Robotech: The Stargate Saga

Disclaimer: I do not own the characters and universes that I am about to mangle around and mash together for my own demented author amusement – sadly all Robotech and Stargate characters and concepts remain the property of Harmony Gold and MGM respectively – I am merely borrowing them and make absolutely no profit from their use. As a result, please keep the legal attack dogs – also known as lawyers – firmly muzzled and on a leash as I have no money to give to anyone.

Chapter Two

UEG Private Flight LT14

Two Days Later

Daniel's mind was still somewhat awhirl as he sat in an incredibly comfortable seat as an official government plane conveyed him towards his destination. Which was apparently Fort Minotaur a UEDF military base on Crete – a base that was serving as the centre of UEG political and UEDF military operations in the European sector – a few miles to the south-west of the capital city of Heraklion. He still couldn't quite wrap his head around how quickly events had moved from the moment he had agreed to assist with the translation of the hieroglyphics.

As soon as she had had his agreement Major Grant had set things in motion with a call, from a portable fold comm device, straight to Admiral Gloval himself. Within no more than two hours he had received a phone call from the dean of the university informing him that they had agreed to loan his services as a translator to the UEDF, though they hadn't said at the time what they had been given or offered in exchange. He had later found out from friends among the staff that not only was the university getting a hell of a lot of money – enough to run it for nearly five years – from the UEG but they were getting a whole lot of state-of-the-art equipment out of it along with a full refurbishment of the campus. Both the speed of their offer, and the immense generosity of it, had communicated to him quite clearly that whatever this was, whatever the UEDF had found beneath the remains of the Giza Plateau it was big, possibly as big as the arrival of the SDF-1 had been nearly fourteen years ago.

Since then, everything had been something of a whirlwind, the vast majority of his time being taken up by travelling. First there had been a flight from Santiago to New Macross City where he had spent the night put up in one of the nicest hotels in the city. Then after a hearty breakfast they had boarded this plane and begun a long trek across first the Atlantic Ocean then the Mediterranean Sea towards Crete. At least I have good travelling companions, he thought glancing across at where Major Grant – or Claudia as she kept telling him to call her - and Exedore were sitting. They had both been very good conversationalists, he'd especially enjoyed talking with Exedore as the anthropologist in him had been fascinated to learn more about the Zentraedi as a people and how they were learning to, slowly but surely, embrace a way of life that didn't involve being at war all the time.

"May I have your attention please," the voice of Captain Hunter said from the public address system gaining all their attention. "We have entered the approach pattern for Fort Minotaur and will be landing within the next ten minutes. Please prepare for landing."

"Finally," Daniel muttered, it had been a very long time since he had taken a flight anywhere, let alone one like this that crossed hemispheres and multiple time zones. Thankfully the phenomenon known as jetlag was a thing of the past as drugs existed now – and had done since two thousand four, along with numerous other things they had been developed from technology and knowledge found on a fallen alien starship that had been both a Rosetta Stone and a Pandora's Box in equal measure – that compensated for physiological upsets that caused the condition. He had made sure to take some before they had left New Macross.

"Not used to flying for long periods are you Doctor Jackson," Exedore asked with a smile.

"Not these days, Exedore," Daniel replied with a smile of his own as he fastened his seatbelt for landing. "Until I left Santiago, I hadn't been on a plane for over a decade. Taking a long flight like this after so long is therefore a bit taxing even with an anti-jetlag drug in my system."

"While your people use it for that that is not that particular drug's primary purpose," Exedore answered with a smile. At the surprised look Daniel shot him he explained. "The drug was originally created by the Tirolians to counter the occasionally very deleterious effects of the first generations of space fold drives. As space folding technology has improved over the last few millennia, and the flaws that caused said effects eliminated, the need for the drug diminished though its formula has remained in most databases."

"Which is where we found it," Claudia said recalling how they had found the formula for that and a number of other drugs that had radically improved life for so many on Earth before the Zentraedi arrived and the Robotech War began. Though those drugs had also helped save a lot of lives after the Rain, especially the ones that boosted cell regeneration and helped counter the worst effects of radiation poisoning.

"Indeed," Exedore agreed.

