I own neither Stargate nor the X-COM franchise. No infringement is intended, no profit is to be 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.
Cheyenne Mountain – Earth – June 2002
Samantha Carter watched as the gate finally reached the surface, it had taken a little over two hours to secure the thing, rig up the winches and haul the device up the access shaft. ‘Remember it weighs sixty-four thousand pounds’ she called out to the team of Army Engineers now preparing to transport the stargate the rest of the way to its final destination. ‘Don’t let the size fool you’ she continued, ‘the gate material is extremely dense.’
‘The gate may be dense Carter but I don’t think the engineering crew are’ Colonel O’Neill told her quietly. ‘You do the physics and leave the heavy lifting to them’ he advised. ‘People hate being told how to do their own business’ he reminded her.
Carter looked embarrassed, she realised she was getting a displeased look from the Officer commanding the crew and decided the Colonel had probably read the situation pretty well. ‘Carry on’ she said loudly, then turned to head off towards the closest of the Base Laser Defence installations X-COM had been emplacing around the mountain over the last year. It was a great deal easier to bring the gate to the laser than the oversized laser cannon to the gate and some of the best scientific minds on Earth were now working to re-tune the weapon from its usual output in the visible-light part of the electromagnetic spectrum to one which would transmit through the active wormhole. ‘I feel like a fifth wheel’ she admitted to O’Neill. ‘McKay has a team putting together the EM Pulse Generator in case the laser doesn’t work and we’ve got the actual people who designed the laser doing that part of the work so I’m left standing around trying to look busy’ she said.
‘Sometimes you’ve got to let go and let the best qualified people for the job do it’ O’Neill told her. ‘You were the one that ordered all these people here and told them what they needed to do’ he continued, ‘now you just sit back and wait to take the credit for all their hard work’ he said. ‘I’ve been doing that with you and Daniel for years’ he added deadpan.
Carter laughed. ‘I don’t know how I’d handle another promotion’ she told him as they walked together.
‘I find avoiding the paperwork made it less painful to rise above Major’ O’Neill replied. ‘Of course you do need to find a smart, hard-working and meticulous second-in-command who you can dump that on’ he said.
‘I’ll bear that in mind Sir’ Carter replied. ‘Which reminds me, I might be willing to do some of your reports but I won’t forge your signature so could you at least sign them and read them through in case General Hammond or Commander Sharp ask you questions’ she said. ‘I looked ridiculous trying to mime the answers to you at the briefing last month.’
‘I’m sorry but I didn’t think Sharp was a paperwork kinda guy’ O’Neill responded. ‘Hammond yeah but Sharp isn’t my idea of a desk jockey’ he said. ‘Caught me on the hop when he asked a hard question about the report summary’ O’Neill told her.
Carter shrugged. ‘It’s the nootropic drugs the X-COM people take’ she explained. ‘They make it easier to focus on tasks, even mundane ones’ she continued. ‘Ritalin is a nootropic, the stuff they give to kids who can’t concentrate in class I mean.’
O’Neill blinked. ‘You’re not seriously telling me that not only are the X-COM people stronger, faster on their feet and with quicker reactions, they’re also better at doing their damn paperwork than we are?’ he asked with a groan.
‘I’m afraid so Sir’ Carter replied apologetically. ‘If it wasn’t for the other side effects I might start taking some of the pills and injections they take myself’ she told him. ‘I don’t think the long-term dangers are worth it, you just can’t play with the human body and mind like that and expect to come out okay at the end of it’ she opined. ‘It’s like abusing a sarcophagus, short-term you feel great and it’ll add decades or maybe even centuries to your life but in the end you’re giving up too much of what you really are’ she said.
The Colonel nodded his agreement, he was willing to give his life but his mind and soul were something he’d rather keep intact until the end. ‘So much powerful are these lasers?’ he asked as their destination came into view, the heavy steel doors set into the ground open and the laser turret having been raised into position as it would be during an attack. Several of the weapons ringed the complex waiting to shoot down any unwary alien craft that approached.
‘They’re roughly ten times the wattage of the laser cannon the F-302X Reapers carry’ Carter told him. ‘You could take out an Al’kesh or a shielded Tel’tak with one shot, not nearly enough firepower to deal with a Ha’tak but anything less wouldn’t be able to get near’ she told him. ‘There are a few silos with naquadah-enhanced nuclear-tipped SAM’s as a back-up but detonating that kind of ordinance over Colorado wouldn’t be my idea of a great idea’ she said. ‘They’re planning to add a trio of mothership heavy guns we copied from the ones on the Enterprise by the end of the year which will give us some protection even against full-scale attack but that may fall behind schedule because of resources diverted elsewhere.’
