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 Six
Movements
On a planet devoid of humans there sat a mountain that was not a mountain. What that mountain truly was, was the beginning…
Several thousand leuga away, an inland sea lapped at the shores of the supercontinent within which it was land locked. Suddenly the air above the water twisted and roiled as enormous amounts of energy began to bleed into real-space.
Tremendous amounts of power, enough to shatter the crust of a planet if directed improperly formed a closed system and resolved into an isolated circuit, stabilizing a window into hyperspace. Even then a few arcs of plasma impacted the surface of the water merely a few hundred paces below the opened vortex.
Hot steam rose in a mist of vapor as the surface of the water-body boiled. From the space time phenomenon, a dark shape exited in a blur, leaving a supersonic triple-crack as the hyperspace window collapsed. The dark shape turned out to be a cylindrical ship two hundred and sixty paces in length. It had only just begun to decelerate when the vessel crossed the shores of the lake, headed inland on a course toward the distant mountain. The turbulence generated by the ship's passage so close to the ground uprooted trees, sending them tumbling to earth in its wake. More than a few avian creatures met their end on the lightly flaring shields of the fast-moving vessel.
The two armored figures conferred with their instrumentation.
"The intelligence retrieved, appears to be correct." One of the two noted.
"Indeed…It is dormant" The other replied.
"For now…" The first commented.
By the time that the spaceship had approached to within a leuga of the mountain, it had decelerated to subsonic velocities. Even so, when bay doors opened in the belly of the ship and allowed a group of six armored warriors to leap out from within onto the peak of the mountain several hundred paces below; the relative velocities were still great enough to drive the jumpers up to their hips, armpits in one case, into the earth.
The armored warriors had jumped in an upright position, with feet together and each landed with a thunderous crash, kicking up loose dirt and pebbles. They immediately began to extricate themselves, moving effortlessly. Their transport swung around in a wide curving arc that took it over the stargate located within a clearing in the forest to the west.
A weapons mount on the underside of the vessel activated, sending glowing golden toroids of plasma flashing down at the device, knocking it off of its plinth and crashing to the earth with a boom that rumbled through the ground nearby. Several more bursts trailed from the ship, rapidly opening range. One of the cleverly aimed shots, flipped the gate so that its front side faced downward into the earth, while another buried it under falling soil and burning debris.
During the time that this was happening, five of the jumpers had extricated themselves from their respective craters and converged into a loose circle. Their ship was still coming about as the five stood together, their sixth member had only just managed to heave himself up to his hips in the dirt.
One of the armored beings placed a device shaped like a quarter-circle disc of metal on the ground and touched a button on the wrist mounted keypad built into his gauntlet. The device expanded into a circular platform a little less than two paces in diameter upon which the five figures stood.
"Thirty levels down…" One of the armored individuals stated aloud, the others nodded curtly.
A glowing cylinder encompassed the five, and then after a few moments of resistance they fell through a hole cut into the surface of the mountain. A short while later, the sixth armored warrior calmly walked up to the hole and looked down, revealing the interior of a largely hollow, organic structure. A series of bleeding holes were cut through successive floors and the distant echoes of rumbling crashes could be heard as a glowing light below indicated the progress of the group of five that continued down into the bowels of the disguised monolith.
fThe sixth warrior waited until the crashes ceased, before a heartbeat later, he leapt into the void…
The lone wraith commander knew that something had happened, just not what exactly. The atrophied sensors of the hibernating hive-ship were not so far gone as to miss the opening of a hyperspace window within atmosphere, the problem was that by the time he knew enough to understand that a warning should be sent out, it was already too late.
In the few seconds that it took to access the relevant systems to alert security drones and send a warning to his queen, the intruders were already within the central command node of the hive. The shearing power of the energy field just missed cutting the commander down as he leapt aside. The intruders did not….
As it was, the species-specific, telepathic death-scream was enough of a warning when the wraith commander died after being struck several times by golden, ovoid plasma projectiles.
They worked quickly, the five stepped off of the transport pad, firing as they did so. One of their number briefly hesitated, before picking up the deactivated device and stepping toward the centrally located console. He looked at the mass of lipid jelly and neural tissue before detaching from his belt, a bladed contraption that looked more akin to an ancient torture implement than the infiltration tool that it really was. In the background a sixth figure landed with a crash.
Brutally driving the blades into the surface of the console, the figure stepped back as the hemispherical disc that comprised the main body of the device, unfolded like a lotus, revealing a suite of analysis tools and snake-like cables which prodded, sampled, drilled and injected themselves into the console. Building upon the data retrieved from others, the intruders managed to take control of the doors throughout the ship and download a basic schematic of what was now obviously a dormant hive.
