"Colonel Carter" Larrin greeted her when she came onto the bridge. They had been in transit for a few minutes before she had gotten there.

"Captain. How's the new upgrades?" Sam asked with a smile.

"Everything seems to be working as it should and we don't need nearly as large a crew" she replied along with a smile of her own. "But I wouldn't have minded if it was one of the larger ships."

"We have begun construction of three more and you seem to be leading the Travelers we've hired, so why not go ahead of the line and take the next one?"

"There is already a line forming of captains who have lost their ships to receive new ships from you."

"Do they all know that those ships are bound to us and that we will not allow them to take the ships back with them if they leave our service?" Just as she finished the sentence the ship left hyperspace and arrived over a long dead world.

"We all know, but there are many who see you as our last chance at survival. Of course there are many others who think you are using us. But we can talk about this later when we don't have a job to do."

"Of course." She had walked over to a nearby station where she pulled up the ship's sensor readings. "We're looking for anything which could come from the Alterra."

"There's no gate within sensor range" someone reported.

As the minutes passed the sensors only showed the same rocky planet which showed no signs of life ever existing there or even visiting briefly. Then the minutes turned into hours without them detecting something. After three hours and thorough scans of the other six small planetoids they suddenly got something on their scanners from the planet they had firstly arrived over.

Suddenly the bridge was full of action as the ship begun to descend down through the atmosphere and everyone prepared for a worst case scenario. When the ship was a few hundred meters above the surface the ground begun to roll up to reveal a large metal plate which was several thousand meters long and over a thousand wide. This metal plate then folded outwards to allow access to the ribcage of a very large ship.

"Move it people, move it" someone shouted while Crown and Cadman were lifted into the room by soldiers. "Get the scanners ready."

The two patients had been beamed over from the Odyssey after receiving CPR for half an hour. "Put them over there" the doctor in charge ordered while gesturing for two of the six beds in the room. She would do all she could for them but they showed no signs of anything she thought she could cure, then that had always been part of the job with the SGC.

Sheppard was standing in front of his creation and as his rage was starting to settle down he realised that he might have overdone it slightly.

-Colonel Sheppard, the Retribution have received both women. They have been taken to the infirmary-

"Thank you for the notice Major, set a course for Earth. We will pick up the jumper under cloak and meet up with the others back at Atlantis."

-Copy that Colonel, we'll relay the order.-

"I will need a few minutes for myself now." He did not wait for a reply before turning of his com badge and turning all his focus towards the prior.

It was true that everything could be solved with cable ties, duct tape and vaseline and the Asgard core had created it all for him. With cable ties he had fastened the prior's hands to a support which ran along the roof and his feet to the vertical supports that lined the wall. Then he had 'repaired' the prior's clothes with a knife and some duct tape until he looked more like a beggar than a priest of an alien religion. Lastly he had stuffed vaseline into the man to make him slightly 'fluffier'.

He knew he had gone over the edge with crazy here, but only the other priors would see it. He would make sure any evidence of what he had done was gone before anyone else could see it.

Next to the prior lay the staff that the prior had clutched even in death and only when Sheppard had hung him from the roof had the staff fallen to the floor. Now he reached down to grab the staff, the moment he touched the staff he could feel his mind connecting to at least twenty other minds which each and everyone belonged to a prior. Then there was something else in the background which seemed to be pressing itself into his mind but he would not allow it to dig into his mind, he had already sent the message he meant to and by the disturbed thoughts of the others he knew it had struck home. With the message delivered he did what he planned on doing from the start and put the staff back into the prior's hand before walking out of the airlock and sealing the door behind him. Still with his back towards the door he pressed a button and the outer hatch opened to suck the prior and everything else in the room out of the ship.

With that taken care of he headed back to the bridge to find that the ship had already arrived in the solar system and was heading for Earth under cloak. Through the forward viewport they could see some fifty ships circling the planet with an additional sixteen coming and going through hyperspace. As they approached the stimm of ships Captain Cooper, who was the pilot, switched over to manual controls and put them in orbit right between two of the 305s.

