Dear readers, here is chapter 8, whose length will entertain you long enough, I hope. And before you ask, yes I played Cyberpunk '77 -)

Chapter 8 – A Dragon's kiss

A month later

Ann Rayner dropped on the bar stool with a small satisfied sigh. The Crossroads actually felt like a familiar place now, with the pair of bouncers at the entrance giving her a friendly handwave as they ushered her in. She still had to unload her weapons in the vestibule, though. That rule was ironclad and she didn't mind.

Glancing at the shelves, she spotted one of her bottles – with a suitably translated and altered label that didn't tell anything about Earth. But the various high-end liquors, wines and brandies smuggled through Boch's stargate did eventually find their way into the closets of… discerning and exotism-loving customers in the Hebridean systems.

So did the chocolate. Apparently cocoa beans were not a standard part of whatever terraforming template the Gatebuilders used across the galaxy. So was coffee, though it seemed every world had an equivalent to it, or tea at least, to satiate their denizens' craving for caffeine.

In any case, it provided her with a steady trickle of funds.

Grain, on the other hand, was a staple of ecologies, thus beer appeared to be universal. She ordered a favorite one then nursed the foaming stein of fruity bitter liquid, taking little sips as she pricked her ears to listen on the latest gossip. She was looking forward to unwind a bit more with Aria – she long discovered the woman wasn't exactly monogamous, but it suited her. She wasn't exactly looking for that kind of relationship herself.

She watched the dancers and the colorful fauna – a few locals she'd worked with came to greet her and make small talk. All in all, it felt almost homy.

Which was dangerous, part of her felt. She couldn't afford to think of herself as a local, couldn't forget she was a Draka on a mission, and look at what happened when she'd thought she could be someone else. The burning pyre of her past Tollan life flashed in front of her, the picture she'd seen after she was revived.

The call saved her from further brooding, and she went up to Charo's nest.

They went through the usual greeting and pleasantries, then Charo switched to business mode, unsurprisingly. She wouldn't have called a physical meeting for a mundane chat. Even for her.

"So. I got wind – don't ask me how" – Rayner did an inwards snort, as if she'd be dumb enough to believe she could ask that question and get a true answer "of a potential job, one involving going deep in Goa'uld space."

"Ah." Rayner said non-committedly. "Going deep in Goa'uld space" was also a euphemism for "insanely risky, if not suicidal" in the merc' circuit. "So… it would take someone crazy to take it, and you thought of me" she teased in return. Charo answered it with an enigmatic smile.

"Well, you proved you were an able operator… and I thought you might be particularly interested in… operating in Goa'uld space." Rayner weighted the hidden subtext in Charo's careful choice of words. She knew Rayner's presence was due to a deeper mission on behalf of her mysterious home world. And she was offering this op as a way to gain some intel in the Goa'uld sphere.

"Unfortunately, details are scarce, but my sources insist the sponsor is a credible player. Thing is, you'd need to meet him, or her, or them, face to face. On Hebridea."

"Ah." Rayner punctuated again, the implications as to her identity and her ship flashing in her mind. Charo's next words acknowledged her thoughts.

"Now, your e-id should not be a problem. Your ship on the other hand… its signature can be altered, but it's still an Alkesh. The deeper in-system you go, the higher the chance that System Control or another agency takes an interest in it, and since it's an armed ship it will be subjected to even stricter rules and procedures. I'd advise you to dock your ship out in one of the less-policed outer ports then charter passage sunward. Even in Tech-Con land, people enjoy their privacy and going as an ordinary passenger, you shouldn't be unduly scrutinized."

"Makes sense" Rayner commented. "Then once I'm on Hebridea, how would I contact that mysterious client?"

Charo made a curious face, as if repressing the urge to giggle.

"Apparently you would have to book in a specific hotel, then there would be a specific set of… recognition signals."

The Draka's eyebrow went up. "Sound very… old school?"

"Sometimes old school just works."

In the end there was no question that she was going to take the job. The datapacket containing the scant job details was transferred, then Rayner began to set up her journey, then Aria, back from an assignment of her own lent her assistance and pleasurable presence.

After a short uneventful flight Alix found shelter in one of the stations orbiting above on of the outermost moons in the Hebridean system – about where Neptune would sit relative to Earth. Rayner paid for several weeks of parking rights in advance, adding a generous bonus to the harbormaster to ensure nobody asked too many questions.

Her luggage – clothes and sundries, all local-made - went into a used-looking hovertrunk, generously adorned with souvenir stickers that told anyone looking that its owner was a well-traveled person. She left out her Earth-procured weaponry. She had a right to bear arms… up to a limit. She couldn't be a walking arsenal or eyebrows would raise and questions would be asked. She satisfied herself with a second-hand slug-thrower of local manufacture, handy and reliable and utterly unremarkable. If all went well, she wouldn't have to use it.

She left Alix in lockdown mode. If anybody tried to tinker with it or force entry despite the dock's security, she would know about it and the culprit would find the ship's various anti-tamper and theft measures thoroughly unpleasant, nerve gas being but one of the features on the list.

To anyone who happened to be looking as the passengers boarded the shuttle flight to the inner system, the tall attractive woman with purple-green hair, fashionable AR glasses and sober but well-cut pant-suit sensibly tailored for the occasional stretch of zero-gravity was just another of the billion folks flying daily between places in the Hebridean system.

Ann Rayner almost jumped when the cacophony assaulted her right out of the transfer tube. The shuttle's quiet didn't prepare her for the smorgasbord of noise inside the large transfer station in Hebridea's orbit. Maybe the large animated billboards on the outside, flashing advertisements away to the ship going to and fro should have told her what to expect… But not that level of sudden auditive overload. Her sensitive ears flattened against her skull and her brain filtered out the racket into a background rumble.

She went forward into the concourse, trying not to gawk as the reality of the inner system hit her. There was the noise, the constant rolling barrage of advertising messages overlaid onto the brouhaha of the crowd, travelers like her flowing in every direction, hurrying or leisurely taking their time, silent or gabbling loudly to unseen correspondents, families with children running and shouting, a teeming mass of brightly garbed humanity – in both smooth-skinned and scaled versions – that drove in the sheer scale of the Hebridean system and how in contrast marginal and isolated the Buffer Zone was.

Abstract knowledge of the Hebridean system density and population was one thing. Seeing a real-life sampling was another. She'd almost forgotten how it was to mingle in the vast crowds an advanced, urbanized society could summon.

She mentally scolded herself. Allright Annie-girl, you're not some plantation-born serf just stepping out in Archona.

Her e-deck booked her a transfer flight down to the capital and she followed the visual directions provided by her AR display to the embarkation terminal, down a lift through the station's main axis and through another vast, crowded concourse strategically dotted with booths and shops selling everything a traveler might require and then more. She paused at a Food-Tech booth to stock up on calories, found them predictably overpriced and longed yet again for the hand-made dishes of her Citizen upbringing, salivating at the memories of warm fragrant and spicy pots brought to the table by her serf nanny, a long time ago… Good times, she smiled dreamily, then the nagging voice in her mind added its acid comment. You were happy, your nanny looked happy, but she didn't have a choice in her life.

She involuntarily gulped and nearly choked on a bite of synth-meat pellets. Her coughing went unnoticed in the hubbub, then she took long steadying breaths. Screw you. I didn't have a choice either being born a Citizen. Nobody's ever actually free. You only get to pick among the choices life and fate present you.

Firmly pushing the little voice back in a dark recess from where she hoped it would never get out of again, she rose up, discarded her tray in the recycler and walked out to the next stage of her journey.

Her seat in the orbit-to-ground transfer shuttle wasn't like the luxurious, semi-enclosed fully reclining and bed-like one she'd spent the space voyage in. But this was a much shorter trip. The blended-body shuttle with stubby wings looked both familiar and subtly alien, not so different from the pre-War scramjets of Earth refitted with artificial gravity systems.

As she familiarized herself with her window-side seat, a middle-aged woman with garish clothes and obvious cosmetic facework sat on the nearby seat and tried to strike a casual conversation. Not wanting to be rude, she obliged, practicing her fake story as a mining company middle-management executive and making polite noises as the woman told her how exciting her orbital spa day had been. Then she cursed her politeness when her seat neighbor excitedly told her of her latest "business venture" where she peddled "natural oils, not the synthetic kind!" that would work wonders for her health and well-being. Listening to her explanations, Rayner found it puzzling how she could describe herself as a "business owner" when all she did was buy some unremarkable products from a company – to which she was contractually obliged to order regular stock renewals – then try and push them out to everyone she knew or met. In fact, she found the woman's insistence that she tried out her products somewhat nagging and desperate-sounding. She eventually excused herself in a firm but polite way, cutting the woman short in her attempt to share her contact details and offer Rayner a "unique opportunity to supplement her own income by joining her team of resellers", then purposefully turned away to look through the window and admire the first lights of ionization as the shuttle began its reentry.

Remembering the size of "Rayna's" accounting ledger, the Draka inwardly sniggered. The "unique business opportunity" sounded rather pitiful in comparison. She imagined the woman's face if she saw the size of her current fortune and how exactly she'd made it, and the mental laugh followed her all the way to the plane's landing.

Half an hour later she went through what passed for a border inspection. The automated body-scan made her briefly fret – but it was tailored to look out for hidden weapons and militarized implants, and the sheer variety of possible body modifications it had to allow for meant her own nominally flesh-and-blood self didn't warrant further, hands-on investigation.

Her luggage breezed through its own exam, including the gun snug inside its specially-sealed travel box. From her observations since she'd arrived in-system, openly carrying was apparently not something done in civilized society. She took the opportunity of a stop in the bathroom to slide the small weapon into a concealed holster in her back where her travel backpack would hide its outline in any case. She didn't anticipate having a need to use it. Unity City might have some rough neighborhoods according to her travel literature, but her planned activities should keep her out of them and staying in the better parts. Part of her almost regretted that. In any case, the familiar feel of wearing a gun was that, familiar and comforting to the Domination citizen she was before all.

After that, she hopped in a waiting air-taxi, told the computer her destination then reclined in the plushy leather seat, savoring a complimentary drink as the capital city's outskirts swept under her eyes through the one-way glass. The starport with its neat ranks of landing pads and gleaming terminals receded and a mish-mash of low constructions and agricultural fields followed, crisscrossed by a network of roads and speedways along which a multitude of ground vehicles appeared to speed through. It was busy-looking, Rayner thought. Busier than the Tollan equivalent – the latter didn't have much use for ground travel or did so using less footprint.

The coast appeared, sea-blue glimmering and a flurry of waterborne traffic – pleasure craft judging from their size and shapes, then the outskirts progressively became denser and the buildings higher, next the ring of imposing carbon-reclamation towers encircling the megapolis, scrubbing the atmosphere clean of the by-products it created, casting vast looming shadows, then at last the city proper in its glorious excess. Glittering multi-kilometer high towers of all shapes – blocky habitation blocks, each of them a small town in its own right – giant billboards cutting through the air itself with bigger and louder versions of the ones in the transfer station. The air-taxi joined the city's general traffic, one vehicle lost among tens of thousands plying the lanes between super-buildings on automated control.

A huge tower complex appeared in her field of vision, relegating even the nearby mega-buildings to the rank of dwarves. The AR glasses helpfully identified it as the Tech-Con Group headquarters and Rayner remembered how the conglomerate and its army of direct and indirect subsidiaries represented eighty percent of the Hebridean republic's total economy at last census. She almost shook her head at the enormous scale of it. She was still staring at the mammoth complex in the distance when the air-taxi left the traffic lane and dropped down towards her destination. Amidst a whine of sustentation turbines, it came to a soft landing on a platform hanging in midair, protruding from the cliff-like side of its parent tower.

The wide, full-height side door swiveled upwards and Rayner picked up her backpack. The vehicle's disembodied voice, neither male nor female but artificially cheerful spoke up.

"You have arrived to the Galaxy Palace. Thank you for choosing Sky-Cabs, a subsidiary of Tech-Con Group. We hope you had a pleasant journey! This flight awarded you no less than five hundred fidelity points!"

"Thanks" the nonplussed Draka replied without thinking much of a machine's generosity, gratifying it with a small dismissal wave of her hand. Her feet on the platform, she glanced at the bellboy waiting for her in a neatly pressed uniform. Huh. A flesh and blood groom. I'd expected another robot or talking screen. Funny how true luxury, when machines can do everything, always ends up meaning a live, sentient being gets to do your bidding.

"May I take your trunk, Ma'am?" the groom's obsequious request cut through her musings.

She waved him forward, and he darted to the taxi's open luggage compartment to extract her hover-trunk. She followed him from the corner of her eye then resumed her walk forward to the platform's exit door, her clothes fluttering gently in the high-altitude wind. The mirrored gates split open before her and she went through, the bellboy and trunk on her heels, resisting the urge to turn back and gawk again at the scenery. She was supposed to be a jaded traveler, after all.

The Galaxy Palace occupied the upper half of the tower, ending on top with a recreation complex of cascading pools and gardens. She found herself walking into the reception atrium, having sidestepped the elevator ride from ground level, and another uniformed employee greeted her on the spot, preventing her from doing more than taking a quick glance at the cavernous space and its glitters of gold filigree and white marble shaping foreign stars and constellations.

"Welcome to Galaxy Palace! May I guide you through the check-in process, Ma'am?" came in the same cheerfully obsequious tone as he straightened out of his greeting bow, reptilian eyes shining.

"You may. Go ahead."

She followed him to the cruiser-sized reception desk, luggage-carrier in tow. The check-in was quick. She'd booked her stay in advance, and her travel identity breezed through the system.

"Your first visit here, Ma'am?"

"Yes. My usual place was full and I wanted to try something else."

"Of course, of course! Certainly, you'll find your trial stay worth repeating!" the clerk enthusiastically commented.

Rayner's e-deck bleeped a soft chime as it received her electronic access token. She smiled at the clerk, then caught the expectant stare on top of the commercial smile. She'd almost forgotten. She typed a figure and flicked her fingers forward, sending a generous lump of credits the clerk's way. The smile became warmer and less artificial as the man's implant acknowledged reception of the tip. "Thank you, Ma'am, I hope you enjoy your stay!" came out of his mouth with something approaching sincerity.

The bellboy took point on the way toward the cathedral-sized elevator battery that would lead her to her suite. She took notice of the boutiques peddling luxury items and clothing, spreading their net of temptations under the visitors' eyes, and made a mental note to visit later. After all, she had most of the day and a night to spend before the meeting time.

There were no obnoxious ads in the atrium nor inside the elevator, she noticed with relief. Apparently, that also was a luxury. Another thing Citizens in the Domination took for granted. To their credit, the Tollans were less… mercantile as well, she reflected. Despite being both long past the subsistence level, the two societies had developed on quite different paths. Then there was the Domination. She shrugged. Of course, there would be differences, human habits could be widely varied – were even on Earth before the Yoke smothered those differences.

She ran out of her inner social commentary when the door to her suite opened. She wasn't exactly a society debutante. She'd rubbed shoulders with the glitz of Tollan society, and she was born a Citizen, taking for granted the notion that she would always be part of her society's upper caste. Yet after the last year spent in the rougher expanses of the Buffer Zone, the sight that greeted her eyes made her ego tingle.

Renting one of the Galaxy's largest suites made a dent in her ledger, but she felt she deserved to indulge herself. The suite's gleaming atrium was larger than Alix's entire living space and she almost cried in joy at the genuine floral compositions adorning the walls between art pieces and floor to ceiling mirrors. She glided forward on a little carpet of dreams. The main room could be called palatial indeed, with a cathedral-sized ceiling and overhanging upper floor. Holographic scenes hung in the air displaying natural wonders of the Hebridean systems, managing not to eclipse the natural materials used in furnishing the room, wood veneers and rich fabrics and golden filigrees combining in a style that was its own but reminisced Rayner of Earth's Art Deco style – the one that received a huge following in the early twenty century Domination.

Then there was the Serrakin butler standing in the middle of it. He glanced at the bellboy in a "I'll take it from there" expression. A generous tip from Rayner later, he backed out of the suite with a respectful bow. All this is nice, but I wouldn't be so nickel-and-dimed in the Domination. Then, these folks are free to hang up their work uniform and go nickel-and-dime elsewhere if they wish.

"Welcome to your suite, Ma'am. Would you like me to unpack your baggage?"

Rayner never thought of refusing. She owed it to her Citizen's upbringing that the idea of a total stranger rummaging through her underwear to pack it neatly on shelves didn't even register as uncomfortable. She checked out the bedroom – suitably huge, with a suitably huge and pillowy bed, with its integrated… bathroom wasn't quite the word for the swimming-pool sized tub recessed in the heated marble floor with its dazzling array of nozzles.

And it was already filled up with bubbly water and flower petals. Rayner's mind suddenly took acute awareness of her own state after a good day's worth of travel. She didn't stink, yet the sight of the ready bath made her feel ripe. Fifteen seconds later, the travel pant-suit was a discarded lump on the floor and Rayner's mouth exhaled a sigh of contentment as she immersed herself.

The butler appeared out of the walk-in closet minutes later, acknowledging Rayner presence in the bath with a polite nod, his expression betraying either an admirable absence of libido or an equally admirable professional façade.

"Would you like me to prepare a meal for you? I hear long travels have a way of opening one's appetite" he proposed with a small knowing smile.

"By all means" Rayner answered, absent-mindedly flicking foam out of her fingers. "Make it a large one." That Food-Tech meal on the transit station felt like ancient memory. She expected the butler to use the food preference questionnaire she'd filled as part of her advance booking.

Left to herself, she concentrated on soaking the weariness of travel – imaginary or real – away.

She opened her eyes with a slight start. She must have allowed herself to doze off. She blinked her eyes several time, then glanced at her wrist terminal. Wow, I've been in there for an hour. I suppose I needed it. She tapped an icon on the tub's control terminal and water poured out through the evacuation holes with barely a growl. She rinsed her body away, then put on the waiting cottony bathrobe, suitably fluffy, as she expected. A she finished toweling her hair, the scent of cooked food wafted up her sensitive nostrils. Either the butler used surveillance equipment to keep tab on her, or he was really good at judging times. Probably the latter, she told herself with a chuckle. She negligently knotted the bathrobe closed. She suspected the Serrakin host wouldn't bat an eye at seeing her naked form, but didn't feel like testing him. At least, not now.

A low table was set with an assortment of plates and dishes, all of them looking fresh out of the plantation. Local fruits, roasted vegetables. Grilled meats, fragrant and intoxicating. A local variant of scrambled eggs. Breads of all sorts, natural or toasted, the latter still warm.

"Please call me if you need anything else."

"Muh-hmm" Rayner found herself answering through a mouthful of eggs, having dived straight in. As the butler departed unobtrusively, she mentally chastised herself for her lapse in manners, then shrugged. She'd make sure to leave him a suitably generous tip at the end of her stay.

She ate, cleaning out the plates down to the last crumb. Read on Unity City's landmarks and history as she digested her meal, laying languidly on the boat-sized settee. Picked up a light dress to change out of the bathrobe. Went down the reception level to buy an essential piece of her recognition signal. She found something in the specified color.

Back up to the top of the tower for a long session of physical exercise in the lavishly-equipped palestra-equivalent, relishing the heat and the sweat coming out of her limbs and acknowledging the occasional lustful glance her leotard-clad body attracted.

One glance led to more and she travelled back down to her suite with a conveniently willing stack of toned muscle that also happened to sport the latest in unobtrusive cyber-enhancement down there. She remembered how Crusher's combat chassis enabled him to overmatch her Drakensis body in both speed and power. Well, the present encounter was such a match, albeit in a much better sense. For the first time of her life, she was the one who had to call for a cessation of hostilities after several hours of relentless action. Shutting her eyes down with her impromptu partner's massive rippling arm wrapped over her flank, her last conscious thought was a whimsical reflection on how valid the expression "he fucked her brains out" felt right now.

A restorative night and another session of wake-up sex later, she almost swallowed the wrong way when "Dorrin" sent a bill for his services on her e-deck during their shared breakfast. She had to do a double-take. Her fling was sitting on the other side of the table, munching on a piece of meat-cake, eyeing her expectantly. She had a flash of understanding. What she'd believed was a fling was in fact a service transaction and she'd been so caught up with her own sexual worth that she'd never envisioned… finding herself as the client.

"Ah. Sure, of course" she smiled back. Ah well, I guess I did lack experience in gauging things out there. Anyway, he was good. Can't complain about the provided service.

The five-figures sum left her ledger to join Dorrin's and he winked at her. "Anytime" he commented.

He rose up to gather his clothes and leave her suite. She suddenly blurted out "Wait! I have a question..."

A raised eyebrow told her to shoot away.

"Did you… did you have fun too?" she was genuinely curious.

A large grin answered her, along with a twinkle in his electric-blue eyes.

"Telling you the truth: I did. A pleasure to do business with you, Miss Rayna."

The rest of the morning she spent reading another Hebridean crime novel, only pausing to honor the mid-morning snack brought in by her ever-efficient butler.

The meeting was scheduled for the afternoon. She shook her head again at the provided instructions, which she had committed to memory before the electronic message self-destructed. There wasn't much to it. A setting and a pair of recognition phrases. By themselves, utterly random, unremarkable and meaningless, which was the point.

She put on the swimsuit she'd purchased earlier. A nominally one-piece affair, its design nevertheless revealed far more skin than it concealed, the glittering red fabric managing to complement her pale skin tone without being too much of an eyesore. It was supposed to be the latest high-end fashion, at least the price tag pretended so. A light summer dress went over. Sandals on her feet, wide-brimmed straw hat on her head, she was ready to confront the sun topside on the palace's most exclusive deck. The one reserved for guests paying for a suite instead of a bog-standard room. The one that sported the infinity pool with a glass floor overhanging the two-kilometer-away ground. That deck.

Leaving her personal stuff on a chaise-longue, she swam laps in the pool, marveling at the vertigo-worthy sight through the thick transparent floor and working hard not to sink. Her body density meant she might as well run on the floor while holding her breath for the same level of exertion, but it would definitely look weird, she thought. Then she did a double take when another guest did exactly that. Well, his cyber-limbs explained the sinking down bit, she reasoned, and he must have some kind of internal implant for the "holding your breath" part. Definitely a strange world.

Lunch time came. Another caloric smorgasbord of real food instead of packaged meals, brought to her lounger. Then some further novel reading. Unwinding, for real. She found herself intensely relishing the moment. Just lounging in the filtered sun without a worry in the world after an evening of wall-busting orgasms. Charo's words came back to her. Such an information could set you up for life, you know. Worth millions of credits. Straight to the cream of Hebridean society, if you felt like it.

She could sell out Earth and live like a queen forever, let others care about the consequences. She toyed with the idea in her mind for a moment, as if it was a gem she was staring at from every angle. And rejected it without regret. This was not who she was.

Anyway, it was time to set up for her meeting. She was already wearing red. The second part of it… she still found it ridiculous. Shrugging, she ordered the most expensive drink on the poolside bar's menu.

She expected some elaborate cocktail made of the most expensive liquor in the system, with cute decorations stuck on top, maybe a sparkling candle or something equally as extravagant. The name, at least, rang no bell, despite her extensive sampling of… stuff during the year. She resisted the urge to look it up on her e-deck, opting instead to savor the novelty, whatever it was.

A short-sleeved waiter brought her order on a silver plateau. The container was deceptively simple. Just a shallow cocktail glass. Not even a little paper umbrella. What the hell is it to be so expensive, then?

She took it, paid the waiter a commensurate tip, then stared at the content. A thick creamy off-white fluid, not at all unlike egg whites and about as… lumpy. There was a strong smell of sea. She put her nose above it and sniffed carefully. Sea-spray, iodized, with a hint of something else underneath, almost… mushroomy? She briefly wondered if it was some kind of civilizational practical joke. She stole a discreet glance at her surroundings, checking whether the bar staff was hiding their faces behind their hands snickering. No, they were a picture of normalcy, catering to other guests.

Nobody else seemed to be observing her in specifically. She'd already tried to spot her prospective and secretive client, to no avail. Whoever they were, they must be perfectly masquerading as one of the dozens other guests enjoying their time around the infinity pool.

With a shrug, she dipped her mouth in and took a sip. Uh, salty. Definitely has something to do with the sea. At first, she wondered what the fuss was about. Then the aftertaste hit, lighting up her taste buds like fireworks on Archon Day's parade. Her mind fought to compare it to anything she'd previously tasted – yes, black truffle, a long time ago at a family friend's plantation to celebrate her rise to decurion rank. It was that kind of sensation on her palate, except stronger. She felt it tingle across her tongue, down her throat. Then she took a second, then a third long sip and almost blinked away tiny stars in her vision, so strong the effect was, seemingly intensifying after each swallow. Her entire mouth and throat felt warm, the sensation diffusing down her stomach and beyond, a warmth that didn't burn as liquor did, a very different, smoother one, almost… erotic. No, it was erotic, she realized.

She stared at the glass, almost goggle-eyed. The fluid's level was down to a last hefty swallow. She drained it in one last gulp.

And came with a gasp of surprise as much as pleasure, albeit a climax that spread through her veins in a very different manner – as if she'd taken of hit of some intravenous drug. Just what in Loki's name is this thing, she eventually asked herself as the waves of pleasure subsided. A quick search and a finder's fee later, her e-deck provided an answer.

The seamilk's bounty, the name translated from an archaic Hebridean dialect. She read further and made a face as she realized just what she'd just ingested. An illustration showed an ugly, slimy squid creature in the sea, shooting a jet of the milky white concoction during its species mating ritual. It was the squid's soft roe, sprayed over the female's eggs to fertilize them. Oh for… gods' sake! Really? I just drank squid sperm and it made me come? Do I have to pay the squid for that too?

Reading past the graphic pictures of squid sex, she learned how this species was only found in a specific part of the sea and mated once a year only. Fishermen had to catch it and… milk it – more illustrations, including a very awkward video – to coax the male squid into shooting his load into a bottle. Hence the name, deduced Rayner. The fishing was thus tightly regulated, for past overstraining the species had led to almost extinction, the drained Mr Squid unable to properly accomplish his duty toward Mrs Squid. And this explained the cost of it, restricting the substance to those affluent enough to afford it.

Great, I just found this world's equivalent to caviar, mused Rayner, her breath returned to normal.

After the squid's gift, she felt the natural urge to refresh herself and headed to the shallow part of the pool where water jets provided guests a fresh, natural massage.

Eyes closed, she relished the hammering of the water cascading down on her shoulder, then felt the water displacement of someone approaching.

"The primordial river never rests" a male voice called through the sound of rushing water. Rayner opened her eyes wide. A human male was standing in the water up to the waits close to her. She detailed him from the top down. Slicked backed dark hair, mirrored sunglasses, a trimmed goatee, ethnicity… unable to place, of course; sun-tanned skin but soft, almost coquettishly so despite the carpet of dark hair rolling down an adequately maintained chest – nothing like Dorrin's, she mused, but healthy, for a human standard. The swimming trunks were tight and black with a gold band, as expected. No trace of obvious cyberware, save a tiny silvery implant near the base of his neck.

"And the flow never rolls back."

A nod acknowledged her return codephrase. The man stared at her behind his mirror shades.

"Suite 2364, in two hours" he simply added, then began to swim away in ample strokes. She watched him get out of the pool and leave.

Okay. Game's on. But he will have to explain why he made me drink squid cum.

Suite 2364 was two floors down hers. She knocked at the door for lack of anything else to do.

A short moment later, the door opened and a woman, young and beautiful looking stared at her down her nose despite being smaller than the Drakensis. Rayner stared in return, noting the skimpy black dress and freshly reapplied lipstick.

"Your turn, I guess" she commented waspishly, almost rubbing against Rayner as she left the room without a glance back. Ann followed the departing, sashaying shape for a couple seconds, then shrugged. After her own adventure of the last day, she had a pretty good idea of the kind of service the girl provided and couldn't begrudge her for believing she was into the same business.

"Come in!" called the voice from the pool. The suite was noticeably smaller than hers, lacking a vestibule to start with. She entered straight into the main room and immediately caught the strong after scent of sex. So she was right indeed about the departing girl. Her contact then came in from the side door that led to the bedroom, clad in a fresh bathrobe and toweling his hair energetically.

Rayner couldn't resist throwing a barb.

"I guess business could wait, then? Had to take care of more important things before?"

The man paused, gave her direct stare, appearing to weigh his answer.

"This is but a subterfuge. I'm certainly under watch by… local authorities. I fear my own suite would be… rigged with listening devices. This woman was a convenient way to obtain a separate venue for our meeting."

"Convenient indeed. I bet she only gave you the key." Her sarcasm was met by a shrug.

"Convenient and pleasurable, I won't deny it. Why not? I was the one paying for it."

"Fine. Doesn't matter anyway. I'd rather know who you are and why the authorities may be keeping you under tab. I don't exactly care for running afoul of them, mind you."

The mysterious man discarded the towel negligently and reclined on the couch, legs apart in a display of comfortable casualness.

"To answer your second question, do not worry that way – I am not a wanted criminal. But the Hebridean security services do have a reason to keep me under surveillance." He paused for effect, then continued in an inhumanely deep voice.

"I am Lord Karl'ac, and you may address me as your god". As if to underline his last words, his eyes flashed the golden glow of the Goa'uld.

Rayner's eyes went wide and her body flushed with the onset of combat mode. She cursed herself for leaving her gun upstairs and showing up in her flimsy sundress rather than a set of armor-lined clothing, but she could hold herself without. Lightning fast, she grabbed the empty bottle on the low table, a vestige from the last hours' activities and smashed its top off, leaving her with an improvised yet lethal weapon in hand.

"Lord Karl'ac's" own eyes went wide in alarm and he hurriedly jumped back behind the couch, launching his hands up and open in a surrender gesture.

"Wait, wait! The god part was a joke!" he quickly blurted out with his human voice. "Really!" he repeated as Rayner advanced on him, the business end of jagged, sharp glass forward, her eyes a dangerous shade of fury. He backpedaled until his back was against the far wall.

"Oh come on, I thought nobody here would take it seriously! This isn't some piss-poor backward peasant-infested world!"

Rayner paused, still throwing daggers with her eyes. "And what would a Goa'uld do around here, then?"

Karl'ac waved his hands around. "You heard of the great war between the System Lords, did you?"

Rayner nodded.

"Well, as much as it pains me to say so, the war didn't exactly go well for me. Long story short, I had to flee and this place seemed like the only safe haven."

"Safe haven for a Goa'uld?" Rayner repeated incredulously.

Another shrug. "I learnt of this world some time ago, overhearing my overlords mentioning it as a place they allowed to exist freely. I was naturally curious. Eventually I found out it was both strong enough to keep the System Lords at bay… and accommodating enough to deal with Goa'uld visitors in the past. Mind you, I'm not the first of my kind to stay at this place either." A smirk punctuated the explanation.

Ann's eyes narrowed. "And your kind never tried to hijack some poor Hebridean's body, then?"

Karl'ac made an impatient gesture, then turned his head so that the base of his neck could be seen. "Look, they made me get a specialized monitoring implant. I simply cannot jump our of this body or every alarm will ring on this planet."

"Nifty. Although it means nothing for that poor sod you're inhabiting."

"Ah, come on. I didn't choose to get implanted in there. As a young mature symbiote, I could easily have been among the millions who simply die with their host Jaffa, or get eaten in ritual ceremonies. Anyway, my host's mind decayed a long time ago. There is no point delving on it. What's done is done, certainly you understand that."

He had a point, she was forced to admit, especially in light of her own species' origin. Could she, as a Draka, point her finger at some random Goa'uld because his kind used humans as slaves and host bodies?

She lowered the broken bottle, still keeping it ready in her fingers.

"Fine. Let's talk. And first" she gave him a dark stare "why the squid sperm?"

Karl'ac made a sheepish face. "Because it's expensive and few people ever order it, hence it was easy to spot." He carefully kept a neutral expression afterward. And I found it hilarious.

As Rayner continued to stare, the Goa'uld exile straightened up, his back still against the wall. "Could we just sit down, by the way? I mean, if you finally decided not to cut my throat?"

The response came through an arm gesture, inviting him to move. Rayner herself pushed a footstool across the divan, swept away some of the broken glass with her foot, then sat down in front of Karl'ac. She noticed his eyes darting down to her crotch and quickly crossed her legs.

"Keep staring at me like I'm one of those two-credits courtesans and I'll cut something else."

The eyes hurried back towards a more level stance and Karl'ac's hand reflexively adjusted the hem of his bathrobe to shield his own nether bits.

"Sorry. I was told you were a good warrior, but not how good looking you are."

"And flattery won't get you anywhere, so why don't you start telling me what it's all about?"

"Yes." Karl'ac folded his hands together, bending forward in a "hear me out" posture. "See, before the War I used to own a cluster of star systems. Nothing fancy, as domains go, but it was home."

"Are you telling me you're homesick? You, a Goa'uld?" asked Rayner in a part sarcastic, part incredulous tone.

Karl'ac made a "help me" gesture with his hands. "Why, yes, why not? Believe it or not, we are people, we even get to have feelings, as incredible as it may sound!"

"Sorry, but most of your folks I know about are complete, unrepentant assholes." She thought of Bar'shan again. Of the rape and torture, still clear in her memory despite her multiple deaths and resets.

Karl'ac winced. "Ah, yes, well, I see why you would say that." He thought of Dhakhan in turn, how the bastard had undermined his position and almost gotten him killed. "Bear in mind that we have to keep a strong grip on our domains, to keep order. Otherwise, there would be revolts, anarchy, mass deaths. Subjects need a strong, wise hand to guide them. Of course, some of my… folks may lean a bit too much on the harsher side, but then, are all human leaders perfect?" He paused, thinking he made a reasonably convincing argument. In his mind, and having sampled widely foreign ways of thinking during his exile, he could grasp, conceptually, how foreigners might regard his species' way of ruling things. Yet he was first and foremost a Goa'uld, with an innate desire to lead.

Seeing the skepticism lingering on the mercenary's face, he tried another approach.

"Look, I wouldn't even be here if the Hebridean leadership didn't believe I could fit in and behave."

"Yet you're telling me you want to leave" came the tart retort.

Touché, thought Karl'ac. He took a long breath.

"I do enjoy it here. Materially, I mean" he made a sweeping gesture. "I can't even deny this place offers more amenities than my old palace. I have access to an entire system's worth of entertainment, and I can afford it."

"Speaking of which, how come you're lounging in a palace suite instead of, I don't know, working?" Rayner interrupted, laying heavy sarcasm on the last word.

"Working? What would you expect me to do? First, there's no way they'd allow me into something approaching a position of power" he raised his hand palm forward "yes, don't interrupt me with some cutting remark as to how they don't actually trust me"Rayner closed her mouth "Second, and following the first, I could only get silly jobs."

"Then how can you afford this?" it was Rayner's turn to sweep the room with her hand. "I can only see one reason why you're rolling in creds. You snitched on your fellow Goa'uld for Hebridean intelligence. I wonder if that would make you a wanted Goa'uld, if the System Lords ever learned about it."

She smirked as Karl'ac visibly sagged back in the couch, his pride deflating like a balloon. To his credit, he quickly recovered his wit, then stared at her curiously.

"Figures that what they call 'a good warrior' in those parts would also be smart. Yes, I sold intelligence on my fellow Goa'uld. That and selling the ship I arrived in, although that I had to share with… never mind." He sighed. "Are you thinking of kidnapping me and selling me hog-tied to the closest System Lord?"

Rayner kept silent, wiggling her fingers. She wasn't actually envisioning it, but let Karl'ac stew in for a bit. He sighed again, more for theatrics this time.

"Then you would be a fool. They would certainly torture and execute me, but your fate wouldn't be better in the end."

"Why?" she asked out, intrigued.

"You have to understand something. To the System Lords, their primacy is everything. As overlords to us lesser Goa'uld, and as a species to everyone else under their rule. And what would a foreign mercenary waltzing in to drop my head – figuratively – at their step would mean?"

Rayner subtly nodded, getting where he was going. "That they're weak. That it took a foreigner, a non-Goa'uld, to fix their stuff."

"Exactly! It would be an affront to their pride." Rayner cocked her head with a thin smile. "Oh, right, mock my own pride then. I'm the one hiring a foreign mercenary to fix my stuff, bad Goa'uld, that's me."

The Draka chuckled. "Well, now that you're saying it, the thought did go through my mind…"

Karl'ac threw his hands forward, palms up. "Ha ha. Go on, revel in your superior wit. I'm even past caring."

Rayner sniggered, then hid her mouth behind her hand. As incredible as she would have thought, she found herself warming up a tiny bit to this particular Goa'uld. She had to admit he was breaking the stereotype in a good way.

She composed herself and spoke up. "Okay, let's forget the 'selling you out to the System Lords' part. But what you seem to be envisioning… using my services to win your domain back – assuming a lone mercenary can even do that – wouldn't it fall under the same reasoning?"

Karl'ac grinned in turn. "Which is exactly why I went looking for someone using a Goa'uld ship."

"Wait-" realization dawned on Rayner's face "am I supposed to masquerade as your Jaffa?"

"I didn't expect you to be a female… but yes. That's the plan." He caught her incredulous stare. "Oh, don't worry. Jaffa armor can hide your delicious forms" the sudden dangerous expression in the woman's eyes made him quickly move on "and you can wear disguising make-up, something like that."

"You realize Jaffa armor and weaponry is utter shit, don't you?"

"Yes, yes, I know. It's part of the rules. But you could wear your own gear underneath, as long as it's not too noticeable."

"Why the shitty Jaffa stuff anyway? Is that so you don't feel threatened by your slave soldiers?"

"They're not slaves, they're…" he saw the don't bullshit me stare "okay, they might be technically called that, but they're bred for war on a genetic level. They'd be unhappy if they were put to, I don't know, tilling fields?"

Rayner sat silent for a moment. The similarity between Jaffa and Goa'uld on one side and Janissaries and Draka on the other hit far too close. At least her people provided their slave soldiers with effective weaponry, if inferior to the Citizens'.

