Reaching for the Stars - A Stargate Quest

Abydos - Humanitarian Aid – 1 Command Point
Ongoing – Currently at 2 of 3 Progress

There were stark limits to what you would be able to deliver to the Abydonians in terms of bulk as everything had to be carried by hand, or by whatever Dr. Jackson had in mind when he talked about pack animals taking over the shipment once they reach the Abydos gate room. That meant that alleviating the Abydonians water problems was not really feasible, but at least medicine and some food could be sent to them.

When talking with Captain Fraiser about this, she pretty much hijacked the efforts from you and provided deployment proposals and procurement orders for everything she would need. She also disabused you of the notion to send MREs, as the Abydonians would have no idea what to do with them. There was also a very veiled suggestion that you might have been flying a desk for too long to remember what the rank and file thought of subsisting on MREs for a any period of time. Instead, she suggested to ship over oil, rendered fat, nuts and other foods that had plenty of calories and did not require water to be prepared.

Meanwhile, your infirmary personal started some regular visits to Abydos. There were plenty of injuries from the forced displacement and work that the people had endured. Many wounded had to be tended to at the mines, being too sick to be either brought to the gate or return to the razed city like most had. A lot of antibiotics were carried through the Stargate and your medical personnel was reporting that they were making good progress, but there remained a lot of problems to address.

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Abydos - Machine Gun Emplacements – 3 Command Point
Finished

It took a bit of digging, but you found a good combat engineer with the right security clearances in the ranks of the Space Force and had him transferred to your command as fast as possible. You had never fortified anything, and while securing the gate in Cheyenne Mountain was straightforward, you did not trust your gut feeling to micromanage the efforts on Abydos. Especially since Abydos would have no available backup in case something went wrong. So, you gave the man command over some of your specialists, told him to fortify the gate and that he should just send material requests for you to sign.

Two more M2 Browning were the first thing he ordered, together with an ample amount of ammunition and a lot of sandbags. That was expected and you just signed it. The next thing were a few kilometres of concertina wire. That sounded excessive, but after asking around, it turned out to be not all that much when you were planning to fill some space. The explosives to demolish part of the temple and HESCO barriers were also making sense and since you were quite busy with other things, you signed it off. It was the order for two more M2's, kilometres more of wire and two crates of claymore mines that raised your eyebrows, and you asked the Master Sergeant for a more detailed account of what the hell he was doing.

He had started with placing the machine guns near the entrance of the temple and next filled the many blind spots behind the pillars with wire traps in case an attacker wanted to take cover there. However, after doing some drills with a few members of the Abydonian militia roped into playing attacking Jaffa, he deemed that insufficient. So, the obvious solution, at least in his mind, was to blow a hole into the temple to move the Stargate out and to start over. At least he had consulted Captain Carter for that part and even got it done within a single night, leaving the gate travel schedule uninterrupted.

You were not sure if you should reprimand the man for grossly exceeding the implied scope of his orders or commemorate him for grossly exceeding expectations. The Abydos Stargate now rested in a small valley dug into a dune and flanked by four-meter-high sheer walls made of HESCO barriers that had been liberally decorated with concertina wire. Anyone who came out of the gate had to walk about 400 meters straight at two machine gun emplacements over open ground. He now wanted to add another row of HESCO barriers to the walls so that it became less of a problem that sand would be blown into the kill zone, add more wire traps, mines and two more machine gun emplacements. You signed off on that and told the engineer that this would be enough for now. You also made a note to keep a closer eye on him the next time before he erected a star fort.

Abydos Outpost established.
Abydos Gate Area built.
Abydos Gate Area gains "Machine Gun Emplacements" and "No Man's Land."

