Asura Path
Disclaimer, I don't own the Stargate franchise, I don't do this for profit, this is a work of fan fiction.
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Chapter Three
Athens 390 B.C.E.
"Son? Son?! Andromache where is that scion of mine?" A man broad of shoulder demands in irritation.
A woman, willowy with long dark hair and darker eyes appears in a doorway. "Where else would a young boy be in the days before harvest, when the bee hives are full and the evening air warm and welcoming? Out with his friends of course, wrestling and listening to old fables."
The man Diron of Athens, a stone cutter by trade snorts in annoyance. "Listening to fables, Bah!"
His wife Andromache directs at him an amused, smoldering look. "Our servants have been sent to the market on errands, our son is out among his peers, there is honeyed wine in our quarters husband." A final look directed over her shoulder, just so, and she retreats into the shadows of the hallway.
A slow grin spreads across Diron's features, a flush spreads around to the back of his neck as he swallows thickly, following his wife into their home. "Perhaps it will do the boy good to socialize with his peers…"
xx
Sophroniskus gasped. "Three stadia long!" His friend, Lysimachus likewise boggled, "Towers that touched the clouds? Streets lined in silver and homes built out of orichalcum!"
Their teacher, called a storyteller for as a woman, it would not be fitting to name her a philosopher, smiled a kindly smile that caused the other boys and girls gathered about her to flush and giggle.
"Yes," she said, "It was an island upon the sea, with piers the size of mountains and slipways where ships could dock with the city."
The children listened raptly to a tale of gleaming towers, ancients of vast and near god-like powers. The girls were awed by heroines of the tale, kind Melia, brave Elizabeth; wise Oma Desala. The boys were enthralled by tales of battle between monsters and gods, men and godlike men. They listened to tales where they rode across the heavens upon silver chariots hurling lightning at each other in battles that roiled the sky.
The children would hear the tales of the city that fell below the sea and from that story learn the price of arrogance. Like other stories the lady would tell them, each would hold layers of meaning, stimulating thought and critical skills of comprehension. These children would grow up and tell these tales to their children who in turn would spread them to others.
Sophroniskus' son, the self-proclaimed philosopher and all-round ne'er-do-well would spread the tale among his own students by word of mouth. Their accounts, enshrined in written word would pass through the ages.
Atlantis…
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When the children had departed, and the sun turned to dusk, the storyteller sat at her loom, industriously working away.
"I miss them." She said.
A man stood behind her, in the light it could not be said whether he was young of old. Eyes too ancient looked out of a face too young. Limbs spry and full of youth moved with the gentle care and grace of the elderly.
Softly, he caressed a cheek, wiping away tears.
"I know.' Was all that he said.
"I tried not to hate them, when they decided that locking the gate would corrupt the time stream." She confessed.
"I know." He promised.
"I miss them." She repeated softly.
"You will meet them again and they will live." He assured, "I am a man of my word."
Long, slender fingers stilled. She turned to him, age falling away like the haze of a summer illusion. "I know." She replied.
"Come with me to Rome." He begged/asked.
Aristocratic brows and features that would one day be called 'Patrician' held query. "But that's just a hovel now?"
A roguish grin as he threw her own words back at her, both old and prophetic. "My dear, Rome wasn't built in a day."
They would laugh and travel and in the wine cellar of a summer home in Pompeii a clay tablet would be secreted in a sealed brass box…
xx
Lantea
The sea winds blew lazily, their near constant presence sending waves crashing against the piers of an Asuran city ship. Lantea was a liquid iron core planet containing a range of basic elements, radioactive isotopes and some few veins of neutronium, naquada, trinium as well as other elements of higher complexity in trace amounts.
It had been home to Atlantis to some 5,000 years out of the 15,000 years that the Lanteans had colonized and seeded their new home galaxy with humanoid life. It would not bear their number indefinitely, but for a time the Asurans could afford to settle in.
