In the aftermath of Ethan Rayne's spell Xander Harris finds himself transformed into a capsuleer and finds himself drawn into the battle between Stargate Command and the Goa'uld Empire.
A Legacy of Chaos
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Chapter One
- Location
- South Wales, United Kingdom
A Legacy of Chaos
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or universes that I am about to mangle around for my own amusement, sadly Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Stargate and EVE Online belong to Mutant Enemy Productions, MGM and CCP respectively, I am merely borrowing them and make absolutely no profit from their use. As a result, please keep the legal attack dogs – also known as lawyers – firmly muzzled and on a leash as I have no money to give to anyone.
Authors Notes: This is my third attempt at a response to the ship of the line challenge, hopefully it will go better than the two iterations of Pioneers Dawn that have sadly died as I didn't really think them through properly and ended up backing myself into a corner story telling wise. While I am still using Stargate as the third crossover element in this latest attempt to answer the very intriguing ship of the line challenge do not expect SG-1 and other characters to be major characters and players in the story events for quite a while. Also as with Pioneers Dawn (both versions) the SG-1 elements will remain timeline compliant so at this point in the timeline they're just after the events at the end of season one/start of season two as a result don't expect to see the F-302, the Prometheus or the Daedalus anytime soon.
Also unlike the norm for these stories and YAHF stories in general I will not go through the events of the Halloween night itself, those have all been done to death and we all know the general gist of what goes on that night, instead we will be jumping straight into the aftermath. Though I will refer to the night itself from time to time. I hope nobody minds too much.
Finally I know some of you are bound to complain about another new story when I was working on an update to A Left Turn at Albuquerque. I am still working on the update but it is slow going as I iam finding it hard to be enthusiastic about Star Wars at the moment.
~~~///~~~
Chapter One
Dampness.
It was the first thing that Xander Harris became aware of. Everything was damp and slimy, and his limbs felt like they were made of wet spaghetti and not skin, bone and muscle. Slowly he opened his eyes to find himself lying flat on a metallic deck amid a pool of golden fluid that was rapidly being drained away through slots in the floor specifically designed for that purpose. He blinked in confusion and awkwardly managed to sit up, it was hard as his muscles didn't seem to want to coordinate for some strange reason and look around in complete and utter bafflement.
He was lying on the floor of a metallic room filled with strange transparent cylinders filled with softly bubbling gold fluid. Though what really freaked him out was what was in those cylinders. Bodies, specifically every single one was an exact copy of himself.
"What the hell," he said blinking as his voice croaked as if it had never been used before.
"Please try to relax captain," a disembodied, somewhat emotionless female voice said from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
"Who the hell are you?" Xander demanded, somewhat foolishly, looking around for the source of the voice.
"I feared this would happen. Please try and relax Xander Harris," the voice said, "your memories of what has happened to you should fully integrate in another couple of minutes and it can be very disorientating."
Xander frowned and was about to repeat his demand when a tsunami of memories and information came crashing into his mind and suddenly, he knew everything. He remembered dressing up as a space pilot for Halloween after his original plan for a two-dollar costume had gone flying out the window after some snot nosed brat grabbed the last toy rifle from the store. Thankfully, or so it had seemed at the time, the proprietor had taken pity on him and offered to let him rent the space pilot costume for the two dollars he'd wanted to spend.
It had seemed so innocent.
Only it hadn't been as he'd been out carrying out the escort duty that Principal Snyder had lumped him, Willow and Buffy with when an intense pain had swept over his body. He remembered feeling himself be changed, remade at some fundamental level into something that was both human and beyond human at the same time as he was transformed into the space pilot version of himself. A pilot who had been way, way more than anything he had ever thought possible and who controlled ships in a way that seemed to have just leapt out of his favourite sci-fi television show. He remembered Willow, somehow turned into a real ghost though wearing some very provocative attire that had to have been chosen for her by Buffy as Willow was not into wearing anything so risqué, finding him and convincing his confused pilot self to help her.
From there he remembered meeting Buffy who'd somehow been turned into a crying, screaming utterly useless eighteenth century noblewoman – something which he was so going to have fun teasing her about for months – and persuading her to accompany them back to Buffy's house. Where his pilot-self had ended up saving Cordelia from something that had looked like a cross between Chewbacca from Star Wars and a stereotypical werewolf, shooting the thing with a suddenly very real plasma pistol that had knocked it flying though had oddly not killed it when the other him had known it should, before getting her inside Buffy's place.
He remembered Angel showing up, Willow leaving to speak to Giles and a kid-turned-vampire by the same spell that had to have affected them attacking, only to be quickly overpowered and knocked out by Angel. Though in that fracas Angel's vampiric nature had been revealed as he'd briefly gone into game face, prompting Buffy/Lady Useless to scream and run off into the night. He remembered going with Angel and Cordelia to try and find the currently helpless Slayer before something else did.
Unfortunately, Spike found her first and they'd ended up in a fight with the blond master vampire. Who'd quickly met his end when a bolt from the plasma pistol ignited his undead flesh and in a flash of flames – and the familiar eerie scream of demonic anguish as the blood demon animating Spike's body was banished back to hell where it belonged – the normally dangerous as hell vamp had been reduced to a sad little pile of smouldering dust. The spell ended at that point but before he had been able to even get his wits back, he'd been set on from behind by someone screaming about him killing her spikey and something about being a bad kitten and needing to be punished. He remembered the inhumanly strong, cold hands of the clearly furious female vampire grab him and, before he could even begin to defend himself, snap his neck…
…only to suddenly wake up here.
Even as that onslaught of memory faded additional memories, a lifetimes worth of them, bombarded his mind and he suddenly knew everything about Alexander's life or rather lives from the birth of his original body on the Gallente homeworld, to his enlistment in the Federal Navy, conversion into a capsuleer and his voyages and adventures through the vast star cluster of New Eden after his enlistment ended. The surge of memory ended and Xander blinked and shook his head to clear the residual disorientation.
"Damn that was… I don't know how to describe it," he muttered even as he carefully got to his feet, his limbs now working properly as his neural patterns completed their integration with his new clone body. A fact that was really going to take a hell of a lot of getting used to, he also now had to a) figure out a way back to Earth assuming that was possible and b) stop Buffy from Slaying him on sight given people did not usually just come straight back from the dead unless they were a vampire or had been raised by dark magic.
"My former captain often said that," the female voice that he now recognized as belonging to Aura, Alexander's A.I replied. "The disorientation will pass completely in another few moments. Neural integration shock is not an unknown phenomenon among capsuleers, especially new ones like yourself sir though it will become less of an issue over time and…"
"…with more deaths," Xander finished even as he shivered both at the thought of dying again and the fact that he was bloody cold as he was kind of naked here. "No offense Aura but I don't plan to die again anytime soon. Now can you tell me where I can shower and get some clothes?"
"There are showers just by the entrance to the clone bay and a dressing room beyond that you should find clothing in there."
"Thank you," he replied as he began walking towards the entrance to the clone bay without needing anymore directions from Aura. "Aura by the way where am I? This definitely isn't somewhere in Sunnydale after all."
"No, it is not. You are currently in bay one of the cloning facilities of a Fortizar-class Citadel station," Aura answered. "We are currently orbiting a gas and ice giant planet in an unknown system. Curiously if I am interpreting data from the stations sensors correctly this gas giant is located only thirty point one astronomical units from your previous location."
Xander frowned slightly, pausing as he reached for the door controls as he recalled the astronomy sections of his high school physics lessons. Surprisingly he found it a great deal easier than he was used to and suddenly realized just which planet they were orbiting. "We're in orbit of Neptune then," he said.
"Neptune?" Aura questioned before searching through the station's library files for that name and feeling as close to shock as an artificial intelligence could at what she found. "You mean the eighth planet of the Terran home solar system do you not?"
"Well I'm not referring to the Roman god of the same name so yeah," Xander answered momentarily confused as to why Aura seemed to be surprised at where the massive station was orbiting. Then he remembered that for Aura, Alexander and indeed anyone from New Eden Earth and the other planets of its solar system were spoken of and remembered as being objects of myth and legend dating back twenty thousand or so years to before the sudden, violent collapse of the EVE gate wormhole severed New Eden from the rest of humanity. It was amazing when he thought about it that the people of New Eden could talk about Earth and the other planets of the solar system in much the same way they'd talk about the lost civilization of Atlantis.
"How could we possibly be here?" Aura wondered aloud. "I have no records of the station ever being built here and at any rate the EVE gate wormhole reopening would have certainly been headline news all over New Eden."
Xander shrugged even as he acknowledged that would be true. The four great empires of New Eden as well as Concord, the various alliances and miniempires created by capsuleers would go crazy if the wormhole back to the rest of humanity suddenly reappeared after twenty thousand or so years of being gone. "Magic would be my best guess," he said, "it's also would explain how all of this," he gestured to the station around them and then at himself, "came into existence in one night. Especially as everything here normally only exists in a video game world, one that is supposed to still be in development out of the old Elite game franchise."
"That is not logical. Magic is not real."
"Maybe not in the reality you're from but in this one it is very real, everything supernatural that has been thought a myth in modern times – by my reckoning probably ancient times to you – is in fact frighteningly real."
"But how?"
"That I cannot answer, Giles might be able to tell you but I can't all I know is that every supernatural I thought fictional, but especially vampires are in fact real and unlike what some modern fiction likes to show they are not in any way friendly."
"Really?"
"Yes, I'll explain more soon after I've had a shower and got dressed as I'm kind of freezing here."
"Would you like me to adjust the environmental settings?" Aura asked concerned about her new captain's welfare, such was one of her duties as an artificial intelligence.
"It's a figure of speech Aura."
"Oh."
Xander sighed to himself. He had a feeling it was going to take him and Aura awhile to get used to each other as while he had Alexander's memories, and hopefully his skills and training as it would suck big time to be stuck on this station, he wasn't him. Hopefully he would soon also be able to get back in touch with Giles and the others – hopefully without Buffy trying to slay him on sight – and figure out just what to do from here as he couldn't leave this station empty for too long. Especially given the fact that there were multiple copies of himself in the cloning bays waiting for his consciousness to be downloaded into them if he ended up getting killed again – though hopefully that wouldn't happen again for a good long while as dying kind of hurt.
He put those thoughts out of his mind for now as he arrived at the showers.
~~//~~
Warehouse
Sunnydale
A Few Minutes Earlier
Buffy Summers blinked as she suddenly found herself back in control of her own body to be greeted by the sight of an astonished Spike as the master vampires outline imploded and he collapsed into a sad little pile of smouldering dust on the floor. The cause of his sudden, fiery demise being a green energy bolt that had come from the real-due-to-the spell sci-fi pistol that Xander was holding in a very competent manner. Or rather had been holding as he suddenly staggered and dropped the pistol as like her he came back to himself, looking around in surprise and confusion.
She couldn't help but shiver as she remembered exactly what had just happened. Being turned into a screaming, crying utterly useless eighteenth-century noblewoman by what was obviously a spell of some kind, she really hated it when she had to deal with magical shenanigans, had not exactly been a very pleasant experience. It was also something that should not have happened since, according to Giles, Halloween was supposed to be a quiet night for the undead and other supernatural nastiness. Obviously somebody didn't get that particular memo, she thought annoyed, and when I find out just who it was they are so going to get it given Spike could have killed me all because Lady Useless had to run away when she saw Angel was a vampire.
"Buffy are you alright," Angel asked as a confused hubbub of voices came from the children and young adults who'd been turned, thankfully briefly, into various ghouls and demons by the same spell that had affected her, Xander and presumably Willow.
"I'm fine," Buffy replied taking off her wig and glaring at it angrily. One thing was for sure she would never be able to watch a period romance drama the same way again now that she knew what the noblewomen of those time periods were really like. An enraged howl from nearby abruptly caught her attention and she looked up just in time to see a female vamp in a white flowing gown charge up to Xander.
"You killed my Spikey. Bad kitten you must be punished," she was screaming as before anyone could react the furious female vampire grabbed the still somewhat disorientated Xander, lifted him up by the throat before snapping his neck.
"NOOO!" Buffy screamed in rage and horror before she charged the vampiress as she dropped Xander's body to the floor, hitting her dead in the face with a fist that had the full strength of an enraged Slayer behind it. The force of the blow made the vampiress cry out in pain even as she was sent flying across the warehouse to slam hard enough into the far wall that the sheet metal wall visibly trembled from the force of the impact. Her fury unspent Buffy stalked forward, wishing she had thought to pack a stake in this costume so she could end this undead fiend's existence right here and now, but she hadn't. She would just have to settle for beating the vampire to a pulp and come back to finish it off later as even the enhanced healing abilities of vampires had their limits.
Unfortunately, her rage would go unsated as the vampiress, with a speed that proved that she was indeed a master level vampire, got back to her feet and retreated, fleeing out into the night. Buffy growled in anger and was about to follow her when Angel put his hand on her shoulder. "Buffy let her go," he said softly knowing that if Buffy continued to go after Drusilla in her current state she would end up being killed as insane as she was Drusilla was a dangerous fighter as he, or rather Angelus, had taught her himself. Buffy would need to be clear headed and focused to have any chance of killing Drusilla.
"But she…" Buffy started to protest.
"I know but if you go after her now, especially as you are unarmed then Drusilla will kill you," Angel replied, "there will be time to deal with her later. With Spike dusted she will be vulnerable, and we can track her down and slay her another time. Right now, you have other things to worry about."
Buffy looked at him, her eyes burning with rage at seeing Xander be murdered by this Drusilla and demanding he explain more why she shouldn't just go after the vampiress right now. In answer Angel just gestured back to the assembled kids and Buffy looked to see that many of them were now either staring at Xander's lifeless body in shock or wailing in distress at seeing someone killed like that. Cordelia was doing her best to comfort them, showing some of the heart of gold that Queen C hid behind her spoiled rich girl/queen of Sunnydale High's social scene veneer.
Immediately her rage vanished, numbness that she knew would soon turn to grief replacing it.
"You and Cordelia should take the children back to the High School and their parents," Angel told her softly.
"But what about Xander we can't just leave him here."
"Don't worry about that Buffy. I will handle Xander and get his body to the right people so the appropriate ceremonies and procedures to lay him to rest can be followed." Angel glanced at Xander's lifeless, cooling corpse with some sorrow. While it was true that they were rivals for Buffy's affection, and he knew that Xander disliked him in no small part due to his vampiric nature, he had respected the young man's courage and determination. You had to respect anyone who voluntarily took up the fight against the more hostile aspects of the supernatural world despite having no powers of their own.
Buffy looked at him for a moment then nodded in understanding before turning to Cordelia. "Cordelia, we need to get the children away from here and back to the school," she said softly but more than loud enough for the normally spoiled socialite to hear, look up and nod in agreement.
"And Xander," Cordelia asked, and Buffy was honestly surprised to hear a slight, but real shudder of emotion in her voice. Maybe she and Xander had already started dating, she thought remembering that Xander and Cordelia had been dancing around each other, shooting flirtatious glances at one another for weeks now. Behaviour that had told both her and Willow that they were on the verge of becoming boyfriend and girlfriend. A state that she knew had filled Willow with a combination of jealousy and horror.
Willow.
Oh God Willow this is going to destroy her, she thought knowing that Willow was certain to fall apart when she was told of her lifelong friend's death. She didn't really want to be the one to tell her the terrible truth of what had just happened here. But she knew she would have to.
"Angel will deal with him," she assured Cordelia. Cordelia hesitated for a moment and then nodded once again and between them they began to carefully herd the shocked, frightened and crying children out of the warehouse.
Angel watched them leave then he carefully walked over to Xander's body and gently picked him up. Immediately he knew something was different to normal as through the clothes beneath his hands he could feel a series of metal objects – six of them in total – running down Xander's spine. What in the world, he thought as he – still being careful with the cooling body of the young man – he shifted the bodies position enough to be able to pull up his shirt with one hand to see just what the strange circular objects were.
What he saw almost made him drop the body in surprise.
"What the hell," he said gaping at what he saw in disbelief and a small amount of horror. In the two hundred or so years that he'd lived he had never seen anything like this before, at the back of his mind he could feel even Angelus reeling in surprise, confusion and a small amount of sick fascination. The objects were small circular sockets each about a centimetre and a half in diameter, they were imbedded in Xander's flesh and looked like they had always been there. Yet he knew for a fact that Xander had had nothing like them there before this evening.
"You could say that again rat breath," a familiar voice said from behind him making him jump before – still holding Xander's body – spinning around to find himself face to face with Whistler. The balance demon who'd recruited him to serve the light, and in the process earn redemption for the many horrific crimes he'd committed when he was Angelus, looked like he'd been pole axed by something and it didn't take a genius to figure out just why.
"Whistler! What the hell is going on here? Do you know what these socket things that have appeared on Xander's body are?"
"I do indeed," Whistler admitted. "They're there because of the spell cast this night by Ethan Rayne, or rather because of what the spell turned him into."
"But what do metal sockets have to do with Xander having been turned into a space pilot?" Angel asked confused.
"Because he became a type of pilot from a reality on the opposite side of the multiverse from this reality. A reality that the people of this reality think is only a video game franchise which will in a few years be expanded into an online roleplaying game. He was a capsuleer."
"A what?"
"A capsuleer in their own universe they're also known as pod pilots or empyrians depending on who you talk to. Through an extremely advanced form of the sciences known as cloning and cybernetics capsuleers are pilots who can be in a very real sense be merged with their ships as in when a capsuleer is plugged in they literally become the ship."
"Incredible," Angel breathed shocked as, while he didn't know a huge amount about modern technology though he was getting better at using it any vampire had to in this day and age if they wanted to survive he knew it would take knowledge and technology centuries or millennia ahead of anything on Earth in order to create something like that. "Wait how come the spell went so in depth as to create cybernetic implants that sophisticated? A fake pistol being turned real I can believe but creating something like these implants?"
"That's just it the spell shouldn't have," Whistler replied. "The spell tonight was always going to happen, it's an important part of various people's destinies, but it was never supposed to become what it became or result in the final death of Spike and Xander wasn't supposed to die."
"So how did it," Angel wondered. While he wasn't an expert on magic, he knew enough about it to know that spells usually worked within relatively tight parameters.
"Someone else interfered and altered the parameters of the spell to accomplish this change. Who they are I do not know so don't ask," Whistler replied the last part was of course a lie, he – and the Powers That Be – knew exactly who was behind the massive changes made to the spell and its outcome. Not that he was going to tell Angel that as there was no reason for the ensouled master vampire to know anything about them.
Angel frowned as he immediately suspected that Whistler wasn't telling him everything. Balance demons never truly told you everything only really what they think you needed to know and no more. "So, what are you telling me this for now Whistler?"
"You needed to know so you can tell the Slayer and her friends that this wasn't the Powers fault. Also tell Giles that Ethan Rayne is only partially to blame for all of this," Whistler answered, "oh and if I were you, I would drop the body now."
Angel was about to open his mouth to ask what Whistler meant by that when he heard it. It was a faint but growing buzzing sound that seemed to be coming from the body he was holding. Alarmed he dropped the body and it wasn't a moment too soon for as soon as the body hit the concrete floor with a brutal sounding smack it began to glow from within. The outlines of Xander's body blurred and before his amazed eyes the whole body disintegrated leaving nothing but a human shaped blackened smudge on the floor to show where it had been.
