Disclaimer: This author makes no claim to ownership of the games, tv shows and other original works of fiction depicted in this story save for the fanfiction itself. This story is not written for any form of profit or monetary gain.

Advent of the Illuminate

Chapter 1

Mathis and Pieta were shivering, completely out of it, the others were in various stages of withdrawal save for Cassin who had adapted best to the pasqueita that smelled sweet on his breath and dampened his ability to hear, save for a murmur; or send, save for a whisper; if he strained the limits of his abilities. Cassin wasn't agitated nor was he distressed about Mathis and Pieta.

It was a test. Cassin had come to realize that everything was a test. The month of freedom after graduating Pre-Schola before Adeptus training began. It was a test designed to examine a Candidates decisions and choices when left to their own devices and off-guard. There was no right or wrong answer to the test, data was collected and compiled into the information that would be used to determine what avenues were open, or closed to them.

The party hosted without parental supervision or the prefects' seeming knowledge… A test of self-control…

The upperclassmen who gate-crashed and heckled Pieta and some of the other girls… A test in conflict resolution…

The various tours, excursions, camping trips and space cruises to choose from in the weeks afterward… A test of their sense of adventure, how they dealt with the unknown…

On counterpoint; the optional educational courses and the various self-training exercises that appeared on the V-Link within hours of graduation… A test of resolve and determination to see how far we would go to improve ourselves…

They'd spent the week on a sabbatical, living on the surface of the Home World, more specifically the desert of their peoples' origin. The greater majority of their planet's inhabitants lived in the forests on the coast, East, West and South. North was too cold for anything but some resorts and an extreme environment training facility.

People lived an outwardly austere existence at peace with nature, using automated air cars to travel to the off-shore, floating cities that held the functions of civilization that would not so easily spare wild habitat. Most, however; forewent physical travel in favor of telepresence or psychic projections, using the V-Link to share, organize and develop vast amounts of ideas and information from the comfort of home.

When this did not suffice and the distance too difficult or purpose too urgent to be easily made by air car, a rarity, a call to the Space Temple could be made by any citizen with just cause or clearance requesting teleportation to any accessible location within the star system. It was ironic in the sense that people spared their natural environment damage by removing themselves from it mentally all while living in it physically.

Cassin and his fellows were candidates at the Adeptus Anima Schola, they, their instructors and the four million men and women that constituted their peoples' efforts in space had at one time or another lived part of their lives aboard the massive Bennui Orbital Arcology. A place constructed from what had been the home world's second moon as a center of learning and a means to more easily gain access to their star system. Cassin also hoped to one day spend time aboard one of the six Transcendence Class star bases that were stationed in-system.

More specifically, he wished to visit the Temple of Illumination, the star base where the Seekers of Truth, his people's exploration and colonization arm trained and rested between deployments. One of the requirements was that candidates for the position of Adept Anima to a Seeker Vehicle had to be able to maintain calm and balanced judgment while separated from the V-Link for significant periods of time.

It was a little difficult for Cassin to tell what reactions were due to Pervasive Social Network Withdrawal Syndrome and what was caused by the narcotic they had been given. This was because Cassin's own perception of the world around him was beginning to distort.

He swore at a sand lizard that was looking at him funny. Instructor Loqalis started giggling he tried to get up and failed. The wind blew against his face and Cassin was suddenly hyper sensitive of the Lady Adept's presence next to him, of her pouty red lips and large, full breasts… the flare of her hips. Hard won control frayed as his body burned with a passion suppressed for a full eighteen years.

Control… Self-Control…

With a wrench he resisted, barely, the urge to drag her to the ground! Rip off her clothes! To rut! Rut! RUT! Desperately affirming that he was not, as the silence of his mind and cybernetics implied, alone, unlinked, permanently offline like the dead and the Silent Ones.

He groaned as she leaned upon him. A firm breast and stiff nipple rubbed against the flesh of his arm through thin nanoweave cloth leaving tingling tracks across naked skin. He tried to swallow but his mouth was dry, He tried to think but there was just too much… A hand brushed against his manhood and he turned to Loqalis, he was going to lay her on her back with her feet at her shoulders and suck and lick and f-f-f.

In all things we do there is a test.

He nearly cried from the agony of separating his long held fantasies from Loqalis' witchery. Failing to completely cleanse the infected portions of mind, he partitioned the suspect portion of his cybercortex and reformatted the entire thing section by section. From there, the Telencephalon Cyberorganic Kinesthetic Interface rebooted his V-Link, purging itself of any lingering infection.

He fought the urge to vomit as he looked around, the majority of his peers were caught up in a writhing orgy, the sights, smells, sounds; all assaulted him from every direction. The slapping of sweaty flesh on flesh, the groans, the moans, the begging for release and the promises made if it were given, whispers that threatened to drive him insane. Cassin staggered to his feet, wounded both mentally and emotionally.

A few of his peers stood with him, islands of reason amid the wild sea of thrashing bodies and rubbing breasts. Their fragmented thoughts bombarded him.

'Harder! Deeper! Be rough! Take me! Aiiieee! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! YesYesYesYesYes! Please, I beg you, Suck Me! Kiss Me! F*ck M-m-m-m-m-me!'

The sea of grasping, caressing, fingering hands parted, Pieta, mindless and naked reached for him and Cassin reared back, falling on his ass. She moaned as someone lapped at her burning core and rough hands grabbed the girl's hair, drawing her upper torso backward as if her body were a bow. Cassin watched her pert breasts sway as another boy madly violated her face with a thrusting arrow of flesh and blood.

Another hand gripped him, and Cassin couldn't break this grip. A cool voice was 'heard' in his mind.

'Interesting, still lucid, how rare for a male candidate to resist Domination Aura to this degree' It said coolly, sounding as if the voice's owner was considering him nothing more than an intriguing puzzle.

He turned to the source and saw not the instructor but Loqalis, Lady Adept Anima in her full glory. Not simply his arm; but his body and mind were trapped in a grip as unyielding as stone. His recrimination died on is lips as he noticed some of the instructors drawing the other successful applicants away. He trailed his captor away from the bonfire until they stepped into the shadows of a tent, and this time Loqalis entreated him without coercion.

In all things there is a test.

As he sheathed himself within her squirming folds she began to tell him stories of the Dreamtime, the heritage story of the Seekers of Truth.

She spoke of the Crocodile Men and Heron Bird.

In the beginning, Mighty Sobek, chose the People for his own and through the Ring of the Gods, the Chappa'ai, he swam, bringing the People to the great river that ran through desert, Nachal. The People lived at the banks of the river and revered Mighty Sobek. The People lived at the banks of the river and feared Mighty Sobek.

Sobek who gives Law,

-Thrust-

Sobek who takes Life,

-Withdraw-

Law giver

-Thrust-

Killer

-Withdraw-

The blood of a thousand maidens, a thousand young warriors, and a thousand children was fed to Sobek.

