XSGCOM: Mirror Image

I own neither Stargate nor the X-COM franchise. No infringement is intended, no profit is to made and I'm just not worth the hassle of suing anyway unless you want a share of the wages of an underpaid Civil Servant.  

Colonel O’Neill and Teal’c were met on arrival through the transporter rings and were led to the ships Pel’tak, or Bridge as it was now called under the ships new ownership. It was certainly easier to travel back and forth now a set of rings had been set up in the SGC, shuttling back and forth in Deathgliders was a pain in the ass.

Much of the ship seemed to be crawling with engineers and technicians trying to figure it out. One of the plasma cannon’s that made up the Ha’taks secondary armament had already stripped out and shipped down to Earth in pieces so it could be back-engineered and the plan was for one of the even more powerful main guns to follow in time. So far it seemed that all Goa’uld plasma weapons were based upon the same basic principles as the Jaffa staff-weapon and were simply scaled up versions of the same with certain necessary changes made to adjust for increased size and power. As such they weren’t working blind and the R&D people were confident they could figure the weapons out in a matter of weeks rather than months or years.

As they made their way along a corridor they ran into the Tok’ra Anise who was explaining the principles of the sub-light engines to a number of X-COM and SGC Scientists taking notes as she traced the route of some of the internal cabling through the ship. She acknowledged the two of them with a nod but continued unabated in her lecture, the only one following her not seemingly enthralled by either her words or her appearance the bored looking female X-COM grunt with a Laser Rifle assigned to watch over her in case the Tok’ra did something underhanded.

A few things had already been established which were interesting. Although they hadn’t tried to enter Earth’s atmosphere the Sectoids had sent scouts into Earth space revealing that the Goa’uld vessel had the same trouble tracking Sectoid ships at extreme range as the Asgard, which wasn’t necessarily a shock as Loki would wish to avoid the attentions of the System Lords as well as his own people. The Hat’ak could get a decent weapons lock at relatively short ranges of hundreds of miles but it needed to be directed to the vicinity of the enemy first by the more primitive, but nonetheless in this case more effective, human radar first. Also of note was that Goa’uld shielding was less energy efficient than the otherwise similar Asgard-modified Sectoid deflector shield units now being used by X-COM Firestorms. Anise had already suggested that this finding could be the basis for a more resilient hybrid shield unit that would stand up to punishment longer than a standard Ha’tak, though it would still be far below the standards of even an older Asgard design such as a Beliskner Class ship.

In the long term the plan was to strip out the Deathglider bays one at a time and refit them for the superior and slightly larger F-302’s as they came off the production line. It was felt that the ship would be better deployed as a carrier rather than a line warship given that Earth only had one such vessel and could not afford to have it battered about unnecessarily. The striking power of fifty-plus of the new Tau’ri fighters armed with lasers, plasma cannon and naquadah-enhanced thermonuclear warheads should give most foes pause for thought without having to bring the ship itself into danger it was considered.

Colonel Caldwell turned in his command chair when they eventually arrived on the bridge and narrowed his eyes. ‘Colonel O’Neill’ he greeted his guest with a hint of more than a touch of hostility in his voice, ‘Teal’c’ he added, acknowledging the Jaffa, ‘welcome aboard’ he told them.

O’Neill wasn’t sure what the attitude was about, he himself would have been overjoyed to have been assigned the job of commanding a sweet boat like this but Caldwell a fellow USAF officer didn’t seem all that happy. ‘Enjoying the new command Steven?’ he asked, deciding that given they were the same rank and had met before a few times some informality was okay.

‘I was enjoying it more until recently Jack’ Caldwell replied, taking a look around the bridge which was only partially manned at present.

‘Problem with the ship?’ O’Neill queried.

‘The ship’s fine, everything working like it should be’ Caldwell replied, ‘my problem is the crew, and it’s your fault’ he declared.

‘What did I do?’ O’Neill asked in confusion.

Caldwell crossed his arms. ‘When I took command of this vessel I was told they hadn’t come up with a name yet’ he began, ‘then someone decided that they’d let everyone in X-COM and the SGC vote on it after taking suggestions.’

‘Ah’ O’Neill responded awkwardly.

‘So when the votes are counted I check to see why exactly the suggestion that won got so many votes and I discover that a certain well-respected Colonel had been campaigning for it’ Caldwell continued. ‘He swayed so many votes with the SG Teams that along with the science geeks it beat out all the decent names to first place.’