Then she realized the deeper implication of the Jaffa being both inferior soldiers to what the Goa'uld's technology could create, yet somehow remaining the most numerous components of their armies.

"The Jaffa" she exclaimed "they're what they are because you people are playing a game between yourselves! Ritualized warfare, that's what it is! Against anyone else, you don't care how shitty they are as actual soldiers because you're not actually counting on them to win!"

"That's the gist of it, yes."

"Then… I bet the other System Lords didn't take well to that Anubis fellow creating actually dangerous soldiers, did they?"

Karl'ac nodded emphatically. "An astute deduction on your part. Indeed, Anubis was reviled because he didn't play by the rules. Forced the rest to take desperate measures to stop him. How far they might have gone… I don't know, I was out of it then. But now, I heard that Anubis disappeared and the War is winding down."

"So back to business as usual?"

The Goa'uld shrugged. "Perhaps. In any case, it is the time to act while things aren't… settled."

"You're really willing to leave this life" Rayner gestured again at the luxurious room "and go back to ruling muddy peasants and toy soldiers in a palace that probably doesn't even have running water?"

"Hey! My capital had sewers! And not all my subjects were peasants! Some were renowned artisans!"

"Ah yes, I'm sure you loved staring at the pottery or whatever. But really? After your time here, you don't have… ambitions beyond that for your domain?"

Karl'ac sighed, as if weighting things in his mind. At least he spoke again in a tone of resignation. "I see what you mean. Why don't I try to play the wise benevolent ruler, guiding my people toward progress and knowledge? Well, because then the System Lords would crush me like a nut, obviously!"

"It still sounds shitty, if you want my opinion." Maybe the Goa'uld should borrow a page from the Domination, Rayner mused. At least the serfs do get to benefit from technological progress.

"Opinion taken, and it doesn't change a thing. Listen, I understand what you mean. But I need to do something beyond sitting on my thumb and eating pastries. Besides, once I'm back on my rightful throne, I might still steal a vacation here. Discreetly, of course."

Discreetly, of course, Rayner's sniggered in her mind. Apart from the trail of used whores.

Nevertheless, she smiled her understanding, if not approval. Then her mind jumped back to an earlier point in the conversation. "A few minutes ago, you said you had to share the money from selling your ship. Who with?"

Karl'ac made a grimace. "I arrived her with two of my Jaffa. We were separated during our… processing. I didn't care to look for them afterwards."

"But they're alive?"

"Of course, what would they need the money for otherwise? Naturally, whatever they might have told the Hebrideans had to be worth a lot less than my intel."

"Afraid to meet them after they realized you weren't an actual god?"

"Please" he said rolling his eyes dramatically. "In fact, I suspect my First Prime was already past that belief. He wasn't stupid. No, I suppose I didn't want to see them as reminders of my failures."

"Maybe they're homesick too?"

Karl'ac shot her a "you don't believe that" look. Yet Ann's curiosity was piqued and there was always the remote possibility that the two ex-warriors might have useful things to say.

"I would like to talk with them."

"But… what for?"

"To check that you're a decent employer, of course." Savoring the look of consternation on Karl'ac's face, she broke out of her serious expression and allowed a smirk through. "Actually, this is shaping up to be a risky mission and I'd rather not forget to check any source of data. They might know things you don't, as is often the case with underlings."

"I understand, though I'm sure you will be disappointed." Standing up, he went to retrieve his own e-deck from the pair of trousers discarded on the floor. "There, I'm sending you their contact info." He didn't care to add that Chu'rel, his former Prime, had never returned a call or that he had the second contact, whose name he would have rather left to forget, on a blocking list. He went to pour himself a shot of expensive brandy from a bottle the little whore from earlier had insisted he order from room-service, confirming his suspicion that the latter was metaphorically, if not actually, in bed with the ladies plying their old trade inside the hotel.

Rayner adjusted her position on the footstool, uncrossing and stretching her legs, then called the first e-id. The call was accepted a few seconds later. Her profile picture always ensured she got a prompt response, she thought. Men! They see a pretty face and a dash of cleavage and you've got their attention.

The familiar videocall interface unfolded from the e-deck's flat surface and a male face appeared in a window hovering in the air. The shaved scalp and the black tattoo on his forehead instantly marked him as Jaffa. He scowled at her.

"Who are you?" he spoke Hebridean with a strong accent, she remarked.

"My name's Rayna. And you would be Chu'rel?"

The ex-warrior nodded. "What do you want?"

"I understand you were previously working with a certain gentleman sporting a goatee?"

Chu'rel appeared to process her words for a couple seconds. She could almost hear the gears turning in that shaved skull of his.

"So? You his new girlfriend?" he replied brusquely. "Lookin' to crosscheck if all the bullshit he's telling you 'bout being a king be right?"

"No, well yes, in a manner of speaking, but I'm no girlfriend of his. Look, I might be taking on an… assignment for him, that would involve going back to his former domain and-"

"HA HA HA!" Chu'rel bellowed his laugh then almost caroled the next words "He want'go back! Knew it!"

Rayner saw Karl'ac visibly cringe.

"I don't suppose you'd be interested in joining us, lend your expertise…?" she asked for the sake of trying. The ex-Jaffa broke into an even more epic bout of laughter, visibly fighting to regain his composure and failing to the point that tears rolled down his cheeks. She saw him turn to acknowledge some unseen call, failing to do much more than wave his hand over his mouth, then trying to break through his uncontrollable mirth. Eventually he managed to push some coherent words through between renewed bursts of laughter. "It's Karl'ac… he's… he's… he wants t'go back… wants me along… not even him talking… thought it was his girlfriend… yes… look" The picture suddenly shifted and swiveled as Chu'rel made it so whoever was along could see Rayner. As the video stabilized, she could see them in turn.

There was a swimming pool on a terrasse, evidently high up some luxury tower, with loungers and something looking very much like a futuristic barbecue, a collection of intact and empty bottles strewn about. Then there were the people. Women, all of them young and showing similarly pneumatic bodies through a predictable lack of covering fabric, and men who wore little more on bodies that might or not be entirely natural either. All of them were evidently in the process of partying hard.

As the e-deck's sound filtering routines were thrown in disarray by the sudden switch in focus, the roar of bass-laden music came through before the device compensated for its new operating parameters. The roar became a subdued background din.

From the facial expressions on the little crowd, the notion that Karl'ac might be going home and asking his former warrior to come along was an egregious pretext for hilarity.

Ann fought to remain non-plussed. Of all things, she hadn't expected a partying Jaffa. Then, why not? It was nevertheless obvious the former Prime wasn't going to jump in their little adventure. She stoically waited for the laughter to dwindle. The camera pointed at Chu'rel again, but he was now sitting further back, exposing his naked upper body. She noticed the tell-tale cross-shaped opening of the symbiote pouch. She immediately felt curious about that and it couldn't hurt asking.

"You kept your pouch? Do you still have the symbiote inside?"

"What? No. Why'd you ask?"

"Curiosity, that's all. I've never met a retired Jaffa before, so I'm wondering how it works."

Apparently mollified, if not flattered by her expressed interest, Chu'rel answered in a less cutting tone. "Got that thing out after I got, what they call it, asylum status. Didn't give me a choice, but no regrets anyway."

"But… didn't it work as your immune system?"

"Yeah, they explained it t'me. Turns out the locals have better godmagic" the last word turned ou dripping in sarcasm. "Got myself a nice Tech-Con synthetic 'mune system instead. All I have t'do is stay current on the subscription."

"Subscription?"

"Right, stuff to tell the system how to deal with new stuff, that kind of thing. No big deal. Just means I use a prop when I need to show the symbiote."

What? A prop? Rayner's puzzlement must have shown, for the ex-Jaffa turned party-man explained. "I play in vidshows. I'm an actor!"

"Really?"

Stirred by Ann's apparent interest, Chu'rel sent her a data packet. She let her e-deck switch displays to project the first image it contained. "My newest" he commented.

It was a movie poster, at least the local equivalent, Rayner immediately grasped. It showed Chu'rel in a martial pose, staring defiantly at the camera, staff weapon in hand and pointing to some off-frame target. In a departure from reality, all he wore was a… chainmail underwear exposing an almost comically exaggerated bulge. Then there was the blonde girl splayed at his feet and holding his thigh, clad only in a replica Goa'uld hand-device.

An exploding Ha'tak made up the scene's background. The title translated as "The Jaffa's staff" and the underwear bulge made it obvious what staff it was. The mention "adults only" at the bottom only confirmed Rayner's guess. The following images, stills from the movie, left no doubt standing. Especially the ones involving the fake symbiote as well.

She blinked, almost wishing she could clean her mind with bleach.

"I… see" she slowly said. "Well, it's obvious to me that you found a better calling for yourself here. I shan't disturb you again."

She moved her finger to cut off the call as Chu'rel's voice came out of the air again. "Hey, you can be in my next movie, I'd love to –" whatever the ex-Jaffa was about to tell her was lost forever as she firmly pressed the disconnect icon.

As silence fell back in the room, she kept staring at something far away in the distance as seconds ticked by. Karl'ac sensibly chose not to interrupt with a pithy comment.

"Okay" she suddenly exhaled all the air she'd been keeping in her lungs. "That was something." What in Loki's name am I getting into?

I wonder what's the second one going to be. Probably just as useless, but while I'm at it… might as well be certain. As if to let her mull it over, Karl'ac excused himself from the room, clutching his discarded clothes with a look of almost embarrassment. She wondered what might be going through the Goa'uld's mind after getting his former Prime's "success" rubbed in his face. Strange how I'm almost commiserating for one of them, after Barshan and Tanith. 'Course I'm not doing all this out of the goodness of my heart either. And if he so much as twitches in the wrong way, I'm ending him.

Taking a good breath, she tapped in the call.

A long moment passed. She was going to hung up when the connection was accepted at the other end. The viewport wobbled as if the person holding the recipient e-deck was fumbling with it, then the display resolved in a clear stable picture. The face that appeared couldn't have been more different than the previous one. Where Chu'rel had a fashionably shaved scalp, this one had unkempt greasy black hair falling on a shallow forehead, obscuring the dark mark of Jaffahood. Small porcine eyes looked out crookedly from the recess of a simian brow. Snot came out of a bushy nostril over a slightly lisping mouth. A ragged beard covered the cheeks. Rayner almost did a double-take. No way this one's a movie star.

The face sneezed explosively and she reflexively pulled back from the life-like holographic simile. Snot? Sneeze? How come…? Ah, she suddenly realized. He's not keeping up with the immunity subscription, this one. It's… not a good sign.

Then there was the background. Far from a sunny swimming-pool, this one hung in the gloom projected by an overhead… bridge? Now she caught the faint rumble of traffic, as if her contact's e-deck had inferior sound-filtering.

"Hello?" came from it in broken Hebridean. "Who you?" The voice seemed unsure. The ex-Jaffa's eyes kept darting sideways, she noticed. There was a shack just behind, made of salvaged bits and pieces. It seemed this Jaffa definitely had a contrasting turn of fortune.

"My name's Rayna" she switched to Goa'uld, trusting that her command of that language would make communication easier. "I want to talk to you… Bald'reek,"

The Jaffa's eyes went wide as saucers. "Oh! You speak like a god! Are you a god?".

Ann fought the urge to bury her face in her hands. She saw Karl'ac's face peeking in from behind the doorframe, silently mouthing the words told you so before disappearing again.

"No, I- Yes, I am and a friend of your former lord." Since this Jaffa appeared to have few braincells to rub together, she figured she might as well keep things simple for him.

"Oh, m'lady!" Bald'reek exhaled in visible relief. "It was awful, awful when the metal people separated me from lord Karl'ac! Please tell me he's alive and well! I swear I did everything to reach him!"

"Lord Karl'ac is well and forgives you. Now answer me. What happened to you? Why are you living under a bridge?"

"M'lady, the metal people asked me many questions about the gods. I did my best to fool them!" Ann rolled her eyes in her mind "Then they told me about their world and how I would be free now. I didn't want to be free! I only wanted to continue serving the gods! They laughed and they took my little godling and told me so many complicated things about their own magic, that it would fix me, they gave me that little magic mirror which shows people and stuff and told me about that thing they call 'money', how I could get anything I wanted with it, and then they let me go, and at first I was alone but then I made friends, and friends, and I got things for them with my money and everyone was happy and nice with me" listening to his babbling, Rayner almost felt pity. She had a strong inkling of how the story would end. "Then I didn't have money anymore and my friends left and I found this place to build a shelter. It's home now." Her suspicions confirmed, she raised a hand to place another question and Bald'reek obediently shut his mouth.

"How did you survive? What do you eat?"

"Oh, I do stuff for some people, I catch rats, I'm good at catching rats, always was, even in the god's sky chariot. They're tasty. But some people, they're bad, nasty." His eyes darted sideways again. "They want me gone."

"Say, would you like to help your lord regain his rightful throne? And your place as a proud warrior?" Karl'ac's head reappeared with a look of consternation and mouthing are you crazy at her. She flicked her fingers at him in a "go away, I know what I'm doing" gesture. He retreated back inside the bedroom, exaggeratingly rolling his eyes and shaking his head.

Bald'reek's eyes lit up. "Yes! Yes! Yes!" he exclaimed, jumping in place excitedly. "I even have a cunning plan for that!" Ann raised her hand in interruption. "We'll see about that later. First, you have to…" the Jaffa suddenly looked aside, a startled expression on his face that quickly turned into fear. "Oh no! The bad people are coming! I have to hide!" The camera turned as Bald'reek skittered from his spot. Rayner got a glimpse of ragged-looking silhouettes, carrying various improvised blunt weapons and obviously closing in, then the image became blurry as the body attached to the hand holding the e-deck started to run. She could hear Bald'reek quickened breathing and shouts chasing him. There was an almost nauseating change in orientation, then black as the deck went into a pocket, muffled sounds for a minute, then the picture came back, showing a close-up of the Jaffa's reddened face, breathing hard. More angry shouts rang in the vicinity. "I'm hiding", he whispered. A second later, a loud metal-on-metal banging noise followed. "Oh no! They found my hiding place! But the door is solid, maybe they'll just grow tired and leave?"

A string of insults and violent promises, muffled by the door of his improvised shelter, but clear enough, seemed to contradict his hopes.

"Look, where are you? Wait, just say yes when your e-deck asks you to allow location sharing with me." A couple seconds after she sent the request, Bald'reek's location appeared pinned on a map of Unity City. Of course, he has to be held up in one of those neighborhoods where travelers are dissuaded from going. What did I expect?

"Good Jaffa. Try to hang in there. I am coming. Keep the link open."

She rose up. Karl'ac came back, fully dressed and a look of complete disbelief on his features. "Why are you trying to save this waste of oxygen? He can't help us! You saw it, he's a complete moron!"

"Yes, but he's stupid and apparently still devoted to you. If we needed a diversion, he would be perfect."

"I'm afraid even his abyssal stupidity wouldn't be enough of a diversion."

"Not if he's carrying explosives in his pouch like a walking bomb."

"Ah". Karl'ac eyes flashed in approval. "Ruthless and effective. I'm sold."

Despite being a robot, the voice of the air taxi had a very subjective tone of I don't want to go there when Rayner told it of her intended destination. But credits talked, especially when doubled with a and don't spare the horses bonus. The flying transport alighted from the tower's landing pad, climbing above the general traffic and accelerating away and the Drakensis mercenary hoped she would arrive quickly enough. A dead Jaffa wouldn't be so useful at this point.

She stared outside at the scenery zipping below. A forest of mega-scrapers, home to three hundred million souls at latest census, the largest urban conurbation in the Hebridean system, dwarfing even the Tollan capital. She almost shivered, it was so far outside the cultural norm of her native Domination. A teeming hive of mixed humanity and human-replacing technology.

Minutes flew by and the buildings became smaller and sparser, giving way to the sprawl of single and two story-housing and industrial districts, cut through by the grey ribbons of mega-highways.

The taxi began a steep descent towards a stretch of shanties lining an elevated section of highway, then swerved brusquely as gunshot tracers went up, fired by drunk trigger-happy shooters or as a display od defiance against that flying symbol of affluence, she couldn't know. She doubted such small-arms fire posed a real danger to the vehicle's lightly-armored frame, but it had a right to be skittish and she didn't complain when the disembodied voice announced that it was going to land a bit further away from its original destination, leaving her to walk the rest of the way.

Its quartet of thrusters blew out a cloud of dust and debris as it came to a halt in the middle of a vacant lot and Rayner quickly ran out to the relative shelter of a warehouse's wall. The taxi remained poised on its landing struts, instructed to stay and wait for her.

She took a few seconds to familiarize her senses with the surroundings. There was a stench of burned hydrocarbons and rubber and burning waste, offending her nostrils. She glimpsed the top of a reclamation tower far away in the distance, its gargantuan intakes sucking in that polluted air to clean it out. Then she blinked and set her mind to her immediate task. There had been not time to do more than grab her small gun in her suite and dart toward the taxi platform. Having left Karl'ac in a hurry, she was still dressed in her light sundress over the posh swimsuit, quite a contrast to the dilapidated environment. But she doubted she would have to face anything she couldn't handle in her current attire.

She walked out of the lot and into the street lining the low shanties sheltering below the looming concrete ribbon of the highway. There were fortunately few souls in sight but she nevertheless hurried. She didn't want to fight her way through a throng of ferals if she could avoid it. Her mind fought to reconcile the sight before her – the hollowed-out ground-car carcasses, corrugated iron and plywood shacks, the stench of poverty – with the rest of the system, the proud mega-scrapers, flying cars and space stations. Such a vertiginous disparity was insane, she couldn't help finding. Yet it didn't seem to stop the system from running along. Well, she wasn't here to fix it.

The specific underpass came in sight, strewn with litter and the rusted remains of discarded appliances. She immediately spotted Bald'reek's hiding place: it was the rusted metal door set in a concrete pillar, which her eagle eyesight identified through the half-erased painted sign spelling "electrical substation" along with warning glyphs. Oh great. He went hiding in a power cabinet. Here's hoping he didn't fry yet.

And surrounding the door were the members of the local gang who wanted him done for. They'd apparently stopped banging at the door but were in the process of… waiting him out, having broken open cheap beer and assorted beverages and set up one of those annoying portable speakers from which blared their deadening "music". Apparently, they made "lynch the Jaffa" into an open party. Degenerates, Rayner judged, taking in the scene.

Walking at a fast pace she closed to the mixed group before the first of them noticed her. A shout, and the rest turned toward the newcomer. Predictable jeers greeted her.

"Hey doll, you lost?" "Mmmm, fresh meat!"

The closest of them, a ratty-faced human clad in garish, plastic clothing thrust his hand out, intent on grabbing her with a leer that made very clear how he intended to sample her body. It was too bad her intention was different. The leer changed into a cry of anguish as his wrist twisted painfully under the Drakensis's fingers, then his elbow snapped with a sickly sound as Rayner's hands pushed him through the arm lock. His scream went up, immediately smothered by a wet crunch as a heel crushed his windpipe.

"Let's dance, punks" taunted Rayner. She doubted anyone who shed a tear over that sorry group of low-lives and she welcomed the prospect of good old-fashioned violence.

A woman ran at her screaming insults, a metal pipe in hand. Apparently rat-face had been a darling of her. She swung the pipe in an overhead motion, intent on crushing Rayner's skull. Side-stepping and parrying, right hand flashing forward, fingers extended like a blade, surgically crushing the attacker's larynx and leaving her to collapse and die like her sweetheart.

A blade flashed, coming from the side. Rayner's hand cut blinding-fast and the blade skittered to the ground. The Serrakin male barely had time to process the pain of his broken wrist before the kick landed on his face and pulped his nose, driving fragments of bone into his brain.

The remainder stopped in their tracks, then scattered running for their lives, shouting things like "She's a psycho! She's got combat implants! Run!"

A long burst of small-caliber gunshots as the last fighting-minded, and best armed one let loose with a submachine-gun at Rayner's back. Puffs of earth and dusts around her then a stitching of hammer-like impacts on her back, staggering her forward. She powered through it, her body telling her that none of the bullets had penetrated the subdermal armor. She pivoted, her unholstered handgun coming out and up in a fluid motion. Two shots in the chest as the remaining shooter reloaded, then a final one between the eyes, dropping him like a cut puppet. She fired again, putting a bullet in the back of the closest fugitive, then a second, then the rest disappeared in the wasteland, leaving her alone with the dead.

She swept her surroundings to check that nobody else tried to get into the action, then touched the bullet holes in the skin of her back, wincing. There was no bleeding thanks to the quick-clotting agents in her blood, but she'd have some extensive bruising and the superficial tears would take a day or two to close. She made a note of cleaning and dressing them as soon as possible to help the healing process, dropping the flattened bullets on the ground.

That ruined the dress though, pity.

Gun in hand, she walked to the metal door.

"Bald'reek! It's Rayna. You can come out now, it's safe!"

A screeching metal noise, then the door swiveled open and the Jaffa came out gingerly, squinting against the light.

"M'lady! Be careful, there are bad people here!"

"Don't worry, they're dead. I killed them, see for yourself."

She saw him look past her at the cooling corpses, then back at her, a growing look of adoration on his face, then fall down on his knee to grovel at her.

"Forgive me, m'lady! I forgot you were a god too!"

Welp, I left the Domination and here I am being worshipped as a god by a dimwitted Jaffa. How deeply ironic this universe is.

Fifteen minutes later Rayna pushed her newest charge into the bathroom, gestured at the various appliances, and closed the door after a "and don't come out until you're scrubbed clean" admonition. Then she walked to the small window, opened it wide to allow the city's air in, then released the breath she felt had been holding during the entire trip to this place. There was no way she'd bring Bald'reek back to the Galaxy Palace. Not wearing foul clothes and smelling like a sewer. This automated hotel would do instead, having the added advantage of being anonymous, lost in the urban sprawl, one among thousands of such establishments scattered across the cityscape.

She heard the sound of rushing water. Good. She exited the room and went down to the atrium, taking no notice at the scant other patrons hanging around and doing their own things. The automated vending machines provided what she was looking for. A few snacks and water, new and clean clothing for herself and Bald'reek, and a first-aid kit for her own superficial injuries.

Back inside the room discarded dress and swimming underwear, then craning her head over her shoulder and standing in front of the door-mounted mirror, she cleaned the bullet wounds carefully before applying protective dressings. It didn't noticeably hurt. No, her wince was more of a self-reproach. She'd been cocky and reckless. If that gangbanger had something better than his pea-shooter, it could have been ugly. Now, the odds of such a low-life having anything better than a pea-shooter were low. But still.

Humming now, over the sound of water. Good, that Jaffa must be feeling better. She paged Karl'ac, updating him of their location. They had some planning to do and this anonymous hotel room was just as good a place to start on doing so.

She went to the window again to shut it close against the pervasive rumor of the city, a mix of traffic sounds and shouts and broadcasted advertising. The sewer smell was gone along with the Jaffa's old clothes, down the recycler drain. She glanced at her wrist. The small watch-like screen was technically a peripheral of her e-deck. Fifteen minutes. Damn, Bald'reek was really enjoying the unlimited supply of hot water, she thought with an indulgent smile. Poor sod. It was probably best for him to go back to a familiar life as his master's Jaffa. Emancipation did not work well for him, unlike his former warrior brother Chu'rel.

The shower noise stopped and Bald'reek came out a minute later, towel wrapped around his hips like a loincloth. He stopped in place, eyes snapping wide open at the sight of a naked Rayner sitting on the bed and scrolling through her e-deck, then began to stammer what might have been an apology. She shut him up with a gesture as she rose up, her Draka upbringing making it so that she didn't see a difference between standing naked in front of furniture and in front of, well… servants, for that was what the Jaffa was in her mind. "Here's some new clothes and shoes for you. Nothing fancy, but clean. Get dressed while I take a shower myself. Your master's on his way."

She brushed past him, not giving it a second thought as she entered the small bathroom and headed to the shower cubicle. She felt powerfully relieved that it looked clean enough. The long shower must have washed out all the grime, she didn't have to step in dirty Jaffa soup.

She stepped out ten minutes later, feeling refreshed, towel wrapped around her body. Then she paused after a couple steps. Bald'reek was huddling at the farthest corner of the room, his back toward her and fumbling over something. Then her eyes picked up the swimsuit she'd discarded on the ground. Except it was now laying in a heap on top of the bed. Then her nostrils flared with a familiar scent. Realization dawned on her. She stared at the Jaffa doing his best impression of a lamp post, then at her underwear, then at the window. Too small for an adult body. Perhaps if I push really, really hard? The whimsical little voice said in her head, a counterpoint to her realizing just what the Jaffa had been doing… and failing to find an appropriate reaction that wouldn't make the whole rescuing him meaningless.

Her mental gears turned and ground for several long seconds. Then she took a deep calming breath.

Yes, filling him with explosives. That'll do. Later.

Dress and underwear went down the recycler chute in turn and she unpacked the replacement clothes. Dropping the towel, she lifted her leg to don the denim-like pants and froze. Bald'reek was overtly ogling her, his gaze directed straight at her crotch.

What the hell? I mean, I don't give a crap about being seen in the nude, but this is going too far. This… pervert needs to be straightened out here and now.

She smiled at him seductively and he almost began to drool, exposing a gap-tooth mouth. She walked toward him, sashaying in a most provocative manner, noting his growing look

of… well, he was looking like a man who just realized he won the lottery. "Are you enjoying what you see?" she asked him in a honeyed voice, her breasts almost level with his eyes. "Yes, m'lady!" "Would you like to touch?" she added sweetly, although there was just that stillness in her smile that finally made Bald'reek pause instead of answering straight away.

A long moment passed, him staring like a dog in front of a meat-laden table it suspected it shouldn't touch, her looking down at him with that too-sweet smile and enjoying how the first notions of doubt were creeping in his attitude.

Then she grabbed his balls. And started squeezing, her smile now very cold. He gave out a yelp of pain that rose in a keening crescendo as the pressure increased and he found he couldn't escape with her other hand now squeezing his neck. His legs weakened and he found himself sliding down the corner, blackness probing at the edges of his vision, the pain of his crushed testicles burning at the forefront of his consciousness. She drove him down until he was huddling and babbling ineffectually.

"Now," she intoned icily, "let's make a few things very clear. I'm not particularly shy and I don't care much about people seeing me naked. It's the human body after all. But. I'm not going to let a two-bit Jaffa" she dropped as much superior contempt as she could into the word "disrespect me by openly leering. For. We. Are. Not. Equals!" She gave an added squeeze and Bald'reek convulsed in agony. "Nor are you allowed to wank in my underwear!" she hissed. "Do that again and I'll RIP YOUR JUNK OFF!" she roared. "IS THAT CLEAR?"

She released her pressure fractionally and the punished Jaffa nodded frantically, tears of pain and snot streaming down his face. "Yes, m'lady Rayna! I'm sorry, m'lady Rayna!" he managed to stammer.

"Good boy." She released the pressure entirely then patted his head as she would a dog. "Now sit and stay quiet."

Of course, the door opened right at that moment. Karl'ac strode right in, then froze in turn seeing a naked Rayner towering over his huddled and very-uncomfortable-looking Jaffa.

She preemptively answered his questioning before he could do more than stare in utter puzzlement, his mind too caught up in trying to interpret the scene to even fully contemplate the mere fact that yes, there was a beautiful woman standing there clad in nothing more than a dotted line of wound dressings.

"Just establishing some boundaries here. Your Jaffa's otherwise unharmed."

"Ah." The word eventually dropped from his mouth. Then he showed the good sense of purposefully staring elsewhere as she finally managed to put some clothes on.

Five days later

"Last Breath Station" wasn't exactly an auspicious name for a space station, Rayner couldn't help reflecting. Apparently, the name came from an unfortunate event involving construction workers and a missed resupply shuttle back when the place was under construction, a hundred years ago. She supposed it was a bit more dangerous and isolated back then, so far in the outer system. Nowadays the place proudly owned its name and nobody asphyxiated who didn't mean to. It still was located in the proverbial boondocks of the Hebridean system. Which was exactly why Rayner had picked it for her last pick-up.

Three days ago, she'd left Unity City behind, her purse lighter of another five-figure tip for Dorrin the tireless, having figured it would be the last opportunity for a high-quality romp in a while. Two days ago, she reunited with Alix the faithful Al'kesh and made a few interior adjustments for the upcoming trip. The previous day she did a short, intra-system jump to another station orbiting another gas giant and picked up Karl'ac who'd arrived there at the end of his own particular itinerary.

And now they waited for the last and least piece of the trio. The two of them had wisely estimated that Bald'reek couldn't be expected to navigate his way through the Hebridean system alone without getting lost, walking out of an airlock, plain getting robbed or ending as a supply of spare parts for some of the unsavory criminal gangs providing "cheap, after-market limbs and implants, no questions asked".

Therefore, Rayner had called on her network of contacts to contract the task of delivering him safe and sound to Last Breath Station. She and Karl'ac were now waiting inside a travellers' lounge for the scheduled arrival.

Her e-deck bleeped a notice. The expected interplanetary shuttle was coming in. She raised her head from the novel she was reading. From the corner of her eye, she saw that Karl'ac was doing the same. Through the concourse's vast window, she could indeed watch the shuttle come to a graceful stop at the end of a docking arm, robotic arms grabbing it and locking it tight. The airlock telescoped out, hiding a portion of the shuttle's body.

A dozen passengers alighted from the gate, then she recognized the Jaffa and his chaperone, a raven-haired woman sporting a half-shaved, tattooed head.

The black eye was new though. She heard Karl'ac sighing loudly, having spotted the same thing. She rose up to greet them.

The contracted escort scowled and shoved Bald'reek forward. "Here's your guy. In one piece, as agreed."

"And relatively undamaged?" Ann Rayner arched an eyebrow.

"He tried to grope and kiss me when I was sleeping" the contractor explained with a look of disgust.

"I see. Sorry for that. I'm adding a bonus to your fee… for your trouble. And thank you."

The scowl transformed into an appreciative smile, then a chuckle.

"Well, he's your trouble now!"

A quick meal later, Rayner led the way back to her own ship waiting at a private dock. At the airlock's threshold, she turned back and stared at her traveling companions.

"Before you two come in, here's the rules. This is my ship. It only answers to my orders. None of you try anything cute, it may look like an ordinary Al'kesh from outside, but it's definitely not and among the alterations… well, increased security's one. Which I'm not going to detail, but anyone believing they can steal it from under me is in for unpleasant, and deadly surprises."

She stared conspicuously at Karl'ac, who was after all a Goa'uld. Better nip any funny idea in the bud. He appeared to take the hint. "Of course, Rayna. Your ship, your rules."

"And no one touches anything I didn't clear them to. There are many personal items and customized systems inside which are not standard Goa'uld issue, if you get my drift. You shouldn't be able to break anything with access controls, but better safe than sorry" she added, thinking of the bolted-on compsystems, the autodoc or even the cooking appliances.

Karl'ac nodded, then elbowed Bald'reek impatiently. The not-too-bright Jaffa took the hint. "Yes, m'lady! No touching godmagic stuff!"

She eyed him for a moment, trying to find a spark of intelligence in those beady recessed eyes. She was glad she'd taken some time to fool-proof the ship.

She reached for the recessed door controls and put her hand on the reader plaque. The security system did its duty, running a complex and multilayered set of checks. Fingerprints, DNA sampling, body heat and electrical charge, then cameras analyzed the scene, pattern-recognition algorithms looking for signs of coercion and finding none, storing Karl'ac and Bald'reek's in the facial signature databank. Implant-mediated challenge and counter-challenge, transduced through specialized nerve channels inside her palm. A second later, Alix opened herself and the trio stepped into the inner airlock-cum-atrium.

Karl'ac stared around. The space was familiar enough, yet… different. There were the circular hairlines in the floor that corresponded to the transport rings, but with the addition of a sturdy-looking lock mechanism that would prevent activation in a hack-proof, brute-force manner. Against the walls stood several tall cabinets, some with clear fronts containing what he guessed were space suits, the others probably full of useful hardware for working in space. Then there was the rounded device hanging from the ceiling, inactive, yet clearly emanating weapon-ish vibes. A security turret?

Going through the aft door however, the familiarity ended. Where a normal Al'kesh would have contained a small crew space (and the flight to Hebridean space with Chu'rel and Bald'reek had proven how small it actually was for anything longer than a couple days travel) this ship held a noticeably roomier apartment, if still constrained by the vessel's overall dimensions. Close to the door was the working space with its wide holo-projecting tactical table currently showing a model of the station and the side-facing workstation with its very unfamiliar-looking compsystems. He couldn't resist sweeping a hand through the hologram, getting a look of annoyance from Rayner, but he hadn't actually touched anything, had he?

Further beyond stood the galley in its stowed state, which he only identified thanks to the stacks of Food-Tech boxes. It was his turn to look in annoyance, though he knew better than to demand Rayna cook for him. And Bald'reek… well the last thing he wanted was letting the hygienically-challenged Jaffa have anything to do with something he would put in his mouth.

On the other hand, that big wide bed at the back looked highly inviting. But Rayner immediately squashed his hopes, noticing what he was staring at. She pointed at the couch facing the galley on the opposite bulkhead. "You will be sleeping there. Don't worry, it does unfold as a bed." Karl'ac's deflated look showed how much he found it a relief. Well, what did he expect, that he'd sleep in her bed? She shrugged inwardly, then caught Bald'reek staring at her bed with a lustful expression of his own that almost managed to make her uncomfortable.

The Jaffa yelped as she clamped steel-like fingers on his shoulder and pushed him towards a floor hatch. "You… will sleep in the hold" she told him in a don't argue tone.

He went down the ladder into the forward hold. Rayner had cleared a space between crates. When all three were standing in, she pointed to the basic amenities, explaining each of them for the dim-witted warrior's benefit.

"Bed" she pointed at the inflatable mattress and sleeping bag. "Latrine" she demonstrated how the space-rated porta-loo worked. "Trash" she did the same for the portable compactor.

"For cleaning" a couple boxes of wet wipes and tissues. "And that's for passing time" she handed him a Tech-Con tablet filled to the brim with appropriate entertainment. He immediately appropriated the device with a hungry expression, then almost squealed in joy when the movie library appeared. Karl'ac audibly inhaled. The beginning of the list seemed to consist of Chu'rel's complete filmography. Bald'reek tapped the first icon and Rayner quickly decided it was time to leave. Karl'ac was already hurrying up the ladder. "Now behave, and if you need anything else, the intercom's there." She left him engrossed in the opening scenes, climbed back to her deck and closed the hatch against the rising sound coming from the tablet.

She found Karl'ac staring at her in disbelief. "Did you just hand this… goat a tablet full of Hebridean pornography?"

She shrugged and spread her hands out. "Eh, that should keep him busy and happy enough."

The hyperspace trip to their first destination was to take twenty Earth days. All by herself, Rayner would have used the autodoc's stasis function to sleep through the journey. But with her two guests aboard, she couldn't take that chance.

Which meant they fell into a routine. Going through the plan again grew stale the second day, since there wasn't much of an actual plan beyond "let's see how things are and improvise as we go". On second thought, Karl'ac's whole enterprise looked very much like a half-cocked undertaking. He'd been out of the loop for years and didn't even know just who exactly was sitting on his former throne, for Loki's sake! They were supposed to reach the capital of his former enemy, where a fatefully failed assault drove him to drop everything and run to the Hebrideans, somehow manage to reach the stargate, use it to cross the thousand-light-year gap to his former domain while sending Alix on autopilot, use the intervening time to gather intel on the present situation, then somehow make up a final plan and win back the throne while making it look like Karl'ac had been plotting his return in secret for years instead of, well, living the high life on Hebridea, and finally convince his higher-ups in the Goa'uld food chain that yes, he'd done it all by himself and a couple loyal Jaffa, promised, no exterior help at all.

That made a lot of "if", Rayner told herself whenever she wanted to think about it. But she couldn't deny it was exciting, in a crazy way.

Which was all well and good, but didn't make the days go by faster. Karl'ac fortunately made himself a bearable travel companion, keeping his complaining to a minimum and even helping with tidying after their shared mealtimes. Either it was superlative acting to keep her on his friendly, trusting side – for as much as she'd ever trust one of his kind – or she'd actually found the one Goa'uld who wasn't a complete dickhead, she chuckled to herself.

He was even accompanying her in her daily calisthenics, which made sense after her initial surprise. He was looking forward to a personal fight against one of his race, after all and he didn't take much convincing when she suggested some hand-to-hand remedial training.

The first sparring session in the aft hold went about as expected. Without his technological gimmicks, namely the hand device she'd made very clear was staying in her safe for the duration of the journey, Karl'ac would be hard pressed to beat even a nine-year-old Draka. She went easy, yet he finished breathless, bruised and beaten. It was a good thing he could heal quickly, as for some unfathomable reason he wasn't eager to lie down in her autodoc. Reasonable distrust went both ways, apparently.

More physical exercise on the fitness machines, with him making faces at the performance levels she was operating at. But he was improving daily. The symbiote also had that effect, it seemed.

On the eight day it happened. They were both hot and sweaty and high from the physical exertion. Normally she had first dibs on the shower. This time she beckoned him in, knowing full well how, despite his courteous demeanor in the tight confines of her ship, his occasional not-so-well-hidden glances at her body betrayed how much appreciative he was.

Ten minutes later she found it almost cute, in a funny way, when his eyes flashed golden at the moment he orgasmed in her. Then it was her turn to find a much-needed release.

The improved routine went on for the remainder of the flight, then at the predicted time Alix exited from hyperspace at a safe distance from Bellenos, the planet Karl'ac knew as Camulus' throne world. It was time to check who was who in the new order.

Bellenos system – Dominion of Camulus

Karl'ac had warned her about the moon-based superweapon which had slaughtered the allied fleet. That, and the mere fact that it was a throne world ensured it would logically have a significant fleet presence.

