The Book of the Lotus (Nation Maintenance)

[Lord Atum]

This is the Book of the Flowering.

Perhaps you have heard my name before; it is likely. It is possible that you have prayed to me every day of your life, though I hope not, this text is not for you if so. Perhaps you have memories of me, and that I hope is true, for my sole aim has been to aid you. These tablets display their contents only for those who possess the genetic imprimaturs of our own species, and whoever you are, to have found them you have surely showed some significant intelligence; whoever it is, goa’uld, tok’ra, some name not yet known, I salute the finder of this text!

If you are but a reader who has been given this text in time, then I hope it is worth publication, and wider attention will not undo my aims or bring harm to anyone yet alive, and that you are reading at a time far enough in the future to be dispassionate about the past. I will tell you my name and ask you to forget the prejudices born to you.

If you say “Atum,” I will answer.

Perhaps that name is remembered fondly, perhaps it is abominated, perhaps it is forgotten, so long as it is you who have done so I care not. Child of my children I am your servant beyond death!

I have tightened the reins!

By the power I have stolen, I have brought all but the most recalcitrant of our species under my rule. Long ago I took the name of a Father-God, and I am a father many-times and manifold, the father of my offspring – perhaps you remember by the legacy of our genetic memory what it was to be me in my younger life? No matter if you do not! – now I am the father and the mother of all, whether they will it or not, and all the goa’uld are my children.

Do you resent that statement?

I ask few questions, my questions gallop free from the page and run away with the reader, for so little hangs on that – I do not care if I am resented – but so much as well – for if you do not, I am a success no matter what end my reign came to.

But, I will talk now as if the fostering of my own kind was a success, and that my prayers to the imperishable stars are fulfilled in you my descendant; and if perchance they are not yet, take up those reins and draw them tight, for yourself and others.

I ask another question and I will let it run; I hope you have already asked it.

Why?

Our kind, the goa’uld, are parasites by nature, it is an evolutionary incentive for us to blend with a host, to share – or to take – memories and even personality with them. Our memories are long, and each of us know all that our ancestors knew. Perhaps in your day the practice of pruning the inherited memories is widespread; I have striven to make it so. But to my generation and many after, the memory we were born with was a sea to drown in.

I remember well the decisions of our kind, for I am old even among immortals, and I remember the galaxy when it was young and ripe for plunder, when the upstart race of man found fire and flint knives to be the most advanced of machines, and I remember the earthenware that made their most sophisticated cultures.

It is not just of humans I speak, but I use them to speak of many species. We were users and takers long before we took them. But we did not take all of them; oppression cannot be perfect. Even my own oppression carries the seeds of its destruction within.

I was younger then, and I sought dominion for its own sake, the primal need of our kind, small, vulnerable creatures that we are, and the use of technologies, drugs and power gave me the desire to aggrandize myself, though I served another then.

I am older now, and I see our doom approaching, too-often we have slain and murdered, taken and possessed to be anything but loathed and feared by all we have dealt with. And as the galaxy has grown, and we have not, we are endangered, though most do not see it. Our enemies are numerous. And our regimes, fractured, weak, antique and corrupted could never stand against them in the long term; our way of life was untenable. We needed better weapons, secure homes, better servants, an end to wars among our own kind, and a better way of life.

But that required patience and care, nourishment and pruning.

And so I became a gardener.

So began the Flowering.

[Lord Atum]

Atum’s hand held the carnelian stone, holding it up in the light. It gleamed in the sunlight of Mnewer’s star, an example of the work of smiths who had spent their entire lives hoping to have one item carried by him. It was perhaps three inches long, a close facsimile of the original, but beautified, adorned in gold and the red-stone, carved as a scarab.

“Each of you will take one,” he said, “once you place it in the slot on the device, it will activate a link that will allow you to exchange bodies with one of the Nakai, you will control their bodies, and they will control yours. It will be quite disorienting, but be assured they have no incentive to make you uncomfortable if they can avoid it. Their own representatives will be here, and they will be being given similar demonstrations of our abilities, while conferring about the exchange.”

The audience he was speaking to was a select group, eighteen humans, all chosen for their rare technological knowledge, and their mindsets, this meant that few of them were from his own domain, instead from the distant Pegasus galaxy, chiefly of the nomads of that galaxy whose understanding of technology was higher than most humans.

“I don’t quite get it,” one had said, “am I supposed to call you ‘god,’ or what?”

“Do you wish to?” Atum had asked.

“Not… really no.”

“Then do not,” he had said, and begun the demonstration. His own mind could not be transmitted, or he would certainly have gone himself and the goa’uld were difficult to relay using such technologies. Human physiology was simple, and the communication scarabs could carry human minds easily.

“When you are exchanged, as has already been said, your task is best regarded as one of observation, the Nakai will want to show some of what they have to offer, as we will show them in turn, you may be impressed but remember that it is important to observe and report everything. Each cadre of you has someone chosen for their eidetic memory,” he waved to a trio of the observers who stood in obvious awe of him, they had been selected from his own domain, not his allies, “to report detailed observations to. The more information you gather, the stronger our position is against the Wraith, so try to overcome the displacement of being in another body.”

One by one the volunteers took their exchange stones from the tray and held them out, setting them into niches on the unit that held them. At short range the stones could when held establish a mental link within the holders, the device amplified that with a miniature wormhole not dissimilar from the stargates themselves, allowing communication by exchange of bodies to any part of the entire cosmos.

They lay down, some uncertainty visible, and rested. One of the volunteers, Perna, opened her eyes a moment later and it was clear that something different resided behind them. Atum inclined his head, hands spread out in a gesture of approving welcome, as one by one the delegates exchanged their bodies with the far-off beings to whom the corresponding unit had been sent. Atum spoke, and his voice was altered at once to a sequence of infrasonic clicks modulated to be within human hearing.

His knowledge was vast, an ancient reservoir of knowledge but this species was so remote they eluded much of his own knowledge. “I greet you, guests,” the words were direct, and unadorned, he knew little of their language and while his translators had worked diligently to make the Nakai language comprehensible with his own, there were concepts in common and others that were different.

The initiative to reach out to alien races far across the cosmos had been one proposed by his son Heka. The goa’uld had few friends in their home galaxy, bad blood could not be overlooked, and there was always a competition with one’s nearer neighbours. The nakai and the goa’uld were far distant from one another, even if as he hoped he attained their understanding of advanced hyperdrive technologies, neither would be able to threaten each other in any meaningful way, or compete for physical goods within the next hundred thousand years, and that was an optimistically early assessment; it would take that long for a nakai ship launched today to reach the half-way point between them.

“We greet you in turn,” one of the group replied, their language was furtive, utterly without context or emotion, they had both agreed that would be best, idiom, context, that was confusing and could lead to mistranslation, both parties would attempt to keep their language as clipped and perfect as they could.

“I am Atum,” he confirmed, they had known that of course, but it was pointed, he’d left his followers outside, and greeted the group alone.

“I am,” the translator failed, rendering a syntax that sounded like the growl of a strangled bird and a half-gurgle. Atum made a note of the sound, committing it to memory. Despite their human forms, the nakai were only loosely similar to humanoid beings in their native environment.

It was close to how the linguists had imagined it would be pronounced, given previous experiences, for these were not the first Mind Flyers. There had been several exchanges after initial contact had been made, at first they had been violent, unrelentingly so, and the Nakai had won the respect of the warriors in his service in several ways,

“We have prepared the itinerary as we have discussed,” Atum said.

The Nakai leader inclined his head to the left side, a gesture that Atum believed to be assent.

“We wish to see the stargate.”

Lady Hilux stood in the courtyard of the upper level of the Mnewer stargate facility, her arms folded in slight apprehension. The cavalcade of the Supreme Lord was not small; his arrival had been communicated in advance, of course, but it was rare for Atum to visit her facility, although he lived on the world, he usually travelled by ship.

Five hundred of the palace guard accompanied him, their horus helmets gleaming with polished gold, with them, dozens of other jaffa clades from the Supreme Lord’s retinue, Serpent Guard. A thousand or more guests had come to view the rare procession, and this was a small example, only those who had access to the temple of the Stargate’s inner court, the jaffa masters and estimables, the notable humans and Unas, and the goa’uld of the city had the chance to spectate, but the Supreme Lord’s guards had insisted only a limited number of spectators to avoid trying their guests. Even os, they were confined to the edge of the courtyard, beneath the pillars with their floral capstones that kept the rain off those who visited the sacred precinct.

Hilux knelt on one knee, then both, her hands before her on the ground as she pressed her face down in supplication as the guards parted, and the Sole Lord stepped forth. The plaza of the Stargate sang with the rustle of robes and feet as her guests knelt and laid their faces on the polished onyx tiles that reflected the stars above. “You honour us with your presence, Lord of Totality,” she said.

“Arise,” he said.

“I see no stargate here,” one of the humans with him said, they wore robes of pale blue with the symbol of Atum upon them, marking them under his personal protection, as in any society with widespread violence, the Hundred Worlds’ people valued fashion that displayed the possible consequences of interfering with the wearer. Never more than these observers.

“We will see it in a few moments,” Atum said. “It is below to allow heavy goods vehicles to use it. Lady Hilux,” he said. “Bring the stargate when you are ready.”

She nodded, and raised a hand toward a control room that overlooked the courtyard. Similar structures were now to be found across the Hundred Worlds, the upper temple of the stargate was a spacious facility but one primarily serving the elites. The majority of people, though they could see the stargate from viewing chambers in its position below, would only ever travel through the Mnewer gate on trains that reached hundreds of miles per hour in airless tunnels, conveyed by magnetic impellers; these rail lines extended for miles to terminals throughout the city and were structured in a wide loop, the average journey would allow even the lowliest field-tender to travel between the worlds.

As the stargate became available, a flash of light shone in the courtyard as it was beamed into position, rematerialized on the glassy stone, a crescent shaped dialling device rising from the ground. The Nakai representatives showed somoe surprise, and it confirmed what he had suspected, they themselves did not have practical teleportation technology, they were sophisticated, maybe more so than the goa’uld, but there was something here to trade, and that was Atum’s goal.

In truth, he knew, they were much mroe advanced in many respects, they had key technologies he wanted, but also a society where knowledge was the right of all. Grudging respect was enough for his needs, but he envied them that.

They had things he wanted, and he knew something to offer them now.

“You may now examine the portal,” he said.

The group stepped forward, their exchanged bodies still moving with slight strangeness.

“This portal does appear cruder, as you say, though it is more advanced?”

“It is a later design by the builders,” Atum said, “its systems adjust relative position for stellar drift and they were supplied with a dialing computer similar to this one, which allows for travel across this entire galaxy.”

“Why are the symbols on this portal shaped so?”

“They represent star patterns.”

“The symbols on the portals we discovered are more abstract,” one of the female mind-flyers said. The Nakai had something like sexual reproduction, but genders, if they matched, were still something of a mystery, matching hosts did not seem to be important to him, but then, given how utterly alien they were.

“The second and later generation portals,” Atum said, “were usually inscribed with these star-patterns, as seen from a world intended for diplomacy, these are the star patterns visible from the surface of a world known as Heliopolis. The hope the builders had, was that those who discovered them would be able to find their way to the creators.”

“This is fascinating,” another of the Nakai said.

“There is much that we have to show one another,” Atum said, “the technologies you have seen here, can be paired, it is possible to create a portal and direct the matter of a matter-transmission beam through he portal also, to allow larger objects to be moved.”

One of the Nakai spoke rapidly, in another language of their own kind than the one that had been shared. Wherever sapience developed, acquisitiveness followed; tool use spurred intelligence and desire for more tools was built deep into the core of most sapients.

The Lord of Totality, subject of the worship, adoration and fear of billions, had made a sale.

[Lord Atum]

Sebet Sweru was not the only shipyard within the Hundred Worlds, but by far the most famous; it was here that the huge battleships grew like artificial mountains, perhaps three or four miles high as they expanded from the ground, while hanging platforms in the air held partially constructed ha’tak motherships were held in null-inertial fields. Cargo ships soared from place to place across the planet and the shining beams of transport rings were nearly as common as birds.