‘Teal’c helped out’ O’Neill responded, trying to share out the blame.

‘Indeed’ Teal’c concurred, ‘I talked around many wavering voters’ he declared proudly.

Colonel Caldwell muttered something darkly to himself. ‘Nobody with my hairline should ever find himself the commanding officer of a starship called the god-damned Enterprise’ he growled.

O’Neill desperately fought back a grin, even the stoic and ever laconic Teal’c was clearly finding it hard to keep a straight face. ‘What’s the problem Steve?’ he asked deadpan.

‘The problem, Jack, is that everybody on this ship has started calling me Jean-Luc Picard behind my back, and in the case of some of the civilians right in front of me’ he complained.

O’Neill felt his cheek twitch as he continued to force back a smile. ‘That can’t be good for the dignity of command’ he observed. Caldwell did have a reputation of being pretty tough, harsh but fair was the oft-used phrase to describe him, and he wasn’t the type who’d enjoy this kind of thing.

‘It’s not’ Caldwell replied flatly.

Colonel O’Neill looked thoughtful for a few seconds. ‘You know I see a solution’ he said eventually.

‘I’m all ears Jack’ Caldwell replied, his voice tinged with hope.

‘Okay so here’s my idea’ O’Neill began, leaning in so nobody but Teal’c could overhear. ‘You start wearing an expensive, but unconvincing toupee, make out with resident alien babe Anise and then they’ll start calling you Kirk instead’ he advised in as serious a tone as he could muster.

Caldwell blinked a few times and then narrowed his eyes again. ‘I can have you thrown out of an airlock, you do know that right?’ he asked coldly.

‘Totally worth it’ O’Neill replied happily, ‘you can let it go now Teal’c’ he added causing the Jaffa to break out into the best laugh he’d had since telling the joke about the Setesh Guard.

‘Get off my bridge’ Caldwell ordered sharply as soon as Teal’c stopped laughing.

Captain Michael Redmond grinned as he gained on the Sectoid Battleship, for some reason it wasn’t putting everything it could into the engines enabling the X-COM Firestorm under his command to catch up with the large alien craft, once he was down to sixty kilometres he was going to joyfully put a naquadah-enhanced nuclear tipped avalanche missile up its ass and then go home and paint another flying saucer on the side of his Interceptor, at least that was the plan.

It was surprising the opposition hadn’t done this before Redmond thought to himself as he chased down his prey. Another identical enemy ship was currently on the other side of the world heading across the Pacific towards South America which was why the newly christened Enterprise was being bought into action down there instead of here, the captured Hat’ak was a hell of a weapon but what it couldn’t do was be in two places at once which meant Interceptor Control had to prioritise their targets. Flying out of X-COM Europe Redmond had been seconded from the USAF and he hoped this mission would give him the chance to finally get his kills into double figures, it had been too quiet recently with the lull in the war and he had been worried he was never going to splash his tenth UFO, one thing was for certain, he didn’t want to lose out to the second Firestorm heading from X-COM’s base in Japan so he pushed his fighter’s engines to the maximum as he closed in on weapons range.

The plasma cannon on a battleship outranged his missiles so this wasn’t going to be a cake-walk. The shield fitted to his fighter could reasonably be expected to take one hit before failing but after that all he had to rely on was the Firestorms armour plating and his good luck. Adrenaline starting to surge as he closed in to less than a hundred kilometres Redmond initially failed to spot the change in the blip on his radar only noticing that it was breaking up into one distinct and one much fuzzier track when the second began closing fast, very fast.

His first thoughts were that the Battleship had fired an Air-to-Air missile at him, which was a first, but far from totally beyond the realms of possibility given that the enemy weren’t stupid and humans had been successfully using such things against them for over two years now. Breaking off pursuit and slowing down for increased manoeuvrability the pilot put his hybrid Tau’ri/Goa’uld/Sectoid technology derived ECM system to maximum and got ready to try and jink to avoid the missile.

The sudden and visible impact of plasma fire against his shields soon changed Redmond’s mind as to what the indistinct signal was on his radar. ‘Son of a bitch bought along a fucking fighter escort’ he exclaimed, pulling the Firestorm around and starting to perform a series of viciously high-gee manoeuvres which would have black him out in an instant if not for the inertial dampening system back-engineered from a Goa’uld Deathglider fitted to his craft.

