Across Many Worlds... Children of the Gods [Jumpchain]

Imperator Pax · Mar 12, 2021

Impressions I

Ishtar was a blonde woman about five and half feet tall. In a largely bronze age agricultural society that was about normal for the social elite. She was a jaffa after all, more to the point she had been up until very recently been high priestess.

Very recently because she had watched Moloch die. Moloch's host body was taller than she had been of course. Not especially muscular, but not flacid either. He had never seemed small though. He'd rarely shown fear.
There had never been a point to entertain fantasies about Moloch being overthrown. The society as laid down by the gods was inherently polytheistic. For thousands of years the countless worlds had recognized the de facto overlordship of the Supreme System Lord Ra. That had not stopped disputes from the system lords or their underlords from breaking out, or even in the cases of particularly powerful System Lords of their Primes, or even lesser Jaffa, from launching private wars. It had however insured that there was a sufficiently powerful figure that the gods could go to for mediation. Ra though had been slain a few years earlier. That had allowed Moloch more freedom to bully and harass his neighbors.

Even before then it had seemed unlikely that one of Moloch's rivals among the system lords would destroy the Canaanite Fire God. Even if they had it would possibly have resulted in Moloch following Baal's example and salting his worlds to spite his rival. It also likely would have potentially meant Moloch simply being conquered and subjugated rather than destroyed. If Moloch were to be destroyed it still likely would have meant the destruction of his priesthood, but at least that would have meant the end of the ritual infanticide that Moloch had restarted decades earlier. That would have been something at least she had supposed.

Moloch was not a god inclined to the history of past events. Particularly since as a lesser system lord a number of his practices from time to time had become reprehensible enough for Ra, or Apophis, Cronus, or Yu to intervene and reprove his actions in public in front of the other system lords. Ishtar had not expected such a thing to occur as for someone to actually destroy Moloch.
Less than a moon's turn earlier in midst of an overblown celebration over a petty minor goa'uld whose realm Moloch had sacked fighting had broken out. Moloch had worked himself into a fury to conceal what had quickly become apparent as a panic. By that point it had too late. A trio of Ha'tak bearing the Dynastic markings of Ra had emerged from hyperspace over the planet well within the defensive envelope of his fleet. The enemy though had already arrived, because the attack had already set fire to plazas, and barracks, and thrown the festivities into a chaotic madness... and because the instrument of torment had arrived.

Ishtar had never seen an Unas before that night. Never mind the hundreds of the monstrous lizard like demons from the underworld, but she knew what they were on sight. At their head in dark red and black armor of chitinous plates was a golden eyed god with skin so pale it might have been marble. His presence had driven Moloch to terror.

Even knowing that her own death would likely follow soon after there had been a visceral satisfaction to watching the other god strike. In a single blow from a claw laden red right hand the Dragon swung his arm down. The blow opened Moloch from breast to back spraying bone and viscera across the chamber. It had effectively bisected the one time system lord in a near unrivaled display of wrath and carnage.

Ordinarily the most dangerous parties to a goa'uld was the threat from below. An underlord rising in rebellion, or a prince unseating his father. None of Moloch's underlords survived the following nights. They died in similar feats, and it left Moloch's Jaffa in a place of limbo. Of concern. No new Jaffa arrived though. The unas were present, but no Jaffa came to proclaim the ancient rites of conquest. There were no celebrations of Moloch's destruction, or the victory over the destroyed canaanite god.

That had been nearly a month ago. Moloch's pride had always been in his army. He'd never been particularly naval-ly minded goa'uld. The three Ha'tak which had arrived had been able to easily push aside and disable Moloch's small capital fleet, and remained in orbit even now.

She doubted they needed to be. The Unas were unnecessary as well. At least from the perspective of maintaining order in the Dragon's name.

Jaffa as a society were inherently polytheistic. One god killing another in theory transferred the property to the victory. In practice it was never that clean, but what could anyone have possibly done to contest what had happened.

No one who might have attempted to ferment resistance against the Dragon stepped forward, principally because the underlords who might have tried to do so had been killed already. Thus the first orders to be issued were not celebrations but orders to clean up the debris and detritus left behind by Moloch, and the fighting which had unmade him.

That such commands had been issued, and that she wasn't dead was a surreal experience for her. It was also a completely different experience than anything she had known in Moloch's service. It was not entirely unheard of. As a girl she could recall a time when the Ushabti, the Stone Guard of the System Lord Ptah, who was as eccentric as any System Lord, had come to visit in an attempt to improve the magiks of Moloch's domain. They had been disgusted and gotten into an argument that had quickly escalated to Ra's brother arriving in person to harangue the fire god for something. She had been young. Ra had eventually mediated the dispute. She had never understood the crux of the dispute.

This was no Ptah but the irritation he seemed to express at water flowage, sewage, fields, and mines was probably similar. For the first time in who knew how long a focus turned to infrastructure beyond the palace and temple districts.

Her fellow Jaffa around her didn't know what to say. She didn't know what to say. This wasn't trying to explain to explain a failure to take an objective. Or taxes bringing fewer returns.

The first changes would be to the naquadah mines. It was not dissimilar to what she had seen in domains of the Egyptian dynasties of Ra's other kin. The alluvial deposits of naquadah that Moloch had been haphazardly mining had been deemed, "Unacceptable," in their productivity.

The Jaffa to her left spluttered striving to come up with excuses or possible solutions to make the slaves work harder, but he was waved off. At least as far as dismissive gestures went it had lacked overt violence, but for a Jaffa who had risen in the ranks of Moloch's through aggression and strength on the battlefield it was probably worse than simply being blasted from the room. The crocodillian heads of the demons flanking the god did not move to smite the Jaffa beside her either.

"That will not be necessary." There was a ripple of light, which shifted into a landscape that she resolved was how a mine should have been. It was a progression of time from how things were, to digging shafts, and then establishing quarries. She'd seen similar enough in more developed Goa'uld domains though it was somewhat different... had she not seen something similar in worlds that had belonged to Cronus's sublords once? Perhaps that was it.

Regardless the body of labor needed to work such would have to be pulled from less productive mines and concentrated at other mines. There simply wasn't a sufficient population otherwise to complete the task.

Naquadah was the most important material to the gods, nearly to the exclusion of all other materials. It made sense of course that what it would go to. It had only been a few days of course earlier that word had reached Moloch's domain from infrequent tradesmen that Apophis had escaped from Sokar, and that Heru'ur had apparently responded by bombing many of Apophis's worlds from orbit. These titanic clashes had inflicted horrendous death, and insured that Uncle and Nephew would be committed to fight each other on a scale not seen in generations.

It also made sense that the improvements to the mining of Naquadah would go to feed the growth of vast star faring Ha'tak. These would be the more virile and swift craft the Dragon had brought to the world not their weaker cousins that Moloch had built over the course of his reign. Moloch's death was one more change following in the comparatively recent demise of Ra, and the changing order of precedence among the System Lords. The Galaxy was a tumultuous place, and sooner or later they would be going to war against someone. Short of outside aggression that would most likely be some relative or another. It was the way of war for the Goa'uld.

The meeting adjourned without any threats or bombastic declarations. They, she and her fellow Jaffa, departed the chambers, and the building in the strange architecture of Unas. It was like a ziggurat, but different. It had steps, and interior offices for clerks ... demonic clerks and staff. It was different though.

She had never thought of a day when Moloch would be dead. In hindsight while it was relief to be from it, she had heard the Unas use the god's full epithet. The Dragon of the lands beyond Shadow. Lord of craftsmen. Master of metals. They went on, of course. She had seen the demons work magic, and bequeath to their god the sobriquent 'Lord of Magic'.

Mittin believed he bore another name, and used an appropriate title, "The scourge lord," SOKAR, "returns to the shipyards." He observed. It was a joke to have called the fight between Moloch's fleet and the invaders such. The ships in orbit carried the markings of Ra... when she had first seen them she wondered if Ptah had built them, or perhaps been constructed by Heru'ur in Ra's name. Moloch's former ha'tak had been shorn of their canaanite markings, and were now being pulled part. "The Unas complain frequently of how shoddy the ships are."

She remembered the complaints of the Ushabti as a girl, and nodded to her deceased husband's younger brother. "They are used to prouder barques to carry them to war I think."

"This is so I think, older sister." He agreed looking at the trio of golden stars visible in the afternoon sky. "I must go to district of the craftsmen. I bid you good health." She returned the farewell even though his eyes lingered on the ships. She made her way back to the busy temple district. The ceremony of fire was forever gone now. Moloch destroyed meant that he could never reinstitute it.

She paused looking at the working Unas, and the humans they were along side. The humans were naturally skittish of the great demons who were beside them, as well as supervising. They had taken the stargate and had begun the process of erecting a field around it. Heavy foundations had been excavated along either side it was a long rectangle... or it would be when it was done. More of the Unas's strange buildings? The looked like nothing she could remember encountering among the possessions of the Greek or Egyptian pantheons. At least the pyramid had been sort of familiar.

Imperator Pax · Mar 16, 2021

To Rule the Stars

Oskyld rested easily in a relaxed observing posturing. His hands were clasped loosely behind his back. If you discounted the technology of the goa'uld then quite frankly the city around them, any of the settlements on this world, would not have been out of place elsewhere. Or when. This could have easily been several previous worlds, even with the high technology... no especially with the high technology he wondered if the Shiar, or Thanagarians would have been out of place.

After a moment he decided no, they' probably wouldn't have been. This wasn't so terribly different, but it wasn't the same either. He'd have to think about it, but the ships taken from Moloch would need to be seen to first. Killing Moloch was enough to satisfy the system lords that he could have Moloch's position... though how much of that was pragmatism versus loathing for the dead god was probably variable. They had other things to deal with, and no one wanted to contend with facing anyone who could sweep Moloch aside like that when there were clearly easier pickings to be had.

That still left him the matter of the ships. Quality. The ships he had taken from over Cimmeria, from Heru'ur, were qualitatively better. He actually suspected that the ships had taken less time to construct, but that probably hadn't overly increased the cost in material. The Ha'tak were a pattern of ship, but the quality of the shipyard, and available materials created grades in how good one was... and it was a massive expensive. Beyond the reach of most goa'uld, and that was one of the hallmarks of being a system lord.

One of that rank had the resources to construct fleets of Ha'tak. Moloch had been a system lord. Now Moloch was dead, and what had been Moloch was now his. That left him a variety of other responsibilities though as well, but it was a fleet which would allow him to keep it. The standard pattern of Ha'tak was a kilometer across. Massive. It was however two distinct shapes, a central pyramid structure with an outer superstructure scaffold apparatus. It was the latter upon which the majority of the ship's weapons were mounted.

The pyramid seemed to have been the original structure. He had learned that from interrogating the goa'uld... unfortunately none of whom had been technically proficent enough to readily elaborate on the why's. The Ha'tak had been a revolutionary leap in shipbuilding and had become the standard of goa'uld fleets in short order. It had succeeded the older siege vessels, which had supplemented the even older Cheops it was a modification of. Part of that was simply that the Ha'tak had when it had debuted represented the goa'uld beginning to... he supposed understand how to manufacture the technology better.

The pyramid hull contained vital features like hangar space, the bridge, reactor, hyperdrive, and the central control. It was the central control systems that he was going up to, and his raptors were already in the process of pulling apart the computer's crystalline computer cores. There were no jaffa present... not that he had expected any to be. None of Heru'ur's jaffa, or at least those on Cimmeria, had known anything about the technical specifics of the ship, which was disappointing, but he supposed understandable. That Moloch's jaffa didn't wasn't a surprise.

It was still annoying.

"Noyan."

The raptor bowed, even though it still left his head higher than Oskyld's own. He was tall even by the standards of the lizardmen. "Docking was successful, and the drones are deployed." The process of pulling a single ship apart at a time was as one might imagine time consuming. They'd started of course with the most heavily damaged ships. "I would expect that given the lessons learned refitting the previous two vessels that this one will take no more than a week."

That was fine. As far as he was concerned they were making good progress so far, but the more important thing was the process of a practical experience with the technology. The raptors were his first choice, though the other lizardmen races would be seeded, and so too would the goblinoid minions... but from a purely practical stand point, "That's good Noyan," He replied. "The system lords have their own prerogatives, but I suspect that we may need a handful of ships to better patrol the border."

Moloch had bullied, and raided the various minor goa'uld around him. Taking, or extoring goods and other resources and with him gone it wasn't unlikely someone would try and make a name for themselves while the other system lords were distracted.

Moloch bordered parts of the wider Mediterranean - Near Eastern religious group. That was to say a mix of greek, Egyptian, and even Sumerian deities. The Celts were a bit farther afield, but reachable with the modifications to hyperdrive. Mostly though were the former domains of system lords like Zeus, Marduk, and the Supreme System Lord Ra.

"We will endeavor to be ready." Noyan responded, before pausing to look around to the control room's debilitated state. "I must note though that this ship, and the others were not originally built to the same standards as the ones we began this crusade with."

He knew that. "I know. These are merely stopgaps," It was in part why he was here to help, "until the shipyards are in a position to build more improved versions." Or ones that were closer to the standard that Heru'ur built his Ha'tak too, at the very minimum faster hyperdrive was what he hoped to achieve ahead of anything else. That would require improvements in the reactors, and that meant naquadah, which required improving the mines.

A shrill tone, an alarm, cut off any further discussions regarding the fleet. A golden sphere floated through the space and projected a holographic image of the stargate. Noyan bared his teeth at the hologram, "They dare to mount an attack? I will rend the flesh from their bones."

He gave the Raptor leader permission to leave. Noyan stormed from the room. Truthfully Oskyld had hoped for a little more time to prepare, but this was fine. He turned to the golden drone crafted by the 25th century humanity of another reality. "Where did they come from?" He asked.

There was a series of tweets and beeps in the machine language, and the hologram projected the combined cartouche catalog of Heru'ur and Moloch. He had to admit... he had kind of expected the Goa'uld Imhotep to mount the first attack. These were not Jaffa in service to any of the nearby Egyptian pantheon goa'uld, but one of the Greeks. The problem of course was to whom they paid tribute too. Imhotep was a true freestanding lord. He had done something for Ra, according to Heru'ur's records, and been paying tribute directly to Ra himself. When Zeus had been defeated by Cronus Ares had managed to carve out a small territory, as had Pelops. He wasn't sure which of those two system lords the invader paid tribute too... or if he instead paid tribute to say Cronus. That was a possibility as well.

Regardless it wasn't something he could just let stand... though he would have to be careful he decided. Well Noyan could handle the ground fighting. Oskyld turned to Noyan's second in command, and the smaller saurian bowed, "We would be honored to join you in work Illustrious Creator."

Noyan had been right of course these just weren't up to the same standards as Heru'ur's ships had been. There was only so much that they could actually do to improve the reactors of the ship. "Show me the hyperdrive." He ordered, and was lead down another golden lined corridor. That would have to change, he decided, when they built their own Ha'tak. They would, it would be simpler to do, and more importantly attract less attention.

Imperator Pax · Mar 18, 2021

Alexander's Envy

Ishtar watched the attack with a critical eye. These wretches would not have dared to think of mounting such an attack on Moloch while he ruled, and had grossly misread the change in ruler ship given what now unfolded. She had not been near the gate when the raid had started, but it wasn't as if staff weapons were quiet either. It was actually a little surreal since in the month since she hadn't heard staff weapons fire outside of Jaffa training. A single staff weapon discharge might have been dismissed, especially during Moloch's reign, but she hadn't heard even that off of the training field and thus it was a sudden shock to here several discharges, and the exchange of fire.

The second exchange of staff weapons fire confirmed what she had already suspected what had happened even without having yet arrived. Then of course had been the deafening thunderclap as Unas arrived from the Ha'tak in orbit.

By the time she had arrived a few minutes earlier the demon's armor was already streaked with the blood of Greek Jaffa. A handful of black and red armored unas had appeared in the center of the field ahead of the stargate, and it wasn't as if they'd been the only ones. She could piece together what had happened from the upturned carts, and work tables. The human laborers had scattered at the incursion but it was clear the unas supervising had moved to attack, probably even before the Jaffa had.

Reinforcements from the ships in orbit must have caught the attackers by surprise. It certainly wouldn't have been something she would have expected. Moloch's armies attacking a rival would not have expected it after all. Noyan's arrival had been girded for war. Not for the honorable exchange of equals, between system lords, or the raids Moloch had conducted to show his strength to others, but the wars of more ancient times. Sokar's demons were charged with the annihilation of the wicked.

Noyan stepped over a fallen jaffa. Either he or one of his fellow demons had smashed the attacker's skull and left him were he had fallen. The demon snarled orders to the other crocodilian warriors some of whom stalked towards the chappa'ai. It had deactivated of course and no further invaders appeared.

From behind her other Jaffa were beginning to arrive as well, and Ishtar caught sight of some of her sisters in the priesthood, of the Hak'tyl, as well as other Jaffa she knew in acquaintance. "These are the Jaffa of Thale."

The observation brought her up a little short, "He is one of Ares's tributaries." Another pointed out. Not that that really said much like many of the minor greek gods the wind god had been subject to a procession of overlords. He had paid homage to Cronus, Zeus, Ares previously, Pelops, and yet others before once more finding himself under the suzerain of Ares. Thale had in truth been little more than a minor functionary in the time that the goa'uld had ruled Earth, and had never even ruled in his own right until well after Zeus had unseated Cronus the first time. Cronus had eventually overthrown his usurping son, but by that point the wind god had been a minor free holding god, and his place among reaches meant he remained nominally independent rather than becoming a true Underlord to whichever system lord he paid tribute to. He was by no means unique in this. It was often said that the pantheon of the greek gods was prone to anarchy, and perhaps the many wind gods who stood as freeholding lords attested to that.

Still it seemed patently insane that a minor goa'uld who paid tribute to Ares would dare to strike at one of the gods who bore the mantle of system lord. Surely after the destruction of Moloch it was obvious to do so was to court death.

Ishtar eyed Noyan as he stalked the field. Except of course it was obvious she supposed... the minor goa'uld had not known the strength of the god he attacked. The terrifying aspect of the great demons unknown.

"We will address this insult," The demon spat teeth gnash as his tail swept with barely leashed fury before kicking a fallen ma'tok away from a slain jaffa. Noyan's threats gladdened some of the Jaffa around her. Ishtar found that she interpreted the demon's 'we' as meaning his fellow unas, the Dragon's raptors going to hunt down the aggressor.

If that was what he meant she would not point it out.
--
It had been a few hours now, and the excitement had died down.

The truth was he had not liked ruling as a god on Athas. Then again it wasn't as if he had particularly cared for Athas period... and the Darkhallow mantle had been different. That universe though had also been half a century after Nagash's defeat, the binding of dwarven chaos god, and all of the rest that had been occurring as part of the Last Alliance. Quite frankly he had half a mind too... too what? He wondered. Throw lightning? He'd been doing that for literally centuries now. Even before his brief stint as archmage of Tamriel.

What he had to contend with now was reprisal for a raid, but they were talking about crossing interstellar space to do so... except that with hyperdrive that really wasn't quite as much of a hassle. There were other issues as well. All the same it was why he was looking at a holographic map of space. Moloch had been among the lower end of the system lords. Ares, and Pelops fell into a similar bracket of power though for different reasons than Moloch did. The greek pantehon buttressed against the expanse of space dominated by the Egyptian pantheon, but there was ... a not insubstantial volume of three dimensional border gore going on.

He knew he would have been looking at the map sooner or later anyway. Part of the reason they had struck Moloch down besides his repulsiveness had been due to the cartouche that he awoken on Cimmeria with. They had taken another different cartouche from Heru'ur's ships months later. The two cartouches hadn't been identical, but Heru'ur's had come with more details. Moloch's cartouche had added a third to cross reference from, but had been less helpful than had been expected.

Regardless the most likely explanation is that the Greek goa'uld had probably assumed that he was now strong enough that he could simply steal his de facto independence by becoming a system lord. Ares wasn't a particularly powerful system lord and likely couldn't have taken Moloch in a fight head on, without relying on allies to take some of the weight. Of course Moloch had repulsed the other goa'uld enough that that wasn't an unreasonable scenario.

From his understanding the reason that that hadn't happened was because Ra had been careful to maintain buffer zones between system lords to prevent anyone from getting any more powerful than they already were. That was probably why Cronus hadn't subjugated Ares and Pelops. Regardless Ra was dead now, and something would need to be done, and quickly. He had maps of Ra's domain as it had been, and that helped to explain, to give context to the borders as they were.

All of that boiled down to, could be reduced to how the Goa'uld had interacted for the duration of the Pax Re when Ra had been Supreme System Lord and able to enforce arbitration by his own decision or the consensus of the senior most system lords. All of whom who had an investment in the status quo. It certainly also involved the general state of technology for most of the galaxy, and more specifically mining and agriculture. Keeping most worlds at bronze age average kept populations low by virtue of agricultural productivity.

Low populations were as by product probably easier to control, but it also meant rather obviously that mining and other labor intensive industries remained limited. Hobbled. That was probably a better word for it. Unfortunately he had no way to really put that into terms for the Jaffa to understand... and he had butchered all of Moloch's goa'uld underlords. The Jaffa warriors who were still alive had nothing approaching the aptitude for what he required... and that ... left the priestesses at least as far as remnants of the previous order. Not that he was opposed to wholesale lizardmen management, but that had its own hurdles.

Deal with the attackers first, "Noyan I will allocate a portion of the fleet to deal with this. Ishtar will go with you to bring the mortals into the fold." The truth was he had other matters to deal with. The mantle of system lord came with it in many respects the duties of treaty ratification, and he had already received notification that the Asgard had moved to add the local Earth to the Protected Planets Treaty. It was a ghastly long document that had been in effect for nearly a thousand years now. The communique was a distraction. He had no intention of committing to anything outside of local space until his borders were secure.
--
Commentary: Like with my Drow CYOA story Out of the Dark I'll include bits of music with this.

I'll have to edit it in, but one of the inspirations for some of the narrative of this jump's plot was Nile's Annihilation of the Wicked. Nile is a southern death metal band which as you might have surmised from the name does Egyptian Mythology themed metal.

Imperator Pax · Mar 20, 2021

Against the wind

The memorandum to all those who bore the title of System Lord occupied one screen. He didn't have time to deal with it. Nor did he really get the impression for that matter the System Lords were actually inclined to move quickly. Earth was pretty far away from most of them. Distant at least in terms of actually travelling there by ship with the commonly available hyperspace drives of most ha'tak. There were those who were close enough, including those who had expanded their borders by taking bites out of Ra's domain.

There were other factors in play. The system lords during Ra's rule had had a series of fairly comprehensive naval arms treaties place. Part of this seemed to have been for the same reason treaties like the London Naval Treaty had existed. The powers that be didn't want to contend with any trying to upset the established order, and also didn't want to have to spend vast sums of money in a naval arms race. The Ha'tak was a goa'uld design that seemed to trace its lineage back to something older, and probably not originally goa'uld. Its hyperdrive was ... inefficient and those slower than it should have been probably as a result of the copying process. Heru'ur's hyperdrive.... the Ha'taks of his in general were of higher quality to start with than those of Moloch's. That suggested quality of ship manufacturing varied between system lords, and logically as a result of available resources.

That was however between system lords who had the resources to build Ha'tak. Ha'tak were expensive and thus most goa'uld didn't have such vessels. There were underlords who had access to them, but during Ra's rule it was rare to see any in the fleets of free standing lesser lords. At least if they hadn't been directly bequeathed by the dynasty of Ra. Naval Arms Control.

That was why he was comfortable sending Noyan with a portion of the overhauled fleet to attack via space while he continued to work on the other ships, and the infrastructure in general. Because if they were going to do anything the borders needed to be secure, and that meant the resources available to actually provide for the defense in the first place.

Moloch's cartouche had been disappointing in that respect though. His information was not surprisingly up to date on his neighbors but that only underscored on how foolish it seemed for one of them to launch such an attack. For all that he kept drawing mental comparisons to agreements between the British Empire and its fellow great powers it wasn't quite the same even if it facilitated a similar purpose.

There were advantages though to holding the rank of system lord... though Moloch, and those like them had never bothered to avail themselves of such. Even Apophis was loath to journey to Saqarra but at least as a world it had been on all three Cartouches. Stennos as it was known had not been on either Moloch, or Heru'ur's. That was part of the reason it had been put on display in the room.

The orbital, and wider solar system, readings were enough to show it was interesting. Stennos according to the histories of the system lords had belonged to Zeus. Its position in Space corresponded to his territorial holdings. That wasn't what made it interesting. The orbital debris was what made the system interesting, and that had been what had warranted more interest.

They weren't entirely certain from drone footage as cataloging the debris wasn't finished yet, but perhaps four or more Ha'tak had been destroyed in system within four to six centuries. The simple answer would have been that two goa'uld forces had destroyed each other over the planet, but that didn't seem to be the case.

That really was the attention grabber. He'd have been interested in that, even if the planet had been uninhabited. Except it wasn't. Stennos had a global population roughly equivalent to medieval earth, and with a comparable level of development, which was interesting given that the planet showed obvious signs of having been bombed from orbit at some point in the past. Data was still preliminary, and he couldn't afford to leave just yet, but it was on his list of things to do.

Moloch had as much interest in trade as one might have expected, but it wasn't nearly as much of a problem as he had expected it to be. That didn't mean there weren't improvements to be made, and frankly insure the army was properly equipped, and the population fed was something he was better suited to overseeing, but there would always be room to improve.

--
She did not question the prerogatives of the one who had unmade the golden bull. Even now surrounded by ancient lore of times long before Jaffa had walked the living world his attention was focused elsewhere. Really that was preferable. It was still surreal to consider the differences even as she slowly took note of them as they presented themselves.

In Moloch's time ruling he had derided male Jaffa who pursued any path other than that of a warrior. As a result any male jaffa with a prim'ta, who carried a larval goa'uld would never have been found engaging in menial labor, or crafts. Moloch had even doubled down on this by recruiting a greater volume of humans into his army... though how much of that had been more staff weapons than larval goa'uld she wasn't sure of.

She would have never imagined to see skilled silversmiths among the ranks of the underworld's demons. They lead work parties of masons, and carpenters. Others raised pens for fattened steers, and were organizing fields for the spring planting. All of it was at odds with Moloch's reign, or the expectations of how Jaffa in his service were to behave.

... and it was something of a relief. Not that she wouldn't be leaving soon. She had received the directive to serve as second seat, which was still a higher position of responsibility than any of her fellow Jaffa had received. This was a military command, or rather it would have been under Moloch's domain... certainly as high priestess she would have been involved eventually but not in the first wave... but then unlike with Moloch's army she would be travelling with a host of Unas.

The tyrannical lizards, devourers of sin, formed the core of the retaliating force. Noyan, and his kin, carried with them strange and powerful magical weapons more like what was used to fight the monstrous Retou.

The floating barque stopped. It and the smaller skiffs conformed to similar shapes to riverine craft she saw humans use throughout the Eygptian pantheon's domains, but there were differences. Long and flat the floating platforms were armed to defend themselves, but were stacked with provisions for the coming campaign. Noyan conversed with a floating golden orb as the last arrived. "We are provisioned, the last of the Lembas,"

A kind of black bread she understood. It seemed a little strange. Ordinarily an assault would be mounted through the gate, and the conquerors of a new world would simply procure food from that side. If that wasn't an option, then one would simply bring food in through the gate to provision the armies... but then again... the Unas were probably used to waging a much different sort of war. "I understand." She replied. Ishtar wished that it was a simple matter to direct the Jaffa accompanying her aboard, but that was sort of the problem. There were high ranking warriors who clamored for the opportunity to join battle against the Greeks.

Noyan half turned to regard some of the warriors. His crocodilian eyes surveying. His size belied the ease with which he moved, and his armor was immaculate. It was the same chitinous like pattern of metal the other unas wore. The helmets were different than those of Jaffa Guard, but presumably that was because of the different shape of the head, they seemed to incorporate the same scrying powers of the helms worn by elite jaffa. Finally he made a low noise in the back of his throat and a hiss, "You can bring them if you chose, but they had best not fall behind." His tail flicked in agitation.

She nodded. To tell the truth though she almost hoped Aron, or some of the others would. It might curb some of their arrogance, and force them to contend with the changes to the realm. Noyan flicked one armored talon clad hand out and gesticulated to another pair of his kind who fell in behind them. She had heard that the raptors would live forever unless they fell in battle. Given that there armor facilitated them protection against staff weapons at all but point blank range she couldn't imagine few warriors could legitimately pose a threat to them... so what then, which enemy had they been bred to do battle with in the first place? What ancient foe had warranted their creation, she wondered as they parted.

Ishtar looked south in the direct of the clearing grounds being expanded. There was an acrid tinge to the air from the work. Red sands being cleared off and liquid stone being poured into the foundations of what would be new foundries...

Imperator Pax · Mar 21, 2021

From the Sky

The sorceress was digging through the drone data separate from his own read through. Vivi was still making her own notes, and probably similar to but different from his own. The drones were still cataloging information, but they had enough to suggest that it would be better to take the chance and come in person via ship. That meant taking a second of the three improved Heru'ur pattern Ha'tak away from anchor.

Then again they weren't expecting a naval incursion. Ha'tak in general had relatively slow hyperdrives. That probably wasn't fare... slow in this case was relative after all. Deep space monitoring suggested an average of about a hundred light years a day for Ha'tak. That was slow only in comparison to the Ha'tak they had taken from Heru'ur over Cimmeria. It also didn't seem like those ships were unique. There simplest answer was that more efficient drives, relatively speaking, had originated from Ra originally, or that there had been agreement to limit the qualitative 'strategic mobility' to a certain number of ships while Ra had been alive. There was always the cost explanation, why build lots of more expensive ships if most of the fighting was going to be conducted in largely ritualized infantry combat between Jaffa.

The historical reasons didn't really matter. They could afford to pull ships for the moment, but only because he'd already come to the conclusion that right now they'd have plenty of warning. They were going to have to establish something more reliable than how they were doing it now, but that was part of the reason they were retrofitting Moloch's former ships, and also going to investigate Stennos. Someone at the height of Ra's power had seen fit to wager, conservatively, at least double the number of Ha'tak Heru'ur had been fine with writing off in his bid to take control of Cimmeria.

Conservatively because there were at least that many destroyed Ha'tak in the system. There were probably more that had either not left enough wreckage behind in orbit, or which had crashed into the planet. There was some evidence to the latter, in addition to much older indications of orbital bombardment.

Given all of that going there in person seemed to make plenty of sense, besides what else was he going to do? Oskyld adjusted the display, both grateful and annoyed that the goa'uld generally didn't have much of a role in day to day management of empire. This was not the Titomachy though, and nor was it Athas. There were too many differences between any of those worlds for it to really be a true comparison, but there were lessons learned. The problem in applying those lessons had always repeatedly proved to be an intermediary layer of skilled personnel to disseminate information and skills.... and of course time.

The knowledge of the old ones, the ability to create the lizardmen had alleviated some of that. That though had been only about a century and a half prior. As a change it had only come after Nagash's defeat, not before it. There hadn't been any real pressing need to try and use the lizardmen to uplift bronze age societies in such a way in any of the following worlds either. This was basically a new situation for them. They were well suited to the warfare role, but there other issues. Stennos though, if it was as it appeared might be able to provide some answers... or rather solutions. Oskyld had little objection to appropriate medieval or Greek organizational schema if those were the experts he had available to use since it would be a step up from Bronze age Canaan.

Telemetry from the orbital sensors projected a revised evaluation. "It looks like the easily minable naquadah has been played out." Not that it looked like the planet had had all that much naquadah in the first place. That was probably why it was little more than a footnote in goa'uld records. The mines being played out had probably happened well before any of the other interesting developments. The large medieval level population base, and of course the orbital debris had happened long after the Goa'uld had stopped ruling over the planet.

No easily accessible naquadah meant no real ability to fuel shipyards. Naquadah was the critical strategic resource for power systems at the heart of goa'uld technology. There were other strategic resources, but those could be worked around. Naquadah provided energy densities that were unrivaled from the goa'uld understanding of science, and Oskyld had to agree Naquadah was impressive on that front especially at higher degrees of refinement. A naquadah reaction in an atomic weapon could potentially boost its reaction into the gigaton range, and that would only require something estimated around ten pounds.

Unfortunately he'd since determined that Goa'uld shields were sufficient take that kind of energy without much trouble. Nuclear weapons in space simply weren't efficient in terms of energy distribution, and thus naquadah power generation was best served in feeding power to directed energy weapons. That of course brought them back to the issue of the space battle half a millennium earlier in the solar system.

