ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Limit Theory [PA Multicross SI]
Sakuya's Butler
A refined Butler to a knife wielding Mistress.
- Location
- ↓, ↘, → + Punch
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Poi~
Chapter 43
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So, since I noticed someone binging my fic, (hi crys!) I will try to update on Friday.
...hang on a second
-----------------------
SG-7
--------------------------
22 August 2000
Major Laura Bowman rolled her shoulders. The gate was currently dialing out to the world that Rachel Ezros had asked them to dial - it was some world they hadn't dialed before, so they really didn't know what was going to be on the other side. For all they knew, it could uninhabitable.
But they had to get the ships that Rachel was promising. And Major Carter really wanted to know what Rachel meant with the "mugging physics" comments. And everyone wanted to know who the Exiles were. Where had they come from? Why were they exiled? What did they want to do with the galaxy once they freed it from the Goa'uld? And more importantly, would they give up those ships?
"Seventh chevron, locked." Came the voice of the Gate Operator, or "Spinner" as the men usually called whoever was sitting there. Ca-chunk, ka-woosh. "Wormhole established."
"Send in the MALP." The Gate Controller ordered. Gate Controller was responsible for determining who entered the gate, and when. The Spinner was responsible for monitoring the gate and making sure the wormhole wasn't destabilizing. The MALP driver was responsible for handling the probe. And once the Gate Controller gave them the okay, they would head through the gate themselves.
"MALP entering wormhole." The driver announced.
"MALP en route, wormhole stable." The spinner announced. "MALP has reached target buffer.
"We are receiving from the MALP." The driver stated. "MALP is out of the wormhole. Sensor data coming back now." Everyone waited for the driver to announce the sensor results.
"Basic atmospheric is acceptable." The driver said. "Still waiting on advanced atmospheric. It looks like you'll be dropping into a base of some sort. It's a pretty big room there. Are those more Stargates on the walls?" The driver asked suddenly.
"Wait, let me see." The controller said. There was the sound of scuffling from up in the control room as the personnel moved around.
"Advanced atmospheric is green." The driver announced.
"Get us closer to one of those." The controller ordered.
Sergeant Teldy rolled her eyes.
"Gah!" The driver shouted. "Where'd she come from?"
"It seems Rachel managed to sneak up on the MALP while the camera was turned." The Controller remarked, stifling a bit of a laugh. "Alright, looks like we should hurry things up. SG-7, you're clear to proceed through the gate."
---------------------------
One wormhole jaunt later, and Bowman and her team were stepping into the massive chamber on the Exile world. And it was massive. Far taller, wider, and longer than the room that the SGC had for its gate. The floor, walls, and ceiling were made of massive panels, with strips of lighting running along them. And running along the walls were a few rows of ring structures that definitely looked like Stargates, even if some of them were nearly six times the size.
Rachel, meanwhile, had switched from leaning into the camera of the MALP to sitting on it.
"Good morning!" She said, hopping off the MALP to greet the SG team. "I am Rachel Ezros, leader of the Exiles. And you are?" She asked, gesturing to them with both hands.
"Major Laura Bowman, commanding officer of SG-7." Laura suppressed a brief spurt of envy at the woman for leading an entire civilization.
"Lieutenant Sarah Ackerman." They weren't sure if the Exiles put more respect towards military or civilian titles, but judging by Rachel's comment about "facerolling" entire fleets they were probably pretty military. Hence Sarah introducing herself with her military rank.
"Lieutenant Victoria Seras." Their team sniper wouldn't have to worry about that problem for another few months, as she was still working on her doctorate.
"Sergeant Anne Teldy." Their interpreter didn't have that problem.
"Alright, then, this way." Rachel said, walking towards one of the smaller rings on the wall. Her hair. There was so much of it, down to her knees. And it was so shiny and smooth too. It had to be a wig, especially since it was dyed a bright purple. Like, not even kidding purple. Seras's only thought on the hair was, look at that nice handhold for grappling.
A secondary ring spun up inside the first one, and a hexagonal fractal pattern appeared, bright blue. Lances of light appeared to jet out from the surface, bright white. Meanwhile lights on the ramp leading up to it lit up to form arrows pointing at the ring.
"Shall we?" Rachel turned back to them, silhouetted by the light of the teleporter.
"Where's this taking us?" Seras asked.
"To a garden where we can discuss the terms of our arrangements better." Rachel stated. Bowman frowned at this. One the one hand, they'd be taken somewhere they couldn't control. On the other hand, they could hardly refuse at this point. There might be somewhere where they could meet that didn't involve the ring, but it would be better to accept now rather than risk will trying to change that. They needed those ships. And if Rachel felt better about dealing with them in the garden, well, that would be more ships for them to use.
"Alright. Let's move." Bowman stated. Rachel turned and walked through the fractal surface. Bowman took a breath and walked through herself. Unlike with the Stargate, there was no buffer, no strange feeling that happened when all sensation was gone except the extension of gravity and floor into that strange space. One moment in the gateroom, the next looking at a fairly small garden.
