Disclaimer: This author makes no claim to ownership of the games, tv shows and other original works of fiction depicted in this story save for the fanfiction itself. This story is not written for any form of profit or monetary gain.


Advent of the Illuminate

Chapter 2


Tab eased forward slightly then stopped. His squad mates were arrayed to either side, they lay belly down in the mud and ash. Emitters built into their trauma suits played a range of deceptors, trying to convince advanced sensor suites that they were not there, that what was there belonged there and did not require the attentions of a starship grade antimat round.

Tab's heartbeat sped up in spite of the super-oxygenated content of his completely remodeled blood circulatory system. An Assault Bot was patrolling nearby, he could feel the tread of its footsteps through the ground. His artificial nerves held his body still as he saw with more than his eyes, heard with more than his ears, not that there was much to hear and see.

Energy dampeners fouled most sensors when combined with careful movement on the part of the soldier. Waveguides built into Tab's trauma suit armor at an atomic level altered radiation and sonar returns. Nanomechanical deceptors sprayed from under arm dueled with snifferbots, smart dust, detochem, biochem and targeted radiologicals, just a small list of the wandering nasties on the Illuminate battlefield.

The deceptors did strange things to unaided sight and sound. Modern warfare meant that that not even the naked eye could be trusted, one kept one's helmet on and prayed to Wiseman that the seals held against whatever could be trying to eat its way through to get a taste of human flesh. These were refinements of the weapons created to fight the insurgencies that had been fought on ancient Nazca.

The Goa'uld had gone to ground when the Illuminate had liberated the world. Taking a series of hosts and using the People as a shield against retribution, it had been the Fedayeen Mahdi who had secured the planet against this insidious threat to the Unity. These were the weapons that they used, the tactics to reclaim those taken as hosts, men and women prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice on a nightmarish battlefield, nanowarfare, psiwarfare...

Psiwar in combat was a terrible thing. A soldier might be thinking that they were back at home with their spouses and friends, happily eating dinner waiting to be called into action when in reality they were lying in a ditch somewhere in a psychically induced coma as something that looked like a flatworm chewed on their faces. They could be perfectly fine and then a stray thought, a burst of emotion and a disciplined squad was suddenly in chaos shooting into their buddies or flagging an Assault Bot down on their position. It had been an effective tactic for capturing the Misguided in those days.

The last goa'uld captive to die on Nazca had been three hundred and ninety-six years old. It passed away from organ failure and old age. One would think that one thousand years after the System Lord Sobek's demise; and nearly eight hundred after the last of the insurgencies perpetrated by the goa'uld that had hidden in the wake of Sobek's defeat, had been pacified; that the Nazcan Illuminate would have moved on and forgotten the past.

Had they been a society less enlightened, like the Silent Ones, there was the real possibility of the facts of those days being forgotten and obscured by the haze of myth and legend that time often interposes in the intervening years. Just a single generation would have been enough for a people to doubt their history if not for the Ancestor Anima. It was a blessing and a curse, and part of the reason why the Silent Ones were tolerated.

Another people might have dismissed the tales of the Crocodile Men and Sobek as an allegory, or a fictitious tale of monsters and magic. They certainly wouldn't have sponsored and volunteered to train among the Fedayeen Mahdi, soldiers for a war that need not be fought, for battles that were almost certain to bring death to kith and kin, to prepare for such a future when the Illuminate war machine could instead use cheap drone warfare.

"I am Tabbai, son of Hezrah, son of Terah. Three seasons from this day my elder sister Hassifa was taken to the temple to dance for the Hungry God's blessing." –a scent of wild berries and mirrth- "Hassifa was the most beloved of my father's daughters, most beautiful, most kind to the elders, her eyes were flecked gems of jade and jasper, hair dark and silky tresses, a smile that held the promise of amity and hope, laughter that bubbled like water from a fresh spring." –grief- "She danced for three nights without rest, a dance of such beauty and grace…"

Tab held still as the live fire exercise continued, the most notable events of his career to date had been responding to natural disasters and other emergencies that at times cropped up on the new colonies, these drills were the closest thing to an actual fight that his men had gotten to. When not on call performing disaster relief, his duty was normally guarding Illuminate military facilities or enforcing the peace. He and his men trained for the chance that they might one day be brought to battle. Patiently waiting in his trauma suit, his Ancestor's words echoed in his memories.

