"Picking up the emergency beacon, ma'am." the sensors officer announced. Kat merely nodded, giving the signal to extract them. "One more beacon appearing outside of the shielded area!" Kat raised an eyebrow about that - nobody was supposed to be there. She'd have to find out in debriefing. "Pick them all up, we don't want any stragglers. Time the redeployment of Tolia's gate to the same time so we only have to drop the shield once. On my mark." the captain ordered, counting the Al'Kesh shots as they impacted. One, two, three - close enough. "Mark!"

Shields of the [i]Langford[/i] dropped and the transporters engaged, pulling up the facility team and the stray into the ship while depositing Tolia's gate back on the surface. Of the two Al'Kesh that didn't fire in this cycle yet, one disappeared into hyperspace. Kat nodded to herself - Ariadne apparently succeeded in acquiring the ship. The other Goa'Uld ship managed to land a hit in the meantime. The ship was momentarily shaken, causing a few crewmen to lose their footing. "Shields are back up!" another officer reported. "Damage?" Kat asked nervously. The 304’s hull held without it’s shield for quite a while, but the subsystems were different story. "Impact on the top section, damage minimal. Minor system failures across the ship due to power fluctuations, nothing critical."

Nodding at the report, nothing was holding them here now. "Launch tube one and get us out of here. Put us on the edge of the system until we receive further orders." With an affirmative, the buzz of the hyperdrive filled the ship. At the same time the time delayed nuke launched from one of [i]Langford's[/i] bays. As soon as the window closed behind the departing ship the bomb went off, obliterating majority of Tolia's spacecraft. Suffice to say, these people will be threat to no one who passed through from now on. "Give me shipwide," Kat told the comm tech, "Command and ground team debriefing in three hours." she announced, handing the ship over to the helm to go prepare for it.

Returning to her cabin, she sat down at the desk, pulling her computer from the drawer. Several messages popped up in the unread folder. Sighing, she started going through them. There was no escaping paperwork. She was surprised though to find several complaints. First one was from a private who was apparently rendered unfit for duty in a spar with Rea’c. Well of course - that’s what you get for fighting a Jaffa. Still, she couldn’t have her crew mowed down as training. The injury was a dislocated hip though - something quite painful and the private was out of commission for weeks, bad enough for the doctors to request transporting him back to Earth in fact. She’d have to address this, although she was certain somebody already made sure it wouldn’t happen again, hopefully without getting injured as well.

The other complaint was from a lab assistant and concerned something he called lack of morality and professionalism. Apparently the senior staff played some kind of a prank. She didn’t have time for this! OR rather she didn’t want to put any time into it. Those petty scientists - back to the kindergarten with the rest of the children!

Powering through the rest of the mail that mostly concerned with battle and damage reports, she noticed a disturbing trend: Majority of the tech support was being directed to one person only - one Dr. Kate. The thought that if something was to happen to the good doctor her ship would be rendered irrepairable did not sit well. She had to do something about this. Just as she was about to leave for the briefing room, her comms beeped. Apparently Ariadne was back on the ship, arriving through the gate. She wasn’t an expert, but the Al’Kesh wasn’t that fast. Oh well, she’d find out soon enough.

---

Looking over the room, everyone was already there. “Please, be seated.” she waved the crowd off, taking her place at the table. “Let’s start with where we stand. The ship fared well enough in the battle. We took a hit when our shield were dropped for beaming which overloaded some noncritical system. Damage control teams are already on those and we shall be fully operational within an hour. Medbay reports three injured personnel - Lt. Brown has taken a staff blast to the shoulder and is in recovery, Dr. Harper took a Zat blast, and prior to the battle in what I presume was a sparring accident, Pvt. Truman dislocated a hip. I’d like to stress out training is meant to prepare the crew for battle, not send them to the hospital for several weeks.” she said, moving to the next point.

“Under the circumstances I believe you all did well. Unfortunately we were unable to prevent the escalation of the hostilities, but the primary objective was satisfied to a large degree. We recovered sizable volume of data from the ancient facility before extraction. We were also able to commandeer an enemy ship. I’d like to continue this trend, because we might just have a credible fleet one day if we do. This brings me to a rather disturbing observation though,” Kat said, rubbing her eyes.

“The hostilities escalated after the Tolian Ha’Tak suffered an explosion. Analysis of the sensor readings revealed that it was caused by a naquadah enhanced bomb. The Tolians are way too primitive to devise such a weapon, and I doubt they would blow up their biggest ship. It wasn’t one of ours either, we only fired two missiles in the whole engagement - one to intercept the attacking Al’Kesh, the other as a mine after we left to strip that planet of it’s spacecraft. That leads me to believe a third party was involved. We have no clue to who it was or what are their motives, but if they are after the same thing we are, I want you to be extra careful on the next mission. Overall, I consider this mission a success.” the captain finished the mission summary.

“Now that that’s out of the way, If you have anything to report concerning what happened down there that might shed some light on the situation, what stood out and what we could have done better, I want to hear it.”