Note: Sorry this one took a bit longer, I was struggling a bit with the plot and didn't have as much time, but it all suddenly crystallised in my mind last week. Also sorry about the length of the review responses…chapter is still 8500 words at least.

Review responses

A Guest: Yes, true theoretically but any practical wormhole would stabilise the throat with negative mass exotic matter or a negative energy pressure, which necessarily makes it traversable two-way. We're not dealing with theoretical wormholes involving black/white hole pairs. If we were, we'd have to deal with impractical gravity gradients, travellers appearing to take infinite time to cross the event horizon, the white hole side spewing intense death radiation and so on. In Harry Potter canon, one can stick their head in the fireplace to make Floo calls and withdraw it back through the same, ergo Floo is a two-way wormhole—that's where Hermione is taking that from. Also keep in mind this is Hermione's thoughts on the matter, not mine. Hermione did Muggle primary schooling and whatever she learned on her own time, but by no means does she have a degree in astrophysics.

fvdv123: Apologies, I will try to make the technical explanations more approachable in future…I don't want to be excluding any readers.

Lordlexx: They are actually repeated on every gate bar the point-of-origin glyph. The point-of-origin glyph is what differs between the Antarctic gate and the Giza gate.

Laigron: Sorry, that makes no sense. If the glyphs are arbitrary symbols unrelated to the positions of the constellations, then there is no need for the addresses to ever change due to stellar drift. It is well established that the first six glyphs represent the bounds of a 3-dimensional volume of space. Regardless of whether the glyphs are arbitrary (i.e. they correspond to a value) or represent a direction/distance based on the constellation, there is no way to make sense of any of the addresses unless they are all relative to Earth/another single origin point. However, arbitrary glyphs are ruled out by the fact that canon addresses don't contain repeats, which means they must be using constellation direction/distance…which is horribly flawed.

Regarding Hermione inventing stuff—she hasn't really, and not anything technological. She deduced how to break through the Fidelius. She wants to build a Floo portal. Harry wants her to make essentially a magical version of a Muggle excavator. None of that requires thousands of years of Goa'uld knowledge and technology. You don't need programming to make Floo—clearly it exists in the magical world already without anyone knowing what a computer is. Mineral excavation and refining? Literally just digging crap and sorting it. Everything she's done so far and is about to do could be done with her primary and magical education, her general knowledge and interest in everything, and her ability to consume knowledge from books. I'm explicitly not making her an uber-mega-genius-mad-scientist. She's a clever, enthusiastic, inquisitive girl—that's it.

Guest: Believe it or not, Dumbledore doesn't know everything. Canon shows Slughorn knows about Horcruxes. Canon also shows that Dumbledore was stupidly secretive, not entrusting the existence of Horcruxes to literally anyone. Including Snape. You're also straight up wrong about Bill—he's already 27, almost 28 here, so he's had nearly 10 years out of Hogwarts. I also never said he was the one who personally dealt with all the Horcruxes that he'd encountered—he could easily have been an apprentice while his seniors dealt with them. I also don't know why a cursebreaker coming across a bunch of Horcruxes makes you think they're common. It's literally his job. That's like saying plutonium is common on Earth because a guy working on nuclear bombs handles kilograms of it.

Dumbledore is fantastically knowledgeable, sure. But he's also spent most of his adult life as a full-time educator and politician, and his area of expertise is Transfiguration and Alchemy. Just because he was 110 doesn't mean he knows literally everything. Hate to break it to you but you don't absorb knowledge by getting old. "Life experience" is meaningless if it's irrelevant…also just the card some fuckwit plays when they've made it to middle age without actually learning a thing and has an inferiority complex over younger people being more successful. Plenty of 27-year-olds have had world-changing insight that plenty of 80-year-olds have not. Bill has 10 years' experience as a cursebreaker, which is 10 years more than Dumbledore has as a cursebreaker. But sure, you go ask your 80-year-old dentist to give you eye surgery. The real intellectual dishonesty is painting Dumbledore as Merlin reincarnated, who knows everything about everything and is immune to hubris. The school dropouts, as it were, have thus far contributed very little, which you would know if you had the intellectual honesty to actually read anything before mouthing off.

It's also hilarious that you claim that I've "changed how magic works". Magic isn't real buddy; it can work however the fuck I want it to work. I have at least attempted to maintain consistency with HP canon, but you know what? HP canon is so stupidly inconsistent itself that that's almost impossible. What I am actually trying to do is squish and expand HP canon magic into something describable scientifically without killing its lustre.

Finally, I think you need to re-examine your life if you're getting this offended over fanfictionnot precisely conforming to canon, or if you actually think I care that you're so angry over fanfiction, especially when you're too much of a cowardly twat to sign your review.

Everyone else: Thanks so much for your kind words. Please excuse the previous response.

Gradients

Chapter 4

"Well, fuck me," Neville said, staring into the expanded greenhouse that was supposed to be containing their food crops. "That's never happened before, I swear."

"Happens to the best of us, mate," Fred said, slapping him on the back as George squatted down to examine the row of floppy yellow chard closest to them.

"Must be the soil," Harry said. Like the chard, all of the leaves of just about every plant in the greenhouse appeared to be stunted and yellow. Harry got down next to George with a conjured cup, pulled out a plant and scooped up some of the soil beneath it. "I'll run molecular analysis on this, see what it turns up."

Neville frowned. "I hope it's salvageable," he said. "I just assumed the soil would be okay."

"You and me both, Nev. It's not your fault. The native plants manage fine, don't they?" Harry said, pocketing the soil. "Come on, we'll come back to this. Let's continue the tour."

Astoria's stomach growled. "You did pack lunch, right? I forgot to have breakfast," she said, blushing. Tracey rolled her eyes beside her.

"Of course! There's plenty of food in one of the trunks we brought last time," he said, grinning at her. "We're almost done with the tour, then we'll eat."

