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Chapter 2: Making deals with the Devil...

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Part 7

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Slavna Zemq

Perun's domain

Milky Way Galaxy

Back home… I paused at that thought. I've been using it lately, even if for the first time in decades I was in a galaxy where modern Earth was real. I could more or less remember leading a normal life there, though as the years passed, more and more details got blurry and distant. In yet another life, I fought a desperate war to protect a future Earth. For a brief few months, that world became my home.

After that, I spent decades, as a servant of the Sith Empire, fighting for a cause that was never mine. I was a warrior at heart, shaped by some of the best and worst Sith to ever re-shape the galaxy in their image. I found a home there and lost it.

Now? I had a small domain, where I ruled. Most if not all of my people believed that I was their benevolent god and with a good reason. Yet, these few worlds I ruled, they were mere possessions. I had little to no emotional attachment to them. They were all means to an end, even if they were shaping nicely.

What was my goal beyond surviving and keeping myself safe? Everything I've been doing for months now, all the tedious exhausting work was to increase my odds of weathering the wars to come. Even if Ra reached and left Abydoss without accident, either Sokar or Anubis would ignite the war. With Ra alive, they might bide their time until they were properly prepared to take on all other System Lords.

And those were the threats that I could recall. Who knew what other disaster might rear up its ugly head by slipping unnoticed until it was too late?

Survival. What else was there to fight for? The truth was that I had nothing else in this world. Everything else I held of value was now lost to me, at best overseen by a counterpart if I was a mere copy.

Or perhaps not. Being a Mandalorian was never about any individual people or worlds. It was being part of a culture, it was an idea, and ideas could be hard to kill. And when all was said and done, I would need something tangible to bind my realm with in the future, when a mere claim of divinity, no matter how credible, wouldn't be enough.

Perhaps I was living in the past, chasing a dream I could never relieve. Yet, I was nothing else left, and nothing to lose by trying.

That was how one evening, I found myself writing down the tenets that made someone Mandalorian. Amusingly enough, many of them might just fit in right with Jaffa traditions.

At its core, to be a Mandalorian meant that you had to live up to just six tenets.

1. Wear armor – the Jaffa already did it most of the time. Besides, the rule never explicitly said that you had to be in armor unless you were in the fresher, or sleeping.

2. Speak the language. That was self-explanatory. More importantly, thinking in a language, subtly shaped how you viewed and reacted to the world. The Mandalorian language thus was a core part of the culture.

3. Defending yourself and your family – again, it was self-explanatory, and as a warrior, it was something utterly obvious that everyone should do, that the thought of not doing it if you could fail to compute properly.

4. Raising your children as Mandalorians. If you were a Mandalorian, that much was obvious. Almost all people did raise their children in the culture they lived and breathed.

5. Contribute to the Clan's welfare – take care of your extended family, and they will take care of you. Again, that was something sensible and taken as a given by a lot of cultures.

6. When called up by the Mand'alor, rally up to his cause. In the long run, this one was vital. If one day, my claim as divinity was no longer enough to rule, my record as a ruler, as Mand'alor, should be sufficient to get people following, if I led by example.

It wasn't until I had the core tenets written down in plain text, that it dawned on me how similar they were with how the Jaffa culture worked in practice. There was an opportunity here, one that I would be a fool not to take advantage of.

That was how it all began – with a night of melancholy. After that, every evening I could spare some time, I spent it typing down everything I knew about the Mandalorian language, and trying to codify it in a form easy to learn.

It was relaxing and wholesome work, not so different from meditation.

The other work that took up much of my sparse free nights was working on a lightsaber. Back home, I could have built one from scrap. Here? The power cell was the simplest part, and the only one available off the shelf. While not as long-lasting as those back home, the fuel source of a staff weapon would do, after some minor modifications.

I had to re-create, or improvise, while heavy drawing on the Force for everything else. Something as simple as getting off-the-shelf synthetic crystal was out of the question. Instead, I had to use trial and error with an ancient technique to grow Goa'uld computer crystals Perun had been vaguely familiar with. In six months, I got two promising crystals that way, none in an appropriate red color.

I used one of the forges on Pirin to slowly make the necessary metal casing, then used the Force to shape it just right. That was my only viable option because I lacked the necessary precision tools to do it otherwise.

In contrast, when building a lightsaber, strictly speaking, you needed to use the Force only when properly aligning and attaching the focusing crystal to the power source. A mistake there would turn the whole thing from a precision instrument, into a bomb. Everything else you could do with a bit of know-how and the right precision tools.

It was the height of irony that I finally managed to complete my first lightsaber in this realty the night before going on a raid with my Lighting Legion. Tomorrow, I couldn't afford to bring my lightsaber and use it. Any wounds or traces it would leave in its wake was so unlike anything else that the Goa'uld used, it wasn't even funny. Leaving such evidence behind was thus out of the question.

