While SG-2 faces a political conundrum whose implications may be far reaching, another Goa'uld Dynasty begins to prepare to address the madness of Apophis and a bit more of snake Geopolitics gets revealed.
Also a while back
@Spartan303 wanted to know more about the ecology of the Galaxy, you get that here.
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Helios System home to the Crown world of Apollo’s domain – Month of Tartarus (September 29th by Tau’Ri reckoning.)
He hadn’t been back to Helios since Great Grandfather launched his insane, ill-fated rebellion. -And Father insists that I come via ship- So be it, he thought. Opting to take one of his many pleasure barges rather than his personal Hat’ak battlegroup. After all, had Cygnus, Lord of the border worlds and Captain in the fleet not been on a noble progress surveying the extent of the new growth of the Imperial religion outside their domains and the slow crawl method of colonization that Grandfather mighty Lord Zeus preferred to simple vassalage through economics. Though if he was being honest with himself, Cygnus was using the progress to become drunk and to have sex with whatever he could. There were no challenges left to the Imperium anymore and all of the frontiers had been tamed long before he was born.
He had missed his father though.
Apollo had always loved his sons dearly and Cygnus had been the closest to his father for the longest time. With only his displeasure at the seeming reluctance his father had at making war against Kronos causing any distance between them. Distance that was mended quickly enough at least over the last century. Quick he supposed, for immortals. “Let it not be said that the House of Aether isn’t close.” He muttered to himself, one had to be. To tame the galactic wilderness that had been the domains his grandfather and great uncles and great grandfather had carved out for themselves. Under constant siege from Ori drone ships, with death worlds filled with genetically engineered monsters and Alteran and Fyryn planetary engineering projects run amok. More Unas had been devoured or killed in the jungles of his personal capitol
Kretes in the taming than often died in the wars against the elder races. Or so the history books and what smatterings of images his genetic “memories” allowed him to access. A bitter laugh escaped his throat at the thought of genetic memories, and he once again wondered just how poorly his species would have turned out had the ancient Queens of the rebellion simply allowed the Ori’s profane violations to exist unmitigated. Would he have been born with a personality utterly overwhelmed by the personalities of all those who came before him? As opposed to merely being able to glimpse shadows of memories when one was near certain places. Or possess solely the skillsets acquired by his parents and their progenitors? Unable to acquire more except by theft? Bereft of invention or innovation because he was more of a sentient vessel for data than a living, thinking creature with a soul and the ability to choose for himself? The genetic memory of all Goa’uld species was a tricky subject, both in how jealously the secret was guarded and how it shaped their development and the development of many of their subjects (Who had more docile versions of the same ability gently eased into their genomes over the millennia.) Brilliant Thoth believed it was an artifact of their primordial homeworld, that in order to better survive the myriad of predators and to better take hosts queen would ensure certain actions would be taken instinctively and certain emotional baggage was carried on for better self-defense.
It was that and the regenerative and restorative abilities even primitive Goa’uld barely worth sharing a name with the mighty Peers that lured the Ori to their world. And the vile Ori did so much over the thousand-year period they…His thoughts drifted, even the mercies of his foremothers could not fully banish the inherited sense of utter revulsion he felt when he remembered that which he learned as a youth. It did benefit their kind though, Prim’tah learned at a much faster pace than the offspring of most species, as a matured Peer Cygnus continued to have an easier time learning subjects that his father and mother and grandparents had mastered, even if he lacked the exact and vivid details of their past the
skills were partially transferable in that his kind learned as much from inference and anticipation than by repetition and self-discipline. This was one of the many reasons the Goa’uld aristocrat disliked staying in safety, it was easier to learn all that been learned by others.
So, like his father before him, Cygnus had resolved to challenge himself by entering areas no one before him had. The first time he truly struggled with a subject (In his case textile work.) it had been one of the most exhilarating experiences in his life. Tenerus and Melia his half siblings by Nanshe had taken up play acting in the holodramas which were so beloved across the Imperium and beyond, produced by the entertainment sectors of the guild of Scribes. They had struggled for centuries working in low budget nonsense before the skills to reach the top of their hobby craft’s profession and they were still not quite at the pinnacle. But their reels had indeed improved, and praise came now often.
Cygnus was too old for holodramas, at nearly fifty thousand he had been born before Tau’Ri was discovered and had fought in the wars when straits were dire for the Imperium. He’d also been born just as the last of the wilderness of his family’s domains had been tamed, missing the adventure. Behind him footfalls brought him out of his introspection and his eyes glowed sky blue, shimmering in the dim light of the observation rooms.