There were a couple of possibilities. They had arrived on Cimmeria with not only the cartouche of gate addresses, but also a set of armor. The armor was not, or did not seem to conform to what the goa'uld used. So it was possible the likely idenitified remains of the ship on the surface might have been the source. Maybe. It could have been unrelated too. The identity of the ship was unknown, but it wasn't goa'uld, and it didn't seem to be whatever race (the gate builders) the goa'uld had largely back engineered their ships from. The asgard were the most likely explanation. They were the only race the goa'uld admitted to knowing about who warranted that kind of wariness.

They were also fresh on the mind. Hathor's death was as much of an excuse as anything. If the humans hadn't managed to have killed her it was just as likely the main complainers would have found some other objection to levy. If the System Lords agreed to the Asgard proposal though then they'd be expected to stop any actions against Earth. The System lords on the opposite side of Moloch's domain from Earth largely didn't care. The Celtic pantheon in particular was isolated from the Goa'uld in general with only some of them bordering non Celtic domains. The Japanese Pantheon were largely between the domain of Yu Huang Shang Ti and the Jade Emperor had no interest in Earth affairs. Unfortunately Cronus bordered Yu on the other side, and he sat on the High Council of the system lords as well... and he likely would want a seat at the negotiating table. Cronus's border was also much closer to earth, and to Moloch's former domain.
--
Similar to the Goa'uld Raptors enjoyed a genetic memory. They were born with a hereditary knowledge of passed on skills. The Old Ones had created the Saurus races to fight, to enact the great plan, and thus it was the instinctual knowledge to battle, to guard. Thus his lineage would be one of the first to pass on the knowledge of faster than light mechanics. That was one of the great changes worked into their race following Nagash's defeat.

Intelligence had increased, technology, and technological skill had been selected for to represent needs in particular in combating Apokalips, and the Thanagarians a few decades before this one. This had also coincided with morphological changes as well, but most wouldn't have known to even look for those.

That intelligence though provided further clarity to purpose. Noyan stood on the pel'tak of the kilometer across warship seized more than a year prior from Heru'ur over Cimmeria. They could have pushed the engines accelerated to nearly a light year a second, but they weren't. There was no point, and it would have risked damaging the engines. Besides if they red lined the drives they would have outstripped the consort ships travelling with them... and that would have defeated the purpose.

It didn't matter either. They weren't travelling far enough anyway to warrant that. Even bound by the slowest ship in the detachment a hundred light years in a day would have still meant they arrived inside of a few hours. They would be there soon, so he was waiting.

The problem he was having was the process of planning an invasion. The jaffa were unprepared for launching this sort of assault... not that there was anything impractical about Alkesh and Gliders launching first. It was just something a bottle neck. Initial invasions always had those sorts of problems with the first waves of landing crafts. It would be much easier to use this vessel's transporters to deploy Raptor assault elements concurrently to any small craft assault.

He had already identified the acropolis plaza as ideal to land. Securing the stargate was another priority, but less of one than usual planetary invasions because they weren't dependent on it for deploying the bulk of their forces. A tone sounded, they were now on the final approach... the last preparations before battle needed to be made. Crews dispatched to Alkesh, and pilots to their gliders. Noyan gesticulated to one of the other raptors on the bridge, and began delegating the tasks as needed for what was to start soon.
--
Commentary: Star Wars, Trek, Gate all have pretty fast hyperdrive but really Battletech is one of the few Sci Fi franchises where despite the slow hyperdrive you end up with space feeling populated. Where canon makes it clear you've got an abundance of stellar neighbors, especially in the Inner Sphere, you can get to in one jump.

In SG1 early Goa'uld Hyperdrive is something like 32Kc with instances of faster being shown, but the implication of earlier goa'uld drives being slower, and there are attempts to explain this in different material. Certainly the island theory makes sense, as does the implication that Ra has restricted access to hyperdrive manufacture, and the Asgard went out of their way early on to keep Ancient ships from staying under goa'uld control (never mind that having an ancient vessel would almost certainly have meant other goa'uld viewing it as a danger).

That being said Teal'c comment about whatever the speed of hyperdrive was probably tell the groundpounder something that sounds impressive but not accurate, or at least not the top speed. Ten C for example is close to what ME drives are capable of, and thats slow. BT drives can do a 30ly jump per jump but then week long charge time so its complicated. Here though you don't need very fast drives to go harass your neighbor you just ordinarily wouldn't have ships for that compared to attacking through the stargate.

Imperator Pax · Mar 26, 2021

Lightning

Oskyld had taken a break from his review of still processing sensor data. It wasn't that he was getting tunnel vision per se. Processing the information coming in wasn't really the problem, but they had hit the point where useful information would be unlikely to be forthcoming until the cataloging was done. They had a complete enough picture of the system in any event. They had all the relevant details worked out, and a hologram of the planet with its gate address projected set center in the room. He had other responsibilities to contend with.

Taking on the mantle of system lord meant a surprising degree of bureaucracy... of course ordinarily such things would have been dealt with by a combination of clergy and well minor underlord scribes. Less goa'uld who handled various minutiae... then again it was entirely likely that Ra's instance on such ceremonial duties had been part of his efforts to keep things rolling along... and probably to spy on the other system lords. With the office of de jure emperor vacant though the taxes paid to the Supreme System Lord went unpaid... and unlamented. Legally speaking the System Lords still expected writs of conquest to be recorded. Under the bylaws that created the entire order goa'uld were supposed to register newly acquired (or colonized) planets, any newly discovered planet really was supposed to be reported to the system lords ostensibly for tax reasons. Part of it was that, but also to keep an eye out of potential threats including ancient technology that might be recovered. Failing to do so wasn't really penalized, and wouldn't with Ra dead, just that legally speaking if another goa'uld attacked the original founder they'd have trouble arbitrating the dispute before the council.

He was considering whether or not he wanted to go through the hassle of legally proclaiming his rule over Stennos. Or rather if they actually could come to the process of adding it into the domain in the first place. Stennos's legal status though wasn't the more pressing concern, and most of the goa'uld were still dithering over the Asgard's proposal regarding Earth. It was Noyan's expedition that going to be the bigger bureaucratic mountain to climb... and would probably put him at odds with Ares. It was possible Ares had put Thale up to it, but that would be hard to prove, and it wouldn't really mean much anyway. Even a confession wouldn't mean much... the goa'uld didn't work like that.

That was why he had taken a break from Stennos's data, and turned to consider the matter of ground equipment. Jaffa armor was relatively primitive, but generally uniform across the galaxy with exceptions. The combine Greco-Egyptian pantheon established a basic pattern that had been accepted broadly by everyone else. Equipping jaffa was thus a matter of the metalworking. Its time, skill, and expense.

In practical terms what really differentiated it was quality of manufacture, and that often corresponded to the Jaffa's rank, and means. This construction ranged from iron, to steel, and then to well an alloy construction of an alien metals of trinium and naquadah. The only examples of the latter he had had come from the Horus Guard officers of Heru'ur on Cimmeria. Apparently Moloch was either too poor or too cheap to afford such protections for even his elite Jaffa. Then again while Naquadah was the rare mineral that formed the backbone of goa'uld high technology it wasn't the only highly prized resource.

Geth pulse rifles, or rather weapons that had been descended from those, had proven overkill. Conventional small arms would have been sufficient against Moloch's jaffa. Anti midian rounds would have been overkill. Part of that was design. Chainmail was not ideal for stopping bullets even the improvement from iron to mild steel wouldn't change that. Naquadah even in a low purity alloy offered some protection, but still had suffered in that mail wasn't suited for that. The partial plate ensemble offered much better protection against bullets. Steel and iron was far from ideal, but it might offer some protection where as naquadah and trinium offered very good protection.

Gunpowder weapons were well beyond the scope though of what the armor worn by jaffa was designed to counter though. Naquadah invested alloy could protect against staff weapons, but the lower quality iron armor couldn't. It could however protect against iron age, or bronze age weapons... like was to be found fighting human auxiliaries... or rebelling slaves. It was the sort of armor that would have offered relatively reliable protection against even medieval bows for the most part. Not modern fire arms though, they hadn't been intended for that.

--

Noyan's ancestral memories reminded him of conflicts elsewhere. The Dragon's titomachy preceded his race's existence of course, but they had fought in conflicts of a few decades against Ares, as well as against Thangar, and Apokalips. He knew enough to understand the architecture at least.

The directions to his talons was all instinctual as they stormed the plaza. The jaffa would be able to follow them or they wouldn't, but he wasn't counting on them to carry the day. Not the ones coming through the 'tube. No the real jaffa support would be those in Alkesh and Death Gliders battling for air supremacy, and then to use them to direct any necessary strikes as well as offload additional troops.

He had only a small cohort of his race with him. The Jaffa host which had accompanied them would be needed to secure and hold territory if there was resistance. He knew that. Noyan raised his forearm mounted plasma caster, and sent several bolts of star fire crossing the intervening space of the plaza. They had elected to change to plasma weapons from their pulse rifles, but the effect was largely the same.

The brightly painted acropolis found its walls scoured with stray staff weapons fire as Jaffa launched salvos at one another from hastily assembled lines. Part of the inaccuracy was the difference in elevation, some people were down flights of stairs others had clambered on to plaza fountains, or platforms. Some Jaffa were even scaling to the rooftops. It was in many respects turning into a mess already.

That was fine. He craned his armored head upwards and latched a taloned gauntlet around the iron sabaton the jaffa warrior was wearing and slung him across the cobblestones into some of his fellows. The Greeks tumbled down the short flight of steps into a pile with audible groans and clamor of their armor.

Noyan raised his armored gauntlet and opened fire with the plasma caster again. The fight in orbit was as one sided. The aging cheops carriers were cheaper to produce than Ha'tak, and had much greater transportation capacity. They were ideal for ferrying passengers or cargo, in addition to carrying gliders and alkesh into battle. They were not however intended for use in gunnery duels especially against modern Ha'tak.

That much had proven apparent. The 'wind god' did however have gliders and alkesh and the fight between those and their own was much much more even. Only his heads up display allowed Noyan the ability to keep track of which exploding fireballs that had been fighter craft told him whose they were. He knew that the gliders carried the marks of the gods they served but they were high enough up right now it wasn't easy to tell.

Regardless of stiffening resistance though as he took the ascending plaza steps forward towards the palace temple complex it was obvious that the enemy had not expected a teleport attack directly into the heart of the city.

--
The fighting itself had taken several hours. It had taken that long for the defeated Goa'uld to signal his surrender. Most likely he had been holding out that he might be able to surrender in person to the Dragon... who of course wasn't present.

The demon Noyan had been somewhat annoyed by the Greek god's initial intransigence, and if she were being honest Ishtar had almost expected the Unas to simply seal the goa'uld inside his sarcophagus for transport. Perhaps the minor goa'uld had had the same thought and had quieted down after some early bloviating.

Still it left Ishtar in a precarious position she was unused to being in. She couldn't very well appropriate the Raptor's rights. She couldn't use those of Moloch's anymore, and her fellow Jaffa were becoming boisterous. A number of prominent Jaffa had gathered largely without prompting into the ornately painted temple palace. The frescos here, painted in blue, red and orange, had largely been unmarred by the fighting compared to those in the exterior.

The boasting that the Dragon was the master of the wind was not really unfounded per se... save that as she had seen the battle unfold the Unas had been doing most of the work. It was a cynical observation, and despite being the ranking Jaffa present it would have won her little to point it out, but the thought lingered. She had seen more chaotic invasions of course. Thale had clearly not been expecting a counter in the form of an invasion.

The minor goa'uld had probably been comfortable that his tribute to Ares might insulate him from all but cursory retaliation. So that really left her to deal with the matter of the Jaffa, and human populations. She turned to one of her sisters, wearing a wary expression. "What is Chan'ra doing?"

The other priestess shook her head, "This is not like Moloch's domain at all." She replied. Ares, and Pelops were both war gods. They were very different though from Moloch though. Pelops had been the goa'uld responsible for the creation of the Jaffa. Unlike Ares he'd been less convinced that all jaffa needed to be were warriors, even though they shared the formidable Spartan Jaffa Guards. In Moloch's domain, and likely contributed to by the limited number of Primta, Jaffa as warriors were the only role worth pursuing to the destroyed canaanite fire god. "He is having to contend with Jaffa, and humans who live under greek rule, and greek expectations of society."

"I understand," Ishtar remarked with a nod as she returned to contemplating the throngs of humans and Jaffa in the outer plaza. She needed to go forth and say something... and that was difficult because the eldest lord of interminable darkness had gone to another world entirely. Sokar was away visiting some other world, and she was unsure how she should phrase the rites of conquest that she was expected to proclaim to the gathered Jaffa. She needed to blend both Egyptian and Greek to be sure as Moloch's entire pantheon had been destroyed by the scourge lord months earlier at the end of the flood months.

Imperator Pax · Apr 2, 2021

Cloud break
Lightning (2)

Communications security was one of those things the Goa'uld had basically come up with a system, and then basically declared it to be good enough and left it at that... for thousands of years. To be fair it was a relatively effective system in terms of both security as well as convenience. Ideally if they needed to send a priority secure message they would dial a planet and hold a live conversation through the open wormhole. It also would allow them to actually go directly to the world in question. There was a very slim chance of someone intercepting the message this way. Not that transmissions through subspace via more conventional FtL communications were significantly less secure, but those were the fall back options for the goa'uld, and rarely needed during peace time.

It was a simple fact that communications were generally secure, and weren't often needed. The goa'uld did not as a rule micromanage and most reports could be given in person which was the preference of the goa'uld if usually for the sake of pageantry. There were exceptions though. Oskyld had expected the report from Noyan, and it bore out what he had expected anyway. If not for the conditions on Stennos then Thale's small domain would have been ideal. Not that Thale's domain wouldn't help. They already had something of the infrastructure he needed, and it would be a lot easier to bring experts there. Stennos was complicated. The other message had been broadcast by the High Council of the System Lords... and it was more troubling.

Not that Oskyld considered a bad thing, just complicated.

The simple explanation of the process had been the Asgard had advanced the proposal to add a planet (Earth) to the protected planets treaty. The High Council of the System Lords had then polled all those titled System Lord and then decided, based on whatever that result had been to advance to the negotiating stage. That had entailed putting together a 'diplomatic mission', in this case of three system lords and going to Earth. The mission would then negotiate with the Asgard, and their appointed human representative and that should have come back with a proposed treaty amendment or set of amendments or nothing. That would have been complicated enough, but instead Nirrti the technically 'junior' member of the mission had decided to attempt to assassinate Cronus in between sessions.

Oskyld didn't pretend to understand that, but apparently Nirrti had been expecting the opportunity to present itself because her Jaffa had been ready to attack Cronus's domain. If Cronus had died that might have been one thing... except of course Sarcophagus were a thing. Regardless Nirrti's attempted assassination had failed and the High Council had ratified the treaty amendments to add Earth to the treaty. The bigger more complicated issue was Nirrti's imprisonment by Cronus, or rather taking another System Lord out of the equation entirely. That was doubly true given where Nirrti's domain sat relative to the one he had seized from Moloch... She was the nearest Hindu pantheon system lord to his domain.

There was also the problem in terms of proximity that she had gobbled up bits of Ra's domain when that had been up for grabs. He was going to have to return sooner rather than later to contend with this that much was clear. Cronus, Apophis and Heru'ur all at it made it even more of a mess. That was especially a problem because Stennos was very interesting.

The salvage from the Ha'tak could potentially have given them some insight to be sure, but they were pretty sure that one of the debris fields wasn't a Ha'tak. Actually they knew it wasn't. The hull within the layout of the crash wasn't symmetrical. The ship had been vaguely cruciform in shape, and the metallurgy involved was significantly different.

The older orbital bombardment scars definitely originated over a protracted scale, and well preceded the battle five centuries earlier. Those had definitely been goa'uld strikes. The battle about five hundred years earlier involved a newly revised minimum of ten Ha'tak, plus the unknown cruciform ship, which they were tentatively identifying as an Asgard Cruiser, or light cruiser. There was no indication from the wreckage analysis thus far of the cruciform ship was from an ancient, gate builder, derived tech base, but that was still in the preliminary stages.

A hologram flickered. Stennos was a temperate world, and the hologram had its corresponding glyphs for the gate address to one side. A quick clip of terrestrial footage from a drone showed that the stargate was in a region of foothills of a larger set of mountains. The valley was heavily wooded, but there was a road evident leading to a city as the drone climbed higher.

He noticed the drone's telemetry indicated the planet rotated opposite of the Earth's. That was most apparent as it reached high enough to show the northern hemisphere, and the side of the mountains the deserts were on. It wasn't the Greek city that was most interesting. "Some of that are much older orbital strikes," Vivi announced with certainty, as the drone panned away from the surface to high orbit... to drifting centuries old orbital debris. "That debris field is comparatively recent, and it matches the time of the impact strike on one of the other continents."

Impact strike was probably the wrong word. A ship had crashed there about five hundred years earlier. The ship's debris field was smaller than the pyramid ships though, and probably wasn't goa'uld, but it was hard to say given the damage. "How many ships is that?"

"From the debris in orbit its hard to tell. From the remaining pyramid superstructures probably at least five. We know at least one more that tried to limp away to the reach of the system, most of them burned up or impacted during reentry in the same time period."

"We should investigate the Ha'tak at the edge of the system." Heru'ur had attempted to invade Cimmeria which was proclaimed to be under the protection of the Asgard. That didn't mean it had to be the Asgard, but from Goa'uld records it made the most sense. "The sensors indicated that the Naquadah mines are largely played out." The planetary reserves seemed depleted to the point that even significantly mechanized mining might not even be worth it. "We'll put into orbit afterwards." The debris field in high orbit was unlikely to yield anything useful either in the short term. There would be too much work to do. "After that we'll investigate the crash site," And send drones in to investigate any remaining Ha'tak debris, but besides the unknown smaller ship, "Hopefully the runner's computers are intact enough to explain who and why they were fighting."

"And if the smaller ship was where that armor came from?"

It was possible, and he shrugged at the sorceress in a what could you do gesture, "That might be, but it doesn't seem as if whoever they were that they're in any position to fight. The planet is still classical age in technology?"

"More medieval. Agriculture is much improved over classical." She amended, "It seems that after the original spate of orbital bombardments Goa'uld involvement ceased. However it looks as if the bombardment was selective." It hadn't been conducted all at once.

"You are suggesting that Goa'uld took sides in a terrestrial conflict?" He received a shrug in reply. The cartouche of worlds from the ship's computers had suggested the planet nominally belonged to the former System Lord Zeus. Zeus had been imprisoned by his father for managing to topple him briefly... or at least that was the official by line from the System Lords. It was hard to discern what the real truth was given Goa'uld politics. Whatever the case Stennos as a world had fallen off Heru'ur's radar centuries before the apparent orbital bombardment since it had been so long since Zeus had been a relevant player among the system lords. Even the underlord of Heru'ur, who they had captured on Cimmeria, hadn't known anything about the world, which made sense of course. There was no indication in Goa'uld records that this planet had ever been very important. Except that recorded information was contradicted by the debris field, and by the curiosity of how orbital bombardment had been conducted. "Still we should be there soon." By all historical records among the Goa'uld Zeus was as detestable as his father Cronus.

Interestingly among the notation from the council of the System Lords ratification of the Protected Planets treaty amendment had stated that Cronus had supported the Asgard position to add Earth to the treaty with the caveats. Then there was also Nirrti's arrest, and her removal from the System Lords as well in the conclusion of the treaty. Cronus had recently been at war with Yu before Ra's death at the hands of the Tauri, but then he'd paid a peace price to Yu to turn and gobble up Ra's available worlds.

That of course just underscored the difference in power between the most powerful System Lords, like Yu, and Cronus, versus weaker System Lords like Nirrti or the late and un mourned Moloch. Cronus was however still at war with the recently returned Apophis. A conflict that they had exasperated by using Heru'ur's stolen vessels to bomb Apophis's worlds. "There is no guarantee that either of us, or any of the others will be able to recover anything that will improve our ability to build better warships."

That was true, and given the naquadah mines on the world they were going to were largely tapped out Stennos wouldn't help on that front either. Lack of accessible naquadah would stop them from building ships here, or at least doing so efficiently. "Its a potential lead, all the same. We're already committed to expanding Moloch's," pathetic excuse, "for shipyards, and repairing and improving those we took from him." That was going to be costly in terms of naquadah, but then with Ra dead it wasn't like Moloch's domain needed to pay tribute to the Supreme System Lord any longer.

Given the conflicts likely to be on their new doorstep they really did need to improve their ability to produce ships as well as the capabilities of those ships. "We'll need to secure the landing sight, even if we're not going to be able to spend a protracted amount of time surveying in person." That was unfortunate but that was how it was.

Imperator Pax · Apr 9, 2021

Lightning (3)
Thunderhead

To facilitate assuming control of the planet had meant landing Raptors in the vicinity of the stargate. They would need to move it elsewhere, either somewhere intentionally fortified, or at least somewhere where it would enjoy some degree of defensibility without actually sticking it in say a bunker. In the longer term they would probably move it to a dedicated facility, but only after more permanent orbital infrastructure was in place. Given the planet's lack of available naquadah resources that would require bringing in defenses manufactured elsewhere, and thus it would be better to avoid advertising any unique protections to the world until then.

Thankfully the majority of the planet's population were quite a distance from the stargate, and thus unlikely to attract the attention of any Jaffa who traipsed through the stargate randomly. Not that they'd initiated contact with the locals yet, but it was obvious that their level of glass making was advanced enough to manufacture telescopes. Renaissance level ideas about heliocentric orbits were common among the populace in their learning material as well.

That had only become apparent because the locals had actually noticed the Ha'tak in orbit. Stennos was a relatively developed world in that respect, and its population familiar with its condition, and the presence of a new 'star' in the sky obviously changed that. It would have been nice to have the option of cloak capable Alkesh to make the journey down to the surface, but they didn't. Those were in few supply, and hadn't been considered for this particular mission.

They had other requirements for specialty equipment, "Salvage crew reports?" The sorceress inquired at a tone.

"Yes," Of the ten ha'tak that had engaged the other vessel, only one was really in anything approaching 'intact', and that really was relative. It was enough to develop idea about the difference power, and weapons. The general perspective of the goa'uld plasma weapons were largely based off the same principle. That was to say staff weapons scaled fairly well in terms of reliability. Staff cannons were reliable, and needed little in the way of maintenance and just generally worked. In the ship to ship contexts of Ha'tak main batteries this relied on a 'bursting' like plasma discharge that was effective against shielded, and unshielded targets. "The planet side team has been staking out the crash sight there."

The damage to both the mostly intact vessel as well as what remained of its fellows in other expanded debris clouds showed what was more consistent with more coherent beam like plasma weapons. The easiest context to describe this was a term called 'plasmatic jacketing', which was a fancy way of saying greater magnetic field strength in a beam preventing less diffusion over a comparable distance. They assumed it was beam due to the way it had cut laterally across one surface of superstructure armor plate, and from scorch marks on a number of other pieces of debris.

The debris told them a great deal. It was unfortunate that none of the cruciform ship's weapons had likely survived. They had no answers for who would have thrown away so many Ha'tak against a single ship. The most likely answer was Ra. The problem with that theory was there were no discernable surviving dynasty markings on the remnants of the Ha'tak. That wasn't unheard of, but was still strange. It was possible they might be able pull computer data from surviving crystals, but even that was a slim chance at the moment.

The debris field also suggested a break from more ... staid ... goa'uld fleet doctrine, but that was less certain. Regardless it had been a major naval engagement during the height of the Pax Re... and there was no explanation for it. "We're certain the vessel is Asgard?"

"Relatively sure." Oskyld replied. "Being physically present and investigating the wreck may give us a final confirmation quickly, or it might not." He admitted. Site securement entailed, in the archaeological sense mapping and cordoning off miles of area, and marking off pieces and fragments as they were detected. That would take time, and would not be something they would be able to remain on Stennos to oversee. They could still learn things from it.

The ship lay broken in a tangle of snapped and ruined metal some two hundred miles from one of the nearby major human settlements. Pieces of debris were scattered over a roughly ten mile area. The more important facet of this information was confirmation that there was power still to some kind of central system.

The ship would never fly again, but if something was working down there then they might not have wasted their time in coming. If something valuable still worked then they may well have hit the jackpot.

"We've confirmed the locals aren't blind, and keep an eye on the sky. At least enough to recognize we're in orbit." Vivi reminded him. "These ships aren't precisely easy to miss though."

He had considered that already. That was one of the problems to owning a spaceship that was painted a bright gold and was a kilometer across. That was one of the things that would be the first to change once they started building their own Ha'tak. A nice black or uniform gray, some red piping maybe or red and black, but gold was going out the window. Aesthetics aside though firepower and speed would be the more important factor. "The ship is large enough it would be visible without aid in the daylight, never mind in the night's sky." Most of the planet was rural, but the fact the observatories in the city seemed to be experimenting with complex glass lenses was a little beyond 'classical Greek'. Not that that was the sort of technology the goa'uld objected violently too. Plenty of Goa'uld encouraged glass making, though usually for its artistic value than anything else. Again Stennos had been left to its own devices for several hundred years at a minimum.

Still they were lucky that the ship's crash hadn't been into the water. Like Earth most of the planet was covered in water. It was actually covered in more liquid surface water than earth, even though land volume was about the same. The planet was either in a warm period, or just naturally warmer than earth which might have contributed to the sea level.

--
Tel'tak and Alkesh were not ideal for the sort of work they were doing, but that wasn't really a surprise. The goa'uld process of excavation was painfully primitive, and unique methods were developed by individuals. Oskyld certainly wasn't going to advertise that there was a crashed Asgard ship on a planet he intended to lay claim to.

There was no indication of active goa'uld systems on the planet though. Their descent from orbit had triggered no automated guide beacons or other indicators. There were doubtless relics and artifacts from the Goa'uld administration on the planet, but there were no active ones broadcasting. There were no signals projected to direct the Ha'tak where it might land, or to serve general ground to orbit communication from a central command post. More to the point there were no indications of any hidden outposts, though they couldn't be sure that those weren't there... just that given the spaceship debris and lack of signals suggested there wasn't. The ship remains took priority, especially given the limited time they'd be able to spend on the surface.

Raptor landing parties had already begun the process of carefully deforesting the overgrown crash site, but it had been left for five centuries. By all indications the natives gave the crash site a wide berth. "Goblins are an idea." He agreed.

"Fortifications would be a problem."

Stennos was a heavily forested world, temperate, but it had several large mountain ranges. Unfortunately none of those were ideally placed for any kind of archaeological mission... and any attempt to recreate the World Spine fortresses ran into the problem of a lack of suitable orbital to surface weaponry at this stage. "We would basically have to build out in the open." Digging five hundred years down into the earth, and sifting through all of that was going to be a chore, but Vivi had been right that seeding goblin warrens on the planet would significantly uncomplicate labor concerns.

Parts of the debris field were being covered by tents already more out of an abundance of caution than anything else, but it was turning the field into a vaugely approaching orderly camp. Plant matter, including pieces of trees, were being hauled off an stacked, and dirt carefully sifted through and relocated elsewhere. It was a start.
--
The humans native to Stennos came to a not unfounded assumption that they were gods, and the servants of gods. That they were goa'uld, and Jaffa, though they had never seen the latter, coming to visit Zeus. Who greeted Oskyld as brother, which relieved the natives, but if that wasn't a confusing enough occurrence it was what would unfold from there.

The Zeus who ruled Stennos was an amnesiac ancient Asgard, the commander of the vessel that had crashed on the planet five centuries earlier. His physical body was of an earlier more robust Asgard physiological model, though he had no knowledge of such things until after gaining access to the ship's still functional computer core.

--
Commentary: This covers much of the same material as the original wrap up to the Lightning arc, and moves us into Summer of 99 with proliferating word of Earth being added to the Protected Planets Treaty and so on.

Now that brings us to a matter of Chronology. Apophis was turned over to Sokar by the SGC late in season 2, and then the System Lords proceed to use Hathor's death at Jack's hands, which is part of the impetus for Thor trying to get Earth added to the protected planet's treaty. The best possible explanation available for that is that its an excuse, and the goa'uld use Hathor's death as an excuse possibly with Heru'ur actually being the only one to care. It still creates something of a compressed timeline issue there.

Then half way through Season 3 SG 1 blows up Netu and kills Sokar by bombarding Delmak with the shards of the moon, which allows Apophis to escape and steal a bunch of stuff from Sokar, and he returns as principle antagonist of SG 1.

I just kind of want that out there to acknowledge that there is some overlap timeline wise of, technically the events of the Episode 'Fair Game' occurs before Devil You Know where Sokar is killed.

That out of the way, the 'Goblins' as Oskyld and companions refer to them are the minions from 'Overlord' (the video game) just so no one is confused. Goblins is the preferred term in place of 'minions', and that they come in different colors.

Imperator Pax · Apr 16, 2021

Mesore
[Time stamp July 1999]

Ishtar was beginning to feel the fatigue. It was the last month of the calendar year. Mesore. Ra's tenure as Supreme System Lord had enforced on the majority of galaxy a degree of conformity, so it wasn't as if she were making things up wholesale. She would have doubtlessly felt more comfortable, and been reassured with more guidance but in the face of Moloch's destruction conflict from the frontier had followed.

It was the harvest season though, and Ishtar had found herself responsible to distributing loaves of black bread to the masses of workers bringing in end of the year's labor on top of overseeing the addition of new populations to the domain. The resettlement, and influx brought with it artisans, and other craftsfolk, but of a decidedly Greek persuasion, which was something else she wasn't prepared to contend with.

Even now her sisters were whitewashing the walls of the temples in what she was hoping on was an appropriate display to celebrate the new year's approach. It was also to symbolize the Dragon's victory over the wind, but in more symbolic turn. Thale's scribes, and ... citizen farmers... were already being organized to supplement preparations the unas already had underway for the coming season's planting. A coming season where, from little she had been able to gather from the Unas, should hold its most important day of celebration in roughly three and a half months time. The planting season would be the obvious most important portion of time to look forward to... excepting again that they were in conflict with neighboring domains.

"Apophis has unleashed powerful magic with his return." Neith remarked.

There was speculation of the serpent god's return. Everything ranged from his wrath being in response to the other system lords adding the First World to the protected planets treaty, or that Cronus had specifically supported the addition of the Tauri to the treaty to snub his ancient rival. It was also rumored that it had nothing to do with Apophis at all, and it was very possible that in itself was a snub directed at the much reduced brother of Ra.

It was not Apophis or his armies she was particularly concerned with, "That may be," She agreed, "But it Ares, and the Jaffa of his Spartan Guard we must contend with." Ishtar was hoping that Neith wouldn't point out that the Ha'tak which formed the vanguard of Apophis's new fleet bore the mark of Sokar, and by all reports were much superior to those foes he had faced thus far. She had no explanation for that.

The Unas were occupied constantly as well. The chappa'ai had been moved to a cleared field, and groundwork had been laid. If she understood what the Unas had planned, then it reminded her... the nearest thing was was the ball courts of the minor system lord Tonatui, or perhaps those of Apophis's favored sub lord Zipacna. That was probably coincidence. There were talks that the same would be done on other worlds. That the stargate would be re-centered in a modest flat field with the gate a one end of an I shaped structure with masonry or stone walls framing an outline. Militia and officials would be provisioned nearby to handle disputes that might originate from disagreements from merchants. Or really just their coming and going

"You think he will attack?"

The ease at which Noyan's breed had brought Thale to heel was no surprise. The minor free holding god still had paid tribute to Ares, and the Greek God of war could hardly have allowed such a motion to stand. Ares had responded with parties of Jaffa sent to collect tribute Thale had owed the system lord, and they had been driven off.

In realpolitik terms Thale had been a buffer zone between Moloch and Ares. His small domain had prevented either system lord from having an easy excuse to move against the other. The slow speed of their ha'tak had made it thus impossible to invade planets across the gulf of stars. A limitation which did not apply to the more fleet vessels of the Dragon's navy.

Ares had thus far avoided naval conflict, and probably with good reason. None of the Olympian gods were known for their talent for that sort of war. Ares may have been a system lord in his own right, but paid some degree of homage to his grandfather Cronus. The Titan possessed a much more mighty fleet... and that was likely tied up in expectation of war with the now returned Apophis.
--
Ishtar was unsure of what to make of the Stennosians. They worshipped Zeus son of Cronus, which did not bode well for long term peace with the latter she suspected. Still Zeus's chosen, their arrival, did make her job much easier at least in terms of administrating civil affairs. Particularly on worlds which had previously been disorganized, and left that way for centuries.

Simarka had been one such world. A target for infrequent raiding generations previously it had not been a Jaffa likely since before her birth. The humans lived largely as steppe nomads and pastoralists in great confederations of tribes.