"What the hell caused that," he asked aloud. When he received no response, he turned to look for Whistler to see that the balance demon had vanished. Oh, I hate it when he does that, he thought mentally grumbling at Whistler's lack of manners, but then in his experience most demons didn't care for the little niceties. Then he sighed as another thought occurred to him. How am I going to explain this to Buffy? Maybe just tell her the truth about the cybernetic implants I found and that Xander's body disintegrated presumably due to a biological self-destruct. Though I wonder who Whistler wasn't telling me about? He clearly knew far more about what happened to the spell than he was letting on and who was behind it.
After a moment Angel shrugged and headed off in the direction that Buffy and Cordelia had gone with the children. He would tell Buffy and the others the truth and hope to stop Buffy from doing something stupid to a certain Ethan Rayne for setting this whole thing in motion.
~~//~~
Stargate Command
That Same Time
"General Hammond sir."
Major General George Hammond looked up from the paperwork he was working his way through at the sound of someone calling for him. He had been going over the latest prospective candidates report, with the SGC having been formally reactivated after Apophis' abortive attack he'd been given the go ahead by the joint chiefs to increase the number of operative SG teams, and welcomed the break from the monotony of reading personnel file after personnel file. Somehow, he wasn't surprised to find Airman Walter Harriman standing in the doorway.
"Yes?" he asked.
"Sir we just received a report from one of our deep range telescopes on Hawaii," Walter replied, "they've detected an anomaly in orbit above Neptune sir."
"What kind of anomaly?" George asked instantly worried that it might be Apophis returning to attempt another attack on Earth. An attack he had no idea how they would repel this time given that they'd only survived last time through sheer dumb luck and SG-1 defying Senator Kinsey's shutdown order and going through the gate only to by pure chance end up aboard one of the motherships heading for Sol.
"It appears to be a very large space station of some kind sir," Walter replied, "unfortunately they were not able to get many images of it before it disappeared into the penumbra of Triton, Neptune's largest moon. We estimate it will be eight to twelve hours before they'll be able to get a view of the station again."
"And the images they were able to capture?"
"They've been sent to us. We're working to enlarge and enhance them now they should be ready to view in about twenty minutes."
"Bring them to the briefing room as soon as they're ready and have SG-1 come to the room as well," George ordered, though he wasn't sure what they would be able to do about a potentially, but only potentially, hostile alien space station located so far from Earth. They certainly had no weapons capable of reaching such a station and even if they did there was no guarantee that they'd be anymore effective against whatever defences the station would have than they'd been against the shields surrounding the two ships Apophis had brought to Earth.
"Yes sir," Walter replied before turning and walking away. George for his part sighed before reaching for and picking up the handset of the red phone on his desk and bringing it to his ear. For a moment more nothing happened then the hotline connected.
"This is Major General Hammond," he said to the white house switch board operator. "I need to speak to the president."
"Stand by General."
For a few moments the phone rang then it was picked up. "Yes, General Hammond?" came the familiar voice of President Julian Marcel. "What is it?"
"Mister President we might have a problem."
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or universes that I am about to mangle around for my own amusement, sadly Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Stargate and EVE Online belong to Mutant Enemy Productions, MGM and CCP respectively, I am merely borrowing them and make absolutely no profit from their use. As a result, please keep the legal attack dogs – also known as lawyers – firmly muzzled and on a leash as I have no money to give to anyone.
Authors Notes: This is my third attempt at a response to the ship of the line challenge, hopefully it will go better than the two iterations of Pioneers Dawn that have sadly died as I didn't really think them through properly and ended up backing myself into a corner story telling wise. While I am still using Stargate as the third crossover element in this latest attempt to answer the very intriguing ship of the line challenge do not expect SG-1 and other characters to be major characters and players in the story events for quite a while. Also as with Pioneers Dawn (both versions) the SG-1 elements will remain timeline compliant so at this point in the timeline they're just after the events at the end of season one/start of season two as a result don't expect to see the F-302, the Prometheus or the Daedalus anytime soon.
Also unlike the norm for these stories and YAHF stories in general I will not go through the events of the Halloween night itself, those have all been done to death and we all know the general gist of what goes on that night, instead we will be jumping straight into the aftermath. Though I will refer to the night itself from time to time. I hope nobody minds too much.
Finally I know some of you are bound to complain about another new story when I was working on an update to A Left Turn at Albuquerque. I am still working on the update but it is slow going as I iam finding it hard to be enthusiastic about Star Wars at the moment.
~~~///~~~
Chapter One
Dampness.
It was the first thing that Xander Harris became aware of. Everything was damp and slimy, and his limbs felt like they were made of wet spaghetti and not skin, bone and muscle. Slowly he opened his eyes to find himself lying flat on a metallic deck amid a pool of golden fluid that was rapidly being drained away through slots in the floor specifically designed for that purpose. He blinked in confusion and awkwardly managed to sit up, it was hard as his muscles didn't seem to want to coordinate for some strange reason and look around in complete and utter bafflement.
He was lying on the floor of a metallic room filled with strange transparent cylinders filled with softly bubbling gold fluid. Though what really freaked him out was what was in those cylinders. Bodies, specifically every single one was an exact copy of himself.
"What the hell," he said blinking as his voice croaked as if it had never been used before.
"Please try to relax captain," a disembodied, somewhat emotionless female voice said from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
"Who the hell are you?" Xander demanded, somewhat foolishly, looking around for the source of the voice.
"I feared this would happen. Please try and relax Xander Harris," the voice said, "your memories of what has happened to you should fully integrate in another couple of minutes and it can be very disorientating."
Xander frowned and was about to repeat his demand when a tsunami of memories and information came crashing into his mind and suddenly, he knew everything. He remembered dressing up as a space pilot for Halloween after his original plan for a two-dollar costume had gone flying out the window after some snot nosed brat grabbed the last toy rifle from the store. Thankfully, or so it had seemed at the time, the proprietor had taken pity on him and offered to let him rent the space pilot costume for the two dollars he'd wanted to spend.
It had seemed so innocent.
Only it hadn't been as he'd been out carrying out the escort duty that Principal Snyder had lumped him, Willow and Buffy with when an intense pain had swept over his body. He remembered feeling himself be changed, remade at some fundamental level into something that was both human and beyond human at the same time as he was transformed into the space pilot version of himself. A pilot who had been way, way more than anything he had ever thought possible and who controlled ships in a way that seemed to have just leapt out of his favourite sci-fi television show. He remembered Willow, somehow turned into a real ghost though wearing some very provocative attire that had to have been chosen for her by Buffy as Willow was not into wearing anything so risqué, finding him and convincing his confused pilot self to help her.
From there he remembered meeting Buffy who'd somehow been turned into a crying, screaming utterly useless eighteenth century noblewoman – something which he was so going to have fun teasing her about for months – and persuading her to accompany them back to Buffy's house. Where his pilot-self had ended up saving Cordelia from something that had looked like a cross between Chewbacca from Star Wars and a stereotypical werewolf, shooting the thing with a suddenly very real plasma pistol that had knocked it flying though had oddly not killed it when the other him had known it should, before getting her inside Buffy's place.
He remembered Angel showing up, Willow leaving to speak to Giles and a kid-turned-vampire by the same spell that had to have affected them attacking, only to be quickly overpowered and knocked out by Angel. Though in that fracas Angel's vampiric nature had been revealed as he'd briefly gone into game face, prompting Buffy/Lady Useless to scream and run off into the night. He remembered going with Angel and Cordelia to try and find the currently helpless Slayer before something else did.
Unfortunately, Spike found her first and they'd ended up in a fight with the blond master vampire. Who'd quickly met his end when a bolt from the plasma pistol ignited his undead flesh and in a flash of flames – and the familiar eerie scream of demonic anguish as the blood demon animating Spike's body was banished back to hell where it belonged – the normally dangerous as hell vamp had been reduced to a sad little pile of smouldering dust. The spell ended at that point but before he had been able to even get his wits back, he'd been set on from behind by someone screaming about him killing her spikey and something about being a bad kitten and needing to be punished. He remembered the inhumanly strong, cold hands of the clearly furious female vampire grab him and, before he could even begin to defend himself, snap his neck…
…only to suddenly wake up here.
Even as that onslaught of memory faded additional memories, a lifetimes worth of them, bombarded his mind and he suddenly knew everything about Alexander's life or rather lives from the birth of his original body on the Gallente homeworld, to his enlistment in the Federal Navy, conversion into a capsuleer and his voyages and adventures through the vast star cluster of New Eden after his enlistment ended. The surge of memory ended and Xander blinked and shook his head to clear the residual disorientation.
"Damn that was… I don't know how to describe it," he muttered even as he carefully got to his feet, his limbs now working properly as his neural patterns completed their integration with his new clone body. A fact that was really going to take a hell of a lot of getting used to, he also now had to a) figure out a way back to Earth assuming that was possible and b) stop Buffy from Slaying him on sight given people did not usually just come straight back from the dead unless they were a vampire or had been raised by dark magic.
"My former captain often said that," the female voice that he now recognized as belonging to Aura, Alexander's A.I replied. "The disorientation will pass completely in another few moments. Neural integration shock is not an unknown phenomenon among capsuleers, especially new ones like yourself sir though it will become less of an issue over time and…"
"…with more deaths," Xander finished even as he shivered both at the thought of dying again and the fact that he was bloody cold as he was kind of naked here. "No offense Aura but I don't plan to die again anytime soon. Now can you tell me where I can shower and get some clothes?"
"There are showers just by the entrance to the clone bay and a dressing room beyond that you should find clothing in there."
"Thank you," he replied as he began walking towards the entrance to the clone bay without needing anymore directions from Aura. "Aura by the way where am I? This definitely isn't somewhere in Sunnydale after all."
"No, it is not. You are currently in bay one of the cloning facilities of a Fortizar-class Citadel station," Aura answered. "We are currently orbiting a gas and ice giant planet in an unknown system. Curiously if I am interpreting data from the stations sensors correctly this gas giant is located only thirty point one astronomical units from your previous location."
Xander frowned slightly, pausing as he reached for the door controls as he recalled the astronomy sections of his high school physics lessons. Surprisingly he found it a great deal easier than he was used to and suddenly realized just which planet they were orbiting. "We're in orbit of Neptune then," he said.
"Neptune?" Aura questioned before searching through the station's library files for that name and feeling as close to shock as an artificial intelligence could at what she found. "You mean the eighth planet of the Terran home solar system do you not?"
"Well I'm not referring to the Roman god of the same name so yeah," Xander answered momentarily confused as to why Aura seemed to be surprised at where the massive station was orbiting. Then he remembered that for Aura, Alexander and indeed anyone from New Eden Earth and the other planets of its solar system were spoken of and remembered as being objects of myth and legend dating back twenty thousand or so years to before the sudden, violent collapse of the EVE gate wormhole severed New Eden from the rest of humanity. It was amazing when he thought about it that the people of New Eden could talk about Earth and the other planets of the solar system in much the same way they'd talk about the lost civilization of Atlantis.
"How could we possibly be here?" Aura wondered aloud. "I have no records of the station ever being built here and at any rate the EVE gate wormhole reopening would have certainly been headline news all over New Eden."
Xander shrugged even as he acknowledged that would be true. The four great empires of New Eden as well as Concord, the various alliances and miniempires created by capsuleers would go crazy if the wormhole back to the rest of humanity suddenly reappeared after twenty thousand or so years of being gone. "Magic would be my best guess," he said, "it's also would explain how all of this," he gestured to the station around them and then at himself, "came into existence in one night. Especially as everything here normally only exists in a video game world, one that is supposed to still be in development out of the old Elite game franchise."
"That is not logical. Magic is not real."
"Maybe not in the reality you're from but in this one it is very real, everything supernatural that has been thought a myth in modern times – by my reckoning probably ancient times to you – is in fact frighteningly real."
"But how?"
"That I cannot answer, Giles might be able to tell you but I can't all I know is that every supernatural I thought fictional, but especially vampires are in fact real and unlike what some modern fiction likes to show they are not in any way friendly."
"Really?"
"Yes, I'll explain more soon after I've had a shower and got dressed as I'm kind of freezing here."
"Would you like me to adjust the environmental settings?" Aura asked concerned about her new captain's welfare, such was one of her duties as an artificial intelligence.
"It's a figure of speech Aura."
"Oh."
Xander sighed to himself. He had a feeling it was going to take him and Aura awhile to get used to each other as while he had Alexander's memories, and hopefully his skills and training as it would suck big time to be stuck on this station, he wasn't him. Hopefully he would soon also be able to get back in touch with Giles and the others – hopefully without Buffy trying to slay him on sight – and figure out just what to do from here as he couldn't leave this station empty for too long. Especially given the fact that there were multiple copies of himself in the cloning bays waiting for his consciousness to be downloaded into them if he ended up getting killed again – though hopefully that wouldn't happen again for a good long while as dying kind of hurt.
He put those thoughts out of his mind for now as he arrived at the showers.
~~//~~
Warehouse
Sunnydale
A Few Minutes Earlier
Buffy Summers blinked as she suddenly found herself back in control of her own body to be greeted by the sight of an astonished Spike as the master vampires outline imploded and he collapsed into a sad little pile of smouldering dust on the floor. The cause of his sudden, fiery demise being a green energy bolt that had come from the real-due-to-the spell sci-fi pistol that Xander was holding in a very competent manner. Or rather had been holding as he suddenly staggered and dropped the pistol as like her he came back to himself, looking around in surprise and confusion.
She couldn't help but shiver as she remembered exactly what had just happened. Being turned into a screaming, crying utterly useless eighteenth-century noblewoman by what was obviously a spell of some kind, she really hated it when she had to deal with magical shenanigans, had not exactly been a very pleasant experience. It was also something that should not have happened since, according to Giles, Halloween was supposed to be a quiet night for the undead and other supernatural nastiness. Obviously somebody didn't get that particular memo, she thought annoyed, and when I find out just who it was they are so going to get it given Spike could have killed me all because Lady Useless had to run away when she saw Angel was a vampire.
"Buffy are you alright," Angel asked as a confused hubbub of voices came from the children and young adults who'd been turned, thankfully briefly, into various ghouls and demons by the same spell that had affected her, Xander and presumably Willow.
"I'm fine," Buffy replied taking off her wig and glaring at it angrily. One thing was for sure she would never be able to watch a period romance drama the same way again now that she knew what the noblewomen of those time periods were really like. An enraged howl from nearby abruptly caught her attention and she looked up just in time to see a female vamp in a white flowing gown charge up to Xander.
"You killed my Spikey. Bad kitten you must be punished," she was screaming as before anyone could react the furious female vampire grabbed the still somewhat disorientated Xander, lifted him up by the throat before snapping his neck.
"NOOO!" Buffy screamed in rage and horror before she charged the vampiress as she dropped Xander's body to the floor, hitting her dead in the face with a fist that had the full strength of an enraged Slayer behind it. The force of the blow made the vampiress cry out in pain even as she was sent flying across the warehouse to slam hard enough into the far wall that the sheet metal wall visibly trembled from the force of the impact. Her fury unspent Buffy stalked forward, wishing she had thought to pack a stake in this costume so she could end this undead fiend's existence right here and now, but she hadn't. She would just have to settle for beating the vampire to a pulp and come back to finish it off later as even the enhanced healing abilities of vampires had their limits.
Unfortunately, her rage would go unsated as the vampiress, with a speed that proved that she was indeed a master level vampire, got back to her feet and retreated, fleeing out into the night. Buffy growled in anger and was about to follow her when Angel put his hand on her shoulder. "Buffy let her go," he said softly knowing that if Buffy continued to go after Drusilla in her current state she would end up being killed as insane as she was Drusilla was a dangerous fighter as he, or rather Angelus, had taught her himself. Buffy would need to be clear headed and focused to have any chance of killing Drusilla.
"But she…" Buffy started to protest.
"I know but if you go after her now, especially as you are unarmed then Drusilla will kill you," Angel replied, "there will be time to deal with her later. With Spike dusted she will be vulnerable, and we can track her down and slay her another time. Right now, you have other things to worry about."
Buffy looked at him, her eyes burning with rage at seeing Xander be murdered by this Drusilla and demanding he explain more why she shouldn't just go after the vampiress right now. In answer Angel just gestured back to the assembled kids and Buffy looked to see that many of them were now either staring at Xander's lifeless body in shock or wailing in distress at seeing someone killed like that. Cordelia was doing her best to comfort them, showing some of the heart of gold that Queen C hid behind her spoiled rich girl/queen of Sunnydale High's social scene veneer.
Immediately her rage vanished, numbness that she knew would soon turn to grief replacing it.
"You and Cordelia should take the children back to the High School and their parents," Angel told her softly.
"But what about Xander we can't just leave him here."
"Don't worry about that Buffy. I will handle Xander and get his body to the right people so the appropriate ceremonies and procedures to lay him to rest can be followed." Angel glanced at Xander's lifeless, cooling corpse with some sorrow. While it was true that they were rivals for Buffy's affection, and he knew that Xander disliked him in no small part due to his vampiric nature, he had respected the young man's courage and determination. You had to respect anyone who voluntarily took up the fight against the more hostile aspects of the supernatural world despite having no powers of their own.
Buffy looked at him for a moment then nodded in understanding before turning to Cordelia. "Cordelia, we need to get the children away from here and back to the school," she said softly but more than loud enough for the normally spoiled socialite to hear, look up and nod in agreement.
"And Xander," Cordelia asked, and Buffy was honestly surprised to hear a slight, but real shudder of emotion in her voice. Maybe she and Xander had already started dating, she thought remembering that Xander and Cordelia had been dancing around each other, shooting flirtatious glances at one another for weeks now. Behaviour that had told both her and Willow that they were on the verge of becoming boyfriend and girlfriend. A state that she knew had filled Willow with a combination of jealousy and horror.
Willow.
Oh God Willow this is going to destroy her, she thought knowing that Willow was certain to fall apart when she was told of her lifelong friend's death. She didn't really want to be the one to tell her the terrible truth of what had just happened here. But she knew she would have to.
"Angel will deal with him," she assured Cordelia. Cordelia hesitated for a moment and then nodded once again and between them they began to carefully herd the shocked, frightened and crying children out of the warehouse.
Angel watched them leave then he carefully walked over to Xander's body and gently picked him up. Immediately he knew something was different to normal as through the clothes beneath his hands he could feel a series of metal objects – six of them in total – running down Xander's spine. What in the world, he thought as he – still being careful with the cooling body of the young man – he shifted the bodies position enough to be able to pull up his shirt with one hand to see just what the strange circular objects were.
What he saw almost made him drop the body in surprise.
"What the hell," he said gaping at what he saw in disbelief and a small amount of horror. In the two hundred or so years that he'd lived he had never seen anything like this before, at the back of his mind he could feel even Angelus reeling in surprise, confusion and a small amount of sick fascination. The objects were small circular sockets each about a centimetre and a half in diameter, they were imbedded in Xander's flesh and looked like they had always been there. Yet he knew for a fact that Xander had had nothing like them there before this evening.