"Hmmm." Bowman looked around at the nice arrangement of flowers, bushes, vines, and trees, mixed and braided- wait, what? Apparently Rachel had managed to get her plants to grow around each other in braid-like patterns. It was pretty interesting.
"Nice little place you've got here." Bowman eventually decided to remark, above the background hum of various animal noises.
"Uh, little?" Teldy asked.
"Yeah, I don't think this qualifies as little." Seras said. Frowning, Bowman turned around, noting the lack of a wall or any barrier before visibility fell to the mist. Then Bowman noticed that Seras and Teldy were looking down, at the lack of ground.
Bowman walked over to the edge and looked down. They were probably a kilometer up in the air, above a dense canopy of green. And they were in a tree. A massive, kilometer-scale tropical tree, in a sub-garden nestled in the lower branches of the massive yggdrasil that Rachel had apparently made for… whatever reason.
"Okay, that's just showing off." Ackerman finally remarked. "Why did you even make this?"
"I was bored." Rachel answered plainly. "And while I could just have just left this as a design, I decided I'd rather actually have physical gardens."
"Right." Bowman said, noticing the plural. "Let's get to negotiations." She had realized that if she let Rachel keep talking, the Exile would reveal that she ate planets or something.
"Okay." Rachel said, sitting down at a glass-topped table. "Let's begin. So, what Furling artifacts do you have that you are willing to allow me to study?"
"We have 2048 data storage devices, 512 handheld devices, 64 workstations, 32 1-meter cores, 16 2-meter cores, and one server farm." Bowman stated. The SGC had decided to play all their cards right from the start. If their ally caught them trying to create scarcity, then she might react badly. And they didn't want that, judging from her oddly-worded declaration of power.
So they had to haggle their prices up as much as possible, without angering the Exiles' leader. Who was apparently counting up assets on the holographic display built into the table, and looking smug.
-----------------------------
"Well, SG-7, how did your first day of negotiations go?" Hammond asked, the team now cleaned up and looking presentable, sitting around the conference table. Teldy had stopped by the archaeology department to deliver Rachel's question.
"Swimmingly well, sir." Bowman responded. "We have a full trade agreement pretty much ready to be signed."
"General, it also appears to be a trap." Teldy spoke up. "The negotiations were too easy. Rachel pretty much looked like she wanted us to get the ships."
"Well, yes." Bowman said. "There's something off about this. For all we know, she just doesn't care if we have those ships because hers are so much better. Or she has enough of them to steamroll us. Or she's bluffing. We honestly have no idea what her plan is. And because of that, we have no idea how to stop it."
"Do you think she's planning on using the ships as an attack vector?" Hammond said.
"It would be too easy for us to notice," Ackerman said. "She already warned us that we should be careful of Goa'uld traps, so I don't think she'd try to stick her own traps in."
"Perhaps she wants us to waste our time and efforts on converting those ships, instead of advancing our own designs." Teldy said.
"Well, our own ship won't be ready for action for another two years if everything goes according to schedule." Hammond said. "We just suffered a major setback on our 301 program, so even a space-capable interceptor is beyond our capabilities. We need those ships."
"Sir." Bowman said. "Are we sure that Rachel wasn't the one to sabotage the 301 program?"
"Our analysts found that unlikely, given that she is offering warships for items in Area 51 that she could have taken while she was there." Hammond said.
"So we're springing the trap?" Teldy asked.
"We have no choice." Hammond replied.
...hang on a second
-----------------------
Chapter 43
--------------------------SG-7
--------------------------
22 August 2000
Major Laura Bowman rolled her shoulders. The gate was currently dialing out to the world that Rachel Ezros had asked them to dial - it was some world they hadn't dialed before, so they really didn't know what was going to be on the other side. For all they knew, it could uninhabitable.
But they had to get the ships that Rachel was promising. And Major Carter really wanted to know what Rachel meant with the "mugging physics" comments. And everyone wanted to know who the Exiles were. Where had they come from? Why were they exiled? What did they want to do with the galaxy once they freed it from the Goa'uld? And more importantly, would they give up those ships?
"Seventh chevron, locked." Came the voice of the Gate Operator, or "Spinner" as the men usually called whoever was sitting there. Ca-chunk, ka-woosh. "Wormhole established."
"Send in the MALP." The Gate Controller ordered. Gate Controller was responsible for determining who entered the gate, and when. The Spinner was responsible for monitoring the gate and making sure the wormhole wasn't destabilizing. The MALP driver was responsible for handling the probe. And once the Gate Controller gave them the okay, they would head through the gate themselves.
"MALP entering wormhole." The driver announced.
"MALP en route, wormhole stable." The spinner announced. "MALP has reached target buffer.
"We are receiving from the MALP." The driver stated. "MALP is out of the wormhole. Sensor data coming back now." Everyone waited for the driver to announce the sensor results.