O’Neill grinned. ‘I’ve got this vision of a Ha’tak coming in to land on the mountain like we saw in that parallel universe we went to and the mountain kicking its ass’ he said.
‘I missed that mission if you’d remember Sir, had to stay here because my dimensional twin and I couldn’t be in the same universe at the same time very long’ Carter replied.
‘Well it’s a sweet mental image anyhow Major’ O’Neill told her. ‘How do you think Sharp is doing?’ he asked, pointing upwards at the sky.
‘They should have loaded the weaponry into the bays on the Redemption and be preparing to head out any time soon Sir’ Carter replied.
‘They’d better bring back some video that’s all I can say’ O’Neill declared yelling over the sound of an F-302X coming into land. They had already formulated another back-up if both the laser and the EMP pulse failed, now the gate was on the surface they could simply strap it to the aerospace fighter and haul it into space where the detonation wouldn’t be quite such a world-imperilling issue.
‘I’m sure they’ll be recording the whole thing Sir’ Carter told him with a smile.
O’Neill looked at the oversized laser cannon. ‘Think Anubis is going to see this coming?’ he asked.
‘Sir we’ll be firing the beam at a wavelength he won’t see at all except for the after-effects’ Carter replied. ‘Anything in front of the outgoing stargate when that laser is fired back at it is likely to be vaporised’ she said.
‘Here’s hoping that Nuby is the type to be stood there cackling and rubbing his hands gleefully then’ O’Neill replied. ‘Or if not that he’s the hands-on type that will be personally investigating what happened when Sharp arrives and nukes the crap out of the planet he’s firing at us from.’
Carter laughed. ‘Think the Commander will be cackling and rubbing his hands with glee when he orders the Redemption to drop its warheads?’ she asked.
O’Neill looked thoughtful for a while. ‘No to the hand-rubbing’ he said eventually, ‘but only because he’ll insist on pushing the button himself’ he said. ‘Maybe more of an excited schoolgirl giggle than a cackle too’ he added.
‘Unleashing thermonuclear hell does seem like his idea of a fun activity’ Carter agreed.
‘Remind me to ask for a raise’ O’Neill replied. ‘He’ll be in a good mood for weeks after this.’
High Orbit – Earth – June 2002
Captain Tanner turned in his command chair when Sharp entered the bridge and gave a nod of acknowledgement to register his presence. ‘Hyperdrive powering up Commander’ he reported. ‘Shield generators and Particle Cannon showing one-hundred percent efficiency’ he continued. ‘Just remember that if we try and tangle with a Ha’tak we’ll come apart with the third shot from their main guns’ the non-terrestrial born human officer added seriously.
‘I thought we’d upgraded the shields and weapons?’ Sharp queried. Thanks to captured Goa’uld, Sectoid and a few other alien defence technologies it had obtained over the last few years Earth was developing some very interesting and surprisingly effective bastardised systems which often surpassed the original designs by a noticeable margin.
‘Before the upgrades our shields would have collapsed after the second shot’ Tanner replied flatly. ‘Your people added a few laser point-defence turrets which give us a much better chance against a Death Glider squadron or two but we’re still a long way from being a capital ship’ he told Sharp frankly. The four forward-facing particle beam cannon the Redemption carried would pulverise an Al’Kesh or a shielded Tel’tak in short order but they simply didn’t have the firepower to burn through the shields of a pyramid ship before the damn great thing blew them to fragments. During the fighting to defend Tanner’s home system he had watched the Goa’uld motherships sweep aside his peoples small navy and its relatively undersized ships with impunity, the memory was painful though not as much as the guilt he felt for desertion.
Sat in the navigators chair Martin Lloyd nodded his agreement with Tanner, they had been getting along better of late but Martin was however still wary of the rest of his crew given their history together during their brief exile on Earth. Although more advanced than the Goa’uld in some scientific areas Martin pondered to himself, their matter transporter technology to give one example, his people had nonetheless been overwhelmed by their enemies raw military might which is why of course they had sent this ship to look for allies in other star systems, in particular the fabled homeworld of humanity hoping that the first world would be more advanced than it turned out to be. ‘Course laid in for P8X-987 Captain’ he told Tanner, trying to sound calm although the prospect of possibly facing battle had his heart racing. They had all opted to keep their adopted Earth names, much as they had also accepted the renaming of their vessel, it was easier to deal with both the present and future if they avoided too much dwelling on the past.
