Snakepit

A Draka – Stargate Crossover

As usual, the Stargate-verse is the property of, MGM I think, not mine in any case, and the Domination of the Draka is S.M. Stirling's.

Everyone knows Stargate (well… maybe the youngsters out there don't, but Google's your friend), so I won't explain what it is. This story's going to be very AU therefore there won't be any SG1 with the familiar character set.

The Draka are a creation of SF author S.M. Stirling, and they're not nice guys.

If you don't know anything about them, a good read is Wikipedia's page ( wiki/Draka). Another is the page on TVTropes, which I'll quote here:

"Gather around lads and lasses and I shall tell you a story of a good republic and an evil empire where the bad guys are vanquished and truth, justice, and the American Way prevail.

...Well, Science Fiction author S.M. Stirling said "Screw that". Apparently tired of seeing the same cliches being used again, and again; he created the Domination of Draka, an Evil Empire that doesn't intend to lose...ever. The Draka series is military science fiction and Alternate History at its best, and a must read for any Sci Fi fan.

(...)

The Draka timeline diverges from our own during the American Revolution, where American Crown Loyalists, due to the Dutch intervening in the war, are shipped to the new British Crown Colony of Drakia-named after Sir Francis Drake-on the southern coast of Africa. They are joined shortly by French Royalists, defeated Confederate troops, and generally the other losers of history. Burning with a desire for revenge, they founded the Domination of Draka: an Empire forged on conquest and slavery. Their goal is nothing less than world domination. Standing in their way is the United States of America and the Alliance for Democracy. And you just know this is going to be bloody."

Last disclaimer: if you enjoy "moral" stories where the good guys always win, don't go further :-D

And the story is rated M for good reasons (swearing, sex, violence, torture and the occasional rape).

Update : I started writing this back in 2009. Over the following years I wrote many more chapters, and the follow-up story Stars of Iron is on-going in 2021. Therefore I wanted to rewrite the first parts of Snakepit to try and bring them up to, well, my latest standards. Here's the revised chapter 1, as of May 2021.

Chapter 1: A snake running with its tail between its legs

The star system was very ordinary. An unremarkable yellow star, a handful of gas giants accompanied by the required escort of moons and moonlets, the most interesting of those having the good luck of orbiting in the system's temperate zone, thus enjoying a mellow enough climate. As life is wont to do, it took advantage of those circumstances and diligent unicellular organisms had created a breathable nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere before more elaborate life either evolved or were brought in.

Yet this made it an unremarkable place in a galaxy that carried so many life-bearing worlds. What eventually garnered the attention of star-faring civilization was the presence of naquadah, the exotic and highly sought-after stable superheavy element at the core of Goa'uld technology. Hence, centuries after its discovery by the parasitic, spinal-cord-dwelling, host-taking aliens a sizable human community lived on said moon, enjoying the stupendous backdrop of its gas giant, having being brought in through a conveniently-planted stargate and told to "work for the glory of their god". Despite living in the medieval-like conditions favored by Goa'uld lords to keep their minions gullible, fearful and pliable they'd developed a healthy and generally happy community for their little world was altogether a rather pleasant and fertile place, devoid of unusually nasty fauna or flora.

This community of course only existed to support the mining operation that extracted naquadah ore from the nearby mountain range. Their star-faring, god-impersonating masters being justifiably wary of handing out more technology than strictly necessary, the miners were using hand tools and muscle-driven machinery. Therefore, the mines' yield was something best described as "artisanal". But it didn't matter to the Goa'uld. They were quite content to have things running that way inside their domain; anything else would have them lose their mystical god-like status in the eyes of their subjects as these would inevitably understand that "god-magic" was actually merely highly-complex, but rule-driven and repeatable feats of knowledge that they could emulate… without their overlords' supervision, and to their own benefit.

In the time this story began the moon in question belonged to a fairly minor Goa'uld lord who'd risen among the ranks of his kind from luck and talent. It was luck that made his larval form survive the ritual wars that occasionally killed both the maturing symbiote and the Jaffa warrior who hosted it inside his sub-species' engineered stomach pouch. It was also luck that made his mature symbiote form chosen for implantation in a suitable human host rather than be sacrificed in a ritual feast by those Goa'uld higher in the food chain.