‘Can’t get a missile lock’ Redmond growled as more plasma impacted on his shields, the enemy craft seemed to have much better ECM than previous ships they had encountered and although it’s plasma cannon wasn’t remotely in the league of the Battleships it was still starting to deplete his shield strength.

Another tight turn bought the Firestorm almost face to face with its opponent, a small roughly saucer-shaped craft of very similar dimensions and a slightly more flowing design aesthetic than other sectoid ships. It flashed right past the nose of the Firestorm and Redmond found that he could get a lock but only at near point blank range which was not what he wanted when his Avalanches were carrying naquadah-enhanced nuclear warheads.

‘Nimble little bastard’ Redmond noted as the alien fighter demonstrated it could outturn him, its plasma weapon continuing to chew on his shields every time it got the chance. ‘Okay let’s do this the old fashioned way’ the pilot said opening his second weapons bay and powering up the Laser Cannon it was carrying.

As the two saucers danced through the air it was more like a First World War dogfight than a twenty-first century air battle, no long-range sniping with beyond visual range missiles and huge Directed Energy Weapons this was more of a knife fight and the Firestorm was at a distinct disadvantage. Although it could outturn any terrestrial fight with ease unlike its opponent the Firestorm was not a dedicated aerospace superiority fighter, it was a pure interceptor with a laser cannon designed for maximum beam strength not rate of fire.

‘I’m being pecked to death’ Redmond said through gritted teeth as the alien fighters guns bought his shield strength closer and closer to zero. He wasn’t at all keen to find out what those plasma weapons would do to his armour once the shield was gone and he decided it was becoming the smart thing to do to run like hell. Unfortunately when he tried to break off he then discovered that the alien fighter wasn’t just more manoeuvrable, the damn thing had better acceleration and was goddamn faster too.

As determination turned into panic Redmond tried a series of rapid random turns and loops to break away from the engagement but it was getting him nowhere until he once again found himself nose to nose with the enemy fighter and triggered his Laser Cannon on reflex, this time the searing beam of coherent light cutting deep into the saucer, causing the alien to jink away this time. At least they didn’t have shields yet Redmond thought to himself with relief, we’ve still got one edge on the bastards he decided.

Taking advantage of the temporary reversal in the situation Redmond banked hard right, gunned his elerium powered gravity engine to maximum and put the Firestorm into a steep dive. If he could just make it back to land instead of dogfighting over the sea and occasional iceberg he could lead the alien fighter a merry chase flying nap of the earth.

It might have worked if the battleship hadn’t decided to end the fight, coming into range of its oversized plasma cannon and firing a single shot which instantly bought down the Firestorms remaining shield strength, vaporised its armour and overloaded the naquadah generator sat just behind the pilots chair. It detonated reducing the craft and its pilot to several thousand pieces in a microsecond, the flash visible for scores of miles even in daylight.

The alien fighter turned and rejoined the ship it had been escorting. As the battleship quickly settled down near the town of Kazachye in Northern Siberia and began abducting people wholesale the fighter performed a Combat Air Patrol overhead, effortlessly knocking down a pair of Russian Airforce MiG-31’s that tried to challenge it. With the second Firestorm coming from Japan ordered to return to base until this new threat could be properly analysed, and before X-COM in the form of the Enterprise in orbit could otherwise intervene, both the Battleship and its Fighter escort were leaving the atmosphere again, soon disappearing from all sensors as they accelerated away from Earth.

In the aftermath the recorded telemetry from Redmond’s Firestorm told a disquieting tale, they clearly hadn’t seen everything the sectoid’s could do yet and it came as a nasty shock. They were still introducing new technology to the game and Earth wasn’t as secure as it had started to think it was.

The second battleship and its own fighter escort had been blown apart by the Ha’tak over the Pacific but neither Loki nor his AI copies cared for the lost of a few clones or easily replaced ships. Human genetic material and test subjects were more valuable than ship crews, the former carried the secret of saving the Asgard Race from extinction and perhaps securing ascension, the latter be they sectoids, mutons or other races were simply grown in a tube as replacements were needed. Earth was an endless genetic resource to be plundered, and it would be until the humans there raised their game even more.

As ever in the aftermath X-COM licked its wounds, and prepared for the next round, more determined than ever to fight back regardless of losses or technical inferiority. The war might be fought in the skies and on the ground but it was going to be won in the lab and if Loki’s Legions had thought they’d seen everything humanity could do yet they were in for a nasty shock too. Deep inside a mountain at Area 51 the first prototype F-302X Grim Reaper was being assembled, technicians working around the clock as they redoubled efforts to get the aerospace fighter operational as soon as possible. Back against the ropes with a bloody nose once again the Tau’ri were going to do what they always did, come out fighting.

