A/N: Thariorn, I really can't blame you for choosing not to make an account, and I thank you for leaving a review anyway. If I didn't already have an account on this site I certainly wouldn't make one now. I'm honestly surprised that you called the search engine "competent," as I personally have copied and pasted titles verbatim only for them to not show up in results of a whole-site search. As it is the only reason I'm not treating the site like it's going to collapse and vanish into the ether anymore is that they finally fixed the baffling bug where I was both logged into my account and not logged in at the same time unless I had been to Mass for exactly 3 out of 4 Sundays preceding the most recent blue moon. (I exaggerate, but only slightly.) The fact that I'm forced to use mobile to get my notifications, while technically a fix for the issue they were patching, is so irritating that I'm only really still here because some of the stories I like are exclusive to the site and still posting updates that I can't get anywhere else. Without that I'd have transmigrated to AO3 as soon as they officially gave up on making email notifications work at all.
I mean seriously guys. They stopped working the same day as the mobile notification patch hit. That can't be a coincidence. You could have at least waited for them to break on their own before pulling the plug. What's more, I got an email about how they're totally still supposed to work and people have been complaining so they fixed it…but they totally didn't, they're just full of shit. The site's not even being consistent about what's supposed to be happening!
But I digress. We came here to experience the story of a young warlord in over her head taking over a hive of scum and villainy because the alternative options were worse than just shrugging and resolving to do it herself.
You know, when I put it that way, I'm rehashing a lot of Worm's main themes here, aren't I? No wonder this crossover worked so well.
Interfering with a stargate's ability to receive a connection from other stargates was both simpler and more complex than you might expect. On the one hand, once you got up to your elbows in the guts of the control systems you'd find that there was a relatively simple-to-access privacy mode of sorts that caused any incoming wormhole to be refused. On the other hand, the goa'uld had known about this trick for so long that all of the many ways to work around the privacy mode were well known and easily accessible to all but the measliest of planet lords and lesser nobility. Even the humans of Earth could probably manage it with their improvised control device, if only because the thing likely lacked all but the most basic handshake protocols and thus caused its paired stargate to run on the closest thing to an emergency mode that the ancient devices possessed. If they managed to use such a primitive setup to explore the galaxy, they would be a force to be reckoned with inside of a decade from the necessary sheer dumb luck required to survive the ordeal, never mind the technical expertise they would gain from the many, many informative technical issues that one runs into when forcing backwards compatibility onto massively superior technology.
I paused in my work and fought down the part of me that wanted to stop humanity from 'rising above their station.' That instinct at least was one I had encountered many times in my gestation and knew well how to suppress. Humanity had every bit as much right to the galaxy as the goa'uld did, and considering what the goa'uld have done with the galaxy in general humanity might even have the superior claim. As I once more affirmed this truth to myself I also performed a few anti-master pseudo-meditation techniques I'd learned to help shake off known-false information while I was in the Wards to help myself actually believe it. They weren't meant to be used in isolation for a case this extreme, really, but they were the best thing I had. It wasn't like I could call up a Thinker who could carefully poke holes in over nine thousand years of memory, never mind how long that would probably take. Goa'uld memory wasn't perfect, but it was much better than it had any right to be due to all the genetic modification they'd done to themselves.
There were truly monsters on your world who could freely manipulate the minds of those held in their thrall? Skarra asked, more to distract me than because he couldn't see the truth of such a thing in my mind just by looking.
I smiled as I returned to work. Skaara was a good kid. All the powers you could imagine and more, from what I could tell. It made dealing with brand new capes one of the most dangerous parts of the job. Sometimes even they didn't realize what they could do.
And, he said wryly, sometimes they were willing to bury their opponents in a tide of venomous biting insects so numerous that not even the greatest crime lord could withstand the onslaught?
I grumbled mentally at him for bringing that up, not least because he was definitely exaggerating. I still didn't regret what I'd done with Lung on my first night out, even if I probably wouldn't have done it at the time if I'd known I was saving the lives of criminals instead of some random 'kids.' Meeting the Undersiders and avoiding getting placed on a team with Sophia had been worth it, in the end, no matter how many regrets I had about everything else I'd done.
Skaara responded to my grumbling by projecting into our shared mind a kind of good cheer that I'd genuinely forgotten, after everything that had happened to me. I wasn't sure if I'd still known what it felt like when I died, but even if I had the goa'uld generally only experienced joy when someone else was suffering somewhere or their ego was being stroked so hard they were practically getting off to it. Having a genuinely human mindset to ground me after 10 years without one was a godsend I hadn't realized I should look forward to when I'd thought about taking a host.