"You could say that again rat breath," a familiar voice said from behind him making him jump before – still holding Xander's body – spinning around to find himself face to face with Whistler. The balance demon who'd recruited him to serve the light, and in the process earn redemption for the many horrific crimes he'd committed when he was Angelus, looked like he'd been pole axed by something and it didn't take a genius to figure out just why.
"Whistler! What the hell is going on here? Do you know what these socket things that have appeared on Xander's body are?"
"I do indeed," Whistler admitted. "They're there because of the spell cast this night by Ethan Rayne, or rather because of what the spell turned him into."
"But what do metal sockets have to do with Xander having been turned into a space pilot?" Angel asked confused.
"Because he became a type of pilot from a reality on the opposite side of the multiverse from this reality. A reality that the people of this reality think is only a video game franchise which will in a few years be expanded into an online roleplaying game. He was a capsuleer."
"A what?"
"A capsuleer in their own universe they're also known as pod pilots or empyrians depending on who you talk to. Through an extremely advanced form of the sciences known as cloning and cybernetics capsuleers are pilots who can be in a very real sense be merged with their ships as in when a capsuleer is plugged in they literally become the ship."
"Incredible," Angel breathed shocked as, while he didn't know a huge amount about modern technology though he was getting better at using it any vampire had to in this day and age if they wanted to survive he knew it would take knowledge and technology centuries or millennia ahead of anything on Earth in order to create something like that. "Wait how come the spell went so in depth as to create cybernetic implants that sophisticated? A fake pistol being turned real I can believe but creating something like these implants?"
"That's just it the spell shouldn't have," Whistler replied. "The spell tonight was always going to happen, it's an important part of various people's destinies, but it was never supposed to become what it became or result in the final death of Spike and Xander wasn't supposed to die."
"So how did it," Angel wondered. While he wasn't an expert on magic, he knew enough about it to know that spells usually worked within relatively tight parameters.
"Someone else interfered and altered the parameters of the spell to accomplish this change. Who they are I do not know so don't ask," Whistler replied the last part was of course a lie, he – and the Powers That Be – knew exactly who was behind the massive changes made to the spell and its outcome. Not that he was going to tell Angel that as there was no reason for the ensouled master vampire to know anything about them.
Angel frowned as he immediately suspected that Whistler wasn't telling him everything. Balance demons never truly told you everything only really what they think you needed to know and no more. "So, what are you telling me this for now Whistler?"
"You needed to know so you can tell the Slayer and her friends that this wasn't the Powers fault. Also tell Giles that Ethan Rayne is only partially to blame for all of this," Whistler answered, "oh and if I were you, I would drop the body now."
Angel was about to open his mouth to ask what Whistler meant by that when he heard it. It was a faint but growing buzzing sound that seemed to be coming from the body he was holding. Alarmed he dropped the body and it wasn't a moment too soon for as soon as the body hit the concrete floor with a brutal sounding smack it began to glow from within. The outlines of Xander's body blurred and before his amazed eyes the whole body disintegrated leaving nothing but a human shaped blackened smudge on the floor to show where it had been.
"What the hell caused that," he asked aloud. When he received no response, he turned to look for Whistler to see that the balance demon had vanished. Oh, I hate it when he does that, he thought mentally grumbling at Whistler's lack of manners, but then in his experience most demons didn't care for the little niceties. Then he sighed as another thought occurred to him. How am I going to explain this to Buffy? Maybe just tell her the truth about the cybernetic implants I found and that Xander's body disintegrated presumably due to a biological self-destruct. Though I wonder who Whistler wasn't telling me about? He clearly knew far more about what happened to the spell than he was letting on and who was behind it.
After a moment Angel shrugged and headed off in the direction that Buffy and Cordelia had gone with the children. He would tell Buffy and the others the truth and hope to stop Buffy from doing something stupid to a certain Ethan Rayne for setting this whole thing in motion.
~~//~~
Stargate Command
That Same Time
"General Hammond sir."
Major General George Hammond looked up from the paperwork he was working his way through at the sound of someone calling for him. He had been going over the latest prospective candidates report, with the SGC having been formally reactivated after Apophis' abortive attack he'd been given the go ahead by the joint chiefs to increase the number of operative SG teams, and welcomed the break from the monotony of reading personnel file after personnel file. Somehow, he wasn't surprised to find Airman Walter Harriman standing in the doorway.
"Yes?" he asked.
"Sir we just received a report from one of our deep range telescopes on Hawaii," Walter replied, "they've detected an anomaly in orbit above Neptune sir."
"What kind of anomaly?" George asked instantly worried that it might be Apophis returning to attempt another attack on Earth. An attack he had no idea how they would repel this time given that they'd only survived last time through sheer dumb luck and SG-1 defying Senator Kinsey's shutdown order and going through the gate only to by pure chance end up aboard one of the motherships heading for Sol.
"It appears to be a very large space station of some kind sir," Walter replied, "unfortunately they were not able to get many images of it before it disappeared into the penumbra of Triton, Neptune's largest moon. We estimate it will be eight to twelve hours before they'll be able to get a view of the station again."
"And the images they were able to capture?"
"They've been sent to us. We're working to enlarge and enhance them now they should be ready to view in about twenty minutes."
"Bring them to the briefing room as soon as they're ready and have SG-1 come to the room as well," George ordered, though he wasn't sure what they would be able to do about a potentially, but only potentially, hostile alien space station located so far from Earth. They certainly had no weapons capable of reaching such a station and even if they did there was no guarantee that they'd be anymore effective against whatever defences the station would have than they'd been against the shields surrounding the two ships Apophis had brought to Earth.
"Yes sir," Walter replied before turning and walking away. George for his part sighed before reaching for and picking up the handset of the red phone on his desk and bringing it to his ear. For a moment more nothing happened then the hotline connected.
"This is Major General Hammond," he said to the white house switch board operator. "I need to speak to the president."
"Stand by General."
For a few moments the phone rang then it was picked up. "Yes, General Hammond?" came the familiar voice of President Julian Marcel. "What is it?"
"Mister President we might have a problem."
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- Location
- PR
Never seen on of this with a capsuleer.
The ones I have seen always show him immediately becoming BFFs with SG1 instead of striking out on his own.
Or just using the Event plus new memories to change him enough that he doesn't feel much emotions from Willow or Buffy and decides to leave.
The ones I have seen always show him immediately becoming BFFs with SG1 instead of striking out on his own.
Or just using the Event plus new memories to change him enough that he doesn't feel much emotions from Willow or Buffy and decides to leave.
RichardWhereat
Feanor did nothing wrong.
- Location
- Australia
I love the premise, but you do have the voices wrong for angel, and xander. I'll expand on that when I wake up. Enjoyed that chapter.
- Location
- South Wales, United Kingdom
With Xander remember that he's not quite the same person he was before but is now an amalgamation of his original personality and memories and those of Alexander. As for Angel what exactly is wrong with his voice?
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Like your technical quality of writing is far superior to the one other EVE crossover I've read, but honestly, that one was still way better a story.
Maybe it's because I've read too much Xanderzone power fantasy fic already, but my eyes started to glaze over at the sheer prevalence of overused xander power fantasy fic cliche
Maybe it's because I've read too much Xanderzone power fantasy fic already, but my eyes started to glaze over at the sheer prevalence of overused xander power fantasy fic cliche
RichardWhereat
Feanor did nothing wrong.
- Location
- Australia
Just a couple of words that were extraneous. It was almost exactly on point.
- Location
- South Wales, United Kingdom
Xander does have limits here mind, far more than in most power fantasy fics and him being the major one changed is part of the Ship of the Line challenge on twisting the hellmouth. Capsuleers have limits as many EVE ships still require crews after all though the numbers needed are much smaller on capsuleer controlled ships than on normal ships.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
I didn't say anything about power level. Drich's commander fic has made the MC vastly more powerful than everything in EVE squished together, and yet it doesn't read as naked power fantasy or fall into clichetrain the way this does.
I made a criticism of literary style and theme, not power calcs.
RichardWhereat
Feanor did nothing wrong.
- Location
- Australia
"I know, but if" needs the comma. "especially as you are unarmed" would likely have been shortened to "unarmed, then Drusilla will kill you." He also uses a lot more contractions. They all did, it was very 90's casual. Hell, it defined 90's casual. "There will" to "There'll" "she will" to "she'll".
The "Wait-" bit isn't really him. He only ever used that to tell someone to physically wait, in conversation he was far more direct, and would likely have skipped asking them to wait, and just asked the "How come.." His character might have moped, but he was still written to be the 90's alpha male stereotype. He also didn't really 'get' the new fangled technology, cybernetic was likely not in his active lexicon. A lot of this reads more as a way for an omniscient character to provide exposition, than Angel talking.
Probably don't need the "about that" in there, as I mentioned earlier, he uses shorter sentences, and is less likely to say more words than is needed. He's a Man's Man. I'm aware that me taking so many words to say that means I'm not.. More contractions. "to the right people so the appropriate ceremonies and procedures" seems written to say he's gunna get a contact to cast magic and shit. Just a simple "I'll make sure he won't rise after the funeral." or something similar would likely work smoother for the character. Hell, it wouldn't even need magic. Just a toothpick or wooden skewer in the heart would do the trick. Besides, no blood in the mouth, no suckage going on.
Angelus waffles, Angel doesn't. Angelus does in order to draw out the moment and savor the fear.
Anyway, beyond that, solid start. I don't know the crossover setting, so I look forward to reading it.
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Chapter Two
- Location
- South Wales, United Kingdom
Author Note: My thanks to Keiran Halcyon for his help with refining this chapter.
~~~///~~~
Chapter Two
Xander's Citadel
Neptune Orbit
A Short Time Later
Freshly showered and dressed Xander Harris felt human again as he stepped out of the changing room outside the clone bay. He had absolutely no idea what to do now as he couldn't just go back to Earth and show up in Sunnydale as if nothing had happened. Not only would that be kind of in extremely bad taste, but he would surely be attacked immediately by Buffy given he knew she'd been there when he'd been killed by that vampiress. Thus, the Slayer would no doubt immediately assume he was either a demon masquerading as Xander Harris to get close to her or that he was in fact a zombie – both of which would immediately see Buffy attempting, and probably succeeding, to slay him.
"So, what do I do," he asked himself aloud.
"Did you say something, captain," Aura asked, making him jump.
"Damn it! Aura are you trying to give me a heart attack," Xander replied, "I don't fancy dying again anytime soon."
"My apologies I did not mean to startle you captain," Aura answered her quasi-feminine voice sounding genuinely apologetic.
"It's alright."
"You seem troubled," Aura commented, "is there anything I can do to help, captain?"
"For a start you can stop calling me captain. Call me Xander instead."
"As you wish… Xander. Do you mind telling me what is bothering you?" the artificial intelligence asked.
Xander sighed. "I'm just wondering what to do now," he admitted, "as much as I would like to go home, back to Sunnydale I cannot since they… well saw me die."
"I do not understand why you could not. Do they not know of capsuleers?"
"No, they don't, Earth isn't even capable of interstellar travel right now. Plus, if I did go home, I would certainly be killed by Buffy."
"Why would this Buffy do that?"
"Because she's the Slayer. She would assume I am either a demon masquerading as me or that I was a zombie raised from the grave by dark magic," Xander replied, "no until I find a way to convince her that I am still me, just in a new clone body going home would be extremely dangerous. Besides I don't really like the idea of leaving this station unattended for too long. I assume that I am the only one here."
"Indeed. There should be tens of thousands of people on a space station this size yet aside from the clones in stasis there is no one here besides you. I should also inform you that you would not have left a body on Earth for very long."
Xander frowned and was about to ask what Aura meant by that when the information came bubbling up from the deeper recesses of his mind. All capsuleer clones had a self-destruct built into them, nanomachines that would reduce the body to a few milligrams of ash a set period of time after the body expired. It was designed purely to clean up and not leave a lifeless clone drifting through space to foul up the ever-bustling space lanes of New Eden where it could potentially impact a vessel and cause damage.
"I see," he replied. "Then you can see my predicament."
"While I can offer no counsel on that matter, I can give you something to do. Scans of the system have revealed a corvette-sized ship in a stationary orbit above the fourth planet of the system. The vessel is not emitting any of the normal signals of a powered vessel. Logically I can only conclude that it has been abandoned."
Xander raised an eyebrow. "Surely if there was a spaceship orbiting Mars it would have been seen from Earth long ago," he replied as while he knew corvettes were small, less than a hundred metres long, Earth based telescopes had the resolution to easily spot one orbiting Mars. Not to mention there were a few probes on the surface of the red planet that would surely have spotted it.
"Analysis indicates that it is positioned in such a way that the planet would be continually between itself and Earth."
"So, someone has hidden it there before abandoning it," Xander mused aloud feeling parts of Alexander come forth indicating that this was an opportunity that could not be missed. Not to mention that retrieving it and bringing it back here would give him something to do instead of just thinking about his current predicament and somewhat unwanted exile from Earth. I just hope I am capable of interfacing and flying a ship properly, he thought as he was honestly quite worried about that as he had no idea just how much of Alexander's skills that he possessed. Though he wouldn't know for sure until he got in the control pod and tried.
"That is the most logical explanation," Aura confirmed.
"Are there any ships in the docking bays? And do any of them have salvage modules?"
"There is a full fleet of starships docked in the main hangar bay," Aura replied, "most have salvage modules equipped. However, given the unknowns in this situation and the fact that we lack the supportive manpower to operate almost all of them I would suggest you take a frigate. Only one frigate is currently at stand by level the others are completely cold and will take some time to bring online."
"Prepare the frigate for launch. Where's the control pod?"
"It is in the staging area," Aura replied as a door down the corridor opened revealing a small compartment. "This lift will take you there."
"Thank you Aura," Xander answered before he mentally steeled himself, said a silent prayer that he didn't mess this up as he had no wish to die again, and entered the lift which immediately began its journey through the massive station to the main hangar bay staging area.
A few minutes later he was stepping off the lift into the wide corridor that led to the capsuleer staging area and where they could get into their pods before the pods automatically moved aboard the selected ship and locked in place behind the protection of the ships shields, nano-regenerative armour and of course its weapons systems. Though hopefully I won't have cause to use any of the weapons for a good long while, he thought as Alexander's memories showed him just how devastatingly powerful the ship-based weaponry of New Eden could be.
It didn't take him long to reach and enter the staging area's changing room. Moving to the closest locker he opened it with a retinal scan before, trusting in his other self's memories and experience, beginning to take off his clothes. After a few more moments he was naked aside from a pair of underpants that were only there really to protect the capsuleer's modesty when they were in the pod. Though he was aware that most capsuleers stopped caring about modesty the older they got, along with almost everything else that really made a person human. I just hope that doesn't end up happening to me, he thought with a mental shiver at the thought of forgetting or just simply no longer caring about what he currently considered to be the most important thing in his life – his friends back in Sunnydale.
Pushing aside those thoughts for now he left the changing room and moved into the staging area itself and paused at what he saw. Control pods hundreds of them lined up in neat rows, waiting for owners who were not here and likely who never had existed given that everything here had certainly been created by the spell he'd gotten caught in. The sheer number of pods here though was a little surprising until he remembered that a Fortizar-class citadel was designed to be both a fleet staging area and a corporate headquarters. Thus, it would have all the support facilities required for corporations or governments capsuleers.
Of course, so many pods in the room presented him with a problem.
"Which one is mine," he wondered aloud.
"All of them are ready for use, Xander," Aura replied once again, making him jump.
"So just choose one."
"Exactly. I should inform you that the frigate is ready to launch. Would you like me to plot and upload a course to Mars into the navigational computer?"
"Yes, please Aura."
"As you wish," Aura replied.
As Aura signed off Xander made his way to the small lift platform underneath the closest control pod. The moment he stopped on top of it the pad shivered slightly and lifted him up into the pod where a small seat and a set of six cables a centimetre or so thick were waiting, each cable having a plug on the end that in another few moments would sequentially attach themselves to his body. He would be lying if he said he was completely comfortable with the idea. But it's my life now, he thought, so I might as well get used to it as even if I do go back to Sunnydale, and somehow avoid getting slayed by Buffy, it won't change the fact that due to that bloody spell I'm a capsuleer.
Deciding it was time to stop procrastinating about this, it wouldn't change anything after all, he sat on the seat which prompted the bottom of the pod to seal itself. A holographic console appeared to his right with the option to engage the interface written in Gallente script though he could of course read it somehow even though the characters were not English. He hesitated for a moment before, after plucking up his courage, pressing the command to engage the interface. The hologram disappeared and for a moment more nothing happened. Then hatches in the base of the pod opened and a light blue fluid began to be pumped in. Simultaneously the cables, all six of them, came alive and began moving towards his spine where they lined up with the sockets built into his body and which began just below his neck and went much of the way down his spine.
With a series of whirring clicks the cable ends docked with the ports each interface sending a momentary stab of pain through his body. It was all he could do not to scream as he really wasn't expecting that. The last cable plugged itself in as the fluid level reached his nose and mouth. It was all he could do not to gag as the fluid entered his mouth and nose and began cascading down his airways into his lungs. Strangely though he felt none of the instinctive panic you would normally feel at feeling like you were drowning. It was as though there was something stopping him from feeling any panic. In a few seconds his lungs were full, yet he was still able to breathe as the fluid was hyper-oxygenated and would let him breathe normally. The pod finished filling and he felt it move backwards as it was docked into the egg-shaped pod-ship that could, in an emergency, serve as a capsuleers personal escape ship as it was capable of warp flight though his other self's memories told him it rarely worked out that way as the pod had only basic shields and armour and thus was relatively easily shot out of the sky. Heavy metal shutters closed over the transparent walls sealing him in, small lights came on illuminating the liquid-filled environment surrounding him.
This is a strange experience, he thought, feeling the pod begin to move and knowing that it was being guided into his chosen ship by the station's automatic systems. He closed his eyes and for a moment saw only darkness, then he could see again through the pods external pickups which now showed him being guided across the cavernous main docking bay towards a ship that had been brought forward so it was facing the softly shimmering, semi-opaque force field that sealed the entrance to the bay. The ship he was heading for had a slightly bulbous bow section leading back into the spine that connected to the engines. Two small wings – each mounting a secondary engine – extended down from the spine just forward of the main engines. It also had the distinctive ivory white and gold livery of an Amarr vessel. He immediately recognized the design as being a Punisher-class frigate.
The pod came to a stop over the frigate and he watched as a section of the armoured hull turned fluid and flowed aside revealing a hatch just big enough to let the pod through. The pod lowered itself into the frigate and for a moment all he saw was a metal shaft as he was lowered into the very core of the frigate's bulbous bow section. The pod came to a stop and locking clamps locked it in place and conduits began connecting to it from the ship.
Again, his vision changed and suddenly he was looking at everything through the frigate's sensors both externally and internally. Information flowed into his mind on the status of every single system onboard and indeed providing basic data on all the ships around him in the bay including tactical analysis, power usage levels or lack thereof and numerous other things. A window popped up in his vision with the image of a blue humanoid woman.
"Xander it is time," Aura told him. "Shall I begin the departure sequence?"