A team of Engineers and Technicians had installed a large flatscreen X-COM Geoscape display on the back wall of the Gate Control room some months back and General Hammond was using the remote control to slowly rotate the image of Earth hanging in space. Eight bright blue squares superimposed on the world showed the locations of X-COM bases right around the world, two orange squares indicated Area 51 and Yamantau and a single white square pointed to the location of the SGC.

A blinking blue diamond moving across the surface of the image of the world meant that the captured Goa’uld Ha’tak was directly over that spot. Solid yellow diamonds were X-COM craft in flight, either Firestorm Interceptors, older XF-701’s pressed back into service after a brief retirement, or Skyranger supersonic VSTOL Transports. Red diamonds were hostile UFO’s, and there were three of them showing up with the blue diamond heading for one and several yellows heading for each of the other two.

‘They’re getting more escort fighters every time they show up’ Commander Sharp standing just behind Hammond stated flatly. ‘Three or four of the things for every battleship now at least, our Firestorms are outclassed even with the shields and the older Interceptors aren’t much more than plasma fodder’ he stated.

New symbols, this time orange diamonds seemed to be appearing from the symbol for the Ha’tak. ‘Deathgliders?’ Hammond queried.

‘Yes’ Sharp replied. ‘They aren’t remotely a match for the Foo Fighters one-on-one but we’ve got fifteen of them re-armed with lasers now and weight of numbers is a good equaliser. Mostly we try and use them to chase the bastards off, harass them so they don’t try to land, sometimes it works’ he said, ‘sometimes it doesn’t.’

‘What about the rest of the Deathgliders?’ Hammond asked. ‘We got more than fifteen from the Hat’ak’ he noted.

‘They’re all being upgunned, but it takes time to do that and purge the onboard computers of any nasty surprises the Goa’uld left behind’ Sharp replied. ‘They’re even dusting off the old X-301, it’s not much but it’s got the speed to catch a UFO and we need every bird we can get into the air’ he said. ‘As soon as we get that other Deathglider back that SG-1 borrowed it’ll be thrown into the fight too.’

Hammond nodded. Somehow Major Carter had destabilised a star by bypassing the stargate safeties and the team was currently trying to save an inhabited world called K’tau by introducing a super-heavy element called Maclarium into the planets sun. This would have been a very difficult proposition if they hadn’t simply taken a Deathglider apart and shipped it to K’tau for reassembly. Once completed it would fly out of the atmosphere, get as close as it could to the star and fire the MacLarium payload hopefully solving the problem. Apparently some local religious fanatic had tried to sabotage the construction thinking it was all the will of the gods, which to him meant the Asgard who the people of K’tau worshipped, but had been shot with a zat discharge by an ever-alert X-COM sentry before he could do so. ‘How many pilots are you losing?’ he asked quietly.

‘Too many’ Sharp replied, ‘but while I hate to say it its the lost aircraft that’s worse’ he continued quietly, ‘we can always replace pilots, we’ve got fighter-jocks from the airforces of every major power on Earth to call on, but we can’t manufacture Interceptors quick enough to replace losses’ he said. ‘The Firestorm was never intended to be built in large numbers, it was a stop-gap until the F-302X and even if that thing was through testing the production lines for it at Area 51 and Yamantau aren’t finished yet.’

‘Ever wondered how the RAF felt during the early days of the Battle of Britain when the Luftwaffe was grinding down Fighter Command quicker than the Brits could repair airfields, train pilots and churn out Spitfires and Hurricanes?’ Hammond asked.

‘I think I’m getting the idea’ Sharp replied. ‘Not so keen on reliving the way the RAF got through it though’ he added. ‘The Germans stopped attacking the RAF and started terror bombing cities instead, it gave Fighter Command the breathing space it needed to recover but it meant the civilians ended up bearing the brunt instead’ he said. ‘If I’d have been in charge of the RAF in the thirties it wouldn’t have happened.’

‘How would you have done it?’ Hammond asked curiously.

‘I’m X-COM, we win the war in the lab’ Sharp replied. ‘I’d have thrown money at Frank Whittle when he came along with that crazy “no propeller” idea, can you imagine what the first Messerschmitt pilot crossing the channel in 1940 would have thought when he got bounced by a jet fighter?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘It could have happened that way instead.’