It was doubtful that they would have really noticed Ares's band of warriors at all. If not for the presence of Zeus's chosen having been present. It was not Ares's jaffa that concerned her as she gripped the staff weapon. It was not the occasional errant blast of a staff weapon, most of which streaked skyward from either side's impromptu lines that concerned her.

One of Noyan's kin, the Prelate Anker had come to the world, and was even now engaged in mortal struggle. The bull bellowed as it battled the similarly sized crocodilian demon. The kisariku, minotaur, was perhaps seven feet tall and dressed in the standard Olympian tunic favored by Greeks when not in armor.

That would probably be the beast's downfall. The unas Prelate was armored and had already struck a blow that caused blood to mat the fur around the beast's eye. "I have never seen a minotaur," A jaffa beside her remarked shuffling to try and gain a better vantage point to watch as the two struggled amongst the standing stones.

Ishtar knew that neither side wished to interrupt their respective champions in this ritual, this if somewhat informal duel. She could not see the blow from her position, but the bellow from the beast was more pain than rage this time. Whatever blow Anker had struck had been true. The sin eater slammed the bull creature again, and then into a megalithic standing stone with a resounding crunch. Blood droplets bubbled from its snout. It was dying, Ishtar recognized the glazed look in the eyes of the creature.

Hours later she was in orbit of Simarka aboard a Ha'tak. She was given to understand that future warships would be different from this one. Ha'tak were the pride of Goa'uld fleet, and Moloch's pride had never allowed him to retain any of the older vessels. The Ha'tak he had been master of had been few... and his shipyards' had produced them in poor quality apparently as well. Anker, and the labors of the others, had been exactly, but there were limits.

The golden adorned walls so normal for the great ships had been pulled down. Gone were the hieroglyphs and replacing them were whitewashed hallways and corridors. The red lighting that some time suffused the corridors was presumably a preference of the Unas. The halls though created a clean atmosphere in their austerity.

It was still not one of those trio of Ha'tak that carried the dynastics of Ra. That continued to do so even though though the mark of the golden bull had been stripped of all other ships in the fleet. It was not something Ishtar questioned. Future Ha'tak would apparently be built like this one had been modified to, and insteady of golden pyramids the entire ship would probably be black, or the pyramid's sides would be red. Of course those could be rumors as well. It would be a change from the time of Moloch. A further reminder that the Canaanite fire god had been cast down.

It was not just the interior appearance of the vessel that had change. The ship was faster, and more powerful in battle. Under Moloch's reign it would have been unthinkable to have a vessel respond in such a timely manner to an outer province, and that was what had happened. Ishtar busied herself with staring at the swirling curtain of stars in the galaxy... or more correctly those in this region... and the domains of the gods who ruled.

She had never seen the scrying magics of the Goa'uld able to detect other fleets in neighboring star systems, and yet they could Ares's fleets across the border. They could track Tel'taks and other transport barques as well as the larger more impressive vessels of war. They were slower. That much was apparent. There were indicators in the spaces between star systems estimating the time of arrival of a given ship. It measured in days, weeks, in comparison to hours.

Moloch had never been a god of ships.

"No further hostilities seem imminent." The eater of sin remarked, "We will return to the anchorage of the fleet." So much had changed in the span of little more than a single season.

--

Commentary: the kisariku or minotaur originally comes from the Stargate RPG, and IIRC it makes an appearance alongside a couple of other furry aliens in the MGM novels. I include them because I think they make nice additions to the story. They're not common, again neither are the Unas. Indeed Ishtar assumes the Saurians are Unas because she's never seen one in person and thus has made the assumption and everyone around her has come to the same.

After all, everyone knows Sokar has unas attendants. 'Everyone knows this.'

Which brings us neatly to the next bit, the most important festival of Memphis was a two week (ish) affair celebrating Sokar, and Ptah which would fall roughly speaking during Halloween. (Again the Egyptians used a lunar calendar so there is some variation, and measured with three seasons based on the annual inundation)

Imperator Pax · Apr 23, 2021

An Approaching New Year

The goa'uld were the top levels of the pyramid structure of their society. For the majority of the galaxy underneath the underlords it was the Jaffa who were next in line in terms of prestige and position. There was an exception though. Jaffa were important in the exception's case, there was no denying that, but in the domain of the Jade Emperor things were different from the galaxy at large. Yu Huang Shang-ti ruled over the most populous expanse of goa'uld space, and was the only notable system besides Ra's own brother Ptah, who had not placed strict controls on literacy, and writing. In the domain of the great Yu human commoners could aspire to take the Imperial examinations, a system that had been in place for twenty five hundred years continuously. It was in this domain that the gentleman scholar was held up regardless of birth, after all Pelops had created the first Jaffa from humans.

Most of the galaxy though did not fall under Yu's sway, and nor did Yu wish it to be thus. Yu, like Ptah, and a handful of a few Systems Lords were content with what they had. Thus it was unusual but not unheard of for humans to hold higher status. The most common exception was the lo'tar, but some goa'uld raised either by necessity or choice human classes up further with distinctions. Ra himself had elevated a specific class, a tribe of Medjai, to equivalent status with his Jaffa Guard giving them commands of planets, fleets, and armies. Ra had been Supreme System Lord and his eccentricities had been his own.

Zeus's chosen involved clergy of the Olympian, but were not solely comprised of it. The Greek citizen-soldier was not a slave. He was a general, and an engineer. He had been tutored by his god in both fields and had extensive experience. Zeus's chosen was to be responsible for coordinating a body of labor to expand and manage the mining of the all important mineral naquadah. It was something that Philip had never done, and hence was consulting with humans and jaffa who were in the service of the subjugated minor Goa'uld Thale.

She considered that, and dismissed it. Thale's raiders had attacked through the stargate, not by ship after all. Ishtar could understand though why given its location Ares had left Thale as a free holding lord. The handful of systems did produce a suitable tithe of naquadah, and looked like they would produce more in the upcoming year.

"The shaft could flood." One of the humans remarked. He was dressed in a chiton, which distinguished him as being from Thale's sub domain than that of Zeus's.

Phillip nodded, "We have considered this, we have techniques to pump out water from deeper mines that should not be a problem to implement." He went on to describe a system, that Thale's human seemed to understand, the screw would remove water. It wasn't the only solution, but it was apparently the one that was their first choice. Ishtar better understood the talk of widening the roads, and paving them. The engineering to remove water flooding underground mines was beyond her education. It would have been something Moloch just waved away... but then Moloch was not a lord of the underworld. She understand the numbers though, 25 talents of naquadah was a princely sum in Moloch's reign for a mine to produce with the stripping from shallow surface mines.

She understood what it was for though. Naquadah was the wealth of the gods. Unlike Moloch's labor relying on slaves the new mines would require craftsmen and artisans to toil in the earth beyond the sun's rays. The naquadah they would extract would go into foundries to forge the great warships.

"How many mines will that be?" She questioned reaching for the paper made of wood pulp she had been provided with. It was fragile, but apparently inexpensive.

"Not quite two dozen," Phillip responded, as he glanced to one of his fellows who nodded, "Twenty one, a projected total of seven thousand talents per season." Certainly she could understand the need to widen and pave the roads to move such a bounty.
--
It was a bit odd to contemplate the year ending in September, but that was a small problem compared to other ones. Oskyld had confirmed that if not necessarily all, but a significant portion at least of them, planets he had surveyed thus far had been terraformed. Some of them had clearly been carried out by the goa'uld either originally or as a follow on to whoever had done it originally, but the goa'uld had been using the same technology, and general process if not identical.

Technology that he did not, unfortunately, have access to. It would be one of the things he would have to contend with in the coming weeks. The most obvious solution would be since he didn't have the technology to do so, to use magic in its place. It wasn't his only problem with planetary administration.

Moloch's domain had been relatively contiguous in terms of occupied space. It might have seemed strange in terms of stellar space, but it was what separated the System Lords from less goa'uld. Occupying a largely continquous area of space allowed a system lord to concentrate his power base and respond, even despite the utility of the stargate. Given the expense, and legal restrictions on shipbuilding imposed under Ra, it also made sense to have domains radiate out from a central hub world... especially since the goa'uld did not micromanage things.

It wasn't ideal because generally constrained by the technological base of the bronze age, or even in iron age civilizations, there simply weren't enough productivity for what were considered developed worlds to provide for what he had in mind. Not efficiently anyway. There would have to be a capital district, but there would need to be surrounding provincial capitals. A next level down in terms of hub planets to manage, and coordinate both industrial, and defense needs.

Each of those provincial capitals would need naquadah, would need shipyards of their own to build ships, which would require naquadah. That was a shortage in terms of production that required time and inclination the canaanite fire god simply had never had. Of course Moloch had hewed more heavily in one direction than the average system lord, but most were loath to risk having parts of their empire be so potentially self sufficient. The general thinking was such tended to lead to a powerful underlord who might in turn get ideas above his station.

That freed him to contend with more external strategic concerns.

--
Commentary: So at some point I am going to have to go and include the perspectives of SG 1, its important to plot progression. Earth's view of developing things is not always correct. Much as Ishtar, and her fellow Jaffa also get things wrong.

In this case we're talking about moving from bronze age mining techniques to Roman, and high medieval scales, which is what these estimates are based off of. I think a lot of people fail to understand just how big of a change the late antiquity represented in terms of human productivity, Rome was an economic superpower.

Digression

That of course also leads into the fact that Renaissance, especially as it has been portrayed in historical popular culture was not some great leap ahead of medieval technology. Medieval Europe (and for that matter 'dark ages' Europe) made a number of very important technological shifts but agriculture is boring for most people so major farming shifts and so on and the beginning of European industrial metal production get overshadowed. And frankly Italy gets too much credit, France and England were quite frankly vastly more important in terms of social change (admittedly there are people who go the opposite and buy wholesale into magna carta this and regulations of Thames that and parliament). [As a further aside, England at the end of the Stuart dynasty, the civil war and subsequent Glorious Revolution basically borrowed everything they're famous for from Sweden. Stock markets? (not originally Swedish mind you) Bank of England (based off of the Bank of Sweden) Cromwell's New Model Army (basically a rip off of the early Swedish Army reforms of the 1610s such that the New Model Army would have been obliterated by any contemporary Continental Army of note, etc. This is also a facet of the protestant reformation, the nationalization and break up of the monasteries set English industrialization back two centuries, and is a major problem of Weber theorists.]

I'm done I'll stop with the social science.

Imperator Pax · Apr 30, 2021

Knowledge of the Gods
[August 1999]

Oskyld flexed his fingers. Arcane power morphing into divine energy. The bigger issue was not transubstation of one to the other, he was used to that. It was the difference in scale in terms of prayer, which provided a well spring of divine energy to draw from. On Athas he hadn't had anywhere near such a density. Then again they were talking about planets worth of populations centers, even if it was largely confined to the averages of bronze age technology and more importantly agriculture.

The agriculture, and the water were what allowed population centers, even if they weren't industrial era cities, to grow. The problem was the limits of bronze age agriculture. A problem he needed to rectify while still having it remain in the scope of indigenous understanding. That was where Stennos came in. Though commonly thought of as the dark ages in terms of agricultural productivity medieval Europe had made several leaps forward over the late classical, and those developments had set the stage for the oxen to be eventually superseded by the horse as the principle heavy labor animal.

There was also water to consider as well. Stennos had over the late five hundred years been pulled up from the level of antiquity of the Hellenistic period to a society that was more technologically, and militarily comparable to an emerging European state of the 15th century. It was interesting of course that the dominant weapon in Stennosian society was now the more status oriented sword.... but he supposed that would change as energy weapons proliferated.

Zeus's efforts to uplift his chosen had been a painstaking process, and it gave Oskyld a template to work from, and a body of labor to do it. It also meant there was a ready culture of civil law to address the implementation of and so on, which was another benefit. Stennosians were a blend of like Mycenaean Greeks coupled with cultural additions to their society from the Norse... or more correctly from Asgard inclinations. Even without his memories Zeus had known what had felt right, and how things should be. That meant that Stennos held assemblies of free men, and the Greek assembly mixed well the the nordic thing. The concept of citizen solider, and hoplite's responsibility was a purely Greek military matter, but it saw the introduction of new superior iron technologies resulting in changes to Stennos's military all the same. Zeus's introduction of iron weapons, and the fact that it made longer swords more readily functional had impacted culturally as both status symbols, and as dueling weapons.

The staff weapon was effective in terms of what it had been designed for. In massed combat was superior to any 19th century breechloader at the expected ranges for that sort of combat. Of course Europe had known about smokeless powder by then, but it had only really been the Boer war that had really resulted in the expectation of long range gunnery rather than things like volley sights. The staff weapon, outside of those hand tuned for the most elite jaffa guard, was not a precision weapon. Nor was it suited to laying down fire, again outside of those hand tuned for the very best Jaffa, or the weapon of a martial Goa'uld.

The Zat'nikatel was similarly equipped only to elite jaffa. An officer's side arm issued out as much as a symbol as it was a weapon. The jaffa generally disliked the smaller weapons as it was generally used to take prisoners. It too did the job it was intended to do.

Both weapons met the design requirements that had been set down for them. Oskyld knew what he needed were new weapons built with different requirements in mind. It wasn't an uncommon problem to his mind. It wasn't an immediate priority though. It would have attracted too much attention at this time... and besides the goa'uld had a weapon in production which would be a useful stopgap. The staff weapon was useful, and in trained hands surprisingly accurate, but that took time. It was much easier to simply mass volumes of jaffa and have them fire in ranks at a general area in battles between Jaffa.

It would have been unwise to abruptly escalate against Ares, or any other System Lord, who were when one got right down to it, simply testing his mettle. If he escalated abruptly with new weapons unfamiliar to the Goa'uld society at large there would be questions, and suspicion. There were exceptions to that. The confusion regarding his raptors was largely limitted to Jaffa. The goa'uld didn't care about one more client race, especially given Apophis's 'rampaging'.

Apophis was even now engaged in a war with his ancient rival Cronus, as well as his nephew Heru'ur. That conflict was occupying most of the attention of the system lords as a whole, and that was good. The deep irony was that in terms of changes, the goa'uld would pay much less attention to any large naval project than any dramatic change in ground equipment. It wasn't to say they would pay no attention to new ship classes but the expense of ship design particularly in terms of the skill required to design them meant most goa'uld ignored changes as white elephants.

He dumped the transubstanitated magical energy into the planet's atmosphere a process of creation that would take time to really bear out any fruits, but would have made sense to the Slaan, or even for that matter Nekherran liche priests or the elves of Ulthuan. The difference though was scale, because this was planetary, which wasn't that big of a change when going from 'continental' admitteldy.

More to the point though, it was true magic, not technology masquerading as magic, and there was a reason for that. He needed to be able to modify things like wind patterns and rainfall, and that sort of thing.
--
Zeus craned his head, "I see." He remarked, "I did not realize that it was a potential issue." The Asgard admitted, "And indeed had I, I may have proffered a solution."

"A solution?"

"I have cross referenced your original list of gate addresses with my own in hopes of establishing items of interest." He responded, and tapped a crystalline structure causing a gate address to appear, "And this planet should retain a repository of the ancients."

He looked at the address, and that was basically the end of the discussion on the matter. The prospect was simply too good of an opportunity to miss... to not act on. That the planet was one of those that had largely been abandoned in the fallout of Cronus's return to depose Zeus millennium prior was another reason. It was available and relatively speaking in terms of space part of the Greek sphere of colonization. That put it in relative close proximity to Stennos, and thus Moloch's contiguous domain, but it also represented an area of space in proximity to both Ares, as well as his grandfather Cronus.

Most goa'uld were spawned with what could be thought of as a basic collective memory package, as little more than drones to fill the pouches of Jaffa. That wasn't all goa'uld That was what made Ares, and Pelops rather unique in terms of goa'uld, because they had emerged as carefully nurtured symbiotes. Heru'ur was another example of a goa'uld who had had been born with the knowledge contributed from both of his parents, and perhaps uniquely was Ra's only surviving 'true' offspring, or at least the only one of note.

Oskyld stared down at the sphere. The curvature of the planet. Bits, and pieces of knowledge swirling around in his mind. The modifications of this Ha'tak had been born out of experiences in space warfare, and the sciences that made it possible, providing an insight into the inefficiencies of the ship's systems. Part of that had been born out of goa'uld cost saving measures in designs, or even measures to increase longevity for a ship that would be potentially serving for centuries. It was entirely different matter with the knowledge of the presumable parent designs for things like reactors, and hyperdrive generators. This was so much more than the understanding of terraforming technology.

Zeus craned his head. "No challenge seems forthcoming, though I have reservations not protecting this world."

They didn't have the resources to do that properly. "Am I wrong in, this planet had trinium reserves?"

"It does." Zeus remarked, "I suspect someone purposefully excised it from the standard goa'uld cartouche during or even before the Titomachy, if records sourced from Saqarra are any indication." The Goa'uld System Lord Zeus? Cronus? Perhaps someone earlier, and it would be something to look into.

The planet was large unpeopled, even more so than most. Unlike Stennos it had not undergone a population boom in the centuries after the orbital bombardment, but there was no real lasting damaging to the planet's eco system. It was most likely that natural famines as vagary of pre modern agriculture had taken their toll keeping the population at small bronze age city states. "I already have begun planning for eight provinces," Ringing the 'capital district' that was taking shape as it was. "This will be as good a choice for a forgeworld, and provincial center of administration as any of the others in this region of space."

--
Commentary: I'm having some computer issues with desktop, which ate the planet side scene for P3X 439. Now while this occurs in the original version, with P3X 439 becoming the Thunder Province Capital, this is also the part where I did time skip about ten months to summer of 2000, with SGC (Jack, and Daniel centric scenes) in between.

What I may do, as much of what takes place between the intervening ~ ten months is empire building is still cover the SGC side of things, in addition to focusing on some of the minor matters of development. In the original versions Oskyld is accounted for spending a lot of time in the shipyards overseeing what are really his first major fleet construction programs being needed for defending multiple planets.

Imperator Pax · May 3, 2021

Anointing the new year
September 1999

The white washing of the walls had been finished on schedule. The garlands strong along the paths and in the open spaces of the temples though seemed mostly done for the humans. Her fellow Jaffa at least had the prospect of battle to center them. Even then the influx of wealth brought by the merchants was a change. Zeus's domain, and the Greeks were alien to Moloch's way of thinking.

The rings activated and deposited her from the temple's sanctum into the heart of favor, and divine power. These were the shipyards that would receive the bulk of the naquadah to be mined from beneath the ground on dozens of worlds. She could understand why though, despite the increase in population there was no shortage of food. The wheat loaves of black bread were available, and provided food to those who lacked it, as well as to workers, alongside beer, and other daily labor rations. She was not going to question it.

Ishtar's eyes took a moment to adjust to sight before her. She didn't really have a frame of reference for what she was seeing. She had seen Ha'tak under construction before, and scene their anti ship cannons. These were larger weapons to be sure, but how much larger she wasn't quite able to put into terms. They were shaped different, but that also meant little. It was a difference more in terms of scale.

The alkesh were the thing which had changed the least from her perspective. There had been changes, but in comparison to the work done to breath life into the skeletons of Ha'tak it was small. Like the Ha'tak the main change seemed to be in the speed at which they flew between stars. They were the eyes of Ha'tak ships that could not be everywhere, despite the clarity of their scrying... and presumably they would eventually launch raids wholly independent of the stargate. This had been done before... daring raids had even been launched using unarmed tel'tak.

"Tachyon emissions are what we expected."

"The formula is the accepted metric for calculation for a reason." Zeus replied crossing his arms over his chest. "There isn't any practical difference between mounting alkesh with cloaks than its performance in cargo ships. Even at light speed." He added after a brief pause, as if it were a secondary concern.

Oskyld nodded. The irony of course was that the goa'uld cloaking device had been taken from a ship that was not FtL capable. It was actually one of the improvements that the goa'uld had made in practical terms of design. The application of cloaking devices to small faster than light ships was a boon if properly employed. There were Tel'tak which were either custom manufactured with armaments, or retrofitted, but nothing standard. That wasn't to say the tel'tak was useless, but it was certainly less useful than the Alkesh for his needs. The modern tel'tak design even seemed to be some hybridization of two different gate builder designs, but that was he supposed largely irrelevant. Of course Alkesh were no designed to win fleet engagements, and they weren't trying to make them. "The new ship class was always going to be larger," If only to accommodate not only more Alkesh wings, but also the simple fact that it needed a bigger more effective reactor design. "There are existing designs of troop transports that would be better suited to landing troops than trying to land a capital terrestrially."

They simply needed to be outfitted with shields, though he understood why the original design hadn't been two thousand plus years ago. Just like the Death Gliders hadn't changed much either. In terms of regular usage there had been no reason to do so. Both the larger transport ship design, and the Death Gliders fit into their specific design niche. They had met their original design requirement and that they could be produced inexpensively was the point. The only Goa'uld who seemed to care about improving on the Glider as an actual space fighter was Heru'ur and he'd largely been prevented from doing so by Ra's restrictive policy of arms control. Heru'ur's improvements had been iterative instead of revolutionary, but most of his work really lay on his jaffa being encouraged to master the glider. Racing was a popular past time in Heru'ur's domain, and was well known enough outside of it to attract visitors.

Heru'ur was not the problem. His uncle Apophis was. Apophis had cloak capable Ha'tak, which should not have been possible given the limitations of the Goa'uld cloaking device copies as he understood them. They would need an answer to those. Oskyld banished the Ha'tak as the priestess entered the chamber proper. The classic Ha'tak's pyramid base was at a steeper angle in comparison to the new design, which contributed in part to the size difference. The improved ship would be larger as a result

--
The formal calendar start of the new year was an oddity but it was ideal for announcing restructuring plans. There would be eight provinces outside of the Imperial Core. There would be potentially other provinces created in the years following, but the eight would effectively ring the region of space around the Imperial Core.

The role of provincial capital required certain criteria though. Oskyld would have preferred not to need to relocate large volumes of people, but he would if it was necessary. The more pressing requirement was system location, the necessary volume of naquadah reserves accessible in order to support shipyards. Thankfully the Goa'uld shipbuilding facilities were relatively safe, if crude black box, copies of Alteran platforms. It was what allowed them to still rely on such primitive mining techniques to feed material into the 'forges', and still churn out a respectable ship in a reasonable amount of time.

Anything belonging to the Alterans was impossibly valuable to the Goa'uld even what were really trinkets were important status symbols for Goa'uld. The limitations of the goa'uld to actually produce their shipbuilding facilities had been an important tool of control during the Pax Re. Ra had apparently a lot of effort and political capital to establish the status quo and in particular to keep the other system lords in line.

This would mean basically nothing to the humans of the domain. Even Zeus's chosen were late medieval population. They're drafting abilities, the use of math to calculate things like displacement for shipbuilding, or load bearing capacity were not the sort of thing that would produce spaceships in short order. It would take time to create the institutional knowledge, and the base to support things... he would be long gone by then.

The fleets that would be needed to protect those worlds would need to be built on goa'uld machinery, and in largely Goa'uld methods and styles because to do otherwise would have posed both logistical hurdles as well as provoked potentially dangerous attention.

Oskyld idly ran his fingers across where the repositories arms had latched onto his head. It was taking time to digest the knowledge, and it would take time to separate important worlds in the cartouche, and to decipher the gate software, and others. The ancients had seeded the milky way with stargates, and terraformed it to suit life for the most part, and yet very little of them remained, but then they hadn't been native to this Galaxy. Zeus had remarked that the ancient had passed through the Asgard home galaxy long ago, and that their mastery of the Ancient database was limited... and Zeus's people had problems of their own.
--
Commentary: Due to computer problems, I am now very behind schedule in terms of planned updates, but thankfully there are relatively recent back ups to pull my outlines from. Tentatively the following is scheduled: the usual fixed updates Wednesday Jumpchain, Friday Stargate SG 1 (this), Saturday Alternate History. That has not changed.

Tuesdsay, Thursday, and Sunday will probably mark the beginning of my Pokemon Trainer CYOA posting as a revamp of its SB version. I've been on a Leaf Green binge. Now as I've mentioned in SB in relation to Jumpchain, and this [Pokemon] CYOA story they're similar, but they're not identical in plot, but since I had one sixty thousand word Pokemon fic in progress I wasn't planning to do another one for Jumpchain when they had similar outlines.

Anyway that will probably start tomorrow. Next week while I may deal with Scarlett Witch's introduction in Not a Hero (based off my build from the Supervillian CYOA), I might also be updating this (Stargate) more than once next week, as well as potentially my Xianxia fic.

Imperator Pax · May 7, 2021

SG1 Interlude
[Reference Timeframe Late Season 3]

The Air Force had control of the ICBM portion of the Nuclear Triad, and that had been the first attempt by the US to create an Anti Starship Weapons System. That was to say Groom Lake had decided to use Ra's idea of add naquadah to a nuke as a fusion stage booster. Unfortunately it hadn't worked out well when Apophis and Klorel had shown. In theory the yield would have made a big bang, but they missiles had impacted the shields of the ship prematurely. That didn't mean Groom Lake's nuke and missile people were giving up, and they were paying special attention to goa'uld weapons. All that was fine. Jack recognized they needed bigger better weapons, didn't mean he liked Bauer trying to poach Carter from SG 1.

Jack O'neill could have rationalized his flippancy as being at that point in his career where the orders being stupid was more important to point out than the potential blowback. Really, fuck the NID spooks. Of course that rationalization might have held slightly more merit if his jacket didn't have a plethora of notations on him being a flippant, and frequently downright insubordinate 'vigilante' as one hypocritical navy jackass had called him. Independent Operational Ability had been what the CIA had been looking for though and it was why he had spent the cold war jumping hot spot to hot spot until Saddam had invaded Iraq... and the months spent as POW under the care of the Republican Guard.

It had helped sell his 'going rogue' side trip. He really doubted that NID mission had been all that unsanctioned all things considered, but as tempting as it might have been to ask Thor to go snooping through all the NID networks it would have actually gotten him in serious trouble, and Jack knew where to draw the line most days. Or at least he thought he did. Still the operation hadn't stopped the NID tools from prattling on about how their mission was to provide 'vital and necessary' civilian oversight, which seemed a little laughable given most of their project managers and directors were full bird colonels or up.

For an oversight department there sure were a lot of civilian scientists and military brass involved, and far fewer lawyers than Jack was used to seeing from say the CIA's attempts. When Christians In Action wanted to pretend they were following the rules they at least made an effort to coach people into making policy sound like it was following 'the rules'.

Still there were limits, and he was risking getting Hammond in trouble if he had pushed calling them out any further, so he had skipped off down the hall to Danny's office slash library slash junk closet slash sometimes nap space. Jack got that you slept where and when you could. "Anything interesting, Danny boy?"

"Hi Jack." The archaeologist was predictable in that he was surrounded by books. "I wish Thor had stuck around to be honest it would have been a lot easier to ask him about some of this stuff." He replied. Danield had categorized this problem of 'all the myths were true', which wasn't to say that all the myths were actually true, or even all of them had even had some basis in something that had happened, but that a large volume of events in Earth's past had been shaped by events some of which could clearly be attributed to the Goa'uld involvement.

"Are you still doing that work up on the other protected planets?" Thor had gotten Earth included in the treaty, despite O'neill felt that his own performance as Captain Kirk ... or maybe the new captain now that he thought about it... had been a little lacking. Of course Carter patching Cronus up certainly hadn't heard their standing either, fucking weird as that was.

"Mainly Cimmeria," Daniel replied, "Something happened there. Heru'ur lost three Ha'tak, and we know it wasn't the Asgard, even though Thor did show up after."

Jack nodded. That had been months ago, over a year now, and they had never found an adequate answer for what had happened. "This your militant nox theory?"

"I am still leaning towards that. We know the Asgard were part of an ancient alliance. Asgard in Norse mythology had allies. The Aesir were allied to the elves who were kind of like lesser gods. The Jotun could have even be thought of as other gods ..." he trailed off as Daniel tended to do as he tried to tame a stream of consciousness lecture that would have been more appropriate to a college classroom, Jack was used to it. "Ability to turn invisible, healing. That sounds like what we know of the Nox, and it sounds as what little we know of the elves from Norse myth. Gairwyn even said they were elves."

Jack had to admit that Gairwyn saying they could bring the dead back to life really did make it sound like the Nox... on the other hand, "They had guns. Doesn't really sound like the bunny huggers to me."

"I admit that does make it hard to reconcile." He agreed, "More than anything I think it suggests that we need to pay more attention to cataloging Earth records. Nick's Crystal Skull, and the Aliens responsible for that know the Asgard, and are opposed to the Goa'uld." Daniel's kind of screwball grandfather had been able to share some information, but most of it wasn't useful to the SGC, even if Daniel and Nickolas Ballard both thought the historical information had broader context. "We know the Omeycoan specifically warred with Goa'uld who had adopted the Aztec personalities. Among others, and that Apophis sheltering Zipacna doesn't make them very happy."

Jack snorted. "We shouldn't have let that bastard get off Ne'tu." Not that he had a real good plan of how they could have stopped him from making it off. They'd been in too much of a hurry, and hadn't been prepared. It had been a mission with hairbreadths margin and no prep time. "They have anything else to say. I mean besides that whole lost city thing you and Nick keep talking about?"

"We know the Omeycoan probably had contact with the gate builders early in their," The Crystal Skull aliens, "development, We know that after the ancients disappeared they got into a fight with the goa'uld. We know that about a thousand years ago the Goa'uld ran headlong into the Asgard that resulted in well the kind of galactic status quo. The protected planets treaty. The goa'uld losing the rest of, or almost all of their ancient technology hold overs that they couldn't build copies of themselves. Most of what we've learned is, are details that we've suspected regarding the goa'uld, but it would really be nice to get the Asgard side of things. I would love to know what prompted not only the surge of fighting, but also the peace treaty, the decision to seed planets with Norse populations in the galaxy. There are a lot of questions that we could ask the Asgard that wouldn't violate the protected planet's treaty restrictions."

"We've got a relaxed duty cycle coming up. Teal'c will be visiting his family, and Bratac, I'll go to Cimmeria with you if you want." Jack offered. The fishing was good on the planet, so it wasn't as if he was going to be bored or anything.
--
Commentary: This is the first segment of 'interlude' on the earth side of things. Stargate's timeline is a little wonky in general, but SG 1 Season 3, well we know Jack spent three plus months off world trapped on the planet that routinely gets rained on, and has nadquadah soil which explode (or whatever). Seasons 2 and 3 introduce the Reetou, and Crystal Skull aliens who for all intents and purposes never make a return in the TV show though expanded material and other stuff in the show suggests the Omecyoan played a pretty important role indirectly in a lot of pre show events.

So this one is mainly place setting. Bauer (who in canon temporarily succeeds Hammond) is name dropped here, and plays a somewhat more recurring role in the broader Stargate program (here he is implied to be part of the Naquadah nuclear weapons program, which given the episode he shows up in seems to be supported by canon). The NID is less cartoonish-;y villainous in this or will be as things go on simply because its one of the things in SG1 that I don't think aged well.

Imperator Pax · May 14, 2021

The Festive Season

The klaxons wailing finally stopped by about the time they got Makepeace into the hallway. Jack didn't stop moving backwards even after he heard the Iris seal shut. Once it was secure, and Siler announced that the gate was off he relaxed a fraction. Makepeace was a solid guy, still kind of naïve in Jack's opinion for a jarhead who'd seen the mess Yugoslavia had turned into, but he was a good guy. "You alright?" He asked.

"Yeah." The other colonel croaked from the gurney as the airmen navigated him into Doc Fraiser's waiting room. A few of the junior docs moved to check him but he waved him off. "I'm fine, just my leg." He protested. It probably wasn't just his leg, but Makepeace's marine team had apparently run into stiff resistance.

"The UAV footage looked bad?" He asked searching for information, "There was what looked like a forest fire."

"OH, fuck," He groaned trying to sit up putting weight on his hip, "it probably did. If not for those Jaffa pulling us out we wouldn't have made it around it." Jack knew Hammond was going to have questions about that. "That big plume of smoke on the UAV footage you saw was probably where that Alkesh got shot down." Jack got the marine a cup of water with one of the bendy straws. "Thanks. I don't," He coughed some of the water going down the wrong pipe, "what happened. Things were okay, and then there was an explosion. The locals had been pretty friendly. No sign of hostilities."

"SO someone attacking the planet?"

Makepeace tried to nod his head, "Yeah, I think so. Nirti I think. I think that's the mark I saw."

"What about the Jaffa who pulled you out?"