This called for a sneaky insertion, meaning Alix first hypered out in the outer fringes of the system, collected an up-to-date sensor picture of the planetary configuration, then made a precisely calculated micro-jump that ended right outside Bellenos' atmosphere on the opposite side of the weaponized moon and the pair of motherships that orbited it in turn. Such a maneuver would not have worked during the war, Karl'ac reflected, but peace meant a reduced level of readiness. Even a small System Lord couldn't afford to keep his Jaffa on a war setting all the time – especially those manning his ships. They couldn't produce the next generation of warriors if they were forever stuck in spaceships far from their spouses.

Rayner's Alkesh dove toward the darkened night side, eager to become a part of the planetary clutter then levelled off a scant ten meters over the ground. They flew silently over the rolling landscape, most of it untamed wilderness. By and large, the Goa'uld preferred to keep their subjects close to the true centers of their domains: the stargates. Even this throne world held few settlements outside the capital region, all of them existing for a reason that served their god, be it mining or exploiting some unique natural resource. Those would typically be connected by transporter rings placed in the local temple doubling as a tithe collection point. There was no reason to overfly those and risk some overzealous or simply insomniac priest ringing their superior with a report of unscheduled godmagic activity. Even if such was likely some joyriding Jaffa. For which self-respecting priest wouldn't jump at the opportunity to earn some arrogant warrior – the correct appellation being those unwashed brutes competing with us for our god's favor - a slap on the wrist?

Hours passed, the slow stealthy flight feeling like creeping over the planetary surface when they could have zipped through at hypersonic speed – and gotten shot at in turn. Rayner and Karl'ac used that time to perfect their covers – story and appearance. They needed to look like a couple of traveling merchants, the kind that went from village to village carrying useful, or not so useful but entertaining trinkets. It was a test of Karl'ac's will to get in the role – but at least it came with the perk of Rayner acting as his loving and obedient wife, though he wouldn't push his luck too far with that. Besides, she had to uglify herself to look the role, which he couldn't help thinking was a pity.

"I really prefer you as yourself" he commented, looking at her altered face. No longer a young martial goddess, she wore the face of a twenty-something who would be old at thirty, hair colored a faded chestnut, rougher, weathered skin down to a tuft of dark hairs on a prosthetic mole, yellowed and stained teeth that never saw proper dental care. The clothes that concealed her body made it look far more shapeless than it truly was, barely better than those of a peasant, though colorful as was the fashion of the lands.

His own appearance was correspondingly fitting, and she didn't miss the retort.

"Yes, well if I wanted to fuck a dirty ugly peasant, there was already Bald'reek, you know."

He chuckled good-naturedly, her own smile making it clear that she'd meant the whole thing in jest. He had to admit there was a certain… fun in their disguising.

Of course, Bald'reek himself didn't take much effort to turn into the model image of the servant he was supposed to play. He was mostly peeved to leave the tablet behind. It took Karl'ac cajoling him with promises of nubile young virgins to pick from when he was the rightful lord of his domain again. Not that he actually expected to have to fulfill his promise. If all went well, that two-legged millstone would find his virgins in paradise, or not.

In the meantime, he would carry their luggage on his back, the wooden frame overflowing with sundries printed by the ship's fabricators, the jumble of items artfully disguising the actually useful devices they would take along and which would look very out of place otherwise.

Alix reached their final waypoint, still clad in darkness. The trio alighted in a forest clearing, a two-day walk from their destination. Even with the best stealth systems Earth could slap on an uncloaked Al'kesh, it would be too risky coming closer to the capital world and its Goa'uld sensors.

The ship accelerated away. It would autonomously retrace its route, altering it so that it kept out of the moon's line of sight, then hyper away to another corner of the system and lay low until it received the signal from Rayner to leave for its own parallel journey – right before she went through the stargate, if everything went as planned.

Its low humming sound and the rustling of air parting quickly dissipated to nothingness, and all that was left was the sounds of a sleeping forest. There weren't supposed to be predators like wolves or bears here… but if there were, they would find something far deadlier, Karl'ac thought, fingering his ribbon device through the rough fabric of his fingerless mittens as a reassurance. Yet in his mind, the device was but a second thought. It was Rayner's presence next to him that actually made him feel safe.

They came out of the forest at dawn, huddled in their cloaks against the morning cold. An hour-long walk after a short, rustic but roborative breakfast got them onto the road, or what passed for one. It was more like a wide trail, just wide enough to let a horse or ox-pulled wagon through. But it was a road, and they followed it through farmland, going past sparse hovels and the occasional hamlet. As the sun went up, they saw laborers toiling in the fields – it was early spring, it seemed, with a thin fuzz of green growth peeking out of the earth, still too early for Rayner to try and identify what kind of crop were growing out there.

At midday they stopped under a tree to share lunch, cutting thick slices of black bread and thin ones of dry, cured meat, washing the improvises sandwiches with short swigs of light beer and wine. A couple laborers passed by and waved at them, then approached after they were waved back, curiosity driving them to the travelers. Kar'lac greeted them in the patois, a simplified, if not degenerate form of Goa'uld. The locals caught on his slightly off-placed accent.

"You're not from the region" the wisest one astutely noticed.

"No indeed, we're traveling merchants, going from region to region, village to village, town to town and realm to realm in our Lord's domain" the disguised Goa'uld told them, nodding sagely.

"Oh? Can you go through the Ring of Gods?" the youngest peasant asked wide-eyed. "How honored you must be!" he added in visible envy. Karl'ac smiled back. "Praise the lords, they granted us passage through their realms so that we may share the wonders of their kingdoms!"

Unseen in the shadow of her cowl, Rayner's eyes rolled skywards. At least Bald'reek was keeping wordless, busy munching on a mouthful of lard with a variety of masticating sounds.

"Can you show us something from another god realm?" inevitably came from the youngster. Fortunately, they'd planned for that as part of their cover.

Karl'ac rummaged through a bag and extracted a small tube, removed the cap, poured a roll piece of fabric from the tube onto his palm. He presented the unrolled cloth. "This is an handkerchief from the world of Soliria."

"I've never heard of it!"

"It is very, very far away and belongs to another god" Karl'ac pontificated. "Look how fine it is."

The laborers watched with saucer-like eyes at the embroidery depicting a dress-clad young virgin picking colorful flowers. They couldn't know the design came from a Hebridean fashion magazine and was extruded, after some computerized editing, in a space-age matter-printer. It was probably the most beautiful thing they'd seen in their lowly lives.

"This item's worth gold, though. Maybe I can offer something more affordable, yet exotic" he quickly squared the cloth away and produced a clothespin made of a shiny metal. A simple utilitarian item of stainless steel, it still made the laborers' eyes gleam. "This can be yours for a handful of coppers."

A bout of haggling later the pin changed hands. The older laborer reverently put the pin away in a pocket, then further conversation followed, deftly led by Karl'ac trying to coax information out of the locals. Yet their humble condition meant they didn't know much besides "our god Camulus who lives in the sky, and the great capital where I've been only twice in my life is getting rebuilt after the evil godmagic blast from several summers ago, and surely lord Camulus will grant us good crops this year since the whole district paid full tithe on time".

An amicable parting later, the laborers went back to their fields and the travelers to the road.

"So, this Camulus fellow of yours doesn't want to put dirt on his shoes, huh?" Rayner later commented to break the silence.

"If he spends most of his time in a Ha'tak or his weaponized moon up there, so much the better. Less chance of a heavy Jaffa presence groundside or near the Chappai itself."

"Not trusting your own cunning plan?" she chuckled.

"It better works, or the indignity of this" he gestured at his disguised self "would be too unbearable to think about."

Rayner made a little laugh. "I don't mind a little indignity as long as we come out of this alive."

Mars orbital shipyard, Solar System

Gwendolyn Ingolfsson stared out of the concourse's wall-to-ceiling vitryl window. Her next assignment awaited. Even better, her next command. No more refurbished pulse-drive cruiser, no Ma'am. She couldn't deny how exhilarating the first journeys into the great unknown interstellar space had been, mapping nearby star systems before the new class of purpose-built explorers came online.

But after a stint aboard a Tollan ship during the Tanith War… well, old Earth spaceships felt antique. It may be unfair, but she couldn't help it. Not having to deal with zero-gee plumbing day by day was a small revolution alone. And no, she didn't feel as if preferring a one-gee standard environment was "getting soft". It just made everything more convenient. Besides, they were keeping all the microgravity training and backup modes, didn't they?

When the time had come to design the next generation of cruisers, some traditionalists had insisted on keeping a thrust-aligned deck plan, because "what if that fancy-new gravity plating fails? At least that way we can still use thrust gravity!" But it wasn't so simple with the new amalgamation of inertia-cancelling tech into the oversized sublight engines – "one gee" didn't necessarily feel like "one gee" anymore. Besides, grav plating was tested extensively, and it took a lot to fail, having an integrated backup power supply even. There was so much their new-found mastery of gravity allowed them to do… forging hyper-dense armor, for example. And the ship's main reactor used focused gravity fields among other exotic technologies. No way could a conventional design reach the stupendous energy density, even using mirrormatter injection to boost the standard aneutronic fusion reaction, that enabled an exawatt-level rating at maximum power setting.

Ingolfsson remembered her double-take when she first read the design spec. Exawatt! This was more than the pre-War energy budget of the entire Solar System, for the Race's sake!

The Valhalla-class cruisers, of which she was going to captain the second unit, Valkyrie – she liked the name enough – were supposed to fight Ha'taks and win. Their designers amalgamated post-Contact scientific principles and technology on top of Earth's knowledge. They used the same science as the Goa'uld… but the latter had millennia of experience, and as impractical, or unoptimized as their gear might appear to the critical eye, there was no denying that the underlying technology was both refined and elegant. Their stuff could channel astronomical levels of energy in small devices and keep running during centuries with next-to-no support, which fit their particular modus operandi. The hardware developed by the Domination, such as the new plasma cannons might be largely copied from working examples of Goa'uld ones, and pound-for-pound were usually inferior. Which meant their Earth designers added more pounds, and then slapped some more. A System Lord, or even a Tollan engineer might scoff at the plasma cannons that made the Valhalla's primary energy battery, finding them crude and maintenance-intensive in comparison. What they lacked in sophisticated elegance they made up in sheer, brute force. They used more power, were larger, heavier and needed an active cooling system. But they packed a punch.

Valkyrie carried dozens of them in her flanks, concealed behind armored gunports in casemate emplacements reminiscent of old age of sail men-of-war, one row of eighteen on each side-looking facet of her hexagonal cross-section hull. Thirty-six for each broadside, the inclined sides of the hexagon meaning two rows from each broadside could always fire on targets "above" or "below" the ship. There were eight more spread on the flattened hammerhead of her prow, and another eight covered her rear quarter, between the four massive semi-recessed drive pods.

Nor were the plasma cannons her sole heavy armament. Unhidden, even in their semi-recessed standby position, were the long tuning-fork shapes of turreted heavy railguns, four on top and four on the bottom side of the main hull, each rated to throw a four-ton projectile at a percent of the speed of light, every second. Initial concepts had called for an all-energy armament for the cruisers, on the sensible-looking ground that it would make logistics much simpler. Then just as sensible voices were raised cautioning against planning for a single, known enemy when they knew next-to-little about the rest of the galaxy. In the end, not only was the design reworked with a more varied armament scheme, it got more of them too as the initial schemes were found far too light in simulations, and considering the vast room available on the eight-hundred-meters-plus long hull.

Therefore, a sizable kinetic armament was retained in the form of the eight heavy railguns, and a couple dozen smaller ones – salvaged from the pre-Contact Domination ships being made obsolete, actually, like the Gatling point-defense slug-throwers that made up her defense grid along with the new rapid-fire plasma blasters and point-defense lightguns.

Ingolfsson's eyes searched the cliff-sized hull for them. She knew where each of them was, but they were invisible too in their sleeping recesses. It made the broadsides look blank in the gun-metal grey of her standby smart-paint coating; a smoothness only interrupted by the scattered outlines of surface-mounted sensor arrays. A narrow recessed "trench" visually separated both horizontal halves of the hull at the equator, widening at places to make room for hangar bay openings and loading docks. Most of the ship's missile armament was fired from tubes and box launchers there, protected from indirect enemy fire by the overhanging oblique armored sides. The heavy ship-to-ship missile component belonged to the frontal hammerhead, two large-bore launch tubes inside each tapering "cheek" for a total of four, each connected to a rotary magazine. They could launch large recon drones, but the bulk of the load were the big Ha'tak killers. The Arrows were long, sleek torpedo-shaped rockets, fusion-powered, able to strike across a star system or expend their drive in a short-range, maximum acceleration race against enemy defenses, protected by their own energy shield to ensure delivery of their payload. And that payload was the biggest ever built in the Solar System, an energium-amplified, matter-annihilation, gigaton-range focused-effect warhead. Specially designed, short-lived containment fields could focus ninety percent of the total yield in a narrow cone of ultra-hard gamma rays to strike at enemy shields and batter them down through sheer brute force. Each magazine held six of those. A single, four-shot salvo was expected to severely damage a Ha'tak, or at the very least make it fodder to the rest of her weaponry. Assuming Tanith's motherships were representative of the Goa'uld top of the line, Gwendolyn tempered her inner enthusiasm. After all, he was not a first-rank System Lord.

And if her magazines ran dry… well she still had her forward-facing spinal weaponry. The particle lance was a large neutral particle beam, as its name indicated, which could cut through a kilometer-thick nickel-iron asteroid. Flanking it was a pair of wide-aperture X-ray lightguns intended for long-range, precision strikes.

Rounding out her offensive power were the forty drone fighters in two separate storage and maintenance bays deep in the armored hull, with a pair of launch and recovery tubes connecting to the exterior. Ingolfsson made a grimace. Mongoose. Really? She stood among those in the Space Force who found the official name of the drones a bit out of place. Yes, the Goa'uld were literally parasitic snakes. But "snakes" was also how their late Earth enemies called the Draka, and while they almost wore it with pride, it seemed a bit ridiculous to name a piece of military hardware after the animal that killed snakes. Personally, and based on their swarming logic, she found starling a much more fitting name, and she counted herself among the vocal cabal of officers who called for an official renaming. At the very least, there would be no calling her drones "mongooses" while she captained Valkyrie!

She crossed into the boarding floatway after a short but thorough identity check. The transparent tunnel gave her a breathtaking view. Across the chasm between ship and slipway ran several larger cargo transfer connections, standard shipping containers running across on support cables, then further away but still razor-sharp in vacuum, the thick umbilical pipes pumping energy, fluids, refrigerants and superchilled hydrogen into the ship's engineering section. Above and below was the deep black of space, bottomless.

Color-coded lines on the floatway's wall and flashing lights warned her that she was approaching a gravity threshold. She prepared herself for the transition from the floatway's microgravity to Valkyrie's one-gee field and negotiated it graciously, landing feet first on the textured metal. The pair of sentries in space armor, helmet visor open, saluted, imitated by the ship-suited officer standing behind.

"Captain-Merarch Ingolfsson, requesting permission to board."

This she was going to get used to. The new ships were larger and held more numerous crews despite extensive efforts at automation. Much more than the older space cruisers. And between the Army, Aerospace and Navy components of the Citizen Force, the latter successfully argued that it was the sole one who did have institutional knowledge in operating, well, ships, with larger crews, for extended deployments. And managed to keep its old, peculiar rank scheme, dating back to the time when it looked up at the British Royal Navy as a model, relevant despite being at odds with the neo-classical, Hellenistic rank structure of the other larger branches. But then the Draka Navy was always the smallest of the services, and it couldn't expect to actually crew the new vessels that were going to form the backbone of the new space fleet, despite having suffered proportionally fewer casualties during the Final War.

Which meant that the new Aerospace Navy was going to use Navy-flavored ranks for the personnel manning the space ships… except those making up their naval infantry components, who were going to keep their traditional ranks.

For Gwendolyn Ingolfsson, up and coming Merarch fast-tracked into a prestigious command based on her merits and – she was lucid enough to admit it – impeccable political connections, it meant that by stepping onto Valkyrie's deck she was changing onto a Captain. Not the Captain yet, mind. Chiliarch-Engineer Bormann was still in command as long as they didn't formally transfer it, and yes, being an officer of the War Directorate Technical Branch meant he was staying a Chiliarch, what the Alliance military would have called a Brigadier General… despite being addressed as Captain as long as he was sitting – metaphorically or not – on the command chair in Valkyrie's bridge.

How do those old sea-paddling fogies keep track of that spaghetti plate of a rank system without a nice smart Drakensis brain? She kept the irreverent thought for herself as the other officer answered.

"Permission granted, Captain-Merarch. Welcome aboard Valkyrie."

Gwen stepped forward, her light bag slung over a shoulder, then extended her arm for the less-formal clasping salute. "Commander de Vries" she greeted the other officer as a matter of fact, having memorized the names of her future crew in advance. Marteen de Vries was a Drakensis like her, slightly taller and blonde as his distant Afrikaner ancestry almost dictated. He'd been in the actual Navy during the Final War… deep down the Atlantic in a missile submarine. Having expanded its hypersonic missile tubes towards the South American coast, it was then damaged by a near-miss from an Alliance battlestation before it was destroyed in turn by Draka space assets. The inner hull sphere that comprised the deep-submergence sub's tactical section was holed by the blast, and sea pressure at the depth of three thousand meters made sure that nobody was left alive inside in less time that it took them to blink.

By then Lieutenant de Vries was the highest-ranking officer still alive, in the forward sphere section housing the ship's main sonar and torpedo armament. Establishing contact with the engineering sphere, he'd led the combined effort to escape from the datum and reach the surface, several days later, to leave the sub and its compromised reactor and be picked up by a rescue hydroplane after a week drifting at the surface of the ocean. The whole episode had earned him a commendation and a fast track to… civilian life as the War' wound down on Earth.

Civilian life in the aftermath of a global nuclear war wasn't as fun as he'd expected though, especially for an aspiring writer. When Contact happened and the dust settled, he was quick to realize how it meant a radical new expansion of the Force and how his naval experience might be an asset.

"Indeed, Captain-Merarch" he answered with a crisp tone, then cracked a welcoming grin. "And your First Officer, as soon as you formally take command. Then I'll finally be able to simply call you Captain" he quipped. Gwendolyn chuckled in turn. "A bit of a mouthful, isn't it? But as old-fashioned as these naval ranks sound, I'm sure I'll eventually manage to get used to them."

"Certainly! Practice makes perfect, and all that. Anyway" he gestured at her to follow as he prepared to leave the entrance compartment, stepping towards the inner hatchway cut into the thick bulkhead "your baggage awaits in your cabin, Captain Bormann already packed up and your steward cleaned up. Would you rather settle in now or head straight to the bridge?"

There was no hesitation in Gwendolyn's mind.

"The bridge, of course. No ill-meaning towards the Chiliarch-Engineer, but I'm eager to take command of this beauty."

De Vries grinned agreeably. "And a beast of a beauty she is. Captain Bormann shook her up well and good, we have all the teething kinks straightened out, unless something comes out of left field." "Six months trials should have taken care of any egregious problem, I agree." "That, and Valhalla took the worst of new-design woes before us."

They crossed another thick bulkhead, heading deeper inside the ship. Reading the blueprints – or more accurately, the three-dimensional model – of the ship and its intricate scheme of compartments and layers of armor was one thing, actually passing through it was another. The Valhallas were designed to keep taking blows even after the energy shield failed and remain in the fight, unlike the Tollan ships she'd served on. The outer armor belt, which wasn't a belt at all but generally hugged the exterior hull, varied in thickness but was nowhere measured in anything but meters. Then there was the sponge-like thickness of sealed compartments and metallic hydrogen fuel cells filling the vessel's load-bearing framework. And more armor surrounded every vital section, those laying deep inside the hull. At any place, an enemy Ha'tak would have to land several cannon hits in the same spot to reach those vitals and then some more to get through.

"I'm looking forward to strutting her out in front of our Tollan friends" she confessed.

"They're probably going to call her big and unrefined" de Vries sniffed in mock affectation.

"And crewed by barbarians."

"I was told they liked barbarians, actually…"

Gwen made a knowing smile. "Never been there yourself?"

He shook his head negatively. "No, and I admit I'm looking forward to correcting that."

She thought about his answer. The wet navy had the reputation for being the branch where the most… liberal Citizens went traditionally. But she didn't want to push him into a political conversation he might be uncomfortable with, and it would be improper to ask anyway, as his next commanding officer.

"Well, it is a pleasant enough place to visit in my experience. I'll give you a few pointers if you want, when it comes to shore leave!"

"Speaking of shore leave, the crew will certainly need it after the six-month transit. But…"

"But the serf crew might be a problem then. They're all servus, and vetted for, but they're still serfs" she finished for him. She saw at his glance and nod that she was right. "Of course, the Tollan government agreed to deal with any escaped serfs" that was recapturing them and handing them to the Domination "but it would be embarrassing."

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I suppose. Certainly, the Legation will have made arrangements. There's no shortage of near-empty regions where we could have the serfs unwind and spread, I mean stretch their legs."

The meandering and dog-legging path through the bulkheads and outer hull sections ended at the closest mainfare access. At more than eight hundred meters of length, walking from place to place wasn't practical if you were in a hurry, even if one would seldom have to cross the entire length of the ship. Then there was the vertical distance. Climbing stairs and ladders was great for keeping fit, but there were times when you simply wanted to go fast.

Which was why a system of travel capsules was designed to allow quick travel in both dimensions, like a lift system that would double as a tram of sorts. The design was tested and iterated virtually… where its drawbacks became blatant. Too vulnerable to disruption by combat damage. Too space consuming with all its ancillary servitudes and holding spaces. Its tunnels and shafts cut through the compartmentalization, which meant that it should be locked down during combat with all blast doors shut closed. This left it as a system of dubious value for its weight.

A much simpler system was eventually adopted. The ship's manned spaces, with a few exceptions like decentralized backup fire-control posts, were contained in a number of enclosed and self-sufficient core section. For example, Main Operations, containing the main bridge, Combat Information Center and Central Compsystems was a three-deck high armored box nestled set near the transverse center, roughly where the main hull started to flare outwards and transition to the frontal hammerhead, allowing it the thickest protection outside of Core Engineering, where the ship's stores of stabilized mirrormatter were located.

Below and offset starboard laid Primary Citizen Quarters, and its symmetrical counterpart Primary Serf Quarters on the other side. All three sections, despite occupying the same "slice" of the hull were essentially independent, with their own armor protection and life support systems. The same principle applied to the aft engineering sections surrounding the main reactor, with its secondary quarters and fabrication shops and robotic maintenance bays.

All of them would be sealed up in combat, each behaving like a fully independent and autonomous environment even if everything else was destroyed. They were also generally kept under the standard one gravity setting.

Connecting them all was a limited network of travel tubes, the mainfares. Essentially rectilinear, they were kept under low gravity, which allowed crew to take long aerial bounds forward, essentially flying for short distances. A generous padding of shock-absorbing foam at turns and junctions took care of the inexperienced or plain clumsy.

The thick armored blast doors were open and Gwen stepped onto the gravity transition zone, feeling herself become lighter and lighter with every step, then bounded forward with practiced ease, imitated by her future executive officer. The walls swept past, painted in a pleasant light-yellow base over which stenciled indications and sundry signage were applied in brighter colors that included enough phosphorescent particles to be readable even in total dark. They came to a T-intersection and she rebounded gracefully on the wall to change heading, following the arrow that said "Main Operations". Another pair of crewmembers were going the other way, carrying an empty shipping crate between them. At their combined crossing speed, the salute was hardly regulation-proof, but the Draka military was notoriously not a stickler for cumbersome formal courtesies in the course of duty.

Gwen noticed how every blast door was presently open. The ship was at its most vulnerable docked that way, at the end of a short refit and resupply, her cargo loading bays open to the void, umbilicals full of potentially flammable and explosive fluids, internal blast doors retracted to allow swift, efficient passage. Valkyrie had her figurative pants down and was relying on the shipyard complex' defenses, which were thankfully formidable.

A minute later she stood at the entrance to Main Ops. As a hole in the section's armored envelope, the airlock complex put bank vaults to shame. It was a thick round plug stuck through the armor with a massive swiveling round door at both ends. Gwen stepped over the exterior threshold, having received a salute from another pair of sentries and submitted to another quick biometric scan. She had to take a long, almost awkward step, so thick was the doorway's frame. The passageway beyond led to the interior of the section, compartment by compartment. She glanced through the open doorways, comparing what she saw with the memorized plan. Clerical work spaces, small armories, emergency shelters and damage control cabinets, rest rooms and mess hall.

Finally, they went through another airlock, less massive but hefty in its own right, and she stepped into the bridge. It was a flat cylinder whose inner surfaces were an encompassing pseudo-holographic display, currently set to show a composite outside view. Inward, raised curving platforms supported the bridge crew's workstations. Raised on a dais slightly offset back from the geometric center of the room was the captain's chair with a commanding view of all stations and the central volumetric display. It was both suitably futuristic, Ingolfsson thought, yet subdued. In fact, there was more than met the unaided eye. All crew, Citizen or Serf, had transducer implants, and these could pipe graphics straight into the visual cortex. Depending on their rank and station, everyone had access to additional data presented in implant-mediated augmented vision. Overlays, virtual displays, messages, the possibilities were endlessly customizable and a strict permission system ensured nobody could access data they weren't allowed to.

The bridge wasn't exactly crowded, unsurprisingly. Being "at anchor" and in no hurry to depart there was no need to. But Bormann was there, expecting her. He was Old Draka in his late fifties, from the last generation born without genetic improvements. They exchanged salutes.

"Merarch Ingolfsson… good to see you. I'm sorry I couldn't arrange a more formal reception, with a brass band and everything, but I was told you weren't exactly fond of such ceremonial."

"If I can help it, I'd rather avoid it" Ingolfsson chuckled. "Besides, I'm sure you had better things to do!"

"Ah, true, true. My engineering teams have been working overtime to fix the last egregious gremlins out of her systems… had to replace a mirrormatter injection pump that wasn't performing quite up to spec, among other things, but everything's in the reports. Same for the loading manifest. All of which you can read at leisure after we're done with the present business, hmm?"

She nodded her agreement and he beckoned both future captain and XO to the ready room accessed through a side door. The smaller room served as a captain's office, though it also contained a couch and bathroom for those times when the ship's master – or in this case mistress – would need to take a quick rest without moving all the way to their quarters.

Prominent was the rectangular combined desk and holographic plotting table. There was a keyboard on one side and Bormann positioned himself there. Gwendolyn stood close, with De Vries standing on the other side as a witness to the proceedings.

Bormann reached under his collar and removed the master key from his neck. A small thick rectangle, not much larger than a finger, silver brushed metal with a golden filigree motif containing a crystal-based optical memory, it was physical representation of the captain's mastery over the ship's systems. He inserted it in the matching port close to the keyboard and the table's surface display lit up, displaying a master interface straight to the central compsystem. He next input his command passphrase, scanned his palm on the surface, held still so that the embedded scanner could check and confirm he was the captain and rightful owner of the key.

"Standby to transfer command" he said as much for the computer's benefit as for the other two officers.

The display beeped and reconfigured as Valkyrie's core intelligence retrieved the War Directorate message saying that, as of said date a Merarch Gwendolyn Ingolfsson was to take command from Chiliarch Bormann, rechecked its encryption and found its authentication details congruent.

Gwen's hand went into her bag, emerged with a tube container bearing Castle Tarleton's seal, removed the rolled letter it contained and handed it to Bormann. He unrolled it delicately, read the contents aloud, found them in accordance to the electronic copy he already had. Smiling, he handed the letter back. "You'll want to keep it and frame it" he chuckled. The formal letter of command was technically an anachronism. It wasn't printing on paper, however high quality. It was actual parchment, hand-made calligraphy, meticulously traced by a qualified serf copist in Castle Tarleton, adorned with rich colorful illumination like a precious medieval manuscript. On top was an intricate drawing of Valkyrie over a background of silver and gold stars and a ring-circled gas giant which must have taken days to make.

"That's my intention" she replied, putting the precious writing back in its protective container.

"And now…" Bormann intoned "I stand ready to transfer command of Valkyrie."

"I stand ready to assume command."

"As First Officer, I stand witness to the transfer of command."

The display changed to a prompt. Ready to transfer command. Bormann tapped the "proceed" button, then confirmed his choice again, feeling the haptic feedback vibration through his finger. He stepped aside as the display beckoned the captain-to-be forward.

Gwendolyn Ingolfsson went through the biometric check in turn, then typed her alphanumeric command passphrase as prompted while her two witnesses purposefully looked elsewhere. Then she had to memorize a list of challenge codes. Finally, the system made a satisfied chime, and she felt her implant cease to be ignored by the ship's internal network. It was like slotting in a vastly larger system. She felt it poised and ready rather than invasive, as it should be.

She breathed in. The joy and pride in her heart were strong enough that she felt like grinning like an idiot, but she merely beamed as Bormann and de Vries smiled and clapped their hands. Drakensis or not, she couldn't help the flutter in her chest when her – her! – XO grabbed the microphone on the desk's sidewall, opened the shipwide circuit, then handed the device to Bormann.

"Attention all hands, Bormann speaking. This is a general announcement. As of right now, Captain Ingolfsson is in command of Valkyrie. I repeat, as of right now, Captain Ingolfsson is in command of Valkyrie. You can expect a formal address from her later. For myself, it's been a pleasure working with you all and I'm confidently handing Captain Ingolfsson the meanest warship ever commissioned by the Race, as well as the best crew. This is all. Glory to the Race!"

He handed the microphone back. "And now, my work here is done."

"Sure you won't miss her?"

"Oh, I certainly will" he chuckled "but more are coming, then there's the next generation battleships to think about. I won't stay bored for very long!"

"Ah. Well…" "And don't worry about escorting me out of the ship" he laughed. "I know my way, and I don't want to keep you a minute longer than strictly necessary. I would be impatient in your place" he winked.

The trio walked out of the ready room. As soon as the sliding door closed behind their backs, the bridge crew greeted Ingolfsson with a standing salute which she crisply returned. Then there were the expected goodbyes to their former captain, ending with a round of applause which she did partake sincerely. Bormann had the reputation for technical excellence and being a generally appreciated officer, though from self-admittance cut more for the work he did rather than leading in battle. He was handing her a functioning ship and a crew who knew her workings well. Forging them into a honed instrument of war would be up to her.

When her predecessor was definitively out of the bridge, did she finally have the opportunity to do what she was burning to.

She sat on the command chair with a voluptuous sigh, feeling the memory gel conform to her curves and lowered her head and arms on the waiting rests. The combat restraints she didn't bother to try yet. There would be time enough, when she'd start driving her crew into combat exercises. For now, she merely savored the moment.

Captain Ingolfsson.

Bellenos, Capital World of Lord Camulus

Ann Rayner opened her eyes to the first rays of dawn, yawned, then fully awake, disentangled herself from her sleeping companion and slithered out of the heavy, fur-lined cover. The air was still frisk and dewy. After she took care of the usual morning body needs in a nearby thicket, the outer robe went back on to conceal her forms and complete the disguise that started with her semi-permanent face mod. At least during the night and in the dark, it didn't prevent Karl'ac from finding her warmth desirable, and vice versa.

She rekindled the campfire and prepared a rustic breakfast of flat bread and thick gruel. Look at me cooking for the snoring men, she snorted inwardly. Truth be told, she'd rather do it herself than trust the Jaffa who was sleeping alone a bit further away where his smell was less noticeable.

As she finished, Karl'ac emerged from slumber, yawning and stretching and rubbing his eyes, then threw his own over clothes over an apparent morning wood. He disappeared behind a tree and Rayner heard the tell-tale sound of his relieving himself against the trunk. Then he reappeared, walked up to where Bald'reek was still snoring away and kicked him awake, not too harshly but enough to punch through whatever wet dreams the Jaffa was ensconced in.

Rayner watched the little byplay as Bald'reek woke up cursing then quickly apologizing to his lord, then scurried out to deal with his own… well, hygiene wasn't exactly the right word, but whatever. What I wouldn't give for a nice, hot, clean tub. Then she forced herself to look at the quirky bright side of the situation. There aren't many people in this galaxy who can say they've been camping in the woods with a Goa'uld, a Jaffa, and no modern comfort item, all on the way to restore said Goa'uld onto his petty throne. Think of the souvenirs to tell your grand-children, woman! If I ever get to know my grand-children, of course, if they won't know me just as "that long-dead soldier who donated her eggs to the Fertility Bank".

Karl'ac sat down next to the fire, rubbed his back to straighten the night's kinks, then took the offered bowl of gruel and leaf of bread with a nod of thanks. He helped himself to a cup of the herbal tea that served as a wake-up drink on a world that never heard of coffee. They ate in silence until the morning pangs of hungers were sated. Only then did they bother talking.

"We should arrive in the capital at sundown" Karl'ac remarked.

"No time to cross through to the chappai then?"

"No, and Jaffa patrols would find it suspect if they bumped onto us in the dark hours. Better spend the night in the city, then head offworld in the morning. Besides, we're more likely to hear useful gossip in a travelers' inn."

Rayner nodded in understanding. They still didn't know much about the conditions in Karl'ac's old domain and lack of intel was the thing that worried her the most. It was all well and good if some second or third-rate Goa'uld was sitting on her client's throne, but if a System Lord-level one had taken over directly, well… best case was, Karl'ac would go back to sipping cocktails at the Galaxy Palace. Worst case… she promised herself she would pull out before it came to that.

Half an hour later, they were up and going, back onto the gravel-strewn road and out of the wood. More fields then, spotted with the occasional hovel. Two hour later they crossed another village, sold a few trinkets, gave some back to the local priest "for gaining divine Camulus' favor". Afterwards they crossed paths with a Jaffa patrol, giving the chainmail-clad warriors the right of way and receiving no more than disdainful glances in return, which was the point. At least those regular patrols meant there weren't any bandits prowling around, unlike in the more remote areas of such worlds, or those backwater worlds that were too insignificant to deserve a permanent Jaffa presence – especially during the Great War and its aftermath, when millions of Jaffa were mobilized on the actual front-lines, such as they were.

Rolling hills flattened to plain, the road came to parallel a water canal going the same direction. They saw a barge pulled by slaves, Jaffa escorts and overseer occasionally lashing them as encouragement. The vessel was full of ore, naquadah ore, according to Karl'ac. It was mined further out, in the distant hills, and brough to the city for automated processing and refining.

"I suppose the miners are slaves too?" Rayner enquired out of curiosity.

"Many are, of course, the ones doing the hardest and most dangerous work. Many of them die. Few ever get out."

"Where do they come from? The slaves?"

Karl'ac shrugged. "Sentenced bandits and criminals, prisoners captured on invaded planets, there also are worlds that specialize in slave trade for the System Lords. Including expensive, specialized slaves, if you see what I mean."

I see very well, thought Rayner.

"Looking forward to buy some when you're back in power?"

Karl'ac made a noise out of his throat, one that meant embarrassment, and grimaced.

"If you want the truth… I could never afford it before. All the naquadah I mined went into buying ships from my overlords. Not that it mattered much in the end. They were all destroyed, then…" he didn't finish aloud. It was a subject of, well, shame, his personal failure. Receiving his small fief from Cronus after centuries of loyal service, then spending the next two centuries deftly navigating the treacherous currents of Goa'uld society, switching fealty to Lord Yu when Cronus lost their latest petty war, carefully nursing his small empire's meagre wealth… and all for naught when the Great War came and swept him all away back to begging at Yu's court.

Rayner gave his hand a gentle squeeze. "Don't worry, we'll get you back in the saddle, then…"

Karl'ac stared at Bald'reek's back walking in front of them, almost invisible under the mountain-pile of stuff he caried on his back, a walking reminder of his miserable state right now. He belonged to a race that could accurately be characterized by a massive superiority complex over the rest of them. It was ingrained in his genetic make-up. Yet he was personally humbled, then sought refuge in a non-Goa'uld polity whose technological accomplishments and sheer weight put a nail through the notion.

And now, walking on his own feet in the borrowed attire of a roving peddler, he felt grateful, buoyed even by the small gesture. He squeezed back in turn, then forgot to release Ann's hand, the warm touch of the Hebridean woman-warrior feeling like the best thing in the world at this precise moment.

She noticed that and inwardly smiled. If Kar'lac was feeling romantic about her, so much the better for her greater mission. Wasn't pillow talk one of the most effective sources of intelligence? If she could groom him into becoming her inner tap into the Goa'uld system, even if he was a small tap… It might be cold reasoning, and she found him agreeable enough, but he was still a Goa'uld in the end and it wasn't like they'd end up having kids together and live happily ever after.

In the meantime, the sex was a bonus.

The canal and the road gently curved through a pair of low hills, and as they came out the city came into view after another expanse of verdant fields that licked the outer wall and its rounded towers. Another medieval-looking place, Rayner commented to herself. Then she peered more intently at the stone wall. Patches of it were being repaired, clad in wooden scaffolding and wheel-driven cranes. More such signs of rebuilding could be glimpsed beyond.

There was a forest in the distance, then the sky with its unique shade of blue and the bright dots that marked distant moons and planets.

The memory burst back in her mind and she almost gasped. There, beyond a shadow of doubt, was the planet where she'd died the first time as a high-yield bomb went off in that same city. To come back to life in a sarcophagus in Bar'shan's palace and torture den. She blinked, caught Karl'ac's inquiring glance wondering why she'd just stopped in place.

"Uh, the city" was all she managed to utter at first.

"Well, yes?" her companion chuckled. "Don't tell me you're impressed. It's nothing compared to those giant Hebridean cities!"

"Right, right, of course, it's just that, well, here it is finally" she answered, wanting to slap herself in the head for sounding so lame. "Hopefully we'll find some real food there" she ended in a more upbeat note, willing to dispel the bad spell raised by her recognition.

"Oh that, yes, no doubt" Karl'ac grinned. "And a real bed and a hot tub even" he winked.

