Ch. 33 — Hogwart's
General Hammond leaned back in his chair and massaged the side of his temple with one hand staring at the artist's representations. He sighed and leaned forward to once more shuffle the photos, drawings, and transcripts littering his desk. He pulled out two photos and a drawing. He studied them. Dr. Littlefield's rough drawing bore a striking resemblance to the photos of the original Star Trek Transporter room that lay beside it. The doctor's surprise in his interview at seeing the old photos from the TV show, and confirming that that was what he had seen, proved the SG-1 team hadn't concocted the entire experience as a joke.
Not that Hammond would expect such a thing. Not when there was no other reasonable explanation for how the SG-1 team got back to Earth without going through the Stargate in the base. That he considered this the most reasonable explanation showed just how much things had changed in the last year.
The next set of photos were of a school bus — bright yellow, of course — driving away. The final five were of a distant yellow thing that abruptly changed to a white. Only when it went vertical did the shape clearly appear. It wasn't Star Trek, this time, but another science-fiction television show that made an appearance. Space 1999, to be specific. There was only one good shot of it, but the resemblance was clear. The others were too blurred to do more than reveal a vague shape, despite applying the best enhancement possible.
The real question was, why. Why were the aliens being so . . . bizarre?
Was it an attempt to confuse the humans? It certainly was working, if so! No one had any clues as to who these aliens were or where they came from.
The scientists' report stated that the speed of the "bus" as it passed the moon and reached the Earth meant it was traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. From which they estimated the "bus" couldn't have travelled further than Mars — unless it had already drastically slowed down. In that event, the bus couldn't have travelled much further than Saturn.
That didn't mean, though, that the alien's Stargate couldn't have been on a faster-than-light ship, Hammond knew. Teal'c had been very straightforward about the Goa'uld having such things, and using them when the Stargates would have been a bottleneck. Such a ship could have ferried the team from another star system, first, and let the "bus" run the last leg just to confuse them instead of using their "beaming" to put them down on the ground.
Another layer of obfuscation.
Of course, the alien "pilot" blatantly pointing out how everything could have been recorded beforehand, except their landing and the subsequent take-off, muddied the waters quite well. They could have had the Stargate in their ship over England and only the last portion of the bus' flight was real.
It was the sort of double-think the intelligence-wonks delighted in.
In any event, they were showing a very disturbing deep understanding of Earth and its culture. Enough to make jokes only a native might understand! Naming their ship-bus Midge was a telling move. According to the experts, the idea of a shuttle craft used for space travel first appeared in the silent film "The Great Romance" way back in 1881, in which it was called the Midge!
That implied the aliens had been here for a very long time, indeed. Could all those "flying saucer" sightings be these aliens making minor mistakes? Or even just pranking the natives!?
That the aliens who had intercepted SG-1 were the same as the ones over England seemed rather obvious, to him. It was the only thing that made sense.
They had British accents.
The odds that two totally different alien races would have the same localized, native accent was next to impossible. He could be wrong, but it was unlikely.
The most confusing aspect, though, was their apparent ignorance of the Goa'uld while in the possession of a Stargate! How could they have a Stargate and not know of the Goa'uld? Almost every inhabited world the Stargate teams had visited had known of the Goa'uld! The conversation with the team, though short, would seem to indicate that not only did they not know about the Goa'uld, their Stargate didn't even have an iris, or its equivalent, to prevent unwanted guests!
On the other hand, considering the unexpected arrival of SG-1 at their stargate, that was good thing! Otherwise, SG-1 and the two civilians would be no more, Hammond reflected.
But it still showed an appalling lack of knowledge about the state of the galaxy in general.
Which begged the question of where they had acquired the Stargate and how long they had had it, in the first place! From their apparent lack of knowledge, and statement that they had not expected guests so soon, very recently. Where had they gotten it? Or had they always had it and just ignored it for some unknown reason?
Confusing things more was that, according to the team, they had disassembled it, already! Why? That made no sense. Burying your head in the sand never worked. It would have been better to put an iris over it, while keeping it for future use.
He couldn't help but wonder if the comet that was on a collision-course with Mars had anything to do with the aliens.
He sighed and went about organizing the folders, photos, and papers, and making a quick to-do list of what he needed to tell the Chief of Staff in the White House.