-Thrust-

The Crocodile Men rose from the Nachal and bore them to Sobek's maw so that none could get away. Some of the blood spilled from his jaws and into the river where it spread through the desert, painting it red as the roui'I clay on a bride's forehead.

-Withdraw-

-Moan-

The People saw the desert run red and named it, Nazca. The blood of a thousand daughters and sons washed through the river Nachal and their bleached bones turned into shiny stones rubbed smooth by the water that Sobek sought with greed. He bade the People to dig a pit and piled our bodies in there.

-OH!-

Out of the pit Sobek drew bleached bones and smiled a terrible smile.

-OH!-

-Fingers grabbing, scratching nails that ran along his back to his buttocks, encouraging, needy-

Sobek who takes,

-OH!-

And takes away…

-Ohhhh!-

One day a god descended upon Nazca. It spread flaming wings and came to rest beside the river.

-Oh mnnhhhh!-

Thus came Heron Bird to drink at the bank of the river...

She wouldn't release him, or allow him release, the indoctrination process sharing user restricted access protocols between their cybernetics. Their minds melded as their bodies lay entwined. The story continued.

The Heron Bird took a sip from the Nachal and found the blood filled water to be too bitter to drink, so she waded upstream in search of a fresh spring.

-Again! OH-

The Crocodile Men were sunning themselves on the river bank when Heron Bird waded by. When they saw Heron Bird they jumped up and tossed their golden spears, trying to kill her. Heron Bird spread her fiery wings wide and blew aside the golden spears of the Crocodile Men. She flapped her wings once and a great wind came from the west and blew the Crocodile Men into the desert from where they did not return.

He could only lay there and shudder as his bioengineered augments and cybernetic implants attuned themselves to the final changes the marked him as an Adept Anima. The trance and the tale being spun served to focus Cassin's mind through the storm of sensations that threatened to break his currently fragile hold on his sanity.

It also felt really good…

Sobek had been sitting on his throne overlooking the Pit when the Heron Bird's gale blew. He raced for the river to see what had happened and found Heron Bird at the bank of the Nahal drinking the sweet water.

Lord Sobek opened his jaws wide, trying to devour Heron Bird. Just then Heron Bird looked up; and seeing Lord Sobek, flew away, landing beside the Pit. Sobek came after Heron Bird and tried to bite her but she danced out of the way until she came to rest upon Sobek's own head. Sobeck thrashed about, trying to throw her off of his head but Heron Bird stayed on.

Finally, Sobek began to roll about and Heron Bird spread her wings and flew up into the air as Sobek rolled and rolled and rolled into the Pit. There his bones lay, even to this day.

Heron Bird shook her head, and as the People watched, lowered her long beak to the desert floor. From her beak came two women and a man. Vradica, Dauer and Wiseman, these three were the Triumvirate, they who taught us the value of enlightenment, endurance, unity.

We killed our god and found our true strength…

Strength is Unity.

One Thousand Years Ago

The citizens of the Unified Illuminate were encouraged from a very young age to seek enlightenment. By 'Seeking Enlightenment'it was meant, broadly, that one should seek to self-improve by any means possible, using whatever means available, mentally and physically.

Generally this outlook was achieved via a number of ways. Gene therapy, cybernetic augmentation, drugs, hypnotism, meditation and extensive physical and psychological training were all valid methods.

Bio-engineering, in vitro, in utero and post-natal was common. Screening for diseases and harmful genetic disorders could begin within hours of conception, allowing parents to virtually shape and design their children. A wide array of medical treatments, drugs that temporarily or permanently altered brain function and chemistry were available and used if it took one closer to the goal of enlightenment.

Due to the realities of star travel and familial relationships that can stretch across parsecs of space, artificial wombs turned the entire affair of carrying a baby to term in vivo, into a moot, and more than a little dangerous proposition. The V-link shrunk distances so that a family that had for the most part never actually been in the same star system; could enjoy a communal lifestyle.

The point being, that technology, was another avenue through which one could pursue enlightenment. The Telencephalon Cyberorganic Kinesthetic Interface, TECKInt for short, was the basic technology upon which much of the Illuminate's existence had been founded. A masterful convergence of nanotechnology, molecular biology and quantum computing that created a new superior layer to the brain, a cyber-cortex.

From this new organ came new definitions of man and machine. The human brain possessed an awesome computational ability of which evolution allowed only a slight fraction to fall within conscious control. With the TECKInt and the V-Link software, each member of the Illuminate became a standalone knowledge base with the ability to freely share new thoughts, ideas and hereditary memories.

Merely achieving biological perfection or a technological singularity wasn't the end of their goals. For the Illuminate, the path to enlightenment was heavily influenced by their harsh desert origins. A community of shared purpose and history that extended throughout the whole of their lives and across the entirety of their domain bringing peace and strength through a unified will and shared consensus was their goal.

Each citizen added their voice to the whole and though this method the Illuminate evolved both physically and technologically, by far outstripping the efforts of their human peers; no violence, no want, no chaos… Peace, strength… Unity.

It says something about the human race that their vision was so reviled when they sought to share it with others. That they were driven from their homes, their planet, families hunted and eradicated when found. Corporations, governments, tyrannies of meaningless promises, the corrupt and greedy clinging desperately to power and unworthy influence at the cost of their fellows, it was no wonder they were so threatened by the Unity's Call.

But their efforts were futile. One ship did survive the purging. Where there was one, thousands more survived, called to each other across the stars, gathered, grew. Remembered...

After nearly a thousand years the wound that never healed, that had festered along generations would be reopened and cleaned. The Illuminate would have its revenge but even as huge fleets of warships gathered to travel back into their former territories and seek out old enemies, it was the will of the Unity that the Illuminate Astra Telepathica Directorate continue to send out Adept Anima on missionary vessels. Those rare individuals who would spend generations cut off from the whole, their sacrifice for the future. Sacrifice for indeed many a noble explorer would not be heard from again.

The missionary vessel HERON was one such explorer.

Falling, I was falling.

That was never a good sign…

I sat there- or lay, insensate on the crash couch set in reclined mode.

My first thoughts were…

"What the fuck just happened?"

I couldn't shake the sense of vague unease that told me I wouldn't like the answer when it came.

I was falling.

I was falling from a very great height.

Before my eyes wisps of cloud floated high above a super continent, higher still were other clouds that cast shadows against the lower clouds and ground. Yet I was even higher still. How high up was I?

I turned my eyes to the side and groggily looked at the glittering star field that contrasted with blue curve of the horizon and the faint halo that was the upper limit of the planet's atmosphere.

Flames began to lick against my face as I passed into the atmosphere proper.

I was reallyhigh up.

And I was falling.

