Ch. 26 — Beam Me Up, Scotty . . . Not!
Harry was finally sleeping in his dorm room again — pain-free for the first time in years. With Malfoy in Azkaban, his followers, Crabbe and Goyle, were subdued — apparently, they hadn't taken the mark yet. Pansy had also lost most of her bluster. In fact, a large number of the upper-year students found themselves the Head of the Family, and under regents until they were twenty-five or thirty, depending on their individual family's traditions and wills. Their remaining family members were not shy about telling them to keep their mouths shut and their wands in their pockets. Otherwise, the next Head of Family was sure to be in a cadet branch, if one existed at all, leaving the main family-line extinct.
Not to mention that if one of the crew happened to be present, the retaliation was swift and often quite painful.
While the pure-bloods grumbled about muggle-borns, that was all they did. The taunting and outright attacks that had dominated last year disappeared as the number of confessed Death Eaters in Azkaban, and those tossed through the veil, increased. It was a stark contrast to how things had been handled, before. No more did a pure-blood get a slap on the wrist for wrongdoing.
Even the densest pure-blood fanatic could see that the rise of the pure-bloods had been halted, and their gains were being whittled back. Every time the Wizengamot met, the laws that protected the pure-bloods were being pruned back.
For the first time since Harry was a Firstie, the halls in Hogwarts were relatively quiet. Arguments between Houses were at an all-time low. Professor Snape was as surly and unpleasant as ever to Harry, and only a bit less so with anyone not in Slytherin.
The rumour was that he planned to leave at the end of the school year and open an apothecary for rare potions. Or to be a supplier of potions to apothecaries. Or to go to the continent and open a shop there. Or, even, go to the colonies and do it there.
The Hogwarts' rumour-mill, while it always had the latest information, was rarely accurate except in the vaguest way possible.
It had taken weeks for Harry to come to terms with the thought of a piece of that evil creature in his head. Hermione had stayed at his side that entire first night as he started what she called the seven stages of grief. First came shock and denial — it couldn't be true! Then came the pain and guilt — as long as he lived, so did that monster. That became anger and bargaining — by god, he would do anything to get rid of it, even die. Then he fell into depression — of course it was him, every time things started to go his way, something came along to ruin it. He was still working at accepting his fate.
As Hermione repeatedly told him, he had lived with that scar in his forehead for ten years without him noticing it as anything but a scar. Only when Tom was active had he had a problem. With Tom gone, he could certainly go another ten years as they searched for a way to permanently remove it.
It helped that he hadn't had a problem with headaches or pain in his scar since they had exiled Tom to Barnard's Star. Whether he slept on the ship or in his room, it was the same restful, undisturbed sleep. He no longer resorted to the late-night meanderings to avoid the nightmares that had plagued him before they had found the ship. His anger issues, likewise, were gone. He no longer feared losing his temper over silly things such as not getting enough of his favourite treacle tart.
His attention in class had suffered greatly from his depression and angst over the horcrux in his head, in the meantime. So had his grades. Even potions suffered, despite the assistance of the notes in the book he had found. Only flying took his mind off the problem. Or staring at the Earth below him on the Requirement. If he hadn't had Ron to lean on, even his Quidditch practices would have been lacklustre and disappointing.
One side effect, however, was that he and Hermione had grown a bit closer together.
He had thought she was getting more interested in Ron. However, Ron snogging with Lavender celebrating their win after the Quidditch game in November, had killed that interest, it seemed. As did their frequent snogging sessions in the common room, or disappearances to go broom-closet hunting. None of which they made any effort to conceal.
That they didn't sneak off to the ship was a minor miracle.
In any event, Harry's bushy-haired Number One was spending more time with him. Which he greatly appreciated. Especially when she sat quietly listening while he raged at the unfairness of his life. She even gave up some of her research and study-time.
She became his number one in more than just her rank on the ship.
At one point, he wasn't sure when it was, the two had exchanged a kiss. Then another.
That, had probably been his turning point. Someone cared about him. Someone didn't let the piece of Tom in his head bother them. Someone had faith he wouldn't become a mad-man.
Time, and school, marched on.
The first Fuel Depot was completed and it immediately started making a duplicate of itself. Uranus Base went back to completing the U.S.F.S Galileo.