Looking away from the command console in front of his chair Tanner directed his his full attention on Sharp. ‘The cargo is secure’ he said. ‘Your people are going to have a cramped journey in the hold with all those warheads’ he noted. It wasn’t a large ship, barely over forty metres in length and not intended for passengers, just the five man crew and a smallish cargo hold for supplies.
‘I don’t like travelling without a few troopers just in case’ Sharp replied, ‘there’s only three of them, plenty of space to stretch out as long as they don’t mind cuddling up to a few nuclear weapons.’
‘Not my idea of a sleeping companion’ one of the other aliens observed, Sharp thought he was the one called Ted which made him the weapons officer, the pilot over there called himself Bob but Sharp was damned if he could remember what the fifth member of the crew, the engineer who was still helping the X-COM soldiers get settled in the hold, called himself.
‘If you’re right next to the thing when it detonates it doesn’t really matter if it’s a quarter kilo of HE in a grenade or a quarter-billion tonne yield nuke’ Sharp pointed out reasonably. ‘There’s only so dead you can be’ he said then paused. ‘Of course resurrecting you in a sarcophagus after the grenade would probably be a more likely proposition’ he added, thinking about it some more.
‘I was thinking a woman not a warhead’ Ted replied. ‘As a companion I mean’ he continued. ‘Haven’t got any surface leave in a while’ he complained, giving Sharp a meaningful look. Between beaming engines out of Sectoid ships, and hauling naquadah from the asteroid full of the stuff the Goa’uld had thoughtfully supplied, the crew of the Redemption had been very busy the past few months and occasional trips to the Enterprise wasn’t quite the same as a weekend in Vegas. They were paid the same salary as other X-COM personnel, indeed they now wore the standard jumpsuits and insignia too, but they rarely got to spend their pay.
Sharp frowned. ‘You do realise the core mission of X-COM is to keep you damn aliens off our fine Earth Women?’ he asked straight-faced before smiling. ‘This mission goes smooth and you can take a few days off, just don’t leave any accidental kids behind with DNA anomalies someone will notice’ he requested semi-seriously. Thousands of years of minor, or in the case of some worlds like the one Jonas Quinn was from fairly major genetic divergence meant that extra-terrestrial humans would clearly be identifiable as such from their genes.
‘So we kill Goa’uld then get laid’ Ted remarked. ‘Sounds good to me’ he opined. ‘Beats the shit out of carting naquadah ore from the Oort Cloud’ he added brightly. ‘Hyperdrive is in the green’ the pilot announced giving his own console displays a final check.
Sharp looked around the bridge. ‘Okay we think Bratac is the best bet to have a handle on where Anubis is firing at us from so we pick him up from the Free Jaffa base on Hanka and then deliver our response to our new favourite System Lord’s demands’ he addressed the crew. ‘Let’s get going Captain, and don’t spare the hyperdrive, we’ll overhaul the thing when we get back if we have to so push it hard’ he ordered.
Tanner pressed a few controls on his own touch-screen panel, verifying the ships condition and the programmed course. ‘Let’s go’ he told Ted and in response the pilot fired up the ships faster-than-light engines, opening a hyperspace window ahead of the ship as the Redemption shifted to flight mode, the outer section of the vessel swinging around ninety degrees from the horizontal to the vertical and then accelerated on through into sub-space.
‘Let me know when we’re an hour out Captain’ Sharp told Tanner, turning to head back to the cargo hold before stopping and turning back towards him again. ‘There’s one more thing I need to know’ he added. ‘Where’s the toilet on this ship?’ he asked.
‘First hatch on the left after the reactor room’ Tanner replied, ‘we’ve added instructions in English because we know you can’t read our script’ he told Sharp. ‘Just make sure to turn the valves in the right order when you’ve finished’ he warned. ‘The pump can go into reverse and you don’t want that to happen trust me’ he told the Commander with as much emphasis as he could.
Sharp noted the grimace on Martin Lloyds face and made sure to read the instructions thoroughly as he headed for his latest encounter with alien starship plumbing technology. He only hoped they had a better sense of ergonomics than the Goa’uld, by general request the toilets on Enterprise had been ripped out and replaced well before the X-COM personnel aboard started dissecting the computer core.