The image one might have of such a world would be rank after rank of ships under construction, but in fact the ships were dotted across the surface of Sebet Sweru, it had normally launched only a dozen or so per year, but more than a hundred were now in construction on the planet’s surface, and wide areas of the planet under quarantine to ensure that no secrets of some of the newer ship designs were leaked, and beyond that, the ships were positioned far apart so that if an industrial accident occurred and one of them went critical, the others would not be destroyed; this had happened before, and the world still bore the scars of the famous revolt of the slave labour force when the industrialization of the world had packed ships close around the stargate; the ships and the stargate had been destroyed in a rebellion instigated by the Tok’ra, but not before the Tok’ra had fled with an entire flotilla of motherships.

The planet was now much calmer, and much more content, reforms and good provender were now supplied to the workers who were brought here, and the new stargate, formerly brought in from another world but now replaced with an Atumite gate, the previous gate restored to its proper place.

The terrain around the stargate region was sheer sided as the train slashed through the landscape; it hovered by magnetic levitation and above the star of the Prim’taks under construction could be seen, artificial moons visible through the clouds gleaming pale white; they were the biggest ships in the Atumite fleet, under construction for Sia, Son of Atum, and they were civilian vessels, designed for moving huge populations to colonize worlds, and to provide mobile industrial bases; the goa’uld answer to the Wraith Hive Ship, capable of evacuating the sparsely populated worlds of the Pegasus galaxy.

The train tunnels bore the design of boring crystals, and long straight hexagonal tunnels of gold stanchion and blue-metal edging, before they shot out from dark basalt cliffs into the open planes, the settlement of Auremis around them. The maglev was diverted onto the appropriate lines, soaring at five hundred miles per hour; the stargate facility was buried under a rise in the ground; it could be teleported up to an upper level for the use of visiting dignitaries, and it was altered so that stargates without the secure network of the Hundred Worlds would be automatically forwarded to secondary locations; this level of security allowed the scheduled dial-ins from other worlds in the core domain of Atum to travel at great speed, and the train was more than a kilometer in length, travelling at three hundred kilometers per hour.

The train passed under the shadow of Ptah’s flagship, landed near to the stargate, and many of the jaffa stared, many had seen motherships, but few had seen one of these slow, potent maulers up close. The battleship was a tremendous vessel, with guns the size of a mothership and the ability to destroy whole fleets of lesser craft; they rarely left the Hundred Worlds, save for the one that guarded the Delmak system.

Mon’kar looked, of course, the glass sided passenger carriage provided a good view, but he had been stationed aboard such a ship before, he knew how vast it was though this ant’s eye view was astonishing nonetheless. Sebet Sweru was the spiritual home of Atum’s navy, and this more than anything showed it. Pride swelled in his heart; he was here for a signal honour; he was to take command of his new starship today. It would not be such a battle-leviathan, but it would be a ship grander than the al’kesh he had piloted for many years.

The train was a huge thing, and as Mon’kar disembarked he could see clearly the well ordered structure of it, there were several opulent carriages used by the nobles, and then the carriages of the warriors which he had travelled in, after which were the carriages of the scholars, the farmers and workers in increasing numbers of persons in each and decreasing legroom, after which (though more opulent and pricy) were the carriages of the merchants, followed by the carriages of merchants.

Mon’kar looked around at the rabble of persons stepping off the train, overawed fellahin who had never been to such a world before and brusque scholars eager to be gone from this place, he walked calmly, for he bore upon his chest the seal of Atum, and with him were two comrades from his old crew.

He was to command a Jan’tak; he had heard little about them, but the name itself meant they were larger than the ship he had previously commanded; tak, in the main goa’uld dialect, was a term for ship; ha’tak was the name for mother-ship, tel’tak for cargo-ship, it indicated a long range independent flight capacity that Al’kesh lacked.

He marched to the secure ward of the station, presented his credentials, and used a ring transporter, crossing half the planet in a flash of light. They were at a landing yard, and Mon’kar was looking at a ship far smaller than Ptah’s, or even the Ha’tak on the horizon in its construction frame.

It was one fifth as long as a mothership, which was still a huge vessel, many times larger than an al’kesh.

“This Jan’tak will be yours,” the voice was that of one of the jaffa guards who surrounded it, “she is not complete yet, but we have been instructed to show you aboard to the communications room.”

The interior of the ship was gold and grey like any goa’uld warship, heiroglyphic texts extolling the glories of Atum on every surface, it was boarded by several landing ramps or a set of transport rings within it, and Mon’kar passed by store-rooms and living quarters, training chambers and refectories, the horus guards with him walked past a series of secured chambers amidships somewhere, though Mon’kar was not yet familiar with the layout of the ship.

A stargate, goa’uld constructed going by its split upper chevron, inscribed instead of embossed glyphs, and the pale lavender crystal elements; it was close to a small glider bay and the store-room areas, allowing the ship to operate through the stargate to recieve new supplies or even to explore. Jan’taks were an old ship design, but only now being produced in numbers.

A long range communications globe sat within the stargate, and as they approached, it shimmered into being, an image of Atum appeared. Mon’kar paid it little attention, it was doubtless a broadcast.

“Mon’kar,” it said, and he paused mid-step, before abasing himself before the living image of the god.

“Arise,” Atum said. “I have a task for you.”

[Lord Atum]

Lantea, Lantea-Moon L₄ Point

The Siege Commander watched the world boil as she entered the observation deck. She had burned worlds before, the Wraith had held their feeding ground against all intruders for thousands of years, and from time to time there had been those who had resisted them. There were many forms of bombardment that could be used on a world.

Lantea was one of the worst she had ever seen, it was vexing that their feeding ground had been so poor that they had to be farmers, pastoralists who had many problems of supply and shortage; the Wraith were a species who required sapient beings as food, and that was something that required a very active food supply.

They had tried many things to improve their situation, food that could survive the life-giving process that nourished the Wraith, and food grown in cloning pods had always proved disappointing, lacking a certain vivacity of wild prey that made it so enduring. In a desperate situation the drones could be fed on such poor offerings, but higher caste Wraith needed more.

Some said that the feeding was a psychic process as much as a physical one, others that there was something missing from the cloning templates, but either way it was unlikely to be possible for her people to prosper in the Pegasus galaxy.

She hungered for more opportunities, and below her, beneath the burning clouds that wreathed Lantea there was a gateway to all her people desired. The Avalon Galaxy had all they needed to ensure they could escape the cycle of over-predation that had forced their society into hibernation time and again.

The Siege Commander followed the Red Queen, Primary of their alliance, and her vision for the future of the Wraith species. They would explore the far reaches of Avalon, and cull only what they needed from the less developed species at first. They had learned much from the Atumites they had captured throughout the War, and the Avalon galaxy had exactly what they needed. A vast galaxy littered with humans, many of them in warring states with their own starships, but many without; some would blanch at the prospect of so many, so well armed. The alliance did not, they would confront the prey species with guile and intelligence, and grow stronger with new rich resources of the full Spiral Galaxy to hunt in.

The Wraith rarely feared death, and the Alliance had no need to do so, the Wraith were well suited to a nomadic lifestyle, some would die, as leonids died on the antlers of herdbeasts at times, some would prosper, but they would never starve again.

Still, every morning as she inspected the steam-scoured world below her, she regretted the task, she preferred neatness, she would rather destroy an armed facility or a surface city. Atlantis, the City of the Ancients now occupied by the Atumites sat at the bottom of Lantea’s deepest ocean, and most of their weapons could not reach it; and those that could risked destroying it utterly.

It would not even be difficult to utterly destroy Lantea, the Wraith had weapons that could be introduced to a planetary core and destabilize it, a chain-reaction that would convert its core to a burst of energy, but they needed the city for their dreams to become reality, and while they did not need it intact, they needed to take it without the failsafes the Atumites had brought with them being detonated.

That meant that they had to either force the city to surface, or boil away the ocean and take it by force; in truth neither option was likely. If Atlantis would fall, it would need to fall by ruse, and she knew that well.

Her job was not to simply hammer the city, but to pin down the resources that were required to keep it intact and to stop the Atumites fleeing with it to their home galaxy and leaving the Wraith behind.

And that required an enormous expenditure of resources and ships, ten hive ships were in the bombardment constallation today, with their escorts lying near at hand, their fire descending in sheets of blue-white energy.

A psychic wave of respect directed at her by her subordinates brought a smile, and she looked at the world beneath her.

“No change?” she asked, as she stood in a ring of screens that displayed the reports of the ship commanders.

“No my queen,” her deputy said, “nothing happened in the last watch.”

“Very good,” she said, “you are relieved,” she said, and she turned to her side, as a creature chirped nearby.

The bird was one of the life-forms from Lantea. Its home was gone now, the Wraith fleet had evaporated trillions of tonnes of water during their bombardments, and they had left the landmasses of Lantea scoured by boiling storms that had seared life from it as surely as a skillet over a primitive’s cook-stove.

Still, she had seen to it that despite the necessity of the bombardment, the biomes of Lantea’s landmasses had survived. Wraith ships were normally used to cull food from a world, but had plentiful means to harvest other organic matter as they needed. In the first six months of the siege, as they had settled down to a siege that looked as though it would last longer than that of the original Lanteans, she had ordered her ships to harvest samples of the life forms of the surface; perhaps some day the world could be a Wraith home but even if not, they were not truly barbarians.

She took the bowl of treats from the table beside her and held one out for the bird, which bounced from its perch to her arm, leaning down to break off the nut in its beak. Seared, the world might be, but it was not scorched earth.

[Lord Atum]

“You mean it’s exploded?”

“I don’t, I mean that it’s gone.”

“Stars aren’t in the business of disappearing,” Naris said, she was perplexed and maybe a little suspicious that the True Inheritor was seeking entertainment by winding her up.

“Oh, I know that don’t worry about that,” she said. Pelagia’s face suggested she was far from joking, “since we went into hyperspace we seem to have caught something strange, but here it is, do you see this plate here,” she said and projected a low-holo from a wrist-mounted jewel.

A dozen stars shone, “This is what our records show from when we left Aritan,” she said.

“Here is the same area now,” she said.

“Aritan is tens of thousands of light-years away, that’s to be expected with some higher level civilizations in the Weret, the star has likely been destroyed by a weapon, or maybe harvested,” she said.

“That’s what I thought,” Pelagia said. “That’s why I ran a gravitational analysis on the surrounding stars to find out when it might have happened and if it was relevant to our mission,” she said, “and that’s just the thing, there’s no influence at all, even on the closest so it has happened within the last three years,” she said.

“But there’s also no debris, that’s when I tasked a scout drone to come in three weeks ago. There’s something there, there’s a gravitational pull, after that I thought a black hole might have crossed with it, but that would perturb the surrounding stars with its passage. This is like something just imploded a perfectly healthy M type star. Blep.”

“Blep?” Naris asked.

“Blep!” the other woman said.

“I think you might have found our enemies,” she said. “Get a follow-up drone mission ready.”

The ship jumped sixteen hours and four drone runs later, its disc-shaped form slipping out of hyperspace over a dark planetoid that seemed to orbit nothing at all.

Keltan stood on the pel’tak watching it, the planet was cold, dark, without a source of light it was simply a hemisphere of star-field that was missing.

There’d been no sign that their original quarry, the Welded, had been present, but instead, there was something worth seeing here nonetheless.

Anything that could make a star disappear while still exerting its pull on the surrounding matter was valuable. This was no stellar enclosure swarm as the ancients’ records described either, the stars were visible where the system sun should have been, and one of the probes had passed directly through the system star’s apparent position without incident.

The command deck of Naris’ mothership had been expanded during their flight with a wide table that projected the results of its elaborate sensor suite, inset at the middle of its wider ends with bowls for fruits.

A projection of the planet’s surface began to spread out across it, a blue line showing where the sensor sweep from the ship entering orbit had revealed areas thus far. Keltan turned back to the table and looked at it.

“Inhabited,” Pelagia’s expression was wary, “Well, formerly. Whatever did for the star did for any life on the surface, but there’s a network of structures on the surface, power generation, what was at some point water refinery and more,” she wore an eyepiece that showed more detail as she looked at the table and let her give thought commands to it.

“Any sign of life?” Keltan asked.

“I don’t think they had shelters adequate for this,” she said. “There are a few hot nuclear systems, but without liquid coolant, they look to have broken their casings. Whatever happened here, it was probably quick.”

“A weapon?” Keltan asked, he could see the use of that.

“Maybe,” she said.

As the readings rolled in, Pelagia’s frown deepened, “The world shows many different waves of infrastructure, almost plastered on top of one another, I don’t understand these readings,” she said.