Five of the six warriors in the room, proceeded to the door. Four entered the corridor, killing a passing drone, leaving behind the fifth, who stood within the room, behind the closed doors with his weapon arm trained on that entryway, while the other continued to monitor the upload process while training his wrist weapon on the hole above.
The four warriors split into pairs. Wraith stunners splashed into the shields of one member of the pair that had headed toward the engine control center. It had taken just seconds to kill of the commander in that node, who had been unable to either close off the blast doors or fill the corridors with enough drones to overwhelm the intruders.
Now the second member of that pair, joined his partner in holding off the attacking drones while the weapon they had set up, gorged itself on plasma.
The other pair of intruders had made their way, mostly unopposed to the hibernation chambers. The few encounters that had occurred on the way there mostly came about because of a lack of effort on the part of the infiltrators, to hide their presence from those they came across. After some brief, and extremely violent battles the two warriors eventually arrived at their destination and began to search out, under the direction of their colleague in the control node, the primary feed conduit, carried the hormones that controlled the wraith hibernation cycles.
Locating a major artery, the two attached devices that began to inject a foreign substance into the fluid. After a minute, first one, then several of the figures within the chambers began to writhe. Leaving the devices under guard by several of the weapons produced in advance, the two figures headed back toward the control node.
It was a massacre…the corridor empty of bodies, as they had all been retrieved by the weapons for processing, but the walls were green with blood. The two made their way from the engine room back to the control node in half the time it had taken for them on their first trip. Gathering together, the six stood upon the transport pad, which activated the blue shield and levitated the group out of the hive and onto the waiting transport, incinerating a drone that tried to stop them.
The vessel spun about and was gone long before the wraith drones were able to get within range to fire upon it.
In the Queen's chamber, the Keeper seethed at the insolence of the attack, further incensed by her warriors' failure to thwart it. Finally, her most favored commander-no longer!- entered the audience chamber. She hissed in agitation.
-Speak!-
And grew even angrier as the wraith just stood there silent as a drone...
It took a moment due to her anger for her to realize that the normal psychic emanations from her consort were strangely absent…a moment too long.
-Ahhhhh!-
Pain burst through the Keeper's senses as a thin metal spike penetrated her skull and slid deep into her brain. Lurching forward, she gripped at the cool metal fingers that clutched at the back of her skull and upper neck.
Her steps brought her close enough to see the silver fingers that gripped the commander's skull as well.
Fighting back with all her will and psychic strength she heard it before she saw it.
[YoU arE St-t-t-t-T-tRonG]
She hissed in agony as her attack was analyzed and turned back against her, a hundredfold greater in might and complexity.
[SUBMIT]
Collapsing to her knees the queen could only hazily make out the figures of several Iratus-like devices, biomechanical in nature, looking at her with glowing yellow eyes atop black eye-stalks.
-NO!-
[YOU WILL S-s-s-s-s-SUBMIT!]
-You will pay for this, we will find you! Destroy you! All of you!- She screamed.
[IRRELEVANT, SUBMIT!]
Unable to overcome the direct rewiring of her neural system, that was when she truly saw it.
A billion faces,
A billion voices,
A billion, billion fingers that clutched…
The name that her mind, what little of it that could still be called her own, supplied was [ABOMINATION]
-GET OUT! GET OUT OF MY MIND!-
He smiled, and she looked at the queen, It sang a few notes of a pulsar's final sonata, and they all tasted madness.
She could see a few drones and the mind of a commander being dissected.
[YES]
-Wha-
[YOU ARE NEXT, WE WILL KILL YOU AND THE SIGNAL WILL BE SENT]
The Keeper's mind shuddered and died.
[WE WILL KILL YOU YET YOUWILLNOTDIE]
The Keeper's mind quivered and lived.
[NOW THAT THE TASK IS FINISHED, LET US, sInG tOGeThER]
And so they screamed…
In hyperspace a figure looked upon a half-melted skull mounted on a pedestal.
"It begins…"
An hour later, Asuran drone satellites monitoring all known dormant hives, reported a sudden spike in activity, corresponding to the receipt of a certain signal transmitted through subspace in the clear.
The one word command carried by that signal would cause the Asuran Compact quite a bit of consternation.
[AWAKEN]
On a certain pedestal, trapped in stasis, the runtime of a quantum processor array, spiked.
It stirred...
On a planet devoid of humans, six Asurans stared at a valley, where there should have been a mountain that was not a mountain.
Dietel grimaced, "First impressions?"
Vindel her technological 'twin' sighed "This, won't end well..."
AN: Eh, this was actually written a while ago, I've just transferred it over to the site, I found the time to write again.