The last thing I checked was the hostage, dear brother of mine. He was almost recovered, so I adjusted the treatment program to keep him in a state of sleep. After that, I just had to retire to my private room and study the language of the Ancients and personal Goa’uld artifacts.

We left hyperspace rather far from the planet, so we had to fly two more days at sublight speeds. I did not dare to reactivate the hyperdrive. Who knew how much longer it would last. During the flight, I scanned the planet and found those two deposits of Naquadah on it. One was large and with very low metal content in the ore. The second was better, but the whole field was localized by a small deposit and the total reserve of Naquadah was at the level of five percent of the previous one.

As a landing site, I chose the second field. At least it could somehow begin to develop with some assistance from the typical methods of the Goa’uld, that is, with pickaxe and shovel. Free slave labor, in my opinion, was the most primitive way to develop deposits.

Hovering at an altitude of five kilometers, I began to examine the surroundings of the field. The mountain I needed was surrounded by desert -- pure sand as far as the eye could see to the west. Ten kilometers to the east there was a small chain of mountains where there were sources of water and a settlement of people. The level of technology in the village corresponded to the environment. They were clearly primitive, for their houses had been built of mere stones and clay. The trees here had never sprouted, so the animal dung served as their fuel. The only sign of agriculture to be found was in the region of a trickling brook flowing from the mountain. In general, the situation was so dismal that I even started to think about giving up any use of native people.

In the end, I landed on the sand two kilometers from the Naquadah field. The ship buzzed for the last time and froze like a lifeless pile of metal. I had less than a ton of Naquadah fuel, so the ship’s next flight could definitely be its last. Having immersed all the systems of the ship in a state of energy saving, I then went to take care of the prisoner.

I put Klorel and his host to sleep, by injecting him with a horse’s dose of sleeping medication. Because the Goa’uld had very strong immunity against all types of drugs and medicine, I was certain that his heart would not stop from the high dose. After that, I pulled him out of the sarcophagus, dressed him in rags and plunged him into the tel’tak. Along with a couple dozen Jaffa I flew to the gate. There we used gate to go to one of the neutral planets, from there to another, and so on. From the third planet I opened the gate to one of Apophis’s planets, where a dozen of my Jaffa went, carrying their Apophis’s son. With me remained ten, and we moved to the fourth planet, from there to the fifth, finally returning to the first. The third and fifth planets were quite lively, so I figured that the information about my transition would quickly be erased from the DHD, and it would be impossible to track my trajectory. The Jaffa themselves didn’t see the addresses I had dialed, and therefore couldn’t say anything.

Returning to the ha'tak, I ran into a whole delegation of Jaffa that had come out to meet me.

“My God, Great Imhotep, will you please explain to us what exactly we will do in this desert world?” It was the leader of my troops who addressed me.

“Of course. You will execute my orders, you do not need to know anything about my plans. You won’t be able to understand anyway. Any more questions?”

The Jaffa looked at each other in confusion.

“And what will be your order, oh your divine mercy?”

“Sit on the ship and do not interfere with me. You should not go to the nearest settlement yet. Later, I myself will visit these savages. You have nothing to do? Then exercise. In a couple of days I will arrange a test of your skills. Whoever can not resist me in hand-to-hand combat, will go to mine Naquadah.”

The eyes of the fighters widened in horror. Naquadah was a radioactive metal, and those who mined it died in less than a year. Even carriers of symbiotes in their bellies lived in the mines for no more than five years. After my promise, the Jaffa immediately rushed to the gym, where they began to practice methods of wrestling and handbattle.

I went to explore the technical rooms of the ship. The five Jaffa serving as my “honorary guard” followed me. The technical areas were empty, and all the equipment had been uprooted. I had to scan the ship with my symbiote’s tentacles and compare its readings with the plan of the ship in the computer.

Finally, I was able to localize fairly long, but fairly thin devices that stretched across the entire hull of the ship and adjacent narrow technical passages. Finding a way to get into these rooms took another fifteen minutes. Finally, I got to the right place. The entrance to the small room corresponded to its size — it was a narrow and low door. And on the other side of the storeroom littered with junk there were large double doors, the size of the whole wall. Opening them, I stumbled upon another wall of dull silver metal.

