SG Nova Roma, Chapter 2.5

5 – Brewing Wars

(Earth – Stargate Command, Briefing Room – 24 September 2017 / Day 30, 0945)

Hank Landry was not a happy camper. This morning, he had found a considerable mountain of paperwork on his desk. He had been getting through it at a healthy pace. Had being the operative word. Because Daniel Jackson had just come in and asked him to come the briefing room. Besides Jackson, the rest of SG-1 was sitting at the briefing room table. (Samantha Carter wasn’t present. Hammond was on a mission to salvage the Sun Tzu from the intergalactic void.)

Also there were Doctor Carolyn Lam and Richard Woolsey. But the surprise was the presence of Jeannie Miller. She was sitting at the far end of the table. As Landry sat down, President Mackenzie and General O’Neill came up the stairs from the Control Room. Landry was about to stand up, but Mackenzie gestured for him to remained seated. He and O’Neill sat down at the table.

“Sorry about the unannounced visit…” Mackenzie said. “…but Mrs. Miller asked me to come.”

“I know this is a big deal. But there’s been a development, Mister President. And…well….I thought you would want to hear this.” Miller looked at Jackson. “Daniel?”

“We just received a report from the New Asurans. There’s good news and bad. The good news is that Spera is on schedule. Also, the Ursini-Nakai colonists are hard at work building their new home. It is actually ahead of schedule. That is where the good news ends,” Jackson paused. “We have a major problem with Operation Supernova.”

“Operation Supernova?” Vala Mal Doran asked.

“Our plan to blow up the berserker drones.”

Vala nodded. She had read the file on the plan, but she had forgotten the name. The plan had been to see the Nakai drome colonies – which had upgraded into ships – ahead. Once they reached Galaxy Destiny Two, they would draw the attention of the berserker drones and their command ships. Then they would self-destruct, taking the drones with them. If Operation Supernova worked as planned, it would thin out the berserkers before Spera reached their turf. But now the operation was apparently in trouble.

“Daniel?” General O’Neill said, his tone making it clear he was annoyed. “Am I going to have to shoot somebody?”

“The New Asuran Deep Space Internet Facility has detected the berserker control ships. They are no longer in Galaxy Destiny Two.”

“And we’re trusting the Replicators?”

“The DSI-Facility at Atlantis has confirmed it.” Woolsey began. “And it gets worse. As far as we can tell. Every single command ship in existence is headed for the Nakai Home Galaxy. And….”

“…somebody has modified their hyperdrives. And based on the telemetry, they did so using knowledge of Destiny’s FTL-drive.” Miller added.

“Could they have made the modifications by studying the FTL-drive on the seed ships?” Mackenzie asked.

“No,” Miller said. “The seed ships have a Mark-One FTL drive. Even if they copied the drive exactly, it wouldn’t be enough. Whoever modified the ships, increased their top speed by a sixteen-hundred percent. A Mark-One wouldn’t get anywhere near that.”

“So, not only is our plan kaput. Somebody has Destiny?” Mitchell asked.

“I’m afraid so.” Woolsey said. “The New Asurans sensed that there was something wrong, so they ran a deep diagnostic on the feed from Destiny. They found a program inside the feed. Once they eliminated the program, they discovered that Destiny is stationary. The data that Destiny has been sending back….is fake.”

“The only way to fake the telemetry is to install a generator program. And the only way to do that is to actually be *on* the ship.” Jackson said. “So, yeah.”

“What do we do?” Landry asked.

“We don’t know,” Miller said. “But we need a new plan.”

Landry leaned back. This was indeed bad news. ~Very bad indeed.~ And nobody had discussed the elephant in the room…the Lucian Alliance. So far, the Alliance had not shown any signs of knowing about Spera and her mission. But the war between Earth and the Alliance was still ongoing. So - whatever they did - they would have to be careful as they moved forward. Of course, they needed a plan first.

(Earth – Stargate Command, General Landry’s Office – 24 September 2017 / Day 30, 0955)

Mackenzie had ended the meeting after Miller’s announcement. The President had asked for them to take a break. Landry got the impression that the man wanted a little time to process the information. And the General couldn’t blame him. Now, Landry was sitting in his office and reading Jackson and Miller’s official report. There was a knock at the door and he looked up. General O’Neill walked into the room.

