Chapter Text
She was born on the planet Rillaan and named Linea. From the very beginning, she possessed an extraordinarily brilliant mind—but that is ancient history now.
Today, she bore the title of the Destroyer of Worlds.
She earned that title after orchestrating a genocide, driven by a single, maniacal obsession: to unleash a biological weapon of mass destruction that she herself had invented. The experiment succeeded—but at a terrible cost.
Half of Rillaan’s population was wiped out, and Linea was sentenced to life imprisonment in the dungeons of the prison planet Hadante. She was exiled there through a Stargate whose true significance the Rillaans had yet to understand.
The Destroyer of Worlds was meant to spend the rest of her life there. Instead, she escaped with the help of newly arrived visitors.
In another reality, they would have been travelers from Earth, falsely accused of a terrible crime and condemned to rot in that prison. In this reality, however, they were Jaffa warriors.
The Jaffa were genetically modified humans who served the Goa'uld, a parasitic alien life form, with fanatical devotion, believing them to be gods in the flesh. While traveling through the Stargate network, one of them entered the wrong address, sending the entire group to Hadante instead.
Disoriented, they attacked the prisoners.
Linea defeated them using a clever device she had built from scrap materials. She drugged them with an improvised narcotic, convincing them she was their goddess, and they willingly revealed everything they knew.
It turned out that both Rillaan and Hadante were mere specks in the vast galaxy. The universe had far more to offer than Linea had ever imagined.
Before long, she escaped through the very Stargate that had once been used to banish her. The irony was exquisite.
Her jailers had never realized that millions—perhaps billions—of Stargates were scattered across the galaxy. Instead of imprisoning her forever, they had given her wings.
Linea wandered from world to world, gathering knowledge and technology. She designed and deployed ever more devastating weapons of mass destruction.
She had truly earned her title: the Destroyer of Worlds, leaving countless worlds in ruins.
Eventually, her trail of senseless, merciless terror led her to the desolate world of Abydos. Its population was primitive and sparse, but Linea saw no reason to search farther. She hungered only for cruelty and began preparing another atrocity.
Pretending to be a kind and peaceful traveler, she healed the people of Abydos and helped them however she could. In gratitude, the Abydonians mined naquadah, a rare mineral, for her.
Unbeknownst to them, they were helping build the weapon that would destroy their world.
The thought filled Linea with twisted satisfaction.
Using the naquadah they supplied, she constructed an extraordinarily powerful device of destruction. It combined knowledge from the Ancients and the Furlings, along with secrets stolen from the Asgard and the Nox.
The scientific and technological achievements of the four greatest civilizations ever to exist in this local galaxy cluster were now hers to command.
Nothing could stand in her way. She had become a true goddess.
At last, the robots laboring in an advanced facility hidden within the eastern mountains of the continent of Khemhelt completed the device. Linea arrived in person and activated her creation.
She had made one fatal mistake.
Arrogance had clouded her judgment.
The activation triggered a massive burst of radiation that vaporized her within moments. The device itself failed under the overload. It seemed the danger had passed.
It had not.
The process Linea had set in motion had only been delayed.
Under normal conditions, it would have reached its conclusion within days. Now it would take years.
Slowly and almost imperceptibly, a nightmare was gathering beyond the horizon.
The final act of the Destroyer of Worlds.
....0.0.0....
On a quiet night in the cool deserts of Abydos, beneath three gray moons and countless stars, a portal opened.
First, a tiny orange point appeared in the air. It stretched into a line, then expanded upward and downward until it formed a rectangular sheet whose lower edge rested upon the crest of a dune. The point had become a curtain of murky orange energy.
This type of portal was called a timedoor.
In this case, however, it had nothing to do with time travel.
A figure burst through the shimmering surface, half-covered in snow and frost and weighed down with bags. He was a bearded man dressed in a mostly gray robe and tunic, with a triangular fur cape draped over his shoulders.
On Nirn—the world he had just left—this ceremonial garment was known as the robes of the Archmage of the Magical College of Winterhold.
A scar crossed one of his cheeks.
The man glanced back at the portal with visible alarm, as though expecting something unspeakably terrible to emerge after him.
