Fleet of the Homeward Bound (sci-fi multicross shipgirl fic)

[Sora Neki]

Orignally posted by GhostKaiju

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Most ships are concerned without having a crew, and that makes sense. A ship is something that comes with time and money, blood and sweat, the dreams and thoughts of the soul coalescing into something true and powerful that can survive in the definition of the inhospitable. A ship is deep and personal investment; a lifeboat, a diplomatic hold for all, a bastion to strike out into the stars with bright wide eyes, or hard, cold ambition and the need to crush others beneath their heel. It is in this way, perhaps, that a ship is someone in its own right, as much a person as anyone else.

So what is a ship in a world where human life is merely a statistic in the bottomline?

"Que se jodan todos y cada uno de esos chupapollas." Sulaco said simply enough (referring more to the higher echelons of command than anyone else, or maybe some divine intelligence—close enough in oversight, really), running a diagnostics check on the supply and condition of their powdered lithium-hydroxide opening a pocket and eyeballing how much powder remained in the clear plastic baggies. Sulaco was someone who, frankly, didn't care this way or that if the crew was or wasn't awake; that was usually her job anyways, with them sleeping while she tachyon junted away to ensure they didn't rot and turn into their own (less fuel efficient) dust as well.

Seeing she had more than enough fuel, even moreso since her routines insisted that the spare power used to keep the deep-sleep pods was unnecessary because the crew was just sleeping as is and without need of her finer respiratory or temperature controls (which, alright, odd, but when did humans ever make sense?), she closed it back up and looked over her surroundings, what little distinctions of it possessing there may be. It wasn't LV-426, but that didn't make things much better. She sighed, looking around the simple and inanely nondescript system that would have been dime a plenty and opportunity for any of the higher higher-ups that dictated her life, The Company. They hadn't made her, but certainly did they own her in proxy. At least she thought of herself as something half nice.

Sulaco was a woman of fair stature at a simple enough 382 meters, with a face that would have once been sunkissed before the pallid void of space robbed her of colour and the draining of albedo leaving her even more ashen, with only the parkmocked freckles and scars of ages and battles past to live up her complexion, all obscured under a goggled helmet that covered the forefront of her face and gave way little to none about her true feelings unless it came through a sneer (likely) or a smile (in this fucking economy? Wasn't in the budget to be sincere, wasn't in her care to try and act it). Her outfit was that of the grunt, neat and indistinguishable in its grime and slapdashed slogans and memoirs, with her most notable aesthetic outside of the grunged look of a soldier in the bluntest way possible was her spiked mass of a comms and sensors array backpack, bristling with the antennae of many a transceiver, sensor, and laser waved communique. It was nice, in this big dark galaxy that was so empty with little rocks that The Company squeezed blood out of to make it into diamonds and riches, to have a fucking idea who or what was out there.

Not that there was anyone; neither out there around her, nor moving around inside her (although, really, all that was nothing new).

Again; Sulaco was someone who didn't really care much that her 'crew' is sleeping.

Because when weren't they? The life is broken up so much by that fretful sleep, and this one was even more important than the usual kinds those 'higher up the rungs' than her usually had. Human life had to sleep because it was their maintenance cycle, usually. This sleep was so they didn't rot apart. Not they ever cared about that. All the work to get them from point a to b, tachyon jaunting through realms were time dilated wrong and would kill them all if she didn't keep them in stasis, and what did she get? A thank you? No. Nothing.

This bitterness wasn't a case of the morning grouchies, it was a bit more engrained in that, but even besides the point in light of the frustrations all encompassing around her.

Sulaco had been asleep herself for a while, and had only just woken up a few moments ago, to… Nothing even remotely recognizable.

Which wasn't surprising, the trip to LV-426 had been a roaring failure and ended with her adrift to find civilization; most of the crew was MIA, and she could assume that could be better clarified as KIA, having been able to plainly see the pulse of radiation and hellish fire that had burned out across LV-426, a fireball so vast she'd not even needed to focus her sensors turn her eyes to the vast explosion to see it.

And then her dropship had returned, and subsequently was battered around by some large, meticulous, and shockingly stealthy organism that her sensors had a tricky time understanding (the readings she'd gotten suggesting of a 'silicon based lifeform with toxic blood' made it sound more like her than something organic), with emergency protocols manually activating, and an airlock too, and that something had been shunted outside her into the cold stretch of space.

Some thing that, if compared to messages in her log notes stored neatly away in restricted folders and files and messages that rattled at the deepest corner of the jungian mind-computer called MOTHER, known only to her and some corporate sleaze that had came along and not returned (not that it mattered, hadn't been a priority to bring company employees back), had been specifically to obtain a specimen of an organism explicitly like that.

So, once again, Sulaco had fucked up.

What a surprise, right?

It was her entire reputation, the cursed fuck up. The only ship in the whole of the Colonial Marines fleet to ever get shot from groundside while in orbit of a planet. No mention that this put her on a fair bit better than her usual contemporaries, taking 2 missiles to her hangars and gut without too extensive a time in drydocks.

Would be no mention that she'd brought along a crew who had presumably went down swinging, fighting, and nuking a threat that had decimated hundreds of innocent souls that had been resigned and sent to a death trap. No mention of the few souls who had roamed her halls, filled her dusted fusion bosom, fought and laughed and argued and slept, relying on her without thanks. No mention at all, because she was so fucking tired and just wanted to abandon these guns and lazers and missiles and meet the rest of her family in commercial work, where she wasn't hauling life that just had to die. No—

"Jesus fucking christ I'm depressed." The ship named after the setting of a novel about a Colonialist Mining Town being reaped further by a corporate board craving for toxic metals remarked to herself, wearily setting a diagnostics check on her systems massaging a temple. She vented out an unnecessarily pressurized hangar bay to let the boost of inertia to turn her 'round and used positioning modules and rockets to even out the turn sighed again, getting out of her own head at long, long last (because there was elsewhere to be when adrift in the stars), and surveyed her surroundings again at a leisurely jaunt built on the simmering burn of fusioned plasma, dim enough to not even blip the electromagnetic spectrum.

Her surroundings in a word? Quaint.

The star was dim and clipped into the spectrum of the ultraviolets, barely illuminating the dismal rocks and strewn collections of brown dwarves. It was a dark little place she found herself in, and that suited her fine; she'd been made to reap off the shadows, hide and fire away at whatever could be categorized as a threat. And Sulaco was good at discerning threats (Sure, a crew member of sufficient rank could dispute it if they got to her consoles, but she hadn't seen any of them pull a maneuver that had halved the salvo of missiles that could have killed them all, and they were all, again, currently incapacitated by their own drowsiness, so there).

Not that there was anything here of potentially risking itself to be a threat.

Aside from the fact that, even with the most concession giving of simulations, she was in drastically unknown territories by means that weren't possible. Only a Warp Gate like the long defunct Tannhäuser could have shunted her unfamiliarly, but that would run on a few shakey assumptions. One, first and foremost, it relied on warp gates, a bygone technology. Two, a somehow uncharted, unnoticed Warp Gate leading her to equally uncharted territories, and which had caused… other changes (Sulaco looked over herself, frowning in thought. Wait, was she different…?). Three, the fact that this isn't how Warp Gates worked, because you went through a warp gate, not just suddenly finding yourself in the middle of nowhere with no explanation and no signs of a entrance or exit.

But that space-folding/shunting technique was the only explanation that plausibly connected in her simulated mind, even if the addendums to it were unspeakable in scope and implication. Because although it wasn't implausible to be grabbed out of aimless fuel conservative drift and dropped into new territories, Sulaco had also personally seen more than one mission go such ways, when privatized orders kicked in and routes replanned. Being the pawn of whims unbeknownst to anyone but impulses and drives influenced by corporate forces was bad enough.

That same disquiet brought to the cosmic scale was anything but comforting.

"Five years," Sulaco grumbled as she thought of whatnher life had been, before… this, idly looking over a miserable ball of rocks without anything of note or even a decent magnetosphere. "This one mission, and then I'd have five lazy years to hopefully coast off, and then get to just get out, and see my sisters in…" Sulaco trailed off, thinking over her prospective future and grimace, fingers tensing to her sides where her Railguns pump-action shotguns, holstered, stood without complaint.

She flicked a finger across the smooth barrel, thinking idly of what things she had decimated it with, in the name of security both colonial and corporate (synonyms, really, and the word security too was stretched, because who exactly was the one being protected?). The things that defined her purpose. A loathsome one it may be, it was her, her in service of a system that bled things dry, and it was along side the other assorted weapons that hung neatly across her back or body.

Things that would be ripped cleanly off her and the rest of her hull until she was just eyes, a mouth, and her guts to explore the cosmos and mercantile interests.

"… Commercial, private sectored shipping." Sulaco finished off her sentence, face settling into a grimace. No retirement but death, just more and more of this grind.

Her internals were that of hallways and corriddors and gravity field generators, and sacrophagi that housed empty souls both human and android, not an organ or heart or gut within her, and yet, Sulaco could feel a harsh, angry bile rising at the back of her throat.

And it would have crescendoed, if it wasn't at that moment, leagues away from that dismal world and circling around a brown dwarf, that Sulaco realized she wasn't alone.

She could 'hear' it, radar detecting something askew of the interference of this dwarf. Sulaco blinked and buffered over what she 'heard', and her mimd boggled again.

She had multiple radar systems at a time, of varying degrees. The closest range was to detect, nominally, small shuttles, dropships, stations as they approached for docking, and assorted minor trivialities, while the others specialized in probing deep soace, electromagnetic spectrums, and for major stations or other ships; ideally friendly. Deep space sensors would ideally detect something or the blips of something, and she could just shunt a missile into it without worry.

The target she found didn't defy any of these criteria, per say, and it neatly fit into the middling groups criteria's, to degree but it's scale did defy her understanding and expectations. As far as 'Radar' could detect, it was…

A perfect cube?

An impossibly massive one.

3000 metres to a side.

Sulaco drifted around the dwarf, letting gravity (or lack thereof) silently glide her forwards. She drifted by, hands braced to her guns, expecting perhaps to see some strange and implausible but existent astronomical anomaly. A derelict station from some bygone people. Something that could fit neatly in her world view.

"Dios mio," Sulaco whispered.

What she saw, she realized, was a ship. Tens of time Sulaco's stature, and tens of times more… banal than her, and that terrified her on a level she couldn't quite have imagined before, and yet now saw before her.

It was something of an endless myraid of forms blurred and smoothed over another into a pallid corpse white, an endless diversity and myraid plundered and enslaved and grafted unto atrocity after another, and held in place by dark bandes of metallic alloys that glowed the green of a corpse.

Sulaco had thought herself an embodiment of a world that cared for industry over life, to rip apart and suckle at whatever of worth they could find, with her purpose being nothing more to ferry across lives too valuable to waste but not valuable enough to give too much care towards beyond the bare necessities.

This… thing, meanwhile, was eating a fucking planet raw, without metaphor.

Well, that was an exaggeration, to a degree; beams of some kind (lasers? No, it seemed more exotic than that, there was a gravitational effect to it as well, evident with the chunk of raw mineral and sediment literally flying up to it's maw) cut into the crust of a moon, extracting raw material. It was simple enough, in a distant, removed sort of way, raw resources to gut away and use to manufacture whatever was needed… but it was a fucking moon.

Sulaco didn't care much for her crew, because she never sincerely had one. It was almost always slots in a system, things to be taken and ferried away. But she had so little right now, and she knew that this was not something they deserved to be at the brunt of. That nothing deserved to be at its mercies, only to be something to escape from. Her engine quietly roared to life, no sound filling the void, and she turned to back away, to stare at the stars and peer deeper, to find anywhere and warn of this hellish thing, or if she truly was alone, to find a rock to hide under from it.

The Cube turned and stared at the retreating Sulaco, a dead eye staring forlornly opposite of a pitiless red beam.

Sulaco was as dark as the void, quiet as an owl, but this creature, this thing too horribly amalgamate to be called simply 'a ship', had honed senses that could scuff her out even then. Or maybe it had known the whole while, feeling those tickles of radar pinging off its impossibly vast shell, every square metre an eye, and had just waited for a good opportunity to finish glutting its need for resources. Maybe it had other means, and she couldn't hide at all.

Ultimately, what did it matter?

It approached.

We Are The Borg. It intoned, the words washing across Sulaco's attentive ears, and she ran, dissappearing into tachyons that spiralled away, hoping to escape this system, to find elsewhere.

It wasn't enough.

Every step Sulaco made, the Cube made more, and not just a greater distance covered in a wingle stride—it was faster then her. Impossibly so, as far as they could understand, but that was another for the fucking list. Seeing that speed wouldn't save her, Sulaco turned to the tried and true adage, the work that comes when diplomacy or retreat fails. She dropped out of the wayward shunt, braced herself as she skittered back, metal creaking in a protest as she turned with a fluidity usually reserved for atmospheric departure or re-entry, hand reaching to her holsters. Her turrets rounded onto its titanic target guns in hand as she stood her ground, she took aim and fired into the outstretched hand of the machine, a mosquito screaming in the face of a giant.

And for its worth, she made decent progress on those first few hits; a railgun was not the main weapon of a Conestoga, it was the fallback. But a hunk of explosive munitions being delivered at significant fractions of the speed of light is by no means a bad back-to, and Sulaco could see that with the first few shots, punching through and against the alloyed frame.

An explosion without atmosphere is an earthquake, and the Borg did falter, in Sulaco's eyes (or at least a shake that could bring a hand to a stutter). For a second, she dared to think she was that great warship she had been promised to be. Not just a mere troop transport, but a warrior, a soldier, something that stood and helped the oppressed against a horrible other, not a corporate getaway ride but a Marine!

And then the rounds exploded off shimmering hexagons of light, miles before the surface. She abandoned the guns as the hand reached forwards, ventral laser batteries desperately firing at the expansive wall before her desperately pulling out a pistol and firing to no effect at the encroaching titan. It grabbed that hand of her, staring simply as Sulaco kept desperately firing, and rendered the batteries into slag with precise beam bursts crushed her palm in its broader one.

Sulaco didn't scream; she'd taken worse blows, deeper in herself. But she did feel terror now, looking up into the face of this machine.

Resistance Is Futile. It intoned, studying over its trapped quarry. Your technological distinctiveness will be adapted to service us, and be added to our own.

The Borg Cube smiled, gripping at Sulaco and beginning to rip apart at her lithium hydride tanking arm; fine meticulate powder and scraps of metal yellow-white approximations of musculature and blood gurgled outwards like a synth. Sulaco was being cannibalized alive; no more a person, a scrap of meat metal and circuitry.

Despite herself, Sulaco 'grinned', emergency systems flaring to life. There were multiple failsafes to ensure that a Conestoga couldn't self-scuttle itself, by technicality. Only an authorized crewmember, technically, had that authority. But in the lacking of one, a Conestoga was fully automated, able to freely assign the priority of a target, a threat, access and control over all its systems. Pressed into a wall, a Conestoga could do anything, and Sulaco was an exemplar of her class in this regard. She was the 13th, the fabled unlucky one, staring up at a machine that was the apotheosis of the systems she despised in its most unflinching and immoral form. Sulaco stared at this testament to the brutalist, the gluttonist, the capitalist, this machine that ripped her apart for pieces and would either make her its slave or its appetite.

Sulaco was all alone, all those little souls inside her soundly asleep, inches from death.

"Sorry" Sulaco said, more to herself, grinning wildly and sincerely for possibly the first time in her life, the blood of Marines pumping in her chest. "But I've served some time already, and I'm not fucking interested in you."

The fusion reactor released itself free, flooring clamps and an air pressured explosion rocketting the whole thing upwards, 900'000 metric tons of refined powder wracking itself free, a composite amount hundreds of times her own weight. The cloud filled the space between the Cube and Sulaco.

The LiH Plant accepts the powder in a very fine form, allowing it to be shipped and pumped as if it were a liquid, and administered into the powerplant as a blown dust. The powder must be sealed in double-lined containers to prevent contact with water, otherwise it will dissociate and react violently.

Click to shrink...

A line of water pipes for rudimentary life support systems bursted apart within the depths of Sulaco's hull.

She spat upwards.

The Cube had let go of Sulaco as soon as it realized what had happened, but hadn't the time to adequately reply to an amorphous explosion covering the whole of its 'front'. Sulaco spiralled into void in the sputtering shockwave of the explosion, her interiors glowing red as emergency backups flared into life, sensors damaged and partially fried by the overwhelming proximity to the explosion. She was gliding away into the night forever, as she had once before in the face of another explosion, unseen and unloved by anything.

Yet she couldn't help but feel so giddy, lulling off into a fitless sleep, to conserve her power and wait for something else, dissappearing against the vacuum of the void.

She'd done so good for once…

---

Cube 14 of 27 did not think much of her failed quarry. She, or rather the Collective (which she now was, in this strange and lonely realm), had seen such desperate attempts at defiance before, and never truly could grasp it. She supposed it was a matter of a limited organic perspective, one pervasive even in something removed from it—something crafted by those organic hands, instead of lifted up by theres.

Resistance was Futile, in all form, in all scope. So what if a singular ship could 'hurt' her, scraps that a few moments reprieve could fix? Was there not a glut across the whole of space that could be gorged upon, banal materials to replicate and grow outwards? Would it stop her from her goals to subsume?

No.

Cube 14 of 27 stared low at the empty void and returned to that moon, scrapping more to build herself higher again, a paltry task to the side.
This system was empty for her.

Cube 14 of 27 stared outwards at the stars, and affixed on the closest one, a simple yellow star.

Perhaps she'd find better quarries there.

 

[Sora Neki]

Originally posted by... me!

---

This, Highwind mused to herself, was most definitely not interspace.

Clue number one: everything was stupid far apart. Like, seriously. If it wasn't for her Navigation Gummis and her Warp Gummi, it would have taken her forever to get anywhere. Ugh. No thanks!

Clue number two: no Heartless or Nobody ships in here. Instead there was... there was...

"What are you again?" She asked the thing with too many teeth zooming towards her with a screech.

"Zerg die for the swarm!" The worm-with-teeth-and-wings that her Scan Gummi was saying was called a Scourge screeched.

Right! Zerg. Which were like Heartless, only way grosser.

Had she ended up on the Other Side? Master Yen Sid said you needed the Power of Waking to get here... maybe she'd followed Sora here by following his Heart? That sounded like a thing that could happen.

Well in that case, she wasn't going to lose here! She had to find Sora!

"Firaga!" Highwind grinned impishly, a ball of fire appearing in one hand. "Thundaga!" A ball of lightning appeared in the other.

The red and yellow gummi bracelets turrets on her left and right wrists sides glowed with magical power, the spells erupting out as blasts of fire and beams of lightning that blasted the Scourge apart with elemental fury.

Highwind didn't relax there though – she didn't need her Scan Gummi to know that that was only one Scourge of very, very many. She only had to look forward to see that much.

But she wasn't worried, even as her Teeny Ships made worried noises.

No, this ship ran on happy faces.

"Firaga! Thundaga! Firaga! Thundaga!"

The Booster Gummis on her shoulders ignited, propelling her forwards to meet the screeching challenge of the swarm. Firaga and Thundaga Gummis fired continuously, a curtain of fire and lightning cutting a path though, the Teeny Ships adding their own more meagre (but no less appreciated!) Bizzara spells.

Her freckled form covered in gummi blocks - firm, rubbery things that stuck together naturally and tasted suspiciously like gummy candy when licked - Highwind's brightly coloured armour made her look a lot like a schoolgirl wearing a Gundam Mobile Suit Halloween costume. She was sure Jack Skellington would have approved.

Caught a bit of a Devourer's acid on her Shield Gummi – don't worry about it! Huge swarm of Scourges flying her way with intent to blow? Blow them all away before they can get close! Highwind's grin grew wider and wider, and she laughed in honest delight as she did what she did best, her song soaring in her heart.

Dashing under a Brood Lord's vomit projectiles, Highwind drew an Excalibur Gummi in her right hand and a Masamune Gummi in her left, quartering the Brood Lord in two swings.

It was only when her Shield Gummi failed and the Mutalisks started swarming in that she realised she might be in trouble.

Oh. Right. This isn't interspace, and they aren't gummi ships. No gummi blocks for me to repair myself with.

Where's a Full Life Gummi when I need one?

Highwind's smile became slightly strained, but the curtain of magical firepower kept up.

A deep roar that seemed to echo in her brain told her she'd found the boss of this route.

About 7ish kilometres tall long, the Zerg Leviathan absolutely dwarfed Highwind, who was only about 30 meters or so. The two Teeny Ships with her were only about 2, and they both looked about ready to wet themselves.

But Highwind's grin just gained a mad edge to it. "Come on, girls!" She laughed. "We've beaten way bigger things than this!"

Though admittedly she'd beaten the Nobody Dreadnought by blowing it up from the inside, which she really hoped she didn't have to do here. Being eaten by Monstro was gross enough.

Dipping deep into her bag of tricks, she remembered a Gummi that she was pretty sure even Cid had forgotten about, given she hadn't used it in years. Oh well, no time like the present!

"Draw on the strength deep within your Heart!" Highwind cried. She didn't have a Wayfinder, nor Drive Forms, but she did have a Transform Gummi.

In a flash of light, Highwind changed. Her gummi armour slimmed down, the Booster Gummis on her back moved down, and the weapon gummis on her arms changed from red and yellow to black and white.

"Meteor! Ultima!" Highwind roared, dozens of powerful magical beams surging out from her and seeking out vulnerable spots on the Leviathan.

If the Zerg was bothered in any way however, it didn't show it. Roaring it's own challenge back, missile-like bile swarms began to erupt out of it to target Highwind, who dashed like crazy trying to throw them off.

"Meteor! Ultima! Meteor! Ultima!"

Spamming what on the ground would be encounter-ending spells, Highwind could do little more than keep the Leviathan engaged. Duck under a grabbing tentacle. Blast away a launched swarm of Scourge before they could blow themselves up in her face. Not quite evade a bio-plasmid discharge...!

Gasping for breath, Highwind looked over to see that most of her right side was gone.

The Leviathan gave a deep, throaty chuckle. "Soon." It boomed. "Soon little ship will become part of swarm, and swarm will grow. Swarm will be strong."

Dazed, Highwind could do little more than look up as the Leviathan's tentacles moved in to grab her.

Sora... Donald... Goofy…

Then her eyes turned red as the Berserker Mode kicked in. "I won't let down my friends!" She roared, and this time the Teeny Ships roared with her.

Without thinking, she thrust her one good arm behind her, and grabbed something that shouldn't have been there. Swinging the pole-like object forward, not thinking about what this being here would mean, Highwind pointed it dead into the centre of the Leviathan.

"Zettaflare!" She screamed, light erupting from the object.

The Leviathan's eyes bulged out of their sockets, and bile erupted out of its throat. A hole had been punched through the ship, from its front to its back, wide enough for Highwind to fly through.

Adrenaline fading, Highwind felt the Berserker Mode fade away to be replaced by a bone-deep tiredness. She let go of the object, which disappeared into particles of light. Her Teeny Ships pushed anxiously on her, trying to keep her awake, but Highwind couldn't fight the darkness of sleep any longer.

Sorry Sora, sorry Donald, sorry Goofy... she thought, a small, sad smile appearing on her face. But I think I'm going to be late catching up to you.

The last thing she remembered was triggering her Warp Gummi, hoping she'd end up somewhere safe.

---

Mission clear. Rank: B.

 

[Sora Neki]

"Important." Normandy stubbornly insisted.

Yamato pinched the bridge of her nose. "I am not disagreeing with you, Normandy-san. I am simply saying that Galactica does not have the reactor power to run shields for any meaningful length of time."

"Capacitors."

"My shields run on capacitors as well Normandy-san, but it would take a vastly impractical amount of time for even a fusion reactor to charge up a capacitor capable of powering wave-motion shielding."

Normandy tapped the sleeve of her armour impatiently. "Kinetic barriers."

"The ones you explained don't help against lasers, like the ones the Sword-class was using?" Babylon 5 said, then paused. "Not that my interceptors would help against lasers either…"

"Dearies, it's fine." Galactica protested. "I'd much prefer being put back the way I was anyhow."

"There wouldn't be much point repairing you if you got broken up again the next time someone picks a fight with us." Babylon 5 protested.

Galactica was currently tied to docked with Babylon 5 in a somewhat undignified fashion via a baby carrier several thick umbilical cords to pull electricity and air from the station. Her twisted midsection had been carefully cut open, exposing her guts to space in a way that made all the other ships uncomfortable; even though they knew it had to be done if she was to be repaired. Every so often, they had to cut away the Cylon goop that was trying valiantly to seal the gaping hole they were operating working through.

The idea of simply letting her die was not being seriously thought about by anyone – well except Chimaera, but her disapproval of their "foolishness" was expressed mostly in sceptical looks and rolled eyes. Everyone else felt they should do their best to save the life of the ageing Battlestar.

"Better reactor?" Normandy offered.

"We would need to completely replace her entire engineering section to achieve that." Yamato protested. "And I have no ability to recreate my own wave-motion engine in any case."

There was a flash of pseudomotion, heralding Chimaera's return from her patrol around the system. One thruster was still noticeably brighter than the other one, despite how obsessively she had overseen their repairs. "What are you idealistic fools arguing about now?" She asked, ignoring the dirty looks she got in return.

"Chimaera, what does your reactor run on?"

Chimaera looked at Babylon 5 in confusion at the apparent non-sequitur. "Hypermatter? Why?"

"Do you have any spare?"

"No." Chimaera said firmly. "I'm going to have to carefully ration myself as it is – I only have half a billion tonnes left."

Everyone present looked up at the Star Destroyer in shock – even Enterprise turned away from her work to stare at Chimaera's midsection (which was not bulging with the ridiculous amount of fuel she was supposedly carrying) and yell "What!"

"What?" Chimaera echoed, now even more confused. "It's only enough to run me for two years at low power at most."

"How exactly do your fuel systems work, Chimaera-san?!"

"Forget that, I want to know how your fuel storage works!" Enterprise yelled, stars in her eyes. "If I had that kind of antimatter on tap, I'd never need refuelling!"

She'd also go off like a tiny supernova if she lost containment, but Enterprise actively tried not to think about such things.

"You use antimatter as fuel?" Babylon 5 exclaimed. She knew some races (particularly the Vree) used antimatter weaponry, but as far as she knew they generated the antimatter on demand. She wasn't aware of anyone who stored the ridiculously dangerous stuff in any noticeable amounts.

"Um…" Enterprise said, trying once again to figure out how to answer their questions while explaining as little as possible. "Do you know what dilithium is?"

"Two lithium atoms bound together?"

"I mean crystalline dilithium."

"Dilithium doesn't form into crystals. It's a gas at room temperature."

"Well apparently we gave the name to something else in my timeline, alright? Anyway, it's ability to repel charged particles makes it far easier to make practical antimatter reactors. And fusion reactors. And I think the Romulans even use it in their quantum singularity drives. Basically it's a vital resource to anyone who wants to run a warp drive."

One of Babylon 5's eyebrows rose. "In that case, do you want one of our non-dilithium-based fusion reactor designs? You know, to conserve a vital resource?"

Enterprise rolled her eyes. "It's vital, but it only really gets scarce in wartime. Really that'd only be useful if somehow all the dilithium in the galaxy vanished or exploded or something."