As it turned out, Chudley's soil—at least the soil that Neville had Switched in—had such a high concentration of toxic metals like lead, arsenic and cadmium that they wouldn't have wanted to be eating anything grown in it anyway. It was also completely depleted of nitrogen and running thin on phosphorus and potassium. Chudley's plants had seemingly developed enzymes that specifically excluded lead and other toxic metals, and while Harry could have used the DNA resequencer to modify the Earth plants to incorporate those enzymes, they weren't that desperate for food crops yet and it would serve as a convenient testbed for the molecular separator project Hermione was leading. If they could manage to filter out toxic metals here, they could do it anywhere.

The lack of nutrients in the soil was more puzzling, but a quick experiment revealed that while the Fertileze Solution broke down minerals in the ground to replenish the soil and ensured that the plant received exactly what it required, it wouldn't do anything if the ground didn't have any of the necessary minerals in the first place. It couldn't transmute atoms from one kind to another. For Earth plants on Chudley, fixed nitrogen was an issue. Chudley had very little nitrogen in its atmosphere, and Earth plants were simply not used to how little nitrogen the soil bacteria made available to them. Likewise, the limestone of the floor beneath the soil, being mostly calcium carbonate, was very poor in key nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium—something none of them had really considered when they were setting up the greenhouses—so there wasn't much the Fertileze could do. As a result, Proxima's ice giant planet had just become a lot more valuable to them. Its gaseous envelope was full of ammonia, carbon dioxide, water and some phosphine. Very bad for habitability prospects, for sure, but the ammonia could be reacted with carbon dioxide directly to make urea and the phosphine was an excellent source of phosphorus. It was pure fertiliser just waiting to be mined, and once they figured out Floo-like portals they could funnel atmosphere straight into Goa'uld molecular synthesisers in The Cannon with very little effort and upkeep.

.o.

"That sunrise is something else," Tracey said through a yawn as they all gathered together in the library lounge. "Those beds are unreasonably comfy, too."

Through the soaring windows, Proxima peeked between the two volcanoes on the horizon, staining the clouds crimson. Brilliant, deep emerald light filled the sky.

"First one we've seen, actually," Ron said from behind the breakfast bar, conducting a stream of steaming hot tea into twelve separate cups. The breakfast bar was a recent addition of Ron's when he realised that they all kept converging in the library lounge to relax and regroup.

Harry picked up a cup and took a grateful sip. "So, what do you think? Want to join us?" he asked.

Fred and George looked at each other, then at Harry. "Do you even have to ask, Harry?" Fred said.

"We'd have to be mad to turn this down," George said. "Don't get us wrong, we love our shop, but we're inventors at heart. I've already got half a dozen ideas for those space probes."

"It's the planetarium for me," Fred said.

Tracey nodded. "I'm in," she said quickly, "Astoria is too."

"Hey!" Astoria said at Tracey with a pout. "Well, obviously I'm in. Whatever you lot are getting up to will literally change our world. Doing anything else feels rather dull by comparison."

"Fantastic," Harry said, putting his teacup down. "I'll be honest, it's going to be gruelling, dangerous work, even if magic gives us an advantage. And I want to use some of what we develop to improve the lives of Muggles on Earth. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the state of the planet, but there are almost six billion Muggles."

"Blimey, I knew there were a lot of them," George whistled, "but that's an awful lot."

Harry nodded. "Their pollution and destruction of the environment is out of control. I've run enough scans of the Earth to know that the oceans are chock full of rubbish. There's plastic and toxic chemicals everywhere. And the atmosphere—it's got a hole in it because of their chemicals, and it has almost twice as much carbon dioxide in it than it did when Nehebkau was last around. Hermione looked at the Muggles' own data on it—most of that increase was in the last hundred years. The simulations I ran say that in twenty-five years' time the climate is going to warm up past a point of no return, and Earth will get less and less habitable as a result. The Muggles, though—most of them are straight up denying that it's happening. Well, eventually, it'll start affecting magical creatures and plants."

"Wow, they're affecting the world that much? That's why you want to start a colony for witches and wizards?" Astoria asked.

"That's more to do with the risk of us being discovered, but it's a factor," he replied.

"I don't think individual Muggles are at fault generally—the average Muggle is so far removed from the destruction wrought by their corporations. It's not like many of them have a say in how a company or industry operates. You know, one third of Muggles live in poverty? None of them surely have any influence over how much companies pollute," Hermione said. "A lot of them don't even have access to clean water. If I can crack these refining enchantments, we could conceivably eliminate all pollution on the planet and provide everyone with clean water to drink."

"You're starting a Muggle company?" Tracey asked.

"We have to if we're going to do this with magic at all. It's the only way to do it without drawing the attention and ire of the ICW," Hermione said. "Obviously, we'll keep magic under wraps. We can call it proprietary technology."

"Most Muggles really don't deserve the coming disaster, but honestly, we need all the allies we can get in the fight against the Goa'uld, so uplifting Earth is more strategic than altruistic," Harry said. "True, we could adapt Goa'uld technology instead of using magic, but for these specific purposes magic is actually a lot more effective and efficient. Our first few products will be Goa'uld derived things, though, mainly because it will be easier to establish a legitimate revenue stream that way to make the rest of our activities less suspicious to the ICW," he added, "but yes, we're going big on improving Earth. If we can get people to stop worrying about how they're going to survive, or how to reverse the pollution, they'll have more freedom to think about advancing their society."

"I think I'd like to be part of this company," Tracey said. "I've learned a lot about the ins and outs of business management from my dad—he's a Muggle, you know. The company he works for manufactures electronic components."

"Merlin, how'd you survive in Slytherin?" Ron asked, putting the finishing touches on twelve plates of full English breakfast simultaneously.

Tracey shuddered involuntarily. "Daphne's influence, mostly," she said. "I was lucky she didn't end up in Ravenclaw, the little nerd."

"You think he'd be interested in what we're doing?" Harry asked, his computing clusters cycling through potential advances they could introduce to Muggle electronics.