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Abydos - Pyramid Investigation - 1 Command Point
Complications – No Progress

Things were progressing less well within the pyramid. Most of the writings within were about Ra's power, his victories and how he was much greater than any of the other Goa'uld, but especially better than Apophis. It was unclear if it was on orders or if the Stargate guards acted on their own, but at some point after SG-1 and the Abydonians left the pyramid catacombs, Jaffa had come into the chambers and defaced much of the writings by staff blasts. The damage was quite extensive and though Dr. Jackson was certain that between his very detailed notes and some proper archaeology, all the information could be restored, it would take more effort than originally expected.

Action cost raised to 2.

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Abydos – Naquadah Retrieval – SG-1
Success

Diplomatic efforts were progressing decently. The leader of the Abydonians, Kasuf, was originally reluctant to part with their small stockpile of Naquadah. While it has no practical use for them, it is still used as a trade commodity and sometimes for jewellery, so he originally planned to hold onto it and to trade with some of the nomad tribes roaming the deserts for supplies. However, between O'Neill's efforts and the aid you were giving them, he felt comfortable to part with it.

Gained Naquadah Ore

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Training – Stealth – SG-3

The only other ready team was meanwhile sent away from Cheyenne Mountain. After a few calls, you managed to organize a vacation in Fort Bragg for them where they would run through some training and drills by Delta Force instructors. It is quite a lot to expect from a recently promoted Sergeant and a few enlisted that were expecting to be guarding a base or something similar mundane when they signed up for the Space Force. None the less, Sergeant Yi had apparently taken quite well to his role after the battle on Abydos and the instructors were quite happy with his performance in particular.

Sergeant Yi gains Rank 2 Stealth.
Specialist Apgar gains Rank 1 Stealth.

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Base Improvement - Better Infirmary – 1 Command Point
Ongoing – Currently at 4 of 10 Progress

With all the strain on the medical staff, you had not expected much headway to be made in regards to expanding your own medical facilities, but Captain Fraiser surprised you there. She apparently kept in touch with quite a few colleagues she had worked with over her and provided you with lists of specialists that were already in the military and potentially open for a transfer, or who could be recruited with the right incentives. Given what you learned about her in the short time you had been working together, you suspected she meant you should talk about your humanitarian efforts, but you decided a well-padded pay check wouldn't hurt either.

The responses were quite positive. A few specialists were still missing from the list, but overall you had a lot of experienced staff lines up for recruitment. The background checks were still pending and would take a while, especially for the civilians, and you still needed to procure a lot of specialized equipment, but the project was already well ahead of schedule.

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Procurement - Infantry Weapons - 2 Command Point
Finished.

Given the experiences in the field, you prioritised straightening out the equipment of your teams. Thankfully, that was all handled quite well by official channels and a few calls to speed up the churn of the bureaucracy. O'Neill and Ferreti chimed in on what they thought would be best and you mostly kept to their suggestions.

Instead of adopting the current M4 for your forces as most of the US military did, you went with the M27 rifle that the marines used and which was based on the HK416 that SG-1 used to good effect. On O'Neills urging, you also obtained a large number of FN P90s as your default submachine gun. He apparently had taken quite a liking to the weapon through prior experience with it in the late 90s and early 00s. Lastly you got a good number of M249 SAW LMG's with the goal of having one of them in any team. It was getting very obvious already that your teams would be often outnumbered, and every force multiplier was welcome to push back against that.

A few days after the first orders went out, you got a curious call out of the blue. Someone connected to the Next Generation Squad Weapon Program had gotten wind of your orders and thought they could make some inroads in the Space Force by advertising the new XM5 rifle that had recently been approved. You weren't going to say no to a few crates of new weapons and so a small number of XM5 was also getting a place in your armoury.

Armoury stock standardised and upgraded.

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Outreach – FEMA – 1 Command Point
Finished

Trying to get in touch with FEMA turned out much easier and faster than expected. You pretty much had been expected already. Without much ado, you got onto a call with the current Administrator, Catherine McAllister, who was visibly relieved to speak to you in person. She had already been briefed on everything and felt much more secure now that she had a face to the main defence against alien invasion. The president hat decided to have FEMA prepare disaster preparedness plans for mass casualty events in the US and since they needed to know what to prepare for, she and the most senior staff of her agency got shown some of the video material and photos of Jaffa you had accumulated.