Afterwards, it was talent, cunning and the occasional treachery at the expense of his competitors that allowed him – for his given host-form was male – to step from the most menial tasks handed to such wet-behind-the-ears Goa'uld by their older, wiser and better kind towards loftier pursuits, culminating in the most-coveted of all things: lordship over worlds and subjects of their own. Lordship granted, and at the discretion of a suzerain higher in the Goa'uld ranks, yet it was the start of a fruitful life as a self-styled god and master.

Or so it should have been, for mere decades after Karl'ac, as the Goa'uld in question was named, sat his lordly behind on the throne that awaited him inside a modest-but-cosy palace, a war started that was unlike the largely choreographed and ritualized wars that made the spice of Goa'uld civilization in a manner largely unchanged from those days when Supreme Lord Ra directly oversaw the flow of Goa'uld history rather than hide behind a veil of secrecy and detachment, leaving the rest of them to go on with the motions in a way that arguably suited everyone – those who survived their society's inherent level of violence and treachery anyway.

Then this millennia-old working arrangement crashed down as the galaxy witnessed the return of Anubis, the most despised, feared and hated Goa'uld of all, the very one every System Lord was glad not having to deal with. Yet he'd managed to attract a sizable following in the years that followed his return, by ways encompassing outright death and terror to dangling tantalizing gems of novel science and technology as the proverbial carrot. Hence the Goa'uld dominated quadrant of the Milky Way was soon enough ripped apart by something that was as close to total war as the Goa'uld dared wage.

Alas, Karl'ac chose to stay faithful to the Old Order facing Anubis, an alliance gathered under the leadership of the System Lords Yu and Apophis, with Lord Baal keeping true to his reputation as an opportunistic player, generally acting against Anubis while seizing any opportunity to benefit from the conflict. An alliance that was presently losing ground steadily despite localized successes. Yet in as much as this war's stakes appeared higher than usual, old habits died hard and the System Lords were rather more apt to attack and capture systems owned by such weak under-lords as Karl'ac than their more powerful opponents.

And since Karl'ac's little domain lay quite close to the War's broad and loosely-defined front-lines the conflict quickly took the form of an unmitigated disaster to him.

Over the past year three out of the four systems he nominally commanded were lost to enemy assaults, armies of superbly-equipped Jaffa easily overrunning his own meagre garrisons on the ground while his modest space-based capital fleet paid the price of its relative obsolescence. The handful motherships that came with the domain, an understrength Ha'tak squadron and a positively ancient Cheops that must have begun service in the old days of Ra buggering children, fell under strikes led by larger and meaner versions of themselves.

Now the enemy was coming for the last morsel of his fief and naturally he was alone to face them with a pitiful fleet reduced to his command Ha'tak, a handful Al'kesh strike craft and a couple depleted Death Glider fighter squadrons. He'd left but a token force of Jaffa down on the moon to guard the stargate, fully aware that in their demoralized state they were more likely to flee or even defect than attempt the expected "die for your god" performance. The rest were up on his mothership, barely safer given what they were about to face.

Chu'rel, his First Prime was still loyal as far as he knew, but even he couldn't quite hide his pessimism. What more even more telling was that Karl'ac didn't even feel the urge to strike his servant down, as most Goa'uld were wont to do whenever they could pin failure onto an underling. Maybe it was an accident of his birth, maybe it was his relative youth, but he was too self-conscious to do so and even the idea of torturing a few slaves for relief didn't appeal to his lordly mind. The best he could do, he felt, was to remain seated onto the gilded throne overlooking the command deck of his Hatak as it orbited the moon, and try to keep wearing a look of confidence that he absolutely didn't feel. What he absolutely couldn't bring himself to do was flee without even trying. He still had a sense of honor.

"First Prime! What's the status on my forces?" he inquired in a haughty manner, more as a relief against fiddling rather than real need, since his own link to the mothership's ancient but serviceable computer could provide all the required information directly to his mind.

"My Lord," the grizzled warrior intoned, "our remaining ships and Jaffa are fully prepared to fulfill their duty, but I must respectfully advise against staying at all costs if we're attacked. Anubis' fleet in this sector is far too powerful and we won't be able to stop a determined assault if they come in force here."

