Neutral Space- Andromeda Galaxy
Drey’ac would never understand why so many fleet Captains throughout the Empire were dismissive of the Hyperspace relays when in her mind they were an invention on par with the Stargates themselves. The fact that they were an invention wholly of the Empire was an even bigger source of pride for her (And designing them allowed the Imperium’s technologists to figure out how to design different types of Stargates and how to update and modernize the Gate Network.). Her little fleet had crossed into another Galaxy half an hour ago. A seventeen-hour trek through hyperspace and a half an hour cooldown time for the engines when traveling distances as short as forty lightyears outside the network unless you wanted to risk destroying your jump drives. Subspace was a mess and the only other way to travel without making small jumps of a dozen lightyears or so followed by a cooldown period was the ludicrous Hetch Drive that the Sebaceans and Scarrens used (Before she destroyed their fleet and wiped out their shipyards any way. Did the Peacekeepers leave any left alive after she did that?) which seemed to fold subspace to create a tether that let them “skim’ hyperspace. It was a slow method of travel; she supposed the tradeoff was that they didn’t deal with the problems everyone else did. Her thoughts strayed from the failed Jaffa prototypes turned vigilantes out in the wilder regions of the cosmos and to Apophis himself.
Requesting Ba’al send a small battlegroup to escort a trade fleet from one of the minor powers in this Galaxy that the Imperium had trade with to his domain was a very odd request. It seemed her old lord was trying to force Ba’al into a position where he’d have no choice but to reveal just a little bit of his capabilities. The sheer pettiness! And to a potential ally in his mad quest for a Throne she was convinced would drive him to suicide out of sheer boredom or assassination by his harpy of a queen. -He’s playing games that are beneath him and beneath us all-, this kind of rank paranoia was something a primitive petty kingdom of thugs would indulge in and not a mighty Goa’uld of the race of the Peers, not a keeper of the flame. A distress signal brought her out of her darker thoughts and her consternation was only added too when the frequency her comms officer identified as peacekeeper came up on the screen.
This is the expeditionary fleet Command Carrier Durka we’re escorting a convoy of merchants to the border of imperial space….Under attack by Lucian pirates! They’ve got Hataks!
The command area went silent, Jaffa, even the Goa’uld technologists all looked up to her with a gaze that mixed incredulity with concern. -Mayhap even fear- she thought, the Imperium maintained an enormous technological lead over the rest of the civilizations in the known universe save the Asgard. A gap that was unlikely to close any time soon and one of the ways in which the Imperium made sure of that was the strict regulation of commerce involving their technology. Technological theft was also, usually punished severely unless it was an ally or a species, they respected in which case sanctions were usually imposed. This technological hegemony was maintained at all costs, sometimes to an extent Drey’ac thought was detrimental.
After all, they were tens of thousands of years ahead of everyone, what was the point? And by the time another race backward engineered their technology, they would likely be a generation behind and that ignored their industry. Even if a race did have technological parity with the empire, they would still be drowned in numbers. No, what System Lord or minor noble would be insane enough to sell technology to the Lucian alliance? To drug kingpins, slavers, pirates and petty warlords? The cost of being caught far outweighed any benefits, any member of the nobility that wasn’t a System Lord would be killed and a System Lord would likely be dispossessed and exiled.
Already Jaffa were calling the Peacekeepers liars and cowards, but Drey’ac wasn’t certain. That they were all the way out here, made little sense to her. To her knowledge, they weren’t yet able to pay for the technology to use the relays so unless they were ferried in the hyperspace wake of a hyperspace capable vessel how were they out here? If something as absurd as Peacekeepers in another Galaxy existed, then what’s to say they weren’t telling the truth? Besides, not all Sebaceans were pathetic creatures.
Drey’ac shared the disgust many Jaffa had for Peacekeepers, though she’d met one or two in her life that might have been worthy of recognition. A crippled half breed researcher she encountered some forty years ago and disgraced Captain who was supposed to have killed himself in a bid to delay an enemy from harming his friends. She could give him that at least, both he and the living ship he created died honoring the Sodan and she wondered, if Anubis truly greeted the children of the Goa’uld in the afterlife and she hoped he found the man worthy.