Yet, for a brief moment, none of that mattered. It is hard to describe in words how I felt the moment my completed lightsaber rose in front of me guided by my mind. The same was true about the moment it ignited with a painfully familiar snap-hiss, lighting up my bedroom with silver light… That was the moment I decided that after all, I might be able to build myself a home in this reality.

And this time, I would keep it safe, no matter how many corpses it took.

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Staging site Alpha-One
Milky Way Galaxy

Two hundred Jaffa, all Lighting Legionaries in their distinct armor, stood at attention in front of me. Behind me, towered the Stargate, with a Jaffa ready to punch in our target's address.

"You all know your orders, my Lightning Blades. You know our plan, and the men standing proudly beside you. Today's battle is ours to win!" I proclaimed grandly. I was kitted out just like my Jaffa, with nothing standing out to make me appear different. I even had a temporary tattoo with my bird-of-prey symbol on my forehead.

Nearly a thousand years away, Prime Orel would be giving a speech of his own, before moving in to raid the second target. I nodded at the Jaffa at the dialing device and turned around to face the gate. This was it. It was finally time to let loose a bit, something that had been a long time coming.

The Stargate activated with a whoosh, and I could sense the unshakable belief om my Jaffa. If morale by itself was enough to win battles, today I had a force able to conquer the whole galaxy.

I submerged myself in the Force and went in first, with my Jaffa racing to keep up. The following seconds felt like an eternity. I was one with the Force, and my power could sense shadows gathering on the horizon. Slowly but surely, our time of relative peace was running out.

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Objective Sierra
Heru'ur outpost
Milky Way galaxy

At the face of it, striking at a place belonging to the heir of Ra's throne was sheer madness. I should have removed it from the target list and forgotten it existed for years to come.

Instead, I chose the remote Al'kesh fabrication and training station as one of my primary targets.

First, the outpost in question was very far from my domain. The distance added a layer of deniability. Second, there were a lot of people who would love to tweak the beak of Heru'ur. For all his boasts about being an accomplished commander, from what I knew, he kept failing to live up to them. It was Ra's Horus guards and handpicked Jaffa acting as commanders that made Heru'ur truly dangerous. That was true as long as he was willing to listen to advice. What you had to fear from Heru'ur was his brutality and the people who backed him.

More importantly, the price of pride he held among the System Lords as Ra's son and heir, ensured he had access to the best toys. He also had a rather large domain and despite having a big fleet, he couldn't afford to properly garrison and protect everywhere without stretching his forces thin.

Just like I had to rely on outdated Cheops and my Al'kesh to police most of my own, much smaller domain, the same was true for practically all other Goa'uld.

This made various outposts patrolling the borders, vulnerable.

Finally, the reason why I in the end chose to go for the prize was simple. The border the facility guarded faced the edge of a galactic arm, with no rival Goa'uld in the region. There were no naval reinforcements ready to ride to the rescue within a quick response time.

Then there was me. While we will be coming with a lot of heavy weaponry able to take out bombers, they were no match for the power of the Force. In fact, the bombers themselves didn't matter, they were mere targets. It was all the machinery needed to maintain, repair, and build them that I wanted to get my hands on.

We exited the Stargate on schedule, facing virtually no opposition. The facility itself was about four kilometers away. The reason why the gate lacked meaningful defenses? Sheer arrogance and complacency. That would likely change once the wars began, and raids greatly increased in both intensity and frequency. In contrast, nowadays, I would find it surprising if there were a hundred defended gates in the galaxy that wasn't mine.

Frankly, if this was any other enemy, I would have thought that the whole setup was a trap. At any rate, I did have contingencies in that case. As soon as we got to the treeline unmolested, the second echelon of my Jaffa came through the gate. They carried even more heavy weapons. Onde dug in, they would use those weapons to lock down the area.

With our route of retreat secure, we kept moving through the forest, heading toward the base. The scouts who had been here for weeks now led the way and apprised us of the latest developments.

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Part 8

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Objective Sierra
Heru'ur outpost
Milky Way galaxy

Heru'ur's Jaffa offended my professional sensibilities. Granted, it was peace-time, or what passed for it among Goa'uld. That still meant the odd raid to test the waters happened as a matter of course.

There were no sensor nets to fool and sneak through. No patrols to evade, or cameras to bypass. A few hours before dawn, all that stood between us and utter surprise were a handful of sleepy Jaffa leaning on their staffs, and trying not to doze off. This had to be a trap, right? No one should be this dumb and complacent! Then again, these were Jaffa we were talking about. They hadn't fought a real war for longer than the Republic, and less said about that shit-show, the better.

Frankly, this was perhaps the first time I felt bad about using the Force to silently eliminate sentries, and open the way for my forces. Fuck it, I could have sneaked by those clowns decades ago, while still learning how to not get myself killed as an Acolyte on Korriban.

