DocSolarisReich
Esoteric Spaceman
Interesting, it seems there is more of moreness to the Goa'uld here, an actual society as it were. Colour me intrigued.
Stargate Through the Looking Glass and into Heaven.
- Thread starter The Immortal Watch Dog
- Start date
Yeah, that's exactly what I am trying to do. The early seasons of SG1 they were depicted as this incredibly resourceful and ambitious people who manages to punch way above their weight class class achieved Galactic dominance and then that was completely abandoned.
This is my attempt to rectify that and give this SGU a unique perspective I haven't seen a lot of fan fic writers do.
Oh and Anubis being the nice guy is something even Thor and Lya would back up. He was basically the Goa'uld version of King Arthur.
And while Ra was cope posting in his tirade a bit. He isn't full of BS about the Ori.
Chapter 13: Defiance
Alright, bit of a long post, but this is the penultimate chapter. @bullethead @DocSolarisReich @Bear Ribs You guys seem to like the chapters that explore the Goa'uld and their empire.
Ra's perspective again, though with a grain of salt in some cases because. y'know.
Kasuf and O'Neill make a decision.
Chapter 13: Defiance
Nagada
“Kasuf! Your son fired on Amun Ra! The Supreme and divine!” The deep basso voice of the man doing the arguing reverberated through the vast stone interior of Kasuf’s office. Kasuf paid Hadek little notice, his mind was on the argument he had with Shau’re and on the stones of his office, or perhaps stone was the proper word for most of what was left of whatever great City Nagada had been seemed to all be cut from the same massive slab of granite. Or, he realized, as if it were grown this way. He could never detect any seams, any indication that even the corners were set against each other. The place was always cool during the hottest days of the year, always warm at night and always a reminder of what his people could never build again.
Hadek was the City Master of yet another mining City called Sorqet, he was overly cautious and today he was irate that his son had joined with the rebels.
“We’ve all harbored these misgivings, though perhaps in different forms” Sala remarked, he was a tall, gaunt man whose smooth brows and scarecrow like figure contrasted with the massive hands and long white beard that distinguished him as having ancestry from the men who were not men as Ra called them. On Earth they might have been called Neanderthal or perhaps something else, to Ra they made excellent laborers and artisans. It was no coincidence that their species was genetically conquered by mainline homo-sapiens in Europe around the time the rebellion had driven Ra off.
Mostly because Heqet and Set had taken some seventy five percent of the species with them when they left Earth to take up stewardship of territories Ra and Anubis liberated from an Ori hermitage some two centuries prior to the rebellion. Though they could have no way of knowing this, it explained why their features were so exaggerated here. Sala steepled his fingers “I don’t think the distinction matters, Ra may not be a literal divinity, but his powers are so vast he may as well be. What use is a rebellion if he smites us from the Mandjet as he did to Lantesh only, this time to all of us”
Sala was a Farm Master, one of the four rulers of the villages and homesteads and counties that made up the agricultural backbone of the lands around Nagada. For nearly a thousand miles, it was easy to understand his reluctance, his wealth made him the one with the most to lose and perhaps, his seventeen children (ten of which had joined Skara, Kasuf felt Sala’s pain acutely).
Another City Master spat; it was Arish who was nearing his ninetieth year of life. Half blind, he rose leaning on one of his great-great grandchildren. “It was Sobek I owed my allegiance too, Sobek and to the goddess Hathor..Ra was someone I prayed too, but what I saw..what..I..heard at the execution.” He suppressed a shudder; no god could sound like that. Shaking his head, a face gnarled with wrinkles and an incredibly long nose. “Sobek was kind to us, strict perhaps but kind. He shed blood beside us when we faced the great wolves of the desert and while it is true both Sobek and Hathor served Ra, when was the last time anyone saw anyone except Sobek?”
The room grew uncomfortable. “We’re alone.” Arish said his voice wheezy “I shall tell you the last time anyone saw Hathor, it was in the time of my grandfather’s grandfather! Where has she been? Where has anyone been? Sobek killed himself in the desert and it was a great tragedy, but he was no god, not like Hathor and Ra and he was the only who cared, and they never came to help him with whatever madness drove him to wander into the depths of the sand.”
There were many nods in agreement among the farm and city masters and Kasuf had to suppress a sigh. Allowing the realization to dawn on him, that they were going forward with this madness, Skara had forced their hands and now they would make a rebellion. “I wonder, how many of us are doing this to free ourselves from an evil God and how many of us are doing this because our children forced our hand” Kasuf muttered. “I am prepared to follow your votes brothers, but I caution you, we will suffer most gravely should Amun Ra choose to strike back as he did with Lantesh. We would not survive if he chose to smite us”
“We die free, or we die a slave after a lifetime of back breaking mining Naquadah?” Meslet remarked with a shrug of her slender shoulders. At thirty-two, she was the youngest City Master in recent history and rumored to have been a descendant of some of the survivors of Lantesh. “Let us die free, or perhaps in risking death gain freedom for ourselves”
“I wonder” Sala began “How many of us will vote to rebel solely because of our memories of Sobek.” That elicited a chorus of laughter. The truth was that they owed what little trappings of the civilization they lost long ago to Sobek, who instructed them on how to dwell within the ancient walls and to make use of the underground rivers and gardens of the lost cities. He obeyed his Gods yet found loopholes in those demands for obedience that kept them safe and in something approaching comfort.
“What do we do then?” Meslet asked.
“We let the outsiders and our sons make the first move, let their actions serve as a distraction for our movements” Kasuf remarked, and he hated himself for saying it aloud, it was unthinkable to use your own children in such a way and yet, it might have been the only way to save them.
“Agreed”
“Agreed”
“Agreed”
“Agreed”
-I wonder if the rebellion in Lantesh started so easily? - Kasuf thought, ominously.
………
“I don’t understand, you were just, going to stay back and manually detonate the bomb?” Daniel Jackson sat in the fire, Shau’re sitting on his lap, O’Neill had been unusually sullen and quiet since they arrived, knowing Jackson was going to tell them, he hadn’t and that gesture of respect and that dare was enough to force O’Neill to admit it. “Our mission Doctor Jackson was to seek out technology we could bring back to earth if any existed that could be salvaged and if we made contact with any extraterrestrial life, to conduct a threat assessment” He took a long drag of a Marlboro, ordinarily he’d lament the fact that he was running low, but Skara had given him a pouch of space tobacco and some of their papyrus rolls. Kasuf and Skara were clearly more cigar men, or the space equivalent and that fact only added to why enjoyed their company so.
His father had been a cigar man, cigar, bourbon and long hours spent talking with friends. Jack himself was more of a hunter and a fisher, a kid with a potential career as an NFL quarterback who decided to serve his country instead. He didn’t have the patients to stick around for those long nights and long talks and looking back on it, he wished he had. This whole trip had screwed him up but O’Neill was starting to realize, he was already so screwed up that the clusterfuck of picking a fight with a space King probably screwed whatever was loose back on right.
“And what?!” Kowalski asked alarmed “If we find an alien threat, set off a tac nuke in it’s face?!” His tone was terse, and he stopped himself from questioning the fitness of General West for command and O’Neill gave him a sly grin. “Go on, say it”
“Is General West psychotic?” It was Lahm who piped that in, she was leaning on Kowalski’s shoulder, evidently, they’d decided to hook up (them, Jackson, was he running an op or a tacky romance “reality” show?). -He’s lucky she’s a civie- Jack thought with an amused glint in his eyes.
“That’s just great” Daniel muttered “Our first foray into the realm of cosmic politics and our first action is to commit an act of terrorism?!” Daniel almost roared it out. “I thought you spent most of your career fighting suicide bombers, is this like a profiler who starts empathizing with serial killers?!” he winced at the words, realizing how awful they were and to his surprise O’Neill only raised an eyebrow. “Really? You want to aim below like that Jackson? Wake up! We blow the gate they don’t follow us back. Earth safe, Daniel safe, team safe and if you want to talk terrorism their forefathers were abducted by a tyrant and brainwashed into being his slaves!”
“Oh, so we’re gonna fight fire with fire?!”
“Sometimes” O’Neill groused out.
“Te-terrur-eist?” Shau’re mouthed the word out, noting the disgust by which both men used the word and when Daniel explained that it was a word used to describe cowards who used barbarism and fear to achieve a political end. Shau’re understood enough, nodding her head oddly green eyes flickering. She knew the type, though they were less political but more common criminals. Bands of nomadic plunderers who preyed on the caravans (Except those that flew under the banner of Ra, even they weren’t stupid enough to steal from a god). But she didn’t particularly see anything wrong with what he described O’Neill was ordered to execute as far as a last resort went. It was risky to be sure, but they came from far away and ultimately no one really cared about Abydos, except Amun Ra and no one truly understood why. It held an emotional significance to their abductor, but none knew why. There was a chance no one would notice anything until the Ra came and he could have come now, or a dozen lifetimes from now. She had no way of knowing if he would even be able to ascertain who did it. Perhaps one of his own devices worked improperly and caused it?
“We’re assuming the gate can even be destroyed by a Nuke sir” Ferretti chimed in. “I saw a dozen bolts from those staff guns hit the gate and the energy just seemed to be pulled into it. Might be a nuke just offers it a snack”
“Might be the whole damn pyramid comes down it. I was going to set off the bomb in the Gate room, but I can’t do that now” O’Neill growled looking at everyone present. Intimidating as he was, Shau’re could see a profound sadness in him and an indignation that bordered on the fury of the righteous and the vengeful in him as well. -He hates what we have become and what he was asked to do now-.
“But that still doesn’t answer my question Jack” Daniel pressed, using his name for the first time, something that seemed to soften the colonels chiseled face. O’Neill took a breath, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “No parent should ever have to outlive their own kid” He wouldn’t elaborate and thankfully Daniel didn’t press him. O’Neill sat in the firelight, crouched and as hard as steel, a grim statue in the semi dark. Until Skara offered him something to drink, which brought Jack out of it somewhat.
“And now?” Daniel asked.
“It doesn’t matter, I’m not detonating a nuke miles away from a city in a mountain sized pyramid containing who knows what.” Jack was a killer, but he wasn’t a butcher. A marine, even a broken one still had his ethos.
For a moment the group went silent by the firelight, Shau’re eying O’Neill intently, making him wonder if she was starting to speak more English than she let on (Nagadans didn’t need to be shown how to do a thing more than twice, O’Neill wondered if that was the product of genetic engineering or just divergent evolution or whatever). “What happened to your boy?” Jackson finally asked, deciding to confront the elephant in the room head on. O’Neill gave a cold look for a moment before finally relenting. “I taught my girls, Sasha and Sandra how to shoot from the time they were nine, wife came from a military family, I grew up around guns. I knew there’d be plenty in the house and that it was safer if they knew the tool for what it was and how to respect it. Charlie, he..I just never had the time, always on deployment or dealing with his older sisters and their antics. He just, wanted to be close to me and” O’Neill trailed off and tossed a cigarette butt into the open flame, he waited for Daniel to finish translating for Shau’re and Skara and both looked gravely at him, but there was an odd understanding in their eyes. That made a degree of sense O’Neill supposed, they were probably used to seeing accidents like the one he described but with mining gear, they were probably used to seeing grieving fathers. No, Jack realized the familiar look in their eyes told him something similar had happened to a sibling of theirs and yet they offered no Judgment.
He turned to Jackson expecting scorn from the intellectual, who seemed to sense what O’Neill wanted and he shrugged “If you want condemnation you’re going to have to look elsewhere. I have a degree in anthropology y’know? It happens in warrior societies, its awful and they mourn, but it happens, and no blame is assigned save what the parent in question assigns to his or herself”
“Hah! Any of those cultures you know have some ceremony to deal with it? Because it’s got me fucked sideways Jackson” O’Neill muttered.
“Well, the Comanche used to get high on cactus juice and ride out to kill as many enemies as possible as an offering to their kid and their gods” Jackson said with a defiant smirk that made O’Neill laugh.
“My grandmother was Comanche on my mom’s side” O’Neill admitted with a feral grin. “Maybe I should go offer that dog headed fuck who killed our guys to my boy?” He turned to Kowalski a look in his eyes the major hadn’t seen in a long while. One that reminded Kowalski of the O’Neill he knew a decade ago one dealing with grief rather than being brow beaten by it.
“Oorah!” Skara bellowed, eliciting a similar screech from O’Neill and the surviving marines. It seemed, the course was now charted and one free of so much of the weight of before.
“Ra plans to send the bomb through the gate with some Naquadah, he said it would enhance explosive power enough to vaporize the facility, I guess bring the mountain down as well given the way he was bragging” Jackson said finally. “If we’re going to get home, we need to stop that first.” There had been something else, he kept trying to recall, a warning or a boast but it was hard to recall, hard to pinpoint.
O’Neill nodded “Two birds with one stone, alright Jackson” free their space cousins and the cavemen’s descendants and intercept a supercharged nuclear bomb. Sure, he could do that, no biggie, it was what Marines did anyway.
“Hope they declassify this someday” Ferretti remarked “So the corps can add a verse ‘bout kill’n Gods to the song”
“From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli! We fight our country's battles, on land, in space or sea.” Kowalski chimed with a voice so out of tune with the rhythm that Shau’re almost cringed.
“When Ra gets to heaven, he’ll get shitkicked into hell for blasphemy by some of our brother’s running escort duty for saint Peter that’s for damn sure” Ferretti remarked taking a large gulp of whatever the hell Skara had given them, which tasted to him like anis, or some other cane distilled liquor.
“We’re really talking about leading a bunch of bronze age people against a guy who flies around in a pyramid made of silver colored metal using engineering even we can’t understand?” Lahm asked with a raised eyebrow, she knew the Marines were arrogant but good lord. She remembered her father describing the marine corps as a group of men who thought they could all walk on water and do it better than Jesus did. Her time with O’Neill and his marines made her wonder if that was yet another thing Henry Landry was wrong about, then O’Neill decided to be Lawrence of the space Arabians. “Sir, they’ll be annihilated”
“Maybe” O’Neill remarked “and so would we, don’t kid yourself. Next to Ra we’re cavemen scratching at an M1-Abrams trying to figure out how it works. If it were anyone else, we’d be fucked, horribly” O’Neill’s tone caused Lahm to raise an eyebrow. So, this wasn’t a way to couch suicidal tendencies in heroism, he did genuinely have a plan?
“Sir?”
“You saw the same things I did Doc, he let the mask slip a little. And I get the feeling if we came from anywhere not Earth he’d have hopped on his spaceship, taken to orbit and pounded Nagada to sand from space before fuck’n off to space Memphis or someshit” O’Neill handed her some of the sweet liquor which she took and gratefully. “You talked to Jackson about this huh?” she queried with an amused smile, Kowalski, Ferretti and Jackson had gone off to talk with the youth and to translate what Kowalski was telling them about how their guns worked. The enterprising little shits had managed to recover almost all their ammo and gear again making O’Neill wonder if they weren’t naturally intuitive and fast learners, or selectively bred to be that way.
“Yeah, before our little strategy meet” The colonel admitted. “The Dork’s growing on me, plus he saved our lives back there. He sensed it too, the personal animosity Ra has for us. If half the shit he showed us of his memories is half true then he’s way out of our league when he’s got his shit together, hell he’d probably be out of anyone’s league if he had his shit together. But he doesn’t, he isn’t using that big brain of his because he’s so bitter” O’Neill began rolling one of the cigs Skara gave him and ignited it in the fire. “I get the feeling” he began, measuring himself because he didn’t actually like revealing how smart he really was. “That ol’Ra took it a hit after the rebellion. Those hammer ship guys, maybe they sensed weakness and went wild on his ass. Maybe his failure to handle a bunch of naked monkeys made some big-time nobles in his space kingdom sense weakness and maybe they went after him, maybe it was someone he was close too. But it was humiliating enough that Ra was willing to make himself look weak in the long term just to satisfy some personal vendetta.”
She smirked slightly “Colonel, you sound like you’re profiling you know?”
