Asura Path

Disclaimer, I don't own the Stargate franchise, I don't do this for profit, this is a work of fan fiction.

Chapter Five

Siege Bhrigu

The economy probably wouldn't have worked if it wasn't for the Asurans…

All peoples across the Compact had the right of access to materials necessary to live. The Mass Fabricators assigned to each planet provided food, clothing and shelter to young and elderly alike. Even if one was a true lay-about, the bare minimum needed to live comfortably was still provided.

Of course such a lay-about attitude among the humans of the Lantean Galaxy was generally viewed as being just a step below a Wraith worshipper. One either worked hard to live and help his people survive, or one died. Even the Athosians at a certain age abandoned their young adults for ten days in the wild as a lesson meant to teach them how to fend for themselves later in life.

So help was accepted where necessary and otherwise politely refused.

The Asurans created an equitable system of credits, driven by supply and demand. The Compact members each found a niche in trade and did what evolution had molded them to do, survive. The Compact was self-contained due to the necessary services provided by the Asura. Advanced medicines and medical care, basic agricultural supplies, education, ships, raw materials, safe homes…

Needless to say the Asurans working among the general populace were popular on a level that came very close to surpassing the Ancestors…

And the Asurans themselves were also undergoing a transformation.

Minerva and Peorth watched in interest as Fativa extolled the virtues of the organic. "…and when he came over after I stubbed my toe…Ooohhh! Pain! It's an unpleasant but strangely enlightening…I screamed, and he was so flustered it was stimulating to see the worry –sigh-but when I was about to tell him how grateful I was for his concern, all that came out was 'F—t m—get the f—and go s--- your self!' completely the opposite of what I was meaning to say."

Minerva looked amused, Peorth wasn't so restrained and snorted. "What then?" They asked.

Fativa blushed, a true function of organic metabolic processes within her nanoconstructed, Lantean body. "Well I meant to apologize, but he was begging for my forgiveness so strenuously that I couldn't get a word in edge-wise. Then he stepped on my other toe and the only way that I could avoid making matter worse was to kiss him!"

The other two leaned in closer, excited "Ooohhh!'

Fativa leaned in as well, "And then the oddest thing happened…Did you know that when one kisses the person one likes certain biochemical processes begin to activate…leading to certain other reactions…"

Perhaps not even Janus could have seen it coming, the Asurans were beginning to evolve again…

Old Satedan Star System

He hissed darkly. His frustration at the task he had been assigned was evident for all to see. The warrior caste Wraith hissed again as he was passed by a quartet of soldier drones. His annoyance was shared by his crèche-mate; the emotion shared telepathically from the other's location on the bridge of the cruiser.

Their assignment was to discover what had been the fate of the hive assigned to this feeding area. Rival queens communicated as little as possible when there was no need to do so, but this particular hive had held only a juvenile queen, and was under the command of a Wraith Warrior well respected for his ferociousness in battle.

That Hive had been a year out of contact, three months beyond the time set for a rendezvous with one of the planet-bound hives to transfer the livestock. It was the complaints of the Keeper aboard that hive that had triggered this mission.

He stalked to the control nodule and pressed his fingers into the gel covering the station's neural tissue.

"Hssssh…"

Briefly the sensors linked to the darts exploring the planet below transmitted the filtered information into his mind.

Nothing…

"Hssssssssshhh…."

His brother agreed, they would extend their search to the next planet on the list as it seemed that this place had been culled, the seed population that was usually left behind either fled or killed given the evidence of battle damage.

The warrior was unhappy, returning without answers meant losing face and favor with the queen, extending the scope of the search meant leaving their queen in the company of their rivals.

"Grrrrhhhssssshhggrrrhhh!..." Twisting his lips and baring yellowed teeth he snarled as his brother gave the order.

"Return! We move on…"

Thirty minutes after the Wraith cruiser entered hyperspace, a cloaked Asuran observation satellite in orbit over Sateda and sent its sensor readings via line of sight subspace burst transmission. Its target was a dark object that lay above the Lantean galactic plane.

