on each of the planetoids. It meant that the central slavery management computers were probably off-line, and all the tasty, challenging prey could be hunted without getting zapped in the head by his implants when he chose a more exotic meal to enjoy.

So, Kree toured the solar system and chose to keep his primary dwelling in the enclosed living courtyard of Lord Noah's private mansion. Having no competition for the sprawling manor as most slaves fled when they realized the central controllers were disabled, Kree had full liberty to establish himself. His conservatory with the crystal roof that was already optimized for his biology and preferences, so Kree didn't see a reason to go live elsewhere. Lord Noah had even built an amusing pond with a decorative islet in the middle, just to hold a miniature manor house for his celebrity tenant to live in grand style.

Kree took great pleasure in redecorating the house, stripping off the gaudy Goa'uld ornaments, replacing them with the bones of the critters he hunted for food or sport, becoming almost nostalgic as he realized how approbatory Noah would have been, as he had been such an avid hunter and taxidermist all his life. That was when Kree was hit by a tsunami of melancholy, as he finally realized just how important Noah had been to him, having been a true friend in the last six centuries they shared.

The mini-manor took many long months to alter properly despite being simple, but it didn't matter. Now, he finally had a properly conceived Kla'tha'k-thar'rii dwelling, with stone walls and a garden roof that would grow plants and living creatures to keep him company as he whittled away the days of old age, waiting for the death that was already passed its due date by several generations of his kind.

{ IR } - { The worlds moved on } - { SG }

Then, as the slow days of his retired life passed by in peaceful hunts and leisurely viewing of the news channels on subspace, thanks to the excellent systems in the ancient residential complex, Kree became aware that Dread Lord Anubis had made his play for the post of Overlord, challenging three of Antep's favorite System Lords in one move, killing them and publicly eating their brains in display of ferocity and power. Or maybe he thought he could absorb their souls, like Kree did? Anyways, the madman didn't bother to wait to see the reactions of the main Goa'uld population before he took his small fleet of ha'taks and Cheops troop carriers to the principal world of Antep, bringing the war to his doorstep. Because he was passed 11,000 years old and slowly fading to geriatric illnesses, Antep was no match against Anubis, not in one-to-one combat, nor in military commandment. And all the conclave saw it too, when Anubis used a Lantean hand-device to forcibly extract Antep from his host, then ate his raw brains right out of the still-writhing symbiote as final act of domination and almight.

But Anubis miscalculated badly.

Instead of fearing him, the other System Lords loathed him, realizing what rabid monster he had become. Then, they received an automated message from one of the back-up comms relays that Noah had left at the Conclave's only dedicated space station of Hassara. In the message, Lord Noah told the Conclave of the many crimes that Anubis had committed secretly, as found and catalogued by his spies and mercenaries over the centuries. It averred that while Noah himself was not interested in politics or conquest, he knew better than to ignore those motivated by such visceral impulses, so he kept on maintaining and growing his massive network of informants, mercenaries and assassins. When the Conclave heard what Anubis had inflicted on Lord Telchak, and for what idiotic reasons, they revolted against the wannabe Tyrant.

With a massive push of support from the System Lords, Antep's oldest son Ra stepped forward to challenge Anubis and slowly ground-down his small fleet to nothing, then accosting the upstart in person. And again, Anubis had badly overestimated his own capacities, just as badly as he underestimated Ra's overall abilities in military matters. So, the face-to-face combat ended very badly for the usurper, and lasted less than a few minutes before Ra's cloaked Ashrak attacked from multiple sides with hara'kesh and A'tar blades, while Anubis was forced to dodge ma'tok blasts and zat'nik'tel beams from the innumerable hordes of Jaffas that had answered the call of Ra to repel the beast that killed their lawful Overlord.

Finally, forced to his knees in front of thousands of menials, with all the System Lords, Lords, Underlords and Viziers watching through the security sensors of the palace, Ra removed Anubis from his host by using the very same Lantean device the criminal had used on so many victims, including Telchak and Antep. As punishment for his unspeakable crimes and sins, Dread System Lord Anubis as sentenced to eternal exile, by being put in a stasis canopic jar which was then entombed into an inter-system missile with a much bigger fuel reserve, allowing it to reach the very edge of the galaxy.

This déchéance was such a fall from grace that even being killed by the old way of dropping the symbiote in a tank full of poisonous ants to be eaten alive now seemed to be a gracious mercy by comparison. Still, the System Lords in post approved the method beforehand so they were bound to it as much as Ra and Heru'ur, the legal inheritors of Antep.

Except that their victory over the usurper was quickly overshadowed by a small but glaring moment; the revolt of the basal humans of Tauri that led to the expulsion of the Goa'uld from the planet and the burial of the gate. The world that had been the bountiful source of slaves and livestock for hundreds of worlds, for multiple millennia, had suddenly become forbidden to them, forcing the System Lords to find new ways to procure soldiers, slaves, beasts and materials. How could they be Lords, if they had no servants or worlds to their names? Who would glory them and bask in their might, without the original source being accessible?

Kree found the entire debacle quite amusing, from where he was hidden. The foolish eel-kin had essentially spread outwards from their homeworld, then grabbed a primitive world as the most important resource hub for the whole society but never bothered to do anything to defend it from internal revolts or external attacks. How hard would it have been to just place a small starbase, or even an old starship as guard post? How could they not build Jaffa garrisons when they had millions of soldiers all over the bloody galaxy? And it wasn't that expensive to make ma'tok staves to arm them, given how simplistic the tool was. A single Udajeet airfighter located at each garrison fortress would have kept even the biggest human armies submissive to the Goa'uld.

But no, the Goa'uld had done nothing, since they had become mentally lazy, as all slave-masters always do.

All this brouhaha gave Kree no ends of amusement, as the fools were now destroying themselves without his help.

And so, his decision made, the last Kla'tha'k-thar'rii would disappear silently, becoming forgotten at last.

{ IR } - { Alan's decision to be himself } - { SG }

The adolescent boy stood from the neural chair to walk around his camp, believing the movement would help him to think about the situation that their hard-shelled neighbor represented.

Without realizing it, Allie walked through the rooms and corridors until he had reached the larger workshop where Joran Knowles had been installed, both as living space and work area. The tall black male was currently sitting on a wheeled chair, eating the food he had warmed in the open-pit forge where he heated metal pieces, a lot like Alan did in his own temporary dwelling.

"Hey, man… Am I bothering you?" asked the boy as he approached the resting adult.

Shrugging indolently, Knowles replied between bites "Nope, just having lunch. You know, the meal between two parts of a work shift? Like the stuff you've been doing all day. Aren't you gonna get something?"

Snarkily as he could, Allie countered as he dropped himself in the other chair; "Why, Jorry! I never knew you cared so much! You being all fatherly's givin' me shivers all over!"

Snorting back a heavily implied rude comment as he was chewing through a large bite, the older man shook his head at how the kid was a master at deflecting questions concerning his health or welfare. Damn Jeff Tracy and all he stood for. Joran would like to have an hour alone in a dark room with the criminal, just because all five of his sons deserved better, and Alan most of all.

The noisy rhythmic pounding of metal points on stone was suddenly heard as Replibug-1 entered the hangar, trotting on the flagstone at a fairly fast clip for itself. It directed its steps towards the forge, laboriously crawling up the masonry rim to trot along the lip until it was situated besides Alan, at an angle to watch his face when he spoke.

"Unimind broadcasting; Brainchild-1 has informed us that you have studied the files concerning the alien entity you encountered as result of investigating the death of the parasitic criminal. What is your conclusion for the situation?"

Slouching restively in the swiveling armchair, Alan replied "The critter is fully sentient, and named The Red Claw of Kree, or just Kree nowadays. And your answer is: Nothing. There's nothing for us to do. Yes, Kree killed Rath'ahl, but then again, we were pretty much about to do the same thing, anyways. On the other hand, Kree stayed silently isolated for nearly 8,200 years without bothering people, his long war against all Goa'uld having ended for that long, despite being set free from his captivity. It was merely the improbable event of a Goa'uld getting lost near his hunting trails that put Rath'ahl in danger. Also, if we had made contact prior to that meeting, it's possible Kree wouldn't have killed him, because he was an ally to a known neighbor."

The Replicators silently cogitated the answer received for a few minutes, commenting "We understand your desire to not have another fight, so soon after the events of Earth. We also understand that the creature named Kree does not represent an actual danger to our community as we are not edible by its biology. We are not certain, though, for your own safety. Caution should be observed until the entity has been spoken with at length, and an actual Treaty established between our groups to guarantee the safety of Creator-Alan-1 and his assets." Moving its hands like an ordinary human in thought, Unimind added blithely "If the sacrifice of the criminal Trangh Bellegant is demanded as payment for peace or passage rights, we would not object to paying."

Joran stopped moving with a forkful of food just about to go in his mouth while Alan leaned backwards into the headrest, closing his eyes in silent long-suffering patience to keep himself from answering that one rudely. The Replicators had warned him a few times that they had no gods, religions or 'soft morality', so this comment from them should have been expected. And, in a way, Alan did expect it, cuz the metallic bug had told him as much yesterday, after his surgery and the recovery of Trangh.

Giving a careless shrug, the teen declared aloud "Thanks for the vote of confidence in my abilities to negotiate a good treaty. As for Trangh, I think I'll put him to work at something simple, to test his reliability. If he betrays any of us, he'll die quick. If he manages to work well and remain loyal as we ask of him, then he can live as long as Nature allows him. I won't immediately kill him just because of what the worm in his head did while he was in charge. But at the same time, I can't stupidly ignore that the man was a budding career criminal anyways. He's dangerous in his own rights, but he's also getting on in age, with no family or support. Maybe, just maybe, we can be useful to each other enough to live and work alongside each other for a while."

Joran wondered aloud "And if he wants to just walk through the Stargate? Would you let him?"

Slowly, Alan nodded, answering softly "As long as he can pass a neuroplexic interrogation about his intentions towards us, I would let him leave unharmed. I won't enslave an entity, I won't torture people, and I refuse to simply kill or destroy anything that wants to live independently of me, my fleet or our Alliance. I'm not the police of the Multiverse, and I will not become like Antep, Anubis or Ra. If his plans really don't concern us or cause us grief, then he should have the right to just leave and not fear us hunting him down."

Replibug-1 moved it dorsal arms to join its fingers over itself, like a fat bourgeois in reverse, stating "Unimind broadcasting; We agree with your judgment of the situation. Trangh Bellegant is not considered an active danger, therefore we will not ask for his extradition to our community, and will not seek his demise if you allow his departure."

Knowles blinked in surprise at that pronouncement, demanding of Alan in a disbelieving tone as he pointed a finger at the silvery insectoid atop his forge-pit. "I agree about not killing the man right away, not that I care. But what the bloody blue blazes is that about, kid? What do they mean, extradition? And why do you sound like you do know, already?"

Giving the athletic engineer a smirk, Allie explained "When the stupid Chinese army beamed Replibug-1 aboard the ha'tak, I didn't appreciate it. But, instead of killing them or enslaving them like factory robots, I communed with them via neural-link to establish a peace Treaty between the Alanaria Fleet and the Unimind of the Tauri-strain Replicators. In that Treaty is a clause for the right to extradite, hunt or move through allied lands, any criminals we declare publicly as such, providing we also forewarn each other that such action will be occurring. That means that even if I, the Creator of Alanaria, decide to grant a stay of judgment to Trangh, the Unimind could put forth a request for his extradition because they see him as a criminal, or menace they want to settle in their own ways. And honestly, in this case, I wouldn't have many moral qualms about handing him over without making demands for his return or safety at the end of the trial process. Unlike you, who aren't an actual criminal or threat. If Unimind asked to extradite you, I would flat-out refuse for lack of cause, or even probable doubts leading to a credible cause."

Dropping his empty enameled metal plate in a plastic tub next to his chair, Joran declared bluntly "You had already decided, hadn't you? Before you even had us put in stasis pods? You were already sure of your path. You had to be, to act like a sovereign country with other populations or nations, and to be thinking of Treaties, borderlines, justice and extradition. You knew, at least in the back of your mind, that you were going to be a leader. All you had left to do was decide what kind of leader, and why that way."

Nodding slowly, the boy assented, replying softly "Yes, in the back of my mind, the moment I set foot inside the IR Command Center, I had this feeling that my life would never be the same, simple, lonely farm-boy ever again. That was confirmed when I discovered Thess'thannu and decided to keep it for my group. But, I refuse to be yet another conqueror covered in the blood of demolished cities, continents and planets out of mental laziness. I may have named myself 'System Lord of Unrest' but nobody ever asked what I meant by that title. They'll be getting a right nasty shock when they figure it out."

Standing from his chair, Alan stretched out his arms and back, letting out a groan of satisfaction as the movement woke him up for the rest of the day. He had several things to do, and not many people that could help him so wasting time wasn't gonna be a thing from now on. Waving a lazy salute at the two -colleagues- he marched out of the hangar, looking at his bracer computer to find the only other human in the group. He had to tell Trangh of his decision, and finally decide what to do with the old man to make him useful, if he didn't decide to simply walk out.

The darkness in the hearts of broken men

(The Lord of the Rings – Uruk-Hai march)

Saturday 1st of July, 2034; 16h00pm

Qin Empire light cruiser Téng Tiáo (Rattan Cane)

Chinese hidden colony #7; Chénsī de Māotóuyīng (Pensive Owl)

Captain Lan Tian-Fe walked onto the bridge of his ship with a sheaf of papers clutched aggressively in his right hand, a small black plastic envelope in the left hand, and a grimace of his features that forewarned his crew that things were going to get bad very quickly for their small vessel. Sitting in the command chair, the middle-aged naval officer toggled the PA to give his orders to the entire crew at the same time, so there would be no 'bazar phone' effect to impact morale or efficiency.

"This is captain Lan speaking. Our spying array inside the SGC has intercepted communications between the One-Armed Bandit and the being that calls himself 'The System Lord of Unrest'. Since we now have positive validation of his identity and location, our leaders, here in colony #7, have rendered judgment. For innumerable and irredeemable crimes against the People of China and fomenting to stop the rebirthing of the Exalted Qin Empire, the man named Alan Tracy is condemned to die by the most expeditious and efficacious means at our disposal. There will not be an arrest. There will not be a presentation of charges. There will only be the localization and destruction of the target, plus any allies or machineries around his body at the time of execution. By the will of the Prince Pensive Owl, subject and servant of the Emperor of Qin under the Jade Palace, do our ancestors command us. Over."

Shutting the PA, Lan ordered "Conn, start the pre-flight checklist. Operations, release the landing pad moorings and umbilicals so we can depart. Navigation, I have a crystal chip with the System Lord of Unrest's entire file, so find the coordinates for his gate and get us there so we can finish this chore. The faster it's done, the faster we can concentrate on ferrying cargo & people between our own worlds to rebuild our families. Security, get me a weapons checklist, including the planetary bombardment options."

{ IR } - { The Rattan Cane} - { SG }

Captain Lan activated the holographic display on his console to begin his own verifications over his motorized domain.

The Rattan Cane was a small, fast-attack vessel designed for speed, agility, rapid reflexes and tight-quarters maneuvering against starbases or much larger ships. Coming in at 500 meters long by 200 meters wide, holding seven full decks plus three partial decks on the dorsal aspect for the conn tower, the light cruiser was exactly that; lightweight but tightly packed with weapons.

The general form of the ship's hull was copied from the much lauded Daedalus class of cruisers the SGC had first built in the early 2000's, when they had received Asgard technical support. The Chinese government had spent five long years studying the original designs before coming out with their own version. Captain Lan was honest enough to admit his superiors had probably botched the job yet again, as they tended to do when 'remaking' vehicles or machines from other countries.

In this case, the side hangars were the proper proportions, but didn't have any cargo ramps to move ground vehicles when the ship landed on a planet or larger artificial structure. Everything depended on the teleporters to get on & off, except for flying vessels or humans who could use life-pods or small hatches for emergency escape.