"Ishkur's dragon guard. One of them had been showing us around. Young kid, one of his officers came and lead around the fire, got us back to the gate. They were taking fire as pulled out. It looked like there was shit going on in the skies, orbit."

"Colonel I need you to move." Apparently the captain had run to get Fraiser, as she was now shooing him away, and out of her domain. That left Jack with fuck all to do. The base would be in restricted security for a while now. They'd have to MRI all of the marines. Blood work, and a bunch of other stuff. Hammond would want a report on what all, what little, he had gotten out of Makepeace before he went into surgery. Makepeace had been the last man through the gate as well having come through with a squad automatic with less than a third left on the belt.

--

"I'm still looking Jack. " Daniel preempted him, before he could ask. "I mean, Ishkur on earth terms isn't someone we have a lot of information on. We do think that he and some of the others used different names for different city states, Dr Briski is an expert in Mesopotomia and I've requested some of his publications from the University of Colorado's library but he's a sumerian storm god, basically."

"And?" Jack nudged.

"The goa'uld Ishkur has been a system lord of the middle rank for a long time. Five thousand plus years. He's mercurial, Teal'c doesn't think its a good idea to trust his jaffa. His jaffa are quite fanatical according to both Bratac and the Tokra." Daniel tapped some keys on his computer to cycle through some pictures, "He may or may not be related to some of the other Sumerian and Mesopotomian Goa'uld. Baal is currently a system lord. Marduk was at one point. I mean if Makepeace hadn't seen Nirti's jaffa, I'd have thought Apophis might have attacked given where they were."

Jack had considered that to. Someone attacking an SG team on a peaceful fact finding mission... well Apophis had not been happy to find Earth added to the protected planets treaty. He had to abide the treaty, but that didn't mean he had to like it. Still he was tied up fighting both Heru'ur, and Cronus so how much in the way of resources Apophis could spare was up for debate. "If Nirti is involve they're going to keep us locked down for additional screening." Which was admittedly good because the NID had wanted to come in and sent down and 'talk the talk' "Kennedy was already coming in from the Pentagon when SG 3 was dialing in."

"What is that about?"

"I don't know. They mentioned Set, so I guess either the ATF, or FBI have been poking around." It seemed likely that having exhausted most conventional channels they had decided to make a nuisance of themselves. During his time with the CIA Jack had seen the DEA, and FBI both do it enough, and it was just as likely that ATF was no different. "I think the NID is just using it as an excuse though. They said congress though, which probably means someone in the FBI ran to a friend on the hill... that could be a problem." He supposed he could have seen if anyone at Langley would take his calls during the downtime... trying and figure out what was going on.

"Uh, yeah about that. You remember when the Stargate malfunctioned and caused us, caused the wormhole to slingshot us back in time."

"Yeah, I've got the pictures." Of the gang in front of the VW bus, "Why?"

Daniel ground his teeth, "So I was watching CSPAN, and we might have a problem." The archaeologist clack clacked away at his keyboard. "I caught it entirely by accident." Jack glanced at him. "This is the house armed services committee,"

"Okay and?"

"The representative from California doesn't look familiar?" Daniel asked, "That's Jennifer Clark, the ... hippie Sam gave the pep talk to. Apparently after we left, her and her boyfriend went back home, and he joined the air force. Early pioneer of computers in the eighties, and in particular has spent most of the last two decades as a part of the SETI institute. He's only been full time there since 94." The thing that looked for alien signals in space. Jack decided to sit down, and cleared off some books from a chair. "I've asked Sam about the work he does, and its supposed to be pretty impressive."

"Crap. Have you told Carter how Jenny grew up?" Danny shook his head, this was great, "Where was he in 'Nam?" He asked deciding to change subjects.

"I don't think he went. Testing scores that I've come across say he was sent off to technical school as opposed to sending him to Vietnam." Michael Clark was probably happier that way, Jack figured. "He worked for NASA during the eighties, and then Berkeley," Jack wrinkled his nose, "but its not like he's unconnected. And Jenny... well I haven't told Sam but she probably has the security clearance to get our files."

"Really?"

"I'm not sure," Daniel hedged, "But I did some digging," A few more key strokes, "And this is her..."

"That's General West, when was this?"

Daniel looked a little startled, but Jack eased back in his seat. "84. Some kind of Scientific initiative, looks like it was overshadowed by Star Wars, but West was convinced it would provide an edge over the soviets, and eventually Catherine brought me in, and well Abydos. We've got to tell Sam."

... that sort of went without saying. He was tempted to respond with 'what's this we shit', but Daniel was right, "Yeah. I don't even want to fathom what the NID reaction might be. You told her about the SETI thing?"

"Yes." Daniel repeated.

"NASA requires pretty serious background check what did he do for them?"

"Jet propulsion lab,"

In the eighties? Jack shook his head. "Alright so both of them probably have current security clearances." Jenny certainly would, "If Hammond wasn't currently dealing with SG 3, I'd say we need to take this to him." This would be a call the president before Congress started convening a commission.
--
Makepeace would, or was supposed to, be taking it easy for the holidays at least. Even with the use of a healing device most of SG 3 were on light duty. No one was dead though, and there wouldn't be any issue with them eventually returning to duty. Carter's summation of 'Whoops' to their politician problem was something he had wished he'd thought of it was a great summary of problems. They needed to tell Hammond of course... who would probably need to brief the President, but they had held off. So far nothing was in writing. The 1969 trip was not something that had been documented by the SGC in the official record.

It was just a 'gate malfunction' file. Minimal details, and relying on the gate's ancient origins as being unknowable. As long as it stayed with SG 1 it could stay off the books, but Kennedy had rescheduled their meeting until well into the New Year, apparently he had to also needed time to see about Area 51, which was probably true. If they were lucky they probably wouldn't have to deal with him until early March maybe later than that, certainly after SG 3 was back in the rotation for regular duty. There were only so many SG teams and the marines being out of rotation really degraded the overall operational capability of the SGC.

"Holiday plans, Colonel?"

"Me, I'm going with Teal'c help him and Drey'auc move. Bratac says there is a lot of goa'uld activity in that sector. He thinks it would be be best to get the moved now, before a Ha'tak shows up in orbit again. What about you major?"

"I'm going to San Diego visit my brother, and David and Lisa." Mark's two kids. "What about you Daniel?"

"Christmas with Kathy," So the same as every year since Daniel had been back on earth following Abydos, "Its a tradition I'm trying to keep."
-
Commentary: Notations, particularly on revisions. In canon, and in the original version, it is Kur who has the Dragon Guards I changed it to Ishkur or rather combined them into a single Goa'uld system lord because its easier for me to combine their plots. That's just an FYI. We are moving into the year 2000 with these interludes, but I'm not going to cover the Russian introductions to the SGC. I will probably cover the events of the episodes the Curse, and the Tomb down the road when we get there, but those are for later.

Imperator Pax · May 17, 2021

That Y2K Bug

It was funny how many otherwise intelligent air force personnel had expected the sky to come crashing down and all the computers to stop working on New Years, but the world still kept turning and SG 1 just sat back and had a chuckle at their coworker's expense. They'd live it down in a couple more months probably. Jack figured he'd let it go by then, but until he'd yuck it up for a bit longer. It was a small reprieve from some of the SGC other issues, like why he was currently leaning one of the cheap office chairs as far back as he could get it on one of the conference rooms on level 27 without it tipping over.

The galaxy was a big place, and if they were lucky that was all Kennedy was going to want to talk about today. Jack knew that they might luck out there, but the fact the career bureaucrat was angling for stars at some point and was coming from Washington. That Kennedy was continuously purporting to be on their side just made Jack even more uncomfortable... it was like talking to used car salesman honestly.

Even Daniel was noticing it.

"I do not understand the purpose of this map Daniel Jackson." Teal'c rumbled.

"Oh its a map of what we call the Mediterranean basin, and surrounding countries. Middle East, North Africa, and the southern half of Europe, basically," He waved his hand, "This is the majority of the source of all the humans and civilizations we frequently have encountered. We do know that the goa'uld did involve themselves elsewhere, but this the geographical boundaries of where see most of the diaspora."

"I see." Teal'c responded inflecting slightly to imply he still didn't quite get what Daniel was getting at.... because frankly Jack wasn't seeing it either. Yeah, the Goa'uld had snatched a bunch of people from Ancient Greece, and Egypt, but they knew that. "And you believe that this map may be useful to today's discussions?"

Daniel shuffled, "Uh well maybe, I think that it would be helpful to to, provide a visual representation of how this relates to Earth. The goa'uld seem to have colonized blocks of space, or at least the system lords in groups according to their geography in a lot of ways. Ra was the largest contiguous region of space but it kind of lines up with who bordered who on ancient earth."

"There is a great ocean between Mexico and North Africa Daniel Jackson. I admit Zipacna is only an underlord and we have encountered Zipacna on more than one occasion but some of his kin have held the rank of system lords."

"Yes, thats right, but overall the majority of the civilizations we encounter are Egyptian, or Greek, or from Mesopotamia or related to those. They originated from the near east. I mean we know the Omeycyoan and the Asgard also both moved humans off world, but they're an exception."

"This is related to SG 7's report from P3X 797?" Kennedy asked.

"Its related. 797 was originally colonized by Minoan Greeks. They still retain the use of what we generally refer to as Linear A, which is interesting." Not to Kennedy, his eyes looked like they were starting to glaze over, "We think that they were moved circa the middle Minoan period, around 1700 BC. They're an iron age society, and that is part of why its related to SG 7's report, but also regarding other developments. Sokar, for example, was closely associated with Ptah, and that seems true in System Lord politics as well. The goa'uld describe Ptah and Sokar as being brothers, and on earth they were the general primary gods of Memphis during the Old Kingdom. "

Jack knew if Daniel kept up Kennedy might very well doze off in the middle of the brief, "Sokar.... his death guard," Inviting Danny to correct him, which he predictably did. General Hammond shot him a knowing look.

"Necropolis Guards Jack. They have have heavier armor."

"Yeah the peach, ruddy red coloring. Chain mail doesn't stop bullets real well." Jack remarked, and Kennedy was back with them, which was good. "Most of the coloring though, thats a maker's mark according to Bra'tac. We see some of Apophis's jaffa still using it, but its the armor design itself, and its naquadah investment is really what makes it expensive."

... and what made it stop bullets... "So 797's blacksmiths."

"They've transitioned to iron working, Jack."

"Ok. I'll bite why is that important Daniel." They hadn't rehearsed this, not really, but they had talked about this... or stuff like this. Some of the details Daniel was probably going to drone on about would be newly gathered stuff from other SG teams, or things he had dug up in musty old books, but Jack was mainly playing dumb for Kennedy's sake.

"Because there isn't, wasn't, any reason to make the change. 797 had more easily accessible tin than anywhere on earth did during the bronze age. Their main population centers are all located near readily accessible reserves and they don't need to ship it across vast distances. There isn't any chance of a shortage, or it being disrupted by conflicts."

The colonel from the Pentagon finally stirred, "So you're arguing it was a political decision not an economic one?" Kennedy asked. He seemed skeptical, but Jack could understand why, or guess why. Daniel had touched on these sorts of things... misconceptions about bronze age tools versus iron age ones.

"There are limitations to what you can do with bronze as a metal," Daniel commented, "But for your average goa'uld controlled world, bronze tools are suitable for agriculture, mining, as well as artwork. There would be reasons to move iron technology, but on 797 the people there have so much tin that transitioning is an outside factor."

"The goa'uld."

"Specifically Zeus." Daniel agreed. "We're seeing it on other worlds where we know he's active. SG 7's report though provides other details about the goa'uld, about changes that we know about. Its not just 797, SG 3's routine follow on to 593" P3X 593 called Simarka by its natives, "is another where we are seeing similar, changes."

"593 was already iron age, High Medieval I believe you classified it as."

"Yes. Its the standardization though. ON 593, Colonel Makepeace's team noticed that the 'Chosen of Zeus', who are all human they're not Jaffa, use the term doctor in the medieval latin context. They're introducing the same mining techniques though as on 797. What we're seeing on 797 is the introduction, the melding of what looks like a combination with the early greek culture, with Zeus's much later Greeks, and Egyptian culture." Kennedy gave him the dead eye fish look, and Daniel gave Jack a warning look forcing a raised eyebrow in surprise, "So when we've been exploring Goa'uld involvement with Earth, Setesh, and also when Cronus's involvement with the protected planets treaty there were certain topics that came up."

"I am passingly," Kennedy conceded chewing on lower lip, "familiar with those reports, Doctor Jackson." He hedged.

"Well when he visited, we speculated that he might be tied to Sokar. Which he was but that was based off of associating Sokar with Hades, like how we think Seth masqueraded as Typhon while on Earth for a while. Now Teal'c had said that Cronus was responsible for originally banishing Sokar so there is an association there."

"Ok so recently the Goa'uld Zeus has reappeared. IN Greek myth Zeus overthrew his father and imprisoned him in a place called Tartarus, and that seems to have some basis in truth among the goa'uld. It seems however that sometime after losing contact on Earth Cronus breaks out of Tartarus and in turn unseated Zeus and imprisoned him, presumably in Tartartus."

Jack couldn't help himself, "Turnabout is fair play, Danny." He grunted, and Kennedy glanced over and shrugged in seeming agreement to the quip. Hammond didn't say anything, which really only further reminded Jack that the General was here to basically keep Kennedy in line more than anything else.

"That is probably true. However that is only part of what we're observing. Zeus's reference in his recorded holographic messages speaks of his 'older brother', and we know Sokar was actively move human populations from Earth as late as the thirteen hundreds, possibly later still. That would go a long way to explaining well certain things we're observing."

"Such as?"

"Swords." Jack quipped. Kennedy gave him a queer look. "Like medieval swords Kennedy."

Daniel reached beside him to his satchel and pulled out a dog eared thirty year old book, "Here colonel," he pushed the worn book over the table. "This is kind of sword we're seeing show up with Zeus's chosen. A very similar kind of sword that we see with Gairwyn's people on Cimmeria. Now admittedly yes this is a descendant of the Roman spatha which we're relatively sure archaeologically was celtic originally."

"And there are celtic goa'uld?" Kennedy asked.

"Right. Its possible there are other explanations. The Spatha takes its name from greek origin, but as a development its possible this is convergent development, but given linguistics I think we're talking about a medieval transplant population." Daniel was cut off with the wail of the klaxon.

"Colonel," Hammond rumbled standing to, "With me."

Jack was already up as soon as the gate alert had started. The nearest scheduled activation was a few hours away, and was just the Alpha Site's scheduled check in. Siler's voice came in over the intercom, "General Hammond, Gate Room, we're receiving Bra'tac's IDC."
--
Commentary: Just as an aside, we are in Season 4 now roughly its march of 2000. That is roughly because s3 and s4 dates run into a number of problems, particularly because we know Jack spends a hundred days stranded on Edora in Season 3, which as I've said that presents a problem. Now what will probably happen is that while Wednesday will be a normal update for the main jumpchain thread, (and a standard update will go up Friday here), the main jump thread will sometime this week probably get an MCU jump snippet update. Probably.

Imperator Pax · May 21, 2021

Crossroads
In the east where morning begins
[Timestamp Spring 2000]

The briefing room was small and cramped... really reflective of the fact that this facility had been constructed during the early cold war originally with secrecy and security in mind. They thirty storey underground give or take after all... and he was referring to a dog eared book printed probably a little after Cheyenne mountain had started construction.

Swords weren't the real problem though. Daniel Jackson picked up the clicker and navigated the slides forward, and the roughly half of the SG team leaders quieted down. If this had been a few years ago Jack would have probably had had to come up here. "Zeus by all indications seems to have a collection of experts. We're talking educated, literate humans handling most of his civil engineering programs. They are involved in military activities, but more as auxiliaries. Police roles, but the more important development is we're seeing them issued with armor that has been invested with low purity naquadah alloy plating."

There were some groans. "What about the lizards?"

Sam glanced at him. Daniel knew that Hammond wanted everything to get covered, and he wasn't supposed to get side tracked. "Uh, yes, I will get to them in a moment. This armor is roughly comparable in purity to what Teal'c and the serpent guards were issued at the time of Apophis's incursion into the SGC. Its not quite as naquadah heavy as Bra'tac's armor but it arguably better designed." He gestured to the kind pigeon breasting effect of the plate protecting the pictured greek man's torso... it wasn't Maximilian plate by any means, but it was better than links of mail joined together. "As you may remember Apophis's personal Serpent Guard had armor that would protect them from our guns, better than lesser," From the front row Jack raised an eyebrow, "Lower ranked Jaffa, well Major Carter says that's because that was some kind of low purity naquadah alloy. It might even been a product, scraps of some other industrial process they reuse to make armor. We're not seeing this with the, what most people are calling Unas armor. That's purpose built, intentional. The human armor here is naquadah invested, and presumably expensive as a result, but is in a different design than we're used to seeing. We are seeing it proliferate though."

Not quickly by any means. Most of the Jaffa who bore Moloch's mark of sun and crescents still wore the more common armor that was nearly universal to all Jaffa of means.

"Come on Danny get to the good stuff." Ferreti urged. "I heard the lizards had TERs, what's that about?" SG 2's CO asked.

He flipped slides if a little reluctantly to one of the six foot lizards. They weren't Unas, Daniel knew that because... well they'd met one of Sokar's Unas as well as Chaka's tribe to consider. For most of the galaxy who had never seen the first hosts to the goa'uld though it was understandable to make the assumption. "We have observed them equipped with TERs," As well as something that more ergonomic, more vaguely recognizable as in line with modern firearms ergonomics, "So its not inconceivable that they're intended to fight the Reetou. As I was saying given the protection their armor offers against staff weapons fire its not unreasonable to believe it would offer good protection against Reetou weapons."

If Daniel was honest the more pressing thing he would have preferred to cover were not the technical speculation about such things. That was Sam's bailiwick to be honest, he wanted to zero in on the fact that they weren't in service to Zeus but rather to the goa'uld's 'older brother'. There was also the fact... the differences in their architecture. He flipped some slides to show still frame video footage, as well as conventional camera snapshots. Some of it was distinctly Mayan, others were more broadly pre Columbian. It didn't mesh. It was out of place with the Greek and Egyptian architecture.

It was also just another piece of evidence of goa'uld involvement long after the Egyptian rebellion was supposed to have buried the stargate of the giza plateau. More than that though, never mind that Sokar had been relocating medieval Christians off world from England and probably northern France, but the pictures of clearly mayan structures were occupying space with bloomeries and water wheels. It was process of lifting up bronze age Canaan thousands of years to be like the Byzantine empire in many respects.

Sam stood up, and came forward. "Alright the general pattern of engagement we see is that the," She paused, "Lizards are equipped with plasma weapons, or the observed TERs. They're not generally observed engaging Jaffa, though it has happened. Their armor, we're relatively sure integrates a greater volume of communications equipment than what we've observed from Jaffa Guards Armor. The ability to communicate with starships in orbit, direct gliders, and alkesh onto ground targets or to signal the reinforcements via ring platform. All of this is probably a step forward from the Guard helmet, but is largely form fitting rather than the mostly ceremonial retracting mask normally used.

--
Oskyld had little interest in being seen on a day to day basis, which thankfully was not something unusual for system lords. His bigger problem had been in the whole sale purge of Moloch's underlords who would have handled much of the day to day Goa'uld affairs. Zeus was much, much more keen on being a public presence for the humans to look to, and that freed him to see to that matters of industry, and ultimately the fleet.

Of course it wasn't as if Zeus was directly overseeing the uplifting the worlds. He just had had several centuries to implement a standard system of weights and measures for things that most goa'uld simply left to local human, or jaffa rulers. Having a universal system applicable throughout the entire empire was something that was great, especially since as a system it was entirely within the technological capacity of Stennos. No real 'high technology' was involved, and thus it wasn't likely to get more than a second look even if anyone noticed.

No really if there were going to be issues it might be literacy, and literature, and room for academic debate and experimentation. Those were rare. Yu Huang Shang-ti had used a consistent system since the spring and autumn period on Earth with only minor changes. If anything those changes with their greater inclination towards educated bureaucracy would have been the bigger concern to the goa'uld. Yu ruled over a stable prosperous realm that wasn't inclined to come over its borders lightly so Ra had let the matter lie.

Ra was gone now so there was no one to try and push limits on literacy, and that meant Stennos's population could be used to facilitate public works programs to while also using their world as a template in many respects. It was also something that could be delegated to Zeus's chosen, and then leave it to them. That left him time to digest, and process through the source of the technology of the goa'uld... and in the last six months he had been busy.

Simarka's human population had been relocated there, at least so far as he could pin down circa the thirteenth century. That had probably been when the last goa'uld visit had deposited a final batch of settlers in an event, but at the earliest colonization of the planet had begun perhaps in the eleventh century, and he was skeptical on that. Even so that was nine hundred years of settlement, but more interestingly was that it was after the peace of Tonsberg, and the goa'uld who had done it had not seeded the planet in the vicinity of his native pantheon, or with humans from that pantheon's usual population.

Simarka was located relative to the Hindu orientation of space, but not quite within 'touching' distance of Nirrti's domain. It was however relatively close, especially with more modern hyperdrives, and that was really why he was here. In terms of borders it was too close.

The golden orb twittered rapidly. Nirti, prior to her bonehead maneuver, would have been the nearest system lord to this side of his border. With her having been removed from power it had left her domain in something of a mess, which was a problem since her domain bordered Cronus, and Apophis both.

It was Apophis who was the problem. It was likely his Ha'tak they were expecting to meet, and expected the hyperspace eddies... the gravitational disturbances did turn out to be a flight of Ha'tak. The only one they really cared about was the anamoly of the three ships. From the reactor signature it would have been faster than the two Standards in its flight, which was interesting. On visual inspection it was clearly different as well. Its consorts had clearly been constructed by Apophis's shipyards probably before Ra's death, and had undergone a series of refits to improve speed at FtL They had been seeing those for months of course, over a year really.

Such vessels were superior to the quality of build Moloch had adhered to, but inferior to those of the Ha'tak of Heru'ur seized over Cimmeria. That was interesting, though seemed largely a result that Heru'ur most likely had a shipyard which if not actually Gate builder in origin, was built much closer to spec. It seemed unlikely that Heru'ur was expending much more in terms of naval budget than his uncle, particularly during the Pax Re.

No the anomaly was the center ship, and its markings confirmed it. "Delmak." He remarked. The initial round of refits to Moloch's Ha'tak would have made this a mostly fair fight, but that wasn't the point. He was commanding the flotilla from one of the three Ha'tak he'd taken from Heru'ur, the higher quality of build insured that its reactor had been able to be improved to accommodate the much larger main batteries. They weren't properly speaking prototypes. While they had been improved with knowledge from the ancient's repository they had been in testing and slated for installation before Zeus had shown him the repository. "Open fire." He ordered

His flagship's duel batteries opened up from across the superstructure catching their opposite number with streaks of white gold beams. Their respective consorts opened up shortly thereafter firing the more diffused golden streaks that looked more like comets as they got closer to their targets.

The Ha'tak whose markings attested that it had been built at Delmak returned fire with a salvo that was more effective than those of its consorts, but not strictly speaking comparable to the newer guns that was good. It was however predictable. For the general improvement in quality, it was an iterative improvement... the guns were the 'same caliber' so to speak. He was interested, because there was nothing to suggest that whoever had built this had done so by improving quality rather than simply making a better copy of the original gun design.

He left the Jaffa to handle the launch of Alkesh, and Death Gliders to handle naval aviation. If the Alkesh were able to make it through they would in theory be able to attack the opposite's escorts, and knock one or even both out sooner. That result would allow the other ships in the squadron to turn towards remaining hostile elements. This was the first time designs he'd drafted personally had been used in anger in a capital ship exchange. There were already plans for larger ships to better accommodate the new weapons than simply retrofitting suitable ha'tak.
--
Commentary: This directly leading into the opening for June of 2000, concluding the largely SG1/C centric interludes of late 99 early 2000. This is relevant to their side of the equation because well changes in ships is something Earth witnesses, with Apophis in canon trying to build a new model Ha'tak based off of Sokar's research, but we'll get to that.

Imperator Pax · May 28, 2021

Procession
June 2000

Moloch had been downright abysmmal at record keeping, and unattentative at best to the matters of managing his domain so there a significant amount of work, and mismanagement to correct besides the expansions to the shipyards, even though that was the majority of what occupied his personal attention. To the best as that he could determine the goa'uld development that thad eventually resulted in the ha'tak had been... weird. It seemed as if the Goa'uld had started with the pyramid base and then over a span of a few centuries had just repeatedly surrounding superstructure with extra equipment, in this case an ever increasing number of cannons.

What was perhaps more interesting were the intermediary designs between the Cheops and Ha'tak, the so called 'Chel'tak' class or family of ships, had actually mounted larger guns than their modern counterparts. They had however been more expensive and finicky compared to the smaller 'caliber' modern cannons aboard ha'tak. SO the goa'uld had largely abandoned the Chel'tak layout, though some of those vessel's main battery designs had eventually gone on to be refined into the guns on the vanity projects that were system lord flagships.

It was still appropriate to call it stagnant. The modern Ha'tak had been designed by Ptah, and proliferated to the other system lords as a complete technical package. Other system lords could have made modifications for greater specialization, but they hadn't. No it was mainly the quality of manufacture and the degree of expense a system lord was willing to expend to construct his fleet that played the role.

The hologram occupying his attention was the after effects of the engagement. They hadn't been able to take Apophis's ships whole. That was in its own way unfortunate. The Delmak ship had been more sturdily constructed, evident on review in that it broke from Ptah's layout of the ship, which increased structural integrity. There had been nothing revolutionary in the design though whoever had overhauled the design had painstakingly poured both effort into it in terms of improving performance as well as simplifying production. It made more sense why Apophis was winning naval battles against other system lords. There was no getting around though the conclusion that the overhaul of the delmak design was largely a conservative one. It was a better ship, but nothing revolutionary.

At least that had been his initial conclusion on review.

"A cloaking device."

"Certainly what it appears to be." He agreed, which was according to traditional goa'uld wisdom supposedly impossible. A ha'tak was too massive to cloak. At a kilometer across and several hundred meters tall a Ha'tak was very large. The goa'uld had never been able to make Alteran cloaks work to conceal such a ship. The few experiments Ptah had publicly disclosed had all be failures that had destroyed valuable ancient relics, and the goa'uld were loathe to lose any to begin with.

They'd been concerned about this sort of thing for the better part of a year now. "Then the question becomes how did he actually manage it." They had known Apophis had them, but had no explanation as to how. The fact that his other two ha'tak hadn't had them... was telling. Had all of the cloak capable ha'tak been built at Delmak. The cloaking device was the only revolutionary feature in terms of design, and did explain some of the redesign, but it wasn't actually losing any other capacity... thus Delmak's shipwrights had been able to keep the price the same despite new capabilities... or at least that was his guess.

Still that wasn't really why Zeus was here. The Asgard's insight into practical ship matters were welcome of course, but there was another concern. Oskyld ran his hands over the machine, and series of droning tones began coinciding with the flashing lights.

The mind machine interface of the ancient technology was very similar to the goa'uld copies. It was crisper of course. The connection flowed more smoothly, and the Alteran system was better suited to the mass of information being transferred, but the difference wasn't as pronounced as in some other systems that the goa'uld had copied.

There was another round of flashing lights.

Oskyld frowned at the results. He had some experience with the remnants of Asgard technology in the crash on Stennos but those were glorified trinkets, this was different.

"What is it?"

He drummed his fingers on the console. It wasn't identical of, but it certainly did remind him of Luther's problem with trying cloning out... or the occasional patch work degeneration seen in attempts to clone mutants or other, "Just a moment," He ordered the 25th century drone to do another scan just to confirm it with the medical records it had from those decades. When Zeus had crash landed on Stennos five centuries earlier his body had been critically damaged or had been injured the battle and those injuried had made worse by the barely controlled reentry. There were a series of chirps, "The good news is your not in any physical danger." Not in the short term anyway. The one time amnesiac Asgardian was in surprisingly robust health, and he hadn't changed bodies in five centuries. He speculated that if anything that had helped. The salvaged Asgard database though suggested that for some time leading up to the battle the Asgard had been changing bodies significantly more frequently than they probably should have been, and the flash cloning new bodies probably didn't help. "The errors can be patched over in a number of ways." Which brought him to another question, "The Goa'uld sarcophagi is based off of Alteran technology," and there were next to no indication the Asgard had made any attempt to integrate those into corrections. The Asgard had lost the ability to reproduce conventionally a thousand years ago, "Regardless the most likely explanation is multi factor rather than singular. I think an over use of flash cloned bodies was only one factor. Your current body is well adapted to your environment, and there is little doubt given its physical robustness that you should be fine. The headaches as far as I can tell are a natural consequence of the data upload from the computer." Cataloging epigentic factors in Stennos's environment would be time consuming to say the least.

Zeus nodded, and blinked. "We will have to repair the damage."

"Indeed." He responded in a clipped tone looking back to the string of glyphs, "A preceding ancestor, ideally before cloning, or at the very least before the errors became widespread would be a good starting place." It wasn't the only one. Attempts to clone aliens with minimal understanding of their physiology and life cycle had been tried on more than one occasion by various super villains or government entities when those weren't the same thing. He looked at the corpse, which was preserved in an asgard stasis tube. Dead, but not decaying. Maintaining a dead body didn't require a lot of energy after all. "I'll start directing search parties to various alliance worlds," Not Jaffa obviously.... most likely his raptors. Thankfully the Asgard stargate database had been intact, and that yielded a much more massive number of worlds than the standard Goa'uld cartouche, or Heru'ur's cartouche, or Moloch's.

"You can fix this?"

"Yes." He paused, "You have a stronger immune system than most clone bodies would. You've been alive for centuries exposed to a wealth of epigenetic factors and the result in your immune system is in significantly better standing for it. I can tailor a mutagenic agent, and retrovirii package specifically to this body, but I'll need time." Zeus's existing musculature would help though, "I've already ordered a number of separate cloning methods to work on regrowing your, well that body."

Zeus nodded, "You do not believe it would be wise to attempt to restore it to life?"

... no. "No. I'd like to keep that as a last resort, I'd sooner recommend we try short term cybernetics than go that route, at least until we better understand how that physiology might interact." If they had more Alteran technology that would be different, but that was also why they knew what to look for.

There was a soft thump as Zeus moved off the bench he had been occupying, and reactivated his holographic shroud resuming human -ish appearance. "What about military matters, cybernetics would prove significantly beneficial to troops in the field."

"I agree. With Nirrti imprisoned by the system lords though," There had been a number of raids on her worlds, and while there was no denying she was a genius... he doubted all of her work had been solely unique. "Nirrti seems to have found either Alteran records, a living Alteran to learn from, or someone who learned from a living Alteran," This was the explanation he considered most likely, "And then found a series of Alteran devices related to genetic manipulation." Which of course legally speaking she should have announced to the other system lords... not that anyone was likely to be terribly shocked she hadn't. Her dicking around against Cronus was just as likely to have been what had really gotten her in trouble as her not sharing technology. Even so, well, there was a reason he was working to compartmentalize as much of his efforts as possible. The truth was as important in the long term uplifting human society in the galaxy was, in the short term he needed a military edge against the bulk of the system lords.

"That makes an alarming amount of sense," Zeus agreed. "Given her propensity for using diseases in warfare, we should exercise caution." With the exception of malnutrition most human diets across the galaxy were relatively healthy. The goa'uld had proliferated livestock across the galaxy alongside humans, and so had the Asgard as well. Of course for most of the galaxy draft animals were still dominated by slower oxen rather than horses. That might have sounded like an utterly minor change, but in term of practical yields... it was basically night and day. Never mind when they got around to introducing widespread fertilizer usage, and a variety of new world crops for a mixed four field system. "Thale reports that humans of the first world were investigating the forges again."

"I'm surprised, but also not."

"Yes, they seem to be focusing on the manufacture of arms and armor, rather than the lathes," Zeus responded, "That will not last forever."

He nodded. Getting everyone to a uniform medieval level of technology sounded easy on paper... and few of the goa'uld were going to complain about that. The difference of on paper versus reality though was that most humans in the galaxy were illiterate. That made implementing standards and weights pretty difficult. "Well the lathes themselves aren't new," Ra had been perfectly happy to allow lathes to proliferate in his domain since they had existed in Egypt. Yu Huang Shang-ti's realm used them to make metal tools, and weapons and no Goa'uld had complained. Cronus, and the rest of the broader Titanic-Olympian pantheon used them. They had existed on Stennos without Asgard-Zeus introducing them. The Tauri though were the most likely to recognize what a leap forward they represented for construction, and the economy. "Besides." The door slid open with a pneumatic hiss. "I'm more worried about Ishkur and Svarog."