-Major Rutherford do you read?- Colonel Sheppard's voice rang out from the jumper's speakers. They had been observing the fifty nine concrete hangars on the bottom of the ocean for several hours and during that time hundreds of submarines had arrived with parts strapped to their hulls while other parts had been dropped from ships on the surface. No matter where the parts had come from they had mostly been taken to the hangars before they had been sealed up again. What parts were left over were large amounts of concrete bricks heading for a group of new hangars where the foundations had just been laid.

"Colonel Sheppard we read you loud and clear" the Major replied.

-Have you managed to locate the hangars?-

"Yes Sir. We have located fifty nine hangars deep under the Arctic ocean, I believe we arrived just as a group of ships were taken into service."

-Fifty nine new ships? That could cause some trouble for us-

"Yes Sir, but they're already working on the next group and they seem to have all the parts they need already." Because he knew that their mission was soon over he willed the jumper up from the seabed and let it rise slowly towards the surface.

-Good observation Major.- In the background he could hear other voices and a few muted words from the Colonel.

"Thank you Sir. The jumper's loaded with drones, we could make sure some of those hangars can't be used again."

-No Major, we want them to keep all their production here so we can take it all out at once.-

"Yes Sir."

-What about the outpost and the gate?-

"Scans showed nothing of use but we saw hundreds of scavs who seemed to be based at McMurdo Air Force Base out in the blast crater Sir."

-Get back down there Major, we're picking up a weak subspace signal from the area. We're ready to beam your team to safety when you need extraction.-

"Yes Sir." Everyone in the jumper had hoped their mission would have been done so they could return to Atlantis but as the jumper slowly rose out of the water they knew it would have to wait while duty called. The reason they wanted back to Atlantis was not because they had all been living in the city for years now but rather because of what they had seen while going from the former south pole to the former north pole. While a straight route would have been the best for the mission they had all felt the same and Rutherford didn't even need to talk to the others before he set a course for Australia which was where the two sergeants in his team came from. They had both lived in the same small mining town before joining the Australian Defence Force but when they had flown over the area they had found a deep hole in the ground with thousands of people mining under slave like conditions. Around the edge hundreds of crosses had been raised and on some of them people had been crucified.

At the sight the Major had quickly gotten the jumper up to speed, he knew his people well and the two Australians had a short temper even when someone was only making fun of their home this would have caused an armed retaliation if they got the chance. When they saw thick and black smoke rising up and covering the sky as they came up on the Lieutenant's home in India the Major had changed their course straight away for a direct path for the Arctic ocean.

What they had seen there was the reason they wanted back to Atlantis, not to flee from their problems and drench their sorrow with something from the bar in Atlantis even if they would all toast in memory of those who died when everything was done, they wanted back to Atlantis to plan some payback.

Over the frozen ground a siren was screaming out the signal for the guards to herd them back to the base and McKay's guards seemed all too eager to get back inside the warmth of the base. They waved their weapons back and forth between the thirty people the five were guarding. From time to time they fired of a round against their legs to make them hurry on for a while.

When the group was only a few kilometers from the outer perimeter one of the less sober guards thought it was his time to do some shooting and so he pressed the trigger and fired round after round. It ended when one of the other guards slammed the butt of his own rifle into the side the first guards head but by then the damage was already done.

Five bullets had hit McKay when he had jumped for cover behind a boulder, two had cut through his right thigh, one had shattered the right side of his pelvis, another had pierced his left arm and the last one had gone clean through his left shoulder. While the boulder had caught half a dozen more bullets those that hit made him collapse face first into the muddy snow which quickly turned red while his bloody slowly leaked out of his body.

The shooting caused a heated argument amongst the guards about who would support the wounded, not the wounded workers like himself but two guards who had been graced by bullets. While the argument went on he heard several bangs as shots were fired, then one bang sounded and he could see the drunk guard falling down next to him with a hole gaping through his head.

When the guns fell silent he saw the guards stomping through the snow back towards the base.