██:::::██:::::██
The Requirement's first stop that weekend, naturally, was Earth's closest stellar companion, the triple system known as Alpha and Proxima Centauri. The wizards still called the two brighter stars Rigil Kentaurus and Toliman. They ignored the third as you couldn't see it with your bare eyes, and it had only been discovered in 1915. The two bigger stars orbited each other in an orbit that ranged from eleven to thirty-five times the distance of the Earth to the Sun.
They found three planets around Rigil and two around Toliman. To their delight, one of the three around Rigil was slightly larger than Earth, and in the habitable zone of the star! That is, there was liquid water on the surface! Disappointingly, though, almost the entire planet was under water, with only a few islands poking up, the largest barely the size of Britain. The ship's instruments indicated the ocean had a depth that ranged from continental masses only a hundred feet below the surface to larger-sized plains several miles deep.
There were numerous signs of volcanic activity, and massive undersea mountain ranges that hinted at plate tectonics.
A closer look from the Runabouts determined that there were fish-like animals in the water, which wasn't really a surprise as all three stars in the system were older than the Earth's sun by about ten percent.
Harry marked it as a possibility for the Merfolk, after taking a few samples of the water to see if it was safe for them. It was, if with a bit lower salt concentration than Earth's oceans.
Of the other two planets, one was too close, similar to Mercury in that respect, although being nearly the size of Venus. The other was further out than Mars would have been, but was more the size of Earth's Moon.
Toliman's planets, were a disappointment; one was too close to the star, and the other too far from the habitable zone.
Proxima Centauri had three planets. One was earth-sized and in a twelve-day orbit, putting it in the habitable zone for the star. Unfortunately, Proxima was unstable and giant flares had reduced the planet to an airless rock. The second planet was even closer, with a five-day orbit and about one-quarter the mass of Earth. The third was a gas giant about the size of Neptune, but nearly fifty times the distance from its host star as Earth was from the sun.
The next-closest star to Earth was Barnard's Star, but they avoided that one for obvious reasons.
Then came Wolf 359, also known as CN Leonis, and Lalande 21185. Both were small M-type stars that had about ten percent and forty-percent the mass of the sun, respectively. While the first had three planets, only one of that group was in the habitable zone and it was too small to have an atmosphere. The other, larger star had five planets, but none managed to be within the orbital range to have liquid water on the surface.
They did find two more gas giant planets, one the size of Uranus and the other close to Saturn. Both were good candidates for harvesting helium-three if they didn't want to continue operations in their own system. Or to diversify and not put all their eggs in one basket.
Then came Alpha Canis Majoris, better known as the Dog Star. Famous throughout history, the star was the brightest star in the sky from Earth. It was almost twice as bright as Canopus, the next brightest star in the night sky.
"Wizards have never noticed that the Sirius system was actually two stars, A and B," Hermione lectured them as they stared out the windows at the two stars, "which the muggles discovered in 1862. The distance between the two varies between eight and thirty-one times the distance that the Earth is from the sun. They orbit each other every 50 years."
She smiled at her audience. "The second star, B," she pointed at the bright dot, "is the shrunken remains of a star that has not only turned nearly all of the hydrogen in its core to helium, but turned the helium into carbon and oxygen. It wasn't big enough to carry the fusion beyond that stage, and with the cessation of the intense heat generated by fusion, it collapsed to the small piece we now see. Although it is barely the size of the Earth at seven and a half thousand miles, as opposed to eight thousand, it weighs as much as our sun."
She stopped to let them think about that.
"However, on the way to that shrunken remnant, the star turned into a red-giant star, expanding until it was as big as Earth's orbit around the Sun! This also means a great deal of its mass was lost as it literally blew away in a great wind." That got a few murmurs. "Oddly enough, the Greeks claimed that Sirius was red, not white, in several ancient manuscripts. One astronomer has suggested that the reason that Sirius was seen as red and now is white is that three thousand years ago, B was in the last throws of being a red-giant star." She shook her head. "Others say that's impossible, given the time-scale of stellar evolution — as if they know everything there is to know about nuclear fusion, and how quickly a star moves from one stage to the next."
She sighed. "Whenever it happened, though, it did destroy any planets that were orbiting close enough. Rigil Kentarus and Toliman, which have similar orbital characteristics, had most of their planets within the orbit of Mars. As a result, it is likely that the decreasing mass of B as a red-giant either ejected them from the Sirius system, or absorbed them because they were actually orbiting inside its surface!"