Acting on its standing orders, the vessel folded its more sensitive arrays into shielded pods and after reorienting, the conical device extended gravimetric drive pods from it's narrower segment. Briefly, the stargate seeded in orbit above the planet flared as it activated, there as a ripple that spread across its event horizon as the invisible vessel glided through.

Not even the Asuran's supreme calculations could account for the capriciousness of fate. A wraith Dart, bearing battle damage not seen in ten thousand years would pass through the star system, its pilot dead beyond recovery.

The vessel had been sent out of control on a collision course for the System's gas giant. Having collided with a piece of stray debris on its months long journey, it instead passed into the gravity well of the giant. Cold and with it systems deactivated, the vessel was hidden by the planet's EM signature until it was slung back into the system, on course for a long orbit through the star system that would either see it destroyed or slung out into interstellar space.

The Wraith cruiser on its return trip through the system would only just fail to notice the wreck as it passed out of sensor range…

New Sateda

Malikai grimaced, "Mila… What is that?" The Traveler captain gestured to the creature that stood just behind his nine year old daughter.

Brown eyes blinked innocently, "It's my pet Papa!"

The older man shut his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose in annoyance, his other hand snagging the girl as she tried to slip past him with the tame creature on a leash.

"Darling while I did say you could get yourself a pet and I suppose it does count as a cute bird…" He trailed off delicately as his girl's lower lip began to tremble. He didn't like doing this, disappointing her, not when things had really started looking up for his people but…"That's a Hiirja Mila, they grow to be four paces tall and this one's already at two."

The trembling became more announced! "But…'

"No." He cut her off firmly, "It's just not a good idea, for us, for this bird or for the Lady." The man said gesturing toward the spaceship behind him. "A Hiirja needs space Mila, or it will be terribly unhappy, and even if we had the space there's no way that I'm letting some plane-walker bird mess up the Lady- not when she hasn't been this clean since…ever. Trust me, Mila, this bird will be much happier under blue sky and on soft earth, anything else would be doing a cruel deed to a dumb animal."

The Hiirja let out a treble "Wark!" as Mila sullenly led the giant yellow bird away. "I hate you daddy!" The words wafted back to him with some feathers and the smell of a…mess courtesy of the damned bird.

Sighing in aggravation he looked for a water stand where he could clean off his shoes, they were lifting off for Athosia-Neru in a couple of hours once the Spaceport master gave them clearance to leave groundside. Maybe before then he could get Mila a cute dress for her birthday…and an arc welder? She liked arc welders.

Mila was at that age after all… when girls love power tools...

On his way out the Spaceport Malikai nodded distractedly to a passing Satedan Legate. He briefly contemplated asking the older man for the shortest way to a tavern but settled for heading to the market instead.

With the doubling of the Traveler fleet, space wasn't at a premium any more, and with the greater part of his people's population settled on a series of planets, guarded by the new, Asuran provided, Aurora fleet. Malikai could now live out his dream of traveling through deep space, seeing different planets and worrying 'less' about the Wraith, just blue sky and space.

At times he worried about the daughter that he had sired, about her future. The Travelers were on a matter of principle wary of the Asurans but so far their allies hadn't broken their word, keeping to both the letter and the spirit of their treaty with the Travelers, even when the Travelers did not.

Those incidents tended to turn out badly…The Travelers with their large fleet held a virtual monopoly on bulk freight within the compact, virtual due to the fact that the one time that a Traveler captain had tried to price gouge a Zebrian trader out of habit, the entire fleet had found itself neatly undercut by a single Asuran heavy-lifter/mass fabricators that moved the planet's entire load of trade goods for free.

Malikai shook his head in pained disgust at that memory. Silas had been one captain that hadn't lasted long, only as long as it took for Larrin to assure the Asurans that the Travelers would abide by their agreements to aid their ally's war effort by easing the workload on their freighters.

