Here's the next chapter for you all, questions will be answered and others will be asked. Note: I only own what characters i create, the names and places i invent and the ships and vehicles i seem to be designing in droves for this single story.

I would like to thank AlexanderD for all his help and i strongly recomend reading his story New Dawn. I hope he likes the character named after him Admiral Alec Xander.

For those of you interested in what some of the ships featured in this story look like here are a few sketches on photobucket: albums/ae166/Senrab_Nomis/

Please review and i will respond. Or alternatively post in the thread for this story in my forum. topic/84023/35075481/1/

Review Responses

AlexanderD: Borealis is a good name, i was honoured to use it. Oh you can bet on the IOA sticking it to them when everything seems to be going our way. Glad i could fullfill one of your requests in this chapter.

BIG Z1776: More like the calm before the storm, much like this chapter. Beaming down tanks is something i plan to exploit to great effect in the coming chapters.

Shadows of Realm: And long overdue i would say.

Cdoctor: Having the tech and reverse engineering it are two very different issues though. You can say what something does but not how it does it.

Oddliver: Hardly used? They had to dig the thing up. Give it time and Borealis will fly.

Just a Crazy-Man: Here's what's next.

stormwolf3710: We'll see.

romanhellhound: Thank you.

SkywalkerT-65: Unfortunately that won't stop Zarin from plunging the galaxy into war.

Argus Shipyards

There were many different kinds of days Colonel Michael Pierce reflected as he sat working in his shipyard. There were slightly dull days when nothing interesting seemed to happen and it was just business as usual. There were the exciting days where he got to oversee the completion of another advanced vessel armed with amazing weapons using technology that had been derived from transporters of all things and made him glad he had accepted this posting. There was the nerve wracking days where the ships were in the final, vital and more importantly delicate stages of their construction. He was determined to not see a neutrino ion generator explode on his watch and he was always watching. Truth be told he was a yard dog at heart and ideally he would like nothing better than to be down there with the other engineers getting his hands dirty. However by sitting in the big chair he got to look at some of the more interesting projects coming down the pipeline, one of which was something he was particularly looking forward to.

With a flourish he signed the last piece of paperwork that signified all checks had been completed and would approve the launch of the Relief. Students of history might recognise the name as the being the same as the US Navy's very first purpose build hospital ship and that was a fact that hadn't changed in this case. With the Nightingale being deployed to Pegasus to act in a supporting capacity during the upcoming conflict a new ship was required to fill her place and provide aid in the Pegasus galaxy.

As it stood construction for more ships was being temporarily halted as the need for other things became more apparent. With Celestia staying in Pegasus for the foreseeable future the station was more than capable of providing logistical and repair support for the fleet there, especially with a mining world located in the very same system. However there was still the issue of providing logistical and repair support for a sizeable fleet in the Milky Way. With the entire fleet of Pegasus class vessels in the next galaxy the Milky Way lacked the logistical boost that the vessels had been purpose built to provide. Arguably it would surely just be easier in the long term, if not the short term, to simply build another station like Celestia in orbit and leaving the original in Pegasus. It was a thought for the future but in the meanwhile they were going to stick with the simpler option.

In geo stationary orbit, directly over the Alpha Site, they had constructed a Midway II class station with a dozen additional modules attached to it, all for the purposes of providing fleet support. Now arguably at some point they would need to expand the Argus facilities to better accommodate so many ships however keeping Argus in its current form was quite useful for the short term. By keeping the facility at its current size they effectively had a hidden ace that they could utilise as they saw fit and even build new ships later on. Aside from a powerful dome shield to protect the shipyard there were also a number of holographic emitters placed around the facility to create the illusion that the landscape had been untouched by the shipyards presence. So long as any ships built in the shipyard exited under cloak whenever anyone happened to be looking no one need know that Argus was there. As an added bonus the shipyard was even on the opposite side of the planet to the Alpha Site.

However if this plan of keeping the shipyard hidden from sight was to work then they would need somewhere to allow the larger ships of the fleet to dock for repairs. The modules were useful but they were only capable of supporting the smaller vessels of the fleet and with the inclusion of Borealis to the fleet a new dock was now more important than ever. So they had decided to kill two birds with one stone and build a single birth that could hold something the size of a city ship or in its place a number of Pegasus class vessels.

