STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust
Page 35
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 exactly 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.
About the author
Peter J Evans’ first novel, Mnemosyne’s Kiss, was published in 1999 under Virgin Publishing’s science fiction and fantasy imprint, Virgin Worlds. Evans later co-wrote the Judge Dredd novel Black Atlantic for Black Flame, which was re-printed as part of the I Am The Law Judge Dredd Omnibus, and the five part Durham Red cycle, also for Black Flame.
His latest projects have been the Stargate Atlantis novel Angelus for Fandemonium, and a script for the latest series of Stargate SG-1 audio dramas for Big Finish. He is presently working on a new novel, but if he says any more about that terrible things will happen to him.
During daylight hours Evans does something terribly complicated involving navigational radar. He lives near Croydon in southern England, and rather wishes he didn’t.
THE ADVENTURES CONTINUE....
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