O’Neill shrugged “If you ever got a hold of my service file, you’d find about ninety percent of it redacted. I did a lot of classified work. Some of that involved knocking over certain, undesirables who came to international prominence in the shadows of the collapsed Iron Curtain”. Lahm was likely born in the early nineties; she likely had no idea what it was really like for the first ten years after the USSR fell. At least, in the shadows.
-Was he Delta?- Lahm thought, could marines even be Delta? She might have spent her formative years on bases, but she resented her father too much to really learn much about the inner workings of the military. “I was young then. They used to call me baby face” Jack admitted with a bitter laugh. “but enough of it stayed up here, you hang around enough spooky power players you realize the scale of the game may change but the mentality doesn’t. I know Ra, because I spent my youth killing diet soda versions of that old bastard. Hell: I’ll even be the first to admit a guy who can bring tens of thousands of years of life experience to the table isn’t someone I would ever fuck with under ordinary circumstances. I’d just make a play for gate room and evacuate as many Nagadans as we could and hope Ra didn’t just bring the pyramid down on our heads. But we have a chance, for the same reason I always had a chance. Guys who are accustomed to having to front absolute control, eventually end up believing their own hype and the people who make them remember they’re mortal? Well, it enrages them so much because it scares them. Especially when you blame that person or people for a personal tragedy or someshit”
“I don’t understand?” Lahm asked. Was Jack alleging their ancestors hurt Ra in more ways than just one?
“Not sure, but the more I think about it the more I wonder if it was more than just politics” O’Neill leaned back against the cave wall, outside the wind blasted and within a celebration began.
……….
Mandjet.
He enjoyed the thunder, or perhaps the host did. Ra wasn’t sure which of them had enjoyed the aesthetics of it and of lightning in the skies. Like the Naquadah that fueled much of his technology, Goa’uld could feed on energy to a certain degree and those primitive instincts may have had something to do with it. He was adorned in a cloak of dark black and little else, mostly naked after he had a stint with his temple girls and a eunuch or two (Ra was rather drunk by the time he choked that las tone to death oops), he disliked the carnal excesses that some of the System Lords got up too. But still, their instincts, embracing both the savage within them and the enlightenment had allowed Ra to avenge the death of his parents and with the help of his wife and his brother, and his in-laws. Organize a slave rebellion that took the Goa’uld from being chattel bound to a race of arrogant fools to freed beings and then to masters of their destiny and rulers of the known universe. Slave rebellions, he laughed bitterly at the thought that one was mounting for the second time against himself. Sometimes, he wondered if his mother wasn’t correct in her assessment that there were forces at work in the universe even Ori science couldn’t explain.
Ori science, that was so long ago, had they surpassed them by now? Most likely, not at their peak certainly, when they were one of two branches of a billion-year-old race whose achievements and domains spanned billions of lightyears. But the broken remnants that enslaved his forefathers to use to rebuild their civilization? Yes, Ra realized, they likely had. The Ori had forgotten how to make Stargates, Thoth and Yu and the other one, had learned to replicate the technology. At first fashioning crude gates that were as simplistic in design as the oldest gates the Ori possessed and then, the far more ornate and complex ones that were now spread throughout the empire and connected to the ancient gate network.
Hell, Ba’al the upstart, the youngest of the system lords even found a way to update and upgrade the Gate Network, something the Asgard grudgingly admitted they had only recently learned how to do as well. Ra had granted Ba’al an extra fifty planets for that one as well as the right to maintain estates on Dakkara and send his Jaffa to train under the War Master himself. Technically, those were rights a system lord should have been accorded by default, but in truth Ba’al was only six centuries old, practically an infant and he was dangerously smart and dangerously ambitious and had been a system lord only for a century by the time he’d achieved that. Ra wanted to hold him back for the sake of the empire, but that wasn’t the only tribute he brought to the table. Ba’al and his innovation made the Emperor’s mind wander to the Asgard.
Those stunted bastards! They were ahead of his people as always. Although, the gap was shortening with each passing millennia as the Goa’uld grew while the Asgard began to slowly plateau. Their stagnation and perhaps devolution always mystified him and he long wondered if they were embroiled in conflicts on a similar scale and in overextending themselves, doomed their efforts and their evolution. Asgard, He shuddered at the memory of the agony he’d felt when he’d taken Odin as a host. It was an act of desperation, the Asgard were still strong then, virile and bold and their leader, great king Odin stormed the Mesektet even as she burned and impaled Ra’s host through the heart with some manner of spear made of plasma, turned into crystal by their obscene technology. Odin sneered, pulling him close to mock him.
In that instant, Ra tore from his host’s throat and jumped down Odin’s. The move was disgusting, primitive, something the mindless savages that were his most profane ancestors did and what lower class Goa’uld would do whenever they got tired of one body and wanted another. Ra despised it, in a hundred thousand years, Ra ad taken only four hosts and that had been three too many as far as he was concerned. Odin’s body decayed around him and even his vast healing abilities and the resurrection chamber could only slow the rot down. He could hear Odin laughing at him from within as well. It had been worth it for the knowledge stolen and for the fact that his desperation led him to Tau’Ri.
Tau’Ri, where his people found deliverance and where it all went wrong. After all, it was a human of the Tau’Ri line, the progenitor line that he believed corrupted his beloved daughter. There was movement out behind the curtains in the royal hall as his attendants and warriors prepared for the events of the morning. He could also sense Sek’Het, haunting his steps like a concerned pet. While he’d kept the young man at a distance due to his mongrel of a mother, he admittedly had grown fond of indulging the boy, after all a benevolent God rewarded faithful service and even diluted blood was still blood. Or perhaps he was merely feeling the weight of his age and was growing nostalgic. “You wear that long face for me Sek’Het?” Amun Ra asked.
The Goa’uld first prime who’d been given the honor of donning the Anubis mask bowed deeply. “Forgive me, majestic eminence, but you seem far away. Ever since discovered the interlopers were Tau’Ri”
Ra laughed a soft, slightly feminine laugh. “What do you know of the rebellion on Tau’Ri? Of the rise of that violent faction of Tok’Ra?”.
“Thirty years ago, at the Birth ceremony of Amunet. Lord Apophis grew unfathomably drunk and told us the story” Sek’Het answered, though with a pang of skepticism that made Ra laugh.
“Ah yes, the tragic tale of how my daughter Egeria who was promised to him in marriage was discovered making sexual congress with Amaterasu? And how after I wisely allowed him to torture and rape Amaterasu to prevent a civil war and Egeria and her heretical tutor Prometheus turned the hapless, lazy Tau’Ri against us in vengeance and ingratitude at our benevolence?” Ra spat the last part out in mockery. That story verged dangerously close to sedition and the only reasonhe didn’t have Apophis attainted then butchered was that his domain was too vast to safely divide amongst other System lords and because Apophis himself was the backbone of the Imperial military, making him essential to the empire. Still, Ra thought, he was growing dangerously more brazen, and time would come when he would not be able to ignore the man’s arrogance.
“Apophis is a degenerate; did you know his future queen is a mongrel whose mother was born of a breed barely sentient?” Ra asked with a venom in his voice that made him sound almost like a town gossip.
“I had not” Sek’Het answered, wondering what was said about his mother behind closed doors. “It doesn’t matter I suppose, if he wishes to undermine and debase himself by grooming and then laying with an animal that is his prerogative. The bitch will never attend court and he knows it!” Ra would not have that, thing anywhere near him.
He’d reached out and set a hand on Sek’Het’s massive forearm, an oddly affectionate gesture that made Sek’Het wonder if this nostalgic indulgence was safe. “Come Grandson, walk with your god”. As they two strolled along the moonlit terrace of the outer deck of the Mandjet Ra resumed his tale in earnest.
“I nearly killed Egeria when I pulled her from her mother. Using a host to conceive and deliver a larval queen has always been a dangerous affair, that your grandmother managed to carry and deliver six is a testament to her resilience if not her wisdom” He would not elaborate on why and the not so hidden malice in his tone suggested that if Sek’Het inquired further this pleasant evening with his divine Grandfather would quickly become an exceedingly long fall for him from the balconies of the Mandjet. “But, I hesitated, instead I gave her to one of my closest temple priestesses to incubate. At first, I regarded her as a curiosity, but she eventually earned my love. And I did love her, yes, it is true what I allowed Apophis to do to Amaterasu was the catalyst for her decision to rebel. She loved Amaterasu; it was more than just the romantic triste of two spoiled children. Though I cannot fathom why, Amaterasu is a boring, brooding sow of a woman” But love was often times an absurdity. After all, he loved Hathor for a long time. Until she eradicated his felinoid paramour and her entire species. That, that had been the proverbial pebble which broke the Mastage’s back. “But it was not the true reason, a far more romantic excuse for the purposes of propaganda perhaps, but not the real reason.” Ra paused here, deliberating for a long moment on whether or not he should continue and reveal further truths to a mongrel like Sek’Het. Then he decided he would continue, after all there was a chance the overeager First Prime would be killed tomorrow and he knew to keep his mouth shut in any case.
“Egeria sensed some, potential in the native sentient life amongst the Tau’Ri, she conferred with her first host. She wasn’t wrong about that potential either and she argued that I should encourage my subjects to take not hosts, but partners. That a union between our races, a communion of minds and hearts would breathe not only new life into the empire but perhaps convince our enemies to relent and leave the remaining Ori to their fate at our hands. After all, the Asgard held no love for the race now called the Ancients, though the history books may say differently.” Ra laughed a soft laugh, inclining his head slightly at the memory of the argument. “For a time, I admit, I was considering it…”
That floored Sek’Het who couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Most Goa’uld took hosts that were born brain dead, as they didn’t like having to suppress a personality, others took the terminally ill who volunteered, making a sacrifice for their lords. System lords though generally took what they pleased, though he understood why. Most had the psionic abilities to simply obliterate the mind of the host. It troubled him to imagine himself spending the next five centuries he’d likely be able to keep this body alive listening to the protestations of another, opening himself to its influence. Ra sensing his confusion smiled a truly ancient smile on such a young face. “My boy, we had been fighting the alliance for nearly sixty thousand years. The preposterous Fyryns had been eradicated by then, the Nox had withdrawn into themselves and the last of the damnable Ori were nearly dust and bones. Only the Asgard stood against us, but the first battle of Cimmeria was a disaster for both our races. The second, the one I showed the Tau’ri was but a pale shadow of the first” Ra cursed it, that had been the last time the Goa’uld ever fielded a fleet of a hundred thousand warships. Facing ten thousand Asgard vessels, their true warships in a battle that destroyed two of the twelve planets in that solar system and saw the annihilation of the majority of both their fleets and, their peoples.
That had been when the Goa’uld stopped advancing, when they began to stagnate, why the Tau’Ri were so integral. While Ra believed his people could amass fleets of that size were, they truly pressed now a days, they hadn’t needed too. The Asgard were the only ones left that could face them and potentially beat them and while they had become even more advanced now, they had become an exhausted, over extended people. Ra’s empire had licked its wounds, healed, rebounded with new life. That was all due to humanity, it gave them the breathing room they needed, in the fast multiplying, adaptable species, the hardy Goa’uld found the perfect hosts, their differences complimenting each other, their similarities making them an unstoppable force. “We were exhausted, I was willing to consider many things if it meant sparing my people further war. But considering and accepting are two different things. I had done as she asked and entertained the notion, but the Tau’Ri were a bunch of primitives, barely above the apes that Amaterasu surrounds herself with, or the ones that roam the forest worlds of Set’s domain. There was nothing their minds could offer us that their spirits and their flesh could not…Egeria never forgave me, she lost trust in me” Ra sounded, almost mournful for a moment before it was gone, and it left Sek’Het wondering if it was an echo of the kindness he once possessed or all he had left of his soul.
“After Amaterasu, Egeria's host convinced her that I wasn’t worth trying to save. And with that ancient fool, Prometheus began encouraging the Tau’Ri to question our doctrine, by that point we had ruled their world for twelve thousand years and spread them amongst the stars across countless worlds. The populations on many of those worlds even exceeded Tau’Ri, no they began the rebellion there because it was a symbolic blow, and it invited the Asgard to make one final, desperate push”
After that, the one who would not be named rebelled. His horror and madness were enough to stay the Asgard, who allowed Ra and Apophis to put an end to that. The fact that Ra had to beg for a reprieve from the Asgard, that Tau’Ri had stolen his most precious child, the one whose character was the closest to what he had originally been. All of it compounded “I had to kill them, Prometheus my oldest friend, my mentor and Egeria my dearest daughter? All because some savages got it in their heads to listen to the words of a senile old fool and a broken-hearted child?! It all went wrong on Tau’Ri, amongst the Tau’Ri”
Sek’Het was both touched and horrified, on the one hand he had evidently allowed Apophis to rape and torture Amaterasu, he had forced Egeria into that marriage (This was expected of course, even Gods had duties to attend too), it was almost touching how Amun Ra refused to hate Egeria and instead blamed the Tau’Ri for her sins and yet. He was now more convinced than ever that his grandfather was as dangerous as he was glorious. Sek’Het fell to one knee “Tomorrow, I shall not fail you grandfather. I swear on our blood”
A smile one part genuine and entirely brimming with malice danced across his youthful features. “Bring me the heart of the one called O’Neill and you will be granted a resurrection chamber fit for you and your wife and the right to breed. You will take your place as a lord of worlds governing on behalf of the Gods.”
Sek’Het for the first time in decades felt his sullen mood vanish.
“All Hail Amun-Ra, Emperor of the Second Dynasty, the exalted, the master of death, the deliverer of the Goa’uld! God of Gods! Lord Most High!”
Ra's perspective again, though with a grain of salt in some cases because. y'know.
Kasuf and O'Neill make a decision.
Chapter 13: Defiance
Nagada
“Kasuf! Your son fired on Amun Ra! The Supreme and divine!” The deep basso voice of the man doing the arguing reverberated through the vast stone interior of Kasuf’s office. Kasuf paid Hadek little notice, his mind was on the argument he had with Shau’re and on the stones of his office, or perhaps stone was the proper word for most of what was left of whatever great City Nagada had been seemed to all be cut from the same massive slab of granite. Or, he realized, as if it were grown this way. He could never detect any seams, any indication that even the corners were set against each other. The place was always cool during the hottest days of the year, always warm at night and always a reminder of what his people could never build again.
Hadek was the City Master of yet another mining City called Sorqet, he was overly cautious and today he was irate that his son had joined with the rebels.
“We’ve all harbored these misgivings, though perhaps in different forms” Sala remarked, he was a tall, gaunt man whose smooth brows and scarecrow like figure contrasted with the massive hands and long white beard that distinguished him as having ancestry from the men who were not men as Ra called them. On Earth they might have been called Neanderthal or perhaps something else, to Ra they made excellent laborers and artisans. It was no coincidence that their species was genetically conquered by mainline homo-sapiens in Europe around the time the rebellion had driven Ra off.
Mostly because Heqet and Set had taken some seventy five percent of the species with them when they left Earth to take up stewardship of territories Ra and Anubis liberated from an Ori hermitage some two centuries prior to the rebellion. Though they could have no way of knowing this, it explained why their features were so exaggerated here. Sala steepled his fingers “I don’t think the distinction matters, Ra may not be a literal divinity, but his powers are so vast he may as well be. What use is a rebellion if he smites us from the Mandjet as he did to Lantesh only, this time to all of us”
Sala was a Farm Master, one of the four rulers of the villages and homesteads and counties that made up the agricultural backbone of the lands around Nagada. For nearly a thousand miles, it was easy to understand his reluctance, his wealth made him the one with the most to lose and perhaps, his seventeen children (ten of which had joined Skara, Kasuf felt Sala’s pain acutely).