It had a small door through which the Jaffa could squeeze only after passing through on all fours. And what pleased me most of all, next to the door was a panel on which the text in the language of the Ancients glowed. It seemed that this kha'tak was made from the parts of the ship of the Ancients, and now I had reached the oldest part of it. I put my hand to the panel and slipped into the open passage.

There were narrow low corridors, in which there was absolutely no lighting. The Jaffa followed me, weapons held at the ready. Apparently, they also did not suspect that there were such premises on this ship. There was a rustle, and a small repair robot rolled out of the next corridor. He had four wheels and several manipulators. Before I could examine him properly, the Jaffa opened fire on him with their weapons. The robot flew off to the side and emitted a shower of sparks.

“Stop!”

But the stupid warriors did not listen to me and continued to shoot.

“Idiots!” I shouted, turning to the vandals, destroying the equipment of the Ancients. “Die!!!” Three figures were immediately torn to pieces by my symbiote. “You violated my order.” Seeing the expression on my face, the surviving couple shamefully threw down their weapons and darted away. “I won't see you again, ugly creatures.” I shouted after them. “For everyone who enters the utility rooms, I will kill two more of you. Useless creatures.”

I finally was able to calm my anger and turned to see what was left of the robot. Alas, it was completely and irrevocably destroyed. All crystals, wires and microcircuits were fried together in an amorphous mass. I spread the symbiote tentacles and began to look for similar mechanisms. Unfortunately, the corridors were full of all kinds of garbage, but there was not a single such robot in the area.

Only by rummaging around the entire ship from top to bottom, could I find a couple more of these same robots, but in much worse condition. They were in extreme deterioration, and barely moved. Another of my discoveries was the onboard computer of the Ancients, which controlled the work of these robots, as well as all the other systems of the ship.

Having figured out the scope of work, I was climbed into the living quarters of the Jaffa in fury, where I gave them an exemplary “spanking”.

“Listen to me, you miscarried sons of peasant whores. From now on, you are forbidden to leave the living quarters of the ship. For every violator, I will execute him and two more of you. Do not leave the ship, do not go to the control room, or to the transport rings or the shuttles. You are so stupid that I do not even trust you to clean the toilets. So you must sit and wait until I need you. The punishment for any wrongdoing is death. The punishment for disobedience is painful death. The punishment for stupidity is prolonged torture and death. I am a god of knowledge, and I do not need fools who are unable to distinguish a repair robot from a sand rat.”

At this point I finished pouring out streams of anger and irritation and went to study the computer of the Ancients.

A week later, I was able to determine the current state of the ship. Once upon a time it was the cargo ship of the Ancients, intended for the transport of ore. After the death of the civilization, the ship floated in space for almost seven thousand years, after which it was discovered by the Goa’uld. The worms did not come up with anything better than cutting the ship into slices and cramming these fragments into the hull of the ha’tak. The computer of the Ancients was extremely puzzled by the new arrangement of engines and emitters of protective fields, but in the end was able to calculate a more or less working model for their use.

After some time, they decided to modernize the ship with the technology of the Goa’uld, adding new engines. So they did not come into opposition with the already existing technologies, the computer of the Goa’uld was connected to the computer of the Ancients, but, of course, again “through the ass”. And finally, about a thousand years ago, the ship came to Apophis, who did not even suspect the presence of the engine of the Ancients here, and therefore installed another system of engines and shields, leaving the existing one as a backup.

The reverse plunder of the ship began about fifty years ago and ended a couple of months before my appearance in this world. The remnants of the ship were planned to be driven away under their own power to one of the planets where the Goa’uld’s ships were sold for the price of scrap metal. Apparently, it was someone's cunning plan to deceive Apophis for a ship built with the technology of the Ancients. Because literally a couple of years before the beginning of the looting of the ship, someone directly connected to the computer of the Ancients and looked through the information on the state of the systems. Now I had this pearl, and I was not going to let others get it.