The new space station was, quite frankly, a huge 5km plus disc with six folding 3km arms attached to the edges. These long arms had numerous other smaller arms running along them that were adjustable themselves and like the bigger versions they were covered in industrial beam emitters. Normally these arms would remain open and uncurled but when a city ship docked a number of procedures would be initiated. First of all tractor beams would be activated and snare the city ship before pulling it down inside the reach of the arms and holding it in place. Then the arms would curl inwards over the six piers of the city ship and the smaller arms would soon follow until the entire city ship, or base ship, was enclosed in their grasp. Numerous large neutrino ion generators would then channel power into the industrial beams and repairs could begin. To further support this repair role there were two types of shields being employed to protect the dockyard. The first was an outer capacitor based shield that was designed to protect it from harm while the second was a weak but sturdy atmosphere retentive force field that would contain a breathable atmosphere at all times. To bolster the defence of this new station on the underbelly of the station were large hangers designed to hold thousands of drone fighters and ringing the station were sizeable numbers of the various energy weapons that the Tau'ri had at their disposal.

It was a massive undertaking to build this new station, a station which no one had even thought of a name for yet, but the Tau'ri took pride in the fact that this colossal hulk of material was currently sitting in orbit as a result of all their hard work. Unlike Celestia, which had been built entirely by the Asgard, the new station had been constructed entirely by human hands and while admittedly had been built using acquired technology it was their achievement and theirs alone. It was a pity that Borealis couldn't be completed solely by their hands but it was a joint project and they were responsible for coming up with the design all by themselves. Even the Asgard had been impressed with the design for the base ship once the reasons for the modifications had been explained. When Borealis had been revealed in its uncovered and effectively scuttled state the Asgard had been quick to acknowledge that that it would never be the same city ship again, it couldn't even be called a city ship now. Turning it into something the allies could be proud of was a much greater kindness than simply leaving it in that, quite frankly, ravaged state.

What had Michael scratching his head though, and as it turned out nearly everyone else who took a moment to think about it, was how Borealis had managed to end up in that state in the first place. Even taking into account the damage caused by ten thousands years of structural fatigue it didn't explain how the city had come to be buried under all that dirt or the destruction of the towers. He knew for a fact that his grease monkeys had a book going as to just how it had happened. Theories ranged from the safe bet of a Wraith bombardment from orbit to the long shots of a freak act of nature like a mud slide. Personally he believed that Borealis had been ambushed by a Wraith fleet when the ZPM's were low and the shield had been collapsed to solely include the control tower. In the resulting fire fight the city ship would have lost a number of towers and been knocked out of orbit resulting it coming in at such a steep angle that the rest of the towers would have collapsed as a result of re-entry and probably additional weapons fire. If what he suspected was true then the city ship would have hit the ground with barely any towers except the central one standing and at such a velocity that it would have cut into the dirt like a knife. The earthquakes the planet was known for would have then resulted in the rest of the dirt subsiding and the city being completely buried aside from the central tower. Of course that was just his personal theory and there was no guarantee that they would even know for sure unless the information could be recovered from the damaged computer core, assuming it was even there, and if not then all bets were off.

Looking at his grease monkeys clambering over the latest prototypes he couldn't help but smile. Argus wasn't just a shipyard. It was also home to some of the craziest and creative geniuses that he had ever met. Just the other month he had walked into the mess hall to a discussion on how they could replicate the stargate weapon that the Asurans had used against Atlantis using a Grodin. One side had been saying how it should be possible if you could channel enough power through the stargate to provide power for a barrier shield and the other was trying to shoot them down. He was happy for them to indulge in such conversations just so long as it meant they didn't take it further than the design stage without permission. He had a cabinet full of the weird designs his scientists and engineers put together that he was tasked with looking over and shipping off to get permission to build. As it happened one of those designs would soon be bearing fruit and it was rather funny how it had come about.

Pierce had walked into the mess hall one evening and had been thinking of nothing else than his dinner. That all changed when he noticed the two opposing sides that had formed and the very simplified designs drawn on the wall mounted white boards. The white boards were supposed to be used by the kitchen staff to put up notes or whatever speciality dishes were on the menu but they had long since given up ever after the techno debates had started and the grease monkeys would immediately make use of them. The current topic of interest was the Ori or more specifically their mothership designs.

