I don't own Star Trek or Stargate SG1.
X
Shattered Times and Timelines.
Odyssey out of Time.
Five Years Later.
Admiral William 'Bill' Ross, the Head of Starfleet Command watched with guarded eyes as his flagship jumped out of the hyperspace vortex, just above the planet, blinking as the Bellophron emerged from the five-day journey into the Ida galaxy, the impulse engines autonomically compensating with the inertial dampeners to slow the ship down.
Ross sighed as he took in the vast number of starships stretching out as far as the eye could see, in three dimensions. "Why did it have to come to this?" He whispered, feeling as if his lungs had been aged by forty-five years or more.
He wasn't quiet enough. The Bellophron's captain was standing near him and heard. "Sir?"
Ross turned to the Bellophron's captain. "I was wondering how it had to come to this," he said with a weary sigh. "This war's gone on forever, and the Dominion is fighting to the bitter end. It has to change."
"And we hope these ships will help stop the war?" The captain asked before shaking her head. "Good luck."
Ross grunted. He didn't say a word to refute the captain's pessimism; the Dominion War had lasted for so long now, ever since the Dominion stole hyperdrive technology that it was becoming increasingly hard to see a way of getting themselves out of this hell. He turned to her, seeing the pretty but hardened face. He wondered if she had joined the fleet before the war, she had joined because she had been inspired by people like James Kirk, Rachel Garrett, Jean-Luc Picard, or all of the other heroes of Starfleet.
All that promise and she had been a frontline soldier where she was forced to spend her time fighting, giving eulogies. The war had hardened everyone in Starfleet. People were being promoted daily to the ranks of lieutenant commander, commander, or even admiral, whether they were ready for the jobs or not.
Ross himself had encountered and dealt with so much death for the last few years. He'd even had to make deals with the literal devils, he had no love for Section 31, but he had no doubt that they were the ones behind the virus that was wiping out the Founders. Although it horrified him that he would even think about it, being from the 24th century although he had to admit to himself that you could live in whatever year or century you liked, human beings had the same view, Ross hoped the entire race was wiped out. The Founders deserved it for everything they had done, and he had lost any interest in defending them as a life form. The war had changed everyone, and Ross wondered what those changes would be like in the next decade.
If they had a future.
That was why he was here.
To make sure the Federation, the Milky Way, had a future and that future did not include the Founders, the Dominion, or the Jem'Hadar. Ever since the deaths of Odo and Julian Bashir, who had been trying to find a cure for the disease wiping out the Dominion's Founders (likely Section 31's work to ensure the war ended the way they hoped), Ross had been trying to find ways of ending the war, and the increasingly hardline in Starfleet and the Federation, to say nothing about the view of the Delta Coalition who didn't have the same philosophical views as the Federation, were prepared to go to whatever lengths were seen fit.
After the attacks on Earth, Vulcan, Voth Prime, Nyria 3, and many other worlds, the tolerance towards the lines of morality had blurred. The Voth had always had a zero-tolerance policy towards the Jem'Hadar and the rest of the Dominion. The ancient Saurian species had begun committing mass genocide against every single Dominion outpost they encountered. They worked with the Nyrians and even the Vidiians, who worked with the Brunali, a species who had been rescued by Starfleet from the Borg and worked with other races to devise bioweapons.
Despite their success especially since the Delta Coalition wanted the Dominion to pay for everything they had been doing since the war had begun and was drawn over their part of the galaxy, many in Starfleet condemned the bioweapons as it was too close to genetic manipulation, earning the contempt from many Delta Quadrant races and powers, who practiced genetics, and called humanity stupid for not bothering to grow and mature to use genetics in a more mature manner.
The war was getting worse and worse, and with the Delta Coalitions' unwanted reality check ringing in their ears, Starfleet was beginning to make use of bigger and more dangerous weapons. But the Dominion continued to fight with their last breaths as the Founders were being wiped out, dying. And then Starfleet came out with a master plan.
Ross closed his eyes. "May our children forgive us," he said.
"Sir?" The captain said, confused.
Ross smiled thinly to himself. The captain, like the rest of the Fleet, did not know of the plan. She wouldn't for a while yet. He wondered if she would be horrified if some part of her which had been raised in the utopian Federation which still survived and existed even after all this time, fighting the Dominion, a war which had been going on for nearly 8 years. Ross knew he would never have allowed himself to be coming up with this type of plan a few years ago, in the first years of the war, but he was no longer that man.
He had seen the Breen attack on Earth.