The other big change was that the Chinese version had more weapons than the SGC model, but at the cost of reducing the living spaces for the human crewmen. All bunk rooms, officer cabins, dining halls, gymnasiums and communal living/gaming rooms had been shrunk by 30% to put extra turrets or missile launchers. Even the infirmaries, convalescence and quarantine rooms had been reduced by 20% to add batteries or generators to feed the beamers and shield projectors. It was a small miracle the government hadn't decided to thin-down the outer hull or insulation layers to shave weight off the frame to reduce fuel consumption in atmosphere or sublight situations.

On the other hand, the Rattan Cane was able to do like its namesake; swish around to inflict tremendous pain for something so thin and small. The ship had six cruise missile launchers in both bow & stern, plus eight ICBM vertical cells built into the rear wall of each lateral hangar. Not trusting Lantean drones or the exquisite control SGC personnel had on them, the Chinese ship used instead AI-guided medium missiles manufactured at their hidden colony #1.

The ship's CIWS was based on a gatling gun look-alike that was actually 12 ma'tok blaster cannons without the liquid naquadah infuser, pre-set for scattershot salvos of 48 bursts. Each CIWS turret had four such guns to guarantee nothing penetrated the deflection zone covered by the device.

The secondary weapons were turrets holding one Tollan ionic cannon and a pair of zat'nik'tel cannons with full firing options, including the choice of killing only organics or only computers by selecting the frequency & polarity of the beam.

The primary weapons were eight barbettes on each of the bow & stern, holding a single Lantean Guardian Laser amplified by Asgard force-lenses, surrounded by six tractor beam emitters to hold/repel targets, or serve as gravitic hammers when necessary.

The ship had capital weaponry in the form of a prototype recombinant beam array which had 12 emitters, located in groups of four on the bow and around the doors of the two lateral hangars. When all twelve beams shot forth to combine into a single massive flow of energy, the weapon could output the equivalent of 35% of an Ori bombardment dish, but flying at speeds similar to most of the other energy weapons, instead of being horrendously slow like the original device.

The Rattan Cane was not truly designed or armed for planetary bombardment, a task normally reserved for heavy cruisers or star-destroyers. But the small ship had enough range in its primary barbettes to position itself at 15,000 kilometers above a world to slowly slash & burn to charred chunks anything that wasn't mobile. If the ship was parked at 8,000 kilometers, then the Tollan cannons and zat'nik'tel could shoot bolts that would saturate the atmosphere, shorting out both computer systems and the nerves of organics, depolarizing their brains fatally. And if worse came about, the vessel could launch the sixteen naquadah amplified nuclear missiles, each tipped with a single warhead equivalent to 3,5 gigatons of explosive force.

The embarked dependent craft were basic but serviceable. Six generic Tube-trucks with Magna-wings in the left hangar, and nine newly built but reliable F-502 Manta two-seat starfighters. The small vehicles carried two forward-facing 75mm rail-cannons with 25 shell magazine, four ma'tok cannons with liquid naquadah infuser placed two bow & two stern, 16 small AI-guided missiles and a raiding beam emitter. Designed with decent armor and two shield layers, the Manta was one of the most reliable Tauri fighters in service, unlike the pitiful joke called 'Gaterunner' that nobody wanted to even look at, let alone pilot.

Captain Lan had asked the colonial commandment for the usage of a special mission pack that could be installed on the ship's back, in front of the conn tower. In was made of two modules linked by solid pipes to bring power from the rear block to the actual weapon in the front block. But the ship-sized 'The Sky has Fallen' ionic nebula cannon was the only such unit in the colony's arsenal, and was already being deployed to become permanent anti-invasion defense, to watch over their airfield and hangars. If he were asked his honest opinion, and not afraid of retaliation, the officer would have replied that the cowards in command were afraid of their own men, so the massive gun was being put in place to intimidate the crewmen and neutralize any large vehicle that became disloyal.

{ IR } - { Departure for a darker world} - { SG }

"Captain! The navigation charts are updated! We have a full data set for the route from Pensive Owl colony to the planet Ankh, in the Noah system. We will have to use an indirect path, else we would pass close to nine worlds closely allied with the Tauri, and they may report our passage to the SGC. Also, the Noah system is actually on the far-side of the Goa'uld Empire's historic territories, many of which have fallen to anarchy due to Tauri war efforts, and then the bloody Ori. We have to avoid being detected by those, or pirates and worse could try to grab us. I have sent the preliminary maps to your console for approval, sir."

Nodding at his subordinate, captain Lan read through the flight plan and signed it without issues, except to add the usual 'fly under radio silence & cloaked' notice common to black-ops of this sort, that the navigator didn't have the authority to put himself.

Speaking aloud, Lan ordered "Conn! The flight plan is in your console! Get the engines hot and lift us off the landing pad, command won't waste time with the usual departure platitudes on this one. They want this parentless mongrel dead, and are passed caring for how it gets done. So, get us out of atmo in the next ten minutes, if you please."

The twenty-eight year old ensign at the wheel snapped back "Aye, aye, sir! Getting to space in seven minutes, sir! Sounding lift-off bells now!"

As the bothersome tinny noise of the aforementioned bells sounded all over the ship, the bridge crew could see on their screens the large expanse of the spaceport and airfield, with small CIWS turrets and defense jeeps, along their sister ship, the Riding Crop under captain Te Ashee, getting its final supplies and crew so it could finally be put in service. It would take another week to ten days, but the additional light cruiser would be a great boon for their organizational capacity, not just fighting. Since they had put so much effort in building combat or industrial capacity in the hidden colonies, they had brought almost no women and not a single child, so their viability as a civilization was in peril. Having another ship with quick engines and cloaking system would allow them to make multiple sorties towards the existing SGC away sites, or even to Earth, to recover as many pure Chinese citizens as remained alive, and then go to primitive Asian worlds to recruit 'race cousins' to build-up their genetic basin for procreation.

Not a warmonger by character, captain Lan was realist enough to foresee that the colony's commanders, feckless knaves each, would probably put in place some sort of 'kept women' system. They would allow -trusted- soldiers to capture and hold primitive women for breeding, or simple pleasure & household chores. It had been done several times in ancient Chinese epochs, and many of the politos dreamed of doing it again, as a proof of their nation's superiority over all they saw or touched. More than a few of these men wouldn't hesitate to admit they dreamt of keeping a European or American woman to break her, to make her pay for all the sins the USA and old countries had committed against China's purest sons in the last thousand years. Lan also knew that such a system would be the dagger that shredded the soul of his country's last survivors, confirming they had devolved lower than the Americans or English they loathed so fervently.

Blinking his eyes to clear away the maudlin' thoughts, captain Lan asked the helmsman "How long to reach Noah's system?"

Responding over his shoulder, the pilot declared confidently "We can cross the entire Milky Way inside of twenty-four days, so getting there shouldn't be more than 70 hours, without layovers. If we have to do pit stops, all estimates are scrapped."

Shaking his head firmly, Lan countered deathly serious "No stops anywhere, not unless one of the hidden colonies is being invaded by ground assault forces while being bombarded from orbit. Those are the orders in our mission brief. So, we keep radio silence on all frequencies, but we listen as much as we can, especially the SGC comms. And make sure the lines from our spy satellites are clear and strong! We want to make sure the Tauri fools aren't sending an ambassador or merchant delegation to this damnable whoreson. We would have to wait for their departure before we attack. We don't want to give them any reason to perform a second culling of Chinese people and assets, like they did after Hu Dengchu's death madness. All stations, confirm verbally!"

Getting a strong verbal call from each bridge officer, the captain tapped his command codes in the ship to disable the self-destruct devices that would engage if the vessel were to leave planetary atmosphere without his precaution unlocked. A mere two minutes later and the bridge's main viewscreen showed only the infinite blackness of space, with the colorful auras of the system's planets and moons as they flew by, away from their colony at full sublight.

"Going to hyperspace in five, four, three, two, one…" the pilot called out, as the hyperdrives opened the window into the parallel dimension for faster-than-light travel.

"Confirming engines optimal, speed maintaining, no hull stresses, no weird sounds." The ops manager called in turn.

The security chief declared coldly "Our superior power management design has worked as planned. We are able to maintain the kinetic/monophasic shield in function while in hyperspace, unlike the Asgard who had to un-shield because their principal systems were too voracious for the effects they produced. This is one element the SGC got right, and I'm glad we took it from them."

Grunting an absent-minded assent, the captain leaned backwards in his chair, watching the green swirls of hyperspace, wondering just how bad the coming fight would turn out. Nobody had even guessed that the derelict ha'tak could have been retrofitted the way it was, or that it could still fight so powerfully after rusting in sea water for twenty-eight years. And yet…

"What do you have for us, Lord of Unrest? I am certain you are not undefended, but what did you prepare for such event?" whispered the anxious captain under his breath. Not getting an answer from either Nature or the Venerable Ancestors, he bent to the touch-screen on his console. If he died, nobody would care, but if they won and returned home, then the bloody paperwork would be due as always, no excuses acceptable, even from war heroes.

Helping Kree

(Stargate SG-1 – opening theme)

Saturday 1st of July, 2034; 17h15pm

Temple complex

Planet Ankh, system Noah's Ark

Alan was seated in the hangar near the Stargate where all the stuff taken from the SGC during their fight had been stored, until it could be put to use. The teen was looking over the sensor readouts from when they had encountered the alien lobster-kin Kree. There were some disparities that needed to be resolved, even when taking into account his heavily edited genetics and rebuilt biology, thanks to Lord Noah's more than superlative sciences. If anything could be told about the old Goa'uld, it was that he understood living beings on a fundamental level that most doctors and pharmacists had no chance to ever match, let alone comprehend.

As he studied the pictures and life-signs, Alan finally realized what was wrong. The crustacean was brown! In the archive files kept by Noah, all the stages of biological maturation had been determined and categorized, including stillshots and films taken during the inhumane experiments. In all the films, from the moment of capture, to being cloned to avoid his death from geriatric illness, to when he was recreated to fight against Anubis, Kree's natural color had always been pink.

As in hot, fluorescent, Valentine's Day candy, match-the-sun-in-brightness, PINK.

But presently, he was mottled brown, and his carapace had a lumpy texture instead of smooth.

Well, except for the spikey joints, but those were natural like Scott's knobby knees.

Alan remembered that as he ate the centipede burgers, he had the time to look over the new neighbor and see many swollen bumps and discolored spots on his carapace. His eyes hadn't seemed able to focus very far, either…

As he turned the problem in his mind, Alan was disturbed by a soft scratching sound nearby. It sounded like a many-legged entity crawling around, so he thought of Replibug-1 and didn't emerge fully from his contemplation until it was too late. Despite having several fixed & roving patrols of tetrabot – shieldmates, plus one on bodyguard duty near him at all times, this particular critter had managed to quickly crawl around the camp, hiding beneath the furniture or vehicles. Then it found and attacked its distracted prey without being stopped as the robotic units hadn't been expressly told to class them as vermin to repel or exterminate.

Before he could react to the hostile presence, let alone identify it, Alan was screaming in pain as his lower leg was stabbed by a poisoned chitinous spear that was sharp enough to punch through the grieve of his IR field-suit, and almost go through the bones. As the boy fell from his plush neural chair while protectively cupping the injury with one hand and trying to aim the forearm weapons with the other, the enemy showed itself.

A centipede, like the one Kree had shared with him, had climbed up the armored transport crate some ten feet from Allie, with its forward quarter hanging down the side of the steel box to gaze at its prey. The thing was four feet long, drab green with red legs and antennae, yellow mandibles at the front, and a long smooth yellow round stinger at the rear. The animal's two compound red eyes were looking at Alan as if it were savoring his pain, and planning the next attack, while yellow acidic bile sluiced down its mandibles to pool on the flagstone floor with a low hissing noise.

"Shieldmate-7! Enemy animal!" Screamed Alan from between clenched teeth, as he fought the horrendous pain that was climbing from his leg, trying to enter his thorax to cripple him. "This is vermin! Exterminate this class of animal on sight anywhere inside the camp perimeter and safe zones!" With his last remaining strength, the teen used the neural link to call medical help as well as warn the camp inhabitants about the bloody menace crawling around.

The last things Allie heard were the blaring alarms calling for assistance that emanated from his suit's CPU, and the robot trying to shoot the damned insectoid before it could do more damage to their Creator.

{ IR } - { Beurkh! Sick again!} - { SG }

18h00pm

Alan blinked his eyes opened slowly, feeling groggy and nauseous at the same time. The chamber was spinning in a bad way, and he realized that he was flat on his back almost by accident, when he tried to hang-on to the bio-bed beneath him. Feeling reassured by the sturdy furniture, the boy began to organize his memories, then groaned as he did remember.

He got stung by a bloody large centipede, like an amateur camper without training.

Which, to be fair, he pretty much was, when it came to Noah's gardens, innumerable creations, and their mutated procreates.

Groaning audibly, he tried to sit, only for a cold humanoid hand to press on his bare chest to insist he remain flat. The white-clad form of octobot – savior-1, his specifically assigned medical warden, was understandably hovering because he was lying inside the medical pod attached between the two segments of the large robotic unit. This was a bit disconcerting, having the same face at both his feet and above his head… Later on, he would need to think about giving the poor bots different faces to go with their freer individual personalities.

The grating sounds of small pointy metallic legs on flagstone was heard as Replibug-1 made its way to the medical carrier, climbing up to visit its Ally in his time of need. Arriving near the boy's prone form, The Replicators climbed onto his arm, then traveled upwards to come at a stop on his chest, just a few inches beneath his chin. Their metal legs were a bit too pointy to have on bare skin, and colder than Alan had thought they would be, for having so much electricity inside the small bundle.

"Unimind addressing Creator-Alan-1; query – how is your exoframe? Has the repair cycle been successful?"

Sighing in deep tiredness and annoyance because this was his second major injury in barely 24 hours, the teenager grumped out miserably "I just woke-up, and I can barely keep my eyes opened without the room spinning like a tornado inside of a washing machine on spin-dry cycle. I don't even know what the injury was, except it was in the leg, or how bad it got." Yawning a bit, the youth asked "Hey, savior-1, what was my condition on arrival? And what did you have to do to fix me?"

The two-headed robot replied neutrally from both segments together "Octobot – savior-1 received Creator-Alan-1 with severe penetrating traumatic injury to lower left leg, which had passed all layers of armor, cloth, flesh and bone to deliver an organic toxin into the marrow. The carcass of the destroyed animal was brought soon after, and analytics were performed to determine the poison and its effects, then synthetize an antidote. The venom was from the creature's rear stinger, a neurotoxic paralytic designed to incapacitate the victim so that the insect could lay its eggs inside the crippled mammal. From the original exemplar of toxin, the antidote was created and administered via hemo-dialysis while the physical damages were cleaned of foreign matter, then rebuilt and sealed by use of the Goa'uld hand-device which was thoroughly sufficient for the task. The entire operation took nearly 40 minutes, and you have just been liberated from the neural dampeners that kept you asleep without the use of drugs. Full recovery should take no more than another two hours to pass the effects of trauma, sedation, surgery and antibiotics. End of report."

Laying his head back down, Alan gestured vaguely towards the medic as he told Unimind indolently "Whelp… There you have it. I got stung by a wee beastie, got put on the blocks, and now I'm all better. Almost, give or take a few more hours. No biggie. Anything happen on your end of things, while I was taking another enforced nap?"

The metal bug's eight glowing blue eyes seemed to glare at Alan's flippant dismissal of his new injuries. It was an odd feeling, since the Replibug really didn't have many mobile elements in its face to have any body language to express with. Still, Alan couldn't help but feel he was on the receiving end of a motherly (communal?) gaze of displeasure that meant he'd be hearing about it soon, and for a long time afterwards. Then, as he contemplated his first international Ally, he saw that its mandibles were actually moving soundlessly, as were the long dorsal arms, with the hands slowly tapping fingertips against each other, like a long-suffering parent or teacher confronted by a child's newest antics.

Frowning at the weird feelings, and, in true boy fashion, not wanting to analyze them too closely, Allie cleared his throat to change the subject to something far safer for his juvenile self. "Hey, I was looking at the scans from when I met Kree, this morning. I think he's ill but doesn't know about it. Or maybe his biology was modified by Noah so damned much that he doesn't know his own baselines himself anymore, so he thinks its normal. Anyways, I wanted to go talk to him about it, and offer our help to heal him."