"Basic atmospheric is acceptable." The driver said. "Still waiting on advanced atmospheric. It looks like you'll be dropping into a base of some sort. It's a pretty big room there. Are those more Stargates on the walls?" The driver asked suddenly.
"Wait, let me see." The controller said. There was the sound of scuffling from up in the control room as the personnel moved around.
"Advanced atmospheric is green." The driver announced.
"Get us closer to one of those." The controller ordered.
Sergeant Teldy rolled her eyes.
"Gah!" The driver shouted. "Where'd she come from?"
"It seems Rachel managed to sneak up on the MALP while the camera was turned." The Controller remarked, stifling a bit of a laugh. "Alright, looks like we should hurry things up. SG-7, you're clear to proceed through the gate."
---------------------------
One wormhole jaunt later, and Bowman and her team were stepping into the massive chamber on the Exile world. And it was massive. Far taller, wider, and longer than the room that the SGC had for its gate. The floor, walls, and ceiling were made of massive panels, with strips of lighting running along them. And running along the walls were a few rows of ring structures that definitely looked like Stargates, even if some of them were nearly six times the size.
Rachel, meanwhile, had switched from leaning into the camera of the MALP to sitting on it.
"Good morning!" She said, hopping off the MALP to greet the SG team. "I am Rachel Ezros, leader of the Exiles. And you are?" She asked, gesturing to them with both hands.
"Major Laura Bowman, commanding officer of SG-7." Laura suppressed a brief spurt of envy at the woman for leading an entire civilization.
"Lieutenant Sarah Ackerman." They weren't sure if the Exiles put more respect towards military or civilian titles, but judging by Rachel's comment about "facerolling" entire fleets they were probably pretty military. Hence Sarah introducing herself with her military rank.
"Lieutenant Victoria Seras." Their team sniper wouldn't have to worry about that problem for another few months, as she was still working on her doctorate.
"Sergeant Anne Teldy." Their interpreter didn't have that problem.
"Alright, then, this way." Rachel said, walking towards one of the smaller rings on the wall. Her hair. There was so much of it, down to her knees. And it was so shiny and smooth too. It had to be a wig, especially since it was dyed a bright purple. Like, not even kidding purple. Seras's only thought on the hair was, look at that nice handhold for grappling.
A secondary ring spun up inside the first one, and a hexagonal fractal pattern appeared, bright blue. Lances of light appeared to jet out from the surface, bright white. Meanwhile lights on the ramp leading up to it lit up to form arrows pointing at the ring.
"Shall we?" Rachel turned back to them, silhouetted by the light of the teleporter.
"Where's this taking us?" Seras asked.
"To a garden where we can discuss the terms of our arrangements better." Rachel stated. Bowman frowned at this. One the one hand, they'd be taken somewhere they couldn't control. On the other hand, they could hardly refuse at this point. There might be somewhere where they could meet that didn't involve the ring, but it would be better to accept now rather than risk will trying to change that. They needed those ships. And if Rachel felt better about dealing with them in the garden, well, that would be more ships for them to use.
"Alright. Let's move." Bowman stated. Rachel turned and walked through the fractal surface. Bowman took a breath and walked through herself. Unlike with the Stargate, there was no buffer, no strange feeling that happened when all sensation was gone except the extension of gravity and floor into that strange space. One moment in the gateroom, the next looking at a fairly small garden.
"Hmmm." Bowman looked around at the nice arrangement of flowers, bushes, vines, and trees, mixed and braided- wait, what? Apparently Rachel had managed to get her plants to grow around each other in braid-like patterns. It was pretty interesting.
"Nice little place you've got here." Bowman eventually decided to remark, above the background hum of various animal noises.
"Uh, little?" Teldy asked.
"Yeah, I don't think this qualifies as little." Seras said. Frowning, Bowman turned around, noting the lack of a wall or any barrier before visibility fell to the mist. Then Bowman noticed that Seras and Teldy were looking down, at the lack of ground.
Bowman walked over to the edge and looked down. They were probably a kilometer up in the air, above a dense canopy of green. And they were in a tree. A massive, kilometer-scale tropical tree, in a sub-garden nestled in the lower branches of the massive yggdrasil that Rachel had apparently made for… whatever reason.
"Okay, that's just showing off." Ackerman finally remarked. "Why did you even make this?"
"I was bored." Rachel answered plainly. "And while I could just have just left this as a design, I decided I'd rather actually have physical gardens."
"Right." Bowman said, noticing the plural. "Let's get to negotiations." She had realized that if she let Rachel keep talking, the Exile would reveal that she ate planets or something.
"Okay." Rachel said, sitting down at a glass-topped table. "Let's begin. So, what Furling artifacts do you have that you are willing to allow me to study?"
"We have 2048 data storage devices, 512 handheld devices, 64 workstations, 32 1-meter cores, 16 2-meter cores, and one server farm." Bowman stated. The SGC had decided to play all their cards right from the start. If their ally caught them trying to create scarcity, then she might react badly. And they didn't want that, judging from her oddly-worded declaration of power.
