Chapter One
AJW
Well-known member
A Legacy of Chaos
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or universes that I am about to mangle around for my own amusement, sadly Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Stargate and EVE Online belong to Mutant Enemy Productions, MGM and CCP 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.
Authors Notes: This is my third attempt at a response to the ship of the line challenge, hopefully it will go better than the two iterations of Pioneers Dawn that have sadly died as I didn’t really think them through properly and ended up backing myself into a corner story telling wise. While I am still using Stargate as the third crossover element in this latest attempt to answer the very intriguing ship of the line challenge do not expect SG-1 and other characters to be major characters and players in the story events for quite a while. Also as with Pioneers Dawn (both versions) the SG-1 elements will remain timeline compliant so at this point in the timeline they’re just after the events at the end of season one/start of season two as a result don’t expect to see the F-302, the Prometheus or the Daedalus anytime soon.
Also unlike the norm for these stories and YAHF stories in general I will not go through the events of the Halloween night itself, those have all been done to death and we all know the general gist of what goes on that night, instead we will be jumping straight into the aftermath. Though I will refer to the night itself from time to time. I hope nobody minds too much.
~~~///~~~
Chapter One
Dampness.
It was the first thing that Xander Harris became aware of. Everything was damp and slimy, and his limbs felt like they were made of wet spaghetti and not skin, bone and muscle. Slowly he opened his eyes to find himself lying flat on a metallic deck amid a pool of golden fluid that was rapidly being drained away through slots in the floor specifically designed for that purpose. He blinked in confusion and awkwardly managed to sit up, it was hard as his muscles didn’t seem to want to coordinate for some strange reason and look around in complete and utter bafflement.
He was lying on the floor of a metallic room filled with strange transparent cylinders filled with softly bubbling gold fluid. Though what really freaked him out was what was in those cylinders. Bodies, specifically every single one was an exact copy of himself.
“What the hell,” he said blinking as his voice croaked as if it had never been used before.
“Please try to relax captain,” a disembodied, somewhat emotionless female voice said from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
“Who the hell are you?” Xander demanded, somewhat foolishly, looking around for the source of the voice.
“I feared this would happen. Please try and relax Xander Harris,” the voice said, “your memories of what has happened to you should fully integrate in another couple of minutes and it can be very disorientating.”
Xander frowned and was about to repeat his demand when a tsunami of memories and information came crashing into his mind and suddenly, he knew everything. He remembered dressing up as a space pilot for Halloween after his original plan for a two-dollar costume had gone flying out the window after some snot nosed brat grabbed the last toy rifle from the store. Thankfully, or so it had seemed at the time, the proprietor had taken pity on him and offered to let him rent the space pilot costume for the two dollars he’d wanted to spend.
It had seemed so innocent.
Only it hadn’t been as he’d been out carrying out the escort duty that Principal Snyder had lumped him, Willow and Buffy with when an intense pain had swept over his body. He remembered feeling himself be changed, remade at some fundamental level into something that was both human and beyond human at the same time as he was transformed into the space pilot version of himself. A pilot who had been way, way more than anything he had ever thought possible and who controlled ships in a way that seemed to have just leapt out of his favourite sci-fi television show. He remembered Willow, somehow turned into a real ghost though wearing some very provocative attire that had to have been chosen for her by Buffy as Willow was not into wearing anything so risqué, finding him and convincing his confused pilot self to help her.
From there he remembered meeting Buffy who’d somehow been turned into a crying, screaming utterly useless eighteenth century noblewoman – something which he was so going to have fun teasing her about for months – and persuading her to accompany them back to Buffy’s house. Where his pilot-self had ended up saving Cordelia from something that had looked like a cross between Chewbacca from Star Wars and a stereotypical werewolf, shooting the thing with a suddenly very real plasma pistol that had knocked it flying though had oddly not killed it when the other him had known it should, before getting her inside Buffy’s place.
He remembered Angel showing up, Willow leaving to speak to Giles and a kid-turned-vampire by the same spell that had to have affected them attacking, only to be quickly overpowered and knocked out by Angel. Though in that fracas Angel’s vampiric nature had been revealed as he’d briefly gone into game face, prompting Buffy/Lady Useless to scream and run off into the night. He remembered going with Angel and Cordelia to try and find the currently helpless Slayer before something else did.
Unfortunately, Spike found her first and they’d ended up in a fight with the blond master vampire. Who’d quickly met his end when a bolt from the plasma pistol ignited his undead flesh and in a flash of flames – and the familiar eerie scream of demonic anguish as the blood demon animating Spike’s body was banished back to hell where it belonged – the normally dangerous as hell vamp had been reduced to a sad little pile of smouldering dust. The spell ended at that point but before he had been able to even get his wits back, he’d been set on from behind by someone screaming about him killing her spikey and something about being a bad kitten and needing to be punished. He remembered the inhumanly strong, cold hands of the clearly furious female vampire grab him and, before he could even begin to defend himself, snap his neck…
…only to suddenly wake up here.
Even as that onslaught of memory faded additional memories, a lifetimes worth of them, bombarded his mind and he suddenly knew everything about Alexander’s life or rather lives from the birth of his original body on the Gallente homeworld, to his enlistment in the Federal Navy, conversion into a capsuleer and his voyages and adventures through the vast star cluster of New Eden after his enlistment ended. The surge of memory ended and Xander blinked and shook his head to clear the residual disorientation.
“Damn that was… I don’t know how to describe it,” he muttered even as he carefully got to his feet, his limbs now working properly as his neural patterns completed their integration with his new clone body. A fact that was really going to take a hell of a lot of getting used to, he also now had to a) figure out a way back to Earth assuming that was possible and b) stop Buffy from Slaying him on sight given people did not usually just come straight back from the dead unless they were a vampire or had been raised by dark magic.