Their first order of business was to examine the entirety of the Atlantis Database. Some forty billion minds worked on analyzing the 56 million years of records within the Database with some three million assigned to analyzing the final years of the Wraith-Lantean War disseminating their knowledge across a further one billion minds in the three hundred and forty-five city-ships that had spread across the seas of the planet tracing a titanic Flower of Life that would have been an awesome sight from orbit had the city-ships not been cloaked. As it was all that could be seen was a strange wave pattern…
Of the twelve billion or so Asurans not so engaged, the absolute minimum of 6 million Asurans needed to maintain optimal functions within the fleet of cities spent that time devoted their tasks. A few thousand had been relegated to physically exploring Atlantis in conjunction with those examining the databanks.
Aside from a small mishap involving a strange energy being that had been goaded into leaving through the city's stargate, a quickly contained outbreak of an ineffectual nanovirus and a brutally short encounter with a Hive queen. There had been no serious setbacks that couldn't be solved by reconstituting the destroyed body of an Asuran researcher…or fifty.
As for the rest of the Asurans, those not lending a portion of their run-time to updating scenarios and tactics for use against the Wraith; had risen up from their new home in cloaked, multipurpose reconnaissance vehicles and swiftly constructed fabricator ships. Spreading out into the asteroid belt surrounding Lantea, the remnants of a long destroyed moon and moving out even further to the limits of the Lantean star system, they began to reconstruct the Lantean defense grid.
The Asurans were in a very real sense, a testament to the ingenuity of the Ancients. The analysis of millions of years of history, the in depth, the hour by hour examination of years of combat logs both public and classified, the exploration of a city made to hold hundreds of millions comfortably, the recreation of a system-wide defense grid.
All of it took just seven days.
And then, what did the Asurans do?
They…
Thought…
It may not have seemed like much at all, but the one year that the Asurans spent in quiet contemplation interspersed with brief forays into art and music was one of the most critical blows ever struck against the Wraith, by anyone. It was an attack that far surpassed the destruction of any drone, commander, dart, cruiser or Hive. No greater blow had ever been struck against a fleet of warships or species of sentient beings than what the Asurans leveled against the Wraith that year.
69 billion minds, each a walking, talking array of trillions of quantum super-computers, sat down and thought for one year…
And their focus was finding the very best way to exterminate the Wraith…
xx
One Year Later Asuran Virtual Space
At this point, it should be mentioned that Janus' tampering may have at once saved the human race, all humans everywhere in existence, and at the same placed it in its greatest hour of peril.
This was because, no matter how the problem was examined, the Asurans always came down to the same answer.
"Are you sure we can't just wipe out all humans in existence and let the Wraith starve to death?" P'Forzia one of Forge's fellow researchers groused.
"While I agree that it would be the most efficient method of attack, I find that such an act would also contradict our stated ultimate goal of surpassing our creators in every way. I also feel discomfited by the idea of eliminating another species as a strategy to deny the Wraith their supply of food." Yeager, Forge's assistant and chair of the battle tactics discussion group replied with a sigh.
"It's also unnecessary, we have other, less extreme methods of passive and active denial being researched." Minerva added. "It may not be the most efficient but I like Eris' divide and conquer, recruit and deploy plan better."
"I know you do, and I agree but Option One had to be said." P'Forzia replied, and it was true, though many Asurans genuinely embraced the ideal of protecting their brother species, the humans, from the Wraith as a matter of familial duty. There were still some Asurans, mostly the ones that had been undecided during the confrontation with Oberoth, who had been swayed by the argument of seeking to surpass their creators as a worthy goal for their race.
Option Two had been a classified and locked down file relating to a project called Exogenesis. There were only a few remnants of data on the project as well as a working prototype and historical references to what may have been a prototype from before the Ancients came to Lantea. It was an area of effect device that released a preprogrammed matter dematerialization/materialization wave, backed by clouds of nano-machines and a macro-scale molecular fabrication field.
Basically Exogenesis broke down all complex matter into its constituent elements then reconstructed it into a preprogrammed form on a planetary scale. The creator of the device, recorded as an Ancient named Atlas, had presented it to the Lantean Council as a means to create life-bearing designer planets from previously uninhabitable or unfeasibly difficult worlds and asteroids.