Enterprise grew with another store in Paris.
And then it was Christmas at the Burrow.
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General Hammond intently studied the papers in the folder. Between the Leonids in November, and the sigma-Hydrids and Geminids in the first two weeks of December they had managed to nail down the location of the strange ship hovering over England.
They had arranged for a satellite in a co-orbit to the unknown ship's altitude to disintegrate — "accidentally." Over the course of a week the spreading orbital debris had given them a rather accurate map. The protective "shield" around the craft was not spherical, but more of a flat lozenge shape, wider horizontally than vertically, and much longer than wide. The "shadow" of the ship was almost fourteen hundred metres long, nine hundred metres wide, and seven hundred metres tall.
They still hadn't figured out what happened to the debris when it hit the shield. The matter simply disappeared in a very dim flash of light that in no way matched the amount of material disappearing.
How it managed to remain absolutely still over a single spot at such a low altitude had his experts vibrating with excitement — and tearing their hair out in frustration. Their best guess was that the aliens had discovered how to manipulate anti-matter, leading them to all the things so popular in science-fiction — artificial gravity, shields against gravity, and warp drives for faster-than-light travel.
Additionally, while such things were theoretically possible, the energy requirements were thought to be so high, they could only be met by a steady, stable fusion reaction at rather incredibly high levels of output efficiency. Otherwise, the ship would have had to leave almost daily for refuelling.
The scientists were trying to set up a neutron detector, buried deep in a gold mine in Scotland, focused on the ship's position to see if they could verify its power source. Whatever they discovered would revolutionize nuclear power production.
In the meantime, cancer cure-rates remained steady. Every known or newly-detected cancer patient below the age of thirty in Britain was now cancer-free. Lakenheath was very active in ensuring that arriving American cancer-patients, all children, and their families, were transferred in an orderly fashion to British hospitals. And then returned home cancer-free two weeks later. They had exhausted the backlog in the families of active personnel, and had discretely started contacting and moving civilian patients for a "revolutionary treatment" in Britain.
With M.I. 5's assistance, they had managed to install a number of cameras in several wards. Unfortunately, they always failed whenever a cancer patient was cured, and nothing was ever caught on video.
One film-based camera, completely mechanical with a spring motor and timer, had managed to capture only puzzling images of occasional wavy outlines in the air of the wards.
They had thought to leave a message with one of the patients, a paper attached to their bed, asking to talk with them, but the problem with that was how would the aliens communicate with them? They couldn't exactly leave them a phone number to call, now, could they? That would presuppose they had access to a phone, and knew how to use it! The idea they had an apartment somewhere with a phone was ludicrous. Radio was similarly handicapped. Not to mention that that assumed they knew how to read English.
That was implied in that they knew which patients had cancer and which ones didn't, but it was no guarantee.
While slight, there was the possibility the aliens didn't know how to communicate with them in any recognizable fashion, anyway, and only knew that they could cure cancer patients. Or maybe they communicated in a way humans couldn't understand. Leaving a written note was pretty useless if they "talked" using pheromones, like ants.
Hammond doubted that. The attitude of the "team" he had met in 1969 seemed to indicate they could communicate quite well in English.
However, did they really want to spook the aliens and stop the cancer cures?
Then there was the problem that if the aliens were so far advanced, did they really want to attract their attention in anything but a benevolent way?
Brussels, Amsterdam, and Paris hospitals had begun to report "mysterious" remissions in their child-cancer wards. The effected hospitals formed a rough circle centred on the Scottish Highlands, oddly.
Two new trends had appeared as well.
The first was a large number of AIDS and HIV positive patients who were beginning to experience "spontaneous" remissions, but only those admitted as overnight patients in certain hospitals. There were also signs that gravely ill patients waiting for donor operations were also, spontaneously, having their damaged organs regenerate. A few of the smaller hospitals had reported that the only patients they had left were accident victims recovering from injuries, and mothers-to-be.
The National Health Service was deliriously happy at the expense reductions.
The second was discovering that unmarked gold bars of high purity, zero point nine-nine-nine-nine percent, had begun to appear. What was truly peculiar was that the bars, to all appearances, were absolutely identical. Their trace elements were the same, and in the exact same proportions. An impossibility, according to his experts.
