Stars of Iron
Prologue
Eons had passed since living beings had last visited that particular star system. It was merely one of many in that region of space, much closer to the galactic core than Earth was. Countless stars could be seen by the naked eye from the surface of its planetary bodies - those that did have a solid surface, at least - at night, their sheer density making the local nights as brilliant as full moon on Earth, a spectacular light display of bright pinpoints and diffuse glowing nebulae and a huge glowing cloud that was the galactic core itself, lit from within by the colossal energies it contained.
An eternity ago, the ancient civilization that seeded the galaxy with a network of connected stargates and engineered habitable worlds had taken advantage of the energy and resource rich region of space to fuel the industrial machine that produced the massive roving world-shapers. Thanks to the myriad burning starforges, planets and asteroids showed an abundance of stable superheavy elements unmatched in the more distant reaches of the galaxy, elements that enabled the gate-builders civilization to thrive and sustained its needs over the thousand centuries it lasted at its height, until they, too floundered and fell into almost oblivion, remembered as tales and fragmentary stories and leftover wonders, save a handful of younger civilizations that nevertheless managed to rival its power, if not sheer expanse.
Thousands of years after the last gate-builders had left the stage their accomplishments were still remembered in the memories of those species that stood as equals at their side.
And despite the march of time and the upheavals it brought along, some testimonials of the Gate-builders glory remained intact and untouched by the new masters of the Milky Way, protected by time and secrecy and lost in the sheer vastness of space.
Few Asgards still knew about the seemingly unimportant star system where representatives of the Great Four had once congregated under the patronage of the Gate-builders. The place was left alone after the demise of its owners and the great alliance withered away.
There was an almost taboo associated with it, the symbol of past greatness now abandoned and useless, even the technology it contained grown mundane next to the other great races’ own accomplishments. No Asgard had had an interest in it for millennias. None except one, that is, and then Loki had only viewed the old facility as a curiosity, until it provided an answer to a particular consequence of his on-and-off meddling with the evolution of a world whose importance was easily overlooked - by his own race as well as the tyrannical Goa’uld. Well, at least nobody else looked over his shoulder to prevent his behind-the-scene meddling. And there was no trace of it. If the Supreme Council ever sniffed around he could deny any intervention - after all it wasn’t the first human planet to reach a post-industrial level.
If they investigated deeper, then they might wonder about some discrepancies, but no concrete evidence there either.
At least until it came to his blatant and direct intervention in the New America’s case. Towing a human colony ship to the other side of the galaxy was breaking every rule abut non-intervention and in a manner that left little doubt if anyone bothered to look into it. Fortunately, the whole Asgard species had been so giddy with Loki’s out of the blue solution to the Replicator threat, literally saved from the brink of extinction at the last moment, that the Supreme Council had swallowed his explanation hook, line and sinker. Commander Thor’s inner suspicions couldn’t prevail against the wave of popular gratitude for their savior, specially after his own resurrection from backup mindstate was only possible thanks to the victory Loki had brought on a trinium platter.
Between this and the need to rebuild the shattered Ida home galaxy, nobody would expend the effort to check Loki’s statements.
And assuming the most probable computed scenarios panned out as expected, by the time anyone ever got wind of his little fate-pushing in the Milky Way it would be too late to do anything but watch the fireworks. It was a brilliant plan. In a few decades, the Goa’uld would be caught between hammer and anvil. Whether it was hammer or anvil that survived the ensuing shock didn’t matter as long as the Goa’uld upstarts were reduced to paste in the middle.
Loki rather looked forward to that. What were decades or even centuries to a being like him ? There still was the nagging problem of his species genetic decay, but in the worst case scenario he was prepared to simply shed off biological existence and continue living as an uploaded mind.
In any case, now he had ample time to tinker. Maybe even take a little jaunt out in the neighbouring galaxies where Ancient facilities were rumored to still exist.
Far below the lofty machinations of ancient alien beings, a starship hung over a dead planet in orbit of that unremarkable star. The ship itself represented the pinnacle of its creators’ prowess as well as their salvation, liberty’s own liferaft fleeing the wreck of Earth’s freedom, bound for a star four lightyears away from Sol, a journey that should have taken the next fourty years spent with most of the crew in cryogenic storage.
Thats plan had gone overboard.
General Frederick Lafarge’s personal diary
Date of entry 28th October 2010 (Earth reckoning)
I shouldn’t even be writing this now. I’m looking at the date displayed by the mission computer, and I can’t help wondering if this is some kind of dream I’m having while my body’s frozen. Even though this should be impossible, impossible seems a valid adjective for the situation as I discovered it upon my premature thawing. It felt as if no time had passed since I went into cold storage but at least the unexpected developments kept me from dwelling in reflections about the war and how it could all have been different. If only. The words are still there and painful as ever, but I keep telling myself we should all look forward. No point looking back now. Especially not now, when the answer to the centuries-old question of makind just received an answer, as enigmatic as it came : we are not alone.