"Yes Aura," he thought spoke back. Immediately he felt two things happen, first the powerful electromagnetic fields – being projected from pit-like projectors all around the bay – that had been holding the frigate stationary disengaged. Then the gravimagnetic forces of the bay's tractor beams – visible to him as fans of diffuse light his mind translating the data into a format he'd understand – engaged and began guiding him out of the bay.
He waited patiently as the beams guided him first through the shimmering wall of the force field into open space then began guiding him to the edge of the station's docking perimeter. The beams disengaged and he just knew exactly where he was supposed to go. With a thought he brought the engines online and used his manoeuvring jets to come around and begin the first phase of his journey to the unknown ship over Mars. He wasn't quite able to warp there yet as Triton was kind of in the way.
As he flew Xander couldn't help but be surprised by how easily he was doing this, considering that in some way he'd never actually done this before. He easily followed his course past Triton and aligned onto the warp vector that Aura had plotted for him. With a thought he engaged the FTL drive.
"Warp drive activated," Aura said as with a watery shimmer the laser-channelled depleted vacuum field formed and suddenly, he was hurtling at FTL speeds through the solar system towards Mars.
It took only a few moments before he came to the end of the warp tunnel and fully integrated back into normal space. The dark side of Mars dominated space ahead of him with one of its two asteroid moons just able to be seen over the edge of the northern horizon. A nav point blinked into existence showing the location of the unknown derelict and Xander immediately headed towards the ship, mentally reaching out with his/the ships sensors to see what he could learn about it.
The analysis appeared almost immediately.
As their scans from the station had indicated the vessel was corvette-sized being forty meters long, thirty-five meters wide and fifteen meters tall. It's appearance kind of reminded Xander of the horseshoe crabs that they'd studied in biology class early last year, before the death of Jesse and his introduction to everything that went bump or rather 'grr' in the night. The vessel was only emitting very small amounts of power, enough to indicate that whatever its power source was it was only ticking over so to speak being active just enough to keep the ship in a stable geostationary orbit. There certainly wasn't enough power active now to support any form of life support system.
Xander had to wonder just why it had been abandoned as there was no evidence of any damage existing or historic to the vessel. According to the sensors there was absolutely nothing wrong with the vessel, aside from the fact that it was powered down and just left sitting in orbit of Mars by whoever its builders were. After a moment he gave a mental shrug and decided he'd try and work that out later, for now he would focus on getting it back to the station.
With that goal in mind he carefully began to position the ship to take the craft in tow, while also aligning onto the right warp vector to take him back to Neptune. It was a tricky bit of manoeuvring requiring him to use navigational thrusters only instead of the main engine in order to angle the ship just right while also getting close enough to bring the ship into tractor beam range. The process took the better part of ten, somewhat frustrating, minutes of high precision manoeuvring but he finally got into the correct position to execute what he wanted to do.
Okay here goes nothing, Xander thought as he engaged the salvage modules tractor beam. The beam of gravimagnetic force emerged from the ships ventral midsection and locked onto the derelict. Like a fisherman reeling in a catch he began to slowly pull the derelict closer to his frigate. Again a tricky, time consuming process as he had to be careful to avoid colliding with the hull, while it would be a low velocity impact and do no real damage he really didn't want to mess up his first real salvage mission.
Eventually though the derelict was as close to the hull as it could be without coming into direct contact with the frigate's hull. Bringing the vessel to a halt, Xander carefully checked to see if it was within the perimeter of the depleted vacuum bubble on its normal setting. He gave a mental groan as he saw that several meters of the ship's ventral side were outside the bubble. Why can't the universe cooperate for once, he thought in annoyance before accessing the settings for the depleted vacuum bubble that was the essential part of how the warp drive worked.
Carefully he adjusted the settings to make the bubble large enough to fully encompass the derelict ship. A warning flashed up indicating that the new bubble configuration would put considerably more stress on the ship's capacitor. With a thought he overrode the warning and actioned the new configuration. Then after a quick double check of his warp vector, confirming it was correct, he gave the command to engage the warp drive.
"Warp drive activated."
~~//~~
Silently Xander's frigate vanished into warp flight with the derelict in tow he was unaware that the moving of the abandoned starship prompted an emergency burst transmission to be sent from the ship to those who had crewed and eventually abandoned it. Thus, in a sealed drawer in a darkened office in Billings, Montana a light began blinking on a small but highly advanced device waiting for attention.
~~//~~
Xander was relieved as the frigate dropped out of warp. Towing the derelict across the system from Mars had seriously pushed his systems as he was getting numerous warnings from the warp drive system everything ranging from a low power warning from the gravity capacitor to thermal warnings from the drive core. Automatic systems had cut in and increased the coolant flow to the drive core, but he was getting an advisory that he could not safely engage the warp drive again for a few hours without risking a dangerous overload.
Thankfully I have no intention of going anywhere for a few hours, he thought having already decided when he got back to the station he would ask Aura to direct him to some quarters where he could lay down and have a sleep as it had been one hell of an evening. He put those thoughts out of his mind for now and focused on navigating around Triton and onto a vector to the station's docking perimeter.
It only took a few moments to travel around the moon and the Fortizar came back into view silhouetted against the blue and white of Neptune. He carefully guided the frigate and its cargo to the outer edge of the station's docking perimeter and came to a halt before transmitting to the station that he wished to dock.
"Docking request accepted," Aura reported automatically as the station's own tractor beams once again engaged and began to draw the frigate in. "Xander once we're in the bay I will have one of the station's internal tractors take the recovered derelict to one of the secondary bays to await analysis. I will let you know when the time comes to disengage your own tractor beam."
"Understood Aura," he thought spoke back. "And Aura when we dock, and the pod disengages, would you be kind enough to direct me to some living quarters on the station."
"Of course, I have already prepared the station administrators quarters for your use."
Xander was about to protest that he didn't need to stay in the station administrators' quarters but ultimately decided against it. Something told him that it would do no good, besides he was so emotionally exhausted from today that he really had no fight in him right now. So instead he waited as the tractor beams drew his frigate and its cargo in through the bay force field.
~~//~~
A relatively short time later he found himself once again in the pod alone as it was drawn out of the ship and carried through the docking bay back to the staging area. In no time at all the pod ship was once again back in its docked position.
The external feeds shut down and Xander opened his eyes to find himself back in his body. A moment later the armoured panels enclosing the tank opened and the tank slid forward into its undocked position. Immediately he felt the cables plugged into his back pull away, as with the initial connection each cable withdrawal sent a momentary stab of pain through his nervous system making him wince but if there was one thing a lifetime with Tony Harris had taught him it was how to endure pain.
With a muffled whoosh the fluid level in the tank began to drop firmly dumping him back on the seat. In only a few seconds the fluid that had been supporting and protecting his body was gone. The bottom of the tank opened and Xander found himself on his hands and knees on the floor. The moment air began to enter his nose and throat again he began coughing and retching until the fluid that had been in his lungs exploded out of his mouth. Thankfully the liquid didn't taste that bad, leaving a faint hint of peppermint in his mouth though it was still not exactly a pleasant experience.
As the last of the fluid left his lungs, he lay there barely holding himself on all fours as he trembled with the reaction. It only lasted for a few moments before everything settled down and he could awkwardly climb back to his feet. "Damn I hate that," he said.
"My old captain used to say that all the time," Aura told him, "I don't think there is a capsuleer in existence that actually likes that part of getting out of the control pod. It's just something that they learn to put up with as you will learn Xander."
"I guess," Xander replied as he headed for the showers outside the pod bay and where he had left his clothes in the changing room.
~~//~~
Ten minutes later Xander was once more showered and clothed though he was really beginning to feel the events of this evening followed by the strain of flying a starship for the first time – something that had been incredibly enjoyable to his inner sci-fi geek not to mention amazing with how he'd flown the frigate by literally becoming one with the ship – catching up with him. It brought a tidal wave of exhaustion and made him momentarily stumble.
"Are you alright Xander?" Aura asked, the AI sounding concerned.
"Yeah I'm just tired," Xander told her, "thirsty as well."
"There are drinks available in the station administrator's quarters," Aura replied as a nearby door opened revealing another lift. "This lift will take you up to the level where the quarters are. As soon as you get out of the lift turn left. The entrance is at the end of the corridor. Your DNA has been programmed into the security lock."
"Thank you, Aura," Xander answered as he stepped into the lift prompting the doors to close and the lift to begin moving.
"You are welcome Xander. Would you like me to begin an initial analysis of the recovered vessel while you sleep?"
"Yes please. Focus only on the hull and external fittings of the vessel for now please. We'll see about getting inside in a day or so."
"As you wish Xander."
The lift came to a stop and the doors opened and Xander blinked at what he saw. Instead of the silver-white bulkheads of the rest of the stations interior – well what little of it he'd seen so far as given the sheer size of this place it would take months at least for him to see the whole station, well the parts of it that were people accessible as his memories told him that some sizeable areas of the place were warehouses, raw materials storage silos and massive nanofabrication plants – the walls were panelled in a honey coloured wide grained wood that he recognized as tana wood from Gallente Prime and the floors were carpeted in a light cream coloured carpet. If he hadn't known better, he would have thought that he was in the hallway of some five-star hotel on Earth and not on a gigantic space station orbiting Neptune.
"Whoever designed this level sure loved their comforts," he muttered to himself as he followed Aura's directions to the station administrator's quarters. In no time at all he was outside them and put his hand on the lock panel which immediately began glowing softly. He felt a momentary prick as a tiny needle extracted a sample of his blood and scanned his DNA then the door slid open and he stepped inside.
The room beyond was opulent to say the least.
As with the corridor outside the walls were all panelled with tana wood and the floor covered with a deep pile, rich blue carpet. Expensive looking furniture dotted much of the room while off to the right a spiral staircase led up to where he guessed the bedroom was located. Though what really grabbed his attention immediately was the far wall as it was transparent giving a breath-taking view of the space outside the station especially the great blue planet that they were orbiting.
Mentally shaking himself he walked forward and made his way over to the bar where he found a mixture of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. After fixing himself some flavoured water he wandered over to the window wall and found that the room was located on one of the upper levels of a tower that rose several kilometres above the metal surface of the station. If he looked down all he saw was a sea of dark grey metal littered with rows of lights and projections that while they looked flimsy from here would be a kilometre or more high and would serve all manner of functions from sensor antenna to communications arrays to some of the stations defensive cannons.
Man, this place is huge, he thought as he took a sip of the pear-tasting water. I really need to somehow get back in touch with the gang back home or go to see them during the day and hope Buffy doesn't try to slay me, as I could really do with some more people up here. But that will be something to start figuring out how to do in the morning as right now I'm beat.
Tearing his eyes away from the incredible view outside he made his way back through the room to the stairs and went up to the bedroom. Within a few minutes he'd slipped off his clothes and climbed into the bed, though not before setting the alarm to wake him in eight hours. A wave of a hand over a sensor caused the lights in the room to go out and the viewport to turn opaque – cutting off the light reflecting off Neptune – plunging the room into darkness. His eyes closed and seconds later he was asleep.
~~//~~
Stargate Command
Cheyenne Mountain
A Short Time Earlier
Colonel Jack O'Neill had a puzzled frown on his face as he, along with his team, filed into the SGC's briefing room. He had no idea why they had been summoned as, to the best of his knowledge, there was to be no off-world activity for another few weeks. Not until they could recruit more people and train them up ready to start going out there into the galaxy and start looking for the tools and technology, they would need to defend themselves, and the planet, from the Goa'uld.
Hence why he had been surprised to get this summons.
I wonder what this is all about, he thought as he and the rest of SG-1 took their normal places around the conference table waiting for General Hammond who they could see was still in his office and appeared to be on the phone. He couldn't help but wonder, well worry really, if it had something to do with his teams going AWOL and going through the Stargate against orders. Though they'd managed to stop Apophis attack on Earth at literally the eleventh hour, ultimately destroying two Goa'uld motherships in the process, there was bound to be some negative consequences at some point. The top brass, sitting in their nice cushy Pentagon offices, generally were not that forgiving of the whole disobeying orders thing after all.
Through the glass partition wall between the briefing room and Hammond's office he saw the general put down the phone, whatever call he'd been on having finished, and pick something up from his desk. Something that looked like a small stack of folders and come out of the office prompting all of them to stand up even though technically Daniel and Teal'c did not need to.
"Please be seated," Hammond said as he made his way to his familiar seat at the head of the table. As bid, all four members of SG-1 sat back down in their seats. Hammond handed two of the folders to Jack and two to Sam with the clear indication that they were to hand one to their neighbour. Which they promptly did. "You are probably wondering just why I have called you here when there are no missions allowed at the moment."
"The thought had crossed our minds sir," Jack replied being, as diplomatic as he could be, which for most people wasn't diplomatic at all.
"An hour ago, one of our deep range telescopes on Hawaii detected an anomaly in orbit above Neptune," General Hammond told them all before gesturing for them to open their files. "We believe it to be either an impossibly large ship or some type of space station. Unfortunately, they were not able to get many images of it before it moved into the shadow of Neptune's largest moon. What few images they were able to take before Triton got in the way were forwarded to us."
Jack raised an eyebrow and took out the first of a series of photos. Which showed nothing much beyond the blue orb of Neptune and a tiny black dot that was more like a speck of dust on the telescope lens – which he knew from experience could be a right pain in the ass to get off – than anything else. He moved onto the next image which had magnified in a bit on the dark dot enough to reveal that it wasn't a speck of dust but was clearly something else, something artificial though it was still too faint to make out anything specific about the structure.
Moving on to the last image Jack noticed that the enhancement and magnification were a bit better. A bit in that he could make out the object did indeed appear to be some type of space station. It was a faint wedge shape and from the basic scale they'd been able to work out during the enhancement process, utterly enormous. The scale indicating that the alien structure was somewhere between a hundred and ten kilometres and a hundred and fifteen kilometres long.
"Whoa that thing's big," he said.
"Do you recognise it Teal'c," Hammond asked.
"I do not General Hammond," the big Jaffa replied even as he quietly marvelled at the magnified images. The things the Tau'ri could do never ceased to surprise him, especially how they repeatedly insisted that it was not magic. "The design of the station is not Goa'uld. I do not believe that the Goa'uld would actually be capable of building a space station this large."
"That is both good and bad news Teal'c," Hammond replied, "on one hand it means we probably won't have to worry about another confrontation in space with the Goa'uld for a while. On the other we have someone new, and obviously quite advanced if they can build something this big, in our own backyard so to speak. Which given what happened twelve minutes ago is a worry."
"What happened," Jack asked, noting out of the corner of his eye Sam closely scrutinizing the images as his team's resident scientist tried to learn whatever she could from the images.
"Deep space radar detected a small contact passing Triton," Hammond explained. "Within a few seconds of them detecting it the contact vanished and reappeared just over a minute later near Mars before disappearing behind the planet."
"To cover that distance in such a short space of time the object must have travelled beyond lightspeed," Sam commented looking up.
"That is deep space radar's belief," Hammond confirmed. "About ten minutes later the contact reappeared from behind Mars and once again accelerated to translight speeds, reappearing near Triton two minutes later. It was also giving off a slightly bigger signal, so it is believed it was towing something. It then once more disappeared behind Triton presumably moving to dock with the station."
"So, we have someone operating in our backyard so to speak," Jack commented frowning. "What are we planning to do about this sir?"
"At the moment the president has ordered that radio transmissions be directed towards Neptune in the hope of establishing contact with the space station," Hammond answered. "However, given the distance from us it will take at least eight hours for us to hear from them assuming they even detect the radio signal, understand it and immediately send one back."
"Why eight hours General Hammond," Teal'c questioned.
"Radio waves travel at the speed of light Teal'c," Jack explained knowledge from his astronomy hobby coming to the fore making him put aside his general joker persona for a few moments, revealing the intelligent man beneath. "Neptune is thirty AU from us, at light speed, it would take a radio wave just over four hours to reach the station. That's a long time to wait."
"There is another thing to consider. Due to its size and position it is only a matter of time before other people besides us learn about the station's existence," Sam added. "Once it comes out from behind Triton any observatory, anywhere on the planet, that has their telescope pointed in Neptune's direction are certain to see it. From there it certainly won't take the world's media long to learn of its existence."
"Oh terrific," Jack said with a slight groan. The last thing they needed was for the world to learn about the existence of aliens, the public weren't ready for that knowledge. There would certainly be panic and rioting in the streets at the revelation that aliens existed, and they truly weren't alone in the universe. To say nothing how the hard line religious nutjobs would react. Plus, if the public learned of aliens from this massive space station then how long would they realistically be able to keep the existence of the Stargate a secret?
"There has to be something else we can do to make contact with them so we can convince them to either leave or do something to hide themselves," he added aloud. "What about the two gliders we used to escape Apophis' ship? Could we use them to get a small team to the station?"
Sam shook her head. "I'm afraid that won't work sir," she replied, "both gliders were quite badly damaged by the fireball that erupted when we blew those ships up. After the Endeavour recovered, the two fighters were transported to Area 51 for analysis. Last time I checked they had just started taking them apart.
"At any rate even if the fighters were operational, they do not have the life support capacity to sustain such a long flight," Sam continued. "We would run out of air before we even reached Saturn."
"So, there is nothing we can do?" Daniel asked.
"No nothing," Sam replied, her voice grim. It was a sentiment that didn't sit well with anyone around the table. So far, they'd managed to cover up the existence of aliens from a world that wasn't ready to learn of their existence, even managing to cover up the destruction of the two Goa'uld motherships as anomalous solar flare activity from the sun. Unfortunately there did not seem to be any means of covering up this space stations existence, not when numerous observatories around the world – many of which were either privately owned or owned by nations opposed to the United States – would be certain to see it since they were in the middle of the relatively narrow period of time every year in which Neptune could be viewed and thus studied from Earth. It was a revelation that did not sit well with any of them…
…not well at all.
~~~///~~~
Author Notes: Another chapter bites the cybernetic dust. I apologise for not including anymore of the Scooby Gang in this update but the scene I had in mind for them just didn't work right and felt a little cheap as I tried to write it so I ditched it. We will see more from them in the next update, especially as the shock of Xander's 'death' at the hands of Drusilla wears off and the reality sets in.
Aura might read as being doing far more than what she is shown to do in the game, but I figure this is well within her capabilities as an artificial intelligence. Not to mention she has been subtly altered by the people who interfered with the spell cast by Ethan Rayne to be more able to help Xander in the situation he finds himself in.
Finally, can anyone guess whose ship he has just salvaged? Until next time.
~~~///~~~
Chapter Two
Xander's Citadel
Neptune Orbit
A Short Time Later
Freshly showered and dressed Xander Harris felt human again as he stepped out of the changing room outside the clone bay. He had absolutely no idea what to do now as he couldn't just go back to Earth and show up in Sunnydale as if nothing had happened. Not only would that be kind of in extremely bad taste, but he would surely be attacked immediately by Buffy given he knew she'd been there when he'd been killed by that vampiress. Thus, the Slayer would no doubt immediately assume he was either a demon masquerading as Xander Harris to get close to her or that he was in fact a zombie – both of which would immediately see Buffy attempting, and probably succeeding, to slay him.
"So, what do I do," he asked himself aloud.