Sirius, his godfather, was depressed at what they had found.
The only planets remaining were small, rocky ones orbiting close to Sirius A.
Then it was time to head back.
Still, it made for an interesting weekend.
It also gave them a bit of measuring-stick for travel between stars. They were fast, but not instant.
██:::::██:::::██
Trying to do a tour of the closest stars wasn't that great an idea it turned out, after that first weekend. They ended up crisscrossing near the Solar System time after time because the stars were scattered around them. The next star that was only twelve lightyears away from Earth was on the opposite side of the solar system from the one they had just visited, meaning they had to travel twenty-four lightyears instead of the six to the nearest star to the one they were at.
It was much more efficient to head straight out in a given direction, and then return.
The last week of August, a large comet crashed into the Martian southern pole. It created a giant oblong crater and slightly decreased the length of the Martian day by several seconds. The glancing blow had the additional effect of strewing a great deal of material for hundreds of miles down from the polar region. Fortunately, most of the mass was in frozen gases and water, which the heat of the collision quickly thawed. Atmospheric pressure went up, but not by a lot.
According to the instruments the Martian terra-forming team placed around the planet, it had rung like a giant bell. The ground-wave echoes bounced and rebounced inside the planet for hours, showing them, through the routines in the Library, a great deal about the insides. It was more than sufficient to tell them that the core of the planet had long ago given up its heat and become a rather solid chunk of warm iron. The large sections of uranium and similar radioactive elements that helped keep the Earth's core molten had given out long ago in Mars. There were a few pockets, still, but nothing big enough to do more than make the centre a trifle cooler than boiling water.
They had also been able to develop quite accurate maps as to what and where to find all sorts of metal deposits closer to the surface. Several deep cavities were discovered, as well. What use they might be was anybody's guess. Someone would look, Harry was sure.
██:::::██:::::██
If it weren't for Hermione's parents, Harry would have been happy to never leave the Requirement these last few weeks of the summer hols. Not that it was the parents' fault, of course, it was just that Hermione wanted to see them. Given that she would be spending most of her in the coming months at Hogwarts, it made sense. While she wanted to spend more time with them, ducking out of Hogwarts on a regular basis for a dinner and evening with them would rapidly gain the attention of the Headmaster.
Hence why he ended up at her house most of the time. He wasn't about to complain, though. She was very reluctant to wander the ship sans her top, as she did at home while her parents were at work. Sometimes the bottoms would disappear, too.
Yeah. Like he would ever complain about that!
Which made this the absolute best summer in his life.
It certainly went a long way towards making up for the neglect from the Dursleys.
Which, truthfully, wasn't that difficult a thing to do.
He found himself wishing for a time-turner to stretch the days out longer.
Having to stay in the bedroom for a couple of hours because the other two of them were in the pool would be so difficult to do . . . not!
He didn't really care about the last year, to be honest. He would have been happy to declare it done and stay on the ship with Hermione.
Except Hermione wanted those N.E.W.T.s. Which meant he would only see her when she snuck aboard the Requirement. That wasn't nearly enough time together he thought.
By the time September First rolled around, the Requirement was more or less permanently parked over Britain, again, the weres were monitoring Stargate Command, and the Galileo was their main house-elf for exploring the other stars. The word that they were actually visiting other stars drew several muggle-born amateur astronomers who hadn't been interested in the D.S.F. before now. They, after a bit of tutoring and pranks from the twins, had put together a drone that they dropped off at each star system for a long-term study, looking for not-so-obvious things that might be in the system, such as planets with four- or five-hundred-year orbits, and mapping any asteroid, Kuiper, or Oort cloud belts.
In a year, they would have all of the stars, over a thousand of them, within fifty lightyears visited. Then they would revisit them to pick up the mapping drones to move to the next stars they investigated. Pickups would be faster because they wouldn't be making any preliminary investigations of the systems, just grab the drone and move on.
It sounded quite boring to Harry, but they were excited. Plus, it wasn't like they were using the Galileo for anything important.
While Stargate Command and the Goa'uld concentrated on planets with Stargates, there was no telling what they might find on the non-Stargate planets. Of which, if their investigations so far held true, there were three or four times as many inhabitable planets as currently had Stargates.