“Jack?”

“Hank?” O’Neill sat down across from Landry. “So, what do you think?”

“I think we have a major problem. But at least they won’t catch us by surprise, which…based on this….” He closed the folder. “…was the plan.”

“There’s that.”

“Which doesn’t change the fact that we are royally screwed.”

“Yeah, pretty much.” O’Neill leaned back. “Got any ideas?”

“One or two.”

The two of them continued their conversation, planning their next moves and considering their options. As they did so, Jeannie Miller sat in the briefing room and watched them. She had been pondering what their discovery meant. And what to do about it. She leaned back and decided that sitting here and staring at the wall wouldn’t help anybody. So she got up and walked out of the room. ~I need some Jell-O~ She headed for the Mess Hall. After getting some gelatin and a sandwich, she looked for a place to sit. Much to her surprise, Mackenzie was sitting at one of the tables. He was eating a sandwich and browsing through the official report. She approached the table.

“Miss Miller, will you join me?”

“Thank you, sir,” She sat down across from Mackenzie. “So, any questions?”

“Your report only says that somebody modified the command ships,” Mackenzie began. “Off the record…would you care a guess as to who or whom that could be?”

“Well, whoever has Destiny, they know about the Nakai and their interest in the ship. And they consider them enough of a threat to attack them by proxy. But apparently attacking them directly is not an option….”

“Still, they would need some spaceships or space stations to make the modifications. And they have advanced computers. They would need them for the telemetry fraud and to reprogram the command ships.”

Mackenzie browsed through the folder and took out a drawing. It was a schematic of one of the command ships. The communications relays had scanned the ship and done the math on how far the command ships could fly before they ran out of fuel. The ships would have ended up stranded between two galaxies, several hundred-thousand lightyears away from the Nakai Home Galaxy. But the scan showed that somebody had added an extra fuel-tank to the ships. Not only was the tank made from different metal then the command ships and the drones, the tanks were the exact size needed to get the Nakai Home Galaxy.

“And they would need some way to keep the drones from blowing them to pieces as they approached.”

“Right, because the drones are programmed to attack anything that isn’t them or their command ships,” Miller said. “They would need a way around that and a detailed knowledge of the software that runs these things.”

“So we’re talking about an intelligent race, which has advanced technology,” He paused. “How long do we have until the command ships reach their destination?”

“We’re using the satellites to track their progress. If they keep moving at their current speed, they’ll be there in thirty days.”

Mackenzie nodded. This meant that they had some time. And there was one piece of good news. Because the communications relays were built by Spera. Which meant that in order to be detected by them, they had flown past the ship without stopping. ~Maybe whoever has Destiny, doesn’t know about Spera. Or doesn’t care.~ And they had done so before Colonel Vale and his team had arrived. ~Because otherwise, our people would have noticed.~ He wrote a note to have Vale and co check the logs. ~There might be something there.~ Of course, there was still one major question left on his list.

“Let’s presume they get there, who is going to win?” And this was why this whole situation potentially was really bad news for them. Not only would Spera have to face whoever had done this, there was also the potential problematic outcome of the Nakai-Drones War that would start as soon as the command ships reached the Nakai Home Galaxy. “The Nakai have only fought them once and they lost.”

“Atlantis has gotten an exact count. There are two-hundred and seventeen control ships. Based on the reports, the Nakai would be in the fight of their lives. But…based on the information the Nakai Colonists gave on their Home Space….they will win. The problem is that they are in a cold war with an alien race called the Jynacko.” Mackenzie nodded, he remembered that from Vale’s reports.

“And if they attack the Nakai as soon as the Drone War is over. Well…based on the information we have, the Pentagon thinks that the Nakai would lose. In which case, if they also know about Destiny or learn about it, we might end up trading one enemy for a worse one.”

Mackenzie sighed. This meant that there was not one war brewing in the Nakai Home Galaxy, but two. And they were still fighting a war with the Lucian Alliance here in the Milky Way Galaxy. Not to mention the fact that there was a possible war waiting for Spera and her crew to get Destiny back.