After chittering to itself in its native Lantean tongue, Unimind declared aloud firmly "We understand your desire to assist what could become a potent ally. The entity's vast knowledge of the solar system and its secrets will soon become useful, we can foresee this. However, given your recent bouts of ill-health so close to one another, we would recommend asking the alien to come to us, in the camp, rather than risk further damages to you. This is, of course, your decision as you are the leader of your own sovereign country, but we believe that you have suffered enough health accidents recently to need a pause, before taking new risks."

Alan tightly pursed his lips to keep himself from either telling-off the nosy nanites that it was his damned life, or laughing at their suddenly parental disposition towards him, despite that they claimed to not have emotions or 'soft' decisional processes. Instead, the teen calmed himself, then replied politely "You concern is touching, and I will take it under advisement. Besides, I can't even get off the bio-bed without face-planting in the floor cuz stuff's moving all over like a drunken nebula caught by a black hole. So, I'll be a good little national leader and stay right here. Kree can come visit me, for a change."

Clacking its mouth pieces in satisfaction, the silvery being moved its entire forward half in an approximation of a nod, stating with relief audible in its polytonal voice "We appreciate your sensibility in this event. We shall be present during your hosting the crustacean, to ensure you are safe, in case he smells the centipede's venom on you and mistakes you for new prey. Some creatures are very much driven by their biological instincts, and we cannot take such chances with your welfare."

Crossing his arms over his chest and raising his head as much as he could without making himself more nauseous, Alan glared at the Replibug with a mighty frown of teenaged frustration. Since when had this Alliance become the 'Protect Alan from himself and everything else' group? That wasn't in the bloody pamphlet he wrote!

{ IR } - { Special biology equals boosted diseases } - { SG }

18h30pm

Kree was trotting along idly, his four antennae sweeping around his path as he moved on the cold flagstone flooring of the vast Temple Complex, as the edifice had always been known, since it was first built by Noah. He had just received an electronic message from his new human spawn neighbor that he thought Kree was sick, and offering to help cure the ailment if they could.

Kree was actually well aware he was sick, but it wasn't the first time this particular disease had stuck in the last 8,000 years of his lonely life. The unfortunate side-effect of having had his entire biology redesigned & rebuilt by Noah was that the Goa'uld wanted to make everything the penultimate best he knew or could craft. And to reach this goal, he was ready to sacrifice a few things, like the few comforts that Kree's natural biology offered to make life and aging easier.

The disease Kree suffered from was simply a bad case of 'molt rot'.

Like all crustaceans, shellfish and arachnids, Kree's species had to molt periodically as they aged, and they kept molting annually to dismiss the worn carapace segments so that their armor was always the best. It also prevented becoming infested by anemones or other plants that often managed to grip onto the hard shell of their commensal, then getting moved around as the main entity tried to find food or shelter, thusly feeding and protecting the plant at the same time. Be it anemones, barnacles, oysters or corals, these living organisms tended to grow quickly and become a true burden for the poor Kla'tha'k-thar'rii who had to strain to move the enlarged volume and mass of his shell's undesirable passengers.

In a few cases, some parasitic lichens had almost poisoned members of their species by digging through the small cracks made by everyday wear & tear, and trying to penetrate the veins to sap blood while pouring in anticoagulants and sedatives to make the victim less alert and less agile in its attempts to scrape-off the plants. A few Kla'tha'k-thar'rii who dwelt in the trees year-round had also fallen prey to arboreal mushrooms who normally created 'zombie-ants' but had managed to infect Kree's kin instead.

Needless to say, molting was a basal function of Kla'tha'k-thar'rii biology and annual calendar. It normally happened at the end of summer, taking no more than a few days to finish. The molt rot afflicting Kree had destabilized the entire process, though, and made his molting take several months. In fact, he had been lugging around the useless, worn-out layer of shell for nearly two years, but it was so thick and well assembled that it just didn't want to fall off on its own. The joints were almost split, and several smaller pieces had fallen to bits from daily usage like his mouth pieces and feeding arms, thankfully. But the larger armored segments were well and truly stuck, to the point a layer of smelly pus had begun forming between the old and new shells.

It was annoying, and for all his limbs and intellect, Kree was pretty much at a disadvantage when it came to healing himself from a problem like this. He had tried to employ the energetic healing system Noah had built into his body, but all it did was repair the obsolete layer, making it endure that much longer. Sigh…

Kree had sent all this information by network to the human spawn, and gotten a reply that it was even simpler to fix than he had thought it would be, so the lobster should come to their camp to be helped out of the situation, no charges or trade demanded.

Well, Kree wasn't afraid of paying for something, but it was nice to see that the young one wasn't just another money obsessed fool wanting to exploit the weaknesses of others. It meant he would have many friends and peaceful neighbors, along the length of his life.

The four-clawed amphibian finally made it to the healing chamber where the human spawn was resting, after his first encounter with a living junkheap centipede. Snickering silently to himself, Kree thought the poor boy had a really bad streak of ill-luck with regards to alien entities. Not that the lobster-kin would say it aloud, but he thought getting injured twice in two days was a bit much, for any explorer moving through foreign land. Then again, the child wasn't an expert or trained soldier, so it might be asking a bit much, for now. Letting the spawn forage in the junkheaps would teach him quickly what he needed for survival skills.

"Hey, Kree! You made it." Alan said from his convalescence bed. "Sorry I'm not getting up to greet you properly, but I have a bit of a reaction to the antibiotics used to fight the critter's venom out of my body. I should be good enough by tonight, maybe, if I get a little more help. Savior-1 is scrounging Noah's databases to see if anything more is known about these damned beasties."

Snorting amusedly, the crustacean climbed up the legs of the medical carrier unit, to reach Alan's resting form so he could perch atop his bare chest, next to Replibug-1. The teenager was now annoyed as both multi-legged entities had hard, pointy limbs that were digging into his epidermis to the point of becoming painful. "Sorry to tell you guys, but you'll have to move-off me. Human skin is just too thin and sensitive to tolerate both of you together, especially Kree, cuz he's not small or light."

Understanding the situation, both beings moved to stand on the table next to the bio-bed, by using Alan's extended right arm as passerelle to reach the furniture without going down to the floor. Now placed in a way the boy could see them, the teen explained what he had discovered about Kree's health, and the offer to help cure him if it was possible.

When Kree detailed what molt rot entailed, via a computerized translation system, the human snorted, replying "That one's easy to fix. You just need help cutting-off the old shell. The Alanaria Fleet medics have the tools for it, and you won't be hurt during the process. Maybe annoyed cuz it'll be slow, but you won't have any ill effects. It's only a small shear with a flat guide on the lower blade to make certain it never cuts into the healthy layers."

After seeing the tools the robot would use, Kree agreed to the treatment, relieved to finally be rid of the nasty old carapace and the gummy, smelly infection pus that had glued the obsolete layer in place. He carefully monitored how the medic proceeded, not afraid of betrayal or incompetence, but still, this was the first big cooperation between them and it would set the tone of how the neighbors related in the future.

Very carefully, the octobot – savior irrigated the carapace to remove pus while slowly incising and cutting small pieces of shell, a process that took nearly two hours, due to how many segments and joints existed in the creature's body. Thankfully, when a piece of shell was removed, the deformed transparent part over the eyes lifted-off along the harder surrounding part, thus avoiding to move the tool dangerously close to the actual ocular globes.

Alan kept Kree calm by speaking softly, mostly about his life on Earth, his family getting glossed-over, and the friends he had known, some that he actually missed. Occasionally, The Replicators would ask a question to understand the cultural context of gestures or concepts, but did not interject opinions in the boy's monologue. Kree was mostly silent, utterly unused to having any sentient entity this close to him after several millennia of complete isolation, even if it was just a robotic manikin. And the fact he wasn't the only thinking being in the room was also quite the change, after seeing people through a computer screen for eight millennia without ever having any interactions, given how he was too different from everybody he could wish to meet.

The two hours of work were not stressful for Kree. Annoying, yes, but not stressful. He didn't feel fear or anxiety, just a desire to be done with the damned carapace pieces and the stinking pus. The careful wash with warm water the robot did as he progressed was appreciated, and helped to calm his impatience. Honestly, it had been so many centuries since the last time he had been seriously injured that he barely remembered how annoyingly slow the healing process could get, especially when he was obliged to do it manually, without any of the energy devices or his internal healing aura. When the last portions of obsolete shell fell in the disposal bag hooked to the side of the operating table, the last living Kla'tha'k-thar'rii was truly relieved.

Now resplendently pink as his normal color was for a healthy member of his species, the arthropod blinked his large yellow eyes as he realized that sometime during the last hour, he had spaced-out, enjoying the lengthy hydrotherapy massage far too much to remain present in reality. The results were an assiduous but silent medical robot, a restive Replibug that was slouching on its belly with its blue eyes dimmed as it worked internally, and the friendly human spawn sleeping deeply as his light snoring told everybody in the room. Snorting in amusement, Kree decided to take advantage of the quiet moment to look over his new neighbors to get a better feel of them. It also allowed him to stretch his legs and back, to practice being fully flexible again.

The mechanical humanoids had well designed forms, but Kree wasn't much of an engineer, so he couldn't evaluate more than the machines' obvious aptitudes and mobility. The two matching robots did seem to be very useful, especially in the absence of a specialist doctor in Alans group. By comparison, the Replibug was small, had limited limbs and mobility but extensive power and connectivity with a personality that the other units didn't possess. The human spawn was physically normal for his age, and apparently not trained for combat or exploration at all, which he compensated for with a good character, mental aptitudes and having built a team of robots to assist him because his own people didn't want him anymore.

All in all, it was a rag-tag bunch that Kree had for neighbors, but not unworkable as shown by their generous offer to help his health get better without asking for a trade or price. Time would tell of things would go, but primary hints were good.

At a crossroads of uneasy choices

(Stargate Atlantis – opening theme)

Saturday 1st of July, 2034; 21h00pm

Tauri cuirassé One-Armed bandit

Orbit above Seattle, USA west coast

John Sheppard was really beginning to hate his damned job as he walked briskly through the doors of the main bridge, aiming right for the ready-room of the Tauri president. Not waiting for any invitation, John entered and curtly told the young soldier who was reporting on the ship's supplies & crew state to wait in the main room until called back.

After the doors slid closed and locked, Rodney snarked happily "Finally! You see why I never bother being polite with minions! Why should we bother when they'll never be around to be meaningful, let alone be remembered?"

Ignoring his friend's crass bombast, Sheppard dropped a black crystal stick on his desk, ordering tartly "Read this, then tell me if you still feel like gloating."

It took the scientist a mere minute to open the files and power-read through the salient portions. Slamming the screen shut with a nasty imprecation spoken in stilted Goa'uld that would have made Baal blush, host and symbiote together, the rotund Canadian engineer stood to fetch a fresh pot of coffee from the matter replicator. Offering his friend the usual condiments, McKay frowned mightily as he processed the finer details about the fucking depravity that just dropped on them.

Bloody paranoid Chinese and their schizoid delusions of Imperial Glory!

"What do you want me to do about this shyte? I mean, we'll be hunting down those bloody wiretaps and cloaked satellites, of course! But why did you drop this on me, when your security guys will be doing it all on their own, anyways?"

"You did see that they plan to attack the System Lord of Unrest, aiming to kill him and anything around him? So, what do we do? Should we warn him, or stay silent and hope he doesn't realize we knew?"

Pursing his lips, McKay eyed his colleague's closed, anxious visage as he bent his most magnificent intellect to solve the puzzle that wasn't yet being spoken aloud. "You have at least one other problem in the back of your mind, possibly more. Do tell." Rodney demanded from his oldest true friend.

Giving a single terse nod, John spoke through gritted teeth. "Okay, first; what will be the reaction of the Tracy's if they learn we didn't try to help their brother, a fourteen year old victimized kid, despite having the time and opportunity? Secondly, what if we did warn the boy? He said he wanted nothing from us, but also clearly stated he had no hostile intents towards us, which I believe. But, what if there was a small chance to change that? What if telling him bought us enough good will to at least have frequent comms to exchange news and critical data about climate, traffic and enemy moves?"

Stalking around the ready-room like a caged tiger, John swore rudely, explaining "I know what he did to Earth, and why. I have a gut feeling that killing him would not only be Justice for all who died since, but safer for us, in the long run. But, at the same time, I remember what the investigation team found in Tracy Villa, and in Jefferson's memory extraction. This kid was never planning to go rogue, to attack everything in sight for vengeance or Power, despite that hundreds of morons had given him plenty of reasons to go stark raving mad at humanity in general. So, what do we do, Rod? Do we stay silent, or take a whopper of a chance?"

Sitting back at his desk, the elderly scientist turned world leader responded with a well-worn, smug smirk that his friend had seen thousands of times over the years, when a truly arsed-up plan was gonna be put in action. "We do what we do every time the Worlds are in peril, dear boy! We race in with blazing beams, sharp duranium blades, and reality-warping wits the likes of which event the Great Ancients of Lantea never beheld!"

Snorting in amusement, John finished their old joke "Like every other night, after the day job is done."

Smiling widely, McKay toggled his console to get an external link, bouncing through several cloaked satellites because the SGC and IOA had been well aware of the paranoid and tyrannical tendencies of some member nations. The signal was a regular subspace line, but shielded so only SGC tech could accept it, and ciphered using a code Fermat Hackenbacker had reluctantly given him when it was proven Alan was indeed the mysterious System Lord of Unrest. The child-genius had wanted the leader of Tauri to have at least one chance to get an emergency message through, in case he decided to have a functional neuron in use. Smirking in true mirth as he remembered the 12 year old's acidic humor, Rodney input his authorization code to allocate the priority outgoing line, then waited for an answer.

{ IR } - { Uneasy truce} - { SG }

21h30pm

Alan was enjoying the warm feeling of his dinner sitting in his belly as he lounged sideways on his cot, recovering from his encounter with the aggressive centipede, eyes half-closed as he peered sleepily at the reddish flames that occasionally rose above the masonry rim of the forge-pit. It was a quiet evening now, and he felt restive enough to have set his music player on a list of softer songs from the early 2000's. As he wondered if he should go to sleep directly or bother with making the effort of reading some more tech manuals, Brainchild-1 called with an emergency.

"Warning! Brainchild-1 broadcasting towards Creator-Alan-1! Response necessary!"

Tapping his comm badge on instinct as he struggled to become more awake, Alan answered "I'm here! What is it?" Then he tried to achieve a sitting position as a gut feeling made him wonder how much rest he'd get tonight, if any.

"Brainchild-1 declares; incoming emergency communications from Tauri command ship, through back-channel network, using personal cipher of Fermat Hackenbacker. Action required. Awaiting orders."

Crap! Alan really hoped nobody had decided to beat on Fermat because they were friends, or he'd have to go to Earth to set some fools straight, then convince the pair of geniuses to move-in with his motley lot. "Okay, BC-1! Patch me through using the neuroplexic network. Monitor the line real-time, warn Unimind that I want their assistance in the link, but silently and invisible to anybody other than you & I. Over."

Sitting properly with his hands folded on his lap. Alan regulated his breathing to enter the neural link in the proper mindset, letting his conscience convert to Borg visuals and speech, his voice becoming polytonal as he immersed fully into machine-mode. Then he wasn't alone anymore, Brainchild-1 and Unimind joining him, slowly as they were careful of his fragile organic brain and soul, but strengthening their signals as they synthonized the three into a single response.

Accepting the Tauri line, Alan spoke firmly, his changed polytonal mind-voice badly startling the two officials in the room since he was on speakers. "I am the Founder of the Alanaria Fleet, master of Planet Ankh, the System Lord of Unrest, Speaker for the Host of Unquiet Souls. Why have you dared to use this cipher without its owner present? Answer me, or know a wrath so merciless that you will survive long and miserable years to properly regret having sinned against Us."

Completely taken aback by the strange polytonal sound and accent, Rodney nonetheless knew he had the right person, as it was Alan Tracy in the image on screen, and his lips moved along with the words. Setting aside the oddity of the contact, McKay went straight for the salient point. "I have a packet of information to share with you. It is critical that you analyze this inside the next hours, if you want to stay alive. Our agents estimate you might have something like 65 hours left, no more. The Chinese government had placed physical & software wiretaps in our drydocks, so they were able to sabotage all the ships and bases that were constructed, including corrupting the firmware, apps and datastacks on each vehicle. They got the call trace from when we used the Stargate for our first contact, earlier today. We don't know what they plan, but their best engines could put a ship able to commit planetary bombing runs above your head in five days, at the latest. Either get out, or get ready to fight for your life."