“My former captain often said that,” the female voice that he now recognized as belonging to Aura, Alexander’s A.I replied. “The disorientation will pass completely in another few moments. Neural integration shock is not an unknown phenomenon among capsuleers, especially new ones like yourself sir though it will become less of an issue over time and…”
“…with more deaths,” Xander finished even as he shivered both at the thought of dying again and the fact that he was bloody cold as he was kind of naked here. “No offense Aura but I don’t plan to die again anytime soon. Now can you tell me where I can shower and get some clothes?”
“There are showers just by the entrance to the clone bay and a dressing room beyond that you should find clothing in there.”
“Thank you,” he replied as he began walking towards the entrance to the clone bay without needing anymore directions from Aura. “Aura by the way where am I? This definitely isn’t somewhere in Sunnydale after all.”
“No, it is not. You are currently in bay one of the cloning facilities of a Fortizar-class Citadel station,” Aura answered. “We are currently orbiting a gas and ice giant planet in an unknown system. Curiously if I am interpreting data from the stations sensors correctly this gas giant is located only thirty point one astronomical units from your previous location.”
Xander frowned slightly, pausing as he reached for the door controls as he recalled the astronomy sections of his high school physics lessons. Surprisingly he found it a great deal easier than he was used to and suddenly realized just which planet they were orbiting. “We’re in orbit of Neptune then,” he said.
“Neptune?” Aura questioned before searching through the station’s library files for that name and feeling as close to shock as an artificial intelligence could at what she found. “You mean the eighth planet of the Terran home solar system do you not?”
“Well I’m not referring to the Roman god of the same name so yeah,” Xander answered momentarily confused as to why Aura seemed to be surprised at where the massive station was orbiting. Then he remembered that for Aura, Alexander and indeed anyone from New Eden Earth and the other planets of its solar system were spoken of and remembered as being objects of myth and legend dating back twenty thousand or so years to before the sudden, violent collapse of the EVE gate wormhole severed New Eden from the rest of humanity. It was amazing when he thought about it that the people of New Eden could talk about Earth and the other planets of the solar system in much the same way they’d talk about the lost civilization of Atlantis.
“How could we possibly be here?” Aura wondered aloud. “I have no records of the station ever being built here and at any rate the EVE gate wormhole reopening would have certainly been headline news all over New Eden.”
Xander shrugged even as he acknowledged that would be true. The four great empires of New Eden as well as Concord, the various alliances and miniempires created by capsuleers would go crazy if the wormhole back to the rest of humanity suddenly reappeared after twenty thousand or so years of being gone. “Magic would be my best guess,” he said, “it’s also would explain how all of this,” he gestured to the station around them and then at himself, “came into existence in one night. Especially as everything here normally only exists in a video game world, one that is supposed to still be in development out of the old Elite game franchise.”
“That is not logical. Magic is not real.”
“Maybe not in the reality you’re from but in this one it is very real, everything supernatural that has been thought a myth in modern times – by my reckoning probably ancient times to you – is in fact frighteningly real.”
“But how?”
“That I cannot answer, Giles might be able to tell you but I can’t all I know is that every supernatural I thought fictional, but especially vampires are in fact real and unlike what some modern fiction likes to show they are not in any way friendly.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I’ll explain more soon after I’ve had a shower and got dressed as I’m kind of freezing here.”
“Would you like me to adjust the environmental settings?” Aura asked concerned about her new captain’s welfare, such was one of her duties as an artificial intelligence.
“It’s a figure of speech Aura.”
“Oh.”
Xander sighed to himself. He had a feeling it was going to take him and Aura awhile to get used to each other as while he had Alexander’s memories, and hopefully his skills and training as it would suck big time to be stuck on this station, he wasn’t him. Hopefully he would soon also be able to get back in touch with Giles and the others – hopefully without Buffy trying to slay him on sight – and figure out just what to do from here as he couldn’t leave this station empty for too long. Especially given the fact that there were multiple copies of himself in the cloning bays waiting for his consciousness to be downloaded into them if he ended up getting killed again – though hopefully that wouldn’t happen again for a good long while as dying kind of hurt.
He put those thoughts out of his mind for now as he arrived at the showers.
~~//~~
Warehouse
Sunnydale
A Few Minutes Earlier
Buffy Summers blinked as she suddenly found herself back in control of her own body to be greeted by the sight of an astonished Spike as the master vampires outline imploded and he collapsed into a sad little pile of smouldering dust on the floor. The cause of his sudden, fiery demise being a green energy bolt that had come from the real-due-to-the spell sci-fi pistol that Xander was holding in a very competent manner. Or rather had been holding as he suddenly staggered and dropped the pistol as like her he came back to himself, looking around in surprise and confusion.
She couldn’t help but shiver as she remembered exactly what had just happened. Being turned into a screaming, crying utterly useless eighteenth-century noblewoman by what was obviously a spell of some kind, she really hated it when she had to deal with magical shenanigans, had not exactly been a very pleasant experience. It was also something that should not have happened since, according to Giles, Halloween was supposed to be a quiet night for the undead and other supernatural nastiness. Obviously somebody didn’t get that particular memo, she thought annoyed, and when I find out just who it was they are so going to get it given Spike could have killed me all because Lady Useless had to run away when she saw Angel was a vampire.
“Buffy are you alright,” Angel asked as a confused hubbub of voices came from the children and young adults who’d been turned, thankfully briefly, into various ghouls and demons by the same spell that had affected her, Xander and presumably Willow.
