STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust

by Peter J Evans

  On it, a graphic of the Ash Eater planet was overlaid with streams of crimson hieroglyphs. Red light from it washed back over the platform, bloodying them both.

  As O’Neill climbed the last step, the First Prime turned to look right at him.

  He didn’t move.

  O’Neill frowned, and leveled his spear. Carter had been right: without the heavy club at the other end, it was easier to aim.

  He fired, and the blast screamed blindingly away into the ceiling.

  Neheb-Kau spun around, his right hand outstretched. O’Neill caught a glimpse of the glowing gem in his palm before a ripple of distortion hurled him back into the outer wall.

  More bolts whined onto the platform from both sides. O’Neill opened his watering eyes to see the barrage strike an invisible curve around Neheb-Kau, extending far enough back to encompass his First Prime and half the platform. A personal force shield, he realized: Apophis had used one too, on occasion, although his was smaller, less powerful. Neheb-Kau had been tinkering with that, too.

  “Fools,” the Goa’uld spat. “You waste your final moments on this?”

  O’Neill forced himself up. The ribbon pulse had hit him like a truck. “Just shut the damn locks off and let it fire!”

  “And see my children destroyed?”

  “Your children?”

  “Of course. Did you not see them? My unborn children, in their millions, sleeping below, waiting to be born!”

  “So you’re content to die,” Carter said, stepping as close to the shield as she could. O’Neill saw her brush its surface with her fingertips, a crackle of voltage following her hand.

  “Our deaths will be their birth-scream,” the Goa’uld replied, his lidless eyes glowing with rage and fervor. “And my legacy to them will be the galaxy, fat and ripe for them to suckle on!”

  “Now that’s a damn nasty image,” muttered O’Neill.

  “Kafra,” Carter called. “Do you want this?”

  “What can be done? The guidance controls are locked.”

  “Locks have keys.” She put her spear down. “Please, Kafra.”

  He looked at her strangely. “I cannot undo what my master has done. I cannot steal the dreams of a God.” O’Neill saw his gaze flick back to Neheb-Kau. “Not alone.”

  “We can,” O’Neill told him. “Hell, we do it all the time.”

  “That is what I had hoped,” said Kafra. And he smiled.

  At the last moment, Neheb-Kau must have realized what was happening. He whirled, robes flying, and raised his hand to Kafra, but the Jaffa was already lurching forwards.

  Once-powerful arms spread, and wrapped around the God.

  “No!” screamed Neheb-Kau. But he was already being hauled off his feet. His arms flailed, clawed hands scrabbling at Kafra’s armor, at the boiling skin of his head, but it was too late. They both knew it.

  Kafra ran with him to the rail and jumped.

  “Carter!” yelled O’Neill, over the sickening sound of their impact. “Go to it!”

  “Already on it, sir.” She was at the consoles, deactivating the gold and crystal devices clamped to every panel. He ran to her, helping to lift them free.

  Daniel appeared at the rail, watching the screen. “Still a lot of red, Sam.”

  “Give me a minute.” The devices were gone now, and she was tapping frantically at the panels.

  “Ah, I kinda think we’re out of minutes…”

  “Some people,” she said flatly, “are always in a rush.”

  The icons on the screen went blue, and vanished upwards.

  Light, intolerably bright, flooded the platform.

  “Holy crap!” O’Neill ducked away from it, shielding his eyes with his hand. The screen was blocking most of the light coursing down beyond it, but enough was spilling past to be painful.

  “Sorry people,” Carter said, wincing. She worked the controls again. “Didn’t have enough time to get the blinds down.”

  The light was dimming to less searing levels, as the viewports on either side of the screen began to darken from the top down. O’Neill squinted over the rail, still with his hand cupped over his eyes, watching a river of pure white glare thundering past the viewports.

  The Auger was firing. Its energies seared downwards in a vast beam, through the centre of the ring and into their target.

  On the screen, the graphic had changed to a full view of the Ash Eater planet. The beam was a dot of livid white at the centre, growing, the black clouds edging away from it as if unable to withstand the brightness of it, the purity. A sphere of brilliance was growing down there, matter flashing into energy, the raw tunneling power of the Auger chewing effortlessly through the thin crust of the hollow world and ripping into the tether beneath.

  He turned to Carter. “Nice work.”

  “Thank you, sir. But it wasn’t all me.”

  He nodded, and followed her down from the platform.

  Kafra lay on his back, under the rail, blood pooling around him. Neheb-Kau was a sprawl of silk robes a few meters away. Carter ran to the First Prime, and knelt beside him.