"Did you say something, captain," Aura asked, making him jump.
"Damn it! Aura are you trying to give me a heart attack," Xander replied, "I don't fancy dying again anytime soon."
"My apologies I did not mean to startle you captain," Aura answered her quasi-feminine voice sounding genuinely apologetic.
"It's alright."
"You seem troubled," Aura commented, "is there anything I can do to help, captain?"
"For a start you can stop calling me captain. Call me Xander instead."
"As you wish… Xander. Do you mind telling me what is bothering you?" the artificial intelligence asked.
Xander sighed. "I'm just wondering what to do now," he admitted, "as much as I would like to go home, back to Sunnydale I cannot since they… well saw me die."
"I do not understand why you could not. Do they not know of capsuleers?"
"No, they don't, Earth isn't even capable of interstellar travel right now. Plus, if I did go home, I would certainly be killed by Buffy."
"Why would this Buffy do that?"
"Because she's the Slayer. She would assume I am either a demon masquerading as me or that I was a zombie raised from the grave by dark magic," Xander replied, "no until I find a way to convince her that I am still me, just in a new clone body going home would be extremely dangerous. Besides I don't really like the idea of leaving this station unattended for too long. I assume that I am the only one here."
"Indeed. There should be tens of thousands of people on a space station this size yet aside from the clones in stasis there is no one here besides you. I should also inform you that you would not have left a body on Earth for very long."
Xander frowned and was about to ask what Aura meant by that when the information came bubbling up from the deeper recesses of his mind. All capsuleer clones had a self-destruct built into them, nanomachines that would reduce the body to a few milligrams of ash a set period of time after the body expired. It was designed purely to clean up and not leave a lifeless clone drifting through space to foul up the ever-bustling space lanes of New Eden where it could potentially impact a vessel and cause damage.
"I see," he replied. "Then you can see my predicament."
"While I can offer no counsel on that matter, I can give you something to do. Scans of the system have revealed a corvette-sized ship in a stationary orbit above the fourth planet of the system. The vessel is not emitting any of the normal signals of a powered vessel. Logically I can only conclude that it has been abandoned."
Xander raised an eyebrow. "Surely if there was a spaceship orbiting Mars it would have been seen from Earth long ago," he replied as while he knew corvettes were small, less than a hundred metres long, Earth based telescopes had the resolution to easily spot one orbiting Mars. Not to mention there were a few probes on the surface of the red planet that would surely have spotted it.
"Analysis indicates that it is positioned in such a way that the planet would be continually between itself and Earth."
"So, someone has hidden it there before abandoning it," Xander mused aloud feeling parts of Alexander come forth indicating that this was an opportunity that could not be missed. Not to mention that retrieving it and bringing it back here would give him something to do instead of just thinking about his current predicament and somewhat unwanted exile from Earth. I just hope I am capable of interfacing and flying a ship properly, he thought as he was honestly quite worried about that as he had no idea just how much of Alexander's skills that he possessed. Though he wouldn't know for sure until he got in the control pod and tried.
"That is the most logical explanation," Aura confirmed.
"Are there any ships in the docking bays? And do any of them have salvage modules?"
"There is a full fleet of starships docked in the main hangar bay," Aura replied, "most have salvage modules equipped. However, given the unknowns in this situation and the fact that we lack the supportive manpower to operate almost all of them I would suggest you take a frigate. Only one frigate is currently at stand by level the others are completely cold and will take some time to bring online."
"Prepare the frigate for launch. Where's the control pod?"
"It is in the staging area," Aura replied as a door down the corridor opened revealing a small compartment. "This lift will take you there."
"Thank you Aura," Xander answered before he mentally steeled himself, said a silent prayer that he didn't mess this up as he had no wish to die again, and entered the lift which immediately began its journey through the massive station to the main hangar bay staging area.
A few minutes later he was stepping off the lift into the wide corridor that led to the capsuleer staging area and where they could get into their pods before the pods automatically moved aboard the selected ship and locked in place behind the protection of the ships shields, nano-regenerative armour and of course its weapons systems. Though hopefully I won't have cause to use any of the weapons for a good long while, he thought as Alexander's memories showed him just how devastatingly powerful the ship-based weaponry of New Eden could be.
It didn't take him long to reach and enter the staging area's changing room. Moving to the closest locker he opened it with a retinal scan before, trusting in his other self's memories and experience, beginning to take off his clothes. After a few more moments he was naked aside from a pair of underpants that were only there really to protect the capsuleer's modesty when they were in the pod. Though he was aware that most capsuleers stopped caring about modesty the older they got, along with almost everything else that really made a person human. I just hope that doesn't end up happening to me, he thought with a mental shiver at the thought of forgetting or just simply no longer caring about what he currently considered to be the most important thing in his life – his friends back in Sunnydale.
Pushing aside those thoughts for now he left the changing room and moved into the staging area itself and paused at what he saw. Control pods hundreds of them lined up in neat rows, waiting for owners who were not here and likely who never had existed given that everything here had certainly been created by the spell he'd gotten caught in. The sheer number of pods here though was a little surprising until he remembered that a Fortizar-class citadel was designed to be both a fleet staging area and a corporate headquarters. Thus, it would have all the support facilities required for corporations or governments capsuleers.
Of course, so many pods in the room presented him with a problem.
"Which one is mine," he wondered aloud.
"All of them are ready for use, Xander," Aura replied once again, making him jump.
"So just choose one."
"Exactly. I should inform you that the frigate is ready to launch. Would you like me to plot and upload a course to Mars into the navigational computer?"
"Yes, please Aura."
"As you wish," Aura replied.
As Aura signed off Xander made his way to the small lift platform underneath the closest control pod. The moment he stopped on top of it the pad shivered slightly and lifted him up into the pod where a small seat and a set of six cables a centimetre or so thick were waiting, each cable having a plug on the end that in another few moments would sequentially attach themselves to his body. He would be lying if he said he was completely comfortable with the idea. But it's my life now, he thought, so I might as well get used to it as even if I do go back to Sunnydale, and somehow avoid getting slayed by Buffy, it won't change the fact that due to that bloody spell I'm a capsuleer.
Deciding it was time to stop procrastinating about this, it wouldn't change anything after all, he sat on the seat which prompted the bottom of the pod to seal itself. A holographic console appeared to his right with the option to engage the interface written in Gallente script though he could of course read it somehow even though the characters were not English. He hesitated for a moment before, after plucking up his courage, pressing the command to engage the interface. The hologram disappeared and for a moment more nothing happened. Then hatches in the base of the pod opened and a light blue fluid began to be pumped in. Simultaneously the cables, all six of them, came alive and began moving towards his spine where they lined up with the sockets built into his body and which began just below his neck and went much of the way down his spine.
With a series of whirring clicks the cable ends docked with the ports each interface sending a momentary stab of pain through his body. It was all he could do not to scream as he really wasn't expecting that. The last cable plugged itself in as the fluid level reached his nose and mouth. It was all he could do not to gag as the fluid entered his mouth and nose and began cascading down his airways into his lungs. Strangely though he felt none of the instinctive panic you would normally feel at feeling like you were drowning. It was as though there was something stopping him from feeling any panic. In a few seconds his lungs were full, yet he was still able to breathe as the fluid was hyper-oxygenated and would let him breathe normally. The pod finished filling and he felt it move backwards as it was docked into the egg-shaped pod-ship that could, in an emergency, serve as a capsuleers personal escape ship as it was capable of warp flight though his other self's memories told him it rarely worked out that way as the pod had only basic shields and armour and thus was relatively easily shot out of the sky. Heavy metal shutters closed over the transparent walls sealing him in, small lights came on illuminating the liquid-filled environment surrounding him.
This is a strange experience, he thought, feeling the pod begin to move and knowing that it was being guided into his chosen ship by the station's automatic systems. He closed his eyes and for a moment saw only darkness, then he could see again through the pods external pickups which now showed him being guided across the cavernous main docking bay towards a ship that had been brought forward so it was facing the softly shimmering, semi-opaque force field that sealed the entrance to the bay. The ship he was heading for had a slightly bulbous bow section leading back into the spine that connected to the engines. Two small wings – each mounting a secondary engine – extended down from the spine just forward of the main engines. It also had the distinctive ivory white and gold livery of an Amarr vessel. He immediately recognized the design as being a Punisher-class frigate.
The pod came to a stop over the frigate and he watched as a section of the armoured hull turned fluid and flowed aside revealing a hatch just big enough to let the pod through. The pod lowered itself into the frigate and for a moment all he saw was a metal shaft as he was lowered into the very core of the frigate's bulbous bow section. The pod came to a stop and locking clamps locked it in place and conduits began connecting to it from the ship.
Again, his vision changed and suddenly he was looking at everything through the frigate's sensors both externally and internally. Information flowed into his mind on the status of every single system onboard and indeed providing basic data on all the ships around him in the bay including tactical analysis, power usage levels or lack thereof and numerous other things. A window popped up in his vision with the image of a blue humanoid woman.
"Xander it is time," Aura told him. "Shall I begin the departure sequence?"
"Yes Aura," he thought spoke back. Immediately he felt two things happen, first the powerful electromagnetic fields – being projected from pit-like projectors all around the bay – that had been holding the frigate stationary disengaged. Then the gravimagnetic forces of the bay's tractor beams – visible to him as fans of diffuse light his mind translating the data into a format he'd understand – engaged and began guiding him out of the bay.
He waited patiently as the beams guided him first through the shimmering wall of the force field into open space then began guiding him to the edge of the station's docking perimeter. The beams disengaged and he just knew exactly where he was supposed to go. With a thought he brought the engines online and used his manoeuvring jets to come around and begin the first phase of his journey to the unknown ship over Mars. He wasn't quite able to warp there yet as Triton was kind of in the way.
As he flew Xander couldn't help but be surprised by how easily he was doing this, considering that in some way he'd never actually done this before. He easily followed his course past Triton and aligned onto the warp vector that Aura had plotted for him. With a thought he engaged the FTL drive.
"Warp drive activated," Aura said as with a watery shimmer the laser-channelled depleted vacuum field formed and suddenly, he was hurtling at FTL speeds through the solar system towards Mars.
It took only a few moments before he came to the end of the warp tunnel and fully integrated back into normal space. The dark side of Mars dominated space ahead of him with one of its two asteroid moons just able to be seen over the edge of the northern horizon. A nav point blinked into existence showing the location of the unknown derelict and Xander immediately headed towards the ship, mentally reaching out with his/the ships sensors to see what he could learn about it.
The analysis appeared almost immediately.
As their scans from the station had indicated the vessel was corvette-sized being forty meters long, thirty-five meters wide and fifteen meters tall. It's appearance kind of reminded Xander of the horseshoe crabs that they'd studied in biology class early last year, before the death of Jesse and his introduction to everything that went bump or rather 'grr' in the night. The vessel was only emitting very small amounts of power, enough to indicate that whatever its power source was it was only ticking over so to speak being active just enough to keep the ship in a stable geostationary orbit. There certainly wasn't enough power active now to support any form of life support system.
Xander had to wonder just why it had been abandoned as there was no evidence of any damage existing or historic to the vessel. According to the sensors there was absolutely nothing wrong with the vessel, aside from the fact that it was powered down and just left sitting in orbit of Mars by whoever its builders were. After a moment he gave a mental shrug and decided he'd try and work that out later, for now he would focus on getting it back to the station.
With that goal in mind he carefully began to position the ship to take the craft in tow, while also aligning onto the right warp vector to take him back to Neptune. It was a tricky bit of manoeuvring requiring him to use navigational thrusters only instead of the main engine in order to angle the ship just right while also getting close enough to bring the ship into tractor beam range. The process took the better part of ten, somewhat frustrating, minutes of high precision manoeuvring but he finally got into the correct position to execute what he wanted to do.
Okay here goes nothing, Xander thought as he engaged the salvage modules tractor beam. The beam of gravimagnetic force emerged from the ships ventral midsection and locked onto the derelict. Like a fisherman reeling in a catch he began to slowly pull the derelict closer to his frigate. Again a tricky, time consuming process as he had to be careful to avoid colliding with the hull, while it would be a low velocity impact and do no real damage he really didn't want to mess up his first real salvage mission.
Eventually though the derelict was as close to the hull as it could be without coming into direct contact with the frigate's hull. Bringing the vessel to a halt, Xander carefully checked to see if it was within the perimeter of the depleted vacuum bubble on its normal setting. He gave a mental groan as he saw that several meters of the ship's ventral side were outside the bubble. Why can't the universe cooperate for once, he thought in annoyance before accessing the settings for the depleted vacuum bubble that was the essential part of how the warp drive worked.
Carefully he adjusted the settings to make the bubble large enough to fully encompass the derelict ship. A warning flashed up indicating that the new bubble configuration would put considerably more stress on the ship's capacitor. With a thought he overrode the warning and actioned the new configuration. Then after a quick double check of his warp vector, confirming it was correct, he gave the command to engage the warp drive.
"Warp drive activated."
~~//~~
Silently Xander's frigate vanished into warp flight with the derelict in tow he was unaware that the moving of the abandoned starship prompted an emergency burst transmission to be sent from the ship to those who had crewed and eventually abandoned it. Thus, in a sealed drawer in a darkened office in Billings, Montana a light began blinking on a small but highly advanced device waiting for attention.
~~//~~
Xander was relieved as the frigate dropped out of warp. Towing the derelict across the system from Mars had seriously pushed his systems as he was getting numerous warnings from the warp drive system everything ranging from a low power warning from the gravity capacitor to thermal warnings from the drive core. Automatic systems had cut in and increased the coolant flow to the drive core, but he was getting an advisory that he could not safely engage the warp drive again for a few hours without risking a dangerous overload.
Thankfully I have no intention of going anywhere for a few hours, he thought having already decided when he got back to the station he would ask Aura to direct him to some quarters where he could lay down and have a sleep as it had been one hell of an evening. He put those thoughts out of his mind for now and focused on navigating around Triton and onto a vector to the station's docking perimeter.
It only took a few moments to travel around the moon and the Fortizar came back into view silhouetted against the blue and white of Neptune. He carefully guided the frigate and its cargo to the outer edge of the station's docking perimeter and came to a halt before transmitting to the station that he wished to dock.
"Docking request accepted," Aura reported automatically as the station's own tractor beams once again engaged and began to draw the frigate in. "Xander once we're in the bay I will have one of the station's internal tractors take the recovered derelict to one of the secondary bays to await analysis. I will let you know when the time comes to disengage your own tractor beam."
"Understood Aura," he thought spoke back. "And Aura when we dock, and the pod disengages, would you be kind enough to direct me to some living quarters on the station."
"Of course, I have already prepared the station administrators quarters for your use."
Xander was about to protest that he didn't need to stay in the station administrators' quarters but ultimately decided against it. Something told him that it would do no good, besides he was so emotionally exhausted from today that he really had no fight in him right now. So instead he waited as the tractor beams drew his frigate and its cargo in through the bay force field.
~~//~~
A relatively short time later he found himself once again in the pod alone as it was drawn out of the ship and carried through the docking bay back to the staging area. In no time at all the pod ship was once again back in its docked position.
The external feeds shut down and Xander opened his eyes to find himself back in his body. A moment later the armoured panels enclosing the tank opened and the tank slid forward into its undocked position. Immediately he felt the cables plugged into his back pull away, as with the initial connection each cable withdrawal sent a momentary stab of pain through his nervous system making him wince but if there was one thing a lifetime with Tony Harris had taught him it was how to endure pain.
With a muffled whoosh the fluid level in the tank began to drop firmly dumping him back on the seat. In only a few seconds the fluid that had been supporting and protecting his body was gone. The bottom of the tank opened and Xander found himself on his hands and knees on the floor. The moment air began to enter his nose and throat again he began coughing and retching until the fluid that had been in his lungs exploded out of his mouth. Thankfully the liquid didn't taste that bad, leaving a faint hint of peppermint in his mouth though it was still not exactly a pleasant experience.
As the last of the fluid left his lungs, he lay there barely holding himself on all fours as he trembled with the reaction. It only lasted for a few moments before everything settled down and he could awkwardly climb back to his feet. "Damn I hate that," he said.
"My old captain used to say that all the time," Aura told him, "I don't think there is a capsuleer in existence that actually likes that part of getting out of the control pod. It's just something that they learn to put up with as you will learn Xander."
"I guess," Xander replied as he headed for the showers outside the pod bay and where he had left his clothes in the changing room.
~~//~~
Ten minutes later Xander was once more showered and clothed though he was really beginning to feel the events of this evening followed by the strain of flying a starship for the first time – something that had been incredibly enjoyable to his inner sci-fi geek not to mention amazing with how he'd flown the frigate by literally becoming one with the ship – catching up with him. It brought a tidal wave of exhaustion and made him momentarily stumble.
"Are you alright Xander?" Aura asked, the AI sounding concerned.
"Yeah I'm just tired," Xander told her, "thirsty as well."
"There are drinks available in the station administrator's quarters," Aura replied as a nearby door opened revealing another lift. "This lift will take you up to the level where the quarters are. As soon as you get out of the lift turn left. The entrance is at the end of the corridor. Your DNA has been programmed into the security lock."
"Thank you, Aura," Xander answered as he stepped into the lift prompting the doors to close and the lift to begin moving.
"You are welcome Xander. Would you like me to begin an initial analysis of the recovered vessel while you sleep?"
"Yes please. Focus only on the hull and external fittings of the vessel for now please. We'll see about getting inside in a day or so."
"As you wish Xander."
The lift came to a stop and the doors opened and Xander blinked at what he saw. Instead of the silver-white bulkheads of the rest of the stations interior – well what little of it he'd seen so far as given the sheer size of this place it would take months at least for him to see the whole station, well the parts of it that were people accessible as his memories told him that some sizeable areas of the place were warehouses, raw materials storage silos and massive nanofabrication plants – the walls were panelled in a honey coloured wide grained wood that he recognized as tana wood from Gallente Prime and the floors were carpeted in a light cream coloured carpet. If he hadn't known better, he would have thought that he was in the hallway of some five-star hotel on Earth and not on a gigantic space station orbiting Neptune.
"Whoever designed this level sure loved their comforts," he muttered to himself as he followed Aura's directions to the station administrator's quarters. In no time at all he was outside them and put his hand on the lock panel which immediately began glowing softly. He felt a momentary prick as a tiny needle extracted a sample of his blood and scanned his DNA then the door slid open and he stepped inside.
The room beyond was opulent to say the least.
As with the corridor outside the walls were all panelled with tana wood and the floor covered with a deep pile, rich blue carpet. Expensive looking furniture dotted much of the room while off to the right a spiral staircase led up to where he guessed the bedroom was located. Though what really grabbed his attention immediately was the far wall as it was transparent giving a breath-taking view of the space outside the station especially the great blue planet that they were orbiting.
Mentally shaking himself he walked forward and made his way over to the bar where he found a mixture of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. After fixing himself some flavoured water he wandered over to the window wall and found that the room was located on one of the upper levels of a tower that rose several kilometres above the metal surface of the station. If he looked down all he saw was a sea of dark grey metal littered with rows of lights and projections that while they looked flimsy from here would be a kilometre or more high and would serve all manner of functions from sensor antenna to communications arrays to some of the stations defensive cannons.