“I’m fine,” Buffy replied taking off her wig and glaring at it angrily. One thing was for sure she would never be able to watch a period romance drama the same way again now that she knew what the noblewomen of those time periods were really like. An enraged howl from nearby abruptly caught her attention and she looked up just in time to see a female vamp in a white flowing gown charge up to Xander.
“You killed my Spikey. Bad kitten you must be punished,” she was screaming as before anyone could react the furious female vampire grabbed the still somewhat disorientated Xander, lifted him up by the throat before snapping his neck.
“NOOO!” Buffy screamed in rage and horror before she charged the vampiress as she dropped Xander’s body to the floor, hitting her dead in the face with a fist that had the full strength of an enraged Slayer behind it. The force of the blow made the vampiress cry out in pain even as she was sent flying across the warehouse to slam hard enough into the far wall that the sheet metal wall visibly trembled from the force of the impact. Her fury unspent Buffy stalked forward, wishing she had thought to pack a stake in this costume so she could end this undead fiend’s existence right here and now, but she hadn’t. She would just have to settle for beating the vampire to a pulp and come back to finish it off later as even the enhanced healing abilities of vampires had their limits.
Unfortunately, her rage would go unsated as the vampiress, with a speed that proved that she was indeed a master level vampire, got back to her feet and retreated, fleeing out into the night. Buffy growled in anger and was about to follow her when Angel put his hand on her shoulder. “Buffy let her go,” he said softly knowing that if Buffy continued to go after Drusilla in her current state she would end up being killed as insane as she was Drusilla was a dangerous fighter as he, or rather Angelus, had taught her himself. Buffy would need to be clear headed and focused to have any chance of killing Drusilla.
“But she…” Buffy started to protest.
“I know but if you go after her now, especially as you are unarmed then Drusilla will kill you,” Angel replied, “there will be time to deal with her later. With Spike dusted she will be vulnerable, and we can track her down and slay her another time. Right now, you have other things to worry about.”
Buffy looked at him, her eyes burning with rage at seeing Xander be murdered by this Drusilla and demanding he explain more why she shouldn’t just go after the vampiress right now. In answer Angel just gestured back to the assembled kids and Buffy looked to see that many of them were now either staring at Xander’s lifeless body in shock or wailing in distress at seeing someone killed like that. Cordelia was doing her best to comfort them, showing some of the heart of gold that Queen C hid behind her spoiled rich girl/queen of Sunnydale High’s social scene veneer.
Immediately her rage vanished, numbness that she knew would soon turn to grief replacing it.
“You and Cordelia should take the children back to the High School and their parents,” Angel told her softly.
“But what about Xander we can’t just leave him here.”
“Don’t worry about that Buffy. I will handle Xander and get his body to the right people so the appropriate ceremonies and procedures to lay him to rest can be followed.” Angel glanced at Xander’s lifeless, cooling corpse with some sorrow. While it was true that they were rivals for Buffy’s affection, and he knew that Xander disliked him in no small part due to his vampiric nature, he had respected the young man’s courage and determination. You had to respect anyone who voluntarily took up the fight against the more hostile aspects of the supernatural world despite having no powers of their own.
Buffy looked at him for a moment then nodded in understanding before turning to Cordelia. “Cordelia, we need to get the children away from here and back to the school,” she said softly but more than loud enough for the normally spoiled socialite to hear, look up and nod in agreement.
“And Xander,” Cordelia asked, and Buffy was honestly surprised to hear a slight, but real shudder of emotion in her voice. Maybe she and Xander had already started dating, she thought remembering that Xander and Cordelia had been dancing around each other, shooting flirtatious glances at one another for weeks now. Behaviour that had told both her and Willow that they were on the verge of becoming boyfriend and girlfriend. A state that she knew had filled Willow with a combination of jealousy and horror.
Willow.
Oh God Willow this is going to destroy her, she thought knowing that Willow was certain to fall apart when she was told of her lifelong friend’s death. She didn’t really want to be the one to tell her the terrible truth of what had just happened here. But she knew she would have to.
“Angel will deal with him,” she assured Cordelia. Cordelia hesitated for a moment and then nodded once again and between them they began to carefully herd the shocked, frightened and crying children out of the warehouse.
Angel watched them leave then he carefully walked over to Xander’s body and gently picked him up. Immediately he knew something was different to normal as through the clothes beneath his hands he could feel a series of metal objects – six of them in total – running down Xander’s spine. What in the world, he thought as he – still being careful with the cooling body of the young man – he shifted the bodies position enough to be able to pull up his shirt with one hand to see just what the strange circular objects were.
What he saw almost made him drop the body in surprise.
“What the hell,” he said gaping at what he saw in disbelief and a small amount of horror. In the two hundred or so years that he’d lived he had never seen anything like this before, at the back of his mind he could feel even Angelus reeling in surprise, confusion and a small amount of sick fascination. The objects were small circular sockets each about a centimetre and a half in diameter, they were imbedded in Xander’s flesh and looked like they had always been there. Yet he knew for a fact that Xander had had nothing like them there before this evening.
“You could say that again rat breath,” a familiar voice said from behind him making him jump before – still holding Xander’s body – spinning around to find himself face to face with Whistler. The balance demon who’d recruited him to serve the light, and in the process earn redemption for the many horrific crimes he’d committed when he was Angelus, looked like he’d been pole axed by something and it didn’t take a genius to figure out just why.
“Whistler! What the hell is going on here? Do you know what these socket things that have appeared on Xander’s body are?”