For the last thousand years the ship of the Ancients was on a decline. The computer had been set for maximum energy and material saving mode, therefore, the mechanisms had begun to decline. Of the eight repair robots, only three remained on the move, and only one of them was in a satisfactory condition. If it hadn’t been shot by the idiotic Jaffa. Fortunately, the remaining two robots could easily repair each other, and then proceed to repair the ship.

Alas, these plans were questionable, because rare chemical elements and a lot of energy were needed for repairs. If I didn’t start the industrial mining of the Naquadah, then the current reserves would only be enough for me to slightly pay up the engines, after which there would be no fuel even for getting off the ground. The Ancients’ ship guzzled a lot of energy, so the engines of the Goa’uld were ten times more economical than it. However, the speed of movement they had were two orders of magnitude less. Ancient technology was fast, but expensive, whereas that of the Goa’uld was slow but cheap.

In order to solve the rising difficulties, I decided to create a computer model and choose the most optimal course of action. Fortunately, one feature of the Ancients' computers became clear. On Earth, computer programs were written in special languages, like C or Java, but the Ancients wrote programs ... in the language of the Ancients. That is, you could just write the text with instructions, and the computer itself would understand the meaning of this text and line up the necessary sequence of operations.

Based on the results of the iteration of several trillion simulations, an action plan was developed. The two robots began to repair each other. For their repair, a significant part of the life support system and the last pair of shield generators left over from the Goa’uld had to be used and thus became scrap metal. The generators had long been broken and disconnected from the general network, but the robots knew about their location.

Once the robots had successfully repaired themselves, they set about building a mining complex. The robots could not reproduce themselves, because they did not have drawings of the central processor, but they had drawings for a simpler processor capable of controlling simple mechanisms.

The complex process included a hybrid excavator, a truck, and an ore processing plant. It could crush the rock, load it into itself, filter for the most valuable materials, and then discard the waste. All this was done in accordance with the plans drawn up by the computer of the ship. According to the results of the calculations, it was furthermore necessary to introduce this machine to the Naquadah field and to transport ore concentrate to the ship several times a day. Then it was my turn, to process the concentrate into a set of chemically pure substances using my symbiote. And in the end, these materials came to the repair robots that were supposed to produce fuel for the reactor and components for the ship.

For the Jaffa, a place in this plan was found only as guards. But this protection was vital, so that they somehow justified their existence. The fact was that the local fauna followed the path of gigantism. Suffice it to say that the roof coverings for the local residents’ buildings were made from the bones of animals. These creatures gladly ate crops, domestic animals, humans and in general everything, even something that was only slightly different in appearance from stone would also be eaten.

Leaving the assembly of the equipment to the robots, I took a dozen stupid and idle Jaffa and took the shuttle to the nearest village. I needed a source of food and water, so the simplest option was to get the locals to share them with us. No, I was not going to rob them. With a similar approach, I probably would have died of hunger myself. I decided to raise local agriculture and pick up half of the crop as compensation.

The tel’tak flew to the village, made a couple of laps over it, landed, and I came out in shining glory, accompanied by my Jaffa. The faces of the Jaffa were hidden with helmets in the form of a snake's head, and I wore the glasses of the Ancients, so the "divinity" of our origin did not cause anyone to doubt us.

“Who is in charge here? Come out, we will fight!”

I was met by a muscular man of an animal-like species with a cudgel in his hands. Even compared to the Jaffa, he looked like a giant. And where did they get so much food to feed such a boar?

“Yes, why fight with you? You would fold in half from one blow” he spoke, gesturing to the tribesmen. “Or do you suggest to arrange a battle in bed …”

I activated the symbiote, accelerated with telekinesis and struck this impudent swine with a blow to the stomach, from which he bent and flew back a couple of meters.

“Who else wants to say that he is stronger than me?” After witnessing my power, silence ensued. But then one of the villagers came up to greet me.

“Oh Mighty God, I am Stahor Sesmar Anub, the head of this village. We are glad to welcome you in our village.” The peasant greeted me with a sly look. After greeting, he respectfully bowed.

“I am Imhotep, the God of Knowledge and Architecture. I arrived on your planet on my own business, and for one thing I decided to do much good for your village with my appearance. I am going to help you grow a rich harvest, and in return I will take part of it for myself.”

“You won't get anything from us, you miserable swindler,” shouted some old man.