Every gold-bar pour had slightly different proportions of impurities because the sources all had different impurities. Not even pours from the same melting pot were the same, there were always pockets of impurities that had settled in different locations in the melting pot. You couldn't exactly dip a spoon into the pot of liquid gold and stir, now, could you?
Not these, though. They were all exactly the same, right down to microscopic details. That definitely should have been impossible.
They were kilogram bars by the hundreds. Their lack of provenance hadn't attracted as much attention as the fact that the owners trading them in never quibbled about the discounts being given for that lack. They never argued that the purity of the bars should outweigh their anonymity, they just accepted whatever the discount was. It was if they either didn't care or didn't understand the value of what they were trading. Or they had so much that the discount didn't matter.
They had appeared all over Europe, except the United Kingdom. But, then again, owning gold bullion was illegal in England.
They were always brought in by Englishmen, though, and women, too. Every one of them. Nothing suspicious in that, was there? From a country were owning gold bullion was illegal, selling gold bullion required a license with proof of provenance, and only licensed mining companies could possess raw gold ore. Nope, perfectly normal. Not.
The real puzzler, though, was that a number of the people trading in the bars could not be traced. They weren't in the British National Registry. They didn't have driver's licenses, they weren't registered with the National Health Service. The education system had never heard of them.
Suspicions aside, though, no actual laws were being broken.
He closed the folder and set it aside.
It wasn't his problem anymore.
His retirement was coming up in a bit over three months — he'd spend a week helping the new General settle into this position, then transfer to his new post in the "Stargate" division, relieving Major General West.
The upper Staff claimed the project was closing down. His retirement happily coincided with the final stage, hence his transfer. The current General would move onto a more active duty that needed someone who would be there for the foreseeable future. No reason to waste that General's time with simple housekeeping. Overseeing a shutdown was, basically, simple supervision that could be accomplished by someone retiring — both would finish at the same time.
He'd closely read the sitrep on what had happened over the last few months in the Stargate division, and the conclusions the scientists and his superiors had reached. Anyone else would think the matter closed, and that his new post was simply an easy ride for him as he closed out his career with distinction.
However.
He had met a Stargate team in 1969, and the sitrep he had read covering the events of the last six months had been about a place called Abydos. It contained nothing about a team going into the past, when he was just a Lieutenant.
It looked like he wouldn't be retiring quite so soon.
He wondered, just how much that mysterious star-ship over the U.K. had to do with the Stargate?
Their observations and the sitrep seemed to indicate they weren't related. Should he be worried?
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"How many?" Harry asked incredulously. He was in the kitchen of Grimmauld Place with his dogfather, Moony, Hermione, and Lee the day after returning for Christmas. The November's full-moon had been on the twenty-fourth, and December's was just two days away.
"One hundred and ninety-seven, Mon Kapitan!" Sirius retorted, clicking his heels together and snapping off a salute. He grinned widely, unable to keep a straight face.
Remus had asked at the beginning of the month if he could ferry some of the weres to Uranus Base instead of waiting for the last minute. Harry hadn't seen a reason to refuse.
Remus chuckled, "I believe almost every werewolf in England is now at Uranus. They're already asking when classes on magic can start, and when those that don't have them can get wands." He frowned. "Especially the children. We've got about twenty under the age of seventeen."
"Most of them are just celebrating at never having to go through the change again!" put in Sirius. "The idea that they no longer have to worry about where they live, where they can find a job, will they have enough to eat . . . hasn't quite sunk in yet. When it does . . . I don't think you'll need to worry about their dedication or loyalty!"
"Plus, we're starting to get inquiries from werewolves in Europe and elsewhere. If we take them all, we'll have a small town."
Harry shook his head, bemused. "Well, if it keeps everyone safe, why not?" He couldn't see a downside to treating werewolves like decent people while keeping the general population completely safe from any accidents. It was the very definition of a win-win solution.
"They won't be bored, several of the muggle-borns were asking about those X-wing fighters beside the station, and it didn't take long for them to find the simulators. The weres were quick behind them."
Harry sighed. He knew some of the werewolves would want to stay at Uranus Base, but he hadn't figured that so many, this fast, would be willing to abandon England. Not that he blamed them for wanting to leave, he just hadn't expected such quick acceptance.