So they had to haggle their prices up as much as possible, without angering the Exiles' leader. Who was apparently counting up assets on the holographic display built into the table, and looking smug.
-----------------------------
"Well, SG-7, how did your first day of negotiations go?" Hammond asked, the team now cleaned up and looking presentable, sitting around the conference table. Teldy had stopped by the archaeology department to deliver Rachel's question.
"Swimmingly well, sir." Bowman responded. "We have a full trade agreement pretty much ready to be signed."
"General, it also appears to be a trap." Teldy spoke up. "The negotiations were too easy. Rachel pretty much looked like she wanted us to get the ships."
"Well, yes." Bowman said. "There's something off about this. For all we know, she just doesn't care if we have those ships because hers are so much better. Or she has enough of them to steamroll us. Or she's bluffing. We honestly have no idea what her plan is. And because of that, we have no idea how to stop it."
"Do you think she's planning on using the ships as an attack vector?" Hammond said.
"It would be too easy for us to notice," Ackerman said. "She already warned us that we should be careful of Goa'uld traps, so I don't think she'd try to stick her own traps in."
"Perhaps she wants us to waste our time and efforts on converting those ships, instead of advancing our own designs." Teldy said.
"Well, our own ship won't be ready for action for another two years if everything goes according to schedule." Hammond said. "We just suffered a major setback on our 301 program, so even a space-capable interceptor is beyond our capabilities. We need those ships."
"Sir." Bowman said. "Are we sure that Rachel wasn't the one to sabotage the 301 program?"
"Our analysts found that unlikely, given that she is offering warships for items in Area 51 that she could have taken while she was there." Hammond said.
"So we're springing the trap?" Teldy asked.
"We have no choice." Hammond replied.
Crystalwatcher
(Verified GM)
- Location
- Limbo
I feel loved.So, since I noticed someone binging my fic, (hi crys!) I will try to update on Friday.
...hang on a second
Thank you. /hugbomb.jpeg
Arafell
Verified Cephalon
- Location
- Oregon
"And when they take the bait, they'll realize the horrible truth - there was no trap! Bwahahahahahaha!"
-Trolling intensifies-
Jackercracks
In a British accent
- Location
- England
You're really enjoying making her as anime as possible, neh?
Ravengt
(Abusing a Time Loop) (Going mad with power)
- Location
- I'm right here....right?
But that's just the thing you realize. In the SG Universe there's Always a trap, ALWAYS, or at the very least various strings attached all over the place. If there isn't a trap then it simply means that the trap hasn't gone off yet, the trap wasn't meant for u or u just didn't notice it when it went off. I imagine that as time goes on, at least til they see what she's actually capable of, they'll just keep getting more and more paranoid. Should be hilarious.
Stephenopolos
Going through stargate withdrawl
- Location
- illinois
The trap is in the form of subversive programs and nanite bugs throughout the ships place to both keep an eye on the SGC and to prevent hostile takeover by goa'uld or NID.But that's just the thing you realize. In the SG Universe there's Always a trap, ALWAYS, or at the very least various strings attached all over the place. If there isn't a trap then it simply means that the trap hasn't gone off yet, the trap wasn't meant for u or u just didn't notice it when it went off. I imagine that as time goes on, at least til they see what she's actually capable of, they'll just keep getting more and more paranoid. Should be hilarious.
Also, given the massive change to Atlantis and so on, I have to wonder if the Asuran replicators are present in this au, and if they are, did they do something totally ridiculous like turn their solar system I to a fractal Dyson sphere, swarm, or bubble?
Last edited:
Chapter 44
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So, here you go:
Chrono
-------------------------------
28 August 2000
"Well, well, I've been expecting you." Chrono said, to the hyperspace window. Reflex networks had brought her out of her distracted musing and focused her attention on the target in the milliseconds it took for the target to cross her sensor range.
The target did not respond, instead engaging its sublight drive and launching smaller craft.
Chrono's forces automatically responded with a hail of point defense, shredding the smaller craft into their constituent parts. Meanwhile, Chrono grinned and activated her attack.
10,000 kilometers from the incoming ship, three Stormfronts activated their massive ASM projector arrays, defining the interior of the ship as being in the same place as the Stormfronts' troop bays. M-doxes and c-fabbers flooded into the corridors from dozens of points, shooting and reclaiming everything.in range.
"Meet your death!" She shouted over an open channel. Nah, that doesn't work. Her victims refused to respond, instead crawling all over her units. She set her fabbers to reclaim those that were close enough, and shot those that attempted to close. <Mom> would have called it ironic, to eat the Replicators. And especially ironic that their attempts to eat her units weren't working. They were causing heat-charge buildup, but it was unlikely they would be able to reverse-engineer her technology. After all, it had been designed to resist nanomachine intrusion, and whatever field the Replicators were emitting was far less versatile than that.