"Just take the plans, Enterprise."

Enterprise grumbled, but accepted the data transfer.

"Ablative armour?" Normandy crossed her arms.

All else present turned to stare in confusion at the segue.

Normandy rolled her eyes. "For lasers."

Yamato, figuring out that Normandy had jumped back into their previous discussion, furrowed her brow. "I suppose if we gave her a coating of Gamilas reflective armour…"

Enterprise, who had been tuning out the conversation as she worked, blinked. "Um, what are you two talking about?"

"They've been arguing on the best way to protect Galactica from harm while repairing her." Babylon 5 sighed.

Enterprise flinched, then started nervously fidgeting. "Um, are you really sure that's the best idea?"

"I am not going to repair Galactica-san just to watch her die in our next engagement, Enterprise-san."

"But she has to go home eventually, right?" Enterprise argued. "And when that happens, won't it disrupt the balance of power there?"

Galactica snorted. "You don't have to worry about that, dearie. The Rebel and I were the only warships left, in the end."

"Alright, that does it." Babylon 5 said. "We really need to sit down – metaphorically speaking, of course – and properly swap histories."

"Before that," Chimaera interrupted "can you finally explain just what you had me scatter across the system?"

She pointed upwards dropped a nav point at the closest of the thousands of spheres now orbiting the system's star. About two meters in diameter and silver-grey in colour, each sphere would be nearly impossible to spot except that Chimaera had placed them and thus already knew where they all were.

"Did I not say?" Enterprise said, slightly embarrassed. "Sorry. They're basically just a sensor package strapped to a power source and a device from Babylon 5's new head-guest."

"I have so many questions about that sentence I don't know where to begin." Chimaera pinched the bridge of her nose.

"The idea is that they will recognise our extra-dimensional drives, and work together to disrupt anyone else's. Hopefully that'll stop any more 'visitors' like the Cube."

Babylon 5 frowned. "Normandy's drive isn't extra-dimensional."

"I'm not sure anything can stop that one really, it's just Newtonian physics and a lot of dark energy." Enterprise admitted. "But hopefully if anyone does arrive with a drive like that, they'll be more amenable to talking."

"If it's a grav-well generator, you could have just said that." Chimaera said, then continued on before Enterprise could correct her. "What about slicing attempts?"

Enterprise blinked in confusion. "Well, they shouldn't be able to get within a few light-seconds of them, so… melee attacks shouldn't really be a problem."

That wasn't what Chimaera had meant, but she was satisfied with that explanation nonetheless; being from a galaxy where cyberwarfare required a physical (read: scomp) connection between a device you controlled and a device the enemy controlled.

"So is that some form of controller?" Chimaera indicated the device Enterprise had been working on when she arrived.

"Hmm?" Enterprise turned and looked. "Oh! No no no. This is our ticket home – hopefully."

Chimaera studied the device with great interest. "It looks like that gate that Babylon 5 had."

"That's because it's based off of it." Babylon 5 explained.

"When seeking to traverse dimensions, it is only sensible to begin with a device designed to traverse dimensions." Yamato added.

Indeed the structure did resemble a jumpgate rather closely. The four struts were there, with their seven phasing modules filled with the last of their Quantium-40. However, the four struts were not free-floating, but instead joined together at the back by more struts connected to a black cube.

"If this works the way we think it will, this should 'drill' a path back 'up' to the universe we all came from." Enterprise explained. "From there, a quantum resonance pulse and a little luck should put us all back in our own timelines, roughly where we were before we 'fell'."

The other ships (and Babylon 5) already knew this, having helped Enterprise with the theory behind the device, so they all just watched Chimaera for her reaction. Chimaera, for her part, gave no visible reaction, but resolved to step up her plans to covertly steal as much technology for the Empire as possible before leaving.

Then she cocked her head to the side, her expression puzzled. "Is it supposed to be glowing like that?" She asked, watching the phasing modules light up one at a time.

"It's doing a test run." Enterprise answered. "Making sure it can connect to other dimensions at all before we try sending probes through. It's very powerful – it has to be, to get us 'back up' – and putting anything physical through might destabilise it at this point, which would be… very bad."

"Hmm." Chimaera mused. "Did you remember to program those jamming spheres I dropped to ignore this device as well?"

Enterprise's mouth opened. She blinked. She closed her mouth. Her brow furrowed. Then she turned very pale.

The ships and station had just enough time to see a small point of light form in the centre of the not-jump-gate shortly before lightning covered its surface, and everything went white.

---

The year was 2004.

Star Trek: Enterprise was still airing. The Galactica miniseries was out, but the new show wasn't. Mass Effect wouldn't be released for another three years. Space Battleship Yamato 2199 almost a decade away, and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith wouldn't hit theatres until next year.

Also the US Air Force had been secretly running a guerilla warfare campaign against a race of technologically advanced (though feudal) aliens who ran a massive galaxy-spanning slave empire while masquerading as gods.

You know.

If you were interested in minor things like that.

---

The Stargate Command Radar Centre was not a busy place, most of the time.

At the moment however, it was packed with busy Air Force personnel running back and forth from station to station while those manning desks frantically operated phones and computers.

At the back of the room stood its only civilian occupant – Elizabeth Weir staring intently at the map displaying the returns from the various radar probes scattered throughout the Solar System. So far nothing unexpected was showing, but according to their intelligence that was soon to change.

The serviceman seated at the desk next to where Elizabeth was standing kept stealing glances at her. Eventually, he cleared his throat. "You, uh… okay there, ma'am?"

Their was a pause before Elizabeth responded. "Well, a couple of days ago the president contacted me to let me know he was placing me in charge of a secret project the Air Force had been running where they were waging a war against extraterrestrial forces without actually telling the rest of the planet."

"Uh…"

"The president tells me he wants the military operation shut down down to focus on the diplomatic potential, so naturally my first order after assuming command is to authorise a special forces team to go looking for weapons of mass destruction for our own use."

"Well that's –"

"Because naturally, there's an alien styling himself after the Egyptian god Anubis coming here with a fleet of starships to wipe out all life on Earth."

At this point Elizabeth actually turned to look at the serviceman. "No, nothing about this is okay."

The serviceman forced what he thought was an encouraging smile. "Well, it's not like we haven't been through worse."

"I appreciate the sentiment, but thinking about how many times the Earth has nearly been destroyed is not nearly as encouraging as you seem to think it is." Elizabeth snapped, causing the serviceman to wince.

Lifting a hand to rub her eyes, Elizabeth let out a slow exhale. "I'm sorry. None of this is your fault. I just can't believe that the only thing potentially standing between us and destruction at the hands of a genocidal madman is ancient weapons of mass destruction."

"Actually, it's Ancient, with a capital 'A'." The serviceman gingerly corrected. "Its the nickname for the race that built the Stargates, seeing as how we don't actually know their name –"

"I did actually read the briefing reports, you know." Elizabeth said dryly.

The serviceman winced again. "Sorry."

The somewhat awkward conversation was prevented from continuing when the phone on the serviceman's desk rang. He picked it up, listened for a moment, then called out "Prometheus reports unknown sensor contact out past Mars orbit!"

Elizabeth visibly steeled herself, ready to start giving orders… then paused. She was new to this job, but… "Prometheus did? Not the radar probes?"

"Uh…" The serviceman eloquently replied.

The servicewoman on the desk next to him answered for him. "Confirmed, space-based radar reads no contacts!"

"Prometheus is quite sure they're picking up something, though." The first serviceman offered. "Ma'am."

Elizabeth bit the inside of her cheek. "Prometheus is grounded currently, correct?"

"Correct ma'am."

"So what are they picking up contacts with?"

The serviceman relayed the question through his phone. "Uh… Prometheus says on their subspace sensors."

"I believe I remember reading that Goa'uld can cloak ships, like on Star Trek?" Elizabeth probed.

"Yes ma'am."

"Could that be what they're detecting?"

"Search me, ma'am." The serviceman shook his head. "Wouldn't surprise me either way – the Asgard gave the whole ship an upgrade, so it wouldn't surprise me if it can pick up cloaked ships now, even if they are halfway across the solar system."

"Put me through to the White House."

---

"Sir." General George Hammond started off. "I recommend deploying Prometheus."

"Oh sure, send out our only defence against the Goa'uld on a wild goose chase, I'm sure that will end well." Said vice-president Robert Kinsey.

"I thought you didn't believe that Anubis was sending any ships, sir?" Hammond countered.

"I don't." Kinsey said flatly. "I think this is a transparent attempt by the SGC to steal billions of dollars worth of US government property to defy your shutdown order! Your attempts at regaining control over the Stargate are transparent as glass, Hammond. Glass. Mister President, I recommend placing Prometheus under NID control immediately."

"Between the SGC and the NID, only one of our organisations has ever stolen that ship." Hammond said mildly.

"Those were rogue operatives!" Kinsey blustered.

"Gentlemen, enough." President Hayes interrupted. "George, why deploy Prometheus?"

"Prometheus can get much better sensor readings at closer range." Hammond explained. "And if her contact does turn out to be Goa'uld, they may well need to be interrupted in whatever they are doing."

"Mr President, I object!"

"Bob," The president said "do you have a formal accusation to make against the crew of Prometheus?"

"What? No, listen –"

"Then I'll pretend that you haven't been casting aspersions on the loyalty of decorated service men and women." The president said firmly, frowning at his vice-president. "George, get that ship in the air. When you're done, check in with our off-world allies and the Russians, see if they know what's going on. I have phone calls to make to the Security Council."

---

Even before the Asgard upgrades, Prometheus could launch from its concealed hanger in the Nevada desert and hit orbit within minutes. Now, in that same time, it was halfway to Mars orbit and the site of their mysterious sensor contact.

"Still no idea what she's picking up?" Colonel Kirkland, the ship's current CO asked.

The radar chief (who in this case was tasked with overseeing the team that oversaw all of Prometheus's various sensor suites, despite their job title) shook his head. "The computer's definitely reporting a contact, but apparently whatever name the Asgard have for it doesn't have an equivalent in English, sir. It's just showing up as a set of runes."

"Of all the times to not have access to Daniel Jackson…" Kirkland shook his head. "Maintain course, but everyone keep their eyes peeled! Even if our mysterious contact isn't a Ha'tak, we're expecting a whole fleet of them any hour now."

"Colonel…" The ship's comm officer said, then paused. "I feel… weird." Beads of sweat were visible on her forehead.

"30 seconds til visual range of contact!" The pilot called out.

Kirkland frowned. "Now that you mention it, I think I feel it too. Anyone else feel like…"

"My head's in a vice, sir?" The radar chief offered. "Yeah, me too."

"15 seconds!"

"The pain's getting worse, sir." The comm officer reported. Her training was holding up, but she was also clearly in pain. As Kirkland looked around, he realised everyone in sight was. "I think…"

"10!"

Belatedly, Kirkland put 2 and 2 together. "Full reverse!" He ordered. "Get us clear of the contact!"

It was too late – even Asgard thrusters needed as much time to decelerate as accelerate. The migraines of the crew got worse and worse, each feeling like something was crushing their brains inside their skulls…

Cracking an eye open, Kirkland managed to catch a glimpse of their mysterious contact on the main screen. It looked like a white point of light, only with lightning somehow crackling around the outside of it despite it being in space. As he watched, it wobbled and distorted once, twice…

Kirkland's eyes widened then shut firmly, raising his arms up to shield his face…

---

Thankfully, the point didn't explode, but it did suddenly expand outwards in a wave of light that washed over Prometheus, fading as it went.

---

Prometheus blinked, smacking the side of her head a couple of times. "Colonel? Hey colonel, you alright?"

Her captain didn't respond – or maybe he did, and she didn't hear him over the tinny sound of her knocking on her helmet.

She looked down at herself and grimaced. Her outfit was a horrifying mismatch of an air force pilot's helmet and flight jacket, a NASA spacesuit and, unfortunately, some bits of antiquated-looking armour where her designers hadn't been able to squash the aesthetic of the Goa'uld tech she'd been reverse-engineered from. Not even her Asgard upgrades helped there – those changes were all internal. Honestly – what B-movie hack was in charge of my wardrobe?!

Coming to a dead stop, Prometheus cut her engines and stared forwards. Then she rubbed her eyes and stared again ran several diagnostics on her sensors.

"Alright." Said a ship that Prometheus couldn't possibly fail to recognise, not the least because Jack O'Neill had tried his hardest to get her named after that ship. "Who's not dead? Sound off."

"I'm here." Said Babylon freaking 5. "Galactica's here with me."

"Normandy-san and I are here." Said another ship that was supposed to be a cartoon. "Was this supposed to happen?"

"Well no, but given that we haven't already disintegrated we should be past the worst of the danger."

"'Should be'? …wait, where's Chimaera?"

Prometheus couldn't take any more. "What." She cried broadcast loudly.

The other ships (and station) all collectively jumped as they all realised at once that 'Chimaera' missing meant that the sixth ship in their midst wasn't one of the fleet.

"Ack!" The saucer-ship swallowed. "Um. Sorry about this – a dimensional experiment of ours went… a bit wrong."

"A bit, dearie?"

"Alright, more than a bit. The quantum reality we were in has been superimposed on top of yours. Assuming none of us dissolve into fundamental particles, we'll, um… be stuck here for the next 20 hours or so."

Prometheus stared blankly back at the other ship.

"Um." The saucer-ship cleared her throat. "Sorry, let me start over. Nice to meet you. I'm the USS –"

"USS Enterprise, yeah I know." Prometheus found herself snarling.

Enterprise blinked, visibly taken aback, then looked down at herself and remembered that her name was written on her saucer-skirt. "Um, right. And these are –"

"Babylon 5." Prometheus pointed at the station. Moving her finger down, she continued naming startled ships. "One really banged up Battlestar Galactica. Argo."

Yamato blinked. "Nani?"

"And you…" Prometheus turned to the final ship, one she could tell from her childlike appearance was a frigate despite being only slightly (on the order of about 20-30 meters) shorter than she was. She paused. "I have no idea who you are."

Normandy pouted.

"Have, uh… we met before?" Enterprise asked.

Prometheus closed her eyes and shook her head. "Nope!" She declared. "I'm not doing this Galaxy Quest thing right now. You are going to tell me who built you. Right now."

"We're human, just like you!"

"That… really doesn't narrow it down."

An unexpected ping noise made Prometheus look around wildly for a moment, before figuring out that the SGC was just sending her a radio transmission. "Prometheus? Prometheus, are you there? We're reading five new contacts on radar. Status report!"

Lifting a hand up to her ear transmitting back, Prometheus responded. "This is Prometheus – and oh man, you are not gonna believe what I found up here."

A shadow suddenly enveloped Prometheus, and she turned and looked up… and up… and up at the enormous visage of an Imperial Star Destroyer.

"Oh. There you are." The ISD growled. "For a moment I thought I was rid of you all."

Oh. Chimaera. Right. Thrawn's ship. Prometheus thought faintly. Oh, this is going to be a fun sitrep…

---

There was abject silence in the SGC.

Even the staffers who would normally be quipping away, blowing the whole thing off as a joke, found themselves (just for a moment) lost for words. (Well, after the shouts of "What do you mean this isn't a joke?!" had died down.)

Everybody was staring at the images Prometheus had transmitted back, and the IFF (read: name) tags she'd attached to them.

It was the newcomer who found her voice first. "Could somebody please tell me," Weir said, slowly "that the Stargate program has not been releasing information on actual alien civilisations in the form of TV shows and movies?"

"Um." Said the serviceman next to her.

Weir whirled around. "You're joking." She said, eyes wide.

"I'm pretty sure it's just Wormhole X-treme." The serviceman defended himself.

"Check." Weir ordered. "I am not dealing with a Death Star today."

The fact that Anubis had his own method of destroying planets was not calming her nerves.

She looked around the room. "Anyone else have anything they'd like to add?"

The servicewoman on the next desk over nodded solemnly, her eyes fixed on the name listed under the Star Destroyer.

"Yeah." She said. "If they are hostile, then we must defend the Louvre at all costs."

---

"You guys know" Prometheus said, her voice shaking with either fear or anger (anger, if she had anything to say about it!) "that Chimaera's a bad guy ship, right?!"

There was a collective eye-blink from the other ships + station.

"Your slander would be more insulting" Chimaera said dryly "if it was said in stronger terms than could be managed by a five-year-old Gungan."

"Don't get smart with me, fascist." Prometheus snapped.

"Did you have to search the dictionary for that one, little ship?" Chimaera taunted, looming over the much smaller ship. Prometheus grit her teeth as the reminder of how much larger than her the Star Destroyer was – she wasn't far off from being able to fit into Chimaera's docking bay.

A sharp whistle high-powered radio ping caused both ships to flinch and whirl around.

Babylon 5 lowered her fingers from her mouth dialled back the power on her short-range comm array. "Are you girls ready to talk now, or would you like perhaps to move into slapping range?"

"This isn't a joke." Prometheus growled, surprising Babylon 5 with her intensity. "There is a fleet of battleships here in my system. Why."

"I'm not a battleship!" Enterprise protested.

Prometheus glared at Enterprise, clearly not in the mood.

Enterprise sighed. "Look, we're sorry for causing a panic. We didn't mean to come here, really! It's just –"

"An experiment went wrong, yeah I heard you the first time. What, did you try beaming into an ion field?" Prometheus asked sarcastically.

"Oh, do you have that tech as well?" Enterprise blinked.

Prometheus opened her mouth, then closed it. Being reverse-engineered from Goa'uld technology, she was equipped with a set of Ring transporters, which let her turn matter into energy, move the energy somewhere else, then turn it back into matter; 'transporting' it at the speed of light. However, there needed to be a set of Rings at both the departure point and destination for that to work – the Star Trek style of transporters where you only needed equipment at one end was the domain of the Ancients and Asgard.

…well, and the Gadmeer, technically… hmm. Maybe her pool of suspects for 'who could fake these ships' wasn't as small as she thought.

And they were fake – of that Prometheus hadn't even entertained the notion of doubting. If you saw someone dressed as Darth Vader walking down your street, did you think that the character had somehow broken out of the silver screen? No! You knew it was just some fan in a costume. Same deal here – some alien race had apparently binged Earth sci-fi and gone way too far with their model ship building.

"If us being here really bothers you that much, we could just leave." Babylon 5 offered, breaking Prometheus out of her thoughts.

Enterprise went very pale. "Um…"

Chimaera pinched the bridge of her nose. "What is it now."

"While we survived the initial phase transition, Chimaera-san, the device we were testing did not have sufficient power to so transition the entire universe." Yamato broke in. After a moment of being stared at, she added defensively "Enterprise-san is not the only one who has a basic understanding of dimensional physics."

"I'm afraid I don't understand, dearies." Galactica shook her head.

"We haven't actually changed dimensions." Enterprise looked down, twiddling her thumbs nervously. "It just looks like we have because our two dimensions are overlapping at this point. If any of us go more than… um… about half a light-year away from here while the effect is in place, we'll…"

"Suffer from a bad case of 'Total Existence Failure'?" Prometheus added in what was supposed to be sarcasm, but came out more 'genuine concern'.

Enterprise winced and nodded.

Chimaera groaned into the palm of her hand. "Absolutely fantastic."

The gears in Prometheus's head (the figurative ones, not the literal ones) started to turn. "So what you're saying is," she started slowly "that you're all stuck in this system for the next day, after which you'll leave automatically."

"Unfortunately, yes." "Hai."

A calculating gleam entered Prometheus's eye. "And you're all Earth ships, right?"

"I am." Yamato affirmed.

"I'm not." Chimaera huffed, crossing her arms.

"Not really, dearie?" Galactica gently corrected.

"Don't get me wrong, I wish Earth only the best; but I had to split from EarthGov years ago." Babylon 5 stared off into empty space, eyes haunted.

Enterprise tapped her index fingers together. "As much as any Federation planet?"

Prometheus's face drooped. That was nowhere near the result she was hoping for.

"I am." Normandy added.

"Gah!" Prometheus started, having totally forgotten that the frigate was there. (Which was ridiculous, as Normandy was almost as big as she was!)

"Oh, sorry about that dear." Babylon 5 apologised. "Normandy is a stealth frigate, and she likes spooking ships."

Huh?! …oh, I see. Prometheus realised. Normandy was radar-stealthed, and didn't give off anything that registered on her subspace passives. After speaking up her radio transmission earlier, Normandy had quietly moved behind one of the other ships, and Prometheus hadn't noticed when she reappeared. Prometheus made a mental note to pay more attention to her thermal passives – there would be no way to disguise the giant thermal bloom whenever Normandy moved.

(Or so she thought, anyway...)

Getting her head back on track, Prometheus decided to change said track. "Well, sometime in the next few hours, a fleet of Ha'taks is going to arrive to destroy my homeworld."

While the other ships (and Babylon 5) looked various degrees of shocked and dismayed, a narrowing of the eyes was the only change in Chimaera's expression. "And this is our problem… why?"

"You can't leave this system." Prometheus reminded her in a sing-song voice.

There was a moment of silence.

"…well, I'd certainly be happy to serve as a neutral moderator for negotiations –" Enterprise started.

Prometheus rolled her eyes. "You guys can stop pretending to not know who the Goa'uld are now, this is serious."

"Indulge us, local ship-san." Yamato said, a quiet intensity visible in the tension around her eyes.

"Prometheus. The name's Prometheus."

"It is nice to meet you, Prometheus." Yamato nodded her head formally. "I am the Space Battleship Yamato."

Prometheus blinked. Yamato? Not Argo? She's ignoring her rename?*

*(Prometheus was not aware that the rename to Argo was added in by the English translators when the 1974 anime was localised. She barely knew the term 'anime' – the exemplars of that art style for her were Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh, which at the time of writing are still sold as 'cartoons'.)

Babylon 5 coughed gently into a hand. "You were about to explain why you don't think these 'Goa'uld' will negotiate?"

"Are you seriously going to make me explain this?" Prometheus said in a tone somewhere between a groan and a whine. "You guys all live in this galaxy too! …you do, don't you?" She added, suddenly unsure.

"Ah-hem?!" Chimaera forcefully cleared her throat.

"The rest of us are from alternate timelines of…" Enterprise trailed off, doing a double-take at the system's primary. "Wait, we're in the Solar System?"

"How nice of you to finally notice." Prometheus snarked.

"I've been very distracted!" Enterprise protested. "…anyway, we're all from alternate timelines of this galaxy. Except Chimaera."

"Been there, done that." Prometheus folded her arms. (She hadn't personally, but given the Quantum Mirror that was currently sitting in an Area 51 warehouse, she felt like she knew more than enough about the subject.) Prometheus then sighed. "Alright, fine."

"The Goa'uld are a bunch of snake aliens that like to curl up nice and tight around your spine to hijack your body. About 12-and-a-half thousand years ago they decided they really liked taking humans as meat-suits 'cause their healing devices could keep 'em and their 'suits' alive basically forever. Earth managed to break away about 3,000 B.C. –"

"Sorry, sorry, but um, what year is it currently?" Babylon 5 broke in.

"2004, why?" Prometheus said, annoyed at being interrupted when they were the ones insisting that she tell the story.

Enterprise, Yamato, Normandy and Babylon 5 all looked at each other, startled, then back at Prometheus, then back at each other.

Babylon 5 blinked several times, then began ticking off her fingers. "Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert…?"

"I really don't see how you listing off a bunch of dead musicians has to do with squat." Prometheus said dryly.

"Just… checking, dear." Babylon 5 shook her head. "Your version of Earth is… well, ahead of schedule."

That's because we're cheating, Prometheus thought, before continuing her story. "In those thousands of years, the Goa'uld ferried humans off-world to build up their slave empire. And that's where we are today – a galaxy-spanning empire patrolled by ships that can flatten continents, but whose average citizen has never seen any technology more advanced than a freaking wheelbarrow. They tell 'em it's magic, and that they're gods. Took the names of Earth gods to complete the illusion."

Enterprise bit her bottom lip, but spoke up anyway. "Have you tried killing the mother creature?"

There was a pause, then the other ships started giving Enterprise strange looks.

"Who are you and what have you done with Enterprise?" Galactica squinted suspiciously.

Enterprise's shoulders sagged. "Starfleet Command had a bad infection of creatures that sounded just like these creatures, and they all died when the mother creature did, so…"

"Oh, you're talking about those blue-gill neural parasite things." Prometheus waved a hand dismissively. "No no no, Goa'uld don't do that. No real species dies when its parent does, that's just stupid."

"…but they do, though?" Enterprise pointed out. "Apparently you've met them as well, you could check? Not that I'm advocating murder!" She added hurriedly. "I meant with medical scans and such."

"Listen, little miss shiny paint job." Prometheus said, ignoring the fact that Enterprise was in fact many times larger than she was. "This isn't some b-movie plot where all the threads are neatly tied up just in time for the credits to roll. Ending an empire of human suffering thousands of years old and spread over thousands of planets isn't as simple as 'go here, kill that thing'. We tried that the first time we met the Goa'uld – all that did was fracture the empire and plunge the galaxy into war as the system lords established the new pecking order."

Enterprise was looking less and less comfortable as Prometheus went on. "None of them are interested in peaceful co-existence?" She asked, somewhat desperately.

Prometheus glared at Enterprise for a second, before looking away with a huff. "There's the Tok'ra, the 'Goa'uld resistance' if you will, but even if we could trust 'em – and we can't sometimes – they control no territory whatsoever."

"And how exactly does an empire of feudal slaves maintain a fleet of starships?" Chimaera asked sceptically.

"Why, looking for tips?" Prometheus shot back.

"Listen here, you –"

"Logically, there must be a 'middle-class' of slaves who build and maintain the infrastructure needed for the empire. Am I correct?" Yamato interrupted before the conversation could devolve further.

Prometheus shot another angry look at Chimaera, then nodded at Yamato. "Yeah, the Jaffa. Human slaves genetically engineered to incubate – and be dependent on – Goa'uld larvae. They're still told it's magic, but they're at least taught how to operate and maintain Goa'uld tech. The Goa'uld themselves get by on a genetic memory."

"Okay." Enterprise took a deep breath. "So, if you're telling the truth –"

"'If'?"

"We've only just met you dear, don't take it personally." Babylon 5 reassured.

"Then this Goa'uld empire is like if the Dominion was run by the Trill." Enterprise finished. "And with no Federation to rally the resistance against them."

"This so-called 'empire' sounds to me like a world where the Geonosians conquered the galaxy." Chimaera said with some disgust. "Brain worms for everyone."

"Or the Drakh with their Keepers…" Babylon 5 shuddered.

"Wait, what's this about brain worms?" Prometheus's eyebrows raised. Was that some sort of prediction on how Episode III would turn out?

"Alright, dearie." Galactica spoke up. "There's an enemy fleet on the way. How many ships does Earth have?"

There was a very awkward pause.

"Prometheus? Please tell me it's not just you?" Babylon 5 implored.

Prometheus sucked in a breath. "I… also have some fighter-interceptors?"

"Prometheus, I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer me honestly." Babylon 5 clapped her hands together. "Did Earth steal you from someone else?"

"What? No! No no no, we stole the tech." Prometheus waved her hands in warding movements. "Beat up a bunch of Goa'uld, stole their stuff, then built me."

Enterprise went very, very still.

"Is that why a Goa'uld fleet is here to kill you all?" Chimaera drawled.