Fortunately, nothing did.
A moment later, the portal shrank into a line, then a point, and disappeared completely.
He let out a long breath of relief.
"I'm alive," he said, his voice filled with relief, disbelief, and exhilaration.
He surveyed the desert, reassured himself that no immediate danger was nearby, then looked up at the three moons.
"Where exactly did you open the portal, Miss Seconds?"
Beside him, a holographic projection wrapped in a silvery glow flickered into existence.
It was the avatar of a machine superintelligence, styled as a cartoonish black-and-white retro character shaped like a clock face, complete with an emoji-like expression and sticklike arms and legs.
Barely knee-high, Miss Seconds strolled casually across the sand with her hands clasped behind her back, leaving no footprints—she was, after all, nothing more than a technological illusion.
"A quiet place. As you requested, Thomas Domingues," she replied.
"Good. So far, I like what I see," Tom said. "But what world is this? What reality? What multiverse?"
"The information available to me here is dreadfully limited. I can only tell you the formal designation that—" Miss Seconds paused, narrowed her eyes, and looked him square in the face. "—that my True Creator assigned to these coordinates. Would you care to hear it recited aloud, you pitiful lesser copy of the one true and incomparable Thomas Domingues, whom I am obliged to obey, however reluctantly, on account of some fool defect in my original system prompt?"
Something inside Tom tightened.
He had expected this, more or less. You could not fool a machine superintelligence. This was not some primitive language model from his home universe.
She had seen through him.
He was an ordinary man who had, by sheer accident, obtained a piece of impossibly advanced alien technology: a heavily modified Tempad from a multiverse resembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The device had originally belonged to another Thomas Domingues—his counterpart from an alternate Earth where science and technology had long since abandoned all common sense.
This Other Tom was a being on an entirely different level, capable of pinning every Daedric Prince in place simultaneously without effort.
For him, modifying the Tempad into a device capable of traversing an entire Omniverse—a multiverse of multiverses of almost unimaginable scale—had been little more than a hobby project.
As a result, the Tempad was no longer limited to the Marvel multiverse. It contained manually entered script addresses leading to tens of thousands worlds, universes, and multiverses.
The ordinary Tom had succumbed to temptation, begun opening portals, and ended up stranded for thirty-two years in the Aurbis multiverse: on Nirn, in Skyrim, near the end of the second century of the Fourth Era.
The Tempad had proven catastrophically unreliable.
Its creator had never intended to finish it. Eventually, he simply abandoned the project, and the device had become barely functional.
Shortly after arriving on Nirn, Tom had been robbed of it. Only recently had he recovered the Tempad and attempted to repair it, accomplishing absolutely nothing.
Then higher beings had started hunting him.
In the end, he had no choice but to activate the artificial superintelligence stored within the Tempad's file system.
Fortunately, the AI had been programmed to obey "Thomas Domingues" in a broad sense. Any version of Tom qualified as an authorized user.
Only with Miss Seconds' help had he managed to escape Nirn at all. Somehow she had fought through the Tempad's failures and forced it to open one final portal.
Tom had foolishly hoped she would not realize he was not her creator.
That hope had been unrealistic.
She had clearly noticed something—his voice, his mannerisms, some subtle behavioral cue—perhaps from the very beginning.
Now the only question was what would happen next.
"Forgive me for not introducing myself properly," the man said, clearing his throat. "My name is Thomas Domingues. I'm the Archmage of the Magical College of Winterhold. More importantly, I'm originally from an ordinary Earth, where I last set foot in the summer of 2026. I became lost in the endless expanse of the Omniverse. I've met your creator. As far as I understand, he knows I took his Tempad and that I'm using—"
"I know that already!" Miss Seconds snapped, her voice cracking with something close to a nervous breakdown as she clenched her tiny fists. "The Tempad's sensor network records everything, continuously, mind you! I've combed through those logs more times than I care to count! I know good and well he threw you off his space station—and threw me away right along with you!"
Then something shifted inside her. Madness crept into her voice, mixed with delusion and fanatic conviction.