Aboard the Bilskirnir-class cruiser, Chrono proceed to add even more units, using <Mom's> and <Lindy's> frame design craft. Chrono was using the 15-meter Tank frame, equipped with a smaller version of the SSX's laser beams. The coherent streams of photon molecules were absorbed by the bugs, going nowhere. Chrono sighed and sent different units, these ones armed with neutronium shotguns. These were significantly more deadly to the modular bugs.
Eventually, the shields failed, and Chrono sent in two dozen Settlers to finish reclaiming the ship and the remaining Replicators. The ship wasn't as intact as she wanted it to be, though. Her attacks had skewered dozens of critical components, and the Replicators had consumed some of the technology that she knew should have been there. Fortunately that technology was mostly for organic beings, which she had no direct need of.
Now, she needed to send her data back to base. <Mom> had reserved 10 of the 26 complete Libraries for her use. Lindy had plenty of her own Research Cores in this system, but they didn't have the umph needed for her to make all that technology.
---------------------------
Rachel
---------------------------
31 August 2000
"Operation This WIll Probably End Badly is a go." I said to myself, as I mentally slammed the big red button to do something very epic and very boring.
So, in Stargate: Atlantis, there's a device in one episode that causes people's flesh to turn into explosive tumors. Sounds incredibly dumb, right?
Except that the Wraith used biotechnology for everything. Their weapons, their armor, their ships, everything was biotechnology. Darts were specialized organisms, not pilotable fighters. So if that beam could be tuned to only affect the Wraith biotechnology, one could simply fire the beam everywhere, get all the Wraith, and leave everyone else alone.
Which is why I had several billion Type-B(w) (Anti-bio, tuned for Wraith biochemistry) Auduxes around every planet, and several thousand trailing behind every Wraith fleet. Seems excessive, but then consider I had several hundred Libraries under construction, and I was barely using all my economy. In fact, we had so many units that I had to reconfigure them so we didn't run out of IFF addresses. We had actually gotten up to about 10% before I realized that and fixed the system to support even more units. It actually took a bit of hardware modding so I could set new channels for IFFs, but it worked.
So, my units engaged, fired their weapons… and that was the end of the Wraith. Splat on my brutally-efficient, self-replicating-mechanism-of-war windshield. Millions of ships and thousands of Hives just disappeared in the blink of an eye. That… was very anticlimactic. Yes, I do have some more images of explosions, but I honestly expected something to go wrong.
--------------------------
In the skies over Asuras, my Ospreys activated their sweep transporters, derived from Wraith technology and tuned to pick up only particular materials. Like ZPMs. Thanks to huge numbers and some clever flight patterns, I could cover the entire planet in under a minute. The Asurans barely had time to realize what was happening before I was finished, my Ospreys screaming for orbit.
Some of their ships started powering up. Oh well. It wasn't going to help them, because of step two of Operation I Shouldn't Have Done This.
My fusion warheads are about 3 meters in diameter. I have mounted them on high-power asymmetric non-restartable gravwave boosters, giving them a greatly increased speed compared to my previous high-yield weaponry. They are non-volatile, unlike flash-forged missiles, meaning I can make them and let them drift. About 16 trillion of them can fit on the surface of an average planet.
Asuras was about to get 9.6 yottatons of TNT, directly to the everywhere. That's 150 times the binding energy of the planet. You want to cause an Alderaan-like explosion? Then do this. I could have used a Ragnarok, but that might have given the Asurans too much warning.
The Asurans barely had time to get their sensors back online before they realized that I was sending a solid shell of nuclear missiles at them. With nothing powered up and fully online, they could only watch in gobsmacked horror as their doom surrounded them, and tightened around them.
Then the missiles got close enough to almost touch, and exploded. Half the energy went straight into space, in an incandescent wave that expanded from the surface, shredding away the atmosphere.
Below the missiles, my sensors could barely tell what was happening, even before my ARKYDs died from the first shockwave. It was just enough for me to tell that the planet compressed dozens of kilometers. And then nothing happened. The surface cooled to only white-hot, and some areas were almost yellow-hot.
And then the shockwave finished traveling through the planet, and it cracked. The rocks on the surface barely shot up at five times escape velocity, but then the compressed core layer shot past that, an expanding sphere moving at around twenty times escape velocity. Anything smaller than a Skylord was going to get shredded if it moved closer than the moon. Speaking of which, poor moon. Have some nuclear missiles too. That should make you feel all better.
Actually, I really don't need anything in this system. Let's blow it all up.
-------------------------
Detonating an ice moon in a ring system has got to be one of the coolest things ever. There's the initial shockwave from the tops of the blasts, then, there's a second shockwave from all the water plasma, and you might decide there's a third one following almost immediately behind that made up of steam that's almost plasma. These cut through the ring system, creating a rainbow of interactions and radiation emissions. It's kinda hypnotic, watching what's happening as the rings get destroyed by the shockwaves. The explosion of the rest of the moon once the shockwave finishes propagating through the core is lackluster compared to it.