Whatever happened to the New America can’t have been a natural occurrence. Not with an obviously artificial structure waiting at the other end. Who built it ? Is it the same people who have somehow hijacked our journey ? Did they bring us here on purpose ? Why ? Is it a gift or a curse ?
So many questions and so many new perspectives. Faster than light travel at least. Captain Galloway’s crew checked as soon as they managed to get a location fix, we are still in the Milky Way, and the elapsed time according to astrometric data is exactly what the onboard clock says.
In the Milky Way but far from Sol. According to the plot we’re much closer to the galactic core, on the opposite side of Earth itself and apparently the relative motion is quite stable. Which means we can’t directly observe the Solar System (the core’s in the way) and the reverse is true.
And it means one important thing : whatever we do here, the Snakes won’t know.
Yet now we know FTL travel can be done. And the sheer size of that construction out there is pretty telling. If we ever manage to master the principles that made it all possible, then we’ll be able to build an army to crush the Snakes one day… and they won’t even know it until it happens.
That’s one possibility. By the time we’re able to do that, who knows, maybe they’ll have been left alone for so long that they’ll have duelled each other to extinction. That would be quite fitting a fate.
But that’s for a distant future (besides, I wonder what they’re going to think when the New America disappears from their scopes !). In the immediate time we need to survive and rebuild a working cilivization. And grow in numbers before we can ever hope to accomplish much besides.
I have the premonition that whatever we find on this floating island in space will be key to everything.
There is life over there, or at least an environment that’s conducive to life. A nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, water vapor clouds. Which incidently hide much of the external surface, the pictures only show sea and glimpses of dry land and radar scans are blocked by the transparent dome - a wonder in itself given its sheer size and the material strength it presupposes.
The probe managed to get very close to the edge of the… dish ? saucer ? disk ? It’s more like a flower without the petals. As close as a hundred meters and no hostile reaction was registered coming from the alien facility. No reaction at all that we could discern in any case.
The vertical edge below the clear dome looks like a giant cliff of the same burnished grey metal seen everywhere else. It goes for three kilometers before the surface curves inward towards the stalk giving it the shape of a shallow cup, and there are abstract geometric patterns. What looks like a huge rosace on the curving underside, and matched entrelacs on the vertical band. It looks pretty, but whether it’s purely for aesthetics or there’s a more practical reason, we have no idea. There are all sorts of grooves and ridges and unconnected polygonal shapes that may or may not be doors.
The first probe is still taking high resolution pictures of the surface, focusing on the sideband since that’s where hangars doors or access hatches are most likely to be found. Three more probes was dispatched two hours ago in order to speed up the process.
I took the decision to wake up more crews as well. There’s an asteroid belt and several rocky moons in the system and we need to ascertain the resources we can access.
On the plus side, we have enough antimatter to last a century and more if we’re careful. Assuming we settle here, of course. And this decision depends on whether we can gain access to the alien station and live on it.
Uncharted star system
2010, November 2nd
It was an ugly and utilitarian contraption, a soda-can shaped pressurized compartment on top of a clump of spherical propellant tanks, and a cryogenic engine nested at the end. One of the New America’s small runabouts, designed to carry small numbers of personnel or cargo between orbiting starships. Not a heavy lift vehicle and not for endo-atmospheric use owing to its complete lack of aerodynamic considerations and paltry liquid fuel engines, the craft was attached to the hull of the ADSF Barcelona, one of the antimatter-powered parasite cruisers that formed the colony ship’s strike wing. She was named after the martyr Spanish city whose inhabitants had rebelled against Draka rule after the Eurasian War, only to be crushed by a Snake fission bomb. One atrocity amongst many in the dark years that followed the end of the war, as the Domination raped and pillaged Europe herself and drove her populations under the hated Yoke.
The name would always be remembered, as many others. The Snakes had killed or enslaved countless millions and maybe worse even, their twisted society was ensuring that no trace of the cultures and civilizations they had conquered would remain. Cultural genocide, erasing the memory of the people they fed to the Yoke so their descendants would never remember how their ancestors had lived free and the accomplishments of murdered nations. Even the language spoken by their parents they would forget, replaced by the Domination’s English, butchered and warped beyond recognition, a tongue as barbaric and ugly as the black soul of its practitioners. The Alliance refugees fully intended to carry that memory.
The Barcelona had undocked from her mothership thirty hours ago, after her crew was fully awoken and briefed. She was carrying six additional passengers and now they were crammed inside the runabout’s tight confines, strapped in zero-gee frames and clad in vacuum-rated Fleet suits.