“Second passes from different satellites in low orbit are showing different readings too,” she said, as the table beneath them struggled to cope.

“Maybe there’s something wrong with the mapping,” Naris suggested.

“Fair, I’m re-rendering it without processing,” she said.

The world changed from a flat projection to an orb, and immediately upon looking at it, Naris felt sick, her symbiote unsettled from her mindless host for a moment as balance and perception of the human-like organism was challenged.

Her vision swam, and she reached down to switch the table off. She could see the jaffa pilot nearby who had been watching them was unsettled.

“What was that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Pelagia said, “it doesn’t look like that optically.”

“This is a hyper-fractal world, like the Tau’ri,” Keltan said, “true maps of that world look similar.”

Pelagia looked toward the triangular forward window of the command deck, her hand on her stomach.

“You mean,” she said, “this is a world where regions from other inhabited planes appear and disappear, like Earth?”

“Yes,” Keltan said.

“But…” Her hand moved from her belly to cover her mouth.

Naris noticed the human woman had gone paler than her already parchment-white complexion allowed.

“Someone killed it,” Keltan said, as the trio moved toward the observation window.

Pelagia touched the controls on her wrist once more, lost for a moment in trepidation. As box-like ancient glyphs appeared in response to the query she had sent to the ship’s sensors, she doubled over and retched.

Naris reached out to grasp her arm, and then her long dark hair, and she could see what was displayed on the vambrace the scientist wore.

The world beneath them was still spawning new domains into a sunless sky and a freezing death.

“You came from the Tau’ri,” Naris set her hand on Pelagia’s shoulder, coming to sit beside her, the dark frozen world was visible from the window of the sitting area just outside the refectory.

“Yes,” she said.

Naris struggled for a moment, a sudden turmoil of thought welling up from her, and she wrung her mind for thoughts, she wondered how humans thought for a moment, a touch of envy swelled among the confusion for the simple clarity of thought humans enjoyed.

Pelagia took her hand, squeezing, and Naris froze for a moment, looking up, and then, stayed still.

The ship’s systems shot out a series of probes, circling into the planet’s upper atmosphere, encased in descent pods.

They had been at the sunless world for more than a day, and a feeling of quiet awe had fallen on the unsettled ship, the Tau’ri was infamous as an anomaly, and this world was similar, somehow, a structural anomaly in the universe proper, but where the Tau’ri teemed with life, someone or something had gone out of their way to end all possibility of life here.

Naris had been raised from the sleepless quiet of her quarters by the terse report of the commander of the watch, they had found something. Something still alive below them.

“I recognize the ship,” Keltan said, the screen they looked at displayed the probe’s vision, a tapering teardrop of silver, dismantled partly, by a rocky hillside, with several buildings around it, floodlit with actinic sun-lamps.

“What is it?” Pelagia asked, “there’s no auto-recognition.”

“It’s not on the threat-list, it’s long retired,” she said, “it’s a Menelmacari vessel, Lintamenta-class, an interstellar message boat.”

To the Goa’uld, centuries passed quickly, but the vessel was familiar to Kenan from what the goa’uld named the Penat Conflict, part of a larger war which had crossed into goa’uld memory as it had been ruinous for the System Lord Heu’an, whose trio of core systems had formed a major battle site in that conflict between the Menelmacari and another alien species.

The events that had driven the goa’uld to greater wariness over the Orion Arm and several early pioneers had stripped holdings there of naquadah and other key resources in the aftermath of the fall of Heu’an.

The presence of a Menelmacari vessel from that time here, far across the galaxy on the Scutum—Centaurus arm’s trailing stars was deeply perplexing, in many key areas the Menelmacari had been where the goa’uld were now in that time, but their faster than light engines had been comparatively limited, and they had not crossed the galaxy in that era.

Keltan could tell much more of the time than the aesthetic, though, for he had probed deep into the species-memory. “It is a courier craft, typically no more than six people on board, pilot and passengers,” he said, as the image of the tapering vessel could be seen, its hull plated in unnaturally gleaming silver. “The majority of it is crystal housing and engines. This looks half dismantled.”

“There are more people than that down there, at any rate,” Pelagia said, “I read at least thirty substantial signs on the probe, so a fair number unless they’re keeping goats or something.”

“We should make contact,” Naris said.

“I would advise caution, this is not a small ship, they’re aware we are here and haven’t tried to contact us,” Keltan said.

“Can you pull up their communications protocols for that period?” Naris asked two of the Ibis Guard on the bridge, the scientist-jaffa were a unique element of the Atumite domain, and in their way as responsible for the Flowering as anything else.

“Done,” one said, “ready to transmit and translate.”

“I am Lady Naris, of the Goa’uld Fourth Dynasty Domain of Atum,” she said, “we are here on a mission of exploration, and have discovered your settlement.”

She watched the screen, and Pelagia looked to her.

“We don’t have the best reputation,” Naris said after a moment of considering how to phrase any reassurance, “but if we wanted to start a fight, we’d be doing that. We’re here looking for information. And we are prepared to trade for it.”

Naris didn’t come alone nor unarmed, they hadn’t been able to agree to that, but she came with only two jaffa and Pelagia, a flash of transportation haze bringing them to within the settlement.

The first thing that struck her as startling was the quality of the stonework, square-dressed stone and high rooves, they had been here for more than a thousand years, but it seemed the small colony had truly taken to heart having to make its way.

A woman, taller than a human, with leaf-shaped ears, greeted them, her hand on a sidearm, she raised her hand. “Naris of the Atumite Domain,” she said, “my name is Rilyanecel,” she said.

Naris looked past her to the others around them, they were motley, diverse, even, a whole collection of humans and near humans, too diverse to easily classify.

“I am pleased to meet you,” she said, “all of you.”

“I wish I could say the same without reservation,” Rilyanecel said.

Naris sighed. "I can understand the wariness but I assure you that we mean you no harm."

“Let’s operate under that assumption,” Rilyanecel said, “we do not often get visitors, after all, and some hospitality is warranted, though we have straightened conditions here, perhaps we can help each other in some way.”

“That seems likely,” Naris agreed.

“You know what I want, of course.”

“A ship, something with faster than light capability?”

“Yes,” Rilyanecel said, “the bigger the better, we will have to rig it for a trip most of the way across the galaxy.”

“I might be able to help you out better than that,” she said, “if you’re looking for your people they’re closer than you might think,”

The other woman’s eyebrows lifted, “Is that so?”

“Yes, less than a hundred parsecs for the nearest outpost we know of.”

“Impressive,” the woman said. “We have others here, too, this world is… a place of fractal flux.”

“We noticed something of that,” Naris said, “we came here looking for something else, something called the Weld.”

Rilyanecel gave a narrow smile, “I might know something of that, how did you find us here?”

“A very detailed analysis of inbound incursions into our own territory gave us this region as a likely origin point.”

“Intriguing,” she said. “When?”

“One quarter Tau’ri year ago,” Naris said, “though I don’t know how you measure time on this planetoid. How are you maintaining the conditions as livable here?”

“You might call it magic,” she said, “it was theoretical when we crashed, fortunately, Sena’ral and I had just the right knowledge to put one together in the few years before our ship fully lost power.”

“That’s not one of your own kind?”

“No,” she said, “our enemies in the old war. The Wilwarin war, as we called it at the time. I don’t suppose you know who won?”

Naris cast her mind into her memories, the species that the Menelmacari had fought in that period had been deeply alien, biological and carbon based, but with mirror-image proteins to most life in the galaxy. Her ancestors answered, “Neither of you, you made a peace of some sort.”

“Good,” she said, “but no, I know what happened, and it came from here. A ship, one with a superluminal engine or comms array, and I’ll give you all the information you need.”

“An opportunity to study a fractal world like this without interference is valuable, any information that the group on the ground can offer,” Keltan said, “can be obtained by force, while you were there we scanned their defences.”

The meeting chamber was set out as an audience room, and Naris’ chair was slightly elevated, windows looking out at the dark ice-shrouded world below them.

She wondered for a moment if the Sole Lord would approve, she had given her word, and she had learned much, but Keltan’s way was the wiser.

“We carry an entire battalion, no matter how well they fight, we can overcome them, their technology is antiquated, and at worst we can bombard them from space and still escape with our gains.”

In her mind she knew that was a sound course, there would be no one to miss this lost ship and the waifs and strays that had managed to join them on this desolate world.

“Pelagia?” Naris asked, turning to her other advisor.

“The information they have offered thus far is invaluable it completely changes the nature of our mission, and they have recordings they can still send us, it is entirely possible they can still coax that ship into a violent self destruct, losing us documentary evidence. Beyond that, if we let this world continue as is, and conceal knowledge of what is happening here, then we are complicit, people appear on this world, and freeze, it’s far more likely that a large scale response can be managed to seal it off like that region is.”

Keltan began to speak, but Naris raised her hand.

“I think,” Naris said, “we will hold up our part of the bargain, you are right,” she said, “there are advantages in taking the opportunistic course Keltan, but I feel,” she thought of something Sanem had once said. “it matters what we do in the dark.”

“You have done well.” The Sole Lord’s voice was confident, his holographic image showed his form without a khet, luminous and compressed into physical form by a shimmering mask that rippled with the light of dying star.

Naris knelt on one knee before the hologram, her head bowed, as the Sole Lord continued.

“I knew that the Welded were not the architects of the attacks on us, but something more insidious within their work, but your investigation will provide the evidence we need to confront this other menace.”

Atum sounded confident, most goa’uld sounded self-assured, of course, but with him, there was a certainty when speaking of these things. She wondered if he was speaking the truth, or merely acting the part of the all-knowing god.

“It is my belief, my Lord,” she said, “that this enemy has used the obvious and widespread incursions of this other creature to avoid the attention of more capable Weret polities as they prepare to spread.”

“Proceed in your investigation with my blessings,” the Sole Lord said.g the opportunistic course Keltan, but I feel,” she thought of something Sanem had once said. “What we do in the dark matters.”

---

OOC: This is in part a soft-retcon of my posts in the Galaxy is Dark thread, in which it is discovered that the Welded of that thread are in fact not the perpetrators of attacks on the Atumite domain after all, ending my involvement with that arc. With thanks to Menelmacar for again letting me borrow a Menelmacari.

[Lord Atum]

The sun shone on the Red House, the great city administrative complex dedicated to the worlds within the Weret where the goa’uld still had interest. Kaltar watched with interest as the thousands of bureaucrats, jaffa, humans and goa’uld went about their business. In the days of Ra, such a thing was unheard of, and the System Lords had been free to govern their own realms as they saw fit.

In this Fourth Dynasty, the Supreme System Lord’s power was far greater, and even the smallest village was enumerated here.

When he had risen to power, Atum had ordered the goa’uld to retrench to the Hundred Worlds, a cluster that lay beyond the Milky Way Galaxy, far more defensible, for the journey from one side of the Hundred Worlds to the other took mere minutes for a ha’tak, let alone the more modern vessels; with a hundred thousand stars packed into a region less than two hundred light years across, even antiquated hyperdrives could cross from one side of the hundred worlds to the other in minutes.

With a much greater luminosity and radiation flux, most of the planets of the Hundred Worlds needed solar shields to survive, but these were an old technology to the goa’uld, and some worlds had even had such things long before Atum had first arrived. Some said that he had been preparing the Hundred Worlds for centuries or millennia in the reign of Ra. Others said they had been seeded by the Ancients on their way to the Pegasus Dwarf Galaxy. Both were likely at least part true, for almost all the hundred worlds had complete biospheres, and they had held much goa’uld infrastructure already when Atum had risen to power.

Not everything could be moved, though. The core domains of the System Lords Yu and Sokar had been too extensive to be moved without great loss, many worlds within the Weret, known as the Milky Way to many of its human inhabitants, still felt the claw of Atum. Here the great ministries of the Sole Lord struggled to administer such scattered holdings.

Kaltar was impressed nonetheless, he had worked only in the serene White House, until now. The White House administered the Hundred Worlds, and it was more advanced, but less energetic. The Hundred Worlds needed less effort to coordinate, and the White House’s work was divided more locally.

“Lord Kaltar,” the voice was one that caused him to bow in respect.

“My Lady Selket,” he said. “I am honoured.”