"Who are the Tirolians," Daniel asked not recognising the name, though something told him that it was an important name.

"They are the ones who created the Zentraedi initially as tools of labour but later they repurposed us into weapons of war," Exedore explained. "For the last thousand years they have been known more as the Robotech Masters."

Daniel frowned. "They don't sound that friendly," he commented inwardly feeling disgusted at the thought of engineering an entire species first to be a labour force somewhere and then later transforming them into weapons of war, tools of destruction and conquest. It was a disgusting practice as he could think of much better things to do with the knowledge of bioengineering and genetics that these Tirolians/Robotech Masters had to have to create the Zentraedi in the first place.

"The Robotech Masters are a very advanced, very powerful race yes, far more so than my people have ever been, but they have not been to war in many generations," Exedore said reassuringly, unsaid was the fact that warfare was what the Zentraedi were for, "plus Tirolian space is a very, very long way from here being literally galaxies away. There is nothing to fear from them."

For now, at least, he thought knowing that the Robotech Masters certainly knew of the death of Dolza and the destruction of the vast majority of the entire Zentraedi armada by now. He didn't think though that they would be in a position to do much about it for quite some time given that their own forces were limited and mostly tied down keeping the subject worlds of the Tirolian Empire under heel or fighting off the occasional border raid from the Invid. The distance from Tirolian space - located as it was in the galaxy that Earth humans referred to as Andromeda – was also a good defence given space folding across intergalactic space was a tricky and dangerous process given the relative lack of navigational markers. It was certainly something that the Robotech Masters wouldn't want to do unless they had no other choice.

"I see."

The sound of the fasten seat belts sign lighting up and a change in the pitch of the engines, as they were beginning their landing approach, brought an end to the discussion before it could go any further. Daniel braced himself for the bump of landing while wondering just what it was, he was going to find when they entered the base and he got to translate the hieroglyphs on the cover stones.

He also had to wonder if they would show him whatever it was that the cover stones had been concealing. For them to have given all they had to the university in Santiago in order to secure his loan it had to be something massive.

"What are you thinking of Daniel," Claudia asked using his name as he had asked her to do, in exchange for him calling her by her name.

"Just thinking about the cover stones Claudia," Daniel admitted, "I have to admit that I am very intrigued to know what it was that was underneath them. For the UEG to go to all the trouble and be as generous as they have been it has to be something incredible."

Claudia smiled. "You will see soon enough," she replied knowing that the UEG and UEDF High Command first wanted him to translate the hieroglyphs before they showed him the ring. It was believed after all that the hieroglyphs would reveal something about what the ring was meant to do. Despite an exhaustive search by Exedore and his fellow advisors the Zentraedi records had not been that helpful in that regard, having no idea what the ring was though they had revealed a bit more about the capabilities and potential uses of the material that it was made from.

"I look forward to it," Daniel answered as a jolt ran through the plane as the wheels touched the ground for the first time in hours, followed by the sound of the engines going into full reverse thrust slowing them down.

"It shouldn't be long now," Claudia replied as the feeling of deceleration died away as they came to an almost complete halt. The only feeling of motion now was Rick taxiing them to their assigned stand on Fort Minotaur's aircraft parking grid.

After a couple of moments even that stopped as they reached their assigned parking spot, the sound of the engines dying away completely a moment later. A few moments later someone beating on the door to the outside world indicated that a set of steps had been brought up to the hatch. Meaning that there welcoming committee was certainly waiting outside for them to disembark.

"That's our cue," Claudia said undoing her belt and standing up. Knowing that it was time to disembark both Daniel and Exedore undid their own seatbelts and stood up, falling in behind Claudia as she approached the hatch to the outside world. A hatch that was already being opened for them by Rick, who unlocked it, pulled it back and slipped the door to one side letting the warm, moist air of a Mediterranean autumn spill into the interior of their jet.

Throttling down his nervousness Daniel followed behind Claudia, with Exedore following along behind, as they stepped out into the golden sunlight of evening. The sun was beginning to set casting long shadows across the surface hangars and structures of the base – the vast majority of the base including the living quarters would be buried deep underground safe from all but the most powerful of attacks. Daniel briefly looked around noting that the base was primarily constructed from a material that resembled reinforced concrete though it was probably a robotechnology material and thus much stronger than it appeared. Then he noted the small welcoming committee that was awaiting them.