Unsurprisingly, they did not take it that well. You were already not sleeping all that well with the knowledge that a Goa'uld space ship might show up over Earth one day, and you had the benefit of having something you could do about that. For McAllister and her staff, there was no such thing. They were currently in the process of putting together plans under the cover of preparing for a potential asteroid impact, but those in the know were not sleeping well with the knowledge that the 'asteroid' was really coming and that it would actively aim for the largest cities.

She promised you aid in whatever you would need, be it material or personnel. There was the problem of security clearance, as her agency did not actually run any Top Secret black sites, but she promised to sort that out for you. It would take a while to set all of it up, but once everything was in place, they could hopefully aid you or even take over humanitarian efforts for you. Lastly, she offered to use her own connections to get you equally preferential treatment from USAID, but you politely declined that. You had enough problems without the CIA skulking around in your command.

FEMA will set up cooperation infrastructure on their end.

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Outreach - United States Army Corps of Engineers – 1 Command Point
Finished

In contrast, the Army Corps of Engineers was less eager to get in touch with you, but were none the less quite cordial. As your contact lacked the proper security clearance, you needed stay a bit vague on the details of your needs and requirements, but after a good hour of back and forth, you could agree on three rough areas where they could send you some aid. Unfortunately though, you would have to pick one. Their services were always in high demand and even your connections and standing with the president would not be enough to let you monopolize too many of their resources.

The first options would have been assigning your command a team of mining engineers and bunker specialists that had been chronically underutilized in recent years. There had not been as much of a demand for nuclear bunkers in recent times. For you though, they could be a major boon. While there was still some room left for expansion in your sub-levels of Cheyenne Mountain, the space was still starkly limited and expanding would take a lot of time and effort. Especially if you would decide to pursue your idea of relocating the Stargate or expanding the gate room to accommodate vehicles.

On the other hand, they could also assign you a large group of their regular combat engineers. They lacked the specialized training of others but knew how to assemble forward operating bases on the fly and how to fortify them. It would greatly helped any efforts to establish a bigger presence on Abydos, or other planets for that matter, if you had them on-call for such efforts.

Lastly, the corps could provide you with a number of their civilian engineers. Their core competencies were water management, civilian buildings and infrastructure. All things that would greatly help any humanitarian efforts off-world, or if you planned to set up a long-term presence on a planet, though all of that seemed far off and without vehicle access to the gate, they would be of little help when deploying to places like Abydos that were practically still in the bronze age.

Which engineers do you wish to take?

[] Take the mining and bunker specialists. Expanding Cheyenne Mountain and potentially setting up mining operations off-world would be massive boons.

[] Pick the combat engineers. You will need proper bases and defences to establish a permanent presence on other planets.

[] Have the civilian engineers transferred. While not immediately useful, their expertise will be useful long-term and their services could be a great bargaining chip in negotiations with other polities.

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Technology Analysis – Staff Weapon – 2 Research Points
Ongoing – Currently at 5 Progress

Efforts to pry open the weapons without damaging them have been delayed to due one of them exploding and taking some equipment out in the process, throwing the project back a bit. Once that was replaced, the scientists successfully managed to remove the casing of one staff weapon and have now begun to catalogize the internal components. So far, they managed to identify only the power source, which is a small ampule of a glowing, greenish liquid that reminds you vaguely of a glow stick. It is however also the component that keeps bursting into flames or exploding when mishandled, so the team is reluctant to pry it out to see what exactly is in it.

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Technology Analysis – Jaffa Armor – 1 Research Point
Ongoing – Currently at 1 Progress

There have been no new insights into the armor of the Jaffa.

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AN: Pretty decent turn for you, all things considered. To clarify the FEMA bit: they are basically performing a free action for you that will take a few turns to complete.