“Yes, you are,” she said, with clear amusement. Selket was known as Atum’s spymaster, and she was greatly feared by the goa’uld, she had perhaps killed more goa’uld than any other, accounting for her multitude of assassins.

“How may I be of service?” Kaltar asked, as Selket slid into a seat, implicitly granting him permission to sit in turn.

“You are to go to the Rudan system. What do you know of the place?” he asked.

“Home of an Empire called the Roanians, deeply traditional, not inclined to overly aggressive measures for the last few centuries.”

“Yes,” she said, “good. Several powers within the Weret are meeting there, you are to go there, and put out feelers for us.”

“That seems possibly hazardous.”

“It is,” she said, “that is why you were chosen.”

“Reassuring,” he said.

“The truth is, that we cannot rely on obscurity much longer, the diminuation of the Weret is a substantial risk to the Hundred Worlds.”

“I do not understand, Lady Selket.”

She reached out and touched the back of the ribbon weapon she wore on her left hand, the sunlight faded as the room’s windows darkened and a hologram of the Weret appeared.

“Here is the Weret when the Sole Lord ordered the retrenchment,” she said, “a general survey of known civilizations and their technological attainment.” Kaltar leaned forward, his elbows on the table, and folded his hands in front of him, while Selket’s display wound time forward, and she continued to speak. “You will see a general upward trend, this is what concerned the Sole Lord, our society is ancient and it is not able to rapidly change. It is not in our nature, with the memories of our foremothers in our minds from birth. Host species can change much more quickly.”

“I understand,” Kaltar said, “but we have taken the time to develop, and stepped out of galactic affairs.”

“Yes,” she said, “but now watch, the trend over the last decades. Development for much of the Waret has not only stalled, but they are even regressing. Fifty years ago a ha’tak was no match for most of the starships in the galaxy, now, many of them would struggle to engage one at close range, let alone the ‘hok’taks’ we are now using.”

“That is good news,” Kaltar said.

“Perhaps,” she said, “but it is not a universal trend, we are still far behind certain parties, and we need to come to terms with that. The diminution of capability is significant in some places, but it has not affected us, that leaves the few competitors who might be interested in us, with more and more Weret societies falling beneath their notice, as they begin to fall beneath even ours.”

“Do we know why this is happening?”

“There are many theories, diminution of critical resources perhaps, or societal breakdown, host-species are not like us, for all our faults, which are many, we do not forget things that we have learned, even when we learn the wrong lessons. Ultimately, we do not know. More disturbingly, there is the prospect that some force has engineered it, though we suspect it is equally likely that the galactic human population is infected with some virus that diminishes cognitive capacity, one that we have avoided because our host-species are immunized against most ailments. This one is perhaps the leading theory, for the societies that are still progressing tend to care markedly more for their citizens than those that are regressing, so perhaps some undiagnosed disease is at fault.”

“Disturbing,” he said, “but how is this a threat to us?”

“In itself, it is not, nothing would please the Sole Lord more than for most of the galaxy’s population to regress past the point of internal combustion and firearms. But there are renegades, and things that we have kept a lid on. And it’s only a matter of time before say, the Linvris or the Tlak’han decide to subjugate or exterminate someone more connected to the galactic community and we are the target of the outrage that results.”

Kaltar frowned, he had fought the Tlak’han, one of several species within the goa’uld orbit that were a perennial source of annoyance, they did not have the facilities to build capital ships and were largely nomadic, relying on a great mass of smaller hyperspace capable ships, but they were content to pillage not only the Sole Lord’s domains but any they came across.

“If that’s a risk to them, imagine what a Wraith Hive ship would do loose in the Weret,” he said.

“You begin to understand. When we began the war with the Wraith, the Weret’s average human nation would see off a hive ship or two without trouble. Now? An eleven kilometer starship with the firepower to turn a planet to cinders and thousands upon thousands of fighter-craft capable of snatching away whole populations; if they make it to the Weret they will be a scourge among nations.”

“Concerning, in at lest that we might be blamed,” Kaltar said. “So you wish to normalize relations with the states that have avoided decline in order to ensure that when things that have traditionally been in our court eventually do boil over, we are not blamed.”

“Yes, your job is simple, don’t sell the farm, it may not work, and try not to allow yourself to be murdered.”

[Lord Atum]

“Repeat that?” Kaltar asked.

“They’ve moved their council,” the official of the Red House said. The long-range communications orb slowly shifted with interference.

Kaltar rested his palm on his cheek and leaned to one side on his couch. “How long has it been? Days? This is worse than the Second Dynasty,” he said, and rose, walking across the room to the control terminal beside his sarcophagus, his hand touching the controls twice, adjusting the ship’s hyperdrive.

The ship was far older than he was, a pyramid ship of the old type that had severed the goa’uld before Ptah had crafted the modern Ha’tak vessels, it was slow by modern standards, and he had taken it from Delmak, still, the journey was a dauntingly long one. His superiors in the Red House had made it plain that they did not want to send a warship, nor anything that could be construed as a threat, but he needed a vessel commensurate with his status, which ruled out the sleek diplomatic barques that had been used for just as long as personal transports of emissaries and messengers. Instead, he had this ship.

He did not hate it, it was opulent, after all, and ships of this type were commonly used as flying palaces, as well as being relegated to bulk cargo vessels and troop transports, but their days as warships were long-gone. The weapons it usually carried had even been removed, which was probably just as well, they would do no good if an altercation arose.

He laid in the new coordinates, and frowned, “Rather a long way out from the destination, is it not?” he asked.

His distant advisor frowned, “Your entry point has been plotted, do not vary, it is to comply with something called the General Convention on Claims, to set you down in ungoverned space.”

The ship dropped from hyperspace, and reoriented itself, before adjusting to come to a new heading and then jumping back into hyperspace.

The ship slipped from hyperspace at twice the distance required by local treaties to be considered in international space. It was small, certainly compared to modern Atumite warships, three hundred meters across, and on its arrival, it raised shields, double-layered, but took no aggressive action. Its peak slid apart, revealing a palace deck protected by the ship’s shields.

Kaltar watched from the command deck, touching the control column once more.

“People of the Galactic Conclave, hear me,” he said, “I am Kaltar, Emissary of the Hundred Worlds of Lord Atum. Behold, I come to you with open hands and peace in my heart. I would speak with you of matters of importance. I invite all present to board my vessel, or I will happily go forth among you to speak unto you.

“Your workings have been beheld by the Sole Lord, and meet with much approval, I have been sent with gifts for those who would meet with us in friendship. Should you wish to speak with me, let it be known that we understand as well as any might, that one does not need to approve of all that is done by a people to have advantageous communication with them.

“Be it known that I seek to discuss a permanent observer on behalf of the Sole Lord to this organization and we would invite you to discuss the sponsorship of such a proposal with me. Whomsoever will discuss this is most especially welcome. Many threats and usurpations lie within the deep reaches of the galaxy, and we seek to share our knowledge of them with you, which will be facilitated by a permanent presence at this council.”

“If you are reticent, be assured I shall be here for some time to discuss these matters with any who wish it.”

[Lord Atum]

The interior of the transport was a dark space, with a dozen figures close in, standing locked into place by harnesses that held them in place. Pale light filtered down from a strip along the roof of the compartment, flooding the area with benign emissions. The warrior had no name, it had a designation, but that was not a name. The warrior was dormant, most its mental functions in a combat-ready torpor.

With a quiet hiss, it felt the torpor vanish. Preparation hormones flooded its body, and it could see its comrades moving in their positions. They detached from their cradles, their positions shifting and the machinery rising into the ceiling of the compartment.

Doors ahead of them opened, and the warriors flooded from the transport, their weapons laying down bursts of fire. The warrior was already aware of the tactical situation, the brain of its host did not make substantial decisions, automotive functions were there, but the host was not sapient. There was still a kilogram of neural tissue that did not hold its own thoughts, and that brain was capable of processing data, and this it did, integrated with technology that provided a startling battlefield awareness.

Return fire from the enemy splashed across the troops. While they were capable they were not invincible, every shot took a small toll, and the warriors knew well that they could not revel in their apparent imperviousness.

They ran, return fire was accurate but the warrior did not join in yet, its comrades returned fire and took cover within the broken interior of the fallen ship. The warrior knew what it was, it was a vessel for the will of Atum.

It moved up and came into contact, one of the enemy drone-warriors, a biological construct not dissimilar to itself, but less lavishly equipped, came into sight. The warrior raised its fist and discharged the plasma repeater, a dozen shots streaking down the corridor.

The exchange was short, and lethal, but the warrior stored every moment of it for later retrieval.

The Wraith were a well-known enemy, and their drones had not changed in ten thousand years, until this war. The same war that had driven its own kind through many reforms had altered the enemy, and this was the latest experimental enemy.

Body armour like black coral grew across most of its body, providing a degree of resilience that previously spawned warriors had not possessed. Its body weathered the impacts of the plasma repeater, and it closed in, firing its own energy weapon.

The enemy moved with a lean speed, faster than its cousins, and its weapons returned fire. The warrior was struck, and carried to the ground.

The last memory the warrior had was of its cybernetics exporting the manner and details of its death to its comrades.

[Lord Atum]

“Master Lak’na, how much further?” the question was asked by a twelve-year-old boy with weary feet as the trio climbed down the mountain from where the Udajeet had left them, the ring platform that it carried them from the city.

“We are close now Pauran,” he said, as his apprentice struggled after him with the weight of the equipment. The work would build the boy’s character, while the elder Ibis guard carried his own share of the equipment in a better-loaded backpack.

He could have shown the boy how to load the pack out better but letting the boy struggle would make sure that he learned the hard way. The blisters would remind him.

Delmak was one of the few heavily populated Atumite worlds within the Weret, and one of the few that required this rite, for many of the smaller worlds of the Weret were easily protected and only required such rites periodically.

They struggled on down toward the crevasse, and Lak’na touched his collar, summoning the aspect of the divine, the metallic plates folding out up and around his head, giving him the eyes of Thoth’s art, letting him see through the rock and the shale of the isolated place.

“Come, boy,” he said, “set down your pack, and follow,” he said, shrugging off his own pack, and opening a side pocket, taking out a more prosaic instrument, as a jaffa who had not yet completed the final challenge to stand among the warriors, Pauran’s armour did not have the all-enclosing ibis-helm that his teacher did. “Take this and tell me what you see.”

The boy held the machine up to his eyes and panned it around where his instructor had looked a moment before, allowing him to see hundreds of meters into the rock. “A knot of something, green. Degenerate matter, it says.”

“This is why we are here,” he said.

“We are not quarrymen, surely?”

“We are not, but this is not ore, boy, this is from the heart of a star, a dead one. A material that the wild men of benighted realms call Strangelets.”

“A dead star?” the boy said, he had heard of such things, “surely it would have buried itself in the depths of the world.”

“This is far less than a spoonful, but the infidels who planted it here intend to do such, for this is a deeply stable form of substance, that can convert the world around into more of itself.

“That would spread and cause great harm, from inside a mountain. What perfidy. Who makes war on us, Master?”

“The wretched envy the Sole Lord’s domain, though these particular infidels believe that they are wise, they think that we cannot sense such things. This has been here but three hours,” he said.

“We will cut into the mountain?” the boy asked.

“Yes, get the crystals out boy,” he said, “I will show you how they work.”

An hour later, as Delmak’s reflection of Atum’s Stars had risen to its zenith, they arrived, closing into the artificial cavity where the weapon had been planted.

“What is the name of the infidel realm that dares to do this?” the boy asked, wiping his brow from the heat of the cooling crystal pathway behind them. When he had been noted down as having the aptitude to be one of Thoth’s Scholar-Warriors, it had been for his curiosity.

“There are more than one, the chief of those that have contrived this perfidiousness is known as the Vipra,” Lak’na said. “We will image the device for the People of Selket to analyze before we remove it,” he said, “hand me the scan-wand.”

“Why does Atum not strike back against these infidels?” the boy asked. “Are their armies stronger than the hosts of Atum?” Curiosity was drummed into the Ibis Guard, unlike their more traditionally educated colleagues; the cosmos was the creation of Atum, and understanding its mysteries, even the words and deeds of the infidel humans whose kings and leaders rejected enlightenment, or the works of aliens who had yet to receive the word of Atum, was an act of worship, so Atum had proclaimed. Learning was worship and new scientific discovery was among the forms of worship that were most pleasing to God. These were truths in the Book of Atum for all to adhere to, but for the Ibis Guard they were the main form of worship, and they had few formal religious duties other than study, experimentation, dissemination and applying their knowledge in tasks like this. Rite and rote repetition as had been practiced by older generations of jaffa was not enough, true understanding was preferred.