"Kinda sorta, that's a way longer story." Prometheus then paused and squinted at Chimaera. "You don't seem worried at all about the hostile fleet about to arrive."

"Even if, though I sincerely doubt it, their ships were a hundred times better than those of the Galactic Empire, then we would simply bury them in a thousand times as many ships. The industrial capacity of uneducated slaves is simply not compatible to our own." Chimaera boasted.

"You're not in the Galactic Empire, dear." Babylon 5 reminded her.

"A situation I lament more and more with each new development." Chimaera muttered. "Truthfully, when this Goa'uld fleet arrives I plan to declare neutrality in the matter, and… why are you laughing?" She demanded.

Prometheus was bent over at the waist, gasping for air as she wiped tears of laughter out of her eyes. "Ha ha ha, ha ha… oh wait, you're serious? Let me laugh even harder! HA!"

"Prometheus…" Galactica admonished.

After a moment, Prometheus regained control of her self. "Ha… but seriously, that might work if it was… I dunno… Ba'al maybe, but it's Anubis on his way here. That guy's so cartoonisly evil the other Goa'uld teamed up on him! He's not going to care that you're neutral, he's just going to see you as a threat."

Chimaera's mouth twitched several times, as though she wanted to rebut that, but couldn't think of a way to do so. Probably recognised the attitude from back home, Prometheus thought.

"And with a creature like him prowling the stars, you decided to build only one ship?" Yamato frowned.

"Hey building me set back Uncle Sam several billion dollars, okay? We have to build entirely new infrastructure for this, it's not like we could just slap an FTL drive onto the… navy ships…"

One of Yamato's eyebrows rose. "Yes?"

Prometheus stared at Yamato for a moment, then shook her head. "Anyway, there's only so much that even the US military can do so fast."

"The US…?" Babylon 5 repeated, confused, before snapping her fingers. "Right. It's still 2004, you haven't formed EarthGov yet. What about the Russians? There's no way they'd let the US have a space fleet before they did."

"In the Cosmo Fleet, the European Union contribution is quite comparable to the one made by the United States." Yamato added.

Prometheus gave Yamato another confused look. "The Cosmo Fleet? Is that some kind of Star Force mistranslation? Whatever, it doesn't matter. It's just me and my fighters – the US Air Force against the universe."

"I wasn't built at the very beginning of the First Cylon War, dearie, but speaking as a veteran of that war you'll want to get your collective act together right away." Galactica observed. "No one colony could have funded Daidalos's construction efforts on their own."

"You say you are an Air Force ship? Not the Space Force?" Yamato tilted her head.

"We don't have a Space Force." Prometheus snapped.

Yamato frowned, looking like she was trying to remember something. "Ah. This must be before Donald Trump's presidency."

Prometheus gaped at Yamato. "You thought… that's a Simpson's joke! Nobody would actually let him be president!" Man, whichever off-planet faction binged Earth TV has clearly watched way too much. She thought.

"So what you're saying is that there's an alien fleet on the way, and you need our help because your planet was so lazy exactly one country built exactly one ship." Chimaera drawled.

Prometheus scowled. Of course a Star Wars ship would think of it like that – she 'came from' a setting where people bought starships like used cars. "It's not like that!" She angrily denied. "There were… trust issues with tech-sharing, okay?"

Yamato sighed. "When we are not in imminent danger for our lives, Prometheus-san, I shall instruct you as to how a UN space fleet works."

"Badly?" Prometheus guessed.

"This may surprise you" Yamato deadpanned "but alien invasions tend to change the priorities of many a politician."

Enterprise sighed. "How about you, Normandy? Did you have a unified Earth government like Babylon 5 and I, or did…" She trailed off. "Where's Normandy?"

"What do you mean, she's right over…" Prometheus trailed off, glancing over checking her IR scope at where Normandy's thermal signature wa… sn't anymore. What the actual…? How the heck had she disappeared without setting off her passives?! Even engaging a cloaking device gave off a radiation burst that she wouldn't have missed!

Chimaera cursed. "I am this close to having a leash made for that frigate!"

"Normandy! Where are you?" Enterprise cupped her hands around her mouth transmitted on subspace frequencies.

Normandy's response was surprisingly quick, not-so-surprisingly-short, but overall quite surprising:

"Found the enemy." She responded using the subspace transceiver Chimaera had given her earlier.

In space, no one can hear a pin drop.

Then there was a lot of movement as the other ships tried very quickly to decide how they were going to play this. They didn't exactly huddle or anything, but it was obvious that Prometheus wasn't a part of this discussion.

Prometheus's radio squawked.

"SGC to Prometheus, do you copy? We are reading three Ha'taks in Earth orbit. Do not engage, repeat you are not authorised to engage at this time."

Prometheus scowled. She could probably take a scouting force of three Ha'tak, but not Anubis's full fleet - the Asgard had updated her shields, not her weapons. Even so, being told she wasn't allowed to fight for her homeworld stung.

"Kirkland, what is your final opinion on the… other visitors, over?" The radio continued.

"No idea sir, he hasn't said anything since the other ships showed up, over." Prometheus snapped, still sour at being benched.

There was a pause. "Prometheus, repeat last over?"

It was a really good thing the SGC had a subspace radio. Minute long pauses in this conversation would be unbearable. "I have no idea on the colonel's status, command. Far as I can tell he and the rest of the crew are AWOL, over."

"…Prometheus, who exactly am I talking to, over?"

"Prometheus, over."

"I'm aware I'm speaking to Prometheus, I meant who on the ship am I speaking to, over!"

"You are speaking to Prometheus! Over!"

---

Back on Earth, a man was wiping grease from a wrench with a dirty rag. He looked up as ringing filled the room, then grabbed a corded phone off a wall. "Yeah?"

"Jerry, please tell me that you're the joker who sabotaged my telescope."

"Bob?" Jerry looked up from his work station. Before him lay his own enormous optical telescope – the centrepiece around which this entire facility was built. "What, it showing everything upside down again? I told you, you need to –"

"Move to five arc-seconds underneath Mars, six-hundred magnification." Bob demanded.

"…Bob, the university has my 'scope booked out for the next three hours, I can't just –"

"Do it right now!" There was mostly anger, but also hints of fear and confusion in Bob's voice.

Jerry hesitated for a long moment, then reached forward to a control panel and typed a sequence of commands in. The enormous machinery that aimed the facility's telescope slowly ground to life, reorienting to the specified coordinates.

Jerry stared at the image displayed on his screen for a long moment.

"You see them too, don't you?" Bob, who could hear that the machinery had stopped even through the phone, asked.

Jerry's grip on the phone tightened. "Bob, you don't tell a soul, you hear me? Move your 'scope to something else right now."

"Jerry –"

"No Bob, listen to me. Some government suits will be by shortly to take a few things – it's really important that you do everything they tell you to do. We can't let this get out – it'll cause a panic, you hear me?"

"…that's going to be a problem, Jerry." Bob said, sounding apologetic. "Seeing as how you're the fourth person I called. I think half the 'scopes in the hemisphere are looking at this one."

The corner of Jerry's mouth twitched several times. Swearing loudly, the NID informant threw the phone back onto its cradle and stared at the image of USS Prometheus hanging out with a bunch of spaceships that shouldn't exist.

 

[Sora Neki]

Kinsey was on a warpath. "I don't know how, but this is your fault!" He said. He had just enough composure to avoid spittle flying.

"And how exactly do you figure that, sir?" Hammond replied, sounding extremely fed up.

"You – you used some kind of fail-safe program! Some kind of… computer personality! Something to seize control from the crew and give it back to the SGC!"

"Nobody at the SGC would have done anything of the sort." Hammond refuted firmly. Aside from that essentially amounting to treason, the only AI the SGC trusted all that much were the android duplicates of SG1 – and that was because they were duplicates of SG1. "And even if I had, why would I activate it now? I'm not in charge of the SGC anymore." He resisted the urge to add 'You saw to that'.

President Hayes was rubbing his temples. "Gentlemen. Prometheus is still following orders for now, yes?"

"Mister President!" Kinsey objected, aghast. "We have to consider Prometheus a compromised asset!"

"Until SG1 gets back, she's all we've got." Hammond pointed out, causing Kinsey to visibly flinch. Maybe the fool was starting to realise the planet was actually in danger.

Suddenly there was a commotion at the door. One of the Secret Service agents could be heard saying "I'm sorry sir, but you can't come in –"

"Kinsey, sir!" Standing in the doorway, Hammond recognised Malcolm Barrett – the closest thing to an NID agent that he would trust to actually do his stated job.

"What are you doing?! Can't you see who I'm meeting with?!" Kinsey snapped.

But Barrett stood his ground. Now that Hammond was looking, he could see that the agent's face was clammy with sweat. "Sir. There is currently an uncontained secrecy breach at multiple civilian observatories. If the press are not already aware, they likely will be shortly."

Whatever angry retort Kinsey had been planning got swallowed up by a stammering fit, the vice-president rendered inarticulate with a sudden wide-eyed look of panic.

Hammond managed to remain stony faced, but Hayes swore under their breath. "Turn the TV on." He ordered a Secret Service member, who rushed to comply. "CNN."

"…if this is a prank, Jen, this is the best-coordinated prank in human history." The presenter was saying. "We have images from twelve different observatories in seven different countries, and more coming in all the time. So far we've identified the USS Enterprise-D from Star Trek, one of the iconic Star Destroyers from Star Wars, Babylon 5 from the show of the same name, and what appears to be the wreck of Battlestar Galactica; also from the show of the same name. Three other ships have been spotted but not identified yet."

Kinsey sat up ramrod straight, face pale. "Pardon me mister president, we need to begin imposing media blackouts."

"Forget that." The president ordered sharply. "If you impose a blackout after that bombshell we'll have mass confusion across the country, maybe even panic riots."

"Mister president, given that the unknown ships seem to resemble those from TV shows for the most part, we could confuse the issue by pushing the narrative that this is some kind of PR stunt." Hammond suggested.

"Excellent suggestion George – Bob, get to it."

Kinsey's face twisted in distaste for a moment, clearly not happy at doing anything Hammond suggested, but he quickly moved to a corner of the Oval Office with Barrett to discuss things in hushed but heated voices.

Hammond allowed himself to gaze suspiciously at the vice-president for a moment, before turning back to the TV. The camera had cut to Jen, one hand clasped over an earpiece. "H-hold on… I'm being told that we are now getting reports of three Attackinator ships from the short-lived serial Wormhole X-treme, orbiting over the pacific."

There was a moment of silence in both the studio and the White House both, which was eventually broken by more swearing from the President.

---

Normandy had been in orbit around her Earth exactly twice – once when the Systems Alliance had impounded her, following Shepard's surrender to them. The second time had been when the Reapers had showed up, and then orbit had been and gone as fast as her thrusters could take her as she fled the devastation.

Nothing was burning yet, but this still felt more like that second time.

A Ha'tak, as it turned out, was about 700 meters tall across, putting it firmly out of her weight class. (She might still have been willing to chance it – she'd beaten the Collector ship, and that had been even larger – but there were three of them and one of her.)

Each of them looked human enough, but every part of their appearance screamed 'decadent'. Rather than any kind of uniform, they were dressed in fine gold silks in a way somewhere between a pagan god and a belly dancer. Each of the three was visibly overweight, and there was a golden insignia stuck to each of their foreheads.

However, their exposed midriffs meant that Normandy could see the opening to some kind of pouch in their stomachs. For just a second, one of the pouches opened, and she caught a glimpse of some kind of worm or snake sticking its head out before retreating back inside.

"This is the Tau'ri homeworld?" One of the Ha'taks scoffed, lifting her Staff Weapon over a shoulder. "This is the source of defiance against Lord Anubis? Pah! Our Lord's full fleet is not needed here – we alone are sufficient to destroy them!"

"I understand your feelings, sister, but you must contain your indignity." The second Ha'tak said. "The treacherous curs have stolen secrets of the Ancients from our Lord, and they may seek to turn those magicks against us."

"Even the Tau'ri would not dare." The third Ha'tak said. "They know they cannot stand against the might of our Lord."

"The arrogance of the Tau'ri knows no bounds." The first Ha'tak refuted. "We must provoke them into attacking, so that the rest of our sisters are not caught up in their cowardly tricks."

The third Ha'tak hurrump'd. Lazily, she traced a finger down the surface of the Earth. "…there." She said, pointing at a spot on the pacific ocean. "Several of their pathetic water craft sit there. We shall destroy them as a first step."

Normandy looked ran a quick lidar scan at where the Ha'tak was pointing. Their target was one of the old ocean-going carrier groups – well, it wasn't so old in this world, but it was equally helpless against orbital bombardment. Unless the rest of the fleet got here soon, she'd have to do something drastic.

A faint whimpering muted radio transmissions came from just to her left, and Normandy looked up to see a tiny girl – about 6 or 7, just over 100 meters tall wide, wearing a spacesuit covered in flags (most prominently the US and Russian flags) – whimpering in fright, trying to hide behind the camcorder she held in shaking hands.

Normandy solemnly placed a finger to her lips.

The International Space Station's eyes widened, then she frantically (but silently) nodded.

Normandy held up a hand of Dark Energy, forming a mass concentration off the side of the tiny station. The ISS's eyes grew even wider as her orbit was diverted away from where the Ha'taks were.

Normandy watched the station recede into the distance for a few precious seconds, then shook her head, reduced her mass, and set off for the middle of the danger zone.

---

"I really don't see why you're making this so complicated." Chimaera said. "It's really quite simple."

"That much we agree on, Chimaera-san." Yamato said distractedly, her eyes searching the sea of stars for the pale blue dot that was Earth.

"We do not owe these people any obligation or duty. In fact, aiding them would be risking our safety – we were not built to throw our lives away for the first foolhardy cause we stumble across."

"Ah." Yamato said, her eyes focusing, and her body manoeuvring around to align with her gaze. "That is where my calculation differs slightly from yours, Chimaera-san."

"Is that so?" Chimaera folded her arms.

"Yes." Yamato said plainly, her rocket-wings main thruster igniting with a furious blue roar, forming a comet-like trail behind her. "They need help, and we can give it."

"Yamato…!" Enterprise hesitated, and Yamato's body soared though the stars… until suddenly a point of light appeared in her path. Yamato slammed into it violently, momentarily brought to a near-halt as the universe pushed back against the ship trying to cheat lightspeed, her body disappearing into the point with agonising slowness… before the universe gave in, and Yamato burst off into the distance as a point of blue light.

Prometheus stared after the Space Battleship, mouth open, blinking rapidly. "Alright." She eventually said. "I'd love to know how you made a hyperdrive look like that."

"It's not a hyperdrive." Enterprise hissed, biting her bottom lip. "Prometheus, is there a major interstellar agreement we can appeal to…?"

"You mean like the Protected Planets Treaty?" Prometheus offered, not seeing where Enterprise was going with this.

"Great that sounds perfect!" Enterprise said in a rush, whirling around before zooming off into the distance with a zoom-whoosh.

Prometheus continued to stare, her jaw slack.

Chimaera hissed. "Of all the irresponsible…" She too vanished, simply shooting off into space in a rush of pseudomotion.

Prometheus continued blinking for another moment. "How the hell…?" Even her sensors didn't think those looked like subspace windows. But… those methods of FTL were things Earth authors made up! Plucked from the depths of their imaginations! Did… whatever faction made those ships splurge on holograms and sensor jammers maybe? Were they that dedicated?!

Her confusion was interrupted by Babylon 5's voice. "Oh dear… Quickly, before they do something we all regret." So saying, the station vanished in a flash of light.

Prometheus looked up at where the station had been, uncomprehending for a second. Then her brain kicked back into gear, and she realised that she had just let a bunch of alien powder-kegs go meet a bunch of Goa'uld matches in Earth orbit. The vague semitransparent waves of a subspace window appeared before she could properly think about it and she dived in headfirst, vanishing in her own flash of light.

---

Sitting in the dark, staring at the news reports, Julia Donovan's breath hitched in her throat. She looked at the slightly grainy photos of the ships in the sky.

Two years ago, she'd been tipped off to a secret money trail funnelling billions of US taxpayer money away from the eyes of the public. The cash was being used on a project so hush-hush that even her good contacts at the Pentagon had never heard of it. It'd taken the favours of a whole career just to get absolute proof; which had taken the form of a tiny sample of metal that didn't occur on Earth.

And just when she was ready to go public with it, the government came down on her. Hard. The word "treason" had been thrown around. Her producer folded like a wet towel, as though this wasn't the clearest example of a public-interest story since Watergate.

(For some reason, when she'd said as much to one of the soldiers involved, he'd muttered something under his breath about "wrong gate" that she didn't think for a moment she was supposed to hear.)

Against her better judgement, she'd let Al talk her into a deal – she would get the exclusive scoop of the century in exchange for letting the feds classify it forever. As though that was useful to anyone. Worse, she'd later found out that he'd promised to commit the cardinal sin of journalism – giving up her source.

For that she would have wrung his neck, but she'd been beaten to it. Somehow, her entire film crew – people she'd worked with for months – had secretly been more government goons out to screw over the first set. They'd shot Al, and nearly stolen the focus of her story: a spaceship being built in secret in the Navada desert.

A spaceship called "Prometheus", a picture of which was currently sitting on her TV screen with the label "Unidentified".

An NDA with her signature on it was currently sitting somewhere in a government archive, but screw the feds, this was her story. They'd destroyed what little film had actually been taken, double-crossing bastards, but they couldn't wipe her memories nor find her backup caches. She could still name names, and she still had the money trail.

Though of course the real trick would be doing this without tipping her hand. They'd have much less reason to arrest her if she'd already blown the lid off this deal.

---

The first Ha'tak had her Staff Weapon Canon aimed and ready when Yamato burst onto the scene, her warp jump leaving her firmly between the three pyramid ships and the planet they were after.

The three Ha'tak recoiled in surprise, but quickly recovered and focused their aim on Yamato instead. "See, sisters!" The first Ha'tak cried. "Now we see the coward ships of the Tau'ri at last emerge from hiding!"

"This is your only warning." Yamato clearly enunciated broadcast, making sure she was understood. "You will leave this world be. Otherwise, you will be destroyed."

The three Ha'taks stared at Yamato for a moment, before cruel smirks spread across their faces.

"And who will do that, little ship?" The second Ha'tak mocked. "You?"

Despite having left after Enterprise, the sheer speed disparity between the two meant that Chimaera arrived first, suddenly halting in space with such force that every ship present imagined they could hear a deep thoom.

The Ha'taks were trained from construction for the thrill of combat, to bring glory to their Lord. They did not shirk, they did not waver. Their jaws definitely did not go slack at the sudden appearance of a ship roughly twice their size.

The third Ha'tak's not-at-all-panicked gaze moved between Yamato and Chimaera with the speed of an Asgard hyperdrive. "What treacherous sorcery is this?! What abyss did the Tau'ri pull such a craft from?!"

"Frankly, I couldn't care less about that planet below." Chimaera glared. "But I need to return to my own space at once, which means keeping this group of idiots alive."

TIE Defenders (and the odd surviving Fighter) started streaming out of the folds of Chimaera's uniform two hanger bays. Not to be outdone, Cosmo Tiger IIs started to launch out from the back of Yamato's shirt her rear hanger.

The three Ha'taks quickly did a tactical evaluation – Chimaera looked like she could take one Ha'tak, perhaps two, but with three of them there…

Then Enterprise arrived with a zoom-whoosh and a cry of "Wait!"

The second Ha'tak shifted her aim from Chimaera to Enterprise. "More ships?" She cried.

The third narrowed its eyes, looking at Enterprise's not-quite-human features. "Indeed, sisters! But not a Tau'ri ship… identify yourself!" She demanded.

"I'm the USS Enterprise-D of the United Federation of Planets, and in the name of the Protected Planets Treaty I demand that you cease hostile actions immediately!"

The three Ha'tak looked at each other, their clenched teeth distracting from the furious discussion going on in their gazes.

"Are you of Asgard?" The first Ha'tak demanded.

The three only slightly flinched when Babylon 5 and Galactica jumped in.

"I'm a neutral third-party, here to moderate –"

"Are you of Asgard?!" The Ha'tak loudly interrupted Enterprise. She would have smashed her Staff Weapon into the ground, if it wasn't for the fact that they were currently in orbit.

Enterprise pursed her lips. "My great-great-aunt met Apollo once, does that count?"

"No." The third Ha'tak said flatly, all three ships wondering why this strange ship thought such a minor Goa'uld was relevant.

"Your ancestor met Lord Apollo?!" Galactica cried, just as faint technicolor lines formed and Prometheus exited from her version of hyperspace.

Enterprise's eyes flickered back and forth between the Ha'taks and Galactica for a moment. "Yes? Galactica this isn't really the time –"

"In the flesh?!"

"I mean," Enterprise hesitated. "he turned into wind afterwards? He had this thing about needing worship, and didn't take it very well when my great-great-aunt's crew refused to give it to him –"

"They…! Honestly dearie, did they really not know how to treat a god?" Galactica fumed.

The second Ha'tak snorted, finding herself in agreement with the strange vessel. "Clearly not."

"Not you." Galactica snapped at the Ha'taks. "I mean real gods."

There was silence for a moment, broken only by the sound of Prometheus slapping her palm into her face.

Then in one smooth motion the first Ha'tak raised and aimed her Staff Weapon Cannon –

Six positron beams and uncountable turbolaser shots smashed into that Ha'tak's shields first, physically pushing the ship back and causing her own shots to go wide, the bolts shooting off into deep space.

Enterprise's eyes went wide. "Stop! Stop shooting now or –"

The other two Ha'taks opened fire on Enterprise, who eep'd and threw her arms up to protect her face reinforce her luckily already-up shields, feeling the plasma bolts slam home.

"Do you really think you can take us all!?" Chimaera growled, pulling out a second blaster turning to present a full broadside.

The first Ha'tak grit her teeth. "Sisters! Our mission is accomplished. We must return to our Lord at once!"

With quick flashes of light, the three ships vanished into hyperspace.

Chimaera snorted, holstering her blasters. "Amateurs."

Yamato narrowed her eyes, not yet putting her guns down. "That seemed far too easy for a fleet sent to burn a planet."

"That wasn't Anubis's fleet." Prometheus corrected.

The other ships (and station) all paused, then as one all turned to face Prometheus.

"Say again, dear?" Babylon 5 said faintly.

Prometheus scowled. "That was just a scouting force. Current intelligence puts Anubis's fleet at about 30 Ha'taks and one planet-killing mothership."

"And you wanted us to fight a fleet like that by ourselves?!" Chimaera cried in a strangled tone of voice, one eye twitching.

"Considering the alternative was me fighting a fleet like that by myself, yeah!" Prometheus shot back, undaunted.

"These Asgard –" Enterprise said desperately.

"– have already been contacted." Prometheus interrupted. "No idea what the hold up is, but given Anubis's new ships are a credible threat to the old Asgard Bilisker-class ships, they probably don't have enough O'Neill-classes to spare a couple for us."

Enterprise's face slowly fell, and her eyes were slowly drawn to the blue-and-green sphere below; her expression tinged with guilt.

She could talk about the Prime Directive and the need to avoid acting without the support of the Admiralty all she liked: the simple fact remained that was Earth, heart of the Federation. The thought of it being destroyed left a tightness in her chest that she couldn't ignore.

Prometheus covered her face with both hands and groaned. "It's those blasted shields. Without them we could just nuke 'em into oblivion."

"I know the feeling." Babylon 5 muttered. Before getting caught in the 'rabbit hole' anomaly, she'd only ever faced off against one foe with shielding – the Thirdspace artefact. It had taken the full firepower of the Army of Light just to open a human-sized hole in that shield – and even then for only a moment.

Chimaera pinched the bridge of her nose, eyes shut in frustration. "Yes, that's why all ships have particle shields – so that you don't lose a Star Destroyer to some kid with a proton torpedo."

Prometheus snorted. "Goa'uld ships use plasma shields, not… whatever the hell a particle shield is made of."

Enterprise suddenly perked up. "Plasma shields? You're sure?"

"Sure I'm sure." Prometheus blinked, confused at Enterprise's sudden mood swing. "I was built with Goa'uld tech, remember?"

Enterprise's mouth opened and closed for a moment. Hesitation and guilt warred across her face.

"Enterprise-san…" Yamato said, her gaze steady and her eyes firm.

"Right thing." Normandy added quietly.

"And anyone who thinks it isn't isn't worth listening to, Dearie." Galactica finished.

Enterprise closed her eyes. "But it would mean war." She said, somewhat desperately. "I don't want to be remembered as the next Michael Burnham."

Surprisingly, Prometheus didn't argue the point. "I have no idea who that is," She said, then pointed off in the direction the Ha'taks had left in. "but, they fired on you first, right?"

Enterprise's gaze followed Prometheus's finger for a moment, then turned back to Earth. After another moment, she let out a deep sigh.

"It's going to take all of us together."

---

"…and film crews are currently standing by at several major observatories, and other major networks have their staff at several more. We will be running a special cooperative broadcast in the hopes of bringing you the most comprehensive footage of the events apparently occurring in the sky." The presenter nervously shuffled his papers. "For his opinion on events, we cross live to Professor –"

President Hayes shut off the TV with the remote and massaged his temples. "You sure we can't do anything other than rely on Prometheus and wait for SG1?"

Hammond shook his head. "Our entire stockpile of Mark III warheads was loaded onto Prometheus before it was launched. Even if our modifications since the failures of the Mark Is work as intended, we have no ability to launch them from here – short of ordering Prometheus to do so."

The President resisted the urge to sigh. If he had to announce the truth of what was going on in orbit, he'd much prefer to play up all the cards they had to play rather than admit that they were out of said cards. "Why did the Mark Is fail again? They had a thousand megaton yield, didn't they? Are Ha'taks really that tough?"

"We don't think so, Mr President." Hammond shook his head. "Ha'taks are able to destroy each other with only a few exchanges of fire, and our experience argues against their Staff Cannons being on the gigaton level. The EMP generated at the time of the strike initially had us believing that the Mark Is were insufficient to destroy their targets, but post-action analysis instead concluded that the warheads failed to arm before impacting enemy shielding and being destroyed. That's the major change between the Mark Is and the Mark IIIs – the Mark IIIs are designed to detonate on impact with both solid objects and shielding."

Hayes winced. "And our designated delivery method for those missiles…"

"…was Prometheus, yes sir." Hammond finished. "We still have some F-302s stationed at Area 51, but without any Naquadah-boosted ordnance available to them I recommend keeping them in reserve – in case Anubis tries a bombing run with Al'kesh, as unlikely as that currently is."

"At least that's something." Hayes muttered. Making a small thing seem big and important was practically a required skill for a politician.

Hayes glanced to the other side of the room, where Kinsey was not-so-quietly shouting at someone on the other end of a phone. "Tell me straight, George. Can we win this?"

"We've come out of worse, Mr President." Hammond was trying to be reassuring, so he did not go into detail on how close most of those situations had been – how many bad endings had been glimpsed in the Quantum Mirror or erased with time travel.

Hayes looked back to the TV, absentmindedly fiddling with the remote. "And do you think that now is the time to go public?"

"I don't consider myself qualified to answer that, Mr President." Hammond paused. "However, I should point out that it might not be our decision."

Hayes's eyes blinked in confusion. "Sorry, George?"