The Asurans had relented, and the Travelers went back to work, earning by trade, the materials and tools needed to maintain their fleet and protect their future. A fleet academy had been established on Home 1 with the goal of providing an education to the millions of Travelers in the fleet that didn't have to worry about a reactor overload as an indicator of a failing grade.

Malikai stopped and mused as he worked up the courage to walk into the dress shop. Labrea had offered to take her on but perhaps it would be better to let Mila attend the academy…He'd miss her bitterly, but his choices in life weren't necessarily hers. Besides, he'd heard that new graduates apprenticed aboard Aurora's for five years, probably one of the safest places for his little girl to be…

That said something, when the safest place in the galaxy was onboard a warship...

The civilian port legate nodded amiably as the Traveler walked past him. The Satedan noticed that the man was wearing a gun, but said nothing on the matter. Satedan society possessed the same millennia instilled paranoia that dictated that one must be armed at all times even among friends. The possibility of being attacked by a lone Wraith when unarmed was seen to far outweigh the problems caused by having a bunch of heavily armed people drunk and unruly in town.

Even on this new world guarded by the Asurans, Sateda as was its sovereign right, upheld the right to bear arms, though weaponry were forbidden to be carried by unlicensed personnel within certain private and public facilities. In the year and a half since settlement, the bulk of the SDF had been seconded to training in Asuran ground operations.

The exceptions were the Legates. Known as Prefects when they had been an arm of the SDF, these men and women accounted for ten percent of all active forces and reserves. They functioned as a form of military police that dealt with crimes committed by civilians and military personnel alike.

When the Wraith had attacked Sateda, those prisoners awaiting execution or under life sentence, murderers, serial rapists, Wraith worshippers and the like; had been summarily executed en masse. The rest, minor criminals, sex offenders, smugglers and people serving life imprisonment sentences for non-violent crimes or treason had had those crimes either pardoned or heavily commuted in exchange for being pressed into the service of the SDF.

Those indentured soldiers that survived of the Wraith attack had been shipped off to the Asurans with the blessings of the government to serve out the remainder of their time, neatly avoiding a potential discipline problem for at least a couple of decades by foisting the whole mess onto the Asura. Those felons that had been drafted as free men were released into society as agreed, under heavy supervision by a force of legates, military prefects whose mission oversight had been under the purview of the civilian government. Their jobs now involved enforcing the law and guarding areas such as Compact embassies and Satedan government facilities like as the Legislative Council Chambers and the Satedan spaceport.

New Athos

The Legates hadn't been the only group of Compact citizens affected by the Asurans. New Athos or Ubertia as it had been designated by the Lanteans, a word that meant plentiful, was a planet that seemed almost to have been made with the Athosian people in mind, this was partly true.

Aware that many of the human civilizations in the Lantean Galaxy were kept at the level of an agrarian or hunter-gatherer society by the Wraith, the Asurans had searched out a number of star systems with habitable planets, the closest one being less than twenty light-years from Lantea.

The Lanteans had avoided terra-forming most of these planets so as to create a buffer zone between developing civilizations and their own. Space-faring societies would be separated from the Lanteans by the gulf a barren worlds which could be terra-formed as needed by the Lanteans, allowing the Ancestors the option of controlling the level of contact with the younger races.

What the Asurans had found, was a series of star systems terraformed by the Lanteans but devoid of stargates. These had been intended as future sites of Lantean colonization as their civilization expanded. Now those worlds were being used by the Asurans as a home for their Compact.

Ubertia was a liquid iron core planet, one of two located within the habitable zone of the system's primary, a yellow sun. The ratio of landmass to surface water was 1:1 with two life-filled oceans separated by three continents and a number of island chains. The weather was mild year-round with periodic gentle tidal changes caused by the planet's single moon.