Maneuvering from the New America’s geostationary orbit towards the alien platform holding position at the top of it’s thousands-kilometers long stalk had taken the best part of the past thirty hours. It could have been done much faster - but nobody wanted to light a full-power antimatter exhaust plume in such relatively close proximity to the colony ship, thus the cruiser’s bridge crew had taken their time and followed the plan drawn up by the New America’s command staff before their departure.
In addition, they didn’t want to spook any defense protocols the huge construct might have in place. So, a slow approach it was. It also gave the away team ample time to digest the data accumulated so far.
That thing was huge. It was built of unknown materials. One of the probe had latched on the hull and done a surface analysis. Its results were puzzling and that was the understatement of the month : diamond didn’t cut the unknown alloy, the sampling blade barely managed to scrape the surface and what it got was merely space grime deposited by particle winds and micrometeorite impacts.
And a rough-and-dirty calculation, based on the local star’s characteristics, suggested the station/beanstalk had been collecting space dust for millennia. Hundreds of millennia.
This just didn’t seem possible, and a more detailed analysis was sorely needed. And it was just the start.
The small craft shuddered as its mooring clamps were released and the small maneuvering thrusters puffed vapor, jolting it clear out of the cruiser’s frame. Seconds ticked by as it drifted away and once a safe distance was attained it rotated in place to align its axis with the computed approach vector that would lead it to the station looming a hundred klicks away.
Behind the front-mounted hatch and docking apparatus, Flight Lt O’Hare reviewed the parameters displayed on the collapsible flat screen displays. Vector, thrust, engine parameters were all in the green and no additional input would be necessary until they reached the end of their outbound trip. A braking sequence was already programmed to bring the craft to a relative halt near the station’s side, and then careful manual input would allow her to bring the runabout in the immediate vicinity of their target, a small section of wall tentatively identified as an entry hatch on the probes’ downloaded imagery.
Satisfied, she squirmed a little in her front-mounted acceleration frame to make herself more comfortable and craned her neck around to look at her passengers. Like her they wore their helmets with the faceplate open, since the compartment was pressurized. She met the blue gaze of the team’s commanding officer, seeking mere confirmation that everything was fine - so far. Of course, it was psychological, the repeater screens on the back of the acceleration frames showed the essential parameters of the craft. Nevertheless, they all had to be feeling a measure of apprehension. Who knew if some ancient defense system wouldn’t flash-fry them all on the way ?
“We’ve got the final go-ahead from Mission Control, Colonel. Course is set and autonav is engaged. ETA two hours” she rattled off in her professional, bored-unflappable-pilot’s voice.
“I can see that, Lieutnant. I’m sure we’re going to be fine.”
O’Hare nodded at the Colonel’s bright eager smile. The other woman seemed to be filled with expectations, and that was understandable enough given her background. A brilliant physicist and engineer, she had been a key member of the team who had designed the colony ship’s antimatter drive and among the New America’s passengers she was probably one of the most likely to make something of the alien systems.
The other members of the ad hoc team she didn’t know as well, and she tried to discern a reaction on the next passenger’s face. The man strapped at the scientist’s right met Rosie’s gaze with a stony stare of his own. White-streaked brown hair and grey eyes, hard-lined features, the kind of cold look that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Draka’s face, minus the eerie aura of amorality usually associated with the Snakes.
He had been introduced by Lafarge himself as a Major O’Neill during the mission briefing, without any mention of his past service record or technical specialty and O’Hare strongly suspected he was OSS. It would make sense and explain his relative familiarity with the General, an ex-OSS man himself.
Rosie’s gaze then drifted beyond, down the middle narrow passage between the two rows of passenger frames, but she could barely glimpse the last two members of the entry team obscured as the were behind the two officers. They were Fleet Marines, with Space Recon badges on the sleeves of their armored space suits. Muscle and life insurance, albeit both had various technical skills as well as a matter of course since everyone on the New America had at least a degree, everyone save the young children anyway, and half the colonists had a doctorate, many owning more than one. Their weapons were slung in cargo nets overhead, securely strapped to prevent them from escaping in micro-gravity as were the rest f the team’s impedimenta.
The main burn countdown reached zero on the displays and the runabout’s rear engine came to life, cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen reacting inside its combustion chamber and the passengers felt themselves pushed gently against their restraining frames. The acceleration was low at first, then became stronger as the craft cleared Barcelona’s immediate perimeter and its engine reached full power without any risk of damaging panels and antennas on the cruiser’s surface.
External cameras showed the receding hull behind, the looming mass of the alien station ahead and the spherical expanse of its anchoring planet below.
“Mission Control, Bravo-Three is on the way” O’Hare announced on the general frequency, using the runabout’s registry code.
“Understood Bravo-Three” it was the General’s firm, authoritative voice “we’ll be following you. Good luck, Colonel. Lafarge out.”