Passing the engineer in the corridor as the crewman headed in the opposite direction towards the bridge, Sharp failed an attempt to surreptitiously read his name tag en-route and kept going towards the cargo bay finding it dominated as expected by a large rack of nuclear ordinance. ‘You okay in here Troopers?’ he asked, returning the salutes of the trio of X-COM soldiers who had risen from improvised seats of weapon crates to salute him.
‘We’re fine Sir’ the nearest replied. ‘Hoping for a little action’ he added.
‘I guess we’ll see how it goes’ Sharp replied. ‘Stand easy’ he told them.
‘Excuse me Sir but what’s the yield on these things?’ one of the troopers asked curiously, indicating one of the racked re-entry vehicles.
‘Those are our new standard 1.2 gigaton naquadah-enhanced warheads’ Sharp replied, he had read all the documentation. ‘The three oversized ones are something a little special’ he continued. ‘Basically the same warhead but set in two metric tonnes of cobalt’ he explained.
‘Cobalt?’ one of the troopers queried.
‘Produces radioactive fallout like you wouldn’t believe, make an area uninhabitable for decades’ Sharp told him. ‘We’re sending a message to Anubis and every other Goa’uld bastard that if you fuck with Earth then Earth will fuck with you’ he declared. ‘Anubis overloading and detonating the stargate on Earth would cause global damage, well we can do that to his worlds too’ he said. ‘Hopefully they’ll decide that escalation isn’t in anyone’s interest, we know from Tok’ra agents that when the Tollan announced they had the Ghostriders and their new UFT bombs the System Lords crapped themselves’ he continued with a grin, ‘well we can’t blow up a whole world but we can make it so you really wouldn’t want to live there unless you like having your hair and teeth fall out and your kids born with webbed feet and seven fingers on each hand’ Sharp told his troops who laughed in response.
‘How do we drop these things anyhow?’ one of the three asked.
‘Just beam them off the ship and let gravity and the thrusters on the re-entry vehicles do the work’ Sharp answered. ‘Accuracy isn’t perfect I’m told but with those yields getting within ten kilometres of target should more than do it’ he continued happily. ‘Christ you’d still get third degree burns from one of those going off if it detonated two hundred klicks away’ Sharp enthused.
‘And we’ve got twelve of them plus the three big ones?’ one of the troopers responded slowly, looking at the things with mild concern.
‘Let it not be said that X-COM fucks around’ Sharp replied. ‘Just wait until we get those naquadria bombs the R&D people are working on, makes regular naquadah look like gunpowder they say’ he added, rubbing his hands with barely restrained glee and with a beaming smile that wasn’t quite as bright as a thousand suns but was pretty disturbing nonetheless.
When they picked him up along with Teal’c who had been visiting his family on Hanka Master Bra’tac, ever a good judge of character, observed to his former apprentice that Sharp of Canada alas seemed no more balanced than before earning a heartfelt “Indeed” of agreement in reply.
Stargate Destroyer – Anubis’ Planet – June 2002
Operating largely untended once their all-powerful and all-knowing master, the Lord Anubis, had repaired and activated the device the Jaffa guarding the ancient machine were starting to get very bored. This did not mean they were becoming lax, they were too loyal for that, but they would have all much preferred to be with the forces battling Apophis rather than be sat watching the ancient machine fire its continual beam of energy into the gate.
Set in what looked much like a decaying stone amphitheatre, surrounded by two concentric rings of obelisks, the device itself was certainly impressive to watch in operation, at least it was at first, but after a few hours the fascination the Jaffa had with this great artefact started to fade. The outer ring generated a force-field which protected the structure like a great wall with only one way in or out while a looped ribbon of energy connected the inner ring, the ribbon looking much like the beam the central structure was firing into the chappa’ai. They had no idea how it all worked, the Goa’uld did not permit their slaves too much knowledge of what many Jaffa still thought was magic, they only knew that Anubis had declared that the beam would eventually destroy the chappa’ai on the Tau’ri homeworld unless that is that they surrendered both their captive Osiris and the Eye of Tiamat to him and pleaded for mercy.
