5 – A Very Busy (Almost) Year Later
(Spera – Bridge – Year 3, Day 5, 0800)
It had been a very busy couple of months. They had crossed the remainder of the galaxy they had been and had crossed the void to the Far Galaxy. During the trip, Spera had continued looking for traces of the Zovaris. But there had been nothing for her to find. The AI had also accessed the DSI Network and had begun exchanging information with Destiny. This had allowed them to get a glimpse at the ship’s current status. It was still obsessed with catching up, but it was making good time.
At the same time, Spera had also begun replenishing its supplies for building communications relays. Which had given them more to study. And finally, there had been a ton of promotions. The original plan had been for the Nova Roma Expedition to reach Destiny, with the two crews merging into one. But because of what had happened with Destiny, that plan was out the window. So Landry and O’Neill had decide to start handing out what they considered long overdue promotions.
To begin with, Anne Teldy had been promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel and Epsilon Site XO. As for Colonel Telford, he hadn’t really been promoted. But the Epsilon Site was now fully operational, which meant that he had five SG-Teams and a full support staff under his command. So in practice, he was the General Landy of Freedom Prime. The local Senate was still discussing the programs budget and was considering increasing the amount of SG-teams to eight or ten. Alas, that decision would probably still be stuck in committee for the considerable future.
The final promotion at the Epsilon Site was Captain Laura Cadman, who would take Teldy’s old job as Chief of Security aboard Spera. Her previous job had been XO under Telford, so at first glance it sounded like a demotion. Especially because would end up fourth-in-command on the ship. But the job would come with a promotion to the rank of Major. And the Chief of Security also doubled as the commanding officer for NR-3.
As for Spera’s third-in-command, that job was held by Major Levine. He had not been promoted in rank, but his status as third was a step up. Levine outranked Cadman because he had more time in grade. Another promotion had been Xander Henderson, who had been promoted to Sergeant. And to conclude the list, there were Hailey and Vale. Vale was now a full-bird Colonel, while Hailey had been promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel. This was noticeable when Vale walked onto the bridge.
“Colonel.” He said with a smile.
“Colonel.” Hailey said.
“So, how long until we reach Freedom Prime ?”
“About a minute,” Hailey said. “So, what’s the plan when we get there ?”
“To begin with, we have a whole lot of crewmembers to pick up.” Besides picking up Cadman, they would also pick up fifteen of the New Asurans who had left the ship to fly the Nakai Colony domes to the planet. And they would pick up sixty brand new crewmembers. ~All part of the deal to get Chaser and the Epsilon Site.~ “Also, I want to empty artifact storage…”
Which would kill two birds with one stone. Not only would it get them space, the Epsilon Site had bigger and more advanced labs. They would be able to do a whole bunch of test and research that Spera simply wasn’t equipped for. “…And our New Asuran friends haven’t been twiddling their thumbs while waiting for us to catch up. They have some upgrades they want to install before we move on.”
“Nice.”
It was at this point that Spera dropped out FTL. As they approached Freedom Prime, they found that they were not alone in the planet’s orbital space. Exodus One – the new ship that Alex Patterson commanded – and Exodus Two were in orbit. There was also a shipyard that was building three more Exodus-class ships. There was also another Nakai Carrier-class under construction.
This ship – Exodus Seven – had not be part of the original plan. But the New Asurans had provided the Primians with the right tools to build a duplicate of Exodus Two. So now Freedom Prime would be protected by six Exodus-class and two Carrier-class ships. And that was not all. Because there were also eight defensive satellites in orbit and all seventeen cities on the surface now had major ground-to-orbit weapons. It was not enough to take the fight to the Goa’uld. But if the Goa’uld attempted to attack Freedom Prime, the Primians would kick their asses. And there were similar defenses for their one off-world colony on the drawing board.
“Let’s have a look at the surface,” Hailey said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Grogan said from the weapons console.
Hailey and Vale made their way to his console and looked at an imagine of the surface on one of the displays. There had been eighty-two Nakai Colony Domes and there were seventeen cities. And eighty-two divided by seventeen was four-point-eight-two. The Senate had decided to round it down to four domes for each city.
Those domes had been dismantled with the parts being used to overhaul those cities. This division had left them with fourteen domes unassigned. Seven had been used to build the shipyards, while the other seven were part of the plans for the off-world colony.