“I do indeed,” Whistler admitted. “They’re there because of the spell cast this night by Ethan Rayne, or rather because of what the spell turned him into.”
“But what do metal sockets have to do with Xander having been turned into a space pilot?” Angel asked confused.
“Because he became a type of pilot from a reality on the opposite side of the multiverse from this reality. A reality that the people of this reality think is only a video game franchise which will in a few years be expanded into an online roleplaying game. He was a capsuleer.”
“A what?”
“A capsuleer in their own universe they’re also known as pod pilots or empyrians depending on who you talk to. Through an extremely advanced form of the sciences known as cloning and cybernetics capsuleers are pilots who can be in a very real sense be merged with their ships as in when a capsuleer is plugged in they literally become the ship.”
“Incredible,” Angel breathed shocked as, while he didn’t know a huge amount about modern technology though he was getting better at using it any vampire had to in this day and age if they wanted to survive he knew it would take knowledge and technology centuries or millennia ahead of anything on Earth in order to create something like that. “Wait how come the spell went so in depth as to create cybernetic implants that sophisticated? A fake pistol being turned real I can believe but creating something like these implants?”
“That’s just it the spell shouldn’t have,” Whistler replied. “The spell tonight was always going to happen, it’s an important part of various people’s destinies, but it was never supposed to become what it became or result in the final death of Spike and Xander wasn’t supposed to die.”
“So how did it,” Angel wondered. While he wasn’t an expert on magic, he knew enough about it to know that spells usually worked within relatively tight parameters.
“Someone else interfered and altered the parameters of the spell to accomplish this change. Who they are I do not know so don’t ask,” Whistler replied the last part was of course a lie, he – and the Powers That Be – knew exactly who was behind the massive changes made to the spell and its outcome. Not that he was going to tell Angel that as there was no reason for the ensouled master vampire to know anything about them.
Angel frowned as he immediately suspected that Whistler wasn’t telling him everything. Balance demons never truly told you everything only really what they think you needed to know and no more. “So, what are you telling me this for now Whistler?”
“You needed to know so you can tell the Slayer and her friends that this wasn’t the Powers fault. Also tell Giles that Ethan Rayne is only partially to blame for all of this,” Whistler answered, “oh and if I were you, I would drop the body now.”
Angel was about to open his mouth to ask what Whistler meant by that when he heard it. It was a faint but growing buzzing sound that seemed to be coming from the body he was holding. Alarmed he dropped the body and it wasn’t a moment too soon for as soon as the body hit the concrete floor with a brutal sounding smack it began to glow from within. The outlines of Xander’s body blurred and before his amazed eyes the whole body disintegrated leaving nothing but a human shaped blackened smudge on the floor to show where it had been.
“What the hell caused that,” he asked aloud. When he received no response, he turned to look for Whistler to see that the balance demon had vanished. Oh, I hate it when he does that, he thought mentally grumbling at Whistler’s lack of manners, but then in his experience most demons didn’t care for the little niceties. Then he sighed as another thought occurred to him. How am I going to explain this to Buffy? Maybe just tell her the truth about the cybernetic implants I found and that Xander’s body disintegrated presumably due to a biological self-destruct. Though I wonder who Whistler wasn’t telling me about? He clearly knew far more about what happened to the spell than he was letting on and who was behind it.
After a moment Angel shrugged and headed off in the direction that Buffy and Cordelia had gone with the children. He would tell Buffy and the others the truth and hope to stop Buffy from doing something stupid to a certain Ethan Rayne for setting this whole thing in motion.
~~//~~
Stargate Command
That Same Time
“General Hammond sir.”
Major General George Hammond looked up from the paperwork he was working his way through at the sound of someone calling for him. He had been going over the latest prospective candidates report, with the SGC having been formally reactivated after Apophis’ abortive attack he’d been given the go ahead by the joint chiefs to increase the number of operative SG teams, and welcomed the break from the monotony of reading personnel file after personnel file. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised to find Airman Walter Harriman standing in the doorway.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Sir we just received a report from one of our deep range telescopes on Hawaii,” Walter replied, “they’ve detected an anomaly in orbit above Neptune sir.”
“What kind of anomaly?” George asked instantly worried that it might be Apophis returning to attempt another attack on Earth. An attack he had no idea how they would repel this time given that they’d only survived last time through sheer dumb luck and SG-1 defying Senator Kinsey’s shutdown order and going through the gate only to by pure chance end up aboard one of the motherships heading for Sol.
“It appears to be a very large space station of some kind sir,” Walter replied, “unfortunately they were not able to get many images of it before it disappeared into the penumbra of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon. We estimate it will be eight to twelve hours before they’ll be able to get a view of the station again.”
“And the images they were able to capture?”
“They’ve been sent to us. We’re working to enlarge and enhance them now they should be ready to view in about twenty minutes.”
“Bring them to the briefing room as soon as they’re ready and have SG-1 come to the room as well,” George ordered, though he wasn’t sure what they would be able to do about a potentially, but only potentially, hostile alien space station located so far from Earth. They certainly had no weapons capable of reaching such a station and even if they did there was no guarantee that they’d be anymore effective against whatever defences the station would have than they’d been against the shields surrounding the two ships Apophis had brought to Earth.
“Yes sir,” Walter replied before turning and walking away. George for his part sighed before reaching for and picking up the handset of the red phone on his desk and bringing it to his ear. For a moment more nothing happened then the hotline connected.
“This is Major General Hammond,” he said to the white house switch board operator. “I need to speak to the president.”
“Stand by General.”
For a few moments the phone rang then it was picked up. “Yes, General Hammond?” came the familiar voice of President Julian Marcel. “What is it?”
