Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 16

Chapter 16 - General Cleanup

Before the cold war with the Wraith had gone hot, most of his people had just ended up doing what they enjoyed. It was a system that had worked without more than a few minor problems for millions of years, and probably would have kept doing so for millions more if it weren't for the Wraith.

Once things had gone hot however there had been a request for volunteers, and when that failed to generate the necessary numbers, a draft. One that had selected future soldiers by degree of importance. With a person's importance being weighed by factors like what their chosen profession was, how close their planet was to the front lines, and whether or not they had psychic abilities.

For a number of reasons, both practical and otherwise, the last had been allowed to bow out of military service entirely. Something Eventus was extraordinarily grateful for given how bad his people had turned out to be when it came to waging an actual war.

Though, he did sometimes find himself wondering if he might have been able to rise to a high enough rank to actually change the end result of the war if he had been one of that original group of volunteers. 

Probably one of the biggest examples of their failure however was their main warship, one of which he was about to depart through the stargate to repair. They had not been, as the name might otherwise suggest, actual warships. Instead they were long range exploration vessels that his people had renamed warships because they ended up being the second most capable ship design in regards to taking on Wraith hives.

With the most capable design of course being the city-ship.

“You Ancients had power armor?” Shepherd asked as he stared at the hazard suit Eventus was wearing with naked jealousy in his eyes.

“They were for use in hazardous environments.” Eventus offered, looking over to the man at the dialing computer who was engrossed in talking to Doctor Weir and idly wondered if he should just use the suit's uplink to dial out instead. “Which ironically did not include fighting the Wraith.”

“That feels like a rather big oversight.” Shepherd returned in a cautious tone.

“Well, we did lose the war.” Eventus pointed out with a chuckle. “Though in this case it was at least somewhat justified, since the things just aren’t very useful against the Wraith.”

“I don’t know.” Shepherd mused as he looked over the suit with a critical eye. “Assuming those things can shrug off a stunner?”

“They can.” Eventus confirmed.

“A team wearing those could probably take out a hive pretty easy.”

In theory the Major wasn’t wrong, however from a hundred years viewing reports from various groups who’d fought the Wraith, Eventus knew there was one big problem with trying things like that. “Wraith love the hunt, you go in with a team they can reasonably expect to take down with warriors and handheld weapons, and they’ll try and do so. You go in with heavy armor though, and they’ll turn the ship itself against you.”

“And by turn the ship against you, you mean?” Shepherd prodded in clear tactical interest.

“Prehensile energy draining wall tentacles.” Eventus explained, grimacing under his helmet at the memory of watching those particular recordings. “Early in the war we tried to sabotage one of their, I guess you would call them shipyards, by sending in a special ops team to infect the shipyards central control structure with a corruptive virus. They had dispersive body armor and personal shields, made it about halfway to the target before they were grabbed by the facility itself, their shields lasted less than twenty seconds from there, after which it basically just twisted them apart.”

The thrum of the gate being dialed finally rang out, and Eventus watched the indicators light up in turn before the whoosh of the unstable vortex forming momentarily filled the room.

“Anyways.” Shepherd began as Eventus sent one of the two probes he was bringing along though the gate to make sure there weren't any unwelcome surprises. “Before you left I just wanted to say thanks for that instruction manual. Especially the fact it's in English, makes things a lot easier for everyone that way.”

“You've been interfacing your computers with the city for months.” Eventus said as the probe transmitted back the mostly abandoned volcanic flat GE had expected. “Took me five minutes to set up a translation matrix. And before you ask, I already forwarded a copy of the access method to your expedition.”

Mainly because their expedition being able to translate everything with the push of a button would be nothing but helpful to his goal of not having to explain every little thing.

“Thanks for that too then.” Shepherd offered as he gave an idle wave. “And good luck with, well, everything.”

Returning the man's wave, Eventus walked up and stepped through the gate, arriving at the foot of the Taranis facility seconds later.

“Still can't believe the Wraith didn't blast this place from orbit.” He muttered to himself as he began trudging to the entrance, bringing up the facility interface as he did. An easy enough task now that he was, for all intents and purposes, physically standing on top of it.

A quick check showed the Hippaforalkus was more or less how his people had left it outside of some minor damage to the power systems that was probably from the people who had moved in trying to fix things they weren't anywhere near qualified to.

Reaching the large blast doors, he theatrically flicked his finger at it, and the structure dutifully rose up to allow him entrance as the system registered his Capital level maintenance override.

Diving back into the facilities data stream, he let the hazard suit carry him on autopilot to the room with the facilities control chair as he worked through the backlog of emergency tickets the facility had sent out in the ten thousand years since it had been abandoned.

Most of them seemed to be about minor bits of facilities damage caused by various seismic events, which he bundled together and tossed into the low priority maintenance drone que. A number of tickets for punctures in the facilities water systems were set aside as likely just the Taranians tapping into them for clean water, which he wasn't really going to begrudge them since it was functionally harmless.

Less harmless however was the string of tickets confirming that they had been running the facilities shield at maximum for nearly a year.

Following that to the alerts the planetary monitoring systems were sending up painted a somewhat grim picture for the Taranian's future on the world. With current magma pocket growth rate projections giving them roughly fourteen years before it reached critical mass, even if he shut the shield down today.

Ironically however the facilities shield was also the solution to the Taranian's problem, though he doubted they'd be too happy with the cost given how difficult it would be for them to fix if he didn't come back to do it himself afterwards.

The 'you have arrived at your destination’ ping dragged him out of his work, and he moved to open the secure door to the control chair room only to blink in surprise at the fact that he had apparently picked up some tagalongs during his trek.

“You really don't want to do that.” He told the half dozen uniformed men and women pointing some kind of lever action rifles at him. “It'll just annoy me into stunning you. And a better use of your time would be to run off and get someone actually important to talk to while I fix the mess you've caused here.”

“Chancellor Lycus already stated your people weren't welcome here.” The soldier with the fanciest looking hat stated as he shoved his weapon at Eventus in a manner that was likely supposed to be threatening.

Having already written off wasting the hours if not days it would take to explain things to the satisfaction of the people who thought they were in charge, Eventus just rolled his eyes and pulled out his weapon, ignoring the bullets that impacted and stopped dead on his suits shield as he snapped out six quick shots and stunned each of the soldiers.

“Okay, so I was probably going to stun you for pretty much anything but doing what I said. But I have a ship to repair and your lives to save, so enjoy the nap.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Author's Notes: Amusingly Eventus isn't even really overacting here, as the Ancients on the Aurora did pretty much the same thing when Shepherd popped up.

That said, he probably would have been a bit more friendly if Norina had shown up instead of guards with guns.