  “He died free,” said Teal’c. “And with honor.”

  The Auger beam shut off, its thunder turning to silence.

  O’Neill felt the deck beneath him tilt fractionally. He let out a long breath. “Guess we’re moving again.”

  “Next target,” said Carter. She was still kneeling. “He got me out of a lot of trouble back on Neheb-Kau’s ship, sir.”

  “He got us all out of a lot of trouble right here.” He put a hand to her shoulder, then moved away.

  Daniel was standing below the platform, gazing up at the screen. “Would you look at that,” he murmured.

  O’Neill followed his gaze, and blinked. “Wow.”

  The planet had a hole in it.

  Under the spiraling, roiling clouds, the cavity carved by the Auger was growing. The crust was caving in, thousands of tons of rock shattering away from the hole’s ragged edges and tumbling inwards, drawing the clouds with them as the atmosphere followed them down. Ash and dust must have been sieving down too, mountains of it, the whole nightmarish landscape falling in on itself.

  “The suppression field must have given out,” said O’Neill.

  “Hm?”

  “Carter said that the air was kept out of the centre by a field. Look at those clouds.”

  Daniel grinned. “I’m impressed. Hey Sam?” He turned, and froze. “Oh hell.”

  While they had been watching the screen, Neheb-Kau had gotten up.

  He was in dreadful shape. One side of his head was a crimson ruin, one eye obscured or gone. His left arm hung limp by his side, the robes there clinging and sodden with blood.

  His right arm was up, and the ribbon device was pulsing fire into the side of Carter’s skull.

  O’Neill snapped the spear up and fired, but the blast whined off the Goa’uld’s shield. “God dammit!”

  The awful face turned towards him. “Be fair, human. You have taken everything from me. I merely take one thing from you.”

  “No,” said O’Neill.

  He thumbed the spear’s control, and the weapon fell silent in his hands, the spear blades snapping shut.

  Neheb-Kau smiled. “Good boy.”

  “You wish.” O’Neill drew his arm back, and hurled the spear, straight and true, clear through the shield and into Neheb-Kau’s black heart.

  The Goa’uld staggered back, a look of utter shock on his broken face. His mouth worked. His right hand came up, touched the spear-shaft emerging from his sternum as if to confirm its unbelievable existence, then rose to O’Neill. But the gem in the centre of the ribbon device was dark and cold.

  Neheb-Kau sank to his knees, twisted, and fell.

  There was a flicker around him as the shield failed. O’Neill was already running to Carter, and felt wisps of voltage brush him as he charged through it.

  She was in a heap, but struggling to lift herself, her eyes blinking rapidly. As he dropped down be
side her, she glanced around at Neheb-Kau, saw the spear sticking out of him, and then turned to stare at O’Neill.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” she gasped.

  “Wasn’t even sure it would get through.” The shield Apophis had used would allow slow-moving objects through too. He had tried a bow and arrow, once, and it had almost worked.

  “Nice guess.”

  He helped her up. Behind them, the Auger erupted into searing life again.

  When they reached the transporter platform, there was a small army of hoplites waiting for them. O’Neill counted at least twenty, along with a handful of Spartan Guard and a pair of hulking Minotaurs. They parted as the team approached.

  In their midst stood Pythia, her mournful face streaked with tears. And at her side a small, pale woman in a white dress, with sandy-gold hair and gray eyes.

  “Look who’s back,” O’Neill said warily.

  Daniel was next to him, helping Carter along. “Ericaceae.”

  “That name no longer has meaning.” The woman’s steely eyes narrowed. “There is only Hera.”

  “Guess having a backup has its uses.”

  She walked slowly up to him, tipped her head back to fix his gaze with hers. “You succeeded.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “The planet is collapsing. Within hours, it will be no more.”

  He shrugged. “Sounds like a result. So what happens now?”

  “What indeed?”

  He heard running footsteps. From around the opposite side of the transporter came two Spartans. “My Lady!”

  “Report.”

  “Neheb-Kau lives!”

  O’Neill gaped. “What?”

  “The host is gone. The Goa’uld lives, for now.” She looked back over her shoulder at the Spartan. “It’s name will not be spoken again.”

  “It’s still alive? Jesus… What does it take to kill you guys?”

  She smiled grimly. “We shall find out, over time. A very long time.” She turned to Daniel. “The Spartan Guard tell me that you honored my sister, in her last moments. For that reason, and that alone, I will spare you.”

  “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.”

  Epilogue

  Starlight

  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 a
tomic 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.