Befuddled bemusement faded as terror cleared my mind. I might have done something very stupid at that moment if the cortical stimulators in my TECKInt hadn't triggered, working in concert with the nanomachines in my blood; I felt the cool clear calm that settled my nerves and the warm burn behind my eyes that meant that I'd had a mild brain injury and was healing from the results of the accident.

'What accident?'

I now began to remember more as my thoughts focused and my body healed. With a bit of concentration and slight nausea I disengaged from the sensor link. The words JAN WISEMANwere lit in a golden amber holographic script. Jan Wiseman, that was who I was, Adept Anima and colony construction specialist. It took a moment to orient myself within the cranial control module of the Armored Control Unit I was piloting, but as soon as I did I tried to establish a telepathic link with my crew and ship. Simultaneously, I prepped the ACU for atmospheric re-entry.

The conforming nanoshields were already in passive operation and I ran over a systems checklist in the little time that I had using the ACU's maneuvering thrusters to get into feet downward position to better survive re-entry. Alone in the control module with my ACU wreathed in writhing, burning flames; I slowly collected my returning memories and compared them to the somewhat more dependable log stored on my TECKInt.

Vradica and our mission leader, Senior Adept Dauer, had just finished the pre-jump system checks in preparation for entering phase space. I'd been working on integrating new software from the Hellstorm AA cannons on the ACU's shoulders down in the aft storage bay. At the time I was only passively participating in the process by allowing a portion of my TECKInt's processing power to be utilized by the pilot and navigator on the bridge.

The pre-jump checklist concluded, I'd opted to ride out the phase jump in the cockpit of my ACU...

Then nothing…

'Oh, that was bad.'

Phase jumping was the faster than light technology that my people had developed in the time before the invention and usage of quantum gates for interstellar travel. Given that no two quantum gates within a sphere of ten light years in radius could be linked to each other, jump technology hadn't been completely supplanted.

After all, aside from in-system FTL there was also the matter of first placing a gate at a new location. The explorer corps of the Astra Telepathica used Seeker ships to find and drop beacons at promising locations before sending Missionary vessels equipped with automated factories and an ACU to develop and construct the facilities necessary for colonization.

Unfortunately, Phase Jump technology still held some mysteries to the Illuminate. The basic premise was to use enormous amounts of energy to unravel real space at a quantum level and to manipulate this distortion to access another dimension where time and distance functioned in a manner conducive to travel over vast distances.

Unlike quantum gates however, which linked to each other using a beacon formed from a matrix of quantum-locked particles, phase jumps were purely inertial. Unable to interact with real space when at too deep a level of this different dimension, this hyperspace, most ships remained partially in phase with real space, just skimming along, navigating using gravimetric interactions.

The problem with that method was that jump calculations and psychic divinations needed to be spot on, or else encountering a sufficiently massive gravity well could actually rip a ship out of a phase jump prematurely. Given that rogue planets, erratic wormholes and black holes were the most pleasant of the list of things that couldn't be completely accounted for by navigators I was lucky to be alive at all.

So long as I made it groundside and regained contact with my crew….

Illuminate space vessels were heavily mechanized vehicles. Anything smaller than a frigate was not likely to bear a living, breathing crew, this was a means of promoting the survival of their relatively small population.

Drone Anima were used in the role of pilots and crew, a combination of psychic imprinting and limited artificial intelligence programming, all under the nominal telepathic control of a single Adept Anima; though usually capable of carrying out orders and adapting to changing situations unaided for a time. Drone Anima were vital to the functions of corvettes, trade ships, fighter craft, automated factories, and a host of automated machines both terrestrial and space-borne.

Illuminate crews aboard space craft were usually small, no more than two or three humans on a frigate, five to twenty for cruisers; and no less than forty-five crew members aboard a capital ship, though usually no more than that either. The rest of the systems were either automated or wirelessly controlled by the Adept Anima who could quite literally becomethe ship.

For the Pilot and Navigator of the Missionary-class vessel HERON, there was virtually no advance warning that something had gone wrong. For the three hundred meter long vessel, deliberately designed to look like two hands cupped in supplication, the unexpected transition from phase space was a very nearly catastrophic event. The HERON's crew was no better off than the battered spacecraft and none were conscious to witness the burst of anomalous radiation and twisted light that signaled an unexpected detour in the HERON's journey.

Consciousness did not come to Senior Adept Dauer, not in the sense that that a Baseline would recognize. As Eliza Dauer lay comatose, gravely injured, her cybercortex took control of the situation. A Drone Anima, formed from an emulation of Dauer's organic brain, directed the effort to save the ship. It held no consciousness of itself beyond the sense that it wasSenior Adept Dauer, the uninjured part of her.

A few pieces of debris that had once been part of the HERON's hull drifted into the walls of the tunnel-like anomaly that now engulfed the ship. One moment it was there on the sensors, a reminder of just how badly damaged the HERONwas, and in another moment there was nothing.

A second look at the readings allowed the Anima further insight into what happened. The pattern of particle scatter from the point of impact and the HERON'sown scans revealed the wall to be a sort of event horizon beyond which powerful gravitational shear forces ripped apart anything that was incident to it, even coherent light.

Had it been capable of panic, the Ad Hoc Drone Anima would have done so, instead it used emergency override codes to link the two cybercortices it could detect into a stable network for added computational power and carefully tried to navigate down the tunnel. The pilot's Drone Anima used forecasting models, mathematical models based on remote viewing and clairvoyance, in an attempt to predict the turns in the convoluted tunnel and avoid the extremely dangerous walls.

The clock indicated that the trip lasted eight minutes before they were ejected out of a flashing opening and on a collision course… with a planet.

From the moment the collision was detected as imminent, a host of plans and contingencies were considered and discarded until one was settled upon. The aft bay doors were opened, and the contents therein were released to space.

The ACU was designed to make planet fall unaided and its Adept Anima actually had a better chance of surviving than the rest of the crew. A construction drone and a collection of orbital factory modules were released under their own power. While this was being done the Drone Anima sought to change their re-entry vector to one more favorable to their odds of survival, firing deceleration thrusters all the way into the atmosphere.

The ACU made planet-fall without serious issue. There was some minor heat damage to the teleportation module, but nothing immediately catastrophic. As my ACU had descended into the lower atmosphere I adjusted the flight path to take me down near a large winding river.

It was the most notable landmark for miles around aside from the mountain range to the north east and my sensors indicated signs of habitation several klicks away from my landing zone. Whoever saw me would be in for a sight as my ACU set down with nanoshields configured for gliding, massive wings of light catching the air and diffracting sunlight like crystal.

The ACU settled in the river with what must have seemed like a thunderous crash. I barely even felt a tremor due to the inertial compensators. Thirty meters tall, the ACU was almost knee deep in the waters. I sent a query on Illuminate channels and got a return from an auto-factory in orbit. A few commands later had the first of a series of micro-satellites being put into production.

