Some people would say that the planet was in a galaxy far far away and it was actually both in another galaxy and compared to the distance most people travelled in their lives it was far far away, but compared to the distance which Destiny had travelled it was merely a stone throw from Earth and even less from the Tower which was standing protected by only its shield and two command ship as most ships where in the Milky Way cleaning up after the assault on the Goa'uld, thankfully those ships would be more than enough to protect the planet from anything which could possibly appear, at least for the moment.
But on the planet in question a threat to the Tower and the rest of humanity was growing both literary and figuratively speaking.
"How are the hives coming along?" The First asked a queen who was kneeling at the far end of the room, they where sitting in a control centre on the North pole of the temperated planet from where the First overlooked the creation of his army.
"The sixtieth batch will be ready within a few days." The queen answered weakly as he took a fruit from the plate in front of him and took a bite of it. Just like the hybrids he could eat and survive on regular food, but he did still enjoy feeding only his victims where not only humans, but rather the Wraith, whom he thought tasted much better.
"Good, and the cruisers?" He asked before he sunk his teeth into another fruit.
"They will also be ready on time." She said as she begun to slide her feet backwards towards the door very slowly.
"You impress me, you might live for another day if the growth of the drones, queens and commanders are as good."
"There's been some complications with that I'm afraid." She said as she tried to take the last step out of the room, but just as she finished the sentence she felt her mind lock and her feet begun to walk the other way until she found herself in front of the First, once there she knelled at his feet.
"And do you mind telling me why there's been some complications with that?" He said as he stroke her cheek, sending shivers down her back.
"The complications comes from your expectations, I can't oversee the ships while giving birth to the drones, commanders and queens." She said as she felt her mouth returning to her control.
"No, because that's not what I expect you to do. I expect you to oversee the ships and the breeding, I never said that you had to breed them too." He said as he took a firm grip of her chin and pulled her closer to his face.
"If I let one of the other queens breed the soldiers, commanders and queens they wont be as pure and strong as if they came from my hive." She said as she tried to pull her mind free from his control, since they had awoken him and his queens she'd spent much time around him which gave her a much stronger mind than most, but to him she was but an ant.
"You're right, we should keep them as pure as possible, you might be a queen from the hundred generation, but why settle for that when we have two queens from generation zero here?" He said as her hands moved to her back and opened the fastening for her dress.
"Don't do this, I can still be of value to you." She said as she felt her hands let go of the dress, revealing her entire chest and large parts of her stomach.
"Yes, you might still have value to me, as dinner." He said as he pushed his hand against her chest and sucked out all that delicious life which she had stacked up inside her. "Well that's good, shame on such a good looking body though."
Out of the shadows cam two drones which removed the body and as soon as they where gone the two human-like queens approached the First. "The Wraith queens have become so full of themselves that I can't stand it, they think they each control a separate hive when they really all belong to our hive, we go through several queens each month who disappoint me. So I want you to eliminate all of the queens and create a new batch, we're starting over from the first generation again, take turns overseeing everything and breeding the drones, commanders and queens, make sure the queens know that they're simply part of the hive, they don't control their own hive."
"We'll make sure that they'll understand their role." The red haired queen said before her sister took over "We wont disappoint you."
"Go." He said and mentally directed them towards the door and watched as his two queens walked away, their hips swinging from side to side as they did, he would miss their company during the nights, but as long as they did their job he would have plenty of time to spent with them later.
Some minutes later, after finishing his meal, he found himself on a balcony overlooking the cloning facilities where they where breeding both Wraith and humans which lay in a large valley which went across half the planet from the north pole to the equator where it merged with the other thirty five valleys which could be found on the northern hemisphere and on the southern hemisphere hundred thousands of large dents into the surface could be found where hives, cruisers, darts, scouts and supply ships where being grown.
Of course neither of the hemispheres had been that way from the beginning, the entire planet had been terraformed by the First just for the purpose of growing a Wraith army and fleet, this spectacular planet was unique in its appearance, cause the other planets they used, some sixty planets, either had just the dents or the valleys simply because they had either been engineered to breed Wraith or construct fleets, not both.