Who knew? Maybe they would find another civilization that no one else knew about. Or even suspected existed. After all, the Goa'uld had to have had a home-world, right? They weren't in the Library; so the Requirement's builders had never seen them way back then. What else might there be lurking among the unexplored stars?
In the meantime, the Marines practiced fighting on their hoverboards, and another group of muggle-borns and weres practiced X-wing fighter battles, both in space and in the shadow of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The smaller planet was for the challenge of not being spotted by Earth telescopes.
There was surprisingly little information in the Library about either infantry tactics or fighter tactics in space. On the other hand, there were extensive libraries on the subject of infantry and airplane tactics in the muggle world.
Besides, if they were having fun, why should he spoil it?
██:::::██:::::██
They had improved the spacesuits. Around the neck and to the shoulders for their arms, the suit camouflaged itself to match the skin it covered. So did the gloves. Not even shaking their hand would clue someone in that Harry or Hermione, or any suited crew-member, were wearing gloves. It was a bit annoying to have to wear the suit all the time, but there were still a few die-hard Death Eater wannabes who wouldn't miss taking a wand to Harry or Hermione when they were distracted or had their backs turned. The suits wouldn't necessarily stop a deadly spell, but they would mitigate it a bit. The real protection was in the robes they wore over them. The twins had improved the crews' robes, which were now spell-resistant. They were much like the "travelling" cloaks they had been selling last summer, only not as bulky. The acromantula silk woven in with the nanofibers made it easier to spell them with a featherlight to make them impossible to differentiate from simply being expensive robes.
To anyone who didn't know, Harry, Hermione, and the other crewmembers were dressed just the same as all the other students.
He expected that Hogwarts would prove to be a fertile recruiting ground for new crewmembers as the muggle-born ran head-first into the pure-blood nonsense that still had hold of English wizarding society. It wasn't violent, anymore, but still highly stratified with the muggle-borns at the bottom. It would take at least a generation or two before that changed to any degree, if it ever did. Plus, with wizards and witches living to two and three hundred years old, that would effectively make the generation cycle a very long time.
Harry found going through King's Cross Station a bit unsettling. He still wasn't used to large crowds.
Just like the previous five years, the crowd was divided in its reactions: Half hated him, half loved him. The staring from both was a given.
Only the new muggle-borns and their parents were the exceptions.
Hermione kept him distracted on the train by the simple expedient of sitting sideways on the bench-seat with her legs across his lap the entire time, to the amusement of Ginny, Luna, and almost every other crew-member who stopped by their cabin.
Despite the cessation of hostilities from the pure-bloods, the crew still went out of their way to find and contact the muggle-borns. Not surprisingly, all of them were familiar with Enterprise store. The crew re-iterated the warnings and made sure that the few who hadn't picked up a panic-watch received one now. They also got the addresses of the new students' parents. The marines would drop by their homes so the parents and other children, if any, could receive watches, as well. They also explained how muggle-borns would not be treated well in the Slytherin House, regardless of what anyone else might say.
This year, the incoming class was the largest since Harry had started at Hogwarts, fifty-three. Gryffindor had thirteen, Slytherin had ten, Hufflepuff had fourteen, and Ravenclaw had sixteen each. Harry was sure that the stories of how the Slytherins had acted in the past were a big factor in Slytherin having only conservative pure-bloods and half-bloods. Especially because they were stories the Slytherins couldn't deny. Slytherin was the home of bullies and pure-bloods.
There was a normal drop-off in the number of wizards and witches who went on from the O.W.L.s to their N.E.W.T.s, but this year the drop in attendance in Slytherin was dramatic.
Wizards and witches he had seen for years were gone, some to Durmstrang Institute, some more permanently. From one perspective, it was intellectually sobering, sad almost, to see a House lose over half of its Sixth- and Seventh-year students, as well as several fourth- and fifth-years. On the other hand, it was relief to get the more offensive and violent individuals removed from the school.
The Slytherins were quiet that first week, for the most part, and it was easily the best start to Hogwarts Harry had seen since his First year.
To no one's surprise, Draco was back. The Malfoy family finances had been devastated — by parties unknown, of course. There was no way they could afford the tuition for him to go somewhere else. In fact, Sirius had told Harry that having Draco at Hogwarts relieved a lot of the pressure on Narcissa. She planned, he had said, to move to an even smaller place to live in over the schoolyear.