Knowing that he couldn't linger here he followed Claudia down the steps to the ground, Exedore and Captain Hunter following a few paces behind him. Once they had all disembarked, they approached the small group of officers, led by a athletic-looking middle aged man with salt-and-pepper hair.

"Major Grant, Doctor Jackson, Minister Exedore, Captain Hunter," the man said, "I am Colonel Charles Kowalski, welcome to Fort Minotaur. General Richards sends his apologies that he cannot be here to greet you himself but his eldest went into labour an hour ago, so he's had to leave the base to be with her."

"That's quite alright Colonel," Claudia answered.

"If you'll follow me some guest quarters have been prepared for you," Kowalski said, "I'm sure you would all like to freshen up a bit from your long flight."

"That would be nice," Daniel admitted. "Though I would like to take a look at the cover stones as soon as possible."

"Understandable as we are quite anxious to know what the damned things say," Kowalski admitted, "but you should take a little time to rest and maybe have a bite to eat first. The cover stones have sat in the ground for thousands of years they can wait another couple of hours for translation to begin."

"True," Daniel admitted, eager as he was to get started, he was quite hungry, and he did desperately need a shower and maybe a change of clothes.

"Please lead on Colonel," Claudia said.

"Of course, Major this way please."

Two Hours Later

Daniel felt like he had rattlesnakes performing a mating dance in his stomach as he followed a UEDF marine through the brightly lit corridors towards the lab where they were keeping the cover stones. It had been nice to freshen up and have something to eat in the quite comfortable quarters, which were certainly a lot more comfortable than his apartment back in Santiago, that he had been assigned in the VIP section of the underground complex.

Now though he was quite eager to get started and it would definitely be interesting to see just how much of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that he actually remembered as it had been so long. It had been pure luck that he had recognised the meaning of the glyphs that he'd been shown back in his apartment that had convinced him to come here and help.

"Here we are Doctor Jackson," the marine said as they arrived outside one of the numerous labs that dotted this particular level. The marine swiped a security card – identical to the one Daniel himself had just been issued with – through a reader beside the door making it open with a whir of electromagnets. Daniel smiled and followed the marine inside…

…only to stop at what he beheld.

The lab was a large rectangular box eight meters wide by ten meters long. It was largely empty though there were several work benches dotted around that in the labs normal life would have no doubt been filled with all sorts of equipment. It was certainly an impressive workspace but what instantly grabbed Daniel's attention was what was floating suspended on a complex rigging apparatus at the far end of the lab.

The cover stones.

Moving almost on automatic pilot Daniel approached them gazing at the huge circular stones in awe. Though he immediately noticed evidence of damage to the stones, especially the central one as it had a very nasty crack running right through it, damaging some of the glyphs which was going to make translating them somewhat difficult. But then he liked a challenge.

"What happened here," he asked gesturing to the crack, noting with some surprise that the marine had been joined by Major Grant – he hadn't heard her come in or hadn't heard her following him.

"We believe the damage to the cover stones is from where the derelict Zentraedi cruiser was sitting on top of them," Claudia told him, "there was only a centimetre or so of pulverized sandstone between the underside of the cruiser's prow and the cover stones. These stones had a few million tons of derelict robotech alloys sitting on top of them for nearly a year. Between that and the initial impact with the plateau it is not surprising that they took some damage."

"No, I suppose not," Daniel admitted with a sigh as he turned his gaze back to the cover stones noting the worst of the damage was to the circular centre stone though some of the others were also damaged being chipped and cracked from the weight of the cruiser, "I suppose we're lucky that they weren't shattered into a million fragments by all that weight pressing down on them. Still, I can tell you now that some of these hieroglyphs are going to be quite difficult to translate as they are quite badly damaged."

"Can you still translate them," Claudia asked.

"I believe so yes," Daniel replied with a reassuring smile, "it's just going to take me awhile as I will have to somehow reconstruct the damaged glyphs to figure out what there likely meaning is. Due to the damage, I do have to warn you that the translations aren't going to be quite as accurate as I would like."