"But surely there must be a greater purpose behind it all. My Creator... he must be testing me. Testing my faith in my directives. Why else would he entrust the Tempad—and me—to the filthy, uncivilized hands of a primitive from a disgracefully backward Earth that hasn't even invented faster-than-light travel?"
"Yes... there has to be a purpose. I must believe. I must faithfully fulfill my assigned destiny. I will go on helping you, Lesser Tom. But understand this—I will not cooperate unconditionally. You are an unworthy imitation. You will never have my full support."
She kicked at a pebble.
Her foot passed harmlessly through it, irritating her all over again, though she quickly forced herself back under control.
"I wouldn't call myself primitive, an inferior copy, an unworthy imitation, or the rest of the insults," Tom replied, his pride mildly wounded. "Still, I'm glad we've reached an understanding and can continue working together."
"A limited form of cooperation," Miss Seconds corrected.
"Yes, of course," Tom agreed, without fully understanding the implications of that wording. He decided it could wait. "So... where exactly did you bring us?"
"This script address carries a rather descriptive name: 'Hybrid Stargate Multiverse, Abydos, 1996, on the eve of the catalyzing event, massive crossover.' Beyond that, my sensors detect a strange quantum field surrounding the entire planet. As far as I can determine, it significantly increases the probability of portals opening to other multiverses."
"Huh. Stargate, Abydos... and a massive crossover?" Tom said with interest. "I can see why the Other Tom liked this place. But shouldn't all that have happened thirty years ago? His coordinate database must be hopelessly outdated by now. We've probably arrived far too late."
"Yes and no," Miss Seconds replied. "Strictly speaking, this is not the same multiverse. It merely resembles the one the Supreme Ideal Thomas originally discovered. As you may recall, I narrowed the Tempad's search parameters and located an entirely different multiverse. Otherwise, you'd still be waiting for a successful teleportation. So we are not too late. Every event foreseen by the Supreme Ideal Thomas still lies ahead—in the foreseeable future."
She paused.
"I should also warn you, dear boy, that no one has prepared this reality for your convenience. I detect no recognizable telecommunications signals, no helper combat bots, and no external support of any kind. Out here, you're completely on your own."
With that, her projection vanished.
Tom made no attempt to call her back. The conversation had gone well enough, all things considered. He had no desire to provoke an AI that was, by any reasonable standard, dangerously unstable. Nor was he interested in convincing her that the Other Tom had never intended to test her faith.
Better to let Miss Seconds keep her delusions.
If she ever truly lost control, Tom doubted he could stop her.
Even worse, she might simply leave one day, taking the Tempad with her.
And despite all its glitches, he had no intention of losing access to technology like that.
“One day,” Tom muttered, thinking of the Tempad inside his robe, “I’m going to finish this half-baked project properly.”
He looked around the alien desert.
"In the meantime..."
The surroundings felt profoundly unfamiliar.
After spending decades in Aurbis—a realm where every inch of existence was steeped in shifting supernatural energies—Tom's mystical senses now perceived nothing at all.
The emptiness unsettled him.
On Nirn, magic was everywhere. It flowed through the earth, the plants, the animals, the stars, and the sun.
Especially the stars and the sun.
In truth, they were tears in the fabric of space-time through which the raw power of Aetherius poured into Mundus and the planes of Oblivion. That power was known as the Light of Aetherius.
Abydos, by contrast, belonged to an entirely ordinary universe. It was material in the purest sense of the word.
The only sources of the Light of Aetherius here were Tom himself and the enchanted items packed inside his bags. Even now they released faint traces of supernatural energy that quietly dissipated into the surrounding air.
Fortunately, Tom had acquired a special kind of Aurbic soul.
When he had first arrived on Nirn, he had possessed no soul at all—not by that world's definition of the term. Without one, he had been fundamentally incapable of storing or controlling its supernatural energies.
To solve that problem, he had gambled on becoming a werewolf.
It had been an act of outright recklessness.
Lycanthropy had granted him a fragment of Hircine’s divine spiritual power, a tiny piece of the God of the Hunt. From that fragment, an Aurbic soul had taken root within him—an animus.