As the two of us chatted back and forth, I slowly finished the somewhat tedious task of locking the stargate in "private" mode and putting the control console back together. Now it was time to do something that would buy me more than a few hours. Fortunately, I already had an idea about that. The kara kesh was powered by the naquadah in my blood, but there were ways around that. It took some time searching through the temple, but there were some relatively unimportant power cells I could rig up to power a kara kesh instead, once I removed enough of the anti-tampering mechanisms that it would actually function without an active user. The process took several hours, but at the end of it I had a device that could continuously maintain a gravitic forcefield large enough to cover the entire stargate's opening. The feature that let slow-moving objects through was actually an anti-suffocation safety measure, as well, so it was quite simple to remove. Now all I had to worry about was Apophis using some weapon or other that could drain the power cells in less time than it took their associated dynamos to recollect a charge. He…didn't have very many things that could do that as far as Amaunet was aware, at least nothing that could conceivably be brought to bear through a stargate, so I wouldn't worry about it too much at the moment. There would be ample warning if he brought one to bear and I needed to evacuate or mount a defense, which was good enough for present circumstances.
After my work was finished, I gathered all the local jaffa to ooh and aah at the glowing field occupying the stargate. Some of this, according to Skarra, was because I wasn't as good at suppressing the goa'uld's ego as I thought I was. He…wasn't all wrong, there, if I was being brutally honest with myself. But mostly this was because it was about time I started deprogramming these poor slaves and encouraging them to have dignity in something beyond their generational servitude to a bunch of brain slugs.
"Behold!" I cried out when they were all gathered, "the power of the gods, laid bare before you. Using the kara kesh destined for my hand I have mounted a defense that not even Apophis can breach!" I looked over the gathered warriors and selected one who Amaunet had actually bothered to remember the name of. "Jal'dac, fire your ma'tok at this shield, if you would."
He looked uncertain, so I stepped well out of the line of fire and gestured regally toward his target in an unambiguous get on with it kind of way.
"Yes, Lord Khepri!" he shouted, arming and aiming his staff weapon, before letting out a volley of plasma bolts toward the newly created gate shield. Ma'toks being the singular most important weapon for a kara kesh's shield to block, the gate shield held firm where even a reinforced concrete wall would have crumbled.
"As you can see," I said as he disarmed his weapon and returned it to a casual resting position like a more traditional staff, "your weapons will not breach this defense. Even Apophis would find it impossible to break, no matter how mighty he claims to be." This was mostly because he didn't use many weapons that didn't need to materialize at least a little bit in order to arm themselves and the tau'ri trick of placing a barrier so close to the wormhole that nothing but subatomic particles could materialize was entirely novel to the goa'uld, but I wasn't about to bother the jaffa with the nitty gritty details just yet. "Because I am not some arrogant worm like my father, I will still require that this location be guarded diligently. Any activation of the chappa'ai will need to be reported, as well as how long the connection remained open and approximately how many weapons the enemy attempted to send through. But beyond that, for now, we can rest easy and you may go about your daily lives as you did before my arrival."
My speech finished, I simply relaxed my arms by my side and waited, wondering a bit about what the jaffa would do. Failing to end a speech by commanding those listening to return to their duties just wasn't done, in goa'uld culture, so I'd definitely caught them off-guard by instead merely suggesting that they go about their daily lives. The civilian population, most uncertain about their place, nervously shifted about before nearly as one turning to take my suggestion as an order. The warriors, however, all looked to each other for the guidance I refused to offer. When it became clear none would step forward and offer it, Jal'dac stepped forward and asked me, "Shall I be the first guard, Lord Khepri?"
"Hmmm," I considered the man standing before me. I suspected that the fact he specifically had been the one ordered to shoot in my general direction and then not punished for obeying such an order (something the goa'uld were absolutely petty enough to do) meant that he'd realized more than his fellows that my style of leadership was different than they were used to from Apophis and his nobility. "Yes," I decided, "you and two others of your choosing. Ensure that your choices are those you would trust with the lives of your friends and family, because that is what this portal must now defend."