And now, for the next explosion test! I had fired a missile at the core of a gas giant to see how deep I could get it before it was destroyed. That answered that question. The next question was, "what happens when I throw a pentillion nuclear warheads into a hot jupiter?"
Answer: not only did the planet explode in a continuous shockwave, it suddenly spat out another blast that overtook the first one, destroying everything in its path. Everything. That was a small supernova. Okay, time to jump out before that hits my location.
Chapter 44
-------------------------------Chrono
-------------------------------
28 August 2000
"Well, well, I've been expecting you." Chrono said, to the hyperspace window. Reflex networks had brought her out of her distracted musing and focused her attention on the target in the milliseconds it took for the target to cross her sensor range.
The target did not respond, instead engaging its sublight drive and launching smaller craft.
Chrono's forces automatically responded with a hail of point defense, shredding the smaller craft into their constituent parts. Meanwhile, Chrono grinned and activated her attack.
10,000 kilometers from the incoming ship, three Stormfronts activated their massive ASM projector arrays, defining the interior of the ship as being in the same place as the Stormfronts' troop bays. M-doxes and c-fabbers flooded into the corridors from dozens of points, shooting and reclaiming everything.in range.
"Meet your death!" She shouted over an open channel. Nah, that doesn't work. Her victims refused to respond, instead crawling all over her units. She set her fabbers to reclaim those that were close enough, and shot those that attempted to close. <Mom> would have called it ironic, to eat the Replicators. And especially ironic that their attempts to eat her units weren't working. They were causing heat-charge buildup, but it was unlikely they would be able to reverse-engineer her technology. After all, it had been designed to resist nanomachine intrusion, and whatever field the Replicators were emitting was far less versatile than that.
Aboard the Bilskirnir-class cruiser, Chrono proceed to add even more units, using <Mom's> and <Lindy's> frame design craft. Chrono was using the 15-meter Tank frame, equipped with a smaller version of the SSX's laser beams. The coherent streams of photon molecules were absorbed by the bugs, going nowhere. Chrono sighed and sent different units, these ones armed with neutronium shotguns. These were significantly more deadly to the modular bugs.
Eventually, the shields failed, and Chrono sent in two dozen Settlers to finish reclaiming the ship and the remaining Replicators. The ship wasn't as intact as she wanted it to be, though. Her attacks had skewered dozens of critical components, and the Replicators had consumed some of the technology that she knew should have been there. Fortunately that technology was mostly for organic beings, which she had no direct need of.
Now, she needed to send her data back to base. <Mom> had reserved 10 of the 26 complete Libraries for her use. Lindy had plenty of her own Research Cores in this system, but they didn't have the umph needed for her to make all that technology.
---------------------------
Rachel
---------------------------
31 August 2000
"Operation This WIll Probably End Badly is a go." I said to myself, as I mentally slammed the big red button to do something very epic and very boring.
So, in Stargate: Atlantis, there's a device in one episode that causes people's flesh to turn into explosive tumors. Sounds incredibly dumb, right?
Except that the Wraith used biotechnology for everything. Their weapons, their armor, their ships, everything was biotechnology. Darts were specialized organisms, not pilotable fighters. So if that beam could be tuned to only affect the Wraith biotechnology, one could simply fire the beam everywhere, get all the Wraith, and leave everyone else alone.
Which is why I had several billion Type-B(w) (Anti-bio, tuned for Wraith biochemistry) Auduxes around every planet, and several thousand trailing behind every Wraith fleet. Seems excessive, but then consider I had several hundred Libraries under construction, and I was barely using all my economy. In fact, we had so many units that I had to reconfigure them so we didn't run out of IFF addresses. We had actually gotten up to about 10% before I realized that and fixed the system to support even more units. It actually took a bit of hardware modding so I could set new channels for IFFs, but it worked.
So, my units engaged, fired their weapons… and that was the end of the Wraith. Splat on my brutally-efficient, self-replicating-mechanism-of-war windshield. Millions of ships and thousands of Hives just disappeared in the blink of an eye. That… was very anticlimactic. Yes, I do have some more images of explosions, but I honestly expected something to go wrong.
--------------------------
In the skies over Asuras, my Ospreys activated their sweep transporters, derived from Wraith technology and tuned to pick up only particular materials. Like ZPMs. Thanks to huge numbers and some clever flight patterns, I could cover the entire planet in under a minute. The Asurans barely had time to realize what was happening before I was finished, my Ospreys screaming for orbit.
Some of their ships started powering up. Oh well. It wasn't going to help them, because of step two of Operation I Shouldn't Have Done This.
My fusion warheads are about 3 meters in diameter. I have mounted them on high-power asymmetric non-restartable gravwave boosters, giving them a greatly increased speed compared to my previous high-yield weaponry. They are non-volatile, unlike flash-forged missiles, meaning I can make them and let them drift. About 16 trillion of them can fit on the surface of an average planet.