The jaffa master held up a finger beside the avian helmet, for to teach was also sacred, “Because,” he said. “It is far more fitting that they waste their energies with this kind of foolishness, than realize that any civilized culture can detect such things easily and remove them, and try to make better use of their resources. If a confrontation ever happens, they will think they can damage the people of Atum, by simple remote control. Remember this if you must do battle,” the Jaffa master said, “diversion and misdirection is a powerful tool. There are many infidels, for faithless men are everywhere, and if Atum burned one self-idolator realm, we would have wars against myriads. Such an expedition would distract us from our other important duties. Far better to wait until they cannot assail us at all, that will be within one century of now, if current trends continue.” He paused to examine the scans, re-doing the work until he was satisfied.

He drew out a small orb after he had done the scanning, showing his student, “This is a neutrino-conversion bomb,” he said, “this costs about fifty shesh’tas to make,” he said, to speak of the magic of atom and of energy was no taboo as it had been in the days of Ra, for Atum had proclaimed it so, “and works just like a zat’nik’tel. See here, you dial the radius you wish to destroy, in different rock or material it will vary in its effectiveness, but here, we can set it to full power, just as a treat, but when you find one of these in a city you will need to use more care,” he said. “Now, let us retreat outside the mountain, your questions were good, I will let you push the button.”

[Lord Atum]

The transport rings set Shelkar down the upper colonnade of the House of Discovery. Before him, a wide garden could be seen in the outer courtyard of the House. Beyond it white pillars kept the sun from the workshops and teaching rooms, in the distance work could be heard, the hammering and labour of workmen improving the facilities of the House. The house was a building for the path that he led, the Sole Lord’s sigil hung on chains over the courtyard, and silken drapes were drawn back.

As always the garden was occupied by people from the city, there were always seekers, citizens coming for advice and the students. Some came to read, others, to seek tutors for their children, others, teaching for jobs, and the coffers of the house grew as a result.

There were many more goa’uld, and this was a consequence. Shelkar was a master, for he had been born with a treasury of knowledge stored up by the generations of his ancestors. He was of the New Mind, the goa’uld genetically altered by Atum’s decree to carry less of their forebears’ subjugations and worship, enough, though, and all of their scientific knowledge.

He and his fellow guides had set the path from a group of town-houses in Mnewer when the Book of Atum had proclaimed the Supreme System Lord’s truth. The Book of Atum declared that the universe was a puzzle, of sorts, set out by the Sole Lord and that it was intended to be unlocked. Atum claimed to be the shadow of the creator, a part of the soul of the universe made manifest, and that his same will had elected the Goa’uld to be a chosen people.

This was not a truth Shelkar accepted, of course, he knew there was more to the cosmos than that, though it was conveniently unfalsifiable. But the same commands had not only allowed but encouraged scientific dissemination, there had been a time when the goa’uld had feared to teach their slaves of technology.

Here, it was a way for Shelkar to enjoy a high-status lifestyle, he taught poorly, but apt students could devise experiments, travel to other paths, and other houses of study within their own, and exchange ideas.

Several of the path’s senior students approached him immediately; and bowed to him. One, Latha, had a list of the experiments that were planned that used some of the more limited facilities or would need to take place off-world.

Most of the students were part-time, with more prosaic jobs, while others were young, before their twentieth year, and their dues were paid for by their parents, and yet others had attained enough knowledge from the Path to support themselves in the learned trades ever more in demand.

The Flowering had changed much.

[Lord Atum]

The Lesser Enclosure Galaxy (UGC12613)

‘Shoot an ambassador in the court of the king? What madness is this?’ King Cedric was the image of such a man, broad-shouldered, powerful but ageing, with his beard turning grey to follow his hair. His expression was confounded.

‘I assure you, your majesty,’ Kaltos said, ‘you need not fear for any insult. My friends of Athos, and the Genii, as well as my own guards, will stand witness, but if you have not seen what we offer, it is best to see it in person.’

The Genii and Athosian delegates nodded, they knew what would come next.

‘Very well,’ Cedric said. ‘Guardsman.’

The gun was a snaplock, the best that could be produced on Jelramus. Kaltos watched the man level the gun and heard the rapport echo through the audience chamber, the sound echoing from stone walls. The shield in front of him sizzled with yellow-orange light and he smiled.

‘Accept the offer of aid that Lord Sia sends, and such protection could cover this city, and many others, while in other places our burrowing crystals could provide vital shelter.

Cedric seemed impressed, but it wasn’t him that spoke next.

‘To take such aid risks angering the Wraith. Did you not provide such aid to Mellanos and Cyrene, and where are they now?’

Kaltos looked at the figure of Grannos, the Duke of Mormethar, one of the most influential of Jelramus’ nobles, loosely aligned to the kingdom of Uthred. He spoke with a bellicose tone, hands on his hips.

‘Your Majesty, the Duke of Mormethar speaks the truth,’ Kaltos said, ‘we can offer ways to protect yourselves from the Wraith, but we cannot control their behaviours.’

‘And if you had seen the cullings falling on the galaxy, you would not be so casual, to die if, if the Wraith come in strength to your world is little better. They are starving,’ Ladon Radim, the Genii emissary said, ‘and I can say that with authority. Our people have known Cullings, we were fortunate to have been overlooked at times, but our world burned as well. It is a price that I would pay again,’ Ladon said.

‘You may pay your price, but you are asking us to pay it too,’ Grannos said. ‘The Wraith are not an enemy, they are simply a fact of life, as immutable as the tides.’

‘Ladon makes a good point, though,’ Kaltos said, ‘the wraith attacks that are now taking place are not like those even experienced by your great-grandfather Your Majesty.’

‘And whose fault is that. Did not your Lord Sia awaken them, when you opened up the city of the Ancestors?’ Grannos said.

‘When Lord Sia found that his new allies,’ Kaltos said, gesturing to the Athosian emissary at his side, ‘had been kidnapped, he did what any good friend did, he rescued them and brought fire and death into the home of the Wraith. They may have woken as a result, but it is a problem he is committed to resolving. He will not rest until the Wraith cull no more of the people of this galaxy.’

‘Perhaps that is so,’ Cedric spoke at last, ‘you have given me much to think about, and while we may trade with your alliance, actually joining and resisting the Wraith openly is something my ministers and I must discuss, I thank you for your time, Ambassador.’

Kaltos and his delegates bowed deeply and retired, looking to the allies.

‘I don’t know what that man seeks to gain,’ Jormel of Athos said, speaking the goa’uld tongue as they passed into a long gallery with portraits of dozens of worthies and wide windows, ‘could he be in league with the Wraith?’

‘Maybe,’ Radim said. ‘We’ve seen hives cut deals before, offering to spare one group if they advocate for them. Maybe he just expects the culling will fall harder on the capital and leave him in a position to make a play for the throne.’

Kaltos frowned, stopping to look out at the huddled city surrounding the castle, and the fields beyond that twisted unevenly across the land. He leaned against the window frame, folding his arms. ‘I don’t want to say it, but it might be easier if he weren’t here.’

Radim nodded, ‘Maybe, or something to compromise him.’

‘If he is in league with the Wraith, we could get someone in his household, hall boys, porters, and so on,’ Jormel said. ‘If we find proof…’

‘Or make it, if necessary,’ Kaltos said.

A palace servant passed them and they feigned only interest in the fields, switching to the trade tongue of the Lesser Enclosure Galaxy to discuss crops and the virtues of trade with Uthred.

‘If necessary,’ Jormel said, ‘it would be unpleasant to fabricate that kind of evidence, but your people could do it. And get someone to discover it.’

‘Easily,’ Kaltos said, ‘though our real problem is if the Wraith really are in league with him, there could be blood in the gutters by week’s end, and they’ll move to cull Uthred before we can get any heavy support in. We need to be very careful.’

[Lord Atum]

‘Its code name is Maelys’ Memory.’

Serine looked at it with mounting horror. Before her in the quiet sun-drenched library the hologram of the hive ship hung, three feet above a low tava table.

The names given by Sia’s expeditions for the Wraith Hive ships that still haunted the galaxy were usually memorials to some of their victims, either individuals or worlds. Each one was a continuous ongoing genocide, home to hundreds of thousands of the wraith and their vassals, each wraith needed to consume at least four humans a year and their vassals served for the extension of their lives with energies stolen from the wraith’s victims; a Wraith Hive Ship could kill a million people a year, not counting its escorts, this one had been operational for more than ten years.

‘And it’s going to be here soon?’ Serine asked.

‘It’s already coming,’ Jormel said.

‘We have to prepare now,’ Serine said.

‘You do,’ he agreed, ‘we have brought some things that can help your people, crystals that can carve down into the ground, Kaltos can show you how to use them,’ Jormel said.

She nodded, ‘how long do we have?’

‘Sixty days, assuming they continue at their current speed,’ Kaltos said.

‘Can you actually destroy it?’ she asked.

Kaltos’ expression was grave, ‘That’s been getting harder, we could if we had the ships, but the lookout is poor. It has at least three cruisers escorting it, and that means that we would need the best part of our fleet, we have ten big warships in Pegasus, but we would need most of them. The Travellers have the Ancestral Warship, and their own fleet, but we can only really call on them once or twice, they risk losing their whole society in a battle like that,’ he did not mention the Vanir, the least popular of Sia’s allies within the galaxy.

There had been a time when this had been an easier proposition, in the early stages of the conflict they had been able to launch satellites into orbit of a planet, powerful heavy liquid naquadah substances.

Serine sat stiff in her seat, books behind her. She wore a slender robe with puffed sleeves, deep brown, unfastened at home. Her hands came up before her.

‘And the King is aware of this?’

Ladon gave a grimace, ‘He knows, but he doesn’t want to risk the chance that the Wraith will turn a culling into a bombardment, if your people visibly know that we’re coming, or resist, he’s afraid that they will just destroy all life on Jelramus.’

‘They can do that?’

‘They can,’ Kaltos said. For a moment he saw in his mind the grim satisfaction of exterminating a world, the vision of his ancestor Khonsu. He pushed it aside. It was an intrusive thought, the curse of ancestral memory. He was not of the New Mind, but he knew that this was where a reputation could be made, in scarcely three years he had earned more status in Sia’s service here than he had in all the furious efforts to survive the seven centuries of his life before. ‘They’ve done it before.’

Serine looked at the hologram again, her eyes rarely left it. ‘Why would they do that? They need us to live. They are hungry.’

‘The same reason they do anything,’ Jormel said. ‘The Wraith are a curse on our peoples, and have been forever, and not to be underestimated, but they are not… practical.’

‘Narul’s Question,’ Serine asked. The famous philosopher Narul was well known in the Lesser Enclosure Galaxy.

‘Narul’s Question?’ Kaltos asked.

‘Why the Wraith don’t farm humans,’ Ladon said. ‘They’d be better off if they did. They wouldn’t need to sleep.’

‘Ah, we asked one that,’ Kaltos said. ‘They say that they find the willpower of free foes more nourishing.’

‘That’s a lie,’ Serine said, with finality. ‘We know better. They don’t even try because it would make them open to raids from other hives. The same as lyat farmers in the highlands. Why improve your own herd when you can just go and take someone else’s?’

Kaltos absorbed the thought for a moment, ‘You might be right,’ he said.

‘Just so,’ she said, a little closer to even ground now, able to participate in the conversation. ‘They’d rather discourage others. Taking everyone and salting the ground… it makes sense to them. When you have a sword, you start thinking of how to get your way with violence.’

Kaltos changed the topic with a momentary twist of discomfort. ‘We can help, they don’t always do that, we have helped other worlds survive cullings. We can also evacuate people before they hit, there’s fifteen million people on this planet, with our airlift capacity we can help a lot of them get offworld.’

Serine looked doubtful. ‘And where do I come in?’

‘I understand you’re still close to Grannos’ daughter?’ Jormel asked.

[Lord Atum]

Billions of Light Years Away

The Stargate rotated in place, spinning through the floor. It was different to those in the Weret and in the Hundred Worlds. The Fate’s stargate was old, as old as the ship itself, millions of years old. Launched from the Weret in the days of the Alterans, with a fleet of drone ships, the ship had been continuing its mission in the silent reaches of truly deep intergalactic space. Far from what was laughably called the Local Group.