In a few more hours I'd have a much more comprehensive picture of my situation. There was still no word from my crew, but I did well in keeping myself busy, running diagnostic checks on both myself and the ACU; then setting up a series of mass extractors and power generators along with a land vehicle factory and a picket of air and land defense towers.

With the flat land, sparse flora and brush by the river and the desolate landscape filled with rolling dunes in the distance, there was very little that could hide from my defenses and very little to hide the buildings that I'd constructed, not that I intended to hide. Dealing with the locals on whatever planet I had colonized was part of the job, hopefully they wouldn't be hostile, but if they were, well…

On that thought I began construction of a troop of hover tanks and then a lab module for more specialized equipment. Not that I thought the locals were a credible threat, but there was something about this planet that was nagging at my senses. Or maybe I was going into withdrawal from not having been in contact with the rest of the crew for well over eight hours. There was a thought…

As a young man, many, many, many years ago, I had been a gregarious child. I'd created my own sailing club, participated in footraces, practiced the ancient art of oil painting; and gone on long walks through the forests of my home world, most often with a single female companion…

My half-parents had been horrified.

When kids my age were participating in healthy pursuits like taking psychotropic drugs to explore altered states of consciousness, participating in orgies with other thirteen year olds to better comprehend their physicality and mortality; or going in to the Temples of Unity to get another cybernetic implant installed or their limbic system upgraded. I, the son of the choir leaders of a Domina Subjugator cruiser, was learning to play the cello.

The cello!

And I was good at it too.

My parents' other four mates had thought that it was just a phase and became rather defensive of my pursuits, secretly I think they were rather worried that I might chose to become a Silent One and have the few implants that I'd ever had, or actually needed, removed.

My bio-parents had been horrified.

As it turns out, I was just a little bit more independent-minded than the other kids, a natural loner with little desire to form a connection beyond the few thousand or so people that I alrady knew. It was just a phase though and before you knew it I was getting high on drugs and having wild, debauched orgies just like all the other kids. I even had my existing central nervous system overhauled to better manage my telekinesis and telepathy. Frankly, I only did that to keep up as classes became more challenging. I had known even then that I wanted to explore the Dark.

As an ACU pilot, my talents were more than acceptable. Even without the TECKInt I could mentally dominate up to eleven minds at a time and my having started late on the drug/sex/augment part of adolescence that all children go through was to my benefit. Blending thoughts with the billions of souls that made up the Unity was... rapturous, but I could live without it, unlike some. I made a hefty amount of extra credit and hazard privileges, doing something that I would have done for free.

It made my parents, all six of them, proudto learn of the sacrifice that I bravely made in spending time away from the Unity to see its will be done.

By this time I'd had a squadron of hover tanks produced by the land vehicle factory and positioned in a support position near the defense towers. A couple squads of the more maneuverable assault bots were hidden among what little cover there was, motionless. I was just getting an air factory up and running when the satellite uplink came online.

That there was a troop of thirteen or so human life-signs heading for my location was already known to me due to my having sensed their strange minds, so human and yet, so decidedly not. They were still a few more hours away on foot and the satellite imagery provided me with a view of where the HERONhad gone down off the coast. Two troops of hover tanks were dispatched at once, escorting an engineer. It wasn't until I saw the air transport lift off from the north and head in the same direction as my tanks that I began to feel a sense of foreboding.

A troop of anti-air vehicles and a couple of plasma mortars made it onto the build queue.

Kaardu lead his search party in Lord Sobek's name. Their goal was to investigate the impact site of the meteorite that had fallen earlier that day. They had set out almost immediately after the order was given and it had been a long trek on foot but his jaffa had made good time. Now as they neared what had to be the impact site, Kaardu's instincts was telling him that something was awry.

A floating machine, shaped like some manner of beetle with several appendages sticking out of its back, moved into view from behind a stand of trees. A barked command from Kaardu had his jaffa take up firing positions.

"I am Kaardu, First Prime of your Lord and God Sobek the Lifegiver! What is your name and purpose here! Answer! Who are you that trespass on your God, Lord Sobek's Domain?" Kaardu called out.

And the creature said, [biBOUBIh *GOG, JHUUY GHieU?]

Kaardu's sense of unease increased, the prim'ta within his body squirmed in warning and Kaardu came to himself half in the motion of lowering his weapon to the ground.

[Hijhjkj, Hijhjkj, hijidHw… WiDy!]

"Jaffa! Kree!" Kaardu bellowed in warning of the trickery. Then he opened fire on the machine before him.

His men, loyal Jaffa of Lord Sobek, heeded their conditioning even in their entranced state and they opened fire as well. Their initial disorientation resulted in an uncoordinated attack in the same general direction that Kaardu was firing with varying degrees of effectiveness.

[Laoef!]

Kaardu grit his teeth, ignored the wave of nausea that washed over him through sheer force of will, and continued firing. One of the thing's arms swung over to point at a jaffa to Kaardu's left. The was barely enough time for words of warning to form upon Kaardu's lips when a beam of greenish-blue light connected the now thrumming arm to Kaardu's fellow warrior. The warrior didn't even scream before he disintegrated, transformed into ash and dust that swirled up the path of the beam toward the end of the arm itself.

Kaardu and his men betrayed none of the horror they felt for their brother-in-arms fate, save for a widening of the eyes and a more determined, and more cautiousattack. Several plasma bolts splashed against the arm, wrecking whatever the device was before it could turn itself on another hapless jaffa. The thing itself had taken more time to destroy than Kaardu had anticipated but eventually the weight of fire caused it to sag, one side listing to the ground before there was an explosion somewhere within the vehicle.

Kaardu raised his arm as the jaffa behind him gave a fierce cheer…

That's when a thunderbolt fell from the heavens. Kaardu held consciousness long enough to register that he and his arms and legs were flying away in different directions and then, nothing.

A second engineer hovered out of the bushes and reclaimed the mass of the slag that was all that remained of its destroyed predecessor.

"Well, that went well…" That was all I could mutter as I built another land factory and stepped up construction of my air and land assets, both defensive and offensive. As I did so I ran over what I had sensed of the warriors that had confronted my engineer. Human… but odd…analyzing a corpse got me my answer.

I sent out a wing of Fighter/Bombers to police the airspace over the HERON's crash site and intercept that transport. I may have been starting something here by having them shoot it down over the desert but these altered humans, bearing some sort of symbiote, made me uneasy. These humans had resisted my attempts to calm them and responded to psychic influence with instinctive violence. More hover tanks were in order, and a mobile plasma artillery unit perhaps, and another squadron of hover tanks… and an AA vehicle or two. 'yes, hmmm…'

The satellite images showed clearly what the response was to the aggressive party's destruction via plasma bombardment. A scout across the river had started blowing some sort of signal horn. He hadn't gotten past a few notes before a plasma mortar ruined his day rather permanently from the other side of the river but it seemed like that was enough. Enemy life signs began converging on my general location.