"Hell yes, my dad spends his free time building miniature starship models from film and TV," she said, laughing. "Our coffee table is a plate of glass on top of a model Venator-class Star Destroyer. He's going to be so jealous that I got to go into space first."

"At least until Daphne's better, I'll stick with Tracey on Earth," Astoria said. "I might not know much about the Muggle world, but Earth is our home too, even if you are going to start a magical colony planet. And to be perfectly honest, I want to get more acquainted with Muggle science."

"Glad to have you on board," Harry said, grinning widely. "Tracey, would you be willing to manage the company? You'll need to understand the tech inside and out and be the public face. I don't expect you to be perfect at it, but if you're interested? I can support you in doing a management course too, if you'd like?"

"I can do that," she said, looking in his eyes unwaveringly. "Give me a rundown of what we're doing. I'll learn what I need to learn. Don't worry about management courses. My dad's got all the material still from when he did his—I'll use that."

"Easy enough," Harry said. "The first thing we're going to do is manufacture a device that manipulates gravitational fields—it's what the Goa'uld use for their spaceship sub-light engines and artificial gravity. I think the Muggles are actually quite close to that level of technology, but Hermione tells me they haven't figured out quantum gravity, so we'll need to say it was a chance discovery."

"You want to give them the tools to build a proper spaceship?" Tracey asked. "My dad is going to beg us to let him build one, you know?"

"Hey, Harry?" Ron said around a bite of sausage. "When we do get to building our own ships, we should make them the size of a trunk. No need to give our enemies bigger targets."

"Bill's space expansion charm is pretty mean," Neville added. "I doubt I could have made the greenhouse farms half as big."

"There's something about space expansion in hyperspace that feels dodgy, but the expanded trunks we brought with us did alright," Harry said, running a hand through his hair, "we'll have to do some testing. Last thing we need is for an expansion charm to fail while we're all inside it. But anyway, yes, I want to give the Muggles the ability to build practical ships. I'm sure they'll come up with hundreds of other uses for gravitational manipulators that the Goa'uld and I have never conceived of, but that's the main goal. Other than that, the next important piece of Goa'uld-based tech I want to bring to Earth is a very old fusion reactor. We could probably do it magically, but it'd be best if Muggles are able to replicate it. It'll be perfect for transitioning Muggle society to sustainable energy, and perfect for them to use in space or on other planets."

"Harry? I think we should bring Remus into this," Bill said. "He's had a lot of experience working in the Muggle world and he's pretty good at arithmancy…and well, his job prospects are pretty dismal. He has no income now that The Order has disbanded. There's also another reason…would he still be a werewolf if he came here?"

"Yeah…yeah, we'll bring him in," Harry said neutrally. He liked Remus, really, but werewolf or not, the man didn't make much of an effort with Harry, and he couldn't help feeling a little resentful. "Anyone else? We need all the help we can get. I don't care who it is, as long as they're reliable, open-minded and not a complete tosser."

"Actually…I was going to suggest Pansy," Astoria said.

"Parkinson? That—that cow?! Absolutely not," Hermione said, her knuckles white around her knife and fork.

"Hermione—" Harry started. She shot him a furious glare.

Astoria continued, unperturbed, "She's the best in your year at astronomy. She knows loads of obscure astronomical magic, and she genuinely loves astronomy. She'd be a real asset for your planetarium project. I know you don't have the best history with her, but please don't blame her. She acted how she did for her own survival."

"She's a menace. Always calling meMudblood. Always taking pleasure in seeing others hurt," Hermione spat.

"You don't know her," Astoria said calmly, "and you don't know what Slytherin is like. Her family were sick bastards. Death Eaters, the lot of them—her uncle, her parents, her older brother. If there were ever a hint that she was anything less than a fanatical blood purist, they would have thrown her out and had everyone they know blacklist her. All she was to them was a means to suck up to Lucius Malfoy through Draco."

Harry tilted his head at Narcissa.

"Pansy is…a complicated girl," she said after a moment. "Deeply troubled. I suspect her love of astronomy is her engaging in escapism, or at least it began that way. Her parents were uncommonly cruel, even amongst Death Eaters, and Pansy was not spared. They were…irritated when Draco's reluctance to spend time with her in even a casual context was noticed in your sixth year."

Hermione hissed, letting her cutlery clatter to the counter as she pushed her chair back harshly. She stormed out.

Ron sighed. "Hermione really hasn't had the best experiences with her," he said.

"Tracey, you roomed with Pansy for seven years. What do you think?" Harry asked.

Tracey shrugged. "She was a lot more reserved in our dorm. Had no problems talking to me even though I'm barely a half-blood. Never seemed to sleep well, always seemed like she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But…as soon as we left the dorm, her mask was up. And it was impeccable. Daph and Tori know her a lot better than I do, to be honest."

Harry sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "She has no family left, huh? I'll meet her. I need to visit Gringotts in a few days anyway, the Fur—ah…Goblins have been wanting to talk. Could you write a letter for me to send when I get back to Earth, Cissy?"

Narcissa inclined her head.

"Great. Anyone else we should recruit?"

"I reckon we could ask some more Muggleborns," Ron said. "A lot of them end up in crappy jobs no matter how well they do on their NEWTs. You remember Percy's ex-girlfriend?"

"Who? You mean Penelope Clearwater?"

"Yeah, you know how she was Head Girl? Only managed to get a job as a low-level clerk in the Goblin Liaison Office at the Ministry. Percy broke up with her over it, the git. Well…that was before all the, y'know—war stuff," Ron said, gesturing with his fork, "but she's gotta be worse off now."

Harry exhaled wearily. "I knew it was tough for Muggleborns, but it's really that bad?" he asked, looking around at the rest of them.

Everyone grimaced and looked uncomfortable, save for Narcissa who appeared as stoic as usual.