One would think that around sixty planets, spread into fourteen systems, which all had working stargates and large amounts of energy signatures would have been found in the Atlantis database, especially when the Lanteans had been to all the planets, carefully surveying everyone of them. But one of the first things the First had done before starting the war with the Lanteans was to remove the systems from the database during an undercover raid on Atlantis, but he knew that removing them would raise question so he did what he knew would raise larger questions, he removed one eight of the systems in the Pegasus galaxy around the planet where the Iratus bug lived. He had left traces of Wraith all over Atlantis and so when the Lanteans had discovered the large section of the galaxy which went missing they had grown suspicious and had managed to piece together that someone had managed to get into Atlantis and wanted to hide something, what they never did understand was that what the person wanted to hide was far away from the large empty section, so the systems had managed to stay hidden while the Lanteans launched an expedition into the lost area.
The Lanteans had ships which could travel from system to system in seconds and to scan those systems within seconds, but it took them several years to map out enough of the sector to find the planet where he had built up evidence of the Wraith evolving for the Lanteans to find, mostly due to how much time they put into making sure they knew everything there was to know of any one planet, and so they never thought to look for something else, they simply mapped out the rest of the sector and returned to contact the Wraith afterwards. But by that time he'd already positioned his ships around the galaxy so when the Lanteans left most of their worlds unprotected to make sure that their envoy arrived the consequences where catastrophic, half of the humans in the galaxy disappeared over night.
But the First soon saw that it would all be to easy, so he had the ships downgraded and held back most of his ships, only letting a small portion of the fleet attack at any time, but after many years the First grew tired of the battles, the Wraith where pushing back the Lanteans closer and closer to Atlantis, so after a final battle where he personally attacked three Lantean ships with his ship he let lose all of the power he wielded on the Lanteans while he and his two queens withdrew with his ship to a star where they went into stasis to wait for their children to awaken them or if the worst happened they would be awakened every thousand years, but there had never been any problem worth their time since then not counting a small uprising.
As he stood there on the balcony he thought back and realized just how different this was from when he'd fought the Lanteans, this was a race which could think aggressively and defensively at the same time, they had also been able to think outside of the box several times, even going so far as to blow away the box a few times, so hopefully these people could present him with a real challenge and if they didn't present him with that challenge he might have to look outside of the current galaxy, it would take time to get there but for a real challenge he'd do anything and travel anywhere, even if it meant crossing the universe with the fleet which orbited the black hole at the centre of the galaxy several light years away.
There around the black hole a fleet many times greater than any previous Wraith fleet which had been seen could be found, even during the war with the Lanteans, and it was waiting for its commander to let it lose on the galaxy, which would burn like never before.
In another galaxy another threat was brewing, not to the humans of the Pegasus galaxy but to the SGC, although the threat was of far less danger to the SGC it was still a threat to all humans in the Milky Way which would stand in its way as it embarked on its crusade against the humans which had tried to destroy it before and to be honest they had all but succeeded, had it not been for some off world personnel their civilization would have been destroyed, but thankfully the off world personnel had sacrificed the worlds they where on, including the population of the world which consisted of several million people, to save their homeworld.
From then on they had sacrificed more and more planets to find a planet which had a working DHD and when they did the Aschen begun to expand into the galaxy a few planets at a time, as they grew they found themselves to be in a sector of the galaxy where the SGC where not seen as a force of good, so thereby the Aschen expansion had gone unnoticed from the SGC.
On one of the planets they had found three crashed Ha'taks which had been heavily damaged but from one they managed to salvage the hyperdrive and from another the weapons, but the last was damaged beyond salvaging, fortunately for them there was a hangar full of gliders and Al'keshs as well as an armoury which was well stocked on the last ship. Using the technology and materials found in the ships the Aschen managed create their own hyperdrive and weapons, since that day, over ten years ago, they had stopped their attempts at taking over planets over a long time by rendering people sterile, instead they integrated the planets into their ever growing army, still using medicine to do so by making the people easily susceptible to orders and very aggressive, now the annexed planets where turned into military outposts within a few months, pressing the number of inhabitants in the Aschen Confederacy into the billions within the first year, all with their minds set on exterminating all life on Earth.