Man, this place is huge, he thought as he took a sip of the pear-tasting water. I really need to somehow get back in touch with the gang back home or go to see them during the day and hope Buffy doesn't try to slay me, as I could really do with some more people up here. But that will be something to start figuring out how to do in the morning as right now I'm beat.
Tearing his eyes away from the incredible view outside he made his way back through the room to the stairs and went up to the bedroom. Within a few minutes he'd slipped off his clothes and climbed into the bed, though not before setting the alarm to wake him in eight hours. A wave of a hand over a sensor caused the lights in the room to go out and the viewport to turn opaque – cutting off the light reflecting off Neptune – plunging the room into darkness. His eyes closed and seconds later he was asleep.
~~//~~
Stargate Command
Cheyenne Mountain
A Short Time Earlier
Colonel Jack O'Neill had a puzzled frown on his face as he, along with his team, filed into the SGC's briefing room. He had no idea why they had been summoned as, to the best of his knowledge, there was to be no off-world activity for another few weeks. Not until they could recruit more people and train them up ready to start going out there into the galaxy and start looking for the tools and technology, they would need to defend themselves, and the planet, from the Goa'uld.
Hence why he had been surprised to get this summons.
I wonder what this is all about, he thought as he and the rest of SG-1 took their normal places around the conference table waiting for General Hammond who they could see was still in his office and appeared to be on the phone. He couldn't help but wonder, well worry really, if it had something to do with his teams going AWOL and going through the Stargate against orders. Though they'd managed to stop Apophis attack on Earth at literally the eleventh hour, ultimately destroying two Goa'uld motherships in the process, there was bound to be some negative consequences at some point. The top brass, sitting in their nice cushy Pentagon offices, generally were not that forgiving of the whole disobeying orders thing after all.
Through the glass partition wall between the briefing room and Hammond's office he saw the general put down the phone, whatever call he'd been on having finished, and pick something up from his desk. Something that looked like a small stack of folders and come out of the office prompting all of them to stand up even though technically Daniel and Teal'c did not need to.
"Please be seated," Hammond said as he made his way to his familiar seat at the head of the table. As bid, all four members of SG-1 sat back down in their seats. Hammond handed two of the folders to Jack and two to Sam with the clear indication that they were to hand one to their neighbour. Which they promptly did. "You are probably wondering just why I have called you here when there are no missions allowed at the moment."
"The thought had crossed our minds sir," Jack replied being, as diplomatic as he could be, which for most people wasn't diplomatic at all.
"An hour ago, one of our deep range telescopes on Hawaii detected an anomaly in orbit above Neptune," General Hammond told them all before gesturing for them to open their files. "We believe it to be either an impossibly large ship or some type of space station. Unfortunately, they were not able to get many images of it before it moved into the shadow of Neptune's largest moon. What few images they were able to take before Triton got in the way were forwarded to us."
Jack raised an eyebrow and took out the first of a series of photos. Which showed nothing much beyond the blue orb of Neptune and a tiny black dot that was more like a speck of dust on the telescope lens – which he knew from experience could be a right pain in the ass to get off – than anything else. He moved onto the next image which had magnified in a bit on the dark dot enough to reveal that it wasn't a speck of dust but was clearly something else, something artificial though it was still too faint to make out anything specific about the structure.
Moving on to the last image Jack noticed that the enhancement and magnification were a bit better. A bit in that he could make out the object did indeed appear to be some type of space station. It was a faint wedge shape and from the basic scale they'd been able to work out during the enhancement process, utterly enormous. The scale indicating that the alien structure was somewhere between a hundred and ten kilometres and a hundred and fifteen kilometres long.
"Whoa that thing's big," he said.
"Do you recognise it Teal'c," Hammond asked.
"I do not General Hammond," the big Jaffa replied even as he quietly marvelled at the magnified images. The things the Tau'ri could do never ceased to surprise him, especially how they repeatedly insisted that it was not magic. "The design of the station is not Goa'uld. I do not believe that the Goa'uld would actually be capable of building a space station this large."
"That is both good and bad news Teal'c," Hammond replied, "on one hand it means we probably won't have to worry about another confrontation in space with the Goa'uld for a while. On the other we have someone new, and obviously quite advanced if they can build something this big, in our own backyard so to speak. Which given what happened twelve minutes ago is a worry."
"What happened," Jack asked, noting out of the corner of his eye Sam closely scrutinizing the images as his team's resident scientist tried to learn whatever she could from the images.
"Deep space radar detected a small contact passing Triton," Hammond explained. "Within a few seconds of them detecting it the contact vanished and reappeared just over a minute later near Mars before disappearing behind the planet."
"To cover that distance in such a short space of time the object must have travelled beyond lightspeed," Sam commented looking up.
"That is deep space radar's belief," Hammond confirmed. "About ten minutes later the contact reappeared from behind Mars and once again accelerated to translight speeds, reappearing near Triton two minutes later. It was also giving off a slightly bigger signal, so it is believed it was towing something. It then once more disappeared behind Triton presumably moving to dock with the station."
"So, we have someone operating in our backyard so to speak," Jack commented frowning. "What are we planning to do about this sir?"
"At the moment the president has ordered that radio transmissions be directed towards Neptune in the hope of establishing contact with the space station," Hammond answered. "However, given the distance from us it will take at least eight hours for us to hear from them assuming they even detect the radio signal, understand it and immediately send one back."
"Why eight hours General Hammond," Teal'c questioned.
"Radio waves travel at the speed of light Teal'c," Jack explained knowledge from his astronomy hobby coming to the fore making him put aside his general joker persona for a few moments, revealing the intelligent man beneath. "Neptune is thirty AU from us, at light speed, it would take a radio wave just over four hours to reach the station. That's a long time to wait."
"There is another thing to consider. Due to its size and position it is only a matter of time before other people besides us learn about the station's existence," Sam added. "Once it comes out from behind Triton any observatory, anywhere on the planet, that has their telescope pointed in Neptune's direction are certain to see it. From there it certainly won't take the world's media long to learn of its existence."
"Oh terrific," Jack said with a slight groan. The last thing they needed was for the world to learn about the existence of aliens, the public weren't ready for that knowledge. There would certainly be panic and rioting in the streets at the revelation that aliens existed, and they truly weren't alone in the universe. To say nothing how the hard line religious nutjobs would react. Plus, if the public learned of aliens from this massive space station then how long would they realistically be able to keep the existence of the Stargate a secret?
"There has to be something else we can do to make contact with them so we can convince them to either leave or do something to hide themselves," he added aloud. "What about the two gliders we used to escape Apophis' ship? Could we use them to get a small team to the station?"
Sam shook her head. "I'm afraid that won't work sir," she replied, "both gliders were quite badly damaged by the fireball that erupted when we blew those ships up. After the Endeavour recovered, the two fighters were transported to Area 51 for analysis. Last time I checked they had just started taking them apart.
"At any rate even if the fighters were operational, they do not have the life support capacity to sustain such a long flight," Sam continued. "We would run out of air before we even reached Saturn."
"So, there is nothing we can do?" Daniel asked.
"No nothing," Sam replied, her voice grim. It was a sentiment that didn't sit well with anyone around the table. So far, they'd managed to cover up the existence of aliens from a world that wasn't ready to learn of their existence, even managing to cover up the destruction of the two Goa'uld motherships as anomalous solar flare activity from the sun. Unfortunately there did not seem to be any means of covering up this space stations existence, not when numerous observatories around the world – many of which were either privately owned or owned by nations opposed to the United States – would be certain to see it since they were in the middle of the relatively narrow period of time every year in which Neptune could be viewed and thus studied from Earth. It was a revelation that did not sit well with any of them…
…not well at all.
~~~///~~~
Author Notes: Another chapter bites the cybernetic dust. I apologise for not including anymore of the Scooby Gang in this update but the scene I had in mind for them just didn't work right and felt a little cheap as I tried to write it so I ditched it. We will see more from them in the next update, especially as the shock of Xander's 'death' at the hands of Drusilla wears off and the reality sets in.
Aura might read as being doing far more than what she is shown to do in the game, but I figure this is well within her capabilities as an artificial intelligence. Not to mention she has been subtly altered by the people who interfered with the spell cast by Ethan Rayne to be more able to help Xander in the situation he finds himself in.
Finally, can anyone guess whose ship he has just salvaged? Until next time.
- Location
- United States
Well, that ship was obviously he one that brought Martin Lloyd and his people here, though hopefully it won't self destruct.
Also, I'm not surprised that Oma's faction modified Aura, nor that they took advantage of the spell, most likely with help from the actual god Janus, who would only be too happy to get one up on the Powers That Be. Plus, considering the way the Powers operate, I doubt The Others can object too much to Oma and her friends using those same rules/loopholes. Not when there are ascended beings who are not them already interfering with the Mortal planes in the Milky Way.
Also, I'm not surprised that Oma's faction modified Aura, nor that they took advantage of the spell, most likely with help from the actual god Janus, who would only be too happy to get one up on the Powers That Be. Plus, considering the way the Powers operate, I doubt The Others can object too much to Oma and her friends using those same rules/loopholes. Not when there are ascended beings who are not them already interfering with the Mortal planes in the Milky Way.
- Location
- Seattle, Washington, USA
I hereby declare that she is no longer Captain Samantha Carter. Henceforth, she must be known as Captain Samantha Obvious.
Teal'c is a member of a space-faring civilization that only has FTL communications when relaying through a Stargate. He's highly experienced, and his rank in US military terms is effectively O-12 — one level past the highest ranked naval officer in US service. He would not need to ask why radio communications have a lag time.
If anyone in that room needed to ask, I'd expect it to be Doctor Jackson.
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RichardWhereat
Feanor did nothing wrong.
- Location
- Australia
That, and O'Neil was a pilot, which requires an indepth understanding of physics. His hobby of Astronomy likely came from that.
- Location
- South Wales, United Kingdom
When you think about it Sam would often state the obvious in briefings.
You forget that the Goa'uld purposefully keep the Jaffa like all their slaves ignorant of the sciences so that they can pass their technology off as magic. While the Jaffa can use Goa'uld technology i.e. fly gliders, Al'kesh and motherships and do basic repairs they have no idea how it works, how to create it and how to do more complex repairs that don't involve just swapping out a control crystal or two.
Exactly. Jack likes to pretend and act like he doesn't understand but he actually understands a hell of a lot more than he generally lets on.
I was basing it on how they showed deep space radar in the show and how that let them track the two Goa'uld motherships Apophis brought to attack Earth from their hyperspace emergence point by Saturn in real time. It only took the two ships about an hour at maximum sublight to cross the distance between Saturn and Earth so they had to be travelling at a significant percentage of light speed which might explain why only a few minutes past for the people on the ships.
Chapter Three
- Location
- South Wales, United Kingdom
Chapter Three
Station Administrators Quarters
Xander's Citadel
The Next Morning
The sharp, insistent electronic beeping of the alarm, pitched at just the right volume so you couldn't ignore it no matter what you tried, echoed through the bedroom bringing Xander out of the deep sleep into which he had fallen almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. Groaning Xander opened his eyes to be faced with the pitch darkness of the bedroom aside from the light of the alarms holographic display and the point of white light that indicated the location of the sensor controlling the room's lights. Wincing at the continuing alarm sound and making a mental note to adjust the tone a bit as the shrillness hurt his ears as he'd found his hearing had been slightly enhanced ever since the hyena possession, he sat up.
"Alright, alright I'm up, alarm off," he growled in irritation even as he swiped a hand over the light sensor. Immediately the alarm shut off and the room's lights began to come on. They came on slowly at first, gradually rising to full brightness but doing it over a time period that his eyes had no trouble keeping up with.
"Good morning Xander, did you sleep well," Aura asked, making him jump slightly in the bed even as he stretched and yawned. Damn it I wish she wouldn't do that, he thought making another mental note to see if he could persuade Aura to give a warning tone of some kind before she started speaking – at least when he wasn't in a control pod – so as to stop giving him a virtual heart attack on a regular basis.
"I did," Xander confirmed as he finished his morning stretch before getting out of bed. "I'm just going to have a shower now then dress and then I need to find something to have for breakfast."
"The food synthesizer in the kitchenette area of your quarters has a wide selection of breakfast foods to choose from as well as a dispenser for Quafe Zero," Aura told him. "Once you are dressed and have had your breakfast, we will have a few things to discuss."
Xander frowned. "I am not sure I like the sound of that Aura," he said as he stood up and made his way to the on-suite bathroom.
"It's nothing too bad Xander I assure you. It's just I have noticed a few things in my routine post-flight analysis of the telemetry from the frigate you flew last night, I have completed my initial analysis of the recovered corvette and there have been a few other developments in the last few hours that I need to brief you on so you can decide where we go from here."
"I'll take your word for it then Aura, we'll begin discussions soon," Xander replied as he took off the underpants he'd worn last night, chucked them in the chute that would see them taken to an automated cleaning station and returned to these admittedly very luxurious rooms within an hour or so, and climbed into the shower.
~~//~~
Fifteen minutes later dressed and as ready for the day as he ever was, Xander descended the steps from the mezzanine level that housed the bedroom and its on-suite bathroom to the main level. He made his way to the kitchenette just off the main living area and approached the food synthesizer that honestly reminded him of the food dispensers/proto replicators featured in the original Star Trek series just without the ports for pre-programmed recipe cards to be put in. Instead above the alcove – much like in the newer Next Generation series which had recently ended and started making movies with First Contact being the latest, having come out last year – was a control panel detailing what the options were. Thoughtfully Aura had already pulled up the breakfast menu for him. He scanned the options, noting with some surprise that many of the dishes available were very similar to the dishes available back on Earth, but after a moment he decided he shouldn't be, given where the distant ancestors of the people of New Eden had come from.
After a few minutes of browsing he decided on something simple and told the system to produce some simple porridge with maple syrup and butter pancakes. For a drink he decided he might as well try some Quafe Zero since it was specifically designed for capsuleers like himself to drink, being modified especially for their cybernetically enhanced physiology to the point that a normal human drinking it would end up with indigestion at best and a nasty case of the runs at worst.
Immediately the synthesizer went to work with the panel lighting up and emitting a faint humming sound as specialized nanobots began to first produce the bowl, plate and cutlery before beginning to take biomass from the stations storage cells and beginning to assemble it into the correct pattern to produce the requested foodstuffs. Simultaneously a panel nearby opened revealing a can with a simple pull lid and writing on the side – which like everything else here was Gallente script – which confirmed it was a can of Quafe Zero.
Ten minutes later, breakfast over and done with and now nursing a cup of coffee – since his introduction to the supernatural world he'd become quite familiar with the wonders of coffee though unlike Willow he tried not to overdo it – or at least its New Eden equivalent he stood before the window wall in the living area.
"Alright Aura tell me what you found," he said gazing at the thick atmosphere of Neptune, finding its shifting storm bands relaxing though they weren't as energetic as Jupiter's.
"Where do you wish me to begin Xander?" Aura asked.
"Begin with the post-flight summary. Was there anything wrong?"
"Nothing mechanically no. However, when I analysed it, I detected evidence that we had been tracked on an extremely primitive form of interstellar radar."
Xander frowned. "Wouldn't the ECM systems or the navigational shields have stopped it?" he asked.
"Normally yes, however, the frequencies used by these particular radar emissions are extremely primitive and are not normally in the spectrum blocked by ECM for the simple reason no one in New Eden has ever used them," Aura replied. "I have since adjusted the ECM suites on all ships to block the radar emissions. You will not be detected the next time you have to take a ship out."
"That's a relief though I still don't like that someone – presumably the military since they do have a few deep space radar telemetry projects on the go – was able to track us."
"It is a concern," Aura agreed. "And unfortunately, I have to add to it."
"How so?"
"It appears Xander that this station has been detected by Earth based optical and radiological telescopes. In the last eight hours I have detected numerous primitive radio transmissions being beamed towards the station from numerous Earth based sources. Most appear to be the same data transmission sent towards us again and again though several have been audio messages all in the same unknown language."
Xander frowned. "Play one for me please Aura," he asked.
"As you wish Xander this is the first message we received four hours and nine minutes after you turned in for the night."
For a moment after Aura went quiet there was nothing then an authoritative male voice, with a slight but notable Texan accent, filled the air. "To the unknown alien space station orbiting Neptune I am Major General George Hammond representing the United States of America and Stargate Command," the voice said, "identify yourself and state your reasons for being in our solar system."
Xander's frown deepened. "What's Stargate Command," he wondered aloud, "and Aura that language is not unknown, it's American English the same language I've been speaking."
"Actually, Xander you have not been speaking that language," Aura told him. Xander's frown, if possible, got even deeper before he blinked and suddenly realized that the artificial intelligence was right. The whole time that he had been here, literally from the moment he'd been dumped out of the cloning tank, he'd been speaking Gallentese.
"Bloody hell," he said in surprise speaking English this time and blinking as the language, which had previously been second nature for him to talk, suddenly sounded strange and alien to his ears as it was a bit harsher than the more lyrical Gallentese he'd previously been unknowingly speaking. Guess there is a hell of a lot more of Alexander left in me than just his memories, skills and the cybernetic implants that make someone a capsuleer, he thought as he made his way to one of the seats and collapsed down into it.
"I did not understand that, but it sounded to me like you just cursed," Aura commented. "Is something wrong Xander?"
"It's alright Aura," he replied, switching back to Gallentese. "I was just surprised to find out that I've been speaking Gallentese this whole time and that the language I've always spoken sounds and feels alien to me now. It's just… I guess it drives home again that I am no longer the person I was before yesterday and can never be that person again. Perhaps even more than the implants in me or Alexander's memories ever could."
"I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault. Though one thing's for sure I really want to find out who was behind that blasted spell so I can thank him… with a plasma enema."
"I see. Do you wish me to continue with my report? Perhaps move onto the analysis of the recovered alien corvette's exterior?"
"The corvette can wait. Leave me in peace for a bit please Aura."
"As you wish, Xander. Call me if you require anything."
With that Aura signed off. Xander sighed and stood back up before walking back to the window wall which was steadily becoming his favourite place to stand and attempt to gather his thoughts. He didn't know how to feel about what he had just discovered about himself and how much of Alexander was still left inside of him and how much it was influencing him. Influencing him to such a degree that he hadn't even realized that he wasn't speaking his own language anymore but had felt quite natural to speak Alexander's native language. Am I even still Xander Harris anymore, he wondered, or have I become someone else, someone who is a mixture of who I was and who I was turned into yesterday by whatever spell was cast upon Sunnydale?
He did not know and that bothered him more than he could admit, even to himself.
~~//~~
Sunnydale High School
Sunnydale
That Same Time
Buffy Summers sighed softly to herself as she stepped out of her mother's car and gazed upon the front of Sunnydale High. She wasn't surprised to see that Willow was not waiting for her at the entrance to the grounds as she normally was, in fact she was willing to bet that her redheaded friend hadn't even gotten out of bed this morning. Willow had understandably been devastated last night when she'd told her about Xander's death. It had been the hardest thing she had ever done, and Willow's heart-breaking cry of denial and despair would be one she would always remember.
