STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust (45 page)

“Ah, okay. Thank you…”

Then her expression went very cold, and very hard. “But seeing you reminds me that she is gone, and I will not be pained in such a way. So you will take the vessel you stole from He Who Will Not Be Named, and you will fly it out of my flagship. If you do not, I will kill you. If I see any of you again,
I will kill you.
Do you understand?”

Later, as Teal’c opened the hatch to the Khepesh and climbed inside, O’Neill stood on the mesh decking next to it and marveled. “You’re sure this thing’s still airtight?”

“It got us here,” said Carter. She could stand unaided now, but O’Neill still wanted her back under Doctor Fraiser’s care as quickly as possible. “As long as it gets us to the nearest gate, I’ll be happy.”

“You and me both.” He glanced up, towards the monitoring chamber. Two figures stood there, looking back down. One tall and dark, the other smaller and blonde. He suppressed a shiver. “I’m done being under the same roof as these guys.”

“Really? Hera seemed okay.”

“You think?” said Daniel, his eyebrows raised. “Well she didn’t put you in a cell, in the dark, in the —”

“Daniel,” O’Neill cut in, warningly.

Bra’tac was at the hatch. “Do not be fooled, Major Carter. This time, Hera’s motives were not incompatible with our own. That is all. It would not be wise to risk her hospitality again.”

“I don’t intend to,” she said, and went into the ship.

O’Neill stayed where he was for a moment. “You know, Daniel… I was gonna ask.”

“Hm?”

“What did she say? At the end, there?”

“Who, Hera?” Daniel put his hands into his pockets and fixed his gaze on the ship’s battered flank. “She said she could hear the sea.”

“Right.” A beat of silence. Then: “Was that her, do you think? Or did the host get a look in?”

A smile ghosted across Daniel’s face. “Does it matter?”

O’Neill looked at him, sadly. “No,” he lied. “It doesn’t matter at all.”

The
universe is never still.

A fixed point in space is a functional impossibility. Every object, from the smallest subatomic particle to the greatest galactic cluster, moves both in relation to every other and according to its own frame of reference. Each is inextricably linked to the rest of the cosmos and yet utterly separate from it, joined by the unbreakable chains of gravity and quantum probability and separated by the lightspeed limitations of information transfer.

There are no shared reference frames. There is no now. A man and a woman — for the sake of argument, we shall call them Jack O’Neill and Samantha Carter — might look at each other across the interior of a failing Goa’uld scoutship, and believe that they might see a future. But it is an illusion. They see each other not as they are, but as they
were
, when the light that moved from him to her and back again first began its journey. They rotate in a shared orbit, but are doomed to be separate, one from the other, forever.

As it is with humans, so must it be with suns. The universe operates on the same principles at all scales, although the connections between the very large and the very small are hard to define. Two shivering atoms live in each others’ past just as definitely and irrevocably as two people or two stars, and yet they might whirl around each other so closely that they could be mistaken for the same object.

It is a complicated dance, an intricate, interwoven ballet of orbit and vector, of mass and radiation, of probability and gravity and the great, endless spinning of the galaxies themselves. It is vast and unfathomable and beyond any living mind to comprehend.

In fact, the only entities capable of truly appreciating the universe in all its unutterable complexity are those that have been designed specifically for the task.

A machine hung fifty million kilometers above the nameless star’s northern pole. It had been there for some time, watching events in the system unfold with what, in a living creature, might have been called intense interest.

It had seen the Pit of Sorrows break out of hyperspace and be snatched up by Neheb-Kau’s golden claw. It had observed the battle, the shattering of the Ash Eater homeworld, the destruction of Hera’s Ha’tak. It had watched the remaining ships accelerate away, leaving only vast shoals of debris in their wake.

Fragmented ships and broken corpses, turning over in the nameless star’s meager light, some falling into the singularity, others tumbling away on long orbits. From its vantage point, far above the system’s ecliptic plane the Sentinel watched them all, tracked them all, compared their paths and their powers to its own expectations, and found the similarity acceptable.

The Sentinel was far from home. Its creators, a race whose name and nature had been carefully excised from its memory almost ten thousand years previously, had constructed it with one purpose in mind — to watch, coolly and without error, the rise of one potentially dangerous and destructive species. There were, in all probability, many such devices in the universe, simply because there were many species that required observation. If this was true, the Sentinel had no real evidence. It largely kept itself to itself, circling in a high orbit around a planet that the species in question referred to as Earth.

There were no technologies comprehensible to humans that would ever have detected the Sentinel, so it had remained safe and unmolested in its orbit for many thousands of years. For most of that time it had done nothing but observe, and send its observations off through subspace in discrete data packets. It had stopped getting return data centuries before, but it kept sending. It had no desire at all to do anything else.

Little had happened on the world below of any particular note: the humans had occasionally been swept by mass conflicts and virulent pathogens, but that was of no great consequence. Primitive atomic weapons had been detonated near its surface, although they had hardly warranted a mention in the Sentinel’s reports. The large-scale modifications to the planet’s biosphere were of no interest to the machine at all.

However, a small variance in temperature between two patches of Egyptian desert had been enough to send the Sentinel into a pattern of behavior that it hadn’t even known it was programmed for.

Possible evidence of an Ash Eater was a red-flag condition for the Sentinel, one of a list that it was only able to access when one became apparent. This was of no concern to the machine, since it was built to be curious about humanity, not itself. But although the anomaly, recently exposed by the collapse of a rock shelf in western Egypt, was accompanied by certain quantum fluctuations that matched the phase-signature of an Ash Eater, the Sentinel needed to be sure. So it began to plan.