"By your command, Lord Khepri," he said, before glancing at two of his fellows. A third looked uncertain about not being picked as the trio walked to the stargate to take up guard positions, but said nothing. I made a note of his face for later, just in case. It was always good to know if and when resentment was brewing among the troops before it boiled over. And that was if he wasn't just sympathetic to Apophis and/or hoping to win favor by betraying me someday.
General Hammond had honestly been hoping to retire without ever having to deal with another top-secret SNAFU, but now he not only needed to deal with the rapid vetting and staffing of a small base's worth of personnel, but also the personal realization that humanity was less alone among the stars and more alone amidst a sea of technologically superior foes who had, until American soldiers nuked one of them, seen fit to overlook them entirely. That was not the kind of realization that most men took well, and even his long-practiced professionalism from a career in the military only went so far. Now that the immediate crisis was over, however, he needed to send a detailed report to his superiors about the resolution of the incident which had resulted in the abduction of a soldier from within one of the most secure locations in the world and the deaths of several more. What's more, he needed to personally brief the President on the situation.
No matter how much preparation he'd done for this, it still didn't feel like enough.
Nevertheless, he picked up the red phone on his desk shortly before the agree-upon time and, without dialing the phone that only connected to one place, was quickly connected to an aide who verified his identity and reason for calling before forwarding him directly to President Clinton.
"So, George, what have you got for me today? I hear there's been a real shake-up around NORAD lately, but no one's been quite willing to say what about."
Honestly, Hammond could understand why that was. If he hadn't seen it with his own eyes, he would be doubting all of the paperwork he'd seen too, no matter how highly-verified and top secret it all was. Until O'Neill and the men from his former command had started acting evasively under questioning, he hadn't been sure that someone very high up the chain of command wasn't playing a very rude prank on him.
"Sir, that would be due not only to the sensitive nature of recent events, but also the sheer incredulity they inspire. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would probably be doubting the reports myself."
"Is that so," the President mused, "then I suppose you're the one who drew the short straw and gets to sound crazy in front of the President himself?" Hammond had long since learned the trick that Clinton was using, affecting an air of genuine humor to help break the ice with subordinates and encourage them to get on with it, but this was the first time in quite a while someone had bothered to use it on him.
"As the man on the ground, so to speak, I'm not sure the duty could have been reasonably placed upon anyone else," he said simply, before diving straight into the report. "I'll be quite blunt with you Mr. President, several days ago extra-terrestrial invaders made use of a project we have had on mothballs underneath NORAD for several years to infiltrate the base, kill several soldiers, and kidnap another. I was immediately informed, of course, and after being read in on several secrets that had previously been beyond the purview of my need-to-know clearance I called in the team which had formerly been working on the project in question. Using their expertise and experience, we were able to perform recon upon the enemy position and even discover a much more thorough understanding of the methods used by the extra-terrestrials to travel the galaxy, though sadly the kidnapped soldier was killed before she could be rescued." There was more to it than that, much more, but Hammond knew that if he didn't stop now Clinton would have even more questions about his sanity to answer, and that was never a good place to leave your superiors.
"…George, is this some kind of prank?"
"I'm afraid not Mr. President. The details should be available to you under the name of the Stargate Project, which was renamed three years ago after the final breakthrough which allowed us to send and retrieve personnel through the device we've been studying since it was unearthed near Giza decades prior."
There was a short but notable pause, likely for the President to demand someone get the files for the project on his desk yesterday, before Clinton once again spoke. "And you're telling me that we've got genuine space aliens of hostile disposition with access to one of the country's most secure locations?"
"Fortunately, sir, we've managed to deny them the access they gained using the device we were studying, so we don't have any immediate worries about that. However, we have unfortunately received confirmation that in addition to possessing greatly advanced technology and weapons, they possess starships capable of visiting us the old fashioned way, and are likely to do so at an unspecified time in the future in response to actions taken both in the past week and three years prior."
"What kind of actions are we talking about, George?"
"In the past week, during reconnaissance operations, we managed to ally ourselves with…something of a rebel within their ranks. This rebel managed to kidnap a high-ranking figure in their hierarchy while making use of the distraction our own forces caused. The more serious offence, however, seems to be that three years ago a nuclear device was detonated on board the starship of the leader of their species, fracturing their command structure and causing discord across their entire interstellar empire. The incursion in the last week was actually indirectly a result of that action, as the alien responsible for the incursion was making moves to consolidate his power base in an attempt to take the empty throne for himself when he happened upon us."