Asuras was about to get 9.6 yottatons of TNT, directly to the everywhere. That's 150 times the binding energy of the planet. You want to cause an Alderaan-like explosion? Then do this. I could have used a Ragnarok, but that might have given the Asurans too much warning.
The Asurans barely had time to get their sensors back online before they realized that I was sending a solid shell of nuclear missiles at them. With nothing powered up and fully online, they could only watch in gobsmacked horror as their doom surrounded them, and tightened around them.
Then the missiles got close enough to almost touch, and exploded. Half the energy went straight into space, in an incandescent wave that expanded from the surface, shredding away the atmosphere.
Below the missiles, my sensors could barely tell what was happening, even before my ARKYDs died from the first shockwave. It was just enough for me to tell that the planet compressed dozens of kilometers. And then nothing happened. The surface cooled to only white-hot, and some areas were almost yellow-hot.
And then the shockwave finished traveling through the planet, and it cracked. The rocks on the surface barely shot up at five times escape velocity, but then the compressed core layer shot past that, an expanding sphere moving at around twenty times escape velocity. Anything smaller than a Skylord was going to get shredded if it moved closer than the moon. Speaking of which, poor moon. Have some nuclear missiles too. That should make you feel all better.
Actually, I really don't need anything in this system. Let's blow it all up.
-------------------------
Detonating an ice moon in a ring system has got to be one of the coolest things ever. There's the initial shockwave from the tops of the blasts, then, there's a second shockwave from all the water plasma, and you might decide there's a third one following almost immediately behind that made up of steam that's almost plasma. These cut through the ring system, creating a rainbow of interactions and radiation emissions. It's kinda hypnotic, watching what's happening as the rings get destroyed by the shockwaves. The explosion of the rest of the moon once the shockwave finishes propagating through the core is lackluster compared to it.
And now, for the next explosion test! I had fired a missile at the core of a gas giant to see how deep I could get it before it was destroyed. That answered that question. The next question was, "what happens when I throw a pentillion nuclear warheads into a hot jupiter?"
Answer: not only did the planet explode in a continuous shockwave, it suddenly spat out another blast that overtook the first one, destroying everything in its path. Everything. That was a small supernova. Okay, time to jump out before that hits my location.
- Location
- france
This post is not trolling.
I can't help but remember my childhood when i played with plastic soldiers and a bunch of firecrackers.
Your post is giving me the visual of a child playing in a sandbox, building then destroying.
That said, i loved your anti-wraith beam. As always hindsight is twenty-twenty.:lol
I can't help but remember my childhood when i played with plastic soldiers and a bunch of firecrackers.
Your post is giving me the visual of a child playing in a sandbox, building then destroying.
That said, i loved your anti-wraith beam. As always hindsight is twenty-twenty.:lol
Huh, kinda surprised she didn't try to steal an Asuran or two. Or pull an upgrade with the civilian nano tech. Though, I suppose having the Alteran civilian tech base, knowledge base, and access to Reece would net her the same capabilities eventually anyway. Just that having the ability to build nanotech like the Asurans is all kinds of broken. It's basically having access to re-programmable matter. Just store piles of the stuff and when you need a specific building or ship or unit it just pulls itself right out of the giant blob. It gets even more ridiculous when you take the commander resource network into account. All you need is the minimum amount of material to serve as a resource node and you have a seed that can grow and reconfigure functions as you please.
- Location
- 'Murica
*breathes deeply*
Ah. I love the smell of curbstomp in the morning.
Ah. I love the smell of curbstomp in the morning.
Crystalwatcher
(Verified GM)
- Location
- Limbo
What was the point of killing the Asurans?
From what I remember they were isolationist and left the rest of the universe alone and were trying to figure out ascension until the atlantis expedition backstabbed them and fucked with their programming to make them attack the wraith.
Which they did by going after their food source, the Pegasus Galaxy humans.
(Said fuckery also removed the safeguards that stopped them attacking the ancients.)
Then the Atlantis Expedition blew up something on Asuras.
The Asurans started making a fleet to go tell Earth to knock it off and break the SGC's precious masquerade.
The SGC blew up their planet and genocided them down to the last person, who happened to be an uploaded Elizabeth Weir, the former head of the Atlantis Expedition.
They didn't seem like a faction that was initially even hostile to anybody other than their creators, who tried to genocide them upon finding they didn't want to be war-machines.
From what I remember they were isolationist and left the rest of the universe alone and were trying to figure out ascension until the atlantis expedition backstabbed them and fucked with their programming to make them attack the wraith.
Which they did by going after their food source, the Pegasus Galaxy humans.
(Said fuckery also removed the safeguards that stopped them attacking the ancients.)
Then the Atlantis Expedition blew up something on Asuras.
The Asurans started making a fleet to go tell Earth to knock it off and break the SGC's precious masquerade.