Still, it kept them safe, and prevented accidents. The only problem would be keeping them from getting bored. On the other hand, having so many willing hands would let Neville greatly expand the greenhouses for magical plants. It might not be glamorous work, but it would steady. Plus, a few more eyes watching the Fuelling Depots replicate and verifying their correct operation wouldn't hurt, either.
Adding the additional sections to the Base for the increased population would be trivial. The Base was designed for the possibility of growth to a hundred times its current size.
"Regarding magic schooling," Sirius said, "Moony and I are going to be escorting the ones without a wand to Ollivanders over the next week. We'll start school on the following Monday. We've already lined up several teachers for them, primarily muggle-born, of course, but all with NEWTs in their subjects."
"We figure to keep the classes to fifteen students each, with seven subjects: Transfigurations, charms, DADA, Herbology, History of Magic, double Runes, and Arithmancy, to start. Each student takes four classes a day, and we alternate them."
Sirius chuckled again. "They're really motivated, especially the adults, so I figure they'll blast through the first year in record time."
"Between working in the greenhouses and schooling, I don't think anyone will have time for mischief. Or to be bored. Plus, some of them have expressed interest in getting combat training as Marines."
"Do we really need to do that, though? The Death Eaters are gone," Harry said.
Remus shrugged. "Not everyone is honest. Some people like to take advantage of others. Some people are simply bullies — especially with the wolf wanting to establish dominance over the others. That's a really bad habit some of them have left over from living with the wolf, even if the wolf isn't present, anymore. If we get enough people together, we'll need someone to act with authority, on the spot, like Aurors or hit-wizards."
"Being quasi-military in organization," Hermione interrupted, "we should use the Marines. Divide them into three wings: patrols for primarily on stations and in towns, patrols for on-ship presence, and fighting units for actual fighting, wherever that occurs."
Remus frowned. "We'll need clear laws."
Sirius shrugged. "We'll start with the basics: no killing, no stealing, no destruction of property, things like that, then add stuff as we need it. Punishments must fit the crimes, and so forth."
Hermione hummed a bit, obviously thinking, then said, "I'll see if anyone wants to draw up some sensible laws for wizards and muggles to live together. We can look at that, then decide. I think we've got time."
There was silence for a moment as they considered what to do next.
"Hermione?" Harry asked. "I remember someone mentioning beaming as a way to get around, and also something about a 'Stargate'? Do you know anything about those?
"About the beaming? Yes. We looked into that. It's basically dematerializing and rematerializing at the same time, like we've been doing to build the Runabouts, X-wings, Fuelling Depots, Uranus Base, and the Galileo. Unfortunately, while we know beaming works on muggle animals without a problem, it kills magical animals — at least the ones we've tried so far. We haven't used it on a wizard or witch yet, so I'm not sure if it would be fatal, or simply make them a squib or a muggle. We haven't tried it with muggles, yet, either. I'm sure you'll understand the lack of volunteers," she concluded dryly.
They all chuckled.
"Well, the Ministry still has about a dozen or two accused Death Eaters waiting for trail. The next time I hear of a verdict of someone going into the Veil," Sirius said lightly, "I'll alert you and we can try beaming them to the ship. If they're alive when they get there, we'll see if they can do magic. If they can't, then we definitively know that it makes muggles out of wizards and witches. If they can do magic, we know beaming is safe for us. If it kills them," he shrugged diffidently, "then we just beat the Veil to its job. In any event, we beam them back to their cell, and no one will ever suspect what happened. Everyone will assume they died of a heart attack or killed themselves. Or they're raving lunatics."
"That's . . . rather brutal, isn't it, though? I mean, we just kidnap them knowing we might be killing them? Can we do that? Do we want to do that?" came Hermione's uneasy objection.
Harry wasn't very happy about it, either. He didn't want to kill someone when they were helpless. It just felt . . . wrong. But, then again, that's what every government did when executing a prisoner — they were killing someone helpless, who couldn't hurt them, and couldn't fight back.
Sirius shook his head. "Not our problem. The person was condemned to die in a fair trial. Depending on what happens, we'll either just hurry the pace a little to learn a valuable piece of information or the prisoner just wakes up in his cell after a really bizarre dream. The Ministry, in our place, wouldn't even hesitate."