The project had been banned due to the fact that the device destroyed environmental ecosystems in the process of creating new ones. The potential abuse as a weapon was probably also factor in that decision. Option Two had been declined due to the sheer indiscriminate nature of the weapon, as Wraith generally traveled from one human inhabited system to another, the chance that even a properly calibrated and redesigned version of the exogenesis device would have deleterious effects on inhabited worlds was still significant enough for the Asurans to shelve that option until later.
Thousands of smaller projects popped up with groups of Asurans studying the component aspects of Exogenesis. The matter dematerialization/materialization component was taken over by a discussion group lead by several researchers with Forge as the moderator.
Vidane, a gross nanite interlink (GNI) technician lead a similar group looking into new nanite designs and the effects of using alternate materials in such designs. That group ended up being split into two, one studying weaponized applications the other studying peaceful uses.
Vidane's group would expand and split again into groups studying transient-state nanites (nanites composed of energized particles and only existed as such), as well as a group studying variable state nanites (nanites that altered their phase of matter in response to stimulus).
The macro-scale molecular fabricators would have several teams studying potential applications the most promising of which was a MMF project that designed an integrated fabricator and subspace containment unit that built drone weapons and stored them in the millions for future use while actually significantly decreasing the space needed for drone bunkers aboard a warship or weapons satellite.
Their next great idea was self replicating minefields…
Technological advancements weren't the be all and end all of the Asuran's work on Lantea. While the cloaked weapons installations surrounding Lantea and drifting through the star system were being updated with optimized energy weapons, grossly enlarged reserves of drone weapons and mobile clouds of self replicating mines, Niam and Auricht were studying the tactics of the Wraith and the Lanteans during the war.
To put things simply, the Wraith depended on superior numbers and strength, swarming through the galaxy using the stargate network. In this time they were little but a shadow, a fearful rumor of vanished towns, dismissed by the Ancients as the superstition of a primitive mind.
That changed when the wraith began appearing in starships, little more than armed transports utilizing Wraith biotechnology, perhaps gained through access to a lightly manned Ancient outpost. Whatever the method that made it possible, Wraith began to create their first, primitive, interstellar warships.
The Lanteans had swatted them like flies….When they deigned to.
But still the Wraith had numbers on their side and in their teeming millions they spread throughout the galaxy, dying in uncounted numbers attempting to breach Lantean defenses on human worlds. About this time the first prototype Hive ships began to appear, short ranged, holding several thousand crew and a queen they spread the reach of the Wraith even further.
And still they died…
But again the Wraith had numbers on their side. Where an Aurora would obliterate entire fleets of Wraith, in another place five more fleets would feed to their fill. There were not enough ships to stop them.
The Asurans noted that…
Outraged at the tactics used against them, the Wraith acting like looters stealing life where they could and fading into the endless night, the Lanteans moved their fleets into Wraith territory.
There they found them. The Aurora fleet swept through, moving from world to world, erasing the Wraith where they found them a haughty star that liberated defenseless human worlds from the scourge. Ever onward the ever-victorious Aurora fleet progressed, splitting apart to follow the dispersing bands of Wraith that fell before them. Victory was tantalizingly close…
And the Wraith drew them in…
Alone, isolated and lacking support, the Wraith swarmed them, spending nearly the entirety of their race to capture a handful of these seemingly invincible ships.
An asteroid that was not an asteroid but a cleverly hidden bomb, a nebula with an odd characteristic that inhibited hyperspace travel, a fleet of proto-hives diving unhesitatingly into a ship's shields, firing all the way even as they burned. A wall of ships, darts, transports, everything that the Wraith could send they did.
The Asurans took note of that…
Many of the thusly assaulted Auroras returned heavily damaged. Many did not…
The learnt at the cost of their brethren's lives what was needed to make a shield falter, and when it faltered they learnt where to hit it to make it fail. Powerful weapons or no, once they got aboard that ship the ones they fought were even weaker than the human prey. Once they got aboard they would feed.
It was all that the Wraith needed.
The Asurans made note of that…
The Lantean soldiers were valiant men, but the Lanteans, Anquietas as they named themselves had not fought a major war in more than fifty million years. Their technology was so advanced and made them so powerful that the roles of their military officers, a job that had at times become extinct for ages at a time, had devolved into little more than glorified exterminators. At their command a cruiser would shatter, at their word a Wraith infested world would be purged, with literally nothing but a thought on their part a swarm of drones would clear the heavens of the Wraith's foul ships.