"As far back as the turn of the century, it has been the goal of some of the conservative factions of the Wizengamot to induce Muggleborns to return to the Muggle world," she said. "Mostly through legislation making it difficult to secure employment, levying higher taxes, requiring Pureblood sponsorship to start a business and so on. Something like eighty percent of Muggleborns give up and disappear within five years. Most of those that remain marry into Magical families, which at least allows them to avoid the higher tax rate."

"Merlin, that's more than I thought it was," Neville muttered.

"Some British Muggleborns 'ave ended up in France," Fleur said. "It is less classiste thanks to the Revolution, but of course the French Ministry and many French companies give preference to French nationals over foreigners."

"Alright, we'll put out some feelers. Before we head off, I also want to give everyone some technological augmentations. Ron and Hermione have already undergone the procedure. I won't bore you with the details now, but Ron...tell 'em."

"Abso-bloody-lutely worth it," Ron said with a mouth full of baked beans.

Harry rubbed his forehead. "Thanks Ron. The most convenient features I think are the perfect recall and ability to view every single memory you have, and the ability to talk to anyone else who has the enhancements, no matter the distance. Well, there needs to be a planetary relay. Oh, and a causal cascade generator to ensure this region of space remains causally linked to the network when any residual hyperspatial entanglement from hyperspace travel collapses. But that's already up and running," he said, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder. "Sorry, I know that probably didn't make much sense...my mind keeps going on tangents with all these memories. Anyway, if everyone could meet me in the lower lab in a couple of hours let's say, we'll get that done. It's quick and completely painless."

As breakfast wound down half an hour later, Hermione burst back in, her face beaming. "Watch!" she said, placing a small, plain open-top box on the counter. She held up a chunk of limestone and dropped it in. When it hit the bottom surface, it was converted instantaneously into a little pile of tiny spheres. Silvery grey spheres were rapidly tarnishing, pitch black ones sat there perfectly unbothered, and translucent pale blue ones appeared to give off fumes for a minute, then rather quickly fell to slush and evaporated in a cloud of condensation.

"Calcium carbonate into calcium, carbon and solid oxygen," Hermione said.

Harry raised an eyebrow. "Solid oxygen? From a room temperature piece of limestone?"

"I made the rune matrix nullify all kinetic energy when it separates the elements. So technically, all of it was close to absolute zero when it appeared," she replied.

"Impressive," Harry said, "that gives me some interesting ideas for thermal management for spaceships. Where do you suppose the heat goes?"

Hermione shrugged. "I don't know, perhaps it dissipates as some sort of low-grade magic…oh," she said, "oh! Oh my god! Can we convert heat energy directly into magic?!" She slapped her forehead. "Of course we can, Floo does it! Has anyone realised how absurd that is? Magic must be incredibly efficient. Do wardstones convert heat they pull from the ground? They do have to be buried in the ground, right?"

Bill and Fleur both nodded. The rest of the group stayed silent, letting Hermione finish her thoughts.

"Mm that wouldn't give you much of an energy gradient if any, but maybe it pulls the heat from deeper underground? The geothermal heat flux is something like a tenth of a watt per square metre on Earth…I've never really considered the power consumption of magic or wards before, especially not by Muggle measures…but solar irradiance at Earth's surface is about a thousand watts per square metre. If anyone had ever realised and devised a way to convert light into magic, they'd have wards ten thousand times stronger—during the day at least…I guess that's a problem…oh! You know Muggles have started building these solar concentrator power plants. I read about one in the US that generates over three hundred megawatts. That's three hundred thousand times the power…good heavens, I can't even fathom what kind of magic you could do with that. Wards would be indestructible…"

Silence—but this time speechless, wide-eyed silence.

"That's insane," Tracey said finally.

Hermione swiped her mineral decomposition box off the counter. "Gotta go figure something out," she said abruptly, then she was gone.

"She's barking mad," Fred said, shaking his head. "Brilliant, though."

Narcissa stood. "I'm going to assist her. And talk to her about Pansy," she said. She walked out, Delphi's bassinet floating along behind her.

Luna pulled a lollipop from her mouth loudly. "Well, that was exciting," she said. Harry shook his head in amusement.

.o.

While the group disbanded to get more acquainted with the different projects, Harry took the opportunity to really stretch his cellular computing clusters' legs now that they were fully integrated. He'd given a lot of thought to their pressing need to build up a space fleet. And a sensor net…and a whole civilisation, but those at least he could delegate to the others for now. Designing the ships for the space fleet, however, would require him to delve deep into Nehebkau's Goa'uld knowledge. Many of the systems could probably be enhanced with magic in hundreds of ways, but that would be on top of the Goa'uld technology as a base. There was no way he was going to simply copy Goa'uld ship systems architecture, though—the ships would be ground up, clean sheet designs. Magically expanded interiors—if they were reliable—was a given. So far it seemed like the trunks they'd brought with them hadn't suffered, so Harry assumed they would be okay, but he did want to make damn sure the expansion charm would stay powered and not be disrupted by things like strong gravitational fields. Since a trunk's contents didn't seem to move around, he suspected the expansion charm created disconnected spacetime, its outer surface becoming just a projection of the expanded interior. That was promising, so with the assumption that there would be no real dealbreakers with using expanded interiors, his mentality expanded into his computing clusters, and in his augmented vision, he began designing.

An exterior footprint two metres wide, five metres long and about one point six metres high would ensure that it would fit through a Stargate, and he would make sure their Floo gates were wide enough to accommodate it. A side benefit of those dimensions that occurred to him was that it could be camouflaged as a Muggle car. He would worry about making the exterior look cool later. It was almost irrelevant how it looked—it had very little bearing on the interior space. Regardless of the exterior shape, it was going to be covered in special dark grey non-reflective coating for passive camouflage—none of that ostentatious gold pyramid rubbish. The coating would absorb the radiation that the Goa'uld used for their sensors. Harry was less concerned about being detected by other races, but there were only so many ways to build sensors, so in all likelihood it would provide some degree of protection against many other sensor technologies as well.