Another City Master spat; it was Arish who was nearing his ninetieth year of life. Half blind, he rose leaning on one of his great-great grandchildren. “It was Sobek I owed my allegiance too, Sobek and to the goddess Hathor..Ra was someone I prayed too, but what I saw..what..I..heard at the execution.” He suppressed a shudder; no god could sound like that. Shaking his head, a face gnarled with wrinkles and an incredibly long nose. “Sobek was kind to us, strict perhaps but kind. He shed blood beside us when we faced the great wolves of the desert and while it is true both Sobek and Hathor served Ra, when was the last time anyone saw anyone except Sobek?”
The room grew uncomfortable. “We’re alone.” Arish said his voice wheezy “I shall tell you the last time anyone saw Hathor, it was in the time of my grandfather’s grandfather! Where has she been? Where has anyone been? Sobek killed himself in the desert and it was a great tragedy, but he was no god, not like Hathor and Ra and he was the only who cared, and they never came to help him with whatever madness drove him to wander into the depths of the sand.”
There were many nods in agreement among the farm and city masters and Kasuf had to suppress a sigh. Allowing the realization to dawn on him, that they were going forward with this madness, Skara had forced their hands and now they would make a rebellion. “I wonder, how many of us are doing this to free ourselves from an evil God and how many of us are doing this because our children forced our hand” Kasuf muttered. “I am prepared to follow your votes brothers, but I caution you, we will suffer most gravely should Amun Ra choose to strike back as he did with Lantesh. We would not survive if he chose to smite us”
“We die free, or we die a slave after a lifetime of back breaking mining Naquadah?” Meslet remarked with a shrug of her slender shoulders. At thirty-two, she was the youngest City Master in recent history and rumored to have been a descendant of some of the survivors of Lantesh. “Let us die free, or perhaps in risking death gain freedom for ourselves”
“I wonder” Sala began “How many of us will vote to rebel solely because of our memories of Sobek.” That elicited a chorus of laughter. The truth was that they owed what little trappings of the civilization they lost long ago to Sobek, who instructed them on how to dwell within the ancient walls and to make use of the underground rivers and gardens of the lost cities. He obeyed his Gods yet found loopholes in those demands for obedience that kept them safe and in something approaching comfort.
“What do we do then?” Meslet asked.
“We let the outsiders and our sons make the first move, let their actions serve as a distraction for our movements” Kasuf remarked, and he hated himself for saying it aloud, it was unthinkable to use your own children in such a way and yet, it might have been the only way to save them.
“Agreed”
“Agreed”
“Agreed”
“Agreed”
-I wonder if the rebellion in Lantesh started so easily? - Kasuf thought, ominously.
………
“I don’t understand, you were just, going to stay back and manually detonate the bomb?” Daniel Jackson sat in the fire, Shau’re sitting on his lap, O’Neill had been unusually sullen and quiet since they arrived, knowing Jackson was going to tell them, he hadn’t and that gesture of respect and that dare was enough to force O’Neill to admit it. “Our mission Doctor Jackson was to seek out technology we could bring back to earth if any existed that could be salvaged and if we made contact with any extraterrestrial life, to conduct a threat assessment” He took a long drag of a Marlboro, ordinarily he’d lament the fact that he was running low, but Skara had given him a pouch of space tobacco and some of their papyrus rolls. Kasuf and Skara were clearly more cigar men, or the space equivalent and that fact only added to why enjoyed their company so.
His father had been a cigar man, cigar, bourbon and long hours spent talking with friends. Jack himself was more of a hunter and a fisher, a kid with a potential career as an NFL quarterback who decided to serve his country instead. He didn’t have the patients to stick around for those long nights and long talks and looking back on it, he wished he had. This whole trip had screwed him up but O’Neill was starting to realize, he was already so screwed up that the clusterfuck of picking a fight with a space King probably screwed whatever was loose back on right.
“And what?!” Kowalski asked alarmed “If we find an alien threat, set off a tac nuke in it’s face?!” His tone was terse, and he stopped himself from questioning the fitness of General West for command and O’Neill gave him a sly grin. “Go on, say it”
“Is General West psychotic?” It was Lahm who piped that in, she was leaning on Kowalski’s shoulder, evidently, they’d decided to hook up (them, Jackson, was he running an op or a tacky romance “reality” show?). -He’s lucky she’s a civie- Jack thought with an amused glint in his eyes.
“That’s just great” Daniel muttered “Our first foray into the realm of cosmic politics and our first action is to commit an act of terrorism?!” Daniel almost roared it out. “I thought you spent most of your career fighting suicide bombers, is this like a profiler who starts empathizing with serial killers?!” he winced at the words, realizing how awful they were and to his surprise O’Neill only raised an eyebrow. “Really? You want to aim below like that Jackson? Wake up! We blow the gate they don’t follow us back. Earth safe, Daniel safe, team safe and if you want to talk terrorism their forefathers were abducted by a tyrant and brainwashed into being his slaves!”
“Oh, so we’re gonna fight fire with fire?!”
“Sometimes” O’Neill groused out.
“Te-terrur-eist?” Shau’re mouthed the word out, noting the disgust by which both men used the word and when Daniel explained that it was a word used to describe cowards who used barbarism and fear to achieve a political end. Shau’re understood enough, nodding her head oddly green eyes flickering. She knew the type, though they were less political but more common criminals. Bands of nomadic plunderers who preyed on the caravans (Except those that flew under the banner of Ra, even they weren’t stupid enough to steal from a god). But she didn’t particularly see anything wrong with what he described O’Neill was ordered to execute as far as a last resort went. It was risky to be sure, but they came from far away and ultimately no one really cared about Abydos, except Amun Ra and no one truly understood why. It held an emotional significance to their abductor, but none knew why. There was a chance no one would notice anything until the Ra came and he could have come now, or a dozen lifetimes from now. She had no way of knowing if he would even be able to ascertain who did it. Perhaps one of his own devices worked improperly and caused it?
“We’re assuming the gate can even be destroyed by a Nuke sir” Ferretti chimed in. “I saw a dozen bolts from those staff guns hit the gate and the energy just seemed to be pulled into it. Might be a nuke just offers it a snack”
“Might be the whole damn pyramid comes down it. I was going to set off the bomb in the Gate room, but I can’t do that now” O’Neill growled looking at everyone present. Intimidating as he was, Shau’re could see a profound sadness in him and an indignation that bordered on the fury of the righteous and the vengeful in him as well. -He hates what we have become and what he was asked to do now-.
“But that still doesn’t answer my question Jack” Daniel pressed, using his name for the first time, something that seemed to soften the colonels chiseled face. O’Neill took a breath, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “No parent should ever have to outlive their own kid” He wouldn’t elaborate and thankfully Daniel didn’t press him. O’Neill sat in the firelight, crouched and as hard as steel, a grim statue in the semi dark. Until Skara offered him something to drink, which brought Jack out of it somewhat.
“And now?” Daniel asked.
“It doesn’t matter, I’m not detonating a nuke miles away from a city in a mountain sized pyramid containing who knows what.” Jack was a killer, but he wasn’t a butcher. A marine, even a broken one still had his ethos.
For a moment the group went silent by the firelight, Shau’re eying O’Neill intently, making him wonder if she was starting to speak more English than she let on (Nagadans didn’t need to be shown how to do a thing more than twice, O’Neill wondered if that was the product of genetic engineering or just divergent evolution or whatever). “What happened to your boy?” Jackson finally asked, deciding to confront the elephant in the room head on. O’Neill gave a cold look for a moment before finally relenting. “I taught my girls, Sasha and Sandra how to shoot from the time they were nine, wife came from a military family, I grew up around guns. I knew there’d be plenty in the house and that it was safer if they knew the tool for what it was and how to respect it. Charlie, he..I just never had the time, always on deployment or dealing with his older sisters and their antics. He just, wanted to be close to me and” O’Neill trailed off and tossed a cigarette butt into the open flame, he waited for Daniel to finish translating for Shau’re and Skara and both looked gravely at him, but there was an odd understanding in their eyes. That made a degree of sense O’Neill supposed, they were probably used to seeing accidents like the one he described but with mining gear, they were probably used to seeing grieving fathers. No, Jack realized the familiar look in their eyes told him something similar had happened to a sibling of theirs and yet they offered no Judgment.
He turned to Jackson expecting scorn from the intellectual, who seemed to sense what O’Neill wanted and he shrugged “If you want condemnation you’re going to have to look elsewhere. I have a degree in anthropology y’know? It happens in warrior societies, its awful and they mourn, but it happens, and no blame is assigned save what the parent in question assigns to his or herself”
“Hah! Any of those cultures you know have some ceremony to deal with it? Because it’s got me fucked sideways Jackson” O’Neill muttered.
“Well, the Comanche used to get high on cactus juice and ride out to kill as many enemies as possible as an offering to their kid and their gods” Jackson said with a defiant smirk that made O’Neill laugh.
“My grandmother was Comanche on my mom’s side” O’Neill admitted with a feral grin. “Maybe I should go offer that dog headed fuck who killed our guys to my boy?” He turned to Kowalski a look in his eyes the major hadn’t seen in a long while. One that reminded Kowalski of the O’Neill he knew a decade ago one dealing with grief rather than being brow beaten by it.
“Oorah!” Skara bellowed, eliciting a similar screech from O’Neill and the surviving marines. It seemed, the course was now charted and one free of so much of the weight of before.
“Ra plans to send the bomb through the gate with some Naquadah, he said it would enhance explosive power enough to vaporize the facility, I guess bring the mountain down as well given the way he was bragging” Jackson said finally. “If we’re going to get home, we need to stop that first.” There had been something else, he kept trying to recall, a warning or a boast but it was hard to recall, hard to pinpoint.
O’Neill nodded “Two birds with one stone, alright Jackson” free their space cousins and the cavemen’s descendants and intercept a supercharged nuclear bomb. Sure, he could do that, no biggie, it was what Marines did anyway.
“Hope they declassify this someday” Ferretti remarked “So the corps can add a verse ‘bout kill’n Gods to the song”
“From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli! We fight our country's battles, on land, in space or sea.” Kowalski chimed with a voice so out of tune with the rhythm that Shau’re almost cringed.
“When Ra gets to heaven, he’ll get shitkicked into hell for blasphemy by some of our brother’s running escort duty for saint Peter that’s for damn sure” Ferretti remarked taking a large gulp of whatever the hell Skara had given them, which tasted to him like anis, or some other cane distilled liquor.
“We’re really talking about leading a bunch of bronze age people against a guy who flies around in a pyramid made of silver colored metal using engineering even we can’t understand?” Lahm asked with a raised eyebrow, she knew the Marines were arrogant but good lord. She remembered her father describing the marine corps as a group of men who thought they could all walk on water and do it better than Jesus did. Her time with O’Neill and his marines made her wonder if that was yet another thing Henry Landry was wrong about, then O’Neill decided to be Lawrence of the space Arabians. “Sir, they’ll be annihilated”
“Maybe” O’Neill remarked “and so would we, don’t kid yourself. Next to Ra we’re cavemen scratching at an M1-Abrams trying to figure out how it works. If it were anyone else, we’d be fucked, horribly” O’Neill’s tone caused Lahm to raise an eyebrow. So, this wasn’t a way to couch suicidal tendencies in heroism, he did genuinely have a plan?
“Sir?”
“You saw the same things I did Doc, he let the mask slip a little. And I get the feeling if we came from anywhere not Earth he’d have hopped on his spaceship, taken to orbit and pounded Nagada to sand from space before fuck’n off to space Memphis or someshit” O’Neill handed her some of the sweet liquor which she took and gratefully. “You talked to Jackson about this huh?” she queried with an amused smile, Kowalski, Ferretti and Jackson had gone off to talk with the youth and to translate what Kowalski was telling them about how their guns worked. The enterprising little shits had managed to recover almost all their ammo and gear again making O’Neill wonder if they weren’t naturally intuitive and fast learners, or selectively bred to be that way.
“Yeah, before our little strategy meet” The colonel admitted. “The Dork’s growing on me, plus he saved our lives back there. He sensed it too, the personal animosity Ra has for us. If half the shit he showed us of his memories is half true then he’s way out of our league when he’s got his shit together, hell he’d probably be out of anyone’s league if he had his shit together. But he doesn’t, he isn’t using that big brain of his because he’s so bitter” O’Neill began rolling one of the cigs Skara gave him and ignited it in the fire. “I get the feeling” he began, measuring himself because he didn’t actually like revealing how smart he really was. “That ol’Ra took it a hit after the rebellion. Those hammer ship guys, maybe they sensed weakness and went wild on his ass. Maybe his failure to handle a bunch of naked monkeys made some big-time nobles in his space kingdom sense weakness and maybe they went after him, maybe it was someone he was close too. But it was humiliating enough that Ra was willing to make himself look weak in the long term just to satisfy some personal vendetta.”
She smirked slightly “Colonel, you sound like you’re profiling you know?”
O’Neill shrugged “If you ever got a hold of my service file, you’d find about ninety percent of it redacted. I did a lot of classified work. Some of that involved knocking over certain, undesirables who came to international prominence in the shadows of the collapsed Iron Curtain”. Lahm was likely born in the early nineties; she likely had no idea what it was really like for the first ten years after the USSR fell. At least, in the shadows.
-Was he Delta?- Lahm thought, could marines even be Delta? She might have spent her formative years on bases, but she resented her father too much to really learn much about the inner workings of the military. “I was young then. They used to call me baby face” Jack admitted with a bitter laugh. “but enough of it stayed up here, you hang around enough spooky power players you realize the scale of the game may change but the mentality doesn’t. I know Ra, because I spent my youth killing diet soda versions of that old bastard. Hell: I’ll even be the first to admit a guy who can bring tens of thousands of years of life experience to the table isn’t someone I would ever fuck with under ordinary circumstances. I’d just make a play for gate room and evacuate as many Nagadans as we could and hope Ra didn’t just bring the pyramid down on our heads. But we have a chance, for the same reason I always had a chance. Guys who are accustomed to having to front absolute control, eventually end up believing their own hype and the people who make them remember they’re mortal? Well, it enrages them so much because it scares them. Especially when you blame that person or people for a personal tragedy or someshit”
“I don’t understand?” Lahm asked. Was Jack alleging their ancestors hurt Ra in more ways than just one?
“Not sure, but the more I think about it the more I wonder if it was more than just politics” O’Neill leaned back against the cave wall, outside the wind blasted and within a celebration began.
……….
Mandjet.
He enjoyed the thunder, or perhaps the host did. Ra wasn’t sure which of them had enjoyed the aesthetics of it and of lightning in the skies. Like the Naquadah that fueled much of his technology, Goa’uld could feed on energy to a certain degree and those primitive instincts may have had something to do with it. He was adorned in a cloak of dark black and little else, mostly naked after he had a stint with his temple girls and a eunuch or two (Ra was rather drunk by the time he choked that las tone to death oops), he disliked the carnal excesses that some of the System Lords got up too. But still, their instincts, embracing both the savage within them and the enlightenment had allowed Ra to avenge the death of his parents and with the help of his wife and his brother, and his in-laws. Organize a slave rebellion that took the Goa’uld from being chattel bound to a race of arrogant fools to freed beings and then to masters of their destiny and rulers of the known universe. Slave rebellions, he laughed bitterly at the thought that one was mounting for the second time against himself. Sometimes, he wondered if his mother wasn’t correct in her assessment that there were forces at work in the universe even Ori science couldn’t explain.
Ori science, that was so long ago, had they surpassed them by now? Most likely, not at their peak certainly, when they were one of two branches of a billion-year-old race whose achievements and domains spanned billions of lightyears. But the broken remnants that enslaved his forefathers to use to rebuild their civilization? Yes, Ra realized, they likely had. The Ori had forgotten how to make Stargates, Thoth and Yu and the other one, had learned to replicate the technology. At first fashioning crude gates that were as simplistic in design as the oldest gates the Ori possessed and then, the far more ornate and complex ones that were now spread throughout the empire and connected to the ancient gate network.