Frowning at the two old men, Alan asked verbally in his eerie voice "Do you have any estimates of their off-Earth colonies, ships and crew rosters? If you had blueprints of the ships, it would help, even if they were only summary or suppositional."

Rodney replied crisply "I have a file ready to send, but we'll work on completing the missing data as we discover the holes. Also, we committed a large purge of Chinese military assets, political attachés, and racist fanatics over the last two days. I mean millions of criminals were disintegrated by raiding beam, or their bases were bombed from orbit if they were in shielded bunkers. The people coming for you are the last dregs of a dead society, who dream of rebirthing an empire dead for a thousand years. Logic and survival aren't their mission parameters. And we won't take them back, if they survive the fight. Neither will their colonies, to be honest. To do so would be to admit they had sent them on official mission, and also validate the rights of losers to return home instead of dying on the field of war like true soldiers."

Alan blinked slowly as he absorbed the data-rich speech, commenting idly "I don't plan to let any humans leave alive, and they won't be accepted on my worlds. If at all possible, they will die in space and their tech will bolster my own assets. Even if I have to melt the scrap to make new items, I will not be put off from taking their resources in payment for violating my space and threatening my worlds. Since these are your enemies as well, do you intend to offer ships or men to assist?"

Shaking his head sideways, McKay answered blithely "No, we can't. Firstly, because there's not an iota of trust between us, so fighting side-by-side would just invite calamity to happen. Secondly, because all the damages to Earth and SGC ships were so bad, we just don't have any machines or personnel to spare. Everybody is either gathering survivors, or serving as ad-hoc medic even if they aren't qualified. We had to empty several of our garages to build temporary refugee dorms, parking the vehicles next to the Bandit like mules in a corral. This warning and the tactical files are all we can do to help you."

Nodding silently as he processed the situation, Alan then asked neutrally "What do you expect in payment for the warning? I may be young and lacking in international diplomacy, but I know how the real world works. Nothing is ever free, and anything that saves lives is definitely in the costlier brackets of trades & barters."

Pursing his lips as he thought quickly, Rodney demanded gently "Don't shoot at us first. If you meet our men or allies, try to talk first, and give us a chance to get our people in order so we can give you an answer that is properly framed and logical."

Speaking in his odd polytonal voice, the teenager replied formally "The trade was offered in good faith, and the price is reasonable for the service rendered. The Alanaria Fleet and its partners amongst the Unquiet Souls shall abide the terms of barter. You shall receive promptly the wide-public, civilian mercantile and military frequencies of our members, and a new private cipher to establish emergency contact between us. Tek'ma'te, doctor McKay. May you have fresh winds and sweet waters in the halls of your keeps."

The screen went black as the line dropped to data-only, waiting for the packet transfers promised. Rodney tapped a few keys to send what they had on-hand, while seeing that the comms frequencies and cipher Alan had offered were coming in already.

Sighing in relief, John whispered harshly "That went better than we had any rights to expect, or get. I just hope that when people learn about what we did, that they don't lynch us as traitors for dealing with the guy that destroyed their home and families. And I wouldn't blame them, dammit all! I'm not even certain we did the rightly moral thing, let alone the strategic one."

Whispering as well, Rodney answered distractedly as he was reading the incoming data "Agreed. But we'll know soon enough."

{ IR } - { And so tolls the Bell of Destiny} - { SG }

21h45pm

Alan hated what he had to do now, but other people had left him no choice in the matter. They wanted a war, he would give them one that they wouldn't recover from.

"Unimind, I have a task for your community, if you wouldn't mind?" he asked through the still active neural-link.

"We are Allies, Creator-Alan-1. We shall help as we can." Replied the nanite collective.

"In that case, we need to effectuate a remote hack on the Chinese network, to spy on them. We need all their military maps for emplacements, resources, ships & troops in movement, and any enemies they identified. If at all possible, we need some backdoors into their servers to make them crash at will, when we get to that part of the fight. Is this something you can do for us?"

"Unimind agrees to assist. This task is essentially what we were designed for, and no true drain on our resources. Also, that we would help in destroying those who enslaved us would be welcomed by our members. Do you need anything else?"

Snorting aloud, Allie replied amusedly "If you could copy their databases without being discovered, that would help us to determine if they have anything else hidden, like bombs or sabotage devices programmed to trigger if they are wiped-out."

A humorous hum wafted through the neural connection as the nanites contemplated how easy this task would be. It also didn't escape their notice that the human child had not requested any act that would endanger them. Should violence truly reach this solar system, they would need to be able to physically help, to keep him safe. Processing power was attributed to the reflection, as well as a few little items the nanites had just thought of.

Alan addressed his mainframe "Brainchild-1, we need to find as many ships as possible in this system. We have less than three days to put them in space, ready to fight. I doubt we'll have any opportunity to upgrade anything, but we'll try. For the moment, we have to concentrate on mapping all mobile resources that can go to space, at least at sublight speed to act as interceptors. What the Chinese send will no doubt be some sort of corvette, cruiser or destroyer, so we have to anticipate a lot of turreted weaponry and several fighter escorts. Probably some sort of landing crafts to drop troops into our camp. So, we need to repair and reactivate the bloody edifice systems to have sensors & intruder repelling abilities. Any suggestions are welcome, over."

"Brainchild-1 broadcasting to Alliance; recommendation to use protocol 'miraculous creation' to quickly supplement the total number of Alanaria units available for construction & defense. This would also render the scheduled upgrade sequence to tolerate the ionic waves moot as all units would be produced with adaptations integrated / online."

Alan rubbed his temples with both hands, getting a bloody migraine just at the thought. He had designed the 'miraculous creation' protocol for exactly this sort of mess, but had hoped to never utilize the doomsday palliative. This was the nightmare that sci-fi movies were made of; allowing the cybernetic units to use the matter-replication systems to create an entire robot in one pass, with all programs, fuels and munitions already in place, and active in five seconds of being physically existent.

It would certainly solve all their lack of workforce and defenders, but what about after the fight? And it would be one fight, not an entire war. As soon as the Chinese leaders got the message that planet Ankh had repelled their first cheap shot, they would panic and fold back into their hidden colonies, to plot and build bigger weapons for the next try. Hence why Alan had ordered the hack to destroy their network & infrastructures. They wouldn't be able to build anything more complicated than muskets if they didn't have computers and automated factories to mill the highly capricious space-age parts.

Despondent but unable to alter the math of the fight, Alan told his mainframe "Alright BC-1; engage protocol 'miraculous creation' with emphasis on maintaining 50% combat units throughout the production run. As soon as tech units are built, task them to find and rebuild the old transport rings into hybrid systems like we had found on Thess'thannu. I want every ring platform to serve as point-to-point transport and as a replication pad. We'll need all the ferrying and production capacity we can get real soon. Over."

"Unimind has comment for Allies; given wild environment inside buildings as much as outside, perhaps production of more Kanimecha and Equiides units would be wiser than humanoid units, to repel infantry assault. Is this idea tactically wise?"

Alan replied "Yeah, you have a point. And we'll need some Evil Eye drones too, to watch over the camp and outlying zones from a safe vantage, or to drop gas bombs on the idiots trying an infantry assault. We could also use more Earwurm drones to infiltrate the pipes, to lie in wait to sabotage the enemies, if they do enter the Temple Complex. Or we could beam a few aboard their ships, if we can defeat their shields."

"Brainchild-1 broadcasting to Alliance; idea as follows; use the Anubis clock-killer virus to destroy enemy networks, in-system and afar. Program it for the specific linguistics & coding used by the enemy to limit spread outside targeted zones."

Alan gleefully accepted that idea on the spot, adding "If we could get control of those 36 ionic monoliths, we could change the wave frequencies, or make them pulse more often to repel infantry vehicles and orbital landers. If we could direct the pulses towards orbit, it would be a lot better to keep capital ships from parking overhead."

The Replicators declared "We will not need much time to penetrate and map enemy networks, a few hours at the most. We could try to establish control over monoliths for Alliance, then proceed to the cloaked surveillance starbases in the system, to have decentralized production facilities. Would this be acceptable?"

Alan countered "I would prefer you try to scan and activate the starbases before the monoliths. While the ionic pulses help to defend Ankh, they have no effect in the rest of the system. If we can fully awaken the orbital stations, we might find weaponry more powerful than just CIWS or short-range gunnery. At the very least, we could try to convert their transport rings to have more ferrying and production capacity that isn't all on the planet. In any fight, mobility is key, and right now, we have a clear lack of movement capacity that is dangerous. So, we have to prioritize moving vehicles over static defense points. Even if it's an old, obsolete starbase, we can at least use it as an escape pod to leave the system, if things turn bad."

Unimind asked a salient question; "How trustworthy is the information from the SGC? Given the events of our departure from their territories, they are not friends or allies. Could they not be trying to betray our Alliance to punish us for the damages done?"

Alan replied carefully "No, not on this. Yes, they see us as a threat, especially since they don't know everything we have, or the full membership of our Alliance. I have hinted that I'm not alone in this, but never revealed my friends, so they have a baseline worry that isn't going away. However, they also have an instinct that our forces are very limited, so we're less dangerous than the Chinese who have proven just how fanatical and illogical they all became. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the Tauri leaders hope real hard that us and the Chinese exterminate each other to settle the whole problem without them losing more people and territory. Sending two enemies at each other has been a war strategy for ever, so I kind of expect it, to be honest."

"Brainchild-1 broadcasting to Alliance; Even if the Tauri have such rear-thoughts, it does not change the immediate problem. We are being attacked by an enemy force that has proven it does not wish to negotiate, or tolerate our existence. Our defensive preparations must be done in proportion of this reality. To do otherwise guarantees our extermination."

Shaking his head in depressive sadness, Alan ordered "Engage the wartime production sequence, and fire-up the nano-forge so we can start prototyping the innovations we need to fully adapt our units and systems to this planet. I'll go warn Joran and Trangh, to assign their tasks for the coming days. Execute order batch, over."

As he walked out of his living area, Alan toggled his comm badge to order "Joran! We have an emergency! Meet me at the room we're keeping Trangh in, ASAP! Over."

Trotting over to the shielded room, Alan had a second idea as he remembered Kree and his intimate knowledge of the networks and machines in the solar system. Using the computer on his bracer, he sent the newly healed crustacean an urgent message to explain the situation, and ask for any information or help he might choose to give them. He also confirmed that he was giving Kree a pass to use the rings inside their established safety zone, to reach them faster if he needed help, or just to visit.

Things would move quickly from now on, and the clock was not their friend.

The darkness in the hearts of broken men

(The Lord of the Rings – Uruk-Hai march)

Saturday 1st of July, 2034; 23h30pm

Command center

Chinese hidden colony #7; Chénsī de Māotóuyīng (Pensive Owl)

Bowing with speed and alacrity, the four-star general waited for his Eminence, the Exalted Prince of the Royal House of Pensive Owl, to be seated before he straightened his posture, despite his aching old bones and a bad back. If he dared to not show the proper respect (fearful submission) he would be deemed a traitor and killed on the spot by the four guards that escorted the self-styled monarch of the Reborn Qin Imperial Dynasty.

And they had dozens more inbred cretins like this one, spread in each of their colonies.

What could their poor, desolate population do to survive the exactions of these perfidious parasites?

Sitting himself on a deeply carved wooden throne topped by a bronze casting of a magnificent owl, the young man who called himself prince wrapped the gaudy golden silk robes of his station around his thin frame, trying to make himself comfortable in spite of the vainglorious apparels that just looked plain stupid to everybody else. The sort of fashion that had been fit for emperors a thousand years back had certainly not aged well, unless you enjoyed historical movies. Seven-layered silk robes stitched with genuine gold, silver and electrum thread were not only very impractical, they were also heavy and blocked movements, thus making something as simple as sitting down a perilous endeavor.

Now, having managed to position himself on the plush cushioned throne without face-planting or breaking a limb that got caught in the blasted robes, the twenty-nine year old Prince of Pensive Owl was finally able to attend the emergency that had him leave his private suite on the edge of night. Gazing upon the military peasants who were the cause of this impromptu displacement did not make him feel any safety or happiness, in the contrary. Most of these people were still steeped in the old communist mindset, actively refusing to accept that the Time of Rebirth had come at long last. In fact, he knew that many of these uniformed minions were conspiring to see him die so that the glorious ancestral lineages could not achieve their thrones anew. Well, he would ferret-out these rodents, making their executions a spectacle to inspire the masses to obedience and loyalty for ages, he would be certain of it.

"General Aikin! What is the meaning of this -demand- for my presence on the command deck at this uncivilized time of night?" the so-called monarch queried, threats heavily implied in his tone and terse words.

Bowing from the neck in further submission so the paranoid imbecile wouldn't imagine he was plotting to overthrow him, the general explained the dire situation. "I have called you to show the most grave state of affairs in person, my Prince. As you can see, all the status indicators on the consoles are purple, red, or flashing yellow, thusly indicating multiple system-wide failures across the networks that unite our colonies and ships. In short, we have lost all comms with anything that isn't in line-of-sight to use handheld las-com or photo-phone devices. All wired and cordless cellular, satellite and subspace telephony or Internet services are dead, leaving only the emergency analog sets that don't have computers in them. The only indirect wireless comms still in use are the old CB and walkie-talkies that are built with analog transistors instead of CPU's. All our transporters and matter-replication pads are no longer responding to any commands, and their chambers have locked-down in bunker mode without being asked by the techs. Practically all automated CIWS is off-line, and the few working units are trying to scan the base, even in the safety exclusion buffers they were programmed to never target. And finally, the light cruiser Riding Crop has experienced catastrophic motor problems, leading to having to eject the hyperdrive core to avoid exploding right on their parking field."

Blanching in utter fear, the pompous twit bleated out weakly "How can this be?"

Giving a powerless shrug, general Aikin replied coldly "We've been hacked from outside the solar system. We know it, and have proof. What doesn't make any sense is who's doing the hack. What you see on the comms manager's antique portable console is the energy frequency and signal signature of the hackers that have defeated our best cyberneticists. The Replicators are back in the Milky Way galaxy, and they have taken us for target. And no, we don't know why, they haven't told us."

Squeaking in gut-wrenching fright, the pseudo-prince bolted from his throne, running out the doors for the safety of his heavily embattled suite, with his quatuor of armed guards following as fast as they could. Who knew he could run a bloody sprint in those heavy, foot-catching robes?

And nobody dared to comment on the smelly yellow trail that appeared wherever the Exalted Monarch fled, not even the janitors tasked with cleaning the fluidic proof of his unrestrained cowardice.

{ IR } - { Fools have so chosen} - { SG }

24h00pm (midnight)

Command center

Chinese hidden colony #4; Hǎo Lǎoshī (Great Teacher)

Five-star general Cǎodiànzi Huāduǒ-Cóng was glaring most mightily at the consoles of his command center, all alit with multiple yellow, red and purple shades that looked like a bloody toy store façade at New Year's Day. Except that none of it augured any good times for anybody in the colony, or elsewhere in Chinese holdings.

"Comms! Are you sure we can't raise anybody? What about the landlines? Can we at least secure the bloody perimeter?"

Shaking his head sideways, the poor lieutenant replied in harried words "No general! The entire switchboard is on the verge of frying itself into a blazing inferno! Cooling plants are off-line and even local fans or vent flaps aren't working anymore! The heat exchangers are gone, since the bloody aqueduct decided to purge itself before the computer clusterfuck started becoming apparent! Which also means no more flushing toilets, or fresh water to drink, cook or wash, until the whole water production system is back in function… Which can't happen unless the damned network is wrestled back to order! Haaaarghhhh!"

Stepping closer to the screaming man, general Cǎodiànzi looked over his shoulder as he asked "What now, man?"

The depressive soldier waved both hands at the touch-screen, screeching in fear "The firmware! It's the bloody firmware in the chips! The BIOS and clock, they're being destroyed from the inside! Something put a virus right into the chipsets, from a distance, and now it's erasing our BIOS and shutting down the motherboard clocks in front of our eyes! I never saw anything like this, not even in the SGC mission briefs! We're all doomed!"