The ship would have two traversable openings. One at the front for personnel, one for cargo that could double as an emergency exit. Hundreds of openings only a couple of millimetres across would act as passthroughs for naquadah wires that would project shielding energy, either Goa'uld particle shield or a magic-based shield and disillusionment, or both. Naquadah could conduct the energy for either, which was nice. On either side, a battery of four openings about a centimetre to passthrough power for small cannons—magic-based or Goa'uld. On a spine on the top surface, a four-centimetre diameter hole acted as a passthrough to supply power to a single main weapon—also yet to be determined. Then, four small passthroughs each on the top and bottom surface for point-defence turrets. Defence was not something Harry was going to skimp on just because they had magic. For all he knew, advanced aliens could detect magic, and even the Goa'uld would be able to detect the gravitational wave emissions of these ships if they were looking. Fortunately, they rarely had a need to sense gravitational energy, and as long as their ship was coasting or pulling less than 20g or so, chances of detection were practically zero.

The hyperspace window generator, sublight and manoeuvring engines and sensor packages would also need to have access to the exterior, but that was relatively straightforward. The hyperspace window would always be projected ahead of the ship, so could be emitted from an inset rectangle bevelled into the front of the ship. Sublight and manoeuvring engines were just gravity manipulator plates affixed on every side. With magic reducing the ship's effective mass, Nehebkau's experience suggested that they'd be able to achieve accelerations upwards of 300g—a truly incredible figure. Even the manoeuvring manipulator plates would be able to accelerate the ship at about 30g in any direction, which would be enough to evade most incoming weapons fire, assuming a hypothetical hostile ship would even be able to track such a small, magically protected target. A bulbous protrusion on either side would contain a set of sensors each, to give complete coverage of their surroundings.

The remaining surface would be covered in armour plates made from hafnium-doped naquadah carbide. Magically enhanced, of course. This alloy retained the superconductivity of naquadah but sacrificed some of the element's current and magnetic field capacity to make it several orders of magnitude tougher and harder. It was one of Nehebkau's innovations that he hadn't shared with Ra, so it was possible that the Goa'uld were still using naquadah nitride armour plating—something that they'd used for the eight thousand years prior to Nehebkau's imprisonment. Naquadah nitride was a formidable armour material, but it was suited exclusively to protection against energy weapons. It had relatively low fracture toughness—a plate of it would shatter if dropped from a couple of feet off the ground, which meant it wasn't great against kinetic weaponry or even a hard landing on a planet. The Goa'uld relied on their shielding to provide protection against meteorite strikes—and incidentally kinetic weapons—since no space faring civilisation the Goa'uld had ever encountered still used actual physical projectiles.

Harry wanted to design this ship to be a fully self-contained, self-sustaining environment, able to be crewed by a single person but carry thousands. The interior would be a grassy woodland biome, supplying oxygen and removing pollutants without the need for any technology. Of course, there'd be a Goa'uld environmental regulation system to keep things more stable and as a back-up, but passive life-support was always a good idea. The sky would cycle between artificial sunlight and a projection of the universe outside.

The personnel opening would emerge into a small, squat building in the centre of the biome. A quick walk into a lift would shuttle someone to the bridge, which contained five control chairs in an arrow formation. Each chair would interface with the cellular computing clusters and augmented vision that all of his…followers?—no…crew would be enhanced with, so there was no need for any display panels. When the primary chair was occupied, the entire room would become a projection of the world outside, and their augmented vision would interact with that projection to supply them with information and essentially enable seeing out of the back…and top and bottom…and sides of their heads. It was a confusing sensation and difficult to describe, but one's cluster-enhanced brain quickly adapted to having panoramic vision—and the cellular computing clusters damped down any nausea. The primary chair would always be the pilot and would be able to command every system on the ship, but its occupant would be able to delegate control of various functions to the four secondary chairs if so desired, like weapons, sensors, communications, internal systems, engines and so on. Communication between the chairs simply used the occupant's implanted nano-antennas and their cellular computing clusters.

The cargo opening, like the hangar door below The Cannon, would stretch to accommodate whatever was going through it. It would emerge into a cavernous basement below the building. The dimensions would depend on how expanded the volume inside the ship could be, but the cavern would cover the entire subterranean extent of the biome. Some space would be reserved for cargo and personnel transport, as well as a couple of small scout ships, and a big chunk of the space would be stockpiled fuel, raw material, water, food and useful bits and pieces like portable power supplies, survival kits, medical supplies and so on.

Any other non-crew passengers they carried would be housed in a cosy little town in the biome, down the road from the control centre. Water in the biome would be magically recycled, and clouds magically seeded above the landscape. Food would be grown in a number of greenhouses and farms, tended to magically. In the town, any market or restaurant or café—all serving auto-magically prepared food—would be able to transport food and goods stockpiled in the cargo basement, where any grown food would be sent automatically to be stored in a magical stasis. There would be enough space for sufficient chickens, pigs, goats and fish to roam the biome to feed the fully populated town—anything not consumed would be stockpiled and kept in stasis. Chicken eggs would be whisked away, goats would be magically milked and shorn, and goat milk would be magically churned or cultured to make butter and cheese. Animals, when they reached the end of their natural life, would be rendered into food and animal products automatically. Meat would be separated from bone, bone would be used to make concentrated stock, and everything leftover would be decomposed into its elements and repurposed. None of it was at all necessary…but there was no reason not to carry a slice of a world with them when they had the space.

Away from the control centre in the opposite direction, he situated an industrial building. Anything they needed to manufacture they could do here, as long as the raw materials were available in cargo. Once they developed Floo portal gates, even those could be built here.