Eurydice, like him had chosen the body of a Kelownan that didn’t have as much Tau’Ri descended Lotar in her background. Unlike Cygnus, Eury had chosen to create that host in a lab, a cultivated and enhanced flesh suit as was the custom of the day in this wretched era. She’d been named after an older sibling who fell in battle in the final days of Egeria’s rebellion, and she was a considerable upgrade from the original in that he absolutely detested her, whereas he adored Eury and was all too happy to have her along on his travels. At sixty, she was the youngest member of the House of Aether until very recently and had only occupied her host body for twenty of those years and prior to Amunet she had been the youngest peer in the Imperium. “You’re dressed rather…militantly.” Cygnus remarked, like him she had scarlet colored skin and the thick dark hair with its odd patterns that made it clear the strands of hair were more often than not feathers that connoted their hosts avian ancestry. She was adorned in the armor of his household. His personal standard, a winged mount descended from somewhat small odd toed herbivorous animals that the primitive Tau’Ri either hunted for food or at times attempted to domesticate and breed for manual labor.
They hadn’t caught on, he wondered if the Tau’Ri later attempted the efforts again. Which he strongly suspected, given a heavily modified variant of the species was becoming fashionable on less advanced worlds due to trade with Asgardian worlds. There were other beasts they had taken from Tau’Ri. Large and intelligent lizards, creatures with long noses both gigantic and small and the like but Cygnus had chosen the winged version because the Tau’Ri barbarians who served as the genetic foundation for much of the Lotars in his domains associated the creature’s defiance with his family’s willingness to fight for was theirs and they worshipped it as a spirit animal. And so, when he finally ennobled. Even if he would never be a system lord (Not that he wanted to be.), well he could still hold a measure of pride for his branch of the House of Aether.
“Militant? Well, I guess so elder brother.” She answered, with her usual stoic tone of voice. In many ways she was still a Prim’tah, but sometimes she sounded older than even he and wiser by a good margin. “If you’ve seen the more recent reports from our Ashrak…”
He sneered in disgust. “Apophis wanting to invade Tau’Ri and none of us can still guess why.” He sighed. “And with my half brother making so friendly with them.”
“I agree with Athena on that honestly.” She muttered. “They might be useful to solving this problem without all of us having to gang up on Apophis.” It was still mind boggling that the House of Tartarus would think after all the millennia of war, blood, sacrifice and loss that any of the system Lords would risk the destruction of all that they built in civil strife simply because the House of Ra had grown remote, distant and cruel with Amun-Ra at its head. -It might have been that Ra lost himself, but his children are fair rulers, Horus is the noblest living Goa’uld, and Hathor is still unimpeachable in her character- she thought as she walked from where her brother sat to the table where a immodest amount of food had been laid out. She walked towards an ornate carafe wherein a pale glowing green liquor sat shimmering in the dimmed light. Ambrosia was an invention only fully mature Goa’uld could drink and only a Peer in any quantities that were safe.
Distilled fruit of the Atalan a tree that grew in the most irradiated and poisonous of the worlds that the House of Aether had tamed, they were an invention of Prometheus, the legendary mentor of Ra and the uncle of her grandfather Zeus. He was searching for a way to gradually scrub radiation and chemical waste from dead or dying worlds, to begin the healing process a new and he’d succeeded. He also succeeded in making a radioactive wine that the energy absorbing metabolism of Goa’uld (especially Peers.) thrived on. It was also, one of the few things a Peer could consume that could intoxicate them and in sufficient quantities made their bodies radioactive enough that Lotar couldn’t be near a Peer without suffering radiation poisoning until their abilities neutralized and devoured the radiation. When she poured herself a glass Cygnus arched one of his painted eyebrows disapprovingly and she rolled her eyes. Now wasn’t the time to be a prude. “I’m celebrating, I haven’t seen our divine father in fifteen years and don’t give me that look, I’m
young and let’s not lie to each other. Fifteen years is a long time in our family.”
It was true, the house of Aether was a lot closer than the other Goa’uld dynasties. But none had suffered the loss of so many of its finest children or brothers and sisters save perhaps the house of Ouranos and save for Set and his children and the heirless technologist Thoth it was largely extinct as Ra and Yu had founded their own clans and were not counted. Their losses had damn near driven them insane, it had driven Amun-Ra insane in her opinion. But he buried only one daughter, during the wars with the elder races Apollo had buried fifty, Zeus and Hera stopped counting at some point and that was to say nothing of the tens of millions of lobotomized Prim’tah her elder sisters and cousins and distant kin had given birth too that died with their Jaffa in battle and however many died every day when their Jaffa at long last succumbed to old age or accident (Once again causing Eurydice to thank Ra that she wasn’t born a queen, she couldn’t fathom doing that to her own offspring.).
Yet they weathered that storm, without losing their minds as the former radiant, majestic Emperor of all the cosmos had. They weathered the abuses, excesses and treason of their patriarch Kronos as well, though her siblings seldom spoke of it. It had been their proximity and perhaps remoteness as for the longest time their realm was far from the intrigues and stresses of Dakkara, and they had the task of converting ruined and impoverished and even dead worlds into a healthy, vibrant kingdom. That had been why her divine and noble Great Grandfather likely ordered Uncle Herakles to accept Horus offer and promise not to try and run for throne. She couldn’t imagine any of the System Lords taking what Apophis seemed to be planning with anything but scorn and fury. -To think he would spit on all that we’ve worked to achieve, our mandate to spite the elder races and our goal of being proper custodians of the lesser races solely because he feels cheated-. “Besides, I managed to sinch a trade deal with a minor noble of Lord Ba’al’s domain! And I did it using accounts from the bank of the House of Set.” She beamed causing her oh, so very much older brother to look at her in alarm. “The Lord High usurer will not appreciate that.” He grumbled.
