They had circled the area where the antarctic outpost had been for half an hour in the jumper before the Lieutenant looked up from the readings. "Scan shows no signs of the outpost Sir, but we are picking up hundreds of scavengers in the crater."
"We can clear them out later. First we need to find the hangar where they built those ships," Major Rutherford replied.
"Already scanning for any large energy signatures, shouldn't be too hard to find with all the power outages across the globe." Across the globe many major cities had lacked power when they arrived but everyone seemed to be calm, there were no riots in the streets and even thieves and criminals stayed indoors. The only ones who were outside were the soldiers who patrolled the streets, armed with automatic weapons and dressed in full body armour. "Sir, I'm detecting something beneath the Arctic ice. It's using the majority of Earth's electricity."
"Then that's where we're going."
Sheppard and his nine men had arrived in the Retribution's hangar twenty seconds after he had left the bridge. A new record he thought as the hangar doors shifted to allow them to leave in the jumpers. Outside the ship the Odyssey had just arrived through the supergate and was scanning for the cloaked ship. Then, a few seconds later, the gate's surface was broken as an Ori ship arrived through it, followed by five more within the next ten seconds. By the time they had all arrived and the gate had shut down again a thick, long swarm of drones had left the Retribution, prompting the pilot to move the cloaked ship again. By this time Sheppard was just flying the first jumper out of the hangar while Edison was following right behind him in the ship's second jumper. Angling the jumper tight backwards he flew the jumper over the Retribution towards the Odyssey which was trying to take down the drones with its quick railgun before they could reach the Ori ships. Only seconds later the first drone exploded against the Ori shields, then a hundred more followed it before six drones pierced the shield and begun to drill through the hull, creating explosions as they did. When they finally ran out of power they exploded and ripped the ship to pieces. With one down and five more to go the swarm moved on to the next. From the relative safety of the jumper Sheppard watched the numbers of drones fall quickly as they impacted the enemy shields and he could feel the dread crawling over him. A single drone in the right place would be enough to take out almost any ship, but now they had to sacrifice a large part of their storage just to let that single drone through the shield. Still he had more pressing matters to attend to because the Odyssey's hangar was just ahead of them and he was bringing them in for a landing. "I hope everyone has checked their shields and weapons already." He had brought his Alterran SMG to complement the Alterran and Tau'ri pistols, just like Crown, Cadman and Edison's team. The others had only their Alterran pistols since they normally only manned ships and should not see combat personally. The hangar they had landed in was packed with Ori soldiers and crates so Sheppard let Edison attack from the front of the hangar while he parked his jumper behind some crates at the back and begun to flank the Ori soldiers. The forty or so Ori soldiers in the hangar lost more than half of their numbers before they realised they had been flanked and turned to defend their rear. To his right Sheppard could see something moving and a few seconds later the Ori were again flanked by two of Edison's men. In under a minute the hangar had been cleaned and the three crew members were called out of the jumper.
-Colonel, we're out of drones and falling back to a safe distance. There's two Ori ships left.-
"Copy that Captain, if this ship jumps away you fall back to the rendezvous and wait a few hours," he responded through his com badge.
-See you there Sir.-
"You heard him, we're on our own people. So get a move on."
The jumper dove through the surface of the ocean and down into the icy water of the Arctic Ocean. In a matter of seconds the water around them went completely black and for several minutes they navigated on sensor data alone towards the anomaly. When they came over Gerkel Ridge deep down in the ocean they could see lights moving around deep down. A thought from the Major sent the jumper diving down along the side of the ridge towards the bottom. About halfway down the ridge they saw several new lights appearing and growing in size rapidly. Two seconds later the jumper crashed into a huge air pocket that raced to the surface. The sudden impact of air confused the internal dampeners when they returned to solid water seconds later so much that the jumper was sent tumbling into the side of the ridge. As the four members of Rutherford's team got back on their feet inside the jumper they could see four large ships rising side by side past the viewport, followed by several more groups. By the time the ships had all passed by they had managed to restore power to the jumper and slowly they continued the descent down to the bottom of the ocean to find out what they had done down there.
Back on the Odyssey Sheppard and his group had just managed to shoot their way into one of the corridors leading to the bridge and the resistance was still fierce. A tap on his trigger took out a soldier hiding in a door opening, to his right Crown was sneaking up along the wall to the door. When she came to the door she took two steps past the door to the other side while spraying everything inside the room. With the room clear the group moved on to the bridge. During the short distance to the entrance to the bridge everyone but two men switched to pistols to keep structural damage to a minimum on the bridge. The two men still equipped with SMGs followed the others inside the bridge but took up positions on either side of the door, meanwhile Sheppard had rushed the bridge, which was coloured by the view of hyperspace, with his pistol firing at anything which moved. Anyone who survived Sheppard's rush was picked of by the rest who followed right behind him. The bridge crew had fallen in a matter of seconds and within the next minute Gant, Cooper and Kleinman had gotten rid of the bodies from their stations.
"What's our destination?" Sheppard asked the three man crew. From outside the corridor the sound of fighting intensified as more Ori soldiers converged on the bridge.
"I can't say Sir, we're being towed by an Ori ship," Crown replied from the pilot's seat.
"Sir, the Ori ship's shield is down in hyperspace, a well placed strike would take out the ship," Kleinman said.
"We would need our shield to survive that at this distance Lieutenant," Major Gant pointed out. "And we can't raise the shield without access to the Asgard core."