“Fleet Captain, we’re coming out of hyperspace a million
Sest’a from the battle.’ A young Llempiri in a Jaffa’s uniform was something she was still having trouble accepting. Not that the Llempiri weren’t worthy, they had earned the right to serve along side Jaffa despite their allegiance to Egeria as far she was concerned. They honored the
Sodan and offered tribute and thanksgiving to Anubis as all Jaffa did and like most Jaffa she knew, they lived up to those oaths. Besides, any race that could be called an honored enemy by Anubis before their conquest was more than deserving of respect. Only the Luxan’s could really make the same claim and even then, the stories of their fighting and dying beside Jaffa when the nameless one made his move against the System Lords in defense of Prince Osiris were just tales from the dawn of the Jaffa race.
No known holographic recordings existed, only the mummified remains kept in a place of honor at the hall of heroes in
Iwnw
And yet, she still found herself feeling insulted by their presence on occasion and then she’d spend hours feeling guilty. She’d been idle too long, she needed to kill some pirates, the distraction would set her mind straight. Ba’al having asked her to lead the battlegroup as he wished to gauge how Lord Apophis would react. -More suspicion, yet on his end, it is sadly necessary- Six Hatak’s, twenty-four Alkesh bombers and the crescent shaped Dreadnaught that Ba’al had built as his flagship all exited hyperspace, through a blue and purple bubble that formed between time and space.
They exited, black and emerald in color. Where ordinary
Hatak’s Had one blade like pyramid at the center of a sort of lattice like hexagram with plenty of empty space to add sensor suites, shield generators, heavier weaponry, troop transports or anything else. Ba’al’s
Hataks had the one main pyramid, green in color and two smaller green pyramids. The rest of the vessels were of a black so dark it seemed to devour starlight and his Alkesh were less like frigates and more small battleships. The House of Ra, it was said; held the most advanced technology out of all the peers and yet Drey’ac had seen things in her service with Ba’al that led her to believe the young System Lord might have held a slight edge. The vertical bladeship the
Enkidu Accelerated beneath her feet, the rest of the fleet joining her. “We’ll see if it’s true.”
“It is” Answered one of the sensor officers, her turned eying her with shock. “We’re detecting seventeen Leviathans, two are killed..and..the third..the readings are.”
“If you’re going to stammer like an undisciplined whelp do not waste my time. Show me.”
The youth nodded and a holographic image appeared.
Sure enough, three command carriers, though one was currently on fire and trading vicious blows with a Hatak backed up by the conventional Lucian ships…A very old
Hatak, of a model that hadn’t been in use in twenty thousand years but a
Hatak none the less and before her blood could boil in rage her eyes shifted to the wreckage of the two Leviathans, they were not…Her eyes narrowed.
The Fyryns it was said, created both the Leviathan’s and their insectoid pilots during the war, wishing in their final hours to create a legacy that would atone for their atrocities against the universe via their hyperspace weaponry. Many Jaffa erroneously called them gentle brutes, but they were not brutes. She felt a sense of sympathy for the poor creatures, who labored as the backbone of the trade fleets that spanned the universe. -Well, that explains why the Command carriers are here, they rode the poor creature’s hyperspace wake- she thought but the new ones?
They were warships! Her eyes narrowed, organic technology wasn’t the end all be all most of the less advanced races made them out to be, nor were they necessarily a sign of advancement. But she didn’t doubt that they held souls of their own and these mechanoids were peaceful. Her mind wandered back to the sullen Sebacean she knew long ago, the moody youth of nineteen who was obsessed with creating leviathans that could fight, not only for the Peacekeepers but so that the race would remain victims no more. But he died, along with his warrior Leviathan?
Two had fought well, a veritable graveyard of pirate ships were scattered all around their dying bodies and the largest of the two, a majestic piece accelerated towards the burning Command carrier unleashing four titanic blasts of superheated plasma that roared into the shields of the older Hatak which was forced to disengage.
But not before it unleashed a fury of orange energy that smashed into the center of the Command carrier.
The larger vessel lurched, arched and Drey’ac swore she could have heard its spine snap as it was blown wide open by the fury of the weapons fire. It didn’t last much longer, two
Sest’a of starship yielded to kinetics, gravity and exploding internal systems and shattered as a torrent of energy roared out of its power plant hurling the forward section toward the Hatak that was accelerating way from the energy wave at dizzying speeds in a frantic attempt not to be smashed by a projectile several times its size.
It had succeeded, but the damage to its shields and its desperate course left it open to a broadside from one of the other command carriers, a broadside that caused its shields to flair in fury before dovetailed right for the vessel’s underbelly unleashing a frenzy of fire that smashed into the crimson shields of her defective cousins.