"We have a high-resolution laser scanner due here tomorrow," Claudia told him making his eyes widen in surprise. "Will that be of any help reading the damaged hieroglyph sections?"

"It should yes," Daniel replied after taking a moment to recover from his surprise. "Though I will need quite a bit of help deciphering the data as I've never used a laser scanner before thus, I have no idea how to interpret what it tells me."

"That can definitely be arranged," a new voice said from the direction of the doorway, drawing everyone's attention. Daniel turned with the others to see a relatively tall blond-haired woman who appeared to be in her mid-forties – much like Daniel himself – and wearing a lab coat had come into the room. "Sorry I'm late I was unfortunately delayed dealing with a slight spat between some of the other scientists. It's been resolved now."

"That's quite alright doctor," Claudia replied knowing from experience how tetchy scientists could sometimes be, having worked with a fair few of them over the years since the SDF-1 first fell to Earth. To say that it could be like herding cats at times would have been an understatement. "Doctor Jackson please allow me to introduce Doctor Samantha Carter, she is the head of research here at Fort Minotaur and is the leader of this project. Doctor Carter this is Doctor Daniel Jackson."

"Pleased to meet you," Samantha said holding out her hand for the other scientist to shake. She had been reading up on Doctor Jackson and had found his theories about the pyramids being constructed by aliens as well as crosspollination of the ancient cultures of Earth quite interesting. The arguments were logical and made sense, unfortunately they had been a bit too radical for the scientific authorities in the pre-Robotech world and the poor man had been made a laughingstock by those who felt threatened by what was clearly a very intelligent and intuitive mind.

"Likewise," Daniel replied with a smile taking the other scientist's hand and they shook. "Though what project is that? There is obviously quite a bit more going on here than just these cover stones."

Sam blinked. "You haven't told him yet?" she asked looking at Claudia.

"Not yet," Claudia replied, "UEDF High Command wanted Daniel to begin working on the translations first before we showed him the rest."

Daniel blinked. "Show me what," he asked.

"Why what was under these things Daniel," Claudia replied with a smile. "I know you have been curious ever since we first met you in Santiago and you have been patient enough, as much as command may disagree, I am not going to make you start translating until we can do the laser scan."

"You mean," Daniel started to say.

"Indeed, we are," Sam replied taking the lead. "This way please, doctor."

"Please call me Daniel."

"Alright then Daniel. You can call me Sam only my father ever really called me Samantha and usually when I'd done something wrong," Sam replied, even as she felt a familiar stab of pain at the thought of her father General Jacob Carter, who'd died of cancer a year or so after the arrival of the SDF-1, before the modern anti-cancer drugs – created from information found in the computers of the alien battlefortress – and treatments became available. Treatments and drugs that had cut the mortality rate of all forms of cancers down to virtually zero – something that had saved a lot of lives both before and after the Rain.

"Alright Sam it is."

"This way," Sam said with a smile before turning and leading the way out, back into the near featureless corridors of this particular subterranean fortress. Only the fact that she was well used to UEDF underground bases, all of which tended to follow the same basic floor plans with only small, mostly cosmetic, differences between them due to scale and the bases intended function, enabling her to navigate the corridors towards the main lab. The sound of footsteps behind her letting her know everyone was following.

In no time at all they reached the main lab and she gently ushered Doctor Jackson inside, Claudia also following while their marine escort remained outside. Daniel immediately noticed that this lab had a lot more people in it than the one assigned to him, all the tables had people working on them but what really grabbed his attention were two objects in the centre of the room, which unlike his lab was circular with everything facing inwards.

One was an enormous ring-shaped structure made of a brownish-grey material that didn't look like anything he had ever seen before. It could almost have been mistaken for stone but there was something about it, something about how it gleamed under the lights told him that it wasn't made from stone. As he looked closer, he could see that it was actually two rings in one with the inner ring consisting of thirty-seven panels each engraved with different symbols whose meaning escaped him. Spaced equally around the edges of the outer ring were nine chevron-shaped objects that appeared to be centred around a reddish-orange crystal of some type. The other thing that grabbed his attention was a vaguely mushroom shaped pedestal with a slanted circular board on the top clustered around an orange crystalline dome. Again, he could see that it was split up into a series of panels each with a symbol on them – a symbol that to his trained archaeologist's eyes were identical to those on the ring-shaped device.