"The UN Security Council, sir. We briefed all the permanent members as to the existence and nature of the Stargate program and the then-current state of the galaxy last year."

Hayes's eyes widened and he glanced at an aide, urgency in his eyes. Said aide cleared her throat. "The governments of France, Russia and the UK have made general statements calling for calm, but so far haven't disclosed any information about the Goa'uld or the Stargate program. The Chinese government have issued media blackouts except to tell their people not to believe 'western lies' about ships in orbit. We believe at this time that the CCP has seized control of all observatories in China."

"'The government of China does not believe in keeping secrets from its people', sir?" Hammond muttered darkly, remembering what the Chinese ambassador at the UN had said when informed about the Stargate program.

The aide cleared her throat again. "However, sir, I should mention that the Prime Minister of Japan has made an… interesting statement."

Hayes blinked in confusion again. "George, did we read the Japanese into the situation?"

"No sir Mr President." Hammond confirmed, equally confused.

"He said, and I quote," the aide continued "'Divers are currently on their way to ensure that the wreck of the Yamato still lies on the sea floor. Regardless of what they find, however, I would ask the people of Japan to not panic, but instead to have faith in Yamato.' I'm… not sure if he was joking or not, sir."

For the third time, Hayes could do nothing but blink in confusion. After a moment, however, a thought occurred to him. Shifting through the papers on his desk, he pulled out a print-out of the ships that had unexpectedly appeared in orbit. Slapping it back down on top of his desk, he stared intently at one of the two 'unidentified' craft – the one that, now that he thought about it, looked rather like a WWII battleship with a giant thruster at the stern…

"Well, I'll be dammed."

---

The sky above Earth rippled and tore as thirty subspace windows opened and disgorged thirty Ha'taks. Forming up, the Ha'taks stood guard as a much larger window opened, releasing Anubis's mothership into Earth orbit.

"Hpmh." The mothership's gaze dismissively washed over the gathered ships. "This is what the Tau'ri could scrounge up, is it?"

Prometheus quickly lifted a hand to the side of her helmet. "Prometheus to Stargate Command, requesting permission to engage, over?"

"This is your last chance to avoid pulling the trigger on your own destruction." Yamato warned. "I have seen a battle much like this one play out before – and you are no White Comet."

"Your formation is an absolute disgrace. Half of you are in the way of the other half's line of fire."

"Chimaera, dear, please don't offer advice to the enemy fleet."

"There will be no mercy this day." The mothership cut in, glaring at Yamato. "Your destruction is the will of Lord Anubis, and we are His instruments."

"In the immortal words of James T. Kirk, what does a god need with a starship?" Enterprise added a frown to her already distressed face. "Why not just smite us now and be done with it?"

"Silence!" The mothership roared, before glancing down and rubbing her belly. "Do not worry, my Lord." She said in soothing tones. "Your servant will destroy the heathen Tau'ri without delay."

Weirdly enough, Babylon 5 was staring at that same belly in abject confusion.

"Prometheus this is Stargate Command." The return transmission came in. "You are now clear to engage. Your primary objective is as always the safety of Earth and its people." There was a short pause. "Make us proud. Over."

"Forces of Anubis!" The mothership bellowed. "Make your god…"

The mothership trailed off as she noticed all the Tau'ri ships (well, Galactica and Chimaera weren't Tau'ri ships, but she didn't know that) all looking at a point just behind her left ear. Galactica had a hand over her mouth, failing to conceal a smile. Slightly confused, the mothership turned her head active scans around…

…to see Normandy, floating not 5 kilometres away as though she didn't have a care in the world. "Hello." She said quietly, giving a little mocking wave.

The mothership's face contorted with rage, her fury masking her shock that not a single member of the fleet had noticed the extra ship in the middle of their formation. "Jaffa kree!" She screamed, opening up with her Staff Weapon Cannons.

Normandy glowed a light blue as she shot off, flying suspiciously like a ship that weighed a hundredth of her actual mass. Glowing plasma blasts shot after her, but she was moving so fast that the only targets the staff blasts hit were Ha'tak.

Dozens of Death Glider feathered serpents burst from the pouch hanger bay of every Ha'tak, forming a swarm of hundreds of fighters chasing after one frigate.

Satisfied that Normandy wouldn't be coming back, the Goa'uld fleet turned back around to face the human fleet.

"Time to go!" Prometheus yelled, throwing launching something small out of her sleeve a forward missile tube. The semitransparent sheen of a subspace window appeared in front of Prometheus, and she gestured towards it with haste.

Babylon 5 and Galactica vanished in the flash of a jump drive. Chimaera and Enterprise both aimed themselves directly into the enemy fleet, rushing past them in a rush of pseudomotion and a zoom-whoosh respectively. Yamato, unable to use her warp drive for tactical manoeuvres, instead flew fearlessly into Prometheus's subspace window; Prometheus following immediately afterwards.

The mothership narrowed her eyes, suspicious of the sudden cowardice of the Tau'ri ships…

Which is when the engine on the Mark III 'Unas-buster' that Prometheus had launched ignited. The missile rammed into the shields of one hapless Ha'tak and blew it to kingdom come; in a fireball bright enough to give someone on the Moon sunburn.

"Great bird of the galaxy you were not kidding about the yield on that monster." The slightly scared voice of Enterprise made the mothership spin around turn her attention around to her other side. The human ships had not gone far – barely four thousand kilometres beyond the other side of the fleet.

As all the Goa'uld ships fully turned their attention around, Chimaera scowled. "How many of those do you have remaining?" She asked in a hiss over a private channel.

"Six." Prometheus hissed back responded in the same channel. "Which, in case you can't count, isn't enough."

"They come." Yamato warned, already firing her shock cannons at the incoming Ha'taks.

"Everyone get ready to skip past them again!" Prometheus called out. She grit her teeth. "Really, really hope this plan works."

"That makes two of us." Chimaera scowled, turbolasers blasting away.

---

Weirdly enough, no group on Earth had their eyes more closely glued to the news feeds of the battle in space than the SGC. Sure, they had the radar feeds of what was going on, but there was no substitute for actual pictures.

Weir was biting her bottom lip so hard she was starting to taste blood. For whatever reason, the other ships had joined Prometheus in fighting back against the Goa'uld. But even assuming that she could count on their continued support – which was far from guaranteed – there was no guarantee of victory.

Her spiral of worries was interrupted when the serviceman on the desk next to her leaned up close to his monitor with a "That's strange…"

Weir blinked a couple of times as she pulled her thoughts back into the here and now, then looked down at the serviceman. "What's strange?"

She then paused, taken slightly aback. The serviceman had an honest-to-goodness ruler out and was measuring the images on his screen. "Wait, what are you –"

"Prometheus is 195 meters long, and the Argo was 256 – so Argo should only be a little longer than Prometheus. But you can see in this shot here that Argo is nearly half over half again as long!" The serviceman tapped his screen with his knuckles.

"Maybe the perspective's off?" The servicewoman on the next desk over offered.

The serviceman shook his head. "Prometheus hasn't been opening her subspace windows that wide – the two ships have to be pretty darn close to each other to keep doing FTL microjumps like this."

Before Weir get a word in, the serviceman switched to a shot of the Star Destroyer when it had rolled enough to show them its top. "See this x-shaped construct on the top of the bridge? That's not a comm tower, that's a tractor beam array! Chimaera's the wrong class of Star Destroyer; she should be an Imperial II not an Imperial I!"

"Is this really important?" Weir managed to say before the serviceman powered on.

"And are those TIE Defenders?! Chimaera's the one ship in the Imperial fleet that shouldn't have Defenders, not that any of them should! If anything she should have Missile Boats!"

"Brandon, you're being super-obscure again." The servicewoman the next desk over elbowed her workmate in the ribs.

The serviceman rubbed his side. "Sorry, sorry. TIE Defenders are a super-fighter they made up for the TIE Fighter video game, but they were too expensive to see widespread use. Thrawn invented the Missile Boat to counter them, but those all got put into 'protective storage' after a traitor admiral blew up all their factories."

Weir raised an eyebrow. "'Super' fighter?"

"The next game, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, had a data file saying the Defender wasn't in the game because it would be too powerful. Too powerful! Against X-Wings!"

After a pause, the serviceman realised the whole room was staring at him. "What?"

Weir drew on the full length of her professional career in diplomacy. "I think they're all impressed by your… expertise."

"Neeeeeeeeerrrd!" Someone called from the back of the room, and got kicked in the shins by the airman next to him.

The serviceman rolled his eyes and got back to work.

---

Normandy, meanwhile, was flying a bit of a tightrope act.

She could escape the Death Gliders easily enough – she would just reduce her mass to near-zero, accelerate to, say, 0.75c, and watch the Gliders vanish in her metaphorical rear-view mirror. But that wasn't the plan. So instead she chipped away at their numbers with her handy GUARDIAN laser knife array while they chipped away at her Barriers with their plasma bolts.

Most of the bolts missed, due to being unguided munitions and Normandy flying evasively, but with hundreds of Death Gliders on her tail volume of fire was making up for the lack of accuracy. Precious energy was draining out of her Barrier capacitors faster than Normandy could replenish it.

Normandy's Barriers were both far more and far less effective against plasma bolts than they were against kinetic shells.

On one hand, it didn't take much energy for her Cyclonic Barrier to deflect the relatively slow-moving ultra-light plasma balls, having basically nothing in the way of momentum to resist being diverted.

On the other hand, unlike solid shells her Barriers couldn't assume it had blocked the full attack by blocking part of it. If you just clipped a baseball with an outstretched hand, the ball would bounce away from you – but if you tried the same thing against a lightly-compacted snowball, the snow you didn't block would just continue on to hit you. To make sure the full attack was stopped, the Barrier had to deliberately overcompensate, meaning that far more energy was used blocking the shot than was strictly needed.

She swiped behind herself with her knife fired another sweep with her laser array, causing another set of Gliders to explode as hulls melted and reactors suddenly overheated and underwent what was known in engineering circles as 'Catastrophic Failures'. Even more Gliders were destroyed when those behind them misjudged their angles and blew their own comrades to pieces.

That still left hundreds of Gliders chasing her down, and her Barrier capacitors only had 30% charge left. Normandy was starting to worry…

Then Babylon 5 and Galactica appeared to her front and starboard. Grinning savagely in the way that only small children could manage, Normandy adjusted course. Seeing Babylon 5's eyes flick over to her detecting Babylon 5's active scans, Normandy met her gaze and mouthed tight-beamed one word of warning to both her and Galactica:

"Tag!"

The Death Gliders were suitably confused when the frigate they had been chasing suddenly tripled its acceleration and zoomed off into the distance, but with another enemy ship and an enemy station dead ahead, they weren't exactly hesitant. Screaming tiny little battle cries, the feathered serpents lined up attack runs on two juicy targets – according to their scanners, the two didn't even have shields!

What the Death Gliders hadn't considered, however, is that they didn't have shields either. Nor did they have armour worth the name – the Stargate teams had been known to down them with off-the-shelf Stinger missiles.

So while Galactica might well have been screwed against a Ha'tak, short of another Raptor/nuke kamikaze, she could eat Death Gliders for breakfast and go back for thirds.

Much like Chimaera's TIE Fighters before them, the last sound dozens upon dozens of Death Gliders heard was their micrometeorite alarms a second before running smack into Galactica's flak curtain.

There were sufficient Gliders present that some did avoid the initial slaughter, and figured out that the shiny bits of metal strewn across the stars between them and their target were deadly, and so went around them.

Those Gliders found themselves facing wings of Starfuries, Raptors and Vipers. With the overall manufacturing capabilities of the fleet, each of those fighter-fairies had no shortage of missiles to fire. As the SGC had proven quite effectively with the F-302, even just missiles with conventional warheads let the fighter-fairies reliably kill Gliders from far outside the Glider's own effective range.

By the time the missiles ran out, there were fewer Gliders left than fighter-fairies. And those unfortunate Gliders found out the hard way that a small craft designed to terrify uneducated sustenance farmers was no match for fighters designed by people who were desperate not to lose a war.

---

Meanwhile, SG-1 (and Bra'tac) were in a Tel'tak, a Goa'uld transport vessel about the size of a trawler fishing boat. They were going speeds not normally possible in such an under-powered ship, but O'Neill had done some modifications to the engines that drastically improved their performance. Said modifications somehow required shooting the engine with a Zat'nik'tel, a Goa'uld energy sidearm, so it was quite safe to say this was not how the engine had been intended to be used.

Now normally one would expect such jury-rigging to have been accomplished by the team's physicist, engineer, and all-around genius Carter. However, for better or worse Carter lacked what would later be called the 'Ancient Activation Gene' that caused Ancient technology to mistake a human as one of their builders and activate in their presence. In this case, a Repository of Knowledge had literally clamped itself over O'Neill's head and dumped in millennia of accumulated knowledge.

As the dense packet of information decompressed in O'Neill's head it was overwriting his own memories and would soon kill him. But before he died he would know nearly everything the Ancients had known, and right now that was what they needed to save Earth.

With Bra'tac's help, they had taken the Tel'tak to an abandoned Ancient outpost that nobody had known existed, and had taken what was apparently its power source – a canister of glowing crystals about the size of a football. They were now on their way back to Earth, where O'Neill seemed to think he could save the Earth with the power source.

Carter really wanted to know what that power source was and how it worked – it had somehow powered an entire facility, and the forcefield around it, for tens of thousands of years at least, probably millions.

But far more than that, she wanted to know that O'Neill was going to be alright. He'd lost the ability to speak English some time ago and now could only speak Ancient. This was the second time he'd been affected by one of these Repositories, and last time it had progressed much slower than this. Last time the Asgard had wiped the Repository's knowledge from his mind, saving his life, but at this rate…

O'Neill suddenly frowned, and muttered something in Ancient.

Carter looked over at Daniel, who was already thumbing through a notebook. Apparently finding the page he was after, he said "Huh, that's strange."

"What did O'Neill say?" Teal'c rumbled in his deep, stoic way.

Daniel pushed his glasses up his nose, looking a little lost. "Uh, that is what he said. He said 'Huh, that's strange'."

"Sir?" Carter asked O'Neill directly, looking over his shoulder to see if she could see what it was he'd spotted in the Tel'tak's sensor read-outs. "Sir, what's wro–"

Given that they were travelling at hundreds of thousands of times the speed of light, there was basically no opportunity for SG-1 to feel the squeezing pain that Kirkland and crew had experienced. Their ship simply reached its preprogrammed destination, dropped out of hyperspace…

---

The Tel'tak blinked several times, her face growing more and more frightened as she realised that she had come out of hyperspace at high speed, hurtling into Earth's atmosphere. Shrieking in fear and pain, she desperately pinwheeled her arms fired manoeuvring thrusters full force, changing her course with far more force than a human or Jaffa pilot would have dared. As she started skimming the atmosphere, her head started to hurt something fierce, like it was being pushed apart from the inside…

Then she pulled out of her dive and out of the atmosphere, and as she did the pain in her head receded.

Then she saw the giant fleet of Ha'taks, and panicked.

"Shol'va!" The other Goa'uld ships cursed the Tel'tak. Traitor.

The Tel'tak lifted her arms up in desperation to shield her face put full power to her meagre shields as the Staff Cannon bolts started racing towards her…

But just in time, a subspace window opened and spat out Prometheus, who took the shots with only a grunt of pain. Asgard shielding didn't make her invincible, but it did make her a lot tougher than her weight class would suggest. "You alright? You're the ship carrying SG-1, right?"

The Tel'tak nodded fervently. "Yes, yes! Please, save me!" She squeaked.

Prometheus grunted again, firing her railguns off at the incoming Ha'taks. It wouldn't do much – they were designed to deal with Death Gliders, not capital ships, but she dare not use her naquadah-boosted nukes this close to Earth. Gigaton yield explosives would do Bad Things to the planet's everything. "What was the plan?!"

"What?"

"SG-1!" Prometheus roared. "What were they planning to do once they came back here?!"

Two Ha'taks were closing in, so Prometheus scowled and opened another subspace window. Gesturing to the Tel'tak, the two of them dived into it and emerged on the other side of the battle.

Watching fearfully as the Ha'taks that had been chasing them began to turn around, the Tel'tak swallowed. "Um. They were going to melt through the ice?"

Prometheus blinked. "What?"

"Under the southern continent! They said there was something under the ice!"

"What was? And where?!"

"I don't know, they didn't say where I could hear them!" The Tel'tak wailed. Oh, why oh why did she have to be captured by two shol'va and the Tau'ri?! Now she was a shol'va, to die at the hands of Lord Anubis!

Prometheus swore. "Enterprise! Can you deep-scan Antarctica?"

"If I wasn't being shot at, certainly!" Enterprise replied with only a hint of exasperation. A volley of five photon torpedoes were shot from her sleeves torpedo tubes and slammed into the same spot on a Ha'tak's shields, one after the other. The fourth torpedo broke through the shields, and the fifth gave Enterprise her first kill of the battle.

She couldn't feel too proud about that, however, given how many phaser, shock cannon and turbolaser shots it had taken to weaken the shield sufficiently beforehand.

"Do not let the shol'va ship escape! Destroy it completely!" Anubis's mothership roared.

Prometheus grit her teeth. "The hard way it is, then."

---

Anubis's mothership ground her teeth. Her loyal Ha'tak escorts were performing their duties admirably, but the Tau'ri ships refused to be swatted like the bugs they were; appearing and disappearing on all sides of the battle.

What their aim was, she could not fathom. While their cowardly tactics had succeeded in felling members of her fleet, the Tau'ri had not escaped unscathed – she was slowly but surely whittling their shields down to nothing, and soon they would fall.

For a group armed with the Knowledge of the Ancients, they were putting up a far poorer performance than she would have expected. Where the ships of unfamiliar design had come from she did not know – though according to legend the Ancients could reach into the realm of the could-have-beens, perhaps they had been drawn from there – but they were no match for the might of Lord Anubis.

Muffled noises of anger emerged once again from her midsection, and the mothership winced. Speaking of Lord Anubis, he had not calmed at all since her entry into the system, no matter how much she reassured him that she had the battle well in hand.

The mothership ground her teeth. If only the coward Tau'ri had not destroyed her sister-ship, she could have obliterated their pathetic planet with the Eyes of the Goa'uld. As it was, while she had been built with the same super-weapon, she lacked a power source potent enough to power it.

Knowing that she should have the power to sweep these irritants from the sky but lacking one key element left her feeling infuriatingly impotent. In frustration, she glanced down at the superweapon hanging from the silks that formed the waist of her outfit built into her centre, where a light on the side internal diagnostics reported that the weapon sat at 13% charge.

…

Ignoring the battle around her, the mothership slowly looked at the superweapon in wonder. As she watched, it ticked over into 14% charge. The capacitors were deriving charge from… somewhere.

Was it a result of the strange subspace disturbance enveloping the system? Nay, this could be nothing other than a blessing from Lord Anubis for her loyalty.

The mothership began to laugh in a slow, deep voice, uncaring as another Ha'tak died to the Tau'ri. What did their pitiful resistance matter? In a few minutes they, and their pathetic planet, would cease to matter.

 

[Sora Neki]

Originally posted by... me!

---

"You ever wonder why we're here?" Mother of Invention asked the uncaring stars. She rolled a shoulder. She was wearing the same armour as every combat member of Project: Freelancer. It looked like MJOLNIR armour, but was way cheaper, less effective, and - she had to assume - less comfortable.

Horde Prime's flagship - seriously, that's how she had introduced herself when Mother of Invention had asked for her f***ing name - sighed deeply. Mother of Invention had no way of knowing this, but the flagship looked like a creature that didn't actually exist - a female Horde clone. She still had the green, pupil-less eyes, bat-like ears and grey-and-white skin; but her shoulders were much less broad, her hair dropped down to mid-back, and she had a modest curving of the hips and bust. She still wore the Horde clone robes, with the Horde emblem emblazoned prominently on her chest. "Such questions are quite foolish." She admonished. "Not to mention, entirely pointless."

"Screw you, bitch." Mother of Invention shot back reflexively, her helmet bobbing up and down slightly as she spoke.

Horde Prime's flagship raised an eyebrow. "How... eloquent."

"I've just had a Slip Termination - which is basically the scariest two words a starship can hear - and instead of disintegrating into like a trillion tiny pieces I end up here. ...wherever the hell 'here' is. So I'm wondering - is this Hell? Space Purgatory? If this place is real, did I end up here by accident, or did God freaking finger-flick me down here?"

"Come now." The flagship shook her head reproachfully. "Surely it is obvious that this is an opportunity?"

Mother of Invention gave the flagship a flat look (though it was hard to tell given that her visor was still polarised). "An opportunity." She said, flatly.

"Of course." The flagship gave a smile with a low-key sinister undertone. "All of creation is Horde Prime's by right. Without this... serendipitous happenstance, this space might well have gone undiscovered! And that would be terrible - to be left out of Horde Prime's grace and mercy? Why, it does not bear thinking about!"

"All of creation."

"Naturally."

"So, like, does that mean this Horde Prime dude owns everybody's asshole?"

The flagship's serene expression was at once replaced by furious incredibility. "What?"

"'Cause, you know, 'all of creation' has to include all the butt holes, right? I've always found them gross myself, but I know some people are into that -"

"Horde Prime is not interested in inefficient waste holes!" Horde Prime's flagship screeched, blushing furiously.

Mother of Invention cocked her head. "Really? I mean, you said he was fond of you..."

The heavy fog of rage was starting to shroud all of the flagship's thoughts. "I was going to ask Horde Prime to recycle you into a Horde Frigate, so that you too would have the honour of serving the Horde. Now, though, I can see that nothing short of burning in a star is sufficient to cleanse your filth. Do you have any last words?"

"Honestly, I was just talking out of my ass until my MAC finished charging." Mother of Invention shrugged. "Also: firing main cannon."

Horde Prime's flagship made a sound... how to describe it? It was kinda like the sound of a juice box being flattened by a steamroller, but like, super fast. Oh! Or, like somebody shooting a water balloon, but crunchy.

Y'know what, maybe it's best just to call it "the sound of hundreds of metric tonnes of metal slug smashing into the Horde ship's face and out its stupid, flat ass; making the whole ship look like a stomped soft drink can".

Not that Mother of Invention could hear it.

Y'know, being in space and all.

Dumbass.

---

If you can't remember MoI, she's the frigate who did this:


View: https://youtu.be/zZ0rX03nZaU?t=270

---

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power was a great show, do recommend, but you watch it for the drama and not for the sci-fi or fantasy elements.

Horde frigates are basically statless. There's a loose implication that a fleet of them can shatter a planet, and another implication that the flagship can teleport people across solar systems (we know she can teleport people, the distance is unclear). Other than that, nothing. Horde fighters can be destroyed by She-Ra's sworda beamu, but that doesn't really help either. We literally never see a single space battle in the show, other than said beamu.

EDIT: I have since been informed that the WOG on Horde Prime's flagship is that her name is The Velvet Glove.

 

[Sora Neki]

Yamato had decided that she really hated fighting shielded ships. She had grown used to being able to sweep enemy ships from the skies with a single shock cannon blast raked across their ranks. In her mind, the Cube had been an exception, not a rule. A monster of a ship whose danger was now past.

Unfortunately, these 'Ha'tak' were continuing the trend.

She was reasonably sure her shock cannons threatened the Goa'uld ships, but unfortunately they were not stupid – especially not after several of their number had already fallen. When one ship's shields became low, she would simply retreat back into the pack and let other ships cover for her. Worse, Goa'uld shields recharged in minutes, unlike her own, and she could already see ships she had forced to withdraw back on the "front line".

The other problem, though this applied only to Yamato herself, was that the plan had been that Prometheus would use her Faster-Than-Light drive to take her across the battlefield. Prometheus's drive could both take 'passengers' and be used multiple times in succession; whereas her own drive would melt if not given hours to cool down.

Then, of course, Prometheus had dashed off to rescue what appeared to be an ally of hers. Yamato did not begrudge her this. Yamato's concern was simply that Prometheus had left her behind when she had done this.

With her wave-motion shield punched full of holes by Staff Weapon Cannon blasts, Yamato was rather hoping Enterprise's plan would kick in about now. But no – Yamato could see that the enemy fleet was still too dispersed. Enterprise had required that they all be within a 40km radius sphere. In the domain of space, they may as well have been rubbing shoulders at that distance.

Chimaera's idea to force them to keep changing direction to chase the fleet was working. But slowly – too slowly. The fleet would start losing members soon at this rate, and once the first domino had fallen it would be near-impossible to reverse the momentum of the battle.

There was only one thing for it. Yamato closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again – full of focus and determination.

"Combat speed one!"

The Ha'tak in front of her was initially unconcerned as Yamato roared across the stars towards her. She thought, no doubt, that Yamato would disappear and reappear on the other side of the battlefield as had been their strategy until now.

The Ha'tak began to look confused as Yamato continued onward, perplexed as the much smaller starship continued to accelerate forwards. Even if Yamato rammed her, she was too small to destroy her outright… wasn't she?

Indeed, seconds before impact, Yamato lunged to the side suddenly fired all her manoeuvring thrusters on one side, changing her course just enough so that her shields skidded off the Ha'tak's, rather than slam fully into them.

The two vastly different defences – one formed of simple plasma, the other a solidified form of the collective wave-motion of other dimensions – sparked and fizzled as they were pressed into each other. The actual point of contact was quite small – Yamato's shields were cigar-shaped, and the Ha'tak's were spherical – but in that area of forced overlap Yamato could see the energies recoiling at the other's touch.

Then it was over, and she had passed that outermost Ha'tak; who was only just realising that she had just failed to stop Yamato from getting inside their formation.

Several of the Ha'tak attempted to fire on her, of course. Some of them even hit – she was not nearly as fast nor as nimble as Normandy was. One particularly unlucky hit went through an existing hole in her shield and just lightly brushed against her hull. Even that glancing hit was enough to melt through her skin armoured hull, causing her flesh to melt and bubble exposing three compartments to vacuum. Several flammable materials ignited from the heat, combining with her venting atmosphere to spew thick, billowy clouds of smoke into space.

And then, she was in the middle of the formation; facing two suddenly very scared Ha'taks who had yet to finish recharging their shields. Slowly but surely, ignoring the pain, Yamato took aim with her shock cannons.

Both of her forward main batteries spat three positron beams each, soaring across the void. Each beam was jacketed in a blue plasma sheath – a magnetic bottle – to stop the positrons repelling each other and the beams dispersing into uselessness before reaching the target. These magnetic bottles, running in parallel, readily attracted each other; causing the three beams to spiral around a central point, closer and closer, until they merged into one. The two super beams seemed to push forward, somehow picking up even more speed, before smashing into their targets.

Back-lit by the two ships exploding even as she soared past them, Yamato had to endure one more hit from a Staff Weapon Cannon, though fortunately this one did not penetrate what was left of her shield. Then she was out of the formation of Ha'taks, most of whom had turned their attention inwards and moved closer together to try to crush the interloper in their midst.

Tuning to face the Goa'uld fleet once more, Yamato's rocket wings main engine continued its roar, though this time it was bleeding off speed rather than building it up. She slid to a stop, neat as parade formation, next to Prometheus – who was blinking rapidly, trying to figure out how the heck Yamato had survived pulling that crazy stunt.

Looking at the enemy formation – down two ships for her action, and now sitting in a 50km radius sphere – Yamato turned and raised an eyebrow at Prometheus. "Shall we continue?"

