"I have some concerns from my engineers," Katana said.
"I'm sure Zelenka can explain everything to them," Mokar said. They were seated around the conference table in Atlantis for what had become a weekly briefing. Since Katana and her ship was still landed on the city she had been invited too.
"It's not easy to do when I don't understand the technology fully myself," he replied.
"So where does the problem lie?"
"Our ships used a simple mass to energy converter for power, now...," she begun, but before she could finish the sentence Mokar let out a shriek and fell out of his chair and onto the floor, clasping his head in his hands.
"Get a medic in here," Sheppard shouted as he ran around the table and the doors begun to open. From outside the sound of the dialing gate called for his attention and while four medics standing by in the control room rushed inside he hurried out. "Who's dialing?"
"We are Sir," the technician said, just as the gate failed to get a lock. "That's odd, we can't seem to get establish an outgoing wormhole."
"Dial it again."
"Yes Sir," the tech responded and a few seconds later it failed again. "No lock Sir."
"Dial Athyl and recall General O'Neill."
"Yes Sir."
"Radek," Sheppard shouted towards the conference room.
"Coming," the Czech's voice responded. A second later the medics rushed out with Mokar on a stretcher and Radek followed behind, just as the gate shut down.
"General O'Neill will need at least an hour before he can reach the gate," the tech reported.
"Dial the gate again to where we failed to establish a wormhole," Sheppard ordered before turning to Zelenka.
"You mean to Earth Sir?" the tech asked.
"Yes, if that's the world we couldn't establish a wormhole to," he said before the meaning of the question could sink in.
"Move," Zelenka said to the tech, leaving no room to argue. Before he even had time to sit down in the now empty chair he was working.
"Who dialled it?" Sheppard asked, the fact that they could not establish a wormhole to Earth was now sinking in.
"By remote Sir, wasn't from here," the tech replied.
"Find Rodney."
"Yes Sir," the tech said and rushed away.
"Rodney returned to Earth yesterday, with Elizabeth," Zelenka informed him.
"I know he was meant to, but I could at least hope," Sheppard replied. "So, what's happening with the gate?"
"Well whatever happened to our Alterran friend was linked to this, the gate tried to dial using a special protocol, you could call it a clean up of sorts."
"Clean up?"
"Well normally a gate would not connect if it was buried, this overrides that failsafe," Zelenka explained patiently. "Now the mental connection he can establish with the city was active at the same time, so he either dialled the gate or the dialling was what caused his pain."
"Do what you have to, just get us a connection to Earth," Sheppard said, then he took of for the infirmary.
A few hours later an outgoing wormhole was established between Atlantis and a Jaffa world, when it did the activation signal was transmitted through the wormhole and into Pegasus. While hundreds of receivers had been sent out through the Milky Way only four had been smuggled through the gate to Atlantis by a Lucian Alliance agent. Each one had been rigged to explode when triggered and each one had been placed where they would do the most damage. One had been placed on the stardrive's buffers. The explosion it caused was far from catastrophic but it did strand the city-ship on the planet. Two had been placed on the main power conduits which came straight from the three ZPMs and they cut most of the power to the entire city, but with them offline the backup Naquadah generators simply kicked in to power the parts of the city it could. The fourth device had originally been inserted into one of the ZPM sockets underneath the ZPM itself. There it would have caused a catastrophic overload powerful enough to evaporate the star system and three of the surrounding ones. Now the two on the power conduits had been thought to be enough to start this overload, but due to the fire suppression system they were never given the chance to do so. Instead the last device had been moved to the traveler ship's mass to energy converter. There it caused a slightly delayed explosion during the seconds the city lacked power, when the fire suppression system could not detect it. The result was an explosion which destroyed the traveler ship completely and badly damaged the pier it had landed on. Thankfully it had been a late friday evening and most engineers and Travelers had left the ship for the mess hall, only leaving twenty men to die on the ship. Thankfully enough they were the only lives lost in the city that day. But the damage caused to the city was great enough to send another painful jolt through Mokar for breaking one of his prime directives and it would take him days before he had the strength to open his eyes and for weeks to come he would be unable to get out of bed.
Two days after the explosions O'Neill had managed to restore enough order that he could visit the infirmary. He had come through the gate about an hour after the explosion, the delay had been due to some unforeseen problems with the new Asurans.
"How are you holding up?" he asked while he took a chair and dragged it across the floor to the bed where Mokar was lying.
"I have what you would call a migraine."
"A hell of a hangover was what the doctor compared it to."
"I assure you there was no alcohol involved in this, at least on my part," he said and sighed. "That was the punishment for breaking the prime directives."
"Twise."
"Twise?"
"We assume something happened to Earth since we can't establish a wormhole there."
"Yes, the gate's gone along with the DHD, I'm more or less connected to the network all the time here on Atlantis and it detected their destruction," he said and grimaced at the pain. "Which was the second?"
"Atlantis. We dialled another world in the Milky Way and some sort of subspace signal backtracked through the wormhole, luckily for us you got the fire suppression system working again or the four following explosions would have made the city sink."
"Casualties?"
"A handful of travelers and just over a dozen engineers working on the ship."
"High or low compared to structural damage?"
"Extremely low I'd say. We're still running the city on the generators and the stardrive couldn't take us anywhere even if pushed it. But the west pier, where we refitted their ship, took the most damage, you'll need more than just a bucket of paint and some duct tape to fix it."
"How bad is it really?"
"You'll need a few hundred tons of steel and a few thousand paint buckets. Around two thirds of the pier is lying right next to the outpost on the seafloor."