Buffy mentally shook herself and walked through the gates, climbed the steps and immediately went inside. As always, the school corridors were thronging with students and some members of the faculty as they prepared for another school day on the mouth of hell. She paused in the doorway for a few moments, observing the activity, everyone going about their business as if nothing had changed as if Xander's death was of no consequence to them.
It infuriated her to no end. She had to fight hard not to give into the urge to scream at them, to demand how they could act as if nothing had happened as if the death of a brave young man meant nothing to any of them. She managed to keep the words in though and forced herself to walk inside and make her way to her locker. It took only a moment to put her packed lunch inside and get out the books she would need for her first lesson of the day.
It was when she closed the locker though that she got a surprise as standing there, his presence previously masked by the sheet metal, was Kyle Dufours. The leader of Sunnydale High's own little pack of mean teens, though they had gotten a lot quieter since the hyena primal incident, looked dreadful. His skin was paler than it should be, his normally neat black hair a mess and his clothing rumpled. She could even see bags under his eyes.
"Is it true?" Kyle asked her bluntly, seemingly desperate for an answer to his question.
"Is what true Kyle?" Buffy asked with a look of genuine confusion and concern on her face.
"Is it true that al… I mean that Xander's dead?" The look in Kyle's eyes, the desperate hope that she would tell him that it wasn't true and that Xander was still alive, broke her heart. Especially as she would have to dash his hopes that Xander was still alive, though she wondered just why Kyle was reacting like this to Xander's death. If her ears weren't deceiving her then she was sure he was going to say alpha before he corrected himself and said Xander's name. I should report that to Giles, she thought, wondering if there was still some echo of the hyena possession in Kyle and the others.
"I'm afraid so," she said softly, sadly, feeling her eyes begin to sting with the tears that wanted to start falling again. It was obvious that that reply was not the one that Kyle had wanted, and hoped not, to hear as his shoulders slumped and he looked down and away for a few moments. When he looked back up, she clearly saw that he was trying his hardest not to break down as there was an utterly wrenching look of pain and loss in the normally mean teens eyes.
"I… I hoped it wasn't true," Kyle said at last his voice notably shaking the waves of sorrow coming off him were almost palpable. "Thanks for telling me… even if it's not what I wanted to hear."
With that he turned and walked away. Buffy tracked him with her eyes and watched as he moved over to where some vending machines were, where somehow, she wasn't surprised to see Tor, Heidi and Rhonda all waiting for him. Though she couldn't hear what he said over the hubbub of dozens of different conversations going on in the corridor, even the supernaturally enhanced hearing of a Slayer had its limits after all, she didn't need to know as the teens reactions told her everything; she saw Rhonda fall into Kyle's arms while Tor embraced Heidi and it was obvious from the way their shoulders were shaking that both girls were crying and that Kyle and Tor were just as devastated with only there male pride preventing them from joining the girls in breaking down.
Okay there is some echo of the hyena left in all of them, she thought, otherwise they wouldn't be reacting to Xander's death in that way. But how Xander told us that he didn't remember anything of the possession, and I haven't seen him hang around with Kyle's crew at all since. Was Xander lying about that? And has he been seeing the other four members of the pack behind me and Willow's backs? She honestly wasn't sure what to make of that possibility as why would Xander feel the need to lie to them about that? They hadn't held anything he'd done while possessed by the hyena spirit against him as he'd had no control at the time. After a moment she gave a mental shrug and decided then and there that as soon as she had a free period – which was just after lunch today – she would go and see Giles about it. Hopefully he would have some answers for her on it as well as some information on where the vampiress Drusilla could be hiding so she could find that bloodsucking undead bitch and dust her in retribution for Xander's death.
Abruptly new activity at the end of the corridor caught her attention. Every student, and indeed members of the faculty including Principal Snyder, were all running towards the main common area outside the canteen. Though there wasn't any fear in the way they were moving just shock and excitement. Now what? She thought as, curiosity got the better of her, she allowed herself to get caught up in the crowd moving towards where the big screens were mounted on the wall above the notice boards. In mere moments she was amongst the crowd, finding herself standing next to a slack jawed Larry of all people with Cordelia on her other side and Jonathan in front of them. Following their gaze to the screens she couldn't help but freeze in shock at what she saw.
The screens were tuned to CNN, which was not unusual as they usually were, but it was what was on those screens that had everyone so utterly gobsmacked. The screens were showing an artist's impression of a great blue planet that Buffy vaguely recognised from physics class as Neptune. Sitting front and centre of the screen was an enormous, vaguely wedge-shaped structure that was clearly artificial. The screen caption reading was as unbelievable as it was Earth shattering as it read: "ALIEN SPACE STATION FOUND OVER NEPTUNE: IS THIS FIRST CONTACT?". There was only one thing she could think to say, and it was something that neatly summed up the shocked, amazed, hopeful and wary sentiments of everyone present students and faculty alike.
"Holy crap."
~~//~~
Billings
Montana
A Few Minutes Earlier
Holding a steaming mug of coffee, the man who now referred to himself as Doctor Peter Tanner arrived at his office in downtown Billings. The office was deserted at this time in the morning, not even the attractive young blond who served as his secretary had arrived yet though she would be here within the next fifteen minutes assuming she didn't get stuck in the traffic, which was why he always came in so early. It gave him time to enjoy a little peace and quiet before the organised chaos of the day began, especially as he had another appointment with Martin today. An appointment where he would have to issue his unknowing countryman with another round of the drugs that supress his memories of their true origins.
It was something that always left something of a foul taste in his mouth.
Yes, it was necessary to stop the man complaining about them deserting their doomed home and how they should return to their ship and make their way back home and salvage their honour in battle against the Goa'uld forces besieging their planet. The fact that their little corvette was no match for a Goa'uld mothership, its beam cannons nowhere near powerful enough to penetrate a Ha'tak's shields, and would be quickly blasted out of the sky by the motherships heavier plasma cannons, never seemed to occur to him which meant they had no choice but to silence him. That didn't mean however that he enjoyed having to do so as taking a man's identity away from him was never something that should be done lightly. Maybe we would have been better off just killing him, he thought, it would be a lot less cruel than what we are doing to him now.
He gave a mental sigh and took a sip of the coffee he'd picked up at Starbucks on his way in. A smile appeared on his face as some of the hot, bitter liquid disappeared down his throat. Coffee was a pleasure of this world that he was seriously beginning to enjoy. There were so many varieties of it to choose from, not to mention the myriad of other beverages hot or cold that there were. He was sure it was going to take him a lifetime to try them all.
Moving to his desk he sat down, put the coffee on its coaster and unlocked a specific drawer in the desk. This was another reason he came in before everyone else did, to check on the status of the corvette they'd hidden behind Mars. Given that its fuel cells had been half empty when they'd abandoned it – the majority of their home planets available naquada reserves had after all been earmarked for both the planetary defence platforms and the handful of surviving cruisers that were the last line of defence against the forces of the Goa'uld System Lord Ba'al – it was only a matter of time before the ship lost power and began to be pulled in by the Martian gravity. As he opened the drawer, he immediately saw a red warning light blinking on the ship remote.
Eyes widening in surprise and concern he brought up the remote's status display causing a hologram to blink into existence over the small silver remote. Late last night, when he and the others had all been sleeping, the ship had sent an emergency subspace burst to the remote. Pulling up the keyboard interface he queried the nature of the emergency message and frowned in concern at what he saw.
Shortly after midnight an alien spacecraft of unknown origin had appeared from an unknown form of FTL propulsion nearby and approached the ship. After scanning it thoroughly for a couple of minutes the alien had moved in close and locked onto their ship with a gravitational-magnetic force beam of some type pulling it out of orbit and in close to itself. The vessel had then created a bubble of depleted vacuum around itself and the ship before accelerating to translight velocities with their ship in tow. The ship had sent its data burst a few nanoseconds before it moved out of the limited range of the ship remote.
"This is not good," he muttered to himself as he pulled up the data burst and looked at what information their ship's sensors had gathered about the unknown that had taken it. The alien vessel was around a hundred meters long and constructed of several unknown metallic alloys which were heavily infused with some type of nanotechnology. There was no naquada aboard that the ships sensors could detect. Instead power seemed to be derived from an incredibly compact antimatter-based power plant and a series of capacitors. Weapons wise the ship appeared to be armed like their corvette with four weapons banks – three on the dorsal hull one on the ventral hull – that appeared to be stowed behind armoured hatches when not in use. It had a shield generator too though, given that its shields had been down at the time, he had no idea how strong the defensive force field would have been.
All in all, its technology was distinctly non-standard.
"Who built you I wonder," he mused as to the best of his knowledge there were no spacefaring races in this region of the galaxy, certainly none advanced enough to build a ship like the unknown warship. Given how thoroughly they'd searched this entire area of the galaxy – which was on the opposite side of Goa'uld space to their homeworld – they would have detected them if they were in any way local. I really need to talk to the others about this, he thought as he saved the data before shutting down the ship remote and returning it to its drawer, though with the ship out of range of our remote I have no idea what we're going to do about it. Especially as our shuttle pod is not capable of hyperspace travel.
It was just as well he had returned the ship remote to its secure drawer as at that moment the door to his office flew open and he saw his secretary Juliet Rawlings standing there. She looked breathless and shocked and he immediately felt concern. "Good heavens Juliet whatever is the matter," he asked.
"Doctor Tanner you better come to the common room there's something unbelievable on the telly that you should see," the young woman replied. Peter – it wasn't his real name of course but it was the one he preferred to use these days – raised an eyebrow. Now what could be so interesting on that idiot box, he thought, as television was one of the things on this world that really didn't make much sense to him. Oh, some of the entertainment could be nice – if a little incomprehensible at times especially that bizarre sport they called football – but most of the time he paid it little attention. Still knowing Juliet well by now, thus knowing she wasn't one to get worked up casually, he found his interest peaked.
"Alright," he agreed, standing up from the comfortable leather backed chair and coming around the desk. Juliet immediately turned and hurried out of the office and its small antechamber clearly in a hurry to get back to seeing whatever had caught her attention. Peter followed at a more sedate pace arriving at the common room that served drinks and light bites to all the staff on this floor a minute or two after Juliet left the office. To his great surprise the room was packed with what seemed like everyone who worked on this floor of the eight-story building and all of them were focused on the television which was displaying a feed from CNN.
What's all this about, he wondered as he made his way through the crowd to get close enough to the tv to see what was going on. When he got there, he practically froze eyes widening in shocked surprise as he beheld the exact same image and headline that at that very moment a certain bottle blond vampire slayer was seeing in distant Sunnydale. Where the bloody hell did that come from, he thought gazing at the massive alien space station in disbelief, it was completely unlike anything he had ever seen in his life before – which was saying quite a bit as he had seen quite a bit of the galaxy before they'd inadvertently entered Goa'uld space starting the war that there homeworld was quickly losing as the superior numbers of the Goa'uld enabled them to triumph over their slightly superior, but only slightly, technology – and also something that had not been there when they'd first come to this system nearly a year ago.
"Oh my," he said aloud.
"Amazing isn't it," Juliet said from beside him, "do you think the aliens are friendly?"
"I would hope so I wouldn't want to get on the bad side of anyone who can build a space station that big," he replied, getting nods and murmurs of agreement from all around. Especially as whoever built that thing would easily have the technology to turn this planet to a pile of asteroids and gravel orbiting this system's star, he thought as he studied the station the best he could. Even with just a limited visual inspection he could tell that it was the product of an extremely technologically advanced civilization as no one in this galaxy, to the best of his knowledge anyway, were capable of building something on such an immense scale.
"Any idea what's going to happen next Peter?" one of the other psychiatrists who worked on this floor asked.
Peter shrugged. "My guess is the government will attempt to make contact with the station," he replied, "though given how far Neptune is from Earth there is no guarantee that the aliens will be able to understand any radio transmission beamed at them." Though that's a thought, he thought, maybe we'll be able to use the ship remote to access the pods subspace transmitter and contact whoever it is that's out there. Maybe they'll know who took our ship, if they didn't take it themselves. I'll have to talk to the others to see what they think.
"Do you think the government would try to cover this up," Juliet asked, "say we're just looking at a reflection of swamp gas or something equally stupid like that?"
"Unlikely as this thing will be visible to both optical and radio telescopes all around the planet," one of the other support staff in the room replied. "Even if they wanted to there would be no way for the government to silence all those observatories, not to mention the other governments who are bound to know by now."
"So, what's going to happen next," Juliet asked a question that was met with nothing but looks between colleagues and silence for one simple reason…
…there was no answer to give.
Station Administrators Quarters
Xander's Citadel
The Next Morning
The sharp, insistent electronic beeping of the alarm, pitched at just the right volume so you couldn't ignore it no matter what you tried, echoed through the bedroom bringing Xander out of the deep sleep into which he had fallen almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. Groaning Xander opened his eyes to be faced with the pitch darkness of the bedroom aside from the light of the alarms holographic display and the point of white light that indicated the location of the sensor controlling the room's lights. Wincing at the continuing alarm sound and making a mental note to adjust the tone a bit as the shrillness hurt his ears as he'd found his hearing had been slightly enhanced ever since the hyena possession, he sat up.
"Alright, alright I'm up, alarm off," he growled in irritation even as he swiped a hand over the light sensor. Immediately the alarm shut off and the room's lights began to come on. They came on slowly at first, gradually rising to full brightness but doing it over a time period that his eyes had no trouble keeping up with.
"Good morning Xander, did you sleep well," Aura asked, making him jump slightly in the bed even as he stretched and yawned. Damn it I wish she wouldn't do that, he thought making another mental note to see if he could persuade Aura to give a warning tone of some kind before she started speaking – at least when he wasn't in a control pod – so as to stop giving him a virtual heart attack on a regular basis.
"I did," Xander confirmed as he finished his morning stretch before getting out of bed. "I'm just going to have a shower now then dress and then I need to find something to have for breakfast."
"The food synthesizer in the kitchenette area of your quarters has a wide selection of breakfast foods to choose from as well as a dispenser for Quafe Zero," Aura told him. "Once you are dressed and have had your breakfast, we will have a few things to discuss."
Xander frowned. "I am not sure I like the sound of that Aura," he said as he stood up and made his way to the on-suite bathroom.
"It's nothing too bad Xander I assure you. It's just I have noticed a few things in my routine post-flight analysis of the telemetry from the frigate you flew last night, I have completed my initial analysis of the recovered corvette and there have been a few other developments in the last few hours that I need to brief you on so you can decide where we go from here."
"I'll take your word for it then Aura, we'll begin discussions soon," Xander replied as he took off the underpants he'd worn last night, chucked them in the chute that would see them taken to an automated cleaning station and returned to these admittedly very luxurious rooms within an hour or so, and climbed into the shower.
~~//~~
Fifteen minutes later dressed and as ready for the day as he ever was, Xander descended the steps from the mezzanine level that housed the bedroom and its on-suite bathroom to the main level. He made his way to the kitchenette just off the main living area and approached the food synthesizer that honestly reminded him of the food dispensers/proto replicators featured in the original Star Trek series just without the ports for pre-programmed recipe cards to be put in. Instead above the alcove – much like in the newer Next Generation series which had recently ended and started making movies with First Contact being the latest, having come out last year – was a control panel detailing what the options were. Thoughtfully Aura had already pulled up the breakfast menu for him. He scanned the options, noting with some surprise that many of the dishes available were very similar to the dishes available back on Earth, but after a moment he decided he shouldn't be, given where the distant ancestors of the people of New Eden had come from.
After a few minutes of browsing he decided on something simple and told the system to produce some simple porridge with maple syrup and butter pancakes. For a drink he decided he might as well try some Quafe Zero since it was specifically designed for capsuleers like himself to drink, being modified especially for their cybernetically enhanced physiology to the point that a normal human drinking it would end up with indigestion at best and a nasty case of the runs at worst.
Immediately the synthesizer went to work with the panel lighting up and emitting a faint humming sound as specialized nanobots began to first produce the bowl, plate and cutlery before beginning to take biomass from the stations storage cells and beginning to assemble it into the correct pattern to produce the requested foodstuffs. Simultaneously a panel nearby opened revealing a can with a simple pull lid and writing on the side – which like everything else here was Gallente script – which confirmed it was a can of Quafe Zero.
Ten minutes later, breakfast over and done with and now nursing a cup of coffee – since his introduction to the supernatural world he'd become quite familiar with the wonders of coffee though unlike Willow he tried not to overdo it – or at least its New Eden equivalent he stood before the window wall in the living area.
"Alright Aura tell me what you found," he said gazing at the thick atmosphere of Neptune, finding its shifting storm bands relaxing though they weren't as energetic as Jupiter's.
"Where do you wish me to begin Xander?" Aura asked.
"Begin with the post-flight summary. Was there anything wrong?"
"Nothing mechanically no. However, when I analysed it, I detected evidence that we had been tracked on an extremely primitive form of interstellar radar."
Xander frowned. "Wouldn't the ECM systems or the navigational shields have stopped it?" he asked.
"Normally yes, however, the frequencies used by these particular radar emissions are extremely primitive and are not normally in the spectrum blocked by ECM for the simple reason no one in New Eden has ever used them," Aura replied. "I have since adjusted the ECM suites on all ships to block the radar emissions. You will not be detected the next time you have to take a ship out."
"That's a relief though I still don't like that someone – presumably the military since they do have a few deep space radar telemetry projects on the go – was able to track us."
"It is a concern," Aura agreed. "And unfortunately, I have to add to it."
"How so?"
"It appears Xander that this station has been detected by Earth based optical and radiological telescopes. In the last eight hours I have detected numerous primitive radio transmissions being beamed towards the station from numerous Earth based sources. Most appear to be the same data transmission sent towards us again and again though several have been audio messages all in the same unknown language."
Xander frowned. "Play one for me please Aura," he asked.
"As you wish Xander this is the first message we received four hours and nine minutes after you turned in for the night."
For a moment after Aura went quiet there was nothing then an authoritative male voice, with a slight but notable Texan accent, filled the air. "To the unknown alien space station orbiting Neptune I am Major General George Hammond representing the United States of America and Stargate Command," the voice said, "identify yourself and state your reasons for being in our solar system."
Xander's frown deepened. "What's Stargate Command," he wondered aloud, "and Aura that language is not unknown, it's American English the same language I've been speaking."
"Actually, Xander you have not been speaking that language," Aura told him. Xander's frown, if possible, got even deeper before he blinked and suddenly realized that the artificial intelligence was right. The whole time that he had been here, literally from the moment he'd been dumped out of the cloning tank, he'd been speaking Gallentese.
"Bloody hell," he said in surprise speaking English this time and blinking as the language, which had previously been second nature for him to talk, suddenly sounded strange and alien to his ears as it was a bit harsher than the more lyrical Gallentese he'd previously been unknowingly speaking. Guess there is a hell of a lot more of Alexander left in me than just his memories, skills and the cybernetic implants that make someone a capsuleer, he thought as he made his way to one of the seats and collapsed down into it.
"I did not understand that, but it sounded to me like you just cursed," Aura commented. "Is something wrong Xander?"