Which Sirius owned, naturally, still sneakily scamming her finances.
Poor Draco would have to stay at Hogwarts instead of returning home for the various school hols.
Harry had to smother a smile at Draco's permanent scowl, and subdued presence. He clearly wasn't the leader of Slytherin House anymore.
Just from casual observance of the seating arrangement in their common room — the drones were ever so useful — it seemed that Daphne Greengrass was calling the shots. Blaise Zabini clearly didn't want the top spot. The best sign things were changing was that the hazing of the half-blood firsties in their dorm was non-existent.
Snape, indeed, it seemed, had moved on. At least, there was no sign of him in the school — to everyone's relief. The new D.A.D.A. professor was a retired Auror.
Harry had suspected Snape might scamper. He hated the man with a passion, but there was no denying his genius at potions. Through their crew-member Healers they had hired him to make a potion to kill the Goa-uld parasites — not that he knew that was what he was doing. The specification was a potion that would convey a year's worth of protection from any parasite, magical or not, one that could be made quickly in big batches from mostly common materials, and could be stored under stasis without losing potency because of magical interactions.
He seemed to think it was doable.
All they needed was to capture a Goa'uld.
Which would be problematic. They couldn't just stun and portkey one through the Stargate!
Still, Lee and Alice thought they might have a technical stunner that could be downsized enough for one or two shots. They weren't sure how they would transport their victim, but they would tackle that problem once the stunner was in place.
School was enjoyable, now that all the drama had been dealt with. Draco was still unpleasant, but he restricted the more vocal opinions to the presence of those who were like-minded.
Seeing one or both of their parents in Azkaban due to self-confessed heinous crimes, tossed through the veil for the same reasons, or simply missing and declared dead by the Goblins had been a shattering experience for the pure-blood children. Many of the remaining pure-blood parents were now stained with the image that they supported those vicious animals. How could they not have known what their spouse was doing while pretending to be a fine and upstanding citizen who only wanted to "improve" the wizarding world?
Having to deal with reduced living circumstances had also humbled many of the "superior" attitudes the more obnoxious remaining Slytherins had sported last year.
It was at the evening meal on when Lee called Harry and Hermione on the comm-link. The comms had been improved with an earpiece and throat-mike, so they could hear and answer calls with a minimum of doing anything someone else might notice.
Harry touched his collar to activate the link.
"Sorry to bother you Admiral," came Lee's tense voice, "But a Goa'uld has just walked, walked, up the Stargate command and claimed she is an enemy of Ra. Over" Harry exchanged a surprised look with Hermione. Harry leaned closer to Hermione and held his hand up to hide his mouth as if he were saying something to her that he wanted to keep private. "I assume you've got a drone on her?" he said quietly. "Over."
"Yes, three actually. One is in her hair. Two are following. Over."
He squinted at his plate a moment.
"If she becomes a problem, stun her and portkey her to a Runabout and get her to the Moon-base." He took a slow breath. "Otherwise, just watch and observe. You're on-site, use your own judgement. Whatever you do, I'll back you. Over."
He heard Lee take a deep breath. "Right. Over and out."
He straightened. "We'll have to wait until after classes."
Hermione nodded, and sighed. She hated having to wait for information.
██:::::██:::::██
This year reminded Harry a bit of his first year. People whispering and staring, but this time it was restricted to primarily First- and Second-years. A few of the pure-blood conservatives still sneered at him.
Because it was so close to the beginning of the year, most of the crew still remaining at Hogwarts were making a show of being present in either their common rooms or the library. They didn't want any of the Professors becoming suspicious of why certain students kept disappearing.
Most of them stayed for the express purpose of recruiting new people to the Crew — and to get their OWLs so they could keep their wands.
That almost every one of the Prefects, except Slytherin, were crewmembers was going to be a huge help in the coming year.
Perversely, the attitudes of the pure-bloods towards muggle-borns and "blood-traitors" would be doing them a favour for years in driving wizards and witches into the Crew.
Tonight, though, the Requirement's Commanders were all headed for the secret passage intersections that they had made last year. A secret passage hidden inside a secret passage! Each was concealed inside a normal House "secret" passage. People could go to the Requirement with the other students assuming they were headed somewhere else in the castle — usually the library. The Vanishing Cabinet on the seventh floor had been relocated and all the spells removed. People could once again admire still-life Trolls dressed in ballerina costumes beating their instructor with clubs.