“Mister President we might have a problem.”
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or universes that I am about to mangle around for my own amusement, sadly Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Stargate and EVE Online belong to Mutant Enemy Productions, MGM and CCP 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.
Authors Notes: This is my third attempt at a response to the ship of the line challenge, hopefully it will go better than the two iterations of Pioneers Dawn that have sadly died as I didn’t really think them through properly and ended up backing myself into a corner story telling wise. While I am still using Stargate as the third crossover element in this latest attempt to answer the very intriguing ship of the line challenge do not expect SG-1 and other characters to be major characters and players in the story events for quite a while. Also as with Pioneers Dawn (both versions) the SG-1 elements will remain timeline compliant so at this point in the timeline they’re just after the events at the end of season one/start of season two as a result don’t expect to see the F-302, the Prometheus or the Daedalus anytime soon.
Also unlike the norm for these stories and YAHF stories in general I will not go through the events of the Halloween night itself, those have all been done to death and we all know the general gist of what goes on that night, instead we will be jumping straight into the aftermath. Though I will refer to the night itself from time to time. I hope nobody minds too much.
~~~///~~~
Chapter One
Dampness.
It was the first thing that Xander Harris became aware of. Everything was damp and slimy, and his limbs felt like they were made of wet spaghetti and not skin, bone and muscle. Slowly he opened his eyes to find himself lying flat on a metallic deck amid a pool of golden fluid that was rapidly being drained away through slots in the floor specifically designed for that purpose. He blinked in confusion and awkwardly managed to sit up, it was hard as his muscles didn’t seem to want to coordinate for some strange reason and look around in complete and utter bafflement.
He was lying on the floor of a metallic room filled with strange transparent cylinders filled with softly bubbling gold fluid. Though what really freaked him out was what was in those cylinders. Bodies, specifically every single one was an exact copy of himself.
“What the hell,” he said blinking as his voice croaked as if it had never been used before.
“Please try to relax captain,” a disembodied, somewhat emotionless female voice said from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
“Who the hell are you?” Xander demanded, somewhat foolishly, looking around for the source of the voice.
“I feared this would happen. Please try and relax Xander Harris,” the voice said, “your memories of what has happened to you should fully integrate in another couple of minutes and it can be very disorientating.”
Xander frowned and was about to repeat his demand when a tsunami of memories and information came crashing into his mind and suddenly, he knew everything. He remembered dressing up as a space pilot for Halloween after his original plan for a two-dollar costume had gone flying out the window after some snot nosed brat grabbed the last toy rifle from the store. Thankfully, or so it had seemed at the time, the proprietor had taken pity on him and offered to let him rent the space pilot costume for the two dollars he’d wanted to spend.
It had seemed so innocent.
Only it hadn’t been as he’d been out carrying out the escort duty that Principal Snyder had lumped him, Willow and Buffy with when an intense pain had swept over his body. He remembered feeling himself be changed, remade at some fundamental level into something that was both human and beyond human at the same time as he was transformed into the space pilot version of himself. A pilot who had been way, way more than anything he had ever thought possible and who controlled ships in a way that seemed to have just leapt out of his favourite sci-fi television show. He remembered Willow, somehow turned into a real ghost though wearing some very provocative attire that had to have been chosen for her by Buffy as Willow was not into wearing anything so risqué, finding him and convincing his confused pilot self to help her.
From there he remembered meeting Buffy who’d somehow been turned into a crying, screaming utterly useless eighteenth century noblewoman – something which he was so going to have fun teasing her about for months – and persuading her to accompany them back to Buffy’s house. Where his pilot-self had ended up saving Cordelia from something that had looked like a cross between Chewbacca from Star Wars and a stereotypical werewolf, shooting the thing with a suddenly very real plasma pistol that had knocked it flying though had oddly not killed it when the other him had known it should, before getting her inside Buffy’s place.
He remembered Angel showing up, Willow leaving to speak to Giles and a kid-turned-vampire by the same spell that had to have affected them attacking, only to be quickly overpowered and knocked out by Angel. Though in that fracas Angel’s vampiric nature had been revealed as he’d briefly gone into game face, prompting Buffy/Lady Useless to scream and run off into the night. He remembered going with Angel and Cordelia to try and find the currently helpless Slayer before something else did.
Unfortunately, Spike found her first and they’d ended up in a fight with the blond master vampire. Who’d quickly met his end when a bolt from the plasma pistol ignited his undead flesh and in a flash of flames – and the familiar eerie scream of demonic anguish as the blood demon animating Spike’s body was banished back to hell where it belonged – the normally dangerous as hell vamp had been reduced to a sad little pile of smouldering dust. The spell ended at that point but before he had been able to even get his wits back, he’d been set on from behind by someone screaming about him killing her spikey and something about being a bad kitten and needing to be punished. He remembered the inhumanly strong, cold hands of the clearly furious female vampire grab him and, before he could even begin to defend himself, snap his neck…
…only to suddenly wake up here.
Even as that onslaught of memory faded additional memories, a lifetimes worth of them, bombarded his mind and he suddenly knew everything about Alexander’s life or rather lives from the birth of his original body on the Gallente homeworld, to his enlistment in the Federal Navy, conversion into a capsuleer and his voyages and adventures through the vast star cluster of New Eden after his enlistment ended. The surge of memory ended and Xander blinked and shook his head to clear the residual disorientation.
“Damn that was… I don’t know how to describe it,” he muttered even as he carefully got to his feet, his limbs now working properly as his neural patterns completed their integration with his new clone body. A fact that was really going to take a hell of a lot of getting used to, he also now had to a) figure out a way back to Earth assuming that was possible and b) stop Buffy from Slaying him on sight given people did not usually just come straight back from the dead unless they were a vampire or had been raised by dark magic.