"They wouldn't even wait for anyone to be condemned to the Veil. They'd just pull a lifer from Azkaban, and do it. At least we're waiting for a deserving candidate," said Remus resignedly.
"Who knows what the results will be?" Hermione said, reluctantly. "It's possible that it's determined by their magical ability. It might kill a really powerful wizard, and leave someone like a squib completely unfazed by removing their magic," she sadly concluded.
Harry ran his hand through his hair. "Okay, much as I hate it, we need to know the limits of this beaming. Currently, it's fine for hardware and muggle animals, However, there could emerge an emergency where we might be able to use it to save lives. It would be horrible to use it in a situation like that, and have everyone rescued die because we never tested it. Or, have everyone die because we were too afraid to use it."
He looked over at his dogfather. "Keep an ear out for any verdicts involving the Veil, and pass the information to Lee as soon as you can. It'll take a lot of coordination to get it done without the Ministry catching on."
Sirius responded with another snappy salute, "Yes, my admiral!" he cried out.
Harry rolled his eyes.
Lee cleared his throat and started the next explanation. "Stargates — it's one word in runes — are just small versions of beaming but only to and from fixed locations. If we want to use beaming, we have a range of anything within ten thousand miles. A stargate is from one stargate to another stargate, only. It's more focused, and the implication is that it allows nearly instant travel between stars. There is a power limit in that the farther you want to go, the more power it takes. But a stargate still converts everything to energy for the transfer, like the beaming does, so it would probably be just as deadly to magical creatures.
"There's another version, called rings, that are the same in operation, but can be programmed for any location from their source. They seem to be limited to orbital distances, as-in, from the orbit to the ground. They aren't quite able to reach the Moon, but anything below that is game. Unfortunately, they, too, convert what they're sending to energy.
"Because both stargates and rings are like beaming, I have a feeling that they aren't the sort of thing wizards and witches should use if we want to remain wizards and witches," he said regretfully.
Harry nodded. "I see. So, we're going to be stuck using portkeys or apparition while the muggles can use beaming or these rings to get to and from the ship?"
"Yes, sir, that seems to be the situation."
"Phht!" Sirius said, and waved a hand. "Apparition has them both beat."
"Or we use the Runabouts for surface to ship transfers," Hermione put in, "like we do with the werewolves."
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Josephine Edgecombe could barely believe how much things had changed in the last six months. When she had first been hired at Enterprise, the world had seemed on a downward spiral. Her daughter had appeared to have been willingly trapped into a shady business, one that could only lead to her, and her family's, doom. To use a sea metaphor, Josephine had felt they had been trapped on small lifeboat and headed for shipwreck on the shoals.
The pure-bloods, at the time, were flexing their power and driving muggle-borns and half-bloods out of their world, depriving them of jobs and livelihoods. On top of that, those same victims were disappearing from sight. Many were not simply vanishing into the muggle world — abandoning the very dangerous wizarding world — they were being disappeared, eliminated as obstacles, or used as object lessons.
The future had appeared dark, and seemed to be getting darker by the day. She had deeply feared a return to sixteen years ago, when you couldn't trust that the person beside you wouldn't suddenly turn and kill you. When safety was almost a foreign concept — nowhere was safe, not even your own home. A time when saying the wrong word during the day could get you killed in the middle of the night.
Plus, the people in charge had seemed to be coordinating it, hiding the results, and revelling at their ability to do whatever they wanted without concerns for whether it was legal, or moral, or not. If you had the right blood, and supported the right philosophy, anything you did was, by definition, the correct thing to do. You were untouchable.
If you had the wrong blood? Then trying to resist an attack would be considered attacking an innocent. Merely protesting your treatment by a pure-blood could land you in hot water — sometimes literally.
Six months ago, those times had seemed to be fast approaching, again.
She had begun to fear for her job and her life. What her daughter was doing at school made her fear for her daughter's life, too.
Her only hope at the time had been a questionable job offer from the same ones who had enticed her daughter into rebellion and danger.
Three months later, she, herself, had become a fierce protector of that group. Setting herself against the pure-bloods who ruled the wizarding world had been difficult. However, she had realized that that stance was the only hope for a future where her daughter had a chance to be what she wanted to be and not what others, who called themselves superior, thought she should be.