“Yes,yes! We will not even share cow’s shit with you ,” a fat woman joined.

The people raised in uproar, and some began to pick up stones and throw them at me. I waited five seconds, and then with one motion of my hand I dismembered all those who disagreed. The people froze, and then screams of horror filled the air. Most of those present ran away, but got tangled in their legs and fell to the ground. The strength of my symbiote was not enough to hold the entire crowd at once, and therefore I just caught their legs.

“Silent!!! I am God! And I have the power to destroy you all here and now!!!” I soared into the air, wrapped in darkness. Such focus had caused a state of dumbness even for the Jaffa. “I am cruel, but fair. Those who bow down before me will rise and prosper. Those who dare to contradict me await a fate worse than death. On your knees, mortals!”

I glanced around the audience, and one by one, people began to fall on their knees and crouch to the ground. I was not at all pleased with this whole farce, but it was the quickest way to subordinate these people to myself. Primitive inhabitants of primitive society knew what the power of the strong was, and therefore they easily inclined to those who could demonstrate this power.

The demonstration of my abilities made it possible to begin successful negotiations, from which I learned the state of the local economy.

People lived here mainly due to agriculture. There were two rainy seasons in a year. Great in winter and small in summer. In a month the summer season would begin, but now the fields were empty. Only near the creek were there several areas where they grew fresh greens. The main scourge of the people were invasions of wild animals, which had to be driven away by the whole tribe. Sometimes this was not possible, and then the tribe was left without crops and was forced to tighten their belts. There had always been few reserves, and the high mortality among hunters forced this society to balance on the verge of eternal hunger. An increase in the birth rate, as a rule, led to a lack of food, from which the most frail layers of the proletariat died. In general, this was quite the ordinary life of primitive people.

I was going to provide the village with water and give them the seeds of normal vegetables and grains. All that needed to be done was to drill a well, install a pump with a Naquadah generator and select the most suitable soil for growing crops in the arid and sunny climate from the stocks of the products in the ha’tak.

The Jaffa themselves had to organize the protection of the mine, the fields, the village and the ha’tak. In addition, they were responsible for the transportation of ore concentrate and equipment. I arranged the promised verification of the skills of hand-to-hand combat, results of which determined who would be on duty at the mine, and who would relax, guarding the villagers.

Assembly and installation of the pump passed without problems. I drilled a well to a depth of almost a kilometer, where a powerful aquifer was discovered. Water from there immediately went to irrigate the fields on which the plants began to grow, even though the rainy season had not yet begun.

Having organized the process of providing jaffa with products and meal, I went deep into developing a ship recovery plan. After increasing mining and processing facilities, the robots had to start producing new Ancient engines on the basis of the available drawings. Initially, the cargo ship was much more modest than the ha’tak. Plus, the elements of the hyperdrive were far from the best. So the ship moved with difficulty.

I was going to produce at least ten times more necessary elements and arrange them according to the schematics calculated by the computer. More precisely, all this should have been done by robots. There were only two of them, so the process of repairing the ship threatened to drag on. To speed it up a little, I gave the command to build eight repair robots with primitive processors. They were able to perform simple operations on their own, and the two full-fledged robots had to manage these other eight, passing instructions to action.

Another planned change was the construction of the bottom of the ship. The Ha'tak was a four-sided pyramid, which when landing was supposed to "sit down" atop another pyramid. The Pyramid of Cheops was built just as a landing site. But as a result of this design, the ship lost 80% of its internal volume. I planned to build a normal flat bottom near the pyramid, so that I could land on flat surfaces. The resulting interior space was to be used to accommodate ... the mining complex.

At one time, the ship of the Ancients was used to transport ore. The computer downloaded the drawings of another ship, which was supposed to be engaged in mining minerals on asteroids;it sucked the crushed asteroid into its womb, and then spat out the waste products; collected materials were then transported by automatic trucks.

After construction, I would get a source of unimaginable wealth. I could get all the Naquadah on this planet in a week. Such a scale could not be compared with how this element was mined by the goa’ulds. Those generally mastered a dozen technologies of the Ancients and used them to suppress the technical level of all other civilizations in the galaxy.