Hell, Ba’al the upstart, the youngest of the system lords even found a way to update and upgrade the Gate Network, something the Asgard grudgingly admitted they had only recently learned how to do as well. Ra had granted Ba’al an extra fifty planets for that one as well as the right to maintain estates on Dakkara and send his Jaffa to train under the War Master himself. Technically, those were rights a system lord should have been accorded by default, but in truth Ba’al was only six centuries old, practically an infant and he was dangerously smart and dangerously ambitious and had been a system lord only for a century by the time he’d achieved that. Ra wanted to hold him back for the sake of the empire, but that wasn’t the only tribute he brought to the table. Ba’al and his innovation made the Emperor’s mind wander to the Asgard.
Those stunted bastards! They were ahead of his people as always. Although, the gap was shortening with each passing millennia as the Goa’uld grew while the Asgard began to slowly plateau. Their stagnation and perhaps devolution always mystified him and he long wondered if they were embroiled in conflicts on a similar scale and in overextending themselves, doomed their efforts and their evolution. Asgard, He shuddered at the memory of the agony he’d felt when he’d taken Odin as a host. It was an act of desperation, the Asgard were still strong then, virile and bold and their leader, great king Odin stormed the Mesektet even as she burned and impaled Ra’s host through the heart with some manner of spear made of plasma, turned into crystal by their obscene technology. Odin sneered, pulling him close to mock him.
In that instant, Ra tore from his host’s throat and jumped down Odin’s. The move was disgusting, primitive, something the mindless savages that were his most profane ancestors did and what lower class Goa’uld would do whenever they got tired of one body and wanted another. Ra despised it, in a hundred thousand years, Ra ad taken only four hosts and that had been three too many as far as he was concerned. Odin’s body decayed around him and even his vast healing abilities and the resurrection chamber could only slow the rot down. He could hear Odin laughing at him from within as well. It had been worth it for the knowledge stolen and for the fact that his desperation led him to Tau’Ri.
Tau’Ri, where his people found deliverance and where it all went wrong. After all, it was a human of the Tau’Ri line, the progenitor line that he believed corrupted his beloved daughter. There was movement out behind the curtains in the royal hall as his attendants and warriors prepared for the events of the morning. He could also sense Sek’Het, haunting his steps like a concerned pet. While he’d kept the young man at a distance due to his mongrel of a mother, he admittedly had grown fond of indulging the boy, after all a benevolent God rewarded faithful service and even diluted blood was still blood. Or perhaps he was merely feeling the weight of his age and was growing nostalgic. “You wear that long face for me Sek’Het?” Amun Ra asked.
The Goa’uld first prime who’d been given the honor of donning the Anubis mask bowed deeply. “Forgive me, majestic eminence, but you seem far away. Ever since discovered the interlopers were Tau’Ri”
Ra laughed a soft, slightly feminine laugh. “What do you know of the rebellion on Tau’Ri? Of the rise of that violent faction of Tok’Ra?”.
“Thirty years ago, at the Birth ceremony of Amunet. Lord Apophis grew unfathomably drunk and told us the story” Sek’Het answered, though with a pang of skepticism that made Ra laugh.
“Ah yes, the tragic tale of how my daughter Egeria who was promised to him in marriage was discovered making sexual congress with Amaterasu? And how after I wisely allowed him to torture and rape Amaterasu to prevent a civil war and Egeria and her heretical tutor Prometheus turned the hapless, lazy Tau’Ri against us in vengeance and ingratitude at our benevolence?” Ra spat the last part out in mockery. That story verged dangerously close to sedition and the only reasonhe didn’t have Apophis attainted then butchered was that his domain was too vast to safely divide amongst other System lords and because Apophis himself was the backbone of the Imperial military, making him essential to the empire. Still, Ra thought, he was growing dangerously more brazen, and time would come when he would not be able to ignore the man’s arrogance.
“Apophis is a degenerate; did you know his future queen is a mongrel whose mother was born of a breed barely sentient?” Ra asked with a venom in his voice that made him sound almost like a town gossip.
“I had not” Sek’Het answered, wondering what was said about his mother behind closed doors. “It doesn’t matter I suppose, if he wishes to undermine and debase himself by grooming and then laying with an animal that is his prerogative. The bitch will never attend court and he knows it!” Ra would not have that, thing anywhere near him.
He’d reached out and set a hand on Sek’Het’s massive forearm, an oddly affectionate gesture that made Sek’Het wonder if this nostalgic indulgence was safe. “Come Grandson, walk with your god”. As they two strolled along the moonlit terrace of the outer deck of the Mandjet Ra resumed his tale in earnest.
“I nearly killed Egeria when I pulled her from her mother. Using a host to conceive and deliver a larval queen has always been a dangerous affair, that your grandmother managed to carry and deliver six is a testament to her resilience if not her wisdom” He would not elaborate on why and the not so hidden malice in his tone suggested that if Sek’Het inquired further this pleasant evening with his divine Grandfather would quickly become an exceedingly long fall for him from the balconies of the Mandjet. “But, I hesitated, instead I gave her to one of my closest temple priestesses to incubate. At first, I regarded her as a curiosity, but she eventually earned my love. And I did love her, yes, it is true what I allowed Apophis to do to Amaterasu was the catalyst for her decision to rebel. She loved Amaterasu; it was more than just the romantic triste of two spoiled children. Though I cannot fathom why, Amaterasu is a boring, brooding sow of a woman” But love was often times an absurdity. After all, he loved Hathor for a long time. Until she eradicated his felinoid paramour and her entire species. That, that had been the proverbial pebble which broke the Mastage’s back. “But it was not the true reason, a far more romantic excuse for the purposes of propaganda perhaps, but not the real reason.” Ra paused here, deliberating for a long moment on whether or not he should continue and reveal further truths to a mongrel like Sek’Het. Then he decided he would continue, after all there was a chance the overeager First Prime would be killed tomorrow and he knew to keep his mouth shut in any case.
“Egeria sensed some, potential in the native sentient life amongst the Tau’Ri, she conferred with her first host. She wasn’t wrong about that potential either and she argued that I should encourage my subjects to take not hosts, but partners. That a union between our races, a communion of minds and hearts would breathe not only new life into the empire but perhaps convince our enemies to relent and leave the remaining Ori to their fate at our hands. After all, the Asgard held no love for the race now called the Ancients, though the history books may say differently.” Ra laughed a soft laugh, inclining his head slightly at the memory of the argument. “For a time, I admit, I was considering it…”
That floored Sek’Het who couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Most Goa’uld took hosts that were born brain dead, as they didn’t like having to suppress a personality, others took the terminally ill who volunteered, making a sacrifice for their lords. System lords though generally took what they pleased, though he understood why. Most had the psionic abilities to simply obliterate the mind of the host. It troubled him to imagine himself spending the next five centuries he’d likely be able to keep this body alive listening to the protestations of another, opening himself to its influence. Ra sensing his confusion smiled a truly ancient smile on such a young face. “My boy, we had been fighting the alliance for nearly sixty thousand years. The preposterous Fyryns had been eradicated by then, the Nox had withdrawn into themselves and the last of the damnable Ori were nearly dust and bones. Only the Asgard stood against us, but the first battle of Cimmeria was a disaster for both our races. The second, the one I showed the Tau’ri was but a pale shadow of the first” Ra cursed it, that had been the last time the Goa’uld ever fielded a fleet of a hundred thousand warships. Facing ten thousand Asgard vessels, their true warships in a battle that destroyed two of the twelve planets in that solar system and saw the annihilation of the majority of both their fleets and, their peoples.
That had been when the Goa’uld stopped advancing, when they began to stagnate, why the Tau’Ri were so integral. While Ra believed his people could amass fleets of that size were, they truly pressed now a days, they hadn’t needed too. The Asgard were the only ones left that could face them and potentially beat them and while they had become even more advanced now, they had become an exhausted, over extended people. Ra’s empire had licked its wounds, healed, rebounded with new life. That was all due to humanity, it gave them the breathing room they needed, in the fast multiplying, adaptable species, the hardy Goa’uld found the perfect hosts, their differences complimenting each other, their similarities making them an unstoppable force. “We were exhausted, I was willing to consider many things if it meant sparing my people further war. But considering and accepting are two different things. I had done as she asked and entertained the notion, but the Tau’Ri were a bunch of primitives, barely above the apes that Amaterasu surrounds herself with, or the ones that roam the forest worlds of Set’s domain. There was nothing their minds could offer us that their spirits and their flesh could not…Egeria never forgave me, she lost trust in me” Ra sounded, almost mournful for a moment before it was gone, and it left Sek’Het wondering if it was an echo of the kindness he once possessed or all he had left of his soul.
“After Amaterasu, Egeria's host convinced her that I wasn’t worth trying to save. And with that ancient fool, Prometheus began encouraging the Tau’Ri to question our doctrine, by that point we had ruled their world for twelve thousand years and spread them amongst the stars across countless worlds. The populations on many of those worlds even exceeded Tau’Ri, no they began the rebellion there because it was a symbolic blow, and it invited the Asgard to make one final, desperate push”
After that, the one who would not be named rebelled. His horror and madness were enough to stay the Asgard, who allowed Ra and Apophis to put an end to that. The fact that Ra had to beg for a reprieve from the Asgard, that Tau’Ri had stolen his most precious child, the one whose character was the closest to what he had originally been. All of it compounded “I had to kill them, Prometheus my oldest friend, my mentor and Egeria my dearest daughter? All because some savages got it in their heads to listen to the words of a senile old fool and a broken-hearted child?! It all went wrong on Tau’Ri, amongst the Tau’Ri”
Sek’Het was both touched and horrified, on the one hand he had evidently allowed Apophis to rape and torture Amaterasu, he had forced Egeria into that marriage (This was expected of course, even Gods had duties to attend too), it was almost touching how Amun Ra refused to hate Egeria and instead blamed the Tau’Ri for her sins and yet. He was now more convinced than ever that his grandfather was as dangerous as he was glorious. Sek’Het fell to one knee “Tomorrow, I shall not fail you grandfather. I swear on our blood”
A smile one part genuine and entirely brimming with malice danced across his youthful features. “Bring me the heart of the one called O’Neill and you will be granted a resurrection chamber fit for you and your wife and the right to breed. You will take your place as a lord of worlds governing on behalf of the Gods.”
Sek’Het for the first time in decades felt his sullen mood vanish.
“All Hail Amun-Ra, Emperor of the Second Dynasty, the exalted, the master of death, the deliverer of the Goa’uld! God of Gods! Lord Most High!”
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Alright gents, sorry for the radio silence...the final chapters of the "movie" are almost done.
The procession reaches the Pyramid complex, O'Neill and Skara start a party...And the final battle begins!
The procession reaches the Pyramid complex, O'Neill and Skara start a party...And the final battle begins!
Chapter 14: Rebellion
Chapter 14: Rebellion
The Pyramid Complex.
The entrance to the primary great Pyramid seemed to glisten in the morning sun. Reflecting the pinks and golds of a star breaking through the night to illuminate a sleepy world. A world on the brink of change, a world of the brink of cataclysm or, liberation. Banners flapped in the breeze on raised poles that seemed to grow out of the smooth stone of the walkway. Each one depicting a different god, the black Eagle in whose talons a lightning bolt was clutched, the Scythe radiating lightning. The Golden Cobra on crimson with pink eyes flapped in the breeze beside a falcon like bird that held a spear in one hand and a scroll in the other. The Flower blazing like a rising sun on a field of white and another Falcon like alien flying through the heavens. Zeus, Ba’al, Apophis, Horus, Amaterasu and Osiris. The Horus Guard, the Elite fighting units of the armies of Ra, a dozen standing like statues, the sun glinting off their headpieces and breastplate. The jeweled spear like tip of their staff weapons sparkled as the first of what would be tow dozen caravans showed up. The first, dispatched from Nagada would have the honor of being transported to Ra’s vessel, gifted as tribute to the Godhead, while the rest would go through the Stargate to Thapseh the Capital of this backwater part of Ra’s domain. All in all, two hundred youths hauling carts that were ordinarily filled with Naquadah and various carved items and precious gems and grain and silk produced by sea snails. Today, they were carrying more than just their usual compliment of tribute, but a bunch of ammo, a pair of rocket launchers, two dozen grenades and one incredibly annoyed Ferretti who was ordered to hide under the tarp of one of the carts.
The guards had been under orders to search anyone who came before the entrance to the pyramid, but most were so accustomed to absolutely nothing happening that the once legendary discipline of the Jaffa lapsed enough that the lead cart and two others managed to get through the main entrance before an irate senior Horus Guard with gold tipped “feathers” on his headdress called out furiously to his men outside, ordering them to stop the carts. Grumbles of protestation from both guards and subjects followed as the armored killers began searching the carts, tarps were angrily pulled back and from outside there was a loud exclamation.
The Senior Horus guard huffed and leveled his gaze on the tallest of the robed and hooded supplicants, pulling it back to espy a tall, chiseled Tau’Ri in a crew cut smirking at him. “How ya doin?” O’Neill asked with mock flirtation, the Horus Guard was about to let out a scream, but his arm simply disappeared, followed by a blast that impacted the space between armor on his ribs. Courtesy of Shau’re who had grabbed one of the staff weapons they’d stolen in the prior engagement. As his cored corpse began to topple, the second in the room converged on their location. O’Neill pulled an M27 out from under the tarp and managed to unload into the attacker, blood spraying from his legs and midsection. A third was on O’Neill faster than he could react to him and had hoisted him up by the throat with both hands, spewing curses in their language at hm. Outside, the area erupted in weapons fire and energy blasts as Kowalski and Skara were able to grab a pair staff weapons, adding their fire to the frantic gun blasts. By the sound of it, they’d managed to kill four of the twelve in the opening seconds, but someone had been shot.
As O’Neill stood dangling in the air the Jaffa was forced to turn and drop him, crying out in alarm as the tarp covering the cart erupted, taking the shape of a giant among humans who tore through, a pickaxe held high above his head. “SURPRISE MOTHAFUCKA!” There was a god-awful clang as metal scraped on metal and the sheer violence of Ferretti’s blow shattered the eye socket of the headpiece and seemed to send a violent current of feedback through the armor, causing the man to howl. Frantically he stepped back trying to retract the armored headpiece, but it got stuck halfway, glitching.
“Too much fancy shit only gets in the way son” Ferretti’s eyes were positively feral as he stalked towards the man, burying what was left of the pickaxe in his head before tossing his staff towards the Colonel. Jackson had, who had handed Shau’re the weapon exchanged his service pistol for the staff weapon. “Your girlfriend’s a good shot Jackson” O’Neill said with an amused grin somewhat grateful Jackson didn’t try and fire the staff weapon himself, the dweeb was an amazingly terrible shot, having brought down the archway of one of the mineshafts on a half dozen Bird Dudes when he was aiming for the center mass of the leader. Shau’re beamed at O’Neill and soon they were joined by Kowalski and Skara. “Lahm’s tending to the wounded Sir, but we need to make some kind of barricade or else”
“Negative” O’Neill said, “We keep ourselves out there, fall back to the town and let them chase you, if you’re up here they’ll swamp us” At least, in the buildings they’d have better odds, CQC is what his boys were best at and if they could use the terrain. “Ferretti, go with Chuck and Lahm, Jackson, you and Calamity jane here are with me” He said gesturing to Shau’re.
Skara made a gesture suggesting he wanted to be by O’Neill’s side, he was a good fighter and unusually strong for a kid his age, but O’Neill shook his head. When Skara flashed him a look of hurt O’Neill grabbed his shoulder and squeezed, gesturing to Kowalski and then to Nebeh and the others. No words needed to be exchanged for Skara to understand the monumental importance of what O’Neill wanted him to do, that he was entrusting Skara with the safety of his own warriors and reminding him that he had a duty to his men. “If they make it through us….”