"And just what kind of interstellar capabilities are we talking about? How many weapons do they have that we need to worry about?"
"The best information I currently have available to me, unfortunately, is 10 years or so out of date and possibly unreliable even beyond that," Hammond said, not wanting the President to start assuming any cold hard facts from what still might well be an overcomplicated deception on the part of the goa'uld. "But even accounting for that, there is no way that all of the nations on Earth working together could overcome a concerted invasion attempt. The rebel I mentioned earlier was quite cooperative, and if she was telling the truth even one of their ships could simply bombard our population centers and military targets until we have no choice but to surrender. They have directed energy weapons with a yield equivalent to a firebomb which can be fired from orbit, energy shields which are easily capable of withstanding a direct nuclear strike, and no reason whatsoever to engage us in any kind of conventional warfare other than perhaps pride, which would only last as long as it took the first idiot they sent to lose enough forces to reconsider their strategy."
"…Jesus, George, that doesn't paint a very pretty picture, does it?"
"No sir, it does not." Hammond wasn't personally sure how far they could trust this Taylor Hebert character who had apparently crawled down the throat of one of Colonel O'Neill's alien friends, but if her brief summation of the capabilities of her species was even remotely accurate there was simply no way that Earth could survive the inevitable retaliation, iris or no iris.
"How soon can we expect retaliation, then? If it took them three years to get this far will it take them even longer to return in force?"
"There, I do have some good news, sir," Hammond said, hopeful that this, at least, among all the things Taylor had told them would prove true. "According to the rebel we made contact with we're in a somewhat remote part of the galaxy, far removed from the center of power of anyone actually important enough to send a ship over. And unless their interstellar travel speeds have improved greatly in the last 10 years, it will take them at a minimum approximately a year to arrive in our solar system, not accounting for any time needed to muster troops. What's more, due to the methods we used to keep them from using the device they previously used to infiltrate this base, they likely think that we're already dead and gone. They've certainly activated the device enough times to send through an entire city's worth of bombs, though fortunately our countermeasure remains effective."
"So it might be in our best interests to just go back to pretending that ET doesn't exist?" Clinton asked with a note of hope in his voice.
"I personally would not recommend that course of action, sir," Hammond said, "The enemy has no reason not to check in on us just to be sure the next time they're out this way, and we currently have the means to exercise reconnaissance in force against potential targets which may be used as launch points for an invasion in the future. What's more…there's the matter of the rebel I mentioned earlier. She's requested asylum for herself and a number of her forces in the wake of her rebellion, and even if we don't grant it to her she's liable to be interrogated thoroughly if and when they suppress her rebellion. And given that she knows for a fact that we have the means to survive the attempts they've made to destroy us so far they'll be coming out this way sooner or later, so we'll need to at the very least know who's who and what's what before they arrive."
"She's requested asylum? She doesn't have a base of operations of her own to retreat to?"
"Sir, due to quirks of her species biology, she was essentially just born yesterday. Quite literally. They apparently possess a genetic memory that has been passed down for over 9,000 years, which allows them to walk out of the womb fully capable of anything their progenitor was, but this individual is nevertheless new enough to the world that she possesses no pre-existing support structure to rely upon."
"And you know this for a fact?" the President asked skeptically.
"She is not the only enemy combatant to independently defect, sir, merely the one with the most sway over her fellows. Another individual who assisted my men in escaping from an otherwise hopeless situation has corroborated her story. And personally, despite how farfetched it all is, I'm inclined to trust him if nothing else, because from the way my men describe it there was no reason for him to do anything other than kill them all. The enemy, at that point, had no way of knowing that we would not allow any further incursions by the enemy into our base and could have simply attempted to return in force with our entire reconnaissance force slaughtered and unable to warn us."
"Then you would recommend that we grant her and her forces asylum?"
"I would, sir. Even just her personal knowledge of the enemy's technology will prove invaluable, and if she refuses to grant it to us we will very quickly know that something fishy is going on. She is asking for asylum for approximately a thousand people, only a fraction of whom are trained soldiers. Assuming we keep a close eye on them, managing that many will be quite easy, particularly if we insist that they surrender their weapons to us. The only issue would be finding someplace to put them, since this base cannot play host to such a large number."
"Hmm. Well you've certainly given me a lot to think about, George. I'll get back to you within the day on the matter of asylum, once I've gone over some more detailed reports on the situation."