The ground floor of the control centre building was devoted to ship function rooms and facilities: power generation, hyperdrive, main and backup computers, quarters, leisure areas, weapons—where power or weapon discharges were fed into the passthroughs, shields, engines, labs, armoury, transport rings, and if it worked from inside the ship, a Floo gateway room. Power would run throughout the biome and to the exterior via gadolinium-carbon-doped magnesium diboride superconductor cables—much cheaper and more plentiful than naquadah and capable of carrying ludicrous current, but it would have to be kept chilled to 30 degrees above absolute zero, which was apparently very easy with runes. Naquadah would be reserved for the exterior shield projection points and any magical weaponry—they only had a few kilograms of naquadah left, and so far, this ship was going to need at least six tonnes of the stuff. That was mostly for the ship's hull and armour plating, but a substantial amount was also needed for the power generator and the hyperdrive. Naquadah was so difficult to find it was good sense to minimise how much was needed. Six tonnes was a lot, but his modified Al'kesh probably weighed over four hundred tonnes, maybe eighty of which was naquadah. Actually…scraping off some armour plates from his ship would net six tonnes pretty quickly…perhaps they could strengthen the bare hull beneath it with charms and runes. It wasn't as though Harry planned on flying it any longer than he had to, so once they'd built at least one new ship, it was a no-brainer to just retire it and salvage whatever naquadah it contained to build twelve more ships. That was already more ships than they could operate—not a bad start.

As he was making some adjustments to the power routing, Luna appeared in his real vision.

"Hello Harry," she said, "I thought you'd like to know it's the time you told everyone to meet in the lab."

His virtual design faded from view, and he stood up. "Thanks Luna, I wasn't paying attention to the time," he said.

"Oh, I know," she said with a cheeky smile as she looped her arm around his.

.o.

Nehebkau's ship touched down on Earth an hour later. Fred and George were the first to Apparate away, citing a need to gather up their belongings so they could move into The Cannon on a more permanent basis, at least until the new planet was located for the magical colony.

Hermione was the next departure, surprisingly. She didn't say much—something about selling her parents' house. Then Astoria and Tracey left to visit Daphne, and Luna gave Harry a peck on the cheek and went to see her dad.

Bill and Fleur wanted to talk to some of their friends, colleagues and former Order members who they thought might be interested in joining their endeavours, so Harry agreed to let them talk to Remus. Neville was going to return to Hogwarts to recruit—he mentioned Susan Bones, Hannah Abbott, and a few other names Harry faintly recognised from his time leading Dumbledore's Army, and he'd promised to deliver the letters he and Narcissa had written to Pansy.

Personally, Harry was itching to visit the Goblins to see what they knew about the galaxy, and what had happened to the Furlings. Narcissa declined to do anything for the day beyond working on some theory for the Floo gateways, as she needed to rest and also look after Delphi. Ron, however, decided he had nothing better to do, so he and Harry found themselves in Diagon Alley just as the shops were opening.

"What d'you reckon Hermione's up to?" Ron asked as they passed by Potage's Cauldron Shop.

Harry frowned. "Not sure. She's been acting kind of strange ever since she showed us that little box," he said. "I think she's upset that I'm considering letting Pansy join us. I know she hasn't been nice to us, but if what Astoria, Tracey and Narcissa said is true, then I can't say I blame her."

"She'll come 'round," Ron said, then frowned, "…maybe. You think we should find a planet for her to claim to cheer her up?"

Harry's mouth twitched. "Somehow I don't think she'd fall for that," he said. He hesitated, stopping in front of the Magical Menagerie. "Ron—have you noticed? Since last week—around the time her computing clusters integrated…?"

"Yeahhh," Ron said, exhaling forcefully and scratching the back of his neck, "I thought she was just being excited about everything, but she seems a little uh…erratic? Is it the clusters?"

"Probably not the clusters per se. I think they're amplifying something that's already there, making her more distractable, more prone to jump from one thing to another," Harry said. "Plus, you know she's burying her trauma. I've been there so I get it, I really do…but I'm worried she's starting to be a tad self-destructive."

"Tell me about it, mate. I don't think you've seen how much she's putting into these projects we've got going. Every waking minute, I swear—more intense than she ever was at Hogwarts. Even I can see that it's too much," Ron said.

"We'll stay on Earth for a few days, I think. Maybe we can take a quick trip somewhere with Hermione. Get her to relax. Lots of pretty places we could visit on Earth—anywhere is only a couple of minutes by ship," Harry said.

Ron shrugged. "Sounds good to me. Bill always had cool stories about Greece," he offered, "how about there?"

"Never been out of Britain, have I? Apart from space and the lab in Egypt and whatnot, but you know what I mean. Nehebkau's memories aren't really helpful either so I'm open to anywhere."

"Mm. Ask Hermione later, I suppose. Come on mate, let's get on with this, I'm getting hungry," Ron said, resuming their walk towards the white marble steps of Gringotts.

Harry rolled his eyes at Ron's predictability and caught up with him. As they entered the bank, a goblin rushed up to them.

"Harry Potter. Griphook told us you would be visiting," the goblin said, baring his pointy teeth and beckoning them to follow.

They were led behind the counters, garnering the attention of the other customers. Some of the tellers paused their activities to look at them.

"I've been waiting in line for half an hour! Do you know who I am? I demand to be seen before those-those ruffians," some snobby arsehole bellowed, stepping out of the line and walking forward.

A goblin in fine gilt armour smacked the man across his stomach with the shaft of his glaive. "They are VIPs. You are not. Back of the queue!" he barked.

The man's sputtered protests were cut off by a door closing behind Harry and Ron. The room beyond was ornate but practical, like most everything of Goblin design. Pretty, but purposeful. It contained a large, beautiful mahogany desk, behind which a goblin sat. The desk was relatively bare apart from a couple of trinkets—clearly Furling, Harry thought—and a folder of documents—pitch black sheets, neither parchment nor paper.

The goblin looked up as they approached. She had a shock of stark white hair that contrasted with her dark skin and very Dumbledorian half-moon spectacles. Half a dozen deep creases graced her brow, but she seemed eager to see them—at least as far as Harry could interpret.