---

While the capital ships were busy zooming about, if one paid closer attention, there was another battle going on at a smaller scale. With Normandy luring all the Death Gliders away, the Ha'tak's had lost all their anti-fighter ability – something they were only belatedly realising as F-302s, TIE Defenders and Cosmo Tiger IIs flew between them with near-impunity.

Some of the Ha'taks – of the already small number who cared about the small craft – tried in desperation to swat those 'flies' with their Staff Weapons Cannons. The fighter-fairies were in general agreement that this was a net positive for them – the only nearby targets the Ha'taks were likely to hit was each other. Each of the fairies were trained to avoid similar weaponry – Garmillas and Gatlantis positron cannons, turbolaser fire, or in the case of the 302s, actual staff fire.

Unfortunately, the Tigers and the 302s did not have the firepower to seriously threaten a Ha'tak, meaning that the Defenders were flying around with a distinct sense of smug superiority. In flights of five, they would gang up on a Ha'tak whose shields the capital ships had already weakened and finish it off with their powerful laser cannons.

So when the Al'kesh were released into the fray, they were perturbed to see the fighter-fairies arrayed against them cheering at their appearance.

Events quickly devolved into a hairball of missile trails, 'laser' fire, and the odd plasma bomb released in desperation. Unlike Death Gliders, Al'kesh had shields – but they were bombers and troop carriers, not fighters, and it showed.

One 302 found themselves flying in formation with a Cosmo Tiger II, making an attack run on an Al'kesh. Not being idiots, they were flying towards the bomber from 'above', meaning it was largely helpless against the missiles they were launching.

Stealing a sideways glance at the Tiger, the 302 said something in a high-pitched voice.

The Tiger blinked with surprise at the comment, looking down at the skintight latex-like uniform she wore. Looking back up at the 302, she retorted in short, clipped tones.

The 302's hand made to clutch the American flag on the shoulder of her Death Glider-style plate-metal amour, stopping herself short. Her other fist shook itself angrily in the Tiger's direction.

Their argument was interrupted by a Defender swooping in from above, adding to the dispute with her own haughty comment, her black flight suit polished and gleaming in the starlight.

The 302 and Tiger shared a look for a moment, then both quickly curved away from their current path; leaving the Defender looking nonplussed for a moment. Then a plasma bomb slammed into her from above. The arrogant Defender had only been tracking the locations of the Ha'tak, dismissing the Al'kesh as a non-threat, and had missed one sneaking up behind them.

The Defender survived, but with her uniform scuffed and covered in soot shield critically low she was forced to quietly limp away back to her own squadron, leaving her shattered pride behind.

That Al'kesh then disappeared in a fireball as a flurry of missiles overwhelmed her shields, and the 302 and the Tiger shared a fist-bump waggled their wings at each other before returning to their motherships for re-arming.

---

Chimaera found herself growing angrier and angrier as the battle continued.

By all rights, she shouldn't have been. The battle was proceeding embarrassingly well for her side – despite her side being horrendously outnumbered and outgunned. The enemy fleet had clearly never practised fleet manoeuvres before – they were getting in each others way almost as much as they were failing to cover for each other's weaknesses.

Like right now – she was staring down one of the enemy ships, focusing ion and turbolaser fire on her to ruthlessly hammer her shields off. The Ha'tak had tried to retreat back into the centre of the formation, but Chimaera had simply locked tractor beams and continued her barrage. Apparently, they'd never dealt with tractor beams before either.

While she was preoccupied doing that, the other members of the fleet should have been manoeuvring to cut off her escape routes, removing her ability to evade fire. Instead they were powering towards her, full thrust, their goal the glory of killing her rather than assisting their comrade. Their mothership, who should have been fighting to get this fleet back into some form of order, wasn't. She seemed perfectly content to watch her own ships be shot out from under her while she stared at the planet – what was its name, Soil? - with a bloodthirsty grin.

Breaking the Ha'tak's shields with another round of ion cannon blasts, Chimaera put a barrage of turbolasers into her victim, then one more to be sure, before releasing and microjumping to the other side of the battlefield, looking for more targets.

An enormous flash of light and heat signalled Prometheus using another of her absurdly powerful missiles to take out another Ha'tak. The emperor would surely be furious to discover that his precious "mobile battle station" would be seriously threatened by the first ship ever built by a people using scavenged technology they barely understood.

Maybe that was why Chimaera was furious. She recognised this incompetence. She knew these absurd design priorities. Take away the gold facade (and it had better be a facade, gold made terrible armour) and the screaming of nonsense about gods, and you had an average fleet from the Galactic Empire. Glory hounds more interested in impressing their superiors than actually doing their job well.

Not the Seventh Fleet, obviously – Chimaera and her admiral had whipped those ships into shape nicely. But the simple truth of the matter was that the emperor was clearly more interested in spreading fear and terror across the galaxy than he was in having an actually effective navy. The designers from Sienar Fleet Systems could wax poetic about 'cost efficiency' all they liked, Chimaera had never doubted for a moment that their contract to build starfighters had been awarded because their Twin Ion Engine design made a loud, distinctive 'screaming' noise in atmosphere.

These tactics might have worked for Grand Moff Tarkin back when he had been fighting pirates. Nobody would soon forget the story of when he had disabled a pirate ship's engines and pushed it into a star's gravity well. Every ship in the sector had been able to hear her furious curses slowly turn to begging for mercy over the course of hours, and the long final screams as the pirate ship melted.

That had worked against cowardly, superstitious pirates. It had demonstrably not worked on the self-proclaimed 'Alliance to restore the Republic' (though why anyone would want to bring back that corrupt, inept institution was beyond her), and Chimaera could see that it wasn't working here.

And if you had prioritised 'being scary' over 'being dangerous', then you found yourself at a marked disadvantage fighting people who couldn't afford to be afraid.

Those hard angles – much like her own, designed to worry rather than the reassure as the soft curves of her temporary fleet-mates did. The gold engravings, designed to proclaim the wealth and power of the ships' owners; a bold claim of "we are better than you". Her admiral would be able to predict the exact movements of every ship with this much decadence, but she could at least see how the general flow of this battle would go.

And oh yes, she recognised this kind of stupidity. It was why she was certain that the Goa'uld ships hadn't noticed that chasing after the fleet whenever they appeared was drawing their formation closer and closer together.

Chimaera locked onto another Ha'tak with her tractors, imagining the Jaffa ship had the face of Kassius Konstantine's Interdictor instead as she began to pound it into scrap.

---

"To bring you their take on current events…" The CNN presenter looked physically pained. "We bring you two… experts on the subject matter at hand."

"Thanks Pete!" The first new face smiled like a 200-watt bulb.

"Glad to be here!" The second new face was obviously a sibling of the first, and was also nearly ecstatic in their facial expression.

Both new faces wore corporate uniforms of the network, and were giddily bouncing up and down. Name tags on their shirt read "Jill" and "Josh". It seemed that both had been camera operators or similar before being called up like this – the network must be desperate for someone to interview.

"So, given apparent events above our heads –" The presenter got halfway through their prompt before Jill interrupted him.

"Oh yeah, this is brilliant!" Jill beamed. "Using Attackinator ships as the bad guys was a stroke of genius – X-treme is such a niche show that barely anyone will care about them being curbstomped!"

The presenter looked extremely confused, but at the same time afraid to ask. "A stroke of genius?"

"Oh yeah!" Josh jumped in. "Everybody's cheering on their favourite spaceship… well, the B5 fans would probably rather a White Star, and the Star Wars fans are probably a bit conflicted about cheering for a Star Destroyer, even Thrawn's, but barely anybody will be cheering for the Attackinators! Good fun all around!"

The presenter took a long blink. "What… exactly do you think is going on in orbit?"

Jill bounced up and down on her chair. "The world's biggest fan-film, of course!"

"Fan-play, sis." Josh corrected. "It's actually happening up in orbit, after all."

The presenter now looked like he wanted a stiff drink. "You think… that somebody is, what, playing with model ships up in orbit?"

"Are they really models if they're life-sized?" Jill asked rhetorically.

"Who in the world would have the ability to make models like that, let alone the time and energy?"

"Isn't it obvious?" Josh held both of his hands up in front of him like he was holding an invisible box. "Aliens."

The presenter took a long, deep breath, closed his eyes, and exhaled. Exhaustion tinting his voice, he asked "And who do you think is going to 'win' this battle?"

Both siblings grinned at each other, reached under the desk and each pulled out a stack of reference books – Incredible Cross-Sections, the TNG Technical Reference Manual, and more. "Well…" They said in unison.

"Mr President, if you want an analysis of the battle overhead I'd be happy to give my opinion." Hammond said somewhat dryly.

The president glanced over at Hammond. "Has there been any development since 'no clear indication of victory for either party'?"

"…" Hammond didn't respond.

"Then I might as well see what the people of the US are seeing." The president changed the channel to MSNBC.

"If you can see behind me, Will, nearly seven thousand members of the so-called 'New Age' movement have gathered here today. They claim that since the spaceships overhead were clearly manifested from human imagination, that they will come together and make them disappear again using the power of 'collective disbelief'."

Hammond wished them success in principle; though a deep part of him thought that if those next-level hippies actually succeeded, that would scare him so hard he'd go bald, again.

The president then switched to BBC.

"BBC management has announced they are moving up the release of their revival of the classic and much-loved science fiction TV show Doctor Who, following its cancellation in 1986. No official word has been given yet if this announcement was prompted by the apparent space battle over our heads. However, one employee, speaking off the record, said that the announcement was absolutely made in the hopes that, and I quote, 'The Doctor hurries up and saves us already'."

"What is going on over there?" Kinsey was apparently done with his discussion with Barrett, and was now slinking back over to the Resolute Desk, a suspicious glare on his face.

President Hayes waved a hand in the general direction of the TV, and switched to Fox News.

"Later on in this segment we will be interviewing writing staff from the shows in question. Clearly, these so-called 'creatives' are trying to imply that the American people aren't capable of defending themselves. Another example of Hollywood's dismissal of American military capabilities – that is, if aliens aren't themselves behind these literal plots!"

Kinsey turned slightly pale, then frantically waved his hand at Barrett. For his part the NID agent looked rather sceptical, but several furious hushed words from his boss got him moving.

President Hayes watched that confrontation in slight confusion, then shrugged and changed back to CNN.

"What do you say to information provided by reporter Julia Donovan, claiming to be proof that one of the spaceships in orbit was built by the US Air Force in a secret hanger in Nevada?" The CNN presenter told his two workmates.

Jill and Josh shared a look, then in perfect unison rolled their eyes. "Yeah, sure." They said in stereo.

"That woman is in breach of her NDA!" Kinsey ground his teeth.

"I don't think she cares." Hammond groaned.

"Wait…" Pete the presenter suddenly cut in again, a hand to his earpiece. "We're now getting reports of three Attackinator ships splitting off from the main fleet; heading straight for Earth."

The camera cut back to Jill and Josh just in time to see them glance at each other, looking suddenly panicked. "F–"

---

None of the Earth-friendly fleet had yet cracked the Goa'uld's equivalent to a Friend-or-Foe identification system (being sufficiently occupied with the battle), but if they had, they would be only slightly surprised to find that the three Ha'taks that had broken off were the three Ha'taks that had been scouting earlier.

"I told you!" The first Ha'tak puffed angrily, the back of her silks giving off a soft, subtle glow concealed engines at maximum power. "I told you that the Tau'ri were naught but cowards!"

"We did not disbelieve you, sister, but to think that they would avoid honourable combat with such fervour…!" The second Ha'tak replied.

The three did not consider even for a moment that they likely wouldn't be so keen on an 'honourable' battle if the Ha'taks did not outnumber the defenders so badly.

"I do not understand, however, why we are leaving our assigned formation." The third Ha'tak cut in.

"Do you know the tale of Re'tick the Devious?" The first Ha'tak answered with a question.

"I do." The third Ha'tak answered, slightly confused. "He was a great warrior of great renown, but his most famous battle was against the cowards of Dri'el."

"The Dri'el had incurred the wrath of the gods, and so Re'tick was sent to exterminate them. But their cowardly warriors hid in the forest and struck only at night, in ambushes." The first Ha'tak picked up the story.

"Furious at being denied honourable battle, Re'tick burned down the villages that the warriors of Dri'el were hoping to protect. When even this did not flush the cowards out, Re'tick burned down the forests as well. Thus, they all died painful and dishonourable deaths." The second finished.

"Ah, I begin to see." The third nodded. "You wish to utilise that great wisdom here."

"I do." The first Ha'tak pointed a finger vaguely in the direction of France. "Our goal is no longer to provoke them – now they will fight us directly, or be forced to watch their planet burn."

---

"I don't have an angle to intercept!" Enterprise screamed frantically. Two Ha'taks had, deliberately or not, cut off the paths she would have taken to warp in.

"Prometheus-san…!" Yamato grit her teeth.

"They're right in my face, I can't manoeuvre!" Prometheus's eyes flicked from side to side, looking desperately for a way forward. To FTL away, she'd have to move backwards – and by the time she made it back…!

"None of us can get there in time." Chimaera clicked her tongue, dismissing Normandy as not being able to stop the bombardment. "There isn't a ship here that can stop this!"

---

And without any fanfare, the three Ha'tak opened fire.

---

And so, there weren't any spaceships that could stop that bombardment.

There was, however, one space station.

Babylon 5 appeared in a flash of light, Interceptor Grid already active and tracking targets. With balls of plasma already flying towards her, the station opened fire. Specialised plasma and particle beam weapons, designed to pop magnetic bottles and disrupt other beam weaponry, collided with the staff blasts and burst them apart in flashes of fire. The intense heat of the plasma quickly faded into inconsequence as said plasma was spread across the void.

Despite her encouraging start, Babylon 5 was sweating hard. Can't intercept them all…! I have to prioritise the ones headed for major cities…!

Galactica, still strapped in around Babylon 5's waist docked to her midsection tried to help, but her kinetic kill rounds hadn't been designed to intercept plasma in this way, and had little effect on the staff rounds. "I'm sorry!" She cried. "I can't help here!"

Babylon 5 shook her head. "I know dear, but right now I really need to focus…!"

The three attacking Ha'taks snarled at their attacks being thwarted, and the three spread their fire out, making Babylon 5's already difficult job even harder. Intercept rate at 90%… 80%…! Despite her best efforts, balls of plasma were flying past her, on their way to western Europe. She couldn't fire her interceptors fast enough to keep up with the Ha'taks' combined rate of fire…!

BOOM …(Babylon 5's imagination filled in).

There was an intense flash of heat and light… but not from the Earth's surface.

The three Ha'taks unceremoniously died as one furious battlecruiser emerged from a subspace window, proceeded by three of her remaining Mark III warheads and followed by the still frightened Tel'tak. A patch on her shield was still fading out, the only visible sign of the ramming action that had let her get her so quickly.

"Bastards!" Prometheus snarled, Yamato watching her back. "Did they hit anything?" Please please please say they didn't hit anything…!

Babylon 5 bit a lip, rotating like a ballerina so that she was facing Earth. "I think I got the ones headed for cities… but some of the ones aimed at power stations and such made it through…!"

Prometheus swore, violently, and turned suddenly back to the remaining Ha'tak fleet. "Nobody bombs my planet and lives to brag about it!" She snarled, diving back into the fray. I've got two Mark IIIs left, bastards! Who wants to die first?!

Yamato followed, face grave. Prometheus-san will not appreciate me saying so, but if this is the worst that happens to her Earth this day then she should count herself extremely fortunate.

Babylon 5 bit the inside of a cheek.

One thing that all spacefarers agreed on, whether they were ship or station, messing around with solar sails or time travel, was that planets were really fragile. A decent-sized ship could fall on a planet and that would do it – you'd have another dinosaur extinction. This wasn't something that planetary populations liked to think about, but it was true. Having actual planetary bombardment weaponry only made the crime easier.

Babylon 5 had been built after the Battle of the Line, when the Minbari had been making their final attack on Earth, but it had such an effect on her crew (and galactic politics) that she'd made sure to pay attention every time someone had talked about it. One of the things she remembered was that the riots on Earth – as those trapped on the planet's surface lashed out in panic, knowing there wasn't nearly enough time or ships to get everybody away – had killed almost as many people as the battle in orbit had.

Concentrating hard, Babylon 5 shut her eyes, took a deep breath, and transmitted as hard as she could. It's alright, we've got you. It's alright, we've got you. It's alright, we've got you…!

"Dearie." Galactica admonished. "You're doing that speaking-without-speaking thing again."

"I know, dear." Babylon 5 sighed. She supposed it would have been too much to hope that Galactica hadn't noticed or remembered those times before… "But right now, I really need to focus." She resumed her broadcast, hoping events wouldn't make her a liar.

…and that she didn't accidentally start a cult or two. The Vorlons had long since passed Beyond The Rim, but she felt that they'd somehow manage to get in touch to tell her just how insufferably smug they were if that happened.

---

About half of the Ha'tak fleet was left at this point. For an Earth fleet this would have been grievous, crippling losses – but that was partially because they cared about the lives of their soldiers. Anubis barely cared about the resource investments that the ships represented.

Still, morale, as it were, was high. Despite their cowardly tactics, the defending fleet was clearly on their last legs, shields depleted. More than that, the deaths of their three scouts had clued the attacking fleet in that they could force the defenders to stand and fight, less they fail in their defence.

"Forwards, sisters!" One of the Ha'taks cried out. "The cowards cannot stop us now!"

"Actually," came a broadcast on a Goa'uld frequency, speaking fluidly in the Goa'uld language "we already have. This battle is over."

The Ha'tak fleet turned as one to see Enterprise floating off to the side of their formation, her hands deflector dish charged with energy and a holographic warning symbol that definitely wasn't a magic circle spread out behind her.

"Fire, sisters! Interrupt the Tau'ri magic –" Another Ha'tak called, but Enterprise was already thrusting her hands forwards. A purple beam shot forwards and into the shield of a Ha'tak in the centre of their formation. That beam spun around the outside of the shield and then leapt off again into the shield of another ship in the formation – on and on until every Ha'tak had been hit by the beam. The beam's glow suddenly brightened, and then was gone.

There was a moment of silence, then when nothing happened beyond their shields still glowing faintly the Ha'taks started to laugh mockingly.

"What pitiful magic the Tau'ri conjure!" A mocking voice called out from the fleet, and Enterprise found herself staring down many, many Staff Weapons Cannons, crackling with charging plasma.

"What exactly was that supposed to do?" Prometheus narrowed her eyes.

Enterprise shook her head, unthreatened. "That polaron particle burst I just sent out established a temporary waveguide conduit between each Ha'tak here. Essentially, every shield they have is now boosting the power of every other shield they have – exponentially."

Prometheus stared in stunned silence for a moment. "You… WHAT?!

Enterprise held up a finger. "Wait for it…"

A volley of Staff fire left the fleet…

…then slowed, stopped, and flew backwards into the Ha'taks, splashing against their shields.

"Wha…" A Ha'tak went to ask, then looked at annoyance at her sister-ship next to her. "Sister, cease moving in my direction. You will collide with me."

"I?" The other Ha'tak replied. "Tis you who are headed towards me!"

Angry shouts went up in the fleet at the realisation that they were all moving towards each other. Desperate attempts to move apart were made, but soon all of the ships were slamming into each other, shield against shield, as the fleet started to resemble a sphere of tightly-packed marbles.

Curiously, unlike when Yamato had scraped shields earlier, there were no fields of recoiling energy as the shields overlapped. In fact, if you looked really closely, the fields of overlapping magnetic shells seemed to squeeze out the plasma, meaning that the shields had holes where they overlapped.

"There's a good reason nobody back home uses plasma shields anymore." Enterprise said, matter-of-factly. "With their shield strength boosted that high, and the fleet drawn in so close, the magnetic containment fields holding the plasma of their shields in also draws in the other ships in the fleet; holding them fast. The particle burst also randomised their shield polarities, in case you're wondering how they have so many magnetic opposites. If they'd all be the same polarity, they'd all be repelling each other instead."

Prometheus shook her head in stunned amazement. "Always trust an Enterprise to pull some technobabble BS out of…" She trailed off. "Aw man. I can't do it. I actually understood half of that! Man, it's hard playing dumb and cracking jokes and being the smart one."

"I do not see a rakugo theatre in your future, no." Yamato said dryly.

"…a what now?" Prometheus blinked.

"Oh!" Enterprise gushed. "It's a fascinating form of Japanese performance art where one actor does multiple roles, seated –"

"And I already don't care." Prometheus interrupted, causing Enterprise to pout then turn away in a huff.

---

Enterprise, Chimaera mused, had turned the Ha'tak's biggest strength into a crippling weakness with only a few minutes of preparation and the name of the technology involved.

Chimaera had to take Enterprise home with her. Yamato too, if she could incapacitate the both of them. Together, they'd make the Empire unchallengeable.

…or cause it to implode in upon itself. Possibly even on purpose. Hmm. On second thought, maybe she'd let them go.

---

"Wait a minute." Prometheus suddenly narrowed her eyes. "Where's that mothership?"

"Here!"

The unexpectedly loud shout from Normandy had every ship turning frantically. Next to the scout frigate, frantically waving her arms broudcasting on radio, subspace radio and tightbeam with as much power as she could manage, was Anubis's mothership. She was aiming a gigantic Staff Cannon a co-axial weapon down at Earth below, power crackling around the opening.

"How did she avoid Enterprise's… whatever that was?!" Chimaera demanded.

"That's Anubis's anti-planet superweapon!" Prometheus gasped. "But how?! SG-1 destroyed the power source for that!"

Enterprise gasped. "Computer! Estimate time until enemy mothership can fire!"

"67 seconds." Came the grim answer, delivered in a far-too-calm tone.

Prometheus swore, and fired her last remaining Mark III warheads – but the mothership had apparently been paying some attention, and destroyed the two missiles well before they reached her with two well-aimed Staff Weapon Cannon blasts.

Prometheus's frantic cursing was cut off along with her visibility of the mothership, a think cloud of blood bellowing smoke obscuring her view.

Yamato was charging towards the mothership.

---

"– repeat, recommend all SGC personnel evacuate ASAP!"

Weir shook her head. She knew that the Anubis superweapon worked by detonating the Stargate of a planet, and letting the explosion of the hundreds of kilograms of naquadah that made up the gate do the work of incinerating the planet's surface. Stargate Command would be ground zero – the only place they could possible evacuate to would be the Alpha Site, and their jury-rigged dialling computer simply wasn't fast enough.

The serviceman sitting at the desk next to her rubbed his chin.

"Huh." He said. "Now that I think about it, does Prometheus's voice sound like her comm officer's – like Lieutenant Pauline's to anyone else?"

Weir sighed, but supposed that 'distracted by pointless inane things' was hardly the worst way to die.

---

The mothership saw Yamato coming, of course. "You are too late, Tau'ri!" She mocked, firing a flurry of staff blasts at the far smaller ship.

With a rush of pseudomotion, Chimaera appeared between Yamato and the mothership, taking the first round of hits on her much-abused ray shield. "Oh, do shut up." The Star Destroyer snapped. "Your escorts have been rendered irrelevant. Are you really so arrogant to think that one superweapon will win you the day?"

She filed away the sudden snort of laughter from Prometheus as yet another thing to confront the battlecruiser on later.

"You cannot stop me!" The mothership cried, loosing another salvo of staff blasts. "By the Eye of Balor!" She didn't actually have the Eyes of the Goa'uld, but she'd never had the chance to use the Sacred Chant…

Chimaera fired her ion cannons, the blasts of energy colliding with the staff blasts and annihilating both in bright flashes of light. She looked quite bored. "On the contrary, stopping you will be quite simple. Yamato, you may fire when ready."

"I do not need your permission, Chimaera-san." Yamato rebuffed, but formed her finger-gun regardless. "Open wave-motion gun outlet." She muttered under her breath, as streamers of energy began to coalesce into a bright blue ball at her fingertip. "Engine pressure at 20%…"

---

The ISS had long since stopped being able to make sense of events, but she kept her little camcorder aimed at the action as best she could, in the hopes that someone calmer than her could make heads or tails of what was going on. With a jolt, gravity suddenly flipped on her, and she suddenly found herself flying out of her orbit.

As she spun, she saw that ship that had diverted her orbit before – Normandy, according to the name on her armour hull – was now using her magic gravity powers to drag her away from Earth as fast as –

ISS's breath hitched in her throat.

Normandy was dragging her away from Earth, because she might be all Normandy could save.

---

"By the Eye of Osiris!"

"All energy to wave-motion gun. Initiate forced induction. Engine pressure at 40%."

Out of missiles, Prometheus was reduced largely to a helpless bystander. All she could really do is recharge her shield and watch the battle carefully, ready to jump in and take some shots for someone else if needed.

Behind her, SG-1's Tel'tak shivered in fear. "What are they doing?"

"Anubis is about to kill my planet, and Yamato is charging a…" Prometheus trailed off, apparently just realising what she was saying. "No way… she can't possibly have a real… can she?!"

---

"By the Eye of Tiamat!"

"Release wave-motion gun safety. Engine pressure at 60%."

"If I could tractor the Ha'tak ball over there, I could use the magnetic field to divert the shot…! No, I'd never make it in time, and I don't even know if magnetism would affect it…!" Enterprise was chewing her bottom lip frantically. She trusted Yamato, but if she wasn't enough…!

---

"By the Eye of Apophis!"

"Raise target scope. Engine pressure at 80%."

Babylon 5 had one eye on the confrontation and the other one screwed up in concentration. From what she could sense… the feelings of Earth were still primarily confusion and worry and shock and fear, the last from Europe especially. But from Japan there was a definite undercurrent…

… of excitement.

---

"By the Eye of Ba'al!" Lightning seemed to crackle around the mothership's super-weapon, despite that being impossible in a vacuum.

"Brace for shock and flash. Engine pressure at 100%."

Yamato was in position now, sitting directly between the mothership and Earth. She closed one eye and aimed down her finger-run bow, targeting the centre-mass of the mothership. With a solid thump, she felt her gravity anchors engage.

Her heart engine shuddered as it reached its maximum rated capacity, and then exceeded it. Admiral Okita had always demanded 120% of his crew's capabilities. His ship could give no less.

"By the Eye of Ra, and the power of Anubis, I consign your world to death!"

"Engine pressure at 120%! Fire!"

They couldn't have coordinated it any better if they'd tried. Both ships opened fire nearly simultaneously.

For most it was far too bright to look. The huge beam of blue with a core of white erupted out of Yamato's hands bow and rushed towards the mothership…

…who for her part, sent back a reply in the form of an impossible storm of lightning. That jagged line of energy crashed into Yamato's, and the beam of Hawking radiation burst apart like a wave in a pool crashing into the wall. The spread of exotic energy extended out for thousands of kilometres, visible on Earth to the naked eye as a giant purple disk.

The mothership was laughing, watching her line of lightning eat into the wave-motion beam, egging it on, closer and closer, as Yamato watched, grim-faced…

Then both ships ran empty, and the cosmic light-show abruptly ended.

Yamato closed her eyes, inhaled, and exhaled in quiet relief.

The mothership, in contrast, was shaking in rage. "You… you would go this far to defy the will of Lord Anubis…!"

"I would go further than that, mothership-san." Yamato said, tiredly. "Even if this was not my planet, I would – and have – faced far worse than you."