"They burned her…"

The Fedayeen Mahdi didn't forget, couldn't forget. Though numbering less than one five hundredth of their population, had the Nazcan Illuminate not been comprised in part, of Silent Ones whose vote in affairs was conservative, the rage of their Ancestor Anima might have driven the Unity into a killing frenzy. Instead there were families of devotees who joined the Fedayeen Mahdi, those who sacrifice for the savior. They trained, believed, waited. They remembered the Goa'uld Sobek and waited for the chance to kill his kin.


1,000 Years Ago

The woman moaned softly where she lay, cocooned within the protective fields generated by her crash couch. For a moment she ignored the insistent tingling sensation from her implants that called for her attention in favor of releasing another pain-filled moan. Slowly, she ran a hand along the side of her head, feeling as she did so the numb patches where her implants extended close to her skin. The woman's eyes were still closed as she frowned, while her cybernetic upgrades were more extensive than those of her comrades, the only time they felt odd to her was after intense sessions of usage.

Tentatively, Jeniver Vradica opened her eyes, looked around the wrecked control center and wondered. "What the fuck?"


It turned out that she'd been comatose for eighteen hours and after her body had been healed, the strain on it due to what had occurred had ensured that she had slept for a further six. This she had learned from the Drone Anima of her superior and friend, Eliza Dauer. The Heron's inertial dampeners had held when the vessel had first been pulled out of phase space by the spatial anomaly else they would all have been dead. Unfortunately, enough force had bled through to cause significant damage to the crew, near fatal damage on its own actually.

Cryostasis protocols had been activated to preserve navigator and engineer, the pilot Dauer had needed to remain active in order to control the psitech systems that had allowed them to navigate though the anomaly. That was several precious minutes without vital medical care and Dauer was paying for it in spite of probably saving all of their lives.

Her body was dying.

Actually, it was already dead, The now quiescent Drone Anima and the psitech link had managed to preserve an accurate emulation of Eliza's consciousness and Jeniver dared to hope, her friend's soul. The cryostasis had arrested any further degradation and Vradica had spent the two hours constructing a resurrection module from the scrap in the medical station and forward engineering bay. She was by no means a professional like Wiseman, who could build anything they needed without pause, but she did have the needed knowledge within her TECKInt and her own profession was a boon to the pace she was working at.

Jeniver's implants upgraded her brain in a number of ways, the most notable of which was an upgrade to her amygdala. It was an augmentation that was rarely attempted due to the chance of complications resulting in clinical psychosis. Combined with the resources of her TECKInt, Jeniver possessed the ability to combine a telepath's sensitivity to quantum states with a highly refined set of mathematical modeling algorithms.

By utilizing her extensive and rigorous psychological training, these skills allowed her to map out accurate mid to long range predictions from an extremely large collection of data, the larger the sample set the better. This was what allowed Illuminate starships to travel through unknown regions at FTL. Navigators like Jeniver used their abilities to predict safe corridors through the intervening space to the target destination.

This ability also manifested to a limited degree as a form of instinctual clairvoyance that Jeniver was using to quickly and accurately construct the modified cloning tank that would hopefully succeed in transcribing the unique characteristics of the neural network that held the mind of Eliza Dauer. It was a technique that worked by transferring an advanced Drone Anima bearing a perfect psychic impression of its creator into a psitech quantum storage device for later transference into a clone body, like the one that Vradica was rapid growing.

Jeniver spared another concerned glance at Dauer's body, sitting reclined within her crash couch at peace. There was a sense of elegant nobility to the dark haired woman that peacefully lay within it. Swallowing thickly, she looked away. There were several more critical tests that needed to be performed, and if she wanted to save the woman she loved she would need to concentrate on the displays before her.


Several hours later, Jeniver was still sitting before a bank of holographic monitors, intently watching the readouts. The pod containing the remnants of Eliza Dauer's original body was gone, placed in storage; all that remained was the inactive cloning vat with the resurrection module attached to it. A series of medical scanners linked to the nascent body's TECKInt and monitored the integrity of the neural network. Jeniver checked her readings one more time, there was a transmission fidelity of higher than level alpha 0.1 percent. It was better than she could have hoped for, certainly better than could be expected after Dauer's body had been dead for more than twenty-four hours prior to the procedure, cryostasis or not.

