"We lost another one?" Carter asked, cringing.
"Afraid so," Cam confirmed, leaning back in his chair as he sat down, just having got back to Springfield from an offworld assignment. "We managed to evacuate most of our people, but had to fight our asses off to hold long enough to do it."
"What'd they hit you with?" Jack asked, sitting next to Carter and two other Generals, making him the lowest ranking officer in the briefing room.
"What didn't they hit us with?" Mitchell complained. "They had enough legos to keep us tied up in orbit while they got a troop transport to the surface. We held the gate the entire time, but those damn Kenobi spheres of theirs are too tough to take down in the groups. We lost every tank we had in a forced withdrawal."
"Aircraft?" Jack wondered.
"They didn't bother sending down any ships, so we got a few good strafing runs until they started overlapping ground fire. We had to switch to less obvious approaches and managed to take out a few of their big ones…but it wasn't enough. Honestly, they just flat ran over us."
"I'm glad you got out when you did," Carter said gratefully. "The people mattered more than the equipment."
"I know," Cam said, hanging his head in a mixture of frustration and fatigue, "but we can't keep taking losses like this. I don't know why they haven't hit us here yet. There's not much we can do to stop them."
Carter nodded. "At least the Jaffa seem to be keeping the bulk of their attention for the moment."
"We're getting the JV team?" Jack asked.
"Scary as that sounds, I think so."
"What can we do differently than we are doing now?" General Oberdine asked, looking at the Five Star General.
Carter slowly shook her head. "I'm not sure. We can beat them if we have the equipment…or at least hold our own turf."
"But we don't have the equipment," Jack pointed out.
"And we just lost more of it," Cam added. "Every time we start to make a little headway on that front we get hit again."
"I still don't see how they're finding us," Carter said, thoroughly annoyed. "There were no random gate activations prior to the assault, correct?"
"Nothing that I was made aware of," Cam hesitated.
"It is standard practice to freak out when that happens now, right?" Jack noted.
"Yeah, so I doubt they found us that way," Cam agreed.
"I double checked our shipping logs," Carter continued. "There have been no Aschen sightings suggesting that they could have followed us to Gondor."
"We must have a leak then," General Thompson insisted.
"A leak where?" Jack asked.
"Earth," he said bluntly.
Cam and Jack exchanged glances, then both look at Carter.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "I've been looking into every technological angle I can and I can't find anything. Though it's possible the Aschen have reconnaissance assets that have some sort of stealth capability that we can't detect."
"Sam," Jack said, giving her a look.
Her shoulders slumped. "Yeah, I know."
"Know what?" General Oberdine asked with a frown.
"Our test site hasn't been hit yet," Jack offered.
"What site?"
"Something I haven't told anyone about," Sam explained, then added with a stern look. "And it will remain confidential."
"Yes, General," Oberdine agreed, with Thompson also giving a nod.
"We've built a small expansion base on the gate network without using spacecraft. Its gate-only access and none of the supplies are sent from here. They all go through intermediaries so there are no logs of its location in our database. Subsequently, there are no copies or notations made of its existence that get sent back to Earth. We're trying to discover if there is a leak, and to do that we need comparison data."
"What sort of base is this?"
"Industrial."
"Staffed by whom?"
"A small collection of individuals reassigned from other locations. Officially they're where they're supposed to be, but have been personally relocated and the site logs altered to cover their absences. Only 14 individuals know the gate address."
"You're trying to determine if our ships are being tracked?"
Carter nodded. "Or if there's a leak and our maps are getting out to the Aschen. But more importantly, we need secure locations to build up our off Earth industry, and putting everything here and at Reach is too risky. We're going to get hit sooner or later, no matter how much we bulk up the defenses. If we lose Springfield we can't let it become a deathblow to our operations."
"Yet the Aschen have been picking apart our startups," Thompson noted with a nod.
"Unfortunately yes," Carter agreed. "It's almost as if they're toying with us."
"Why not Earth?" Jack asked suddenly.
"They did hit Earth," Cam said, frowning.
"Why haven't they tried again with their big fleets?"
"We had help," Carter said, thinking.
"Maybe they're afraid of that help," Jack said, raising his eyebrows.
"You think they're worried about the Alterra?" Cam asked.
"If they're playing with us, then there's got to be a reason. These guys have no sense of humor. None. It's all painstakingly evil bureaucracy."
"If you say so," Cam said, deferring to his elders. "Before my time."
"Come to think of it, you're right," Carter said thoughtfully. "They've been hitting us hard, but it's more like they're keeping us from growing than trying to take us out…at least after that first try with the bioweapon attack."
"I think they're more concerned with the Jaffa right now," Oberdine speculated.
"So why attack us at all?" Jack scoffed.