“My former captain often said that,” the female voice that he now recognized as belonging to Aura, Alexander’s A.I replied. “The disorientation will pass completely in another few moments. Neural integration shock is not an unknown phenomenon among capsuleers, especially new ones like yourself sir though it will become less of an issue over time and…”
“…with more deaths,” Xander finished even as he shivered both at the thought of dying again and the fact that he was bloody cold as he was kind of naked here. “No offense Aura but I don’t plan to die again anytime soon. Now can you tell me where I can shower and get some clothes?”
“There are showers just by the entrance to the clone bay and a dressing room beyond that you should find clothing in there.”
“Thank you,” he replied as he began walking towards the entrance to the clone bay without needing anymore directions from Aura. “Aura by the way where am I? This definitely isn’t somewhere in Sunnydale after all.”
“No, it is not. You are currently in bay one of the cloning facilities of a Fortizar-class Citadel station,” Aura answered. “We are currently orbiting a gas and ice giant planet in an unknown system. Curiously if I am interpreting data from the stations sensors correctly this gas giant is located only thirty point one astronomical units from your previous location.”
Xander frowned slightly, pausing as he reached for the door controls as he recalled the astronomy sections of his high school physics lessons. Surprisingly he found it a great deal easier than he was used to and suddenly realized just which planet they were orbiting. “We’re in orbit of Neptune then,” he said.
“Neptune?” Aura questioned before searching through the station’s library files for that name and feeling as close to shock as an artificial intelligence could at what she found. “You mean the eighth planet of the Terran home solar system do you not?”
“Well I’m not referring to the Roman god of the same name so yeah,” Xander answered momentarily confused as to why Aura seemed to be surprised at where the massive station was orbiting. Then he remembered that for Aura, Alexander and indeed anyone from New Eden Earth and the other planets of its solar system were spoken of and remembered as being objects of myth and legend dating back twenty thousand or so years to before the sudden, violent collapse of the EVE gate wormhole severed New Eden from the rest of humanity. It was amazing when he thought about it that the people of New Eden could talk about Earth and the other planets of the solar system in much the same way they’d talk about the lost civilization of Atlantis.
“How could we possibly be here?” Aura wondered aloud. “I have no records of the station ever being built here and at any rate the EVE gate wormhole reopening would have certainly been headline news all over New Eden.”
Xander shrugged even as he acknowledged that would be true. The four great empires of New Eden as well as Concord, the various alliances and miniempires created by capsuleers would go crazy if the wormhole back to the rest of humanity suddenly reappeared after twenty thousand or so years of being gone. “Magic would be my best guess,” he said, “it’s also would explain how all of this,” he gestured to the station around them and then at himself, “came into existence in one night. Especially as everything here normally only exists in a video game world, one that is supposed to still be in development out of the old Elite game franchise.”
“That is not logical. Magic is not real.”
“Maybe not in the reality you’re from but in this one it is very real, everything supernatural that has been thought a myth in modern times – by my reckoning probably ancient times to you – is in fact frighteningly real.”
“But how?”
“That I cannot answer, Giles might be able to tell you but I can’t all I know is that every supernatural I thought fictional, but especially vampires are in fact real and unlike what some modern fiction likes to show they are not in any way friendly.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I’ll explain more soon after I’ve had a shower and got dressed as I’m kind of freezing here.”
“Would you like me to adjust the environmental settings?” Aura asked concerned about her new captain’s welfare, such was one of her duties as an artificial intelligence.
“It’s a figure of speech Aura.”
“Oh.”
Xander sighed to himself. He had a feeling it was going to take him and Aura awhile to get used to each other as while he had Alexander’s memories, and hopefully his skills and training as it would suck big time to be stuck on this station, he wasn’t him. Hopefully he would soon also be able to get back in touch with Giles and the others – hopefully without Buffy trying to slay him on sight – and figure out just what to do from here as he couldn’t leave this station empty for too long. Especially given the fact that there were multiple copies of himself in the cloning bays waiting for his consciousness to be downloaded into them if he ended up getting killed again – though hopefully that wouldn’t happen again for a good long while as dying kind of hurt.
He put those thoughts out of his mind for now as he arrived at the showers.
~~//~~
Warehouse
Sunnydale
A Few Minutes Earlier
Buffy Summers blinked as she suddenly found herself back in control of her own body to be greeted by the sight of an astonished Spike as the master vampires outline imploded and he collapsed into a sad little pile of smouldering dust on the floor. The cause of his sudden, fiery demise being a green energy bolt that had come from the real-due-to-the spell sci-fi pistol that Xander was holding in a very competent manner. Or rather had been holding as he suddenly staggered and dropped the pistol as like her he came back to himself, looking around in surprise and confusion.
She couldn’t help but shiver as she remembered exactly what had just happened. Being turned into a screaming, crying utterly useless eighteenth-century noblewoman by what was obviously a spell of some kind, she really hated it when she had to deal with magical shenanigans, had not exactly been a very pleasant experience. It was also something that should not have happened since, according to Giles, Halloween was supposed to be a quiet night for the undead and other supernatural nastiness. Obviously somebody didn’t get that particular memo, she thought annoyed, and when I find out just who it was they are so going to get it given Spike could have killed me all because Lady Useless had to run away when she saw Angel was a vampire.
“Buffy are you alright,” Angel asked as a confused hubbub of voices came from the children and young adults who’d been turned, thankfully briefly, into various ghouls and demons by the same spell that had affected her, Xander and presumably Willow.