Hammond zoomed in on a portion of the Geoscape display when a number of red and yellow diamonds had converged. Somewhere over Australia human and alien pilots were fighting for their lives, it all felt so remote until Hammond imagined himself in the cockpit of a Firestorm, dogfighting against a far superior enemy machine high over a red desert. One of the yellow diamonds disappeared from the screen signifying the loss of an X-COM craft. ‘God bless you son’ Hammond said, visualising the wreckage and the corpse of a young pilot falling to Earth.

‘Got one’ Sharp said, as a large red diamond amidst three smaller ones turned into a white cross indicating a UFO had been shot down. ‘They’ll have a retrieval team there in thirty minutes’ he said. ‘That was a Harvester most likely, they pick up cattle and the odd farmer in that part of the world’ he said. ‘We’ve knocked a few of the little ones down but we haven’t recovered one remotely intact enough yet to learn much from it’ he said. ‘They’re making a field modification to our lasers so the pilots can select a less powerful shot with a higher rate of fire which will help with dogfighting but we really need to take a look inside one of those things to see why they’re so good at stopping you getting a missile lock.’

‘Who suggested the name you’re using for them?’ Hammond asked.

‘Foo Fighters?’ Sharp responded. ‘We’ve got plenty of people on the staff who are serious Flying-Saucer nuts’ he said. ‘Foo Fighters is what they called the UFO’s that buzzed aircraft all over the world during World War Two. It seemed as good a name as any so it stuck.’

‘They’re leaving anyway’ Hammond noted, the trio of alien escort fighters accelerating away from the fight leaving even the hypersonic Firestorms trailing in their wake.

Sharp nodded. ‘We got the ship they were escorting and they’re running but it’s a pyrrhic victory’ he said. ‘Lost another damn Firestorm.’

‘And another brave man’ Hammond pointed out.

‘I just wish we had the reserves of aircraft we did of guts George’ Sharp replied. ‘We’ll run out of the first a long time before we run out of the second’ he declared. ‘When we get those Reapers in the air we’ll make them pay, lets see how they like coming up against better technology for once’ he said as Hammond zoomed the geoscape display back out. Already a Skyranger had taken off from the closest base, also in Australia though perhaps five hundred miles distant from the UFO crash site, and was heading towards its target with a squad of determined well-armed troops in the back. That was one difference these days, X-COM grunts weren’t outgunned any more, the R&D people had finally put Heavy Plasma Rifles into the hands of the troops and the days of aliens shrugging off shots and returning fire afterwards was over, even the eight foot armoured Muton behemoths dropped like most everything else when hit by a blast from one of the weapons.

‘So I hear they decided against you having any role in the delegation to Tollana’ Hammond said, putting down the remote and turning around to look through the armoured glass towards the stargate.

‘I can’t say I was too surprised George can you?’ Commander Sharp asked rhetorically.

‘Well you’re not as unwelcome on Tollana as you probably are with the Nox Russ’ Hammond replied, trying to put as positive a spin on it as he could.

‘They’ve recruited some diplomat’ Sharp told him. ‘Supposed to be a hot-shot, they’re bringing her here’ he said. ‘I always wish I could be there when they tell new people what we do for a living.’

‘Nobody believes it until they see for themselves’ Hammond replied. ‘Are we giving her the special tour?’ he asked.

‘I won’t tell her about the rings if you don’t’ Sharp replied with a grin. ‘We just need to get her to stand in the right place and transport her up to the Enterprise.’

‘What’s her name?’ Hammond asked.

‘Doctor Elizabeth Weir’ Sharp replied. ‘If she’s as good as they say maybe she can get the Tollan to swap some tech and open up a permanent Embassy’ he said. ‘Supposedly our Treaty with the Tok’ra is already based on some of her work... she’ll probably want a commission when she finds out’ he reasoned. ‘Oh yeah and she’s not keen on the military which means I bet she’ll really hate X-COM, that’ll make for a fun working relationship’ he said with a sigh of resignation.

‘These things are sent to try us Commander’ Hammond observed.

‘I’d sooner deal with ten sectoids or fifty jaffa than one pacifistic, political scientist’ Sharp declared. ‘You can’t even use a stun rod on them no matter how much they annoy you.’

‘So you’ll be doing more off-world combat missions again to keep out of her way?’ Hammond asked.

‘We both know it’s for the best’ Sharp replied with a resigned shrug.