The Asurans hadn't needed to do much to turn Ubertia into an agrarian paradise. They seeded the planet with large, wild fields of various food crops and used time dilation to accelerate the changes. By the time that the Athosians had agreed to join the Compact, Ubertia and its sister planet Antia were covered in lush, plant filled valleys, forests and vast plains of wild grain-bearing grasses on three continents, all of it teeming with wildlife.

The Athosians, once they had been convinced by one of their leaders; Teyla Emmagan that the Asurans truly wished to offer them haven from the Wraith, had with Teyla's support established settlements on New Athos. They had also brought with them a tribe of nomads, two hunter-gatherer bands and one of their former trading partners, a refugee group from some of the other agrarian societies that had been culled by the Wraith.

The groups had merged and after being checked for illnesses by the Asurans, they were allowed to settle into prefabricated villages, the largest of which was named Neru. They were natural-looking buildings made from nano-compacted earth and clay that suited Athosian aesthetics, being airy, comfortable, moss-covered buildings that were built to be a part of the natural environment.

Most of the groups had settled into the villages that were within a day's travel of each other. Kanan an Athosian spokesperson and Halling, a leader among his people had worked with the Asurans. They coordinated work with the other settlements establishing lines of communication creating a rudimentary system of government by a council of village leaders.

All of the settlers were adverse to the idea of the heavy equipment that the Asurans offered to use in establishing farms. What Kanan and the other New Athos representatives had welcomed were the provision of primitive but fresh tools and supplies to aid in planning out how best to harvest the crops that were growing in the wild.

The Asurans had built the villages the New Athos residents on an irregular ring of forested hills that surrounded a large plain of well irrigated land, fed water from a series of fertile valleys. At the suggestion of the Asurans, the council or villages shared labor, working together on the fields with the limited assistance of the advancements provided by the Asurans.

The three thousand Athosians swelled to three hundred thousand with the addition of members from the other villages. These large groups set about cultivating large areas of the fertile land in a coordinated effort to provide crops year-round. A feat made possible by the stable weather on New Athos.

The number of New Athosians swelled even further when the Zebrians, several clans of nomadic traders that traveled through the stargate network, joined the Compact through the diplomatic connections of Teyla and Kanan. Rather than settle on a planet of their own, the Zebrians established a colony near the Asuran stargate on New Athos within the town of Neru, they traded for goods on other Asuran planets buying and trading for the food produced on Athosia at Portho a trade world founded by the Asurans, connected to their gate network to serve as a safe haven for travelers, traders and the weary.

With the centralization of farmland and the cooperation of a larger pool of workers with access to relatively advanced farming tools, the children of the New Athosians were slowly, being freed from aiding their parents in the fields.

As a result, in a measure to improve the New Athosian's quality of life, it was a proposed that children and young adults attend a voluntary vocational school. The proposal was slow to garner interest in some villages but as news spread that those who attended would among other things, advanced agricultural practices, methods of animal husbandry and medical care for humans and livestock the movement slowly became popular.

The benefits of contact with the Athosians went both ways. Aside from the alliance with the Zebrian trading clans, the Asurans had also established trade relations with the Kingdom of Valaria, a planet that had hosted a Lantean outpost that researched mini-drones. They had also entered into trade negotiations with the Manarian Federation through ambassador Smeadon and his diplomatic attaché Acastus Kolya…

Unoccupied Star-system, Lantean designation Da-let-Tha-Lo-nas-Theo-At

The Vesper was what the Asurans referred to a lightly armed patrol craft. In a few hours, it was going to be run through its final trials. The Vesper was constructed of a double-layered hull, each armor layer was a pace in thickness, with a two pace void between the two layers filled with a honeycomb structure of supports, inertial dampeners, energy dampeners, and backup shield generators.

The vessel was made from two smoothly joined sections, each composed of four mass fabricated segments that were merged using bosonic welds. The space frame and hull was fabricated molecule by molecule from Asuran perfected neutronium alloys and the bosonic welds fused the discrete sections seamlessly.