She had jumped on a ship, sailing defiantly into the ocean, daring their enemies to see them, to confront them, even as they hid from them.
And now? She happily sat in her sitting-room with her husband and daughter on either side of her, watching a movie on the telly, and eating a bowl of popcorn. She was enjoying a wonderful Christmas with the future looking as bright as it ever could be. Money was no longer a concern; they could pay their bills with ease. Her daughter had a job piloting a starship, and she was teaching others to do the same. Her wonderful husband had quit his menial muggle job and was now a manager for Return to Tomorrow Videos, on the back side of Enterprise, in-charge of ten employees. Plans were in place for two more locations to open soon, in Scotland and Ireland.
Enterprise was a going concern with three dozen employees — despite the "Opening Soon!" signs displayed in the windows of the Diagon Alley, Hogsmeade, and Paris stores. She had heard Enterprise's owners were considering stores in Dublin and New York.
The other two affiliated businesses, Quark's in Diagon Alley and Gus's Galaxy Grill and Ten-Forward in muggle London and Paris, respectively, employed another dozen people each.
The purebloods were no longer in ascendance. Instead, they were waging a desperate holding action, trying not lose their grip on the sides of their lifeboats and sink into the dark water underneath. Dozens of others, bulwarks of the pure-blood movement, had vanished into the air, leaving chaos among their friends and business associates.
Timid business owners who had been afraid to retain certain, "unfavoured" individuals had changed their minds. Several half-blood business owners had simply disappeared, their businesses shuttered.
Many of her friends who had lost their jobs in the Ministry to pure-bloods or half-bloods sponsored by pure-bloods, had been rehired as those persons had abruptly disappeared or publicly confessed to being Death Eaters.
Others were now working in the new stores and restaurants.
But many muggle-borns and half-bloods had left the wizarding world entirely, or been hired by other new, fresh businesses without those blood-prejudices.
She wouldn't say there was an employee shortage, not yet, but certain "pure-blood" businesses that exercised an exclusivity in their employees and customers were starting to feel the pinch.
She knew, three months ago, that the "crew" was going to come to a wands-drawn confrontation with pure-bloods — the existence of Combat Officer Lieutenant Lovegood indicated that. She had never expected, however, that the conflict could be so one-sided, and so behind the scenes. She had thought there would be battles in the streets, spells flying from dark alleys, betrayals on all sides, as it had been sixteen years ago.
Instead, though, the battles had taken place in the dark, where no one knew what had happened — just that certain people were gone. This time, it had been the pure-bloods on the receiving end of the wand.
Then there was the news her daughter had brought in to her one day at work, that You-Know-Who, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named — Tom Riddle to those who had paid close attention — was gone. Banished so far away that no wizard or witch could imagine it. The powerful and cruel leader of the pure-bloods had been driven permanently from the battlefield, despite his previous claims to be invincible.
So many wealthy pure-blood families had been destroyed that there was no hope they could be as powerful a political block in the Wizengamot as the liberals and neutrals, not for a decade or two, at least.
The Wizengamot, that "worthy" organization, had been forced to vote new members into place. Poor pure-bloods, and not-so-poor half-bloods, now held those coveted seats. It was that or not have enough members for a quorum.
Plus, if the pure-bloods stuck to their beliefs and eschewed marrying half-bloods and muggle-borns, then they would die out in only a few generations. There simply were not enough of them left, otherwise.
Yes, she could say she was proud of her daughter and her friends, and what they had accomplished. No one else might know, but she did.
She couldn't help but lift her daughter's hand and kiss it, smiling at her questioning look.
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By the time the New Year started, they had thoroughly investigated the records on both beaming and stargates. Apparently, tens of thousands, or maybe hundreds of thousands, of years ago, the makers of the ship they had renamed as the D.S.F.S. Requirement had established an entire network of those stargates.
A network with over 1.98 billion possible addresses.
Not all of them had been in use, though, and the library didn't record how many had been established. It did have a large number of addresses on file, however, so there was that, at least.
On the positive side, Earth was one of them.
On the negative side, it was unavailable to them.