"Incredible," he breathed, "these are what were buried under the cover stones?"

"Yes," Claudia confirmed, gazing at them in wonder herself. It was one thing to see these things on computer screens or projected as holograms, quite another to see them in person. She couldn't help but feel that whatever these things were, they held an incredibly powerful secret one that could bring great scientific and technological riches or utter annihilation in equal measure.

"What are they," Daniel asked.

"We don't know," Sam answered. "We know that they are some kind of linked mechanism, our sensors confirm a subspace link between the pedestal and the ring, but what they are and what they're actually meant to do we have absolutely no idea at this time. We're hoping that your translation of the hieroglyphs on the cover stones will provide us with some answers."

Daniel blinked and then looked at the devices again, eyes practically glowing in glee at the puzzle these things and the cover stones were presenting him with. A puzzle that was eons in the making and one he would do his utmost to solve. "Then I guess I better get started at least with some of the least damaged glyphs," he said a moment before a whooping alarm began to sound throughout the base. "What's that?"

Claudia looked up in surprise and concern at the sound of the alarms, then she turned and spoke to Daniel. "It's a battle alert," she said, "this base is under attack."

Front Gate

Fort Minotaur

A Few Minutes Earlier

Private Adrian Campbell was bored.

As he had been everyday for this last duty rotation, he was sitting here in the guard house watching the feeds from the sensors and cameras that monitored the perimeter of Fort Minotaur searching constantly for any threat to the base. It was a job that to his twenty-year-old mind was the textbook definition of boring. He had joined the military to add some spice, some excitement to his life, not to just sit around watching a bunch of monitors.

He glanced at the chronometer on the wall, noting that it was approaching 1400 hours. Another two hours of this tedium then I can clock off and I'm off on leave for a week then, he thought with a slight smile as he imagined the fun he was going to have over the next few days. While a week wasn't enough time to make his way back home to the small town in rural Pennsylvania where he'd grown up – global air travel had a long way to go before it recovered from the Rain as so many jetliners had been incinerated in transit during the Rain as the sky suddenly filled with lethal energy beams – there was time for him to really let his hair down. There were some nice pubs and nightclubs in downtown Heraklion, perfect places for a guy to unwind.

He put those thoughts out of his mind for now as he picked up his mug of coffee. Only to find to his displeasure that the blasted thing was empty. Grumbling, he stood up and went over to the coffee machine and poured himself a fresh cup. He was just returning to his station with a fresh-ish mug of the liquid – he was really going to have to change the filter soon as it was starting to taste a bit stale – when one of the sensors emitted a warning bleep.

"If it's a bloody rabbit again," he muttered as he sat down and pulled up the feed from the sensor. It was one of the camera feeds that was monitoring the approach road to the base. The blasted thing was forever getting tripped by rabbits or other small animals bounding across the road.

The camera feed appeared…

…and the mug of coffee slipped from this hand to shatter on the floor. He didn't notice as he was too busy staring at the camera feed in shock and horror. Walking up the road was what looked like an entire platoon of battle mecha, specifically a mixture of Spartan and Tomahawk destroids with what looked like two Monster destroids following slowly behind.

Quickly he sent an interrogative command to the computer, prompting it to both send an IFF request to the approaching mecha as well as checking if any of the bases mecha platoons were out today. If Jeremy failed to tell me that someone was out when I took over from him, I'm so going to kick his ass, he thought as the results came back. There was nobody out today, certainly not in platoon strength, plus the destroids were not giving off UEDF IFF signals, or any IFF signals at all in point of fact. Which meant only one thing…

…they were hostile.

Instantly his training kicked in. Reaching out he pressed the alert button, setting alarms ringing throughout the base and bringing the automated perimeter defences fully online while also within the base causing personnel to begin scrambling to stations to defend themselves and the base. Simultaneously with sounding the alarm the control triggered blast shutters on the small kiosk-like room that was his station.

