Eudora, being the last one to enter the room, hissed in irritation at seeing the Cybrex Chassis.
"Fracking toasters."
Lady Isetri nodded.
"Members of a Precursor Civilization. Some Goa'uld like to keep them as trophies."
I turned my attention away from the Cybrex Chassis and to the Goa'uld Terminal. I approached it to find a completely unique input system. I touched it and my perk activated again.
First Perk Activated. Partial Blueprint Acquired: Narep Tok (Goa'uld Research Terminal)
User Interface
I instantly knew what every button on the device did. I almost turned the device on, but I decided against it. Turning to Lady Isetri, I called out.
"Can you please come take a look at this?"
She quickly walked over and I stood aside. The terminal and display both came to life and Lady Isetri began to navigate through the various entries, and I read them as they flew by.
It seemed that whoever constructed this facility – almost certainly Zeus – had found records of an ancient battle fleet that had been active in this area of space several hundred thousand years ago. His most recent discovery had been a terrestrial base inside which he had discovered this mechanical chassis.
Due to my perk, I had a much greater understanding of the technical aspects of Goa'uld language, but that certainly didn't mean I understood everything. There was one particular word which kept appearing that I had never seen before. As Lady Isetri continued to skim through the entries, a frown appeared on her face.
"That can't be right…"
Finally, she arrived at the earliest set of entries. They were taken from a damaged vessel whose rather primitive hyperdrive had failed between Star Systems. The ship had then drifted for hundreds of thousands of years before being captured in the gravity well of a nearby Star System in an elongated elliptical orbit.
Zeus had found the ship by sheer luck and decided to take it as a trophy when he discovered that the vessel was in nearly perfect condition. That all changed when he found something in the vessel's internal computer network. A video of their final mission.
Finally, Lady Isetri started the video. It was weeks in length, so she significantly sped it up. The video started from a distance well away from a star; in the foreground, thousands of different ships were visible, but they slowly began to separate. As days passed in the video, the fleet began to approach the star. For brief moments, a ring was almost visible in the foreground before slowly disappearing from sight.
As the fleet approached the sun, I finally realized what was being displayed in the video. A massive band of metal stretching around an entire star. I remembered these from my time playing Stellaris in my last life. Now I remembered why the word Cybrex was so familiar. This was a recording of Cybrex Alpha, one of at least two such worlds that the Cybrex – an ancient machine race – constructed in order to hide themselves from the rest of the galaxy.
I almost started to hyperventilate at the thought. I took several deep, shuddering breaths at the newly awakened possibilities this presented. Did the End Game Crisis exist too? What about the Fallen Empires?
I turned away from the screen and examined everyone else in the room. They were just as transfixed on the screen as I had been just moments ago. They were lucky that they didn't understand the implications.
Arktos finally broke the nearly reverent silence.
"Who could possibly construct such a thing?"
The silence hangs in the room, how could anyone answer that question. Instead, Lady Isetri speaks.
"Zeus was searching for the location of this… what do you call it in your language?"
"We would call it a Ring World," replied Elder James.
Lady Isetri nodded.
"An apt description."
As the video continued, the side of the ring facing the star came into focus. It was beautiful. Continents covered in green with oceans that stretched for an unimaginable distance. I turned to Lady Isetri.
"Can you tell how… tall that is?"
She pressed several buttons; glyphs covered the screen. Everyone in the room took in a deep breath. A collection of glyphs on the screen indicated a height of nearly thirty thousand kilometers and a radius of 130 million kilometers.
I shuddered at the sheer scale. Some basic mathematics gave me an estimate of nearly 25 trillion square kilometers of surface area.
Then the ships began to bombard the world from orbit. We watched as days and weeks flew by on the video as the surface of the Ring World was turned to rubble, the oceans boiled, and the continents were flattened. It was a humbling sight.
The recording finally ended as the ship left the star system.
The screen returned to the standard Goa'uld interface. I turned away and looked down at the table. No one said a word; I don't think anyone was cognizant enough to say anything. What could you say after watching… that?
Finally, it was Arktos that regained his wits enough to speak.
"Did he find it?"
Lady Isetri shook her head.
"No. If he had found it then he would not have been capable of hiding it. We are the only ones who know of this now."
Everyone just stands in silence for several moments, before Elder James orders one of the guard teams to enter.
"Grab some secure storage units and pack these up. Gently."
He turned his attention to the others in the room.
"We cannot do anything with this information right now. We will bring this up at a later date."
Slowly but surely, the others nod in agreement.
Elder James escorted the others from the room leaving myself and Elder Callum to assist with the cleanup. The guard team returned shortly bringing six crates with padded internals. I assisted with storing each of the chassis, making sure to touch each one for its partial blueprint.
First Perk Activated. Complete Blueprint Acquired: Cybrex Chassis
Frame Structure, Cybrex Armor Plating, Living Metal Myomer, Cybrex Naquadah Battery
First Perk Activated. Complete Source Code Acquired: Cybrex Source Code
The Cybrex Chassis was fascinating, but it wasn't the most interesting thing. The sixth and final Cybrex Chassis had provided me with the entire Cybrex Source Code. Most of it was effectively a highly advanced learning algorithm – and Elder James had already told me not to touch those – what was more interesting (and useful in this case) was the control and interface algorithms for Cybrex technology. If I ever came across surviving Cybrex technology in the future, I would be much more capable of interfacing with it.
The Living Metal Myomer was also rather fascinating. The Living Metal only provided the force for contraction and expansion, and due to the apparent nature of Living Metal, the Myomers used effectively no fuel. The only thing that required actual energy was the Computational System.
It was a fascinating set of designs that I would have to explore at a later time.
It had now been 29 hours since I first stepped foot into this… vacation resort. I needed sleep. I took the ring transporter back to the Fortress and escorted the Cybrex Chassis' back through the gate and to the village where they were safely locked away.