On the flagship of the Aschen fleet a man long since assumed KIA was sitting, tightly fastened, looking out over the bridge and the fleet. "So Ambassador, do you still think that it was a good idea to defy us? We tried to give your people a chance to live peacefully and to be absorbed into Aschen society, now that chance is gone and we will instead annihilate your world and your people, your world will stand as a token of our supremacy." A man said as he checked the straps of the chair to make sure their prisoner was properly restrained.
"Your people are evil, every delay or setback to your plans are good in my eyes as they give SG-1 and the SGC more time to prepare for pests like you." Joseph Faxon said from his chair and emphasised his opinion by spiting his captor in his face.
"Now that's no way to treat your host is it?" The man said as he pressed a button which sent an electric current through Faxon's body before putting a rag in his mouth to shut him up, he then proceeded to the front of the bridge where a man was waiting. "Councillor, the fleet is ready." He reported. "Good, launch the fleet, we've got a long way to travel and we will need to stop several times before we reach the first colony to pick up those worthless soldiers." The man replied.
"I'm well aware of that as well as the fact that it will take us several months to reach our target." He said before he turned around to face the crew of the ship. "You heard the Councillor, take us away from the planet and launch us and the fleet into hyperspace."
Around the bridge several confirmations could be heard as the Aschen fleet received its order and begun to move away from the planet, a few minutes later it stopped for a second before it jumped away one ship at a time. After the first day they had reached the first colony, after a few drop-outs to cool of the hyperdrives of course, there the troops from several colonies had been gathered and where being transported onto the ships, then the fleet jumped away towards its next target.
While even the slowest of the Tau'ri ships would have made the trip to Earth within hours the fleet would be taking anywhere from six to nine months. To the frustration of the Aschen bureaucracy the time needed for the journey hadn't been calculated due to inconsistencies with the performance of the hyperdrives, from time to time they would experience a huge boost in speed which could last from seconds to hours while other times they could lose so much speed that the light almost overtook them, but one thing which was constant with the drives was that they all required time to cool down after a few hours of work, why that happened none of the engineers understood, another thing which was almost always constant was that the inconsistencies in the performance of the drives happened to most ships of their fleet at the same time, so their ships didn't have to wait to long to regroup when those things happened.
All of these things was worrying the Aschen leaders, but the fleet was now on its way and their desperation to retaliate against Earth had made them throw their caution out the window, so they where skipping the paperwork and rushed to action.
But the Wraith and the Aschen weren't the only ones who was planing things, right at the heart of the Aschen target plans where being laid out.
"So what was it that you wanted to talk with me about Samantha?" Narim asked as the two walked through the corridors of Atlantis. "Well this city is only so big and we're picking up refugees at an alarming rate, with both SGC personnel and these refugees within the city there won't be any room left soon." She answered. "So you want the Tollan to move out of the city, to find a planet of our own where we can live without taking up your space or your food?" He asked with a sad tone. "Both yes and no. Let me show you something." Sam said as she led them inside a booth, from the arrival booth she lead them into the holoroom.
"Here's Earth." She said as a hologram appeared of Earth, highlighting Atlantis location. "And this is the solar system which is in the Milky Way." She continued as the holographic map showed the system and the galaxy in order, marking Atlantis location at all times. "If we zoom out even more we'll see the local group which contains the Milky Way and Pegasus." This time the hologram showed the local group and highlighted the two galaxies before diving into Pegasus, as Atlantis was now of the map it instead showed where the Tower was located.
"You want us to move all the way out here?" Narim asked sceptically when he saw the other galaxy.
"No, but in this galaxy there once was an enemy which was far worse than the Goa'uld, we have hopefully managed to exterminate this foe, but the damage they've caused is beyond repair on some worlds. If this enemy was to ever return there will be future causalities and there's also been requests from hundreds of planets who wish to live under our protection within Atlantis or the Tower, the place which is marked at the moment, but if we where to take in those people we would be unable to staff either of the bases, of course there's also been a few requests here in the Milky Way." Sam answered.
"I don't see why you're talking to me about this, Tollana is destroyed and the Tollan people broken, we have nothing to offer you." He said as images of Tollana flashed before his eyes.
