Stargate: Dark Mirror

[Imperator Pax]

Stargate Dark Mirror
The Goa'uld Moloch invades modern day Earth, one where Stargate is a Franchise that has fallen by the wayside.
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Prologue
Earth
Present Day​

John Carter regained consciousness with a sharp gasp. He blinked to clear his vision. The tang of blood in his mouth lingered, the sensation paired with the ringing in his ears was transitory. The shuddering thud of impact caused him to bite his lip, as he'd gone rolling down the hill, but he was pretty sure he hadn't broken anything. Flying bits of trees shaved off at the top hadn't skewered him.

There was dirt and mud caking him from his face to flannel shirt, down to ripstop pants and hiking boots. He'd lost his hat on the down slope, but a pat down found no injuries that weren't superficial. To the point he ran the check a second time for lack of a battle buddy to check him over, this wasn't Afghanistan it was the southern Appalachia and he was alone. The disturbance around him was wrong to have been a helicopter crash...which was what he though had happened he had had a jumble of hazy disorienting thoughts coupled with the fog in his head.

The air frame or what remained of its scattered shape was an earth brown not black or dark gray of an army or navy bird. The fuselage had when it had been intact had not been as big as the old Pave Lows... maybe as long as the Black Hawk but fatter and taller than the UH 60M. It had been a fat air frame solid looking and probably not aerodynamic in the slightest. There were no obvious armaments on the remains of fusealage or the wings and no places that he could discern where they might have been. As he neared, and saw the extent of the damage though he didn't consider that definitive proof.

The aircraft was busted all to hell having flipped and rolled over as it had gone down the hill maybe three or four lengths of the airframe itself before coming to a resting stop in the mud churned by the 'landing'. It was wrecked he could tell that from looking at the rents in the hull, and the debris field scattered around it. The cloud of smoke was black and acrid with the smell of some kind of burning composite tinged with sulfur and that should have told him that walking up was a fucking stupid idea... but he walked forward into an open doorway all the same, and into the interior his back to the morning sun coming up over the countryside.

–
He rolled onto the hardwood floor with a hard thump. His arm lashed out too late and instead of catching him smashed into a nearly century old cedar dresser next to the bed. Pain radiated up from his forearm as his other hand pushed him upward his legs lifting him into as close to a ready position as he could.

Then his brain engaged turning in the first full second of sleep to awake-ness as he took in his surroundings... floor, bedside, bedroom... home. He was dirty, not filthy, and certainly disheveled but he was intact enough. Nothing was burning, there was no downed air frame... he stood up too quickly feeling the sharp shooting pain in his neck, his throat was raw, and his head hurt. He bit down on his lip but not hard enough to draw blood. The room was dark his breathing was now measured... the night was his friend.

He stood and regarded the nineteen forties vintage mirror and its reflection in the low light. He blew out a breath, and moved to the light switch, and the two steps pushed him into a disorienting swim of visions, and memories that were impossible.

He remembered the heat as the fire had gotten out of control... then pain... no, there had been a body a pilot no other crew aboard but one survivor who had extricated himself from the ruined forward section ship.

Then nothing.

The alien spacecraft had had two beings on board. Karni was a goa'uld, a tok'ra by political alignment, but a symbiote, and the symbiote had needed as host. He closed his eyes against the influx of memories of a thousand years. His extremities tingled as he swayed against the sands of time, because Karni was old for a Tok'ra. She had been spawned had grown to maturity when Jaffa were new and been an ashrak before Egeria had turned her against the tyrannical rule that dominated the galaxy...not that the Tok'ra had much to show for their efforts.

Ra had batted aside the Tok'ra's efforts driving them underground and depriving them of Egeria's leadership. Karni who had hoped to achieve a position of preeminence in the original order had instead turned from assassin to scientist spending most of the last twelve hundred years in pursuit of her efforts to make herself superior to other goa'uld. Her hosts had been limited her most recent before had been a smuggler a self taught mechanic who had belong to a league of freebooters that operated on the margins between goa'uld realms, before him a scientist from a people called the tollan.

Karni knew she had been dying, that her host, whose occupation as a smuggler had allowed her to dodge around between domains, was dying. She had blended with him long enough to pass on her memories, and a warning, and to jack him up with a bunch of nanocytes that she usually had more time to administer when she took a new host.