“I’m fine,” Buffy replied taking off her wig and glaring at it angrily. One thing was for sure she would never be able to watch a period romance drama the same way again now that she knew what the noblewomen of those time periods were really like. An enraged howl from nearby abruptly caught her attention and she looked up just in time to see a female vamp in a white flowing gown charge up to Xander.
“You killed my Spikey. Bad kitten you must be punished,” she was screaming as before anyone could react the furious female vampire grabbed the still somewhat disorientated Xander, lifted him up by the throat before snapping his neck.
“NOOO!” Buffy screamed in rage and horror before she charged the vampiress as she dropped Xander’s body to the floor, hitting her dead in the face with a fist that had the full strength of an enraged Slayer behind it. The force of the blow made the vampiress cry out in pain even as she was sent flying across the warehouse to slam hard enough into the far wall that the sheet metal wall visibly trembled from the force of the impact. Her fury unspent Buffy stalked forward, wishing she had thought to pack a stake in this costume so she could end this undead fiend’s existence right here and now, but she hadn’t. She would just have to settle for beating the vampire to a pulp and come back to finish it off later as even the enhanced healing abilities of vampires had their limits.
Unfortunately, her rage would go unsated as the vampiress, with a speed that proved that she was indeed a master level vampire, got back to her feet and retreated, fleeing out into the night. Buffy growled in anger and was about to follow her when Angel put his hand on her shoulder. “Buffy let her go,” he said softly knowing that if Buffy continued to go after Drusilla in her current state she would end up being killed as insane as she was Drusilla was a dangerous fighter as he, or rather Angelus, had taught her himself. Buffy would need to be clear headed and focused to have any chance of killing Drusilla.
“But she…” Buffy started to protest.
“I know but if you go after her now, especially as you are unarmed then Drusilla will kill you,” Angel replied, “there will be time to deal with her later. With Spike dusted she will be vulnerable, and we can track her down and slay her another time. Right now, you have other things to worry about.”
Buffy looked at him, her eyes burning with rage at seeing Xander be murdered by this Drusilla and demanding he explain more why she shouldn’t just go after the vampiress right now. In answer Angel just gestured back to the assembled kids and Buffy looked to see that many of them were now either staring at Xander’s lifeless body in shock or wailing in distress at seeing someone killed like that. Cordelia was doing her best to comfort them, showing some of the heart of gold that Queen C hid behind her spoiled rich girl/queen of Sunnydale High’s social scene veneer.
Immediately her rage vanished, numbness that she knew would soon turn to grief replacing it.
“You and Cordelia should take the children back to the High School and their parents,” Angel told her softly.
“But what about Xander we can’t just leave him here.”
“Don’t worry about that Buffy. I will handle Xander and get his body to the right people so the appropriate ceremonies and procedures to lay him to rest can be followed.” Angel glanced at Xander’s lifeless, cooling corpse with some sorrow. While it was true that they were rivals for Buffy’s affection, and he knew that Xander disliked him in no small part due to his vampiric nature, he had respected the young man’s courage and determination. You had to respect anyone who voluntarily took up the fight against the more hostile aspects of the supernatural world despite having no powers of their own.
Buffy looked at him for a moment then nodded in understanding before turning to Cordelia. “Cordelia, we need to get the children away from here and back to the school,” she said softly but more than loud enough for the normally spoiled socialite to hear, look up and nod in agreement.
“And Xander,” Cordelia asked, and Buffy was honestly surprised to hear a slight, but real shudder of emotion in her voice. Maybe she and Xander had already started dating, she thought remembering that Xander and Cordelia had been dancing around each other, shooting flirtatious glances at one another for weeks now. Behaviour that had told both her and Willow that they were on the verge of becoming boyfriend and girlfriend. A state that she knew had filled Willow with a combination of jealousy and horror.
Willow.
Oh God Willow this is going to destroy her, she thought knowing that Willow was certain to fall apart when she was told of her lifelong friend’s death. She didn’t really want to be the one to tell her the terrible truth of what had just happened here. But she knew she would have to.
“Angel will deal with him,” she assured Cordelia. Cordelia hesitated for a moment and then nodded once again and between them they began to carefully herd the shocked, frightened and crying children out of the warehouse.
Angel watched them leave then he carefully walked over to Xander’s body and gently picked him up. Immediately he knew something was different to normal as through the clothes beneath his hands he could feel a series of metal objects – six of them in total – running down Xander’s spine. What in the world, he thought as he – still being careful with the cooling body of the young man – he shifted the bodies position enough to be able to pull up his shirt with one hand to see just what the strange circular objects were.
What he saw almost made him drop the body in surprise.
“What the hell,” he said gaping at what he saw in disbelief and a small amount of horror. In the two hundred or so years that he’d lived he had never seen anything like this before, at the back of his mind he could feel even Angelus reeling in surprise, confusion and a small amount of sick fascination. The objects were small circular sockets each about a centimetre and a half in diameter, they were imbedded in Xander’s flesh and looked like they had always been there. Yet he knew for a fact that Xander had had nothing like them there before this evening.
“You could say that again rat breath,” a familiar voice said from behind him making him jump before – still holding Xander’s body – spinning around to find himself face to face with Whistler. The balance demon who’d recruited him to serve the light, and in the process earn redemption for the many horrific crimes he’d committed when he was Angelus, looked like he’d been pole axed by something and it didn’t take a genius to figure out just why.
“Whistler! What the hell is going on here? Do you know what these socket things that have appeared on Xander’s body are?”
“I do indeed,” Whistler admitted. “They’re there because of the spell cast this night by Ethan Rayne, or rather because of what the spell turned him into.”