Three Hat’ak ships flew in orbit overhead, and deathgliders patrolled the skies as a defence. Many more of both would have been present to defend such a valuable weapon in less chaotic times but the needs of the front line of the war came first and Anubis could not spare any more assets even to protect a site such as this. Although hard pressed by both the combined numbers of the fleets of his enemies, and the superior shields and weapons in the service of Ba’al and especially Anubis himself, Apophis still stubbornly refused to buckle under pressure and as his own improved model Ha’tak ships increased in numbers from their birthplace in the great shipyards of Delmak his position was stabilising if anything. Long term Apophis probably couldn’t win, eventually as Anubis increased his domain and industrial infrastructure, gaining decent numbers of ships and Jaffa warriors to match his technological superiority the rogue System Lord sitting on Sokar’s old throne would be crushed, but for now Apophis was making a very respectable fight of it and could still afford to lose more vessels in each battle while maintaining military parity.
Still establishing himself after his long banishment from the ranks of the System Lords Anubis still controlled relatively few worlds as yet, indeed if not for his impressive scientific edge on his peers the handful of systems he controlled would have made him no more important in the big scheme of things than a minor Goa’uld such as Imhotep. As it was his forces punched well above their weight making him a powerful ally or dangerous foe, whilst the lust other System Lords had for access to even a few minor examples of his new technological marvels meant even the likes of Ba’al or Lord Yu treated him with a degree of public deference whilst obviously planning to deal with him as he deserved after the downfall of Apophis.
Few of even his most loyal Jaffa knew the location of Tartarus, the secret capital world of Anubis where his chief scientist Thoth was working on new applications for the Ancient Technology Anubis inexplicably seemed to comprehend. As well as continued incremental upgrades to his ships the laboratories and workshops of Tartarus were slowly working towards the perfection of new infantry weapons for his armies with body armour and a new breed of warriors to match. Lacking the disposable cannon-fodder of many worlds with a large population of Jaffa upon them Anubis was always forced to seek force-multipliers, in this way he was strangely similar to the Tau’ri he now found himself in opposition to, they both constantly sought a technological means to make up for their numerical shortcomings.
Two of the Jaffa set to guard the device idly watched the machine continue its task. ‘I have heard it said that once the Eye’s of Tiamat and Osiris are in the hands of our God he will then only need to recover that of Ra to possess all six’ one remarked. The fabled crystal Eye’s had long been spoken of in Jaffa legend as the symbols of the greatest System Lord’s of the old days, that Anubis would have all of them was only fitting for his glory.
‘It sickens me that the atheist scum of the First World that actually deny the very divinity of the God’s should have any of them in their keep’ the other replied with obvious distaste for the very notion. ‘Our Lord Anubis should demand their fealty and the heads of their leaders as well as the return of that which is rightfully his’ the Jaffa declared, the sincerity of his faith clear to any that might be listening.
‘I agree brother’ the first Jaffa concurred. ‘Once we have crushed those heretics and the armies of Apophis then we will surely finish the holy task set us and crush the traitor Jaffa that have rallied to the shol’va cause.’
‘It surely says much of Apophis that the rebel Jaffa are led by two that were both once his First Prime, Bra’tac and Teal’c’ the second Jaffa noted then laughed. ‘For a God Apophis is surely a poor judge of who he should promote to his side’ he continued with amusement.
The first Jaffa nodded. ‘You may be right’ he agreed, Apophis was surely a lesser deity than Anubis on that basis alone. ‘We are fortunate to serve a Lord who rewards only those who are genuinely loyal and deserving and can recognise those that are merely feigning devotion’ he said then smiled. ‘Although to hear tell my wife my own promotion is surely late in coming’ he added.
‘We will have our reward for our loyal service in time Brother’ the other replied with certainty. ‘Either in this life or the next’ he said confidently.
Thousands of light-years distant at the other end of the open wormhole a team of well educated heretics had finished its own act of devotion to its cause and with the receiving chappa’ai positioned on the dangerous end of a large directed-energy weapon one Samantha Carter was preparing to send Earth’s response to Anubis in the form of the most coherent beam of microwaves they could manage. They were going to fire at the longest wavelength the tuneable Free-Electron-Laser could manage and hoped it was long enough to get around the wide band of frequencies in the middle of the electromagnet spectrum that would not transmit down a wormhole, built as a laser it was now by far the most powerful maser cannon anyone had ever constructed.
With McKay and his back-up plan, a charged EM Pulse Generator, ready Carter signalled for the iris mechanism to be activated and as soon as it slid open she immediately pressed the jury-rigged manual control that fired the maser.
Visually it was all highly unspectacular at the Earth end of the wormhole given that microwaves are invisible to the human eye, at the other end however...