Karl'ac almost winced at the warrior's brutal honesty, but deep down he knew that honesty was better than obsequious lies. Nothing Chu'rel said was new to him, of course, but he was still impersonating a god, even if a minor one, and gods commanded respect, deference and a just amount of fear. Yet he was also brutally honest with himself: his lordship was over already. What was coming was merely the official notice. The next battle would probably see him either destroyed or fleeing, a homeless Goa'uld in an unforgiving galaxy. For a fleeting instant, Karl'ac contemplated the unthinkable: running off from Goa'uld space, forging a destiny for himself among the unknown regions of the galaxy. Never mind that such a venture was almost guaranteed to end badly, the most likely outcome being some uncaring and cold Asgard ship vaporizing him without so much as a warning first. Or worse. A lone exiled Goa'uld in a decrepit Ha'tak had no protection. He snorted in self-deprecating despair.

"My Lord?" inquired Chu'rel.

"Never mind, my First Prime... If the enemy comes, we will give them a taste of their own blood!" he managed to spell in a bombastic tone for his warriors' benefit. And then we'll be reduced to atomic vapor, he left unsaid, although it was painfully obvious that under that warrior's stoic face Chu'rel was thinking much of the same.

The gloomy atmosphere hanging over the command deck was cut short by a cry from another Jaffa crew. "Ships, ships coming out of god-space! Make that two, three... My Lord, that's five incoming motherships!"

"Jaffa! Are they enemy?" asked Chu'rel.

"Kree, First Prime! Their auras match those ships we fought over Mandji and Yttrik!" And a short fight it had been both times, the Jaffa remembered but did not say out loud.

Ra's children! I'm well and truly buggered, thought Karl'ac. Yet he acted with godly resolve. "Jaffa! Prepare to fight and destroy those mongrel-dogs!" he said in his best command voice, eyes flashing their godly light. "Launch all remaining Death Glider squadrons and have them form up to escort the strikers for attack runs on the lead enemy ship!"

"Jaffa, Kree!" answered him from a dozen throats.

On their lord's command, the warriors leapt into action. Al'kesh bombers launched from the moon's surface even as fighters were catapulted from the Ha'tak's hangars and blossomed into a screening formation, hoping to catch enemy small craft before they could reach striking distance. Void-borne Jaffa ran to their combat stations as gunners, damage control teams or counter-boarding squads.

"Incoming transmission, My Lord!"

"Put it through." Karl'ac already knew what the message would be, but he had to answer the challenge.

A female face appeared on the screen, smirking arrogantly. Nirrti, you again, thought Karl'ac. Of course you would throw it in with Anubis, sick bitch that you are. I bet he enjoys watching you create abominations out of human flesh.

"Karl'ac, my little wormlet," the higher-ranked Goa'uld greeted him in a scornfully patronizing tone "you should already surrender this pissant little world to me. Or do you need another lesson in respecting your elder and better? Truly, you ought to feel honored that I'm even bothering to speak to you, don't you think?" she added in calculated insult.

Ever the pleasant lady, Karl'ac reflected as he considered his answer. And suddenly had had enough of it, remembering the past insults. What more did she have to consider herself so far above him? A few more centuries, a legacy of distasteful atrocities that served no meaning? A hot wave of anger burned through his mind. To hell with niceness, he would tell it to her as it was! No more Mister Nice Goa'uld!

He arched a sarcastic eyebrow and spoke with the most contempt-laden tone he could muster, the most vulgar retort he could come up with.

"I heard Anubis gave you a very special gift for your service, a nice, long and thick vibrating one. Did you shove it so deep inside yourself that it scrambled your brains? Or did it make you so mad that he couldn't shove his own up your ass?"

A couple short guffaws were heard on the pel'tak, quickly extinguished when those Jaffa realized the magnitude of their god's insulting reply. Chu'rel winced inwardly. All they could hope for now was die fighting, no, worse: be vaporized fighting. For any corpse intact enough to be revived, would be. Nirrti would spare nothing to make them pay and serve as living examples of a fate worse than death, if the stories were true.

As Karl'ac's words sunk in, her face certainly expressed furor enough. Her eyes flashed madly and her beautiful regal features contorted in a snarling mask.