The one thing that the sensors couldn't tell her that she desperately wanted to know was what kept her in this room shaded blue by the light of monitors and the cloning vat's tissue generators. As she watched, nanites slowly accelerated the growth of body hair on smooth pinkish skin, firmed up muscles under the taught flesh at the stomach and along long legs that looked so much like those that had once wrapped around her and threaded with her own, sex pressed to sex. In spite of herself, Jeniver allowed her smoky grey eyes to travel further upward, tracing hips that had truthfully never been quite so slim, up the smooth abdomen lacking the tattoos her lover had favored, the ones Wiseman had spent hours tracing with his tongue. Jeniver 's eyes lingered over perfectly formed breasts so familiar, with their large aureoles and button-like nipples, one slightly more sunken than the other.

Realizing what she was doing, the navigator snapped her eyes down and fixed them upon her trembling olive skinned hands. Her shoulders heaved with a great shuddering sigh before she triggered her cortical stimulators. This time she sedated herself slightly, dulling her intense emotions enough to get them under control rather than disturb the healing trance of the comatose woman before her. This was… harder than she expected. The waiting…

Abruptly Jeniver looked up, brought her hands up to face-level and slapped her cheeks twice. She tucked a strand of rust-brown hair back over her ear as she spoke to herself authoritatively.

"Alright, girl! That's done! Done and over with… Done and over with!"

Her focus for nearly the entire time since awakening had been on saving the HERON's pilot, now as fear and adrenaline ebbed, more worldly concerns began to intrude upon her. She knew that the HERONhad crash landed in water, some sections at the lower levels of the engineering bay had flooded partially before the emergency systems generated nanoshields over the breaches. The carbon nanotube composite armor held off the water without issue and stopped further flooding but Vradica was beginning to kick herself for not taking a moment to find out just how bad the damage really was.

"Schutta!" She cursed, knowing that her situation was probably still in jeopardy.

Tiredly she left the medical station after giving one final look behind her at the cloning vat. Walking out the room and into the hallway she was greeted by the sight of a debris strewn corridor. The walls had actually been warped slightly by the force of the impact and as a result several service panels had popped out of their frames. She walked past exposed optical circuitry as the litany of HERON's many ills ran through her mind.

To start with, the ship had settled on its port side. Jeniver had only the multiply redundant gravity controls, in this case the integrated mag-plating, to thank for not having to walk along the walls and deal with an even more trashed medical station and engineering bay than she had needed to. Next, as she had suspected, the HERONhad crashed landed in a body of water and was submerged on a ledge that was a hundred meters below the surface. There was some minor damage due to flooding as she had noticed but the nanoshields were maintaining the integrity of the hull and the structure itself was holding.

This led to the third and final point, the nanoshields were designed to hold without power. They primarily consumed energy when being formed, manipulated or regenerated. Even so, the HERON's fusion reactors had scrammed and vented the plasma chambers before entering the atmosphere proper, they were currently relying on the charge in the capacitors and battery power… which was running out. While the procedure for restarting the reactor was known to her and surrounded by water as the HERONwas the issue of fuel was moot, the problem was that there had been some damage to Reactor One and she didn't trust her Drone Anima to properly evaluate the state of Reactor Two.

This meant holding off until either Eliza awoke or she got into contact with Wiseman… that is, if he was alive…

Her priorities in order, she did what she could to conserve the ship's power reserves, mentally shutting down power and heat in unoccupied areas of the HERON as she made her way to the bridge. Her goal was to repair the com system if she could, and get in contact with the man whose death she dared not contemplate and procrastinated to confirm. Her hope and her friend, her lover, Jan Wiseman.


Before she had started working, Jeniver had cut back on the temperature settings throughout the ship save for in the medical station. She also sealed off the core sections of the ship as a measure to preserve heat and power. Artificial gravity in the corridors had also been turned off. It made things awkward when moving around the ship, but it also saved power. Her duty suit had activated in order to ward against the growing cold.

The seemingly pointless extra folds of cloth and tabard had shifted and drawn tight against the soft shell support suit that she wore beneath. The support suit was an ubiquitous piece of equipment among space-faring personnel, capable of recycling waste matter into oxygen and water. The loose pieces of smart cloth formed gloves and a hijāb-like helmet. The ornate looking buttons that had seemed like decorations proved to be mag-studs that generated a skintight force field over her form using negligible amounts of energy to operate. In this way, Jeniver worked on the com system in the cold and dark.

Compared to jury rigging a resurrection module from an automated surgical suite and random scrap including a mineral scanner, modifying what remained of the HERON's sensors into a transceiver was a simple task, though requiring Jeniver to crawl though several meters worth of service access ways. The range was pathetic, barely further than the planet's outer atmosphere, but it was more than sufficient to allow contact with Jan should he have survived. Jeniver worked slowly but in a few hours the HERON'sbridge filled with the sound of a familiar voice.