She had had twelve hundred years to perfect the nanotechnology and as a result ordinarily she didn't change hosts very frequently. The loss of her Tollan host had been unexpected, Karni's transition from to her last host had only been the third in that time frame. His spine felt like it was on fire, and he backpedaled back onto the bed cursing incoherently. The last time he'd been this disoriented and tripped over gear had been after getting jackass drunk what seemed like a lifetime ago. It took another minute for his breathing to settle, and the heart palpitations to fade as he stared up at the familiar ceiling. He was missing a big chunk of time, John blew out a breath and when he was confident he sat up a few seconds later. Karni... Karni had come with a warning that Earth was going to be invaded... and if that weren't bad enough news the goa'uld planning to do the invading was the System Lord Moloch.

All the System Lords were assholes, but Moloch was the kind of asshole who even other Goa'uld thought were repugnant. He wasn't sure what the warning was intended to accomplish though... he wasn't even sure if they had had days...Karni's most recent memories were lost to him lost in the haze of all of her other memories. Had she managed to get her warning off, he looked at the reflection in the mirror, and rubbed his face.

If he'd been the sort of man to show his age the nanocytes might have been more pronounced...but he had aged gracefully still being indeterminable that he had to deal with the indignity of being carded on a semi regular basis now that he was stateside permanently. He occasionally blamed it on the lack of tattoos, or that he refused to grow his beard out... but if he let the beard grow out the face staring back at him would remind him of sand. Still as he reached up and ran his hand over the trimmed face fur he felt for the scar that the beard was kept to conceal. He'd taken the straight razor in his camping pack heated water and shaved while camping so not too long could have passed between him blacking out when the spaceship had exploded and him waking up.

A scar that was now absent. One of several changes, one of several corrections Karni and her nanomachines had made. Given his age he should have been in the prime of a normal career, and while his face didn't show it there was wear and tear that he should have been feeling. The pain in his head, and his neck were typical his memories told him of the blending of host and symbiote.

He might have been worried about being potentially tied to whatever debris had been left behind but Karni had not been too far ahead of the Ha'tak even with the modifications to the Tel'tak's hyperdrive. That was a headache in itself.

The foreign knowledge was vivid.

Fully conscious now he was aware of how hungry he was, and the possibility his headache, and body fatigue possibly indicated dehydration. Sparing the face in the mirror a final critical look he shifted his weight and stood, moving first to the kitchen and to a purple gatorade that was in the fridge before beginning to move around the house and then outside to the vehicle.

Karni, in control of his body, had loaded up the back of the vehicle with what all she had been able to salvage from the crash. It was simultaneously both a lot... and also not. That ship, that tel'tak that she more crashed than landed had been her home for twelve hundred years … there was a deep seated nostalgia which tore through him even as his part of his psyche thought about the tel'tak as some kind of space 'van life' thing. The Goa'uld cargo ships were not spacious, but Karni had stolen the ship from Ra when she had still been an Ashrak in service to her original patron. It had been something that she had taken pride in... and its loss like any long time companion presence was sorely missed.

… and it hit him like a sucker punch coming in from the back.


Outwardly he didn't show it as he moved his hands over the alien equipment that had been forced into the back of his vehicle. Karni like all goa'uld hoarded treasure, loot, but she also took practical inventory. The healing device, the more general hand device a handful of other goa'uld odds and ends a staff weapon taken from one of Ra's Horus Guards Jaffa and a handful of more recent staff weapons, alien grenades, a zat nikatel a transphase eradication rod... the list went on and expanded until finally he found what he hadn't even been realizing what he was looking for in the first place.

Crystals, and with them a paper ten digit scrawls of numbers on it... coordinates which accounted for the missing time and the empty slots among the crystals. Then times. "Okay, so she body jacked me, shot me full of nanomachines," He muttered rifling through more of her former belongings, "And limped her nearly dead ass back here after planting the crystals." he checked the time stamps of when the crystals had gone into the ground... in theory they would be fine. The tunneling crystals that the tok'ra used to carve out hidey holes from orbital sensors generated oxygen as a by product of use and usually the Tokra then added air scrubbers afterwards... but more importantly they worked fast.

John shut the back of the Japanese SUV with a thunk and rubbed his neck.

None of this changed the fact that Moloch was still coming. His body had probably been crashing, and Karni had made the decision to come here... here where she had inevitably succumbed to her injuries and died. He moved to the back seat behind the driver's seat and pulled the old Kifaru koala bag out rifled around for the nalgene bottle and then tore into a cliff bar. Then he devoured second on and washed it down with more water. It helped... a little but gorging would have been counterproductive so he stopped got in the vehicle and began to backtrack his steps.

He tapped the radio as the car's electronics came online, and in the tune with the speakers, "Its hard not to take your point cause yeah okay fine." The truck went into forward and and he turned towards the road.