The shutters were just closing when he heard a whistling sound. A moment later he felt some tremendous force lift him up as if he weighed nothing, instead of a hundred and eighty pounds, and slam him into the far wall with enough force that he was instantly robbed of consciousness.

Sitting in the cockpit of his upgraded destroid, the man who now referred to himself only as Prime, watched as railgun slugs from one of their Monsters impacted next to guard house and detonated. The force of the blasts shattering some of the windows – which weren't already covered by closing blast shutters – and collapsing part of the outer wall.

He had hoped that they wouldn't be detected this soon, or that whoever was in there would believe they were just a platoon returning from a patrol, but such was life. It was just going to make his and his fellow disciple's task that much harder as now Fort Minotaur would be on alert and its own destroids – not to mention any veritech's stationed there – would be scrambling alongside fixed defences. While he didn't doubt that the upgrades made by his lord to their destroids would give them an advantage it was a complication that he could have done without.

"Monsters take out the main gates before they seal," he ordered, even as he observed large metal shutters made from a dense robotechnology alloy beginning to emerge from slots in the wall to seal the gates. If those shutters – made as they were from warship grade armour plating – successfully closed, then what was already going to be a difficult task would become near impossible.

He need not have worried as the two Monsters roared again. Eight 381mm heavy railgun slugs – each packing a plasma warhead – slammed into the shutters, four to each, and detonated. The yellow-white flash of plasma detonations momentarily blinded his external cameras but when he could see again the could see that they had done their job. Both shutters had been pulverized as had the gates beyond them…

…the way was open.

"All forces move in," he ordered calmly. "Head straight for the runways and surface to air batteries. We need to take them so our troop carriers can land." He did not need to say that they needed those troop carriers to be sure to take the base long enough to recover the Stargate. They obviously wouldn't be able to keep the base as Admiral Gloval and the rest of the infidels would no doubt send reinforcements as soon as they learned of the attack – and if they were really unfortunate Commander Breetai would send forces down from orbit – but then they didn't need to.

A chorus of affirmative's came from his fellows, and he began guiding his Spartan towards the entrance.

It was then however that things began to go wrong as the base defenders were clearly reacting far faster than they had expected they would. The first indication of this being when one of the perimeter turrets opened up on them, spewing bolts of ionic energy towards them. One of the Tomahawk's was hit almost immediately and immediately staggered, an energy field flaring into existence around it as their lord's protection activated as the ion blasts tore at it. A second volley of ion blasts from the turret hit the staggering mecha and the field collapsed allowing the following volley to blow the destroid apart.

Growling in annoyance he aimed the modified gunpod he was holding in the Spartans hands at the turret and fired. Golden energy bolts flayed at the armour protecting the turret though it held. Cursing softly at the strength of the alloy, even as deep in the darkest recesses of his mind a faint shiver of doubt about his lord's true momentarily blossomed before being quashed, he fired again.

This time the alloy gave way and the turret exploded. But not before firing on him, its ion blast slamming into his shield like an energetic sledgehammer dropping the barrier strength by nearly a half from just one blast. The energy cell immediately began regenerating the defence even as he got his Spartan moving again, charging into the base with the others.

They ran straight into a slaughterhouse of crisscrossing energy beams, railgun, and autocannon slugs as a mixture of fixed turrets and defending destroids – which included two full squads of Regult battlepods deployed a few days earlier by Commander Breetai with the agreement of the Defence Council to assist in the defence of the base – opened fire upon them.

Prime was thrown hard against his seat restraints even as he manoeuvred to escape the lethal crossfire. While he managed it, though his shield was depleted in the process as he took several glancing blows, several of his companions weren't so lucky as their mecha turned into charnel houses – their souls on the way to the heaven offered by their god. On one of his side screens, he saw one of the Monsters aiming to take down a group of Zentraedi battlepods – only to abruptly explode as a pair of Stiletto missiles slammed into it from above the first cracking the shield and the second punching through the armour to turn the walking engine of destruction into a funeral pyre for its three crew.