The argument came down to the belief that if they had not used barrier shields the ships would be a lot more powerful and naturally those on the other side of the room were taking the opposite stance. Normally Pierce stayed out of these debates since he knew his grease monkeys wouldn't get out of hand but in this case he was actually interested in the discussion. It was certainly an interesting idea. The advantage of barrier shields was that they could be tailored for their environment and would hold strong as long as enough power was pumped into them to maintain them. However if a weapon that had more power than they did was used against them they would block some of the energy and the rest would just go straight through. The shields on the Ori motherships had been strong enough to withstand even the weapons of an O'Neill class warship which meant that the generator behind them was powerful. Hence the opposition argued that if they had pumped all that power into a capacitor they wouldn't have been so vulnerable to an APB. The counter argument to this was that the Ori had only given their followers simplistic technology and that they had been tailored for their purpose. The ships were basically designed to withstand any opposition they faced while being able to dish out enough damage to eventually crush the enemy.

Eventually when the two sides reached a stalemate Pierce tossed in the idea that they were effectively mobile weapon platforms. That had then moved them onto the idea of weapon platforms and from there they had started talking about the Lagrangian point defence satellites that had been employed to defend Atlantis when it come under siege by the Wraith. In many ways those satellites had failed to be anywhere near as effective as they could be. They might have possessed multiple weapon arrays, hence the monstrous size, but they lacked a viable method of defence in the form of shields. That vulnerability had made them easy prey for the Wraith and anyone else with the weapons to use against them. So the discussion had turned to how they might build a better version of the defence satellites and that had resulted in them going back to the whole barrier or capacitor debate. Eventually the two sides had broken apart and come up with their own designs with the only real difference being that one used a capacitor shield and the other a barrier shield. The real downside to the barrier shield design though would be that they couldn't replicate an extremely powerful shield for a small scale satellite since they only knew how to build a bigger and stronger shield by massively increasing the scale.

So they had to build the strongest available option to them and in this case that happened to be a capacitor based shield as strong as a battlecruiser. The end design was a hundred metre satellite shaped like a cylinder that was lined with weapons and had next to no internal space. Weapons came in the form of a single Grodin and four ICT's with power being provided by a neutrino ion generator while a second powered the shields. Homeworld Command had approved them and they were building them as fast as they could before preparing to ship them out to the various Tau'ri holdings as well as keeping a number for themselves.

He knew that his grease monkeys wanted to see the new technology being shipped here through the supergate though and to be honest he couldn't blame them. The idea of establishing a working supergate that would allow ships to quickly traverse the distance between Milky Way and Pegasus was a dream of many engineers. It was just a pity that they couldn't build the ninety modules and the energy extractor themselves. Part of the deal with the Tomin and his people was that they would not be handing over the blue prints for the supergate or the extractor designed to draw power from the black hole. Since the Ori had designed them to prevent the technology from being stolen or even tampered with they couldn't even attempt to replicate the devices. Still it was nice to know that they got to get a closer look at the devices as they established a dialling interface connection before the Nightingale shipped them off to Pegasus.

Pegasus – Black Hole

Colonel John Sheppard sat on the bridge of the Weir waiting for the results of another scan of a promising black hole. His current assignment while the rest of the fleet was either in dry dock and being repaired or out searching for the Zarasian flagship was to find a suitably sized black hole in a suitable location to provide power for a supergate.

This may have sounded easy enough but in actual fact it was much harder than it seemed. For one thing they needed to find a black hole that was inside the allied territory lines and not in some unclaimed area of space where it would be easy prey to Zarasian attack, assuming they eventually discovered the thing. Unfortunately that was a very real possibility since the supergate would give off a massive power signature that any passing ships would be able to detect, which presumably included the Zarasian ships. Now arguably a limit on the area of space they had to search would make his job easier but it also limited the number of potential candidates they had to check out. The second criteria was to find a black hole that wasn't too small and weak to provide the needed energy for the power hungry supergate or too large and powerful that the energy siphon they would place near the event horizon would be unable to overcome the gravitational pull and not remain in the accretion disc zone of safety. The end result was that the Weir had been popping in and out of hyperspace to perform a scan of every single black hole they could find in order to find the best fit for their needs.

Staring out in to the cold depths of space he couldn't help but think of what he would rather be doing than being stuck out in here in some random patch of space on this particular ship which actually made him think of something he would not. Or rather someone he should not, Elizabeth.

It had already been over two years now since they had goodbye for the final time and the worse thing was that they had all already given up on her a long time ago. They thought that she had died when the Asurans had captured her but now…now they all weren't so sure. He was personally convinced that the woman who appeared on Atlantis wearing FRAN's replicator form was Elizabeth. She had just seemed too much like the Elizabeth they all knew for it not to be true and what had they done? They had sent her through a random space gate as a sacrificial lamb to get rid of the other Asurans. He wanted nothing more than to go and recover that replicator body and download her into a new body, her body.