As the two Jaffa Guards watched and gaped sparks started to shoot off the Ancient Device, it was too well constructed to be destroyed even by the gigantic wattage being fired back at it through the stargate but like metal in a domestic microwave oven the surface started to arc as it absorbed the energy and if the crystal and superconducting naquadah control circuitry objected most strenuously to this unexpected and unplanned for assault. A small bird flew into the microwave beams invisible path and promptly exploded as all the blood in its body instantly boiled and the internal pressure blew it to pieces.
Constructed to last for countless millennia by the Ancients, a race known to drastically over-engineer, and who seriously built to last, the great machine was not however destroyed but instead long dormant automatic safeties kicked in and it immediately shut down its own beam heading in the opposite direction, shutting down the wormhole to protect itself. Only open longer than the standard thirty-eight minutes because of the vast energies the machine was constantly pumping in to keep the wormhole maintained the chappa’ai instantly turned itself off, cutting off the maser beam going the other way as well and leaving the device inert once again, much as it had been in the millions of years of abandonment before Anubis located and activated it. The main difference however was that you could currently fry an egg on any suitable surface, it was practically glowing being designed to transmit a beam of energy not have one played over it.
Back on Earth dozens of scientists and engineers who had been watching the operation cried out and jumped for joy the instant the gate closed down and a certain Rodney McKay got slapped for kissing Samantha Carter whilst seeking to take advantage of the situation. The other stargate located in the X-COM base in Poland had been standing by and quickly plugging in their DHD they dialled the Omega Site preventing Anubis trying again just in case.
The two Jaffa looked on in dismay. ‘Someone has to tell Anubis’ one said eventually, looking at the now inactive machine. Unfortunately shooting, or rather hand-devicing the messenger was a time-honoured Goa’uld custom and even by the standards of his race Anubis wasn’t exactly inclined to mercy, he would likely just lash out in frustration or merely to make himself feel better.
‘It’s been nice knowing you’ the other replied. ‘And no I wasn’t volunteering to do it myself’ he added in case he hadn’t made that quite clear. They were devoted but that did not mean they were remotely enthusiastic about the likelihood of being slain for stress relief especially given the agony of such a demise, the ribbon of energy from the hand device worn by the God’s inflicted pain beyond imagining. ‘It was as if the Tau’ri used some invisible magic of their own to smite the chappa’ai destroyer’ he continued, ignoring the glare he was receiving. ‘Did you see the bird that flew between them?’ he asked. ‘How could they do such a thing?’ he asked rhetorically, he had not even heard of the God’s themselves doing such a thing the wrong way down the tunnel between worlds, not even in legend.
Anubis had considered possible Asgard intervention, or indeed that the Tau’ri themselves or with Tok’ra help might come in ships, but once again the humans of the first world had demonstrated the power of ignorance. They did not know or care what centuries of hidebound tradition said was impossible, so making it all up as they went along, and frequently with little subtlety of method, they simply tried things nobody else would have considered. Innovation and out-of-the-box thinking was apparently once again proving itself a surprising match for what should have been overwhelming, unstoppable power. Monitoring the situation from orbit the crews of the three Ha’tak ships which had been standing guard decided they had been flying around pointlessly with their thumb up their arses all this time and stood down from high alert because the damn Tau’ri apparently already had an effective defence against the chappa’ai destroyer which they didn’t even have to leave home to use.
Thus it was that when the Redemption emerged from hyperspace near the planet and accelerated to maximum sub-light it took the Jaffa far longer than it should have to respond, the confusion caused by what the Ha’tak ships sensors said it was making things even worse, the people and vessels of that world had been utterly annihilated by the forces of another System Lord years ago.
This is not to say that Captain Tanner on the Redemption was any less perturbed by practically running straight into the three ships which utterly dwarfed his own, that they didn’t immediately fire only gave him more time to swear vociferously in both English and the language of his homeworld as they shot straight between two six-hundred metre wide Ha’tak scanning the surface of the world below for energy readings.
‘Why aren’t they shooting at us?’ Martin asked in amazement.
‘Don’t tempt fate’ Bra’tac advised him. ‘That they aren’t is more than enough to know’ he said sagely.