The propulsion block, composed of the sub-light acceleration/deceleration engines, main gravimetric projector and hyperdrive; was contained within a largesection shaped like a broad-headed arrow that pointed to the rear of the vessel, much like in an Aurora. If stood up, the vertical part of the block's T was the area that contained two of the one hundred and forty-four pace long vessel's four Neutrino/Ion reactors….

Currently those two reactors were powered down to minimal levels. At maximum output the reactors, miniaturized versions of the last model created by the Lanteans eighty-eight thousand years ago, supplemented the ship's needs as a back up power supply. Two larger, more powerful reactors could have been used but Balin, Commander of the Vesper and a member of the spacecraft's design team, had argued for the redundancy of the four, individually less powerful reactors located in discrete sections.

As an Asuran, Balin didn't actually need to read the holographic image displayed before his control chair on the Vesper's bridge. The main mission section of Vesper's hull was an oval-based cylinder with rounded ends. It followed the basic design philosophy of the Lanteans, functional with attention to geometric designs, but the Asurans had given also their new ships a fluid, almost organic feel as well.

Of the two reactors aboard the mission section, one powered shields, active defenses and life support; while the other reactor powered weapons. When not in hyperspace, the reactor dedicated to that drive could supply energy to whatever systems were in need of the additional power.

The organic feel of the warship, for that was what it was, was due to the ten uncia thick layer of nanites that covered the hull like skin and absorbed stray energy passing through the shields. It was a form of ablative paint, as well as a repair system. Receptors contained within this layer also provided supplemental information to the captain, turning the outer hull into a giant sensory organ.

Currently the Vesper was cloaked, waiting patiently for the other participant of the test to arrive. The fin shaped sensor pod on the underside of the bow was open, deploying a host of sensitive, passive detection devices.

Martel, the XO and tactical operator stood at his station upon the gravimetrically stabilized command podium. As was his duty, he confirmed for his commander, that the observation satellite's report a tagged Wraith cruiser was going to exit hyperspace within this star system was correct.

The spiky antennas that housed the Vesper's secondary gravitational projectors slowly began to move the cloaked ship toward the recently abandoned planet. The sixteen drone launchers on either side of the mission section, as well as the six launchers on either side of the bridge and on the rearward facing section all remained closed.

"Give me time to mission start." Balin ordered.

"Time to mission start in ten, nine, eight…" Martel began counting.

Wraith hives were difficulty to create, requiring a power source to accelerate their development and time. The current hives in existence were ten thousand years old and rare. At just the destruction of one of their number the other five active vessels had grown cautious, sending out cruisers as scouts.

This suited Balin just fine so long as the hive ship didn't jump on top of him….

"…five, four, three, two…" Martel continued.

"All ships mission start!" The commander ordered.

"One."

An undercurrent of excitement rippled throughout the combat net, excitement and anticipation. Not of victory, but the proof of the ship's design and the Asuran's overall plan.

As the hyperspace window opened and the Wraith cruiser decelerated in a blur of pseudo-motion, the Vesper de-cloaked, engines at one percent power, limping away in a vector that took it away from the battle group of three Wraith cruisers. Timing it so that when the cruisers decelerated, detected then and turned to engage, Vesper would be at extreme range of weapons.

Balin spent a moment in silence, with forced calm carefully overseeing the analysis of the sensor data, adjusting field strengths and ordering a minute shift in the vessels attitude. As planned, the first salvo from the cruisers missed, passing through the barely there shield, grazing over the ventral surface of the vessel, passing over the doors to the internal launch bay. The nano-skin bubbled and thickened, before returning to uniformity, distributing the extra nanites across the surface of the ship.

Vesper was upside down in relation to the cruisers, presenting its narrower port lateral profile, and incidentally the port drone launchers to the enemy ships. The cruisers turned their backs to the planet and as calculated, began launching Darts.