Reports, no doubt, that were currently working their way toward his desk just as quickly as the top-secret archivists could send them and the Generals that Hammond had already reported to could write them up. "Very well, sir. I'll be looking forward to it."
…
Twenty hours later, Hammond received confirmation: they were to grant the goa'uld known alternatively as Taylor Hebert and Khepri asylum, as well as all civilian and military personnel answering to her command, under the condition that she share what she knew of goa'uld politics, technology, and biology.
Now all he had to do was pass on the news to Taylor Hebert.
…
"What do you mean we can't dial Chulak? As I understand it the only thing that can change a stargate's address is stellar drift, and I may not know my astronomy too well, but commanding NORAD did let me pick up enough to know that stellar drift doesn't just happen over the course of a few days!"
"Sir, Taylor did mention that she would need to take precautions to prevent Apophis from reaching Chulak before she left," Major Carter pointed out. "It's possible that the goa'uld have some way to subvert the standard dialing sequence. I've been going over the data logs from the gate during our attempts at dialing, and there seems to be something like an error message from the gate, a distinctly different one to the normal message we've noted when we dial an invalid address. If Daniel and I can figure out what the problem actually is, we might be able to modify our dialing protocol to bypass whatever restrictions she put on her gate."
"And how long do you expect that to take, Major?" Hammond asked.
"I don't know, sir. It depends on how complicated a security measure she's used, and how easy it is to bypass using our current hardware."
"Very well, Major. Get on it."
"Sir," she acknowledged, before hurrying off toward the room Daniel Jackson was slowly converting into an archeologist's wet dream. Hammond just hoped that they came up with a solution in time. If their only ally among the stars were to fall to the enemy before they could even establish a proper relationship, they would be left with no choice but to blindly recon addresses from the Abydos cartouche using what little actionable intelligence Teal'c could grant them. It would be better than doing nothing, of course, but far from ideal.
It had been two days, and there was still no contact from Earth. I had been hoping that they'd be able to figure out a way past the privacy mode relatively quickly after seeing the impressive improvisational dialing device they'd constructed, but I was unfortunately running out of time. Chulak, unlike Earth, was no nearly far enough removed from Apophis's seat of power for me to sit around and wait for a reply from Earth. So here I was, dialing Earth in the hopes that someone watching the gate knew the prisoner's tap code. I really should have secured a means of contacting them through their iris before leaving, but it just hadn't occurred to me at the time that this particular issue would come up. So instead, I had one of my jaffa holding a large open sack full of rocks to facilitate my game of impromptu knock-knock-who's-there.
First, I threw four rocks, then waited a moment, then three more. Then two, then three. And so on, until I'd encoded a short message asking if they had news and requesting a physical reply through the stargate telling me whether or not it was safe to use the gate to travel to Earth for a more complex conversation. I'd disabled the privacy mode before sending my message, since it wasn't doing me any good against Apophis anymore and I really needed a reply soon or else I'd need to start taking drastic measures.
Sure enough, not long after the gate shut off, it re-opened with an incoming wormhole. I prepared to re-activate the modified kara kesh and my jaffa all leveled their staff weapons at the gate, just in case, but our caution proved unnecessary. A folded piece of paper was all that came through the gate before the connection once more shut down. Dialing out to a random inhospitable world as a precaution while I read the message and having one of my jaffa hold down the activation button to keep the connection open, I quickly collected the piece of paper and read it.
Well Skaara, it looks like you were right. They granted us asylum after all.
Was there ever any doubt? He asked in a lighthearted tone of voice, despite the fact that he knew full well the reasons why I had reservations about any prediction made involving bureaucracy in general and politicians in particular.
Oh, get over yourself, I replied in place of a rehash of that particular argument. It's remarkably difficult to feel like arguing with someone when you've gained an inherent understanding of their point of view by physiologically merging your neural matter with theirs. At any rate, it looks like we're going to have to get everyone ready to evacuate. If we have someplace else to go, this isn't the sort of place where we can stay.
No, he agreed, it really isn't.
And with that, I turned and began issuing orders to the jaffa present. It was time to go back home…in a manner of speaking, anyway.
A/N: Welp, this one's been a long time coming, hasn't it? Sorry about that. Sometimes, the writing juices just refuse to flow, no matter how many interesting ideas I had just five minutes earlier, and working my way past that for something I don't even get paid for is difficult. Still, I did eventually manage it. Hopefully this will mean I get an update out sooner than a year from now, this time!
~feauxen