Freedom Station, Samothracian Republic

"You're sure, Janet" the soft words, almost whispered, were but a rhetorical question and Frederick Lefarge knew it. The decision was taken long ago, no matter how tremulous it made him feel as a father. But he was lucid enough to know how past events that harmed his family, long and far ago in the Solar System, colored his outlook. He was a father and a leader, and he couldn't deprive his child from choosing the path they chose, with adult knowledge and maturity.

Maturity was something the youth had in spade. Growing in a long disappeared-race's giant space station and experiencing first stand how nasty and murderous the rest of the galaxy could be, after believing they'd left the nasty and murderous snakes behind, did that. In fact, they were collectively lucky that Control, the benevolent quasi-AI system running the station, could spawn healing virtual realities tailored to the needs of every mind, from the stereotypically cosy cabinet of a warm-eyed alienist to soothing sceneries and experiences. Control might be purposefully shackled when it came to "true" sentience and self-awareness, but it had amazing listening skills. Lefarge suspected they would have experienced a wave a suicide otherwise in the aftermath of the Goa'uld attack and its atrocities.

And it was a great educator as well running the virtual classrooms. They were still woefully undermanned, but at least quality wasn't a worry. Quantity was. And no, Lefarge wouldn't even consider spending their precious youth as cannon fodder. This role was to be taken by the robotic armies and fleets that were starting to take shape in the Samothracian system and beyond.

But there was still a need for highly-skilled human minds to guide the blunt tools of war.

And there were accounts to settle. And questions to be answered. They had the station's database and galactic map, but the data was woefully out of date when it came to the galaxy's current geopolitical situation.

What they needed was eyes on the metaphorical ground. And Janet Lefarge had shown a keen and early interest in her father's old line of work. Intellectually gifted even before she went through Control's educational ministrations, she'd steadily worked her way through the best training programs the New America's experienced minds could devise, running entire simulated missions in virtuality.

"You know already, Dad" she replied just as softly. "Someone's gotta go out and check things out, and we can't rely on occasional Tok'ra updates. And I'm as ready as I can be. You all made sure of that".

Her father's nostrils flared with emotion, pride, fear. Yes, she was superbly trained, but it was all virtual, though the… augmentations were very real. He stared at her, committing her sight to memory. Not the baby anymore nor the flowering teenager. A young woman now, and he felt even older. The idea of augmentation… well, he couldn't deny how uncomfortable he'd felt when Daniel Graystone's put his ideas on the table. He wasn't peddling something as… radical as what he was researching for the unfortunate Major O'Neill. He'd made his case convincingly, aided by Janet herself. It was a dangerous galaxy and she expected to operate in hostile territory. She needed every advantage, damn if it looked like what the Snakes did.

At least she wasn't getting freakish genetic modifications, save the now standard corrections, life-prolonging mods and the strict minimum of alterations needed to support the suite of concealed cyberized augs Greystone and his team had devised. Reinforced bones and muscles and skin, parallel synthetic nervous system, implanted sub-sentient compsystem assistant, integrated medical suite – more than half her body was artificial, though undetectably so at an external glance. Anyone looking at her would see a young and fit woman – attractive too, as even a father couldn't ignore. The sophisticated hardware and above all, the razor-sharp mind were concealed behind, and if it led potential enemies to underestimate her, so much the better.

"Besides, I have a whole ship to myself." She made a gesture towards the hangar bay and the dark sleek shape waiting behind her.

"You break it, you pay it" he told her gruffly in a fatherly "here's your first car" fashion. They laughed together.

"Time to go" she extracted herself from the father-daughter embrace and saluted in a military manner.

"Lieutenant Janet Lefarge, requesting permission to embark!"

"Permission granted, Lieutenant. And Godspeed."

She looked at the other assembled officials – Samothrace's ruling council in effect. Greystone in particular nodded at her and smiled tightly in an uncharacteristic display of emotion.

Then she made an about-face and walked away to the ramp that waited to collect her.

A minute later the ship's hatch slid closed silently, its outline vanishing in the light-drinking black outer skin.

Serita, Tollan binary planet system, Tollan Empire

"Hey, catch!"

Arnim Gensus caught the flat, light plate that would on another world be called a frisbee and grinned at his work colleague's young son, then threw it back and took a swig of beer. The scent of grilling meat and the sounds of families mingling, spouses chatting and children playing in the large open garden under the summer sun. Way up in the sky and tiny as a toy, the round whitish-blue ball that marked Tolla, the twin planet seemed to be looking down benevolently.

Life was good for the fourty-something man. He had a good and meaningful job at Serita's Quantum-Void Facility, the large industrial complex that extracted all the power the planet needed from the unlimited tap of an exotic dimension. He got along well with his colleagues, hence the friendship and this invitation to have a fun day at Borin's country house, with its huge garden that really ought to be called a park. The kids were loving it and the pool at any rate.

He went to the big grill and helped himself to another grilled, seasoned sausage, then caught a conversation between Borin, his host, and Erebrin, his other colleague who worked at plant security.

"…that virtual's sick, can't believe how you got your hand on it!"

"Eh, working in security means I know where to find stuff on the under-Net" Erebrin smirked knowingly.

"What are you guys talking about?" Arnim interjected. They turned towards him with a half-embarrassed, half-excitingly conspiratorial expression.

"Erebrin here's got a bootleg virtual from the Draka" Borin whispered theatrically.

Arnim shrugged. "What, more ways to put a dick inside a hole?" Draka pornography wasn't exactly a mystery. They even sold it, for Tolla's sake!

"Nooo… it's an execution scene, straight from the guerilla wars on their homeworld. Sick stuff!"

"Riiight, must be some convincing fake. You can show anything with comp-generated graphics."

"No, it's the real deal, mate, real people being convicted and executed right there."

"Yeah well, I didn't know you were into that kind of stuff" Arnim tried to reply in a non-chiding tone. In fact, he'd heard of those, what with their Draka allies still having a rebel problem on their home planet. And some of the images taken during the Tanith War and counter-invasion were appropriately brutal, he had to give them that, and he'd watched them anyway like most patriotic Tollans, cheering on the Goa'uld's warriors' corpses.

"Well, if you don't wanna watch, it's okay. I wouldn't show it to the wives and kids anyway."

Arnim raised an eyebrow at the teasing retort. He knew his colleague enough, he wasn't trying to actually insult him, just teasing him for his apparent squeamishness. Truth was, he wasn't squeamish, no no. He just didn't want to admit it easily: Draka stuff was the spicy stuff and he did indulge in it too.

"Haha. You don't want to show it to your wife because then she'd get ideas to fuck a Draka" he teased back, and rowdy laughter answered him. "Heh, tell you what, show me that virtual while the rest of them's busy" he threw a side look at the playing and chatting families.

Borin winked and beckoned him with a head gesture. "My office, it's private enough".

The trio started to head towards the house. "Hey sweetie, where are you going?" Of course, the wife would notice the motion. "Just some work stuff to go through" "Work? We're on a break!" "Won't take long at all, don't worry, we'll be right back in less time than it takes to cook a sausage!"

The office was ensconced in the house's upper level where no kid could barge in unnoticed. Arnim sprawled on the couch with an expectant look. Borin picked up the virtual reality headset from his desk under Eredrin's grinning expression and handed it to his colleague. "Go on, get blown away!"

Arnim put it on, feeling the device adjust to his cranium, the audio modules plugging his ears tight and enhanced-sensory transceivers pressing onto his skull. Then the blackness lit up with the device's standby display for a couple seconds before Borin started the sequence. The Tollan man was suddenly transported to another time and place, the audiovisual illusion as real as life and enhanced by the additional subtle sensory feedbacks delivered straight to his cortex through the transceivers. It was like being there… and there was under a cold grey sky, he felt the illusion of cold and nearly shivered. There was a brisk, freezing wind. Around was what best could be described as a decaying, low urban landscape, signage written in an alien alphabet, but it was an unambiguously human scenery, one that'd gone through its own end-of-the-world experience. Even if he could read the letters, the name of Lynchburg, Virginia would have meant nothing to him. Nor did the small logo of the Domination's Execution Broadcasting Channel hovering at the edge of vision.

But immediately surrounding him was a camp of sorts, neatly-aligned tents and light prefabricated boxes inside a chain-link-and-watchtowers enclosure, he recognized the alien symbol for medical aid on several of them. Some sort of refugee camp? There were people in drab but clean clothing, visibly frightened and standing in ranks in a corner, in front was a cleared space… where a dozen, no more, bodies laid down in two rows, covered by some plastic sheeting. Dead, the splotches of dried blood and livid skin were proof enough – that and some of the bodies appeared to be laying in several pieces hastily gathered together.

That, and some of the prefab buildings were obviously damaged, scorch marks and slug impact holes. Was that camp attacked?

He returned his stare towards the front. There were the Draka soldiers with their Ghouloon beasts of war, watching, no… guarding a sorry group of humans. He peered closer. They must be the attackers, he deduced from the set-up. They were clad in ragged camouflage-like garments, though there didn't seem to be any… uniformity, giving the impression that it was a rag-tag improvised fighting band rather than a proper military unit. There was a pile of discarded weapons in the distance which must have belonged to them, Arnim surmised. Was the group everyone who'd attacked the camp or merely the survivors who had the bad luck of getting captured? There were only five of them, three men and two women, all of them looking rather young under the grime.

The Draka commander was speaking, pitching his words as much to his own command as to the standing… refugees? Arnim didn't understand the spoken words, but a contextual explanation immediately appeared in his field of vision.

A band of ferals – rebels from the defeated nation that opposed the Domination – struck a medical aid and pre-processing camp where new serfs – from the ex-feral population who submitted to Draka rule – were being held and cared for. The camp was only guarded by a small force of Citizens and Ghouloons. Fortunately, the only casualties were three ghouloons, with a Citizen merely injured by a rocket blast. Unfortunately, the poorly-led and executed attack killed more serfs.

In exchange four attackers were killed and the remainder captured alive through the use of Goa'uld-derived "zat" underslung attachments on the Citizen's Holbars carbines.

For them, the punishment is death by the stake.

The stake! The portion of Arnim's mind that contained all the darkest instincts of man lit up. The virtual jumped ahead.

Now there was a row of stakes planted in the ground. The five prisoners were kneeling, hands bound behind their backs. One by one, a pair of Draka soldiers lifted them while another quickly and efficiently cut through their clothing and removed the pieces, leaving them naked and shivering from cold and dread. The women were bawling when their turn came, Arnim noticed, and he took good close looks at their bodies, sick curiosity overcoming guilt and morality. They were lean, obviously not fed enough. The same could be said of their male counterparts, he noticed. Perhaps hunger had made them attack the camp? Whatever. He was fine with watching their fate.

The Draka officer slapped them, his words not translated but the tone quite clear. Then he had the males stand in front of them, evidently teasing them, even tugging sadistically on one captive's penis, daring him to arousal, to no avail. Both freezing cold and impending agonizing deathconspired against any lustful thought the poor man might have entertained at seeing the two women in the nude.

A harsh tirade, then a shove, and the man was half-carried away by a pair of soldiers. Arnim tensed in anticipation. The "good" stuff was coming. He watched from a close vantage-point as the man was lowered over the sharpened end, legs forcibly spread out. The viewpoint zoomed in as the stake went into the condemned and Arnim watched in revulsion-fascination, suddenly reminded of how he felt while popping a nasty blackhead. The screams were nail-bitingly realistic – of course! They were real! – and the faint smell of copper and shit were the sensorial cherry on the cake, not strong enough to make him gag but present enough to complete the experience.

Blood seeped down the stake, the screams not getting any quieter. It was a short stake, Arnim estimated that it must be penetrating into the man's torso at about half height, not enough to kill him instantly. He'd probably die from septic shock as the contents of his intestines mixed with his blood stream. A nasty way to die, he told himself. But it's also intended to deter rebels such as him from attacking medical camps, his mind rationalized, for the Draka were Tolla's friends, weren't they?

Eventually the screams did abate, settling into ragged, painful rattling breaths. Then it was the second man's turn.

There was a brief, entertaining struggle that ended with a Draka fist in the prisoner's belly before he was lowered onto his stake. This one seemed to be made of sterner stuff, for he refused to scream despite the agony contorting his features, eyes glaring daggers at his tormentors. Well, that was fascinating to watch as well, Arnim found, he couldn't help feeling a bit of sympathy for that brave anonymous man. He might have been on the wrong side of the struggle, but he'd faced death courageously in the end.

The third one, not so much. He cried and squealed like a little girl as the stake kissed his bottom, the squeal unbelievably pitching even higher as the flesh forcibly parted. Arnim chuckled, mindlessly reaching for a beer before he reminded himself that he was inside a virtual. His colleagues were right, this stuff was burning hot, though there was no way he'd tell his wife about it.

The three men were squirming on their stakes, low to the ground, and Arnim expected the women to follow. But then it was a Draka set-up, he was reminded when both captives were thrown onto the ground, legs forcibly opened. Of course, they would be raped first, he almost struck his forehead in realization. He didn't stare away as the Drakas, then the Ghouloons had their way. No, he definitely wouldn't mention this to his wife. Yes, it was riveting and insanely so, no, it wasn't the kind of stuff he'd admit to enjoying in front of her.

The highlight of the show. All in full-fidelity, wide-spectrum sensory emulation, from the bluish bruises to the texture of the sharpened wood and the wet redness of blood, mind-blowing the Tollan man, self-conscious enough to know his body's physical reactions were telling away how excited this made him feel but uncaring – his colleagues went through that too, didn't they?

At last, the virtual ended after another fast-forward. The five rebels were dead for good, faces contorted in frozen expressions of agony. Unfamiliar, jet-black birds were beginning to descend on the bodies, pecking at the eyes. The camp appeared empty, the serfs probably back inside the tents, the ghouloons were tidying up discarded clothing and weaponry under their Draka supervision.

The VR helmet went black and Arnim removed it, feeling his hair sweatier than before.

"Wow" he breathed under the twin grinning expressions of Berin and Eredrin. They charitably didn't comment on his state. Indeed, they'd gone through the same experience.

Though there was a difference.

Unknown to Arnim's conscious mind, the Za'tarc device artfully concealed inside the innocuous-looking VR set had uploaded its poisonous load of sequestering engrams into his brain, where they would in time unfold and spread the mind-programming package from Athena, with a very specific and technical set of instructions to be followed when the signal came.

Bellenos, Domain of Camulus, Goa'uld sector

As they closed in on the city Ann Rayner's little group found themselves sharing the road with local peasantry and their chariots laden with the foodstuffs a town needed. Sacks of grain and produce, wicker cages containing cackling poultry, even freshly cut flowers. It wasn't exactly a traffic jam, but they found themselves forced to wait in line before the fortified gate. It wasn't that the Jaffa guards were very thorough in their search – one could tell from afar that they were mostly relieving their boredom by engaging with the peasants. They didn't seem especially alert to the likelihood of an attack, perhaps rightly so, since the War was officially over.

Then it was the trio's turn, and they made good under the warriors' gaze, turning up the expected level of obsequiousness without going overboard. Bald'reek fortunately remembered to stay mute and look retarded – which wasn't exactly difficult. He did so good actually that one of the guards commented on it.

"That you son, peddler? Doesn't look too bright, eh? Did you forget asking for divine Camulus' favor before he was born?" he cheerfully teased them as one of his comrades made faces nearby, rolling his eyes and contorting his mouth into an exaggerated imitation of a drooling retard, complete with saliva trickling out over his chin.

"Woe be us, you would be right, noble warrior! Yet I was certain I did all the right offerings, but His divine will rule above all! Would I have had more children, alas, it was not to be." Karl'ac lamented with ample gesturing at the sky and the "son" who was standing there stolidly with all the appearance of not comprehending what it was all about, as he'd been thoroughly and briefed to. With repeated promises of gratification beyond his wildest dreams, once Karl'ac was back in control. Which, in the warrior's rather limited worldview, certainly involved nubile young virgins.

"Yes, well, that crone of yours isn't going to give you any more children, that's for sure" the Jaffa commented in return. Ann Rayner shrugged off the slight. It meant the disguise worked, so much the better, and the guard wasn't tempted to pat her down as a "security check" as she'd seen him do when it was some young and still fresh peasant girl.

"Ah, but she cooks well, noble warrior, and is hardy on the road. What more could I want?"

The Jaffas laughed. "Maybe your manhood withered down as well, peddler, but I know I'd want more from a wife! Just in case you're not as decrepit as you think you are, know that Fatma's House is back in business in the merchant district, they reopened two months ago with a whole new stable of girls from offworld."

Rayner harrumphed, struck her heel on the dusty road and furrowed her brow in a display of matrimonial annoyance. Sure, women were supposed to be subservient around here… but surely one wouldn't stand quietly as her husband was overtly advised on the local whorehouse?

The byplay seemed to work as the Jaffas chuckled again. "Well maybe not then, peddler, or you might wake up to find your man parts cut off by that one" he cackled. Then, gesturing towards the open gate with his staff, he allowed them passage. "Benah, peddler, go in and may His divine peace favor you for once."

"Thank you, lord warrior! May you find glory on the battlefield!"

The Jaffa merely flicked his hand for Karl'ac to go on, his mind already set to the next batch of travelers.

Past the vaulted passage began the city proper. Images from a past day flashed past Rayner's mind. The city was under siege then, smoke billowing over its roofs, enemy warriors rampaging through its streets and its inhabitants screaming. The present was so peaceful in comparison. Nobody was running in terror; no house was burning. On the contrary, her eyes could pick many signs of fresh, novel reconstruction. Gleaming roofs, clean stone and brick unmarred by smoke and graffiti, wooden beams that barely showed weathering, and construction sites where slaves toiled diligently to repair the last scars of the explosion that devastated the city years ago. The streets themselves were surprisingly clean for a place that otherwise looked right out of a medieval picture. Teams of slaves were actually visible picking up trash and cleaning up – but then they were walking along a thoroughfare, one of the main streets going from the wall gate to the center districts. It seemed like Camulus had taken the opportunity to rebuild with an eye towards a more ordered street plan. He certainly seemed to have an abundant workforce – perk of being near System Lord level.

As they picked their way towards the merchant district, asking for directions once or twice, Rayner allowed herself to watch as if she was actually a tourist – curiosity wasn't unexpected from her disguise, on the contrary. Besides, she was genuinely curious – she was passing through yet another alien civilization, wasn't she? And Bar'shan, whose memory might have colored her present mood had met a fate worth than death, extracted from his host body and entombed inside an experimentation tank.

Hence, she let her eyes wander over the sights. Bright colors met her gaze anywhere from the painted houses to the gilded little statues and fountains and ornate little details in the local style – itself a consequence of the Goa'uld mashing cultures and pantheons. Here they had something that could best be described as "Antique Egyptian reimagined by the Celts" if it made sense, down to the smallest wood carvings and hanging signs adorning house facades.

Daniel Jackson would gladly spend years recording and studying all of it, tracing each and every influence and connecting it back to Earth, she thought.

And then the Race would come and conquer and erase it all. Rayner shook her head in nervous annoyance. Shut up, little treacherous voice!

It took half an hour to reach the merchant district – Rayner estimated the city must count something like a hundred thousand denizens, slaves included, those living in multi-story barracks when they weren't privately owned. It wasn't just shops and boutiques – many of the houses they'd walked past included some at street level. The central feature was the market itself, a tall open building, mostly a roof supported by monumental pillars, and its surrounding warren of warehouses and workshops. She also spotted Fatma's house, there was no mistaking the garish façade with the penis-shaped rainwater spouts and lewd painted panels, nor the… workers flouting scantily clad bodies at the door, shouting invites and offers to every male passerby.

Bald'reek's steps veered towards the whorehouse as if he couldn't contain himself. Karl'ac opened his mouth to shout him down, but Rayner found herself interposing her open hand, silencing him. "Look, he's been acting good, maybe we can let him blow off some steam, keep him happy?" Karl'ac opened wide eyes, then made a look of thinking it over. "But what if he says anything to the girl or the prosthetics get noticed? We can't -" "I thought about that and I think I have a solution. Just follow my lead."

"Bald'reek! Now listen to me" Rayner said in a low voice to avoid being overheard by the crowd, tugging at his sleeve. His face turned towards her, eyes almost glazed in his eagerness to reach the bordello. "Look, it's fine, you deserve some relief" she told him in an understanding, almost motherly tone. "But we need to maintain our cover, you know that, warrior." He nodded enthusiastically. Beautiful Rayna called him warrior! For the first time! Pride met lust in his mind. Maybe if he was a good warrior through and through and fought for his Lord bravely, she would be even nicer with him? The thought felt almost blasphemous – this was the woman who consorted with his Lord every night, he knew that well, even pretended to be asleep so that he could listen to the faint sounds of their lovemaking, but – "…so you'll have to keep acting with the ladies in there, you understand? And I'll have to be there so they don't give you trouble." Bald'reek's eyes blinked several times as he processed her words. "Of course, Lady Rayna – err, mother" he corrected himself, glancing aside at the foreign people walking by. "I keep acting dumb and you watch over me" he grinned.

Rayner felt like offering a prayer of thanks to the non-existent gods, it seemed the whole half-cocked, planned-as-they-went-along, hare-brained scheme was going to keep tottering forward, one step after another. And if it sure sounded like Bald'reek was eager to have her watch over him doing the deed, well, she was a Draka, she'd seen worse sights.

The uncommon party climbing the steps to the house's door had the outside girls at a loss, and the "family" went through the gilded doors before they could recover and come up with a suitably commercial greeting. Inside the lobby was a pair of burly guards – not Jaffa, but close in bulk, armed with zat'nik'tels interestingly – it meant the estimable Fatma's trade was recognized by the powers-that-be as a public service, then. And that she was most probably keeping those apprised of anything noteworthy that she saw or heard. Rayner's felt a momentary chill as the consequences of being caught displayed themselves in her imagination. But she remained her outward stalwart expression, of an old wizened woman who'd seen much hardship and didn't get fazed easily anymore.

The Madam – must be Fatma herself, given the abundance of golden jewelry on display all over her opulent physique greeted them with an inquisitive expression.

"Kree shak'hel!" she saluted them in lower Goa'uld, locally-accented. "Though I fear you are misplaced. The merchant inn is across the market. We here offer a different kind of service, as you may have divined?"

"My apologies, Lady of lovers" Rayner answered with the proper way of address. "It is indeed a peculiar request of us – see, this here" she pointed at Bald'reek "is our son. He's a good, obedient son, but…" Fatma looked at the "son", saw the barely-acted lack of intellect, understood. It wouldn't be the first time some family send their less-gifted offspring here to lose their innocence.

"I understand. He's not likely to wed, but he still has natural urges" she nodded sagely. "Of course, I can accommodate that." She sniffed and batted her overly-long and thick lashes. Good think I made Bald'reek wash yesterday, Rayner reflected. "Does he have any… particular urges?"

Rayna made a negative shake of head. "Oh no, not like that, but… he's sweet but sometimes, well… he doesn't know what's allowed and what's not. And he hates to removes his clothes. I was wondering if I could stay in the room so I could be there in case… he had a difficult episode?"

"I don't like guests roughing up my girls" Fatma answered in a warning tone. Rayna threw her hands up. "Oh no, not like that! He's sweet as a lamb, my poor boy. But he can be… too curious, if you see what I mean?"

The madam rolled her eyes under the heavy make-up, then made a show of breathing out. "Fine, lady. You can stay in the room with him, as long as you only watch. If you want to partake, there's a supplement." She went on, preemptively ignoring any protestation of decency. She'd been in the business long enough; she'd seen much more bizarre things than parent and offspring sharing a tryst. She really didn't care as long as the money flew in and the house rules were obeyed. Those who didn't, well, her guards knew how to deal with them. She threw an appraising glance at the "father". The man didn't look like much. Having fathered such a son… well, if he tried to sneak in past his wife later, she wouldn't be surprised.

She clapped her hands once, the signal for the lower-tier girls to file in. Given the looks of her present guests and the prospective size of their purse, she sure wasn't going to show her best and most expensive ones.

The merchant inn was a two-story building of blonde stone, rather easy on the eye, with wooden beam reinforcements and a slate roof that appeared brand new – replaced after the blast, then.

A couple silver coins embossed with Lord Camulus' sigil bought them a private suite under the attic. It was cheaper than Fatma's fee and included a small anteroom where Bald'reek could sleep – Rayner was quite tempted to let him sleep in the stables, as did many servants, but there was the risk that he'd be recognized for what he was – a disguised Jaffa. The girl at the bordello didn't notice anything as Bald'reek plowed her from behind, in fact she hadn't even tried to conceal her bored expression to "mother Rayna", but she felt they'd spent their risk quota for the day.

Mars Orbital Shipyards, Sol System

Two days since Gwendolyn Ingolfsson assumed command of Valkyrie. Forty-eight hours standard Earth time. Barely five hours of rest in her palatial captain's suite, not enough to even touch the decadent comforts such as a full-size spa tub. No matter, she'd have ample enough time during the one-year-plus journey towards Tollan space. Valkyrie's top supralight speed still didn't match the efficiency of Goa'uld hyperdrives. Simply pouring more power in wouldn't work. Well, it might work. Once, before the thing burned out, which was to be avoided on a long-duration mission.

Besides, they wouldn't be arrowing straight towards their eventual destination. This wasn't a shuttle run but a cruise through unknown regions, including Goa'uld space. While they would be following the general path taken by one of the Domination's survey ships, space was still immensely, mind-bogglingly big. There were billions of stars surrounding their general path, and only a minuscule fraction would receive even a cursory survey, those being the most likely to hold inhabitable worlds. Even fully exploring the local bubble – the volume of space contained in a hundred-light years radius from Sol – would take decades before every single one of the dozens of star systems it contained would be surveyed as well as Sol itself. A survey ship firing mapping drones and taking distant readings was only the start of a process that continued with actual research teams going in and staying for months, years if needed. In fact, the Race had its work cut out for the next centuries… assuming the rest of the galaxy would let it be.

So Ingolfsson had been diligently matching her theoretical knowledge of the ship with the reality, inspecting every significant compartment, from auxiliary fire control capsules near the outer armor to the heart of Engineering and getting to know her crew beyond the division heads. A speech was even given, which she'd found – objectively, even if she wrote it herself – inspirational and motivating enough. They were the best crew, in the best ship, going boldly in the great beyond, yadda yadda.

Her initial impression was good, as it should be really. This was a hand-picked crew, all extremely competent and motivated, even the servus who were just as eager to explore and if necessary, fight the enemies of the Domination – though in a support role as befit their nature.

And now was time to leave. The ship was filled to the brim with supplies, including crates stacked securely in mess halls and similar spaces. There would be little time in stasis pods in the coming months as she wanted to whip the crew into fighting shape. Only the ghouloons would sleep peacefully – if stasis could count as sleep – anytime they weren't involved in assault and counter-boarding simulations. A resupply stop was scheduled four months hence through a recently surveyed stargate on an otherwise barren world which bore no trace of prior human presence. This particular stargate was one of the newly probed ones since exploration was restarted under the new and extremely cautious protocol.

It involved opening a wormhole and doing absolutely nothing but listening on the radio and subspace bands for the full thirty-eight-minute duration of it, under absolute emission control so as not to betray anything from the Domination's side. The connection was to be shut immediately if any artificial-looking signal or alteration of the background radiation was detected. If this happened, that particular address would be added to the list of future shipborne survey targets. Otherwise, the same listening process would be repeated later at random intervals – up to several months later - before an actual physical probe would be sent through.

The protocol involved significant adjustments to the transit complex, from adding the listening apparatus on special removable support arms to auditing and modifying the entire electrical system so that any tell-tale emission was shielded and dampened.

The new procedure also took significantly more time, which had to be worked into the normal offworld transit schedule. But already a trickle of addresses was processed and classified in round-the-clock stargate operation, making the program's technical director glad that the alien-built marvel exhibited absolutely no hint of wear and tear. And above all, it drastically curtailed the risk of a catastrophic intrusion.

Incidentally, the home world of the April Fool's invader was among those places scheduled for remote examination. Along with very special instructions.

But first was leaving dock, and while she was set to do it at her leisure rather than sticking to a fixed departure time, she felt there was no sense dallying. Adjusting her posture in her command chair, she brought up her auxiliary monitor. The projector affixed to her armrest activated and a flat holowindow appeared out of thing air before her. She flexed her transceiver to swipe between status pages.

Logistics merely confirmed what the loading manifests already told. Valkyrie had a full complement of supplies, ready ammunition and fuel, her hydrogen cells packed to the last cubic centimeter and her mirrormatter store filled to capacity. All crew were present and accounted for – she could track each of them down if she wanted to, present location and tasking and biomonitoring data available to her as the ship's mistress, though out of respect for her Race brethren she would abstain from intrusively looking over their shoulder unless she had a good reason to.

She switched to the master engineering display. The power core schematic showed it on standby, dormant but all ancillary subsystems primed for activation. The capacitor grid was fully charged thanks to the dockyard connection. Engines were similarly cold, but all built-in tests were reading an OK status. In fact, there was not a single subsystem that showed an amber or red status. Everything down to waste reclamation and recycling was ticking like the proverbial clock to her satisfaction.

Weapons were of course cold and stowed, with mechanical safety interlocks preventing activation while connected to the dock. These could be bypassed, but normal operating procedures left no room for an accidental discharge and its disastrous consequences.

Sensors and communications were mostly indicated in the dark outline of standby status. The hard link to the shipyard facility was providing all their data access. Valkyrie's own electrodetector antennas – the vast panels of her skin that contained active emitting elements – would not go active before she was safely out of the yard's perimeter lest their gigawatts of output fry something or someone inadvertently.

Now, it was time to set things in motion, she thought with a sweeping glance across her fully manned bridge. She pressed a stud and a chime sounded throughout the vessel.

"Attention all crew, this is your captain speaking. We'll begin undocking procedures momentarily. All damage control crews to stations, prepare for sealing the hull."

Acknowledgments came by as lines scrolling through her status console even as the three-tone closure siren rang through all pressurized spaces to warn the unwary that the ship would soon move and any external aperture was going to close. Down at the big cargo loading dock as well as the personnel airlocks, caution lights flashed in a set sequence, an additional warning that didn't rely on air to transmit sound. A minute and another order later, the thick outer cargo doors slid ponderously shut with a dull infrasonic thud. The chief overseeing the maneuver locally checked the seal and pressure in the compartment – holding steady, meaning there was no leak. The same checks were repeated at the personnel airlocks, the results duplicated on Ingolfsson's display.

A byplay with dock control and a minute later the umbilicals disconnected one after another, their support arms swiveling and folding away. Armored plugs shut the newly vacated access ports and internal systems automatically picked up the hotel load, the relatively meager amount of power consumed by the ship's active systems trickling out of its capacitor grid.

Gwen knew her XO was watching over the process in the secondary bridge, even though the likelihood of some mishap happening to her and the main bridge during an undocking maneuver seemed vanishingly small. But it was good training nonetheless for the secondary bridge crew.

She opened a link to Engineering.

"Captain, Engineering" she recognized Commander Klaas's deep voice. Another veteran of the old-style pulse-drive cruisers, Gustaaf Klaas was a first-generation Drakensis like her, except he'd gone all up Technical Branch. She knew from previous conversations that he could describe the entire power system down to the last proverbial rivet – though there was hardly anything so old-fashioned as a rivet to be found down there.

"Time to warm up the main reactor and prep the engines." "Warm up the reactor and prep engines, aye, captain. On it."

Ingolfsson kept herself inside Engineering's command circuit, listening to Klaas giving orders and seeing the results echoed on her repeater display.

Hydrogen feed plants online. The hydrogen reaction mass was stored in metastable liquid metallic form inside the hull cells, but this form couldn't be directly fed into the reactor. From the cells, the secondary reactant circuits pushed the metallic hydrogen to the conversion plants in Engineering, which converted the superdense material into its more usable super chilled liquid form that was next pumped out through a cryogenic circuitry into the spherical feed tanks surrounding the reactor assembly. From those tanks, house-sized turbopumps could pour hundreds of tons per second into the reactor chamber's complex internal geometry.

The cryogenic circuitry – or rather the redundant circuits – also delivered reaction mass to the main sublight drives through a conceptually similar feed tank system, except those turbopumps, which were not entirely mechanical in nature, were building-sized and able to push thousands of tons per second into the massive plasma-ion drive assemblies. The beauty of the system, in its designers' minds, was that the converter arrays could function in reverse. The ship could park itself in a gas giant's atmosphere and pump hydrogen back into the cells.

Primary injection system up and running. Standing-by for ignition. Internal field strength nominal. Put in a very simplified way, the reactor was a tube. Hydrogen and optionally mirrormatter came in one end, fusion byproducts came out the other end. Between them, the actual fusion chamber's fantastically strong gravitic and magnetic fields compressed the reactant into the kind of density found inside a star core, then magnetohydrodynamic fields and naquadah capture arrays would convert energetic plasma into electricity.

Ignition. The power curve suddenly sprang into life, peaked, then settled into the lowest level that allowed the reaction to self-perpetuate. There was a short temporary dip in lighting throughout the ship as the internal power grid switched to reactor input, it was actually designed that way to provide crew feedback. Nothing else betrayed the event outside engineering itself. No background noise, no vibration permeated throughout the vessel. The astronomical power running through the heart of the ship was velvet-quiet everywhere else. Only those crew under Klaas manning the machinery spaces could hear the din through their noise-attenuating helmets.

"Reactor online, main power available, Captain" Klaas summarized in Gwen's ear. "Drive systems are hot and ready to take orders from helm."

"Thank you, commander." Gwen's smile could be heard through the line. "We'll take it from there."

Sitting in the center of the bridge, her crew's expectancy was almost physically palpable. It was a tension in the air, ship and men poised to cast off. She savored the moment, then opened a channel to the dockmaster.

"Station control, Valkyrie Actual, requesting permission to cast off and depart according to flight plan."

"Valkyrie Actual, permission granted, vectors green. Service to the State!"

"Glory to the Race!" she replied with pride. Yes, she would bring glory to the Race.

Outside the hull, the massive clamps that held the ship tight opened up and retracted. Gwen saw it happening through the exterior pick-ups. Now nothing but inertia kept Valkyrie flying in close formation with the vast construction complex.

"Helm, take us out, steady."

The ensign manning the helm, directly in front of the captain's chair, was a young Drakensis female who was actually doing her compulsory military service. She was subordinate to the lieutenant currently in charge of Navigation and Astrogation who was unobtrusively but closely watching her work the navigation and steering controls on her console, ready to intervene at the first sign of failure – but she didn't find herself there randomly and if the responsibility of maneuvering a multi-million-ton warship out of a billion-Auric orbital facility weighted on her shoulders, she didn't show exterior signs of stress, confident in her skill and training.

"Aye, Captain. Taking her out of dock, slow and steady." She set up the vector forward and the steering computer translated her request into instructions to the drive system. Cold gas fired out of special maneuvering thrusters at the rear of the ship and slowly, imperceptibly at first, the bulk of the ship began to move in relation to the surrounding dock. In Gwen's visual exterior display, it was like the dock itself was moving backwards, the familiar train leaving station illusion. There was no sense of forward acceleration despite the inertia-compensating system slaved to the main propulsion engines being on standby. Such was the ship's length and unhurried motion that it took five minutes for its rear to clear out the dock's edge, saluted by the running lights flashing in a circling pattern.

Valkyrie's continued to gently move forward for a couple minutes, leaving behind the shipyard's expansive bulk, then she slowly swiveled on two axes so that her prow faced their orbital departure vector.

"Escape vector and target velocity set, ready to engage main drive, Captain."

"By all means, Ensign" Gwen made a go-ahead gesture, the easy smile of a thoroughly confident shipmistress still painted on her face. The probability of failure, at this stage, was vanishingly small, the ship's systems were trialed and true, and yet there were the familiar butterflies in her belly.

Far behind her in the four drive pods that were each as large as a pre-War cruiser, Valkyrie's massive sublight engines came to life with the cold electrical blue glow that betrayed their operating in the low thrust, high efficiency ion mode. There was no need to activate the fusion torch mode reserved for times when high acceleration was called for, especially when they were still in the vicinity of the planet and its array of high-value orbiting hardware. Despite this, the inertia-cancelling system steadily ramping up meant their leisurely exit was accomplished at two objective gravities, or almost twenty meters per second squared – as viewed from an outside frame of reference – while the crew felt no change. They reached Mars escape velocity two minutes later and continued to accelerate with System Control's blessing along a vector that would eventually take them out of the solar system – but here they merely needed to transition into interplanetary space.

An hour later the ship was firmly in the middle of nowhere, Mars being a tiny red dot behind.

"Set hyperspace entry vector."

Valkyrie pivoted into a new heading and accelerated. Dozens of parsecs ahead lay her journey's first waypoint and she prepared herself to leave the Solar System's plane of reference.

The Lieutenant-Navigator rechecked his calculations, or rather the navigation computer's calculations. Despite having idiot-savant calculus designed in his head as every member of the New Race, the kind of accuracy needed to start and stop on target when traveling far beyond the speed of light was best left to computers, not to mention the stunningly complex higher-dimensional mathematics underlaying the hyperdrive's actual function.

"FTL entry parameters checked and set. Ready to enter hyperspace at your command, Captain."

Gwendolyn Ingolfsson checked her subordinate's work on her own console and found it acceptable. She tapped her fingers on the arm rest for a fiddling instant, crossed her legs then gave the go ahead.

"Helm, go supralight."

One instant the cruiser was flying through Sol's space, the next it disappeared through the bluish-purple rent of a successfully opened hyperwindow, and Gwendolyn Ingolfsson allowed herself to release the breath she'd been holding.

Later and farther

Right at the planned time, Gwendolyn Ingolfsson strode into her bridge, a fresh uniform on her cleansed skin. She was damned if she was going to let herself fall back on Citizen physical requirements, captain's chair or not. Granted, it was easier to find time for pankration practice now, three months and three weeks out and the worst of the shaking-up phase over. She'd drilled Valkyrie relentlessly the first nine weeks, never mind that they were flying in hyperspace, from tactical drills to engineering emergencies and damage control. Assaulting a Goa'uld-held planet, defended by a squadron of ha'taks and countless minor spacecraft. Creeping into an enemy star system, taking advantage of every feature, planet or asteroid belt, to disguise their approach. Simultaneously repairing combat damage while fighting off vacuum-suited Jaffa boarders and Kull Warriors, the later requiring some creative tactics with artificial gravity along with every built-in defensive feature.