“They’ve been really busy,” Hailey said.
“Colonel Telford has no intention of letting anybody unfriendly near this planet ever again,” Vale said.
Hailey nodded. She wondered what the crew of Chaser would say if the saw how far this planet had come in the last couple months. ~Of course, it’s not like they have been sitting still during all of this.~ But for now, they had their own ship to worry about.
(Chaser – Bridge – Year 3, Day 5, 0820)
Everett Young was reading the latest updates that would be send over the DSI Network today. While Spera had been heading towards Freedom Prime, Chaser had been pursuing Destiny. Ironically, it had been Pelops’ former host - Sam Wallace – that had made their mission easier. While Eli’s father was not the genius his son was, he was a skilled computer programmer. He had given the advanced telemetry filters a major upgrade, which had led to them finding more resources then they had expected.
But more importantly, he had been bonding with Eli. And that had made Eli the happiest he had been since losing Ginn. Which brought up the next subject. They had found Ginn, along with Doctor Perry, a New Asuran called Ben and a Vicerant soldier on F7L-229. How they had survived on the harsh planet was quite a story. But right now, it was not the story that Young was reading.
The Vicerant soldier had been called Dennis Young. And TJ had taken a look at his DNA, revealing that he was one of the Colonel’s descendants. Having come face-to-face with ancestor, he had agreed to tell them everything he knew about the Vicerant. Young was reading the latest information from his debrief. He had just turned the page when Eli and Ginn walked in. They were discussing the latest mission through the Gate. Young smirked at their conversation.
~With both Ginn and his dad here, he is one happy camper.~ And he was not alone, Rush had been reunited with Amanda Perry. Not only was Perry alive, she now had a working body again. The last time the two of them had met – inside Destiny’s computer – there had been issues between them. In the weeks since she had come aboard, however, they had worked those out. Eli and Lieutenant Scott had christened them an item. Which was as close as to officially together you could get aboard Chaser.
Between the new arrivals and the extra resources, morale was good aboard ship. As for their actual mission, Rush had calculated that they had slowly catching up to Destiny since launch. They were now only a week or two behind the Ancient vessel. But – based on what Ginn and Perry had told them – resettling the ship before Paranoid Mode deactivated was not an option. So for the foreseeable future, it was Chaser that would be their home.
(Spera – Gate Room – Year 3, Day 10, 1307)
Spera had been in drydock for five days. While they had been on Freedom Prime, the New Asurans had made a discovery about the Mark Two FTL-Drive that Spera had. On Destiny, the drive particles simply flowed from the bow to the stern. But on Spera, there was a secondary field of particles was spiraled around the ship. This made the field more stable and increased the ship’s speed. There was, however, one issue with this upgrade. It stopped working if the ship was above a certain size.
~Which is why Spera is not a carbon copy of Destiny.~ Vale thought as he read the report. ~And it also means that we can’t use the New Asurans Nanites or a Wraith expansion to make the ship a whole lot bigger.~ But there was some good news. It turned out that with some minor modifications, they could make the field big enough to add a Wraith expansion underneath Deck 6.
This new Deck 7 wasn’t very big, but there was enough space to hold one of the Puddle Jumpers. So the front of the deck would be a bay that would allow them to use Jumper Two as a shuttle. Jumper One would stay where in the original Jumper Bay slash equipment room. The rear of the deck would be a lower level to Hydroponics Bay Two. But now that they had one-hundred and twenty people aboard, that expansion would not provide them with enough food. And that was why Vale was now in the Gate Room.
“Glad to see you again, Claus,” Vale began. “Things just haven’t been the same without you and the other New Asurans.”
“Thank you, Boss.”
“So, what is this big upgrade you have been cooking up ?”
“Well, Spera is basically divided into four chunks…”
“Right. The inhabited section, then the rooms with the spare parts, then three meters of radiation sponge stuff and then the actual engine compartment. Which is where the FTL-Drive and the sub-light drives sit. And we can’t go there, because we would end up glowing up in the dark.”
“Yeah,” Claus began. “Now, there is one main chamber with spare parts. With several side chambers. Our big upgrade is a new version of the radiation sponge stuff. Besides the ‘you can’t move it or all the radiation will leak out’, there are several issues with the old version. For instance, if the radiation in the engine compartment climbs more than fifteen percent…”
“….It stops working ?”