"Harry Potter. Sit," she said in greeting, motioning at a chair opposite. "You as well, Ronald Weasley."

"Thanks," Ron said, sitting down first. Harry sat silently next to him.

"I am Anakhtokwil, leader of the Goblin Remnant. Or perhaps I should say Furling Remnant," she said.

"Ah—pleasure to meet you," Harry said, taken aback. "I wasn't expecting to meet the leader of the Goblins, but I am glad we are. Hopefully, we can help each other out."

She bared her teeth. "Griphook brought news of your new status. Our ancestors wrote tales of the Fha'ludi...the Goa'uld, and the terrible destruction they wrought on our people."

"I can't explain how other than magic, but the Goa'uld parasite within me is effectively brain dead," Harry said.

"I can see," she said, tapping the arm of her spectacles. "And yet you retain the benefits. Very impressive. Griphook made mention of your acquisition of the parasite's memories, and of the possible second Astria Porta," she said. "To be frank, we only seek the Astria Porta to get off this Kribk-forsaken planet. My people have been trapped here for three thousand years, and it is my greatest shame that in my ninety-four years as leader, I have not brought us any closer to leaving and escaping the oppression of the stick-wavers."

"Pardon my curiosity—did your ancestors not have the capability to build a new ship?" Harry asked.

"Our ancestors…the ship they arrived on was carrying refugees—fleeing the Goa'uld while the rest of our race protected their escape, along with a number of other refugee ships. The Goa'uld overwhelmed us with sheer numbers despite being technologically inferior."

"Refugees—so mostly children and those otherwise unable to stay behind and fight," Harry commented with grim realisation.

"Indeed. According to their records, many of the refugee ships were witnessed to have been destroyed, and there is considerable uncertainty as to whether any other ship made it out," Anakhtokwil continued. "Our ancestors' ship itself sustained significant damage, which led to a catastrophic hyperdrive failure, followed by a six-year sublight journey before it crash landed here."

"How many survived?"

"Forty-seven. Forty children, six elders, one infirm young adult."

"That's all?" Ron blurted, breaking his silence.

"The Furling had faith that their superior technology would prevail against the bhag'r scum…such arrogance," she said, shaking her head with a sneer. "The refugee fleet was cobbled together at the last minute. They were not prepared. The ships were supplied with few spare parts, limited resources—mostly just food and water, very basic equipment for survival. Even then, none thought supplying the ships with comprehensive archives of our race's knowledge was necessary. Everything we know about our race was compiled from memory and the data of whatever personal devices individuals brought with them—during the journey and after we landed. Right on this very spot, in fact. Gringotts was built atop the crash site in 1473."

"Let me guess, when you arrived on Earth you were set upon by wizards," Harry said.

"Naturally," she said toothily. "For the first few decades, it is said that they were held back by our technology. But what remained of our technology was degraded through constant use and exposure to esoteric energies. We were forced to pick up crude arms crafted from salvaged hull plating and further develop our own esoteric abilities to survive. Have you wondered why our culture considers so-called Goblin-wrought silver to belong to the crafter rather than the purchaser? It is not because it is Goblin-wrought. We make many things we do not care who owns. It is because it is not silver, but repurposed hull-plating of which we have a very limited, irreplaceable quantity. We call it ke'krim—literally big atom—but perhaps you have heard of what the Ancients called it: trinium."

"Trinium," Harry repeated. The word evoked a sense of awe from his Nehebkau side. Of course, Nehebkau had been aware of trinium. It was so rare the Goa'uld did not even have their own name for it. He possessed a single sample—a tiny lump weighing a couple of grams, maybe. Ra had searched for decades…centuries…to find a source of trinium. "The Furling had access to enough trinium to build ships out of it?"

"You understand why we covet it so," Anakhtokwil said, sitting back and steepling her fingers. "Once upon a time, the Furling could have supplied you with endless trinium. We could create it. We merged pairs of neutron stars, held them up from collapsing into black holes and siphoned trinium from their hearts."

Anakhtokwil's tale had Harry's jaw hanging for a moment before he gathered his wits.

"Why big atom? My Goa'uld inhabitant never got around to analysing it in detail," he said.

"It is not like a conventional atom with quarks confined in neutrons and protons—as the Earth Muggles call them. Instead, the quarks exist in a stable fluid-like nuclear arrangement with a mass equivalent to four hundred and seventy-three protons and a charge of one hundred and twenty-nine protons," she explained. "In nature, it forms in small quantities in neutron star mergers and the explosions of stars with mass over thirty times that of the Sun. Its lightness as a bulk material is due to the fact that atoms of trinium form a sparse crystalline lattice, and its strength is a result of a special kind of bond the unusual nucleus permits. Actually, there are two other stable arrangements our ancestors discovered—one at a mass of twelve hundred and thirteen protons, and one at a mass of twenty-nine hundred and sixty. They were named i'ke'krim and fviKribk'a'ke'krim…meaning 'very big' and 'by Kribk, that's big', respectively. My ancestors were not creative with names," she said flatly, rolling her eyes.

Ron sniggered quietly and turned it into an unconvincing cough.

"We do not have any samples of those, so I am unsure of their properties, but according to the records left by Heskartt—one of the elders on the refugee ship—they were impressive in their own ways. Incidentally, when trinium is expelled in these cataclysmic events, it coalesces much more rapidly into large clumps than conventional atoms—so although these events spread trinium throughout the galaxy, it is much more likely to accumulate in large deposits on individual planets, rather than enriching an entire sector of space."

"That explains why it's so rare," Harry said, tilting his head in thought. "Very interesting, thank you for sharing that. Now…I believe I can help you. The past month has been incredibly busy and eventful—to summarise, my friends and I have set up a base offworld, we are developing a mostly magical variant of the Astria Porta, and I am aiming to start active development of a new magically enhanced ship design next week. We also have plans to survey local space for resources—including habitable planets. Ultimately, I'm hoping to convince witches and wizards to leave Earth for a new colony planet where we don't have to hide from Muggles. So, if you want to get off this planet, then we're more than happy to assist. We'll even find an unclaimed habitable planet for you to settle on, if that is your desire."