He glanced over at Rodney and knew his friend was thinking the same thing. Why couldn't they just go and get her and to hell with the IOA. Those smug arrogant suits had black balled them every time they had requested that they at least try to recover her, citing some load of bull about it being too much of a risk to have an active replicator around despite the number of contingencies they could put in place. The significance of the fact that the latest refusal had come after Borealis had been taken out of their control was not lost on him. With their allies aid they could download her consciousness out of that replicator body and into a new organic one that was an exact replica of her original body. But no, they wouldn't even let him recover the body and keep her in a stasis pod until they had a fool proof plan in place to safely transfer her consciousness across.

He knew he should stop thinking about matters he couldn't control so he turned his thoughts to other things, like the Ori and the supergate about to be laid down when the Nightingale arrived. He had read the reports about the technology the freed peoples had at their disposal, or rather what the Ori had given them to use and it was actually rather interesting. The Ori had been wanted to keep their followers at a limited level of technological development and as a result they didn't have the knowledge base to operate an advanced industry. The Ori, or their priors, provided all that their followers needed which helped promote their image of being beings worthy of worship and devotion.

In many ways the Ori had actually been quite clever in what they had given their followers. They hadn't actually given their followers, aside from the priors, anything for them to use. They had provided the priors with access to multiple molecular construction devices similar to those used by Merlin to construct the sangraal. These devices could only be used by the priors, which meant only the Ori's most devoted followers would be able to construct the components for both the supergate and the motherships along with the weapons for their army. It was very taxing however which had resulted in the motherships rather limited strength.

Ninety priors had laboured for days on end to slowly assemble the large modules that would make up the supergate went brought together, with each one building a individual module. The reason they couldn't acquire the plans for the supergate was because there were no physical blue prints aside from the knowledge residing inside each and every priors head. Thankfully the ability to create more priors was not something that was a problem with the head prior, the Doci, and the other priors being able to create more as they saw fit. As the technology level of the people advanced they would become superfluous and no longer needed as the people could simply build these devices without the prior's aid but for now they were needed. Designing an interface system for their ships so that even none priors could use them had proven tricky but wasn't too difficult for the Tau'ri scientists. Once the design for the device was understood by just one prior that prior could share the knowledge with the other priors using the telepathic connection that existed between them aided by the crystals in their staffs. Supposedly the crystals resonated on the same wavelength as the telepathic abilities of the priors and amplified them to the point where they could establish a galaxy wide telepathic web, at least that was what the priors had been told and in reality no one knew for sure.

One thing they could easily reproduce was the individual components for the molecular construction devices. One bright spark had the idea of networking several of the assemblers to a single control interface so that the priors could mass produce items in a fraction of the time with the same amount of effort required to produce a single one. It was a step forward for their people and it was something they were very grateful to receive, and in return they had acquired a supergate for Pegasus and another for Ida. Midway would still be used for transporting resources and personnel across galaxies but for ships requiring a quick deployment in the next galaxy the supergate would be used.

"We're done," said Rodney, interrupting John's musing.

"Done as in done done or we're ready to move on to the next one done?" asked John.

"Done done," said Rodney.

"About time," said Sheppard. "So do we have a winner yet?"

"Yes and it's within ten thousand light years of the Wraith homeworld and Celestia."

"Helm set a course and Rodney, get the industrial beams ready for use. The sooner we get this done the better."

"I'm on it."

To act as a control point for the supergate they were going to build a Midway II style space station without stargates that would have the dialling program installed on it to control the supergate. To defend against a possible incursion they were also building multiple defence satellites to protect both the station and the ships that would travel through the supergate. An identical set-up was being built around the supergate back in the Milky Way.

Zarasian Outpost

The outpost was a small one, by Zarasian standards, but like most Zarasian holdings it was heavily defended. It had been designed to act as a forward operating post so that ships would have somewhere nearby to return for repairs as well as an expendable base of operations that Zarin would not hesitate to sacrifice to keep his more important holdings hidden from view. Small it may be but you wouldn't think that to look at it from the outside. From an aerial view it appeared to be a vast complex large enough to be considered a full fledged, still expanding, colony and in the central dry dock sat the Doom Bringer, the Zarasian flagship lifeless where it floated immobile and unpowered.

The Zarasians should have been safe here in this secret base of theirs, surrounded by a powerful stealth field that would mask any energy readings within its wide confines from detection. They would have been very surprised then to know that the facility was being observed by two of the best scouts in Atlantis under the cover of Sodan cloaking devices, Teyla and Ronon.

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