"This is UIMEV ACU JW66 Colony Construction and Engineering Specialist, Jan Wiseman to the HERON and any Unified Illuminate vessels within range of this signal. Automated Distress Beacon Activation, time code PE 1031-08-05-TC-02, declaring unscheduled orbital insertion on unknown exo-planet, requesting emergency assistance. Repeat… Automated Distress Beacon Activation, time code…"

Wiseman's voice when it came elicited a relieved gasp from her suit speakers. Even if only an automated signal it meant that he had at least survived planet fall. The message repeated again and again within the HERON'sbridge as Jeniver worked to pinpoint the signal. It was surprisingly close by, a few meters above them, floating on the surface of the sea was an engineer working on building a mobile salvage dock. The first thing she had it do was set up power and communication links to the surface. The safety of ship and crew assured, she wasted no time in hungrily setting her eyes on the tired but relieved form of Jan Wiseman.

For a moment, all that they could do was gaze upon each other, the relief of one seeing the other alive and unharmed having an almost soporific calming effect.

'Jan…' She sent, with an underlying surge of love.

'Jen!' She heard, relief, love hope… then a tinge of worry. He frowned...

"Where is Eliza?" He asked over the channel.

In her mind she heard, 'Is she all right? Is she hurt? Did she…'

At first her answer was a wordless sense of shared comfort and calm.

'Brain injured.' She sent, 'Delayed healing and death but managed a successful resurrection'

There are no words to properly describe to a baseline the fullness of the wordless communication that the two shared. There was grief at the injury and physical death, but an underlying sense of awe at their comrades willing sacrifice. The knowledge that Jeniver held, the reconstructed events from the ship's log and her conversations with Eliza Dauer's Drone Anima passed to Wiseman who absent mindedly updated Jeniver on his own misadventures. There was approval as Wiseman went over with her the procedures used to conduct the resurrection and found not a single fault in the process.

Together they faced the grim possibility. Eliza Dauer lived, but would Eliza still be their Eliza Dauer?


No one knew for certain the true origins of resurrection technology. Some said that like the TECKInt, the resurrection module was an iteration of the technology used in the Golden Age of the Illuminate's past. It was a time when the Unity flourished upon their home world and at the height of their enlightenment it was said that there was no need, no conflict nor death within the embrace of Unity. Organic existences that blended seamlessly with the synthetic, minds molded as easily as flesh, their technology created sentient intelligences that found homes in organic and inorganic forms without discrimination.

The Illuminate's ancestors had found not only a way to quantify the soul using proto-psitech but created a real and true method of functional immortality. With the wisdom of their ancestors and the vitality of the young, their technology could have easily created an apocalyptic horror were it not for the Unity. Where miscreant anarchists might have turned their technological singularity toward the creation of engines of war and domination, the benevolence of the Unity defined the will of all its members and brought peace to all.

Was it truly so difficult a concept to understand?

Each member of the Illuminate voluntarily surrendered a part of their individuality for the safety of all and in turn, gained so much more…

To the Trade Order, the existence of the collective was even more an affront to humanity than the cloning, flesh-shaping and mind-warping. The use of a cybernetic prosthesis was not unknown, but to see a child eagerly hack out part of her brain and replace it with a machine to make her smarter? To clothe an A.I. in cloned flesh and call it son was as incomprehensible to them. The Trade Order representatives hadn't needed to know of the resurrection technology, the vastly modified forms that some post-humans chose to be resurrected into were so grotesque to their sensibilities that the Unity's desire to spread across human space merited only one possible answer, the annihilation of abomination.

Much was lost in those ancient wars, lost and gained. The art of creating true Sentient Intelligences had been lost for a time along with the knowledge of resurrection tech only to be slowly regained over centuries. Resurrection technology still wasn't perfect. It was in a way analogous to a poorly treated brain injury. Some loss of functionality could occur, impaired cognition, memory or even death of personality could be expected in the worse cases where either the injury or the transfer fidelity was bad. Even in the best case scenario, there was the possibility that the vital skills and abilities of an individual could be completely lost, though this was rare due to the labyrinthine nature of the human brain and redundant memory. Finally, some patients recovered perfectly but experienced changes to their personality, tastes, preferences, personal goals and choices. For this reason a resurrected individual was not legally considered the same individual as their former self, all contracts, personal and professional were annulled including marriages.