"It's alright Aura," he replied, switching back to Gallentese. "I was just surprised to find out that I've been speaking Gallentese this whole time and that the language I've always spoken sounds and feels alien to me now. It's just… I guess it drives home again that I am no longer the person I was before yesterday and can never be that person again. Perhaps even more than the implants in me or Alexander's memories ever could."
"I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault. Though one thing's for sure I really want to find out who was behind that blasted spell so I can thank him… with a plasma enema."
"I see. Do you wish me to continue with my report? Perhaps move onto the analysis of the recovered alien corvette's exterior?"
"The corvette can wait. Leave me in peace for a bit please Aura."
"As you wish, Xander. Call me if you require anything."
With that Aura signed off. Xander sighed and stood back up before walking back to the window wall which was steadily becoming his favourite place to stand and attempt to gather his thoughts. He didn't know how to feel about what he had just discovered about himself and how much of Alexander was still left inside of him and how much it was influencing him. Influencing him to such a degree that he hadn't even realized that he wasn't speaking his own language anymore but had felt quite natural to speak Alexander's native language. Am I even still Xander Harris anymore, he wondered, or have I become someone else, someone who is a mixture of who I was and who I was turned into yesterday by whatever spell was cast upon Sunnydale?
He did not know and that bothered him more than he could admit, even to himself.
~~//~~
Sunnydale High School
Sunnydale
That Same Time
Buffy Summers sighed softly to herself as she stepped out of her mother's car and gazed upon the front of Sunnydale High. She wasn't surprised to see that Willow was not waiting for her at the entrance to the grounds as she normally was, in fact she was willing to bet that her redheaded friend hadn't even gotten out of bed this morning. Willow had understandably been devastated last night when she'd told her about Xander's death. It had been the hardest thing she had ever done, and Willow's heart-breaking cry of denial and despair would be one she would always remember.
Buffy mentally shook herself and walked through the gates, climbed the steps and immediately went inside. As always, the school corridors were thronging with students and some members of the faculty as they prepared for another school day on the mouth of hell. She paused in the doorway for a few moments, observing the activity, everyone going about their business as if nothing had changed as if Xander's death was of no consequence to them.
It infuriated her to no end. She had to fight hard not to give into the urge to scream at them, to demand how they could act as if nothing had happened as if the death of a brave young man meant nothing to any of them. She managed to keep the words in though and forced herself to walk inside and make her way to her locker. It took only a moment to put her packed lunch inside and get out the books she would need for her first lesson of the day.
It was when she closed the locker though that she got a surprise as standing there, his presence previously masked by the sheet metal, was Kyle Dufours. The leader of Sunnydale High's own little pack of mean teens, though they had gotten a lot quieter since the hyena primal incident, looked dreadful. His skin was paler than it should be, his normally neat black hair a mess and his clothing rumpled. She could even see bags under his eyes.
"Is it true?" Kyle asked her bluntly, seemingly desperate for an answer to his question.
"Is what true Kyle?" Buffy asked with a look of genuine confusion and concern on her face.
"Is it true that al… I mean that Xander's dead?" The look in Kyle's eyes, the desperate hope that she would tell him that it wasn't true and that Xander was still alive, broke her heart. Especially as she would have to dash his hopes that Xander was still alive, though she wondered just why Kyle was reacting like this to Xander's death. If her ears weren't deceiving her then she was sure he was going to say alpha before he corrected himself and said Xander's name. I should report that to Giles, she thought, wondering if there was still some echo of the hyena possession in Kyle and the others.
"I'm afraid so," she said softly, sadly, feeling her eyes begin to sting with the tears that wanted to start falling again. It was obvious that that reply was not the one that Kyle had wanted, and hoped not, to hear as his shoulders slumped and he looked down and away for a few moments. When he looked back up, she clearly saw that he was trying his hardest not to break down as there was an utterly wrenching look of pain and loss in the normally mean teens eyes.
"I… I hoped it wasn't true," Kyle said at last his voice notably shaking the waves of sorrow coming off him were almost palpable. "Thanks for telling me… even if it's not what I wanted to hear."
With that he turned and walked away. Buffy tracked him with her eyes and watched as he moved over to where some vending machines were, where somehow, she wasn't surprised to see Tor, Heidi and Rhonda all waiting for him. Though she couldn't hear what he said over the hubbub of dozens of different conversations going on in the corridor, even the supernaturally enhanced hearing of a Slayer had its limits after all, she didn't need to know as the teens reactions told her everything; she saw Rhonda fall into Kyle's arms while Tor embraced Heidi and it was obvious from the way their shoulders were shaking that both girls were crying and that Kyle and Tor were just as devastated with only there male pride preventing them from joining the girls in breaking down.
Okay there is some echo of the hyena left in all of them, she thought, otherwise they wouldn't be reacting to Xander's death in that way. But how Xander told us that he didn't remember anything of the possession, and I haven't seen him hang around with Kyle's crew at all since. Was Xander lying about that? And has he been seeing the other four members of the pack behind me and Willow's backs? She honestly wasn't sure what to make of that possibility as why would Xander feel the need to lie to them about that? They hadn't held anything he'd done while possessed by the hyena spirit against him as he'd had no control at the time. After a moment she gave a mental shrug and decided then and there that as soon as she had a free period – which was just after lunch today – she would go and see Giles about it. Hopefully he would have some answers for her on it as well as some information on where the vampiress Drusilla could be hiding so she could find that bloodsucking undead bitch and dust her in retribution for Xander's death.
Abruptly new activity at the end of the corridor caught her attention. Every student, and indeed members of the faculty including Principal Snyder, were all running towards the main common area outside the canteen. Though there wasn't any fear in the way they were moving just shock and excitement. Now what? She thought as, curiosity got the better of her, she allowed herself to get caught up in the crowd moving towards where the big screens were mounted on the wall above the notice boards. In mere moments she was amongst the crowd, finding herself standing next to a slack jawed Larry of all people with Cordelia on her other side and Jonathan in front of them. Following their gaze to the screens she couldn't help but freeze in shock at what she saw.
The screens were tuned to CNN, which was not unusual as they usually were, but it was what was on those screens that had everyone so utterly gobsmacked. The screens were showing an artist's impression of a great blue planet that Buffy vaguely recognised from physics class as Neptune. Sitting front and centre of the screen was an enormous, vaguely wedge-shaped structure that was clearly artificial. The screen caption reading was as unbelievable as it was Earth shattering as it read: "ALIEN SPACE STATION FOUND OVER NEPTUNE: IS THIS FIRST CONTACT?". There was only one thing she could think to say, and it was something that neatly summed up the shocked, amazed, hopeful and wary sentiments of everyone present students and faculty alike.
"Holy crap."
~~//~~
Billings
Montana
A Few Minutes Earlier
Holding a steaming mug of coffee, the man who now referred to himself as Doctor Peter Tanner arrived at his office in downtown Billings. The office was deserted at this time in the morning, not even the attractive young blond who served as his secretary had arrived yet though she would be here within the next fifteen minutes assuming she didn't get stuck in the traffic, which was why he always came in so early. It gave him time to enjoy a little peace and quiet before the organised chaos of the day began, especially as he had another appointment with Martin today. An appointment where he would have to issue his unknowing countryman with another round of the drugs that supress his memories of their true origins.
It was something that always left something of a foul taste in his mouth.
Yes, it was necessary to stop the man complaining about them deserting their doomed home and how they should return to their ship and make their way back home and salvage their honour in battle against the Goa'uld forces besieging their planet. The fact that their little corvette was no match for a Goa'uld mothership, its beam cannons nowhere near powerful enough to penetrate a Ha'tak's shields, and would be quickly blasted out of the sky by the motherships heavier plasma cannons, never seemed to occur to him which meant they had no choice but to silence him. That didn't mean however that he enjoyed having to do so as taking a man's identity away from him was never something that should be done lightly. Maybe we would have been better off just killing him, he thought, it would be a lot less cruel than what we are doing to him now.
He gave a mental sigh and took a sip of the coffee he'd picked up at Starbucks on his way in. A smile appeared on his face as some of the hot, bitter liquid disappeared down his throat. Coffee was a pleasure of this world that he was seriously beginning to enjoy. There were so many varieties of it to choose from, not to mention the myriad of other beverages hot or cold that there were. He was sure it was going to take him a lifetime to try them all.
Moving to his desk he sat down, put the coffee on its coaster and unlocked a specific drawer in the desk. This was another reason he came in before everyone else did, to check on the status of the corvette they'd hidden behind Mars. Given that its fuel cells had been half empty when they'd abandoned it – the majority of their home planets available naquada reserves had after all been earmarked for both the planetary defence platforms and the handful of surviving cruisers that were the last line of defence against the forces of the Goa'uld System Lord Ba'al – it was only a matter of time before the ship lost power and began to be pulled in by the Martian gravity. As he opened the drawer, he immediately saw a red warning light blinking on the ship remote.
Eyes widening in surprise and concern he brought up the remote's status display causing a hologram to blink into existence over the small silver remote. Late last night, when he and the others had all been sleeping, the ship had sent an emergency subspace burst to the remote. Pulling up the keyboard interface he queried the nature of the emergency message and frowned in concern at what he saw.
Shortly after midnight an alien spacecraft of unknown origin had appeared from an unknown form of FTL propulsion nearby and approached the ship. After scanning it thoroughly for a couple of minutes the alien had moved in close and locked onto their ship with a gravitational-magnetic force beam of some type pulling it out of orbit and in close to itself. The vessel had then created a bubble of depleted vacuum around itself and the ship before accelerating to translight velocities with their ship in tow. The ship had sent its data burst a few nanoseconds before it moved out of the limited range of the ship remote.
"This is not good," he muttered to himself as he pulled up the data burst and looked at what information their ship's sensors had gathered about the unknown that had taken it. The alien vessel was around a hundred meters long and constructed of several unknown metallic alloys which were heavily infused with some type of nanotechnology. There was no naquada aboard that the ships sensors could detect. Instead power seemed to be derived from an incredibly compact antimatter-based power plant and a series of capacitors. Weapons wise the ship appeared to be armed like their corvette with four weapons banks – three on the dorsal hull one on the ventral hull – that appeared to be stowed behind armoured hatches when not in use. It had a shield generator too though, given that its shields had been down at the time, he had no idea how strong the defensive force field would have been.
All in all, its technology was distinctly non-standard.
"Who built you I wonder," he mused as to the best of his knowledge there were no spacefaring races in this region of the galaxy, certainly none advanced enough to build a ship like the unknown warship. Given how thoroughly they'd searched this entire area of the galaxy – which was on the opposite side of Goa'uld space to their homeworld – they would have detected them if they were in any way local. I really need to talk to the others about this, he thought as he saved the data before shutting down the ship remote and returning it to its drawer, though with the ship out of range of our remote I have no idea what we're going to do about it. Especially as our shuttle pod is not capable of hyperspace travel.
It was just as well he had returned the ship remote to its secure drawer as at that moment the door to his office flew open and he saw his secretary Juliet Rawlings standing there. She looked breathless and shocked and he immediately felt concern. "Good heavens Juliet whatever is the matter," he asked.
"Doctor Tanner you better come to the common room there's something unbelievable on the telly that you should see," the young woman replied. Peter – it wasn't his real name of course but it was the one he preferred to use these days – raised an eyebrow. Now what could be so interesting on that idiot box, he thought, as television was one of the things on this world that really didn't make much sense to him. Oh, some of the entertainment could be nice – if a little incomprehensible at times especially that bizarre sport they called football – but most of the time he paid it little attention. Still knowing Juliet well by now, thus knowing she wasn't one to get worked up casually, he found his interest peaked.
"Alright," he agreed, standing up from the comfortable leather backed chair and coming around the desk. Juliet immediately turned and hurried out of the office and its small antechamber clearly in a hurry to get back to seeing whatever had caught her attention. Peter followed at a more sedate pace arriving at the common room that served drinks and light bites to all the staff on this floor a minute or two after Juliet left the office. To his great surprise the room was packed with what seemed like everyone who worked on this floor of the eight-story building and all of them were focused on the television which was displaying a feed from CNN.
What's all this about, he wondered as he made his way through the crowd to get close enough to the tv to see what was going on. When he got there, he practically froze eyes widening in shocked surprise as he beheld the exact same image and headline that at that very moment a certain bottle blond vampire slayer was seeing in distant Sunnydale. Where the bloody hell did that come from, he thought gazing at the massive alien space station in disbelief, it was completely unlike anything he had ever seen in his life before – which was saying quite a bit as he had seen quite a bit of the galaxy before they'd inadvertently entered Goa'uld space starting the war that there homeworld was quickly losing as the superior numbers of the Goa'uld enabled them to triumph over their slightly superior, but only slightly, technology – and also something that had not been there when they'd first come to this system nearly a year ago.
"Oh my," he said aloud.
"Amazing isn't it," Juliet said from beside him, "do you think the aliens are friendly?"
"I would hope so I wouldn't want to get on the bad side of anyone who can build a space station that big," he replied, getting nods and murmurs of agreement from all around. Especially as whoever built that thing would easily have the technology to turn this planet to a pile of asteroids and gravel orbiting this system's star, he thought as he studied the station the best he could. Even with just a limited visual inspection he could tell that it was the product of an extremely technologically advanced civilization as no one in this galaxy, to the best of his knowledge anyway, were capable of building something on such an immense scale.
"Any idea what's going to happen next Peter?" one of the other psychiatrists who worked on this floor asked.
Peter shrugged. "My guess is the government will attempt to make contact with the station," he replied, "though given how far Neptune is from Earth there is no guarantee that the aliens will be able to understand any radio transmission beamed at them." Though that's a thought, he thought, maybe we'll be able to use the ship remote to access the pods subspace transmitter and contact whoever it is that's out there. Maybe they'll know who took our ship, if they didn't take it themselves. I'll have to talk to the others to see what they think.
"Do you think the government would try to cover this up," Juliet asked, "say we're just looking at a reflection of swamp gas or something equally stupid like that?"
"Unlikely as this thing will be visible to both optical and radio telescopes all around the planet," one of the other support staff in the room replied. "Even if they wanted to there would be no way for the government to silence all those observatories, not to mention the other governments who are bound to know by now."
"So, what's going to happen next," Juliet asked a question that was met with nothing but looks between colleagues and silence for one simple reason…
…there was no answer to give.
Hypersonic
200cm Mk XXXIII Hellbore
- Location
- Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha
- Pronouns
- Bolo
Most of the world will be busy denouncing it as fake news since it came from CNN. Would be great to see an excerpt where they put their unique spin on things 
"The entire city of Chicago came out to protest the aliens destroying Neptune's upper atmosphere" said a reporter standing in front of five closely packed together payed actors.
It would be hilarious for people not to believe the aliens are real and are just "fake news" due to CNNs track record.
"The entire city of Chicago came out to protest the aliens destroying Neptune's upper atmosphere" said a reporter standing in front of five closely packed together payed actors.
It would be hilarious for people not to believe the aliens are real and are just "fake news" due to CNNs track record.
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RichardWhereat
Feanor did nothing wrong.
- Location
- Australia
You do get that this is set more than twenty two years and five months ago, right? "Fake News" wasn't a thing then, because most american conservatives weren't as retarded as they are today.
That whole CNN is rubbish claim? That's partisan as hell, with Democrats finding them quite credible. Hell, more Democrats find CNN credible than Republicans find Fox credible.
That whole CNN is rubbish claim? That's partisan as hell, with Democrats finding them quite credible. Hell, more Democrats find CNN credible than Republicans find Fox credible.
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- Location
- South Wales, United Kingdom
I choose CNN because it was one of the few American news organisations that I - being British - am aware of, I could have made one up but decided to use an existing one. Also it's not just CNN that's broadcasting the news of the station's existence its all of them, all over the world announcing the discovery of the alien space station over Neptune to the planet.
Which is going to give certain people - who would have preferred to keep its existence quiet - a fair few headaches.
RichardWhereat
Feanor did nothing wrong.
- Location
- Australia
I don't mind you using CNN, they're a decent news organisation that people would have on their television. Especially in 1997. It's believable.
Also, being Australian, I hope he does approach Earth soon, and does so publicly. I don't know the videogame, but can he teleport down from the moon? Because he could land his wossname in the close side of the moon for shits and giggles. And then take the piss.
- Location
- South Wales, United Kingdom
Teleportation is not a thing in EVE Online as they're more realistic in that you either land on a planet via a shuttle craft or smaller capital ship - like a corvette, frigate or destroyer - or you come and go via an orbital elevator tower. Of course Xander now has the ship Martin Lloyd and his people came to Earth in and that has transporter beam technology so eventually he could use that though that would be for the future.
Hypersonic
200cm Mk XXXIII Hellbore
- Location
- Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha
- Pronouns
- Bolo
you get that it was a joke right? Not sure what political parties or Fox News has to do with anything, but If we're talking about numbers you might want to do some research about CNNs viewership and ratings, they've been consistently going down since 2008, it started way before fake news became a thing. I doubt very many find them credible, let alone watch them.I would consider any media service not to be trustworthy personally, the disconnect that I find hilarious is just how rabidly defensive and gullible CNNs fans are.
But whatever, enjoy imagination land. I'm done with this topic. I don't want to derail the thread.
RichardWhereat
Feanor did nothing wrong.
- Location
- Australia
I wonder how many AI he could set to work reverse engineering that, and then having them build, and testing with clones.
Hypersonic
200cm Mk XXXIII Hellbore
- Location
- Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha
- Pronouns
- Bolo
Just a thought, you may want to consider requesting the thread get renamed with Buffy/EVE tagged to the end, i'm not sure how many people know about the ship of the line challenge.
Guillocuda
The planets don't stop spinning!
- Location
- Tasmania
I would suggest getting a beta to help you with your punctuation. Right now, it's severely lacking. For example, you commonly have characters supposedly asking questions, yet not using question marks.
Good punctuation can massively improve a story. Bad punctuation can do a pretty good job of ruining it. You need to use a lot more commas, and break things up with full stops more. It can make certain lines 'hit' with more impact, and seem more realistic. Considering some changes in your choice of words and grammar structure would help as well.
For example;
"My apologies I did not mean to startle you captain," Aura answered her quasi-feminine voice sounding genuinely apologetic.
Can become;
"My apologies, captain. I did not mean to startle you," Aura said, her electronic voice quiet.
You're also very far over on the 'tell' side of the 'tell vs show' spectrum. You spend a lot of time just outright telling the reader what is happening, instead of describing it. While this isn't necessarily completely wrong, and can be a style choice, it's generally considered a fairly lazy way of writing.
Good punctuation can massively improve a story. Bad punctuation can do a pretty good job of ruining it. You need to use a lot more commas, and break things up with full stops more. It can make certain lines 'hit' with more impact, and seem more realistic. Considering some changes in your choice of words and grammar structure would help as well.
For example;
"My apologies I did not mean to startle you captain," Aura answered her quasi-feminine voice sounding genuinely apologetic.
Can become;
"My apologies, captain. I did not mean to startle you," Aura said, her electronic voice quiet.
You're also very far over on the 'tell' side of the 'tell vs show' spectrum. You spend a lot of time just outright telling the reader what is happening, instead of describing it. While this isn't necessarily completely wrong, and can be a style choice, it's generally considered a fairly lazy way of writing.