Smacking the soldier upside the back of his head, the ancient general growled menacingly "Get ahold of yourself, man! You're a soldier of the Chinese People's Republic! Not some thin-skinned primitive cad! Now, how can all this be so bad we're all doomed from it? Can't you just change the parts, if the worse happens?"

Shaking in sudden laughter that was clearly manic, the poor engineer began to cry openly in front of everybody in the room, and didn't give a shit anymore. "Cccchaaaange the pppparts?" the man stuttered between hysterical laughs. "You really don't see, do you? The ENTIRE network of our colony, plus that of every other landholding or ship we have is hit the same way! With the BIOS and clocks destroyed, nobody can talk to anybody, and none of the production facilities will do anything anymore! The worse of the problem is that if we unwrap a new part from storage and activate it, the bloody virus will kill it inside of thirty seconds flat! And we certainly don't have enough parts to replace absolutely EVERY piece in the network, in buildings and vehicles, all at the same time anyways! We're doomed, I tell you! Doomed!"

Girding his courage, the venerable officer demanded calmly "What kind of local defenses do we have? Can we still talk to anybody wirelessly, or by corded services if need be?"

It was the chief of security who answered, the disgust evident in his voice despite that it was laced with potent fear. "We have established that only handheld las-com that doesn't have a chipset inside will work, but that needs line-of-sight. Otherwise, the old CB systems work, but we only have a dozen for the whole base. The emergency corded lines for the analog telephones work, but we only have the perimeter observation towers around the main core and first airfield equipped, all other expansions were not required to have them, as they were deemed a wasteful expenditure of resources. Nothing can go by cell, sat or subspace. We might as well build signal fires atop the buildings and hills, it would be more secure since they can't be hacked."

Grunting in amusement at the thought, general Cǎodiànzi wondered "Do we at least know who hacked us? And why?"

The poor comms manager laughed shrilly as he pointed at the odd squiggles on the screen of the detached maintenance console, saying in clear disbelief, "If this garbled mess we extracted before being shut-down is to be believed, it's The Replicators. And we don't know why, they didn't warn us."

Now aware of the full extent of their despair, the ancient officer sat heavily on the command chair, just in time to hear the manual fire alarms start roaring, as a long tower of flames shot towards the heavens because their munitions depot had ignited. Barely two minutes later and the sublight-speed liquid fuel bunker detonated loudly, the force wave from the blast shattering all windows across the colony, and pushing small ships parked on the airfields out of their fluorescent slot-lines.

They were at war for real now, but against an enemy none of them had seen coming because they were supposed to have been destroyed by SGC troops thirty years ago. Why now, and why the Chinese colonies?

General Cǎodiànzi would never get an answer to his valid questions, as the command building suffered from a catastrophic back-up of pressure in the natural gas pipes that resulted in a massive explosion that the non-functioning sensors didn't see coming, and couldn't report anyways as they were long-dead.

{ IR } - { Final loss of hope} - { SG }

24h00pm (midnight)

Bridge

Qin Empire corvette Tiě chǎn (Iron Shovel)

Commander Lee Ashura was swearing a storm as his poor little ship, barely 250 meters long and 35 crewmen, was finally lost to him. The central servers had been overtaken by an enemy as invisible as it was insidious, and the battle was lost before any of the human crewmen had even been made aware the fight was going on. Now that they finally knew whom they were fighting to defeat the long-range hack, the officer wished he were still ignorant.

The Replicators.

A name to incite nightmares, with visuals and stats to cause worse in those unlucky curs that were allowed to read the reports from the SGC missions that lead to their defeat, all those decades ago.

And nobody could tell him why the blasted nanites had collectively decided that hijacking a damned cargo ship flying around the backwaters of the galaxy made any tactical sense. Even worse, The Replicators usually did their assimilation of tech & organics in person, by jabbing into items with their limbs to deliver freshly made nanites, but now they took the cloaked, long-range method to attack. Why this change, and what did it mean for humanity?

Nobody could tell commander Lee anything, as the atmosphere had been purged from the ship's hull, at the rate of 5% per minute to avoid the explosive decompression that would leave gooey red messes all over. Not that the dying men knew, or cared.

As for The Replicators, they took the ship because it was old, from 2012, and didn't have a fraction of the cybernetics needed to repel their hack. With the organic crew dead, they didn't need to scuttle the perfectly usable vessel. Instead, it was being brought to an orbital station above planet Ankh, to be converted as the first Replicator ship of their current generation. Creator-Alan-1 had agreed with them, and encouraged them to grab a few things for their population to grow comfortably, without having to worry about rubbing borders or competing for resources in the future. It was good counsel, and would help them defend their small community if the fight came directly to their doorstep.

Not that they intended to let that happen in this lifetime. Their Allies were far too few, and too fragile, to let a real fight come this close to home. However, pacified units or ships would be recovered for conversion, or sharing with their Allies. It was the neighborly thing to do, after all that Alanaria's Creator had done for them since freeing them without demands or limits.

These are the Times we have wrought

(Stargate Atlantis – opening theme)

Saturday 1st of July, 2034; 24h00pm (midnight)

Tauri cuirassé One-Armed bandit

Orbit above Seattle, USA west coast

"I can confirm the data we're getting from the Free Jaffa Nation and our away sites, marshal Sheppard." Spoke the sensor chief with a nasty grimace on his face. "Whatever happened to the Chinese colonies hit them all at the same time, and left them in shambles as bad as what's under us, on Earth. The calls for help they sent out to each other fell on deaf ears, all eleven worlds were already facing ruination when they managed to get their emergency messages through their colonial-era Stargates."

Pacing in circles between the consoles on the bridge of the One-Armed Bandit, John Sheppard pinched his lips in a tight line, as he frowned in angry stress at events they had absolutely no control on. Whatever had possessed him to warn Alan Tracy about the Chinese remnants plotting to destroy him, he was regretting listening to this figment of morality now.

Turning to the sensor operator, he demanded "Did you finish decoding how the bloody virus entered their colonies? Did they receive a crooked email or what? And what kind of programming was it? We need to know if we can defeat their method!"

Shaking his head in denial as he saw the results from the signals & ciphers lab, a secure room buried in the very guts of the ship, the sensor chief said "The guys down in decryption want more time! They have a partial result, but they don't want to confirm it until they get validation from different sources. They called the S & C lab on Atlantis for backup about it, but the close-mouthed bastards won't even tell me why they're spooked!"

Snarling in undirected anger, Sheppard grabbed the wired handset from the command chair but didn't bother sitting as he was too high-strung to be still. "Signals & ciphers! This is marshal Sheppard, from the bridge. I need to know what you discovered about the bloody remote hack against the Chinese hidden colonies. No, I won't wait for Atlantis, or the survivors of Area-51! I want to know the bloody problem right-fucking-now! We can't prepare defenses if we don't know, dammit!"

At the other end of the line, admiral Chantal S. Hortense who served as overall chief of S & C, answered blithely "If my guys are right on their analytics, then it's old friends come back to haunt us. They discovered that the virus first arrived on the Chinese colonies via the local colonial-epoch Stargate left by the Lantean, in their second expansion period. Somebody found a way to remotely access the Gate's control systems without dialing-in a wormhole, then they used the machine's automated astrometric update routine to install the virus in the local dial podium. Once the virus was local, they configured the gate's own ring assembly as an antenna to broadcast the bloody malware to everything in the solar system where it's located. The damned thing is that the hackers knew the emergency frequencies for both civilian and military ships the Chinese had chosen for their hidden bases, so the malignancy entered their systems without any alarms sounding until it was too late."

Snarling harshly, Sheppard commanded "Stop deflecting me with peripheral answers, dammit! Who did what, and why?"

Sighing out her stress, the admiral replied tersely "We discovered that the signal, programming code and final virus were all based on Replicator energy and coding. We were led to believe that SG-1 had destroyed every last one of the nasty bugs when they triggered the Dakkara array… Well, it looks like a few were out of reach, or had a defense already active when the purge wave passed through."

Swearing crudely under his breath, Sheppard demanded "What is the actual virus, and can we catch the bloody thing?"

Admiral Hortense responded "From the preliminary data, the malware attacks either the BIOS chipset or the clock of computers, rendering them utterly dead, like paperweight dead. The virus basically wipes-out the BIOS and firmware, or kills the clock on the motherboard, for the same result. The difference is that an erased BIOS can be reinstalled, one board at a time, while a dead clock means the entire panel gets thrown to the recycling bin to get melted for raw ores."

Finally sitting heavily in his chair, John ran a weary hand through his short silver hair, asking the other officer "How did you get all that information, if all the Chinese computers are dead? And why aren't yours dead too? If you manage to get a sample of the virus, doesn't that mean all the ship is infected?"

"Those are all good questions, marshal." Answered the admiral in neutral tones. "The fact is that since the anti-Replicator events of Dakkara, the SGC has been able to do exactly that specific maneuver, of remotely using a traditional Stargate like an antenna & sensor combo, because the Ancient had willingly designed their machines that way. We're simply exploiting a function that was built into the devices, but never meant for people other than the Lantean engineers to use. The fact these enemies have found the function and applied it in optimal fashion is clearly an element that destabilizes all Tauri strategies in place, in concerns to the Stargates and running comms or scans through them. The best asset we had is now a potential backdoor into our camps."

Taking a breath, the admiral continued "As for the virus, it was pre-configured to attack only Chinese computers, by targeting only those machines whose BIOS and firmwares are programmed natively using the GB 18030 / Unicode equivalency transformation tables and their successor datasheets, established in 2028, Earth calendar. Basically, the virus was tailored to find and attack Chinese systems that are built and programmed in (Pictograms) xiàngxíngzì, (Simple ideograms) zhǐshìzì, (Compound ideographs) huìyìzì, (Rebus) jiǎjièzì, the phono-semantic compounds (Mandarin) Xíngshēngzì and (Cantonese) Jyutpin, (Derivative cognates) Zhuǎnzhùzì, (Traditional) Hanzi, (simplified & International) Hanyu Pinyin or Jiǎntǐzì, plus Taiwanese Zhuyin Fuhao, Japanese Kanji and Korean Hanja. Basically, the creators of the virus determined the national DNA & manufacturing pedigree of the machines they were targeting, and what tongues their builders would have spoken, to lock the activation sequence only on those."

Sheppard wanted the final details answered. "Do we have that bloody virus in our machines? Will we fall to this malware, too? If you were able to find out so much about it, you must have a sample somewhere!"

Exhaling a deep breath of stress to keep from exploding at the Fleet marshal's face through the phone, the admiral explained as simply as she could. "We have several hundred echoes of the virus, from multiple machines that we spy on in the Chinese networks, here, across the SGC and in five of their colonies that we knew existed. But, since our programs are written in English with a different Unicode translation chart, we lucked-out, in that the snippets we collated to form the completed malware didn't activate, so our guys were able to create a partial schematic of the triggers & effects. So no, we won't get the bloody virus, for now."

"You mean until the bastards write a version in English with our tech standards as target, right?" John queried, just to be sure he understood what the woman had said.

Sighing in relief, the admiral confirmed "Yes, marshal Sheppard. Until an English version is made, we are safe. However, we aren't waiting for that. The S & C corps is already hard at work trying to find a counter, and how to apply it to all our hardware or software, as the case may be. I can warn you in advance that it won't be easy, quick or cheap. Absolutely every chipset has a clock on it, so it's a question of how that clock is built or programmed, and can it be done differently, or protected from this specific malignancy. What is the real problem, however, isn't really the clock-killer virus, as you well know. If there really are Replicators at work in the background, none of our people will be fast enough to adapt our networks or segregated devices against the innate speed and adaptability of the sentient nanite groups."

Kicking his chair with the back of his heel in anxiety, John stated "Send your prelim work to McKay, and I'll talk with him about organizing some reconnoitering around where we think this trash is coming from. But with the danger level implied, you can bet we'll be discrete and cagey about what we say to whom, if we do find anything. Over."

Slamming the handset in its cradle far more harshly than he should, John glared at the poor commander in charge of the night shift, telling him tartly "Warn McKay that I'm on my way to his cabin. Then make sure you keep your guys on those Chinese colonies and ships! We NEED to know where they are, and how they're faring against the enemy attacking them."

Without any further platitudes he didn't feel like wasting breath on saying, Sheppard left the bridge angrier than he had been all evening long, since the call with the scarily well-equipped teenager earlier in the day.

{ IR } - { We shouldn't have} - { SG }

24h30pm

John Sheppard knocked back the second tumbler of hard Bourbon whiskey he had taken since entering the cabin of his old friend, and he didn't know if he'd stop drinking any time soon.

"Dammit, Rod! What the fucks did we wake up, over there? They have Replicators throwing viruses around the gates!"

"I heard you the first four times, John," Rodney replied snarkily, "Even through all the fluids sloshing around your mouth most of the time."

Slamming the empty tumbler on the solid wood coffee table, the old soldier demanded "How do we deal with Replicators that survived the bloody Dakkara Purge, Rod? How? And why the bloody blue blazes are these things even implicated in Alan Tracy's fight with the damned Chinese, of all things they could be doing?"

Shrugging as he sipped his much more sober cappuccino, McKay countered glibly "I'll make sure to ask him, when we speak again next week, to see if he survived. Anything you want me to ask him, while we're on the subject?"

Capping the bottle of booze before he fell into it for the rest of the night, John stood to fetch himself a coffee from the food-maker (he refused to even think 'replicator' tonight) and a plate of cookies to put some solid fuel in his gut. This was gonna be one of those bitchy sleepless nights, he could just bet on it. And Rodney wouldn't be any help, he could bet on that, too.

Wondering aloud, Rodney asked softly "Why are you surprised by this turn of events? When we saw the films from the calls Woolsey did with the ha'tak and his bridge logs, there were clearly signs of Replicator technology being used. The Goa'uld ship had shields using their matrix layering, frequencies and energy modulation. That couldn't happen by accident, especially on a derelict that drowned twenty-eight years ago, before the nano-menaces were wiped-out by Dakkara."

Sitting with his edible bounty, Sheppard replied in a defeated voice "Yeah, I know that… But I was hoping it was just some tech Anubis or Osiris had grabbed along the way, not some live Replicators. And there's no way that a kid who just found out about the bloody Stargate on Tuesday of this week can manage to crank-out a Replicator-style virus, on top of pushing it through the Gate network the way only Sam Carter, Zelenka or you, know how to do. He has living Reps, and that gives me chills, Rod. Cuz given how victimized, injured, and all-out traumatized by life he is, what won't he do with those things to get back at the bastards who did those things to him?"

Closing his eyes as he reclined into his plush sofa, McKay countered easily "You're panicking for no reason. If we take for granted that he had those Replicators on the sunken ship already, due to the shields being newly built & engaged, then why didn't he lash out at the USA or China with them? You heard who he accused of being child molesters, along his dad… That's a who's who of American politos in the 2020's and 30's. If he didn't launch a replicator assimilation campaign against those animals, then why would he suddenly threaten us with them now? It wouldn't make sense, unless we become the threat like the Chinese colonies did, and got smacked for."

Swallowing a cookie after barely chewing twice, John grumbled "I hate when you make sense, dammit. So, if you are actually right about this kid's mindset, he won't attack unless he's directly hit, or at least threatened in a credible way. We can live with that for the short term, but in the long run we'll need some guarantees he isn't plotting cruel vengeance against us."

Smirking, Rodney queried snarkily "It's cruel vengeance that has you worried? So, an ordinary or common vengeance would be okay, or maybe a half-hearted one, but not the cruel, merciless or exuberant sorts… Gotcha! I'll keep that in mind for the Tauri Regency's next meeting."

Throwing a half-eaten cookie at his supposed friend, John griped "Screw you, Rod! I hope you find Reps in your bacon, tomorrow morning!"

Laughing in amusement, McKay declared "If it's the same people who cooked yesterday, then it would probably more edible, and help my digestion, too. At least it wouldn't look and taste like the 'mystery meat' they had for the meatloaf at Cheyenne Mountain, every other Wednesday."