"Filth! I will flay you alive and morph you into weeping sacks of faceless rotten flesh! I will cut out your bowels to feed my..." Karl'ac cut off the transmission and his Jaffa looked up at him, the most daring minds of them knowing than even rebelling now would be futile. Even if one of them brought Nirrti their former lord's head, she would have them drawn and quartered for sure. No, better fight and go out on a glorious cloud of fire.

"Attack!" Karl'ac ordered, shaking them out of any deviant thought.

"Kree, Jaffa!"

Karl'ac focused on the tactical situation. A stand-up fight was hopeless, one obsolete Ha'tak against five. A running battle was out of the question as well, they could accelerate faster and started with superior velocity while he was coming out of orbit. They would overtake and envelop him, then pound his ship to dust. Fleeing was a dubious proposition as well since they would certainly track his hyperspace entry vector. Unless... Yes, some old musings about the vagaries of hyperspace came back to the forefront of his mind. Maybe…

"Jaffa! Set a direct course to the system's primary, maximum acceleration! Order our gliders to..."

Karl'ac's mothership lumbered out of orbit, engines straining to extract the ponderous ship from the multi-planetary system's gravitational embrace. Bombers and gliders followed behind, easily keeping pace. In response, Nirrti's own ships shifted course and raced to catch up while they disgorged shoals of gliders and attack craft.

"Jaffa! Time until we reach the star?"

"Fifteen minutes, my Lord!"

It was going to be close, reflected Chu'rel, having correctly deduced his master's plan. Nirrti's ships would be in range in no more than thirteen minutes and her attack craft were already approaching their own screen. Well, they'd be in for a surprise.

Two-thirds of a light-second behind, Nirrti's lead Jaffa pilot was barking orders and urging his subordinates forward, a massive wall formation of five hundred fighters leading, bombers following in their wake. They would slice through Karl'ac's meagre fighter screen and swarm his lone Ha'tak, softening it before the main force came in range. Such finesse was almost unnecessary, so outclassed the enemy was, but a Jaffa was always glad for the opportunity to fight for his goddess. What he couldn't have foreseen was that Karl'ac, utterly outpowered by his opponent's massive forces, had exercised a little creativity since the last battle, when attack crafts had similarly swarmed his ships.

"Enemy fighters approaching range, my Lord!" "Fine... prepare to fire a salvo and have our bombers coordinate their own fire." "Jaffa... Hold on… hold… Now! Fire main cannons!"

Karl'ac's gunners opened fire with the main battery, sending powerful particle plasma bursts towards the enemy formation. As the shots passed through his own screen, his bombers added their own fire, shooting energy torpedoes normally intended for anti-ground or anti-ship duty in a precisely timed salvo. Such fire was normally no threat to nimble fighter craft and their opponents were puzzled as they witnessed this senseless waste of power. There was no way any of them would actually be hit, after all. Just a slight maneuver pushed any threatened craft directly out of the line of fire.

"Pretty fireworks, eh? Nice of Karl'ac's lackeys to entertain us!" snickered Nirrti's fighter leader, raising answering laughs from his subordinates.

They didn't know and never considered the possibility that Karl'ac found the way to time out the plasma containment field of his plasma shots in a synchronized manner, such that the combined salvoes racing towards their formation were scheduled to burst at the precise moment they would fly in the middle of it.

One moment there was a wall of Gliders, the next, space was illuminated by actinic flashes as megatons worth of explosive energy intended to overpower a Hatak's shield expanded themselves against unshielded craft instead. The detonation pattern ravaged the tightly grouped squadrons, vaporizing hulls and Jaffas alike before they could scream and scattering the bombers that followed. Seconds later those were caught exposed and helpless when Karl'ac's gliders tore into them right on the heels of the devastating strike.

It was a master stroke, Karl'ac felt. Nirrti's bombers, stripped of their fighter cover and too far from their own Hataks' support fire, were overwhelmed by gliders intent on getting payback for their previous defeats. Thirty seconds after the initial anti-fighter strike, every last one of those were either destroyed or fleeing. Inside the bridge, Karl'ac and his Jaffa crew could hear the Glider pilots cheering and hollering, taunting their running opponents, and smiled.