“But what do metal sockets have to do with Xander having been turned into a space pilot?” Angel asked confused.
“Because he became a type of pilot from a reality on the opposite side of the multiverse from this reality. A reality that the people of this reality think is only a video game franchise which will in a few years be expanded into an online roleplaying game. He was a capsuleer.”
“A what?”
“A capsuleer in their own universe they’re also known as pod pilots or empyrians depending on who you talk to. Through an extremely advanced form of the sciences known as cloning and cybernetics capsuleers are pilots who can be in a very real sense be merged with their ships as in when a capsuleer is plugged in they literally become the ship.”
“Incredible,” Angel breathed shocked as, while he didn’t know a huge amount about modern technology though he was getting better at using it any vampire had to in this day and age if they wanted to survive he knew it would take knowledge and technology centuries or millennia ahead of anything on Earth in order to create something like that. “Wait how come the spell went so in depth as to create cybernetic implants that sophisticated? A fake pistol being turned real I can believe but creating something like these implants?”
“That’s just it the spell shouldn’t have,” Whistler replied. “The spell tonight was always going to happen, it’s an important part of various people’s destinies, but it was never supposed to become what it became or result in the final death of Spike and Xander wasn’t supposed to die.”
“So how did it,” Angel wondered. While he wasn’t an expert on magic, he knew enough about it to know that spells usually worked within relatively tight parameters.
“Someone else interfered and altered the parameters of the spell to accomplish this change. Who they are I do not know so don’t ask,” Whistler replied the last part was of course a lie, he – and the Powers That Be – knew exactly who was behind the massive changes made to the spell and its outcome. Not that he was going to tell Angel that as there was no reason for the ensouled master vampire to know anything about them.
Angel frowned as he immediately suspected that Whistler wasn’t telling him everything. Balance demons never truly told you everything only really what they think you needed to know and no more. “So, what are you telling me this for now Whistler?”
“You needed to know so you can tell the Slayer and her friends that this wasn’t the Powers fault. Also tell Giles that Ethan Rayne is only partially to blame for all of this,” Whistler answered, “oh and if I were you, I would drop the body now.”
Angel was about to open his mouth to ask what Whistler meant by that when he heard it. It was a faint but growing buzzing sound that seemed to be coming from the body he was holding. Alarmed he dropped the body and it wasn’t a moment too soon for as soon as the body hit the concrete floor with a brutal sounding smack it began to glow from within. The outlines of Xander’s body blurred and before his amazed eyes the whole body disintegrated leaving nothing but a human shaped blackened smudge on the floor to show where it had been.
“What the hell caused that,” he asked aloud. When he received no response, he turned to look for Whistler to see that the balance demon had vanished. Oh, I hate it when he does that, he thought mentally grumbling at Whistler’s lack of manners, but then in his experience most demons didn’t care for the little niceties. Then he sighed as another thought occurred to him. How am I going to explain this to Buffy? Maybe just tell her the truth about the cybernetic implants I found and that Xander’s body disintegrated presumably due to a biological self-destruct. Though I wonder who Whistler wasn’t telling me about? He clearly knew far more about what happened to the spell than he was letting on and who was behind it.
After a moment Angel shrugged and headed off in the direction that Buffy and Cordelia had gone with the children. He would tell Buffy and the others the truth and hope to stop Buffy from doing something stupid to a certain Ethan Rayne for setting this whole thing in motion.
~~//~~
Stargate Command
That Same Time
“General Hammond sir.”
Major General George Hammond looked up from the paperwork he was working his way through at the sound of someone calling for him. He had been going over the latest prospective candidates report, with the SGC having been formally reactivated after Apophis’ abortive attack he’d been given the go ahead by the joint chiefs to increase the number of operative SG teams, and welcomed the break from the monotony of reading personnel file after personnel file. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised to find Airman Walter Harriman standing in the doorway.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Sir we just received a report from one of our deep range telescopes on Hawaii,” Walter replied, “they’ve detected an anomaly in orbit above Neptune sir.”
“What kind of anomaly?” George asked instantly worried that it might be Apophis returning to attempt another attack on Earth. An attack he had no idea how they would repel this time given that they’d only survived last time through sheer dumb luck and SG-1 defying Senator Kinsey’s shutdown order and going through the gate only to by pure chance end up aboard one of the motherships heading for Sol.
“It appears to be a very large space station of some kind sir,” Walter replied, “unfortunately they were not able to get many images of it before it disappeared into the penumbra of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon. We estimate it will be eight to twelve hours before they’ll be able to get a view of the station again.”
“And the images they were able to capture?”
“They’ve been sent to us. We’re working to enlarge and enhance them now they should be ready to view in about twenty minutes.”
“Bring them to the briefing room as soon as they’re ready and have SG-1 come to the room as well,” George ordered, though he wasn’t sure what they would be able to do about a potentially, but only potentially, hostile alien space station located so far from Earth. They certainly had no weapons capable of reaching such a station and even if they did there was no guarantee that they’d be anymore effective against whatever defences the station would have than they’d been against the shields surrounding the two ships Apophis had brought to Earth.
“Yes sir,” Walter replied before turning and walking away. George for his part sighed before reaching for and picking up the handset of the red phone on his desk and bringing it to his ear. For a moment more nothing happened then the hotline connected.
“This is Major General Hammond,” he said to the white house switch board operator. “I need to speak to the president.”
“Stand by General.”
For a few moments the phone rang then it was picked up. “Yes, General Hammond?” came the familiar voice of President Julian Marcel. “What is it?”
“Mister President we might have a problem.”