Alas, there was still plenty of time before such a triumph. According to the computer calculations, it needed more than a year to complete all plans. Now, if I had the drawings of the processor of the repair robot, it would be possible to cope in a couple of weeks. Eh. Well at least I got something as useful as the neural interface of the Ancients from Apophis, in the form of the glasses I wore. Without it, access to the computer would have been limited by the rights of the guest account, and all the information would have to be entered through a small terminal designed to control the ship's gateway. And so it was enough for me only to think, and the ship’s computer immediately offered possible solutions to the next task.

While my flagship of the Triumph class was being built, I decided to start rebuilding my tails. But then an unexpected problem surfaced. Chakra was still completely out of control to me. With magic, the situation was better, although the body of my Goa’uld and the human host did not have the slightest ability to use magic. It just cost me greatly to accumulate more than a certain amount of energy under my control, as the symbiote interfered in this process and literally devoured it. At the same time, it itself did not receive any benefit from such a meal.

I had to sit down to meditate and raise control. Through extreme stress, I could force the symbiote not to disturb me, but this was only a partial solution. I could raise the bar of the energy level at which the symbiote was spinning out of control, but could not prevent it completely. Using remnants of energy, I scanned my soul and began the painstaking process of repairing damage.

More than half a year I was engaged in my own recovery. At first, I still expected that the Being would soon come to me and say that my time was up. But he did not. In the past world, I spent less than a month. In this world, my "business trip" was clearly prolonged, which only pleased me.

After a lot of difficult and persistent meditations, I came to a disappointing conclusion: the restoration of the tails was impossible. Theoretically, it was possible, but for this, a huge amount of Bahion was needed, which I simply had nowhere to take from.

There was a workaround to solve the tails problem in another way. Each tail was essentially a “virtual drive” of Bahion. It could not be extracted from it, but I could try to somehow transform this Bahion by changing the tail itself. I had seven more normal tail germs. I could "throw" the ability from a injured tail to a healthy. But for this, too, Bahion was required, albeit in much more modest volumes.

Having decided on a new goal, I decided to organize a cult in my name in the nearest village. People there, in fact, already deified me, but I needed not glory, but energy. To begin with, I formalized the worship of my being by inventing appropriate rituals. I attended each of the events in person, focusing the attention on me. I felt how they generated Bahion ... only I didn’t get a drop of it. And it was terribly annoying.

Until the very end of the ship's construction, I struggled with this problem, but I did not come up with anything worthwhile to solve it. The only successful experiment required placing the believer in a special device, like a capsule, teaching him some rather difficult meditative techniques, and then introducing him into a state of religious ecstasy. And only then could the tiny drop of Bahion reached me. Alas, this was completely inadequate. I could not plunge the whole planet into the Matrix though, because I did not have such technology. All I could do was control one believer with the help of my symbiote’s abilities.

Finally, the day came when I entered the Triumph cabin and gave the command to take off. It was still a test flight, but in general, the ship was ready. Silently, the pyramid easily soared to a height of three hundred meters into the sky. Hovering at a height of ten kilometers, I launched the equipment diagnostics. Not finding any problems, I put the ship into orbit, made a few circles around the planet, and then headed for the Naquadah field, which I had been developing for a year. During this time, I almost completely razed the mountain, having organized extensive waste dumps not far from it.

The Ha'tak hovered over the mountain, and then huge chunks of rock began to break off from it, soar up and disappear into the bottom of my ship. Having filled the hold completely, I switched the ship to ore processing mode. The technology of the Ancients in this regard was extremely effective. Just an hour later, the process was completed, and the ship flew off to the side, where it "gave birth" to a huge spherical rock, which crashed to the ground.

This rock was the result of the mechanism of the Ancients, designed for mining in the asteroid belt. Instead of producing millions of tons of small space debris, the ship left behind meticulous meteorites that did not endanger the spacecraft.

During the day, I completely processed the entire deposit, leaving a quarry several hundred meters deep. It took a couple more hours to fill this quarry with waste rock taken from the dumps. Having finished with this task, I put the ship in its former place, after which the robots started finishing all the systems, and I focused on my plans.