Removing it almost entirely from consideration, Lee and his team discovered that "beaming" was fatal to wizards and witches. Whatever it was that allowed wizards to have magic, it didn't survive the transition to energy and back.
Because they were based on the same technology, the Stargates had to be just as deadly.
For wizards, both methods of transportation were absolutely verboten!
On the other hand, beaming did provide a quick and painless method of execution!
The positive that the Stargates could be used for material transport was almost entirely offset by the negative of a minimum distance, and exclusivity, requirement. Comparing the number of possible addresses to the volume of space occupied by the Milky Way, the Stargate system wouldn't be that useful. The gate address-blocks were simply too big.
According to the library, there were fifteen G-type stars within the address-block that held the Earth. Five of them, according to the library, had Earth-sized planets, or moons, in the zone where the planet or moon could have oceans of water on their surface.
The problem was that if there were more than two stargates in a given "address-block" you had no control over which one you would emerge from. It might be the one you wanted, or it might not. Plus, if one Stargate in that address-block was "on", none of the others could access each other. Only the Stargate in use could control its destination address. And if it wanted one of the local Stargates? It had no control over which of them would open.
So, until they could determine if there was more than one Stargate in this address-block, they didn't dare use a Stargate.
Very inconvenient.
As a result, even though there was a Stargate under the ice sheets in Antarctica, they wouldn't be expending any efforts to retrieve it.
As Fleur had said during the Tournament, more than once, c'est la vie — such is life.
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The Hogwarts Express had almost reached Hogwarts when Hermione's book pinged her. Opening it, a projection of Lee appeared across from them.
He crossed his arms and stared bitterly at them. "We're daft cows," he finally said. "Bloody bleeding, flipping, barmy berks."
"Language," Hermione said immediately.
He just gave her a sour look.
"Hermione? How did we solve the original problem we had with the Requirement?"
She blinked. "We used enlargement and duplication spells."
"So, why are we still mining helium-three?"
She blinked once, twice, then face-palmed herself. "We're bleeding idiots," she said flatly.
Harry and the others stared at her, startled. Hermione never cursed. "Language, Hermione," Harry finally said.
She gave him an exasperated look.
Lee nodded. "All we need to do is figure the maximum consumption rate per minute, and keep twice that on the ship. Then duplicate it, as we need it, with an array of permanent duplication spells on the tanks' exit valves. The duplication charms don't have to be strong, only good enough to handle the maximum flow-rate. The duplicated helium-three only needs to exist for one second, and it'll be used up long before then!" He waited a beat. "We could do the same for the X-wings, and then they'd never run out of fuel and we'd have more room for other stuff — like food."
He snorted. "Better yet, start the Fuel Depots making that special fuel we need instead of duplicating themselves, and duplicate that. We don't need thousands of Depots making fuel."
He harumphed. "It's not like we're trying to build a fleet of ships here, now is it? We've only got two."
Hermione already had her book out and calculating. After a few moments, she looked up. "We need a kilogram of that fuel for each X-wing, and two tonnes, each, for the Requirement and Galileo." *
She sighed, "Unfortunately, using magic to duplicate the fuel wouldn't work. The duplicates wouldn't last for the years that we need." Lee looked downcast at that.
"However, if we take the forty-eight Fuel Depots at the end of next December's construction cycle, those forty-eight could provide the seed fuel for four X-wings every three months. But we'd still have enough Fuelling Depots in February to give us a ton of Fuel for the Requirement by graduation, and the Galileo the next month."
Lee perked up at that.
"Or, you could wait until March. Then we'd we have enough Fuel for ten of the X-wings every month after that."
They all had a laugh at Lee's conflicted look.
"Or," she said after a moment, and a bit more calculation, "we could make a second Fuelling Depot with Uranus Base while the first one is still duplicating itself, and have three Fuelling bases duplicating themselves next month." She stared down at her book. "That would give us enough fuel for all your X-wings in May, the Requirement in June, and the Galileo in mid-July." **
She looked up and grinned at all of them. "And then we could start exploring the galaxy!"
Now that, Harry thought, was a goal well-worth jumping at! He also thought it had been a very good idea to have the Fuelling stations use the tech-cloaks to hide. Harry had a suspicion that that many Depots in orbit around Uranus would be quite noticeable to the scientists on Earth, otherwise!