It was early enough in the season that he wasn't going to attract too much attention driving around in a mud splattered truck, or being mud covered himself...Karni had turned loose one of the crystals in a nearby national forest which could be easily accessed by a short hike from a trail adjacent to a stream. Another had been activated near the old family farm tucked away in the back... and that left one more... three roughly equidistance from one another but far enough apart that even ha'tak plastering the area with orbital fire wouldn't hit more than one... and given how deep they would be buried a goa'uld mothership's primary armament would have to be hitting directly overhead to compromise integrity.


At least in theory... he hoped he was never in a position where that needed to be tested. What Karni had only been able to guess at though, was how much of a head start that she had gotten away from Moloch's staging ground with. John would have felt better about that if she had detonated a nuke or something on her way out something that Moloch wouldn't have been able to ignore... but there was nothing he could do, Karni had fled here and whatever plans she had had to stop MOloch had been derailed with her death. Earth was on its own it seemed.

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Notes: This is the prologue if you want to suggest tags for me to add, I'm not fully up on the list of tags but I'll look at them later.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Chapter 1
Part 1​

It was roughly 2100 local. A little before nine o'clock but getting properly dark as he had parked the truck up on the surface and began the process of unloading his Toyota and putting things down within the alien bunker of sorts. A bunker he knew he was going to need to make livable and quickly.

Karni had spent centuries studying in a way that most goa'uld publicly decried as insulting. It didn't mean there were goa'uld of rank who didn't study technology, but most because of the culture of conspicuous opulence and leisure could not bring themselves to advertise to their peers. It was part of the reason Ptah so rarely deigned to share technology with his 'fellow' system lords, and as a result most system lords refused to stoop to lowering themselves to ask for any favors regardless of how it might have helped them in the long run.

The room was sparse, the walls were an almost sandstone esque quality to them so they certainly weren't the ugliest things to look at.. but John was fairly certain he'd get sick of them quickly enough. For the moment that didn't matter, the twenty five foot block could be spartan for right now John Carter ran a hand through his hair and eyed the reflective surface of the sleeping computer screen he had set on the large pelican case for the time being. He felt a good fifteen maybe even twenty years younger without any muscle mass loss. It was surreal.

… if anything Karni and her nanomachines had stimulated muscle grown... nothing insane but it was an alien feeling being back in his physical prime. Karni had never taken her research into Hok'tar to the extreme that Nirti had though before he had to wonder if before she had joined Egeria's ranks if that had been more a question of resources than anything else. That might have been a bit unfair given Karni had fixed him up, patched the shrapnel that had riddled him when the tel'tak had suffered a failure in its environmental systems that had turned into an oxygen explosion which would have killed him without her being wrapped around his spinal column.

There was an invasion on the way, and Karni had left him imparted to him a baleful distaste, hatred even for the goa'uld system lord coming. Moloch was reviled by his peers for good reason. He was a shit head, and Karni's memories reminded him all too powerfully of Daesh in Iraq, and Syria... that was what was coming. This place was going to be his base of operations, and in order for it to meet that function he was going to be moving a lot of equipment down here. There were things that Karni had lost when the Tel'tak had been compromised, and frankly it wasn't as if she'd had everything anyway aboard the ship.

She had loaded everything that she could get clear of the compromised cargo vessel as fast as she could and then shoved it all into his truck... now that she was dead he had the job of sorting through it all. She had been a fucking thieving magpie like most goa'uld so what she had managed to salvage from her spaceship ran a gamut of things. There had been two zats in her kit, both of which he'd put in a duffle bag normal used for pt clothes... the staff weapons both the one from a Horus Guard and a handful ones taken from dead Moloch Jaffa far more recently were piled in front of it.

Most of Karni's substantive knife collection had been lost with the ship. What had not gone up was the golden crystalline structure sitting on the ground... it was not Goa'uld he knew that much. Karni thought it was from the gate builders and that it was a power source. The humans of the first world were 'made' in the image of the ancients... just as the ancients had uplifted the goa'uld. That was why the goa'uld were the children of the gods.

The problem with the Goa'uld's mythic origins was that most of the goa'uld in power in this day and age didn't give a fuck. Moloch certainly didn't... and Cronus one of the older Goa'uld had made his bones by overthrowing his progenitor. Karni was old by Tok'ra standards, but still too young to remember when the Ancients had uplifted the goa'uld... most of that generation of Goa'uld were gone. Not that it would have done them any good. That generation of Goa'uld had been the ones to seize control of most of the galaxy using the left overs and cast offs of the Ancients, which which they had promptly started warring with one another over.