"I can deal with Ares." Zeus growled, doing a pretty good approximation of the usual goa'uld harmonic booming.

"I appreciate that, but what you're doing is vastly more useful to the whole galaxy than dealing with one pain in the ass." Ares was making a nuisance of himself it was true, but there were non military solutions to that. Svarog and Ishkur belong to separate pantheons, dynastic bloodlines among the goa'uld... diplomacy was going to be trickier with them. Ishkur... Ishkur was weird... and his Jaffa were more fanatical than most. "You don't remember which Goa'uld lead the flotilla that destroyed your ship by chance?"

"I don't. Though I am certain that he perished after the engagement. I thoroughly analyzed the debris field in Stennos several months ago."

It was kind of hard to argue with that. Asgard-Zeus's ship had fought ten goa'uld Ha'tak to mutually assured destruction, and his vessel had been considered small by Asgard standards. "I know, I am a little concerned someone back during the height of Ra's power feeling cocky enough to throw ten pyramid ships away like that."

"I must admit that the others may not know either." That was probably the case no one had come to rescue Asgard-Zeus. He'd been amnesiac for five hundred years, and given all that time was in no hurry to get back to his galaxy, or to reestablish contact. "Once we have something definitive though we will be able to reestablish contact and provide a great service to our people. We will also be able to act and bring order to the galaxy without needing to be constrained by specific treaty concerns with the system lords."

On Moloch's former throne world his shipyards were being expanded and rebuilt to new tolerances specifically to construct a heavier Ha'tak. Improved Battleship would have been the literal translation though 'Il' was being used as a diminutive. That was fine. In many respects Oskyld considered it to be going from say the Dreadnought class battleship to say American Standard type Battleships, but that was also a gross oversimplification. They were however designed for designed for dedicated space supremacy while being mostly improvements to goa'uld systems.

They were a stop gap. Enough of the debris from Stennos was intact enough to understand the power of Asgard weapons. Enough of the database survived to provide a lead even if not necessarily an easy path to replicating it. Now that Asgard-Zeus had his memories back though... they had leads on other things, including the black armor's origins. They were goa'uld copies of Alteran technology... better copies than one usually saw of the goa'uld. Someone had gone through a lot of effort to do set up that kind of manufacturing.

--
Commentary: We move to first of eight forges next, and that may end up divided into two sections depending on how heavy it is on revisions. Right now there isn't much that I feel needs to be changed.

Imperator Pax · Jun 4, 2021

First of Eight Forges
The River Capital
(June 2000)

The world he was visiting today, or at least this part of it was a semi arid expanse of terrain that reminded him vaguely of the Sudan. The world in question would have been what passed for 'developed' by Goa'uld standards. It had a population roughly comparable globally to Stennos, or to medieval Europe. It was unfortunately a largely illiterate population that toiled in bronze age agriculture and mining ventures in order to support themselves, which actually made the fact they had been able to sustain that large of population impressive. With the introduction of more 'modern' agriculture from Stennos the population would likely boom in short order. Not that he would likely be around to see the results of that, that was why there needed to be a more coherent state of affairs. That was why any theological quibbles could be potentially dangerous, but especially once he was gone.

Ishtar was waiting on the other side with a procession of mixed human and jaffa clergy. Zeus's handpicked experts had already started paving the roads, and Raptors had begun the expansion of the gate area. It was the river that was the more immediate area of concern... it was bluntly speaking a septic mess, unsurprising given its use as a trash dump. If it had just been urban waste, the by products of human, and animal waste, the by products of the tanners and dye makers it wouldn't have been nearly as much of an issue. The problem was the mining waste was going into it as well, iron, gold, as well as more exotic mining by products like naquadah or trinium.

In Amestris Alchemy had been uncommon enough that what his most likely course of action would be had been all but unheard of. It had proven useful there, but also in a variety of other worlds, including in support of the last alliance, and undoing the damage Nagash and others had inflicted intentionally. That development in the application of alchemy had been one step to its application in repairing damage caused by Apokalyptan invasion of Earth well over a century afterwards.

Still they were talking about a river that had been the site of a rapid urbanization for nearly the last three centuries. That roughly coincided with Shaq'ran's defeat at the hands of Apophis. That one of the more potent system lords hadn't laid claim to the world was odd, but presumably Ra's enforced peace had been done with the intention of forcing the Goa'uld to not simply to pay him tribute, but also to keep them fractured. Or it was possible that the system lords had insisted on a buffer zone to keep the next war from getting out of hand too quickly.

Whatever the reasoning it didn't particularly matter now. What did matter was preventing the current crisis from getting worse. It was true that Jaffa with symbiotes would be largely fine... the problem was Moloch hadn't really had a lot of those to go around. His return to practices of female infanticide were rooted at least in the fact that he didn't have the income to secure more prim'ta. That didn't stop Jaffa from being Jaffa but it made them largely as vulnerable to humans to common diseases like the storm of cholera and typhus currently rampaging through the city.

A jaffa even one with a symbiote could still be sickened by unclean water, it was just that their symbiote tended to be able to deal with that in most cases. Humans, and Jaffa without symbiotes were about equally likely to die from tainted water supplies as one another. It was one of the things he was going to have to deal with, and that was why he had a genetics lab. Not here obviously.

There were public worlds, like this one would be, and a handful of face worlds with greater orientation towards trade, but some worlds would need to be sequestered. The New standards, and the alkesh were incorporating things he had learned from that head grabbing thing, and the Asgard database, but they were still based on goa'uld technological base. Improved, but with room for improvement further.

--

Ishtar knew that this world had been selected from a short list of potentials because it met most of if not all the criteria necessary. Most importantly it had the mineral resources and the population base to support the labor of shipyards.

If you had all of the resources on hand you could construct a Ha'tak in roughly a moon's turn. More practically though the process of constructing a Ha'tak required such a wealth of materials, and magic the fastest she had ever heard someone not commanding the massive shipyards at Soma-kesh was about three months. Moloch had never been able to construct a new Ha'tak in anywhere under a year. That of course had been in the face of often chronic shortages of Naquadah. The army had always been the first priority for trading with other goa'uld to purchase weapons, and of course no queen had ever been willing to abide Moloch so goa'uld larvae had always been exceedingly precious.

The latter wasn't something that had been addressed yet but the appearance of the Chosen of Zeus had dramatically resulted in decline of disease among Jaffa who had not been blessed to receive a larval goa'uld. It had also marked a similar decline among humans as well. That had been until she had gotten here, and had to contend with the massive waste polluting the water. The doctors were doing their best to treat the problem, but there hadn't been any other option but to turn towards the gods for relief.

There was a flash of white light and the river glowed. The Dragon had only clapped his hands and touched the river bank. It held that way for a few seconds, just long enough for her to turn her head enough to see that it stretched as far as she could see. It probably stretched the entirety of the river from its source to where it finally reached the sea. He snapped his glowing eyes towards one of the Chosen, "Make sure to show them how to build secondary and tertiary canals, and to dredge them."

Ishtar didn't understand the part about the canals, but then so much construction had been underway she had been unable to keep up with it all. She did suppose it was good that this was a product of waste and stupidity and not the malice of say perhaps the deposed System Lord Nirrti, or another goa'uld. The threat of a goa'uld incursion to this world though was limited largely to the prospect of a gate bound attack. High overhead were a small detachment of Ha'tak. Though it had taken over a year the slow progress of cataloging the realm had begun to morph into the herculean task of organizing new provinces. Given the efforts being expended here in time, and manpower this would likely be the capital of a new province. The fleet above certainly had suggested that before they had summoned the lord of the underworld.

The journey back to the upper reaches of the city was accomplished by hovering skiffs flanked by a small procession of mounted humans and jaffa. Ishtar was somewhat glad that they were on the low flying barges rather than a horse. The priestess wasn't precisely an adept rider, and more than anything hoped to avoid making a fool out of herself.

Some goa'uld, including perhaps whichever god had seed humans on Simarka, liked the idea of mounted warriors, but Moloch had not been among their number. The floating platforms that had been brought with them, and that they now road, though were gate traversable, and could be mounted with a variety of weapons, and were very likely being proliferated for the inevitable conflict against Apophis. There were any number of reasons why they would pursue a battle with the serpent god, but the most easily citable was that Apophis had lost significant standing in the years sense the doom of Ra. It should have been unthinkable with Moloch's domain as a base, but so much of Apophis's domain had been scoured by fighting, most recently against Heru'ur but then also by Sokarbefore. Apophis was no longer as mighty or seemingly unconquerable as he had been even a decade ago.

She looked down into what had been muddy brown before and now the water was clear enough to see fish swimming, and even the bottom in some places. It had gone from an ugly tepid color to a nearly cerulean blue.

"This will greatly simplify preventing any further outbreaks," The 'Chosen' remarked bowing slightly.

Ordinarily humans, even human priests, were not nearly this forthcoming. The closest she could think of the Chosen's brazen behavior was that of the human worshippers of the Asgard. In a particularly embarrassing instance two decades earlier Moloch had attacked a protected planet of the Asgard only for Tyr's berserkers to drive off the attacking jaffa in a nearly suicidal frenzy. They had demonstrated complete lack of fear in death, and Moloch had been forced to concede when the Asgard Ullfrikr had arrived with his warship. She had heard similar stories from other jaffa who had had come into contact with other Asgard protected worlds. It was the impression at least that the Asgard preferred the humans under their protection to speak frankly. "Will not the city simply continue to dump the waste into the river so that it will be carried down stream?" She asked the human.

"Yes, for the most part. The new canals will let us set up filters of sand and other materials to filter out and help us keep the river clean. That will insure disease be much less common." The Greek remarked. "It is a practice that Father Zeus insisted upon soon after his return nearly five centuries ago. It greatly prevents the spread of cholera and typhus in particular." She had seen what those diseases could do... especially given the lengths her heretical sisterhood had went to preserve the lives of infant female jaffa born into Moloch's realm. The problem now was not secreting the infants away, but what to do now that Moloch had been deposed. Protect them obviously. It had been the work of more than a quarter of century. Moloch's doom had in turn meant having to safeguard the Hak'tyl communities from rivals seeking to test the realms borders, but it also had meant facing the massive reshaping of her world into its new vibrant form. Heedless though of these concerns the human continued. "Also since the canals will train into secondary canals before moving into the main waterways the city will be able to extract some of the waste and dispose of it elsewhere before it would reach the main body. This will prevent stoppages, and reduce damage to the fisheries."

Goa'uld as practice did not micromanage. Moloch had wanted to make himself the center of any gathering, or celebration, but the process of labor was not only beneath him but beneath the warriors, Jaffa or human, who constituted his armies. Moloch's domains of yesteryear seemed thin and unproductive in comparison to the new order.

The small talk about the work was largely inconsequential. She would have considered it laughable to spend any amount of time discussing plazas, and tree lined streets. She dismounted quickly as they arrived, and made her way into the great hall. The massive basilica was truly astounding in size, and currently playing host to a great number of various humans, Jaffa, Unas, and indeed other servitor races. It was also interestingly enough playing host to a few minor goa'uld underlords who had warranted the honor of an audience in the Dragon's grove rather than the outright annihilation he had inflicted to the pantheon of Moloch. Even without the crowd it would have stood out from its surroundings given the deep purple it had been painted.

Perhaps it was simply the threat of that which had cowed the underlords, or perhaps it was some other magic that bound them to their oaths. The Unas venerated Sokar in the aspect of the Dragon, celebrating an ancient victory over the evil lord of the dead. The human raised basilica though highlighted other scenes from the equally distant past.

What was interesting was how little Zeus's chosen seemed to pay to the rest of the Olympian pantheon... apparently they had decided the best insult they could make was to ignore them given their betrayal of Zeus to his father. The inhabitants of Tana were a mixed stock of people to begin with having been taken from after the fall of the stargate of Memphis. How Shaq'ran had managed to claim so many tauri from Pelop's chosen stock was lost to history. Tana's inhabitants had been able to rebuild in part thanks to those descendants who shared much of their culture with the Chosen of Zeus.

Moloch had not been able to rule over it long enough to make any real impact in disrupting the mix of Greek, and Egyptian culture. Ra had been abundantly clear that some pantheons were more equal than others in the hierarchy of the system lords. Egypt might have been first among equals, but he had never forced Cronus or Yu, or Olokun or even any of the Celtic pantheons to truly abase themselves before his chosen people The pantheon of Canaan, and Akkad, and others though had been subsumed into largely subordinate roles underneath Ra's dynastic might.

Ra's heir was now in a pitched battle against his uncle, as well as Cronus. As if Ra's doom hadn't also meant that other System Lords, and those without the rank, were clamoring for bits and pieces of the carcass of what had once been the greatest empire in the known universe. Apophis had subsumed much of what remained of the Sumerian pantheon into the ranks of his underlords.

What was perhaps most interesting of course was that their expansion was largely focused on what could actually be secured by ships. Admittedly of course the Dragon's Hatak were endowed with much greater alacrity than those of Moloch, or even other system lords. It was still strange the center piece of securing the domain was naval power rather than the stargate from a military stand point. From a civil standpoint though, as this basilica demonstrated that was where Zeus entered the picture sending his Chosen to provide the practical matter of educating human and jaffa alike. This was probably most ideal because while all of the Unas were well read... they were also the demons of the underworld and having the eaters of sin trying to educate the populace was potentially problematic. Ishtar admitted it was unnerving to see the demon Noyan participate in games of strategy.

The military aspect of such expansion meant eliminating a host of minor goa'uld who were either legally independent of the system lords, or the elimination of a host of outsiders, or other rogues who had carved out small domains beyond the de facto influence of the system lords. During the peace of Ra those domains had largely served as buffer zones keeping system lords from sharing too long of a border with one another. Those semi demilitarized zones coupled with agreements to limit the size of fleets had insured that Ra had been able to keep the other system lords in line, and thus limit the amount of bloodshed. This had been the practice for about the last nine hundred years.

To that end Ishtar was reasonably certain that the eight provinces being formed were military districts to protect the core the system lord's empire.

Tana could hardly be a local capital, never mind planetary or provincial one if there were such problems as rampant disease. At the same time though Ishtar also knew that the reason for a variety of figures was to provide military instruction to the human auxiliaries. Moloch had never had military academies to train his Jaffa. That was a distinctly Hellenic practice, and a number of the surviving warriors looked down on it... or had at least until Zeus had arrived to assist.

It was one thing to lose a match against a demon. Such a trouncing at the hands of an unas was entirely understandable to a jaffa, but losing to one of Zeus's chosen... that had been a humiliation few of the former warriors of Moloch had wished to chance again.

The muscular olive skinned human nodded, "We've begun the process of clearing ground for the academy, but the doctors of medicine," as well as their staff and students, "are for now still working out of the garrison. It was far enough upstream that we didn't realize the extent of the water. Most of that portion of the city have access to springs, and wells."

Ishtar had surveyed the garrison earlier in the year. Shaq'ran had probably had it constructed to watch the mines rather than the city. The mines were significantly more productive now, but also had apparently increased the volume of waste material as well.

One of his companions saw fit to argue the point, "Slurry was already being dumped into the river, the expansion of the mines certainly didn't help, but outbreaks of cholera have been off and on for several decades, and that's been ascertained just from interviewing residents of the town."

There was some clamoring among different parties of the Chosen of Zeus as they prepared to argue amongst each other over the matter. This would have been an unthinkable occurrence a year ago, but now it somewhat normal, common even. The humans would argue over the details of what had caused a particular problem that they had been sent to address. It also wasn't as if her fellow Jaffa were any less bewildered by this behavior than she had been. Especially because the Dragon, and Zeus not only allowed, but generally even encouraged it.

There were limits to this encouragement of course, and this dispute quickly reached it. "Have you surveyed the mountain for any instabilities?" It was a question asked without the hint of threat.

Ishtar had only ever seen flash floods cause what was described to those present. The notion that mining would deposit vast volumes of dirt and debris that might then cascade as an avalanche down the hills into dwellings below was not something she had considered. It was described in such detail that she didn't really need the accompanying holographic images of when it had happened on other worlds in the past to imagine it.

The moved on to other matters, and towards what the planet would be doing in service to the wider empire. "Relocating the gate to somewhere with greater access to the river, would certainly make shipping goods on and off the world easier." Naquadah mined from the mountains near Tana would feed shipyards. It was unlikely that the world would do much in the way of shipping naquadah elsewhere, but it would be serving as a central granary in the event they needed to address food domestically, or to feed armies in the field.

The holographic map of space showed the sum of the galaxy. She had heard the rumors of course. Jaffa warriors were nothing if not incessant gossips when it came to tales of battle. Some portion of Sokar's empire remained intact according to the news. A powerful Goa'uld underlord had rather than declare himself a system lord in his own right continued to fight Apophis, and Kali. That was supremely unusual. Apophis in the mean time was forced to contend with both his rival and nephew as well. She had also heard that Apophis had burned a swathe through his old domain trying to ferret out traitors and enemies from those worlds. This seemed to be a particularly bloody affair, and dangerous given he was surrounded on nearly all sides.

She had been informed of the plans for organizing the empire. The capital province, and eight others each based around a central planet. She understood the reasoning for the size of each province it was to insure that the dragon's ha'tak would be able to swiftly respond to any incursion by hostile fleets. Tana was to become the capital of the River province, the first of eight forges. Heaven and Thunder were to be the last, and most distant of the original eight forges from the capital.

That was the subject they turned to next, the plans for shipyards to construct the basis of a provincial fleet that could respond to a localized incursion. Tana, and its province was in a region of space that had once been dominated by the pantheons of the Akkadians and Sumerians. It had largely come under the sway of Ra, and while Moloch had been able to expand when Apophis had destroyed Shaq'ran many powerful other gods still ruled nearby.

She didn't pretend to understand the delineations of speed for ships, only the practical volume of time it would take for each ship class to make the journey. A few hours from Tana would allow the Ha'tak to be based here to reach even outlying provincial worlds. It also would permit Ha'tak to be mustered to move neighboring provinces to repel stronger invasions, or launch invasions. Svarog could only practically launch incursions by stargate, but Ares was close enough that newer faster Ha'tak could reach this worlds in a fortnight.

The galaxy was changing.
--
Commentary: This is a relatively minor revision of this segment, because well it had already undergone revisions in the previous thread.

Imperator Pax · Jun 11, 2021

War Among the Stars

Raids were a part of the way the goa'uld had maintained an empire. It was ritual warfare in the a much truer sense than most hypothesized about earth civilizations. The goa'uld were detached enough, and had under the Pax Re kept in line by those who remained detached, to maintain the ritual aspect. This was mostly a game to the participants, even to the Jaffa generals. It was less about killing the enemy warriors so much as winning standing and acclaim. It was about status rather than achieving a modern military objective.

Which during the Pax Re when both the System Lords all agreed to largely maintain the territorial status quo for the most part had made sense. With Apophis running around bombing planets from orbit, often his own worlds, or worlds he had formerly controlled, it seemed rather ridiculous to still be fighting in the same kind of ritualized warfare... but Oskyld supposed that was probably why most the goa'uld were shunning Apophis even if they weren't directly fighting him.

Of course that was with good reason given the news from Chulak, among other worlds. Apophis had resorted a degree of heavy handedness that had long since crossed what was socially acceptable for 'proper' system lords, and it was just now beginning to have visible economic consequences. Without Ra around to reign his brother in there was no way to stem Apophis's vengeful excess and thus most the goa'uld of standing had elected to refuse to have anything to do with the rogue System Lord... but Apophis was still considered a System Lord. Apophis was in violation of conventions on decorum but there were other problems to be had.

Oskyld had initially considered this incursion to be the Reetou, even as he felt his flesh ripple and prick at the heat. His eyes flared into the draconic slits, and lightning boiled from his fingertips exploding through the intervening space. Technically speaking he could have used the goa'uld hand device, but his was currently disassembled in his laboratory. Today he shouldn't have needed it. The blast of lightning carved through Svarog's raiding party on the other side of the the ball field. He had been opposed to the design this close to the stargate. No small part of that had been getting confused for some meso american death god, but the raptor of football was one of their few non military past times. So he had acquiesced.

Speaking of the saurians there was a grunt as a six foot lizard dropped down into the dirt from one of the rows of bench seats overlooking the field. The lizard craned his head raising the plasma, what the Raptors translated as 'Star fire', rifle. Rifle was somewhat of a technical misnomer it was more akin to an explosive burst of a staff cannon than it was a more ergonomic, or at least handy, Ma'tok. The prospect of equipping the Raptors with energy weapons though had only really begun a few decades earlier, and it had only really hit its previous peak against Apokolips. That had been less than half a century ago, and in all likelihood the Raptor March here would quickly exceed that one in size and complexity due to the realities of scale. That was going to be a problem theologically in short order.

Jaffa scattered as blasts of plasma rained in and around their few dozen strong number. Svarog was treating this like a game... for that matter this might not even been ordered by the other System Lord. There was a clamoring as Raptor uhlans exhorted cohorts into position defending the valuable shipments of trinium on the hover platform.

He looked across the field with its slowly recovering crowds moving to address the wounded. Most everyone had gotten to cover as the slavic vikings had made their way through the stargate area and proclaimed themselves. If they had opened fire first there would have been more casualties, but that wouldn't have won them as much acclaim in either life or death. They had come through the gate and announced themselves. A habit that was becoming less and less frequently observed by goa'uld as they vied for increasingly greater position in all of the chaos.

Svarog though was still playing at counting coup for the most part. Maybe that was okay.

Right now the goa'uld were watching the massive three way fight between Apophis, Cronus, and Heru'ur. All of whom had according to various reports also abrogated the last of the strategic arms treaties put in place by Ra. Interestingly it seemed someone had destroyed Apophis's own prototype improved Ha'tak. Implication was that the responsible party had been the Tauri, but the method was the more concerning factor. He'd been wanting to avoid making the developing society dependent on magic, but without more information he'd begun ordering a variety of groves, and roads built in specific patterns. None of those were being done near the stargate as the shipyards weren't anywhere close by, unless you were using the ring devises. There were precautions installed on ring transporters of course beyond the simple panels the Goa'uld normally used.

The truth was having to contend with the status demonstrations of various goa'uld, and authorize similar ones though was quickly becoming tedious. Especially given it had taken several months just to pull Moloch's excuse for shipyards apart, and never mind putting them back together. It wasn't as if they could have used Stennos anyway. The Goa'uld Zeus had abandoned it by all indications because the easily accessible naquadah had all been mined. The planet was therefore not very useful for starship construction even if it had had shipyards, and it didn't.

"We have reasserted control of the gate."

"Good," He was getting to the point where even if it would have looked suspicious to the his 'fellow' system lords he was going to start emplacing at least goa'uld built fortifications around the gate. Deployable so called 'staff towers' maybe. It would be vastly less suspicious than something completely unknown to the goa'uld.

It would have been easier to justify if this had been a Reetou incursion. Ever since they had started pushing into Nirtii's domain conflict with the Reetou had been increasingly frequent... of course that wasn't unique to them. He knew both Kali, as well as her ally Bastet, were having similar problems... and he suspected that Cronus was also dealing with the same. Whether Ares was having the same problem was unknown. It wasn't as if they didn't, all of them, have other problems to deal with.

Still that this was just Svarog or one of his generals playing the game had its own benefits. "Transport those to the shipyard immediately." Noyan ordered to one of the uhlans. The junior officer bowed and clapped his fist against his armor. The trinium was a critical component regardless of how effective structural integrity fields could be made. The metallurgy and of course the expense in its use had been a key factor in limited goa'uld shipbuilding. It was actually a limitation that effected several areas, and the goa'uld unwillingness to pay the expense had meant that they'd maintained the less expensive status quo.

--
There wasn't a point in trying to make the move to orbital shipyards. Quite frankly most of the reason to go to orbital shipyards were nixed by the sheer reliability and power to weight ratio of even bog standard goa'uld anti gravity systems. Those made building inside a gravity well of a planet no serious problem, and being able to build on a planet's surface made it much easier to move equipment and material, especially the latter, to the yards by much much lower technology than theoretical maximum that the goa'uld had available to them.

No the real change in the expansion, really the whole sale gutting and overhaul, was in the surrounding infrastructure. This wasn't like the London shipyards along the Thames being rebuilt during the early modern period to be more orderly or less prone to catastrophic fires that change was more stark than that.

To support the hover capable barquess large extensions of horse pulled tramways had been constructed stretching miles to warehouses. They would likely eventually move to electrified rails potentially skipping steam engines, which existed on Stennos, all together. On Stennos of course they were using wooden rails, were these were steel.

There were barracks for jaffa, and humans, but for the most part labor was a matter of supervising moving material from one point to another, up until you reached final fitting out. That was really when craftsmen and carpenters and others came into see about internal decor, state rooms, bunkrooms and the other trim. These shipyards were going to have to be responsible for providing the ships to establish the garrison fleets of the other eight provinces until each of the eight forges could be brought online and begin producing ships to bolster their own defenses.

It created bottlenecks for transporting naquadah, and trinium to build improved ships, but the real delay was in having to contend with the spillover from other conflicts in near space. The last thing Oskyld wanted to contend with was having to have Ares potentially come over the border at the same time as Apophis and embroil him in a three sided fight with everyone shooting at one another, but the other problem was in the refugees, and rebels displaced from Apophis's domain into the area of space nearby that didn't actually belong to those who held the rank of system lord. That placed the world which comprised the Forest Province as the most likely front he'd need to defend.

Oskyld waved a hand at the holographic display even as the golden sphere floating beside him chirped to announce that the launches had begun. The usual Goa'uld Ha'tak was a golden pyramid with black out superstructure. Zeus had wanted to have the pyramids themselves be painted white, which would probably for the fleets that would defend Stennos assuming that when those came online they were still using the standard Ha'tak profile, which was likely. The trio of raising kilometer breadth warships were enamel dark red clay like in their coloring. Their superstructures conformed to the standard shape and structure of the Ha'tak, but that was a factor of expedience in need the ships now rather than in six months when his new 'standards' began wide scale production in the 'new year'.

The reactors, hyperdrive, and shields had been redesigned, which had added months to the time frame. Later flights would likely go to the larger dual mount plasma cannons used on the ships he had taken from Heru'ur and retrofitted. For now though superior power generation made them more effective in naval gunnery, and offered superior protection through more effective energy shields. They were an iterative improvement not a revolutionary one.

The larger form still visible in the swirls of dust from the lifting off of the smaller ships was different. The outer superstructure fused seamlessly and completely around the wider pyramid base. It would be incompatible with the standard goa'uld planetary landing platforms but then that wasn't a design requirement. It was intended to be a dedicated command and space supremacy platform intended to provide superior naval gunnery. It was the second ship of its class, the third after the prototype vessel, all of which were currently in the yards here.

--
Commentary: So one thing to point out is that due to the way travel works SG teams like the one under Colonel Makepeace has been able to wander around planets like Simarka world pretty unhindered. Thats normal for worlds that aren't regional capitals. Don't cause trouble and for most part no one cares. In terms of security on a capital world, or any major world that's different.

The usual Tok'ra scheme of lets infiltrate a goa'uld court doesn't work as well here, or Ashrak for that matter when most upper echelon security is conducted by Saurains who are actively looking for cloaked opposition like Reetou or the like.

There was also supposed to be an Ishtar perspective sgement with this one, but probably next update assuming we don't move into the SG1 'Curse' mini arc

Imperator Pax · Jun 28, 2021

Domain

--
Oskyld waited for the light to fade and made his way into the more expansive than a standard Ha'tak's pel'tak of the warship. Nirti's experimentation had strained even his understanding of the biological sciences. He wasn't quite certain without her notes what she had been trying to do on some of her planets. It had been less of a problem to deliver retrovirri, and mutagenic components in conjunction with other means to largely avoid any potential problems, but it would bear watching. There was no point in trying to annex Nirrti's domain entirely though. Not from a territory perspective, a couple of worlds was one thing, but it wasn't worth the hassle to go for all of it. Never mind it would have been directly confront both Apophis and Cronus's territorial ambitions even as both warred with each other... and he didn't want a border with any of the deposed system lords other neighbors.

Nirrti though had been working with what had clearly been ancient technology. Technology she probably did not fully understand. Even if she did it didn't matter they weren't sure where such a device was, and it wasn't a priority either. Neither was, whatever it was that Olokun had found. The latter system lord was worth watching, but only as a precaution. There was a lot of space in the galaxy that was continuous goa'uld domains. A steady movement from one domain, 'connecting to that of another system lord or a minor goa'uld who was powerful enough to be freeholding. Of course there had also been the fact that Ra's domain had been the most sprawling, and expansive of any of them. A domain that had been separate from that of his nominal heir Heru'ur. There were also the domains that had belonged to system lords who had vanished but weren't confirmed dead. Of course in Ra's time this wouldn't have stopped an attack on their territory, but it had discouraged many goa'uld from attacking those domains, Ptah being the obvious exception, for the sake of conquest until after Ra had been dead. After Ra's death, Apophis been quick to more officially fold some of Marduk's surviving underlords into his domain and he wasn't the only system lord to do so.

Other underlords of the presumed deceased goa'uld including Ra and Sokar had underlords who continued to fight on in defense of their domains to some extent at least nominally for their overlords. In Ra's case it didn't even necessarily mean changing sides to Heru'ur, and Heru'ur didn't have the resources, especially not now, to force their compliance.

Apophis's territorial expansions after Ra had died had included formally annexing parts of Marduk's dominion in addition to trying to devour as much of Ra's domain as he could claim. Apophis's latter annexations put him very close to a number of Asgard protected planets, and also with the former effectively on the border with Moloch's former domain. Ares was in between the bulk of Cronus's domain and there were smaller domains scattered between space between with Ares having largely consumed Goa'uld Zeus's domain after the latter's imprisonment in Tartarus. That could potentially be a problem as well given the situation.

Apophis was the larger more dangerous threat, and his domain was on the other side of Imhotep's domain. They couldn't let this continue. Every time Apophis carried out a massacre Jaffa fled his domain for less secure ones, and that was no doubt swelling the rebellion.

"We have validated the message?" He asked finally.

"Yes my lord. Ares begs leave of the field to answer his grandfather's call to arms."

He had little doubt Ares himself had not written the message, but most likely Cronus had demanded he join him in battle against Apophis. Apophis was too erratic, and too reliant now on strategic bombardment to settle his problems. If this continued he'd likely burn his own war machine out, but in the mean time he was killing millions. "You may reply we understand." He had no intention of indicating that they might join Ares against Apophis, though if this kept on for much longer they were going to have to do something. He had hoped though that things might abate, as he needed more time. He had poached a couple of worlds formerly of Ra's domain, a few off of Nirti's, courtesy of Zeus's expedition, and a few here or there besides, but that was mostly to shore things up.

Cronus, and Apophis were too close for comfort... or more correctly throwing entirely too many ships into a meat grinder with one another. Not a fight he wanted a part of given his own reserve of Ha'tak.

Noyan bowed smoothly, "Shall I signal the fleet to make ready?" They did need to be going. With something approaching a government established that could defend itself, and be self sustaining there were other expeditions to mount. This was one more headache he could have done without though. Ares voluntarily agreeing to knock it off was good news.
.
--
He leaned back into the chair, as it reclined. The mind machine interface illuminated the local area of galactic space showing it in real time. Even now he could see the ships moving to redeploy, moving between star systems. Regardless of increases in production, and shipyards that would become operational this time next year it wasn't going to be practical to garrison every world. Not that he'd intended to, they would eventually move to second level provincial fleets, but the provincial capitals were the first line of defense, even though these sensors could have dispatched the fleet from the Imperial Core.

The worlds he had laid claim to though were ultimately enough to avoid any border gore. As strange as that might have seemed in a three dimensional context it provided the domain a near contiguous zone of control alonging the provinces that bordered the Egyptian and Greek Pantheons an ability to move freely.

More to the point it allowed secondary sensor arrays to monitor for cloaked vessels, because while tel'tak were concerning it was the risk of a cloaked Ha'tak, or squadron of, slipping across the border which would have been a real potential headache.

Apophis had after all committed himself to a multi front war, and showed no signs of backing down. There was a good chance he might come over the border in force, or at least make an attempt at it. There was also the question of Ares's truce being solidified, but if Ares was disengaging to aid Cronus against Apophis, well that would be for the best Oskyld suspected.

He needed time though for the naquadah mines to be improved. For vital mines to begin producing in significant quality and quantity to actually feed his forge worlds... and speaking of feeding agricultural reforms were something else he was committed to, because that was necessary as well. He wouldn't be here for the inevitable population boom that would come from superior agriculture, that would in turn improve the ability to people planets and expand mines. That would fall to Zeus once he was gone... that was the way things inevitably were. He could build the foundation, and hope that it was enough to stand there.