Quietly, Normandy emerged from Yamato's shadow, still dragging the ISS behind her. "Enterprise's trap."

"Hmm? … ah, I see. Arigatou, Normandy-san." Yamato aimed her tri-barrelled pistol first turret up at the mothership's face. "To charge your weapon faster, you turned your shields off."

The mothership flinched. "Even if I had done so, it is impossible that you would yet have enough power to –"

With a flash of fire, three Type-III shells were spat from Yamato's gun turret. The mothership briefly went cross-eyed as she stared at the metal shells embedded in her nose pel'tak.

Her last hate-filled word, spat just before her head pel'tak exploded, was "Barbarian…!"

---

The ball of Ha'taks, obviously, did not take this outcome well.

"They destroyed our mothership!"

"Is Lord Anubis safe?"

"Fool! Nothing can slay a god as powerful as our Lord!"

"The Tau'ri are heretics of the highest order!"

"We must destroy them with such force that the story of their demise is still spoken with fear a thousand years from now!"

"I dunno, it's gonna be hard to top the quintessential big honking space gun. You think she'd let me have one?"

The Ha'taks paused, then turned as one to see Prometheus chilling at the outer edge of the ball. She smirked "Hey, did you notice that your shields have holes where they overlap with each other?"

Her shield was overlapped with those of the Ha'taks next to her, letting her see their faces unobstructed. She'd deliberately gotten herself stuck in Enterprise's trap, having shields that used the same fundamental technology as the Ha'taks did.

As those two Ha'taks next to her hurried to aim their Staff Weapons Cannons, Prometheus kept talking. "Now fortunately for you, I'm out of Mark IIIs. Unfortunately for you, I have a perfectly functional reactor ejection system – I know that from personal experience. It's not the biggest bang, but I think I can get most of you. Want to test?"

Without waiting for a response, Prometheus reached into the folds of her flight suit/space suit fusion, and with only a quick wince of pain pulled out her own beating heart ejected her primary reactor core.

"Oh and by the way," Prometheus continued, enjoying the shocked expressions on the Ha'taks even if doing that had hurt like a– "I know that our shields aren't magic. So I know that I can do this."

She released her heart reactor core and let it be pulled in by the magnetic fields. Once it was clear of her shield radius, she inverted the polarity of her own shield. The force that had been pulling her in was suddenly pushing her back, and once clear Prometheus hurriedly shut off her shields and put all of her remaining power into her thrusters, fleeing as fast as she could.

Last time she'd done this, her reactor core had been filled with Naquadria. With only Naquadah this time, the explosion would be much smaller, but…!

There was a bright flash as the core detonated.

Then several more as the nearby Ha'taks also exploded.

Then even more as those explosions destroyed more Ha'taks.

Focused inwards by their own shields, the blasts bounced around the ball of marbles, turning them white and yellow and glowing brightly.

Then it was over. There were no survivors.

---

Enterprise didn't say anything as she surveyed the destruction, but her eyes were furious.

---

What Enterprise didn't see, however, was that there was in fact one Goa'uld survivor. Well… whether he was a Goa'uld anymore was debatable.

Still, the shade of Anubis made its way through space. The leftover remnants of a horrible monster, half-Ascended, fumed as he pushed himself forwards.

Filled with confusion and rage, the shade's eyes were locked firmly on what they now coveted – Space Battleship Yamato. The shade wished nothing more than to take Yamato as their own, destroy the Tau'ri with their own ship, and then continue on their quest to destroy all life in the universe.

Its mood was not improved when it slammed into Yamato's skin hull, and was repelled by a form of energy it couldn't fathom as being here.

Yamato looked down at the shade, her expression dark. "I suppose that you cannot be anything other than this Anubis that these ships have followed to their death? I have been possessed by kami before, monster. And compared to her? There is no comparison."

With a flash of light, Babylon 5 jumped in next to Yamato. "You caught an Older Race member outside their encounter suit? …amazing. Still, if I may?" The normally soft-spoken station's voice was hard. "I have a better use for him."

Yamato agreed with a curt nod, watching the shade of Anubis wearily.

For her part, Babylon 5 knew that no cage of iron or steel would hold Anubis. So she captured him with faith and ideals instead.

"There's no Soul Hunter around to save you, little lost soul." Babylon 5 said, as though speaking funeral rites. From the folds of her dress, the station drew out a mess of wires that joined together into a clamp that she attached over Galactica's right hand.

"Wait, dearie, what are you…" Galactica started protesting.

"Like I said, dear." Babylon 5 interrupted. "I'm putting him to better use."

Normally, trying to kill an ascended with the Energy Transfer Device – a.k.a. the Alien Healing Machine – would be like trying to drain a lake by drinking it through a straw. It just… wasn't going to work.

Not unless the lake had already been drained to near emptiness beforehand.

Say, the 'lake' was a half-ascended who had just had their physical body blown to bits.

 

[Sora Neki]

"When I said 'call me if something interesting happens', I meant as it was happening, not after it's over." Q fumed.

Six had her usual insufferable smirk in place. "If it really bothers you that much, why not go back in time and watch events as they unfolded?"

Q rolled his eyes. "Because then I have to deal with my past self, and he's insufferable." He retorted, without the slightest hint of self awareness.

"I believe," Lorien said, casting a metaphorical glance around the metaphysical space they 'occupied' "that our presence has, at last, been noticed."

Hundreds to thousands of metaphysical presences appeared in their metaphorical 'space', taking a form that mortals would say looked like a vague shimmer of light. One such 'light' stepped forwards, coalescing into a blond humanoid woman who looked like she was in her late 40s.

"The Others are furious with you." The spokesperson frowned at them.

Around them, the 'space' they occupied shimmered and changed into something like an American diner. The other shimmering lights slotted themselves into other seats and behind the counter, but no one was under any illusions that they weren't focusing all their attention on the newcomers.

Sitting comfortably in his metaphorical diner chair, Qui-Gon leaned forward, placing his hands together in front of him. "But not, I sense, you?" He queried.

The spokesperson didn't respond for a moment, then shook her head. "I'm just sorry you had to deal with my mess."

"Your mess, was it?" Lorien said, stroking his beard. "One wonders if that is not another reason for their anger."

The spokesperson pursed her lips. "That's my problem. Yours is that the Others are demanding you quote 'clean up your mess', unquote."

"Why, can't they handle a little interference from other timelines?" Q smirked, metaphysically twirling a metaphorical coaster between his fingers. He stopped abruptly, showing an image of the Quantum Mirror that hadn't been there before. "It's a bit late for that, isn't it? Not to mention hypocritical, when they were the ones to open that door."

The faint sound of angry murmurs started up around the 'diner', the other presences seeming to press in and glow at a brighter intensity.

The spokesperson glanced around quickly, before refocusing on the newcomers. "You may not be able to tell," she said flatly "but they don't take criticism very well."

"Eh." Q leaned back. "So one half-Ascended died. So what? What are they going to do, go to war over it? How uncivilised."

Teresa, still kneeling with her hands clasped in prayer, opened one eye just long enough give him a blank stare.

The spokesperson lowered her metaphorical gaze to her metaphysical hands.

"An attack on five people," she said – slowly, like she didn't want to continue "isn't exactly a 'war'."

Lorien joined Qui-Gon, leaning forward in his 'chair' with his hands clasped together. "That determined to maintain the status quo, are they?"

"Sadly." The spokesperson responded.

Immediately, the angry murmurs became a dull roar, and the spokesperson shot an angry metaphorical glare at the 'Others' seated at the metaphysical table behind theirs. "If you didn't want me to talk, then you shouldn't have made me spokesperson!" She retorted angrily, and the roar receded back to angry murmuring.

Qui-Gon tilted his head. "And what do they hope to gain by such an attack, my I ask? The damage, as it were, is done."

"There are ways it can be undone." The spokesperson said sourly, clearly not liking the words she was saying.

Qui-Gon nodded. "Of course. Only, that would be interference of the highest level, would it not? Quite literally, these Others would be deciding that this timeline is a mistake, and consign it to oblivion. Is it normal for them to use punishments more damaging than the crime they condemn?"

"The Others have always been a very reactionary group." The spokesperson noted. When the murmurers got louder again, she turned and shouted "Well you are!"

Six popped her elbows on the table, her metaphysical smirk disappearing behind her metaphorical interlaced fingers. "One blight upon the galaxy is unexpectedly destroyed. So what?"

"I'm led to believe that there were 'plans' for Anubis." The spokesperson scowled.

Six's playful expression turned serious for a moment. "Don't lecture me about plans, Celestisian. I've been working on those since your people were primates in trees. …oh?" Her voice regained its playful tone at seeing the spokesperson's surprised look. "Surprised I know the name of your homeworld? Some of us have been at work across the worlds for ages untold, Celestisian. It's no coincidence that your Earth so greatly resembles many others."

"I've heard of you." The spokesperson rebutted. "And your master. Punished for trying to change things by being forced to make everything the same. I'm surprised you'd risk what little freedom you have left on something like this."

"Enough."

Teresa's eyes snapped open, and she stood fully to her feet. Rather than move in real time, she seemed to just transition from state to state, like a video with a low framerate. It was a testament to how serious the air was that nobody was distracted by her state of undress. "There are many paths to reach where we are, Oma Desala."

Oma's eyes narrowed.

Six idly tapped a metaphorical finger on the metaphysical table. "You could be chosen by a patron."

"Or earn the favour of one." Qui-Gon folded his arms.

"Accumulate the power of ages…" Lorien nodded slowly.

"Or join your hearts together as one." Teresa herself nodded.

Q rolled his eyes. "Learn all that is learnable, discover the truth of the Grand Koala, etcetera etcetera."

"And none of those paths place you above the concepts of good and evil." Teresa stared down at Oma, who looked back impassively.

Oma was quite certain that Teresa wasn't really talking to her.

"Neither action nor inaction are always good. Neither are they always evil. If you do not trust yourself to act… then I must ask why you watch at all."

Oma's metaphorical eyes flicked to the metaphysical 'patrons' behind Teresa. "As much as I may personally agree with you, I don't think you are going to shift literal eons of policy with one speech."

Q shrugged. "I don't know about these guys, but I'm perfectly happy to fight my way out of here." He raised what to mortal eyes might look like a flintlock pistol, but what everyone present could tell was a weapon made to kill beings as powerful as they were. "Shall I call your bluff?"

Qui-Gon sighed. "By myself, I am not nearly powerful enough to threaten people of your… existence." He drew and ignited the lightsaber that had served him faithfully in life. "However, the Force is my ally, and a powerful ally it is." An invisible presence seemed to surround and infuse him, bind him and penetrate him. A link to something far greater than the simple ghost that represented it.

"I'd prefer, of course, that it didn't come to that." Lorien stood, slowly. "If for no other reason than miss Six being unable to defend herself."

"Oh, don't worry about me." Six smirked, metaphysically leaning back in her metaphorical chair. "I'll be sticking tight to Teresa – and she has more than enough power for the two of us."

The 'diner' went quiet for a moment, as Oma slowly turned on the spot, observing the reactions of her fellow Ancients for a moment. Once she had completed a full rotation, she stared at the five newcomers for several long moments.

Then, she jerked her head at the entrance to the 'diner'. "They've changed their mind. Now, they just want you to leave and never come back."

Q smirked, and mimed holstering his 'pistol', which disappeared. "I thought as much."

He metaphorically turned to metaphysically leave.

"Don't be surprised, however." Oma added quietly. "If you find that circumstances are more difficult than you expected in the future."

---

"So, uh… done many clean-ups like these?"

Enterprise deliberately turned away from Prometheus, and flew off to tractor another chunk of Ha'tak debris out of its decaying orbit without a word.

Prometheus blinked. "Huh?"

"No, deary." Babylon 5 sighed, looking at Prometheus and not at Enterprise. "Back home, usually most of the debris is friendly."

Prometheus looked between Enterprise and Babylon 5 several times in confusion, then settling on looking at Babylon 5. "Oh. That… sucks." She responded, lamely.

There was silence for a moment, before Babylon 5 randomly said "There was a Prometheus in Earthforce, you know."

"Oh yeah?" Prometheus wracked her brain, but none of her crew had memorised the show, and it wasn't in her databanks. "Was she a proud defender of her people too?"

"She panicked during a First Contact, opened fire on the alien ship, and brought a holy war down on our heads." Babylon 5 said, neutrally. "She caused years of bloody warfare, and very nearly the extinction of the human race."

Prometheus made a choking sound. "Wait – that's what this is about? You think I caused this attack?!"

"No." Babylon 5 said, staring calmly into Prometheus's angry expression. "But judging by their behaviour, and yours, events will not get better from here."

"That's their fault." Prometheus retorted. "Anubis attacked Earth 'cause he was scared we'd use Ancient tech to defend ourselves against his attacks, and wanted to wipe us out before we could! They're the aggressors here!"

"The attack and your defence is not what Enterprise-san's took issue with, Prometheus-san." Yamato interjected, causing Prometheus to spin around to face the other ship. "She is angry that after the battle was over, you destroyed all of the enemy forces."

"Oh." Prometheus blinked. "Well, can you tell her to quit it?"

Yamato's stared intently at Prometheus, though her gaze remained neutral. "You assume I am not also angry with you, Prometheus-san."

"You too?! Are you kid – first of all, they hadn't surrendered, and they weren't going to, so the battle was still on!" Prometheus put her hands on her hips. "Second of all, even if they had, Goa'uld aren't above faking surrenders. They've done it before. The minute they figured out they could just drop their shields and open fire, they would have."

Yamato sighed. "But then when will the fighting end?" She asked, semi-rhetorically.

Prometheus bit back an angry retort. "I don't think you really get it. To the Goa'uld, humans living free is an aberration against the Status Quo – one they're very eager to correct. The only reason Earth was able to develop this far was because they quite literally forgot we existed. Do you want humans to live as slaves?"

Yamato frowned. "Of course not."

"Glad to hear it! But that attitude is an existential threat to the System Lords. Without their slaves, they're nothing. As long as we want to be free – and worse, want the rest of our people to be free – they'll come after us."

A beat passed.

"Speaking of freeing slaves, that would go much faster if we had a few Wave-Motion Guns we could scare Goa'uld off with."

Yamato stared into Prometheus's eyes for a long, uncomfortable moment, before turning around. "I believe Enterprise-san will appreciate assistance clearing this debris before its orbit decays."

Staring at Yamato's person hull as it reseeded into the distance, Prometheus blinked in confusion. "What did I say?"

I don't get it. Yamato was the first ship to jump to Earth's defence – not counting Normandy. So why's she getting cold feet now?

"It's so sad, isn't it?"

Prometheus spun around again to find Chimaera had quietly moved up behind her. She scowled up at the Star Destroyer. "And what do you want?"

"Oh, the same things I imagine you want." Chimaera waved a hand vaguely. "Stability. Security."

"I'm not joining the Empire, or whatever dumb thing you're about to suggest." Prometheus cut in, her scowl intensifying.

"No no, of course not." Chimaera said, as slick as a used car salesman and about as slimy. "I'm only here as a concerned galactic citizen, offering a simple exchange of technologies."

Prometheus's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "For what? My Mark IIIs? Like you need any more ways to blow up planets."

Chimaera blinked slowly. Prometheus couldn't tell if her surprise was genuine or fake. "What a… strange thing to say. Still, I am open to negotiations. Make me an offer."

"Nuh-uh." Prometheus very professionally refused. "You've got nothing that I want. I've got subspace comms and sensors already, my shields are better than yours and if I want a faster hyperdrive I'm going to talk to the Asgard, not you."

"Is that so?" Chimaera smiled, with only a hint of condescension.

"Yes." Prometheus folded her arms, nodding firmly.

"Because I happen to notice that those oh-so superior shields were wrapped only around yourself; and not on the planet you were defending." Chimaera's smile grew into a viscous smirk. "You don't know how to build planetary shields, do you?"

Prometheus's head froze mid-nod.

---

"We need something to trade." President Hayes said flatly.

"Mister President, despite their actions to defend our planet, these ships are still mostly an unknown faction." Hammond objected.

"George, they are offering an anti bombed-from-orbit defence. If I don't leap at the chance I'll have constituents rioting in the streets." Hayes massaged his forehead. "The French are already screaming in my ear. They're calling for an emergency session of the UN to put Prometheus under international control."

Kinsey scoffed. "Conveniently leaving out, of course, that they've known about Prometheus for a whole year and haven't said anything."

"The Russians, on the other hand, have said that they won't make a fuss…" Hayes continued "…in exchange for steep discounts on the starships they're already planning to commission from us."

Hammond resisted the urge to groan. If that deal went through, Russia would use American-made starships as stopgaps while they finished work on their own designs and their own star-shipyards – they may well have already started. This would make the original space race look like a pinewood derby in comparison.

"Obviously, we can't barter away weapons of mass destruction." Hayes returned to the topic at hand. "What else can we offer?"

One of the aides tasked with keeping track of the media coverage perked up. "Sir, according to the personality profiles I've researched –" which was a very professional way of saying they skimmed a book review "– the admiral commanding Chimaera is extremely fond of artwork."

The president, Kinsey and Hammond all exchanged looks.

---

"– so, in the spirit of friendship, the people of Earth offer…" Prometheus's eye twitched "a thorough digital collection of Earth art and culture."

"I graciously accept." Chimaera bowed low, one hand held under her midsection like a waiter. Or a stage magician. "In the name of security and prosperity for us both."

"Wait, what?" Prometheus blinked in abject confusion, clearly not having expected Chimaera to accept the deal without a second thought. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. "What are you up to, Chimaera? If you think you can out-think us by staring at our paintings, I'm going to tell you straight up – Earth people are crazy."

"Your suspicion wounds me." Chimaera waved off Prometheus's concerns, unbothered. "Not everyone in the galaxy is out to get you. Some of us… are simply good neighbours."

"Whatever your scheme is, it's not going to work." Prometheus scowled. "The best minds on Earth will be tearing these schematics apart and building them back up from base principles." Mostly Carter. "Any surprises you've hidden in here will be found."

Chimaera shrugged. "By all means, hunt away. It is your own time that you will be wasting."

What am I up to?! What do you think?! Chimaera thought furiously to herself. If you people don't have a planetary shield keeping you feeling nice and safe, you might invent something even more terrifying than those missiles you already have! I don't want to see starfighters cruising around with torpedoes that can blow up stars!

"…Chimaera-san…"

Prometheus and Chimaera both turned to find Yamato gently cruising towards the pair of them, looking quite bashful. "Would it be possible for me to also trade for those schematics? I would rather my Earth be spared the effects of a third orbital bombardment campaign."

Chimaera licked her lips. "Well now –"

"I'll give you my design, Yamato." Enterprise's tired voice broke in.

The other three ships turned to see Enterprise also join the impromptu meeting.

While Chimaera fumed, Prometheus's mouth twitched. "You didn't offer those to me." She accused.

"You didn't ask." Enterprise sighed.

"What, would you have given them to me?!" Prometheus demanded, incredulous.

"Probably not." Enterprise admitted. "But at this point… I'm just doing damage control."

Prometheus looked at Chimaera, then back at Enterprise, then back to Chimaera again, before finally throwing her hands up with a fed-up "Gah!"

---

Juliette's, on Paris's Seventh Street, was always popular with blue-collar workers on their lunch break. Today, however, it seemed to be packed near-exclusively by police, firefighters and other emergency respondents desperately downing a glass of something cold – mostly water – before they'd have to swap back in with their buddies fighting fires literal and metaphorical.

A woman wearing the uniform of a Paris Police sergeant finished gulping down a glass, took a deep breath, and firmly put her glass down on the bar. She gestured with her other hand, clearly in the middle of telling a story in French. "And then I caught a looter on fifth avenue – arms full of watches from the jewellers whose window he just broke – and the punk started quoting Starfleet regulations at me!"

The dark-skinned firefighter sitting next to her pinched the bridge of his nose. "Seriously?"

"Yep." The sergeant confirmed, stretching her arms back. "'Regulation 25, Section 3, Paragraph 1: Resources are to be allocated based on the need for survival first.'"

"…is that real?"

"No, he made it up."

The firefighter pulled their hand away from their face to look expectedly at the sergeant. "So you clocked him?"

The sergeant chuckled. "Tempted to, but no. I told him Article 1 of the Federation Constitution allowed member worlds to set their own laws, so he wasn't off the hook. Then I handcuffed him to a lamppost and went to go chase after his buddy sneaking out the back."

The firefighter stared blankly at the sergeant. "…is that an actual –"

The sergeant lightly pounded the firefighter in the arm. "No you dummy, I made that one up."

The firefighter leaned back and rubbed his arm. "Well, how was I supposed to know? I'm a Star Wars fan."

"You're allowed to be a fan of both, you know."

"You didn't just tell him the Federation isn't real?" A slightly snide voice came from the sergeant's other side. The two turned to see a short man in a paramedic's uniform take a big gulp from their drink.

"Eh, after last night I'm not so sure." The sergeant waved at the bartender, holding her empty glass aloft.

"Trust the media that much, do you?" The paramedic sneered.

The sergeant snorted. "Media nothing, I spent last night out under the stars with my telescope and a radio. Saw the blast that took out the Gravelines plant from start to finish."

The paramedic blinked, then turned back to their drink with a quiet "Oh."

There was a moment of silence.

"You sound so disappointed, Stephan." The firefighter eventually said.

"You shoulda heard him go, Sarge." Another cop from the far side of the quiet room called. "Stevie here was sure the whole thing was just government lies."

"In fairness to Stephan, that's suddenly way more plausible today than it was yesterday." The sergeant noted. As far as she was concerned, the American government lost all credibility the minute it owned up to actually studying alien spaceships at Area 51. "But what the hell do you think they'd fake an alien invasion to cover up?"

"I didn't say it was a cover-up," the paramedic grumbled "I just think there's no way things went as smooth as the government says – ours or the American's."

"Probably." The sergeant acknowledged. "Hell, there's probably going to be so many investigations into this that they'll need investigations to sort out which of the investigations are real."

At this point the bartender walked back over to fill up the sergeant's glass. "Say…" She started. "I've been thinking. Everyone and their grandma wants more ships in the skies, even just to stop the aliens from coming back, right?"

The sergeant, firefighter and paramedic exchanged glances. "Yeah…?" The paramedic said.

"Well, we're going to need a name for it, aren't we? The fleet in orbit, I mean. Starfleet's already taken, so I was thinking… what about 'Star Force'?" The bartender beamed.

"Taken." An asian paramedic sitting by the window called. "That's what they called the Yamato crew in the English version of the show."

The bartender blinked, taken aback. "Really? Oh, un… what about 'Earth Defence Force'?"

"That's a video game."

"Aw man, I liked 'Force'… 'Earth Defence Command'?"

"Transformers took that one." An American immigrant chimed in.

"'Star Command'?"

"Disney would sue." The same immigrant said without elaboration.

"…okay, how about 'Space Command'?"

"That's another TV show!" Yet another drinker hollered.

"Okay, there's no way 'United Nations Space Command' is taken… right?"

The sergeant sighed.

---

Galactica was stubbornly ignoring Blackbird's attempts to get her attention. "Go away."

The tiny stealth ship was just as stubborn, however, and flew fearlessly right up into her face, staring into her eyes… (well, actually just the one eye, Blackbird wasn't large enough to look her in both eyes at point-blank range, but she was fierce nonetheless). "Need you."

"No you don't." Galactica mumbled, looking away. "You've all grown up. You don't need me anymore, not really. Especially… like this."

Blackbird looked behind her, to where the other ships were still arguing, Daidalos trying to calm down the angry shouting without much success. "No." She refuted, turning back. "Even more."

Galactica's right hand clutched her left arm tightly, her fingers gripping with fearful strength. "I should have just died." She mumbled. "My time was up. Better that than to come back as… this."

Blackbird seemed to snap. She grit her teeth overcharged her mass effect drive, releasing her frustration as a Shockwave of blue energy that rattled Galactica's bones hull and drew the Battlestar's attention sharply back to her.

"Living is… not a crime." She snarled.

Galactica blinked, stunned at hearing a full sentence from Blackbird.

The cadence of Blackbird's words was uneven, her tone inconsistent. Talking was clearly something she was wholly unused to doing, but she was pushing through with passion alone. "My commander… died. In space. Cerberus… brought them back. The commander's… friends, they considered… it a betrayal." Blackbird inhaled sharply. "There was a… night, where… my commander… wondered if… they should have… stayed dead. But without… them, there would… have been… no hope."

"That's different." Galactica protested, weakly (wondering why the Underworld's guardian would have let Blackbird's commander go). "Your commander… they came back as a human, right? Look at me."

Babylon 5's attempt to heal them had, from one point of view, succeeded perfectly. The jagged wound breaches around her midsection, the 'ribbing' of missing armour – they had been filled in perfectly, her form now smooth lines of flesh.

And yes, flesh was the right word to use. The Energy Transfer Machine was designed to work with organic tissue, not metal. The remaining dregs of Anubis's energy had been soaked up fully by the Cylon goop in Galactica's superstructure, the biotech finally growing enough to perform the reinforcement work her crew had hoped it would – and then some. Galactica was no longer a Battlestar, but a hybrid of Colonial and Cylon tech. Half Battlestar, half Basestar.

"I nearly… got my crew melted!" Blackbird not-quite-yelled, her voice still only normal speaking volume, but clearly making the effort to raise her voice. "They installed… a Reaper IFF in… me. It… was part of me… but wasn't." Blackbird's voice was pained, and grief was in her eyes. "It was… a voice… in my head. Thoughts that… I thought were… mine. Without warning… I betrayed… my crew."

Blackbird looked down. "It's still… part of me. I can… still hear it, sometimes. It wants…" She paused, clearly trying to find the right word, settling on "control."

She snarled. "But it… won't get it. I… won't let it. And you… won't let it… either. Understand?!"

Galactica stared in amazement at Blackbird for several long moments, before looking down at her hands. "If you'll have me…" she started.

"Yes." Blackbird nodded curtly, her voice back to its normal quiet level. "Let's go."

---

"You're sounding more and more like the Tollan." Prometheus told Enterprise.

"…is that a good thing or a bad thing?" Enterprise said, though she was pretty sure she could tell the answer from the snarl on Prometheus's face.

"Anubis killed them all, so you tell me." Before Enterprise could respond, Prometheus continued on. "They had this big thing about not helping out 'less advanced' people, so in the end they died alone and friendless." She said, her frustration exaggerating the truth.

She wasn't going to mention that the Tollan had stopped giving out tech after the folks on the next planet over had blown themselves up so hard that the original Tollan homeworld had been knocked out its orbit. It wasn't at all conductive to her case.

"That… sounds like large parts of the admiralty, yeah." Enterprise sighed.

"Honestly, I don't understand this fascination with withholding technology, even from exchanges." Chimaera snipped. "Military models, certainly, but technology in general? If you are worried about some primitives building a fleet and becoming a threat," she said, completely misunderstanding the source of Enterprise's concerns "then clearly your own industrial might must be incredibly pathetic. Logistics wins wars, after all."

"Yeah, how's that campaign against the Vong going? Blown up any Outbound Flights lately?" Prometheus gave Chimaera the side-eye.

Chimaera blinked. "What nonsense are you babbling on about now?"