"Oh, but you do have something to offer, your people have been taken from the ashes and delivered to salvation. Now we want you to do the same for others." Sam said as the hologram flew back to the solar system, but instead of zooming in on Earth it picked Mars and showed a large facility on its surface.
"What is that?" He asked as the hologram flew into the building and gave them a tour.
"That's the twin planet of Earth, we call it Mars. For many years before we gained access to the ships and the technology we have now all we could hope for was to visit it or maybe to have a colony there some day. That's the dream we're once again aiming for, despite our now advanced technology we have only seven colonies, one is the Tower, one is a mining outpost left by the Ancients, then there's the Alpha and Beta sites in both the Milky Way and Pegasus and lastly there's Destiny, but that's a large ship, so its really not a colony and the rest is no real colonies either. So for our first proper colony we thought we'd chose Mars since it's close enough to allow us to reach it if they need it, as a first step we're going to send around a hundred people to set up a working infrastructure as well as terraforming the planet slightly, we'll also be moving the planet into the same orbit as Earth, matching it so that it will be mirrored in every way." Sam said as the hologram pulled back and showed Mars being moved into the same orbit as Earth while it turned greener.
"And you want the Tollan to help you with this?" Narim asked slightly enthusiastic.
"Yes, you've been registered as SGC personnel and your people have some experience within the field, there's also the fact that many still haven't found a proper place to work yet. When the colony is up and running we want to expand it dramatically by sending through any civilizations who wish to be under our protection to Mars, there we hope your people will greet them and help them get settled either if they want to continue their way of life as farmers or if they want to spend their time helping us with construction or anything else they might be good at." Sam said as the single facility grew until it encompassed large parts of the planet while small farms and villages appeared all over the rest of the planet.
"So you want to grow the colony into a refugee planet?"
"Yes, basically that is what we want but we also want to learn from the colony how to improve further colonies which will be further away, by studying what happens when all the people arrive we can study what could happen in a colony over hundreds of years in just a few months."
"Why would you need to prepare for a colony far away? From what I've seen of your hyperdrives they can move anywhere in a matter of hours or maybe days between galaxies."
"Well Destiny which I said was one of the colonies is a ship very far away, for some time we've had plans to build a base to fall back to if they need, using data from Mars we could give them the best possible chance. Most probably some of the people from Mars will be transferred to that colony when we need start on that."
"It is as you've said, we've had a hard time to find an occupation here on Earth. I will talk to the others about your offer and return to you as soon as possible." Narim said as he left the room and hurried away to find the other Tollans, leaving Sam standing in the holoroom with a smile.
A week later Narim returned to Sam, this time they found themselves in the building room beneath Atlantis. "Well I've been talking to the rest and almost everyone will be helping you in building and managing the colony."
"Good, you and your people can review the blueprints for the first facility in any of the holorooms whenever you feel like doing it. Feel free to suggest any changes." Sam said before turning back to a device she was working on.
"We will make sure that we do not disappoint you. What are you working on your self by the way?" Narim said as he crouched down next to her.
"It's the next generation of hyperdrives" She said as she installed a small component.
"I thought the Asgard had the fastest hyperdrives anyone knows of and that they gave them to you?" He said as he handed her another.
"Yes, so far only the stardrive of a city ship can transport a ship faster, but it uses up to much power to be useful on regular ships, the same goes for the Asgard hyperdrives and small ships, at the moment we use ZPMs in even our smallest probes to make sure that they get as much effect as possible from the drives."
"So you want to create a drive which would require much less power to operate?"
"Yes, the Asgard didn't use probes or small ships so they never thought about efficiency the way we do, so it's either to create a new generation of hyperdrives or to create an alternative to ZPMs and at the moment new drives are the best option since neither we nor Lucius are entirely sure of the theories behind them, we can produce them but we don't know why it works, so we rather build new drives which we have some knowledge of instead of doing something which could wipe out an entire planet if we do something wrong."
"There's that much power in a ZPM?"
"No, a fully charge ZPM could easily take out the entire system if not more."
"I think I know why you want to keep the use of them to a minimum."