The problem was with the way system lords accorded themselves. He needed the defenses provided by his fleet now, and that meant always keeping an eye to see if Apophis intended to come across. Then of course on top of that were the bugs. The reetou incursions were largely localized in the vicinity of the Hindu pantheon's controlled region of space, but that was spilling over. It was not entirely unlikely that these were something the gate builders had meddled in their development, or perhaps that simply an attempt to safe face propagated by the System Lords.

Whatever the case was it was a ground conflict he had to contend with that was tying up an increasing number of his Raptors on garrison duty along a frontier that otherwise required for the moment at least little in the way of ships.

A flicker of light appeared on the star map. This was the great advantage of having a hybridization of Alteran, and Asgard sensors. "Anker," He called. The raptor, or rather the holographic projection of, appeared at the call. "I have what appears to be an Alteran hyperdrive signature in the vicinity of the Earth." He declared relaying the sensor resolution 'showing' a silvery whisp of a ship's profile lifting from the planet's surface, then making the jump from light speed as it cleared past the moon.

"I will pursue it." The prelate answered.

He waved aside the comment. That would have been desirable, but the drive characteristics were such that it was actually probably faster than anything slower than the ships he had taken from Heru'ur after their overhaul. He doubted that the Ha'tak assigned to the Wind Province's fleet. It did bear an investigation though, and if nothing came of it, well he was since he held the rank of system lord to go ask the Tauri about it... treaty obligations.

"The signal the ship has broadcast is another matter. It belongs to the Goa'uld Osiris."
--
Commentary: Alright July will most likely cover the events of the Stargate Episode the Curse. That may or may not start Friday, but it does mean we will largely be jumping back to SG 1's perspective and potentially covering the 'Eyes of the Gods' since Osiris was entrusted with one of those.

Imperator Pax · Jul 4, 2021

The Curse
Part 1
Chicago, Illinois

If Jack hadn't been the sort of guy who had picked up reading conspiracy mags to laugh at them the news probably would have skated right by him. The conference Kathy had found him at before the trip to Abydos had been the last unsecure, non security clearance requiring lecture he'd given... and Ra had been dead for years now. Sure he'd spent over a year on Abydos, but after going through the gate for the first time he had basically left life behind except when he needed to request material... and such requests were done through the Air Force's own university system. That wouldn't have been something Steven could have traced, because well he was right, ... well in that nothing Daniel had written wasn't classified to high heaven.

If Jack hadn't read that kind of stuff for a laugh Daniel recognized he wouldn't have been able to make it to the funeral. He was lucky Hammond had been willing to make an allowance for SG 1 to take leave as it was. There was so much going on in the galaxy at large it seemed like a big ask, and the ask just seemed to keep piling up given that he had had to call Hammond. Truthfully he needed an entire team, needed Kathy to come out here, she had current security clearance and knew what to look for. There was a lot of material just left behind in the wake of Doctor Jordan's death, and he hadn't known where to start.

... and then there was of course the fact that there was going to be legal stuff to handle... probate from the estate at some point would come into play... but the 'accidental death' wasn't looking nearly as accidental anymore.

Not that that was necessarily the reason for Special Agent Hartigan to show up seemingly from no where... no that was probably fallout from the SGC using the red phone to come butting into the ATF's gig on Seth... or potentially worse the chance Jenny had friends in the Hoover building looking for answers. Still the FBI special agent showing up had only been after the Chicago Police had come to investigate the Coroner's body. Whatever this was it wasn't from General Hammond's side of things.

Unfortunately Hartigan had had to explain to the Chicago PD, with Steven in earshot, what his governmental pay grade was. That had been enough gobbledygook to get the the police step back, but finding out his college rival was working under governmental auspice... well Steven had flipped his lid over the 'hundred and twenty thousand' he assumed Daniel was taking home. It was more actually with hazard pay,

It was really kind of absurd that Steven was that upset about the money... even if because of his fit Daniel was kind of amused now that he made more money than Steven did... at least from the university. His college rival did have a book on the best seller's list.

"I had always heard college professors made good money," Hartigan guffawed after Steven Raynor had stormed off.

"He's getting a Porsche soon," Daniel replied. It certainly wasn't like Steven made bad money. Daniel glanced over to his own Jeep. If Steven was going to take Doctor Jordan's position well he'd be making even more money. Right now though he was more worried about why the FBI was on the scene so fast. It wasn't like it was the artifacts. He'd considered and discarded that possibility. This was beyond simple theft... if Jordan's death wasn't just a horrible accident.

"Compensating for something?" Hartigan asked, and Daniel felt a smile crack. The FBI agent pushed a coffee cup over and Daniel dumped the requisite amount of sugar into the drink to make it palatable. "I know a guy in the marshals with fancy taste in cars. Managed to get his 67 sting ray vette trashed on the job. Then again, he also said he was getting tired of it." He took a sip of his own coffee, "Chicago PD is preparing to rule the curator's death accidental," Something about bricks falling down the shaft, but Hartigan was clearly skeptical. "The ATF is chomping at the bit to get involved, but the lab explosion still looks like it was a gas leak. Two deaths though related to the museum certainly starts to look like foul play."

Daniel knew he shouldn't mention any missing items. Steven had said that the Osiris jar, the one with the goa'uld inscriptions, had been destroyed in the explosion, which was suspicious. It also probably wouldn't do to mention missing items since he'd been the one to carry the Isis Jar off to the SGC for examination. The missing Osiris jar, and ... also the golden amulet could have just been simple antiquities theft, but Daniel wasn't feeling it. This whole situation was off. "You don't believe in curses?"

"I saw that Mummy movie, I might have to take investing in a cat under advisement if that's the case." The agent replied, "ATF says they're going to bring some people in from another office to examine the scene again."

"Really?"

"I did say they were pretty excited." He paused, "This second death seems to have caught their attention."

Hartigan wasn't in the loop then. Whatever was going on was over the local office's head. Somehow or another Daniel got the impression the FBI and ATF were moving independent of one another and not talking to each other. That of course raised the question of really how much either government agency really knew. No, that wasn't right. Jack had been over this. He shouldn't assume that anyone knew anything. They might have had suspicions, but they would inevitably pretend to know more than they did in an attempt to ferret out information. If they knew something don't be surprised, but don't confirm it either. Jack had been over this sort of thing, and his explanations of this sort of thing were a lot clearer than the mandatory briefings the SGC conducted regularly.

Thankfully the FBI agent didn't know enough and had no indication of the importance of the second set of symbols on the two canopic jars. The basic hieroglyphics were one thing that were going to be an academic issue. The Osiris jar had supposedly been destroyed in the explosion, but he had no idea how the situation with the Isis jar would be handled. Presumably the SGC, or the NID wouldn't just hand it over to the Egyptian government.

"You said the police are ruling it natural causes."

"Yeah. Chicago Police are probably being pressured by the mayor to keep homicides down unless they can close the case. Chicago PD has no leads, whoops falling bricks totally an accident."

He heard a familiar drawl from the doorway that lead into the main body of the hotel. "Yeah, that sounds about right for Chi-Town." Jack, and Teal'c had arrived, and it looked like they weren't alone, but in particular they were loaded down... with what were probably additional equipment for searching trace naquadah, or for energy signatures.

"Daniel Jackson," The burly Jaffa nodded in greeting, "General Hammond believed you would do well with our assistance."

Introductions were made, and moved on from there, "Don't like the windy city colonel?"

"I was born here. My dad was a cop here. I got to hear all about it." Jack remarked and shrugged. "I think I'd have preferred being a firefighter than a cop, at least in this town." Jack hadn't confirmed it, but Daniel was pretty sure he'd fudged some details, like about his age, to get into the air force as soon as possible, only for it to turn around and not matter as he'd end up being accepted to the air force academy. Or something... base scuttlebutt was full of weird stories about people's past.

"Major Carter is still conducting tests with Doctor Fraiser, but General Hammond has made arrangements for them to travel here as soon as they are available." Teal'c stated, and then somewhat more grave than normal, "I have confirmed your translation as well."

Daniel watched Hartigan's head bob up in down at the last sentence. Teal'c didn't generally give off any indication that he was a voracious reader so most people didn't assume that on first impression... unless you had caught him in the library. Teal'c was a voracious reader of a whole slew of subjects now that it was a pastime he could pursue.

Jack interrupted all of that by putting a hard body plastic case on the couch. Thankfully he hadn't put it on the table, but that was only because the coffee was probably in the way. "This is for you Daniel, courtesy of and insisted by General Hammond." Oh guns... that made a regrettable amount of sense. "Really he insists."

Hartigan gave the olive drab case a side long look, but he probably had already guessed. The Agent nodded a bit and sipped his coffee. "So should we be expecting, I don't know DSS?"

Jack shook his head, "No, State will be involved, but," He shrugged.

"The CIA then." Hartigan shrugged, "I was going to say, the bureau has an anti antiquities smuggling database."

"That would be great," Daniel interjected ignoring the case Jack was still resting a hand on, "I will take access to whatever databases you can get me," If only because... because after Seth he really should have considered that yeah people probably had been selling potential goa'uld artifacts pulled out of tombs for centuries.
--
Commentary: Not much changes in this one, because what I am probably going to do is pick up with part 2 from Jack's perspective backstopping the content of the episode in question.

Imperator Pax · Jul 23, 2021

The Curse
Part 2

-
Jack should have known in hindsight that he wasn't going to actually get time off to sit back and relax. He didn't purposefully avoid Chicago... but he had made a concious choice when it came to retiring further west, and there had always been the lake house in Minnesota.... which yeah that had come out of his mom's family. The pager buzzing and Teal'c getting a phone call from Hammon calling them back had just resulted in a short hop from Colorado to the Windy City... not that it was all that windy in the summer months... just hot.

"O'neill?" Teal'c rumbled.

"Its nothing buddy." He replied standing up and moving to the Gulf's overhead compartment. How many people had run away from the draft? He'd volunteered to run away from Chicago. Daniel was too young to understand. Carter too she had flown jets in the gulf while he'd been enjoying the Republican Guard's hospitality. In 68 though Jack had been rushing to get out of town, and the Air Force recruiter had been all too willing to fudge the age issue to get him to basic in San Antonio. Three months later he'd been in Vietnam.

Chicago had been changing even in the sixties... and the city was different today in a lot of ways, but still had the same feel to it. The man on the ground waiting for them was between his and Daniel's age, far too young to have made it to Vietnam and looked exactly the sort to have ridden a desk from when he'd had his butter bar pinned on until the present. The guy was so forgettable Jack imagined he was probably good at his job. He looked more like a banker than a soldier, and that was how the air force liked its spooks. "The Chicago Police Department is still insisting that hte death appears to be an accident, Colonel." The major informed him. "The involvement of the FBI has not changed that. ATF explosives and arson specialists are coming in to review the initial death, but any determination of suspicion will be after their review."

"I understand. Have you received specific instructions."

"National Security sir. We have reason to believe that this investigation has national security ramifications, and that all ongoing matters of review are classified." Glasses responded, which would keep the FBI busy. It would be like trying to argue with a wall unless they filled out the paper work and found someone up high to sign off... and they would hopefully be done before the ink was dry on anything like that. It'd keep the suits running around for a bit.

Teal'c quirked an eyebrow, but said nothing even as they were escorted to the large blacked out SUVs that were thankfully not emblazoned with something as ridiculous as the USAF seal. He understood that Daniel was civilian contractor on the books and it was a lot easier for him to get leave for funerals like this. Jack understood Hammon yanking his leave for this, but he was a full bird colonel for god's sake doing that was going to raise flags if anyone looked. Teal'c was down as a civilian contractor as well people would look less hard at him... but if there was a snake involved in this... they'd recognize Teal'c as a jaffa. Well they'd cross that bridge when they got there.

The flashing police lights of their escorts did little to really cut down on traffic, especially as they neared the rows of brownstones surounded by CPD and cook county EMS. They weren't even the only black SUVs, but their plates, and the baby faces in the windbreakers marked those out as FBI, and if there was anything there... well they'd check tomorrow. Danny's hotel wasn't far anyway, enough that the police cordon actually encompassed it.

Danny was getting chummy with an FBI who was about Jack's height but with a build more like Teal'c and had probably played ball in college. A linebacker maybe? He sipped his coffee as they came in like ghosts, "Yeah. Chicago Police are probably being pressured by the mayor to keep homicides down unless they can close the case. Chicago PD has no leads, whoops falling bricks totally an accident."

Jack snorted, yeah same old. Town hadn't changed at all, he mused as they came into the hotel lobby. "Sounds about right for Chi-Town." He drawled moving towards them cognizant of the plain clothes OSI guy forming rear security. The guy's suit look was somewhat ruined by the Hechler and Koch MP5 hanging from its sling.

"Daniel Jackson," Teal'c set his weather resistant gear case down, "General Hammond believed you would do well with our assistance." Hartigan, once the introductions had been made, probably assumed Teal'c wasn't service, or at least not US service... the FBI were big about linguistic studies and there was no telling how much was going to end up in a report somewhere after all this was over.

"Dad was a cop here," Jack replied to Hartigan's question, and then deflected that if he'd stuck around that he'd probably have preferred going into the fire department. Teal'c then proceeded to throw Hartigan for a visible loop as the conversation turned to translations, which thankfully Hartigan was assuming were of Egyptian. A field that Daniel having his translations check on... well linguistics wasn't a field Danny had a lot of competition in.
--
"IS the CIA coming?"

Jack shrugged, and Teal'c raised an eyebrow, but turn a page. "Well, maybe. There are some people I could call." Danny wasn't the only one who had spent time in Egypt of course, "If this is just a matter of theft then sure." That would be have been a nice break... it would suck for Daniel getting your faculty advisor friend blown up by some greedy assholes so they could steal what they thought were just rare trinkets... "I'm gonna send a buddy over there the gas leak report, see if they make anything hinky out of it," He doubted that they probably weren't lucky enough for this to just be a high stakes robbery. "We should be glad Carter took care of Seth."

"Indeed."

Seth did seem to be involved somehow, or at least in the prologue to this whole mess. Seth, Setesh had apparently gone off the rails at some point late in the Goa'uld reign on Earth and seemingly had ... well they didn't know enough when they got down to the specifics of what life in Ancient Egypt had been like. Mythologically it seemed like after the goa'uld had left there had been a divergence... or something. It was a mess, and it was a wonder that their ignorance hadn't bit them in the ass even harder than it had with Hathor. Geez, he didn't want a repeat of that experience. "Police say gas leak, and with the age of the gas mains it might be accidental." If they had any indication on what had caused the spark it would have helped, "But the bricks falling,"

Daniel nodded morosely. "Hartigan wanted to talk about... Steven, and Sarah."

"Not surprising, Danny." Jack replied, truthfully in Hartigan's shoes he'd have done the same thing, and he reached over the case, "Here," He lifted and put it on the coffee table. "This is courtesy of Hammon, and the general is insisting." Inside was an M9, which Daniel was qualified on, otherwise it would have probably been better to issue him out a more conceable Sig. "Keep the credentials with you." The last thing they needed was any trouble with the local police, but sticking Danny with a baby sitter from office of special investigations would thrown up even more red flags. Jack hated the cold war vibes this whole mess was throwing off... it probably wasn't the Russians, but given everything he wasn't prepared to eliminate the chance entirely.

"Do I really need this?" Daniel asked looking from the case to the small portable naquadah detector that they had developed from the Orbanian technological exchange. "I'm just going to sweep the collection for traces."

"You are unarmed Daniel Jackson." Teal'c pointed out looking up from over the top of his book.

"I'm just going to the museum."

Jack gave him the dead eyed fish look that he seldom had to use, "They found the tech who did the carbon dating on the amulet. Or the guy's body." He deadpanned, "The amulet that," conicidentally, "is missing." The one that was supposed to be ten thousand years old. "And we have no idea what that does, but that's three deaths." and Three was enemy action after all, but he left that unsaid.

Somewhat begrudgingly Daniel complied, and when he was gone Teal'c put his book down, "I believed you that you wished to question doctor Jackson regarding this Daniken person's publications."

"I do, Tee." He replied, but one thing at a time.

"And you also believe we should follow him."

"I'm worried yeah," Jack replied shaking his head, "On the other hand if there is goa'uld."

"He would recognize that I am Jaffa." Teal'c declared. "Indeed. This is true. Then we will remain here."

There was a chance that they might detect the trace naquadah in his blood stream too... which would have sucked as well. "Yeah, I'm hoping the Tokra get back to us about the jars." Jack remarked, though he was pretty doubtful they'd have anything useful. They'd come to them about Seth, and he had turned up on Earth, and well that was why they were in this mess to begin with in a way. Osiris, and Isis though hadn't been brought up even when Danny had brought up the myths about them in relation to koolaid guy. "I'm hoping its not one of Danny's college friends but..." It wasn't like they could put them through an MRI to be sure. If Carter got here well... she'd be able to tell but she'd also set off their alarm bells. So they were really waiting to see if the SGC could develop any actionable information, which was admittedly a longshot. More likely than anything was that if they could get a hold of the Tokra it would be so the Tokra could announce some more bad news. Right now Apophis and Heru'ur were both killing the shit out of each other's worlds... and it seemed like Apophis was losing. Jack felt that good news but there was a lot of collateral damage involved to Apophis being on the back foot... and the snake was probably getting desperate. Desperate snakes were even more dangerous than normal.

"Bra'tac has informed me that Apophis's war against Heru'ur goes poorly." Teal'c remarked, "His conflict has forced many minor goa'uld who are not system lords to choose sides. The other system lords are also involved in their own conflicts creating many disaffected Jaffa as a result of the blood shed."

Jack couldn't exactly say that was good. Daniel had explained at one point that 'primitive war' tended to kill more people belonging to one side as a percentage than 'modern war' did. Of course those papers... that whole topic in Sociology was confined to Earth cultures and usually was stuck in the rut of Western European armies from about the middle ages on versus tribal cultures. It didn't necessarily translate well to the goa'uld who at least while Ra had been alive had had some rules in place when it came to fighting. "Know anything about Osiris?"

"I believe he was a minor underlord to Ra, in the distant past this would have been equivalent to a modern petty system lord. High enough in rank for distinction but not powerful enough to be independent from his patron."

"Wasn't Seth a system lord?" Jack asked.

"At one point he was, and his ambitions outstripped his reach." Teal'c replied. "Even to this day the Setesh guard remain the subject of many jokes." Jack admitted his grasp on Jaffa humor was a little weak. Something just got lost in translation. "Do you believe this Daniken person may have some insight?"

"Into our present problem? Probably not." Jack replied. "Apparently Danny isn't the only who was thinking the pyramids were built with alien help though."

Imperator Pax · Jul 30, 2021

The Curse
Part 3

Daniel wasn't particularly happy with the situation. It would have been different if they'd been offworld but how was he supposed to explain a gun here if it came up. Steven had already found out about his government pay and made enough of a fuss about it.

Five years of absence didn't really explain that sort of change. He'd been incommunicado for so long it... Steven's prodigal son crack hadn't been that out of line. Not that it hadn't hurt, but only because of how true the remark had been... or would have seemed... and he hadn't been prepared to explain the absence. The surprise of the death had caught him so flatfoot he hadn't been prepared for the obvious question of where he had been, and ... he had even less explanation to general Hammond sending Jack and Teal'c in, even though that certainly made sense if this was goa'uld related.

He couldn't just come out and say he had been right, and that the situation was even more complicated than just ancient aliens. The galaxy was spiraling into an even larger mess. He had so many questions about just how mythology on Earth had developed in the upper kingdom, or really how it had developed. The Osiris amulet's already translated segment of text was common by the time of the old kingdom, except that it was ten thousand years old, and the cat was out of the bag on that detail. He had actually been surprised that Steven hadn't ribbed him over the translation, but there was the age of the amulet... not that that by itself was a smoking gun. Most of the Academic Community couldn't read Linear A, but one more undiscovered language by itself wouldn't have a smoking gun. The two together was supportive of Daniel's theory if only because they were talking a much earlier point for writing in the timeline, and even then the simpler answer without further evidence was that there had been an ancient previously unknown developed kingdom. As theory that had more supporters anyway, even if they were often specialists in Mesopotamian studies. Doctor Britsky's work, and publications regarding excavations in Iraq came to mind.
Hartigan stuck his head and shuffled around the various stacked books and boxes waiting to be filled with books and items from Doctor Jordan's collection. "That sounds like it went well." The FBI agent remarked. Something of the other more junior agents could have been missed if they had worn something other than suit and tie, or blue windbreakers, but Hartigan was still big, but old enough he was the right age to be a professor, but his body language was all wrong even as he was just looking up and around the office space's half emptied bookshelves, "I don't suppose you had an inventory of what all was in here?" He asked looking at a statue of a cat. "Something of this stuff might be worth killing over to, or walking off with while its sitting around." Sarah had, or should have had an idea of what all was in Doctor Jordan's collection... or Steven... at the time of his death. "So what's next?"

"I have Professor Jordan's notes being reviewed by someone I trust." At Hartigan's raised eyebrow, he decided to be just go ahead with it. Kathy's father had been Jordan's academic mentor in Egyptology, and most likely even though Kathy had never out and out said it... Daniel was relatively sure it had been conversations with Doctor Jordan where his name had first come up, "It may be nothing, but we'll go through the antiquities archive with that as a initial point of study."

"Fresh set of eyes I get that, I guess it makes sense that its a small community." At least Hartigan had been above making a house divided, or family feud crack, "Chicago PD is still insisting that its initial cause of death remains. We have found any fingerprints for the bricks, ATF wants to poke around up in the shaft so I thought I'd swing by."

"What do you mean?"

"What are they looking for?"

Hartigan shrugged, "Something about a lot of brick powder, CPD won't want to hear it, but ATF is thinking small explosive charge, something timed to dislodge the brick. They can't find anything to explain how it would have been triggered, but they think its a homicide." The idea occurred to him in a flash, Ra's Pyramid on Abydos had had senors in it to provide well modern convenience automatically when directed to. They could be triggered by people carrying items or presumably just a specific person. They had seen other examples of the Goa'uld high priests, and lotars who were automatically set up to use certain goa'uld amenities. "That ring a bell?"

"Yeah,-"

"Call the air force?" Hartigan nodded. "So its the Russians then? I mean." Daniel visibly grimaced as the FBI agent eyed the printing form of the M9 at the small of his back.
-
Jack and Teal'c had taken a break down to midtown to get coffee while waiting for some answers, and then brought lunch back to the small office building the air force had in the city center. "You believe Daniel Jackson's list of cultures taken after the sealing of the Giza Gate represents a security threat?"

"Something like that, Tee." Jack replied, and stopped as the phone rang from inside his coat. "One sec," He picked up the receiver, "Colonel O'neill. Two Ls." Agent Hartigan's voice filtered over the line, "Grab your stuff Teal'c looks like 'Steven'," He said with an exaggerated accent, "done a runner." Teal'c tilted his head, "He booked a flight to Egypt, and has left the country" Jack hung up the phone. "What is it?"

Teal'c looked pensive, and paused before answer, "Hathor was able to locate the stargate. If Doctor Rayner is host to a goa'uld, why would he return to Egypt O'neill?"

"I don't know." Rayner seemed like a prick anyway so maybe the extra prickliness had been the goa'uld being a goa'uld or just magnifying the doc's existing distaste for Danny. The Tokra kept saying that the blending process effected both parties or whatever, "Grab your gear, I'm going to make a call to the CIA, and contact some other friends in the region. If Rayner is responsible for this then I want to be loaded up in case he is a snake." and of course he'd need to call the General as well...

"It is unlikely our allies have come up with the answers you were seeking O'neill." Teal'c replied, "If Steven Rayner is responsible he could be a danger to the public. Additionally if he has fled the country then it would be difficult to track him."

If Osiris started switching hosts they were going to have problems. They needed to grab Danny and get back to the base. They could figure out a plan from there.
Jack dialed the phone and waited for the digital noise to resolve and indicate a secure connection the difference between Illinois and Virginia was a lot less than if he'd been calling Egypt from Colorado after all. He piled in after Teal'c and the big black suburban and the driver waited long enough for them to buckle up before they shot off with the lights on towards the university to collect Daniel.

--

To say General Hammond wasn't particularly happy about this mess was something of an understatement. One might even say it would have been like calling Texas 'big'. "Yes, sir I understand. Yes, sir we will be cooperating with other agencies in this matter." He put the phone down. The SGC was run as a special component of the Air Force and that largely being outside of normal channels gave them a lot of leeway, but at the same time it would attract questions from the FBI. It was both the FBI and ATF asking questions now. The ATF assumed they were looking at some kind of stolen military hardware at least, that could be deniable.

So long as they didn't turn up ancient goa'uld weapons. Doctor Jackson bringing Doctor Langford in on this had been risky. It was true she still lived in Colorado, and her security clearances were still current, but she wasn't a current member of the SGC. They would have to fix that. Doctor Jackson explaining the situation to the FBI agent presented another vulnerability. Colonel O'neill had also exercised his own initiative by going ahead and reaching out to the Central Intelligence Agency, and whether that was going to work out or not was unknown.

He had a preliminary report from Doctor Fraiser, as well as another one where Doctor Langford had taken what they knew and used it to try and explain what had made its way into history. The Osiris amulet that was missing might have been nothing. To the best of their knowledge, well Selmak's knowledge, it was probably just a trinket, but it being stolen suggested otherwise. Unless some hapless thief had walked off with it in all the confusion unaware of all the grief he was causing them, which they couldn't necessarily discount. The inscription related to travelling the stars was something that Daniel Jackson, and Kathy Langford both agreed were common in Egyptian finds depicting kings from the early dynasties.

The canopic stasis jars were used to imprison goa'uld deemed to important to kill, or to preserve the bodies of those who had died and whom the sarcophagi couldn't revive. Seth's murder of Osiris suggested he had removed Osiris the symbiote from his host and dismembered the host but that may have been a latter addition to the tell making it bigger. The Isis Jar they had found, they had less explanation of, there was no mythological evidence to suggest Isis had been imprisoned, and of course the symbiote inside the jar had been preserved but had been itself an odd specimen.

They would deal with those things once SG 1 was on the ground in Cairo in full. Doctor Fraiser was relatively certain the symbiote sedative would be a lot more effective than the previous attempt of doping a host up on horse tranquilizers. "Whats our best case scenario Doctor Langford?"

"The best case would be that Doctor Rayner, or if he is the host of Osiris, is going to the Temple of Osiris where the original discovery was made."

In theory they should have been able to either catch Doctor Rayner and convince him back to the United States. If he wasn't a host well, they would still have questions, but a violent confrontation with a host was the more likely occurrence in their current estimation. That it would be a situation occurring on foreign soil was the bigger issue. "And 31 Expedition?"

Major Davis frowned and interjected, "The Navy isn't sure but on looking at the remains of the ship a second time are concerned that the sinking wasn't accidental."

"Major?"

"We referred all the material we had once details started coming in, the remains of the Steward expedition's transport ship elicited some response that the damage to the boiler may not have been accidental. There is a mini sub being taken down there as we speak to make sure, but the initial attribution that it floundered as a result of the 31 Atlantic hurricane season seems to have been in error."
"Let me know the first thing we hear from the Navy then," He responded, "Doctor Langford, you were saying.

"The original deaths of the steward expedition were attributed to mold spores. That might suggest natural causes, it might have been an intentional booby trap, it could have been something else." In 1931 Malaria would have been running rampant, and there was no telling what else it could have been, but the whole expedition getting wiped out certainly looked suspicious... "I can get in touch with the Egyptian government and curate what items we're certain aren't goa'uld, I can take a team to Chicago and look for any non terrestrial signs and begin shipping all benign artifacts over immediately."

"Do that, Doctor." It would give them some credit. The state department probably would give them a little breathing room to operate on the matter, and hopefully on top of them the Egyptians would take it as a good faith gesture in case they needed to hold on to anything as 'evidence' or some other issue. So far the loss of the Osiris Jar was being taken well, after all explosion, accidents happen, the ministry of antiquities accepted that and if it had been murder then they would likely accept that resolution just as well. The Isis jar could have been a giant headache if it hadn't been pointed out to Doctor Jackson, and if he hadn't noticed the Goa'uld inscription on it in addition to the hieroglyphs. "Selmak, Jacob?"

The Tokra nodded, "As you reported Doctor Fraiser, the symbiot inside is not fully mature. It is certainly not the body of a Goa'uld Queen, certainly not Isis," Selmak responded.

"Does that mean something?"

"It may." Selmak allowed, "It may be nothing. The inscription does attribute ownership of the vessel of Isis, but may be interpreted as belonging to Isis in the sense of not being the resting place for the queen herself."
--
Commentary: A couple of things, now this interlude started about half through the episode it cover, and will cover some extra material. I like this episode of S4 of SG1 there are some changes to it, and we will get to the broader galactic context shortly. In particular in the episode, its obviously a prim'ta or young symbiote prop during the dissection, and I figured I'd use that.

Imperator Pax · Aug 6, 2021

The Curse Part 4

Danny's time in Egypt had probably been very different than Jack's. It had been the eighties, and even discounting the going into Libya, there had been the first gulf war after, and other matters just in the region. As a general rule O'neill tried to avoid vacationing in countries he had worked for while on secondment to the CIA... go down fly fishing in Costa Rica, or deep sea fishing in Mexico, but most of the Mid East just wasn't an option. This was going to be his first trip back in almost a decade.

He tossed a tube underhand to Carter across the isle of the Gulf, "Sun screen major," Cairo was cooler than Abydos, but that was speaking relatively, and at least it was a dry heat. Hopefully they wouldn't be here for very long. Langley was already asking questions about why Air Force Intelligence was interested in something as mundane as the murder of an Egyptologist, and the flight of his ... Rayner wasn't really an assistant, but all the same it was bind he didn't want to be in. The CIA also knew that the Fbi had other interests in the situation presumably going back to Seth, and his koolaid compound, but it wasn't the only situation.

Daniel glanced at him, "I've been thinking about Michael Clark."

"Yeah," A little surprised that it was Michael, and not Jenny, she was the Congresswoman after all, "Does this have to do with NASA?"

"No, I was wondering, I mean he was going to go to Canada to dodge the draft."

"Yeah, so?"

"When we went back in time," He paused, "Downtime you was already in the Air Force right?"

"Yep." He glanced outside to the moving hangars as the aircraft was taxied to its disembark point. It wasn't as if they could fly in commercial. Even that wasn't without security vulnerabilities, they'd get their pictures taken wherever they flew in from, just because the cold war was over didn't mean people weren't watching. The Russians knew about the stargate, they'd gotten the DHD from the Nazis, and who knew what all else. "What do you make of 'Steven' skipping town?"

It wasn't exactly a subtle change of topic, but Daniel rolled with it, "He could be a goa'uld. I can't imagine if, him being a murderer, and even if he was why go to Egypt." Chicago's decision to keep classifying suspicious deaths as accidents was... well there had been Law Enforcement motion to monitor his passport, or do any of that. The FBI hadn't considered it necessary because Doctor Rayner wasn't a person of interest, never mind a suspect, ATF still hadn't reclassified the lab explosion because they were still looking at it, and the backlog for lab time was weeks out at least.

They couldn't exactly bank on Rayner being a goa'uld, but it was a possibility that they couldn't discount... but assuming a snake was running around they were doing a better job at low profile than O'neill would have suspected. Daniel had interacted with Rayner repeatedly and no obvious Goa'uld tells had been made. "Walk me through it, was anything that might give an insight into this?"
"The night the curator died we talked about the items in the Steward expedition. Steven was insistent that the Osiris Jar was destroyed in the explosion, I guess he was defensive. The missing amulet." Daniel shrugged, and after the body of course Hammond had recalled him and Teal'c from leave, and they'd gone to Chicago.

There was jump as the plane went over a speed bump and they slowed to accept the docking collar for the private passenger terminal. "Anything after that,"

"No nothing that would have really been news. We talked about the jars with Sara,"

It was a shame Thor never showed up to fix problems like this, "Anything there?"

"No, like I said nothing that would have been news. We talked about Memphis. I didn't want to talk about anything that might end up related to our work at the SGC, uhm' He paused, "We talked about Thebes, and the city's relationship to Osiris, Sokar and Ptah. We talked about Thebes, Sara talked about the amulet's age." The email of the test results had been rather suspiciously been deleted though, and the tech who had done the testing was dead, and the amulet was of course missing.

There was no smoking gun, and Steven's financials had come back clean. There was no explanation for him running off to Egypt. "Suppose we'll just have to find him and ask,"

"There were two jars, Jack. Seth was here too." Other goa'uld weren't impossible of course they had recognized that after Seth, "and I've got a lot of questions about the time frame that just are increasingly making the sense they used to."

