9: Breech Of Dawn
by Chaoseternus

Trust is broken and the rules rewritten when traitors are revealed and secrets released.

Chapter 9: Rejoining The Fleet

Persephone slid swiftly out of the Thundersdawn dry dock, the very quick easy manner by which she manoeuvred proving the crews practise as they brought the ship rapidly out of the bay for the tenth time since their hyperdrive failure.

Once again, a new 'fix' was in place, but unlike previous times, the crew were hopeful, they had been told what Technical Division felt the problem was, and its extremely simple fix and this time they had understood the explanation, understood the fix, and groaned over the very simpleness of it a thousand times.

Right now, they had a thousand and one vibration sensors packed all around the effected safety device, buried in a mass of padding, of shock and vibration absorbent material.

This time, they anticipated no problems.

Swiftly collecting their escort, the 1 st SFW they moved to outside the orbit of Jupiter and began an exhaustive series of tests and checks in preparation for their first test flight into hyper with this latest fix.

Then they jumped.

Ravenbright Station, Alpha Centauri.

"Unscheduled contacts dropping out of hyper!"

O'Neill snapped awake with a start as the words sounded throughout the control centre, god he hated bridge shifts, nothing to do and boring as hell, a perfect example of the old 98% boredom, 2% sheer terror adage.

"Any IFF?"

"Checking… Persephone, Prometheus class with a drive testbed tag to the IFF code and 1 st SFW"

O'Neill smiled, "It looks like they fixed their drives at last, send them our congratulations"

"Aye… fuck me!" the comm. Officer of the watch, an Ensign by the name of White shouted, his hand slamming down on the alert siren causing the lights to flicker to red and alarms to blare throughout the finished portions of the station and through every suit comm., "multiple contacts, Asgard, RSS and unidentified emerging from hyper"

Ensign White flushed suddenly, "must be the refuges starting to arrive, sorry sir"

O'Neill sent White a direct look, "You saw a fleet unexpectedly arriving and you hit the panic button without hesitation, that in my book gets you a commendation, I would much rather have the occasional false alarm then get creamed because we were debating whether it was an attack force or not"

White flushed again, "Yes sir, sorry sir, shall I hail them sir?"

O'Neill cracked a smile, "I rather suspect we have a closet trekkie here, yes 'hail' them"

"Sir, should I also put the crew on Alpha Secundus on full alert?"

O'Neill nodded approvingly, "Yes please, and take us to condition 2 general, medical to stand to condition 1 and rig for refugees"

"Sir, Persephone just jumped out on a course for the Sol System"

O'Neill nodded, "Signal the rest of the ships to initiate plane 'Covenant-12"

In a surge of motion, the Alpha PDF forces, the MTB's Alpha Prime, Alpha II, Lancer 1-A squadrons Defenders, Foxes as well as the Prometheus class Cruisers trapped in the Alpha Centauri system, the Prometheus herself, and Yorktown all broke from their patrols or docks and headed to the arriving refugees, gathering over the arriving vessels in a protective umbrella of warcraft as they waited for the rest to be delivered into relative safety.

Another race of humans was being brought to Alpha Centauri for safety and like their cousins, the Tollan before them they would be protected and guarded.

With all the force the Tau'ri could bring to bear.