Skara nodded. “Oorah”
“Oorah boy” the two warriors embraced, and O’Neill moved to pass his service pistol to Skara, hesitating for a second…The colt had belonged to his father and his grandfather and his great grandfather. Not exactly company issue, but it was a relic both of the marine corps and of the O’Neill family. The damn thing was also the gun that had claimed Charly’s life and yet, he swallowed. It was time to let go, he couldn’t go on hating himself and wanting death, not when he had two daughters and these junior marines to live for. He handed the gun to Skara and then pulled four clips out from his belt and passed them to the boy. Intuitive as always, the youth eyed him, sensing the gravity of the action if not the reason. Skara slid the gun into his belt and with teary eyes saluted O’Neill who saluted back. “Give ‘em hell kid” O’Neill muttered as the group vanished out the entrance.
“To the gate room?” Daniel asked.
O’Neill nodded before he looked at Shau’re and then gestured to her staff weapon and then her eyes and the hallway.
She understood what he meant and flashed a ferocious smile. “Shoot..Any.,,,In,...Room”
“Yeah, exactly” Turning he looked at Daniel with a raised eyebrow “Been teaching her American?”
“A little sir, but they pick up so much via observation, part of me thinks they were engineered like that. To keep from needing to know written scripture to understand” Jackson muttered rubbing the back of his head. O’Neill nodded “It’s a mystery we can unravel later..Lets go”.
No one had come through the teleportation rings in the Gate Room and O’Neill soon realized why, when a sort of roar echoed through the pyramid. “They’re launching fighters” Jackson called back.
“Fuck!” O’Neill and Shau’re ended up saying in unison which caused O’Neill to chuckle. When they skidded into the gate room, Jackson almost slid into two Horus Guard who wheeled on him and got blasted for their trouble. The first stumbling back, the armor on the chest absorbing all of the first and second blast but the third at such a close range superheated the armor and the warrior collapsed screaming as the smell of seared flesh filled the air. O’Neill stamped on his hand, retracting the head piece and plunged the knife Skara had given him into the guy’s throat ending his suffering.
Another bolt impacted near him, Jackson tackled him out of the way and both he and Shau’re fired at the Bird dude at the same time. They had sprayed him and very little was left but charred bones and carbonized flesh. “Let’s hope our boys made it to the village or we’ll be fucked from both ends” O’Neill grumbled as the panel in the ceiling opened and rings descended followed by the tell tail beam of light that signified the transportation of matter. Four beings stood inside the light; O’Neill could make out two carrying a table that held the modified tac nuke. The other two were escorts and one of them.
“Dog boy” he growled.
Outside, Kowalski and Skara managed to lead their group into what they had designated the town hall and had occupied the first two levels and the roof. Though, they had to give ground on the roof the moment the two golden gliders began strafing the roof. They could tell, the gunners were holding back, because when one of the Farm boys hurled a grenade into the air (he got impressive airtime) from another building, they rounded on him and vaporized the kid and leveled half the building. To Kowalski, the most surreal part was that the pilots had taken the time to activate their sound systems and screech obscenities down at them. He’d fought all over his world and had never seen an honor guard act so strangely. They were all competent fighters, a few of them were extremely dangerous even. Most were very clearly trained and well trained at that but there was an element of shock. As if they couldn’t believe they were putting down a rebellion, as if this was something they had trained for because it was part of the routine, but the concept was unreal to them. This slowed their reactions down, just enough that it made it possible to fight them without being instantly slaughtered.
Part of Kowalski wondered if he would have reacted the same way had the US ever been invaded. Would the absurdity of the situation disorient him, or would his discipline and instincts carry him through? As the debate in his head raged on, Ferretti and Nebeh managed to slide behind him just as a pair of red bolts of plasma smashed into the side of the building opposite them and it exploded, caving in on itself. “Shit boss, we gotta move back!”
Across from them Skara rushed out into the square and darted towards them, lugging the rockets. As the vessels turned on his position Lahm managed to throw a flaming bottle of rubbing alcohol at the cock “nose” of the glider, which burst into flames for a fraction of a second, causing the pilot to veer up cursing. The other disengaged from Skara and turned its fury on Lahm and her group of young rebels, unleashing a torrent of fire onto the roof they’d thrown the projectiles from. Kowalski heard screams but saw that it was mostly from them jumping from the roof and landing on sandy hills or falling onto the slick streets. By some miracle no one had been hit and it took Kowalski a moment to realize Kadra had popped out of the sand and grabbed one of the boys, pulling him between two trees. “Huh? What’s Skara’s kid sister doing here?” Kowalski asked.
Ferretti shrugged, she hadn’t come with them, could she have snuck off? Or? “Maybe we’re lucky and Kasuf decided to rally the villages or something” Ferretti offered. Any discussion was cut off the moment a pair of plasma bolts smashed into a trio of youngers in the floor above the marines. The ceiling came down in a sickening crunch dropping on top of two youngsters and what was left of the ones who’d been shot at wouldn’t even fill a sandwich bag. “We need to do something about the damn Fighters!” Ferretti yelled “We’re gonna get slaughtered like this!”
Pink and purple bursts of energy began to impact into trees and obelisks and Kowalski realized that reinforcements from the spaceship had arrived. “We’ve got company!” Kowalski called. Twenty of their kids, with makeshift spears and stolen staff weapons converged on the group that was charging towards them. They didn’t last long, each of those Horus guard guys seemed to be able to kill four or five of their boys before going down and there was about a hundred of them bearing down. But their sacrifices had been enough, for Skara (who was now joined by Nebeh).
“Alright boys!” Kowalski walked through the partially wrecked building and opened the crate. “Excellent!” he cried out noting that none of the ordinance were damaged. Kowalski grabbed Skara by the chest and gestured to the attackers and then pounded a broken piece of the wall. “Cover us”
‘Cover” Skara nodded and saluted before grabbing a pair of grenades to hand to Lumpy as he pulled out his rifle and opened fire towards the oncoming Horus guard. It took a moment, but the pair of youths heard a rush and a screech and turned to see a trail of fire erupt over their heads as Ferretti fired one of the rocket launchers. It flew into the air, towards the speeding Gliders and impacted on the wing, the explosion was violent, but it didn’t even the thing and the murderous screeching coming from the cockpit prompted an “oh shiiiiittt” From Ferretti as Kowalski frantically reloaded.
To their surprise, Nebeh had a pitcher’s arm, because he managed to beam a Horus Guard in the head with the grenade and when it detonated it killed the guard, his buddy and managed to knock two others on their asses. Ferretti didn’t have time to praise the kid, he only had time to fire off another rocket, only too late did he realize the Gliders were almost on top of them.
There was an odd moment of silence, where time seemed to standstill. He could see Skara waving at someone, bolts of energy slowly streaking by, then the rocket hitting the pilot of one of the Gliders right in the head. Then a flash of light, an arch of fire and his world went black.
From her position with Kadra and her “scouts” Lahm and several of the Nagada rebels saw the explosive detonate inside the cockpit of one of the Gliders. The explosion and equipment failure causing it to tilt, then spin. A wing hit the left wing of the other Glider and both ripped off, spinning through the air (with one smashing into a poor boy of twelve mere feet from where Lahm was). Kadra let out a scream of agony as one of the gliders barreled into the upper levels of the building her brother, her friends and Lahm’s partner were in. Lahm went cold, she watched with almost, detached numbness as the roof seemed to sort of lurch then convulse, tearing itself apart as the flaming debris burst through the other end, bringing down most of the roof, fire belched out the rear and the burning wreckage of the glider smashed into a water fountain and skidding over it, crashing into an obelisk with a Naquadah tip. The obelisk glowed angrily as it cracked.
The other glide went careening into a dozen of the onrushing Horus guard before crumpling not the ground and bouncing into a second obelisk. Lahm felt something rumble below her feet, then two enormous arcs of energy erupted from the broken obelisks, shooting into the sky and causing a small series of tremors that reverberated up towards the pyramid.
Something kicked Lahm in the face and she was realized it was an enraged Horus Guard, Lahm spat out a wisdom tooth and rounded on him, stabbing him through the arm with a field knife and unloading a service pistol into his side. Though, it seemed as if she’d only managed to maul muscle and skin, because it let out a series of curses and grabbed her arm and wrenched it upward all but hauling her off the ground. The eyes in the headpiece weren’t lit up, she surmised that he was fighting blind, and she did all she could to keep him from retracting it and when he finally did, she spat blood into his eyes. He laughed and threw her, causing her to hit the sand hard enough to push the wind out of her lungs and bruise her ribs. As he stalked towards her, she could see his shadow looming over her, the acrid stench of burning chemicals and wood filling the air. As he reached down, she felt a warm spray and realized that Kadra and two of her people had driven wooden spears through the warrior’s body. One of them knocked loose the shoulder strap on his breast plate and as it fell loose, she saw an odd X shaped scar on his stomach where his navel should have been. Something writhed below it and she raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t have time to contemplate what that was. A staff blast hit his midsection and his stomach was replaced by an eight-inch cavern of burnt flesh. Her eyes darted to the source of the fire, Kowalski was bloodied, bruised and by the look in his eyes he had no idea where he got the staff weapon or how he managed to fire it.
She smiled.
Behind Kowalski, Skara let loose a war cry that chilled the blood of all present. He was on his knees before the mangled body of Nebeh, who hung between cables and debris, impaled like a ghoulish scarecrow.
In that second of bestial despair, he ran forward firing with The Colonel’s pistol, managing to wound several onrushing Horus guard, before Ferretti tossed him yet another Staff gun. Everyone charged forward, it was pure madness, the children, fighting as children, driven into a bloody frenzy by so much death smashed into the Horus Guard with such ferocity they managed to do something no army in the known universe had done.
Not in ten thousand years.
They managed to rout an army of Jaffa.
Though the rout was temporary, though it was a brief moment of shock at the suicidal fury of so many people who were barely seventeen, it was enough. The aura of invincibility that had been carefully crafted through millennia of apocalyptic warfare and martial tradition had shattered and as they began to regroup, another sound filled the air.
The sound of reinforcements.
The sound of fury
The Pyramid Complex.
The entrance to the primary great Pyramid seemed to glisten in the morning sun. Reflecting the pinks and golds of a star breaking through the night to illuminate a sleepy world. A world on the brink of change, a world of the brink of cataclysm or, liberation. Banners flapped in the breeze on raised poles that seemed to grow out of the smooth stone of the walkway. Each one depicting a different god, the black Eagle in whose talons a lightning bolt was clutched, the Scythe radiating lightning. The Golden Cobra on crimson with pink eyes flapped in the breeze beside a falcon like bird that held a spear in one hand and a scroll in the other. The Flower blazing like a rising sun on a field of white and another Falcon like alien flying through the heavens. Zeus, Ba’al, Apophis, Horus, Amaterasu and Osiris. The Horus Guard, the Elite fighting units of the armies of Ra, a dozen standing like statues, the sun glinting off their headpieces and breastplate. The jeweled spear like tip of their staff weapons sparkled as the first of what would be tow dozen caravans showed up. The first, dispatched from Nagada would have the honor of being transported to Ra’s vessel, gifted as tribute to the Godhead, while the rest would go through the Stargate to Thapseh the Capital of this backwater part of Ra’s domain. All in all, two hundred youths hauling carts that were ordinarily filled with Naquadah and various carved items and precious gems and grain and silk produced by sea snails. Today, they were carrying more than just their usual compliment of tribute, but a bunch of ammo, a pair of rocket launchers, two dozen grenades and one incredibly annoyed Ferretti who was ordered to hide under the tarp of one of the carts.
The guards had been under orders to search anyone who came before the entrance to the pyramid, but most were so accustomed to absolutely nothing happening that the once legendary discipline of the Jaffa lapsed enough that the lead cart and two others managed to get through the main entrance before an irate senior Horus Guard with gold tipped “feathers” on his headdress called out furiously to his men outside, ordering them to stop the carts. Grumbles of protestation from both guards and subjects followed as the armored killers began searching the carts, tarps were angrily pulled back and from outside there was a loud exclamation.
The Senior Horus guard huffed and leveled his gaze on the tallest of the robed and hooded supplicants, pulling it back to espy a tall, chiseled Tau’Ri in a crew cut smirking at him. “How ya doin?” O’Neill asked with mock flirtation, the Horus Guard was about to let out a scream, but his arm simply disappeared, followed by a blast that impacted the space between armor on his ribs. Courtesy of Shau’re who had grabbed one of the staff weapons they’d stolen in the prior engagement. As his cored corpse began to topple, the second in the room converged on their location. O’Neill pulled an M27 out from under the tarp and managed to unload into the attacker, blood spraying from his legs and midsection. A third was on O’Neill faster than he could react to him and had hoisted him up by the throat with both hands, spewing curses in their language at hm. Outside, the area erupted in weapons fire and energy blasts as Kowalski and Skara were able to grab a pair staff weapons, adding their fire to the frantic gun blasts. By the sound of it, they’d managed to kill four of the twelve in the opening seconds, but someone had been shot.
As O’Neill stood dangling in the air the Jaffa was forced to turn and drop him, crying out in alarm as the tarp covering the cart erupted, taking the shape of a giant among humans who tore through, a pickaxe held high above his head. “SURPRISE MOTHAFUCKA!” There was a god-awful clang as metal scraped on metal and the sheer violence of Ferretti’s blow shattered the eye socket of the headpiece and seemed to send a violent current of feedback through the armor, causing the man to howl. Frantically he stepped back trying to retract the armored headpiece, but it got stuck halfway, glitching.
“Too much fancy shit only gets in the way son” Ferretti’s eyes were positively feral as he stalked towards the man, burying what was left of the pickaxe in his head before tossing his staff towards the Colonel. Jackson had, who had handed Shau’re the weapon exchanged his service pistol for the staff weapon. “Your girlfriend’s a good shot Jackson” O’Neill said with an amused grin somewhat grateful Jackson didn’t try and fire the staff weapon himself, the dweeb was an amazingly terrible shot, having brought down the archway of one of the mineshafts on a half dozen Bird Dudes when he was aiming for the center mass of the leader. Shau’re beamed at O’Neill and soon they were joined by Kowalski and Skara. “Lahm’s tending to the wounded Sir, but we need to make some kind of barricade or else”
“Negative” O’Neill said, “We keep ourselves out there, fall back to the town and let them chase you, if you’re up here they’ll swamp us” At least, in the buildings they’d have better odds, CQC is what his boys were best at and if they could use the terrain. “Ferretti, go with Chuck and Lahm, Jackson, you and Calamity jane here are with me” He said gesturing to Shau’re.
Skara made a gesture suggesting he wanted to be by O’Neill’s side, he was a good fighter and unusually strong for a kid his age, but O’Neill shook his head. When Skara flashed him a look of hurt O’Neill grabbed his shoulder and squeezed, gesturing to Kowalski and then to Nebeh and the others. No words needed to be exchanged for Skara to understand the monumental importance of what O’Neill wanted him to do, that he was entrusting Skara with the safety of his own warriors and reminding him that he had a duty to his men. “If they make it through us….”
Skara nodded. “Oorah”
“Oorah boy” the two warriors embraced, and O’Neill moved to pass his service pistol to Skara, hesitating for a second…The colt had belonged to his father and his grandfather and his great grandfather. Not exactly company issue, but it was a relic both of the marine corps and of the O’Neill family. The damn thing was also the gun that had claimed Charly’s life and yet, he swallowed. It was time to let go, he couldn’t go on hating himself and wanting death, not when he had two daughters and these junior marines to live for. He handed the gun to Skara and then pulled four clips out from his belt and passed them to the boy. Intuitive as always, the youth eyed him, sensing the gravity of the action if not the reason. Skara slid the gun into his belt and with teary eyes saluted O’Neill who saluted back. “Give ‘em hell kid” O’Neill muttered as the group vanished out the entrance.
“To the gate room?” Daniel asked.
O’Neill nodded before he looked at Shau’re and then gestured to her staff weapon and then her eyes and the hallway.
She understood what he meant and flashed a ferocious smile. “Shoot..Any.,,,In,...Room”
“Yeah, exactly” Turning he looked at Daniel with a raised eyebrow “Been teaching her American?”