The first Heru'ur Jaffa who ran afoul of me didn't even know what killed him. One moment he was doing his best to huddle inside his armor because the early morning on this world was quite chilly. In the next, he was already dead, after I buried a mono-molecular blade into his brain. I used the Force to lay him silently on the ground, pulled out my blade, and cleared it on his cloak.

A hand sign had my Jaffa follow quietly, while I went ahead cloaked by the Force. Two more sentries and two more knife strikes later, the road to the barracks was open. I kept advancing with a small group of my Lighting Legionaries following on my heels. Meanwhile, over a third of my strike force stacked up at the various entrances of the barracks, preparing to quietly purge the place with blades and Zats.

I led my strike team to the control tower. If there was one place we had to take quietly, this was it. There would be long-range communication devices there if for no other reason, to keep in touch with Al'kesh patrols.

Examining the place through the Force, revealed several signatures milling around. Most of them were at the top, with only three people moving within the main body of the building. I spent a few moments enhancing myself with the Force. My perception focused, and the world around me slowed down.

"You've got three targets. Sweep upwards quickly." I ordered my Jaffa, then jumped in a way no regular human ever could.

My first bound brought me halfway up the tower, where I clung for a moment using the Force. I looked pointedly at my awe-struck Jaffa, who shook themselves and breached the tower. At the same moment, I leaped again, pushing myself off the vertical metal surface, and landed in front of a large tinted window. The Force pulsed through me, and I unleashed it upon the window, which quietly cracked under my tender ministration. A pair of Jaffa stared at me in incomprehension and began to react as if moving through syrup. I threw shards at their heads fast enough to strip flesh from bone.

The poor bastards couldn't even scream. They just fell to the ground, clutching their ruined faces and choking on shredded throats.

The remaining members of the night shift, finally clued in that something had gone wrong. By the time they figured out they were under attack, I vaulted over a console built under the shattered window and slammed my knife into the back of the head of the nearest Jaffa. The other two turned around just in time to receive two Zat blasts apiece.

Finally, the odd cry of surprise and warning sounded from the far reaches of the base. By that point, my Legionaries were busy slaughtering the bulk of the sleeping garrison and storming the airfield and hangars. I looked around for the communication devices and made sure they were all shut before my strike team finally made it up to the top of the tower.

"Building secure, My Lord. We killed three enemies. No friendly casualties." The Jaffa commander reported.

"Good work. Begin designating equipment for retrieval or destruction." I ordered and glanced at the still choking Jaffa. "And put them out of their misery."

My next task was to ensure that no Al'kesh could get away, so I jumped through the shattered window and ran towards the airfield.

A combat-ready flight might have just made it off before my people overran the base. Hell, it was an SOP for every military airbase to have a few fighters ready to deploy at moment's notice just in case.

That wasn't the case here. All we found on the airfield and assorted hangars, were a handful of technicians. They were mostly Jaffa, and a couple of minor Goa'uld working on a few disassembled bombers. They were probably on punishment detail. There were about ten sentries that died before knowing what hit them, as they attempted to respond to our attack. They had to guard a perimeter too large for a company without anything resembling a modern alarm system or sensors.

I knew that the Jaffa could be a mixed bag as far as competence went at the best of times, but this?! This was what I was worried about? Damn it all, I should have been running raids months ago if this was the standard level of awareness and resistance we could expect!

The only casualties we suffered were a single sprained angke and one unlucky bastard who got caught in a crossfire of not so friendly Zat blasts during the storming of the barracks.

At that point, I was half-convinced that this whole base was a sham, a bait to see who might attack Heru'ur's domain. Yet, as hours passed and we went over an inventory of all we found, that shaky belief dissolved. There were multiple modern fabricators able to produce all parts needed to assemble Death gliders and Al'kesh bombers. We also found all kinds of smaller fabricators and equipment necessary for maintenance and repair of damaged components, instead of just replacing and recycling them.

There were also forty Al'kesh and a hundred gliders we took intact. Sadly the former was too big to take through the gate, and disassembling them enough would take too much time. The same wasn't necessarily true about the fighters. Further, we could strip everything we would destroy of various critical equipment to bring back as spare parts. Further, the bombers would greatly expedite the movement of captured material to the gate for off-world transport.

Today was already a great day. And if Orel was anywhere near this successful in his raid, my modern industrial capacity would increase significantly overnight. Just the fabricators we captured here were going to double it!

Not to mention the technicians we were going to take with us.

While my people were busy pillaging the base, I went to prepare our parting gift. There was a significant quantity of naquadah needed both as a base for the alloy making up the small craft and as a source of reactor fuel, power lines, etc… While we would be hauling away all the trinium, I had other use for at least a quarter of the naquadah. Using the Force, I compressed it in a large sphere. The next step was to line it up with explosives retrieved from the local armory.

The result was a crude naquadah bomb, powerful enough to wipe out most of the base. As a final fuck-you, I had a sealed potassium cylinder placed beside it.

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