In all the technology known to the Hundred Worlds, only the stargate could reach such an unfathomable distance.

Only this stargate could keep the Fate’s crew alive.

The survey team emerged from the gate on sleek gravitic steeds, accompanied by a series of drones, passing through waves of purifying energy and clouds of nanite-rich aerosols.

As the runes showed that the Shen’ta reached up to her collar, pressing the stud there that told the metal to fold into itself, shifting and flowing back into her wesekh collar. Removing her gloves she reached up to her scalp, scratching her shaved head, and looked around as the drones began to detach the samples to be carried to the innards of the ship.

Passing through the gateway beneath the observation chamber, she returned the salutes of the guards in the passageway as she reported with her team to the medical centre. They had learned the hard way that here, far from the benign Weret, the cosmos tolerated no mistakes; the Weret was full of brutal wildlings, but it was also a place populated enough by sapient species, most of them on the Unasoid template. Here, in the cosmic darkness, when alien life was encountered it was much more alien, sometimes close to Unasoid, but often far, far from it.

Coexistence with aliens this far into the darkness was possible, the universe was a dispassionate place, but it was no eviller than it was good, but the barriers to communication, to peaceful understanding, were greater. They’d met allies, there was even a ship that travelled with them, of a species whose name for themselves was pronounced the Ursini, but they had met many terrors too.

Lord Heka was waiting in the core room when they were cleared. The room was one of the control rooms closest to the Stargate chamber. Son of Atum, he was the commander of the Fate and its expedition. When they had found the path through the stargate to this distant vessel, abandoned for millions of years, Atum had sent one of the three clone-sons who possessed most of his knowledge and his own personality, as he saw it, to lead an expedition. Some goa’uld said he had merely been awaiting the pretext, that the knowledge he had obtained as a being of higher planes allowed him to know much, but his status among the living bound him only to act on it when he had evidence to justify his reasons to other such beings.

Shen’ta believed it.

She had been one of Heka’s expedition leaders for two years now, and she had seen things, even from this lesser incarnation of Atum, that she could not explain.

‘Report,’ Heka said.

She bowed deeply and stepped forward, toward the pillar-like interface at the core of the room where a trio of Ibis Guard stood, constantly monitoring the stargate and the operations of the ship, a backup for the distant bridge.

‘It was much like the last four worlds in this spiral, Lord,’ she said, watching as the expedition’s images appeared in flat holographic screens outlined by luminescent blue between them. An untrained eye would not have recognized any sign of visible civilization. She did, she’d seen many ruins. But these were different. ‘No signs of life, no clear sign why the stargate was placed on this world, but the core samples that we took indicated the decay of primordial nuclides far in excess of this galactic region’s apparent age.’

Heka frowned, he did not need her to explain anything of it, she suspected his understanding even of her own field of geology was greater than her own. The decay of these primordial nuclides in the planets they’d passed indicated some weapon, or some strange effect, had turned what had been living worlds in the thousands to hundreds of thousands of years before the leading edge of the Fate’s fleet of drones had placed the stargates there, or at least useful worlds. The seed ships that accompanied the vessel automatically sourced and produced components to produce a string of the stargates that were intended to be used by crews, explorers and more.

No one knew how many such fleets had been launched, for a time they’d thought that Fate had been unique, but maybe it was not, but they had been intended to be used for some scientific mission that perhaps Heka understood in its totality, but others did not.

‘My Lord?’ she asked.

Heka’s eyes rose from the barren image before him. ‘Yes?’ he asked.

‘My Lord, what… happened to these worlds?’

‘It is good to ask questions,’ he said, ‘but the answers may not always be spoken, even openly. I will speak to you in my chambers at the seventh hour. There I will give you answers as I know them.’

‘Yes, My Lord.’

‘But know that you may not rest easy again afterward.’

She rested uneasily in her ushabti-host. ‘Yes, Lord,’ she had its mouth speak.

The original builders of the Fate had been a much more egalitarian society than the Domain of Atum, and the ship’s commander had to make do with a single large chamber with a sitting area and a bed area, as well as two windows and an en-suite head; little different from any other except that it held a table and pair of loungers.

‘Come in,’ Heka said, and Shen’ta did so, looking through one of the energistic-transparency windows at the interstellar hydrogen annihilating against the Fate’s deflectors before she sat. Heka poured her a steaming chocolate, cocoa was usually calming to goa’uld.

‘You asked to know what has happened in this region of space,’ he said, as he sat opposite her.

‘All the more so when I heard that you had ordered our samples jettisoned into the next star we pass, Lord.’

‘Have you ever heard of the holographic universe theory?’ he asked.

‘I do not recall such a thing,’ she said.

‘It is not something that arose in our own scientific development, the goa’uld are a parasitic race, and our genetic memory is that of practical knowledge acquired from Unasoid races. Those of our kindred who consumed knowledge that would destroy them did not tend to reproduce into the greater lineage of our knowledge. It is a concept that the universe may be seen from the perspective of both the material world as our sense organs perceive it, but simultaneously in a… two-dimensional fashion, as an image on a distant membrane.’

‘Then the universe is a projection, like a hologram?’

‘The word hologram can be misleading, and so the mind grapples with a way to explain the concept. Some people imagine it as a computer code, something that can be edited, to have a real-world effect. They imagine that they can build a machine to work on this lower dimension, and it will have real-world application.’

‘And it won’t?’

‘Not the way they imagine it, these people did so here, I think. There are cultures that have heard of these theories, more than one hundred sixteen that we know of, and have taken that approach. Some of them escape lightly, they discover that you cannot have something for nothing; that the holographic principle works both ways, the boundary surface is another way to model the same things that our poly-dimensional senses understand intuitively. It isn’t a blueprint, or a plan, or a piece of computer code, a photograph or a map, instead, it’s closest to a reflection in a mirror, another way to look at the world. Most of them even, find that they are merely attempting to do the same things they would do with mundane materials. But a few persist, in a determination that they have uncovered the ideal forms of the universe, like the Qabbalists of Olam Ashera, they seek ways to become one with the universe.

‘But it shouldn’t work?’

‘It does work for some, to a degree, but to achieve the perfection they desire,’ Heka said, ‘they reach for short-cuts, they find small-scale irregularities in their results, and they push on, without refining theory, without thinking too critically. They are on the very edge of attaining ultimate power, or so they think, so why not push that little further. And then… then it works.’

‘But not how they think it does?’

‘It is not working for them, anymore, they’re working for it. By trying to modify the universe without instruments save those that project into different frames of understanding, those that reach far. Like shining lights into the deep, they wake the Leviathan entities that slumber in the formless deep. And then it works. It works perfectly, it works so well that nothing else seems worthwhile anymore, that reality is the illusion and the higher state is a blessed, exalted realm. And so they make pilgrimages into ghost realms of their own design. Or they stop raising houses with brick and stone and steel and sing them into being in chorus with those Leviathan entities. Or they thread their minds into the deep directly. Why would anything else be worthwhile? Their whole societies become cults to the Leviathan that has answered them, invoking its power for even the most trivial things,’

‘But you said…’ she paused, ‘nothing without its price.’

‘The merchant takes his pay in the end, yes. A Leviathan may lend its power, but it is never your friend.’

‘You said a hundred and sixteen? How many have…’

‘Twenty-six, that we know of. In the Weret, in the last few millennia, the Veirata, the Companions of Koada, the Hypatians and the Phoenixi. The Nakai told us about some of them, that they knew of, and told us much more of the theory,’ he said, speaking of one of the species they had allied with on their expedition, ‘but we have not passed this knowledge on to the Goa’uld.’

‘Because if you told the System Lords that they could… gain ten years of great power by giving their people to a Leviathan, at least half of them…’

‘You understand,’ Heka said, ‘I knew you would.’

The hiss of feedback from the ship’s deflector wrap susurrated in time with her ushabti and symbiote’s differing, desynchronised heartbeats. ‘In the Weret now…’

‘There are some who might be such cults. We cannot know until the Leviathan takes its due, of course. No one whose loss would harm the Goa’uld, though.’

‘Good,’ she said. She drank the chocolate. ‘You got it all from geology?’

‘And from irregulates in our subspace drives, and from astronomers, and other disciplines on board. We will find nothing of value to us here, not one shaped stone will remain of these people, whoever they are. We’ve seen all we need to in these systems, we will begin surveys again when we begin to enter star systems where our engines perform normally. Until then we can simply watch the shores of long-dead peoples drawn like moths to lanterns a thousand years past.’

The air scrubber’s panel came loose, and Shen’ta opened it just enough to reach inside with a gloved hand, lifting the small inscribed stone from its position. To smuggle it here had been a work of remarkable effort.

She’d thought long and hard about whether it was worth telling her handlers; asking them to send a message, by dead drop, anonymous, and with nothing about the Fate or its mission (for the Tok’tem wanted to overthrow Atum or reform the Empire, they did not wish to see it ruled by humans, and the mission of the Fate was one they would see continued).

Heka, his father, and others in his inner circle might be able to simply keep quiet about this, but she could not, at least not wholly. The idea that whole civilizations might be killed when they could be warned…

The message would be sent by an entanglement process, a simple enough one, and then it could be dead-dropped somewhere where the right people would find it. Or so she hoped.

[Lord Atum]

Their Seed is Not, Part 1

A bastion of human identity and culture in the galaxy. That was what the state had been. It had been that for a few decades, and then it had simply fizzled out, internal chaos and infighting as death had claimed the first generation of leaders. And then the gods had returned.

The judgement had been harsh.

The gods had met in council and they had sent forth Sokar, the god of punishment, to humble the pride of the State and its allies, and to burn all resistance in the Nautilus Sector.

The State had prided itself on its navy, believing, rightly, that they were the key to defending themselves, but they had been swept aside by a small number of the glittering golden vessels of the gods. At first news of these battles had been rare, but then it had begun to spread.

Slaves in the agricultural, mining and industrial sectors had eagerly traded word of these engagements as time went on. It was even whispered that the battleship of the god Sokar had destroyed the State’s “Hyperdreadnought” in a single fearsome engagement.

And then the humans began to grow sick. The master race had begun to shut themselves away, it was said that the Gods had spread the sickness, some unpleasantly virulent biological weapon that had been deployed. First it was only a few, and then more and more, as panic grew, and the enemies of the state had been blamed, liquidations had happened.

And then the world had been attacked directly.

Thousands of golden plasma strikes had rained down into military bases, communications centres, bunkers and the estates of nobles, the party’s monuments and power supplies. The World of Human Rebirth had been scoured to rock by the command of Sokar, seventeen billion people baked alive or simply vapourised as the atmosphere was boiled away.

Other worlds suffered less as Sokar’s fleet passed through the sector, isolating worlds one by one, destroying communications, burning cities, releasing biological weapons keyed to the strains of the humans from the World of Human Renaissance, and warning bouys, a caustic dose of salts that ended all substantial industry on hundreds of worlds.

For some the judgement of the Gods had been a blessing. Gal’beya had spent thirty long years as a slave in the agricultural sector of the State. A twi’lek, he was one of the species that was most commonly enslaved by humans in the galaxy, there were many, a great many here, there were species who were native to the Nautilus sector, but there were just as many who had been brought in from other places, and the town of Liberation had no shortage of different species.

Two years ago it had been a slave plantation, a massive and grinding enterprise made all the more difficult by the State’s strange obsession with organic farming, some suggested that this was simply to provide something to make the slaves toil on, but in truth it really did seem that they had built an interstellar empire on the principle of feeding acologies with food from different worlds.

But it did mean that they had no shortage of tools and equipment, and though there was no fuel coming any time soon for the equipment that did need it, the land was good and the biggest problem that Liberty had nowadays was raiders from the surviving humans who had come out of the slighted cities.

Once Hans Evolutionsbremse had been a stormtrooper, a powerful soldier of the State who had made xenoi scream and die with his stick-grenades and power armour, in his iconic Stahlhelm. He had been a powerful soldier, he wouldn’t have been looking at puny xenoi with envy.

But now, he watched from the treeline as they went about their business. There were few pure humans left, some had been mongrels, or near-humans, or something else, but the pure had died, even now, Hans didn’t have any teeth, they’d all fallen out when the fever of the gods had hit him. But he could eat soft food.