To begin with, it was necessary to take into account what I could get using the technology of the Ancients in the Goa’uld ha'tak. The ship of the Ancients, whose equipment I obtained, was a truck designed to transport ore. This implied excellent payload and good shields to protect against meteorites.

The hyperdrive was also not bad, although by the standards of the Ancients it was rather slow. More precisely, it had a high maximum speed, but to achieve it, it took a relatively long time. As a result, a flight to a neighboring star and to the other side of the galaxy required a comparable amount of time. In general, the maximum flight duration should not exceed a couple of hours, which by the standards of the Goa’uld was unrealistically fast.

With this all the advantages ended. There was no weapon schematic on the computer. All I had were two small Goa’uld guns mounted on top of the pyramid. This was enough only to fend off fighters or scare savages on the planets.

The crew teleportation system was initially present, but did not make it to our time, and there were no drawings of it. I therefore had to be content with the Goa’uld transport rings, which nevertheless managed to improve. Now I could teleport to any point within a radius of ten kilometers from the ship. At first the rings moved there, and then they stabilized the teleportation of people and cargo. But if desired, it was possible to use the regular mode of operation, where the ship acted only as the transmitting or receiving side.

I could supply tel’tak and alkes with improved shields, but their engines and weapons remained the same.

The most valuable at the moment were my reserves of Naquadah. The ship was priceless, but I could sell the Naquadah. In general, the term Naquadah in Goa’uld was the isotope of uranium-234, which in this world was metastable. This isotope easily absorbed thermal neutrons and divided into Thorium and Helium, but in the normal state its half-life was longer than that of uranium-238. The Ancients invented a cunning reactor that allowed this isotope to be split, producing lead and magnesium - completely non-radioactive materials. But this isotope was extremely rare.

In average I can extract about eleven ton Naquadaq from the mountain by cube size with sides six hundred meters. It might seem that this was a lot, but all this amount could fit into a cube with a side of eight and a half meters. For comparison, in order to fly to Apophis’s planet, I needed to spend ten tons of fuel. If you were to put the engine into economy mode, the consumption would be reduced to one ton, but I would need to fly more than five days. The voyage to the other side of the galaxy would cost me two hundred tons. In conclusion, the entirety of my stock was enough for about fifty long jumps over whole galaxy.

Having counted the number of ships in the galaxy, it became clear that mass interstellar flights were very expensive. And taking into account the rates of mining of minerals by the goa’uld, it turned out that military actions required tens or even hundreds of years of fuel production.

When I was planning the extraction of a Naquadah on this planet, I simply did not understand what the “base concentration” mark in the description means. Under natural conditions, the concentration of uranium-234 in natural uranium was only 0.0057%. This was too little to get it in the required quantities using primitive technology.

This position of the Naquadah deposit was saved, where it was contained not in thousandths of a percent, but more than half of the total uranium mined. In their time, they were created by the Ancients, irradiating quite ordinary uranium deposits. For such deposits, internal battles between the goa’uld were fought, and the use of slave labor on them completely paid off. After all, crushing and manual sorting of the ore made it possible to immediately obtain a concentrate, where the content of nakadak reached up to thirty percent by weight.

I was able to extract reserves of Naquadah from a natural field, where its concentration was close to zero. The second deposit here was the same, but there was an even lower concentration of uranium itself. So even with my technology, I did not see the point in developing these deposits.

Now I was going to visit the asteroid belt and hammer the one with Naquadah, developing radioactive asteroids. After that, I planned to visit the planet of System Lord Ptah. According to the memoirs of Apophis, he was one of the goa’uld who were engaged in the construction of space ships "for sale". I found the coordinates of his planet in the goa’uld navigation computer. There I was going to buy weapons for the ship, supplies and ... a new host for myself. Ptah offered for sale not only equipment, but also specially grown people who are in perfect physical shape. True, few have used these services because of fearing specially laid genetic defects or poison.

Alas, my calculations to find an asteroid rich in uranium turned out to be a ghostly hope. I had to search in the database for the planet, where already explored deposits were present. One of these planets, marked as unpromising, was in the zone of influence of Baal. Having reached it, I did not find traces of spaceships in orbit or the surface of the planet. After that, I just had to find a suitable field and start its development.