Especially as the Fuelling Depots were about double the size of the Requirement — the huge tanks needed for the storing the helium-three did that.
"In the meantime," she said to Lee, "we can use the duplication charms on the present fuels in place. That will, at least, allow us to use everything we've built so far."
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A.N. Several people had problems with the magicals being incompatible with Stargates and/or Stargates not being simple tunnels.
First, it is canon (100 Days) that energy transits the Stargates without issue (using laser-light that "heats up" the gate's iris, for example). Besides, if it didn't, then SGC could not communicate with their MALPs once they transited the gate, nor could they use radio to let SGC know they were friendlies coming through and to open the iris. Thus, the information contained in energy remains unchanged.
Second, there are repeated references that the way the iris works is by preventing incoming matter from reforming. From the Stargate Wiki: "The iris sits less than three micrometers from the event horizon, so, while an incoming wormhole can still form, any matter sent through will not be able to re-materialize (The Enemy Within)." Not once do they say that incoming soldiers (troops, things, etc.) are merely bounced off the iris and back into the Stargate's wormhole. The sound, thumping, that is heard, must be the enormous clumps of quiescent, unfocused, energy of those things impacting the iris and dissipating.
Further, from Wikipedia (Stargate (device)), "Objects in transit between gates are broken down into their individual elemental components, and then into energy as they pass through the event horizon, and then travel through a wormhole before being reconstructed on the other side." The sound, thumping, that is heard, must be the enormous clumps of quiescent energy of those things impacting the iris and dissipating.
Thus, energy transits without being de-materialized and any information contained in the energy is retained, which means an energy being would transit the gate without any issues.
So, magicals being able to transit the Stargate unharmed is a bit unlikely, as they are both energy and matter, and a certain amount of interaction between the two is required for magicals to remain alive. Which means, that while the Stargates can reassemble matter, they can't renew the connections between matter and energy (they don't affect energy).
This wouldn't affect the electrical pulses generated in living matter because all such pulses are biologically created in the instant they are needed. A human might notice an odd feeling passing through, but that's all. Even standing in the Gate wouldn't be a problem as each "half" of the individual would be sending electrical (energy) pulses to the other.
As for other races having magic? I don't know of any such instances. They are all explained as telepathy, telekinesis, or similar "mind" powers. From GateWorld Forum: "Nothing in Stargate is supernatural. It's all perfectly natural, just beyond our level of understanding, just like most of the technology itself. Telekinesis, ascended powers, Ori will-sucking devotion, the Nox, and the Omeyocan; that's not magic. It's either technology or evolution that's beyond our understanding."
For the claim that the Ascended or Ancients are or were magical, see the above paragraph. Besides, if magicals could survive passing through the Stargate, how did the Goa-uld not notice the magicals in their human slave populations? They took tens of thousands of Egyptians and others to their other worlds in the six thousand years that they ruled Egypt. It boggles the mind that they somehow managed to not notice or accidentally grab any squibs or magicals in that time and take them, too, to populate those worlds.
Plus, Stargate would have shown them using magic incantations and rituals extensively in controlling their worlds and torturing their opponents. Not to mention that them using magic would have made it darn-near impossible for SG-1 to convince anyone they were not really gods.
The only logical conclusion is that magicals don't survive the Stagate. And the Goa'uld are too lazy to be interested in finding out why one in every thousand slaves dies when leaving Earth. Squibs don't die, they just lost the ability to pass on magical descendants.
* A typical cargo ship on the sea uses about half-a-ton of fuel per minute at cruising speed. I assume that spaceships consume quite bit more, especially while in combat. (Remember, anything with Naquadah is supposed to be extremely powerful)
** The first Fuelling Depot comes online in mid-January. It duplicates itself by mid-February. However, if they also have Uranus Station make a second Fuelling Depot, they would have three Depots in mid-February. Then the three Fuelling Depots start replicating themselves while Uranus station goes on to finishing the Galileo and building Mars Base, the Su Song, and other tasks.
Thus, in November 1997 they would have 1,536 Depots. By April 1998, they would have 49,152 Depots. April would have them start making fuel. They would have 1,392 kg of fuel by mid-May. By mid-July, only a week after graduating, they would have made a total of 5.5 metric tons of fuel.