The crews' passages linked up once they left the castle, and led to an underground meeting room at the boundary of Hogwarts' protective spells, their version of Kingscourt Station. From there, they could either use one of the Requirement's Vanishing Cabinets, or apparate, if they knew how, to the ship with no one in the castle any wiser.
The Vanishing Cabinets on the ship were all in a special room that was also the apparition destination. They wanted to protect the ship with various spells to prevent unexpected intruders from getting there via magical means outside that room.
It was still a work in progress.
The room, itself, was quite spacious, easily the size of two Hogwarts classrooms.
There hadn't been any panicky calls from Lee, so Harry was hoping everything had been handled quietly and effectively.
They met in the meeting room behind the bridge.
Lee looked a bit frazzled, and had a pensieve ready.
"What happened," Harry asked worriedly. From their expressions, he wasn't the only one worried.
"Nothing too bad, but I have some things you need to see," he gestured at the pensieve. "First, though, we do have a Goa'uld prisoner at the Moon Base. Currently, they are still stunned, stasised, and under watch. We've also managed to procure fifteen of Goa'uld larvae, in stasis, for experimenting with the potion Snape is trying to make," he said encouragingly.
"The adult's name, as you'll see, is Hathor. Apparently, when the Egyptians chased Ra away and buried the Stargate, she got left behind. Somehow, she ended up in Mayan temple complex in one of their sarcophaguses. It was recently found, and she was released. She killed the two who found her and escaped without detection."
Here he stopped and looked around. "They do appear to have the ability to confuse muggles, and perhaps wizards, into not noticing them, which is the only explanation for how Hathor managed to escape the Mayan tomb she was in without any of the rest of the excavation team seeing them leave the entrance.
"Hathor did this again when trying to escape Stargate Command, which you'll see, later." He paused to gather his thoughts.
"She made her way to Stargate Command and insisted that it 'drew' her. They thought her crazy, at first. She convinced them she wasn't by talking about the Stargate — standard stuff. She claimed that she wanted to help them, but when she learned that Ra was dead, she decided to conquer Earth." He shook his head. "I'm not sure how, but she managed to make almost all the men, including Major General Hammond and Colonel O'Neill, into her servants and puppets, and got them to lock up the women." He stopped again. "It wasn't magic, I'd swear on it, but I'm not sure what it was. It wasn't instantaneous, and it left the women of the Base unaffected."
Hermione shook her head, "If it was magic-based, the first time she went through a Stargate, she'd lose it."
Lee nodded his head to the side, gave the girls in the room long looks, and raised his eyebrows at them.
"Be that as it may," he continued, "I don't know if that's something that all Goa'ulds in women can do, or just her, but it is significant! We haven't seen anything like that from the Goa'uld who inhabit males. I'm hoping some of you might spot something I missed."
He looked at the rest of them. "She had Daniel give her some DNA, she called it the code of life. Then, somehow, she turned Dr. Jackson into a Jaffa, and she started . . . spawning Goa'uld larvae in this big tub! She planned to use them to create an army. I had the drones stun all the men not in the room with her."
"I was about to portkey this Hathor to a Runabout above the complex and programmed for the Moon Base when several of the women managed to break free of confinement and stormed in. In the confusion, I stunned the men with the drones, and portkeyed and stasised fifteen larvae." He shook his head in disbelief. "They managed to shoot her several times, and set fire to the tub."
He pursed his lips. "She climbed out of the tub and left the room, without them spotting her. Just as she was about to use the Stargate, I had the drone stun her and portkey her to the Runabout. I stunned her again, stasised her, then transferred her to a room in the Moon Base. Where she is now."
"Since then, I've had a group of Marines portkey to the Complex, and collect a few memories, under full cloak." He gestured at the pensieve. "Shall we?"
"Pheromones," Hermione said when they came back out. "Notice how the men closest were affected first? They all had those silly smiles boys sometimes get when they're with their girlfriends?"
The other girls nodded.
"That sounds likely," Katie Bell said. "But it's gotta be more," she shook er head as she spoke, "because not even the most infatuated man that quickly or willingly forgets his military training."
"Well, from now on, if we think a Goa'uld is close, seal up the suits or cast the bubblehead charm."