"Prepare the ship then. Crown, Cadman, let's get a move on." By the time he gave the order Sheppard was already moving out of the bridge him his SMG raised to take out any targets in his path.
By circling back the way they came to the bridge Sheppard and his duo avoided the bulk of the Ori soldiers who were still streaming towards the bridge from somewhere on the ship, at least until they reach the Asgard core. Inside the room Ori soldiers were being beamed in six at a time by what looked like a technician standing at the Asgard core. He was quickly relieved of that duty when Cadman came into the room and put a hole through his head. Right behind her were the other two who sealed the door behind them and hurried to seal the other door too while the Ori soldiers turned around to face them.
"We're back in control Sir," Cadman announced from the Core. "Shields are back up and I'm beginning to beam away the Ori soldiers."
After shooting two Ori soldiers and missing a third who was beamed away Sheppard stepped back into the room and sealed the door. "Major, you have a go," he said into the com badge.
-Copy that Colonel. Firing Asgard weapons in three, two, one, mark.-
A split second after she finished the countdown everyone in the room were thrown to the floor when the ship was pushed to the side by the explosion from the Ori ship. When the ship stabilised a few seconds later they got off the floor. "Major, what's our status?"
-Sensors are showing nothing around the ship and a decreasing number of lifesigns on the ship.-
"Take us to the rendezvous."
On Athyl Sam had just arrived through the gate and a swarm of personnel were waiting for her.
"Colonel, we need you to sign this so we can begin construction of six more Traveller cruisers," a blonde, short man asked politely. Because of its size the Retribution class had been called Traveller cruisers while their smaller ships had been dubbed frigates.
"Have Larrin do it."
The man just managed to get out of the way when six other people tried to take his place. "Colonel you need…"
"Get in line and I'll see each and everyone of you in my office one at a time," she shouted and pushed them out of the way. A series of quick steps brought her away from the crowd and into the nearby transporter. She emerged a few levels beneath the gate, in the administrative section and rushed to her office where her assistant was sitting and going through piles of documents.
A sweet "Good morning ma'am" greeted her the moment she stepped through the door.
"Good morning Katy, unless it's extremely important I think you can handle today's duties. I have something I need to do at the moment," she said while she walked through the foyer to her office.
"Yes ma'am," came the reply as the door slid shut right behind her and she was in her sanctuary, her office and lab. She had half a dozen simulations to run and another hundred design problems to solve on the Hermes project, their new exploration ship, but the datapad Jack had given her was her focus for the moment. A few quick taps with her fingers connected it to the rooms holographic display and diagrams of two crafts, quite obviously fighters, of Alterran design were shown in the middle of the room. The smallest one was obviously made to be small, fast and dirt cheap, but it did come with four forward fixed mounts where she could see them mounting railguns and a shield which was equal to that of a jumper. At three times two times half a meter it was by far the smallest fighter she had seen and it meant it would have to be unmanned. The second one was a little longer than two jumpers but about the same width and height as a jumper and with a much more aggressive look. On top of each of the two rear wings it had a weak pulse turret mounted with one additional above and below the main hull and a single one mounted straight forward on the nose of the ship. Its shield was slightly stronger than that of an Al'kesh, but it was still unmanned. The next file on the tablet again showed her two ships, but these did not vary as much as the two before. They had a shape very much like the shuttles carried by Destiny but with wings curving slightly upwards instead of down. Neither was meant to be unmanned and both were equipped with decent shields. The one with weaker shields only had two turret mounts, but it made up for that with a cloak in addition to the shield and an FTL-drive that gave it a decent push, making it something of a cloaked scout. The other one was much more like a gunship as it had no cloak and no FTL drive, instead it had five weapon mounts plus two high energy mounts where she could probably fit weak versions of the Asgard Plasma Beams. The other mounts on both ships would have to settle for railguns. Next followed a rapport by an Alterran scientist which discussed the war with the Wraith and the reason why the Wraith were winning the war. It was well over five hundred pages long and dry as an oblate, so she skipped past the majority to the end where it was concluded that the Alterra needed to make up lost ground by taking away the Wraith's advantage in numbers. The suggestion was to use the ships in the previous files to even out the numbers and launch them from a ship described in the next file. At the end of the file a set of coordinates had been attached a few years later. When she tried to open the last file the supercomputer in the room froze for a couple of minutes before yet another hologram was projected into the room. It was truly massive in size and put even the Wraith hive ships to shame. The Wraith hive with its two kilometer length was only half the size of this beast, but it was almost the same width and height. The front the ship was formed into a sloping tip which reminded of a hawk's head and further back it got wider until it reached its maximum at thirteen hundred meters and begun to decrease slightly. The last quarter of the ship was separated by a narrow section of the ship to separate systems needed to run the ship from the huge hangar which could house several hundred thousand of the smaller ships. On the top of the ship a trench, just over two point two kilometers long and two hundred and fifty meters wide, allowed Auroras and similar ships to land and dock. The ship itself was armed with three Alterran beam turrets, like those on the defence satellite found in the Lantean system, over two hundred point defence turrets and drones. Those weapons would see it safe through almost any fight, even without the class five shield, only Alterran dome shields, like those in Atlantis and their outposts would be tougher when powered by several ZPMs. All this power was controlled from a two hundred meter long and a hundred and twenty meter wide bridge which was sitting near the back of the ship on a raised platform which would retract during battles. If fielded it would be the single biggest ship encountered by the Alterra, with the exception of the big black ship which had been going around the universe for millions of years. It would be a terror for the Wraith, their hives and their cruisers, it was the Nest.