Unchallenged they had been arrogant, un-heedful of the species-memory that screamed, "A cornered enemy is the most dangerous, give it a chance and it will rip out your throat!"
The Asurans made note of this…
Their species devastated, gene samples were taken from the warrior males, ZPM's powered massive cloning facilities. A cast of warrior drones was created, mutated, ill-formed things, masked more to hide their disgusting faces than for protection. The Proto-Hives fed power from incredible energy sources grew into eleven kilometer long monsters capable of carrying their hundreds of millions of drones. Their transports were scrapped in favor of dedicated escort warships, carrying wings of darts, mounting mutated excretory organs that fired energized waste matter at their enemies.
They came, still inferior in technology but in vastly superior numbers. They died and progressed onward over the corpses of the fallen. System after system fallen, a battle waged over one hundred years and then…
Atlantis…
But the Wraith themselves made an error in their final hour of triumph arrogant in their seeming victory.
Had they asked or the Lanteans thought to offer, a cure for the never-ending hunger might have been found. But the Wraith thrived on the feeling of power gained by draining a victim, the near-orgasmic glory of ending the life of powerful prey. They too ignored their species' gene memory.
"Never leave a living enemy at your back!"
The Asurans made note of this…
Thus they prepared, sending out cloaked observation drones through the stargate, dropping the drones' larger and also cloaked satellite cousins into orbit. They mapped out the political, social and military situation of the galaxy, tagged as many dormant Hives as they could find, they quietly set up fortress worlds that were off the stargate network, bedecking them in sphere after sphere of defensive measures.
For their plan of attack to work they would need the aid of the humans of the Lantean galaxy.
They learned.
They created weaponry specifically to fight the Wraith, weapons that left no quarter.
They learned.
They designed new classes of warship unfamiliar to the Wraith, with greater defensive and offensive capabilities, greater versatility, in greater numbers.
They learned.
They sought within the history of the Ancients for knowledge relating to military matters. Lantean commanders notwithstanding, the unique nature of the Asurans allowed them to search within the millions of years' worth of Ancient knowledge stored in Atlantis.
They learned of the psychic horrors and civil war that caused all Nox to forswear violence…
They learned of the noble Furlings, eager to lend aid, even if that meant stepping into a fight that they could not possibly hope to win, so long as it was just.
They learned of the warrior tradition of the Asgard, smoldering within them even as they cloned new bodies to recover what had been lost in an age of war.
They learned from the humans of the Lantean galaxy, watching as they at times fought hopeless guerilla battles.
They even found a fifteen million year-old Lantean military tutorial was actually an attempt to enshrine such knowledge for when it would be needed.
They learned to wait.
They learned to watch.
They learned that a balance was needed when waiting and watching became too much.
Culling beams snap up a child before her mother's eyes…
Niam took to painting a dark silhouette, screaming at the sky.
Minerva took to creating holographic plays.
Auricht started singing to himself as he thought of the best way to kill a Wraith and leave it conscious until the very last -snap-
These children ignorant of the galaxy beyond Asura learnt of the beauty of sculpting and painting when in rest, dancing and singing when moving anonymously through the crowds in exuberent festivals. They learnt of that last desperate kiss when one's world is about to end.
"Sascha! No! Sascha! Give her back! Give her b-"
When the Lanteans created the Asurans they taught them of rage and aggression born of hatred. After eons of peace, the scientists that had crafted their nano-mechanical war machines saw deliberate violence as the result of man's baser instincts let loose of the trappings of civilization, a failure, the ugliness of those less advanced than they.
As they catalogued the campaign of sabotage and sacrifice the Satedan Specialists warred against the swift advancing Wraith.
A bald Wraith commander bared rotting teeth at the thought of breaking such willful prey…
They learnt, if only a little, what it meant to fight for something you loved….
The Wraith came to Sateda, ranchers culling their human herd….
The Asurans came to fight the Wraith…
And earned their name…
Asuran.
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AN Not much to add, review, review, tell me what you think...