"Good. Now if there's nothing else I'd like to make sure that the dampening veil generator and the shroud field modulator use the right frequencies while not interfering with each other." She said as she turned a few dials on the engine and a hologram in the air begun to change to show two distinct frequencies.
"Ok, I'll leave you to it." Narim said as he left the room, leaving Sam alone, in truth not much would happen if Sam failed to set the frequencies just right and that would be the problem.
The dampening veil generator was built to lay a dampening field around the ship while in hyperspace, normally a dampening field would be worthless to put on a hyperdrive since the ship had built in dampeners and in hyperspace there was nothing which could create disturbances that needed to be dampened, but with a dampening field which worked in subspace you could change or eliminate the frequency which every hyperdrive sent out, add to that the shroud field modulator which would hide the hyperspace window from both sensors and eyes as well as cloaking the ship and you would get a hyperdrive which would be close to undetectable in hyperspace, even by the Asgard or the Ancients, and upon reaching the target the ship would drop out of hyperspace and enter cloak without anyone noticing.
It was every military strategist dream, a way of reaching the enemy without them knowing, but that meant that Sam had to get the damn thing to work first, something neither her, McKay nor Zelenka had managed to when they tried to work on it together, but the other two had moved on to other projects while she still came down here from time to time to work on it, the frequencies of both devices would need to be set to the exact frequency which the hyperdrive worked on, but that makes both of the devices clash with each other as one cancelled out what the other did, so she had to get both as close as possible to the frequency without setting them to the same, the closer she could get them to the right frequency the better they would work, her aim was to avoid detection by the sensors of a city ship.
Zelenka meanwhile was further into the room trying to make a hyperdrive which consumed extremely little power and McKay was sitting in a control chair controlling several replicators which was working on an Arcturus reactor, so far this was his eighteenth try, previous attempts had failed miserably but he kept trying and each time the reactor kept going for a while longer before exploding, thankfully he had found a galaxy where there was no chance of life ever evolving due to lack of oxygen and extreme amounts of radiation, while the reactors in Atlantis could supply more than enough power for the city and plenty of ZPMs his goal was to build one functioning Arcturus reactor and then use the same kind of portal to send the power as the one connecting Atlantis and the lower levels, the Ancients had managed to do it, now he only needed to shrink the equipment down to a size which they could use on their ships, that was the real challenge, but as it was Sam suspected that it would end with McKay copying the reactors which the Ancients had built and then figuring out how to shrink the equipment.
Two days later the Tollans where happy with the blueprints and so the construction of the facility begun, the parts which the SGC had already decided upon such as the terraforming devices, the gates and the drives which would push the planet had already been delivered and installed a week earlier so when the Tollan arrived a day after the construction had begun the planet was already moving towards the Sun and small blue spots could be seen on some places, to begin with they had to stay beneath a shield to survive but not for long.
The two weeks that followed the planet moved ever closer to Earth's orbit as it accelerated to match Earth's speed until it finally found itself in Earth's third Lagrangian, by that time it had already received large oceans, forests where beginning to grow on the continents and the animals that had been moved there begun to multiply, this quick terraforming hadn't been possible without slightly alternating time on the planet, around the facility time had moved five times faster but on the rest of the planet several thousand years had past, so when the planet stabilized its orbit the facility begun to expand into a large city as time returned to normal on the entire planet.
Three days later quarters for a thousand people where completed and more would be completed in the following weeks, after the first phase of the build ten thousand inhabitants would be able to move into the colony's first town while even more could live across the surface in small communities.
The first to move in was the remains of the Tollans, while most had moved to Mars when the project begun the remainder arrived now to find a city unlike anything they had ever seen before but at the same time it felt like home because of small details of Tollan culture which had been woven into the architecture of the central district of the city, in the other districts the details of other cultures which where going to move in could be found, among these cultures where the Athosians whom Teyla had gotten on the list of the first occupants as well as several of their trading partners which only numbered to half of the available places, so to fill up the available places the Coalition of Planets had been given the remaining spaces, so in the end all of the places had been filled for the first move and most of the spaces for the rest of the first phase had also been occupied.
The End
Okay, so as you might have noticed in this and the next episode I've been trying to use a more free flowing technique to write, what do you think of it?