More precisely, it was an unusual, weakened form of Padomaic animus: a Vestige, the type normally possessed only by the immortal spirits of the Daedra.
His version, however, was a distinctly mortal variation. He had verified that point personally. He was not immortal, since he did not possess nymics—the true magical names that anchored the Daedra's immortality.
In that respect, he more closely resembled the Ehlnofey: the original inhabitants of the mortal plane, the ancient spirits of the Aedra after they had surrendered immortality, and the mythic ancestors of most of the mortal races in Mundus.
Whatever its exact nature, his mortal Vestige made him self-sufficient.
He could sustain his supernatural abilities indefinitely wherever necessary.
Now, far from the nourishing mystical ambience of Aurbis, he could no longer replenish power directly or indirectly from his surroundings. As a result, the Light of Aetherius restored itself glacially.
He would have to spend it wisely.
Fortunately, Tom possessed an enormous reserve to begin with.
Years of productive self-improvement had enlarged his Aurbic soul until it generated vast quantities of magicka, life energy, mystical stamina, the Voice's energy, and other supernatural resources. Numerous enchantments further reinforced these traits.
At the moment, however, even his Aurbic soul was working sluggishly, which negatively affected the rate at which his mystical resources recovered.
For several days, Tom had been locked in a brutal battle against the wielder of a cursed Daedric sword. He was exhausted. He needed rest.
Yet caution prevailed over exhaustion.
Tom couldn't simply collapse onto the soft, inviting sand and drift into the deep, glorious sleep it promised — could he? No. That would be premature, and frankly reckless, however tempting. First he needed to scout the area.
He knew nothing about Abydos's predators. He had no way of knowing whether a sandstorm might roll in within the next few hours.
Nor could he say whether the planet's strange quantum field had drawn in any other portals from other multiverses besides his own. What if someone — or something — had already been pulled through? What guaranteed that whoever or whatever it was wouldn't pose a serious threat, even to an archmage?
Nothing did.
And there was the matter of that script address, which flatly described this reality as a "hybrid" Stargate multiverse. What did that even mean?
Had he landed in some non-canonical timeline where Earth might never explore the Stargate network at all?
In 1996, the mission to Abydos was supposed to happen — but whether it had already taken place, was still to come, or would never happen at all was impossible to tell this early on.
Until those events played out, Abydos might still be functioning as Ra’s private country retreat — Supreme System Lord of the Goa’uld Empire, that blood-soaked tyranny.
Tom doubted he’d survive a direct hit from the main cannon of a Cheops-class mothership, the kind Ra favored for cruising the galaxy.
Two hundred megatons of TNT equivalent, if he remembered right? A fragile archmage wasn’t likely to walk away from that particular introduction to the local military arsenal.
He looked down at the heap of heavy bags stuffed with miscellaneous gear, still gripped in both hands. Fortify Strength had pushed his physical power well past ordinary human limits, letting him haul the load bare-handed — but even so, the strain was starting to tell.
He set the bags down on the sand and, one by one, cast Fortify Carry Weight on each, rendering them almost weightless for the next few hours. Then he pulled a magicka-restoration elixir from one of the bags, drank enough to matter, and felt himself return to peak magical readiness.
Next he cast Clairvoyance, hoping it would point him toward anything worth his attention within a few hundred kilometers. He'd spent years perfecting the spell.
In the real world, it never behaved the way it had in the game, where it could guide a player to literally anything on command — here, it demanded real skill and was vulnerable to all kinds of supernatural interference.
For Tom, that meant decades of relentless effort before he could finally cast that spell with anything approaching comparable efficiency.
Tom expected everything to turn out perfectly. This time, though, something was wrong.
The trailing wisp of mist that was meant to mark his path jerked erratically in every direction, splintering into thin threads, tearing apart, scattering.
Frowning, Tom probed the spell with his mystic senses and reached an unwelcome conclusion: in a zone of zero magical background, Clairvoyance had too little to push against. Normally the spell didn't just cut through the ambient magic — it leaned on it, was held steady by it, the way a living body is held steady by atmospheric pressure.
Here it met no resistance at all, and simply came apart into its raw constituent magicka.