The SGC blew up their planet and genocided them down to the last person, who happened to be an uploaded Elizabeth Weir, the former head of the Atlantis Expedition.
They didn't seem like a faction that was initially even hostile to anybody other than their creators, who tried to genocide them upon finding they didn't want to be war-machines.
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ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yeah, I realized that when I wrote the thing, that anti-bio technology is an awesome idea if your opponent uses biotechnology.
Starcraft would very quickly be a stomp for me, especially because Stargate has massive emitters that can effect entire galaxies.
Yeah. Rachel is pretty much a war goddess at this point. And she doesn't need mortal champions.
What part of "blow up everything" are you missing? Plus the surface got hit by like 20 gigatons per square meter or something like that. The heat caused by that is more than enough to destroy any nanites. But next chapter...
Let's look at what the Asurans did in canon, shall we?
- Somehow disappointed the Lanteans. Not sure how, but see points 3 and 5 for examples of how horrible they are for inspiration.
- Managed to almost beat the Wraith, before the Wraith decided to hack them. They're pretty smart to do this, as not only does it stop them from attacking it also stops them from coming back in the future.
- When the Atlantis expedition made contact with them, they mind-raped the team and then attempted to kill the entire expedition.
- Then they tried mind-raping Weir into thinking she was insane so they could kill her.
- When they finally tried killing the Wraith, they did so by attempting to genocide humanity. It would not surprise me if this was their initial tactic that they tried in point 2.
In fact, for whatever reason, the Asurans haven't removed the life support systems from their ship designs (see the doppelgangers managing to hijack a ship, and they need to breathe.)
So, why would I want these guys again?
Resource acquisition? These guys require neutronium in order to replicate. If a planet doesn't have neutronium near where I dropped the guy, well that's a bust. Mexes, on the other hand, can pull material from a good distance down in the planet, pulling up dense materials to be added to storage.
War machines? See the part about getting hacked. Plus heat-charge armor is bullshit. If I drop a 60 gigaton nuke right next to something made of nanites, even if it does survive it's going to have its capability reduced. Heat-charge armor, on the other hand, if it survives it's perfectly fine. Also it makes having failsafes in my units much, much harder.
AI assistance? In what, R&D? They can't even make new designs (or don't see the need to) and aren't munchkinning their nanite nature, so no.
No they weren't. Only a small faction was interested in that, and they didn't start until after Asuras got blown up.
In addition, they were created to fight the wraith. The wraith hacked them, the expedition hacked them again.
Yup. Not evil at all.
No, they destroyed the fleet the Asurans were building. And considering the Asurans had been sitting on their ass (and apparently not making any ships) for 5,000 years or something, and they weren't going after the Wraith, it was pretty obvious to them that there were only two targets: Atlantis, or Earth.
You honestly thing that the Asurans were going to be that nice? And this was before any hacking or anything happened at all, except them blowing up the city-ship that they sent to kill them all.
Yes. Because the Asurans were killing off entire planets of humans because they didn't want to engage the Wraith in combat.
In conclusion, the Asurans are horrible, and I do not blame the Lanteans for not wanting something like them in their galaxy.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Yup. Not evil at all.
There's also the more meta-issue. We are humans. Anything consistently trying to kill us, even if it's somehow technically not evil, is evil for human purposes and ought to be exterminated on principal, if their is no feasible way to prevent them from killing us more beneficially/peaceably.
@itmauve, I was think less having an asuran or two for the sake of the asuran and more for the technology they had. The character doesn't have access to a lot of the military tech for the Lantians but the Asurans have been proven to be hackable and poses that tech. Further, their nanotechnology seems to be a might bit better than the commander's. While the heat charge armor is quite impressive there is nothing saying that it can't be placed on top of a mass of asuran style nanites allowing it to change function on the fly.
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hackable. ASM communication is uninterceptable and uninterruptible, unless someone manages to get an active ASM relay to get the channel off it. And I have all of their military tech, from the database in Atlantis. I just haven't really upgraded my units with them, because I'm not done with reverse-engineering. And judging by how the Asurans haven't been innovating their designs, as well as the fact that when the Lanteans destroyed them it was probably not close to the end of the war (they were pretty desperate for materials then), then their tech is probably worse than what the Lanteans had at the end of the war.
And Asuran nanotech can't do the entire "utility fog" thing that LT!Progentior nanotech can. Plus it isn't designed to be a universal constructor.
And speaking of utility fog, have a preview of some upcoming stuff I just wrote.
- Location
- Arizona
Hmm. It's gonna be really annoying that I didn't think of that explosive-tumor gun myself. It's a great anti-bio weapon. So, if I did try to use it, I'd just be copying you. I HATE being a copycat.
I guess I was thinking too conventional by considering making many mini-Janus Devices, and using them as interdictors or traps for Wraith ship movement.
I guess I was thinking too conventional by considering making many mini-Janus Devices, and using them as interdictors or traps for Wraith ship movement.