They finished joining up and dismounted the aircraft and then went through the short and expected song and dance from the Section Chief about how they weren't to cause an international incident or whatever, but that otherwise the CIA would be providing any practical assistance either directly, or as part of the State Department mission. The desk rider then foisted them off on, making them no longer his problem, and they moved on from there.
--
As Egypt was an allied country and affiliated with the US as well as for that matter the UK... the CIA office in Cairo wasn't exactly discreet. It was off from the embassy by about a mile or so, and the Mukhabarat building was almost right next door. It was a far cry from the eighties, and the building itself had the air conditioning going full tilt, and looked like an office building on the inside, with cubicles, fax machines, and computers everywhere.

As a general courtesy the CIA annex had put the Russian academic presence under observation... or probably more accurately just stepped up the observations they had been doing. The benefit of hindsight of course had told them that the Russian had been digging around for over a year now, but it had passed under the radar as just the Russian Federation just building better relationships in the region. There was no sign of Steven Rayner attempt to defect or anything. No that would have been too simple or easy.

There was a little bit of push back to Daniel's expressed interest in visiting the Osiris temple that the Steward Expedition had uncovered in 1931. They were in the process of tasking satellite observation on the temple, but it wasn't as if they were going to have any kind of air support either. They had some leeway, but there were limits to what was available. "Its our best lead on where he might be going,"

Not that it really seemed like Steven was trying to hide. He had booked into a hotel, with his actual passport, and didn't seem to be a man on the run. Of course being in Egypt there was no real way to track his rented Land Rover either, it wasn't an uncommon automobile, and nor was it particularly new.

Coventional thinking in this sort of situation would have been to do simple things. Sit on his hotel, the airport, and work up a target package to find out if there was anywhere in Cairo he was known to frequent while in the country, say a restaurant or one of the universities or something. All of that was based around dealing with a non extraterrestrial angle, and they couldn't not ignore that.

"Where are you going?" The spook asked

"I got invited to lunch with a friend." Jack replied, "Daniel call Teal'c when you get a chance see if he or Jacob have turned anything up."

Daniel turned to Sam who simply shrugged, and Jack's departure left them looking at what all the state department and Fbi had compiled of his one time friend slash academic rival's life. "A porsche?" Sam snorted at the paperwork.

--
Commentary: I'm cutting this here, for this one, originally we'd have gone from Sam and Daniel's perspective but I was running into problems with including Doc Fraiser in the scene even though she should be present. As a result I'm holding off on the Jacob/Selmak and Teal'c exposition scene for Part 5, which should culminate in our conclusion in the Osiris temple.

Part 5 should conclude this chapter / episode and we will move on back to the galaxy at large and so forth.

Imperator Pax · Aug 13, 2021

The Curse
Part 5

Jacob understood where Teal'c was coming from. There was a deep seated part of him that wanted to be in Egypt now, though he supposed that was more paternal instinct than anything else. Selmak was a thousand years old... Seth, Osiris they predated him by thousands of years. They had been around so long his only knowledge of them were memories imparted by Egeria... and by that point both of them were gone.

"Whats the eye of Osiris? Could it be this missing amulet?"

He shook his head in the negative, "It was entrusted to Osiris for safe keeping," Selmak replied to George's question, "An artifact of the gate builders that had belonged to Apep. When Apep was murdered by Anubis Ra took possession of the six eyes and distributed them among prominent goa'uld he deemed trust worthy." It was the only thing Selmak could come up with that would justify going to Egypt, but it might not have been the only reason. "It would be small enough he could take it with him through the Stargate if he could gain access to it, and it would probably be sufficient to buy him the good will and a position at court with any of the system lords even as just a status symbol."

The truth was Selmak didn't know. That hadn't been knowledge Egeria had imparted to the Tokra... only that it had belonged to the gate builders. That coupled with the possibility of a missing Goa'uld queen were easily enough to involve the Tok'ra High Council as a whole. "Osiris would still have to get off world." Though Teal'c admitted that Hathor's ability to locate the stargate might allow them some ability to lay a trap of sorts for the Goa'uld, it assumed that Osiris did want to get off world.

"Osiris is technically a rogue goa'uld. Ra may be dead, but its entirely possible that like Seth he won't want to leave earth out of a fear of some ancient grudge."

"Apophis?" Hammond questioned.

"Its possible, I was thinking Heru'ur personally," Jacob replied, "But Apophis is known to hold grudges," Teal'c responded, punctuated this statement, with a graven nod, "Like Seth his brother would just as out of the loop in terms of recent goa'uld politics, including Ra's death."

"Speaking of that," Major Davis finally opting to speak up, "Since we've brought up Apophis, and Heru'ur."

"Their fleets continue to battle. Cronus and Apophis's rivalry occupies each others attention as well, and for the time being the other system lords are happy to let them bludgeon one another, and few have been thus willing to take the field," Selmak intoned.

"It is not so clear cut with Master Bra'tac or the jaffa rebellion, Apophis's retribution has displaced hundreds of thousands and the fighting in general had spilled over into the border territories." It was a humanitarian disaster in the words of the Tauri, and that was only counting the people who had been able to flee from their worlds through the stargate never mind those internally displaced on their homeworlds. "Apophis has largely been rebuffed by Ptah."

"That's good, right?" Davis questioned.

"It is," Selmak agreed, "Apophis probably hoped that Ptah would be able to help him back engineer the ships he took from Sokar, or even to supplement his own production. Ptah refusing to take sides will keep them fighting, and weaken all of them." It would also reaffirm Ptah's impartiality within system lord disputes, but in particular Ptah not siding with Apophis would also likely slow distribution of any technologies pioneered by Sokar to the goa'uld as a whole, which was another benefit. "Ares has answered Cronus's call to arms, by all reports though Zeus is as inimicable to Apophis as he is to his father."

"He could still side with Heru'ur,"

"The Council has considered this as well," Selmak agreed, and that was the problem Jacob recognized with such multipolar power dynamics. Cronus was never going to actually ask Zeus to come and aid him in battle even if things were desperate, and Zeus probably never going to offer. Zeus's overlord seemed to have been more hostile to Apophis of course, but he also seemed to want all of the participants to... "To borrow an expression from Jacob, to 'stay off his lawn'." Selmak remarked, "yet we recognize that the changes to his domain, and the arms build up will leave him one of the more potent system lords. Zeus as his principle underlord already commands a fleet comparable to that of a lesser System Lord." That would be by itself be enough to potentially tip the balance of the fight, "Heru'ur has the most developed fleet building industry and capacity of any system lord, even before Ra's death," In no small part due to the fact that Ra's favorite son had access, or was suspected by many among the goa'uld as well as the Tokra to have access to Gate builder shipbuilding machines, "if he were to be reinforced..."

"Apophis would become quite desperate." George finished, and grimaced, "Is that why he hasn't made a move?"

"Its possible." No one wanted to take sides if it meant their worlds started getting bombarded from orbit, especially if it was for negligble gain.

--
Jack hated sand. He knew people, plenty of people who had gone to Vietnam, who hated humidity as a result of it, but it hadn't bothered him. He didn't care about elephant grass or that... sand though... bugged him more. Not that Abydos wasn't a nice place, but it did stir up memories of not just the Gulf War, but of the late eighties dancing over the border between Iraq-Iran. Just a messy time all around. The trip through the stargate had pretty much killed any idea that he'd want to go touring the old world, no fishing was the best sort of vacation he could get. Jack accepted that.

This was work, and he would have liked it if Daniel would stop nerding out about the Temple. He ran the light over the walls. "Daniel, answer me this, was this place intentionally buried?"

"That's the thinking. It was known to happen. Dynastic changes saw movement from places, and temples,"

He moved away from the painted facade along the columns of the courtyard. This whole place smelled of goa'uld to him, and that was even without goa'uld markings 'hieratic' all over the wall. He was expecting Heru'ur's beaky boys to pop out from around the corner any minute now. Of course that was in no small part to carter's gizmo detecting a shielded naquadah generator somewhere nearby . This was goa'uld. "Buried beneath the sands at Pharoah's command and all that."

"Uh something like that." Daniel agreed. "The amulet Steven took is ten thousand years old," dating to eight thousand BC, certainly in line for early Goa'uld presence on Earth, but Osiris hadn't been imprisoned at that point. Osiris and Seth hadn't disappeared from goa'uld records until thousands of years later, which was still thousands of year earlier than the present day.

Jack pushed off the corridor wall and to the corner sweeping the room for potential hostiles, but nothing. No jaffa, no chanting cultists, and at least no snakes... of the normal terrestrial kind. Just dust, and sand, and the sunlight trickling in from openings and bouncing off the polished silver disks, that he figured someone would have looted after a hundred years. "This leads down to a chamber."

"Steven's land cruiser was outside he's probably already in there."

"Carter, watch our six." He pushed forward into the room the MP5 at its ready, "Got something, body," Fraiser's footfalls followed behind him as she came around and passed him as he moved left towards the wall, but not enough that he couldn't still see the far entryway on that side. Carter and Daniel switched as he relieved her of rear guard and she moved to assist the doc, and more importantly...

"No Symbiote, he's not goa'uld."

He was bleeding internally. Steven came around to the probing and admitted to taking the amulet, "Its a key?" Jack repeated as a question, and swept room again. Hidden chamber? Right the altar immediately flagged. Now that it had been opened he could see the goa'uld style storage chamber that was popular Ra's group.

The sudden kinetic wave of the karakesh blew him off his feet and tossed him into a temple wall alongside Carter. Fraiser followed winged by a second 'whoosh' as she switched from medical practice to draw her side arm from its concealed position at the small of her back.

Osiris had possessed Danny's college girlfriend... he supposed as he coughed that he should have seen that coming. "You know much of the goa'uld. Where is my brother Setesh?"

"Seth? Yeah we killed him."

"Really." Osiris preened at the notion, "Then you have done me a great service in this."

Keep her talking Danny, Jack was pretty sure the kinetic wave hadn't broken anything but it felt like it had bruised everything at the very least. She seemed a little more skeptical about them killing Ra, "And Hathor," Jack added. "But yeah Sokar's back, well depending on who you ask." He coughed again.

"He has returned?"

"Apophis, Heru'ur and Cronus are all slugging it right now."

"Sokar though has returned?"

"Yeah." She flitted back to Daniel biting her lip slightly, as he grunted the reply, "Huge fleet, Apophis tried to take it over when we blew up the planet's moon."

She chuckled at that. Then Jack depressed the trigger on the MP 5 sending the rounds at the goa'uld before she could get any closer to Daniel. He missed, or he pretty sure he missed before he had to roll out of the way of the karakash. Then the rings activated and Osiris was gone.

There was a rumble from the temple, and then the unmistakable sound and feeling he had come to associate with goa'uld anti gravity engines for small spacecraft. Of course she had a ship, that made perfect sense of why to come here.

--
Commentary: Okay, S4E13 done. Does it cover everything I wanted it to? No, but lets talk about the episode. It came out in September of 2000. That is how old this episode is now. Now I made some changes to the episode, and I suspect that the reason Jack and Teal'c are less prominent was probably actor related. RDA probably had other stuff going on, or they wanted more Daniel centric, or wanted to focus on Fraiser or something. It is a very Daniel centric episode, but I don't really read too much into that. Really the biggest substantive change to the episode in my mind is dialing back the 'mildly military nature' of the show. Jack comes in, is called in to come to participate, but it is an episode I like.

Its in my opinion one of the better ones written by Mallozi.

Imperator Pax · Aug 21, 2021

Tidings
Part 1

Meter thick armor plate clad the exterior surface of the warship, but that was only part of its defenses. Trinium was simply too uncommon, and expensive to work that its alloys could be used in armor plate of this magnitude. The new improved Ha'tak version intended for mass production was already a significant percentage greater in size never mind mass compared to the line of battle warships that formed the back bone of any 'dignified' system lord.

The trinium used in the ship's core systems had been useful in allowing the reactor to reach far closer to the tolerances of the original Alteran design, and that would draw far far less attention than those outputs might otherwise attract. No the I-series with its larger shape, and greater mass made trades not that the outer armor had been relevant today.

Zeus's image flickered to life from aboard a ship much like the one he occupied. "The Tauri?"

"Anker will investigate and file the report," Oskyld replied drumming long fingers on the throne's arms, "It will be interesting to see how the system lords respond to this... development." The Asgard would, at least working from existing examples, do nothing. Technically speaking as he understood the protected planets treaty Osiris, assuming Osiris had been on the ship, had been leaving Earth, not violating the treaty. Of course now that he had left he couldn't go back without then violating the treaty... at least under the letter of the law. The Asgard were likely to see it that way, and the System Lords were too occupied for any of them to simply decide Osiris had already violated the treaty even though he had likely no idea as to its enactment, or in theory.

He didn't want to describe the Goa'uld as having technologically backslid. That would have been inaccurate for a number of points of discussion. The loss of gatebuilder ships by which to study directly and reproduce had resulted in a drop in quality, but it was also likely that loss of vital machinery to maintain closer to that original design standard had likely contributed. The modern goa'uld fleet was a product of evolution The Ha'tak, and its predecessor the Chel'tak, were increasing armed versions of the Cheops based on adding the superstructure around the pyramid and increasing reactors to power increasingly more powerful batteries of plasma cannons. Neither ship had existed in a time when the goa'uld fleet had consisted of much closer copies of Alteran vessels helmed by salvaged gate builder ships serving as command vessels.

That was thousands of years in the past though, really even before Ra had found earth that trend had been evident in goa'uld history. Ra had certainly been very opposed to the notion that another system lord retaining Alteran built or artisanal copies of such for the threat they would have posed to more easily reproducable ships especially in the Era of the Chel'tak. That had directly contributed to the rise of the Ha'tak. Oskyld for his part in this modern era did not want to end up with a fleet of Ha'tak that had to be delineated first rate through third never mind fifth, sixth or seventh. It would be possible to refit and rebuild some Ha'tak to something of a 'modern' standard, and lessons learned in building the ships like he and zeus presently command from would let them build better standard Ha'tak from the ground up with improved reactors, and engines, but even that represented a marked departure from what was orthodoxy of a realm's management.

Of course even as the ship shifted seamlessly under its reactionless drive out of the planet's gravity well and from the shattered debris of aging Cheops and the modern construction of Chel'tak by second and third string freestanding Goa'uld who formed a combined buffer region across what had been the intervening space between his new domain, and Ares. They had been caught off guard by Ares's decision to suspend hostilities in favor of going to aid Cronus against Apophis, and were now facing the undistracted first and second fleets. Truthfully he had no intention of annexing most of the border worlds, he didn't want the threat of their fleets positioned where they could be called into service again by Ares for a pittance if or when the 'sport' resumed... or at least before he could reinforce the provincial fleets out of their respective provincial capitals.

Not conquering the worlds would also draw less attention. Ra's reign had always been a balance of compromises. The various buffers were quite artificial in nature where Ra or the council of system lords would arbitrate disputes both to moderate wars , or to prevent rising goa'uld from becoming too powerful, especially too powerful too quickly.
... and of course if the other system lords considered his focus to be more concerned with 'digesting' the worlds that had formerly belong to Nirti or Ra then they were more likely to let that be so long as he moved sedately.
By leaving the buffer zones, and more importantly framing it as retaliatory, in place he could mollify some of the concerns about the empire's growth and leave most of his neighbors fixated on the much larger war ongoing between Cronus, Apophis and Heru'ur. That was buying him time, and he was glad that Zeus's world of Stennos had already made the leap to medieval agriculture, and the complex iron work for tools that went with it. He had also introduced trousers for work clothes, even though formal wear still was distinctly greco-roman.

It would take time of course but Stennos's concerns of manufacturing of common goods would insure a growing market. It would drive specialization of labor, and the availability of clothes, and so forth... all the small things that would make managing and integrating countless little fiefdoms into an empire, that would take time to disperse to the worlds he already held.

--
Fall had come to North America, and the SGC had largely returned to its normal state of affairs.

"Unscheduled Offworld Activation." Siler declared into the microphone in front of him. The dampeners helped of course to mask the gate activation but it was still generally obvious before the klaxons sounded, "Closing the Iris." The sergeant continued going through the usual procedure to such an occurrence. Unscheduled Activations were uncommon most of the time. After about a year of stargate operations, following Apophis's original incursion to the base... when he had been searching for a host for his newly matured queen... the goa'uld had stopped making an effort outside of if an SG team had really done something to kick over an ant hill. Since the addition of Earth to the protected planet's treaty even that had largely ceased.

"We're not expecting anyone back."

"No IDC General Hammond," Siler glanced to the general, and then to the visiting General Bauer who had come from White Sands looking to TDY Carter for more of his nuclear experiments. The first indication this was different than the usual came when the lights flickered, and the security team glanced around the gate room before a point of light began to form a few meters in front of the stargate.

"That's a," General Bauer to the rear started to speak.

The light had begun to shift and coalescence into a life size shimmering, and then solidified eight foot lizard person... thing. It was a hologram, rather than a living being. It would have been a major issue if some kind of matter stream could be projected through the stargate to bypass the latest trinium iris that served as the SGC's first line of domestic defense. The lizard was solid and stockily built and appeared to be wearing large black robes. "Greetings humans of the Tauri."

Hammond shuffled his way through the standing around enlisted and junior officers and hit the intercom. "I'm General George Hammond I am in command of this facility."

"Indeed General." The dinosaur like head cocked slightly towards the overview portal looking out over the stargate. "I mean no offense when I say this, however I am legally obliged to ask that you summon Colonel O'neill, and it is my recommendation you summon Major Carter, and perhaps, if you like Daniel Jackson and the Jaffa Teal'c. In short it might be prudent to gather the entirety of your first Stargate Team."

"What's this about?" Hammond replied his voice echoing through the speakers down below being a little awkward. Maybe, he thought, it'd be better to just walk down there.

"Of course," The lizard replied. "I come in fealty to the Dragon of the Lands Beyond Shadow. The particulars of this visit in regards to the treaty which exists between those titled System Lords, and the Asgard." He waved a clawed hand softly to one side, "It is normal practice, that we monitor and observe the comings and going of FtL vessels in the vicinity of Earth, generally to the wider solar system." That wasn't disconcerting at all. "Under the auspices of the treaty the comings and going of the Tok'ra who are goa'uld are assumed to be peaceable and internal matters of hospitality." The lizard bobbed its head slightly again, "This is hardly a relevant matter as such, and merits little matter for treaty enforcement. However our spatial detection network detected a goa'uld hyperdrive signature and identified its manufacture as a particularly aged example which flagged it for further scrutiny."

A couple weeks previously Daniel Jackson had attended the funeral for his mentor in archaeology. Unfortunately the death had not been accidental. One of the canopic jars the doctor had been studied had in fact been a goa'uld stasis chamber for a mature symbiote. Apparently it had housed one of Ra's underlords the Goa'uld Osiris. Unfortunately they had been following a false lead. Daniel's rival, and more 'orthodox' academic, archaeologist hadn't been the host, had nothing to do with the murders, and at best had been a glory hound and guilty of misappropriating a priceless Egyptian relic to try and rush to make a discovery. That had been a headache, but nothing in comparison to Osiris making her way to Egypt and recovering a buried starship. That was presumably what the lizard was referring.

Not sensing a response forthcoming the lizard nodded again. "This is a matter of treaty follow up, we would prefer to be able to inform the asgard promptly of any potential issues that may arise from this."

"And you need Colonel O'neill for this?"

"O'neill is the Asgard representative for the planet, by the consent of the System Lords, and that appointment is for life. His presence barring exigent circumstances is required for such meetings."

Hammond felt a headache brewing. He had known that Thor had chosen Jack O'neill for the meeting, but he hadn't guessed that Thor had been effectively making what sounded to him now that O'neill was the ambassador for Earth. "They're not on base at the moment. I'll need time to recall SG 1."

"Very well. You may dial in to the planet you designate P3X 797 and either send an SG team or a simple message via radio to discuss establishment of protocol as to how you wish this to be handled." The lizard paused, and then made a brief observation that it might be prudent to include the designation of protected planet treaty markers in front of the stargate in both Goa'uld Hieratic and Asgard, but that was not a legal requirement to the protected planets treaty.

With that, they were done. A few moments later the stargate shut down and the hologram vanished. He barely had to half turn to order someone to go get SG 1 before he heard the affirmative and the rushing of boots. "We should inform Washington of this." General Bauer remarked. In itself that was mind-numbingly obvious. Within forty five minutes Jack and the rest of SG 1 were assembled in the meeting room. If he were being honest he would have preferred that they had taken a little longer to give him more time to think.

"So we got a visitor?" Daniel Jackson seemed perplexed at the notion. "And its about Osiris."

"No this makes sense that they would monitor Earth." Major Carter commented, and then added, "The Asgard probably do the same thing."

Considering the X 301 mess, and now this Hammond really would have liked if they would have been able to find General Carter, and get his and the Tok'ra Selmak's opinion of this. They didn't have time for that, and they needed to find out what all this was about. "What about the treaty?" He'd seen the nine hundred plus pages of document that Thor had had translated into English when he had informed them that he was appointed O'neill to represent the planet. "IS there anything in there about this?"

"Oh yeah," Daniel nodded, "I don't think we need to worry about, well not too much, about this being a trap. The Asgard have probably been informed, and Sam's right the Asgard probably do monitor Earth a little more closely now. The treaty does outline provisions for setting up a meeting, but..."

"But, doctor?" Hammond didn't like 'hanging buts at the end of sentences particularly in a command like the SGC that routinely handled threats from outer space that might destroy the world as they knew it.

"They're going to want to hold it here."

"We can't lock the base down again." The SGC was an active and vital part of NORAD, particularly with its increasing space based detection system designed to search and survey near earth orbital, and high atmospheric trajectory. Even closing down the lower floors separate from the main NORAD complex was a massive red flag and the Canadians weren't stupid... someone in the Canadian military had to have noticed the expansion of USAF personnel over the last few years, and a supplementary command. It would have attracted less attention if the cold war was still going on, but now it was harder to justify that.

"We shouldn't need to, treaty negotiations prohibit the presence but that shouldn't be a concern if we're only dealing with well paperwork," Dr Jackson reached for some other papers, "Thor left some other documents, and it seems like that the system lord handling the investigation, I assume that we're dealing with Sokar, is going to send a functionary who will take a report ask some questions and then forward that to the System Lords and the Asgard. I assume this is because Osiris is a Goa'uld fugitive technically, even though Ra is dead." and besides say Heru'ur it wasn't like most of the goa'uld had been that sad to see him gone.

Imperator Pax · Aug 27, 2021

Tidings
Part 2

Oskyld looked at the pitiful creature as it thrashed angrily inside the aquarium. The beserk serpent frenzied by Nirti's meddling. He had some of the deposed System lord's notes... not that her records were complete. Detailed record keeping was not a goa'uld strong point, and part of that was probably a matter of the modifications the gate builders had made to the symbiotes in distant eons past. Nirti had little reason to keep notes, but it seemed she had been sharing her findings or a portion of them with among other system lords, Pelops and Olokun, which made sense of course given their own interests. The problem was Nirti had a nasty habit of diverging into a decidedly common habit of the goa'uld in their poetic ritual bragging in such official correspondence.

He extended a tendril of theoric energy touching the creature's mind. There was a fragment of intellect there, but stifled under a near blinding rage. What Nirti had managed to do to the queen that had spawned the goa'uld had... it was as unclear to her as it was to him why this was the result of the brood she had spawned. Even the most sane of the brood were prone to wild fits of anger, and blind fury that simply was undesirable. They certainly wouldn't have made reliable underlords for Nirti, if that had been her goal... though he doubted that given her comparative position amongst the goa'uld. If she had been trying to create a queen that could reliably spawn a scientist caste of symbiotes, then she had certainly failed... but certainly that was an idea... though one that this brood would be of little use for.

The divine magic soothed the fury and made subtle changes to the creature's physical and spiritual form. The creature would likely always be short tempered, and if this solution worked out so to would likely all of its siblings. That wasn't to say there weren't advantages. The ones who had enough sense not to be in a near constant state of frenzy had demonstrated access to planning and access to the goa'uld memory, the problem was the rage made them very short term thinkers. That made them very unwieldy as anything other than blunt instruments, which had been something Nirti hadn't been looking for. She had been deposed as a result of the shenigans of the treaty before she could make any adjustments to her experiments.

There was a tone, and he shuttered the aquarium structure as the feed began to fill the holographic globe. He was distant enough from Earth that even without having to contend with crossing other domains it would have been impractical for standard goa'uld drives to cross the space in a time frame that wouldn't have otherwise attracted attention... never mind that he'd have have to cross Apophis's domain. That didn't, or wasn't stopping him from his current actions.

He was exploiting the treaty though nothing he was doing was illegal, or against the treaty. It was just most of the goa'uld hadn't wanted to run afoul of Ra during the time he'd been alive... and Ra had really not liked it when lesser goa'uld went around interacting with the Asgard directly. The Supreme System Lord had thereby been the stick to keep most of the goa'uld in line.... so to that extent it was ironic that Heru'ur had tried to invade Cimerria. Not that it mattered.

No since he was a system lord and recognized as such by the others he was legally allowed to monitor the planets of the treaty, and he had the resources to do it. That was practical due to improvements in hyperdrive mostly. The best he'd been able to retrofit Moloch's fleet to get up to was thirty two thousand times the speed of light. Those Ha'tak had been of inferior quality to those he had taken from Heru'ur, and then been able to improve upon once he understood the mechanisms. Never mind with Zeus's assistance and the Asgard database, even if it was five hundred years out of date.

Not that the goa'uld production base, never mind the one he had access to at the moment, was capable of replicating that level of engine technology for mass production. The shipyards he was expanding and updating would be able to produce faster, and more heavily armed standard Ha'tak, and his improved contiguous hull would be more dangerous still but he needed time.

The Treaty between the System Lords and the Asgard affirmed a number of points. He was allowed to monitor, and report breaches of compliance. Ra might have done it, or another Goa'uld, in hopes in what was effectively narcing on a rival would result in an Asgard Mothership smashing up their rival's empire. Of course, unsurprisingly being known as a snitch wouldn't necessarily be a popular moniker to have in Goa'uld circles.

The goa'uld technological base was derived from copying Alteran technology. The technology of the gate builders. It was why among other things the goa'uld had wrist mounted dial home devices, and a variety of other useful basically knickknacks as well. Most of the Goa'uld had no scientific acumen to speak of though, not really. So when those ancient examples of Ancient Hyperdrive had been lost goa'uld hyperdrive became well much slower cheaper, and reliable, models. During Ra's reign on Earth even though Goa'uld fleets had been much smaller ships had been faster than they had afterwards. By about a thousand the Goa'uld were using the much slower drives outside of specific vanity projects even though Ptah had developed faster drives for use by Ra and his dynasty. Most likely it had been those secrets that Apophis had stolen and applied to improve the speed of his Ha'tak... Cronus certainly had done just that.

So no, the much faster drives of even his weakest pyramid ships didn't help all that much. Those wouldn't be the ships which would head for Earth anyway. It would have taken too long if he ever needed to get there quickly. No, for Oskyld sending someone in person would help in other ways. So having a faster hyperdrive spin up and break orbit of earth had been a little worrying. The signature though had been too small to be a mother ship, or a dedicated warship. He'd seen signatures from contemporary Tel'tak, presumed from intercepted transmissions to be Tok'ra. The latest ship was fast though.

An underlord's personal chariot, skiff, or yacht most likely. That meant of course Ra's underlords from before the loss of Earth to the Goa'uld. None of the others would have wasted such a luxury on their minions. The alternate possibility was that a system lord had lost such a ship of his own when earth had fallen, but that was less likely.

He was waiting for the SGC to respond. He didn't think they'd take too long. A few days maybe, but weeks were unlikely. Oskyld adjusted the cloaked monitoring platform... in truth he wasn't just monitoring the earth for potential breaches in the Protected Planet's Treaty. He had other reasons.

The goa'uld were too busy at the moment to really attack earth. Cronus, Heru'ur, and Apophis were all too deeply embroiled in war, and the other system lords were looking to exploit that for that most part. Earth would have to do something tremendously stupid to provoke any of the weakened system lords to risk a squadron of motherships if the Asgard did show up. Apophis was the most likely to try something, and Cronus and Heru'ur were pushing too hard for him to reasonably try something.

"And?" He said in response to the flash of light. Asgard teleportation technology was actually significantly more advanced, and useful than its Ancient equivalent. Of course, the goa'uld could readily replicate Ring Platforms, and there was something to be said for already having the tech base and infrastructure for that given that all goa'uld ships larger than the standard death glider carried them.

"Asgard monitoring platforms have been confirmed by our own platforms around the other protected planets." Not surprising that, "I have also confirmed a number of anomalous platforms, and signatures. I believe that the Asgard must suspect the Goa'uld Olokun of having access to dangerous ancient technology. A number of his worlds show signs of Asgard surveillance. As do several of Nirti's worlds."

"That's interesting." He agreed. Nirti was supposed to be imprisoned on Tartarus, though her realm had been picked at by some of the other goa'uld few were willing to go out of their way to try at present given its location, and her neighbors were more worried about each other. "I had expected Kali to make a move against some of those worlds by now."

"Given the nature of Nirti's experimentation on humans we should consider intervening. Some of the damage may be irreversible,"

The description of Island of doctor moreau in space came to mind. "If they're alive I can probably undo, or mollify at least anything she's done." He might not have had much technology in the way of capital ships, but there were plenty of medical technologies, mutagenic compounds, and real time genetic manipulation that could stabilize or repair damaged systems. "Is that what you want to do?"

Zeus nodded, "I have the requisite forces already prepared, and outfitted with biowarfare equipment."

That he was already prepared for that wasn't a surprise "What about those Asgard platforms you mentioned this morning?"

"Nirti's deposement may have reduced their concern for such, we should still exercise caution," He declared "More interestingly they remain monitoring Olokun but do not seem to be doing anything. I suspect that the council must be distracted by matters distant."

That wasn't likely anything good, "We should hope not. The Asgard has largely hewed to the Peace of Tonsberg,"

"That is indeed true."

That had been in about the mid tenth century, even if according to records it had taken time to get everything else in place, and even longer to achieve treaty compliance. "Indeed, I'll handle briefing my emissary, and we'll see what's all this mess on earth." He declared with somewhat forced joviality. "Nirti was in contact with Olokun, and Pelops as well, is there any indication of scrutiny of the latter?"

"None that I have discerned, but his is more distant than Olokun's realm." Pelops was on the complete opposite side of Cronus, and Apophis's domains relative to his own... which was odd since Ares's domain was on the near to side. Olokun's domain was too far to reasonably project even their fast moving Ha'tak vessels across intervening space. Whatever the Asgard thought he might have would likely a mystery. "Unlike Nirti and Pelops Olokun, lacked Alteran involvement directly, if he unearthed something he likely has expended significant effort conceal. Nirti's own artifice suggest gate builder machines."

"Her attempts to modify symbiotes as well as host suggested as much." He agreed. "No sign of the device?"

"Not as of yet." A pity of course. Magic worked fine, but any alteran system was likely to have significant specialist material in genetic engineering. "As I said, I have those standing by to invest the worlds most near to our own, and to clean them of the phages her recklessness has left behind." Which of course left him to deal with the matter of the Reetou, a conflict, a foe the Jaffa were scarcely suited to face, but he supposed that threat did give cover to his raptors. The broader movements into what had been hindi territory by the Reetou drew the attention of the system lords in that region of space, and that had its advantages.

Imperator Pax · Sep 3, 2021

Tidings
Part 3

Jack had known having Hammond recall them back to Stargate Command that something had to have gone wrong, at the very least obviously something had happened. He knew really there was a lot that could be going on. Stargate Command was on paper masked as a part of Space Command, but in actuality functioned in many respects like a direct reporting unit. It gave them plenty of discretion. That still wasn't a perfect solution since, especially with the Russian acquisition of a gate, their operations had steadily widened.

They were in something of a bind as a result of mission creep, no surprise there. The X 301 program, and before that the Naquadah enhanced Nuclear Warhead program were being carried out at other Air Force facilities. It was no secret that Hammond had been trying to keep other parts of the apparatus from borrowing members of his staff for ostensibly temporary duty assignments that would in all likelihood 'need' to be extended.

In truth Jack was a little surprised that Langley hadn't asked more questions about what had happened in Egypt, or that they hadn't needed to borrow him... but then he supposed part of that was he was getting older. It had been six years since his last secondment to the CIA's ground detachment, and then... after that had been the mission to Abydos... or rather Charlie's death and then the mission to Abydos.