Eventually her ragged-run crew reached the point where performance was more than adequate around the board in every scenario she could conceive and any further improvement could simply not be artificially rushed, the plateau that separated well-trained crew from veteran and elite ones. Which meant it was time for some well-deserved rest… including for the ship's captain. The initial training and ramp-up cycle over, a more routine rhythm could be instated. A third of the crew could be rotated in and out of the stasis pods every fortnight, saving supplies, yet keeping their skills honed and resting thanks to the slow sleep pod setting.

And now, they were about to reach the first scheduled stop.

She took her seat, nodding to the officer of the watch who'd just vacated it and acknowledging the "captain has the bridge" announcement. She took her time reading watch log – nothing out of the ordinary, the reactor was steadily burning hydrogen and powering the hyperdrive, all scheduled maintenance actions were done, the galleys were reporting a higher-than-expected meat consumption… ah well, for this she was part of the guilty parties, she supposed. A Drakensis could and did eat a pound of steak for lunch… meatberries were nice but more servus food, really. She scratched her chin as she mulled whether this was a serious problem or not. The report helpfully stated that they wouldn't run out of real meat before their scheduled resupply, but it would be close. Thinking it over for a couple more minutes, she eventually sent back a note that cooks make the meat supply last longer by producing more mixed dishes and closing off the grill three days a week. Then she chuckled. If she was down to fixing such "problems", then Valkyrie was really running like clockwork, wasn't it? And she really ought to send Bormann something nice next time she was at Sol.

She mindlinked into the operations network using her transceiver implant. It too had become second nature. For most things it was more convenient than using manual controls, and the direct mind-to-mind communication was truly boosting effectiveness after she got used to it.

Valkyrie's trajectory appeared in her mind-vision, translated into real-space references, star systems creeping back around the ship's vector. The exit countdown ticked down in a blur of microseconds. She didn't have to ask for status reports, they "appeared" as she thought about them. Yet it didn't make the slightly cumbersome naval protocol redundant, surprisingly. There was a reassuring solidness to enunciating orders and having subordinates acknowledge them. Less chance of dropping something important, and as long as they weren't engaged in fast-unfolding maneuvers the additional speed gained by going mind-to-mind messaging wasn't necessary.

The ding-dong chime of impending return to real-space rang throughout the ship as a gentle warning. Condition three was already enabled, two steps down from general quarters. Crew not on active duty were not roused from rest or whatever they be doing, but all combat-essential systems were powered up and ready for instant activation.

"Exiting hyperspace… now" Helm delivered perfunctorily. On the bridge's surround display, the blue-white swirling tunnel brutally dissipated into the black of Newtonian space with a subliminal – as far as the scientists could tell – feeling of sudden deceleration. Anyone looking from outside would have witnessed a flash of Cherenkov radiation seemingly vomited from nowhere with a ship magically springing into existence from its source.

But there was nobody to witness the event. Valkyrie's path led it to the outer fringe of the target star system, light-days from its primary star. Her sensors drank in the radiation sleeting through near-interstellar space, found nothing of immediate relevance, then on cue from Tactical long-range telescopes and high-gain directional arrays emerged and unfolded from the hull. Powerful gravity lensing fields bent photons towards the telescopes' ultra-sensitive multispectral imaging sensors and a rough picture of the system ahead began to coalesce.

A main-sequence primary, one of Sol's billions of cousins. A massive giant in a close Mercury-like orbit, another further out-system, a smattering of large moons and the Earth-range planet that was their likely destination. Nothing indicating mega-scale artificial structures. No radio signal strong or focused enough to reach Valky's remote location.

"Tactical?"

"All clear, Cap'n. Should we go active?"

"Negative, ell-tee." The abbreviated rank rolled out of Ingolfsson's tongue. Her bridge seemed to be populated by ensigns and lieutenants. Young Citizen officers who might perhaps command a ship of their own one day. No servus in sight, the closest ones would be collating and cross-referencing data in the Combat Information Center under Citizen officer supervision. "Granted it's unlikely we'd warn anyone by radiating so far out, but we'd have piss-poor resolution too. We're going to listen for another…" she paused. She was going to say "two hours", but it seemed an awfully long time to learn… not much more, likely. But the protocol was clear. "Two hours. After that we'll head in-system. Helm, prepare a short jump to put us four light-hours out of the outermost gas giant and I want us to transition out of hyperspace right in the shadow cone as seen from that Earth-like world."

"Aye, Cap'n."

Next, she opened another call.

"Medical, we might be heading in-system soon. Prep to awake the frozen crew. I want everyone up and running for General Quarters in two hours."

The senior duty officer in the sickbays answered a second later.

"Even the ghouloons?"

"No, not the ghouloons at this time. Keep them on ice."

"Understood."

That medical officer wasn't a talkative one, Ingolfsson remarked to herself. But then Medical was always a rather independent branch… hell, they actually had the power to remove the Captain from duty. Anyway, two hours should be enough for them to get the sleeping crew out of stasis and up to date. It wasn't like they were currently overloaded, what with a few training casualties occupying the beds.

Her mind focused on the distant planet again. It was placed on the ship exploration list because faint radio emissions were detected out of the active wormhole… faint but encoded and clearly artificial. She wondered what she would find. A potential ally, another enemy, or Yoke fodder?

One moment local space held the usual lonely atoms per cubic centimeter, the next it was a lot, lot more as that same cubic centimeter was instead packed with a densely-assembled complex of iron and carbon and tungsten and vanadium atoms and a smattering of more exotic elements, all of them taking residence in one of Valkyrie's external armor plates as part of an ultra-hard kinetic layer and those lonely resident atoms were rather forcefully pushed away. Nobody heard their tiny screams of protestation in the infrared band, for nobody was watching that area of space that extended a long way from the nearest solid feature.

"Matching speed and vector with local system reference, Cap'n" said Helm while the cruiser's main drives lit up in cold blue. A trail of excited ions erupted into space behind the ship as it accelerated to match speed with a system that orbited the galaxy at a noticeably different angular speed and direction than Sol did. Still, those four ion trails were lost in the cosmic background. While operating in fusion torch mode would have shortened the maneuver drastically, the resulting star-hot incandescent line striking against the cold black would have been unmissable from the opposite end of the system.

"Tactical, fire the ready drones."

"Aye, Cap'n. Drones away."

Another week passed by. The vast ship was infinitesimally small in orbit of the gaseous planet and its attendant moons and moonlets, having crept closer on the heels of the drones as they sanitized the giant's planetary system on their way inward. There was always the remote chance of some observation post lying camouflaged and silent, but given the lack of apparent traffic, this was vanishingly unlikely. It really seemed that the locals – if there were indeed locals – didn't have a presence in outer space. Coming from Sol and having visited Tolla, this appeared as weird to Ingolfsson, almost unsettling. The distant Earth-range planet was confirmed to have a breathable atmosphere as revealed by its spectrographic analysis. So, there was life for sure. And life that used encoded radio transmissions. Unless it was some kind of alien species that used radio waves like Earth's sea mammals used ultrasound… that meant technology.

She'd used the time to replenish Valkyrie's hydrogen stores even though they were barely depleted by the journey so far, dipping into the gaseous giant's atmosphere like a submarine into the sea. And they were still deep inside the vast cloudscape, hovering like a giant blimp on counter-grav, all but invisible from outside while the recon drones swept through the vast distance to their eventual target. Their reactionless drives were taken straight from captured Goa'uld deathgliders, contributing to their stealthy nature as much as the radio-scattering characteristics of their actively cooled skin. Yet they detected no high-power electro-detection waves directed at them as they closed with the life-bearing planet. Eventually, as they decelerated and maneuvered into high polar orbits, they released their parasite load of specialized survey microsats, augmenting their own considerable on-board sensor capacity and the small, stealthy fleet began to map the planet under every angle and spectrum.

Forty-eight hours later the network of spy satellites had recovered a complete enough map of the planetary surface that a briefing could be called in one of the cruiser's conference rooms, one deck down from the bridge. Gwendolyn Ingolfsson sat at the head of the table as befit her rank with her executive officer at her right, on her left sat Lieutenant-Commander Parnassus Kardashyev – a third-generation Citizen who owed his exotic surname to a Soviet grandfather whose engineering skills spared him and his family the Yoke in the aftermath of the Eurasian War. It was fitting that his all-Draka grand-son would stride among the stars, though the elder Kardashyev didn't live long enough to witness it. The breakneck race to orbit of the late forties and fifties was strewn with accidents and casualties… and he was one of them, killed in the rapid unscheduled disassembly of a scramjet prototype.

Parnassus headed the Tactical division, another Aerospace Force veteran who even took part in the last assault on Ceres during the Final War. Therefore, he was the one responsible with establishing a picture of their target of interest. At his left sat Lieutenant Olia Brandt, his actual intelligence officer who had supervised the collection of data from the remote spy sats and drones and built a briefing out of the result. Across her and rounding the table was the last participant, the Centurion who commanded the ship's infantry contingent and thus would have to deal with any mission involving more finesse than "shooting at it with the ship's big guns".

Ingolfsson listened to her circle of officers exchanging the usual pleasantries as a pair of stewards – servus of course – deftly placed trays of finger food and pastries on the table and served refreshments. Once they were done and left the room, sealing its sound-proofed door behind them, she clapped her hands together, just loud enough to give the "let's start" signal. The buzz of conversation died and all eyes converged upon her. She pushed herself forward, resting her crossed forearms on the precious veneer and smiled.

"Well, Citizens, let's get to it. Parnassus, Olia" her eyes met theirs "I believe you've got some answers for us?"

"Answers, which raise more questions in turn, naturally" Kardashyev raised a tight smile. This wasn't the first such conference and the use of first names among them, in private, was something they were used to. The Citizen force was never a stickler for excessive formalism, and officers on a space ship were used to the kind of familiarity that arose from belonging to the same aristocratic warrior class and rubbing shoulders in a tin can for months on end. As the saying went, at the end of the day they were all naked in the palestra. Here in a closed meeting and with no serfs in range, there was no need for cumbersome titles. Ingolfsson herself was but a first among equals.

"Funny that I expected exactly that" Gwen chuckled with the rest of them. "But show us what you got."

Kardashyev exchanged a look with his subordinate and Olia brought herself forward. Tapping her perscomp, she made the room's holodisplay light up with a tridimensional representation of the planet.

"This is PCS3, as designated by Command for 'potential civilization stargate'. Our recon drones were able to generate a global map using purely passive optical scans, with higher resolution data in various areas of interest. They also captured some signal intelligence in the electro-magnetic bands…" She went on for an hour, illustrating her spoken briefing with specific views and figures on the display.

In short, PCS3 was the theater of a global and devastating war, and its main landmass bore scars visible from orbit. It seemed that two power blocs, or nations, fought each other until one of them was pushed back to a last redoubt – but then the environment was utterly trashed. In fact, it seemed the planet was well in the process of total ecological collapse, with the vegetation dying en masse visible from orbit as large brown patches. Not only that, but spectroscopic readings and samples taken by the drones inside the atmosphere showed a toxic concentration of various chemical compounds related to dioxin, making it highly dangerous to breathe without filtering equipment. On the other hand, the radiological background didn't betray large-scale use of nuclear weapons.

Despite this absence, the scars of war were all too visible. Vast swathes of land were pockmarked with craters and the ruins of defensive fortifications, those the thickest in a region that marked, supposedly, the initial border between the two antagonist powers. One of the high-resolution pictures even showed a literal field of half-buried bones, as if waves of attacking infantry died taking a fortified position before moving on. Other pictures showed carcasses of war machines, flyers of some sort from their general layout, with different models that were tentatively classified as fighters, bombers or transports, all the way to the losing side's last city, a city in ruins, its buildings gutted, roads and streets strewn with rusted and decayed debris, parks and gardens long turned to dust and skeletal, carbonized husks.

One area in particular had suffered a more recent and concentrated bombardment by ground-penetrating ordnance, deep craters showed shattered reinforced concrete in their depths, and interestingly there were signs of activity on the surface: one of the satellites had caught a flyer transport landed near one of the craters during one of its passes, though the resolution was too low to conclude anything for certain, it seemed like the victors made sure their enemies were well and truly buried.

The victors themselves, if one could call them so when their planet was dying under their feet, hadn't escaped the war unharmed. Their territory bore the signs of an appallingly high population density before the conflict – ruined megalopolises crisscrossed their land, having gnawed through whatever woodland or natural biomes originally existed. Oblique pictures showed forests of tall habitation buildings whose sheer density made the Draka almost physically sick, conditions not even compound serfs ever had to endure. Hives, Gwendolyn thought with a shiver. People living packed like insects. And if she had to wager, the cause of the war, since the other nation seemed to have avoided such overcrowding. A casus belli as simple as "we need land, you have land, we want it?" They wouldn't know until they got a much closer look and acquired some cultural data, which the satellites and drones couldn't do. There were some radio transmissions, granted, but digitally encoded, and the remaining population centers appeared to be mostly underground, betrayed by their infrared output; though there was definitely activity going on the surrounding surface as well, as if the locals were trying to recolonize their land – or as if they were overcrowding their underground shelters.

A welcoming world this was not, Gwendolyn concluded. But she couldn't ignore it. Now that they were here, they would solve the mystery and determine whether or not the Race could have some use of it and its denizens.

"Engineering, we good to move?"

"Affirmative, Cap'n. Atmosphere intakes are sealed, reverse-conversion plants offline and we're fully topped off."

Now was time to leave the gas giant's Jupiter-like embrace. Signal intelligence from the reconnaissance platforms showed the locals' electro-detectors were only sweeping the surface and inner atmosphere, in line with their use of endo-atmospheric flyers. There was nothing specifically scanning outer space, nor did the recon drones pick evidence of nearby subspace-based activity. Of course, this said nothing of the possible optical instruments which might look upwards, but this was something Valkyrie was equipped to handle. Besides, Intel evaluated the probability of the local civilization being able to threaten the Draka warship as remote, what with their lack of any orbital infrastructure. Of working orbital infrastructure anyway. The drones had picked up a few other artificial objects… but they were debris, the still-orbiting remnants of satellites that were destroyed during the conflict.

The bridge was floating in darkness, faithfully reflecting the ship's surroundings. Valkyrie was hovering deep inside the giant's atmosphere under two thick cloud layers. Deep enough that external pressure read almost five bar, five times Earth's sea-level. It made the conversion plants' job easier and was a good test of the hull's integrity when faced with a higher exterior pressure. No leak was detected, and this was good since the outer mix of hydrogen and methane and ammonia didn't make for very breathable air.

And being so deep underneath the clouds meant little sunlight was reaching in. This was a dark place of hurricane-like winds going round the planet, though Valkyrie was currently moving with the flow like a giant metal airship at zero relative velocity.

On impulse, Gwendolyn Ingolfsson reached for the exterior lights commands and turned on the powerful projectors. Small suns fed by an actual miniature star stabbed into the darkness for hundreds of kilometers… yet the sheer size of the layer meant they dimmed long before they reached anything that could reflect and provide a sense of depth. Instead, the ship floated inside a thin yellowish fog that seemed to stretch forever and ever with no end in sight. It was an unsettling sight, Gwen decided, vertigo inducing despite her Drakensis brain being engineered to remove the fear of heights.

"Helm, take us out, steady on counter-grav."

"Increasing counter-grav strength, aye."

Her main engines still dark, the cruiser floated upwards like a hydrogen balloon leaping up from the ground.

"Crossing boundary layer in one minute."

A chime rang throughout the ship. Secure for turbulence. They were going to cross a transition between atmospheric layers and the one on top was flowing at a different speed and direction. In effect, they were going to hit a five hundred kph headwind as they went through. It was going to be rocky, briefly, before the inertial compensation system adjusted.

Inside the bridge, seat restraints snapped in place over the crew. Elsewhere, those crew not sitting in operator stations pulled themselves tight into designated handholds and restraining harnesses.

It was hard to discern the boundary visually, but the weather radar showed it clearly enough in the synthetic representation. Gwen bared her teeth instinctively as it approached.

WHUM.

She felt her captain's seat try to push inside her then she was doing the same to the restraints. All around her the multi-million-ton warship shuddered mightily like a diver hitting water at the bottom of a cliff. Then it was over. Gwen released her breath. All green on the board. Valkyrie was built like a brick… well not really like a brick. But her structure was designed to weather immense loads. A bit of shear was nothing to it.

No medical alert either. Both ship and crew were fine. Nice test, she concluded.

They rose up and the first clouds appeared above, ghostly nebulous shapes merging into an overcast sky that stretched again far beyond the human mind was accustomed to see. There was no horizon, or rather it was several Earth radii away, essentially lost in the distance. Nothing to see in all direction but that fuzzy yellowish cottonscape descending closer, closer… closer… abruptly they were inside and the lights adjusted automatically after a moment of blinding diffused brilliance.

The engines were firing now, adding their blue glow to the rear quarter view, then the ship burst through the cloud layer picking up speed. Sensors showed a clear path upwards to the last layer of clouds before clean sky. Sunlight was filtering down, tenuous as it was so far away out-system but enough to see through augmented vision and the projectors shut down. Gwendolyn took a moment in her mind to reflect on the absolute magnitude of such experiences that may become routine. She'd flown a massive vessel down into the atmosphere of an extra-solar gas giant, a place worthy of several lifetimes of academic study. The data log from her sensors alone could mean scholars back in the Domination publishing thousands of pages in scientific journals. Yet they'd barely skimmed the giant planet's environment. Down below oceans of liquid hydrogen and methane awaited exploration if someone ever came back one day… but with a drastically expanded universe in reach, this world was but one among so many. It was likely that it would bear little scrutiny after she was gone, left and forgotten for more pressing issues.

Valkyrie broke through the last clouds and leapt into dark space.

Hours later she settled in a high orbit over the dying world, using her counter-grav to hover in a fixed position relative to the ground, her nose pointing towards the planet and minimizing her cross-section. Her outer skin was turned matte black, she was emulating a hole in the sky and unless someone ran a thorough, or lucky, occultation watch from the surface nobody was going to spot her. By intel estimates, the locals had more pressing issues than dabbling in amateur astronomy.

A large armored panel slid open on her port side in a widened section of the trench that ran between lower and upper hull. The newly open hangar was darkened save for the low reddish glow of "night" operations. A short moment later, one of the shuttles detached from its holding cradle and crossed the threshold with effortless precision, drifted away the required distance then lit its own engines and accelerated towards the planet. A dark, blurry shape underneath its dynamic camouflage, thick stubby wings and a boxy fuselage, it was directly derived from pre-Contact scramjet shuttles but counter-grav alleviated the need for slavishly conforming to the laws of Newton. It dove straight down with little orbital velocity to shed and entered the atmosphere sedately, creating no more than some turbulence after her instead of a fiery reentry trail.

Inside its cockpit the weak sidelobes from the distant electrodetectors sweeping the victors' sky registered as faint beeps and icons on the threat warning display. With its stealth shaping and coating there was no chance of the shuttle being picked up, but just in case a pair of Starling drone fighters followed it in a wide escort formation, their own electronic eyes scanning the sky beyond for any hint of an airborne threat.

The shuttle steadily lost altitude, tearing through puffy white clouds without a concern. Down below the ground was bare and dirty yellow-brown and it bore the traces of a devastating war. Old craters, large and small broke through the outlines of ancient roads and towns. As they approached their destination more traces of ancient battles appeared, husks of downed flyers and house-sized ground war machines lying dead at the end of half-erased tracks dug into the soil. Images from the shuttle's high-powered optical trackers showed the dead metal behemoths sitting on colossal tank-like tracks, mobile fortresses as large as an old wet navy corvette, festooned with gun turrets and boxy missile launchers, rusted and decaying as the holes punched into them let the elements in.

Senior Decurion Monica Raeder watched the pictures hungrily and her mind threw up conjectures. Those hulks were evidently old and they didn't reach all the way to the defeated capital. Maybe, she thought, those big ground boxes were the local form of armored warfare? Not as efficient as tanks, maybe, but workable with the local technology and history? The larger picture, composited through Valkyrie's CIC from all the sensors at play, did show the remnants down there were the end tip of a sweeping wave of destroyed war machines and mass graves coming from the "victor" nation. It didn't look like a swift offensive either, all indications so far pointed to a long, grueling offensive through contested terrain. One that went almost all the way through… then faltered. Sheer exhaustion? Changing circumstances? A combination of factors?

She remembered other pictures from the previous day's briefing. The hive-like cities with a chilling population density, now abandoned and deserted. The scars of huge exploitation quarries and open-pit mines, the lakes of brightly-colored toxic sludge, the rows of beached factory fishing ships, hundreds lined up rusting on a never-ending beach that fronted a dead ocean. Stuff that would make the folks back home at the Conservancy Directorate scream and tear their hair out. Those people had been destroying their entire biosphere at a fast rate to fuel and feed their insect-like demography. Maybe this was the root cause of that war. Lots of maybes, and Captain Ingolfsson wanted answers that couldn't be delivered by remote observation.

They could have chosen to land elsewhere. To directly make contact with the main remaining population center where activity was clearly visible, live people going in and out of a massive, bunker-like building into the surrounding ruins. Where flyers emerged from subterranean hangars. Where heat signatures betrayed large-scale activity going underground in what must be an entire buried city and industry. Right now, another recon drone was hovering forty kilometers above, acting as a relay for a small army of modified biodrones tasked with infiltrating ruins and active structures. Cockroaches, the universal survivors of cataclysms, able to slip into the smallest cracks unnoticed, all connected through a lower-power wideband network. If one of them was caught, well, it was just a cockroach. Only a proper dissection would reveal the hidden organic circuitry.

But Monica Raeder was bound for another destination. Hers was the location where the losing side made its apparent last stand under their enemy's bombardment. Intel analysts had noticed a pattern to the destruction, most of it old and peripheral – flattening the surrounding city, with the most recent craters a tighter grouping, as if something had prevented the underground facility from being directly targeted all that time. Something like a powerful and accurate interception system or an energy shield. In any case, the victorious party did bother with regular visits, having gone through the length of setting up a proper inflatable airlock over their ingress point. This suggested there was something worth reconnoitering. Decurion Raeder and her lochos – a reinforced squad of twelve – would provide the boots on the ground, with Valkyrie's brass watching over her shoulder but sensibly abstaining from micro-managing. She was trained, she was briefed, she was geared up with the best – and with a stint at the Draka-Tollan Joint Military enclave, she even had the open mind to deal with entirely novel situations. Or so she hoped.

At least she wasn't afraid of dead corpses.

Deep down in the earth and half a continent away, Nebo Momko pestered in his native tongue against the ancestors, the thrice damned and hated Eurondans and the Universe for good measure as an electrical spark jumped out of the dead circuitry he was tasked with fixing and singed the four fingers of his left hand. Sucking in the tips to nurse the burn, he frowned in concentration and adjusted the headband that carried his working lamp to better see into the open panel. It was dark and hot in here. Overhead lamps glowed faintly in the narrow service tunnel that ran down the length of UnderHab Block 124's principal waste reclamation machinery. Accordingly, a nauseous smell permeated the air, stronger here behind the sealed door that separated it from the block's actual living throughfares. It was the third time he had to go fix something this cycle-month, a different part failing every time. As head of sector maintenance, he knew very well how this was going. Same as Block 48. The self-contained life-support systems had been operating non-stop for much longer than they'd been designed for – and even that design was a rushed job. There wasn't much time for refinement when the air and ground rapidly grew toxic, poisoned by the Eurondan bastards in the face of his people's inevitable victory. Nebo grew up listening to his parents' tales of the Cataclysm, how millions fell ill, among them neighbors, friends and family, suffering agonizing delayed deaths as their organs went into systemic failure. Millions then billions, turning the great cities into open-air graveyards as nobody cared about organizing burials anymore. Yet they kept working and fighting to the end under the All-Mother's eye with hate-fueled resolve, throwing their last strengths into building the shelters that allowed the People, even reduced to a rump of its former greatness, to endure and keep fighting. The underground factories would keep churning out war machines, even if they had to be simplified designs, stripped of many former refinements to focus on the simple task of bringing hurt to the Poisoners.

He flicked sweat off of his brow, summoning all the focus of his mind. It was hard. He wasn't as smart as his father, who taught him everything, was. He knew it all too well. That reason to hate the Eurondans he shared with every member of the generations that followed the Going-Under. Those who died quickly were spared the long-term consequences of the biosphere poisoning. Dioxin-like compounds seeped into the soil, contaminating everything, accumulating in living tissue. Nebo was fortunate to be alive to begin with – many of his would-be brothers and sisters were instead still-born. The missing finger of his left hand and the grotesque deformity that stuck out of his left flank, along with a score minor health matters only made him "normal" for the current definition of normal among the People. At least if the stumpy supernumerary arm jutting out of his torso actually did something… a working third arm would be useful, but no, it was just some stupid flesh leftover from a womb accident. It still made him grind his teeth sometimes. Like now.

He banged at the faulty electronic box with his pry-bar and managed to dislodge the thing. Now all he needed to do was plug in the replacement… itself a mish-mash of previous repairs. He did it with utmost care, then switched the power back on. Indicator lights turned a soothing blue, then seconds later deep gurgling sounds came from the partition as the machinery started back up. He listened for another minute and watched the lines of diagnostic codes scroll through the small matrix display. Good, the damn thing was operating normally again, it seemed. He released a breath with satisfaction and closed the access panel. Until next time.

The service door closed behind him with greased smoothness and he slung his bag over his shoulder. Hands thrust into his baggy overall's pockets, he started back towards home for a much-needed shower – a luxury he was entitled to due to his position. His shift was over anyway unless some new emergency came up.

He navigated the maze of tunnels with all the familiarity of someone born and raised there, bumping shoulders with familiar and less-familiar faces – those of his own generation he knew well, but there were always new faces growing up, blessed the All-Mother whose smiling, motherly face watched them from posters and wall shrines everywhere. He had to step aside for the ball that a throng of kids was chasing across the sub-level, then smiled at them as they ran past – well, one of them wheeled past on the rolling board that carried him instead of his non-existent legs.

Ah, the little joys of life.

The door to his quarters opened on a familiar scene. Laynee, his third wife was sitting on a settee and sewing clothes for her second child, the very same one she was nursing and singing a lullaby to. Around her three of his remaining eight children were playing with toys in the communal room, playing war of course with little bomber aircraft dropping fake penetrator bombs onto a cardboard representation of the Eurondan underground fortress shield. "Whee! Boom! Poisoners dead!" The sight made him chuckle. Yes, the Poisoners were dead, or as good as. But the hate wasn't extinguished, oh far from it. He eyed Laynee's blonde hair, with her underground dweller's pale skin she could have passed as one of them, he always thought – just as he'd fantasized when he took her virginity three solar cycles ago after the wedding ceremony. Her blue eye met his and she smiled, dispelling the bad guilty thoughts out of his mind. Then she turned to face him fully and opened her mouth to greet him home, and he saw again the blank expanse of skin where her right eye should have been. Well, she was still beautiful to him. She had the right number of appendages, unlike his two other wives whom he loved nevertheless and she was fertile, her nubile body strong to bear children, more children to inhabit the world according to the All-Mother's gospel.

"All-Mother smile on you, husband", she said modestly. "And on you, my wife. And you, and you" Nebo added as they came in from the other rooms.

Yes, he was a man of importance, he told himself again. Many lives depended on him. Tens of thousands in Block 124, the census wasn't exactly accurate; and that was only after he'd proven himself in his younger years by flying several successful bombing missions to the Poisoners' nest. There were always more women than men, an imbalance inherited from the decades of war, when the People's finest threw themselves against their enemies' fewer but more lethal weapons, crashing through fortified line after fortified line, paying every advance with rivers of blood that were to fertilize the world.

He strode forward and put his hand onto her bare shoulder, relishing the contrast between her pale skin and his darker complexion. His other wives were closer to his thanks to their lineages, yet they didn't see the sun either and were merely dark brown rather than the rich deep black of their ancestors. He remembered the All-Mother's words, how all were destined to be one People, united and strong and numerous and bold, the true inheritors of the world; how the Eurondans had rejected that truth, waning and reveling in their self-imposed sterility, discarding the People's warm embrace, spouting their vacuous tales of "purity" and "self-moderation" and grotesquely pretending to revere Nature when they were discarding Nature's purest command: breed and multiply!

"Hekshee, Meksheba, my dutiful and bountiful!" he gave them a wide loving smile in return.

"Have you fixed the recyclers, love?"

"I did. Until the next time. We won't go hungry today."

"Not today, love," Hekshee replied with a serious expression. She was as privileged as he was by virtue of being his spouse. She settled onto another stool, wary of standing up for too long with her mismatched legs. "I was afraid the children would go hungry."

He shrugged. "Not on my watch."

They didn't go hungry indeed for the closing-day meal as the family's ration of nutrient slop poured out of the wall tap into bowls and they mixed flavoring powders into it before digging in. He knew where the slop came from – they all did, but he knew better thanks to his responsibilities. Recycled waste, broken down into atomic components by the kind of machinery he'd just fixed. And the blessed dead of course whom they never forgot in the before-meal prayers.

Then, as he settled for a late-evening distraction the news came in on his terminal. A message from Supervision!

His devotion to duty in the service of Block 124 and its inhabitants didn't go unnoticed by All-Mother, Enanna-Mun Incarnate. In two days hence would the next Celebration of Fertility come. And he was invited to attend.

Reading the message again, he couldn't hide his excitation. His wives didn't hide their pride either. Theirs was a man worthy of the All-Mother's favor, worthy of receiving the gift of Victorious Sustenance. It would make his seed even stronger, no doubt!

The shuttle carrying Decurion Raeder and her squad landed a kilometer away from their eventual destination, inside a square opening between ruins that belonged to a long-abandoned plaza. Dust billowed up as exhaust from the landing thrusters struck the ground underneath the thick wing roots. Shock absorbers compressed with a whine of hydraulics, firmly planting the craft onto the cracked concrete. The disembarkation ramp at the bottom rear opened with another hiss and Raeder's squad fanned out in a protective formation, weapon sights scanning the surrounding ruins for any threat. The probability was low – thermal scans didn't show anything alive – but complacency was not how the Race won its battles.

Battlefield surveillance drones went up the air, the quiet little quadcopters beating the toxic air with little care to provide an overhead picture ahead of the team. The shuttle's hatch closed and its dorsal surfaces turned into the smart-paint's best imitation of its background. Perimeter sensors went online and self-protection gatlings sprang out of their fairings. Nobody was going to creep on it and its flight crew while Raeder's squad was away.

Their recon armor suits flickered as well as they mimetically adjusted to the all-around decayed environment and they started toward their goal in a well-oiled tactical progression through the desolate landscape. Signs of former life were strewn around – burnt-out husks of the local ground car equivalents, still intact signs, if blackened by the long-ago starved-out fires that ripped through the city, sundry decayed everyday objects – and then the tell-tale black shadow silhouettes on walls, all that remained of bodies incinerated, turned to ashes and blown away by the winds. The area must have been fire-bombed; not by nuclear weapons since the radiation background appeared normal, but some effective mass-destruction ordnance nevertheless.

She knew Valkyrie was keeping track of the overall aerial picture on the continent. She would be warned well in advance of any local attempt to crash the party and the pair of Starlings orbiting above at the edge of space could provide fire support at a minute's notice if they didn't care about the sonic booms. All this meant she only had to worry about what she'd find in that hole.

Her point men reached the edge of the cratered area. Nothing else was moving as the quadcopters could attest from their own vantage point. They risked an active sweep of the ground in front of them, wary of traps and mines. But no buried threat appeared on their displays. It was really a desert called peace and the native ferals obviously never imagined that people from outer space would drop in and stick their noses in their business.

Five minutes later and they'd reached the airlock apparatus sitting down one of the deep wide, craters. The locals had installed make-shift stairs out of sheet metal, she eschewed them, opting to slide her way down.

Her point-man didn't wait for a prompt.

"Looks simple enough. Mechanical lock, pressure indicators" he pointed at a cluster of old-fashioned mechanical dials, "no sign of anti-tampering mechanism."

She nodded behind her face-shield and respirator.

"'Kay. Prepare for entry, people. You know the drill."

A communication box was quickly emplaced nearby, out of immediate sight from the entrance, its flat antenna pointed upwards. A thin and almost invisible fiber-optic went through a tiny hole in the airlock's side, ending in an indoor radio relay as large as a coin. Similar devices would be dropped whenever needed to keep a clear signal out. Four soldiers would be staying outside to act as guards and reserve force.

The point man actioned the outer hatch controls and the light-frame door swiveled open. The whole construction was rather flimsy – there was no pressure differential to withstand after all. The thing was only supposed to keep the worst of the toxic atmosphere out.

He inserted a sensor rod inside to sweep for any surveillance devices. Nothing, not even a camera registered. The man shrugged minutely, his opinion of the natives not improving in the slightest. "Clear."

They filed inside the space, it was large enough to contain the nine of them, and the outer door was closed. They made sure it could be opened from inside, they went to crack open the inner hatch without difficulty. They fanned out into a larger space, more or less flattened and cleared of rubble. Working lights were standing around an opening in the ground. They found the controls and turned them on. It was another hatch, a rather strong one at that – cut through with something like a plasma torch from the smooth fused appearance of the cuts.

"Deploy the microdrones."

Graceful metallized dragonflies flew out of a container and streamed into the hole, a vanguard of slave hybrid organisms that cared little for their own preservation.

They went down the bunker's exterior carapace and found a service tunnel. More lights were strewn on a wire overhead, powered somehow. The light was dim, but enough. Dried blood had that unmistakable tint.

The tunnel continued straight for about thirty meters then doglegged left. After another straight stretch arrived an intersection and the dragonflies separated in two groups, mapping the layout as they went their separate ways. So far there was no sign of life.

The first Draka jumped down the hole and knelt a dozen steps ahead, rifle pointing down the corridor. It must have been some auxiliary or emergency access since it ended in a cul-de-sac behind him. A second soldier dropped down and they began to walk carefully down the path explored by the dragonflies. The air was hot and stale. According to the readouts the concentration of toxic compounds was much lower than outside, almost safe to breathe – but they wisely kept the rebreathers on. The whole mission was naturally run under strict biocontrol procedures, this being an unknow environment and biosphere. A thorough decontamination awaited them back at the ship, even if the biomonitors didn't register any apparent microbial threat.

They turned past the dogleg and found the first clues as to what might have happened. The concrete floor was brown – not the original tint, no. It was the dark brown of dried, caked blood – old but still very noticeable. Someone or several somebodies must have bled heavily right there. There were other biological traces on the walls, quite visible under the right wavelength. Dried specks of flesh – hair even. Someone had their brains blown out. Pitted patches on the walls, traces of weapon fire, blackened spots reminiscent of plasma impacts, but not quite. Quite clearly this was the spot of an ancient firefight. Whoever cleaned up afterwards must have disposed of the bodies.

Gwendolyn Ingolfsson heaved herself out of the pool with a splash of water, stood up and stretched her arms above her head. She glanced at the pool again – she was sorely tempted to stay longer, but she had duties. Other off-duty crew were still paddling happily in their respective lanes – some were running full-bore, others were lounging or exercising in the water; artificial gravity meant they could have swimming pools inside the ship for both Citizen and Serf crews and it was part of the ship's water reserves. Not a luxury, in Gwen's opinion. Like the garden compartments and the general amount of greenery adorning the living quarters, they were amenities intended to make long-duration missions less taxing on crew morale, in addition to their immediate practical uses.

She quickly showered, then a pair of serf attendants toweled her body dry then helped her into a fluffy bathrobe. One of them returned with a tall jug of papaya juice, a favorite of her. Swimming made her thirsty, paradoxical as it seemed, and the sweet juice also helped replenish her energy reserves.

Several slices of cake followed the juice, then she laid down onto a massage bench. A servant rubbed moisturizing oil into her skin, another took care of her wet hair, gently drying them with a soft towel then treating them with a fragrant conditioner. She felt herself relax. Whoever had expressed reservations at having serf crews inside the cruisers had been wrong, she told herself. She couldn't bring her own servants along – one of the annoying sides of military life – but the War Directorate's Support Corps personnel were anything if not efficient. Sometimes she wondered if her dedicated steward had mind-reading powers, so good was he at forestalling her needs. And her own mother must have sent him a list of her favorite foods, there was no other way.

The servants finished their ministrations on her down to the quasi-regulatory finishing orgasm, leaving her with a light-headed smile, then helped her into her captain's uniform. She looked at them fondly as they took their leave. Ah, servus, such wonderfully pleasant creatures. And no emergency to make her feel guilty for taking some time off, though really the transceiver tech meant she could, in a pinch, direct a fight butt-naked in her bathroom. Anyway, she was eager to see what else they'd found out down there while she was exercising.

Of course, she had been following things in her ready room with Kardashyev and Brandt when Monica Raeder landed and her squad began investigating the feral facility, watching the video feed as they happened upon the ancient firefight site then headed deeper into the bunker.

Or bunkers, more appropriately, linked by reinforced tunnels, much like the deep survival complex buried kilometers beneath Castle Tarleton in Archona. As the squad went deeper, leaving miniaturized radio relays in their wake like Tom Thumbs dropping bread crumbs, it became clear that it would take some time. Especially when they had to turn back and try alternative routes whenever one passage was interrupted by a cave-in. The drones helped as well, but still, they had to pause, geotag and catalog anytime they found something interesting.

Now, having spent two hours down at the palestra, Gwendolyn expected to come back to some juicy discoveries. Not just old fight spots – that the decades-long siege of that bunker ended with an actual invasion once its last defenses fell was already abundantly clear. No, she hoped for answers to the more fundamental questions: who were those people and why did they kill their own planet? She expected that they would find nobody alive to answer, but anything else could help – writings, computing tech, maps, whatever, if the other guys hadn't picked their old enemy's last stronghold clean already.