Karni had been hoping to do something. John wasn't sure what, but it didn't matter. Even if Moloch had followed the agreed upon procedure set down by the senior most system lords was to refer any advanced worlds like Earth to the council... but goa'uld policy would still be to bomb the planet from orbit. He could see nothing to do about that though the invasion was on its way... thus these bunkers.

There was a chirp from the goa'uld computer, irritatingly it repeated the notification and he tapped the alien machine next to his own toughbook. Karni's rebuilding of his body had been a rush job by a dying goa'uld and she wasn't there to direct the nanomachines settling into his spine and bone marrow. His temper flared in irritation that wasn't like him, ordinarily he had a better handle on his temper... but then again Karni wasn't here to regulate his endocrine system so with a handful of clicks wrote it off as the elevated testosterone count from her mad science bullshit.

He felt the pinch behind his eyes, the pressure of a headache come one and knew some of it was dehydration. John pulled the nalgene bottle from the koala bag and sipped, before dropping it back into it, and pushing the camo bag away... he'd drain the sixteen ounce bottle next go round. He wondered if there was areal plan for dealing with aliens... but he doubted it. The Stargate tv show had to be fiction... he was pretty sure of that, Karni's memories told him Ra was alive, and smug motherfucker was still in charge of the other goa'uld... and there were other details that, well probably not appropriate for network television. He felt another irrational flash of anger at the possibility of how whatever ghost writer had pitched show might have been able to better prpepare post cold war America for the fight to come... but hadn't. It passed after a moment.

Thinking incongruously of the way hollywood typecast foreign locales, the yellow filter for Mexico... but more than that he thought of shitty movies like the green zone which had come out after the franchise had run its course. John idled around splitting his time between shuffling cases, and gear against the wall while comparing the snake's memories with that of the fictional franchise then to the the dufflebag, pushing one of the zats to the side to look again at the slightly luminescent long gold crystaline mass. "So why the fuck did you have a ZPM?" He asked himself... Karni hadn't planned to crash land after all, she wasn't here to explain herself.

His irritation flared again the headache back after a couple more hours of moving and lifting crates, and he shoved back once more into the bag. The bag then was put up on top of a hard bodied plano case that was against the wall. It was about that time that the goa'uld computer chirped annoyingly again. The small subspace 'receiver' detecting the change in mass indicative of a hyperspace event and … the warships disgorging from faster than light. His breath caught in his throat.

One, two, three.

Moloch had to have stripped his border defenses nearly bare to bring three Ha'tak. John offered a small silent prayer that any higher power that might be listening would nudge one of the golden bull's rivals to consider launching an attack on those weakened frontiers. Goa'uld vessels were preening things, even Tel'tak and Alkesh could be gaudy depending on the inclinations of their masters. Black superstructure and gold pyramid Ha'tak were the destroyers of worlds.

Karni had expected one maybe a second, but Moloch also dreamed of plunder and spoilage... of wanton rape and pillage. There could be no concealing the massive ships, an hour maybe more before the first human telescopes and scanning systems caught sight and the sublight drives would mean that the ships would need perhaps several hours to reach orbit, perhaps longer, but Moloch was an impatient bastard. He would push the capital ships' engines to reach earth orbit, especially if there was nothing to deter him.

John turned what he knew over in his mind as he turned away from the feed. The subspace detector could not give him true visuals... that would only come from purely human built systems. The Ha'tak once they were in orbit would be visible as false stars and by then it would too late. His eyes swept over the material he had brought down already. Not enough as he wondered how thorough Moloch would be in his bombardment.

There was too much of a gap to be sure of an accurate timetable of the attack itself, but most likely crowded metropolitan areas at least some of them would be packed with people. The population of the earth … of the first world anyway would have more than its share of people who would dismiss this as a hoax, a fraud and would do so until forced to confront the thunder falling from the skies. He sat down and swiped his fingers over his toughbook and looked, and breathed counting backwards... it would take hours for hte sub light drives to put the ships into orbit so maybe by dawn here there would potentially be circulating pictures maybe not... but he supposed there was time for some last minute shopping trips.
–
John had as a matter of course started a timer shortly after the hyperspace event window had been registered. He had put himself together and begun the last minute preparations, which had become a very hurried procedure indeed.

Karni had seeded three crystals which had all done their expected job of carving a shaft underground and expanding out into rooms. He didn't have time to visit all three sites not when making time to start grabbing up fuel, filling jerry cans and the scratch list he had thrown together all too aware that he was winging it.

Alien invasion had not been a high priority, and conventional disaster preparedness had not been focused on hostile strategic fires... the fall back was last minute preparations for an imminent nuclear exchange. All the while instead of the usual audiobook, or music his radio stayed tuned waiting for news, an emergency broadcast something.