The engineer's analysis of the enemy troops' remains had some interesting metallurgical findings but I was much more concerned by the activity coming from the camp situated near an open-pit mine to the north. There were some sort of aerospace fighter taking off and more transports. The fighters split between heading to my base and the fighter-bombers patrolling to the northwest here the HERONhad gone down off the coast. Some transports set down out of range of the AA towers and began unloading more troops in what looked like an encirclement maneuver.

I had the latest squadron of fighter bombers in the air and on the task. The hover tanks stayed under the cover of my shield structures for the moment but they were joined by some more AA vehicles in addition to the AA towers. The fight in the air proceeded as I had squads of assault bots move north using the brush as cover and eliminate the ground forces there in a firefight that lit the bush afire. In all other directions I positioned plasma mortars to break up the encirclement, aided by several flights of gunships.

The fighter/bombers were larger and slightly slower than the aerospace fighter analogues used by the enemy. Things were settled in my favor however, due to the Black Jackfighter/bombers' superior aerial agility and armor. While the enemy fighters were packing what looked like a higher caliber version of the staff weapon that had slagged my engineer, the weapon's firing angle was narrow and range ridiculously small.

The plasma bolts were unguided ballistic projectiles compared to that, the Black Jacks' self-guided anti-air missiles were tearing apart the enemy fighter craft whose pilots only belatedly realized that the incoming fire was tracking them. Between that and the fighter bomber's incendiary plasma bombs, I quickly secured air superiority over most of the continent.

As an additional measure, I had parts for micro missile modules constructed and installed on all of my available assault bots. A full two tank squadrons were sent up river, twenty-four hover tanks, eight AA vehicles with anti-infantry, metal storm gauss cannon modules, four plasma mortars and two engineers protected by an over strength platoon of hover tanks. They followed the winding river, moving at high speed above the water. They were shadowed on both banks by a squad each of assault bots. The destination was the airbase to the north.

I began passing orders for my bombers to get me a closer look at the situation on the ground. It was a measure to track the progress of the engineer that I had earlier dispatched with the aim to recover my submerged comrades. It would also allow me to keep an eye on my attack force. All the while, reinforcements were being created.

The name of the game was resources. In addition to the mass extractors that I had running at the base, there were several more in the desert, reclaiming large amounts of material for processing. It was mostly silicates with iron oxides but the quantum assemblers and nanoforges housed within my factories were perfectly capable of creating the iridium and osmium composite alloys used by my forces. It was done at the cost of elevated material and energy consumption but I was in the middle of a desert with sand as far as a non-augmented eye could see, it was the energy costs that were killing me.

A couple flights of gunships were created and deployed, and my intel-suite pinged me with an update on the weapons used by the enemy forces. The news was both good and bad. Good for me was the fact that the weapon was badly designed for the type of combat I was used to. The plasma generated was only magnetically contained in a stable configuration for a few seconds before dissipation began. This placed a serious limitation on the weapons' effective range which was much less than the 4,250 meter engagement envelope of my hover tanks' plasma weaponry.

The bad news was that these natives had somehow gained access to a power source that allowed them to miniaturize their plasma weaponry to an amazing degree, yet still retain potency. It was a puzzling conundrum. Their technology in some areas were almost on par with my peoples' and yet, the associated technologies that should have advanced alongside symbiotically, like the magnetic containment fields that these weapons used, were far weaker than they should be for a people who possessed superconducting alloys that could function in the middle of a fucking desert without the need for refrigerant systems.

'Puzzling… Oh yes, very puzzling…'

In any case, I used my ACU's quantum assembler and construction nanites to quickly build several fusion generators near the river to meet my current energy needs. I then sent an air transport loaded with engineers toward the mountains to the northeast. Satellite reports indicated a wealth of metals ranging from transition metals to veins of a transuranium metal that was tentatively identified as similar to the unknown material used in the enemy's armor.

With my engineers on their way to create more mass extractors and the last of the base's shields finally online I allowed myself time to link to the combat feed.

Lo'rek was a jaffa master-of-arms in the service of his lord and god, the mighty Sobek. This truly was how he thought of himself. A jaffa weapons master with nearly a century of service to his name, Lo'rek devoted his life to training his master's forces upon this harsh desert world. His face was weather beaten and covered in crisscrossing scars that denoted years of combat devoted to preserving his master's realm from attack by the servants of rival gods.

Nazca was not the only world in his master, Lord Sobek's domain, but it was the key to colonizing a new star cluster without the usual competition that such things entailed. As a result of both this world's distance from goa'uld space and the secrecy needed to secure it without opposition, there was little orbital infrastructure. The local human slave populace had first been tasked with building the main plinth and then later with mining the resources necessary to construct the first of the many ha'tak Lord Sobek needed to secure local space.

What this meant to Lo'rek was that when the call to arms had sounded, he and a hundred recruits had gathered in the slave city to hold it against enemy raiders. The bulk of Lord Sobek's forces were split evenly between attacking the enemy beachhead and defending Lord Sobek's stronghold. Lo'rek spared nary a thought to what the situation might have been if only this intrusion on his lord's domain had occurred just a few months later when the ha'tak was completed. The unfortunate timing spoke of treason he knew. As he settled the nerves of another group of young warriors, a cry from one of the staff cannon defenses on the roofs above let him know that the enemy drew close.

He welcomed the chance to blood his warriors using the enemies of his god as a foil

The first line of the invader machines glinted on the horizon as they came into view. The jaffa that saw them tensed at the sight and took aim. Lo'rek placed a calming hand against the younger warrior's shoulder.

"Hold." He said.

The Jaffa held their fire out of practicality. A staff cannon fired the equivalent of three hand-held staff blasts in a single salvo. The effective range was a little over one kilometer in atmosphere, although a dissipated wave of plasma would extend far past that. In comparison a jaffa-portable staff weapon had an effective range of a little more than two hundred meters. For both types of weapon, accurate targeting was more of an art than a science.

So the Jaffa waited for the hover tanks to come closer.

They didn't…

An actinic blue fireball shot from where the tank column was moving, barely visible to the unaided eye four kilometers distant. It raced across the landscape with a supersonic crack before impacting the top edge of a building to the left of Lo'rek, destroying the staff cannon placed there and killing the crew manning it. There was a thunderous boom as mortar and stone shattered and the air filled with a haze of dust and the smell of ozone. Lo'rek again placed a hand on the shoulder of the jaffa before him and said.

"Hold."