"We can salvage that later, we don't really need that pier right now anyway. The Travelers can wait and we can still service one ship at a time."
"Way to stay positive. Problem is Daniel wasn't aware of the fact that Athyl isn't in Pegasus but in Darecian, so he might have promised them that we could service a few more ships at a time than we could ever do with just the city."
"We can sort out that mess later. For now I need everyone to focus on the outpost, get it operational."
"We are already doing just that, Radek said we can mine much of the rare resources we need from the planet through it. And I have called back Sam, she will get to work on the pier with the Asurans."
"Good, focus on Neutronium and Naquadah. If we lost contact with Earth we will need more Asurans for a large workforce."
"Hence the Neutronium. And the Naquadah is the base for most of your technology." O'Neill said.
"Come closer." Mokar said, he could barely stay awake and he still needed to show O'Neill what they were going to build. When O'Neill was close enough he held up his hands and let them touch his head, sending an image into his mind. What O'Neill received was the image of a segmented ring, close to a stargate in appearance. Then the image shifted and the ring shrunk into a star system. When it activated just like a stargate he realised it was a supergate and it was confirmed when his vision crashed into the surface of the wormhole and was shifted to an identical ring at Athyl. The message was clear to him, that was what they would need the Naquadah for. Also in his head was what he needed to set up the supply line from the outpost to the manufacturing facility in the Milky Way. From there he would send the gates back to the star system he had been shown in the Pegasus galaxy, a remote and desolate system, perfect for hiding a supergate.
Around a week later the first batch of Naquadah came back from the Milky Way in the form of supergate segments. Standing ready in the gate room of Atlantis were eighty five Asurans who caught the segments as they came through and moved them to a storage room. With all the segments on Atlantis the gate was dialled again and the segments were carried through the wormhole to the desolate world on the other side of the gate. There the segments formed a supergate while the Asurans quickly set up cloak projectors to hide the stargate and the facility on the planet which would provide the power to the gate. The Ori gates were built to sent through their great warships which were just shy of one kilometer in width, but this one had been made much smaller so instead they could be powered by eight of the new Naquadah generators. At two hundred and fifty meters in diameter it was large enough for even the massive, but slender, Aurora class to slip through.
Under the cover of darkness she snuck out of her assigned room and walked down the corridor. She had something in mind, but the others did not need to know about her plans, at least not for now. When she came to the end of the hall she turned towards the door and waved her hand in front of the sensor, not surprisingly she heard the signal inside the room, but no one replied from inside, just like she had hoped. With her knife she pried open the casing and begun to shift around the crystals to open the door, the same procedure they had used on their Aurora-class ship.
"I'm out here, no need to ruin the lock," a familiar voice sounded behind her.
"Thought I'd surprise you a little," she said in her sweetest voice and hid the knife quickly in her clothes.
"Well you didn't," he said while she walked towards the figure who stood on a balcony outside the tower they were in.
"It's truly beautiful, the city in the dark," she said when she leaned against the railing next to him.
"Yes. The city's been my home for years, but I still come here almost every night to look at the view," he said affirmingly. As they stood there he felt a hand fumbling onto his.
"You know when I last bound you up we formed an alliance against the Asuran, now here you are using them as workers John."
"Yes, we have lost all contact with the humans of our home galaxy, we call it the Milky Way. So we can't get workers that way any more, but we still need more capable hands every day. But these aren't meant to be used as weapons, only as a labor force. We have faced nanites in many galaxies but these are the first which aren't allowed to replicate, the trait which have made them such a pain. We need to manually construct each one of them, one at a time."
"If you say they can be trusted then I will take your word for it John," she said and squeezed his hand. "But I was going to talk about the alliance we formed then and what we have now."
"What about it?" he asked, spreading his fingers so her fingers could interlock with his.
"Well to start with your people owe us a ship."
"Something which we're going to settle tomorrow," he promised.
"Then there's your lack of people, we number in the thousands and everyone older than eight years can man our ships."
"You can't build new ships, we can," he said as he caught on.
"You haven't proved that yet," she teased. "But I think you understand where I'm going with this."
"You say the Travelers would complement us," he said and turned towards her.
"Just like we complement each other," she said and came close to him.
"Really? Like how you go and romanticize everyone to disarm them?"
"My only knife is stashed away and I don't think I really need to take away any weapons from you."
"This knife?" he asked with her blade dangling between his fingers.
"So you have me unarmed John, what are you going to do?"
"I'll probably ask what you suggest for our alliance?"
"What do you know of our fleet?" she asked after turning away.
"Not much, it's some sort of lose group were each captain rule over almost everything on the ship. When you don't need supplies or need to trade you try to stay in deep space, away from the Wraith."
"Yes, that's true, but there's only a small portion of our fleet which gathers supplies," she explained while they looked out over the city. "The majority of our fleet is in such a bad state that it no longer leaves deep space, it floats around there in a tight cluster while the rest of us do our best to bring what they need."
"So the fleet we saw was only part of your fleet?"
"Around a fifth of our still space capable ships, the others are spread out into groups of four," she said. "But that's not what you should focus on here John, with hyperdrives I could repair the ships and have them flown here to be upgraded. I could have them put under your control and in exchange you provide us with supplies and repairs."
"Your ships are small and old Larrin, even if we refit every system in the ship there's no way to make up for that."
"We have a few larger ships, they just don't move by themself," she protested.
"Which is your problem, but you say they're packed with people?"
"We don't keep exact count, but there's thousands of people on each one of those ships."
"We could use those people, I'll see what I can do."
"That is all I ask John."