‘Deathgliders on our ass’ Ted the weapon’s officer reported as staff-cannon fire began ineffectually impacting the upgraded shields. The motherships might not have been awake but some of the Jaffa fighter-pilots on patrol around them were still alert enough it seemed. ‘Point Defence Cannon tracking and firing’ he continued with a smirk as the retro-fitted laser turrets swung around and began swatting the unshielded deathgliders like flies. Though a fraction as powerful as the modified base-defence cannon which had been fired into the open stargate back on Earth the X-COM designed directed-energy weapons added to Redemption were still overkill against the Goa’uld fighters. They had been originally designed for engagement against the considerably better armoured ships Loki’s creations flew, not the relatively flimsy targets they were being fired at now, and at near point-blank single-kilometre range, and still outside the atmosphere which would have otherwise bled off some of their wattage, the beams sliced through the small enemy craft like the proverbial hot-knife through butter.
‘I think we’ve got our target, starting bombing run’ the pilot reported. ‘Preparing to transport warheads from the hold in planned sequence’ he said, wishing his palms weren’t so sweaty on the controls.
‘I’ll push the button’ Commander Sharp responded. ‘Anybody back there in the hold sitting on a nuke that doesn’t want to go out yelling “YEEEHAAA” riding it like in Doctor Strangelove might want to get the fuck off the thing right now!’ he yelled down the open passageway that led to the cargo bay. It was sound advice as seconds afterwards, as he pressed the control indicated to him, they slammed into the atmosphere going fast enough to jar the whole ship and then the first warhead shimmered into nothingness only to appear outside the ship where it began to fall just like things should in a gravity field, the ships computer having determined the best place to deploy the thing so that it landed where they wanted it to.
Redemption ploughed a fiery path through the sky as it tore through the atmosphere, plasma bolts from Deathgliders hurtling past it, plus an ever increasing volume of initially inaccurate but improving fire from secondary batteries on the Ha’taks joining in. The motherships were also starting to roll, orientating themselves to bring their main guns to bear as well but it was too late, by the time they had done so Redemption had released its entire inventory of nuclear weapons and was running for its life, not just from the enemy but from its own labours.
Fused to surface burst the first in the string of twelve naquadah-enhanced warheads impacted the ground and each detonated with a force equivalent to over ninety-thousand Hiroshima bombs. The thermonuclear fireball was still growing when the next warhead detonated twenty-five kilometres further along the flight-path the ship had taken and so on it went, the dozen warheads wreaking unimaginable destruction in turn as their blast-waves grew and overlapped, each generating a fireball itself twelve kilometres across that vaporised anything caught within it. The blinding flash and shock wave through the ground each caused heralding the detonation of the next as they carved a vicious wound across the planet, a chain of fire that put any artistic depiction of hell to shame.
The seventh warhead landed with more accuracy than had been hoped, only two kilometres from the gate-destroyer, although built to withstand the ages this was considerably more than even the Ancient engineer that designed it had planned for and it was simply erased from existence by the explosion as the rather tougher stargate itself was sent spinning away through the air like a matchstick in a hurricane, landing far away and bouncing along the ground until finally coming to rest half submerged at the edge of a swamp, the water boiling around it from the heat it had absorbed from the blast.
Climbing back into space after its bomb-run Redemption had left the best till last. As titanic mushroom clouds of debris climbed to the heavens in its wake, the three special cobalt-jacketed warheads detonated as airbursts some hundreds of kilometres apart to maximise the spread of their deadly radioactive fallout. It would encircle the globe within days, poisoning much of the eco-system for generations to come, the Chernobyl disaster was a release of radiation barely worth mentioning by comparison. It was a final object lesson left to the Goa’uld by Earth that said simply your worlds are fragile too, don’t push us too far into a corner or you may not like how we choose to come out fighting.
The Ha’tak were opening fire with their main guns as Redemption jumped back into hyperspace, one shot impacted the shields and interrupted the impromptu chorus of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” being sung by the X-COM Troopers in the now much more spacious cargo bay before the ship passed through the hyperspace window and disappeared, its engines pushed well beyond the recommended limits and Sharp spitting blood because the jarring impact of the energy against the shields had caused him to bite his tongue as he joined in the singing.
When Anubis personally arrived to inspect the damage wrought he was so enraged that he did not even bother to kill any of his Jaffa, he did however maim one severely when the Taur’ri sent him a device containing a video recording of the events taken from the bombing craft. He vowed never to underestimate their resourcefulness again and plotted his next move as his self-professed experts in Tau’ri culture tried to determine the hidden meaning behind the small image painted on the device, a caricature of a human child, one arm outstretched and saying “Hah-Ha!” in Tau’ri script.