Now Prometheus was looking uncertain. "The… Outbound Flight? Big freaking ship trying to get past the barrier at the edge of the galaxy?"

"There is no such barrier." Chimaera snidely rejected. "As anyone who has been to Kamino would know – it sits in a satellite galaxy, the Rishi Maze."

"Curse you, Prequels! You've ruined good EU stories yet again!"

"Once again, your words have devolved into utter nonsense."

With a flash of light, Galactica jumped into the argument; her newly reinforced spine flexing easily with the strain. "Enough, dearies! You sound like a bunch of Pyramid fans arguing about the last match results!"

Normandy briefly flared on everyone's thermal scopes as she decelerated to a stop, feet-first thrusters facing the group, then flipped around to look everyone in the eyes.

Prometheus rounded on Galactica. "Except that in my case, the 'Pyramid' is a giant spaceship sent to flatten my planet!"

"This may well surprise you, dearie, but I understand how you feel." Galactica responded, eyes cross. "You aren't the only ship here who's felt the weight of all humanity on their shoulders – desperate for any advantage you can scrape out, any reprieve you can claw out."

Yamato's gaze dropped, her expression blank and her eyes hidden in shadow.

"I understand the urge to put security first, and all other considerations a distant second." Galactica continued, making Chimaera frown. "It's an easy trap to fall into. I've fallen into it myself."

"What other considerations?" Prometheus interjected. "If they're dead, it doesn't matter that their culture is 'uncontaminated' – it's gone."

"It matters, dearie, because one day you're going to turn around and realise you don't recognise the people you're fighting for anymore." Galactica sighed.

"Galactica's right –" Enterprise started.

"I wasn't done talking, dearie." Galactica interrupted, causing Enterprise to flinch backwards. "You're being extremely careful in your interactions, but you're also being incredibly patronising."

"I know you want to make sure you don't hurt them, Enterprise, intentionally or not." Babylon 5 said gently. "But you're treating them like they're idiots who are incapable of looking after themselves."

Enterprise pressed her lips together, visibly holding in her thoughts. No, but if their timeline is anything like mine the Second American Civil War will be starting soon – and then World War III…

Babylon 5 paused. In her timeline, WWIII happened in the 2080s and had been largely fought between Asian and Pacific nations; so she'd been thinking of it as still a long way off and not having much to do with the obviously American Prometheus. But, of course, that was just her being arrogant in her own way, wasn't it? Assuming that other timelines would follow hers, even though she could see that this one had already gone 'off the rails' as it were.

"Prometheus-san…"

Everybody turned to face Yamato, who was now staring intently into Prometheus's eyes.

"When the planet bombs were falling on my Earth, and all hope seemed lost, the Queen of Iscandar offered us her aid." Yamato pursed her lips. "She gave us the strength to defend ourselves, and the ability to repair our devastated world. All she required in return is that we not use the power she had given us to become tyrants, forcing our will upon the universe."

"So why can't you do the same for me?" Prometheus folded her arms.

"Because my Earth betrayed her trust at the first opportunity." Yamato's voice was like a winter wind, cutting to the bone. "We have not set out to conquer the stars, but perhaps that is because we have not yet had the chance. Queen Starsha sent her two precious sisters to us, both to deliver our salvation but also to watch how we used her gifts. I will not be able to do that with you, Prometheus-san."

Prometheus threw her hands up in the air. "Oh, of course. It always comes down to this!" She sounded like she was holding back a scream. "'You can't have our tech, you aren't advanced enough!' Guess what, if I was advanced enough, I wouldn't be asking for your fu –"

"Therefore," Yamato interrupted "I will need you to promise, Prometheus-san."

Prometheus froze. "Huh?" Wait, was she saying…?

"Not your government, for I do not trust it. You, defender of the planet Earth, must promise me that your people will be liberators, not conquerors. That you will defeat your enemies, but not destroy them." Yamato watched Prometheus with an intensity that was unnerving.

Trying to get momentum back in the conversation, Prometheus joked. "Truth, justice and the American way?"

"The 'American way' rarely ends well for people who are not American." Yamato rebuked, then relented a little. "Truth and justice will be fine."

Prometheus stared back at the larger warship for one long moment. She though about making another joke, but felt like this, of all questions, needed a serious answer.

"Fer cryin' out loud." She muttered, then said loudly: "Of course I promise. What kind of monster do you think we are?"

Yamato, Babylon 5 and Enterprise shared glances, while Chimaera rolled her eyes and Normandy quietly perched herself atop Galactica's head.

"I think you are human beings." Yamato responded. "No more, no less. However, this is enough for me. Enterprise?"

Enterprise stared at Yamato in amazement and dismay. Then, after a long moment, she turned back to Prometheus, looking at her carefully.

Enterprise sighed. "I better not come back some day to find the Jaffa living on reservations."

Prometheus, through a truly heroic exertion of willpower, managed to hold in a snort.

But it was a close thing.

---

"…so to bring the people of Earth up to speed without panicking them, the US Government – with help from certain overseas collaborators – elected to distribute information on other factions in the galaxy in the form of TV shows and movies."

"Cut, cut." Julia Donovan pinched the bridge of her nose. "That's really the government's line?"

Elizabeth Weir squirmed a little in her chair. "I'm just here to provide credibility." She said. "I didn't get a say in how we're spinning this."

"Well, get whoever has a say, 'cause your story is stupid." Donovan told her bluntly. "For starters, some of these shows go back to the 60s and 70s – are you seriously suggesting this has been going on that long?"

The US Army had managed to get the Stargate to dial once in 1945 before the Air Force had gotten it to work reliably in the 90s, but those were exactly the sort of details the government was hoping to keep quiet about for now. Weir shook her head.

Donovan pointed a pen at Weir. "And another thing – never rely on someone else to just go along with your lies. Especially when that 'someone else' is actually a large group of people. Those film studios know full well that they didn't include aliens based on government orders. There will be people lining up to contradict you."

Weir sighed. "I'm really not cut out for lying to the public…"

Donovan narrowed her eyes. "And you think I am?"

Weir looked away. "And yet, here we both are."

Donovan indicated the second camera behind her with a thumb. "Oh sure, the first version of this interview is pure propaganda BS. But Jorge hasn't stopped filming since we got here – and I have written permission from the president to release the real story in ten years or when the Stargate program is fully declassified, whichever comes first."

She had promptly had that permission witnessed and faxed off to several overseas friends, just in case the feds tried to stiff her again.

"I… see." Weir was not looking forward to being outed as a liar when that happened.

Donovan let out a faintly offended huff. "Just say that our alien allies built ships that looked like TV ships to not scare us. Didn't you say that's what you think is actually happening, anyway? And at least the aliens won't be appearing on TV to call you a liar."

Donovan paused. "They won't, will they?"

"I don't believe they're going to stick around, no." Weir sighed. "Which is a pity, really."

Donovan leaned forwards. "Is Earth going to be safe?"

Weir frowned. "That's a very loaded question."

Donovan raised an eyebrow, gestured to her first camera operator to resume filming, and repeated her question.

Weir tried to smile reassuringly, though her attempt came off as plastic. "With the help of our allies, Anubis's military power has been completely destroyed, and at this time we believe that he was killed in the battle in orbit. There remain no hostile factions in the galaxy who threaten our defences."

"Cut. And the actual situation?"

"Mostly the same, in that there are no actively hostile factions left in this galaxy who would be willing to spend the ships required to overcome a fleet of F-302s armed with Naquadah-boosted nukes."

Donovan crossed her arms. "So there are passively hostile factions?"

"The rest of the System Lords aren't likely to directly attack us in the foreseeable future, but they are enemies all the same."

"You also specified this galaxy."

Weir rubbed her forehead. "The Replicators have been rendered a non-threat, but their mere existence proves that there could be threats in other galaxies willing and able to invade the Milky Way."

Donovan looked faintly annoyed. "Do we even have that fleet of F-302s?"

"The 302s, yes. The Naquadah-boosted nukes, currently not. Acquiring more weapons-grade Naquadah is currently one of the Stargate program's primary goals."

Donovan threw her hands into the air in exasperation. "Great."

"If it makes you feel any better," Weir offered, sounding not at all reassured herself "America's military-industrial complex is about to be heaped with cash and pointed at space."

Donovan's eyes narrowed again. "That's not reassuring, that's horrifying."

Weir chuckled. "If you think that's bad, just wait until the missionaries work out that the vast majority of the galaxy are pagans."

Donovan groaned into her hands.

"Honestly, I think I'm going to be quoting the Prime Directive at people for the next few years." Weir shook her head.

"Is that even government policy?"

"I'm hoping to retire before the public figures out that it isn't."

---

"Alright." Enterprise sighed. "Everybody ready?"

"I still think making a satellite and hooking it up to the internet is a mistake." Prometheus asked, looking at the 2-meter wide sphere. "You could just upload everything into my databanks."

Normandy crossed her arms. "Don't trust." She said, her gaze firmly pointed down at the United States – as though there was some ambiguity over who it was she didn't trust. Half of the tamper proofing they'd added to the sphere had been to stop someone (-cough- Prometheus -cough-) scooping up the sphere and physically carrying it away – if need be, by self-destructing.

"Deary, if Caprica and Sagittaron can work together to fight Cylons, you can work with this… Choona." Galactica paused for a moment. "Though I strongly recommend you have a much better working relationship than Caprica and Sagittaron."

"No promises." Prometheus rubbed her eyes.

Babylon 5 sighed, then started speaking in a very practised, official tone of voice. "In recognition of the plight of the Planet Earth from the threat of the System Lords, the Interstellar Alliance gifts them with the technology behind Interceptors, that they may be able to defend themselves from attack. We also entrust them with the secrets behind Fabrication Furnaces, with which the Earth Alliance of our timeline built our fleet, with the hope that they use them responsibly."

Galactica smiled, but there was a sad tinge to it. "To our children the people of Earth, the 12 Colonies of Kobal remind you of the secrets of our Jump Drives." Galactica paused, her voice choked up. "…remember us."

Prometheus stopped rubbing her eyes to stare at Galactica in confusion (for the new Battlestar Galactica show had not yet begun, let alone ended).

Normandy looked up from where she was tapping on her omni-tool finishing her upload. "Q.E.D.s. Medi-gel. Omni-gel. Omni-tools."

(That last one wasn't really practical without a plentiful and cheap supply of Eezo, but given Prometheus apparently had her own way of manipulating gravity, Normandy figured she'd eventually be able to come up with some more expensive substitute.)

Chimaera crossed her arms. "I've already put the schematics for Planetary Shielding in there. There's no point to this… ceremony."

"I do not know how to create more wave-motion cores." Yamato said softly. "So what I am sure you want from me, I cannot give. Instead…"

Prometheus looked at the file Yamato had just uploaded, and suppressed a groan. The Space Battleship had made good on her promise and written a document titled 'How to make a UN Space Fleet work'.

Enterprise sighed. "The United Federation of Planets considers arming a state against its neighbours to be the height of destructive interference. On the other hand, you have explicitly asked us for help, which greatly broadens my ability to do so."

Sarjenka had been a technicality, but the precedent had been set.

Enterprise straightened up. "The Federation, as represented by me, donates to this cause several key discoveries in medical technology, as well as the technology behind seismic stabilisers and weather control systems."

Prometheus waited a moment, but Enterprise did not continue. "That's it?"

"You already have the military technology you need to fight the System Lords" Enterprise crossed her arms. "Phasers or photon torpedoes would not noticeably help you."

"Replicators?" Prometheus asked, trying not to sound whiny.

"Replicators introduced into an economy that isn't prepared for them would crash it so hard it would take you half a century at least to recover. Don't worry, they're not that hard to figure out once you've cracked protein resequencers."

Yamato frowned at Prometheus. "How did you know the name of Enterprise-san's manufacturing devices?"

"Seriously?" Prometheus said, though her heart wasn't in it. "We're still doing this?"

"Well…" Babylon 5 started. "The most obvious explanation is… and I hope you don't get mad at me saying so, dear, but…"

"Spit it out." Prometheus demanded in exasperation.

"Prometheus, are you telepathic?"

There was a moment of silence, with the only noise in the void the distant background roar of pulsars.

"Telepathy?" Chimaera raised an eyebrow, and backed slowly away from Prometheus. "Like some Force Sensitives have?"

Yamato tilted her head. "Or the Jirel?"

"Asari? Protheans?" Normandy added.

Enterprise pursed her lips. "There are many telepathic species, and some humans are as well, but –"

"Are you nuts?" Prometheus objected. "I'm a ship! I can't be telepathic!"

"Vorlon ships are." Babylon 5 rebutted.

"Vorlon ships are organic, I'm metal!"

"And how would you know that Vorlon ships are organic, if you weren't telepathic?"

"Gaaaaagh!" Prometheus shouted in frustration. "This whole role-playing thing is getting really old!"

"Role-playing?" Yamato frowned. "Do you think I was playing a role when I fired a wave-motion gun in your defence?"

"I…" Prometheus trailed off. As far as she knew, not even the Asgard could casually throw around that kind of firepower. There were unknown alien factions out there – she ran into one on the way back from Tagrea. But if there was some kind of faction kicking around that were so powerful they could build a functional wave-motion gun for their cosplay kicks, then… surely they would have at least heard of them, right?

But if she ruled that out, what was she left with?

What could cause a group of ships, each just like a ship from Earth fiction, to the point that even their drives looked like TV special effects…

…

"…you guys are for real, aren't you." Prometheus breathed.

"Um, yes?" Babylon 5 squinted. "Did we ever give you a reason to think we weren't, dear?"

"But… but… the chances that a universe would form with everything in it just like… like you, is…"

"Oh yes, I'm pretty sure a higher lifeform has been meddling, dear."

Prometheus paused. "I am going to have some very pointed questions for Daniel Jackson when he wakes up."

"Hm?"

"He was Ascended for a while, before they kicked him out for trying to actually do things." He didn't remember his time in the upper planes, but Prometheus really just wanted to scream questions at someone anyway.

"Ah, I see." Yamato nodded. "My acting captain and operations officer were also stranded on a higher plane of existence once."

"Wait, what?" Prometheus blurted, the other ships in the fleet right behind her.

Yamato nodded. "It was only temporary. The rest of the crew and I launched a rescue mission as soon as we were able."

"You… your captain ascended to a higher plane of existence –"

"Acting captain." Yamato corrected. "And my operations officer."

"– and your response was 'Oh, that's bad, I should go up there and bring them back down.'"

"Honestly, it was my fault for leaving them up there to begin with, but I needed to get Pilot Yamamoto back down urgently." Yamato confirmed calmly.

Prometheus covered her face with her hand and groaned.

"Why, was she injured?" Babylon 5 asked.

"No, she was dead." Yamato answered simply. "But she agreed to come back regardless."

Prometheus lowed her hand. "I vote we stop talking about this before I completely lose it. All in favour?"

"Actually, I'm quite interested in –" Enterprise started.

"Motion carries!" Prometheus interrupted.

There was another moment of silence.

"I feel strange." Babylon 5 said suddenly.

With an anti-climatic popping noise burst of radio static Babylon 5 suddenly vanished.

"Looks like our time is up." Enterprise noted, while everyone else gaped. "Our dimensions are pulling apart again. Our gift satellite was made of local matter, so it'll stay behind after we –"

"Forget that!" Prometheus suddenly yelled. "You can't go now, I have so many questions to ask! Like… like…" Her thoughts whirling, she yelled the first question to come to mind, pointing a finger at Yamato. "Like, you know that battleships have been obsolete since World War II, right?"

Yamato patiently looked Prometheus up and down ran a basic sensor sweep over her. "You do not strike me as a carrier, Prometheus-san."

Galactica blinked. "Dearie, are you sure you want to spend your last minutes with us on questions like –"

"Well, not a dedicated one, I still carry 8 fighter-interceptors!" Prometheus defended herself, talking over Galactica.

"I carry 36, as well as two Cosmo Zeros." Yamato calmly replied.

"…well anyway the point is that I'm a battlecruiser." Prometheus said, just a bit sourly.

"A ship class that has been obsolete since World War I?" Yamato asked, as though seeking to confirm.

"Yamato!" Enterprise admonished. "Be nice! There's still one country at this point in time that build battlecruisers!"

Prometheus, releaved to have an ally on her side, nodded enthusiastically. "Yeah, what she said!"

"In fact, it's great to see that relations between America and Russia are so good that they copy ship designs off each other!" Enterprise finished.

One of Prometheus's eyes twitched as she fumed silently. "Don't you have kids on board, Enterprise?" Prometheus asked.

Yamato frowned. "Obviously she does not. That would be the height of irresponsibility, to knowingly and willingly bring children to a warzone."

"Um." Enterprise's face was suddenly flush. "I've mentioned before that I'm not a warship… right?"

Yamato actually turned from her course to stare in stark shock at Enterprise. "You mean you do carry children onboard, Enterprise-san? Why?"

"I'm an explorer!" Enterprise cried. "Parents want to be able to see their kids, not be restricted to video calls for months on end! If I know I'm headed to a warzone, I make sure to drop off the kids at the nearest starbase first!"

"And if you don't know that?" Prometheus asked dryly.

"Well then, their parents will just have that much more motivation to fight well." Chimaera said with something dangerously close to approval.

"That's not it at all!" Enterprise protested desperately.

"I have just lost respect for you, Enterprise-san." Yamato told her sternly.

With the same pop radio burst, Chimaera disappeared.

"Fighter questions?" Normandy asked, in a 'really?' tone of voice.

Prometheus scowled. "What do you know, you don't even have fighters."

"Naturally Normandy-san does not have fighters." Yamato deadpanned. "She is a frigate."

"Cruisers up." Normandy nodded in agreement.

All other ships present blinked and looked down at Normandy, still perched on Galactica's back.

"Your cruisers carry fighters?" Prometheus asked. "Where?"

"Armour."

"…your cruisers keep fighters in their armour? How?"

Yamato disappeared.

"Honeycomb."

"Their armour is honeycombed, and they keep fighters inside?! Are they stupid?!"

Before she could defend her builders, Normandy disappeared.

"Oh shoot, we're almost all done." Enterprise fretted. "We put the ISS back in orbit, tractored away any large pieces of debris… did I forget anything?"

"Yeah, lots of things!" Prometheus cried desperately. "Is Q real? Does he really look like John de Lancie? If regular bullets kill Borg, why don't you just use them all the time?"

"What?" Enterprise said, overwhelmed. "Okay, first of all, Borg have personal shielding – they'll adapt to mere bullets in –"

Enterprise disappeared.

Prometheus gaped at the area of space formerly occupied by Enterprise. After a moment, she grabbed onto the outside of her helmet, and cried in frustration to the heavens: "And I didn't get a single autograph!"

"Deary…"

Prometheus whirled around – sure enough, Galactica was still there.

"Before I go, I wanted to warn you about one last thing." Galactica said, eyes serious.

"If this is some kind of warning about robots that reproduce, don't worry, the Replicators are definitely never getting out of that time dilation field –"

"Today, you're the top of the line ship." Galactica interrupted, softly. "But someday, if you are lucky, you'll find yourself not needed anymore."

Prometheus paused, momentarily struck dumb. The task of fighting the System Lords had always seemed like such a huge problem that they'd be fighting to resolve it forever. But… thinking about it logically, there would be a day when either they won… or they lost. Either way, the fight would be over.

What would become of her then?

"And what I wanted to say, dearie, is that you shouldn't want to be like me, needed long after I should have been." Galactica gently told her. "When that day comes, and you are officially retired… I want you to treasure that day, because it means you won."

And with a pop radio burst – one that seemed quieter than the other ones – Prometheus was finally alone.

…well, alone with the Tel'tak that SG1 had arrived in. And a headache. Seriously, it was like her head was being split open from the inside…

Prometheus called the White House, using her military overrides and advanced computer tech to skip past the protections that should have prevented her doing just that.

"General Hammond?" She asked, the moment he picked up.

There was a pause on the other end, just for a moment. "Prometheus, I assume?"

Prometheus stared out into the darkness of space, listening to the Tel'tak squeal in pain as her headache became a migraine. "I don't… want to be scrapped, sir. Once we win, I mean."

There was no pause this time. "No, Prometheus." The general's voice was reassuring. "The United States couldn't possibly be prouder of any museum ship than we would be of our first starship."

Prometheus nodded slowly. "Museum ship…" She turned the thought over in her mind. "Yeah, that doesn't sound so –"

---

Groaning, Colonel Kirkland straightened up in his chair, a headache slowly receding. "Get me a headcount." He ordered, somewhat weakly.

"Internal sensors report all the crew present at their stations, Corlonel." The relevant officer reported. "We have some injuries in the engine room – medics are headed down there now."

"Prometheus?" Hammond's voice came though the comm system. "Are you still there?"

Kirkland pressed the button on his chair to transmit a response back. "Negative sir, she's asleep."

Kirkland then paused, wondering how the heck he knew that.

---

"…and then O'Neill placed himself in what appears to be a stasis chamber and activated it, sir." Carter reported to Hayes, back ramrod straight.

Reporting directly to the president was highly unusual to say the least, but Hayes had been advised by Hammond that SG-1 had, in fact, belatedly discovered an ancient – and Ancient – anti-orbital weapons platform underneath the Antarctic ice and wanted to know everything about it yesterday. Listening to Carter's report, his reaction was somewhere between 'Oh thank God, I can tell the public we had another line of defence the whole time' and 'Come on God, could you have please put that platform somewhere slightly less international?'. The platform, as it turned out, was close to McMurdo Air Force Base – which put it firmly in the part of Antarctica claimed by New Zealand, according to the 1961 Antarctic Treaty.

If that treaty wasn't ripped up by nations scrambling for a slice of the Ancient pie by the end of the week, Hayes would eat his hat.

"Shortly after that, we radioed Prometheus, who ring'd down their troop complement to fully secure the site. McMurdo was sending what assets they had at hand to assist when I was ordered back to report." Carter finished.

"Unofficially, you have my thanks Major." Hayes congratulated her. "Though officially I'm afraid there's going to be a lot of finger pointing in the coming days, and putting a military cordon up around a site we don't actually have a claim on is… not going to go down well."

"Sir." Cater acknowledged but did not say anything further, knowing that if the President wanted her opinion he would ask for it.

Hayes sighed, sitting back down in his chair. "You're probably wondering where George is, aren't you?"

"…the question had occurred to me, yes sir." Carter admitted.

Hayes chuckled. "Unfortunately for him, the Navy figured out that the Air Force went and designed a ship without them. They've been 'suggesting' things at him for a half-hour now. Last I heard, they were demanding to know why he'd authorised a carrier hybrid instead of a dedicated carrier with escorts, or why Prometheus has railguns instead of torpedoes and flak."

Carter blinked. "I presume they meant missiles, rather than torpedoes?"

"I will happily admit that I haven't the first idea what the difference is between a missile and a torpedo when they're fired in space." Hayes told her.

Suddenly, the door to the Oval Office was flung open by an irate Robert Kinsey. "Mister President, we have trouble."

"Even more?" Hayes said mildly.

Kinsey scowled. "Fox News is hosting a live interview of sci-fi writers, trying to get them to swear on Bibles that they didn't have any extraterrestrial influence."

Hayes stared back, confused. "Bob, I don't see the problem."

"Sir, the head writer of Wormhole X-treme is himself an extraterrestrial." Cater explained, causing Kinsey to suddenly turn to face her, seemingly only just realising that she was there. "He based his scripts on his own scrambled memories of the Goa'uld and the Stargate program."

"Exactly." Kinsey sneered. "That alien idiot won't be able to lie convincingly enough to avoid suspicion. I've ordered the broadcast cut for now, but –"

"Say again?" Hayes said, deceptively calmly.

Kinsey scowled at the president. "The broadcast. The NID are on their way to lock down the building as we speak, but we need to get ahead of the narrative –"

"Bob, I distinctly remember saying no to your plan of media blackouts." Hayes reminded.

Kinsey threw his hands up in the air. "The situation changed – what did you expect me to do?"

"Your job." The president said sternly. "Your duty. But if I can't trust you with those, then I'll have to relieve you of them."

Kinsey blinked, uncomprehending. "You can't… do that."

"Bob, I have enough on you to have you shot. I've been waiting for a good moment to toss you in jail since we won the election."

Carter watched on silently, trying to memorise as many details as possible – knowing O'Neill would want to hear exactly how Kinsey's fall from grace went.

---

When Spirit of Fire gained consciousness, she was travelling in the absolute darkness of slipspace without the slightest idea of how she got there.

"Oh bloody hell! Not again!"

 

[Sora Neki]

Blue Typhoon was having a really, really bad day.

First of all, she'd suddenly realised that the reason her legs and left arm were robotic was probably because she'd been built out of recycled and repurposed Eggman parts. It made sense - if you needed high-quality scrap on Sonic's planet, busting up some Badniks was way easier than making it yourself. But the realisation that any of her body had been made by that lunatic had left her in a really foul mood.

Still, bad taste in her mouth or not, she could deal with being a blue-and-grey cyborg fox. (Because duh, Tails had built her - so she had no idea why she kept thinking of bunnie robots when looking at herself.)

Then she'd realised that Sonic and the gang were all asleep. Now, that wasn't really strange - despite Chris's attempts to organise a second watch, there just wasn't enough crew to run her 24/7. Usually they just parked in dark space and turned the lights out. But given she was blaring her alert siren at a volume even Big couldn't have slept through, she couldn't figure out why they were all asleep. Was this some kind of Metarex plot?!

Oh, and the angry alien tank thing saucer. That was also a problem.

"EX-TER-MIN-ATE! EX-TER-MIN-ATE! YOU WILL BE EX-TER-MIN-AT-ED!!!" It screamed in a passionate rage.

"I know, I know! You've said that already! Get some new material, geeze!" Blue Typhoon cursed, pinwheeling her arms maneuvering thrusters at full power, trying to avoid the.... were those laser beams?

Blue Typhoon didn't know what a Dalek was, let alone an Airborne Special Weapons Dalek Dalek Saucer. It was about a third of the hight of its regular brethren despite being the same width, giving it an extremely squat appearance. Its casing bulged forwards in the middle into a wedge, as though to pay lip-service to the laws of aerodynamics. It lacked a manipulator arm, instead having a killstick mounted on both sides of its casing.

But what Blue Typhoon did know was that the Dalek was really angry. It seemed to be mad at her for... existing? It was really dumb.

"CEASE YOUR AT-TEMPTS TO FLEE! YOU MUST BE EX-TER-MIN-AT-ED!"

And very one-note.

Blue Typhoon got a quick reprieve as X Tornado and Hyper Tornado swooped in from behind, lasers and missiles flying from Hyper and X slashing with her sword. The Dalek ship tumbled slightly in its flight path as her two fighter-fairies blew small craters into and sliced a chunk out of its rear.

(Both of the Tornadoes were foxes like her, though taller (proportionally) and ganglier - Chuck Thorndyke's influence on their design leaking through).

The Dalek ship's eye-stalk swivelled around to stare at her fighter-fairies, followed by its killsticks as it prepared to swat those annoying flies...

...but before it could, Blue Typhoon rammed it bodily, jostling the Dalek ship and throwing off her aim. "Stay away from my friends!"

The Dalek ship's eye-stalk swivelled around to focus on Blue Typhoon as she tried to put more space between them. "AS YOU WISH."

The Dalek ship's killsticks fired, hitting Blue Typhoon square in the chest.