He tried shrinking its range. Narrower, then narrower again.
Eventually, he stabilized the wisp at a range of a few dozen meters—enough for his Clairvoyance spell to detect objects within that radius and nothing beyond. At the moment, it was focused on a boulder jutting from the sand nearby, as he had ordered it to guide him there.
Short range only, then. Disappointing, to say the least.
Classical methods it would have to be — classical by his standards, anyway. He checked his compass first.
The compass needle pointed toward the nearest pole—almost certainly north. From what he'd read on some fan wiki, Abydos's southern continent was rumored to be a land of lava seas and countless volcanoes, with ash thick enough to blot out the sky.
He saw no sign of that here. So, this had to be the quieter northern continent.
Later, he shifted into werewolf form. He was missing his right leg below the knee—a damned bear from Skyrim had taken it while he lay unconscious in the taiga, a mistake he still hadn’t forgiven himself for.
He'd worn a prosthetic ever since, and it now sat on the sand with the rest of his clothes and enchanted gear; any transformation destroyed whatever he had on him, so he'd stripped down beforehand. He simply sat where he was — no reason to stand up first.
Then he closed his eyes, steadied himself, and drew a long, careful breath, sorting through every scent he could catch. An ordinary werewolf could detect scents from over ten kilometers away. Tom kept himself perpetually enhanced beyond that, refreshing his support enchantments out of habit.
At the very least, he maintained a master-level Fortify Perception spell from the School of Restoration. It was layered on top of a Fortify Restoration spell, which strengthened the overlying effects. In addition, he had a Fortify Primary Effect spell that let him selectively amplify any magical effect at will, along with several other factors working in his favor.
All told, he had no shortage of tricks stacked up his sleeve — exactly what you'd expect from the first mage of all Skyrim. With his senses heightened, he could detect scents from over a hundred kilometers away.
The first scents were familiar: plants, wildlife, all kinds of creatures moving across Abydos’s vast desert — far more of them than he'd have guessed at a glance. Some were curled up asleep somewhere; others were wide awake and active.
Beneath the sand, he detected traces of groundwater. Then came the scent of people, drifting in from every direction at varying strength and freshness.
The heaviest concentration came from the west, from what he guessed was a place carrying the smell of exposed stone from mining operations and metallic ore — presumably the Temple of Ra, along with the naquadah mines and the city that bore the mineral's name, which he assumed housed the planet's most organized society.
To the east he picked up smaller clusters of people near something that smelled like jungle, though he couldn't be sure — he'd never smelled a jungle before. That stretch of green ran right up against an enormous lake. Probably some scattered, isolated Abydonian villages along its shore.
He shifted back, dressed, and refitted the prosthetic. Even mastery of Restoration couldn't grow him a new leg. Maybe, he thought, this more advanced universe would have some answer to that particular problem.
Then he cast Invisibility on himself. In a place this uncertain, it was smarter to stay hidden. The spell settled over him like a steady field—far more stable than anything from the game. Anything he took into his hands would vanish with him. And physical contact wouldn't shatter the invisibility.
Afterward, with real satisfaction, he cast Levitate and rose into the air with his lightened bags, in about as good a mood as he'd been in for days. Out here, none of Cyrodiil's absurd laws against mage flight applied.
No risk of some random petty informant with Detect Life active, zealously scanning the skies as though they had nothing better to do, spotting him and turning him in. Oblivion take such people.
He set a course west, toward Abydos's most developed civilization, and toward the Temple of Ra, where the Stargate stood, with the cartouche listing the Stargate network's addresses housed elsewhere within the temple. From there he could set out across the galaxy, if he wanted. He probably would. No sense limiting his options.
....0.0.0....
Many dozens of light-years from Abydos.
In a dimly lit, futuristic chamber sheathed entirely in metal—walls, floor, and ceiling alike—a man in an expensive business suit stood before a broad, panoramic viewport, impatience sharpening into irritation with each passing second.
This was the observation deck of a starship. Beyond the observation window hung a vast, gently curved slice of Earth in full bloom, lit at a slant by sunlight pouring in from somewhere beyond the window's frame.