"We could cast a transparency charm on the helmet so no one will notice, too," suggested Ginny.
"Meanwhile, have the Healers notify Snape that we have some 'live samples' for him to experiment with," Harry said to Hannah, and nodded to Ginny to acknowledge her suggestion. "Once he has something that he thinks works, we can use this Hathor as a test to see if it can actually kill the parasite when it's in someone."
He looked back to Lee, "Have at least two drones watching Snape at all times, and others watching the larva. We will only portkey him one of them at a time. They are just too dangerous, otherwise. If anyone even thinks a larva has gotten to Snape, stun him."
The others nodded their agreement.
"If Snape can come up with an aerosol, or a potion we can use tranquilizer guns to inject in someone, that would solve a lot of problems," said Katie.
Harry grimaced. "I think we took apart the Stargate too quickly. We didn't test potions through it."
Hermione sighed. "Potions still require magical components, so they probably wouldn't have survived with their abilities intact."
It was Harry's turn to sigh. "You're right." He shook his head wryly. "That would have been too easy. Find a Goa'uld, pump a couple of gallons of aerosol into his or her palace, and get them all without risk."
He thought a moment.
"Good work, Lee. You played it far closer to the line than I would have, but you got good results. Give my congratulations to the weres and Marines on a job well done to get these memories."
He looked over at Angel. "Is there some way we can shutdown Stargate Command's Stargate with a drone? Maybe prevent the last address from registering?"
She frowned at him. "I'll have to see what the Library has on that."
"We should think on this a while, maybe a better solution will come to one of us after a good night's sleep. In the meantime, I think I have a Charm's assignment to finish!" He grinned at them.
"It's Potions for me," said Hannah, with Susan agreeing.
Those that had school tomorrow headed to the apparition room. The others, to bed or for another look in the pensieve.
██:::::██:::::██
On the third weekend, Harry and Hermione went to the lake and took some gillyweed. A short time later, they swam into the Mer-village at the bottom of the lake. Of course, they were noticed long before they arrived, so they were accompanied by several curious children and an escort of trident-bearing warriors. They had greyish skin and long, wild, dark-green hair. Their eyes were yellow, as were their broken teeth, and they wore thick ropes of pebbles around their necks. They had long silver-finned tails and vaguely fish-like faces. They looked nothing like the painting in the Prefects bathroom or what the muggles imagined.
The warriors said nothing to them, and the children were too excited speaking to each other to say anything to the two.
They stopped in the middle of the village, and waited.
Moments later, a mermaid with a string of small shells around the top of her head arrived. "What do you want?" the Chieftain asked suspiciously.
Harry and Hermione bent at the waists, bowing.
"I have an offer for you," Harry said, "I and my friends have discovered a world that is almost entirely one giant ocean. We thought you might be interested in exploring and colonizing it." He paused for a moment. "Or if you aren't interested, you could convey our offer to others, outside the lake, who might be."
The Chieftain stared at them, incredulous. Several others nearby were echoing his astonishment. "Why," he finally said, "are you doing this?"
Harry rubbed the back of his neck, "Well, we were exploring and came across this world. It has no muggles and no wizards. We aren't interested in it, it only has a few islands, so we thought, considering how polluted the oceans are getting, that you might want somewhere you could escape to."
"By providing you a place away from here, we prevent the muggles from finding you and revealing the magical world to them," Hermione said, "which benefits us."
"Just think about it," Harry said. "There's no hurry. We can take a few of you there to explore on your own, and then bring them back a week later. They can tell you what they found."
Hermione opened her expanded purse and pulled out a thick sheaf of plastic-coated pictures. "Here," she said, offering them to the Chieftain, "are pictures of the little we saw while we there for a few hours." The pictures were water-proofed wizarding photographs of moving creatures.
Hesitantly the Chief took them.
As he was flipping through them, his eyes wide in amazement, Harry said, "Well, that's all for now, so we'll head back to the surface." Suiting actions to words, the two began kicking their legs gently and heading up. "We'll come back next weekend to see what you decided."
They left a growing crowd of merpeople, all looking at and exclaiming over the pictures of creatures they had never seen, nor ever heard about.
The following week the Galileo took five mermen and a merwoman to Rigil's water planet. The crew almost wiped-out Britain's supply of Gillyweed for the week they stayed there.
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ██:::::██:::::██