The Gate Historian: A Military History of the Stargate Universe

Time dilation offered the Asgard a way to defeat the Replicators without destroying every individual machine. On Halla, they created a field intended to slow time around the trapped swarm so severely that the rest of the universe would gain ages in which to develop a permanent solution. The Replicators reversed the advantage. By altering the device, they accelerated their own subjective time and spent thousands of years evolving while only a short interval passed outside the field. That isolation produced the human-form Replicators and a more sophisticated collective capable of challenging both Asgard and Earth. SG-1 eventually restored the trap, leaving Fifth behind and containing the enemy again, but the solution was temporary. The machine intelligence continued searching for escape, and later failures reopened the war. Halla demonstrates the danger of using time as a battlefield. A device designed to freeze an enemy’s development instead provided the protected laboratory in which that enemy became far more dangerous. Visit ImaginedBattlefield.com for more military and science fiction.