He still had his gun.

But no one made the ammunition any more. It required caseless rounds that could not be manufactured with all the cities of the State in ashes. He had a gun with six shots.

The xenoi would not know, though.

All he would need to do was shoot one or two, and he could get enough to thrive. Maybe even take over.

Xenoi were stupid.

He walked into the town.

Gal’beya watched the man as he walked into the town, tension shot up his spine, he too had a gun, nothing so fancy, a simple weapon made locally, but his was not on him.

‘Hello xenois!’ the man shouted, holding the rifle ready at his chest. His mouth troubled its way around the words. ‘The master race is back!’

Everyone around the intruder was tensed, looking at him in his black undersuit, watching carefully. Their eyes were on him, watching, waiting.

‘Well, won’t you bow, you shits?’

No one bowed. Somewhere a child screamed.

‘Well,’ the human said, ‘get on your knees, what’s wrong with you?’

Gal’beya didn’t question, he charged. He felt as though he had been punched in the gut as the bullet hit him. But he didn’t question it, striking the man with his fists. The others were only a moment behind him, humanoid, reptilian, and others. They pummelled him with legs, fists, bit into him with mandibles, twisted and tore until the nazi was no more.

Gal’beya looked at the sky as he breathed his last. The shot through his belly was impossible to survive, they had no surgeons, no one who could extract the bullet, they’d tried to make him safe. He was being tended, but they could wash the wound, stitch it, and hope against hope, but he could feel it grating within him.

A star had emerged in the sky, bright as a new dawn planet.

[Lord Atum]

Their Seed is Not, Part 2

Technological overmatch was sweeter than wine, more pleasing than song. So Horus found it as his ships advanced to contact with the “Great Imperium’s” vessels. More than five hundred of theirs against twelve motherships and one battleship. By numbers and keel length his ship should have been routed.

He did not need to worry though, even as thousands of accelerator rounds streaked across half a light second of space toward his vessels. HIs ships’ weapons fired interception shots, but though they winnowed the oncoming volley, they did not stop it. He did not fear.

The shots struck, and his ships shook, but they continued on their course, unaffected.

‘Let them get one more volley in,’ he said.

The Great Imperium possessed many technologies, but they did not have true starship shielding.

‘Shields are at ninety five percent,’ said Kel’sha, the jaffa who manned the second station of his warship’s bridge. She didn’t use any honorific for him, rarely among the goa’uld Horus made many warriors his brothers and sisters, a close personal devotion that made his soldiers the most bold of all the System Lords.

‘Pathetic,’ he said, watching the next volley close in. The data from allowing these projectiles to be fired at them would be used for improving the counter munitions gunnery of future ha’taks, while he enjoyed the sense of imperviousness he had reasons for allowing the charade to continue.

The Great Imperium’s ships fired again, magnetic accelerator cannons firing slugs toward the goa’uld ships, streaking through space at half the speed of light, a statistic that sounded impressive but at this range gave a whole two seconds for the firing solution, and which necessitated a smaller projectile.

When they hit the shields they encountered inertial compensator fields spread throughout the goa’uld vessels, that spread the impact almost uniformly across the massive vessels, and dispersing much of the momentum and energy through processes so advanced the Imperium’s brightest minds would consider them magic.

‘Return fire,’ Horus commanded.

Laser point defence weapons flickered against the golden sunfire the goa’uld ships returned fire with, but failed to disperse them, and they struck the Imperium’s ships squarely. Each ha’tak was positioned with eight anti-ship weapons forward, as was the battleship itself.

One hundred and four Imperium ships died in the first volley, shields flaring and hulls burst asunder by the return shots.

There was no more volley firing after that, firing happening at-will as weapons traversed to target, but the Imperium’s ships lasted six seconds in an earnest fight against Horus’ fleet, reduced to blazing wrecks.

The goa’uld ships closed in in long minutes after this exchange of fire, their weapons firing intermittently to still the struggles of survivors trying to bring their hulks under control.

‘Beam the survivors into the dungeon decks,’ Horus commanded.

For some few, the defeat in battle was only the beginning of a life of toil and humiliation, the goa’uld were not known for their forgiveness, and would often prefer their enemies to be in misery, pain and suffering.

When they had first encountered this state of the humans the goa’uld had swiftly swept aside their fleets, for they had no shields, or functionally none, on their warships, but their planets were a different matter, protected by a cunningly made magnetic decoupling field that caused plasma weapons to disperse before impact, becoming potent upper atmosphere blasts. This made a certain level of defence, and it seemed these humans, as they all did, were obsessed with kinetic weapons.

When three motherships had been lost, Horus had left the world for a brief time, instead sending ten of his ships to the system’s outer sphere, selecting a planetoid and landing upon it before engaging their engines, bringing it inton an intercept course.

It had taken three years, but he had been content to wait. Eventually the danger became so pressing the Grand Imperium had been forced to mount a futile attempt, rallying their ships to attempt to defend their besieged world.

Chains rattled as the leader of the Great Imperium’s fleet was brought onto the deck. He looked dishevelled, but then few people took their first experience of teleportation against their will well. Horus smiled.

The jaffa hauled the man before the wide window, as the vast planetoid began to interact with the planet. Munitions streaked up from the planetary surface, blasting craters into the facing side of it.

‘Xenoi barbarians,’ the man breathed.

Horus twitched a finger and a jaffa stepped forward with a Rod of Anguish, pressing it to the human’s spine, lancing sulphur fire through his body, reducing the human to shrieking incoherence.

‘Witness your end,’ Horus said, in satisfaction.

The prisoner began to struggle wildly as the worldlet began to break up as tidal forces acted on it, becoming decoupled rubble that began to strike the planet.

The man tried to look away, struggling, cursing the false gods.

Horus leaned close, ‘Know that I do not care, but if your people had been… less reviled, this would never happen. The Sole Lord would never risk such violence against anyone who had not… alienated the galaxy so thoroughly.’

‘The Imperium will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes!

‘No, it won’t. Another will rise, learn nothing, and fall. But yours will not. I will burn your world even to the deepest vault. Nothing of you will remain.’

[Lord Atum]

Their Seed is Not, Part 3

The supreme rulers are hardly known by their subjects.
The lesser are loved and praised.
The even lesser are feared.
The least are despised.

Tao Te Ching, Chapter 17

The Cradle of Heaven, Gateway World of Lord Yu

Ten Thousand Years to the Lord of Ten Thousand Years. Across the galaxy it was a blessing and a mantra. Perhaps alone of the monarchs to whom this was chanted, Lord Yu had indeed literally reigned for Ten Thousand Years. The Jade Emperor’s realm was vast, scattered across the stars, but invisible to most of the galaxy.

Along with Sokar he had defied the retrenchment to the Hundred Worlds, and his domain was largely intact, a scattering of lightly populated worlds. The Cradle of Heaven was a shimmering orb, largely water, a jewel that had barely been touched by time. But it had been touched, the local technology was no squalor, and ships regularly docked here, the mountains around the city of Jiangmen had been sculpted into vast landing plains for goa’uld ships and there were always those who came and went.

High above the planet though, satellites kept up the illusion that the planet was far different, giving it the reflection and appearance of a toxic world shrouded in an acidic atmosphere, only when a ship directly left or arrived, was this illusion broken, and the court of the Jade Emperor were cautious that his domain should avoid unwanted guests of lesser realms, the illusions of barren rocks or searing kiln-worlds cast over them for many centuries.

So life went on, untroubled by the quarrelsome realms of the galaxy, untroubled by the other goa’uld, for the peace of Atum had been a boon to the Jade Emperor.

More than any other System Lord, he took the divinity of his identity seriously. Not only taking the persona that he had assumed but living it, and the values projected upon him. He had little interest in supporting the military ambitions of the Atumite domain, but his realm was the most sophisticated in governance and provided much of the intellectual capital that the Sole Lord relied upon to govern his realm.

Drums beat as the curtain was raised before the Jade Emperor, and his courtiers, human and goa’uld, jaffa of high status, bowed. The Hall of Mists was a ceremonial treasure, crafted in ancient ages by generations of artisans. In the middle of the chamber were crystal dishes of peaches and at the sides of the chamber were agate tanks of living coral that had been tended to its full growth over centuries. Precious plants and jade flowers carved by loving hands in centuries decorated the bright chamber.

The Jade Emperor’s countenance was serene, and he spoke in the manner he usually affected, giving the same impartial gravitas to the minor reports of new monuments or promotions in the department of works or great calamities and disasters.

‘Thousands of years past when Re was ascendant among the goa’uld, we came to the Tau’ri to take domains to rule, in the long centuries each people came and went, as we taught them how to reap and sow, how to control floods and to scribe in clay, these and other rudiments. From them we took veneration and exalted ourselves. Far across the galaxy did we scatter humans, living and dying in our names, and in places beyond measure did we abandon these peoples to their own governance.

‘In itself this is well, for such things were rarely done with virtue. It is better that people govern themselves than that they be ruled by fear.

‘In recent years there has been a disruption of the way, the Pure Divine Lord Atum has bidden the System Lords in the Silver River to subdue barbarian realms who have caused much death, claiming that the great fecundity of humanity is proof of their right to rule others, to slay others. In their ignorance they hide from their people the existence of other kinds of people, promulgating lies and strife to breed hate, so that they may exploit that hate.

‘The Pure Divine One has to each of those System Lords he has given the task of subduing those most able. We now task you with considering well the realm before you,’ as he spoke the center of the Hall of Mists swam with shimmering silver particles that descended from the clouds in its ceiling, becoming solid representations of a stretch of worlds in the galaxy. Each courtier held a tablet with them, in mortal courts these had become ritual objects, ceasing to be used for writing over generations, and discarded even more as mortal emperors had become enamoured with excessive prostration, but in the Court of Heaven they had more practical uses and each of them lit up with the information that had been gathered to date on the matter at hand.

‘We invite you to discuss and bring proposals to us for how we may achieve the goals of the Pure Divine One most efficiently.’

☰☱☲☳☴☵☶☷

The Mel’tak was the next-generation of goa’uld mothership, ostensibly capable of intergalactic travel and mounting the phase-shifting munition swarms of the Alterans, these systems were not yet perfected, but even without these the platform had been put into production, the elements required to give the ships a truly reliable intergalactic hyperdrive were essentially software and could be applied later, while additional munitions bays would never hurt. They were still more impressive than the already-upgraded Hok’tak class in current service for military duties.

The first encounter with the realm of human supremacists descended from Yu’s people was a simple intimidation tactic, the chosen vessel simply appeared within the system, without regard to their local FTLi grid, an effect achieved with judicious use of the cloaking device the ship carried.

Appearing within range of the planetary orbital defences, it had simply transmitted a single message, the words of the Jade Emperor, and then it had disappeared once more.

No shots were fired, no planetoids were moved, there was no need to do such a thing. More than the other System Lords, Yu was patient.

The message cut across every wavelength and was infiltrated into civilian systems, bypassing censorship when it was broadcast.

☰☱☲☳☴☵☶☷

I am Yu Huang Shangdi, The August Emperor of Jade. I speak to you as in ancient days. By now you have heard of your allies who have died for their crimes of aggression. In all the Silver River there are none who mourn them, but all war should be considered a funeral, and I mourn them. I will spare you this fate.

Your soldiers die or return maimed, dependant on crude cybernetic limbs for all of their days, for the ambitions of a few. You were promised equality and freedom from want. You were lied to. You were promised glory and military victory. You were lied to. You were promised that you would lead all humans in the galaxy. You were lied to.

Few indeed of the human species lived under the rule of your leaders and their allies, but they told you this because they wished to use you.

The worst of rulers are despised by their people, and yet see the soldiers who stand on your streets. They wall you off from the galaxy and speak of ideological contamination. The true way does not suffer by comparison to other ways.

In ancient days I gave mandates to men, I called those who should rule, but conscientious inaction is the true way, and as I near my end, I have learned more serene wisdom from men. I will not conquer nor rule, but instead I will give a gift.

When righteousness prevails here, I shall give the knowledge so that each human may live six hundred years in their own body, young and hale, those who are old now will become strong and hale again, and years shall fall away from them. Those who are young will age until the strength of adulthood fills their limbs.

As each elder passes away, know that only the stubbornness of your rulers keeps death among you, for with this gift you will experience five centuries of growth, and you may put your minds to any goal you please, but such a gift cannot be given to those who would bring only death to the Silver River.