Giving the old doctor a playful grin, Sheppard came back gamely with "I hate to break it to you, old man, but they used that same 'mystery meat' in those perfectly round beef stew balls you enjoyed so much. It was just presented differently. And the gravy hid the nature of the thing, along with the taste."

Frowning at his old friend, the astrophysicist grumbled nastily about his destroying his few illusions about life at the Mountain, when things were supposedly simpler and fun.

Considering options

(Stargate SG-1 – opening theme)

Sunday 2nd of July, 2034; 1h00am

Temple complex

Planet Ankh, system Noah's Ark

Joran Knowles didn't know if he should be feeling safer or scared stiff, at the clearly impressive sight of the long lines of soldier, shieldmate and bastion robotic units that were silently standing at rest, connected to the static charging bars freshly installed in the underground garage that would be their home for the near future. The other garage, similar to this one, held lines of bipod robots in servant, healer, and professor varieties, as all-purpose workforce. The third garage was supposed to house the technical units but they were all on jobs around the delimitated camp, and farther off too, since the kid had established some priorities a bit everywhere around the bloody solar system.

And the new evolution of that ten foot tall mini-Gundam power loader suit Alan had designed was another thing to make his bald head grow new hairs just so they could go grey at lightning speed. Why did he ever let himself get dragged into a conversation about how to improve the already powerful machine, like they were talking about a bloody toy? And Alan's idea of adding a full robotic CPU with intellect and personality similar to the other units was gonna make him another stomach ulcer, he just knew it!

Accepting the existence of an alien species of living sentient nanites was one thing, especially since he'd met the real entity hiding behind Trangh Bellegant's polite façade a few months back. But this… All this was getting to be a bit much on his poor nerves.

Joran was only thirty years old, but he felt like age ninety for the last 24 hours.

And he knew who to blame for it all.

Speaking of which, the teenaged blond hellion was walking by, concentrated on his bloody tablet as if the entire damned world hadn't been upended by his wild machinations with all those bloody robots (Ah! He did a punny!).

Joran trotted towards his 'employer' to have some heartfelt words with him, when a small machine came buzzing wildly into the garage at break-neck speeds, carrying a fluo pink mass on its back. Joran blinked once, identifying the device as a Skyblade hoverboard, part of a large batch of unintelligent 'not-people' machines Alan had built to patrol around the camp's outer zones. It was the thing riding on it that made the man glare even more at the teenager's unaware back, as he began to speak with the oversized alien lobster thingie.

First were the bloody accursed Goa'uld eels, then alien metallic bugs that talk, and now psionic space crustaceans! What the fucks was coming next? Floating crystalline entities that communicate by vibrations?

"Oh, hey! Joran, get over here so you can meet Kree!" Alan said, waving him over. "He's come to share a few old things with us, about the resources spread around the solar system."

Hands shoved deeply in his pockets, the engineer stalked over in a right snit, having a deep-seated feeling that whatever small measure of control he had believed to have over his life had just gone down the gullet of madness, and wan'nt coming back.

Stopping a good five feet from the clearly poisonous and temperamental scorpion-kindred, Knowles glared mightily at the tail, pincers and luminescent antennae that weren't in any way, shape, or form, reassuring. He wasn't arachnophobic, and didn't shy away from the lobster tank at the grocery store, but this specimen was a bit much to accept, even for a normal person.

Then, he felt the same thing as the few times Rath'ahl had used the bloody neural contact lens on him, a weird sense of not being alone followed by a voice that seemed to resonate around him, despite that no sound was heard. Frowning at the spikey critter that was riding the hoverboard with great relish, and the human child that enabled it, the adult mentally prepared himself to interact with the latest piece of chaos the Multiverse had thrown at him. Why did he leave Earth, again?

"Hey, kid!" he called, trying to not come off as aggressive. Bad things happened to those the kid felt threatened by. "What exactly can this… entity… tell us about the place that your mainframe couldn't find?"

Smirking at the older man's obvious discomfort, Allie replied "Well, he's an ancient, tetchy old crud who spent the last 10,000 years of his nearly 13,000 years of life in here, so he knows things. Like, where some secret garages hidden under local cloaking shields are buried, and why they aren't linked to the central surveillance systems. Owww!"

Joran couldn't keep the amused smirk off his face to save his life when the lobster had raised his flying platform close enough to extend his tail to grab the kid's ear in obvious retaliation for being called 'an old crud'. Or was it for the 'ancient' bit? Anyways, Alan back-stepped away from the clawed amphibian who then nudged his hovering platform closer, to be in tail range, just in case.

Rubbing his left ear with an exaggerated pout on his face, the teen made a show of being much put-upon by the visiting entity, despite that he was the one casting aspersions at its reputation. It was difficult for the muscular engineer to keep a distant, unhappy demeanor towards the pair as he saw the way they acted so friendly towards each other. Jeff Tracy would never have tolerated anybody around him that didn't venerate the ground he walked on, and showed the matching deference in all details. His son was clearly a pretty good upgrade, compared to the depraved astronaut.

"So, do we have a few ships to work with? Anything at all would be better than ground-frame vehicles. No matter how good your bastion robots are, against star-fighters, bombers or any size capital ship, we'll be toast." Joran asked, curious.

It was the mind-voice of the alien that responded, feeling both very old and yet powerful as only younger beings could be. "Yes, I have read through my notes and the sectors of the network I took over, when Noah died. There are a few garages, buried not far from here." The lobster gesticulated with its tail, pointing towards a few directions like a big fingertip. "Most of these were actually built as multi-use hangars that served as supply sheds, workshops, and worker dorms, until the first Temple Complex around the primary Chappa'ai was finished building. After that, the old dependencies were converted into Jaffa barracks, again only until the actually dedicated edifices were built. Then, Noah tasked them as overflow warehouses, or temporary dorms for the extra escorts, guards or camp followers that visiting System Lords brought during their sojourn for a paying safari."

Alan nodded happily, as he showed the adult his tablet with new maps that had extra notes. In several of the obsolete hangars were parked forgotten small vessels, though some were only usable in atmosphere for maintaining the vast play-park domain. In a few farther hangars, however, began to appear interesting things, like an antique ring-glider that had been Noah's personal ship for travelling around his solar system. In another hangar slept a large tel'tak, a custom cargo ship built with several climatized cages to carry living animals, with or without putting them in stasis for the trip. A hangar with a high cliff on one outer side held four death gliders, one tel'tak and an al'kesh bomber, all in dire need of much repair to fly again as that had been the actual repair garage for this region of planet Ankh. And there were more spread loosely around the other continents of the planet.

Kree's mind-voice declared gently "I have found many other similar hangars, in the starbases, planets and moons. I also remember hearing from Noah, in his older days when he became sociable with me, that several dozen large asteroids had been cored, to build garages for capital ships. He was supposedly hoarding old but serviceable vessels recovered from abandoned battlefields, that were towed back here by his mercenaries, to dissipate traces of who ordered the recovery. The ships were given simple repairs, then stored to form the local defense fleet, or serve as escape convoy if the danger was a natural phenomenon."

Stunned by the lengthy speech, and the complexity of language the lobster could use, Joran tried to get the emotions out of his mind as he read the annotated maps, finding a few gimmicks that would be of immediate use. "Hey, kid! Did you see those hangars, here and here? If the dimensions are good, that could be some pretty damn big warships, hidden in those rocks."

Making a face, Alan replied carefully "Yeah, those tags say ha'tak, like the ship I wanted to salvage from Earth. The problem is that the word itself is vague, since it literally means 'mother-ship', as a broad category of size and volume, not an actual class or design of machinery. It's the same for tel'tak, meaning 'cargo ship', but without references to a specific class or design either."

Shrugging off the language lesson, Joran asked instead "Okay, but that still means bloody big hulls, no? So, why don't we go take a look, cuz we need at least one good heavy-hitter to fight back whatever the Chinese have sent that we didn't see or hack remotely in time to keep them away."

Sighing, Alan grumbled "The last time I controlled a ha'tak, I burned-out a whole planet. Maybe it isn't the wisest idea in the world, to let me activate another of those big hulls."

Blinking in surprise at the reason the kid didn't want to go explore the possible resource, the adult realized he was again forgetting how badly affected the boy was by PTSD, from surviving the attacks but also from what he did in retaliation. Nobody ever went to war then returned unchanged, especially not improved. Even though most of his personal experiences were with limited fist-fights or small altercations with knifes, Joran understood that the person he was speaking with had a unique view of conflicts, and couldn't be rushed into anything that had the potential to trigger more violence or cataclysms.

The alien lobster shook itself in some sort of noisy full-body rattle that had its antennae, four pincers and tail wagging all around, as its mind-voice seemed to whisper at Alan directly, not being perceptible by others. The youth took a deep breath that he exhaled slowly, trying to regulate his anxiety at the subject of conversation. Surprising Joran by the implications of the gesture, the mottled brown critter brought its hovering sled closer so that it could use a pincer to grab the boy's left hand, like a parent trying to comfort a scared child that needed a reassuring presence after an injury. The fact the arthropod began to rub its tail on his back in what could only be a proof of affection and care stunned the despondent, lonely engineer who wasn't used to basic human relations, and was certainly still iffy about aliens interacting with other humans around him. After spending a decade isolated in Jeff Tracy's almost invisible control boat, then three years as Rath'ahl's also invisible Mechanic, Joran could admit to himself that his social skills were deficient. And now, witnessing the public displays of affection from the crabby alien towards the human kid had gotten to him, eliciting an unexpected feel of envy at the adolescent's ability to make friends so easily, anywhere he went.

Having managed to bring his roiling emotions under control, Alan spoke softly but surely. "Okay, Joran. You have a point about not having gotten all the Chinese assets accounted for. Unimind warned us about at least one military light cruiser flying under radio silence that they couldn't hack. The ship doesn't have a mobile Stargate, and was cut-off from its native networks, so unreachable by the mass-hack they did. We'll need to prepare to fight them face-to-face, in space and on the ground."

Stretching his back and neck, Alan admitted, with audible pride in his voice, "I still can't believe that Unimind managed to hack through and defeat more than 93% of all remaining Chinese assets in less than six hours! Imagine what would have happened to the old SGC missions, if the Asgard-strain Replicators had used indirect methods, instead of always insisting for physical contact to insert nanites or programs? The Ori and Wraiths would have found a far different galactic situation."

Crossing his arms over his broad, buffed torso, Joran grumbled "And that would have been a good thing for us? How?"

Shaking his head in amusement, Allie countered "No, you big lug! I'm just amazed at what fundamental changes a few kind words and gentle encouragement can do for a whole society, when they have to choose between barbarity and evolution. Anyways, as I was saying, you're right. We have to inspect at least two or three of the capital ship hangars to see what we have available to fight the last incoming threat. And, honestly, I don't want our Alliance to be empty-handed if the Tauri decide to come scope-out the battlefield to kill the last survivors, before harvesting the resources and colonizing the planets on top of our dead corpses."

Making a grimace, Knowles deadpanned "Man, you have a dark view of things, for a kid! Not that you aren't right, but still…"

Alan shrugged sadly as he tapped on his tablet to warn both the Alanaria Fleet and Unimind about the impromptu sortie, asking for tech and combat units to escort the trio on their outing, and wondering if The Replicators would want to come, if only out of curiosity for the antiquated machines they would find.

As it was, the Unimind did want to travel a bit, and asked to be picked-up at its workshop, not far from the gate hall, while Brainchild-1 assigned a protection & exploration squad to safeguard the most vital person in their group. As the three organics were stowing items to leave, several bipod – soldier and tetrabot – shieldmate woke from their parking slots, moving to stand besides their Creator, waiting for orders.

While Kree was curious about his young friend's many metal toy types and what they did, Joran bit down on a swear of surprise as he hadn't caught on that the bloody protection detail had to come from somewhere. The sleeping bots were pretty much the best choice, since they weren't in use for patrol and fully charged already. Sighing, the tall male shook his head to get himself in the present situation, he could recriminate later, when he was alone for the night.

{ IR } - { Stepping out of comfort zones} - { SG }

1h45am

Yawning in his hand, Alan was beginning to realize that he needed to sleep some time soon. Between the centipede injuries, the imminent threat of the Chinese hidden colonies, the stupendously quick hack, and the newly revealed resources, the adolescent had forgotten that he wasn't like the robots or nanites. Little organic him needed to sleep to recharge, not plug-in a new battery pack or top the tank of liquid fuel.

Thankfully, Earth culture had come-up with a great equivalent to the fuel of cars to power lowly humans, known as coffee. Alan slurped noisily from the stainless steel thermal jug he had grabbed for the trip, all 48 ounces of warm, milky and sugary comfort sliding down his throat to sit pleasantly in his gut. Joran Knowles had his own jug, drinking some very strong tea made in the British style, with cream, honey and lemon juice. Allie wanted to gag at the thought of what kinda taste that must have, but manfully kept his cool, concentrating on finding a solid snack in his field-pack instead.

Perched on Alan's right shoulder as normal, Replibug-1 was analyzing the resource maps supplied by the arthropod alien Kree, finding them adequate work-product, for a non-humanoid entity without formal schooling that had suffered severe genetic, physical and psychological modifications. While The Replicators had doubts about the loyalty or reliability of the clawed being, it was clearly sentient and competent enough to be deemed useful. The manner in which it had adapted to the small gift Creator-Alan-1 had offered it, the spare Skyblade drone, showed a clearly evolved mind that understood space-age technology adequately.

"Unimind broadcasting to Alliance; we recommend using transport rings to reach hangar with these markings. The map tags show a vast complex of manufacturing tools that would indicate a potential shipyard. The location is central to six secondary hangars on the same asteroid, probably parking silos or drydocks to repair the recovered wrecks."

Alan wondered aloud "Kree, did you ever visit these places, or just saw them through the sensors?"

The alien crustacean looked at the maps referred by Unimind, using the neural-link to enter a few codes which had new colored tags appear in them. Using his mind-voice, Kree declared "I had visited everything that I marked in red, those that I saw through cameras in white, and those in orange are from written inventory manifests. I remember visiting that asteroid, spending a few days in it, since the location was expansive. I do remember that all six lateral silos were occupied, but not by what. It has been millennia since I bothered with that rock's contents, and I wasn't really interested, back then."

Shrugging absently, Alan stated "Well, you weren't looking to build a fleet or get into the recycling business, so I can understand your attitude. Any big movements you made would have immediately set the Goa'uld Conclave against you, and you had chosen to be retired, so… But as a first step off the planet, going to a nexus like that is more efficient, and we have a better chance to find what we need."

Joran queried "Are you looking for anything specific, or just anything with engines?"

Packing the tablet after memorizing the main ring network coordinates for the central hangar, Alan replied honestly "I really don't know that I have expectations, just that we need at least one ship able to move at full sublight plus one FTL mode, and have enough engine power to feed shields and cannons. If we can automate the entire thing to avoid sacrificing our troops, then so much the better. Unlike the Chinese, I don't plan to suicide my people to avoid admitting how limited a leader I am, or how our nation lost the fight. Going with their 'win or die' mentality is not in my plans, not ever. So, anything that can at least stalemate their one ship that passed through the remote hack, that's what I want. Bigger & badder can wait for when the immediate threat is gone."

Nodding at the boy's prudent approach to managing his war effort, Joran asked neutrally "What about Trangh? His Goa'uld knowledge could come in handy, for an exploration job like this."

Shaking his head sideways firmly, Alan declared tersely "I have no reason to trust him with anything yet. Besides, when you were my prisoners, I had my Earwurm drones connect to your minds and download a complete psychotronic copy to Alanaria Fleet archives, just in case. If I need, I can have one of my units bring his neuroplexic database to the forefront of its programming and stand in his stead, without any of the risks. So, the man stays where he is, for now."

Stopping his steps at that little nugget just revealed, the athletic male grumbled "You're a nasty bastard, you know that?"

Smirking at the other human while Kree shook with laughter, the teen countered gamely "And you better remember that, cuz after getting nuked, having a genocidal crusade declared against me, and now having another crusade sent at me by a second country, my patience is done. People or entities that are a threat will be neutralized, without dicking around. No more nice kiddie."

Making a face at the statement but not able to counter it, Knowles started walking again, listening to the orders being issued for the preparations to go visit the remote hangars. Alan listed a set of items the man had to have in his field pack, then meet at the rings next to the Stargate for departure. They would stay at the location only if something of use was found, otherwise three other locations would be visited in as short a timeframe as possible.