Kardashyev and Brandt were back in the CIC, her transceiver informed her. She considered summoning them to her ready room again, but opted to join them in their workplace instead.

She saluted the sentries guarding this most sensitive compartment – the Combat Information Center was the fighting nerve center of the ship, where all tactically relevant data was collected and parsed and analyzed and collated and fused by living brains and expert systems based on the best comptech the Domination could build. The ship's computer security team also resided here in their own sub-compartment, but at this moment Gwen's focus laid on the Intel corner. She spotted her two officers there among their own subordinates. They also sensed her approach and their eyes rose from the tactical table and whatever it was displaying.

She spotted their expression right there. Both had that "cat that just caught the mouse" excited grin and were not even trying to restrain it.

Her raised eyebrow provided the interrogative cue they needed. It was Kardashyev who spoke first as the ranking man.

"Cap'n… we hit jackpot." He flicked a holo up. An image hovered under Ingolfsson's eyes. Taken from inside the underground facility, it showed a large room – a huge one, actually, dark and poorly lit though it didn't prevent the enhanced vision system from showing its interior in detail. But it wasn't the size of it that caught Gwen's attention. It was the ranks upon ranks of capsules… no, pods, human-sized and powered-on.

"Loki's balls. Is that what I think it is?" she breathed out.

The Lieutenant-Commander nodded.

"Hibernation, or stasis pods. Still functional, they seem to have their own power source even though the rest of the facility's down. There are people in there, Cap'n. Thousands of them… though Raeder's men say that several hundred pods are missing where they should be. There was a clear path from the ingress point to this chamber, too, evidently cleared out by the invaders even though they didn't bother with other cut-off sections of the facility, which we still have to explore."

"You think the other ferals… took those missing pods?"

"Raeder thinks so. They spotted scratches on the floor, pretty consistent with the notion. I'm guessing they wanted prisoners."

"Why? Their war's obviously over."

Kardashyev shrugged. "Maybe they Yoke them, just like we'd do."

"Did the away team get anything else?"

"Not much. Every room they came across was picked clean of anything valuable. Pro'lly be luckier searching the inaccessible areas, if'n when we clear a path through. Will need more people and hardware tho'."

Gwen scratched her nose thoughtfully. Such an undertaking would take days, weeks perhaps, raising the risk of counter-detection by the other ferals if they sent another flyer. On the other hand, what if they were detected? She could shoot down any local flyer and interdict the entire region if she wanted with Valkyrie's firepower. Those ferals would be helpless. Besides, the infiltration of their main city by her insectile spies was proceeding, soon they might be able to peer inside as well.

"All right. We'll dig them out."

Several parsecs away in another star system located near the approximate line between Sol and Valkyrie's present location, another ship bearing the Domination's emblem emerged from hyperspace. It was a long skeletal frame connecting a drive assembly with a collar of spherical tanks for reaction mass and a blocky living quarters and command deck module, with ample space in the middle dedicated to cargo attachment points. It was a cargo ship, as bare-bones as could be designed and mass-produced with a hyperdrive that was comparatively slow, but also cheap and sturdy.

A representative of a new class of utility ships built with the new technology, some were put to use by the Domination's industrial combines to ferry supplies and goods between Earth and its new interstellar colonies, but this one belonged to the War Directorate as part of its fleet of support ships. And its current mission wasn't to transport containers full of parts and supplies. Instead, it carried the mass-produced subspace sensor and relay buoys that were to expand the Domination's real-time communications and detection bubble.

It had departed Sol many months before Valkyrie left her dock with a two-person crew who spent most of the voyage in stasis between destinations, traveling a meandering outward path from system to system. Hyacinth Crowley, as it was officially christened wasn't much compared to the big lethal cruisers, but its task was nevertheless crucial.

As its drives flared up to adjust its vector following the realspace transition, its crew ran through the automated checks on the latest payload to be deployed. Minutes later, established in a stable orbit around the local star at a Mercury-like distance from it, the locking clamps unlatched from the buoy's hull and the autonomous machine separated from its carrier ship. Hyacinth Crowley let it build up a safe gap then activated its own thrusters to add more clearance.

The reason for it became apparent ten minutes later as large panels opened on the space buoy's rotating cylindrical body and the semi-reflective solar film began to unfurl. The slow flowering process took the next five hours, at which point the buoy assumed its final operating appearance, a tiny solid nub at the center of a petal array thinner than a human hair yet spanning dozens of square kilometers. This expanse of solar sails, held in place by centrifugal force and a gossamer frame of superconducting memory metal strands would both power the buoy and allow it to maintain its orbital position without having to expand any irreplaceable propellant.

It was a simple and elegant design and one that could be produced with minimal cost and expense in exotic materials – naquadah-based compounds – those only entering the make-up of its primary mission components: the subspace-based detector and communication relay. Its low power budget – compared to the fusion-powered arrays in proper starships – meant it could only provide this functionality in a ten-light-year radius. But a chain of those could instantaneously relay transmissions anywhere within their combined coverage and hopefully warn of hyperspace arrivals and departures within their star systems.

It meant that eight hours after Hyacinth Crowley deployed its latest payload, a faster-than-light transmission path opened for Valkyrie straight back to Earth and Gwendolyn Ingolfsson's preliminary report, encrypted and compressed, reached her superiors in Archona along with a request.

Her request was answered two hours later on Luna when the Stargate Operations Center dialed the combination for PCS3 and a stable wormhole sprang into existence between the two widely-separated locations.

"Subspace energy spike, Cap'n! Congruent with a stargate activation. Approximate location… here" At the techserf's bequest Gwendolyn saw a red-marked circle appear on the planetary map. It was roughly centered on the region that contained the buried fortress. But the rough accuracy of the subspatial detection only confirmed the stargate's presence. What they relied upon for a more precise localization was the widely-spaced, ultra-sensitive seismic detectors emplaced on the surface. Triangulating the tell-tale waves from a stargate activation, they were able to provide a more helpful indication of the portal's actual emplacement and it appeared overlaid on the tridimensional representation of the underground complex.

"Got it. Good work." She pressed the servus' shoulder affectionately and felt his reaction of pride, though he remained professionally focused on his workstation, earning her silent commendation. Some had expressed concerns that servus would be too emotional to make reliable warship crew… but the reality as she witnessed it was that they operated just fine, eager to please their masters with pride even. Of course, she wouldn't put a gun in their hand and tell them to fight boarders, but anything else, including tense exercise situations in the CIC or engineering, they rose up to the challenge. It was a true accomplishment for the Race, she felt, a vindication of the Final Society's goals.

And in the meantime, the information about the stargate's location would save the ground team a lot of time. Now not only could they focus their clearing efforts into that direction, but Luna-based efforts would start from the other end as well with the benefit of better, dedicated clearing and construction crew and equipment, including shoring up material to safely reinforce those areas where the tunnels and underground chambers were structurally weakened by the final bombardment.

"Now what do you make of this?"

Thomas Rohm, science and technology director for Dante Base pivoted away from the half-crushed console with the awkwardness of someone clad in a bright orange, fully-sealed biohazard suit. The cause of the damage was close by: a heavy concrete slab fallen right on top of it and carried away by Dante base's workers after they'd shored up the ceiling with light-weight carbon beams. The device's innards were thus exposed in a sorry state, crystalline photonic circuitry shattered and unseated wires hanging out from busted panels. The other victim of the fallen concrete was secure in a heavy vinyl body bag – not exactly in one piece, and a fair quantity of its inner fluids were dried up stains on the floor anyway. The corpse would soon be transported back to Dante base in a containment gurney. An exhaustive autopsy awaited him in a secure lab – not to find the cause of death, since that seemed quite evident. But there were many things that could be learnt from a human body, even somewhat rotten and desiccated. The biohazard suits at least spared their occupants the lingering odor of death.

He was standing in a side room not far from the stargate's chamber in a remote extension of the main bunker complex. Cabinets lined the walls – storage ones and others that bore a lightning-shaped glyph, a depiction of the natural phenomenon that seemed to symbolize electricity in every known human culture. From the look of things, it must have been a control room for experiments the locals were running with the stargate. There was no dialing pedestal in sight and no clue whether they'd ever successfully managed to open a connection from their end.

The other engineer was holding something, having picked it up from under a collapsed metal table. It appeared as an assembly of three large crystals set in a cylindrical base. As Rohm approached for a closer look through the transparent face shield, he noticed what looked like data ports set in the base.

"Since these people apparently used photonic circuitry… some kind of processing module or databank?" He moved in a semi-circle around the proffered object to take it from every angle. "Looks intact, too." He shined a light at the ports. "Hmm. Optical connections. What looks like a power plug? Shit, can't make sense of the writing… I guess they're not using volts and amperes, that'd be too awfully convenient, right?"

"Valkyrie's people are trying to work this out by looking at those active hibernation pods. On our side, maybe we can deduce it from the electrical cabinets. Disassemble them, reverse engineer what they used as measurements?"

"Could work. I'll place a call to Faraday; they'd have the most qualified personnel to do that. Have them brought right here, in fact. The sooner we get answers the better."

Gwendolyn Ingolfsson knew she was suffering from hurry up and wait syndrome. Several things were in motion down there: the clearing of the fallen bunker complex and the infiltration of the victorious side's main base of operations, all in the name of getting answers. Work crews, hers and Dante base's were busy crawling over the accessible parts of the complex, cataloguing everything and particularly ascertaining the hibernation pods, chiefly to answer whether they could be safely moved out without killing their occupants. Otherwise, they'd have to stay for as long as it took to unfreeze everyone – assuming this was deemed safe and desirable by Archona. The Domination's higher-ups were extremely interested by this newly discovered, technologically advanced human population and the peculiar history of their world – at least the little that could be reconstructed so far.

On the other side of the Draka effort, the little army of spy cockroaches had been spreading through the decayed urban scenery and infiltrating nooks and crannies to access the interior, with a focus on that standing concrete block that most closely reminded of the long-dead Soviet state's official, brutalist architecture. Thermal scans from above betrayed actual occupation, as did the lights going on during the local night. But it was also sealed against the toxic environment, with few openings and those being monitored.

On the other hand, there were air intakes leading inside and the crawling spies did spot them. But their progress was blocked by the heavy-duty gratings protecting the filter assemblies. The roaches, by themselves, were only able to provide mapping of their explored area and a very rough reading of activity – they merely had a cockroach's sensory apparatus and the smallest of low-powered wide-band transmitters, not nearly enough to act as actual eyes and ears. But this was the job of their larger spider-like brethren, who could in addition sport actual tools and be teleoperated by human operators.

Which was why a pair of such biomechanical drones were busy skittering along one of those conduits with a customized toolset. For their operators trained in sensitive remote bomb disposal, clearing a route past the blockage was merely a different challenge. Unscrewing grates and cutting through sheet metal was easy. The most delicate operation would be setting up a miniature airlock on the breaching site so that any inward-located air sensor wouldn't scream a contaminant alert.

Myrella dreamt. She hadn't dreamt for ages – about sixty years, in fact. She just wasn't supposed to while hibernating. But as her body started down the lengthy thawing process and her metabolism slowly returned to baseline normal, the connections between her neurons started firing again in a sleep-like manner.

She was small and going so fast in that swing in the golden light of summer bathing her family's garden, the sweet scent of cut grass and flowers filling her nostrils. Her mother's long billowy hair and their synchronized laughter as she pushed her small daughter forward on every swing. Resting her head in her mother's lap under the old tree that sheltered generations of her ancestors in its shade. She was destined to be the heir of it all, tree and garden and vast house until her own child would inherit in turn. She would be more a guardian than an owner, guarding the beauty and sanctity of their land, wisely nurturing what Nature started.

She was taller and sitting on the grass under another tree whose leaves were reddening in the unhurried slide between summer's splendor and autumn's graceful melancholy. Other boys and girls of her age were sitting alongside and she half-listened to their conversations as she studied the intricacies of open-cycle ecosystems with their dazingly complex arrays of feedback loops. They were on their fourth Academy year – next they would graduate as junior citizens. The conversations ran across the typical subjects that mattered to young men and women this age: studies and gossip and romance and definitive ideas on how the world should turn. Shadows were massing on the horizon with the Breeder's seemingly unextinguishable desire to multiply out of their lands' ability to sustain. Every year more and more of them were streaming across the great border forest, challenging the Purity Corps' overstretched patrols, illegally logging and planting and digging for precious ores with no concern for the damage they were causing to the ecosystem. Anytime a band of them were arrested and deported back the same words came out as excuses: but we have mouths to feed and you don't! We fulfill the All-Mother's command, unlike you, our many children proof of our commitment! Why don't you partake in the great celebration of fertility? Why don't you share?

Myrella hoped they would all see reason. They were human and shared a same planet after all. They even had a common origin, albeit near-lost in the dawn of History. Surely despite their different paths they could live out their differences peacefully? Some Breeders did live among them and earned good money as workers, servants, aides, nannies – Breeders knew something about caring for children, didn't they?

The dream jumped forward. She was lying on her back, eyes closed, blonde hair splayed like a golden halo and arms wrapped around Jinners's strong shoulders. They were making love as they'd been doing so ever since graduation or so it seemed to her; days and nights passing through a daze of sex and celebration. Nor were they alone in doing so. Ever since effective birth control was invented by their scientists, Eurondans had lost the need for strict sexual controls. Morality simply evolved to follow technology – even if their planetary neighbors had something else to say about it. Voluntary sterility was akin to blasphemy in their eyes. But this wasn't Myrella's problem. The Breeders could scream and moan if they wanted just like she did in the throes of passion, she was young and beautiful and carefree in the knowledge that her youth and beauty might last the following century.

She was losing herself in Jinners blue eyes, their shade a mirror of her own when the siren went up. They rose up from the bed, startled. The lights suddenly went down. Oblivious of their nakedness they ran to the window. There was no light outside and the neighboring building were mere shadows. Rolling thunder echoed through the street but the sky was clear. Bright lights streaked up over the skyline and Myrella understood. Interceptors were taking off! War? It was preposterous! Those small clashes at the border couldn't mean war, it was just Purity Corps patrols driving off crossing bands, nothing else! And hardly anyone was killed, the Corps was using non-lethal weaponry after all! All that inflammatory rhetoric in the Breeder street was just that, hot air spouted by excited minds. Their All-Mother was supposedly all-loving, wasn't she?

Their slates beeped at the same time and they turned away from the window. They read the overriding notification sent on the emergency broadcast system and let go a breath of relief. An exercise, it was just an exercise. The lights would turn back on momentarily. Later, Myrella found her concerns vanishing under her lover's touch and relegated to an oblivious recess of her mind.

The happy times were over. The next stretch of her brain's memory rebooting cycle came up with a bang.

"Watch out!" Jinners' warning came over the com with late usefulness. She was already rolling sideways behind a still-standing wall as the explosion's shockwave washed over the avenue, blowing dust and leaves and matter where she'd previously crouched. A roar from above and another shockwave from the enemy assault flyer's supersonic passage, having dropped the bomb that was intended to dislodge her small fireteam from their vacated position. But they were on the move before it hit, the exoframe sensors warning of incoming.

A shower of debris thrown by the blast hit the ground around her. Then she heard the screams again. Their enemy was preparing a new rush forward. She threw her rifle arm above the edge, servos bracing in anticipation of the large-bore weapon's recoil. The sight repeater showed her the avenue ahead, broken pavement, charred ornamental trees, shattered glass from empty windows, every one of those possibly hiding an enemy soldier – movement! It came as a blur, a missile from one of their single-use launchers streaking in and bursting forty meters away into a black cloud of multispectral smoke, obscuring the entire width of the thoroughfare. It was a new tactic of theirs, Myrella reflected with fatalistic disappointment. The Eurondan exoframes's primary thrower could lay down long-range automatic fire but it didn't matter when your enemy was spotted at the last moment. The Breeders had suffered staggering losses in men and vehicles as they crossed the border forests where the exoframes' superior agility easily prevailed, until they'd simply laid down massive amounts of thermobaric ordnance to flatten clear lanes through the natural obstacle. Fighting across hills and plains then allowed their mobile fortresses and accompanying infantry to progress unhindered – there were simply too many of them along hundreds of miles front to stop all. Massive air battles happened overhead, raining flaming hulks down on the battlefield to add their funeral pyres to the already destroyed armor. Where the Eurondans had technological superiority, the Breeders had superior numbers and industry – the very industry they'd built up with no concern for sustainable exploitation of the planet's resources. An apparently endless stream of metal and explosives and people was gradually eating through Eurondan territory and turning the carefully protected and nurtured lands into scorched earth.

The smoke moved. A Breeder Berserker emerged from it, his lightweight power frame moving his legs at the speed of a galloping horse. His bellowed war cry boomed through his suit-mounted speakers.

BLOOD TO FEED THE BIRTHING FIELDS! BONES TO BUILD THE BIRTHING THRONE!

Myrella took a fraction of an instant to confirm the target and her rifle barked. Gone were the days when they'd tried using non-lethal weapon settings. The electromagnetically accelerated superfluid slug smashed into the berserker with the stopping power of a cannonball. His chest harness shattered and fragments penetrated inwards on the heels of the concussive shockwave that liquefied his organs, shredding whatever remained. A wet red cloud erupted behind him before his already dead body flipped backwards onto the ground. Yet he was but a vanguard and his death served to pinpoint the defender's position. Fire poured out of the smoke, a hail of fast-traveling metal that ripped through Myrella's cover. She was already on the move but she felt impacts on her exoframe, transmitted through the neural link. An angry damage readout sprang in her vision, her rifle was shattered by return fire. She'd lost her primary weapons but she heard more shots as she skittered away – her own team was shooting down the smoke at the enemy shooters, a familiar game of fire and counter-fire.

The problem always was, for one Breeder their weapons found and killed, ten more shot back and another ten were pressing in the intervals to flank Eurondan defensive positions.

"Myrella! Fall back! Coordinates!" Their team leader's order translated itself into a new waypoint on her tactical map and she ran-crouched, using the mobility of her exoframe's quadruped stance to sprint out. The ground shook behind her, followed by a pattern of smaller concussions. Cluster bombs on top of the Breeder assault wave! It would slow them down. Air support wasn't useless after all. It was just overwhelmed most of the time. She also knew, from base gossip that their own flyers had experienced heavy losses attacking the Breeder supply corridors. Their mobile construction rigs, hill-sized factories on tracks were easy to spot, but were correspondingly protected by curtains of ground-based and airborne defenses that exacted a heavy toll on attacking squadrons. Automated factories back home were running non-stop to replenish their ranks, but Eurondan industry was not designed for mass production on the scale that it was forced to operate now.

Myrella skidded to a stop in front of an almost intact mansion, though its ornamental flower beds were torn and shredded. Her exoframe jogged up the gravel pathway to the elegant portico of the façade and climbed the short volley of steps to the tall lacquered wood doors. The war machine compacted itself into its indoor configuration and she squeezed through into the tall-ceilinged lobby. She found a majestic bifurcated staircase, quite reminiscent of her childhood home.

"Check upstairs" came the order from her leader, who was entering from the side, unseen but pinpointed on her tac-map. She saw Jinners was doing the same at the back.

"Going upstairs" she acknowledged and bounded up the marble steps, short-range stunner extended on its stalk-like motorized mount. She spotted the spatter of blood half-way the top flight of stairs. A trail was leading back to the upper floor. She followed it into a left-turn into the corridor. It was dark, already dried, marring the beautiful wood flooring. She spared a short glance to the family portraits hanging on the walls. Faces so reminiscent of her own parents, grand-parents, ancestors, the gift of kinship transmitted from generation to generation.

The blood trail went through a half-closed doorway into what ought to be the master bedroom. Myrella made a swift entry, her sensors showing no motion beyond the threshold. She made a visual sweep of the scene inside the room. The blood trail ended at the foot of a large bed. The house mistress was there, propped on her back with a look of horror on her face. The hand on her lap was bloody, as she evidently used it to try and stem the bleeding from the gash in her torso and contain her intestines from pouring out through the tear in her belly and dress, until shock and exhaustion sapped her last strengths. Slick gory ropes were pooling in a grotesque heap in her lap. Flies were buzzing and landing to lay eggs in the wound. Myrella felt certain that it had happened days before at most. The olfactive feed was thankfully filtered through the neural link, but this wasn't her first corpse.

She noticed an open side door. She approached with guarded caution – she spotted the decoration through the opening first. It was the nursery. Either the house mistress had expected, or… She clamped down on the clammy feeling that suddenly froze her blood and peered fully inside. She almost retched, prevented at the last moment by the inhibitors clamping down on her body's reaction. Vomiting inside a command pod wasn't dangerous per se, but it was messy to clean up and always left a lingering smell.

She didn't need a close sensor sweep to know the baby was dead. Not with the blood and brain matter sticking on the wall where the attacker had smashed the infant's head in. Then something shiny laying on top of the tiny corpse attracted her sight. She bent down to retrieve it in a manipulator. Recognizing what it was, she felt blind rage invade her mind. It was a bracelet, neatly left there as a signature. A guest worker's bracelet. The motif was a popular one with Breeder nannies. A nanny who was smiling on that bedstand photograph where she stood alongside the radiant mother holding the baby. Myrella couldn't wrap her mind around this. It was preposterous. Breeder nannies loved children! Hell, all Breeders loved children, it was their culture's primary tenet! How could one be filled with such hate that…? How? What went wrong during all those years, how couldn't she see her planetary neighbors sink into that abyss of hatred? Was it jealousy? Should her people have done more to bridge the chasm between their cultures?

Why? There was something she could never understand, she realized. And whatever could have been done in the past didn't matter now. Not after this. Not after the Breeders themselves died by millions, their own blood no doubt provoking the same kind of reaction she felt herself into the surviving Breeders' hearts. It was total war, a war for survival.

The pod's medical interface recognized her emotional distress and injected a dose of suppressor into her bloodstream. Her mind blanked behind a curtain of cold awareness. She was still able to fight effectively but felt as robotic as the machine she was driving. She backed out of the bedroom and completed her sweep of the floor.

"Clear" she announced mechanically.

"Understood. Regroup in the lobby, we'll –" her leader's sentence didn't finish. There was a flash and a blast and the entire floor collapsed under her in a great fracas. She tumbled and landed sideways and something hit her and her vision briefly cut off, came back, she was pinned by pieces of the fallen walls. She began to try and move and unstick herself. Impacts registered around her. She saw a Breeder soldier enter her field of vision. She stared at him even as he did, then he raised a large-bore gun directly at her.

Flash. A jolt on her nervous system, the whine of the pod cover opening. She staggered out of the pod on weak legs, then collapsed on her knees and finally vomited. She didn't know if it was the gruesome massacre sight or the aftereffects of the neural link. She sensed others approaching.

"You all right, soldier?"

She nodded weakly. "Your exoframe's toast. Telemetry ended right after registering a kinetic impact right on the primary sensory and processing box."

"Give me another one then" she tried to instill a sense of bravado in her answer as hands gently pulled her up.

"No, not right now, you have to rest first, too much link use will fry your brain otherwise! And we can't. Word just came in from HQ, Erlonda Defense Center fell an hour ago." She recognized the commanding voice of her unit's leader. "Breeder columns are already moving to exploit the breach, if we stay here, they'll cut us off eventually. We evacuate this facility in one hour."

"Where, sir?"

"We're pulling back to a new defensive line. Now go get your stuff."

Jinners' face, looking as stunned as she felt. Yes, things didn't exactly go well the past two years, making tactical retreat after tactical retreat with the occasional counter-offensive only delaying the inevitable. There simply were never enough exoframes available to mass in one point to achieve a true breakthrough. The limit wasn't even exoframe production. Not any more at least. Burnt-out operators were. There was a firm limitation on the total time anyone could spent in neural linkage; it varied from individual to individual but sooner or later one exited the control pod feet-first, drooling and brain-dead if they didn't heed the early warnings.

Myrella and her partner had avoided that fate so far, but she knew it was only a matter of time. She was feeling worse and worse every time she unlinked. That and the tremors in her hands when she found herself alone, the nervous tears when Jinners held her in his arms at night.

They were recalled four days ago, their entire exoframe unit back to Euronda center and there they met others like them. In fact, it was as if every still operating unit was pulled back. And they filled the single amphitheater, less than a thousand of them remaining, a shocking realization.

But soon enough it became more shocking when the gravity of the strategic situation was entirely revealed along with their leadership's war-turning plan. It all came down the Breeder's superior numbers. What Euronda needed was a breather, no – they needed the Breeders gone. And Myrella couldn't find herself disagreeing with that, she was too war-weary to remember her youthful belief in the possibility of coexistence.

But as she watched the huge wall screen and the figures it displayed, she had to swallow her incredulous laugh. Or was it the accumulated tension that was threatening to burst out of her throat?

The presenter kept talking. "…we estimate that, in a matter of two weeks a lethal concentration will be achieved globally. Effects on the enemy war effort should then cascade, not only will their troops on our soil die or become severely incapacitated but their own homeland should fast become incapable of sustaining the war. Three months after initial deployment, total casualties should represent ninety percent of their current population, eliminating them as a threat before eliminating them altogether…"

The man in a general uniform continued to speak but Myrella's mind wasn't listening anymore. They were planning to end the war through total genocide. Gambling on the fact that they'd found the perfect killing formula to snuff out unprotected human life without harming the rest of the biosphere. She was having her doubts about that – academic memories, how complex life's interactions were and the laws of unintended consequences – but she told herself to quit fretting. Nothing she could do about it, and her people's best minds must have worked it all out. Hopefully.

Her attention returned to the presentation as a new map appeared on the big screen. "…as you see, our remaining population's regrouping in the survival centers where our new cold stasis technology will keep them alive and healthy with minimal supply consumption. Every center will be protected by a defense field and a squadron of interceptors."

"No exoframes?" someone interrupted.

"Once the Breeders start dying, protection against ground attack will become moot. On the other hand, air attacks should persist for a while as they've introduced their own unmanned fighter variant recently."

The man went on about recovery rates and post-war reconstruction plans and Myrella found herself looking into her mind again. She would be going into a stasis pod along with Jinners, then. Sleeping through the worst days to come and emerging into a reborn world. Well, she supposed she deserved the rest. And the Breeders deserved what was coming for them. What the presentation didn't say but she could deduce was that her leadership must have been planning for this even before the war started. Between the construction of the special chemical plants and huge storage tanks and actually developing the chemical weapon itself… it was a decade's effort in her estimation. In complete secret, for she'd never heard a hint of it before. Why didn't they spend those resources on more exoframes or remote fighters…? She remembered the beginning of the war then. It came as a complete surprise, the day before they were still minimizing the tensions, saying that negotiations were ongoing with the All-Mother's representatives. As if the Eurondan leadership was trying to buy time.

Realization flashed through her mind. The Eurondan leadership was trying to buy time because their culling plan was a long way off. They'd been hoping to stall a shooting war until they could open those valves and gas the Breeders, pare them back to more tolerable numbers maybe rather than outright killing every last of them. It was the only way it made sense.

The Breeders had attacked first, hitting Eurondan cities in surprise attacks, laying waste to entire districts before the defense fields went up and their bombers were shot down. Did they have an inkling of the Eurondan plan? Who knew? She couldn't exactly ask the All-Mother about it, could she?

Maybe it was inevitable, that war. Maybe one of them did have to disappear. Well, it might as well be them, her weary mind concluded.

Returning consciousness threaded itself through Myrella's rebooting brain with the same purposeful slowness as a deep-diving submarine crawling up towards surface light. Sensation returned from her body and limbs, mushy and muffled as her nerves fought to shake off decades of inactivity. She was snug and warm in the womb-like embrace of the translucent stasis gel. Vague sounds reached her ear – more felt vibration rather than audible signal, the subliminal mix of her pod's internal machinery working to raise her up from slumber. Her skin felt prickly down to the tip of her fingers – she remembered her fingers, curled them inside the yielding gel, then did the same with her toes. The rest was still stiff and unresponsive, as if she was coming up from anesthesia – which for all intents and purposes she was.

She inhaled air from the mask snugly enclosing her face. Her lungs inflated for the first time in ages, her chest expanded, she felt the displaced gel push against the surrounding skin. I'm breathing! I'm not dreaming it?

Then she dimly remembered how she'd came to lie in the pod. The war, there was a war; did we finally win the war?

She became aware of something else creeping at the edge of her sensorium, a rumor at the very limit of her audition. The pods were heavily shielded and insulated. Whatever was managing to penetrate the hard shell then the gel had to be loud. A victory celebration?

Thunk. A shock as well as a sound, the pod lid's locking mechanism unlatching. A hiss of equalizing pressure. She still couldn't see anything with the face mask. She blinked nevertheless to try and chase the accumulated sand away.

Motion. Something plunged into the gel, she felt the medium conducting waves of motion – lighter now, the pressure on her skin abating – someone was ripping the gel away, digging her out. She was still too feeble to help, gravity was pulling her down, the gel wasn't supporting her anymore, she felt air on her skin then scratching as hands continued removing the mass of gel – rough hands, nails biting in her epidermis in their haste to free her – she almost fell, the restraints catching her, then she felt more scrabbling and – the noise hit her brain then, a powerful din overloading her atrophied senses. A thrumming bass line was sending quasi-shockwaves in fast sequence, generated by some humongous drums beating in unison. Chanting, loud, frenzied, coming from hundreds of throats.

Myrella's blood congealed. The chanting jolted context out of her deep memory. Those tones, those rhythms… a threnody that was at once monotonous, powerful, haunting and nagging, a melodized mantra. Those were Breeder chants.

The hands reached her limbs, clawed, pulled, she felt the pod's medical lines being ripped out of her arms and legs with no attempt at gentleness. Pain flared, instantly eclipsed by the primal fear that was suddenly knotting Myrella's guts. The restraints were cut open and finally someone ripped her mask out. She pressed her eyelids tightly closed against the sudden blinding light then tried to squeeze them narrowly open, terror overcoming comfort. The hands grabbed her flesh with nothing like a lover's touch – they were hungrily digging her out of the pod and she fell forward, legs unable to support her weight yet.

The hands caught her amidst shouts in the overall clamor, catching her under the armpits, around her ankles, pushing up from below – she was being manhandled on her back on a carpet of hands like some object being passed forward; pinching, scratching, clawing, poking, opportunistic fingers not so accidentally slipping up her intimate parts; she gasped then shouted with hoarse vocal cords, cursing them. She blinked the tears out of her eyes, adjusting to the ambient light – what her long-closed eyes found blinding at first was more like a gloom, lit from unseen angles by reddish flamelight – flamelight?

She could barely make out a distant vaulted ceiling, dark yet evidently covered in vibrant frescoes in the naturalistic Breeder form half-emerging from the shadow; then she was jolted aside again, lowered down with little care, her flesh bumped against cold metal – she turned her head to look aside: a slab of stainless steel and beyond the shiny surface were shapes in the form of people, human shapes and faces, grimacing and shouting at her with hateful expressions. The hands pulled at her limbs again, pulled her wrists and ankles in a spreadeagled posture, contemptuously overpowering her feeble attempts at resisting. She felt the restraints closing around her skin, tightening, locking her in a helpless position. She screamed shapeless words, calls for help that she knew intimately would never be answered.

Then the hands went away, leaving her alone and shivering despite the ambient heat of the vast room.

The focus of the shouting crowd seemed to shift away from her and she tried to raise her head. Her skull felt like weighing a hundred tons, all her neck muscles could do was turn her face sideways. She forced her eyes to focus and dispel the distant blurriness of things. Away to her right sat a cliff-like wall, easily three body lengths in height and nearly a hundred paces in length, she recognized the intricate decorative carvings on the plinth – fertility figures, huge swollen vulvas and engorged penises swirling in surreal dances, male and female figures coupling in a dizzying array of positions – her mind couldn't help noting how some of those looked barely feasible unless one was a trained contortionist. Recessed alcoves interrupted the vertical expanse at regular intervals, holding life-sized statues of heavily gravid women with their faces upturned and bearing an expression of ecstasy pasted on their blank faces of bronze.

She knew there would be a raised dais in the center and indeed there was, the angle barely allowing her to see it. The carved throne whose legs were thick, veiny shafts and feet were corresponding egg-sized pairs of testicles, the infamous Throne of Plenty, so much derided by her Eurondan folks before all went to hell. Lying naked and vulnerable on a slab that appeared far too much like a dissection table with its stainless surface and flow grooves, Myrella was all but finding it funny now.

Sat over the Throne of Plenty, or rather overflowing the expansive chair's frame sat the current Ripe Mother, the All-Mother Incarnate according to the Breeder gospel. The rich embroidered robes covering her ample body must have been enough to make a tent, the Eurondan woman couldn't help noting in the corner of her mind that wasn't blabbering in terror. Fat fingers emerged from the gold-hemmed sleeves, skin the color of bronze, the little of it that was showing under the dazzling array of thick golden rings and gems. The robe covered only half of the Ripe Mother's bosom – the hem was pulled back over her left breast, a pendulous amphora of smooth flesh from which a fat infant was suckling hungrily – infant? No, there were two heads… two heads over one body and the head who wasn't suckling was grimacing at her!

Myrella's mind froze in askance for a second then her mental faculties deduced the correct answer to her wordless interrogation. The toxins… it must be the toxins her own people had pumped the atmosphere full off, planning to destroy the Breeders. The last-ditch Eurondan plan was a failure, the Breeders were still alive and breeding even though their offspring were mutated monsters!

The cold fear redoubled, clawing in her abdomen. Her face reflexively turned the other way. She knew where she was, this was the House of Profligacy, the Breeder parliament-analogue. Facing the dais rose rank upon rank of marble bleachers beyond table-sized brasiers whose light and heat were responsible for the chamber's hellish ambiance. Through the heat-blurred air Myrella saw her people's enemies, a crowd of them in the throes of a mass orgy, malformed bodies cavorting and mixing together in a mass of sweating flesh that physically repulsed her. That wanton lust and lasciviousness had killed their shared world! Didn't they have rules, morals? She couldn't be further apart, she felt, remembering her own values and conduct – she'd given herself to her one lover and never strayed, united in the joy and sanctity of a bond that wasn't to be squandered away.

A shift in the surrounding rumor brought her mind back to the immediate precariousness of her situation and she craned her neck back. The crowd was cracking open a second stasis pod and her heart sank deeper when she read its stenciled number. Before they even opened the lid, she knew Jinners was inside. They'd entered their pods together, having stripped down so that the medical crew may rig their monitoring and intravenous hardware. The last vision both of them had before darkness fell was each other's loving eyes.

She felt the knot in her stomach tighten and a sob shook her core. Tears rolled down her cheeks onto the stainless slab.

"And now the second of the chosen penitents awakes!" The All-Mother's voice boomed across the man-made cavern in a tone of ecstatic fervor. "To atone for their sins and be reborn to the sanctity of Life!"

A wave of sound answered the Ripe Lady's proclamations as hundreds of throats cried back in pleasure and the drums beat in a thunderous crescendo and Jinners' pale body was dug out in the same manner. His eyes rolled left and right wide as he too woke up in hell. Meeting her gaze, his mouth opened right before he was manhandled up, the ugly limbs of the Breeders propping him up as if to expose the contrast between their subhuman reality and his godlike perfection. Myrella caught his expression of shock and rage, saw his strong limbs try and shake their medicated languor away, his instincts those of a fighter foremost – to no avail as the Breeder horde threw him down another stainless-steel table and fastened thick restraints onto him.

"Behold! The male and the female penitents, ready to atone for their crimes against the All-Mother and against you, my beloved people! Look at their prideful forms laying before you, perfect in the All-Mother's image, yet hiding but sin and sterile malefice! Look at them and look at you, my people! Is it not fair that they pay you back?"

Another answering roar sent a pulse of hatred and hunger through the very air. The orgy was coming to a pause – Myrella felt a chill despite the ambient heat. She was the next piece of this grotesque show, she knew it. Denial was not a thing she could afford anymore.

"Breeder abomination!"

Jinners' outburst made her heart falter. He followed with a string of the strongest insults in the Eurondan language. The All-Mother incarnate heavy laugh answered him. Not even a mocking laugh, that was the worst to Myrella's ear – she sounded like a mother discovering her youngest child's latest mischief. Like it didn't matter in the grand scheme of things.

"Such words are blasphemy, my child! Oh, who first should I blame, but you own misleading elders? For you were not the first of your people to stray from the just path of the All-Mother! Yet those words are but the last addition to your own personal list of sins, grave sins, mortal sins. You will atone for yourself and through yourself for your kind, child – and through your penance will your substance be transcended into the People's light!"

At a subtle wave of her bejeweled fingers two men detached from the Breeder crowd. One was squat, leaning on a leg that was shorter than the other and a face whose left eyelids were forever closed over an empty socket. The other was taller but stooped and bald – his ornate clothing couldn't let Myrella see what his deformity was, if he had such – but worse was the look of intelligent malice in his eyes and the leather aprons both wore.

Squat raised a toolbox, took out several instruments as Jinners' slab was rotated in a more upright position. Strong assisting hands caught the Eurondan's head in a vise and forced his jaw open. Squat thrust a pair of metal pliers into his mouth and pulled the tongue out. Eyes produced an injector – Myrella recognized the markings for Beta-cantin, the miracle drug that could almost stave off deathly injuries – and shot up a strong dose right in Jinners' biceps.

"This will keep you alive and awake through it all, child" he said with a voice devoid of any warmth, only cold sadistic mirth. "Your kind's very best medicine for you – alas, it didn't do anything to counter the damage your poison wreaked on our unborn children. But we endured through our own will and determination to live" he stage-whispered to his patient's ear, loud enough that Myrella easily caught his words. "Of course, your own determination will change nothing to your fate now."

The Eurondan captive tried to shake his head free, unable to speak in return, unable to pull much as his tongue was stretched to the painful maximum. He couldn't scream properly when Eyes cut his flesh with deft scalpel motions and Squat raised the gory trophy up to a round of delirious shouting. Myrella could and she did in pure horror, watching her lover spit out thick blood with an expression of pure agony. Yet even now Beta-cantin was working its medical miracle, accelerating clotting and tissue scarring in his martyrized mouth.