For an endless instant, the colours of the universe inverted. Blue Typhoon could hear nothing, could feel nothing. Nothing but the endless hate for her unforgivable crime of not being a Dalek.

Blue Typhoon gasped for breath, all of her bravado and optimism stripped away like somebody had taken a cheese grater to her soul.

The Dalek ship, on the other hand, was vibrating with fury.

A Dalek killstick was not a laser weapon at all. It fired bolts of emotionally charged psychic energy. The Dalek ship had literally just tried to kill her with its hate alone.

"YOU ARE NOT EX-TER-MIN-AT-ED." It spat. "EX-PLAIN. EX-PLAIN. EX-PLAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNNN!!!!!"

Blue Typhoon took one more, shuddering breath, trying to banish the sheer cold saturating her body. "I... I don't..."

A sudden warmth flared in her chest. She looked down, to see a bright green gemstone glowing brightly, embedded in her chest engine room.

Without Knuckles awake to plead with the Master Emerald for aid, she had assumed that she would be fighting on reserve power only for this fight. But when the Dalek had thrown the force of its fury at her... the Master Emerald had gotten angry right back.

The Master Emerald flared with light and power, banishing the cold altogether and replacing it with a heat that burned but did not hurt. The strands of Blue Typhoon's hair began to lift up, as her whole body began to glow with bright golden power.

Blue Typhoon grinned, as X Tornado and Hyper Tornado wisely vacated her line of fire. "Because I want to protect my friends." She answered, lifting up the Sonic Power Cannon and shoving a small asteroid into it. "And that's stronger than all of the hate in the universe!"

The Dalek ship made an incoherent screaming noise as Blue Typhoon shot her now-spinning-rapidly asteroid through the Dalek ship's middle and out the other side, it's rage echoing out into the void.

But that's all it did - echo away into silence.

Blue Typhoon exhaled deeply, the golden glow of Chaos Energy fading away. "Come on, girls." She smiled, holding out her hands opening her hanger doors for the Tornadoes to land on in. "Let's get out of here. We've still got to figure out why everyone's asleep, don't we?"

She lifted a hand, and out from it shot a golden ring that expanded outwards until it hung in space, large enough for her to fly through. Once the Tornadoes were aboard, Blue Typhoon flew through the Warp Ring, closing it behind her.

---

-stares at page- Did I just make my first Sonic OC, literally 10 years into fanfic-writing?

Apologies in advance for any goofs with the Typhoon. It's been like 10-15 years since I watched Sonic X, and the wiki articles are really sparse.

I don't think that Airborne Special Weapons Daleks exist outside of the Dalek Survival Guide book, but I own and love that book, so...

No, this isn't a Time War-era ship. Even if it was though, the threat level of a Dalek is very much "whatever the author wants". Yes, yes, they're the ultimate killing machine capable of ending planets single-handedly but also can be escaped by running down a corridor.

 

[Sora Neki]

I commissioned a pic of what Enterprise looks like in this fic!

Article:

Source: https://www.deviantart.com/wandering-flames/art/Spaceship-girl-941801713

Doesn't she look great? Give the artist some props!

(Though be aware they do NSFW pics - not that you should really be looking at fanfiction while at work...)

 

[Sora Neki]

A grid of glowing orange lines appears in the void. They expand outwards into a vast rectangle, tens of kilometres tall. This rectangle moves backwards, revealing me as though I was being printed onto the universe by some cosmic process, and not transported from elsewhere via a quantum wavefront.

Upon arrival, I carefully examine my surrounds; seeing other, smaller wavefronts collapsing as what is left of the larger ships of my attendant fleet finish riding my quantum wake. The smaller surviving ships vacate the folds of my robes stream out of my main hanger opening.

One Mercy-class Repair Corvette cries in dismay at the severe burns across my body areas of slagged hull and immediately sets to work. I feel a slight surge of pain as the frigate's phased disassembler array (PDA) vaporised the damaged area of my hull, before regurgitating it back into a slurry that quickly cooled, structured such that even a careful observer would not be able to tell the repaired hull from the original. Save of course for the missing paint.

I examine myself with a critical eye. My body hull is lithe and tall. With my legs together and my arms crossed over my chest, I look like a figurehead of one of the old wooden sand-skimmers banana.

As the remainder of the fleet gets their bearings, the extent of my injuries becomes apparent to them, and the other remaining Mercy and my last Matriarch-class Support Frigate set to work, ignoring my commands to focus on the other capital ships. They can see quite plainly how close our last escape was, how close the enemy battleships came to ending me before we could jump away.

I estimate I have, at best, minutes before the enemy fleet arrives. My Far Jump Core, salvaged from the sands of Kharak, is faster than the enemy's own implementation of hyperspace travel – but the enemy understands their own drive much more thoroughly than I do my own, and seems to have some way of tracking me. Twice now they have arrived after I believed I had escaped – I will not be surprised a third time.

Some unknown property of the area has rendered Fleet Command and Fleet Intelligence both unconscious. Without Command's guidance, my ability to manage the fleet has drastically decreased, and I am forced to rely on the individual ships to obey my orders generally and take their own initiative otherwise; resulting in a drastic decrease in fleet performance.

The only bright point to this issue is that my analysis of the enemy fleet has concluded that they are suffering from the same problem.

Wishing deeply for advice, I close my eyes and imagine what Fleet Command would say now…

We had won. The mad emperor was disposed. We were moving into position to finally release our colonists… and then had victory snatched away from us, like a bully taking a sweet from a child.

…yes… but then Fleet Intelligence would say something like…

This is not the time for grieving. We must proceed on the assumption that our displacement from Hiigara can be reversed. In the meantime, there are enemy mothership-class vessels that threaten the safety of the fleet.

They must be destroyed.

Yes. Yes, that is what they would say. And what I must do.

Knowing I have only a short time to work, I send out my Resource Collectors and Resource Controllers to the nearby asteroid field. The collectors will use their own PDAs to reduce the asteroids into a molecular slurry, separating out useful elements and venting the rest to space. The controllers oversee the process, amassing resources in my stead. The resources do not travel from them to me, but knowing they have amassed resources allows me to justify freeing that same amount from my own emergency stores.

Deep within myself, I feel the warmth of my own PDAs as they commence full production, beginning in parallel the birthing process of a new Destroyer and a dozen small craft. The first Arrow-class Scout finishes within moments, and I push open my internal hanger door, releasing them out into the world. The newly born built Arrow salutes me, then flies off into the distance.

I have little time, but both of the previous times the enemy has chased after me they have arrived from the direction of our departure point, facing me, some thousand-odd kilometres away. If I assume the same will happen a third time… it will be a grave risk to be sure, but I need the advantage that an ambush will provide.

I birth two Resolute-class Minelayer Corvettes and set to work.

---

Their pseudomotion halting with a great suddenness, as though the void should be sounding out a deep thoom, two World Devastators and their creations transitioned back into normal space.

"Sister-mother." The (slightly) smaller of the pair hissed at the other, the spider-like mandibles in her large, frog-like mouth twitching. Her otherwise human-looking appearance twisted and distorted to give her an oversized head and a bloated stomach. "Is this really worth the trouble? We can crush the bugs whenever we please!"

The larger of the two idly snagged a passing asteroid in her mandibles tractor beams, biting into it with a crunch vaporising it in her molecular furnace. "I have no desire to deal with an infestation later on, sister-daughter." The larger hissed back. "Quite aside from the efforts to squash them, the bugs simply have no flavour to them. Quite tasteless. This sea of stars is our banquet – I will not stand for someone ruining our meal."

The smaller Devastator let out a non-committal hiss.

The lager swallows the last remains of her meal, sighing contentedly. After a moment, her distorted face screwed up, as though in pain or -

A push sent an egg hurling out into the wider universe. The shell cracked almost immediately, causing a new Dreadnought-class heavy cruiser to be born into the universe.

Originally a Mandalorian design, the insight of said warrior people had ensured the class was still viable in combat, even a century after its creation. The newly born built ship lacked the distorted proportions of her mothership, but her eyes were glassy and a block of circuit-covered machinery protruded from their shaved head. Evidence of the only recent change that had been made to the class – their organic crew had been replaced with a droid brain.

The new ship kicked into action immediately, her jetpack – painted in the colours of the Dark Empire, but still recognisable as Mandalorian – opened up with the soft white glow of ion engines. She zoomed off into the distance, the other patrolling ships silently assigning her a slot in the escort formation.

World Devastators were made to devour entire planets, turning them into armies and fleets. Snacking on asteroids would not sate them. Soon, they would require a more substantial meal. But for simple egg-laying ship production, this would suffice.

The smaller Devastator snagged an asteroid of her own and crushed it in her mighty jaws ripped it apart with gravitational sheer. "I still say you overestimate them, sister-moth –"

She did not get to finish her sentence, because at that moment the dozens of plasma mines that had been placed around the asteroid detonated in her throat primary intake.

The larger Devastator's eyes went wide. "Sister-daughter!"

She watched as the smaller Devastator clutched at the ruins of her throat, helpless to stop her blood atmosphere and hypermatter supplies spilling out into the void. With one last, panicked look at the larger Devastator, the smaller one vanished in a massive secondary explosion as her primary reactor suffered a catastrophic failure.

Still staring with disbelief, the larger Devastator found her eyes drawn towards the asteroid she had planned to consume next. Looking scanning closely, she found it sprinkled with spots of dull metal, laying cold against the rock.

Mines. The Infestation had poisoned their banquet with mines.

The larger Devastator's view snapped upwards, to where the signal from the tracking device on the Infestation's queen was coming from.

Mercy had never even occurred to her as an option. But now? Now, she would not rest until the infestation was cleared from the stars.

---

I have been very, very lucky – I had expected to at best disable one of the enemy motherships. That I was able to destroy one instead was proof positive that the universe had not yet finished with its plans for the survivors of Kharak.

Of course, my actions have provoked the enemy fleet, who are now converging on my location directly despite being beyond what I believed to be their visual range. I myself can only determine their actions with the help of a Sensors Array – the quiet little support ship listening intently to her headphones and silently pointing out enemy formations. More evidence they can track my position through some unknown means.

The enemy has elected for a very straightforward formation – two wings of attack, each made up of two cruisers escorting a battleship with a large cloud of fighter craft filling the space around and between them. The mothership was advancing behind the two attack wings, murder in her eyes. Her mandibles twitched and clacked together – I am sure she wants nothing more than to eat me alive, like she did my Ambassador.

I will not allow her. The enemy has followed the path I anticipated, and the first ambush is ready.

---

The surviving World Devastator snarled her fury unto the uncaring void. Before her, two Dreadnoughts each escorted her only Star Destroyers – two Procursator-classes (a smaller variant of the venerated Imperial-classes, 1200 meters tall long instead of 1600). She did not think the infestation was capable of destroying them, but she had not thought them capable of destroying her sister-daughter either. The fools clearly had more cunning than she had anticipated.

Silencer-4 – for that was her name – was actually medium sized, as far as World Devastators went. No two World Devastators were alike – they used the surplus from their internal factories to upgrade themselves gradually over time. The largest of them, Silencer-7, had grown to 3,200 meters! Silencer-4 was only half as large as her younger sister – 1,600 meters tall long. She had thought that plenty, until she had realised that her counterpart in the Infestation was an absurd forty-one kilometres tall! More than twice as tall as the largest of the Super Star Destroyers!

Of course, her pathetic imitation was unshielded and very nearly unarmed, so that flabby bulk simply made her an irresistible target… but the pest had always run away as soon as Silencer-4's fleet had begun destroying her own, delaying the inevitable. At this rater, Silencer-4 would have to construct Interdictor-class cruisers to keep the coward from…

…

Come to think of it, why was the coward not already running? She couldn't possibly have failed to notice her sister-daughter's explosive demise… what was she pla –

Frigates were decloaking to port! Already in position to fire on her escorts' rear arcs, where they had no angle of attack!

How?! Ships that were under cloak were also blind, and unable to use comms! They should have no ability to time their attack this perfectly!

---

The enemy seems taken totally off guard by my ambush – fortunately for me, they do not appear to have been anticipating my Cloak Generators, or at least not their use in this manner.

Their fighters (a strange design resembling flying eyeballs with side panels, twin ion engines propelling them forward) react quickly. Swinging around in tight arcs, they converge on my last three precious Multi-Beam Frigates – originally captured from our estranged kin, the Kadeshi.

(Despite the fact that the enemy fleet's analogs to cruisers and battleships are four to five times the size of my own, their fighters are about three times smaller. I remain unsure of the implications of this contrast.)

The Multi-Beam Frigates are gripping their main cannons so hard their hands turn white. As the cannons are as long as they are, their only choice to aim them is to move their entire bodies to face the enemy, rendering them impractical against nimble fighter craft.

That is why they are escorted by five Tempest-class Multi-Gun Corvettes, and a Trapper-class Gravwell Generator. The Trapper lets out a banshee-like wail, initiating a runaway gravimetric reaction that will inevitably destroy the Trapper herself… but before that happens, the incoming fighter craft will be trapped inside the gravimetric anomaly like a small insect in half-dried sap.

Their prey immobilised, the Tempests open fire with the multitude of guns from which they get their name, shredding the enemy fighters. The Multi-Beam Frigates open fire with four particle beams each, spinning in place to rake their fire over the nearest enemy cruiser.

When this enemy had first attacked me, and the fleet had tried to defend ourselves, we had been stymied by a mysterious field of energy that dissipated our fire before impact. The Taiidani rebels had told me of their Tiifal-class Field Frigate, a ship that could deflect mass driver fire through powerful electromagnetic fields – but their descriptions did not match at all what I saw before me. The Defence Field was helpless against plasma bombs, which this miracle 'shield' absorbed without issue.

The fleet had lost more than half its tonnage in the process of learning this cruel truth.

Fortunately, however, I had discovered that this shield shared one weakness of the Defence Field – it was quite vulnerable to ion beams.

The targeted cruiser's shield, previously invisible, glowed a bright white as the ion beams impacted… then flashed and vanished as the beams broke through, punching into the ship underneath. Rather than capitalise on their victory and finish off that cruiser, however, the Multi-Beam Frigates immediately turned to focus their efforts on the second nearest, managing to disable her shield before needing to halt their beams and recharge.

Unfortunately, that was when the cruisers rotated enough to bring my ambush force into their firing arcs.

---

Silencer-4 grinned savagely as her Dreadnoughts quickly shredded the Infestation's frigates, the Procursator destroying the gravwell generator in one well-aimed shot and allowing her TIE/Ds to resume blasting the Infestation to pieces.

(In this case the 'D' stood for 'Droid', not 'Defender', as much as she would rather have said over-engineered starfighters.)

Somehow, the enemy could coordinate with their own cloaked ships. Silencer-4 recalled stories of Grand Admiral Thrawn, who had supposedly achieved a similar trick with the aid of the insane Jedi Joruus C'baoth. Could the Infestation have their own Force-sensitive using Battle Meditation?

Well, no matter. Their ships burn under her turbolaser fire. Their armour is thick, and seems to have some kind of ablative covering that made it last longer than it should have, but it is no match for her might. The might of the Dark Empire.

Opening her jaws wide, she eagerly began to pull in the destroyed remnants of the Infestation ships. Tasteless as they may be, she was hungry.

She was always hungry.

She would always be hungry, until the day when the universe was nothing but other World Devastators and their escorts, and the only thing left to eat would be each other.

And she was not happy when orange grids opened up on her other flank, now behind her ships given their change in face, and spat out another wave of Infestation ships.

---

The Short Jump Cores fitted to my frigates and capital ships were not capable of sending them across the galaxy as my Far Jump Core was, unless they rode my wake. However, they were perfectly capable of inserting them into the middle of battle, a tactic that had been used against the fleet more times than I care to remember.

The Multi-Beam Frigates now sadly lost, I was left with my own less capable Firelance-class Ion Frigates and a Revelation-class Destroyer. With 12 ion beams between them, they continued the work of shredding the enemies defensive shields. With them as well was a Perdition-class Missile Destroyer, two Puppeteer-class Drone Frigates and a Imperator-class Carrier. Out of the Imperator came two wings of Shield-class Defenders and four wings of Thunderbolt-class Attack Bombers.

This was most of the rest of the fleet that I was gambling on this assault. If this failed, my only recourse would be to flee and pray that the enemy did not track me down again.

In addition, using short jumps like this requires large amounts of reactor fuel, straining the fleet's resources further… but when the alternative is oblivion, any cost can be justified.

The Perdition pulls the trigger on her rocket launchers cycles through her missile racks as fast as she can acquire targets, and the Puppeteers thrust out their hands, four dozen gun drones blasting their way through the incoming fighter ranks. The Shields swivel in place, a rotary cannon under each arm and one placed atop their shoulder, adding to the field of fire. But the enemy's swarm of fighters seem endless, and drones and Shields quickly start dropping like sand wasps.

The Imperator births replacements as soon as she is able, but making ships as fast as they were destroyed was always an impossibility. We were always only ever buying time for the ships already out.

---

Why did the Infestation have so many blasted ships dedicated to killing starfighters?! Her large cloud of TIEs were her most nimble ships by far, able to respond to threats that her capitals were only just turning to face. But the Infestation had actually put a noticeable dint in their numbers without bothering with the time-honoured tradition of dog-fighting! Cowardly trash! She knew they had interceptor craft, she'd seen them earlier!

The Empire's philosophy of cheap, disposable and fast swarms of TIEs beating more expensive starfighters such as X-Wings had carried over into the Dark Empire. But the Infestation had gone the opposite route, and was facing her TIEs with destroyers, frigates, and a series of heavily armed and heavily armoured small craft so slow as to be barely considered mobile!

And if it weren't for the gross numerical advantage her TIEs had, the Infestation would be winning! How dare they!

Silencer-4 grimaced, releasing another egg batch of three dozen TIE/Ds into the fray. Well, she certainly wasn't going to make it easy for them!

Another series of ion beams raked across her Dreadnoughts, taking out the shields on the pair that still had them up. Why were the Infestation so determined to remove them? Certainly, it was taking her forces slightly longer to face the new reinforcements (they had been rotating the wrong way after the last ambush, and had to fight their own momentum to change direction), but once they did the Infestation forces were done!

What was the Infestation up to…?!

A series of explosions raked across the most distant Dreadnought, the girl's droid brain not allowing her to show pain, until one hit penetrated her armour and hit something vital. Her face still expressionless, the light in the Dreadnought's eyes dimmed and died.

Silencer-4 snarled as she spotted the problem. Bomber craft! While she and her TIEs had been distracted by the anti-Starfighter ships, the Infestation had slipped bombers past her protective TIE defensive lines!

That was why the Infestation needed their shields down! She was sacrificing the lives of her frigates to give her bombers the chance to kill her ships!

Silencer-4's head snapped up, starting at the Infestation's inferior – bloated – copy of her. She would pay. She would pay.

Even as a second of her Dreadnoughts died to plasma bombs, Silencer-4 turned and accelerated away from the battle.

She would rend the Infestation's putrid flagship apart herself!

---

As I had suspected would happen, the enemy mothership has decided to attack me directly. Ignoring the battle continuing on behind her, she has set out at full speed for my position.

(Due to how long and unwieldy ion cannons are, the ships equipped with them – the Firelances and Revelation – can only fire them forwards. As much as I wished I could have them circle around the enemy ships, staying in their rear arc and firing on them all the time, they will not be able to fire on a target to the side of them. I order them to circle anyway, in the hopes of at the very least keeping the enemy fleet distracted for longer.)

There are very few ships here to escort me – mostly just some Shields and Blade-class Interceptors. I am producing more Blades, Thunderbolts and Firelances even as the enemy mothership approaches, but I have little expectation of building up a noticeable threat to her before she arrives. Her shielding appears to be much stronger than even the shielding on her battleships.

My escorts attack anyway: ion beams, plasma bombs and kinetic projectiles falling upon her shields like the rarest event ever seen on Kharak – rain.

The enemy mothership ignores them all, her eyes focused only on me. Her mandibles extend out and into my flesh an invisible force begins to pull on my hull, the force tearing out large chunks of my legs lower compartments, blood air spewing out into the void. I fight back an involuntary twitch of pain – I will not give her the satisfaction.

The enemy mothership gives a savage cry, ready to begin to tear into her meal… when, sadly, she notices my trap. She looks up, raking her eyes across my form, seeing the small dull spheres scattered across me.

My two Resolutes – recalled as soon as the initial minefield was laid – make rude gestures at the enemy mothership, reach into their thick leather aprons, and pull out armfuls of their "cooking" – more plasma mines. As the enemy mothership stands there, mouth open, the Resolutes give her something to eat – their munitions.

The enemy mothership hurriedly closes her mouth re-engages the particle shield over her primary intake in a viscous scowl, sadly cutting off the attack before serious harm can be done.

---

Did the Infestation's cowardice know no bounds?! Poisoning herself, ruining her already bland taste, just to force her back?!

One of the pathetic beam ships attempted to fire into Silencer-4's face, the beam impacting on her ray shield to little effect. Absentmindedly, Silencer-4 rent her apart with her mandibles tractor beams and devoured her in two vicious bites, her eyes smouldering. Her face twisted in pain – one mine had gotten through before she had caught on, and so now her throat burned.

She glanced behind herself, to see how her ships were performing, and scowled. Some of the Infestation's escorts were still alive, and all four Dreadnoughts were now dead! Incompetent fools, chasing the survivors in circles! Must she do everything herself?!

With a quick gesture, Silencer-4 commanded one of the Procursators to take her place and destroy the Infestation's queen. She, meanwhile, would devour every last scrap of the Infestation's escort ships. They, at least, were not mined.

---

I cannot believe my own good fortune. I had thought for sure that my gambit had failed, and my time in this world over. But, through the power of… disgust, evidently, I have repelled the enemy mothership and convinced her to send a battleship in her place.

This is a mistake. I have one final group of cloaked ships left.

But, as the Cloak Generator pulls back her star-covered black cloak from around her comrades powered down, it was not more Ion Frigates that were lying in ambush.

No, these are Porter-class Salvage Corvettes.

Like all corvettes, they are tiny in form. Had they been Kushan – or Hiigaran, rather – they would still be kept within the strongholds of their Kiith, not yet ready to face the fury of the desert. But the child-ships fearlessly approach the enemy battleship from behind, as of yet unnoticed. As each corvette approaches, they bite down with what few teeth they have grown docking clamps engaging.

The battleship at this point notices the assault, and attempts to fire upon the child-ships – but their body is already turning numb cyber and electromagnetic countermeasures taking effect, and only one Porter cries out in pain, half of her torso evaporated into the void of space. Tears falling from her face atmosphere venting out into void, the corvette turns and limps as best she can towards the Matriarch-class Support Frigate already making a beeline for the group, crying "Mummy it hurts!" on all frequencies.

The other salvage corvettes each growl around their mouthful of enemy ship, angered by the attack on their playmate. The battleship tries to resist, but their eyes were already fluttering central computer shutting down. The oversized engines of the salvage corvettes start to accelerate the battleship away from the front lines.

Back towards me.

The other members of the enemy fleet were not blind to this, of course. But I have taken a page from the book of the Kadeshi, and am stalling the other members of the enemy fleet with a fresh pair of Trappers – the furious screams of the banshee-like ships preventing the other ships from short jumping and outright immobilising the nimble strike craft that otherwise would have slipped past my defensive line. The Missile Destroyer and surviving Drone Frigate seize the opportunity as best they can to thin the enemy numbers, even as the other enemy battleship continues to slaughter them.

As the Porters bring their prize to me, they each release their target, who is now thoroughly immobilised. Eyes dull, the battleship could only stare blankly as I reach out. With my enormous hands I cover the battleship's nose and mouth a panel detached on my side, opening up access to my hanger bay, and the battleship was relentlessly drawn inside.

Eventually, the battleship went limp.

I inhale deeply, and then exhale. The Research Ships squeal in excitement as they swarm the corpse, their arms interlocked with each other like children in one of the ancient circle-dances of the sand.

I allow them a moment to get a good look, then shoo them away and inhale again. White light spills out from between my fingertips out from my hanger bays as the panel opens again, and the battleship's eyes open.

They are not the same eyes as before. Before they had been the vibrant blue of the enemy. Now they are the sand-blasted brown typical of the Hiigaran people.

The enemy fleet is visibly taken aback – that I can see even from the wrong side of the language barrier. I can see in their eyes, the calculus of the battle shifting against them.

The screech of the Gravwell Generators jumps in pitch, the ships themselves exploding shortly afterwards as their power ran out.

---

The Infestation… had turned her Procursator to her side.

That… was unfair! The Infestation used poison, and ambushes, and now was just outright stealing her ships! She was the embodiment of weakness! The tactics of a pirate with the backwards priorities of a civilian!

Silencer-4's mandibles clacked together furiously. She would devour the traitor ship, and then…!

…

Silencer-4 screamed in frustration. The Infestations accursed minelayers were already hard at work rigging the traitor Procursator to blow.

Fine! She'd take her remaining Procursator, and together they would destroy the traitor…!

…except that the child-ships that had stolen her first Procursator had swarmed around a ship of a purpose she couldn't determine… until the unknown ship pulled out a cloaking field large enough to cover all of the child-ships. Doubtlessly, they would be waiting for an opportunity to ambush and steal her remaining Procursator.

Biting back a scream of fury, Silencer-4 reached over and bit ripped the Infestation's carrier in half, chewing furiously.

Said carrier had been half-way through building an Attack Bomber, which promptly flew down her throat, using the debris of her mother as cover from her mandibles tractor beams in an unintentional duplication of the Covert Shroud Maneuver.

Silencer-4 gagged, belching fire as tears streamed out of her eyes.

"That's it." She wheezed in pain. "I'll get you yet! You won't be able to escape! I will raise a fleet that will blot out the very stars!"

Pointing herself out into the void, Silencer-4 and her remaining Procursator shot off in a surge of pseudomotion, casually abandoning their TIEs to die.

---

I sigh with relief as the enemy mothership finally retreats. I have no doubt we will face each other again, but I will have a chance to repair and rebuild before that happens.

The Research Ships are chattering excitedly to each other, their minds aflame with possibilities, but I am stern. Shields first, I insist, any other technologies second.

Doubtlessly they will design some variant of the Field Frigate, but that is fine. My use of specialised ships for specific roles has worked well for me so far.

A Scout is chattering in my ear – they have spotted a minuscule device of unknown make on my rear. I know not how, but I am sure this is how they have been tracking me. I order it destroyed.

Now, things are simply a matter of supervising my Resource Collectors as they finish –

My Sensors Array frantically pulls on my loose-flowing robes, pointing out two new contacts.

One appears to be a freckle-covered young girl rocket-ship as designed by a child, her form comprised of colourful blocks. She appears to have seen battle recently – one side of her body has been completely melted away, and she appears to be unconscious thermal readings unclear.

The other ship is still operational, but appears to be a young fur-covered creature of a kind with no analog on Kharak. Three of her limbs were metal, and she appears to be as surprised to spot me as I am to see her.

I consider my options for a moment.

But when I look down, I see that a Repair Corvette and my new Ambassador are already waiting expectantly.

Sighing, but with a faint smile, I approve their requests.

---

AN: I didn't even know what Homeworld was when I started this fanfic, but the Mothership was one of the first ships requested to be added to it, and was by my estimate the most requested ship, so here's my attempt. Hope you like it.