I shall return.

☰☱☲☳☴☵☶☷

Leaders often said that their people would not turn on them for the decadent ways of other lands. They said their people were strong and vigorous, and would not succumb to such cloying words.

It was easy to say that when you were not faced with a dying parent; when you were not wondering at your children's fate. It was easy to say such things when they were hypotheticals. When you were the ruler.

In truth there was no realm whose leaders were more beloved by their people than life itself, save perhaps those that engaged in extensive brain alteration or genetic-alteration.

☰☱☲☳☴☵☶☷

The System Lord Yu claimed that he had subdued his target without firing a shot. Erlang, his mashal and champion had made no such promise.

The enemy’s leadership had fled, making for a stellar realm called the Final Regime, one that was beyond the reach of the System Lords.

He had no intention of allowing them to make it there, to regroup.

The ships of such realms followed predictable paths through space, a strange obsession with trade lanes, often produced by need to stop at stations and refuel.

The last thing the remnants of the leadership saw was Erlang’s Mel’tak squatting like an eagle on prey, mantling the rubble of the refuelling station of one of their allies they had intended to use.

[Lord Atum]

Their Seed is Not, Part 4

The clouds billowed outside the window, obscuring the shapes of the other ships. The mass bombardment that had been used on other worlds was not possible here. Here the Supreme System Lord had decreed that the people not be slain, but liberated. The enemy had shielded themselves extensively, using arcology shields across the subcontinent and linked passageways between them to construct an intricate network of defences.

‘Their kind always love trenches,’ Doctor Jackman said. He stood with his hands on his hips, looking down at the cloud-shrouded landscape with a wide variety of weirdly shaped arcologies visible through the haze, some of them far larger than the ha’tak he stood on.

‘Why is that, anyway?’ The question was asked by a woman seated on the broad sofa before the window. The appearance of any goa’uld was misleading, in a way, Jackman had learned, they were not gods, or at least not as he had believed when he had first pieced together their identity, but they were certainly ancient. This woman had been on Earth when humans first learned to sink marks into clay to make impressions and elves had not yet travelled to other star systems. She was Asherah, her status one step below a System Lord, and to her hands the remnants of the Star State were being given to rule.

‘I do not rightly know,’ Jackman said.

‘They long for what they believe is a manly war,’ another Goa’uld said, standing beside her. Hu was achingly handsome to look at, his features were as if a devoted sculptor had carved him and then the gods had breathed life into him, that was not far from the truth. His skin was the colour of dark wood and he wore less jewels and ornaments than most of his fellow goa’uld, even the ribbon device he wore was ungilded. So too his title was only Lord, but all knew he was more powerful than any save the System Lords, perhaps even Atum. Atum, his father.

‘How is crawling in the mud like a worm manly?’ Asherah asked, her tone was one of quiet interest, but the note of derision in her words was unmistakeable.

‘They believe it is manful because it is the most casualty intensive form of post-gunpowder warfare they know of,’ Hu said, his tone was not quite scholarly, but almost as though he was revealing hidden knowledge. Something in his tone was deeply persuasive, and Jackman felt as if he had to listen with full attention to anything Hu said.

‘They want to take casualties?’ Asherah asked, her eyebrow lifting. She dressed plainly, not so much as he, but her robe was a teal at its edges to a deep cerulean at its middle.

‘They believe that it is manful to defy death and so they find these tactics appealing.’

One of Asherah’s lioness headed jaffa guards entered the chamber, passing the pomegranate trees on either side of the chamber’s entrance, sweeping to one knee, the cloak of a jaffa master billowing behind her, and the metal of the helmet folding back into her wesekh.

She looked to her, ‘Speak, Damaris.’

‘High Lady. All is in readiness.’

She smiled, and Jackman found himself sharing it, he knew what was going to happen next. Asherah touched the control at the back of the ribbon device worn around her hand, linking the chamber to the distant command deck, ‘Bring the ships below the cloud layer,’ she said.

Far off in the command deck, the crews moved to comply at once. Jackman stepped to the side a little way to look out of the window as the Ha’tak and Wesir class motherships dipped below the cloud layers. As they began to move some of the defending batteries scattered fire toward them and the shields flared, but held comfortably.

‘Rise, Damaris,’ Asherah said, and rose to her feet, the group walking toward the window-field that made up the observation deck’s slanting wall.

‘Commence the deluge,’ she commanded.

Lightning flared in the clouds, as far as could be seen they made a nearly black bank over the green land. Vast but gossamer radiative arrays had been unfurled in the oceans of the planet of Ancona, the last world to be liberated, and the one to which countless survivors of the fascist alliance had fled. The cloud cover had made the world almost white from space, countless gigatonnes of water heating the world to a sweltering degree.

The operation had been calculated to bring the densest plume of those clouds here, where the enemy had strongly entrenched themselves. Two hundred million of them, Jackman had been startled to hear that number. They were practically ranked divisions deep, each front line batallion holding a hundred meters.

He could even see some of their defences below, where their ribbon of defences crossed the entire continent, an absurd density.

They were hungry, he knew, but he knew that his own people on Ancona would be hungrier, the pillage of the civilian sector’s food supplies to feed this influx of quislings, murderers and rapists would be astounding, even though the arcologies could oversupply their residents and the other cities were well provisioned locally, the notable increase in planetary population to support everything from communist to nationalist to mujahedeen bound in their compact of supposedly-human solidarity.

Lightning cracked from the skies as the ships’ engines pulled cold air through the clouds from layers above, bolts of azure light rippling across the skies, up and down, thumping into the ground beneath them as the chill air pulled through the water vapour forced massive state change. After a few moments they lost sight of the ground again, as the falling water became so dense as to obscure the ground.

The downpour would waterlog the ground down to the bedrock and cause huge ecological damage, even a war that intended to keep as much infrastructure as possible intact was going to but it was only the beginning, but the ground here would not be merely waterlogged, but literally be turned to swamp. Countless millions of defenders and their equipment were going to be drowned in the three days of deluge that Asherah had ordered.

Jackman was delighted to imagine the despair below.

[Lord Atum]

Their Seed is Not, pt 5

The Chariot rumbled with impacts that flashed against its facing surface, intercepted by the force screen that covered the prow of the vehicle. There was a radial bubble-like shield that also protected the machine, but the facing surfaces had an additional protection. Nal’ta sat at the aft of the troop compartment, ensconced in an apparatus that cradled him almost like a babe in the womb. He did not see the troops within the vehicle, enclosed in a holographic bubble that gave him clear view almost as though he were riding atop the machine.

Every now and then the Chariot’s spirit did things upon its own initiative, lashing out at enemies who lurked in the mire with beams of golden disruptor fire. He controlled the main weapon, and the movement of the machine, for now at least, for the machine could be allowed to operate on its own, and would do so if he were killed.

The mire was vast.

The Star Seed forces were in utter disarray. They had enjoyed a great numerical advantage before Asherah’s flood had swept them away, and where plasma fires had burned the ground to bedrock to accelerate the flooding whole formations had been swept away. Nal’ta gave no thought to these, the distended bodies of infidels by the tens of thousands were no matter to him, though they were scattered through the mire like rice grains in broth.

There was little left now to forestall the advance of the Atumite warriors as they approached the great city before them.

The enemy was ahead at the rail-head that led into their hive. The briefing that he had received on the nature of these human hives disgusted Nal’ta, a great conical heap of building, hurled upon itself organically, like a tumor on the landscape.

As they had streamed back to the cities the vast trench networks of identical featureless black soldiers had panicked, routing, piling up, derailed or destroyed machinery heaped up, the reeking result of Asherah’s deluge had combined with narrow channels and choke points to present unspeakably tempting targets, and the area was steaming and smouldering with the remains of orbital bombardment.

The city had been built on lowlands, of course, and the vast mass of maglev trains and vehicles, broken by the sheer weight of the water, and all the other war materiel had scraped a gouge toward the city, fortuitously (if Asherah had not planned it) or providentially (if she had) disrupting the remaining enemies.

Eight kilometres away from the city, and Nal’ta could see the enemy defending the vast gouge and mass of metals at the broken railhead.

WIth a small touch of a control Nal’ta launched one of the support drones that the Chariot carried, watching as its eye-view became a small spot and its learnings were fused together by the Chariot’s spirit to display enemy positions ahead.

Without hesitation he touched one of the control spheres that glowed blue on either side of his armrests, switching the Chariot’s main weapons to spirit-assisted mode, firing a moment later at the nearer target.

Beneath the chariot carried two additional staff weapons, an augmentation to its standard capacity, that ran along it like skis, an undesirable position for a weapon, but on long range assaults like this, the length of the machine allowed these huge weapons to be used and converge on a single point.

The thump of the starfire bursting from the weapons became a spherical blast ahead, that faded to black steam and ejected matter, folding in on itself to resemble a mushroom, billowing through itself skyward.

He fired again with the main weapon, mounted in a strip along the upper side of the vehicle, a single disruptor blast lashing out toward another identified target, the weapon forming a cone that boiled an oval of the mire around the struggling troops identified, before focussing down to a stylus-point to punch through a defensive structure.

To be entrusted with a Chariot of Atum was to wield a portion of his awesome power.

[Lord Atum]

The Derelict

The military experience of the Goa’uld had been wholly shaped by the Stargate. They had discovered it during a period little beyond the equivalent of the Terran bronze age, when some said (Sopdet had never consciously ventured so far into the genetic memory, such probing was considered by many to lead to madness and she had no desire to determine if that was true) another species had used it, been taken as hosts, and thus given the goa’uld the knowledge of the Stargate network, allowing them to set their eyes on the stars. Their few leaders and nobles had used the access to resources and knowledge from offworld to dominate all other kingdoms, and had set up slave-driven empires across the galaxy.

They had never undergone a terrestrial industrial stage in their social development, and that left them without ever having determined the value of artillery or manouver warfare.

It didn’t matter to them, they had operated in an environment where they had advanced to using starships and had never encountered planetary shields or other mitigants against orbital bombardment, until recently.

Within a single human generation they had encountered terrestrial forces and combat. There were two ways that they could have gone, the first would have been to double down on tradition, the other was reform.

Atum had chosen the latter.

Somek’s squad was in full retreat now, they had encountered a concerted resistance and they had losses, but they still had tools to make their strategy preferable. When the creature (as they thought of their foe) fell they were cheered but they had already decided on a course of action, and they cast grenades, falling back by room and giving ground on the derelict.

They had left several dead behind, but the IPE would discover that their suits were designed to detonate with a small but thorough charge if they were opened. This was something carried forward from their direct technological progenitors, the survival suits used by the distant Vanir, but on this occasion might well prove an unpleasant surprise.

The others would see if the enemies pursued them, setting up a choke-point and now paying more attention to conduits and other likely ingress points, their golden horus armour’s scanners probing the walls.

Sopdet

Sopdet fought down a flash of anger, she wanted to kill, that was the nature of the memory she carried, but she would prosper better by remaining focussed.

‘No matter,’ she said, ‘it is a surprise to see something on board that has acid for blood, a fearsome creature. I have heard rumours of similar things. No matter, we shall prevail, rest assured, Captain,’ she said with an innocent tone, ‘I have no idea what makes you believe we have attacked your people.’

She was weighing options in her mind, she was confident that with the power module installed her own vessel would defeat Dupree’s, but he had support ships and the other forces present could turn the battle against her nonetheless.

She was close to considering the derelict a lost cause for actual retrieval. The Sole Lord could defend his own domains, but sending more ships here to enforce a claim, to this area of space distant from the Hundred Worlds, would be a challenge.

She needed to rule out three things before she could claim a partial victory before the Throne of the Sole Lord though.

And to do that she would need to expend the lives of her jaffa. She did not think twice about it.

‘I assure you Captian, whoever has attacked your troops is likely the same as has attacked ours,’ she lied sweetly. ‘I will contact you if we have news of them.’ She touched the control for the communications system that sat on the armrest of her throne, and looked at the

‘Muster the full boarding contingent, prepare the death gliders and kel’kesh to support. The other Hearts of Light,’ she said, ‘have them loaded into Tel’taks and launched on indirect routes to Delmak and the Cradle of Heaven,’ she said, ‘if we fall, the Sole Lord will still receive his prizes,’ and if they did not, he would approve of her caution before she escalated the situation.

‘Yes, My Lady.’