“A little sir, but they pick up so much via observation, part of me thinks they were engineered like that. To keep from needing to know written scripture to understand” Jackson muttered rubbing the back of his head. O’Neill nodded “It’s a mystery we can unravel later..Lets go”.
No one had come through the teleportation rings in the Gate Room and O’Neill soon realized why, when a sort of roar echoed through the pyramid. “They’re launching fighters” Jackson called back.
“Fuck!” O’Neill and Shau’re ended up saying in unison which caused O’Neill to chuckle. When they skidded into the gate room, Jackson almost slid into two Horus Guard who wheeled on him and got blasted for their trouble. The first stumbling back, the armor on the chest absorbing all of the first and second blast but the third at such a close range superheated the armor and the warrior collapsed screaming as the smell of seared flesh filled the air. O’Neill stamped on his hand, retracting the head piece and plunged the knife Skara had given him into the guy’s throat ending his suffering.
Another bolt impacted near him, Jackson tackled him out of the way and both he and Shau’re fired at the Bird dude at the same time. They had sprayed him and very little was left but charred bones and carbonized flesh. “Let’s hope our boys made it to the village or we’ll be fucked from both ends” O’Neill grumbled as the panel in the ceiling opened and rings descended followed by the tell tail beam of light that signified the transportation of matter. Four beings stood inside the light; O’Neill could make out two carrying a table that held the modified tac nuke. The other two were escorts and one of them.
“Dog boy” he growled.
Outside, Kowalski and Skara managed to lead their group into what they had designated the town hall and had occupied the first two levels and the roof. Though, they had to give ground on the roof the moment the two golden gliders began strafing the roof. They could tell, the gunners were holding back, because when one of the Farm boys hurled a grenade into the air (he got impressive airtime) from another building, they rounded on him and vaporized the kid and leveled half the building. To Kowalski, the most surreal part was that the pilots had taken the time to activate their sound systems and screech obscenities down at them. He’d fought all over his world and had never seen an honor guard act so strangely. They were all competent fighters, a few of them were extremely dangerous even. Most were very clearly trained and well trained at that but there was an element of shock. As if they couldn’t believe they were putting down a rebellion, as if this was something they had trained for because it was part of the routine, but the concept was unreal to them. This slowed their reactions down, just enough that it made it possible to fight them without being instantly slaughtered.
Part of Kowalski wondered if he would have reacted the same way had the US ever been invaded. Would the absurdity of the situation disorient him, or would his discipline and instincts carry him through? As the debate in his head raged on, Ferretti and Nebeh managed to slide behind him just as a pair of red bolts of plasma smashed into the side of the building opposite them and it exploded, caving in on itself. “Shit boss, we gotta move back!”
Across from them Skara rushed out into the square and darted towards them, lugging the rockets. As the vessels turned on his position Lahm managed to throw a flaming bottle of rubbing alcohol at the cock “nose” of the glider, which burst into flames for a fraction of a second, causing the pilot to veer up cursing. The other disengaged from Skara and turned its fury on Lahm and her group of young rebels, unleashing a torrent of fire onto the roof they’d thrown the projectiles from. Kowalski heard screams but saw that it was mostly from them jumping from the roof and landing on sandy hills or falling onto the slick streets. By some miracle no one had been hit and it took Kowalski a moment to realize Kadra had popped out of the sand and grabbed one of the boys, pulling him between two trees. “Huh? What’s Skara’s kid sister doing here?” Kowalski asked.
Ferretti shrugged, she hadn’t come with them, could she have snuck off? Or? “Maybe we’re lucky and Kasuf decided to rally the villages or something” Ferretti offered. Any discussion was cut off the moment a pair of plasma bolts smashed into a trio of youngers in the floor above the marines. The ceiling came down in a sickening crunch dropping on top of two youngsters and what was left of the ones who’d been shot at wouldn’t even fill a sandwich bag. “We need to do something about the damn Fighters!” Ferretti yelled “We’re gonna get slaughtered like this!”
Pink and purple bursts of energy began to impact into trees and obelisks and Kowalski realized that reinforcements from the spaceship had arrived. “We’ve got company!” Kowalski called. Twenty of their kids, with makeshift spears and stolen staff weapons converged on the group that was charging towards them. They didn’t last long, each of those Horus guard guys seemed to be able to kill four or five of their boys before going down and there was about a hundred of them bearing down. But their sacrifices had been enough, for Skara (who was now joined by Nebeh).
“Alright boys!” Kowalski walked through the partially wrecked building and opened the crate. “Excellent!” he cried out noting that none of the ordinance were damaged. Kowalski grabbed Skara by the chest and gestured to the attackers and then pounded a broken piece of the wall. “Cover us”
‘Cover” Skara nodded and saluted before grabbing a pair of grenades to hand to Lumpy as he pulled out his rifle and opened fire towards the oncoming Horus guard. It took a moment, but the pair of youths heard a rush and a screech and turned to see a trail of fire erupt over their heads as Ferretti fired one of the rocket launchers. It flew into the air, towards the speeding Gliders and impacted on the wing, the explosion was violent, but it didn’t even the thing and the murderous screeching coming from the cockpit prompted an “oh shiiiiittt” From Ferretti as Kowalski frantically reloaded.
To their surprise, Nebeh had a pitcher’s arm, because he managed to beam a Horus Guard in the head with the grenade and when it detonated it killed the guard, his buddy and managed to knock two others on their asses. Ferretti didn’t have time to praise the kid, he only had time to fire off another rocket, only too late did he realize the Gliders were almost on top of them.
There was an odd moment of silence, where time seemed to standstill. He could see Skara waving at someone, bolts of energy slowly streaking by, then the rocket hitting the pilot of one of the Gliders right in the head. Then a flash of light, an arch of fire and his world went black.
From her position with Kadra and her “scouts” Lahm and several of the Nagada rebels saw the explosive detonate inside the cockpit of one of the Gliders. The explosion and equipment failure causing it to tilt, then spin. A wing hit the left wing of the other Glider and both ripped off, spinning through the air (with one smashing into a poor boy of twelve mere feet from where Lahm was). Kadra let out a scream of agony as one of the gliders barreled into the upper levels of the building her brother, her friends and Lahm’s partner were in. Lahm went cold, she watched with almost, detached numbness as the roof seemed to sort of lurch then convulse, tearing itself apart as the flaming debris burst through the other end, bringing down most of the roof, fire belched out the rear and the burning wreckage of the glider smashed into a water fountain and skidding over it, crashing into an obelisk with a Naquadah tip. The obelisk glowed angrily as it cracked.
The other glide went careening into a dozen of the onrushing Horus guard before crumpling not the ground and bouncing into a second obelisk. Lahm felt something rumble below her feet, then two enormous arcs of energy erupted from the broken obelisks, shooting into the sky and causing a small series of tremors that reverberated up towards the pyramid.
Something kicked Lahm in the face and she was realized it was an enraged Horus Guard, Lahm spat out a wisdom tooth and rounded on him, stabbing him through the arm with a field knife and unloading a service pistol into his side. Though, it seemed as if she’d only managed to maul muscle and skin, because it let out a series of curses and grabbed her arm and wrenched it upward all but hauling her off the ground. The eyes in the headpiece weren’t lit up, she surmised that he was fighting blind, and she did all she could to keep him from retracting it and when he finally did, she spat blood into his eyes. He laughed and threw her, causing her to hit the sand hard enough to push the wind out of her lungs and bruise her ribs. As he stalked towards her, she could see his shadow looming over her, the acrid stench of burning chemicals and wood filling the air. As he reached down, she felt a warm spray and realized that Kadra and two of her people had driven wooden spears through the warrior’s body. One of them knocked loose the shoulder strap on his breast plate and as it fell loose, she saw an odd X shaped scar on his stomach where his navel should have been. Something writhed below it and she raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t have time to contemplate what that was. A staff blast hit his midsection and his stomach was replaced by an eight-inch cavern of burnt flesh. Her eyes darted to the source of the fire, Kowalski was bloodied, bruised and by the look in his eyes he had no idea where he got the staff weapon or how he managed to fire it.
She smiled.
Behind Kowalski, Skara let loose a war cry that chilled the blood of all present. He was on his knees before the mangled body of Nebeh, who hung between cables and debris, impaled like a ghoulish scarecrow.
In that second of bestial despair, he ran forward firing with The Colonel’s pistol, managing to wound several onrushing Horus guard, before Ferretti tossed him yet another Staff gun. Everyone charged forward, it was pure madness, the children, fighting as children, driven into a bloody frenzy by so much death smashed into the Horus Guard with such ferocity they managed to do something no army in the known universe had done.
Not in ten thousand years.
They managed to rout an army of Jaffa.
Though the rout was temporary, though it was a brief moment of shock at the suicidal fury of so many people who were barely seventeen, it was enough. The aura of invincibility that had been carefully crafted through millennia of apocalyptic warfare and martial tradition had shattered and as they began to regroup, another sound filled the air.
The sound of reinforcements.
The sound of fury
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15: First Prime, First Duty.
Next up, Ra cope posts a bit and delves into the history of the war with the ancients and shares his thoughts on a certain topic. Sek'Het and O'Neill the two first Prime's engage in a battle to the death.
Shout to the artist who did this because its fuck'n awesome.
Here's hoping I didn't fuck up the action too badly.
15: First Prime, First Duty.
Mandjet
He watched, in full regalia, his brass “skin” shimmered in the light and his robes fluttered in the breeze of the pleasure craft’s balconies. The velvet glove that had enabled him to incinerate a Jaffa brimmed with energy, his eyes glowed a white hue and the energy seemed to slide down his cheek, giving him a partially ethereal visage. They were doing it again, the accursed Tau’Ri were doing it again. He could sense it, the fury of the children below, the large horde of thousands coming on boats up the river, he could sense their hatred, their fury and their complete and utter ignorance of the Empire and its true nature.
-Sobek- Ra thought with disgust, it happened before, it was uncommon, but it happened. From time to time a Goa’uld of the lower breeds would become disgruntled with his or life, the tedium of bureaucratic governance. Or a Jaffa along the path of Sodan, the rigid honor code of Anubis would seek to abandon his warriors’ pride and relinquish himself to the cosmos. Seeking the higher state, the Ori and their idiot brothers sought, that state where energy, reality and thought became one. A state, so far only one race managed to reach for all the good it did them in the end. A Goa’uld on such a path, accessing the genetic memories of his ancestors, often was a lethal experience, or the ocean of personalities that came before threatened to overwhelm and the Goa’uld would go mad and commit suicide, or else need to be killed. But for those, descended from Ra and the other System lords, those who were..His eyes narrowed. Genocide, Lyra had called it when she tried to get him to see reason. Genocide of a dying race? No, Ra thought, it was justice. “Sobek” he hissed, he’d done such a poor job of education these people on the pantheon and preaching the structure of order that they thought the idiot governor of a bunch of backwaters was their true overlord and Hathor their goddess as if even Hathor herself did not bow to the Emperor, the Godhead.
Gods; why had they taken that title again?
Ah yes, because the wars of the great races in eons prior left everything so ravaged and destroyed that the System Lords were left with the unenviable task of dragging the whole galactic cluster out of a universal dark age. So many of the once, advanced species they took custody of had fallen into such a savage state that they could only understand what Ra and the System Lords were in terms of gods and magic. They were supposed to uplift those species, to beat the ancients at their own game but a broken people who wanted to be ruled could never be made anything but chattel. Over time, Ra grew tired of trying, the Tau’Ri and the humans of the universe were the only ones who really showed any promise and because of fools like Sobek and Egeria and Prometheus, Ra was always having to break them before they could be more than they were.
Behind him two children were playing a strategy game on a table. Holographic images of figures maneuvered in a chess like pattern. His body twitched, a slight curve of the lip conveyed a snarl as he watched the idiot eunuchs, oblivious to what was happening below. -Do they not see?- suddenly there was an explosion and then a pair of energy columns and then Ra felt the Mandjet shake. Great, he thought as his hand twitched at his side the rebels damaged the power plant system on the planet. That would take weeks to fix, as it wouldn’t be safe to land a large vessel anywhere near the damaged site and they’d have to send crews through the Stargate and land shuttles. His hair blew in the wind and he sensed a pause, a shift in the emotional tenor of the battle. Someone had snapped and the rebels charged and…gave pause to his Jaffa?
Ra’s blood boiled and when he turned and espied the children playing that rage converted into action. He waved his gloved hand, with the sheer amount of energy loose in the sky around the Mandjet, it was rather easy to reduce the two to charred bones. “I am facing a revolt of the faith and you worthless creatures play games!” Ra almost roared, but he calmed himself, holding in his manic rage.
It was all happening again!
What was it that Sek’Het said? -leave me with a contingent of Jaffa and-
No, no he couldn’t, he had to see this through. With a wave of his index and middle finger he sent the command, his mental powers activating the bomb.
The Gate Room
Jack O’Neill, had been in some firefights in the twenty years plus he’d served his country. He’d also had the misfortune of fighting child soldiers and fighting beside militias filled with teenagers in third world shitholes too irrelevant to remember now. He’d been in scrapes one could adequately call a clusterfuck. But Shau’re didn’t just cause the shootout with Dog breath’s men to devolve into a clusterfuck, she redefined the meaning of the word. Those weird ring things had barely lifted off the ground when she started shooting with her staff weapon, Dog breath let out a cry of fury and jumped out of the way sliding along the floor as she managed to hit what O’Neill suspected was the power supply of a staff weapon, causing it to explode in a maelstrom of pink and purple and orange sparks which rained down on Marine, Abydonian, bird dude and nerd alike. The person who held the exploding staff wasn’t there anymore. Oddly enough his legs were standing perfectly still, yet the rest of him was gone. Oh no, it was all over the place, never mind.
O’Neill didn’t have time to really dwell on that fact, mostly because Shau’re was howling like a lunatic and exchanging fire while Daniel ran in front of her, dropping to one knee both to shield her and cover her. The scene might have been an amusing Bonnie and Clyde type deal, if she wasn’t making it downright impossible for him to do any shooting of his own. It was only when the marble column where Shau’re was hiding had been hit and pieces of debris stabbed into her hip and calf that O’Neill was able to duck out from cover, finding most of them dead. With only Dog breath alive.
The Jackal Bastard rushed O’Neill grabbing him by the fabric of his jacket and hurling him across the room. O’Neill landed with a thud, wincing as he felt ribs rattle and an odd smoking sensation, prompting him to look to his arm, realizing the bastard was firing a staff weapon over him, deliberately skimming his body with the heat the Colonel felt a surge of rage. “Are you trying to cook me to death? You bastard!” He didn’t know why that particular action brought a surge of indignation forward, but it caused O’Neill to rush into the oncoming fire, tackling the warrior and knocking them both to the floor beside Shau’re who was swatting at Jackson and trying to tell him she was okay, that he needed to help the Colonel.
“Please don’t help me, the last time you handled a staff weapon you demo’d a mine!” O’Neill thought. Jackson shot at the Jackal, but his bullets dinged off its snout and ricocheted around, causing the bastard to reach for that weird side arm thing. He managed to fire a pulse at O’Neill who was frantically struggling to turn his grip, he managed too, and O’Neill was only hit with part of the energy, the rest crashed into the column beside Shau’re and another burst partially catching Jackson, who crumpled onto the floor beside his woman.
O’Neill was up, his eyes a haze of agony as every single nerve below the surface of his skin decided to go haywire. The Knife he’d been given was drawn and he slid under a blow and managed to land a slash across Sek’Het’s thigh. A meaty forearm came down against his back sending O’Neill sprawling was the response. Rising the Colonel staggered, then swayed before flipping the knife in his hand and nodding. Dog boy hated him, perhaps it was time to use that and drive him up the wall, get him mad, get him stupid. Recalling the insults Dog breath had heaped at him while he was in Ra’s brig O’Neill affected the alien’s accent “Whuu’rythlessss”.