The metal slab was rotated back to the horizontal and Eyes almost lovingly traced his victim's smooth muscle lines with gloved fingers.

"And now it's time to start on your actual penance."

The scalpel cut through the skin of Jinners' right shoulder as a prelude to the dismembering and even as Eyes dug into flesh beyond, separating fat and muscle with expert precision, Myrella's eyes widened again when a singular Breeder was escorted down from the bleachers to stand in front of her captive form, stripped, exposing a monstrous abortive third arm, a stump really protruding from his side. The Breeder's smile was ecstatic and vindictive both as the Ripe Lady spoke to him. A faithful servant of the People, he was to plant his seed inside the perfect female specimen so that she would carry his offspring, the first of a long series.

Nebo Momko climbed onto the slab between the Eurondan woman's splayed legs, his mouth reciting thanks and blessings to the All-Mother as his eyes drank in the otherworldly beauty laying open for him.

Myrella desperately screamed again as the subhuman entered her and Jinners' left arm, butchered into assorted pieces went to sizzle over the brasier for the nourishment of the Breeder assembly.

Unknown to her, up in a dark corner of the vaulted ceiling, immobile behind an aeration grid, a biomechanical spider watched with artificial compound eyes and relayed its sight to an orbiting starship.

Those living beings watching the spider's feed inside Valkyrie's ready room weren't of the sort to cringe at the thought of raping another human being. As Citizens of the Domination of the Draka, raping defeated enemies was a notion firmly entrenched in the realm of normalcy and properness. On the other hand, eating them was a novelty. Eating parts of them while they were still very much alive, conscious and watching their erstwhile body parts roasting on a fire then disappearing in hungry and appreciative gullets was the kind of refinement that early Drakia colonists would have found repulsive to the extreme – they didn't exactly allow the defeated cannibal tribes of Africa to keep those particular customs, for that matter. As such, ritual cannibalism didn't become one of the Domination's quirks to be shunned by the rest of the civilized world, not that it needed to. Rape, torture, slavery and mass executions were more than enough.

At the moment Jinners' arm was parted from his torso and laid on a butcher's slab to be cut in edible pieces, Gwendolyn Ingolfsson's eyebrow rose up but she kept watching in silence, keeping her commentary for later. They still weren't sure precisely how to deal with the planet's inhabitants or whose fault exactly it was that the biosphere was dead – those people overexploiting it to destruction or those people unleashing industrial poisons as a last-chance war winner. Archona was waiting for more data to decide whether to finish off those ferals or else.

But the scene unfolding in real time was pushing the balance a bit towards the "let's finish them off" outcome in Gwen's mind. The sight of a misshapen subhuman, pustulous dark skin peeking out from under an apron made of human skin, brandishing a rare-cooked rib like a trophy even as the victim's heart was till beating in plain view, stripped of the protection of those ribs now grilling over a brasier, made her finger twitch over an imaginary trigger.

By the time the male captive was reduced to a still-alive but very diminished torso, ribcage gone, heart beating feebly among barely stirring lungs and glistening entrails, the female one was down to her tenth grotesque suitor and her erstwhile screams were down to whimpers. The tears were still flowing at a reduced rate from eyes glazed over by shock, anguish and pain but the woman was still beautiful with Nordic features the Eugenics Board wouldn't find anything to quibble about.

The eaters were starting to feast on liver when she was lifted from her slab, unresisting after her ordeal. What she, and her unknown onlookers had mistakenly taken as mere statues in the plinth's alcoves were actually receptacles and she was lowered into one of them. A pair of medical attendants of sorts connected various catheters into her limbs, attached a receptacle onto her crotch and inserted a feeding tube into her mouth. Restraints then secured her inside the coffin-like contraption, then the top half swung on hinges to shut it close and seal her inside like a medieval heretic inside an iron maiden. The whole apparatus was then hauled back into its alcove and reconnected to the support sockets. Evidently the impregnated captive was to stay recluse as her tormentors' offspring grew inside her womb. A live breeding tank.

Two hours later the barbaric celebration was winding down, its participants fed, filled and drained depending on their gender, the unwilling expectant mother locked up behind a bronze shroud, her erstwhile lover reduced to charred discarded bones and a skull split open to leave nothing of the fatty nourishment within; the brasiers themselves were turning into reddish embers and the Ripe Lady asleep along with a lazily suckling infant still clinging to her ample bosom.

The video of the Breeder celebration was carried away to Archona through the subspace relay network along with a written update on the situation, including Captain Ingolfsson's suggested course of action.

The techs down on the surface were still busy examining the working stasis pods in the bunker complex, measuring their power draw and crosschecking those markings most likely to be voltage, current and frequency equivalents on other laying pieces of hardware. The suspected data storage device, on the other hand, seemed to have its own power supply since they'd found an on/off switch and activated it, resulting in the crystals lighting up but nothing else.

A shuttle came up from the surface carrying the latest batch of newcomers from Earth. A special one, it seemed, for Ingolfsson was told very unambiguously to meet their needs and heed their requests… and she understood why as she met them in the corridor leading to the special room they were to use. All four of them wore State Security insignia. Two of them were bodyguards, wearing light armor and carrying carbine and plasma pistol. They were escorting the other two, who wore the unadorned black uniform, devoid of any other identifying unit or specialty badge – which was in itself a clue that they likely belonged to the Headhunter's most confidential circles. They didn't even offer a name as Ingolfsson greeted them with the traditional Citizen salute, their whole expression, posture and stance radiating the strongest we're in charge here, cross us and we'll break you, no matter who you are or what grade you wear institutional aura.

Spooks, in other words. And as grating as their presence might be, Gwen knew even her name and family connections wouldn't protect her if she found herself in State Security's crosshairs. So, she smiled amiably in response and palmed the secure control panel near the hatch. The hatch door slid open to reveal a short corridor, or airlock and she led the quatuor inside. The outer panel slid close and the inner one opened on a blank square room. Its walls were seamless, there wasn't even an air conditioning vent – a low table stood in a corner, carrying a passive air quality sensor, oxygen candles and chemical CO2 scrubbers. There was no active life support machinery that might conceal miniaturized recording hardware. There was no outside power connection – nor did any network socket grace the room. Once the inner door was shut, the secure room was effectively cut off from the rest of the ship, save the deliberately primitive interphone with its old-school telephone handle and manually-operated power crank. The walls, floor and ceiling were shielded with overlapping layers of superconducting mesh. Nothing electronic could go in or out.

The pair of StateSec operatives examined the room while their bodyguards took position near the entrance, waving portable detectors along every surface of the room, meticulously inspecting the life support consumables. Gwen knew better than commenting on their professional paranoia, instead quietly waited until they were satisfied, feeling the weight of the bodyguards' stares on her back – she knew they wouldn't hesitate to shoot her, captain or not if they deemed her a security risk.

"Clear" one of the Headhunters announced laconically, and she felt herself relaxing, almost embarrassingly – she was Drakensis, keeping cool under pressure was a built-in characteristic, yet she admitted to herself that those two managed to spook her.

Then she caught the man's pointed stare. Oh no, no way they're evicting me from my own fucking ship.

"I'm the captain of this ship and I have Zebra-Gold security clearance" she told them tartly. The I'm being accommodating enough, so stop your bullshit subtext she left unsaid, knowing they'd catch it.

The man appeared on the verge of snapping at her, but his colleague put a hand up. "Fine" he said "then I don't need to tell you how anything you see here… and no questions." Gwen nodded back her understanding. Merely being allowed to stay while they did whatever they did was a victory already.

They took the plastic folding table laying against a wall and unfolded it in the middle of the room, then opened the hardened carrying case they'd brought along as Gwendolyn extracted the found indigenous data device from its protective casing, delicately put it on the table and turned it on. Taking a step back, she let them put their own addition to the work space. It was a box… a computer-looking one, except it was no design that she could recognize. Indeed, the markings on it were no alphabet she knew, meaning the thing was neither Terran, Tollan nor Goa'uld.

The senior operative – the one who'd allowed her to stay – toggled what must be the box's power switch and it turned on with a soft electronic whine. A volumetric holo-display sprang above it, projected from a complex lensing array. The interface was completely alien in design. An input slate extruded itself from the box, matter flowing out like liquid metal before it solidified into a keyboard analogue.

She continued watching as the two men plugged a data cable from the alien computer to the locally-retrieved alien device, or rather brought the end of it near what must be a data port. She looked in fascination as the alien cable… morphed, evidently scanning the data port and reconfiguring itself to match those connections, before the operative physically plugged it in.

A series of inputs followed on the keyboard and the display morphed into… something else, abstract data representations, Gwendolyn instinctively figured, knowing her curiosity would receive no explicit answer from these people. Instead, she watched them interact with that unknown technology, deducing from the shifting figures and shapes that somehow, that alien compset was accessing the data stored in those crystals and trying to make sense of it.

She couldn't know that the thing was a state-of-the-art Hebridean computer loaded with the best e-war, decryption and data analysis programs a certain officially-dead Draka soldier had smuggled out to the Domination, that ghost Draka's very existence being a State secret.

"…so according to the data structure, it contains pretty much their entire civilization's knowledge. Language, history, science, technology, culture, everything. It's huge. Exploiting the whole database will undoubtedly take a while even now that we can begin to translate it. In the short term, its language files provide us with a base template we can plug in our translators. A rough base, I should add, since lacking much of the context for high-order concepts."

Eric von Shrakenberg nodded. "How useful would a live speaker be to fill in that context?"

Strategos Anya Rosenberg, whose Security Directorate agents had extracted the Eurondan data, inwardly made a face. The Archon's question was of course a rhetorical one and simply raising it, thus bringing up the subject of that Eurondan woman who was already conveniently out of her stasis pod, was enough to set the sequence of events that would best serve that shrewd politician's plans. And she had more than an inkling of what he intended to do with those bodies sleeping in cold stasis.

Worse, she could even understand his side despite counting herself as a Militant sympathizer as many in the SD were wont to do. Militants whose leader's mixed performance in her mission of pacifying the Australasian territories somehow tempered the radical zeal. Making a desert and calling it peace was easy. Getting killed by the last organized bushmen as they sacrificed themselves and countless other ferals detonating a buried tactical nuke just to kill one Louise Gayner and nothing else of military significance… well, on one hand it made her a martyr of the Pacification, on the other, it quite underlined how heavy-handed she'd acted to warrant such hatred. Not that Draka expected to be loved, but still.

"Very useful." Rosenberg breathed out. "Provided she's not gone irretrievably nuts already." But even as she said it, she knew it was a rather weak argument. They could easily summon the Domination's best alienists in addition to the medical staff onboard Valkyrie.

Gwendolyn Ingolfsson took it as a cue to provide her opinion. "Plus having a live one showing us how to crack open those stasis pods would save a lot of time and effort. The sooner we're done here, the sooner I can resume Valkyrie's primary mission."

"Agreed then" Shrakenberg opined, his features almost fuzzy in the low-definition subspace teleconferencing feed. "Captain Ingolfsson, retrieve that woman and any other of her kind still alive down in that butcher house. Out."

The feed cut off without as much as a personal word – the Archon might be her great-uncle, but he wouldn't show anything in an official context, not with a SD officer in the loop. But the fact that he intervened in person made it clear that the fate of this planet's denizens was something he would have the final say on. As it should be, Gwendolyn thought. She'd always liked the old man and didn't find a fault in the way he'd steered the victorious Domination after the Final War.

And now that she had her orders as the highest ranked officer in the theater, it was time to put those into actions.

Four hours of planning and preparation later two assault-configured shuttles left the cruiser's void hangar, escorted by a full dozen Starlings in vanguard formation. They carried not only a full tetrarchy of Citizen troops under Senior Decurion Raeder's lead, but also two complete platoons of Ghouloons woken up from stasis specially for this operation, almost fifty of them. This wasn't a stealth run. All wore hard assault armor and a mix of heavy close-quarter and open-field weaponry. Their goal was to smash their way inside Target Blue – that big building holding the cannibal party while the Ghouloons deployed around in a protective formation to repulse any surface counter-attack.

On the interior side of the assault, two main objectives were identified and located thanks to the diligent roaches: the main festivity hall and a side room where a dozen more stasis pods were stored.

The shuttles dropped out of space over the Breeder home region in the darkest night. Those ferals' massive electrodetector arrays had quite sophisticated waveforms according to the shuttles' e-war systems, but they were looking in the wrong direction to catch something stealthy coming in directly from above and there was no warning before the pair of aerospace crafts braked in a whine of turbines over the massive construction and came to a hover right where they were supposed to. A rear hatch opened and drop lines fell away to the ground. One after another bulky Ghouloon shapes slid down as their transport circled the defensive perimeter. In the center, the shuttle carrying Raeder's soldiers touched down, gatling cannons out and shifting in their quest for a target to annihilate. Battle-armored Drakensis erupted out of the hull and leapfrogged towards the blank side wall that was their initial point of entry. Breaching charges detonated seconds later, cutting out three separate holes in the concrete wall, then portable field generators activated even before the smoke could clear. Over each hole an atmosphere containment force field shimmered out, close analogues to the containments fields that were used in starships to keep air in hangars exposed to the void. They prevented the toxic outside air from seeping into the Breeder parliament, but things far more immediately lethal were already coming in.

The Draka force poured inside the outer corridor, following the path laid out on their tactical map and augmented vision. The first Breeder, badly shaken by the concussion appeared seconds later, investigating what was this all about. His torch fell to the ground as fragmenting bullets turned his brain and heart into mush. Monica Raeder emerged into the entrance hall – the outer gates were sealed shut, but a battery of lifts at the back were leading to the subterranean levels. Shots rang again as Breeder personnel appeared out of side rooms. Whether armed or not, they were cut down by short and accurate bursts.

One squad remained in the hall while the other two continued toward their objectives. Powerful arms wrestled open lift doors and small breaching charges cut down holes in the floor of the lift cages, then heavier explosive satchels dropped down the darkened pits. Seconds later powerful concussions shook the ground. Nobody would be coming up those shafts soon, but just in case proximity mines were stuck to the shaft walls, invisible laser beams waiting to catch any feral trying to climb up.

Inside the feast hall most were still happily snoring away, digesting the delicious food and metabolizing the accompanying ethanol, for what was a feast without the local civilization's booze? Only a handful were stirring, either because of dawn's proximity or because their misshapen physiology carried peculiar nagging aches that conspired to wake them early. Yet their mind was too groggy still to process weirdly-clad people bursting in from the side entrances and opening up on the sleeping piles of flesh. Heavy-gauge automatic shotguns banged deafeningly in the hall's confines. Angry clouds of tungsten pellets whipped through the air and buried themselves inside Breeder bodies, tearing open flesh and shattering bones. Then the first screams rose up, but all the help they did was marking targets for the next shots.

The Ripe Lady, avatar of the All-Mother woke up with a start, her heavily made-up eyes snapping wide open. In the dim light she glimpsed the sudden carnage tearing through her flock and she opened her mouth to scream, only blood erupted from between her lips as a pistol bullet shot through the base of her skull. Behind her, the Draka soldier pulled the trigger a second time just to be sure, splattering the Ripe Lady's brain down her robes. The sleeping infant woke up and shrieked. The soldier hesitated a fraction of a second, then took a good stare at the baby's deformity. The shot that ensued and silenced the shriek was, in his mind, a mercy rather than a punishment. Then he forgot about it as he killed the priests stumbling forward, hate filling their eyes as they glimpsed the ultimate blasphemy happening in front of them.

Two minutes after the assault team barged into the chamber every Breeder was dead or going through the process of dying as half the soldiers went through the rafters and put mercy bullets into heads whenever these appeared to be still intact, ignoring the mess of gore and the rivulets of blood streaming down the steps.

The other half controlled the entrances and approaches, quickly mining those they wouldn't be using to egress. In case they needed to deviate from the plan, the mines were smart enough to recognize friend from foe – reliably enough, if not, well that's why they wore hard armor.

The other team was off to their own target, shots marking their progress through the building. The storage room was located on a lower level and they found the stasis pods where they were supposed to be. Ten of them were still unopened, with their status indicators confirming they contained live Eurondans. With the entrance hall secure, soldiers from the first squad joined them to move the sarcophagus-sized devices out. As heavy as they were, two Drakensis wearing strength-assisting armor could carry one easily enough. Navigating the corridors and corners with the cumbersome things was the real challenge – one that breaching charges blowing convenient shortcuts considerably alleviated, at that.

Ten minutes from the initial breach through the outer wall and the first pod reached the entrance hall. Shortly after that, a flurry of actinic flashes lit up the front gates from outside: the ghouloons were engaging a hastily-assembled Breeder reaction force on the surface. Raeder glanced at the tactical map. The Breeders were coming through one of the avenues separating dilapidated and abandoned buildings and a drone was already homing to the area they'd appeared from to pinpoint whatever hole in the ground let them out of the subterranean galleries. They ran from cover to cover after initial plasma rifle shots blew apart their vanguard, trading potshots in the blocking ghouloons' direction, but those were either behind hard cover or snug in foxholes hastily dug by entrenchment charges.

The orbiting shuttle opened up with gatling cannons and stitched a line of craters through the Breeder formation, forcing them to take cover in the neighboring buildings – then a salvo of missiles streaked in, leaving smoke trails in the air. Blasts ripped through the still-standing ruins, collapsing walls and floors onto the Breeder militias.

Two minutes later as the dust was settling from those explosions, the orbiting drone found the tunnel exit in the backyard of a derelict apartment block – a hive-like project which nevertheless used to home hundreds of upper-class Breeder families before the cataclysm. Whatever splendor it might have exhibited in those past times was long gone now, decades of neglect and exposure crumbling plaster statues to dust and turning bright frescoes into dull stains.

Breeder militias were still pouring out of the concrete block topping the exit shaft. To the Draka fire-control operator watching through Valkyrie's high-powered optics, they appeared as so many black ants and he felt the same level of concern about crushing those under his feet.

A single low-power plasma round left one of the cruiser's front-facing heavy cannons, so fast it was a blur against the planetary background. An instant later the field-encased superdense ball of plasma impacted right on top of the reinforced exit. Sheer kinetic energy smashed the concrete box into vaporized dust along with its immediate surroundings, its shockwave forcing the ground into momentarily behaving like a fluid. Soil matter shifted and flowed away in microseconds and a crater appeared where the Breeder construction once stood, its surface glowing with molten matter. Even as the kinetic effects reshaped the area, the formidable thermal energy contained in the shot's plasma components unleashed itself from the banished containment field. Air ignited into an expanding fireball and atmospheric shockwave and the inward-facing walls of the housing block caved away, projecting flying debris in a large radius. The fireball expanded until it lost its fiery substance to unleash a scalding mini-hurricane, abating as it wasted its energy outwards. When it reached the ghouloon line a kilometer away it blew over like a burning gust of the desert wind that the armored beasts shrugged away. Their limited minds did not even pause to contemplate how that burst of displaced air carried the disembodied molecules that mere seconds before were living Breeder men and women.

No other ground counter-attack came during the time it took the Draka assault force to stack the stasis pods into the landed shuttle while the "maternity statues" were cracked open and several Eurondan women in various stages of forced pregnancy extracted, sedated and carried away on foldable biocontainment stretchers. Inside the building, belatedly activated security measures attempted to hinder the Draka force. Emergency force fields blocked corridors and intersections – only for the soldiers to make use of their liberal supply of breaching charges, blowing holes in walls to circumvent the obstacles and cut off power lines. Security turrets dropped down from ceilings, but their ancient, long-dead designers never intended them for more than riot control and their light particle slugs didn't do more than superficially pit hard armor before return fire blew them apart.

Yet the remaining Breeder leadership was reacting to the sudden attack. They knew their supreme religious guide was dead, butchered by those faceless invaders but who were those? A Eurondan remnant, it had to be. There was no other likely hypothesis, not in their worldview – how could they have expected people from outer space attacking them to liberate their Eurondan captives?

Deep inside subterranean fortress-barracks technicians and former warriors were hastily called back from "civilian" life, something they'd never expected to happen after the last known Eurondan stronghold fell. There was no time to assemble even a shadow of the War Era army, that colossal steamroller of men and armor, even had many of the land fortresses not been already dismantled and recycled. Yet inside one of those that were kept as monuments to victory and maintained in fighting condition fanatic crewmen flipped switches and power relays, read through procedural checklists, counted ready ammunition and warmed up structural reinforcement field generators, their minds focused on hate and vengeance.

Elsewhere in scattered subsurface hangars pilots ran, crawled or were carried to their attack flyers as technicians closed down inspection and refueling hatches. The whine and ozone scent of magneto-hydrodynamic turbines rose up in the cavernous chamber while automated conveyor belts carried the fighters towards launch rails and meter-thick armored doors opened to the outside. It was a ragged, improvised response, hardly a concerted and planned effort, but Breeder society hadn't yet entirely forgotten its war-footing reflexes.

The Draka rearguard was sweeping through the Capitol building's smoking shell, gathering anything of apparent value with a priority towards anything looking like computer hardware and data storage on their way towards the entrance hall's blown open gates, all worry about toxic gas infiltration gone now that their rescue targets were safely out. At the same time, their ghouloon auxiliaries' perimeter was contracting back towards the front plaza where the first shuttle was ramping up its engines. Decurion Raeder was last out of the shattered gates as befit a Draka unit commander when the warning came up on the tactical net.

Several city mega-blocks away, tremors shook an ancient overpass and dust fell away on top of the machine that crawled up the underlying ramp. Its size made its forward progress appear stately yet it was moving forward at the speed of a galloping horse onto twin sets of massive tracks – owing to a long past lineage starting at giant mobile excavators sized to feed on mountains. It was a boxy thing, a building on tracks – slab armored sides peppered with gunports and sensors, high up the forward inclined glacis stood a pillbox-like recessed operating deck behind thick armored slits from which its crew had a commanding view of the terrain forward between the long tubes of its primary direct-fire armament. A long time ago, the titan was covered in camouflage paint – but as the war progressed to an irresistible Breeder victory the camouflage was eschewed in favor of a garish blood-red coat in contempt of its vanquished enemies. It shone bright in dawn's orange light, a fiery symbol of Breeder pride and might coming to exact vengeance on those who dared defile their most sacred sanctuary.

It couldn't see them directly yet, but it knew where they were and armored plates swiveled away on its roof. The snouts of large bore automatic mortars poked out, adjusted aim then fired with loud WHUMP sounds. Fat mortar shells rose up in Euronda's atmosphere on a ballistic trajectory that would bring them to burst over the plaza where the Draka shuttle was preparing to lift off, its rear loading ramp retracting. The projectiles were instantaneously detected and tracked by the sensors overseeing the battlefield – the Starlings orbiting at medium altitude above and the cruiser several thousand kilometers high. Valkyrie's integrated tactical datamesh analyzed the threat and allocated counters in a fraction of a second.

Spears of pulsed coherent light stabbed down from point-defense emitters located on the ship's forward hammerhead, each beam focused on one of the still-rising shells. Their presence was only betrayed by a blur in the atmosphere – right until the targeted shells exploded, their thin walls instantly shattered by the combination of pulse shock and heating.

A second was all it took for the ten-shell salvo to turn into light and heat.

Inside the titan's command deck the Breeder crew were momentarily stunned as the machine's sensors uploaded the source of the incoming fire into their minds. Yet they didn't pause to reflect on the why and how, too driven by fanatic resolve and combat lust. The response was immediate.

The mortars retracted into their recesses even as another, long and narrow armored panel slid aside and the land fortress' primary anti-flyer armament swiveled out. Never had its departed designers expected it to fire at a target in space… such a thing was barely imagined. Yet the high-cyclic rate coilgun was capable of high elevation and it technically could fire its fist-sized ceramic-coated tungsten slugs at escape velocity – it just was never found useful during the War. Standard velocity was enough to shoot down the Eurondan flyers that tried to attack the Breeder war machines or their logistic tail. Yet all it took to switch was a mental command from the titan's commander. Shoot that thing out there was all the land fortress' cybernetic brain needed to increase the power going to the superconducting magnetic coils.

Thunderclaps ripped through the ruined megalopolis as the metal storm tore apart the atmosphere in their hypersonic race upwards, frictional heat igniting the very air, turning it into a pillar of fire with the titan as its base.

The slugs rose out of the atmosphere, a brightly shining string of beads reaching for the cruiser's prow and the titan's crew watched their progress with teeth bared. Had the slugs been allowed to impact Valkyrie's hull they would have gouged shallow craters in the hexagonal armor plates that covered its snout, cosmetic damage really. Instead, they impacted the shield bubble a long way out from the actual hull and the Goa'uld-derived force field locally flared a golden irised sheen, blinks of light in the void. The resulting shield coherence drop was too negligible to be called out by the tactical officer on the bridge and he focused on his answer instead, contemptuously eschewing the use of Valkyrie's principal weaponry for so piddling a threat at her majestic star-faring scale.

The forward-facing point-defense emitters lit up again on continuous setting, their combined output focused onto the offending crawler, tracking it as it moved between the city blocks. The land fortress' armored plating was strong and it was augmented by a structural reinforcement field – the Breeder answer to the Eurondan's nominally superior energy shield technology. The energy imparted by the cruiser's laser wouldn't punch through – but this energy still had to go somewhere. The top plating began to glow as the lasers' energy transferred into material heating and the very structure of the giant fighting machine carried the heat throughout its interior spaces. The command deck's air conditioning labored to counter the sudden warming before the load overcame its rating and ambient air rose to oven temperature, the floor itself burning through the crewmen's soles in seconds. They ripped their control crowns and unlatched their restraints, air burning through their lungs, ran screaming through the machine's accessway in a desperate race to escape. A hatch opened at the rear of the stopped land fortress, barely visible through a wall of blurry superheated air. The human-shaped figures that stumbled out were on fire and managed to take mere steps onto concrete that was turning to glass before collapsing into carbonized heaps.

Seconds later the inferno overcame the titan's ammunition storage failsafes and the building-sized machine disappeared in a massive explosion that flattened the nearby ruins.

The first shuttle pulled itself from the planet's surface, sustentation turbines screaming to supplement the grav-buoyancy engine. Inside the cockpit the pilot released a breath of relief – had that local anti-air gun waited just seconds later when he was airborne… the fire that was shrugged off by the cruiser's spaceship-scale shield would have shattered his shuttle's lightly-armored hull and its navigational shield wouldn't have offered more resistance than the proverbial wet tissue paper, being intended to protect the craft's skin from extreme aerodynamic pressure and friction during fast reentry phases rather than combat.

"Vulture One, Overwatch – be advised multiple power sources coming up across op-area, probable surface weapon emplacements, transmitting new egress route."

"Copy Overwatch" the pilot answered the air coordination controller's cool voice. On cue, his flight displays shifted and a new course appeared before his eyes, materialized by glowing square hoops hovering in the air. The updated flightpath would have him skim the ruined city's roofs at high speed to minimize exposure to those putative defenses while the rest of the team took care of them. He focused on the controls, distantly hearing the loadmaster warning their passengers about a lively flight ahead. Good thing everyone was strapped in and every box was secured.

The pilot's right hand pushed the throttle midway forward, staying far behind the orbital detent and the combined-cycle engines flared to life. Acceleration pushed him back into his flight couch and the speed readout digits frantically scrolled up. Twenty seconds later the blunt nose of the shuttle pushed through the sound barrier, the shockwave shattering roof tops and toppling walls in its wake. Then it abruptly turned into a steep bank to avoid a stream of coilgun slugs whipping the air a mere kilometer forward – aiming at something else but dangerous nonetheless. The sturdy mil-spec frame groaned and the inertial compensators whined under the pressure, keeping its riders in the "very uncomfortable, might vomit later" zone rather than the "hehe you just blacked out" one, and the loadmaster merely sweating as he watched the webbing over the recovered boxes visibly strain under the load rather than snap. A few groans and whoops came up from the soldiers, the sedated Eurondan women strapped in gurneys were mercifully not feeling anything. As soon as the shuttle settled on its new vector, he swapped through all the camera readouts, checking that everything was still where it belonged and sighed in relief. All good, if you didn't count the widening puddle of fluid in the gurney that carried the most advanced pregnancy. The loadmaster sniggered. Yeah, a fifteen-gee turn was a good reason to break waters. Anyway, that would be a concern for the medical staff up there. He very much suspected that delivering that offspring alive and well didn't rate high on their list of priorities.

As Vulture One carried on its nap-of-the-earth egress Vulture Two did a not-too-gentle landing on the plaza, ramp already open and the Ghouloons began to reembark. The rear guard was coming under fire – the rat nest was spilling out some more suicidal bushmen, apparently. The shuttle's gatlings swiveled on driving motors accurate enough to target a golf ball a dozen kilometers away and two streams of fire lanced over the retreating ghouloons. Distant walls shattered under the impact of hundreds of forty-mil combined-effect shells impacting every second, a fog of concrete dust rising and expanding with occasional bursts of red.

A handful of return projectiles plinked on the tough hull – not a concern, being infantry-scale stuff, but the pilot held her breath in, gut tightening despite her exterior cool. If one of those heavier local guns got a bead on her rides… well, she just had to trust her overhead cover.

And that cover was now busy indeed with the hornet's nest well and truly shaken. Another land fortress half-crawled out of its exit ramp before a main-battery shot from the cruiser collapsed the mighty concrete arch on top of it, a second shot making sure it would stay dead, a misshapen glowing mushroom rising in the air as its funeral pyre. More plasma rain came down on top of the detected energy signatures as they confirmed themselves hostile and shooting. A minute after Vulture Two had landed multiple mushroom clouds were rising around out of the vast megapolis, some of them as far as the horizon and the morning sun's rays bathed them in pinkish-orange light. The Starlings were already sweeping eastward to vacate the unsafe airspace, but soon they were tasked with another mission.

The Breeder underground hive was a tentacular thing. Multi-story living blocks like sunken and blind buildings, factories under and over the surface, sealed domes and reclaimed agri-banks, all connected by tunnels and ground roads and rail lines. Millions lived across that expanse of poisoned land, down from billions a century beforehand. Out of those millions stood Oungko-Bau. "Stood" in the figurative sense, since he had neither leg nor even fully-developed hands. His fat conical head stood on a barrel-like torso with not apparent neck and he had to be carried from his wheeled life-board, after disconnecting his urinal and anal catheters, to the flying egg set in the long neck of his aero-fighter. His comrades strapped him in using a special harness, secured the control crown on his cranium, closed the access hatch and opened the filling port to ensconce his form in acceleration gel. He didn't like it – the drowning sensation was always bad, though he grew used to it long ago. No, it was the acute sense of decay that revolted his mind. Like every Breeder in the generations that followed the cataclysm, born with unfixable defects if they were born at all, growing in a body he knew was a parody of its true form and very aware as well how the Eurondan-inflicted defects didn't simply count towards his appearance, but hindered his intellect too from reaching the full potential that was the All-Mother's gift to her children, he was smart enough to inherit his ancestor's technical accomplishments and operate the wonders they'd left but he knew himself to be forever removed from that greatness. And that awareness fueled the hate he felt peaking again, hate for the Eurondans who'd somehow come up from the grave to strike the All-Mother's children again.

He dismissed the off-taste of the gel, too-many times broken down and recycled by machinery falling gradually ever more outside their initial operating constraints. The crown initialized as it should, finding his cerebral waves, well-mapped out after so many such flights. The fighter was an old friend and freedom at the same time, its engines filling in for his absent legs and his aborted arms spreading into magnificent variable-sweep wings. The machine was lovingly maintained, the culminating focus of hundreds of souls' work and dedication against the odds.

Oungko-Bau accelerated along the launch ramp's inclined length then felt the shudder of the cradle falling away. His extended wings bit the cool morning air, their metallic surface gleaming in the dawning light. An enraptured smile painted itself onto his crude features, behind the oxygen tube snaking into his mouth. He was soaring, he was flying, he was free.

At the end of his craft the flat nozzles of his MHD drives glowed a cool blue and he climbed rapidly at the head of a formation of identical flyers spat out from the launch tubes behind and below. The first cloud layer fell behind and his wings gradually swept backwards – the shudder was almost orgasmic as he broke the sound barrier – he leveled off far above the plains that contained his people's last great works.

Inside Valkyrie's CIC the fighter controller almost whistled. Those new bogies were showing an impressive climb rate – worthy of the old rocket-assisted scramjets from before the Final War. They seemed to use a form of electric propulsion too, which was something that never really came into fruition on Earth outside of maritime applications before counter-grav stole its thunder. As the bogies settled into their cruising altitude, he re-classified the thirty-plus contacts as bandits, confirmed hostiles. There was no way they were coming in for a show.

Oungko-Bau's expression was turning into one of fury. His fighter's electro-optical sensors were showing him the multiple mushroom clouds rising on the rapidly-closing horizon, then his electro-pulse array fizzled. Jamming! He instinctively began to jink. He caught a flash in his peripheral vision – one of his wingmates' life ending in a fireball, debris continuing on their way for a while trailing black smoke before tilting down to their final trajectory. He pulled up hard, trading speed for altitude as he was instructed long ago, then rolled back in a barrel turn. This was a maneuver that saved him countless times against Eurondan interceptors – pulling so many gees was harsh, the enemy flyers were remotely piloted and didn't have biological limits, but this was why his people had developed the gel and crown combination, to narrow that capability gap between man and machine. And he, Oungko-Bau the cripple was ironically even more favored by his short, limb-less body, his inexistent neck, all such factors ensuring his brain didn't have to compete for the blood his heart labored to pump through. More than once his tighter-than-possible maneuvers had allowed him to turn the tables on the Eurondan drones – the kill marks on the neck of his fighter were there to commemorate those.

But the universe was even more unfair than Oungko-Bau ever suspected, for the drones facing him were piloted by avian brains suspended in a nanotech support gel than permeated their entire structure, making them near-impervious to acceleration forces. The Starlings could pull all the gravities he did and more. Their space maneuvering thrusters could throw them through figures only missiles could emulate and the Breeder infrared-seeker missiles were dazzled by directed counter-beams, exploding harmlessly behind the wildly gyrating drones. Gauss slugs reached for them as both formations raced towards each other at a hypersonic rate of closure – then the Starlings arrowed up in a spray of superheated air, straight up to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, leaving the Breeder planes falling out of steam dozens of kilometers below, hopelessly silhouetted against the cold surface.

Point-defense class coherent light beams stabbed from the drones as they pointed their snouts back down. Weapons designed to find and kill maneuvering Goa'uld space fighters long before they could threaten their mothership skewered air-breathing planes struggling at the limits of their envelope. High up where the curvature of the planet was clearly visible tiny pinpricks of light blossomed on the fighter coordinator's visual overlay, each one a dying Breeder craft.

Oungko-Bau saw the strange and elusive enemy machines string and rope his wingmates with their impossible performance and light-beam weapons – unfair, his mind said, what are those things? Eurondans never had this! Why now? He was pushing his machine to its limits and above, he felt his own body straining and his vision graying, throwing out clouds of decoy flares and reflective particles, peripherally aware of his wingmates blinking away, the cannon trails and explosions lighting up the dark upper atmosphere and the golden meteors streaking down to strike the horizon. He knew they were overmatched, knew he had to flee, nothing he could do to change this battle's outcome. His fighter completed a tight series of maneuvers and he reaccelerated with the full thrust of his engines, past the redline, never mind the maintenance techs protesting if he ended up alive to hear them. His fighter screamed down in a shallow dive, easily pushing to its maximum speed on a straight line towards his base.

His vision suddenly went white before his sensorium adjusted. Ahead of him the filtered sky was black and bisected by a ruler-straight line of the purest white. His other sensors screamed warnings about high intensity electromagnetic pulse discharge and ionizing radiation that his mind failed to comprehend. His knowledge of theoretical physics never went very far and a particle beam was something he'd never expected to contemplate – not one with the power to bisect large asteroids and drill through moons.

The lance of high-energy particles only lasted two seconds despite it seeming so much longer, having drilled through the entire atmosphere and hundreds of meters of rock and compacted soil. It punched a hole through the reinforced roof of Oungko-Bau's home base, filling ready rooms and maintenance workshops and the vast hangar with a lethal cloud of plasma and vaporized matter even as then transmitted shockwave collapsed the entire structure on itself.

The Breeder pilot only had time to process the implications of his datalink going dark before the atmospheric shockwave crumpled his fighter like a soda can.

"All bandits eliminated. Vulture One and Two, you're cleared to orbit."

Vulture Two's pilot, a female Drakensis from the Indus provinces undergoing her military service crisply acknowledged the Air Coordinator's notice. She'd been too busy dodging the rising mushroom clouds and keeping to her designated flight path despite the shockwave turbulence to give much attention to the fighting overhead, but she was glad those feral interceptors were in no shape to threaten her ascent any more. At least she could see what was happening – the ghouloons back there didn't like much being shaken and stirred in a closed box and some were protesting quite vocally. Others had actually vomited, which always managed to surprise her – that such tough beasts could get sensitive over a bit of turbulence. At least she wouldn't have to clean up. The serf deck crew would. In sealed vacuum suits, to spare themselves the nasty smell.

Never mind, this was her first actual combat drop and she'd survived it, she told herself as the sky went from deep blue to black. Vulture One's location was highlighted in her helmet display a about a hundred kilometers ahead, and the cruiser's location was marked as well beyond that, invisible to her eyes as long as it wasn't emitting weapon fire. Which had abated since both shuttles were out of reach of any known enemy defenses and the Starlings were climbing out, closing the march behind her shuttle. No losses, the pilot was glad to see; despite the ferals' will to fight the Race had… dominated, as it should, which brought a grin to her face. She wondered about the consequences. Would they Yoke those mongrels? Her pre-mission briefing had only contained general context information about the locals – that they were degenerates due to exposure to teratogenic contaminants. Would the Race have any use for such debased humans? She knew the answer was above her pay grade but she could still speculate. Apparently, the other side's people had more palatable appearances, but they were no Race either. Still, her orders had been to rescue them, so the brass had to know more. She rolled her shoulders to unkink them and pressed herself tighter in the flight couch's memory-foam to be more comfortable. Another fifteen minutes and she ought to be out of her cockpit for a quick debriefing then a much-anticipated shower… with that cute servus attendant. Exactly what she'd need to unwind.