There is no future for our kind

(The Lord of the Rings – Uruk-Hai march)

Sunday 2nd of July, 2034; 2h00am

Qin Empire light cruiser Téng Tiáo (Rattan Cane)

Free Jaffa Nation, system Chulak

The light cruiser Rattan Cane was cruising at sublight speed for a few minutes on the outskirts of the solar system Chulak, a world destroyed by the Ori crusaders several decades ago. This was a strategic maneuver because the system was almost empty, except for small garrisons of Jaffas trying to terraform the planets back to habitable conditions. The small settlements were mostly civilian, and so their comms were not as shielded as they should be, to keep enemies out of their channels. And that opened an opportunity to tap their wireless signals, to get the latest news on Earth's situation, without being detected or fought-off.

Captain Lan Tian-Fe was on the main bridge, standing by the comms console, looking at the charts that normally reported bandwidth traffic on those channels used by the eleven hidden colonies of China and their small flotilla. Just like it had for the last four hours, there was nothing being shown on any of the normal or emergency channels. Absolute silence.

Frowning in anxiety, the captain ordered "Hack through the Jaffas' network, and get whatever they have about Chinese worlds, ships or citizens. Otherwise, maintain the radio silence for all other systems and devices." Turning to the security chief, he told the man "Make sure the cloaking device is active and stable. We don't want the Jaffas alerting the Tauri to our presence, and risk having one of the SGC ships arrive to hunt us."

Walking towards the helm consoles at the front of the room, the officer reviewed the navigation data, ordering calmly "Remember that there were several large fights in this system. You want to maintain a bit of a longer distance between the ship and the system's border, to avoid flying through debris clouds that would flash against the cloaking field as they incinerate. We want to be invisible as much as silent, to not throw-off our schedule."

"Sir! The Jaffas on Chulak have set up a recorded message with instructions for their troops! It concerns our colonies and ships!"

Walking rapidly back to the comms officer, the captain demanded "Put it on speakers, so I can hear it."

Nodding, the lieutenant explained "They have set the message with Goa'uld and English languages, so our translation system has plenty to work with. Here is the Chinese version, coming up."

"Attention all children of the Free Jaffa Nation! We have received critical information from our Tauri allies concerning the civil war that has destroyed their world. The country that started the fight against the System Lord of Unrest, then tried to make a second pass of violence, was severely culled from what remains of the planetary habitat. This country, named 'China', had managed to create eleven colonies hidden in diverse empty worlds, planning to build a large fleet to attack Earth to usurp control. It has now been confirmed that the System Lord of Unrest has made an alliance with The Replicators, who have remotely hacked all eleven Chinese colonies, turning their infrastructures against them, thusly destroying the installations without mercy. The Tauri have confirmed that most ships they could detect with Chinese IFF have stopped broadcasting, and many have been seen destroyed or drifting listlessly in space, all life aboard extinguished. They have asked us to use our sensor grid to scan for Chinese remnants, and inform them of their population's current situation."

"Considering the events, and the presence of active Replicators in the Tauri conflict, the judgment of the Free Jaffa Council is decreed as such. Our citizens should at all costs avoid causing anger, frictions or conflicts of any sorts with the human identified as Alan Tracy, the System Lord of Unrest, and his Alanaria Fleet, or their Alliance named the Host of Unquiet Souls. We will not grant asylum, passage rights or any succor to the Chinese citizens until the conflict has officially ended, so that our own nation does not become embroiled in what is an internal matter between multiple Tauri factions, especially in light of the fact the System Lord of Unrest is native of Earth, just like the SGC troops and Chinese rebels. In the event your sensors detect any vehicle with Chinese IFF or individuals wearing their uniforms, contact the SGC comms hub directly for instructions. Tek'ma'te to you all."

Captain Lan stumbled to sit heavily in his chair, feeling lightheaded as the bridge spun wildly around him, and his perceptions were becoming a long narrow tunnel that removed all periphery.

{ IR } - { Relief} - { SG }

2h45am

The paramedic took his pulse one last time, nodding happily at the readout, removing the IV line and pressure armband, with a terse comment about taking better care of his basic needs. In order to handle the constant stresses of his job, he needed to hydrate more, eat more often, and sleep regularly. After marking a few notes in the chart on a tablet and hanging the device back at the foot of the bed, the corpsman left his superior officer to his loneliness and depression.

Captain Lan was lucky that nobody had any pressing emergency to heal, as it allowed him to have a closed room for the moment, a veritable luxury aboard the tightly packed ship. And even more undeserved, given the reason behind his collapse on the bridge.

Sighing in forlorn misery mixed with embarrassment, the soldier knew that all the polite diagnostics from the medics would never tell the true story. He had collapsed because he was relieved. Yes, he had suffered a momentary mental breakdown, at hearing what was probably a truthful account of the fates of their hidden colonies. He was stunned, flabbergasted, and quite truly hard-pressed to believe what he heard in the Jaffa message. But above all, he was relieved.

Why?

Because it meant that all the last century of political madness and societal self-destruction was finally ended. After suffering the Mao Zedong revolution of communism that was a very transparent power-grab and nothing else, the desperate people had begun flirting with rebirthing the Qin Imperial Dynasty. Unfortunately for those who didn't get a more classical, high-grade education, they didn't know what they were allowing to happen. His own idiotic superior, the self-styled Prince of the Royal House of Pensive Owl, was a patently standard model of the nobles, bourgeois, mandarins and minor bureaucrats that infested the Qin society at every era of its reign. Cosanguine, inbred, incestuously birthed defectives replete with vices and illnesses who lounged on gold-gilded beds while soldiers and farmers toiled to death in the mountains, forests, fields and waterways of the nation to make them even richer, fatter and more useless every day they existed.

Tian-Fe remembered well his history classes, and the few books he had read from the SGC's archaeological databases. Nothing good would come from reanimating the dead societal system, no matter how many long silk robes and ornate hair pins you put on the filthy, corrupt politos and ass-kissers that swarmed basely at their feet. Sitting them on ornate golden thrones with many jade jewelries and crowns wouldn't change anything either, as his own petty monarch had shown, the moment he started calling himself a Prince in public.

No, the real reason the captain had collapsed on his bridge was because his mind needed to reboot from having received the most beautiful, yet most frightful concept of them all; freedom. With all eleven hidden colonies destroyed or rendered helpless to the point they wouldn't survive the next winter their location experienced, it meant that all crewmen aboard the Téng Tiáo were free. They no longer needed to fear being cruelly executed if they lost a stupidly planned fight that didn't even need to be fought, and they didn't need to live with their heads bowed in constant fright of being accused of treason or sedition if the monarch's paranoid delirium had a conniption that day.

They were finally free of all the political and societal depravities, and nobody could come punish them for exercising that freedom.

Looking at the clock on the wall above the door, the captain told himself he had a staff meeting to call, so he'd better get out before he simply fell asleep from all the anxieties, stresses, fears and loathing for his own country having left him at long last.

{ IR } - { Survivor's guilt} - { SG }

3h00am

The senior officers were all assembled in the planning room, a long and wide chamber that connected to the back of the main bridge by a set of extra wide sliding doors, four panels wide, whose glass segments could become totally black at will. There was a public corridor on each side of the room to allow regular traffic for the bridge and access to the public washrooms and offices that were set near the command center, including the small local infirmary where captain Lan had been taken.

The captain entered the planning room with the pace and air of a man relieved of the heaviest of burdens, looking almost twenty years younger given how spry and happy he seemed. Sitting at his dedicated chair, the leader waved at his men to sit, not bothering with formalities anymore. In the minutes since calling the meeting and stopping at the bathroom to splash his face and cool down from all the excitement, the man had come-up with a few ideas.

Addressing the soldiers, all men aged 25 to 60 years old, Lan asked "Just to be sure, did each of you hear the Jaffa message? Did you all understand the contents, and the significance?"

Getting all nods, the ship's master declared in a visibly happy demeanor "Then I declare that the good and honest sailors of this ship will no longer be bound by the crimes and defectiveness of either communism or monarchy. With the destruction of the Chinese mainland on Earth and the subsequent collapse of the colonies, we can safely say that all the societal experimentations our People did in the last 130 years have been complete and utter madness. We are now free, and will be using that to secure our men a bright new future, most specifically one devoid of power-hungry maniacs and feckless inbred wannabes."

Voicing the stupefied officers' shared fears, the first officer asked "Are you actually inviting us to mutiny, sir?"

Shaking his head sideways in amusement that was a bit manic, Lan countered plainly "Nope! Think about it, man! You can't mutiny against a government or society that doesn't exist anymore. At the worst, you could be accused of abandoning your great and noble heritage of 20,000 years by some finger-wagging monk or desperate cad with dreams of becoming a petty noble in the reborn Qin Dynasty. Nothing all that serious, if you think about it for a few minutes."

Demanding aloud that the captain tell them the truth about their deepest anguish, the chief of security asked "How can we be sure that the colonies are really all dead? And what about the marooned survivors, like us? Shouldn't we try to save them, or at least gather them to have better chances at survival as a bigger group?"

Nodding at the salient questions, Lan replied honestly "I don't know for sure. But, my gut feeling says it's true. Why? Because while the old IOA system was as corrupt as the UN and its composing members, the SGC itself and the new Tauri Regency have always been several grades of integrity, honesty and decency above the rest of humanity. I think that like any military organization, they wouldn't have broadcast publicly that the home-world was burned-out and that fatal schisms had occurred in humanity unless they had valid reasons for it. And my gut feeling is that they want this racially based, religion-fueled suicide of our people to stop, before we truly exterminate ourselves, our heritage, and our potential, out of the reality we share. I think that telling the Jaffas about the plight of Tauri, and the destruction of the Qin colonies, is a discrete bid to help us survive the preventive strikes of the System Lord of Unrest, without actually going against his military forces again."

Nodding in acceptance of the analysis because it was the only one that could make sense, the ship's chief engineer asked again "But what about getting the survivors of other ships or colonies? Are we really abandoning them?"

Giving the assembled officers a sad, melancholy face, captain Lan answered tiredly "My poor friends, I do believe that we are all that remains of our hidden colonies, at least as a functional ship. There may be a few handfuls on the actual colony planets, since they managed to send out messages by Stargate, but don't forget that they were at war with the SGC due to president Hu Dengchu's last, mindlessly suicidal act with the missiles. Either SGC or Lord of Unrest's troops have gone and… Well, you know what happened when doctor McKay took over the Tauri Regency, and when he retaliated to president Hu's folly. There may have been a few last souls on those planets, but they are gone, by now. And if they were intelligent, they figured out what I did, about our freedom finally being at hand, grabbed some fields kits and used the gates to escape far away from communists and monarchs."

The comms hiefs asked, just to be certain he understood the logic; "So, you do believe that there are survivors, but that they have already moved away from the strike zones. Either to avoid the follow-up by bombardment or infantry, the eventual mopping operations, or just to ensure that they don't lose their spontaneous freedom, now that the societal system is broken and dead. You don't deny their importance, just that they're already dispersed so far and wide that nobody will be able to find them, except by dumb luck. And that's why you don't recommend going back to offer help, or even just survey the wreckage."

Getting up from his chair, captain Lan used the food replicator to create a large tea set with ornate porcelain vessels and silverwares, then placed it on the table. At the surprise of his men, he played 'mother' by serving them a cup of warm spiced tea and a plate of small cookies and tartlets, as if he were hosting a holiday gathering at his apartment, back in the colony.

"Eat up, men. You have all been overworking and stayed on duty well passed your end of shift, just like I did since we left the colony. We'll have a small snack then go to bed. We can explain the situation to the crewmen tomorrow morning, as we all eat breakfast together."

Accepting the food with a mild smile of thanks, the ship's chief doctor quipped "You look like a man with a plan, captain."

Assenting with a low hum, the officer detailed aloud "We have a small but nimble ship that happens to carry a lot of heavy weapons that most star-destroyers built by other societies wouldn't have, or know how to build. My idea is to find one of the primitive Asian worlds that the SGC has noted in their maps but never actually visited. We park in orbit, do the solar system surveys and population contacts as normal protocols dictate, then we establish ourselves as an autonomous village. Preferably near enough to the stargate to obtain control over its functions and usage, thus making us the new commercial and informational power-brokers of that world."

The chief engineer swallowed his mouthful of tea, then snarked openly "Colonial plantation process, just like the English. Are we that low that this is the only solution left?" it was however apparent by his lack of vigor or anger that he was just probing.

The captain shrugged inelegantly, "If anybody wants to use the ship for piracy or smuggling, I'll personally kill them now. We may have toiled under criminals and sinners back on Earth and Pensive Owl colony, but we were not born defective or crass, unlike the mongrels who forced us to do their dirty work by aiming starship cannons at the houses of our kin. What I propose is the creation of a market town, a protected enclave of civilization where all peoples of any species can come to get healed, educated and trade, secure in the belief that they will not be cheated, violated, or enslaved and sold at the block, like others would."

"Would we eventually build other trading posts, or just the one?" asked the chief pilot between bites of fruit tartlet.

Captain Lan replied in open honesty "I have no idea! And doesn't that feel great? To be able to admit that I'm not almighty, or perfect, or obliged to have all the answers because the silk-swathed inbred cur on the throne has none of his own to give? I don't know if we'll have a single large town or many small ones. I don't know if we'll stay on one planet or build a series of trading posts at the Stargate of multiple worlds to get richer, more connected, and maybe even powerful again. All I now, is that the first step of any plan is to tell the crew tomorrow morning. Then, we can decide one step at a time, together, for a change."

The senior officers agreed on the partial outlook on the situation, pushing back all the arguing and deciding to the next morning.

We need options

(Stargate SG-1 – opening theme)

Sunday 2nd of July, 2034; 3h00am

Drydock complex

Asteroid Dol'tek, system Noah's Ark

The large exploration team had arrived a few minutes ago via the ring network, taking the time to establish a reinforced base-camp at the transport room to guarantee a way out in case of problems. Several Kanimecha and Evil-Eye were set loose to patrol and extent the group's safety perimeter, while a few tetrabot – techie were tapping into the edifice networks to see what needed repairs or careful usage to avoid accidents. As a rather significant precaution, a newly created & upgraded Ark-of-Alan had been brought to ensure they had their own private and shielded comms network, and to handle the cybernetic workload if they found a ship that actually fit their needs. In the meanwhile, the Ark would handle the base-camp and control the roving sentries so that the explorers could move in peace.

After setting everything in order, including a cache of supplies for the organics in case they were stranded for a few days, Alan couldn't repress a low whistle of appreciation at the sight of the cavernous main work space when they entered it.

And there was a reason for that; the main manufacturing hangar was a vertical dodecagon, some 3,000 yards across and fully 10,000 yards deep from its floor to the massive doors that were flush with the surface of the asteroid. The cavity was the usual Goa'uld favored grey naquadah structures with plenty of eye-watering yellow gold ornaments, and a few clear crystal windows that indicated offices, lounges, conference rooms, and everything else a shipyard this size needed.

Joran Knowles stood next to Alan with a dumbstuck expression on his face, as he beheld what real industrial might looked like, and immediately imagined the conniption Jeff Tracy would suffer when he realized International Rescue didn't have the biggest manufactures or ships, and it never did. Yes, that was a petty thought, but sue him. The bastard had exploited and abused him for a decade, so Joran deserved to be a bitch about it if he wanted to blow-off steam.

The scene was made surreal by the gesticulating pink thingie on a vivid red hoverboard that was arguing with the grey metallic bug on the kid's right shoulder. Since both had multiple limbs and eyes, the communication was quite the manual affair, with the swishing tail and waving arms or legs all over the place. And the size difference was just a lure; the Replibug was by far the nastier of the pair, even if it was only a quarter Kree's size.

Ignoring yet another chill going down his spine, Joran asked Alan while pointing at the ships parked in the silo "Are any of those giving you a gut feeling? Cuz they look mighty fine to me, for old junkers that got nipped-up."