The engines ramped to two percent power, the shields grew slightly in strength and the Vesper moved faster, presenting the image of a less advanced ship making a desperate run for the outer system and interstellar space. Its slightly curving track used the gravitational fields of the star system to travel the shortest path away from the Wraith and as predicted, the Darts broke into a stern chase, leaving the cruisers behind, the swarm stretching out as some pilots pushed their ships further than others.

The Asurans drew them in, as they had learned…

Pops of light dotted the hull as intense magnetic fields and pulses of gravity ionized stray particles when the KEWs fired. Nearly invisible to the Dart sensors the bundles had already began their end stage when dart collision sensors began to beep a warning.

A small rotation had been imparted to the high velocity weapons. The rods in the end weren't made of naquadria coated neutronium, but instead of an alloy ofiron, trinium, osmium, carbon and tungsten. The ties that bound the bundles together disintegrated and ninety successive waves of 85 energized, monofilament nets intersected the leading Wraith Darts.

Stretched out fifty thousand times its original length, the heat generated by the intense material stresses, energized the dormant nanites coating each strand, causing a field to be generated, its edge which faced the oncoming darts was so subtle it was almost imaginary.

Still, space was vast, and there half-leuga spaces between some of the ships, through which many of the quarter-leuga diameter nets, passed. The ones that his spot on though…

One net collided with five Darts consecutively, more or less on center. The darts passed through the net, exiting the other side in thirty-six length-ways slices. Several darts were impaled by one of the high velocity spikes. The hit wasn't fatal but the Dart, but what happened next was. The spike had less mass than a Dart, but moved at a much higher velocity. The eight free spikes jerked around, forward momentum changing to angular momentum, the eight spikes buried themselves in the cockpit while the still charged nets cut partway through the drive segment.

The vessel, at that point a macabre spiked ball, tumbled slowly through space, bleeding plasma.

The Darts continued on, eager to kill…

At that point Vesper's three ships, the Valence. Essence and Parity decloaked and raised shields to maximum. Attacking the sides of the group of cruisers from three equidistantly spaced vectors the vessels each presented the large hump on their dorsal hulls.

"Reactors to maximum output, shields to full power, cycle weapons." Balin ordered.

At the same time the Vesper's deceleration engines and vector thrusters flared in sequence, working in concert with gravimetric manipulators to quickly flip the ship over. The inertial dampeners strained as the effects of internal force vectors were artificially neutralized. Even so, the hull stresses of the maneuver would have broken the back of an Aurora. Still moving away from the cruisers on its original heading, the Vesper's two, forward mounted heavy phasers lit up.

The Darts that were further behind had begun turning around in response to the new threat. They began a banking maneuver so as to reduce the force vectors bleeding through their inferior inertial dampeners. The vessels' lit engines were tiny pinpricks of light that formed the outline of a great curving flower as the pilots closest to the cruisers received the orders to break of their attack and defend their capital ships. The lights of the drive section in overburn also served as the perfect target.

The Vesper's heavy phasers fired rapidly in single shots. Each shot sniped at a disengaging Dart from extreme range destroying it. The Vesper began to decelerate as its engines propelled the vessel toward the still significant, oncoming cloud of Darts.

Shortly after transferring from cloak to shields, the humps on the backs of the three attacking Vesper-class warships seemed to shift and change. A pod separated from the top of the hump, turning out to be the primary section of a turret. Two short, fat barrels extended from the turret and each began tracking the Wraith cruisers.

Two of the cruisers concentrated fire on of the Valence while the third fired upon the Parity. In return, compact twin bolts of blue-white energy slammed into the power core of a Wraith cruiser from three different directions. The stricken cruiser crumpled about the impact point and exploded.

The same thing happened to a second Wraith cruiser before the Darts returned and began attacking the vessels, supplying the cruiser with cover-fire. The cruisers tried to signal for help, but found the necessary nodes destroyed and the back-ups paralysed by some strange affliction.

As the other group of Darts powered toward the Vesper, some of them with the intention of ramming the warship, Balin ordered that the anti-Dart systems come online. At once, the thirty-two emplacements with firing solution opened fire. Each emplacement was composed of two rapid fire light phasers, a single medium phaser, and a KEW.