The staff cannon emplacement that Lo'rek was at, was positioned in one of the few rooms in the city that had a high window facing the desert. A wet blanket was usually hung over the window to cool the air flowing into the building and catch the perpetual sand. The cloth had been used to hide the staff cannon from view within the darkness of the room. It was one of the three heavy weapon nests to be hidden as such. The rest were given exposed but commanding views on top of buildings.

Two more bright flashes, two more cracks followed by another two roofs with jaffa on them exploding. The shoulder under the Jaffa master's hand tensed… and relaxed under the elder jaffa's grip.

"Hold." He said softly.

Then there came the whine of a flight of death gliders passing overhead, Lo'rek allowed a grim smile grace his face. He passed orders for his surviving forces to take hidden positions within the city.

A Yenzou Hover Tank's main hull was composed of an inner layer of a shatter-proof, shock-isolating plastic-ceramic composite that was then covered in molecularly bonded layers of iridium and osmium alloy mixtures of both titanium and steel. It was all coated in a self-regenerating nano-armor that blocked incoming hostile laser weaponry and caused the hull to glint as if covered in chrome plating.

Since it was too small to mount a quantum field generator for shielding, the Yenzou utilized a defensive screen based on a similar principle to the magneto-gravitic plates that allowed the two hundred and forty ton tank to hover.

As a result, when an Al'kesh under the screen of a flight of death gliders, dropped a plasma charge on one of the hover tanks, it was not outright destroyed, to the pilot's surprise. Much of the plasma and kinetic force released from the blast was simply repelled. The effort however quickly drained the defense screen's power as the front of the hover tank dipped, causing one of its mag-plates to dig a trench in the sand as it fishtailed.

What plasma that did bleed through burned away the nano-armor and caused carbon scoring on the high-temperature resistant metal hull. The death gliders had picked their targets at random, used more to terror tactics against primitive cultures than actual battle against an equally or superiorly armed foe. The tanks that were struck by the death gliders fared slightly better and their defense fields only failed after having deflected the entirety of the attack, leaving them with only the nano-armor as protection.

This attack was, of course, not without opposition. Anti-air vehicles at the trailing end of the formation opened fire the instant that the death gliders came into range. Dual light plasma repeaters stitched an offensive pattern using linked targeting systems to land multiple hits on every enemy aircraft. The construction grade naquada armor composing the hulls of the death gliders was optimized to withstand plasma weaponry. That said, the weight of fire the AA vehicles put the thin armor of the death gliders under by far outstripped anything their designer intended.

The death gliders possessed little in the way of support systems or damage control; they didn't even have a pilot ejection system. The death glider was designed to leave its pilot solely dependent on its mothership for support and pilots were expected to fight and die.

This is exactly what the flight of death gliders did when they were wracked by internal explosions caused by repeated hits that breached their fuselages and destroyed the internal systems within. Only one of the pilots would survive the initial firing pass, and only then to die screaming as his craft crashed hard into the opposing river bank.

The Al'kesh was a different story. Shielded and more heavily armored it took several more hits and two destroyed AA vehicles before it was forced to limp away; only for a fighter bomber to finish it off over the desert. The tank column circled around the slave city and headed for Sobek's main base, staying out of range of the city's defenders. This is not to say, that they were forgotten…

A Havoc assault robot was in general a much less heavily armed and armored version a hover tank, on legs. With it being a walker it wasn't amphibious so when I had sent those two squadrons of armor up river it was with the knowledge that while faster on land, the assault bots were going to be at least a half an hour to an hour behind if I had stuck to conventional travel.

The assault bots were in a word, flexible. A Jack-of-all-Trades, Master-of-None unit that was fast and extremely maneuverable on land, small and light at ten meters tall while weighing only seventy-five tons; and capable of being equipped for numerous roles both in and out of combat using a variety of mission modules.

Each assault bot mounted a pair of manipulator arms that were usually folded under the front chassis and two more heavily armored weapon mounted arms. At least one of those arms mounted a light plasma assault cannon with an effective range of two kilometers line of sight.

The six assault bot platoons I had sent out were also capable of being equipped with a number of specific mission modules. In this case they mounted a surface-to-air micro-missile module, an ultrasonic shockwave blaster on the off arm; and most importantly, a short-range teleportation module.

The reason for this was seen when the hover tanks left the river and headed past the occupied city for the main enemy encampments near the pit mine. The enemy was either holding their own armor in reserve or had none. I was of the opinion that the latter possibility was more likely given that the open defensive nests that they had set up would have been more suitable against infantry. It was an oversight that I had seen from those unused to tank warfare.

My tanks would have easily destroyed them but if there were any civilians inside this city killing them would probably be detrimental to a long term occupation. With a long-range tank barrage out of the question I was left with going in there and rooting out the opposition at close range. This was a small desert city with the narrow streets and irregularly placed stone buildings that formed a confusing maze with blind spots even from the bird's eye view of my satellite network. Even had my enemy been incompetent, sending my tanks into that situation was just asking for trouble.

Instead, the tank columns bypassed the city, casually destroying all of the staff cannon emplacements that could be seen in the distance, a challenge that was only to be answered by silence. I marked the enemy positions via satellite and sent in two platoons of assault bots as soon as they could advance within teleportation range. The gunships that I had sent earlier arrived in time to serve as aerial fire support with their chin mounted plasma cannons.

The forces that Lo'rek was given consisted of the least tested jaffa warriors, young recruits who were in the process of finishing their training on the desert sands of the world known as Nazca to its human inhabitants. Aside from four other instructors, Jaffa masters too elderly or infirm to serve in any other capacity. The oldest among the younger warriors guarding the abandoned city was a mere forty years of age.

The city itself was intended to be a trap. In raids upon new worlds it was more economical to steal a rival's slave population than to mount an attack against the forces guarding the Goa'uld controlling the planet. Slaves took time to breed, and the speed at which they were replaced could tell an enemy a lot about their prospective adversary's resource base.

If Sobek proved unable to secure his slaves then many of the more labor-intensive works needed to protect his domain would be unacceptably delayed. A shrewd Goa'uld might use this opportunity to force Sobek to give up sole control of the star cluster in exchange for support, probably the one behind this attack. Another possibility was this was the bloodletting of the bull, an attack meant to weaken Sobek for a later hostile takeover as recouping his losses drained his resources.

This was why the slaves had been sent into the mines for the duration of the battle. Any raiders would first head for the city, where Lo'rek awaited with a sacrificial force of warriors. Losing slaves may have crippled Sobek plans for the region but the home planet of his Jaffa was located elsewhere. The warriors that survived the expected battle in the slave city would be deemed worthy, given Sobek's way of seeing things, to serve their master as blooded warriors. That was the way that the Goa'uld master of Nazca ruled his people.

Things may not have gone as expected but Lo'rek remained unruffled; and not simply for the sake of those warriors who looked up to him. The Jaffa master very carefully watched the column of tanks move off into the distance though the image magnification function built into his crocodile-styled helmet. He had a choice to make, either continue to improve the fortifications of the city and risk coming under bombardment, or try to tail the tank column and make the enemy pay for leaving his command functional and at their rear.