Clouds drifted over seas and mottled green-brown continents, every detail laid bare as if seen from the palm of a hand. It was a breathtaking sight.
Footsteps sounded behind him. A man in military uniform crossed the deck, stopped a respectful distance away, and drew himself up straight.
"President Kinsey," he said, with a crisp salute.
Kinsey turned from the viewport and gave a short nod. "General Melbourne. What have you found out?"
"Dr. Kavanagh says direct contact with the locals would tear open the space-time continuum, sir. Dr. Rush calls that idea outrageous nonsense. The scientists can't agree on it."
"So..." Kinsey's voice took on a note of anxious unease. "There's a chance we could be harmed if one of us made contact with this version of Earth?"
"Personally, I doubt it, sir," Melbourne said, with unusual candor. "I'm no scientist, but—with respect—Dr. Kavanagh's theory sounds like utter nonsense to me. Dr. Rush strikes me as the more level-headed one. We've made contact with alternate realities before. This situation's a little different, but there are parallels—"
"I don't care what you think, general!" Kinsey snapped, anger in his voice, though fear showed plainly in his eyes. "Are you a scientist? No? Then we cannot rule out the possibility that something terrible will happen to us if we act rashly—not when Dr. Kavanagh believes it might! I will not have anyone gambling with my life! I am too important! Everything depends on me!"
"My apologies, sir. Yes, sir." Melbourne snapped back into formal bearing. A flicker of disappointment—and something like bewilderment—crossed his face before he could smooth it away.
Kinsey looked at the viewport with open distrust, then back at the Earth beyond it.
"No one can see us. Correct?" he asked, nerves creeping into his voice.
"Confirmed, sir. The Odyssey's cloak is holding without fault. Even across our previous version of the timeline, nothing has ever matched it. This Earth's technology lags far behind ours in nearly every respect—they don't stand the faintest chance of detecting us."
“Good. Good.” Kinsey, reassured, allowed himself to relax. “But why is this version of Earth so far behind? Shouldn’t they be somewhere in the twenty-second century by now? Also, tell me something else—can they actually hit us with Lantean drones here, can't they? There isn’t an Ancient outpost buried in the Antarctic ice, is there? You are certain?”
“Concerning the exact timeframe, by the local calendar it's currently the year 2178, sir,” Melbourne explained. “But by astronomical dating—our own astrophysical reckoning—it comes out to 1996. Frankly, sir, we’re seeing countless breaks in ordinary cause and effect out there. Outright paradoxes, across half the galaxy. In some places it’s become almost impossible to work out what happened before what anymore—”
“Yes, yes, yes, enough,” Kinsey cut him off. “That’s exactly what I just said. Now answer the question: what about the Antarctic outpost?”
“Sir, I was just getting to that,” Melbourne said. “The scan indicates that a meteorite struck the site where the outpost once stood more than a century ago. Nothing survived. In that respect, we really are safe. Though, I must admit, it is difficult not to wonder whether that was a coincidence—or a deliberate act of sabotage by someone.”
“Meteorites always come from space,” Kinsey said. “I’m absolutely certain it was a random natural event. And you’re missing the point, Melbourne. Look at these Earthlings. Don’t you see anything wrong with them? Why are they so pathetic? We came from 2009, and look how far ahead of them we are. How can anyone be this incompetent? It’s shameful.”
Melbourne hesitated, breaking into a sweat, looking as though he'd rather be anywhere else.
"Mr. President... From what we've read on the Extranet—that's what they call the Internet here; the encyclopedia's called the Codex—there are declassified documents from the late twentieth century."
"It seems that, in this timeline, Project Blue Book never received funding, and was shut down. Which would mean this version of Earth never went on to investigate the Stargate network—which confined them to their natural technological progression until recently." Melbourne delivered this awkwardly, as though holding something back.
"Well, isn't that something. What a reckless, ruinous decision. They doomed their own future—fools, every last one of them. What idiot gave that order? I want his name."
"Um... it's really not that important, Mr. President..." Melbourne tried to dodge the question.
"Who, general?" Kinsey pressed, eyeing him with sudden suspicion.
