The(questionable) burdens of leadership of a troll Emperor by Noodlehammer

Chapter 4

Approximately ten Earth years after the raid on Saral.

Hasara Space Station, neutral ground for the meeting of the High Council of System Lords.

Ra had assumed that the insolent swine who had emptied his world and desecrated his temple would be easy enough to find and punish. He would just need to investigate a bit more and eventually, there would be signs pointing at the culprit. He had been fairly sure that it was one of his fellow System Lords at any rate.

Ten years and a few more emptied planets later, Ra had long since revised that opinion. Whoever was doing this, they were definitely not a System Lord, possibly not even a Goa'uld and they left no clue as to their identity.

Not to say that they didn't leave any clues at all, because they did. It was just that these clues weren't all that helpful in figuring out the identity of the mysterious attacker. Often they were merely more of the stone tablets with infuriatingly nonsensical drawings or messages carved into them.

The loss of Saral had been a fairly minor blow to his domain, important only in how it made him lose face in front of his rivals., but the continued attacks were starting to have an effect on more than just his reputation. Some of those planets were places where naquadah was mined and moving about enough slaves to get those mines operational again was a pain.

On the bright side, he wasn't the only System Lord to have suffered such attacks. He'd heard that several others had also been left with mysteriously empty planets and none of them were having any more luck figuring out who was doing this than he was.

What the constant poaching of their slaves and burning of their temples had accomplished however, was garner a lot of outrage. Enough that a summit had been called.

Ra both liked and detested summits. He liked them because he could flaunt his superiority over his fellow Goa'uld and he hated them because he knew exactly what a tempting target they made for the Tok'ra.

The other System Lords thought that his demands on thorough security precautions were excessive, especially his demand that not even Lo'taur were to be present. The Hasara Space Station that had long served as a neutral meeting ground for the System Lords was after all heavily shielded, armed and protected by a fleet of Ha'tak.

Ra thought that their laxity would be their doom one day. He hadn't held on to his position as Supreme System Lord for millenia through luck, but through superior cunning and caution. The fools didn't seem to grasp that the danger of the Tok'ra was in infiltrators, not open attack. The formidabble defenses were still required of course, as some ambitious Goa'uld might think to capture the space station for themselves, but they were not going to be effective against an assassin's blade.

Regardless of his mixed feelings on these summits, it had been necessary to call one.

It hadn't been him who had called it of course...that would imply that there was something that he couldn't handle, which was clearly ridiculous since he was the Supreme System Lord.

Most System Lords attended when a summit was called, but occasionally, some of them would refuse to. This time, the meeting chamber was full, though one of the System Lords had appointed an underling to speak in their place.

Sitting in the more ornate and slightly higher chair as befit the Supreme System Lord, Ra assessed his 'compatriots'.

The closest to his right was his backstabbing, egomaniacal brother Apophis, a constant thorne in his side that obviously wanted to sit on the throne of the Supreme System Lord. Just like him, Apophis still used the same host that he had long ago acquired on Tau'ri, a dark skinned man from Ancient Egypt whose skin had paled slightly over the years due to spending so much time away from the light of the sun.