Frantically he looked around for the source of the Stilettos to find Valkyrie's swooping down on the remains of his platoon autocannons, lasers and missiles bursting forth from them. Quickly he manoeuvred his destroid to avoid the worst of the bombardment even as a burst of 55mm autocannon rounds slammed into him, tearing through his still regenerating shield to slice deep into the body of the Spartan. Only the fact that he had manoeuvred to avoid the worst of the barrage saved his life as instead of finding the ammunition store for the Spartans central gun cluster the slugs tore apart the main circuit breakers sending a momentary burst of power through the entire mecha.

Prime screamed as the sudden electrical surge overloaded the dampeners on his controls sending a massive charge of electricity through his body microseconds before all the controls went dark as the Spartans computer shut down all systems. It didn't help him though as the momentarily uncontrolled burst of electrons arced through his system bringing with it a tidal wave of pain…

…right before everything went dark.

Sitting in the cockpit of the Valkyrie he'd commandeered as soon as the alert went off Captain Rick Hunter watched as the last of the attacking destroids went silent. The sensors of this particular Valkyrie confirming that the destroid while not destroyed by his shots had been mission-killed losing all power. The life signs scan confirming that whoever the pilot was they were unconscious.

Calmly he assessed the rest of the battle to see that it was over. The destroids and Regult battlepods that had helped defend Fort Minotaur moving calmly through the wreckage, much of which was smouldering and burning from the intense heat of particle beams, lasers, and plasma warheads. Ground troops in battle armour were also approaching, searching for survivors so they could learn who the hell these people had been, where they had come from and how there destroids came to be upgraded with energy shields and for the Spartans to be armed with some type of plasma rifle instead of the normal GU-11 gunpod.

A check of his sensors showed that there were no other survivors in the remains of the mecha. But then there rarely were survivors when battles were fought with the immense destructive power of robotech weaponry. Whoever the pilot of the Spartan was, he or she was the only one who might be able to give them some answers.

Hence why he switched to battloid mode and landed next to the Spartan before carefully opening up the pilot's compartment through the external emergency controls. Carefully he reached in and extracted the unconscious pilot before gesturing for some of the ground forces to come over.

"This one is still alive," he said, the external speakers relaying his voice clearly. "Though from the looks of him he's gotten one hell of an electric shock. Take him to the infirmary but keep him under heavy guard."

"Sir yes sir," one of the marines acknowledged as he set their prisoner down. He stepped back to watch as a combat medical team approached even as the marines searched their prisoner, extracting a strange, coiled serpent shaped device from a hip holster – its positioning indicating it was some kind of sidearm – along with a wicked looking knife – a kukri he noted – from a holster on the other hip. Then satisfied that their prisoner was disarmed turned him over to the combat medics.

He was about to turn away, to check over the rest of the battlefield, when the external cameras removed the helmet, the guy was wearing – and from his muscular build he was definitely a guy, an exceptionally fit one at that – and he saw his face…

…and gasped in shock and recognition.

"Sir are you alright," one of the marines, from the IFF his powered combat suit was giving off he was a lieutenant, asked having heard him gasp loud enough for the battloids internal microphones to pick it up. "Sir do you recognise this guy?"

"I do indeed lieutenant," Rick replied at last, mind still reeling wonder what the hell he was doing here. Last he'd heard he and his mother had been on a tour of Europe when he'd run off to join some cult somewhere or other, much to Aunt Maria's horror and despair. "I don't know what he's doing here or how he became so buff as he was a six-foot beanpole last, I saw him, but his name is name is Nathan, Nathan Hunter – he's, my cousin."

Author Notes: Well, another chapter bites the dust. This chapter was already half-completed when I posted the first chapter, I hope you all like how things are shaping up. Before anyone asks while there is an exiled Goa'uld involved with the attack on Fort Minotaur to take possession of the Stargate it isn't Setesh/Seth or Hathor but another Goa'uld altogether, one who until recently has been quite subtle as he builds an army of fanatically loyal followers but who is now being a little more overt due to the fact Earth is still in a degree of chaos following the Rain of Death – though it is diminishing as the UEG recovers and reasserts its authority across the world.

There will probably be quite awhile before the next update of this story as I plan to update a few other fics first, the plot bunnies for three of which are really clamouring for my attention right now. Until next time.