Yet as pleased as Karl'ac felt, he knew this success didn't change the overall fact that he was outgunned. The enemy capital ships were steadily closing and soon they would reach attack range. Already they were opening their formation in order to outflank him. Well, there wasn't much he could do against it. They'd just have to hold until...

"Enemy ships in range, my Lord! They're firing at us!"

"Order our bombers and gliders to attack the lead Ha'tak from the flank! Return fire, focus on the same target!"

His plan was for the attack craft to take out weapon emplacements and weaken the shields of the outermost, thus most vulnerable Ha'tak. It was a good plan, the best they could do. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough. Karl'ac could only watch as his last pilots sacrificed their lives to merely scratch the outer hull and silence a scant number of secondary cannon emplacements in return. He winced as the last bomber wearing his colors exploded, its shielding worth as much as paper against a Ha'tak's main battery.

"Praise be my brave Jaffa! They fought well and will be richly rewarded in afterlife!" he cried with a sincerity that wasn't quite feigned.

Not that his Jaffa uniformly shared the same enthusiasm. In fact, several outright blasphemous thoughts rose among the warriors' minds along with noises that sounded suspiciously like snorts. Yet they didn't feel that it would matter much, for all five enemy ships engaged their lone Ha'tak and they understood what the virgin maiden experienced during Chulak's yearly festival.

The old mothership shuddered as the first blasts struck its shield, joined by more, many more, abusing inertial compensators and gravity-plating so much that crewmen had to grab handholds to avoid falling as the decks shuddered violently.

"Jaffa, report!" barked Chu'rel. "Shield strength at four-tenth and falling! Three-tenth! It's getting through! Hull breach! Losing air in several decks!" the Jaffa responsible for monitoring ship state worriedly reported.

Across the decks Jaffa damage control teams scrambled to seal their armor then attempted to patch over glowing holes and repair ruptured energy conduits to keep their own guns firing – as much difference as it made.

"Time to the sun's chromosphere" asked Karl'ac. "Fifteen seconds my Lord... it's not going to be enough! We're losing shields!"

Under the bombardment the external hull was now glowing in several places, molten-looking holes blasted through the strong Trinium alloy, air escaping and freezing out along with tumbling bodies of Jaffa unlucky enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

"We're entering the sun's chromosphere... heat and radiation increasing inside the ship, my Lord! The outer hull is melting! We won't hold for long!"

"Prepare to open a hyperspace window on my command!"

Karl'ac's ship streaked down like a fireball into the fringes of the inferno, trailing a tail of plasma bolts. Throughout exposed interior spaces temperatures were reaching levels usually found in cooking ovens and the ship's structure was creaking and groaning, loud booms signaling whole sections of hull plating popping out to be consumed by the wreath of fire.

"We're losing the enemy aura, my Lady ! That star is interfering with our god-eyes!" Nirrti's First Prime reacted with an expression of disbelief. "It's breaking apart? Did they choose to die that way?" "First Prime, there's a god-space opening!" a sensor-operator Jaffa shouted excitedly. "It's dissolving... the enemy ship disappeared, interference from star energy, we can't track its god-space trail!"

Nirrti's mood went from triumphant to fuming. That cursed little worm! How could such a pissant youngling dare escape her clutches, after insulting her in such manner! Rage boiled inside her and needed an outlet. Screaming an imprecation, she raised her jeweled palm and aimed at the useless Jaffa operator. Her kara-kesh flashed and he was flung into the nearest bulkhead, dazed and stunned. She stepped forward, hand raised and eyes fuming. "Worthless traitor! You let the enemy escape!" She knew it wasn't the truth but truth and honesty hardly mattered when it came to dealing with her mortal, slave underlings. Only fear did. Raising the hand-held energy projector over the Jaffa's head, she held the beam until his brain was fried, blood poured out of his nostrils and his eyes popped out of their orbits. As the smoking corpse slid bonelessly down, she turned back, swept her gaze across the rest of her terrorized bridge crew and thundered with flashing eyes: "This is the fate of those who fail their goddess! Let it be a lesson for the rest of you!".

With nothing else left to do, her five ships turned around and headed back to the inhabited moon. It was time for the laboring slaves to start fearing their new Goddess.