The possibility that so concerned Vradica and Wiseman was the last…


She remembered that day on her home world Reykjavik. They had eaten kaju melons dipped in nettle bee honey, with ástapungar and some glasses of strong, fruity liquor. Even thinking about it brought back to mind the spicy taste of that homemade wine. Their picnic site was on the top of a hill and it afforded them of a clear sight of their surroundings. She remembered the green trees topped with flowers and the clouds of luminescent beetles that pollinated them. She recalled clear rivers that threaded through the hills and the sound of burbling water coming all the way from the titanic glaciers that so dominated the horizon to the north and south. She remembered Menja risen high in the sky; and the white whorls of the great super storm that had raged across the gas giant's surface for as long as human memory.

That day was a special day, when Sigmund ascended in the east as Signe rose in the west. Their combined radiation sent charged particles skirting off of the planetary quantum shield. This caused hazy dancing lights to spread across the sky; a display that was punctuated by flashes of lightning as the scent of ozone filled the forest. The local over-shields protected the twelve hundred kilometer wide belt of life around the equator, preventing forest fires and the like; in the process this created a vibrant secondary display that served to add a subtle undertone of color to the performance.

They were alone on that hill- oh the minds of millions of others rode upon the backs of the nettle bees as the mindless things flitted from flower to flower. Their optical sensors captured the full vibrancy of particle to particle interactions in ways that unaugmented human eyes could not, adapted by gene manipulation a century prior for the entertainment of seasonal viewers as much as to help the creatures tell where the safety of the radiation shield ended.

Jeniver, that clever, skittish waif leaned against her, drawing her attention. They shared a look of lust before the telepath looked away, blushing not at the lurid cast of her thoughts but at the greater than 99.999 percent probability she foresaw of being brought to a great thrashing, screaming orgasm under her lovers' hands. Her Janny shared a knowing look with her as the girl between them slapped her cheeks twice, a personal quirk when flustered. Together they stared the girl down, bullying her with their intentions until she squealed.

As they bore to the ground like she remembered, in a tangle of limbs and soft cries, her heart swelled with joy. Neuron after neuron sparked, a name formed, a personality awakened from a mess of electronic approximations and psychic impressions. Her eyes opened, Eliza endured.

In the bridge, Jeniver cried sweet tears of relief. Sometimes being clairvoyant wasn't a bad thing.


A year and two months later saw Eliza Dauer back where she felt she belonged, lonely though it was, in space and on the bridge of her own ship. In this case her vessel was a Progenitor-class mother ship that she named the SOMNIUM RUBRICA, or A Dream of Red Earth in the native language. Her HERONhad been reclaimed for mass and used to create a glistening city by the sea for the former goa'uld slaves. It was a fate that she could live with. But even thinking of the situation on the planet that her crew had discovered was enough to leave a bitter taste in her mouth. Resting physically alone in her command couch she was easily able to pull up Jan's report as her Drone Anima directed the mother ship out-system.

It had taken only a little while for Wiseman to realize there was a gender disparity between the slaves working in the mines. The men outnumbered the women five to one and there were no children among the slaves that he had discovered or in the slave city itself. The question of where the rest of their people were, was a little too complex to pose with clumsy hand signs from his ACU. Eventually however, with people actually talking to him instead of shooting, the TECKInt's translation software was able to cobble together a working translation algorithm from archival records of an ancient language similar in structure to what the locals were speaking.

The answer to Wiseman's questions had been provided by an elder among the slaves, a man that from Eliza's perspective had grown old long before his time due to a lifetime of hard labor with little medical care. Listening and looking at the young man, a mere eighty years of age yet already toothless and wrinkled, had been a trial for her. Vradica, the youngest of the three adepts was almost twice this boy's age. Reuniting and reaffirming her bonds with Wiseman had been the only bright part of her day after she was brought up to speed on what was happening on this planet.

Learning of the atrocities suffered under the goa'uld 'System Lord'Sobek, had ignited a sense of outrage. Humans being herded as cattle, driven out into the wild to survive in the desert, the men culled from the tribes from generation to generation leaving behind a few bereaved, pregnant wives and children. Of those taken to the city, some were women chosen to serve as cooks and domestic servants or for their beauty as ornamentation and temple slaves. Some went through the chappa'ai, the local name for the Quantum Gate, and were never seen or heard of again. Arguably they were the most fortunate. Dauer's Elder Anima held memories that reached as far back as the exodus from her ancestor's home, hounded by killers from the Trade Order; taking this into account, to say that the sheer level of misery inflicted upon these people was shocking to her would be an understatement.