In the end, Lo'rek's orders and the speed of the metal god-machines that had killed his jaffa decided his next course of action. His warriors were ordered to hold the city and that was what they would do. Plus, the speed at which the machines moved over land meant that Lo'rek was unlikely to get his men into position to do anything meaningful by the time the battle ended. The only thing he was likely to accomplish was getting caught out of cover. The machines had come from the direction of the river, a second group of raiders might sack the city or pin his jaffa between two highly mobile forces should he choose to leave the city.

It at this thought that the old Jaffa's heard a thunderous crack of displaced air that buffeted the curtains of the room he was in. There was a sharp smell of ozone that passed through Lo'rek's suit filters, and his first thought was that they were under attack by the god-machines again. He wasn't that far off. Only this time, instead of a long range bombardment, the occupants of the slave city found themselves somehow under attack from within the walls of the city.

At first there were two platoons of assault bots, eight god machines that spewed rolling thunder at the defenders of the city. The jaffa were caught off guard but quickly rallied, destroying one of the machines inspite of losses. Then, minutes later, there came the enemy death gliders. These hovering monstrosities that loomed like carrion birds and fired pulses of light that burned men to ash.

Lo'rek had the chance to disable one of them as it flew past his position. He swiftly ran out of the room he had taken cover in, for he knew what was coming next, having seen the enemy use the same tactics before. One of the surviving god-machines, of which Lo'rek was proud to say only five remained, took aim at his previous location and let loose a peal of thunder that cracked the wall facing it and reverberated in the narrow corridor and underfoot most alarmingly.

Lo'rek had lost his Second during the first opening minutes of the battle when the promising young warrior strayed too far from cover and was clipped by a wall of hard sound. The shockwave slammed the warrior into the far wall and his mere proximity to the attack made Lo'rek nauseous as the entire back wall of the room seemed to echo with the roar of a hundred thousand voices, and that was with his headgear filtering out some of the noise. Whatever the attack was, it was meant to disorient and deafen opponents. Lo'rek had managed to escape that room by crawling through a crack in the wall and continue the pitched battle for control of the city.

His warriors fought better than could be expected but he needed to regroup with them. As he turned down another corridor, intent on making for the basement and the network of tunnels the slaves used to travel from building to building during the day, the wall to his left exploded in a shower of stone. There was a second thunderclap that Lo'rek did not hear but the Jaffa felt it as he was lifted up by a concussive shockwave and tossed into the air. His back scraped along the ceiling of the corridor before gravity took hold and he fell to the debris strewn floor. There was a terrible pain in his midsection where the symbiote pouch was located and that was the last he knew…

In a darkened room lit by artificial braziers, the Goa'uld Sobek rested within his sarcophagus. The palace he currently dwelled in was more of a temple than a residence fit for a prince. Nonetheless it suited his ego. After all, what more fitting a home for a god than a temple?

He had directed it to be built for him five generations ago by the slaves that he had brought to this world. It was a crude affair but there was much that appealed to Sobek's personality. The walls and floor were darkened by soot and blood, a testament to the many times he had amused himself by killing useless slaves for sport or for the thrill of having his thralls ritually fight each other to the death in his name.

These actions and gruesome decorations were not without reason. His people feared him as much as they revered him. It tightened his hold upon the lives of the wretches so that for every act of cruelty; even a mere pittance of kindness, kindness that served his goals that is, would be met with such awe and wander it tickled his sense of humor at the simplemindedness of they over whom he held the power of life and death.

It was a power he very much enjoyed exercising. Which was why Vas'nor, Second; and given the death of his predecessor, the First Prime of Sobek, waited until the flow of battle was clear to him before he launched into a course of action that could very well mean his death.

Convincing his lord to flee…

Some of the tanks remained behind to intercept any surviving groups of enemy infantry from the abortive attack on my base. They were to prevent them from seeking to join either the main enemy base or the forces in the civilian city. The majority of the hover tanks continued past the city and headed for the pit mine and the strange pyramidal construct next to it. It looked like someone was using a stone pyramid as the base support for some kind of semi-finished construct.

I wanted to capture the enemy base with as many prisoners as possible. Their violent reaction to psychic contact was troubling and I needed to study it further. The inconsistencies in their technology and the alien presence were also issues that warranted further investigation. The assault bots would be using their shockwave blasters at low power settings to cow any resistance encountered while the tanks and plasma mortars, with gunship support, destroyed enemy weapons emplacements and softened up the stronghold.

The hover tank squadron, with four platoons of assault bots in escort, headed for the main enemy stronghold. The pyramid near the pit mine was what I had identified as the centre of co-ordination for the enemy and I meant to take it. The plasma mortars were useful in this instance. The rolling dunes of the desert degraded line of sight over the terrain, so unless I wanted to fire through successive sand dunes my hover tanks would have to be horribly exposed on the crest of a dune, outlined against the horizon, risking attack from the few surviving fliers and ambush by any infantry platoon wily enough to hide in the sand as the tanks came by.

The plasma mortars fired while still six kilometers away, the plasma bolts rose quickly into the sky before arcing in the air and falling down upon the enemy defenses. There were mag-plates within the capsules that served as the core of the projectile. Each of the tear drop shaped masses of star fire held together as it fell through the air and homed on a target. A few meters above each weapon emplacement the mag-plates overloaded, self-destructing and shooting a spear of twisted metal surrounded by a cone of hot plasma that incinerated anything in the way and spread fire onto adjacent men and structures.

The battle at the city had moved into a mopping up phase with my assault bots using ground penetrating radar to scan for any hidden enemies after it was discovered that some of the basement level rooms were interconnected. The plasma mortars seemed to have done a better than expected job of softening up the base defenses as a group of warriors surrounding a V.I.P. looked to be high-tailing it for what my intelligence algorithms identified as an unfeasibly small quantum gate. Not wanting to let the probable enemy commander escape, I sent orders for my hover tanks and assault bots in the dunes to teleport as close as possible to the gate and cut off that avenue of escape.

They were gone in an instant, appearing in the middle of the base and immediately wreaking havoc. I gritted my teeth as a tank was overwhelmed and destroyed. The mortars were still firing and a wing of blackjacks obliterated the last of the enemy fighters before moving in to attack the base. From where I sat watching with a bird's eye view of the battle, the vulture gunships cast ill shadows over the desert floor as they raced toward the fight.

Vas'nor's Second, was a warrior named Shokkan. As Vas'nor had believed, their Lord Sobek had been mightily enraged at the news of the invader's progress. It was unfortunate, but their hold on the planet had been stymied by the need for secrecy. For generations Nazca had been ignored by the Goa'uld, it was out of the path of current territorial expansion and there was, to the knowledge of the System Lords who prioritized worlds with Gatebuilder ruins upon them, little of note or worth to the planet.

