Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 24

Chapter 24 - Pest Removal

“That's certainly a ship.” Eventus muttered in bemusement as he studied the mishmash of energy signatures the Daedalus was radiating.

There was the expected Ancient and Asgard of course, a number of things that he suspected were Goa’uld in origin, and a smattering of things that just came up as unknown. Which made him wonder just what they represented given the varied alien encounters he knew Earth had experienced in their time running around the stargate network.

“Should we not be… Closer?” Teyla asked in uncertainty as she starred out the currently dimmed bridge windows nearly mesmerized by the swirling stellar matter that was surrounding them.

“Nope.” Eventus told her as he glanced over at the tracking dots to see the Wraith fleet was still several minutes out from reaching Lantea orbit. “If they saw the Enterprise they would flee into Hyperspace till they could gather enough Hive’s to overwhelm us, and then it would be right back to hiding the city underwater for however many years it took them to get bored and go away.”

That was assuming they even would, because he still wasn’t sure just what had caused them to give up trying to get the city in the first place.

“And you’re sure their sensors can’t see us inside the star's corona?” Major Lorne asked, the unassuming leader of the contingent Stargate Command had sent studying the holographic displays from the secondary station he had claimed for his own.

“They couldn’t ten thousand years ago.” Eventus admitted with a wry grin, and he couldn’t exactly direct their active sensors on the hive’s to check for advancement without giving their existence away.

“And they’re launching fighters and cruisers.” He narrated as six large, and nearly a thousand small, energy signatures separated from the trio of hives. “Sorry again about putting your people at risk like this.”

As much as he wished otherwise there really was no realistic way for him to help them truly beat the Wraith. Oh, if he could get the three additional explorer class vessels he knew for sure still existed back in working order they could probably halve the sixty hives team Stargate knew about easily enough. But by the time they did the rest of the hives would group up, and various Queen’s would go to ground in the hidden facilities they had scattered around the galaxy.

That exact situation had in fact happened to his people in the past. For hundreds of years the Wraith had popped up, been soundly defeated, and then the survivors had skulked back to their various hiding holes. In hindsight though it was clear the Wraith had been playing the tactical long game, secretly building up their infrastructure in hidden places while grabbing ZPM’s from their rare victories to supercharge things further.

Thankfully however he didn’t need to defeat the Wraith, just keep them from wanting to attack Atlantis, and that was a much easier goal to accomplish. He just needed to take advantage of their arrogance and make them believe they had won, but the theoretical new feeding ground wasn’t worth the cost they would pay trying to take Atlantis.

“It’s all right. I get it.” Lorne said as he watched the small holographic red dots begin to wink out as they neared the Dadelus. “You’re hoping to trap the fleet between this ship and the planet. Which involves letting them get close enough to the planet where you can actually do that.”

“Just wish we could have warned Atlantis about it.” He finished with a sigh.

“The Wraith are remarkably good at intercepting subspace transmissions.” Eventus admitted as he readied the hyperdrive and initiated a ship wide alert for the dozen or so SGC members not on the bridge. “Hold on tight.”

With that a hyperspace window snapped open, and their ship accelerated into it, disappearing from the regular universe to briefly occupy a different dimension altogether.

The Hipoforalkus had been one of his people's two hail mary refits, with the other being the Tria. Which was why it had an intergalactic hyperdrive, a phasic particle lance replacing a good portion of its long range sensor array, and city ship grade shields capable of staying active even while traveling through hyperspace.

It was that last that was the most important now, as it had meant the Enterprise could enter into hyperspace within the corona of Lantea's overactive sun, and exit hyperspace at near point blank range to the three Wraith hiveships.

Weapons began firing before his ship had even completely finished exiting the hyperspace window. Crackling blue plasma smashing into the Enterprise shields with heavy thuds in the bare seconds it would have normally taken the protective fields to reinitialize 

“Too late.” Eventus whispered as with a thought a beam of green energy slashed out, nearlying bisecting the hive it impacted as twin streams of drones shot out from his vessel's port and starboard launch tubes to weave through each of the remaining hives.

Their ship soared past the exploding wreckage of the three hives towards the six cruisers that were already beginning to reorient themselves away from the planet so they could safely accelerate into hyperspace.

Pulse weapons opened fire, each of the four forward turret batteries targeting their shots on a different vessel while the Daedalus took the opportunity to focus their Railguns somewhat ineffectively on the fifth. 

Seconds ticked by, and it became clear Wraith technology hadn't been entirely static as their hulls held up long enough that he was afraid the sixth vessel might actually be able to escape.

So he was more than a little surprised when the energy spike of a hyperdrive activating began, and then instead of accelerating into a hyperspace window the ship randomly exploded.

“That wasn't me.” Eventus confessed as the remaining drones from the hive reached the floundering cruisers and quickly finished them off.

“Might have been us.” Lorne offered as Eventus set the pulse turrets to dart cleanup mode and took a moment to massage his temples to try and beat back the tension headache he could feel coming on from single manning a job that usually required a pair of his people working together.

“If you don't mind me asking.” Lorne continued as a quick glance over to Teyla showed the Athosian starring at the floating wreckage with open-mouthed shock. “What was that green weapon?”

“Phasic particle beam.” Eventus explained. “It was mostly a fixed platform weapon due to a number of factors. But we started incorporating them into our ships towards the end of the war. Insanely effective, but without a ZPM you're looking at a capacitor recharge time of about twenty seconds.”

“Huh.” Lorne muttered as a contemplative look settled onto his face.

A light chime echoed out across the bridge. “And it looks like we're being signaled by your ship. You mind pushing the flashing blue button? I'd do it myself, but I'm trying to avoid neural interface strain.”

“Sure thing.” Lorne replied with a smile as he tapped the button causing the holographic screens to switch to showing the transmitted video of the Daedalus's bridge.

“Enterprise.” The balding man center screen began. “I'm Colonel Steven Caldwell, commander of the Daedalus. Thanks for the assistance. Wasn't entirely sure you were going to make it in time.”

“Sorry about that.” Eventus apologized. “We've been waiting in the sun for the past ten hours so we could spring an ambush on them.”

“Given your entrance we thought it might be something like that.” Caldwell admitted with a wry grin as he nodded to someone off screen. “I assume there's a reason you didn't want to risk any escaping?”

Moderately impressive to deduce that from his choice of tactics alone, but Eventus supposed Colonel Caldwell had to be considered one of the best of Earth's best for a reason.

“I'm hoping to create a situation where they see too much risk, for too little reward.” He explained. “The downside to that however is that it means we can't really go out and hunt them down.”

“Because then we'd be an active threat instead of a passive one that can be ignored.” Caldwell agreed, following the logic in a way that suggested he'd had at least some time to go over various records.

It wasn't guaranteed to work of course, but as long as they made it look like they were afraid of engaging the Wraith outside of the Lantea system, the Wraith's own ego would lead them to think it was true.

“Though that reminds me.” Eventus added in as he recalled a particular danger they were likely to face sooner rather than later. “You're probably going to want to do a full purge of every computer system on your ship. The Wraith like to use these semi-sentient adaptive computer viruses, and I doubt you had network protection in place capable of keeping them out.”

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Author's Notes: Given what we saw of the barely operational Orion, a fully operational Orion was always going to be a one sided beat down for anything less than maybe a half dozen Hive ships with full escorts. Boom badda boom.