Hammond put the phone down, "The state department doesn't like it," He said referring to the treaty, "And I'm sure we will hear more of that later." Jack nodded, and acknowledged his understanding. He understood at least having to run it up the chain about the Treaty. The first time around had been one thing. "So far they've accepted that the Treaty is between the System Lords and the Asgard, we're just parties to it." That there hadn't been anything for Congress to ratify regarding Earth's 'agreement', and Jack frankly doubted the people of Cimmeria had even been asked about being added to the treaty. "They'll have questions though Colonel, you can bet on that." The Texan drawled scowling at the phone between them.

At the time they hadn't really had time to contend with any consequences of Thor putting him on the spot when it came to representing earth. It had worked out in the end. Nirtii breaking the rules certainly had been in their favor. The idea that he was Earth's permanent representative wasn't something he'd counted on, and apparently no one else had. Danny hadn't mentioned it being explicitly spelled out... "What about the NID?" This should have been the sort of thing the NID paid attention to, at least according to their on paper mandate. Colonels Simmons had exploded that his organization had managed to miss that, apparently no one at the NID had even bothered to properly document the Asgard-System Lords Treaty documents that Thor had provided. They'd apparently been sitting in an inbox somewhere for the better part of a year.

That meant that right now the colonel, and a number of other air force officers, as well as civilian personnel from the NID were crowding one of the briefing rooms on twenty seven. "I expect that Colonel Simmons and his staff will remain through the negotiations, or whatever this is."

"We went to Cimmeria, and gave Thor a ring. He says all of this is all above board on their end." Jack replied. He hoped that would make sure that that would be enough to keep the NID spooks from trying anything funny with all of this. "Makepeace should be back in an hour." He observed looking at the clock.

--

On schedule the stargate activated, they received the IDC code, and the dispatched Marine Stargate team returned from the Minoan planet, and as he expected one large large lizard person was in tow. Hammond had seen the pictures from other teams reports, and there had been the hologram projected through the stargate... but there was still a difference. Even unarmed the creature looked formidable. Part of it might well have just been the fact that Jaffa were still pretty human, barring the snake in their gut. The galaxy at large was confined to bronze age cultures for the most part... at least so far as the SGC most often observed. The Jaffa besides their plasma weapons usually had armor that would have been more iron age, and more reflective of the late Roman empire or early middle ages, but regardless primitive by earth standards. They had gone back to examine the armor Teal'c had been wearing when he'd defected, and it was comprised of a low purity naquadah alloy that did offer it superior protection against modern small arms, and some protection against staff weapons as well, but it was still shaped like medieval armor.

Even unarmed, if you could discount the claws and teeth, the 'functionary' in his robes looked more dangerous than most Jaffa. Admittedly Bra'tac looked inoffensive most of the time, and was generally regarded as the most dangerous Jaffa alive. "I am Prelate Anker, General Hammond." The Raptor bowed slightly forward, offering a gold leaf embossed scroll that were presumably it... his... diplomatic credentials.

They navigated through the secure doors and down the hallway to the lift. Daniel Jackson confirmed that the scroll, which was in Goa'uld Hieratic, Asgard Runes, what to Hammond looked like Greek, and finally a copy in English.

Colonel Simmons who hadn't been invited, but had shown up anyway spoke up, "Anything interesting doctor?"

"Its like the Rosetta stone." Daniel remarked not looking up, "I had suspected that Linear A was Goa'uld to begin with, or heavily influenced by Goa'uld at least," The Archaeologist responded. "That does seem to be the case here. We knew that Goa'uld dialects had had a similar influence on Phoenician, and Egyptian as well." There were also some oddities where the Goa'uld had apparently borrowed from Latin, or it looked like they had borrowed Latin. "We've had little contact with Yu, or the Japanese System Lords but we'd find similar language influences like we see between the Asgard and northern Germanic language groups, particularly like we saw in Cimmeria."

Not, exactly what the NID man had meant by interesting, but Hammond understood why all of that would be interesting to the archaeologist. They really did more linguists, and language specialists in ancient languages. That had been true, and somewhat obvious before the Osiris mess had happened, but the amulet theft, spate of murders and the stasis jars culminating in the buried ship had underlined that issue thoroughly.

The lizard cleared his thought in something that at least sounded like a cough, or an attempt to clear his throat, "If so might we begin."

"Of course Prelate," Hammond replied throwing SImmons a pipe down look as they filed out of the gate room.

They made it up to the conference room without any incident. However came the trickier matter of dealing with what had happened. "Earlier in the summer," Anker began moving to speak from the head of the table, "Our deep space monitoring platforms recorded an anomalous hyperspace signature. " He said, beginning something of repetition of what he'd said during his initial contact through the stargate using the hologram. "It was categorized, flagged for further review." He paused recognizing he probably needed to explain, "Ordinarily any incoming hyperspace signature would have warranted a more expedient follow up. As the vessel was departing it was deemed of a lower category of priority. That review identified its drive signature characteristics and its identification code."

A holographic image appeared of Osiris's ship. It chanced a moment later to show a flight path in space, and then backtracked to the ship breaking orbit, backed up further to where the ship had initially lifted off of Earth. It was something of an alarming prospect even without Simmons knotting up in his chair.

The SGC, and NID personnel looked around at one another. Hammond turned to face Daniel Jackson, "Doctor Jackson, why don't you recount what happened on our end of things."

"My Academic Advisor, senior teacher," Daniel Jackson paused, to organize his thoughts, as he no doubt attempted to contemplate how to explain Earth's college education system to someone from off world, "lead the recovery of certain artifacts that had been lost at sea. As it happened some of these were what we believed were canopic burial jars, but turned out to be Goa'uld stasis jars. These weren't the only goa'uld items present. It turned out that the Isis Jar had failed at some point in some way, and the symbiote inside it was dead. The Osiris Jar we had thought been destroyed during a lab explosion had been intact and Osiris had escaped to take a host. Osiris ended up going to Egypt and recovering his ship before fleeing the planet."

Anker nodded. "Then this is relatively simple." The lizard remarked splaying his hand.

"Osiris is still legally a criminal by goa'uld standards isn't he."

"Yes. The System Lords still attaint him as such." Anker remarked, "He did not technically violate the protected planet's treaty. He, and his ship were obviously on earth before treaty ratification. We will remain vigilant for him, but it seems unlikely he will return here. I assume he is unwelcome, and will note that so we, or the Asgard can act in response to any treaty breaches."

Hammond wondered how savvy the goa'uld were to the notion the Asgard were bluffing them. Then again there was also the thinking that something had had to happen at Cimmeria before Thor had arrived so maybe the Goa'uld were worried about just the Asgard retaliating. It was doubtful the Goa'uld knew anything of the Asgard's troubles with the replicators

Not that it was exceptionally useful, but Anker before leaving provided information on Osiris. The 'Raptor', as he specified was the preferred translation of his race, admitted that the System Lord data was probably well out of date. They'd probably have been able to get all of this or at least verify it with the Tok'ra. Still he was right in that it was doubtful Osiris would come back to earth, though it wasn't as if Osiris had been told Earth was a member of the protected planet's treaty.... which probably hadn't been created at the time Osiris had been imprisoned in the stasis jar.

--
"Something in particular about all that of interest Major?"

Major Carter had been busy pouring over the telemetry report collected from Osiris's ship, and it had caught one of the visiting officer's attention.

"You gonna share with the rest of the class?" Colonel O'neill prodded.

"This, I don't want to say its wrong, but I'd say it looks wrong."

"How so major?" General Vidrine questioned. The Major General had caught some flak after the failure of the 301, where it had been subverted by compromised salvaged parts. "Its a hyperspace trajectory, we see them all the time."

"For Tok'ra Tel'taks," She agreed, "And if this is right Osiris's ship is faster than the Tel'Taks used by the Tokra, which makes no sense. This is actually faster than Apophis's Ha'tak that were used to attack earth. If these numbers are right. The field is configured differently."

There was a flash of light. "You would be correct, Major Carter." Thor had appeared standing beside them. "We have reviewed the data provided. The hyperdrive signature you are looking at is a copy of an Alteran, a gate builder hyperspace drive. It is significantly more advanced than contemporary goa'uld drives, but much more expensive. Goa'uld infighting over Ancient ships, as well as conflicts with the Asgard, and other races resulted in the loss of the examples, and knowledge to make such ships. It is unfortunate that the Goa'uld, particularly over the last three hundred years have made marked improvement in the speeds of their hyperspace drives, as well as reducing the expense."

"Is that what they're here for?"

Thor's bulbous head bobbed, "It is possible. We will admit that while our knowledge of the Goa'uld personalities is limited, Osiris was never the most dangerous Goa'uld. It is true the System Lords would be unlikely to forget any grudges, but this would not ordinarily be a priority."

"Not that I'm not glad to see you buddy, but they made a big deal about me needing to be here. What's all that about?"

"You are responsible for the death of Ra, O'neill. It is entirely probable that you are the single most respected human among the Goa'uld. You accomplished what the other system lords have not been able to do in over ten thousand years."

"Daniel was there too." He pointed out.

"Daniel Jackson is a scientist, and while the Asgard recognize his contribution, we also recognize the Goa'uld ascribe a lesser involvement, a subordinate involvement in the actions of your team. It is those actions which makes you the best candidate to represent this planet, as well as perhaps in the future other worlds of the Treaty." Thor paused, "Admittedly this change in system lord behavior has us concerned,"

"Us?"

"I in particular O'neill. We have observed a marked increased in Goa'uld militancy over the last few years, Apophis's conflict with Heru'ur and Cronus is escalating that to be sure... and to levels that place us in a precarious balancing act. There are those among the council who feel we may have to make revisions to a treaty that has held for almost a thousand years with surprisingly few breaches."

"What about the raptors, most Jaffa assume that they're Unas."

"It is an interesting development to be sure. The council are unsure of what precisely to make of the emergence of another race. The confusion with the goa'uld's sibling species though makes some degree of sense given that they have been rare since before Pelops created the Jaffa."

--
Commentary: So its still relatively buggy at times but I've been playing Rogue State Revolution and its pretty addicting, but then I'm not surprised I really enjoyed the original tropico back in the day.

This is largely just a minor revision of the original portion. Its mostly SG1 centric, slash Earth Politic. Some foreshadowing for the Asgard later, but basically Earth recognizes that the Raptors aren't Unas, because well Unas largely stopped being common. (In part due to Unas hosts being rare anyway by the time Ra found Earth, and finding humans allowed the number of Goa'uld and more importantly their armies to expand rapidly even before Jaffa were developed).

Imperator Pax · Sep 10, 2021

Tidings
Conclusion

The escalation of conflict between Apophis, and his nephew the last few weeks had coincided with the start of the Egyptian new year... that probably was intentional on Heru'ur's part. Whether it was economic, or simply symbolic was harder to say, but Heru'ur had clearly planned his offensive before hand, and his fleet had struck a series of worlds in rapid succession. Rapid enough that most of the ritual fighting by other goa'uld had slackened to almost none. Heru'ur had the attention of the other system lords, and Apophis's neighbors were waiting for the Serpent's response.

To that end it had been something of a surprise to receive the report. In hindsight of course he shouldn't have been, word would have reached K'tano about the state of the war and thus the rebel probably had some idea about the goa'uld fleets currently waiting for Heru'ur to over commit or for Apophis to begin an offensive somewhere else... or for Cronus to take advantage of this three sided mess. What more annoyed him was that K'tano's attack on Hak'tyl was that it was apart of his Forest Province and not so much the rebel Jaffa personally. He could guess why, "And that is a second time he has been repulsed."

There was some rumbling from the Jaffa at the pronouncement. Not that they really needed reminding of that fact... or that it had been Ishtar's priestesses who had done it. If he had to speculate on the matter K'tano had launched this attack to try and wipe the stain from his honor at having failed to succeed the first go round, but that was speculation. If it was indeed that then it was doubly true that something needed to be done.

"The rebel forces are threadbare my lord. Many fight with the weapons of humans," Ishtar meant bows and arrows, and spears not the weapons of the Tauri. She didn't mean guns. Not that Jaffa weren't quick to dismiss Tauri firearms, or gunpowder weapons in general, as primitive. That was problematic of course from a tactical level of thinking.

Primitive or not most Goa'uld didn't like the idea of gunpowder societies being allowed to develop... though there were a few exceptions. Most of those were in the domain of Yu Huang Shang-Ti though that largely took the place of entertainment, fireworks, as well as in his mining industries. Most of the other goa'uld were happy enough to import firecrackers from Yu's domain for entertainment rather than have their own societies develop early and dangerous blackpowder that might add additional fire hazards.

So no these were Jaffa who were in a position to still be using more simple weapons. BY all reports few even had armor.... for what use iron armor would have been against staff weapon. Of course Imhotep had been a poor goa'uld to begin with his realm, and whatever jaffa who had fled into the hinterlands probably wouldn't have had an abundance of staff weapons to begin with. The neighboring domains, never mind the stargate, were mix of a variety of goa'uld seeded cultures in the intervening area of space. A large swathe were settled by the usual Mediterranean basin, and near east, cultures, but there were hindu transplants both from apparently India, and the pre Islamized 'Indies'.

The Dragon stood up, and walked to the observation port that peered out over the shipyards. The concept of drill originated in antiquity. It might have been the spanish of the fourteen hundreds and the fantasists of the Renaissance who set the stage for what would become regiments, but the basic prospect of drill was known to the goa'uld. Some goa'uld took it a little more seriously than others, Ptah's Ushabti, Pelop's spartans, and of course Yu's Jaffa armies, and even his human ones. There were a few others, but most goa'uld emphasized a warrior elite where distinction was earned by the individual. The prospect of drilling jaffa in such volumes and to such an extent was just anathema to the way most goa'uld behaved.

On the other hand it wasn't a completely alien concept. The idea of organizing Jaffa in groups of one thousand, but having it broken down into smaller units, as well as that one thousand being part of still larger formations wasn't unusual. Plenty of goa'uld, even those who didn't rely as heavily on drill still needed ways to organize troops.

"Given their threadbare appearance they must have been searching for weapons, and food." He said turning his attention back to the rebels. "Its not as if Imhotep's domain was particularly wealthy to begin with." Unlike Ares, and Svarog who were both System Lords in their own right Imhotep was basically no one. He'd been a minor goa'uld functionary on earth.... not even properly a sub lord to a system lord. The records suggested he'd been a functionary of one of Ra's sub lords, and had probably received his free holding status for reporting some transgression or another. Not that being a freestanding lord had done Imhotep a huge boon. At least as an underlord to one of Ra's sub lords he had been relatively well insulated against Goa'uld aggression. If he'd been one of Ra's underlords directly he'd have been fairly safe... instead he'd basically ended up neighboring Moloch, or near enough that Moloch alternated between bullying him, and claiming to be 'friends' with him.

They'd have to confirm Imhotep had indeed been overthrown though. He wasn't a system lord so it was possible that it might have escaped notice. Still that only explained some of the attacks there were others that had been reported which didn't seem to be rebels either. Better equipped Jaffa who weren't attacking in accordance to usual custom.

It was something of a pity Hak'tyl wasn't developed enough to support capital ship yards. Alkesh, or an equivalent, would be the largest thing they'd be able to sustain with the planet's meager naquadah access. It wasn't as if those reserves had ever properly mined anyway. The real priority though was economic development elsewhere. It was part of the reason he hadn't been investing in some massive overhaul of Jaffa armaments, which might have been necessary for more expansionist warfare.

He dismissed the Jaffa. A naval reply at this juncture, realpolitik demanded discretion if it looked like his fleet was moving towards 'Egyptian space' there might have been an assumption he had taken sides. The conflict would almost certainly bankrupt Apophis, and Cronus. As for Heru'ur's finances, at least in the way the system lords measured such things, weren't likely doing well either. This was precisely the sort of destructive warfare that Ra's overlordship had prevented, and was why the other system lords had accepted that overlordship for the most part. There was no one with the resources to force them to stop so they likely weren't going to, and every time one of them managed to take a planet, or secure some other victory it only redoubled the tensions.

This was probably Apophis's fault though. Every time the Serpent lord cracked down on potential rebels... well trying to hold sand and what not. That and of course Apophis had had rebel problems before his imprisonment, and savaging several of his own worlds after he'd escaped looking for traitors had done him no favors.

No sending a flight of Ha'tak to go searching for the rebels wouldn't have an appropriate response. There were cloak capable Alkesh coming on line in the next few weeks, and that would give him a better idea of what was going on in Imhotep's domain. He waved a hand, and activated the communications suite. "Zeus."

"Older brother," The Asgard returned formally, signifying that he must have had company, "The expedition progresses, and by spring should see Nirti's pestilence cleansed from her former domain."

--
Lieutenant General Vidrine represented the first real step to move beyond a fairly tightly woven number of largely research, and asymmetrical operations elements. Vidrine's command was in theory to be the first operational US space fighter wing. That had been the plan, and why he had been brought in on the X 301 project. That had, Hammond felt now, been premature. The 301 had obviously not been ready for that move, but that had been a choice made higher up in the air force. Vidrine however had been briefed and he outranked both himself, as well as well as Bauer.

"This goes to your Byzantine hypothesis, Doctor Jackson." Vidrine commented.

"Prelate is a term that is normally associated with a bishop. By itself its hardly definitive, but we also know that the Raptors also use the title, or rank of Exarch. Its true that their architecture is meso american, but we've seen that before actually. There are several cultures that range from Aztec to populations from further south in the meso american region."

Major Carter shifted, "The Tollan, they're a mix of people homogenized between Romans, and the Toltecs, or Mayans."

"Yes that's what we think." Daniel replied with a slight bob of his head, which raised the question of when exactly the Tollan had been pulled off of Earth. "But it isn't just them. There are also other populations in the galaxy that show these trends." The archaeologist had complained about the difficulty of piecing together Earth history of antiquity never mind the galaxy at large, which was of course another one of the problems they needed to address. Doctor Rayner remained a major security vulnerability. The damage of the Kara-kesh largely looked like a concussion and he had claimed that he only knew that the amulet supported the more conservative admission that Doctor Jackson's hypothesis of a much older Egyptian civilization was valid. That was good, but it also meant that he might pursue ideas, pull at pieces of yarn and unravel more of the truth. "I think this shows with the, evolution of armor we see particularly with Zeus's Jaffa."

"And Human soldiers, Daniel Jackson." Teal'c added, "It is not unheard of for system lords to have human axillaries to supplement Jaffa, but it is uncommon for a goa'uld to chose to equip and train humans to jaffa standards. Ra was known to do it, but that was more of a statement of his power as supreme system lord."

"And Yu does it as well." Daniel remarked, "and that may be all that it is. The equipment though, even though its not my area of expertise is of better quality. By all indications, Zeus's chosen are using armors we don't normally see outside of more elite troops."

"I'm sorry Doctor Jackson." Vidrine started, "I don't know what that means."

"When, we first encountered Apophis, his most elite cadre of serpent guards had armor that was constructed using a naquadah invested alloy. This allowed them to withstand fire arms much more effectively including from the M16. Sokar's necropolis guard, both in use by Sokar himself, and then Apophis," After the destruction of Netu, which General Bauer had been very interested in, "also demonstrated this, though it seems that Apophis can't produce these armors on his own, and as they're lost they're gone for good."

The prevalent thinking was Anker's 'Dragon beyond shadow', Zeus's acknowledged older brother was in fact Sokar. "I'm not going to complain," O'neill remarked. "So these 'Chosen' have that kind of armor."

"Colonel Makepeace actually believes it is better, O'neill." Teal'c replied tilting his head slightly.

Colonel Makepeace was actually off world still, and couldn't be recalled for this meeting, but his report had been relatively clear on what he had seen. "Svarog's Jaffa were still able to get through it, but it required them to be at what Makepeace described as spitting distance. "It looks like Zeus is organizing his Chosen into hundred, or a hundred twenty men groups, that form company like formations with command staff totaling about five hundred men." Jackson paused looking around, "Sorry Company is the wrong word in contemporary military group, I think the description Makepeace used was battalion."

"That's right for Marine and Army units," Simmons agreed, "But most of the Jaffa are fielding the same equipment, with limited modifications correct?"

"So far that we've seen."

Vidrine nodded, "Colonel," He turned to O'Neill, "Better armor, I can understand that you described the staff weapon as like a shotgun in report."

"Uh yeah, yes sir. The staff weapon," And Jack pointedly refused to say Ma'tok whenever he absolutely didn't have to, "is in many respects comparable to a shotgun. While accurate fire is possible, and Daniel had compared to napoleonic massed fired doctrine in ranks, its a bit like shooting skeet in my opinion. You can sweep the staff fire, and go on from there. It has a lot of the same downsides though, in my opinion sir." ... and that Teal'c wasn't a slouch on the skeet course probably helped that comparison for Jack.

Daniel Jackson nodded, "As I mentioned to Colonel O'neill though we're seeing reports of significant civil engineering projects on a scale that we haven't encountered among the goa'uld anywhere else. Its not just engineering though, we're seeing a uniform institution of Greco-Roman esque laws and administration, including the structure of multi planet provinces that are administered from a provincial capital and provinces coordinated at a... I'm loath to say national just yet, but a level above that of provincial."

By this point Hammond was well acquainted with the simple fact that Goa'uld didn't micromanage their imperial holdings. They might try and micromanage personnel projects, but most goa'uld had neither the temperament nor the talent to remain on task for the average work of running a government day to day.

Major General Bauer grimaced, "Not to diminish the importance of such changes, and what they might mean Doctor Jackson," and he did seem to an extent genuine about the regret, "But I'm a little more concerned about Sokar's ability to actually effect naval force projection than well, these other projects."

"I was getting to that," Daniel replied, "Because sir, quite frankly those other projects are allowing him to significantly step up naquadah, and what we have confirmed is trinium mining."

It was Vidrine's turn to look concerned. "That's news to me, this was confirmed recently then?" It was, Hammond suspected that the report on mining operations and other geological operations had probably been marked lower priority in the face of Osiris's flight from earth, and everything that had happened after. "These newer Ha'tak?"

"That's what we think its going to, sir." Major Carter replied. "They're a standardized design. The Goa'uld translation loosely can be thought to mean 'Improved', and they've replaced the volume of many smaller ship to ship guns in favor of a fewer number of larger more powerful ones."

There was some ruffling of papers, "Major," Colonel Kennedy was running fingers down a print out looking through something, "Isn't Cronus doing the same thing. What you're describing seems to be Dreadnoughts in the naval sense of ship evolution."

"No sir, well in a sense, yes sir. Cronus, presumably as a war time expediency has reintroduced a modernized Chel'tak. A Goa'uld ship that preceded the Ha'tak, and is a, for lack of a better term, Siege Ship, or gun platform. His 'new' Chel'tak aren't as well protected as Ha'tak, but they do mount heavier than standard guns on them. The only reason Apophis hasn't started fielding a new battleship design is most likely because we succeeded in sabotaging his prototype using the Atanik devices supplied by the Tok'ra." Jack scowled.

"Is it possible that that ship was something that Apophis stole from Sokar? We know that, we have observed Sokar constructed Ha'tak in Apophis's fleet have cloaking devices, or at least some of them do, and all observed have superior hyperdrive and weapons technology."

"Its possible," Carter replied, "But I was also going to say is that Apophis also seems to be, according to Tok'ra reports a new super dreadnought to serve as his flagship. It may even be operational already. Certainly they believe that this new flagship is nearing completion. There are reported similarities though its possible that's parallel development, and Apophis's flagship is project to be much larger. If both are originally Sokar designs, it would make sense according to what Teal'c has said."

"The System Lord Ptah has never particularly, ah, 'gotten on well'," Teal'c rumbled appropriating a 'Tauri idiom' he had picked up somewhere, "with his brother Apophis, and Apophis has never particularly had the patience for the process of research even though he has been willing to pursue such things from time to time. Given his imprisonment by Sokar, I doubt Apophis would have been able to pursue or finance such a project as those Major Carter has outlined. As we are not seeing such vessels in use by Heru'ur I do not believe they originated from Ptah's research, laboratories either." He declared. "I would think it quite likely Apophis has simply made off with them when he appropriated forces from Sokar after the destruction of Netu."

"And Heru'ur has been pursuing carrier doctrine," Kennedy added, "I've read about that. Its really quite interesting that he has an FtL capable shipyard. I really wish we knew more about that as well, or the fact that he was willing to build and supply warships to other goa'uld commercially." Of course that wasn't unheard of in Earth history either, and while Heru'ur was the main one, other goa'uld also were known to do it. It seemed as if Heru'ur filled the role of British shipyards supplying ships to greeks, and turks, and so on in the late 19th, and early 20th centuries.

"So these improved Ha'tak are also bigger,"

"Somewhat sir," She replied, "However we're talking about a larger ship, by mass. There aren't any of the hollow superstructure spaces as with older Ha'tak. Looking at the readings the Tok'ra have taken, they seem to have sacrificed any priority to troop carrying. This is a dedicated space supremacy platform. The Tok'ra do say that the one they've observed carried more Alkesh, perhaps double, the number of a standard goa'uld mothership." Which could be big, or could mean little. "That isn't normal."

--
Commentary: Okay so it is c. late 2000 (It should be mid to late October) when this occurs. This may undergo further revisions, being as its largely the rest of the original tidings chapter with some extraneous material and other changes cut. The next chapter will carry us through Samhain and into November and expand on both the Apophis front, and the Jaffa rebellion brewing in the no man's land along Apophis's border with his neighbors.

Imperator Pax · Sep 17, 2021

Eventide
Part 1

Stennos though lacked an abundant source of Naquadah, the mines had been played out long ago, and thus there would have been no easy way to make the jump to hyperspace faring civilization without offworld resources.
Societies developed certain ways for a reason. They were usually in response to a specific need, and as a result innovations tended to occur either in fits and starts. If not for the last years of fighting on the European continent, the Earth wouldn't have been nearly close to the position it was in... and that was probably as a result of the export of philosophical ideas from even earlier. The crumbling of the Roman empire on Earth had opened the way for an improvement in European agriculture, reforms of which Zeus had overseen on Stennos, and that were now being introduced throughout the provinces. That would mean, much as it had in western Europe more productive farms, and better diets, that would eventually mean healthier people, and the ability to better support specialist populations living in urban areas as well as the armies.

It was when you got down to it a matter of economics. A matter of supplying basic necessities to a degree that greater time could be spent making other goods. Such systems had already existed in less productive societies, but the galaxy at large was administered in a hands off inefficient, and non standardized manner, but one that could trade with planets across the galaxy so long as you could get the goods through a stargate. The goa'uld appreciated art, music, and other crafts even if they had no martial role it was something they encouraged, but pursuing labor saving had never really been a priority. Stennos was heavily populated by most goa'uld standards in no small part because Zeus had spent the five centuries since his crash landing working to build up a population to what on earth might have called a renaissance level tech base...

... the problem there, Oskyld recognized looking at the world from the bridge view display of the flagship... was that Stennos was not 15th century or 16th century Europe. There were lesser nations of humans on Stennos on previously un touched distant contintents but they weren't really equals... and given another fifty or sixty years Zeus probably would have been introducing corned gunpowder or even rifling and iron cannons simply for the novelty of advancement rather than in response to an actual threat that needed to be innovated against. That was why unlike on Earth there wasn't a similar issue.

For the goa'uld warfare was under Ra somewhat rigidly defined in terms of conduct and behavior, it kept casualties down and maintained the status quo. Staff weapons weren't really something a bronze age populace understood or could innovate against. Even if they could have that would have been discouraged by not simply the goa'uld, but Jaffa, or even human potentates. Transphase eradication rods weren't intended to to be staff weapon counters though, they were intended to fight a hostile outside force... and so the goa'uld didn't care as much. Zatnikatel were similarly a specialist weapon for a specialist task, and they were unnecessarily ornate and expensive. Zats unlike TERs were an unnecessary extravagance in a galaxy at war given they were rarely issued to any but the most senior Jaffa or very very rare specialists.

Oskyld half turned. "more suicide attacks?" His lips curled pulling back to bare long sharp canines in irritation.

"An ineffective strike my lord. The explosive used was of poor quality." Was the offered response.

That was irrelevant to the point. The first attack could have easily been dismissed as an idiot overcooking the grenade... theoretically that was possible with goa'uld grenades, in a similar manner as humans. Start the timer and then be a little slow after releasing, the problem had been attacks that hadn't involved goa'uld explosives... or rather proper goa'uld grenades.

Corned gunpowder returned to the forefront of his thinking. Ktano's rebels knew enough about chemistry to make an explosive, but not enough to make it safely or reliably or pure enough that... well it was still dangerous. Like Stennos, Hak'tyl had little in the way of reliable naquadah reserves, and Hak'tyl's population was as sparse as most under, undeveloped even goa'uld worlds... but that wasn't true for all of Forest Province. Making an attempt to steal naquadah made sense for Jaffa rebels, no doubt hoping to use the talents, the bars of naquadah to procure weapons and other supplies, as it did for anyone else hoping to raid planets known to mine the ore, or handle refining.

There were any number of potential solutions to this, but none of them really ideal. He needed the naquadah to feed to his shipyards, thus any kind of delay was undesirable, especially as most of the work was being structured, and resources allocated to make each provincial fleet domestically built... which had meant building new shipyards. Then those shipyards needed to produce Ha'tak, which of course needed naquadah.

It also just ran into the issue, of while K'tano's domain, and the retched stretch of space that formed the unclaimed or nominally independent planets situated between the space Oskyld had laid claim to and the Greek and Egyptian pantheons had the stargate to use for travel as well simply being close by relatively speaking. This was a nuisance he didn't need given that it wasn't just Cronus, and Apophis nearby. Heru'ur was relatively close, not as close as the other but enough that his frontage with Apophis was within striking distance of emerging standards for hyperdrive. Then of course there was also Cimmeria being in between his and Heru'ur's domain. Either reason was sufficient to deter him from moving ships off that front.
--
There were simply too many other things he would have preferred to have been spending his time on. He understood all the reason why someone wouldn't want to micromanage a multi planetary empire. This wasn't any thing like managing Arthas, where even at the end he'd managed a small continental expanse... a population of rough equivalent to the Roman Empire... and of course there was the reality that it hadn't been just humans. So administration wasn't completely alien. He'd been a sorcerous god king under the dark sun...

The thought prompted a ripple of magic to twist through the area. Plant growth followed, just as it had in channeling Isis blessing through a world scoured of green vegetation. It wasn't the only reason for the reaction though. The Egyptian new year tended to fall close to halloween. Though he hadn't enacted by his time on Athas, the souls he had expended to enact the great necromantic rite had already been accumulating, and that rite had fallen on Samhain. That Halloween night had been nearly a century ago now, but supplemented sorcerous god king mantle of power Athas had built... and of course the Jaffa had noticed.

Goa'uld meant children of the gods.

The investment of energy into the land, the tapping of faith had tangible effects on those who lived here, and years having passed since he had killed the golden calf and assumed his place as System Lord were readily obvious. The more skeptical might have questioned if it was really magic, but that didn't matter, the change was too hard to miss now.

Not when it was occurring right in the middle of the biggest festival Ishtar's priestesses organized in a year... and would last through the longest night of the year when the Raptors continued their celebrations that dated to Athas.
The goa'uld played at divinity, scrambling for the trinkets of the ancient race of ridiculously powerful precursors that had uplifted them for the sake of prestige, and thinking that they were supposed to rule the galaxy. Not that Oskyld had any interest in ruling the galaxy, he knew he wouldn't be here for that long, but chances were good that sooner or later the other system lords would start taking note of his burgeoning domain whether that happened while he was here or after Zeus assumed control of the whole domain dind't matter it was inevitable... and precautions needed to be taken.

He waved a hand and watched as the protective enclosures receded and projected the image of a world that had clearly suffered a much worse version of the space battle that had happened to Stennos. The Ancient repository even still digesting it told him all too well what the Eye of Balor was... of course it had only been through reviews of historical record of his cartouche of gate addresses that had yieled that find. Six control systems to regulate an Alteran vessel the size of a city, one capable of terraforming a world, or effectively rendering it to slag in short order. One of six eyes, and it wasn't hard to find the identities of the other six at the time either... Ra, Apophis, Osiris, Tiamat, Baal, and Balor. It was interesting... not the three for the Egyptian pantheon but the other half.

--
Commentary: This is the chapter that would take place between Tidings, and the events of the Episode the Tomb, during which the conflict between Heru'ur and Apophis escalates (more on that next) and of course the fact that a lot of the goa'uld don't do science even if they understand how to make the gate work, and even fix it to an extent when it does break down.

Across Many Worlds... Children of the Gods [Jumpchain]

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