The insult worked, the man reached over to the back of his right hand and the mask of Anubis retracted into the chain around his neck. The creature sneered at him and pulled off his breast plate, only flicking his wrists to call forth metal claws that formed around the tips of his fingers. Sek’Het would savor this, he would gouge out those defiant eyes. He would break this Tau’Ri war leader and then if Ra was kind, he would get to send the bomb through the gate with the Colonel’s blood not yet dried upon his hands.
The two clashed, O’Neill picking up a staff weapon and thrusting it forward, hoping to use it to beat on Dog breath before firing on him when he was down but Sek’Het merely caught the staff with one hand and with a grunt of effort, snapped it. O’Neill to his credit didn’t miss a beat and gripped the rear part and brought its counterweight down onto Sek’Het’s head. The gold splitting open an eyebrow, blood sprayed and a curse followed and O’Neill felt the claws of Dog breath’s left hand tear through his shirt and flesh. Sek’Het reached up and wiped blood from his eyes, the wound already clotting thanks to his healing abilities. Part of Sek’Het wished to show O’Neill what the fool Tau’Ri was facing, that it wasn’t a Jaffa or a mere human but a Goa’uld warrior with eight thousand years of combat experience. But the voice, was an ability only the system lords were allowed to use and any of the lesser Goa’uld breeds caught using it (Even one such as himself, being of Ra’s blood). Would face one of the worst executions imaginable, a torture that endured five days and five nights. The desire to humble this bastard and show off was so strong that Sek’Het was tempted to violate the rules, tempted to risk the Hon’dai method of execution. But he supposed he could settle for simply beating O’Neill to death then violating the girl while the scribe with golden hair watched. He sauntered forward, cruel eyes glimmering in the half dark and hefted up O’Neill, one handed. His free hand moving towards the man’s head, preparing to tear out the Colonel’s eyes he muttered what O’Neill had told him in the dungeon, with those defiant eyes.
“Fuu-uhh-ukk..yooouu” His hand reached for the Colonel’s left eye and he felt a searing pain in his side and he looked down to find Jackson had rammed the broken staff through his side below the ribs and up through the liver and into his lung. Blood sprayed from Sek’Het and he dropped O’Neill and kicked Jackson so hard the scribe almost flew into a wall. He staggered, coughing up blood, and deciding it was better to leave the shaft in until he could get to a medical station (His healing abilities could repair nearly all of this damage inside of a single evening Thanks to the System Lord blood in his veins, most of the lower Goa’uld would be dead from such a blow without extreme medical intervention. Sek’Het merely needed to stop the bleeding.) He advanced on O’Neill who muttered something in exasperation and disdain.
Good Tau’Ri! Good, appreciate what you now face. Still, to his surprise O’Neill lunged at him laying a series of powerful blows to his face and neck, the knife that the Nagada City master gave the Tau’Ri ripped into flesh and Sek’Het felt his insides slide out of one of the wholes. Someone kicked his legs out from under him and he realized it was that stupid Scribe and his female. The loss of momentum culminated in the human War Leader grabbed him by the throat and driving him down onto the raw, hard floor right within the circle?! Someone yanked the medallion Ra had gifted him off his chest. He struggled, even maimed as he was, it required all three to hold him until he saw the malevolent grin across the Tau’Ri leaders face.
He grabbed Sek’Het’s wrist and drove his hand down hard enough to activate the ring device.
“Nanei! Nanei! Nanei!”
“Give my regards to King Tutt asshole!”
The rings descended, crushing Sek’Het’s throat and chest, snapping his neck and an instant later a beam of energy converted his hosts head and most of his own to energy, ripping it apart. Decapitating him.
O’Neill sat beside the corpse, his whole-body sore in ways he hadn’t felt in a lifetime. Bruised, battered and probably concussed and yet, looking at Jackson and Shau’re who were leaning on each other, backs pressed together and laughing, O’Neill hadn’t felt this alive in a long time. “Here Jackson” he muttered tossing him Katherine’s medallion. In turn he handed it to Shau’re hoping that it would help with the recovery process and perhaps that it would seal something between them.
“Don’t you want a chance to prove your grandfather’s theories correct?” she asked me, go to another planet she said, the chance of a lifetime!” Jackson muttered laughing.
“That took longer than I expected it too” O’Neill muttered “I need to stop smoking”. Both Jackson and Shau’re regarded him with incredulous looks before the trio erupted in laughter. "You punk asses" O'Neill muttered with a smile.
“Alright” O’Neill said rising and trying to ignore the protestation of his right knee. “Let me disarm that nuke”
Limping over to the table the nuke rested on O’Neill moved to pull the arming device out. It continued to count down. O’Neill blinked “oh crap”.
Shout to the artist who did this because its fuck'n awesome.
Here's hoping I didn't fuck up the action too badly.
15: First Prime, First Duty.
Mandjet
He watched, in full regalia, his brass “skin” shimmered in the light and his robes fluttered in the breeze of the pleasure craft’s balconies. The velvet glove that had enabled him to incinerate a Jaffa brimmed with energy, his eyes glowed a white hue and the energy seemed to slide down his cheek, giving him a partially ethereal visage. They were doing it again, the accursed Tau’Ri were doing it again. He could sense it, the fury of the children below, the large horde of thousands coming on boats up the river, he could sense their hatred, their fury and their complete and utter ignorance of the Empire and its true nature.
-Sobek- Ra thought with disgust, it happened before, it was uncommon, but it happened. From time to time a Goa’uld of the lower breeds would become disgruntled with his or life, the tedium of bureaucratic governance. Or a Jaffa along the path of Sodan, the rigid honor code of Anubis would seek to abandon his warriors’ pride and relinquish himself to the cosmos. Seeking the higher state, the Ori and their idiot brothers sought, that state where energy, reality and thought became one. A state, so far only one race managed to reach for all the good it did them in the end. A Goa’uld on such a path, accessing the genetic memories of his ancestors, often was a lethal experience, or the ocean of personalities that came before threatened to overwhelm and the Goa’uld would go mad and commit suicide, or else need to be killed. But for those, descended from Ra and the other System lords, those who were..His eyes narrowed. Genocide, Lyra had called it when she tried to get him to see reason. Genocide of a dying race? No, Ra thought, it was justice. “Sobek” he hissed, he’d done such a poor job of education these people on the pantheon and preaching the structure of order that they thought the idiot governor of a bunch of backwaters was their true overlord and Hathor their goddess as if even Hathor herself did not bow to the Emperor, the Godhead.
Gods; why had they taken that title again?
Ah yes, because the wars of the great races in eons prior left everything so ravaged and destroyed that the System Lords were left with the unenviable task of dragging the whole galactic cluster out of a universal dark age. So many of the once, advanced species they took custody of had fallen into such a savage state that they could only understand what Ra and the System Lords were in terms of gods and magic. They were supposed to uplift those species, to beat the ancients at their own game but a broken people who wanted to be ruled could never be made anything but chattel. Over time, Ra grew tired of trying, the Tau’Ri and the humans of the universe were the only ones who really showed any promise and because of fools like Sobek and Egeria and Prometheus, Ra was always having to break them before they could be more than they were.
Behind him two children were playing a strategy game on a table. Holographic images of figures maneuvered in a chess like pattern. His body twitched, a slight curve of the lip conveyed a snarl as he watched the idiot eunuchs, oblivious to what was happening below. -Do they not see?- suddenly there was an explosion and then a pair of energy columns and then Ra felt the Mandjet shake. Great, he thought as his hand twitched at his side the rebels damaged the power plant system on the planet. That would take weeks to fix, as it wouldn’t be safe to land a large vessel anywhere near the damaged site and they’d have to send crews through the Stargate and land shuttles. His hair blew in the wind and he sensed a pause, a shift in the emotional tenor of the battle. Someone had snapped and the rebels charged and…gave pause to his Jaffa?
Ra’s blood boiled and when he turned and espied the children playing that rage converted into action. He waved his gloved hand, with the sheer amount of energy loose in the sky around the Mandjet, it was rather easy to reduce the two to charred bones. “I am facing a revolt of the faith and you worthless creatures play games!” Ra almost roared, but he calmed himself, holding in his manic rage.
It was all happening again!
What was it that Sek’Het said? -leave me with a contingent of Jaffa and-
No, no he couldn’t, he had to see this through. With a wave of his index and middle finger he sent the command, his mental powers activating the bomb.
The Gate Room
Jack O’Neill, had been in some firefights in the twenty years plus he’d served his country. He’d also had the misfortune of fighting child soldiers and fighting beside militias filled with teenagers in third world shitholes too irrelevant to remember now. He’d been in scrapes one could adequately call a clusterfuck. But Shau’re didn’t just cause the shootout with Dog breath’s men to devolve into a clusterfuck, she redefined the meaning of the word. Those weird ring things had barely lifted off the ground when she started shooting with her staff weapon, Dog breath let out a cry of fury and jumped out of the way sliding along the floor as she managed to hit what O’Neill suspected was the power supply of a staff weapon, causing it to explode in a maelstrom of pink and purple and orange sparks which rained down on Marine, Abydonian, bird dude and nerd alike. The person who held the exploding staff wasn’t there anymore. Oddly enough his legs were standing perfectly still, yet the rest of him was gone. Oh no, it was all over the place, never mind.
O’Neill didn’t have time to really dwell on that fact, mostly because Shau’re was howling like a lunatic and exchanging fire while Daniel ran in front of her, dropping to one knee both to shield her and cover her. The scene might have been an amusing Bonnie and Clyde type deal, if she wasn’t making it downright impossible for him to do any shooting of his own. It was only when the marble column where Shau’re was hiding had been hit and pieces of debris stabbed into her hip and calf that O’Neill was able to duck out from cover, finding most of them dead. With only Dog breath alive.
The Jackal Bastard rushed O’Neill grabbing him by the fabric of his jacket and hurling him across the room. O’Neill landed with a thud, wincing as he felt ribs rattle and an odd smoking sensation, prompting him to look to his arm, realizing the bastard was firing a staff weapon over him, deliberately skimming his body with the heat the Colonel felt a surge of rage. “Are you trying to cook me to death? You bastard!” He didn’t know why that particular action brought a surge of indignation forward, but it caused O’Neill to rush into the oncoming fire, tackling the warrior and knocking them both to the floor beside Shau’re who was swatting at Jackson and trying to tell him she was okay, that he needed to help the Colonel.
“Please don’t help me, the last time you handled a staff weapon you demo’d a mine!” O’Neill thought. Jackson shot at the Jackal, but his bullets dinged off its snout and ricocheted around, causing the bastard to reach for that weird side arm thing. He managed to fire a pulse at O’Neill who was frantically struggling to turn his grip, he managed too, and O’Neill was only hit with part of the energy, the rest crashed into the column beside Shau’re and another burst partially catching Jackson, who crumpled onto the floor beside his woman.
O’Neill was up, his eyes a haze of agony as every single nerve below the surface of his skin decided to go haywire. The Knife he’d been given was drawn and he slid under a blow and managed to land a slash across Sek’Het’s thigh. A meaty forearm came down against his back sending O’Neill sprawling was the response. Rising the Colonel staggered, then swayed before flipping the knife in his hand and nodding. Dog boy hated him, perhaps it was time to use that and drive him up the wall, get him mad, get him stupid. Recalling the insults Dog breath had heaped at him while he was in Ra’s brig O’Neill affected the alien’s accent “Whuu’rythlessss”.
The insult worked, the man reached over to the back of his right hand and the mask of Anubis retracted into the chain around his neck. The creature sneered at him and pulled off his breast plate, only flicking his wrists to call forth metal claws that formed around the tips of his fingers. Sek’Het would savor this, he would gouge out those defiant eyes. He would break this Tau’Ri war leader and then if Ra was kind, he would get to send the bomb through the gate with the Colonel’s blood not yet dried upon his hands.
The two clashed, O’Neill picking up a staff weapon and thrusting it forward, hoping to use it to beat on Dog breath before firing on him when he was down but Sek’Het merely caught the staff with one hand and with a grunt of effort, snapped it. O’Neill to his credit didn’t miss a beat and gripped the rear part and brought its counterweight down onto Sek’Het’s head. The gold splitting open an eyebrow, blood sprayed and a curse followed and O’Neill felt the claws of Dog breath’s left hand tear through his shirt and flesh. Sek’Het reached up and wiped blood from his eyes, the wound already clotting thanks to his healing abilities. Part of Sek’Het wished to show O’Neill what the fool Tau’Ri was facing, that it wasn’t a Jaffa or a mere human but a Goa’uld warrior with eight thousand years of combat experience. But the voice, was an ability only the system lords were allowed to use and any of the lesser Goa’uld breeds caught using it (Even one such as himself, being of Ra’s blood). Would face one of the worst executions imaginable, a torture that endured five days and five nights. The desire to humble this bastard and show off was so strong that Sek’Het was tempted to violate the rules, tempted to risk the Hon’dai method of execution. But he supposed he could settle for simply beating O’Neill to death then violating the girl while the scribe with golden hair watched. He sauntered forward, cruel eyes glimmering in the half dark and hefted up O’Neill, one handed. His free hand moving towards the man’s head, preparing to tear out the Colonel’s eyes he muttered what O’Neill had told him in the dungeon, with those defiant eyes.
“Fuu-uhh-ukk..yooouu” His hand reached for the Colonel’s left eye and he felt a searing pain in his side and he looked down to find Jackson had rammed the broken staff through his side below the ribs and up through the liver and into his lung. Blood sprayed from Sek’Het and he dropped O’Neill and kicked Jackson so hard the scribe almost flew into a wall. He staggered, coughing up blood, and deciding it was better to leave the shaft in until he could get to a medical station (His healing abilities could repair nearly all of this damage inside of a single evening Thanks to the System Lord blood in his veins, most of the lower Goa’uld would be dead from such a blow without extreme medical intervention. Sek’Het merely needed to stop the bleeding.) He advanced on O’Neill who muttered something in exasperation and disdain.
Good Tau’Ri! Good, appreciate what you now face. Still, to his surprise O’Neill lunged at him laying a series of powerful blows to his face and neck, the knife that the Nagada City master gave the Tau’Ri ripped into flesh and Sek’Het felt his insides slide out of one of the wholes. Someone kicked his legs out from under him and he realized it was that stupid Scribe and his female. The loss of momentum culminated in the human War Leader grabbed him by the throat and driving him down onto the raw, hard floor right within the circle?! Someone yanked the medallion Ra had gifted him off his chest. He struggled, even maimed as he was, it required all three to hold him until he saw the malevolent grin across the Tau’Ri leaders face.
He grabbed Sek’Het’s wrist and drove his hand down hard enough to activate the ring device.
“Nanei! Nanei! Nanei!”
“Give my regards to King Tutt asshole!”
The rings descended, crushing Sek’Het’s throat and chest, snapping his neck and an instant later a beam of energy converted his hosts head and most of his own to energy, ripping it apart. Decapitating him.
O’Neill sat beside the corpse, his whole-body sore in ways he hadn’t felt in a lifetime. Bruised, battered and probably concussed and yet, looking at Jackson and Shau’re who were leaning on each other, backs pressed together and laughing, O’Neill hadn’t felt this alive in a long time. “Here Jackson” he muttered tossing him Katherine’s medallion. In turn he handed it to Shau’re hoping that it would help with the recovery process and perhaps that it would seal something between them.
“Don’t you want a chance to prove your grandfather’s theories correct?” she asked me, go to another planet she said, the chance of a lifetime!” Jackson muttered laughing.
“That took longer than I expected it too” O’Neill muttered “I need to stop smoking”. Both Jackson and Shau’re regarded him with incredulous looks before the trio erupted in laughter. "You punk asses" O'Neill muttered with a smile.
“Alright” O’Neill said rising and trying to ignore the protestation of his right knee. “Let me disarm that nuke”
Limping over to the table the nuke rested on O’Neill moved to pull the arming device out. It continued to count down. O’Neill blinked “oh crap”.
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DocSolarisReich
Esoteric Spaceman
Looks like immortality has become a curse to the Goa’uld.
More to the System Lords than to their lesser brethren. Ra has lived long enough to forget what it feels like to live.