"They're trying to slow us down. And they're not going to hit Earth again until they're sure they can win. They don't know that the Alterra are in another galaxy."
"Uh, hang on sec…" Cam said, raising a hand in the air and pointing towards Carter. "The Jaffa are now Alterra-ish. Why aren't they worried about them interfering there? Or have they already?"
"Good question. I don't know. There are no reports of the columnars being seen in this galaxy recently. Last we heard from Bra'tac they were busy fighting the Wraith, so maybe the Aschen haven't seen them and are worried when they'll show up again."
"Lucky break for us," Jack added.
Carter agreed with a nod. "But the Aschen are still probing us, maybe looking for a response?"
"Trying to draw the Alterra out without a huge commitment of resources," Cam guessed.
"Possible. If that worry is buying us some time we need to figure out how to use it."
"The Aschen seemed determined to make sure that doesn't happen," Oberdine argued.
"How bad are our frenemies getting hit?" Jack asked.
"They haven't been inclined to share that information," Sam said with obvious sarcasm, referring to the other nations of Earth and their growing interstellar territories.
"I don't suppose we could ask the Alterra if they could build us some drones?" Cam wondered, his frustration showing in his voice.
"Other than Bra'tac, I have no way of communicating with them as it is," Sam said apologetically. "But I doubt they'll be handing those out freely."
"Shotgun," Jack suggested, getting confused looks from everyone at the table. "If we can't put everything here for fear of it being blown up in one big ass attack, then we spread everything out into tiny bases. Lots of tiny bases."
"What's lots?" Cam asked.
"Hundreds. Including worlds that are barely livable. No heavy defenses, just enough to hold out long enough to evacuate if need be, and we put everything else into building the factories we need to give us the toys to really fight these bastards."
"Will that work?" Oberdine asked Carter.
"I don't know," she said, thinking as her eyes glanced down at the table.
"Cells," Cam said, the first gleam in his eyes since returning from battle. "With no knowledge of each other."
"Resistance cells," Carter said, looking at him. "Good idea, actually."
Jack looked between the two of them. "What great idea did I come up with this time?"
"Our potential security leak," Cam offered.
"And if we space them really far away across the galaxy," Carter added, "then the Aschen can't get to them all by ship. At least not very fast."
"We can use the fleet to ship resources to certain worlds," Thompson added, "and from there the cells can be reached via stargate, with the addresses only known to a handful of individuals that will be the first to evacuate if attacked."
"We can add a circuit," Carter amended. "Input worlds and output worlds. That way if a distribution base gets hit, we won't have the cells dialing in afterwards and exposing themselves. We'll have another set of receiver bases that will connect back to here. Those addresses will show in the receiving logs, but the cells won't."
"And those bases won't have logs?" Cam asked.
"No, they won't," Carter said, finally feeling that they were putting a valid plan into play.
"Great plan. Glad I thought of it," Jack said sarcastically. "But to pull this off we're going to need a lot of people we can trust personally. Cells don't work with strangers, not in this case. The Aschen can know who they are if they want. It's the gate addresses they can't get. We have to be able to trust people with those addresses and command of those bases and do it off the books, and while I'm all about making friends, I don't have 100 or so I can call up and ask to volunteer."
"The Colonel is right," Carter agreed. "We have to do this old school. The possibility of an Aschen data hack is too high, no matter where the source may be. If we keep this out of our computers then there's no way it can filter back to Earth or anywhere else the leak might be. And if we only use stargates to access the cells, then there's no chance of convoys being tracked to them."
"What if," Cam asked, "the Aschen take one of the distribution worlds and tear apart the DHD to find the recent addresses?"
Carter softly bit her lip. "I suppose we can design a program that automatically wipes the dialing history after every connection. Ancient tech is remarkably redundant, so it's not something we can just whip up in a jiffy, but I think I can eventually come up with something to cover our tracks there."
"How much shipping can we manage through the gates," Thompson asked, "tonnage wise?"
Carter cringed. "We can't ship anything really big through, like starship ribs, but if we work it right we can have the cells building small stuff on their own and components of the bigger items that can be assembled here or another site. It'll be a logistical challenge, but it's doable."
"Tanks?" Cam asked.
"If we make them small enough to fit them through the gate we can build them at the cells."
"How long will this take to set up?" Oberdine asked.
"Years," Carter said with a frown. "But I don't see that we have any better options."
"And what do we do in the meantime?"
Cam leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table and staring everyone in the eye in turn. "We hold out and play for time. If the Aschen are doing the same thing, we can make this work."
"But," Jack added. "It has to be off the books. Totally. Even the President can't know."
Carter seemed to balk at that and Jack stared her down. "You know it's the only way."
"Yeah, I know," she relented. "If we survive this war I'm totally going to get fired."
"If," Cam emphasized. "And right now that's looking like a very big if."