Lances of energy and metal stormed through space, destroying the Darts even as they were still two seconds away from their own engagement envelopes. Tight bundles of spikes punched through some ships before opening up to ensnare others. Lines of thin bright light immolated wildly dodging fighters.

Engines at high output the Vesper stopped decelerating and barreled toward the hundreds of Darts still incoming, firing all the while.

The surviving cruiser fired wildly on the three trailing warships as it sought to repair the minor damage done to its hyperdrives by an unknown agent. The Heavy phasers of the Essence were responsible for this as the Cetau particles contained within it, damaged the bio-neural connections within the Wraith cruiser, paralyzing it slightly.

The vessels were re-orienting to bring their main weapon to bear, all the while dealing with the Darts firing upon them. A Wraith Dart crashed into the bow of the Parity, followed by three more. The forward shields dipped low enough for a lucky shot to break through the shields. The bolt impacted directly on the ship's bridge.

Balin's lips thinned at the sight, speaking to Martel he said evenly, "We'll need to improve the anti-Dart coverage for these vessels." His comment was underscored by impacts of a number of Darts on the Vesper's shield.

The Parity was still in the fight however, her shields reinforced, drawing on auxiliary power, it's ZPE (Zero Point Energy) pulse cannon didn't have enough power to fire and thus the turret retracted back into its emplacement.

The bridge crew of the Parity had survived, not only because of the extra shields covering that section, but also because of the fact that the Parity's bridge wasn't any more exposed than the rest of the rooms aboard the warship. What looked like windows was actually sections of the double-layered hull, rendered invisible by a limited cloaking field.

As the Parity fell back, taking on the surviving Darts, Valence and Essence chewed away at the frantically running cruiser with their main weapon turning it into a burning wreck. The death knell came when the Vesper exited from a cloud of destroyed Darts and fired a volley of exotic energy into the Wraith cruiser's bow. The destructive energies blasted out the other side of the ship, destroying it completely.

The ZPE pulse cannon was the most powerful weapon in Vesper's armament and required a significant amount of power to fire even at the low intensity and firing rate that the four Asuran warships were limited to.

Information was shared across the command net and the vessels swiftly began chasing down bits of debris, beaming them into their buffers. The entire battle had lasted for twenty minutes, the Asurans using that time to test the capabilities and limits of their warships. After ten more minutes, they signaled their readiness to leave to the heavy cruiser Dark Solace, waiting in the star system's asteroid field under cloak with two other patrol craft as reinforcement.

An hour after that, a Wraith hive ship and five cruisers jumped into the system, searching for their scouts. They found nothing.

Asura

Where do mortal men, fear to tread?

Where does silence…scream?

What is there to fear?

In the grave…

Asura

Armored boots clanked as they stepped across the metal floor. Piles of ruined machinery were heaped within various holding areas for future study. The armored figure stepped into a darkened room, walls lined with displays and consoles. A tangle of cables led to the center of the room, there within a force field, the cables joined with a bulbous sphere.

And atop that sphere…

Horror

Where the brave, and foolish, walk

Where valorous grave robbers tread;

In the darkness something stirs

As the bold hero presses on;

And in the shadow of hubris

A billion eyes, a billion voices, fingers that clutch…

The armored figure looked at the twisted, half melted skull of a grey-haired Asuran. The machine's one intact eye stared sightlessly upward. The skull was affixed to a probe which was attached to an Asuran data core under study by the Vanir.

The armored figure spoke, "Your secrets will be revealed."

March bravely through the valley oh hero!

Oh hero, on quest to slay the dragon;

Ware the Dragon,

Tread softly, lest it awaken.

Something stirred…

AN: A reference for the dimensions used in this story. Read and review TTFN

1 leuga = 2.22 kilometers

1 uncia = 1 inch

1 palmus = 74 mm

1 pace (plural paces or passus) = 1.48 meters