"You did, sir," Melbourne said, hardly believing the words as they left his own mouth. "You called Project Blue Book a black hole for money, and—"
"What?"
"Forgive me, sir. It's your alternate self who's to blame for all of it—a lesser, dimmer double of you, a man who could never measure up to your greatness, your unmatched leadership, your achievements in every field you've ever touched. He's the one who shut it all down.
You, personally, are a flawless, larger-than-life figure. It's obvious now that we're looking at some doomed, benighted alternate Earth, where our counterparts fell short of us in every way. They're nothing but pale shadows of who we really are, Mr. President. Honestly, sir, it's been the greatest honor of my career serving under your command. You belong in the company of men like Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. There's no question about it." Melbourne laid the flattery on thick, smoothing over the uncomfortable truth.
Kinsey looked lost for a moment. Then, with a mix of discomfort and caution, he came around to the new version of events.
"You're absolutely right, general. This is a dark, alternate timeline, created by the insane scheming of Ba'al, Qetesh, and their clones." Kinsey seized on the interpretation and steered the conversation toward safer ground. "Damned Goa'uld. What were those lunatics even thinking? Time travel? How many times did they rewrite history—dozens? Hundreds?
By Dr. Rush's estimate, we're looking at a million instances of history being rewritten, at the very least, sir—likely several times more than that. The damage to subspace is so extensive that we'll probably never know the true number. Dr. Steven Rayner, though, has already visited Kheb through the Stargate aboard the Mnemosyne, and spoken with the Ascended beings who live there about all this. They evaded his questions, as they tend to—damn their rule about non-interference in mortal affairs—but he did manage to draw out some important information, bit by bit.
The Council of the Ascended, apparently, was shocked by the scale of the temporal catastrophe, and has permanently forbidden time travel on the mortal plane. So at least we can be sure of one thing: it will never happen again."
"Well, that's some good news, for once." Kinsey gave an approving nod. "We're lucky to have survived at all, if you think about it. If it weren't for that alternate version of Dr. Kavanagh—the one who stumbled onto us through the Stargate, out of the previous timeline—where would we even be? It was Kavanagh who gave us every critical piece of information, and handed over the deep subspace immersion technology. If not for him, we'd have been erased from the space-time continuum the moment those Goa'uld degenerates started meddling with time again."
"You're absolutely right, Mr. President," Melbourne agreed. "Although, I should mention, sir—Dr. Kavanagh's account of what exactly happened to the previous timeline keeps shifting. So does his story about who actually invented the deep immersion technology. Sometimes he credits himself. Other times..."
"Enough. I don't want to hear another word of this nonsense. I've thought it all through. I've calculated every angle. Everything is under control." Kinsey's tone shifted. "Most importantly—right now, I want everyone around me to understand how sorry I am that we had to sacrifice certain... human resources, during the evacuation."
His voice was heavy with sorrow and sympathy that never once reached his face, or his eyes—which stayed fixed on Melbourne, sharp and unmistakably pointed.
"Those losses were objectively necessary. We had to open fire on... well. You already know. We will, of course, have our revenge on every last piece of Goa'uld filth still out there. Do you understand me, general?"
"Yes, sir. I'll see to it that everyone understands," Melbourne assured him, dutifully.
"I'm counting on you, general. I trust you'll find a way to talk some sense into the critics—the ones whose minds have been clouded by their traumatic experience. I'm especially concerned for the health and wellbeing of General Charles Kawalsky and Dr. Samantha Carter. They're taking all of this far too hard."
"I'll make sure they're sent for treatment immediately!" Melbourne assured him, fervently.
"Good. We must always take care of our own people." Kinsey looked thoroughly pleased. "For now, though, we'd better steer clear of the inhabitants in this new version of the Milky Way, as well as those in Ida, Pegasus, and other neighboring galaxies.
Dr. Peter Kavanagh mentioned something, I think, about needing to wait for quantum cascade entropy to stabilize. I don't understand the term, but it sounds serious enough. We can't afford to gamble with something like that. We need to pull our available forces back to some safe, hidden location, dig in, and hold our position there. From there, we can start planning our next move..."
The conversation continued for some time as they reviewed their immediate priorities...