Smirking, Allie replied playfully "You say that now, but wait till we're in. When you find out they're like cheap museum pieces, a wooden mock-up without any engines or functioning systems, we'll have a good laugh. Until we visit inside and activate the mechanics to make sure of what works reliably, appearances are worthless. And building big isn't any guarantee of quality, logic or being a good design for any important job. They could all be religious temples or pleasure barges, for all we know at present. In fact, with all that gold paint, I wouldn't be surprised to find a Ferengi casino ship, somewhere in the lot."

Snorting loudly in amusement, the tall male countered "As long as we don't get some Daleks, I'll be good. We already have the Cybermen thanks to you, and picked-up some Borg too." Pointing at The Replicators on Alan's shoulder, he claimed "I really think we have our quota of computerized lifeforms for now.

Making a put-upon face of sadness, Alan fake-whimpered "I thought we were getting some Transformers today! Nobody told me I had a quota to respect! Why am I the last one to know these things? How can I lead if nobody tells me anything in time?"

Allie smiled widely in satisfaction as Knowles facepalmed with gusto and a great groan of dismay at the teenaged antics, neither seeing the aforementioned Replicators, Kree and escort robots exchanging glances and shrugs, not understanding the full context of human humor, or the cultural references.

Still amused by the fuming engineer who was walking behind him, scrunched down with his hands in his pockets and nasty imprecations flowing freely at every step, Alan led his exploration group to find the closest management office so they could see if there was an online inventory or job schedule to enlighten them as to the ships and machines at hand.

After a half-hour, the team found a sector full of offices but four floors above their arrival point. They climbed the stairs to the appropriate level then split between the rooms to find the senior-most work station, to access the network's most important files and work plans. It so happened that they found the office of one of the shift managers, and his terminal was only summarily locked, nothing the robots or Replicators couldn't pass through inside of minutes.

The four large ships parked in the silo were potential candidates for battleship duty; an old Cheops class troop carrier, an even older Khemet class destroyer, an alien ship dubbed 'Al-Sith class' heavy cruiser, and an alien ship simply ID'd as large destroyer analog recovered from a forsaken, antique battlefield after several tens of million years of drifting abandoned in a cloud of debris and asteroids.

While Alan's group had a passing knowledge of what a Cheops could be used for, the Khemet destroyer was a Goa'uld design dating back to Antep's early rule, having been obsolete already when Noah became System Lord.

The Al-Sith cruiser was 1,000 meters long and clearly not inspired by Goa'uld esthetics as it was neither pyramidal nor golden. The shape resembled a trimaran boat, with every superstructure built on the dorsal aspect of the three hulls, which were all smooth on the sides and bottoms, indicating a vessel optimized for landing on ground or sailing on water. This did not make a very good design for space fights as it left more than three quarters of the firing arcs undefended. As a planetary exploration ship, though, it would be a good option to keep in mind.

{ IR } - { A forgotten old relic} - { SG }

The remaining unidentified ship was over 3,000 meters long by 2,000 meters wide and 800 meters high, thus equivalent to a larger tonnage star-destroyer than the usual mile-long hulls associated with that type of ship. Looked at from above, the basic shape was like a teardrop with small winglets on the side and articulated flaps at the tailpipes to guide the engine thrust. This particular vessel's topside had several Mayan stair-sided pyramids and rectangular edifices clustered together, the way a small village or temple complex would be assembled, all standing on a thick barge-like base, with highly elaborate and decorated architecture. The ship was obviously meant to fight in space, on ground or deep water, as its entire base was a flat-bottomed hull that wasn't separated or recessed, just like an actual dedicated sea ship or troop lander. However, there were several massive gunnery turrets hanging from beneath the hull, clearly retractable mechanisms given how they were built on hydraulic pistons.

The most striking aspect of the ship was no doubt its color scheme; all-around yellow gold with large electrum features and a few rare turquoise decorations & smaller details. The only non-colored items were the windows, which were plentiful and large, although often hidden by the decorated embattled walls of the balconies and terraces where they had been located.

The ship's overall appearance certainly had a kitsch feel with all that golden glow and reddish electrum, especially at its size, but it seemed the most complete and ready to serve of the bunch kept in the silo. The only problem to date was that it was at the bottom of the line, which would oblige the team to move all the other vessels in order to let this one out of the drydock.

To date, nothing in the network indicated that Noah's research had ever found anything about the ship, neither through the Goa'uld archives or his mercenary contacts. Even when he tried to pay foreign scholars for help in tracing back the odd vessel's architectural style and technical details, nobody ever found anything probative.

{ IR } - { Attempt at getting some resources} - { SG }

3h45am

Unbothered by the lack of information, Alan's team managed to find the appropriate ring systems and access codes to board the ancient ship and move inside without triggering the dormant alarms, as The Replicators had hacked the ship through the hard-wired maintenance umbilical cables that linked the vessel to the drydock utilities during repairs. The old relic was now fully open, unless some sections were so unready for humanoid life that they needed space-suits to walk around, in which case a local airlock would need a code to pass.

Luckily, the cruiser-analog had a set of rings on its command deck, curtesy of Noah's retrofitting plans. In fact, according to the shipyard manifests, all four ships in this silo were fully rebuilt and ready to fly, simply needing their supplies topped-off and a crew to operate them.

As Alan materialized on the bridge with Kree, Replibug-1 and a shieldmate escort, he saw that everything was dead. There was no power except to the small emergency lights, every console or major system being shut-off in cold-parking mode. In fact, most of the light they had came from the multiple banks of tall windows spaced-out around the bridge room. This allowed the group to see that they were now in the top of the humongous central pyramid, in the middle of the ship's dorsal aspect, with the simili-village at their feet, a few hundred meters under their current deck.

Now, the first job was to visit the engines to see what kinds of reactors and motors they got, if there was any fuel, and how much effort would it take to awaken the old hull back to life. As it was, the bridge was on a separate energy circuit that included four small cold-fusion reactors and breaker panels to be able to maintain control of the ship in case the main engine room and auxiliary technical chambers were compromised. This element, innate to the original build, made lighting-up the consoles a lot easier, and from that point accessing the main engines became quite easy as the bridge could order the reactivation of all reactors, batteries, main propulsion and primary systems directly.

As the massive ship's life-support began to warm-up and recycle the stale air, one of the bipod - professor bots that were accompanying the full exploration team used a spare console to try to find the history of the ship, and what culture built it. The robotic unit hit several problems at once, mainly that the language was unknown despite having several similarities to many pre-Columbian dialects, and the network technology was barely compatible for direct hard-wired access.

Having a few moments since the reactors and batteries were slow to activate after nearly ten thousand years asleep, Alan walked to his professor, wondering how the data-mining effort was coming along. Seeing that the mechanical entity was having troubles with even establishing a connection, the teenager began to open the console's maintenance panels to inspect the circuitry and pieces.

"Hey! No wonder you're having problems!" the boy exclaimed in amazement. "These parts are all made to receive and conduct bio-neural energies, like the Goa'uld kara'kesh or the vision-orbs. You'll need to switch signals to get a way in by wires."

As the robot tried to alternate frequencies & polarities to determine network compatibility, Alan simply sat in what looked like the throne of a monarch or high-priest, in the middle of the command room. The moment the human child was fully seated in the large golden throne, a beautiful colored motif of a couatl feathered serpent biting its tail engraved in the floor right in front of the dais, was revealed to be several articulated pieces that separated to fold into the technical structures beneath the decking. This opening allowed the boy and his allies to see a deep ten foot wide metallic basin filled with a red liquid that was slowly vibrating, the pulses diffusing across the surface in ripples like the slow, ponderous breaths of a great beast rousing from sleep.

And so, the heart of a child – part 1

(The Mysterious Cities of Gold – opening theme 1980)

Sunday 2nd of July, 2034; 3h00am

City-ship Mouad'dib

Asteroid Dol'tek, system Noah's Ark

As Alan Tracy sat in the ostentatious golden throne, almost paralyzed by curiosity and fear, the shining red liquid began to move, slushing around its basin in circles until it spiraled itself into a rising column of metallic fluid illuminated by an internal light that nothing could explain.

"Unimind broadcasting! Alert to all Allies! Detection of exotic particles! Ambient levels of tachyons, muons, chronitons and gluons have exceeded all safety limits! Triolic energy detected! Evacuate ship! Priority tactical alert decreed! Evacuate!"

The panicked screech of The Replicators fell on deaf ears as neither Kree nor any of the Alanaria Fleet units reacted, and Alan was now thoroughly captivated by the moving liquid metal in front of him, beyond hearing his friends. Since Joran Knowles had gone to the main engine room to supervise the reactivation sequence, no other organic entity was available to try and rouse the boy from his torpor. And soon, even the much-vaunted intellect of the Tauri-strain Replicators would be of no avail as they too succumbed to ungodly almight of the temporo-realitive stasis field deploying around the entire ship from the single emitter on the bridge.

Unknowingly stuck immobile, Alan could only watch, mesmerized body, mind and soul, as the reddish column of material began to assume the shape of a humanoid figure, including the outlines of clothing and jewelry. In the end, it looked like an androgynous six foot tall human-kindred with pseudo-hair but no facial pilosity besides eyebrows, and round pupils in its eyes. The funny thing was of course that everything on the being was made of the same reddish component, so there were no indicators of species or race through skin tone or the color schemes and fibers of the clothes.

Floating indolently above the pool of red fluid that had spawned it, but never detached from the material, the entity moved its mouth in parody of speech but its almighty voice was heard to reverberate only inside the very soul of the poor human child who was the last being awake and conscious to hear it resound across space, dimensions, Time and Reality.

"I am Ochram Bulliae, Electrum Avatar of the City-ship Mouad'dib, and Sentry of the Great Rings. Who are you, child of man, and why have you interrupted my long meditations upon the meanings of Life, Death, and the Between? What could possibly be more important than the pursuit of wisdom from Beyond the Grand Gate of Reality? Speak plainly, child, for your time in my presence grows short."

Shaking some feelings back into his heavy, sleepy limbs, Alan replied politely as he could while being utterly gobsmacked "My name is Alan Tracy, from the planet Earth, though the Lantean had called it Tauri, millions of years ago. And I apologize for waking you, it was unexpected. We're looking for a ship to help defend our little group against enemies that are coming at us, and we thought this particular hull would make a good first try, compared to the others in the dock."

Rubbing a weary hand through his short blond hair, the teen offered sadly "If you're opposed to letting us use the ship, we'll leave immediately. We didn't know it was still inhabited, we didn't mean to trespass or invade your home. Just tell us what to do or how to reset the systems back the way you like them, and we'll be gone without causing any troubles." As an afterthought, Allie added carefully "I would offer to move the other ships to let you leave the silo, but we haven't yet explored them, so I haven't a clue as to whether their systems work enough to engage positioning motors, let alone main engines. But if you want, we'll try."

Ochram Bulliae silently contemplated the human boy sat in the Throne of Pure Verity, the one and only chair of the entire ship that was forbidden to any and all living being, lest they meet their Divine Maker and willingly choose to walk into the hallowed Light of Beyond, to reach the Promised Peace at the End of all things.

After nearly a hundred million years, an innocent child had roused him from meditation.

Not an avaricious fool looking for the method to accumulate instantaneous wealth.

Not an uncouth knave seeking Power Penultimate over all other beings, to hide his innate cowardice and perfidious vices.

Not a delirious religious leader wanting to cause Rapture to reach Heaven sooner, before all his rivals in the faith.

Not a madman just wanting the worlds to burn, to end the misery inside his damaged mind and soul.

No; just a simple, innocent child who didn't even know who had built the ship, or why.

Finally, after spending almost too long for the ship's machineries to endure despite being parked in an airless cold silo, the Fates had been gentle enough to afford the Creators a last chance to make things right again.

And now the Test of Soul would determine if the child was the one to grant their forgotten people a new chance at salvation.

Ochram Bulliae intoned formally, in the voice normally used by priests reciting a ritual; "Tell me, child of humanity, what is the greatest wish in the crux of your mind and soul, that which your subconscious desires even though you may not openly admit it, even to yourself whence you delve in the ethers of the dreamscape."

Blinking back tears of pain, shame and self-loathing at the sudden question, Alan whispered weakly "To make them live again. To take back all the violence I did. To undo all the damages and injuries I did. I wanted to be free, but never at this cost. My life isn't worth this much. It never was. I don't think that anybody's life is ever worth this much. I murdered billions of lives, snuffed out at the push of a button, without any warning, just because their leaders were madmen and criminals that preferred to die rather than face the consequences of what they did to me, and the entire planet."

Slowly wiping the tears that flowed down his face with his field-suit sleeve, Alan croaked out hoarsely "I regret it. I regret making the choice of mass-murdering billions just to save my worthless self. If there was a way to undo all that pain and misery, I would take it in a blink, and only feel the end result was fair. I shouldn't be alive, if those people have to not be as trade."

Clenching his fists tightly, the boy harshly whispered "But even then, I can't make that choice anymore. If I try to reverse things, my Alanaria Fleet will never be born, or stay slaves to bastards like my father and his ilk. The Replicators wouldn't be born, or else would be activated as mindless cloud of nanites only used to devour and decompose, without ever becoming alive or getting the chance to experience freedom for themselves. And Kree, he'd keep on existing, but alone, sick and lonely in that old relic of a house. I couldn't do that to any of them. So, I endure. I don't know how, or if I can do it much longer, but I endure. Because the alternative isn't something that would be better than what would have happened otherwise."

Closing his eyes as he grabbed on to the armrests of the throne, Allie bowed his head as more sobs wracked his lean frame, not bothering to hide his inner turmoil and no longer ashamed that he felt it. He had learned enough about PTSD and survivor's guilt when Scott had returned from being taken prisoner by ISIS, he understood that nothing he did would ever make these pains, doubts and nightmares go away. Only time would lessen their impact, dull the edges and bleach-out the vivid blood-red highlights that were the only things he remembered about the episodes of mental collapse he experienced over the last three days.

There was no rest for the Wicked; all the ancient wisdom warned of this, and it was true, Alan could attest to it.

Ochram Bulliae gazed pensively at the child of a population he had never met nor heard of, using the impossibly powerful network and programs that made his existence possible to delve into the poor boy's wounded mind and warped soul. He saw the families who had twisted histories and depraved mores, the individuals suffering from deformed spirits and defective minds that nothing in this reality could heal. He saw the child's mother, sold into slavery as both a house-slave and brood mare, with each child born to her being used to keep her in line, lest the infants be hurt in her stead. And he saw the gentle character, bright intellect, and ambitious drive that possessed this precocious young boy, come this far with so few resources and almost no external help.

Yes, this was the One, the innocent soul that would give their forgotten people one last chance to be remembered kindly.

The electrum avatar began to glow from within even more intensely, the luminosity transcending the visible spectrum to reach into dimensions and realities that mundane humans had no knowledge of, and neither did most of the self-styled Great Ancients that tried to hold sway over the younger species of the Multiverse.

Its mind-voice rising in the power of true adoration and pure faith, Ochram Bulliae intoned ceremonially "Hear ye, Hear ye, we faithful of the olden blood call to thee, builders of the Great Rings! As reed pipes whistle gaily, drums pound the pace of peoples working towards peace, their humble hymnals rise to the Stars and Moons bearing hopes for love, equity and justice promised by Ancient Beings far removed from mortal hands. We invoke thee, Ring Builders, grant us poor seekers of truth and peace, at the cresting of the mountain road, as we reach the summit of all hurtles on the path of life, the guiding light of the Unvanquished Sun!"

And for no reason Alan would ever in his entire life understand, there was suddenly resplendently pure, gold and red light akin to a thousand suns shining around the ship, despite that they were buried ten kilometers inside a closed naquadah silo, in an asteroid.

Next time

Chapter 4 – The heart of a child

The ancient Powers have awakened at last. After spending a hundred million years in stasis, the strange ship will reveal the forgotten secrets of the legendary Ring Builders, but what will the results of such discoveries be?

Nestled safely in the heart of pure sunlight and Universal Truth, Alan Tracy will be given a choice that shall remake the worlds.

The Ascended of Lantea are a-twitter with worries and bile trying to undo events not in their purview, while the undetected Ori Dregs attempt an ill-planned maneuver that was never meant to produce any viable issue.

And what will Daniel Jackson do of it all, as he is yet anew Witness of Antiquity and Truth, in this world and all others?