Myrella's mind gradually rose up from the dreamless sedation and before she could think, recent memories rushed again to the fore of her consciousness. She viewed herself again with her legs forcibly splayed and that ugly monster of a man with a lubricious expression… inserting himself in her. Raping her and spreading his abhorrent seed in her womb. The first of a series of breeder rapists attempting to breed her into carrying their repulsive offspring. She'd felt it, the drugs injected in her veins affecting her most inner parts, the tell-tale pinpricks of not-quite-pain that she knew from experience were her ovaries releasing ready eggs. She'd known even then, her mind almost gone from the sheer trauma of what she'd seen and endured, that her body was being fertilized, that new life was undergoing its first cellular divisions inside her womb even as she was locked up in the oppressive black confines of her new prison. She'd drifted in and out of consciousness in the following hours… when there was a sudden commotion, and light blinding her again as the lid of her prison was cracked open and more manipulations by unknown hands, unknown shapes, different, and a cold sensation on her neck then nothing.

Until now. Her eyes were closed and she didn't dare open them yet. There were voices, saying words she didn't understand. But strangely she didn't feel threatened. She didn't know if it was the absence of restraints on her limbs or some concoction still coursing her veins – she suspected some of the latter for the recent trauma seemed locked away, still present but as if she was contemplating it from beyond a thick glass, which her rational thought told her could only happen because her mental processes were artificially altered to cope with. She was of course right though she didn't know the specifics of the tranq cocktail her Draka hosts had injected in her system, a cocktail that was indeed specifically designed to alleviate such mind-breaking psychological trauma and leave a functional mind in place.

She felt her body as well – none of the pain she feared even where intravenous catheters had been forcibly inserted by the Breeder orderlies. She moved her limbs tentatively – she was lying in a kind of bed, soft and crisp linen over her bare skin. She was naked underneath the cover but even that didn't make her feel threatened. The voices were female and quiet, despite their unknown meaning they projected a sense of care and protection. It was time to open her eyes, she felt.

They're Eurondan? Was Myrella's instinctive reaction on seeing two female faces who appeared straight out of her people's mold. Both were blonde, blue-eyed with chiseled good looks and high cheek bones – an expression of professional assurance on one and a quietly regal composure on the other. The first one wore a white long coat of sorts with unknown markings and a strange silvery emblem which she similarly couldn't place – the Eurondan had never seen an Earth caduceus; the second one wore what was clearly a uniform of sorts, except with strange designs, bumps and protrusions – Gwendolyn Ingolfsson's shipside duty uniform with its integrated, concealed and ready-to-deploy emergency vacuum helmet and gloves.

Yet, despite their initially familiar appearance the strange attire told her there was more to this than some unexpected fragment of her people surging into existence to save her from a fate worse than immediate death. The hardware surrounding her bed was unmistakably medical in nature, the tell-tale lines of a heart-rate monitor were universally recognizable, but they were nothing she'd seen in her people's hospitals or aid stations. It wasn't just the general shape and color, it was the symbols and what could only be writing that she couldn't decipher. Something was well and very off and she didn't know if this was a good sign or bad. She wasn't in pain, she'd been cared for… yet she couldn't shake off the gut-feeling that she was stepping in something very, very outside ordinary circumstances.

The uniformed woman opened her mouth again and a badly-accented but recognizably Eurondan greeting came out of it. The accent was off, so was the cadence and tone… words pronounced by someone who had no idea how to actually say them.

Myrella answered with the corresponding counter-greeting and the woman smiled, obviously satisfied that her message got across. "Who are you?" Myrella immediately followed. The other woman frowned, then cleared her expression with a shake of her head. "Slow. Slow words" came back as an explanation and the Eurondan understood. She asked her question again, pronouncing the words slowly and carefully.

"Expected. Question" haltingly answered, with a knowing look. "Answer, long-time say. Something see first."

At the cue, the longcoated woman handed Myrella a bundle of clothes. She unfolded them: a matching set of pants and shirt, light and plain white. She caught the intention and shimmied inside, still somewhat cagey about her nudity in the presence of those utter strangers. The pants closed with a string which she tied up. She found slippers by her bed, but her attempt at standing up was immediately curtailed by the weakness of her legs. "Anesthesia" the Draka doctor said, the contrast between the perfectly found technical word and the stilted, off delivery made all the more jarring. "Embryo, removed."

Myrella almost collapsed as the implication sunk in. It meant she didn't carry the Breeder offspring anymore! Her expression must have told, for the two women gratified her with a smile of understanding. Her thanks came out as almost sobs – segued into sobs, in fact as a dam of pent-up emotion seemed to rupture and she began to cry in relief.

Gwen watched her rescued "guest" break into tears of obvious solace at the medical officer's announcement. Having watched her be forcibly impregnated, this wasn't surprising in the slightest. She was also glad the rough translator worked adequately enough for a start. She had to recognize – only in the intimacy of her inner mind, naturally – that those two Krypteria operatives were making their somewhat grating presence well worth it, with those language files extracted and structured into an initial translation matrix fit for the Draka implants to process.

In common, silent agreement she and the doctor expressed soothing pheromones and waited for the rescued woman to calm herself. When she was settled again, the doctor unfolded a wheelchair and motioned for the Eurondan to sit in, helping her as she transferred herself from the bed to the rolling contraption then grasping the handles to push the chair.

Myrella let herself be wheeled out – she swept a curious eye across the room she'd woken in. Past the light partition that isolated her bed were more of the same but she couldn't see if those were occupied or not. A couple of the strange-looking people seemed to be staffing a workstation at the back. She lost sight of them as she was wheeled out through a pair of sliding doors inscribed with more cryptic writing – though she did recognize the same symbol as on the doctor's coat. It must be some kind of symbol for medical care, she deduced. She must be inside some kind of underground building for the corridors and rooms were lit by artificial means, squares emitting soft light from above and recessed fixtures letting out a warm glow onto the vertical surfaces. It was clean and serious-looking yet pleasing to the eye, she found. Then they went through an airlock and left the medical wing, she concluded from the subtly different colors and lighting and markings. They went past other people garbed in a similar way to the tall woman walking alongside her and she understood from their attitude that she outranked them. She didn't know that servus personnel were kept out of sight lest she believed them to be Breeders, them showing a rather more varied ethnic composition than the Citizen crew. Everyone she saw instead was Drakensis and most had that familiar, Eurondan-like appearance to her, tall and severely beautiful.

This building was quite extensively compartmentalized, Myrella told herself. There were so many doors and airlocks and some walls were thick! Surely this must be to keep toxic atmosphere out and mitigate enemy-inflicted damage, her military-trained mind reacted. Was it that part of her people had evolved into something else, changing their language in the process? How much time had passed since she went into her stasis pod?

She watched herself pass through unbelievably thick doors – slabs of multilayered alloys and other materials that put to shame even the command bunker's main access gates! Her chair had to be lifted over the threshold, which to her surprise her caretaker did without even a grunt of effort. She stayed silent, waiting to see that thing she was told would begin to answer her question. More hatches and airlocks, more symbols switching to different colors and shapes, then her chair stopped in the middle of a smallish, unadorned room. There was some technical hardware on one side, a console of some sort she yet again couldn't make sense of its function. But her eyes went to the horizontal rectangle cut in the far wall, rounded corners and filled with glass or something similar. Very thick and multilayered glass, too. But the strange window was blank, obscured by an exterior cover. Yet she felt in her stomach that this was it, she was going to see where in the world her strange hosts lived in.

Gwendolyn Ingolfsson went to the console and activated a control. The exterior cover began to slide up and away from the window and a sliver of light came into the darkened room. Myrella's eyes adjusted and she saw… black. A tapestry of black so where was that light coming from, what – her eyes widened, her stomach fell away and a cry to her people's closest equivalent to a god burst out of her throat.

She was seeing her home planet from so far above the surface her vision could encompass all of it. Space – the taboo frontier – she was up there – where her people had but barely dared send experimental devices before the War… obtaining pictures such as the one she was now seeing with her own eyes.

Euronda's brownish-white globe reflected itself in her daughter's eyes for long minutes. Only then did she managed to utter the words.

"The Creators!"

Aha, thought Valkyrie's captain. So far, her people had only skimmed the top of the Eurondan database recovered on that crystal storage device, with a priority given to language data. They still didn't have a nice convenient timeline of local history, if it was even included in the repository – at first glance whoever had packaged it, maybe that poor sod found dead close-by, had prioritized science and technology when it came to providing a clear hierarchical data structure.

She found her guests' eyes staring at her intensely as second later. "Who are you?" again, said with a tone of utmost urgency.

Pointing at herself in a universally understood gesture: "Gwendolyn Ingolfsson, commander this vessel", then sweeping around "my people, Draka."

"Gwen'leen Inguhffssuhn, Dra-kay" echoed back, the woman making an effort to wrap her tongue around the strange phonemes. Pointing towards herself, "Myrella, daughter of Euronda". Her finger turned back towards Ingolfsson. "You… your people… come from another world" it wasn't really a question. Her mind naturally came to the only possible conclusion, notwithstanding that it uprooted her people's fundamental worldview.

With the translator routines firming up with additional context and practice, Gwen let out the existential question. "Well, Myrella, daughter of Euronda… how did you believe your people came into being?", while inside her mind she mused this story better suit our dear Archon's purposes, or I have a feeling that woman will wish she was never let out of that box.

In the hours that followed, she had to make Myrella repeat or reformulate sentences occasionally as the translator tripped, but the more they spoke and the more it became natural as contextual knowledge grafted itself onto dry syntax and vocabulary data. And Euronda's history revealed itself with the peculiarities it inherited from the circumstances of its birth.

Ingolffson reclined in her ready room's comfortable, form-fitting chair, having put the end touch to her report. It contained the full transcript of Myrella's interview, augmented with relevant sections from the Eurondan database she was able to parse with her newly acquired knowledge, translated and annotated. The full thing was going back to Earth on cloned physical memory tabs through the stargate along with her four Security Directorate guests and the original device – and that secret alien computer that she was admittedly glad not residing on her ship anymore, faraday cage or not. A copy of the database was staying aboard Valkyrie on secure storage.

Undoubtedly the Krypteria would have their own report out in time, but hers was already transmitting through the subspace link under an encryption scheme reserved for secure Archonate transmissions, effectively a sophisticated one-time-pad. She removed the chip containing the pad from a slot in her console then dropped it into the special-purpose device set on one side of the console's support legs. She pressed a guarded control and a flash of light burst from the thin, shaded rectangular window in the loading door. Seconds later the door opened on its own and a small wave of heat wafted across her legs. She bent again, face level with the revealed cavity, inspected it. Empty save for a coating of ash. Good. The pad was forever gone in a flash of plasma.

It might appear all a little paranoid, she mused as she closed the small door again. But then her people had good reasons to be careful about comp security and data control. In the unlikely event that Valkyrie was ever invaded and captured, flash incineration charges would be the last line of defense, physically slagging secure memories and comp cores to prevent any attempt at decrypting the contents.

The Eurondan woman was back to her bed for a deserved rest. There would be more questions later – she was in for a lengthy civilizational debriefing, after all… but most of all there would be the moment when she would learn about the Domination in turn, and her own new place in the grand scheme of things.

Her own duty day creeping to an end, Gwen checked things on the surface. The Breeder metropolis was still smoldering in places, new craters and ruins scarring the already decrepit cityscape. She had almost ordered a full-scale eradication bombardment after the shuttles were back, but that was a knee-jerk reaction, she knew it. Because the Breeders were repulsive and because she had the firepower poised at her fingertips, so tempting to unleash.

But those bushmen were evidently no threat to her ship nor to the Domination. The damage she'd already inflicted might even tip them straight over the edge of extinction, considering the apparent shape of their civilization, living a precarious survival mode in a hostile environment. Sensors were keeping a close watch over them in any case. If they came up with something, she'd know about it early. Valkyrie herself had relocated to a different position in the sky and should be invisible to surface eyes again. A four-drone Starling element was skimming the upper atmosphere constantly, describing a wide orbit over the continent.

At the other end of the land mass the former Eurondan command center was a hive of activity. A proper airtight dome was being erected over the site and work teams were digging through the collapsed access shafts leading to the stargate chamber – in a day or two the device would be hoisted up to a convenient surface emplacement and Luna would be able to send resupply containers to Valkyrie.

Satisfied that all was well down there, Gwen blitzed through the administrative paperwork efficiently packaged and prepared by her clerical servus staff and wolfed down dinner at the same time. Not very good table habits, she knew, but it afforded her more palestra time, including the quick suck and fuck no proper Citizen should go to bed without.

Her last thought before putting herself to sleep was that Uncle Eric was probably burning the midnight oil himself reading her report. She yawned for tradition's sake, then firmly sent the Dream Express off from Slumber Station.

The Eurondan face visible through the stasis pod's viewport appeared to be sleeping peacefully, but Myrella was aware that it was artificial, a product of the anesthetics and tranquilizer drugs. The doctor told her about it, how her people needed to sedate every one of the Eurondan women rescued from the Breeder iron wombs, how they'd removed the growths in their belly – Myrella refused to call those things "children" – and healed the physical wounds; but the mental wounds on those unfortunate women were something else. Myrella was lucky in that she'd spent less than a full day in the iron womb. The other women spent months, years for the oldest captives, locked in the dark alone, the only sounds those emitted by the life-support machinery plugged into their body, their limbs wasting from lack of stimulation despite the drugs, feeling an alien organism grow inside them – offspring they'd never wanted, forced into them during rape sessions. Only in the end were they extracted from their coffin to birth deformed babies, grotesque bundles of flesh tearing them apart in their way out, then spend the following months in open captivity while the things suckled on their breasts until they were found mature enough to be adopted by proper Breeder families. Three Eurondan women had thus already given birth… and were again impregnated and locked up again. Atoning through multiple pregnancies for their crimes against the All-Mother and her people.

Sanity was not exactly something they had any more and it would take the most advanced treatments the Domination's alienists and neurosurgeons could provide to heal them. Targeted memory alterations would be necessary to excise the worst of the trauma, then intensive cerebral reeducation. It would take months, perhaps years to rehabilitate them, but it could be done. In contrast, healing the bodies back to a healthy standard would be child's play for the society that created Drakensis. In the meantime, and waiting for definite orders from Archona regarding the Eurondan's fate, those women waited in stasis pods, tucked into Valkyrie's primary medical bay.

All of that had been explained to Myrella after she woke up from a long night's sleep and wolfed down a breakfast made of unfamiliar ingredients, but palatable enough, especially to one who'd lived through the war and its gradual breaking down of earthly comforts. She was feeling a bit flushed, a normal effect from the immunization package she'd received. She understood the rationale of it easily enough. Diseases unthreatening to one human group could be dangerous to another group who'd never been exposed to them.

There were still so many things she didn't know about her saviors. They came from another planet orbiting a far-away star… and unlike her people they had unambiguous archeological evidence of their species – which was also her species - evolving locally in a billion-year process that started with unicellular organisms swimming in a primordial soup. Thus, they had material, science-backed proof that their world's creation myths were just that, myths invented by early ancestors trying to make sense of their own existence.

Unlike her people, and the Breeders for that matter. The latter believed in religious stories carried across millennia, telling how the Tribes of Men were brought to life on Erda – the ancient name for their world – brought to life from a pool of mystic light by the life-giving goddess Enanna-Mun. Those old orally-transmitted myths were naturally low on hard facts and heavy on embellishments, having undergone mutations and alteration as they were transmitted from generation to generation. The truth was lost in the dawn of time, more than two thousand solar revolutions before the present. What was puzzling her was how those foundation myths didn't imply that their distant ancestors were transported from another planet, no, they were "brought to life from a pool of light" that she now understood was that strange circular artefact that did indeed allow travel between distant worlds. In those myths the first inhabitants of Erda were young men and women who opened their eyes to the sun and were taught by… angels, messengers with magical powers to spread and populate the world so that one day their descendants would be carried to the heavens and serve their god in glory eternal. The tribes became the Breeders, their belief in the All-Mother consolidating as time went into an all-consuming imperative to increase their number, driving them to improve on the knowledge received from the angels to develop even better ways of spreading and sustaining life, their scientific and technological development pushed by this imperative to reshape the world into the densest of hives – for the goddess' commands forbade from laying their hands on the airless heavens, the realm of the gods themselves.

Her own people had started the same – indeed they were originally one of the Tribes of Men, but "brought to life" several generations after the First Men. And their minds were cursed with ghostly dreams, fragments of memories from another time and place which they couldn't make sense of. Until one day a prophet rose among their ranks claiming he was touched by voices from the heavens. The voices were highly heretical, insinuating that Enanna-Mun might not be a benevolent god and that this world was a jewel that men should live in harmony with rather than consume and overrun. Yet they also told him secrets of the creation that proved true, allowing his people to improve and lengthen their lives.

Needless to say, the prophet and his tribe understood after a few less-than-successful attempts that trying to convince the other tribes would only end in their destruction. Heeding the Voices' advice, they left the Tribes and their territory, leaving no clue as to their fate or destination. By the time their former neighbors realized their absence, the children of Erda, or Eurondans as they christened themselves were far away across rivers and mountains. Rather than try and catch them they divided those newly-vacated lands between themselves, founding new villages and temples to the All-Mother.

Meanwhile the Eurondans made their Exodus through Erda's huge continental mass, the Voices guiding the prophet, miraculously allowing men, women and children to survive the long trek through unknown regions. Years later they reached the last step of their journey and settled a fertile land and Euronda was born. The Voices left then, their mission accomplished it seemed and the prophet settled down to till his field. Yet the Voices' legacy remained, shaping the society that grew out of the promised land. The Eurondans would seek knowledge of the world and shape their numbers to live in harmony with Erda, the kernels of scientific knowledge gifted by the Voices allowing them to do so. But those came with a warning: outside the sky laid danger. The children of Erda must not attempt to cross the void alone lest demons find them. No, they were to build a perfect society – then and only then would other Voices guide them to the heavens.

Myrella thought of her people's timid and belated steps towards those heavens – the space surrounding Erda, the void between stars. Oh, how different would things have ended if her people used their technology to its fullest potential in conquering those outer regions rather than cowering in the belief that they should wait for some mythical signal! But then, she answered herself, the Breeders would have attacked sooner, would they not? They wouldn't have tolerated the Eurondans breaking their own version of the same taboo. They'd welcomed the manned research station lifted in orbit piece after piece by a modified flyer carrier with very hostile reactions… then promptly shot it out of the sky in the opening hours of the war. In retrospect, it was probably one of the motives that pushed a strained relationship over the edge.

And it had all been a lie, as she understood now.

Gwendolyn Ingolfsson sipped her fourth coffee of the day. A rather uneventful one so far. Some Breeders were spotted crawling over the surface of their bombarded megacity in isolated clumps, rescue efforts it seemed. Of no consequence anyway. Domination sappers and engineers were shoring up the excavation pit leading to the stargate chamber. Other technical personnel were cataloguing every stasis pod, using the native interface and their translation matrix to note down the identities of the sleeping Eurondans.

And her guest was still immersed in her reading. Gwen used the monitoring override to check what Myrella was presently perusing on her loaned perscomp. Ah. So she was deep in Naldorssen's manifesto, the quintessential philosophical rationalization of the Domination's worldview, the one boiling down to "we dominate because we can, and we must". The translator did an adequate job – with occasional help from a bona-fide live Draka - bridging concepts from two civilizations separated by a gulf measured in millennia and parsecs. Their Eurondan rescue was given a very condensed history of Earth and the Domination to read after she woke up in the morning and her reactions were monitored and recorded as she went from caveman tribes to the Final Society.

Her terminal beeped with a priority message from Archona and she accessed it. It was short and to the point. Myrella the Eurondan was going to undergo an interview that would seal her fate, her own and that of every one of her kind still waiting to be awaken.

Ten minutes later, the door of her ready room slid open and Myrella was ushered through by her escort, wearing simple, non-descript civilian clothing rather than hospital slacks. Gwen motioned for her to take the seat facing her desk and she sat down with an attitude where the Drakensis could detect both bravery and apprehension. The door closed again for privacy, leaving the pair of guards outside. It wasn't as if Gwen feared the woman attacking her after all.

A tap on her console and a volumetric display shimmered into life to the side of the wide desk, showing first Valkyrie's crest, then a 2D communication handshake page which resolved seconds later into the head of Eric von Shrakenberg, framed in his own archonal office. The resolution and color reproduction were again comparatively poor – an image quality that reminded Gwen of those old-style vacuum-tube televisions that were long obsolete before her own birth. But such was a small price to pay for real-time video-conferencing across the chasm of interstellar distances.

She greeted and introduced him as the head of the Domination rather than the great-uncle he also was, for this was an official conversation rather than a family chat, and noticed the flash of recognition in Myrella's eyes as the tiny bud in her ear carried the translated title. The Eurondan woman sat ever-so-imperceptibly straighter in her chair, almost as if she was trying to stand at attention. A good sign, Gwen told herself. Her estimate was compounded an instant later.

"I'm honored to meet you… Archon von Shrakenberg" Myrella said, the name rolling off her unpracticed tongue with a strange accent but her sentence otherwise perfectly translated into Draka Anglic.

"I see that you did your homework" Shrakenberg said for both women's benefit, it seemed.

"I studied the material your people gave me, Sir. It was…" Myrella wasn't quite sure which adjective qualified. Enlightening? Frightening? Thought-provoking? It was all that and more. "It changed my perception of the universe." And this was quite adequately conveying it indeed.

"I certainly believe it did" Shrakenberg said in a low, almost pensive way, then his tone picked up a certain sharpness. "For good or ill." His brutal honesty struck a string inside their guest, Gwen noticed with her enhanced perceptiveness. Of course. It was as if the Yoke was invisibly hanging in the room over Myrella's head. Yet… she returned a tight, almost challenging smile. "It gave me the truth, Sir. As unsettling as it is to realize how my people's fundamental beliefs were… manipulated from the start. And to clear something out… even your Yoke would be better than what the Breeders had in store for us. As much as I cherish the idea of my, of my people's freedom. In any case, I, we are in no position to choose… am I wrong, Sir?"

Gwen felt almost like whistling. The girl showed guts, going straight to the heart of her situation's… overhanging issues. She briefly met her uncle's eyes and saw that he, too, shared her estimation. And he made a strange, almost gleeful smile in return.

"Ah, but this is where you might be wrong, Myrella of Euronda. But first, let me ask you a question." He leaned forward in the display and spoke very distinctly the following words. "Why do you think your people lost their own Final War?"

Myrella exhaled softly. This question had been overshadowing her thoughts ever since she was rescued and actually had time alone to think. Why did her people lose so badly that they had to rely on a last-ditch, all-or-nothing plan? Reading up on how the Domination of the Draka grew and thrived on a planet overfilled with powerful competitors, to the point of eventually prevailing over an alliance that was every bit as rich and advanced, if not more… it provided her with an enlightening comparison point. She composed her thoughts and selected her words carefully before she opened her mouth again to answer.

"We were too few, purposefully limiting our population growth to avoid overstraining our biome… not realizing early enough that it wouldn't matter if our neighbors did the exact opposite. We couldn't match their numbers, so we developed ways of fighting that didn't involve directly putting ourselves in the firing line. But first this technology was bottlenecked by too-small production numbers, then when we managed to set up mass production, operator burnout became the bottleneck. In the end we could never afford to gather sufficient numbers to achieve decisive results; we were always trying to stem Breeder general offensives and on the rare occasions when we counter-attacked, we lacked any reserves to exploit our initial breakthrough. We killed huge numbers of Breeders but more kept coming, equipped with mass-produced weapons… they didn't care that they were destroying Erda doing so."

She paused to take a breath, but neither ship captain nor head of state commented. They were waiting for her to finish, both wearing expressions of carefully neutral interest.

"Then my leadership's final plan failed. The poison obviously didn't kill all the Breeders and enough survived that they kept coming. It seems that my side managed to deploy that solid-state matter shield technology in the end, but it was too late to do more than delay the inevitable. Without access to our old supply of heavy water, the fusion reactors probably ran out, the shield fell, and we all saw the final result."

Shrakenberg nodded. This sequence of events was the one his people on the ground conjectured as well. It was interesting to note how Myrella confirmed that this defensive shield technology they'd conjectured from skimming the Eurondan database and exploring the bunker complex was actually a thing. So far, and from such superficial examination it seemed that Eurondan technology was certainly advanced, yet not overall superior to what the Domination had now. Their "Beta-Cantin" medical compound was from early analysis very effective at stimulating the human body's self-repair abilities, but there were already comparable tools in the Domination's medical arsenal. On the other hand, their "defensive shield" apparently relied on principles completely different from Goa'uld and Tollan ones, since it supposedly altered atomic bonds to turn ordinary matter into something that behaved like a quasi-monomolecular structure. Effectively it turned a dome of air into an impenetrable solid carapace whose thickness was only limited by available power. At its peak, the last Eurondan fortress must have been protected from any Breeder bombardment by a shield of solidified matter several meters thick. But wars were never won by defensive strategies.

"Another question. How many wars did your people fight in their entire history?"

Myrella blinked several times as her memory came up with the answer and her mind realized its meaning at the same time.

"None that would be properly called such" she slowly enunciated. "Skirmishes between factions, perhaps. Border clashes. Neither us nor the Breeders experienced anything like your own people… your own world's history of wars. We didn't have to compete for resources and land until much later… and then it was the last war."

Left unsaid was that in contrast, the founders of what eventually became the Domination of the Draka benefitted from the legacy of thousands of years of human-vs-human warfare going all the way from sticks and stones to rifles and artillery and every conceivable tactic that could fit them. But it didn't have to be said aloud: both sides realized the other realized. Myrella found herself hoping it would alleviate how her guests might view her people's crushing defeat.

"It seems to me that your people were set up to fail. By the time you realized you had to fight, neither your numbers, resources nor experience enabled you to do it effectively."

Myrella took Shrakenberg's assessment in humbled silence. She swallowed a lump and stared at the desk. What more could she say? Under the cold scrutiny of the universe, her people were a failure.

Heightened Drakensis perception meant Gwen missed nothing of her guest's internal state. But what she awaited with anticipation was the conclusion of her shrew old uncle's set-up. This little exam, questions and answers together were strengthening her suspicions on the eventual outcome. All she left visible of this was the tiniest parting of her lips as she waited for the shoe to drop.

"Now what should we make of you?" Eric asked rhetorically and Myrella found the strength to meet his disembodied gaze straight in the eyes. "We could simply leave you where we found you. A few thousand people stuck on a dying planet, with not much in terms of resources outside your stasis pods and far-away neighbors who only want to eat you and are facing extinction too anyway." He paused to gauge Myrella's reaction. Seeing her merely raising an eyebrow over her well that would be a shitty end, but dying in our sleep would be better than getting eaten alive assessment, he offered a thin smile.

"Or we could put you all under the Yoke." He eyed the foreign woman's reaction. "You would lose your freedom and in time, your previous identity and culture, but you would be cared for and find your place in our Final Society. That, or off yourselves. There's always that choice."

Myrella made the waving motion of both her hands that meant the equivalent of a shrug. Her answering tone was fatalistic. "Not like we can resist it if your intent is exactly that, Sir." But then she clenched her fist on the table and her voice took a bitter, harsh undertone. "But me… I'll rather die than live alongside the Breeders. Yoke or not Yoke." And she's sincere at that, Gwen realized without undue surprise.

Shrakenberg made a low-key chuckle. "Ah, those Breeders. Honestly, I'm not even sure I'd like them under the Yoke. We have standards."

Gwen found herself chuckling along at the Archon's joke. Cannibals with mutation-inflicted deformities would be something new indeed. Hellspawn, just placing one alongside graceful, pretty servus might provide enough kinky contrast to be interesting – for those pervert-minded Citizens. But really, serfs were meant to serve, which meant also conforming to some ideal standards… and those local bushmen would be hard-pressed to. The Domination wasn't a freak-show, notwithstanding what the dead Yanks might have believed.

Their inside joke washed over their guest as she simply waited. Gwen reminded herself that she hadn't showed an overdeveloped sense of humor so far, but it was fairly understandable considering the circumstances she'd found herself in.

Eric rapped his knuckle on the unseen surface of his desk as a sign that he was back to serious talk. "And there's the last solution." He paused for a pregnant second. This is it, Gwen told herself. He's going to… "Those eight-thousand odd men and women in stasis are all that's left of your society. A defeated husk of a people on a planet whose biosphere is so badly gone that it would take centuries to try and fix. Yet that defeat means precious lessons learnt. Your people were a technically adept one yet had respect for natural harmony, maybe too much even. Considering all that… and having discussed it with the other relevant parties" a sly grin escaped him and Gwen promised herself she would hear how he'd sold the idea to those Militants in the Security Directorate, of all things – "I'm prepared to extend your people metic, limited citizenship in the Domination."

Gwen blew out a breath that was almost a whistle. Called it!

But the Archon was going on. "But realize this means you and your descendants becoming Draka. There won't be Eurondans anymore. You will learn our language and mores and come to share our values. You will become part of the growing and expanding Race, and in the Race will your loyalty lie. Any second thought, any subsequent betrayal, any fundamental dissent will be met with… harsh consequences. Those parts of the State who keep an eye on such things are not liberal or forgiving much."

It took Myrella a moment to digest the offer. The prospect of cultural erasure was the most frightening aspect of it, but she was only too aware that a mere eight thousand Eurondan bodies left of it all meant the Eurondan culture, as it existed when her people weren't locked in a losing war, was already dead. Certainly the traces of it, its works of art and knowledge, would be allowed to exist in the same manner as ancient Earth ones, a matter for scholars, some songs and folk remnants still transmitted from generation to generation… firmly superseded in all ways that mattered by the culture borne out of the Final Society. Was it too hard a bargain? She couldn't bring herself to think so, no matter how much she played the devil's advocate voice in her head. As long as… "What of the Breeders in that offer of yours, Sir?"

Shrakenberg waved a dismissive hand. "Valkyrie struck them hard already. They're going to starve or suffocate anyway."

"Do not underestimate their ability to survive. They're like rats that way." Myrella countered, understating her animalistic comparison with a face of disgust.

"And if they survive, your descendants might get to Yoke them properly" Shrakenberg retorted with a final inflexion on your descendants. "Not that we'll leave them unchecked. Your own life will go on far away, but the Race will keep a presence on your homeworld as much for research as strategic purposes. The Breeders won't be allowed to rebuild their power while we attempt to reverse the damage wrought on the biosphere."

"You said it would take centuries…" Myrella's eyes widened.

"And centuries are the timescale in which the Final Society intends to span its future achievements. Our New Race's biological lifetimes are measured in such. Even us Old Draka benefit from medical advances that see us healthily going past the century mark, present example included."

"Do I have to make such a choice alone for every one of my kin?"

"Yes, you do. We're not going to ask every single one of yours as we pull them out of hibernation. You, as the single one awake and sane, get the honor to decide."

Myrella stayed silent for a moment she deemed long enough to honor the gravity of her choice, then spoke calmly despite the butterflies doing aerobatics in her stomach.

"Then I take your offer on behalf of the last Eurondans, Archon of the Draka."

"Now", Gwen said with a lopsided grin after a thoughtful-looking Myrella was ushered out of the room and the two of them could have a more casual conversation, "I can't say I'm surprised that you offered it. It fits nicely with that Great Reset of yours."

Eric steepled his fingers, flexed and wiggled them mechanically then reclined in his high-backed chair. "I never employed that expression myself, you know" he said with innocently arched eyebrows in a face that, although deeply lined didn't seem to belong to a centenarian who fought in the Eurasian War in his prime years. "But it does fit the new realities, I'll admit that."

"The historical parallel is easy enough to see. The Domination's back to square one in this galaxy-spanning setting we found ourselves thrust in, we can't afford to act as if we were still sitting tight inside the solar system's confines. I can see the rationale myself, but I figured some would be more reluctant."

"Ah, but the Militant leadership are Race too, they're not stupid – and between you and me, their collective intelligence actually went up with Gayner's death. They're fully aware of the new conditions as well. In fact, getting Rosenberg to agree was easier than expected. I merely reminded her that it was her service who enthusiastically went forward trying to attract Tollan brains to the Domination… and I then was the one curbing their… enthusiasm so as not to strain our alliance."

"And the rest of them followed?"

"To be fair, these Eurondans made a compelling case. After integrating hundreds of thousands of ex-Alliance metics, swallowing a mere eight thousand newcomers would be a drop in the bucket. And those newcomers have useful technology, their attitude toward ecosystem balance basically seems right out of the Conservancy Directorate; like our settler ancestors, they're fleeing a defeat; hell, they even come with basic racial features approved by the Eugenics Board, if they needed a cherry on the cake. But even if they were they blackest of black-skinned, it wouldn't have changed anything. The Yoke's color-blind, no reason it wouldn't work the same the other side of it. We've got precedent anyway, lots of second-generation Citizens running around with features verging on exotic already, and they're loyal to a fault, bless Freya's tits."

Gwen nodded understandingly. "Yes, got some of these in my crew. Can't find a bad thing to say 'bout any one of 'em, else they'd be out of here faster than yo' can say 'bang'. Still, it's one thing to integrate fellow Earthers…"

Shrakenberg waved a disagreeing finger. "Those fellow Earthers grew up as mortal enemies of us. I'd say it's easier to assimilate people who never had any reason to dislike us; that we in fact are saving from a fate much worse."

"True enough. And while eight thousand isn't much, it creates a precedent, am I right? As the Race expands across the stars, it sets a pattern for… swelling our ranks with the most promising people."

Eric chuckled. "Got me dead to rights, dear niece." He leant forward again, bringing his virtual head closer. "This is exactly the legacy I want to leave when I step down from this office. I want to set the Race on a path where it, well, dominates as it should, but also doesn't ossify, if you see my meaning."

"Regular injections of new blood to keep us from going stale."

"Spot on. And that's something even the Militants agree with, at least in principle, as long as we're not the dominant empire in the galaxy."

"Not going so far as emancipating meritorious serfs, are we?" Gwen said with a guarded tone.

"That ship sailed a long time ago – and even if I thought otherwise, which I don't, I would keep to myself, no matter how good this encryption is. No, serfs stay serfs, 'specially now that they're becoming a separate species. Yet this very disposition means we can safely let them achieve higher accomplishments than we ever could when we had to be afraid of them. In fact, we need to encourage the best of them to reach their own version of excellence if we are to grow into an interstellar empire."

"Lest we become like the Goa'uld."

"Lest we become like the Goa'uld indeed."

"Sooo…" Gwen's lighter tone announced she was switching to a less weighty subject "you're not going for a third mandate, I take it?"

"First, that would be hubris, second, I'm too old for that, Gwen. We old Race need to make room for you youngsters" he grinned.

"I for one am in no hurry to take your place, Uncle Eric. Far more interesting things to do around" she waved at the place she was in, smirking good-naturedly. "And you're not likely to topple over from natural causes any time soon, 'Old Race' or not!" The kind of life-extension treatments the Domination developed and sold to the Tollans, they couldn't realistically keep from Citizen hands. What might have been a stone in the New Race's inherited garden or a point of contention between generations was made irrelevant by their not being limited to a single star system any more. As to the more esoteric method of rejuvenation the Domination had access to in the form of Goa'uld sarcophagi, Gwen knew that her uncle had steadfastly refused to use it and set such a precedent. She also strongly suspected he'd done it to make sure Gayner could not either, not that the nuke that eventually killed her left anything to resurrect anyway.

"No, but I can retire to my plantation at last!" Eric laughed.

"Who's going to replace you then? I didn't exactly get to follow Archona's political life lately… and don't tell me you have no idea."

"Why, but your own mother of course" the von Shrakenberg elder said with a strange glint in his eyes. Gwen's eyes widened in shock. "She didn't tell me anything!"

"Because she had nothing to tell until a few months ago. Backroom politics, I'll spare you the details. In short, she's a candidate every party can agree on. She was radical enough before the War that the Militants love her; she then became the Hero of the Tunnels, giving her more than enough martial credit; afterwards she went on to rebuild Luna with little resources to spare, incidentally working with the new metics to do so despite initially hating each other's guts. In a word, her profile ticks enough cases to make her a consensual choice as my successor. Whatever flaws she might have" Gwen picked up the evasive tone meaning that yes, her great-uncle did have caveats he'd never elaborate on "she also established her qualities as an administrator and leader of men." And yes, while it doesn't hurt that she did mellow out in the last decades, most importantly the SD never found out the true reason why she led us to the Final War. That her trusted personal serf was actually an Alliance agent all those years and went on to insert their dataplague inside our new-built systems using the access granted by her trust and position. A secret that we'll both take to our graves, hopefully.

"Anyways" he followed up briskly "we first have to welcome our new fellow Citizens. Fortunately, we have the people with experience in such dealings, but I'm thinking of setting up a permanent structure rather than relying on ad hoc arrangements. In practice, the draft plan calls for evacuating every remaining hibernation pod to a facility on Abydos and thaw them out in batches. Myrella will help us get the first batch up to speed, and they'll help in turn with the next, and so forth. That way we should have them all up and running inside a year. Properly integrating them will take longer, of course."

"Sounds like a sensible plan" Gwen mouthed approvingly. "I suppose this means Valkyrie will resume her planned course soon?"

"In a matter of days. Once that stargate's up on the surface, you'll receive your resupply, then you can go – make sure those Breeder bushmen don't get to poke their ugly faces out of their holes, but afterwards we'll have sufficient defenses to fend off anything they might send at us. Until then, take care, Gwen."

"Service to the State, Archon" his grand-niece called out in mischievous formality.

"Glory to the Race, Captain." Eric's parting smile belied any attempt at cold formality. He'd always been fond of that little one.