In other words Nazca was a rare gem that Ra had tossed out hidden among the scrap for the other System Lords, goa'uld like Sobek, to fight over and leave him in peace about losing the homeworld of the tau'ri. Sobek himself had paid little attention to the planet and its small population of slaves, more concerned with participating in the small internecine conflicts between the System Lords that often presented an opportunity for the less powerful goa'uld to rise to the prominence of a System Lord by taking advantage of the leavings of their siblings.

It hadn't been until a battle with Bastet had forced Sobek to fall back on Nazca, desperately searching the planet for supplies and resources that the goa'uld warlord realized just what he had on his hands. He looked for gold and found gold. He looked for naquadah and found a mountain of the stuff under the desert sands. He found trinium, platinum, palladium, iridium, osmium, the list went on. The planet was a treasure chest, and if the planet was like this who knew what was floating around in space waiting to be claimed.

If he could just fortify the world against invasion and then use Nazca as the starting point of a new empire under his rule… Sobek had slowly upped the number of slaves and Jaffa sent to Nazca, he'd built a mine and a stockpile upon which he could fall back on while being careful not to let on to his rivals what was happening. To all outward appearances Sobek was quietly retiring from the galactic stage when in truth he was building his strength. It would have taken centuries to send one of his few ha'tak to the star cluster, leading to questions and problems that even his violent brand of dealing with things couldn't solve.

So with the infinite patience that he didn't really have and the sacrifice of others, Sobek had struggled to set the cornerstone of a new Goa'uld Empire in his name, step by bloody step…

Now that it looked as though his ambitions were for naught it was all the warlord could do not to scream or kill something. Or do both…

He struggled to hold his composure long enough to get to safety. From one of his more established worlds he could launch an attack to claim the star cluster in three or four hundred years. It'd require him to form an alliance with one or more of his rivals, perhaps Bastet or Kali, the treacherous witches. He needed their support if only to protect his holdings. There were hundreds of stars in this cluster, he would rather have some, than none.

Sobek's mind was so occupied with plotting how to salvage the loss of Nazca that he first ignored the arrival of the invaders in the midst of his camp thinking it was just another attack. It was the sudden jostling of his form caused by the jaffa that threw themselves between god and god-machine that startled him from his musings with a cry. Sobek's voice began with a deep roar of rage that was throttled by the fear that gripped him at the sight of his first assault bot, a ten meter tall metal giant that walked through withering fire.

The warriors that defended their lord and god were selected for their fanaticism and were to a jaffa, veterans of the bloodiest conflicts that their master could safely throw them into. They stood their ground as Sobek ran for the gate. They fired unflinchingly at the enemy, and they died well.

There was a reason that UI ground warfare tactics called for the use of either remote controlled armies or orbital bombardment. Trying to face down a wall of walking steel and fire took more nerves than most armies had and in terms of the cost in men, a Yenzouhover tank could be reclaimed for up to ninety percent of its mass and rebuilt in under two hours, replacing a skilled soldier in a similar life cycle took eighteen years or more. In the case of a Jaffa that number was closer to forty-two years.

Yet, face down the tanks and assault bots was what those jaffa did. They fired into the mass of metal in the face of return fire. One of the hover tanks was unfortunate enough to be in the firing arcs of three staff cannons, emplacements meant to be used in case of a slave rebellion from inside the mine. It took all three hits simultaneously, and then had the misfortune of eating no less than twenty-four concurrent handheld staff blasts and another staff cannon hit that breached its armor.

It went up in a thunderous roar that damaged the shields of several adjacent war machines. The shockwave from the blast knocked a trio of jaffa off the lip of the pit mine, after bouncing off a ledge or two they fell more or less the whole way down to the rocky bottom. Another tank retaliated by shooting an incandescent bar of plasma that was as wide as a jaffa's torso and kept going after obliterating an offending staff cannon quenching itself in the desert sands through a hole in the wall with a haze of burning hot dust, leaving behind a glass walled cave.

The tanks quickly spread out in a starfish pattern, each with a pair of assault bots behind it. A contingent of assault bots took the rim of the mine, firing down at the forces guarding it. A horn sounded a low, drawn out cry that had the base swarming with warriors. They took cover where they could but most headed for Sobek.

For the aforementioned goa'uld the situation was a nightmare. In spite of his honor guard's sacrifice all avenues of escape through the gate were cut off and his men had tried to head for the mines as the rest of Sobek's warriors bought him time with their lives. It was a futile gesture. The death knell of the battle was the arrival of the Vulturegunships that swooped down on the warriors behind their cover and fired into them with their chin mounted, rotary plasma cannons.

Sobek, deafened by the roaring of weapons fire and the heavy thread of armored walkers could only roar impotently as all his schemes were thwarted by whatever faction it was that had invaded his realm. The battle was well and truly over with each spearhead of tank and walker mowing down the opposition. The jaffa of Sobek were not taught that surrender was an option. Those who did not die were taken out by the shockwave blaster toting assault bots.

In the end, overwrought with frustration, Sobek stood at the lip of the mine when I teleported in, there were but a handful of warriors between us. The reverberating crack of displaced air and the sudden earth shaking thud, caused by the weight of my thousand ton frame settling on the ground, had the unintended effect of causing one of those shell shocked jaffa to fall into the field of a hover tank's mag-plate. The jaffa was crushed, mangled and shot out as a wad of flesh and steel that bounced off my shin with a loud 'ping!'

As luck would have it, instead of receiving the surrender of my enemy in person I was given a front row seat to a game of nine pins. The warriors protecting Sobek were bowled over by the ricocheting corpse, the first to be hit was killed outright by a broken neck, the two behind him were knocked flat, the warriors behind them, including Sobek, were pushed off the edge of the cliff.

I blinked. Opening and closing my mouth in shock. Walking up as close to the edge as I dared, I scanned over the lip of the mine and found the enemy commander's broken body.

"Shit!" I cursed.

The word that thundered from my ACU speakers was [BEnnU!]apparently that meant something in the local dialect…

Clean up was another hassle, I'd finally gotten through to Vradica on the HERONand the news wasn't good so that didn't help my mood. It was tiresome sorting the bodies of the dead from the living but that became a much simpler task as I found that the shockwave blasters almost without exception killed the second life form that these altered humans, the Jaffa carried within them. Apparently they couldn't survive without one for very long, those Jaffa that did not die, quickly did so in spite of my best efforts.

There was more to what happened in those days, but my attention at the time was focused on the developing situation at the HERONwith my superior officer and secret love, Eliza Dauer.

{End Chapter One}

AN: A bit of a mish-mash, Sins Of A Solar Empire, Stargate and Supreme Commander II