Set was the Imperial Treasurer, who managed the finances for the whole of the Imperium and was arguably the second wealthiest sentient in all of the universe through the grand banking guilds that he and his descendants had founded whose reach spawned well beyond even the farthest of Imperium’s outpost. As it was with Ba’al who controlled an energy monopoly that even the mighty Asgardians had to depend on to a degree and whose trade fleets and planetary engineering guilds were famous the universe over. Everyone did business with the Banks of Set, that him being his own banking cartel king while running the treasury of their entire civilization was a monstrous conflict of interest no one remarked on.
After all, he’d done a fine job for the last hundred thousand years.
Except she wasn’t entirely sure that was completely correct.
Something rotten was coming out of Set’s domain and that Fleet Captain Drey’ac and a Peacekeeper Admiral allegedly engaged in ancient third generation Ha’tak class vessels made her as paranoid as it made her father and grandfather. “I suppose this is why we were made to come via vessel and not Stargate, maybe our divine father is worried Set’s agents would tamper with the gate network and have me vaporized or something.” She gave a shrug; it was no secret that Set and Ba’al hated each other immensely. That their chamberlains had supposedly swore an assassin’s vendetta against each other and that neither could fully act against the other without throwing the economy of the whole universe into an uproar and a probable recession. And she wondered, if the vaunted militaries of the House of Aether and Tartarus and their preeminence in the cosmic order of things had the same significance when a war between two glorified accountants could do more damage with a few keystrokes on a datasheet than they could with all their fleets combined.
“I believe he doesn’t want our arrival at Helios
logged.” The movements of every Peer were documented by the Gate Network carefully maintained on Othalla and on Dakkara, the two and as far as anyone knew, the only two known cores for the whole of the universe. It was hard not too, given their nature as not entirely physical beings. Their energy signals were just too unusual, and they were too critical not to be noticed.
Which was what made the actions of Lord Apophis that precipitated the mess they were now in so absurd. How did he think he could go out and abduct women from across the stars to placate that vicious little idiot of a consort he had in Amunet. When their Ashraks broke that bit of gossip she damn near dismissed the lot of them because even that raving simpleton couldn’t be so foolish or possess so little dignity that he’d galivant around the stars like some mindless primitive from one of the lower breeds, taking what he wished as if he was entitled to anything he did not earn.
It demeaned their entire race. “Body thieves, parasites, dream stealers. Hope robbers, plunderers of lives and civilizations..Cosmic grave robbers they called our great grandparents.” She whispered bitterly. “And there are still some among the stars who would say that if they weren’t terrified of our powers. As if the first millennia of the rebellion when our forefathers had to use stolen and scavenged technology marked us forever.”
Cygnus quirked his head, it was oddly birdlike and evocative of what at least one of the ancestors of the Kelownan people that evolved on the Langaran continent possessed. “You’re a little too young to be up in arms over past slights little sister.”
She rolled her eyes. “Only because if half the rumors coming out of our Ashraks are true that violent imbecile has made them modern…I may spawn progeny one day brother, Aether above! Do you not feel the wound to your pride? You worked as hard as any other to make the vision of Amun-Ra reality and what that means.”
He laughed, stopping her in her tracks. “You’re out of sorts Eury, rushing wild to and fro, in that you’re like your grandfather. Like him, you would prefer to rage at anything even nothing so long as it helped alleviate the stress of a looming quandary. Or that you slighted Set in a way that could find you. Shall we say, Inconvenienced in your endeavors.”
The conversation ended as the blue and green gem of the realm of Apollo (Which had also served as the temporary Crown World of her aunt Athena as her own domain’s Capitol was repaired after suffering orbital bombardment during the Titan’s rebellion.), two billion sentient souls resided there, while another eight billion were scattered across the four other planets in this solar system that had been aggressively engineered and colonized.
Helios, named after an uncle of her grandfather’s one of the earliest system Lords and a staunch supporter of Anubis and Amun-Ra. Helios was a deceptive little paradise, filled with estates where even the poorest Lotar had hectares to his name spanning the one super massive continent on the world and its myriad of islands. It was an agricultural hub by extensive planetary engineering and genetic modification of plants and soil replenishing bacteria. But in its pretty mountains and vast inland seas lurked a power.
Because her divine father, mighty Apollo. God of medicine, God of the implements of the hunt, God of fire and the charioteer that carried Ra’s
Manjet through the stars pulling the radiant and eternal light behind him. Lived up to the moniker he shared with Horus as “The far striker.” -Let Ba’al keep his gravity lances and Yu his plant ships with their almost unbreakable energy shields. And the House of Ra with their unimaginably advanced technology…- She thought with a confidence only youth could bestow.
Just as she was certain this meeting was about Apophis and supporting Horus.
With an unfounded certitude only, youth could possess.