“And everybody dies horribly. Fortunately, we came up with Foam 2.0. It will do the job with only fifty centimeters of material. And even if the radiation increases eighteen-hundred percent, we’ll be safe. And because 2.0 is much thinner, we’ve gained a lot of square meters in the spare parts region. In fact, all the spare parts now fit in the side chambers.”
“Allowing us to repurpose the main chamber ?”
“Exactly. And it is three decks tall, ” Claus pointed to the bulkhead behind the Stargate, where an brand-new doorway allowed access to the chamber. The doors had not been installed yet, so there was a sheet of plastic there instead. Claus pushed it aside. “Here, on deck 4, it’s Doctor Bennett’s new digs. Until now, we only had four normal beds and two in the isolation ward. Version 2.0 has six normal beds and three isolation cubicles with one bed each.”
“And the other decks ?”
“We moved the kitchen and the mess hall into the Deck 3 space. Which not only made it twice as big, but also meant that deck zero was empty. So now it’s one big Hydroponics Bay. As for the Deck 5 space, we used that to build Science Lab Two.”
“So the Briefing Room is back to being a Briefing Room ?”
Claus nodded. ~Excellent.~ Vale thought. Then his radio activated and Hailey asked him to come to the bridge. He made his way up there and found her in the command chair. She was working on the final paperwork. Spera was scheduled to break orbit at 1600 hours. So they were running final checks, finishing the last construction work and writing official status reports. She offered him a clipboard.
“Final crew list, boss,” Hailey began. “All it needs is your stamp of approval.”
“What’s the count ?”
“Sixty Humans, one Xivolo, fourteen Jynacko and fifteen each for the Nakai, Ursini and New Asurans,” Vale signed the report and gave her back the clipboard. “So one-hundred and twenty in total. Of which only a hundred and five need food and water. Speaking of which, we are fully loaded. By the way, has the brass cooked up any specific orders for us yet ? Other than ‘follow Chaser.’ ?”
“There might be some pointers coming from Chaser, but the briefing is not until 1500 hours.”
Hailey nodded and went back to her paperwork.
(Chaser – Mess Hall – Year 3, Day 10, 1445)
Colonel Young walked into the Mess Hall. Eli and Varro were sitting at table and studying a map of some kind. Young walked up to them and took a look at the map. It was a map of Sector 3325. Chaser had passed through this region about a week after the Battle of the Border, as their fight with the Vengeance was called in the official reports.
“What’ve you got ?”
“Varro found something in the charts. This is a map of Sector 3325 based on the telemetry from the Seed Ships. As you can see, it’s an Empty Zone.” An Empty Zone was an area inside that was inside the course plotted by the Seed Ships, but lacked Stargates. “There are planets and stars, but apparently there was nowhere suited to put a Gate.”
“Yesterday, Telford send this…” Varro began, while taking out a transparent plastic sheet. “It’s a map of Sector 3325 made by the Order of the Other and…” Varro unrolled the sheet and on top of the map. “…there’s an anomaly.”
Whereas the map showed no habitable places at all, the overlaid sheet clearly showed two habitable moons. And those moons had not been there before. They weren’t already present bodies that had been terraformed, they had just…appeared. ~Well, this is familiar.~ The last time they had encountered something popping out like this way when they had encountered Eden.
“Zovaris ?”
“We think so…” Eli began. “…because this is Chaser’s map of 3325.” Eli unrolled another plastic sheet and put it over the first one. Now there were eight moons in the area. And they followed the course of Destiny, with each being slightly bigger than the one before it.
“How did we miss this ?”
“We’ve been focusing on worlds with Stargates, not off-the-grid planets,” Varro said.
“And we presumed that the Zovaris went straight to building planets, but this…” He gestured towards the map. “This might be proof that there was a curve to get there.”
Young nodded. If Spera could find proof of Zovaris technology on those moons, it might finally give them a clue to this mysterious race. He had barely come to that conclusion in his head when the ship’s alarm began blaring and he had to make his way to the bridge. When Young reached the bridge, he found that Chaser’s long-range sensors had detected several starships ahead. And they did not belong to any species they had seen ever seen before. It turned out that Spera was not the only ship facing a mystery.