Drey’ac was angry, not just at the blatant corruption on display (Someone within the Imperium
had to sell them this technology, the alternative was unthinkable.) but at the fact that several ships of the Lucian alliance began to target the non-warrior leviathans the moment their crude sensors detected the approach of her fleet. That wanton cruelty was contemptible and she intended to take very few survivors. “Disable one of the Hatak’s, the rest of the pirate ships? Destroy them all.” The order was given in a cold voice that brokered no contestations. And so, her fleet moved in for the kill, with Drey’ac ordering the Alkesh group and their dart like fighters to engage the Lucian pirates and to render medical aid to the leviathan crews. A hundred Lucian frigates verses twenty-four Alkesh? If her Commanders were lazy maybe the pirates would last five minutes.
Five minutes was all she would need.
The main weapon of the Enkidu was a monstrosity that only a technologist as mad as the Tau’Ri arsonist Car’tur was said to be, or that fat lunatic Tok’ra Nerus could conceive of such a deviant weapon. While technologists of the Imperium had dabbled in zero-point energy research, their ability to refine Naquadah and Naquadria meant that it wasn’t a top priority. They had other, far less dangerous methods of obtaining huge amounts of energy at a relatively small price. That didn’t mean they destroyed their research or that they weren’t at least a quarter of the way there. Ba’al’s skill at generating and manipulating gravitational fields and that research combined to create a sort of cannon. Using the entire hull of the
Enkidu as a focusing rod the vessel created a small aperture between dimensions, a temporary tear in reality that flared for one glorious nano second, then sputtered and died.
And in its death unleashed a mass of energy more violent than anything Drey’ac had ever witnessed. Encased in a gravity beam, this wave of hell lanced out, a bright white light reminiscent of the main beam weapons used by the Vanir and the long dead and accursed Ori, albeit an order of magnitude stronger.
In one swift motion this wave of energy vaporized one of the older Hatak’s, incinerated thirty of its escorts and smashed into a second Hatak which held up under the energy wave long enough to move out of the way before its shielded evaporated and the ship listed, dead in space.
The
Enkidu went dark as her power plants shutdown and emergency batteries flickered on. It would take the vessel four minutes to regain its main power, but her Hataks would make short work of the rest of the fleet and grab the remaining stray Hatak.
The tall, orange eyed Jaffa would soon be boarding those vessels and when Drey’ac ordered that technologists and command level officers were to be taken prison but everyone else was to be put to the slaughter they all roared in approval.
It seemed they shared in her disgust at what had been done to those freight hauling Leviathans.
She leaned back in her chair, eyes narrowed, she ran a hand through her green hair, removing the cords holding it up, allowing it to fall loose over her shoulders as the battle wound down. She expected she’d be mired in reports from irate technologists now that the majority of the fighting was to be delegated to the other vessels, only she was spared by a hail from the surviving war Leviathan. A holographic image of a Sebacean in what would be the middle years of that race, tall, weary and dressed in an Admirals red and black. A finely groomed mustache and beard and dark eyes, eyes she recognized.
Drey’ac moved up in her seat, her eyes narrowing.
A dead man was speaking to her, on a Leviathan that should not exist.
Still, despite herself she felt some relief. After all, at least one of the good Sebaceans survived and thus continued to redeem his race.
There was a weight to his voice, no longer the sullen boy she remembered, but a man who carried the weight of command well and the many sins of a life of poor choices like armor.
“Fleet Captain Drey’ac, I admit I hadn’t expected to see you again. The Cy-years have been…kind to you.”
“Come now, that’s only a compliment to a female from a race with a short lifespan.” She replied with a smile that wasn’t entirely forced. “But nothing beats you, for a man dead nearly two decades you look remarkably well preserved
Bialar.”
“It seems we’ve much to discuss.”
“We do and you may come aboard for dinner and to assist in the interrogation..though.” she paused and narrowed her eyes. “You are to bring only your best Peacekeepers and they are to behave themselves.”
The lines around his eyes tightened. “It seems, your affinity for me does not extend to my entire race.”
“It does not.” Drey’ac responded with a harshness that surprised her, with a quick intake of breath she added. “What was his name Bialar?”
His jaw set. “Talyn…”
She nodded slowly. “He martyred himself to save his mother and his friends was the story I heard. Is there truth to this and that you intended to die with him?”
“Yes.”
Another tight reply and Drey’ac rose from her command throne and walked towards the holographic representation. “Then he died a true son of Anubis, and he honored the
Sodan in the end.”
A grateful nod followed.
They would discuss why he thought he had the right to be alive after a death pledge later, for now, everything about this made her stomach turn and her “son” spin inside her pouch, he sensed something, something dark.