A week later, sensors detected two ships exited from hyperspace. I immediately began to climb, simultaneously stopping the processing of the next batch of ore. From a height of fifty kilometers I threw off a stone “ball” with a diameter of a hundred meters. By the time I reached the orbit where it was possible to go into hyperspace, the ball fell on the field, causing a good explosion, as if from a fallen meteorite.

The ships turned out to be two ha’tak with additional modules. These modules are discoid “growths” on the pyramid served as hangars for fighter-interceptors and allowed to generate more stable shields.

I did not linger, but hurriedly escaped into hyperspace before the ships reached the attack distance. After that, I laid a course to Ptah’s planet. Now I had enough resources to buy a small fleet if necessary.

Coming out of the hyperspace in the orbit of the planet, I almost immediately received an incoming video call.

“The owner of an unidentified ship, name yourself and the purpose of your arrival.” A goa’uld talked to me, dressed in gold and silk.

“I am Imhotep, the god of knowledge and architecture.” I introduced myself. “I arrived to trade.”

“What do you want to offer us?”

“Naquadah.”

“Acceptable. Follow to the central spaceport.”

I received the coordinates of the landing site on my computer, where I immediately went. On the way I was accompanied by three ha'tak. They looked anxious, but I attributed this behavior to the typical goa’uldish paranoia. The place allocated to me turned out to be a landing pyramid. I no longer had a corresponding dredging in the bottom, but I simply hovered in the air. The benefit of the Ancients' engines allowed me to do this almost without using energy.

A proposal came to the computer to teleport to the palace, located a couple of kilometers from the cosmodrome. I collected two dozen jaffas and teleported to marked place with small groups each of ten jaffa.

Ptah’s Palace made an impression to me. First of all, the walls and columns covered with golden bas-reliefs and precious stones were thrown into the eyes. All the people around were perfectly beautiful and dressed in bright clothes. We were met by a goa’uld, with whom I spoke via video link earlier.

“I greet you in Memphis, the city of the great Ptah. I am Apis, manager of this city. What would you like to purchase?” It seems that they’re not very happy to meet me, because no one even suggested that I sit down or go to a separate room.

“I need a hundred maximum power guns for ha’tak, a set of shield generators and a man host. Also, I am interested in purchasing information.”

“The host? One? Woman?” asked Apis. His expression was unreadable, but the symbiote felt a slight disgust at the sight of my body. The girl I inhabit experienced overloading of information in the brain, and now looked somewhat out of condition, even despite the daily sleep in the sarcophagus.

“Three. Men. I want to feel what it is like to have a snake between legs.”

Apis laughed at my joke.

“We can provide to you all of the above. Now I will show you what weapons and shields we can offer you, and then my assistant will take you to Gardens of Amara, where you can choose a host.”

We went to a device that resembles a computer screen, where I looked at the characteristics and layout of the device offered for sale of guns. Skimming through the range, I chose the most powerful guns. In addition to a large charge force, it had the fastest guidance system. If desired, these guns could be fired at fighters. True, none of the goa’uld would not do this without extreme need, because their energy consumption was monstrous. But I was interested in this question last, because by the standards of the Ancients it was a very low budget option. If desired, I could shoot all the hundreds of guns at the same time.

I took not the most reliable shields, but those that could generate a force field at a great distance from the ship. They primarily interested me as a cover for the fact that my ship possesses the technology of the Ancients. And so I will have the outer shield of the goa’ulds and the inner shield of the Ancients, located just a few meters from the spaceship’s hull.

The prices for the equipment, of course, made me somewhat upset, but with my reserves, I could afford it to myself. After the formation of the order, I went to some Gardens, in fact, being a reservation, in which people of many ethnic groups lived. There were negros, chinese, whites, and dozens of different nationalities. I wanted to get three white men with developed muscles and Slavic-Nordic features. The choice of bodies was delayed for two hours, but at the end the hosts arranged me in all respects, including the length of the “snake”.

I did not dare to leave them with the seller for “presale preparation,” and immediately ordered them to follow me. I also feared poisons and all sabotage, and therefore I decided not to give in to unnecessary temptations.