She smiled. "It is my deepest desire to return my people to the stars and give them freedom, and also to search for whatever remains of our brethren out there. If you can provide a means of transport and aid us in setting up facilities on a new planet, I will offer you a military and technological alliance. That includes access to all Goblin esoteric craft, any tools or weapons we make, and our warrior legions will answer your call to arms. In addition, I will leave you in sole possession of every branch of Gringotts Bank worldwide and the entire contents of their vaults, minus any trinium artifacts and anything else that is rightfully ours."

Ron choked on his spit. "What?"

Anakhtokwil smirked at him. "What use do we have for the money of Muggles and Wizards? Do with it as you will. Continue to operate it as a bank, destroy economies—it hardly matters to us if we are no longer part of this world."

"Alright," Harry said. "How many Goblins are there anyway?"

"Just shy of one million across the world. Yes—I am leader of them all."

Harry whistled. "Well, my ship at the moment can fit about two hundred if they're packed in tight. It might be more time efficient to finish developing our magic-based wormholes instead of shuttling back and forth…okay, it might take a few months, and I suppose you need time to prepare for your departure anyway, but it's a deal. In the meantime, I can scout for a suitable planet."

Anakhtokwil opened the folder in front of her and passed the top sheet of black material to him.

"These are some parameters that we would prefer, but we may be more flexible if the planet has a substantial amount of khalkrim—naquadah, I should say."

Harry took the sheet. It was oddly rigid, and the text on it was an off-white.

"Orange dwarf. Day length between twenty and thirty hours. Temperature ranging from ten to seventy degrees Celsius. Atmosphere—hmm, up to three percent carbon dioxide," Harry muttered to himself. He looked up. "Shouldn't be too difficult to find within fifty or so light years," he told Anakhtokwil. "Though, since we don't have much naquadah, we're planning on making our wormhole gateways out of gold. Our friend Hermione has calculated that gold should be able to establish wormholes out to about nine lightyears, so we may need to chain a few to reach."

"However we may be able to help in the construction of these portals…please do ask. We can supply much gold, or assist with crafting or enchantments," she said.

"We'll keep that in mind—human magic seems less suited for working with gold, so we very well may need it."

She leaned forward, "I would have you know that if even it takes many years for this to come to fruition, you will have our eternal gratitude."

Harry waved that off. "I learned enough about the history of Goblin-Human relations to know that you have no reason to trust me, so I suppose…consider this my personal atonement for what you've faced. I appreciate your offer of an alliance—that's honestly a lot more than I expected. All I would ask for beyond that is your help in bringing down the Goa'uld," he said. "Any information that you have from when your ancestors arrived is still almost three thousand years more up to date than what I know, though I would be extremely surprised if the Goa'uld do not reign over much of the galaxy to this day."

"Of course. We will provide what knowledge we can, and eventually, whatever we can field militarily, we shall," Anakhtokwil said. "And—our warriors will be eager to join you if you undertake any ground incursions."

"Fantastic. One last thing—I'd like to invite you or a representative to come along with us to our new offworld outpost so I can fill you in on some of our plans in that area," Harry said.

"As much as I would love to join you personally, I am needed here. I will send Ne'kiki'pwi. She is rather young, but a very talented esotericist. Her scientific knowledge is quite good as well…not that we are much of a group of scientists. To be quite honest, we picked our scientific curiosity back up only in the past two hundred years—as the Muggles made strides, we watched and learned with them. It is only in the past few decades that we have really begun to understand some of the knowledge our ancestors recorded."

"Well, Ne'kiki'pwi is most welcome," Harry said.

"I will inform her. She can accompany you whenever you are ready," she said. She opened her mouth, hesitating. "Ne'kiki'pwi is…my granddaughter. I trust you will ensure her safety."

"Absolutely," Ron said at once, grinning. "Chudley's Cannon is open to friendly peoples only. No discrimination allowed."

Harry stifled his mirth. "Oh yeah, I let Ron claim the planet our outpost is on. So…it is his planet. He named it Chudley. The outpost is The Cannon."

Anakhtokwil's forehead creases grew deeper as her eyebrows raised.

"As in…the Quidditch team?" she asked. She looked at Harry. "Really?"

Harry shrugged loosely. "It makes him happy," Harry said.

Ron beamed at them both.

.o.

Notes:

Cast: I used Stable Diffusion to cast some people for our characters, and let Stable Diffusion cast some too. See my profile for the link. I know Midjourney is better but whatever. Interested to hear some thoughts. It was pretty difficult to get them just how I wanted but this is close enough.

Furlings: Yeah, I guess I lied about not going into detail about the Furlings. Oh well.

Trinium: It seems to be way rarer than naquadah in canon. Its properties (low density, high strength) would imply it's a light element but there isn't room for any new light elements...so I made it an up-down quark matter atom. This is an actual hypothesised thing, existing in a hypothesised continent of stability. It would form, if it does exist, in conditions similar to what I described. Trinium is also obviously not a Goa'uld word-it sounds like it has a Latin root, which implies it's an Ancient name for it.

Apophis' Ha'taks: 1.7 ly/h–much slower than Harry's 9 ly/h, but Ha'taks are much larger and Nehebkau's ship is heavily customised. In the episodes at end of Season 1, Carter estimates a distance of 10 ly. My explanation for this is that Apophis was using a planet 10 ly away as a staging post for his attack, not that there is a planet in his domain with a Stargate only 10 ly away. If you recall, I said Abydos was 50 ly away around the star Mu Arae, and it's supposed to be the nearest gate.

Harry/Nehebkau's ship: An enlarged, heavily modified Al'kesh 55 metres wide and 62 metres long.