The children were favorites of the priests, who sacrificed the ill-formed or unfit in a variety of macabre ways for their Lord's amusement usually feeding them to crocodilians or forcing them into one-sided battles with marsupial predators from the coastal forests. Some of the women were taken to provide a sacrifice or entertainment as well. There was no limits to the excesses save that the loss of human life was not to exceed the rate at which more humans could be bred. It had taken little encouragement for Wiseman to send the former slaves after what remained of their tormentors. Few bothered to arm themselves beyond what was within reach. The Jaffa priests and minor Goa'uld that had remained behind in Sobek's temple consisted of the least important and the wiliest of the System Lord's followers. By a quite literal process of elimination, only the most devious survived the purge, becoming guerilla forces opposing the HERON'screw.

In the end Wiseman's original posse had been enhanced by the addition of several armed recon probes that worked in tandem with the Fedayeen as they began calling themselves. The supercontinent was a warren of underground tunnels and caverns formed by extinct lava flows, many of which were lined with rich ore deposits including transuranium metals like the 'naquada' that prevented detailed satellite based scans. The entire cavern system was gradually being flooded by nanomachines, looking for the insurgents that hid within them. The nano-detection system would take a hundred years or more to completely cover the cavern network, in the meantime Wiseman's recon drones and the 'Deadmen' who followed after them, bore the task of clearing out pockets of resistance and driving enemies to areas where an assault bot could be deployed.

It was long, hard work, a number of surface raids had been fought off and numerous infiltration attempts thwarted. This was the driving force behind relocating the slaves and as many tribes as could be found, to the city on the coast. In the end, with every tribe indoctrinated, every goa'uld captured, every child born free, enlightenment came closer to Nazca's grasp. It was Dauer's determination that the HERONand her crew were isolated beyond likely hope of contact with home within their lifetime. Thus, the only way forward was to establish an Illuminate colony on Nazca. They were lacking many of the usual tools used for full colonization but just having Wiseman's ACU would have been enough given time. Jeniver commanded the terrestrial base of the newly created space elevator. Through her own recently constructed ACU Jeniver co-ordinated between Wiseman, who worked directly with the native tribes and Dauer, who commanded their space-based assets.

Together the three met regularly, via V-link or in person to discuss aspects of their colonization plan. Wiseman and Vradica were quickly setting up the basics of a variety of systems that were planned to uplift the developing society to modern levels in less than two hundred years. So far use of psitech had been kept to a minimum due to the sheer enthusiasm and the slightly disturbing level of hero worship that the former slaves inspired in their reunited tribespeoples for the HERON'screw. The female dominated desert tribes paid rapt attention to Vradica who was seen among them as the wise woman that commanded the Djinn; much to Jan's bemusement over the way they referred to him. To the primitive tribes, the nano-assembled city that Wiseman had produced seemed to them to be a magic far greater than any they had witnessed from their 'god'.

And again thinking of the goa'uld was enough to sour Dauer's thoughts. The quantum gate had been deactivated for study. It and the control node that came with the device were removed from the surface of the world and placed aboard an evacuated research station in orbit. Their Drone Animae were looking into the simple, yet elegant design. The intact FTL module of the semi-complete Ha'tak had been another source of insight that was removed from the reach of the insurgents. As Wiseman had noted about other examples of goa'uld technology, Dauer's experienced eye found the device to be both a quantum leap in advancement over phase space engines currently in use yet painfully ass-backward. She shared Wiseman's opinion that the goa'uld must have been scavengers or were using decrepit examples of a legacy technology with modifications to patch what was ill-understood.

What this meant for Nazca, and the nature of the original creators of this technology was unknown; and the unknown as far as Dauer was concerned was dangerous. Eliza Dauer intended to be prepared, though not as closely involved in the lives of her fellow colonists her influence was both felt and seen in the new constellation of stars that filled the clear night sky. The SOMNIUM RUBRICA was just the first Progenitor Capital ship in the making; and about her there moved a flotilla of disciple, illuminator and defense frigates. Constantly patrolling the local system, the ships threaded their way through clusters of beam defense platforms as Aeria Drone Hosts disgorged and embarked clouds of fighters. It was only the beginning.


AN: While this seems to be not as well known as my other writings, science fiction is a genre that I love to both read and write. To those that recognize it, there is a slight reference to some other scifi works that I've read.