Or why he fought so hard in the first place.
I plan to keep them around, though Teal'c will defect to the SGC and we will get Hammond. But it will be different, Kowalski ain't going nowhere thats for sure.
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As promised...
Le fin
Of the first part any way
Le fin
Of the first part any way
16 – Home
16 – Home
Kasuf ached in ways he had never ached in his entire life. Blood dripped from a gash above his eyebrow, his robes were torn and ragged and he’d broken his staff of office over the skull of one of the Horus Guard. It had been pandemonium, total chaos as they arrived on the banks of the river and witnessed the suicidal charge of the advance scouts, they’d sent under his youngest daughter along with Kowalski, the brave and mighty second of O’Neill and the giant Ferretti who was the only man Kasuf had ever seen who was able to fight Jaffa by matching them blow for blow (Though even his incredible vigor waned in comparison to the relentless Horus Guard). If there had been any doubt before in his mind about the course charted the night before it had been erased when Kasuf witnessed his only son pick up one of the divine lances Jackson called a staff weapon and fired it several times into a Horus Guard. His son faced with the loss of so many of his friends and hell of combat had refused to yield and instead only fought on with even greater fury.
Yes, Kasuf was as certain as he was proud and his resolve not to be a slave anymore was exceeded only by a father’s pride. Combined, the two made a formidable combination and despite the fact that even more of the dreaded Horus Guard seemed to appear in the space between pyramids to advance upon them. Despite the fact that the retreating Horus guard were mowed down caught between their furious comrades and his son’s forces and the few who survived were turned and rushed onward in a counterattack equally as suicidal as Skara’s charge. Kasuf could only laugh, he felt free, he felt strong, hell he even felt young again!
They disembarked four hundred at a time, boats left, others came and disembarked other rebels, others had ridden their Mastages and come on foot, crossing the river at its shallowest. All in all, fifty thousand Abydonians roared into the breach and their howls of indignation and war cries for freedom clashed with the sadistic cursing and demonic voices of their Horus Guard who were soon either torn apart or foisted up over the heads of an irate mob that cast them into the river or hurled them still kicking and screaming into the burning buildings. The stench of charred flesh, burnt plastics and molten slag filled the air and before Kasuf knew what had hit him (Literally), he was standing atop the ruined carcass of a Horus guard with dark skin, someone had stoved his face in and Kasuf had fired a staff weapon into his midsection after he thought he noticed something moving beneath the fabric under its armor. Though, Kasuf would later dismiss his concerns, it would be a report many would likewise share. A mystery for another time, or as more fodder for fireside stories of their great war for independence he supposed. Independence, the word sounded so alien to him, as alien as the strangers who began the conflagration that would lead to this fateful moment. On Jackson’s homeworld, he explained a group of City and farm masters such as himself and his peers, tiring of the taxation and theft and neglect of a faraway monarch had decided to rebel. To fight the greatest power of that world for the right to build a country of their own, a world within a world. Kasuf wondered if their valiant struggle was as doomed as he suspected they were.
The Horus Guard were defeated, overrun, but there was another five thousand inside the Mandjet and Kasuf doubted if even the enormous numbers fielded by the rebels would be enough and he was perfectly willing to accept the subsequent massacre if it meant so thoroughly demoralizing the derelict God that Amun Ra departed here never to return. But what happened next was something, no one could have imagined.
The Mandjet left…
Kasuf stood in wonder, no one alive had ever witnessed the Mandjet’s departure. The tops of the pyramids glowed and beams of energy which had remained invisible until now glowed furiously in the light and then something like a bubble seemed to perforate around the vessel, releasing a gust of wind that knocked hundreds down onto their faces and uprooted some of the trees in the groves in the parks between the pyramids. It wasn’t a normal departure, Kasuf was sure of that. It had been so abrupt and so violent that it truly looked as if Ra was running for his life! Thousands ceased their fighting or mourning and looked up as the silver pyramid like structure began to into the sky, passing the tops of the immense mountain sized pyramids and soon reach into clouds which protested their sudden dispersal with a cascade of lightning. It moved fast, far too fast to imply a leisurely departure and Kasuf looked from the ever-shrinking Mandjet to his son, who held a look of utter triumph and joy.
Kasuf had never been prouder of his boy.
Mandjet
Ra was over one hundred and twelve thousand years old, in his life he had gone from being the slave of a race of cowards desperate to cheat death to the mind behind the greatest rebellion the universe had ever known. From there, to the mastermind behind the war in heaven, when the great races attempted to stop him, to deny his people their destiny. He’d retreated before, of course he had! Any leader who spent an entire civilization to gain a single victory or ordered his armies to fight pointless last stands for not, but vanity was no leader but a mad fool willing to put a temporary measure of pride above the long-term glory of an eternal Empire that pragmatism could afford one.
His mind wandered back to Dakkara, twenty-eight thousand years ago. He was alone in the palace of Serenity his features a mask of contemplative tranquility that belied a rage that was almost pathological, a rage that he had long kept in check. Ra was no great warrior, even before he took his current host and his slender girlish form, he had never been a physical creature. That was Apophis, that was Anubis and Cronus. The sun was setting over the arid world and Anubis walked into the gardens from the many spas in the imperial winter palace. His human host had gray eyes and a dark black hair that fit the Jackal God depiction his worshippers bestowed upon him. Poor Anubis, who only ever loved his family and fought for the Goa’uld against slavery. Anubis, who had been the avatar of death in the religion that had cropped up around them.
Fitting in a galaxy emerging from a dark age that the God of Death would be associated with justice, fairness and benevolence. Whereas Ra was the golden radiance, the beautiful one, the unknowable and the feared. Their respective hosts were such a contrast and his carefree attitude had always been a perfect contrast to Ra’s austere, aloof nature and Hathor’s brazenly manipulative nature. Anubis who brought out the best of them, Anubis who could have taken the title Emperor, Ra sometimes secretly wished he had. -So, we lost one planet my brother in law! One world, we have more humans in our domain than exist on their world, plus the others, we took all the others-.
Yes, this was true, they had taken the other human like apes. They were so thorough in that, when he studied the books the cursed Jackson brought with him Ra found no mention of war between the “hominids” as his books called them, only that they had died out, mysteriously vanishing.
If they only knew.
-It is not just one world! It was the start of our new lives!-
-Ah, I see, you hate them because they remind you of us. Because we used them as the Ori sought to use us and they were perhaps more benevolent in their rebellion. Merely kicking us off their home world-.
Ra sometimes hated Anubis, most of the time he admired him but that day? That day he silently wished death on his best friend and greatest supporter and a hero even their enemies acknowledged as a great and noble warrior. He’d wished death upon that innocent man solely because he was right and yet wrong. Ra didn’t just hate the Tau’Ri, the Tau’Ri who had been the redemption his species needed to grow and evolve, to live again…But the penitence was terrible.
He had fallen back, retreated a thousand, thousand times. Returning with vigor and a new plan each time. The Alliance of the great races hadn’t stopped his empire from flourishing, even as they were driven to the brink of extinction their domains grew in size and splendor and then the Tau’Ri spared those domains from becoming monuments to yet another dead empire. Ra, felt no shame in retreat, because it was never a surrender. He hadn’t really ever feared death, for what did death offer a slave except release from bondage? Ra laughed bitterly as his hands slid across an altar in the throne room. Two large crystal cylinders emerged and began to glow his fingers traced across them and a series of hieroglyphs lit up. Ra, the Godhead, the Most High, the lord of all creation and master of death still on some level remembered what it was like to be a slave and to welcome death as though it were freedom. He never feared it, he’d laughed, laughed when Odin stormed the Mesektet but his pride did him in and he hated that sense of humiliation, of the final vengeance. Ra reviled the Asgard, for being a mirror into what the Goa’uld could have been had not the Great Races mucked the universe up so thoroughly. He hated the Asgard because they represented what the Goa’uld would one day surpass and then what? The Ori, their cousins the Alterans and those pathetic refugees that fled on their stupid city had all gone insane or else surrendered to stagnation. Was that the fate that awaited the Asgard? And if so, was it the fate that awaited his kind? The Tau’Ri showed him a third path and it frightened him.
And that was the truth of it, The Tau’Ri scared him, the co-dependency of their species was as much a chain around his neck as the compliance nanites had been from the Ori. The others didn’t see it, merely viewing the Tau’Ri was the largest of the demographics that comprised the subjects of the Imperium, trillions of mortals amongst the stars who obeyed and needed shepherding. But to Ra, they represented a threat far graver than any other branch of humanity. He knew it then, when he took the boy so long ago, when his hosts own formidable telepathy reached out to touch his mind. When Egeria admitted she confided in her host, he was as horrified as he was furious with himself for feeling desperate enough to consider her request.
Fool girl! He knew they had much to offer, that was why they were chosen! But that didn’t mean you took them to bed! She wanted their kind to become symbiotic with the Tau’Ri, for two to become one via a union of the spirit. Foolish girl! Didn’t she understand?! The Ori had tried that at first and it was a rape far more profound than she understood and when they began to subjugate his kind outright, it was a valuable lesson imparted to his primitive ancestors. Sentient beings were not meant to share a mind, they were predators by nature and both the Tau’Ri and Goa’uld embodied that! To ask for communion was to ask for the death of what made both races special. To Mongrelize two mighty genetic codes and in doing so, denigrate and mutilate both until neither Goa’uld nor Tau’Ri remained. He could never allow his rule to be that of a monarch presiding over the death of his race and the rise of some new, bastard species. The leaders of the rebellion earth likewise understood this and that those savages were the only ones who shared Ra’s enlightenment had also, petrified him. Tau’Ri was a backwater, even when it was the mother world of their hosts, even when it was critical, it was always little more than a mudball.
So was Abydos.
Ra ran from Tau’Ri and then ordered that the empire abandon the world, neglect it and ignore it as the map redrew itself yet again. He’d ordered the gate coordinates forgotten and he ran, he ran from the truth, he ran from himself as much as he ran from the Tau’Ri and he ran because the concept of fighting mirrors horrified him to his core. What could the Tau’Ri become if they were pushed as the Goa’uld had been pushed? He shuddered at the thought. This time, he couldn’t run, he couldn’t allow his people to run. This time, this time he would return and face his fear, he would not run again. He would head to Dakkara and call a thing that had not been called in two centuries. A great convention and a vote for war, he would make his case before the system lords and then he would marshal the empire for war. And bring the full might to bear against two little backwaters that no one had ever heard of. He would put to bed the last of the phantoms, he would avenge Egeria and avenge Sek’Het and he would avenge himself.
Perhaps if he wasn’t so focused on his panicked desire to call an imperial crusade against two minor worlds, he might have sensed the alarm and panic below the surface when O’Neill failed to disarm the bomb Ra had tempered with (Ra wasn’t much of a scientist, but he was pretty sure even a Jaffa child could rig an atomic weapon that simplistic.), he might have sensed the mutual conclusion and relief and he might have sensed O’Neill’s mad laughter, he might even have noticed the blinking light that was telling him the ring device within the Engineering section had been activated and what the computer system aboard his ship identified as more Naquadah to be taken to ore processing by the engineers. Ra did sense the panic in the engineering crew when they realized that wasn’t a crate filled with Naquadah but a Tactical nuclear warhead with a sticky note attached to it that read.
“It’s not the business of the United States Marine Corps to allow a visiting monarch to leave without a going away present.
Kindest regards, Johnathan “Jack” O’Neill Lieutenant Colonel USMC”
Ra had enough time to turn, his eyes glowing a bright white light that seemed to trace along his cheek, seemingly splitting his skin and the full weight of his psionic powers as he tried to deactivate the bomb in the fraction of a second between one and zero.
He had just enough time to realize he’d failed.
Below, the skies of Abydos lit up with a second sun, for several seconds as an ocean of energy a fireball the size of a small town lit dissipated slowly.
“Caesar is dead” O’Neill remarked with an amused grin. He was leaning on a Staff gun and Kasuf who seemed to take his meaning. “Long live the Emperor!” Jack added flashing Kasuf an amused smirk. “You’re gonna get laid so much now you know, that right? Hah! Yeah, you know what I mean I can tell”
Kasuf gave him a dignified smirk as if such an admission was beneath his stature and O’Neill laughed. Behind him Kowalski and Lahm shared a kiss as Jackson found himself muttering yes when Shau’re more or less demanded they partner. Jackson wasn’t going home, and O’Neill was fine with that, he deserved to be here amongst the stars in a world that both vindicated him and loved him.
That night, they burned the dead, enemy and ally alike in a great ceremony and the City and Farm masters proclaimed Kasuf to be the true successor of Sobek and charged him and his line forever more with the sacred duty of ruling and his first order of business was to offer the survivors of the first Stargate reconnaissance team to remain as part of the new order, to help him establish a decent fighting force should any more like Ra come from above. The offering was tempting for Lahm who saw so many opportunities for research, but she counseled against it, arguing vehemently that Earth maintaining a presence here would do nothing but harm given the nature of the situation. O’Neill agreed, he wanted to go home and set things right with his daughters any way and he didn’t like the idea of some shitheel State Department pencil pusher coming up here and screwing with these people. But he also understood they would need someone to help keep the peace and luckily Ferretti was more than happy to volunteer.
And so it was, on the morning after the Celebration of the first Abydonian Independence day, Lieutenant Colonel John J O’Neill, Doctor Carolyn Lahm and Major Charles Willis Kowalski stepped through the gate, bringing enough left over goodies (Though no weaponry) home to satisfy the brass but keep them from digging and an amazing story about a lost tribe of humanity amongst the stars.
And the evil alien who deceived them.
And the nerd who died saving their lives.
O’Neill would never see Louis Ferretti or Daniel Jackson again, he was sure of that, but he knew the surviving members of Stargate Reconnaissance Team Zero, or SG-0 as Lahm took to calling it would share a bond of fellowship not limited by time, or distance.
A broken man had led a group of soldiers and scholars into the unknown and he returned whole again, and the universe was minus one tyrant.
Ooorah!
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To all those who have read along, I hope you've enjoyed it all and hope that conclusion was satisfying.
Up next, the start of SG1 proper, which I hope I don't fuck up.
Thanks!
Up next, the start of SG1 proper, which I hope I don't fuck up.
Thanks!
DocSolarisReich
Esoteric Spaceman
Ah, I was wondering if you were going to crib story notes from the old Stargate reimagined where SGC gets spun up as a joint combatant command immediately post movie events.
It made a lot more sense, though I have this under the auspices of the Space Force which is a bit different from our space force. Though I'll expound on why.,
a lot more civilian participation as well, though more in an advisory and research role.
DocSolarisReich
Esoteric Spaceman
Also, wasn't OP O'Neill USAF not USMC? I assume that is deliberate?
I've always written him as a marine Colonel and yeah it's deliberate on my part.
The Goa'uld aren't a bunch of rabble with delusions of empire but the dominant political power of the known universe. Can't just send flyboys out there into that.
Need to be a little more comprehensive.
DocSolarisReich
Esoteric Spaceman
Oh no, it totally works. The idea that a USAF jet-head was also running deniable DIA direct actions during the bad old days never made any sense to me.
This is going to be a Space Force operation but like I hinted at in the first chapters the Space Force is a very different animal.
Abe Ellis is in charge but my version is an old cold war era Admiral and he ends up the civilian director of the Stargate program and as the contractor overseeing the construction of the promtheus and stuff later on.
Hammond is a Space Force Admiral here as well.
I might have them establish a more permanent presence on Abydos eventually. But I'm not sure
DocSolarisReich
Esoteric Spaceman
Indeed, your USSF seems more like a joint combatant command with USN/USMC and USAF personnel combined under one command, rather than a branch of service.
It started as that in secret under Reagan but I think I had Clinton create it as it's own multi service Branch of the military or a military all it's own. Which would have seemed absurd and as little more than a pentagon scheme to retire up officers and undesirables and as more gibs
But let's just say the US has known about potential hostiles for a bit and the plan was to low key build up a proper space navy/military on the sly.