He had been part of the liberation fleets to Qo'Nos, Romulus, Betazed, and so many other worlds, and he had seen the atrocities of the Dominion occupation with their Cardassian lackeys.
He had been forced to read hundreds of casualty reports on a daily basis, and the numbers were increasing each day. Civilians were also being counted, and the numbers of children from various races shared across by the Delta Coalition and the Gamma Resistance, who were separated from the Federation by nothing but light-years, horrified him and made him think the view that bioweapons and other horrors might be the only way to save the Milky Way from the war, regardless of what it did to their souls in the future was correct.
"Never mind, Captain," he found himself saying although a part of him wished he could take this woman into his confidence and see if she would be the one to tell him to find a different way, her earlier attitude made it clear she was one of those people who were determined to see the Dominion war over, by any means necessary. In a louder voice, he said, "Contact traffic control," he ordered. "I'll send my command authorisation code to them."
"Understood, sir," the captain left him to send the message, or because she sensed he just wanted to be left alone, Ross didn't know. And he didn't care.
He just found it hard to take his eyes off of the planets in his current line of sight. The whole future of the United Federation of planets was down there. He only wished he could feel reassured by that feeling, or that he wished he could change his mind.
X
Throughout the galaxy, hyperspace windows opened up very close to stars and planets in systems that were known to contain Dominion activity while other worlds had been conquered by the Dominion in secret, so the presence of the Vorta cloning facilities and Jem'Hadar hatcheries, and orbiting shipyards had needed to be especially detected by Starfleet Intelligence (and secretly by Section 31), and ships emerged from each of them. They fired torpedoes at each of them, and they re-entered hyperspace.
The stars flashed as they exploded. If sound could travel through space, the bangs from each of the stars would have echoed across the entire galaxy, perhaps even beyond. But the only thing that signified the star's destruction was the flash. But the stars weren't fully finished, not yet. Within each of the stars, the weapons that were fired in them went to work.
The Isa device was one of the deadliest weapons created by Asgard technology. Finding them had been more luck than by design. One of the researchers responsible for accessing the Asgard data core on the Odyssey after the ship had been transferred to a different galaxy so Starfleet could study it without fear of the Dominion sabotaging, stealing, or destroying it, had been looking through the files about different types of weaponry when one of the Asgard hologram avatars told them about the work of the disgraced Fenrir, an Asgard biologist who'd lost someone important to him during the Replicator war (the idea of a series of machine-beings chewing their way through the Dominion had been compelling, but at the same time thanks to the logs and reports from the Stargate teams who'd encountered them had put Starfleet off), so he had created a powerful weapon which would combine matter-energy transference, time dilation, and solar dynamics into one.
The Isa device accelerated time in a star's core until the star ran out of its nuclear fuel, and it would then become a black hole without the fuel to support its own mass. in the final throes of its existence, the star would let out terrifying levels of x-rays, flash frying whole planets in one go, eradicating all life in the solar system before the star's final collapse.
Fenrir made the mistake of testing the weapon on an inhabited system. It wiped out an entire intelligent society, and the scientist was rightfully exiled, but his work was kept, and it was later used ironically against the replicators. Finding out how the weapon worked was relatively easy, even if some of the mechanics were currently beyond Starfleet science.
The other weapon was the Genesis Torpedo.
The Federation had never forgotten the disaster caused by Khan Noonien Singh, following his capture of the USS Reliant in the 23rd century, and neither had the Klingon Empire, who had detected the enormous amount of energy unleashed by Khan's premature detonation of the Genesis Device in the Mutara Nebula, where the cloud was blended together to form a small solar system, but later collapsed under its own weight.
The Federation had banned Genesis technology of any kind, and while they continued researching protomatter because of its nature, and its unstable side effects, they came down hard on any weapon featuring protomatter of any kind. But desperate times called for desperate measures. Some might say it was illogical to use the Genesis technology on planets about to be swallowed up by black holes, and others might call the Federation Council out on their plan to even go this far in the first place. But Starfleet's moral scruples had started to die off, times were becoming more desperate.
They had spent months speaking to representatives from many of the powers, and they all agreed that the Dominion needed to be wiped out, to say nothing of the Borg Collective, who were also launching their own assimilation attacks, but the Dominion were the top priority.
The Genesis device was precisely sent straight to the heart of the Dominion facilities, detonated and then the protomatter would wipe them out, and the energies would interact with the x-rays unleashed by the Isa devices.
The Federation had wanted a solution.
Now they had one, to force the Dominion into surrendering to the Federation and the other powers.
A Final Solution.