Nothing. He stacked the jerry cans of fuel that he'd put on his credit card along the wall doing a mental inventory. The Tokra were in rebellion against Ra, but that did not change the fact they were goa'uld there were thus certain creature comforts included in the crystalline home building kit as he thought of them. The crystal were thermal regulating but also with electric power could purify water, and provide bathing and other hygiene spaces. Cooking was going to be slightly trickier but shouldn't prove too much a challenge... though he had picked up a handful of carbon monoxide sensors as an added precaution. The cases of water that had been thrown on his credit card as well were less because the underground structures but for travel.

They were quick and easy to procure items though. If he had thought he would have had time he might have gone up to a local big box warehouse store like costco but he didn't, he expected the ships to begin bombing during business hours today. He didn't risk being stuck in a city with the mass signatures approaching earth. Loading up on combat gauze and chocolate bars and toilet paper sounded nice, but not so nice he wanted to roll those dice. He had resolved to make do with what he could get from smaller more local big box stores that didn't require an hour plus of driving. He sat back, his eyes adjusted for the interior lighting that provided from the recessed alien LED, the semi conducting crystalline structure was for all intents that. Like human LEDs they produced a good amount of light for a fractionally irrelevant amount of energy. It was the sort of thing he might have taken more time to marvel if not for the beeping of the goa'uld sensors.

He closed his eyes and took a breath. He'd check the timer shortly, and note it in the logbook... not that he was sure who besides himself would ever read it. He recorded the time all the same in the write in the rain notebook that he had been keeping things in. It would not leave this room so long as he was using it as his ops center. Shaking his head at the thought, John criticized the glorified nomenclature... it was just him, a TOC would have had persons to monitor communications to coordinate a team... and he had no other experts. Just him. Resting a hand on the now closed book he mulled over what to do... of really what he could do... his phone made the decision for him... the chirping of the goa'uld computer was joined by the first reports of visual detection spreading across the internet and news media.

Rather the first reports from reputable media that was.

There was no way to dismiss such as a hoax. No way for logical people to dismiss it he corrected, but he suspected that in the dying hours of the internet that people would waste time arguing about whether or not it was real. He supposed he couldn't fault some of that... the Ha'tak were eyesores and they were ships from a science fiction franchise, how could this be real?

But it was... and John knew that all too soon Moloch's fleet would be in position that the system lord could posture as he prepared to begin orbital bombardment. He half turned back towards the jerry cans, and then to the bottled water. There was a flicker, momentary though it was, of retrospection and even self doubt. He swallowed and tapped the phone. He had not warned anyone, his hand shook and he looked around.

There was the possibility that by carrying the phone here he had compromised the location...but he dismissed that as paranoia. Maybe it was maybe it wasn't, but if he started sending out warnings then the probability of someone backtracking the signal became much much more likely. His mouth became dry even as he swallowed, "there are three of these John...send the messages, leave the phone here, relocate to another. You don't need it anymore." He told himself... Moloch would open fire from orbit, cripple power generation … how effectively he was able to do that was academic. The Ha'tak would almost certainly plaster nuclear power plants from orbit, along with major metropolitan cities... but he doubted if, at least on Karni's memories, if he would take the time to thoroughly hit coal powered thermal plants. He might target hydro electric dams, or he might not... probably not...Moloch was not a navally inclined goa'uld and he given his preference for loot he would mount an invasion of the cities he didn't strike.

If rebuffed he would then bomb them. That would be the way Goa'uld of any rank or temperament would deal with sufficiently resisting strong points... it was how Apophis or Cronus would manage. If Jaffa could not take the city then regardless of how furious Moloch would be he would not abide the shame of their inability... the prime responsible if not already dead would, John supposed be tortured to death, but the fleet in orbit would devastate the cities all the same. He reached up grabbed the small book he'd been writing in, and made note of another entry and time, and tossed it into a bag... pack first what he was going to take, and leave this one with the supplies here come back for them in a few weeks maybe... but he expected it wouldn't be long before the fire started to fall from the sky.

--
Notes: I expect most chapters to be 3-5 parts roughly 6-8 k total though some will broach on the longer sections as many as perhaps 12k. In contrast to for example Weber's Out of the Dark this main story will only last a few weeks in chronological breadth. A sequel post invasion is already in the wings. I am leaning towards slotting this into a standard Tuesday update but April is shaping up to be a busy mess, and I would like to update essence of the viltrumite regularly on Fridays at least to a degree. Speaking of Weber I do want to resume updates of my out of the dark fic among still other things I haven't updated in a while but also post more stuff into the Junkyard for Battletech.