The machine was patient in the way only an artificial intelligence can be, and subtle beyond belief. It spent an age — several hundredths of a second — running countless simulations of its possible actions, refining and evolving the scenarios until it knew, to within an infinitely small set of tolerances, exactly how best to manipulate the initial conditions.

In the end, it hadn’t really needed to do very much at all.

Its first action was to modify the flight-path of the TIAMAT satellite, in order to bring the anomaly to the attention of humans who might be in a position to investigate it further. This resulted in some of those humans ceasing to operate, but the Sentinel cared exactly as much about that as it did about how many grains of sand were displaced by their footfalls. But when the Pit of Sorrows first broadcast its message to Ra’s primary Stargates, so as to warn him, no matter where he might be, that it had been compromised, the Sentinel knew it had been right to act.

The machine did not have direct access to any Stargates, but it was listening in on Stargate Command. It was listening in on everybody. It always had been.

The Sentinel’s next action was to contact the Asgard. The machine had been sharing information with the creatures for some time, and they with it: a beneficial, if trust-free relationship of which the humans were thankfully unaware. The Asgard knew that the people of Earth would not welcome being spied on so thoroughly, so when they gave the Sentinel’s telemetry to Stargate Command they simply said it had come from one of their probes. Had the Sentinel been blessed with emotions it might have found that slightly insulting, but the lie served its purpose. It sent certain humans off in pursuit of the Pit of Sorrows.

This too was largely according to the Sentinel’s simulations, and to the plans of the Asgard. They didn’t want to be personally troubled with the Ash Eater problem — they had far bigger fish to fry. But both they and the Sentinel knew that human beings cannot stay away from any new situation, no matter how lethal it might be. They are simply incapable of leaving well enough alone. So they had merely wound the SGC up like toy and let it go.

Meanwhile the Sentinel had effortlessly overtaken the Pit of Sorrows on its journey, and was there when it arrived. It hadn’t been previously aware of the Ash Eater homeworld before that time, but that was not a matter of concern. Its creators had been, and once it was time for the Sentinel to know, it knew.

After that, it was merely a matter of letting the simulations play out. The Sentinel hadn’t even needed to contact the Asgard again, which it was prepared to do should more direct intervention become necessary. All that was required was to take up a suitable vantage point and watch the pieces move across the board.

As a purely artificial construct, the Sentinel was not capable of satisfaction, but the patterns of information moving through its core became calm and repetitive in a way that could have been thought of as ever so slightly smug.

All —
almost
all — was as had been planned.

After thirty thousand years the Ash Eaters were gone from the universe, finally revealed by the actions of the humans and Goa’uld in orbit around their world and trapped within the event horizon of their own singularity. One day, far into the future, the black hole would evaporate and free them to feed once more, but by that time the humans would have been made dust in far more conventional manners — by age, by war, by the great cataclysm that still lurked, unseen, in their future. It was very unlikely their species would survive long enough to encounter the Ash Eaters again.

Even now, that timescale was expanding. The singularity was growing, spiraling slowly inwards towards the dead star and dragging out a thin wisp of stellar material as it approached. The two would, the machine calculated, eventually become part of a stable pairing, one feeding off the other until the mass of the star could no longer resist its internal energies. Then it would flash into sullen, stunted supernova, feeding the singularity the last of its corpse until only the black hole remained. A parasite and its host, like the Goa’uld themselves. An abusive, devouring relationship that could only end in death.

And yet…

There was a discontinuity. The patterns of matter and energy around the nameless star were not
exactl
y
as the Sentinel had calculated them to be. There was, in one small area, an error that could not be explained.

The matter stream between the star and the singularity had a hole in it.

The machine’s calm state was disturbed by this. It was an observer by nature, but it had recently been required to predict as well as observe. In all other respects, its predictions had been correct, but this small dark spot in the stream was enough to force the Sentinel to re-evaluate its capabilities. The discontinuity might even, it decided, be evidence of a fault.

One that had to be investigated.

The Sentinel chose to act. It engaged its primary motor systems, accelerating without effort to a tenth of the speed of light, and arced down towards the matter stream. The journey took almost half an hour, an eternity to the Sentinel, but its patience was limitless. It watched the discontinuity with, perhaps, a billionth of its possible perceptions during the trip, and tracked the course of every other significant piece of matter in the system with a few percent more. Nothing except the shadow in the stream failed to match its predictions.

The nameless star and its parasite singularity were both vomiting radiation; the star in all directions, the black hole in twin wispy polar jets as it rotated. The energies they spewed out would have been lethal for organic life at such a range, but the Sentinel was made of stronger stuff by far. The machine was able to draw within a few hundred kilometers of the matter stream before it even needed to engage any protection at all.

Finally, as the Sentinel slowed to a holding position just above the stream, the cause of the shadow became apparent. It wasn’t a hole, or a shadow. It was a welter of black, hairlike quantum filaments, a roiling cloud of null-energy reaching languidly out into the stream and feeding on the particles streaming past it.

The Sentinel looked more closely. And yes, there in the heart of the black field was Ra’s Ash Eater, the occupant of the Pit of Sorrows; forgotten in the battle, untouched by the collapse of its homeworld, unconcerned by the imprisonment of its species. It hung, inert and lifeless as ever, with its reflexive feeding-shroud sweeping out around it — ash-gray, fetal, curled and blank-eyed and uncaring. Dead, and yet voracious. Turning slowly in the turbulence of the stream.

The Sentinel watched it for a long time. It sent out a small, high-priority data packet to its long-dead masters.

And then it spun, slowly, activated a superluminal drive array that even the Asgard could not have comprehended, and went home.