I found my way to my bunk where I quickly passed out.
When I woke up, I had slept for almost 24 hours. I still had another 24 hours before work was scheduled to begin on the Ha'tak, but I decided to get to work early by beginning to inspect the smaller vessels that were available.
With the return of the rest of the villagers, guard duty no longer fell just to the kids. Many of the adults and former hunters had trained with the Elders for extended periods for infantry duty, many of those who could had even been trained as Mech Warriors.
As I entered Enyalius' main hangar, I found a few people just loitering around. I was most surprised to see Elder Callum working through the internals of a particular Tel'tak. If I remembered correctly, this was the one that Enyalius had been modifying when we began the assault.
At the time, we were uncertain about whether or not he would be able to bypass the ship lockdown we had implemented, so we had moved a bit earlier than was advisable. Despite that, everything had gone off without a hitch.
I approached the ship and touched it once.
First Perk Activated. Partial Blueprint Acquired: Tel'tak
Subspace Field Initiator
Elder Callum turned to look at me.
"Ahh! Arthur. You're early."
I nodded.
"Elder. I figured I'd get started."
He nodded.
"Well, you should probably start with the Death Gliders first."
I nodded once. He knew this stuff better than I did.
"Alright. What hangar are those in?"
He chuckled good naturedly and got back to tearing through the Tel'tak computer crystals, organizing them and religiously marking what port they had come from.
"Secondary Hangar #2 and onboard the Ha'tak."
"Thank you, Elder." I responded as I walked off. First stop, the secondary hangar it is. It took me several minutes to find my way to the secondary hangar. Inside, exactly as I had been told, lay almost four dozen individual Goa'uld Death Gliders.
The ships are VTOL craft, so a surface like a runway is unnecessary. Starting from the gliders in the front, I begin touching the hull of each of them until I've gained all the knowledge that I'm looking for.
First Perk Activated. Complete Blueprint Acquired: Udakher (Goa'uld Death Glider)
Neural Interface, Goa'uld Targeting Computer, Gravitic Pusher, Inertial Dampeners, Staff Cannon (Medium), Udakher Power Cell
Just the Death Glider had six major components. I knew that just the KF Drive on the Manassas had more than one component – viewing the Field Initiator in my mind, I assumed there were at least three more components – I didn't even want to imagine how many the Manassas in its entirety would have. I could only assume that the Tel'tak and Ha'tak would be even more complex.
Anyway, it was time for me to move onto the Tel'tak. I returned to the primary hangar where Elder James was once again.
"Elder." I said to him as I approached.
He turned to look at me for a moment, before continuing his work.
"You finished with the Death Gliders?"
"Yes."
He nodded again.
"Well don't let me hold you up."
I nodded and began the same process of touching each of the vessels.
First Perk Activated. Partial Blueprint Acquired: Tel'tak
Goa'uld Hyperdrive, Hyperdrive Computer, Gravitic Pusher, Inertial Dampeners, Subspace Field Distorter (Cloak), Shield Emitter
I let out a sigh. Even eight Tel'tak didn't give me the entire schematic. I returned to Elder Callum to give him a hand. I knew for a fact I was still missing the sensor suite, power source, and the Ring Transporter platforms… though I wasn't sure whether those would be counted as part of the ship.
All together that meant I would need at least two more Tel'tak before I could fully understand the ship's internal workings. I wasn't sure whether the ship's hull would need a partial blueprint as well.
Approaching Elder Callum, I spoke.
"Elder, are there any more Tel'Taks?"
He looked at me, his eyebrow raised.
"No. These are all we have. I take it you didn't get everything you wanted then?"
I nodded curtly, my eyebrows furrowed.
He snorted.
"Well let's put to work what you've got. Help me sort these. We still need to figure out what the heck that bastard was doing to this ship before we captured him."
So, I did just that. I began inspecting the various crystals and luckily for me they were all easy to differentiate for someone who knew what they were looking for; key words being "knew what they were looking for." Differences between individual crystals could be major such as color, diameter, or shape; alternatively they could also be differentiated by things like the shape and size of a cut out. Luckily, I didn't need to learn the differences since a lot of the information had simply been dumped into my head.
Unfortunately, there were still a lot of crystals that I didn't recognize. Most blatant was a set of black crystals that sat near the command interface that were totally unfamiliar, though the blueprint in my mind indicated that that section of the ship was for the main sensor suite.
It took us four hours to realize that a set of crystals had been swapped between the Hyperdrive Computer and the main Command Interface, bypassing the lockdown and activating the navigational subsystem. Even if the gravitic pushers, Hyperdrive, and Subspace Field Initiator were still inactive, it meant that whatever Enyalius was doing wasn't for nothing.
We spent a considerable period of time documenting how Enyalius had gone about bypassing the lockout before moving on.
Next, Elder James had me begin documenting the uses of all the crystals, starting from the Hyperdrive. It took seven hours just to document the purposes of all the crystals in the Hyperdrive alone.
That evening, I used the Stargate to get back to the village and slept. The next day was when we got to work searching the interior of the Ha'tak. 500 villagers – nearly half of Veyna's Rest would be searching and clearing every single inch of the village.
I took a deep breath just at the entrance of the ship, before stepping foot, for the first time, in a Ha'tak.
First Perk Activated. Partial Blueprint Acquired: Ha'tak
Goa'uld Capital Hyperdrive
The Hyperdrive was about what I had expected; for the size had been significantly increased and that was about all that had changed. I quickly moved on and began to sweep through the ship with the others. I would only be working on this for a single day – though the rest of the villagers would be searching for at least two considering the fact that every single device would be removed from the ship – since I would be meeting with Arktos in order to get my run in the Sarcophagus.