Silence descended upon the chamber, broken only by the faint clatter of golden chain links. The slaves were shivering.
And then Neheb-Kau chuckled. It was a dry sound, like leaves rustling at the base of a dead tree. “So, the First Prime of Apophis has defied his God, and now serves the Tau’ri. What do you think of that, Djetec?”
The robed man’s voice was a hiss of rage. “It is a blasphemy, my Lord.”
“Manners, Djetec. Apophis is no concern of ours. I would rather a renegade Jaffa on my ship than a loyal envoy of that tedious little insect.” The mask turned to Kafra. “Where is this Teal’c?”
“With your ka’epta of surgeries.”
The word was like ice in Carter’s chest. “Surgeries?”
“He is merely undergoing medical tests. As a Jaffa, his physiology is known to us — the tests will provide baseline data on the state of the Ash Eater.”
“So he won’t be harmed?”
Djetec glared down at her. “He is responsible for the death of one of our Jaffa. Should he not be punished?”
Carter glanced across at Kafra. To relate what had happened in the Pit of Sorrows, at least as she saw it, would place the blame firmly on him — it had been he who had fired first, in the fear and confusion and the dust-laden darkness. She didn’t know how much trouble that would get him into, but she suspected it would be a lot, and not the kind she would wish on anyone.
And he had, in the past little while, started to show her at least a kind of respect.
“That was a…” She searched for the best word. “A misunderstanding. I don’t think your men expected to find us in there, and we just wanted to get out.”
Neheb-Kau’s eyes glowed, subtly. “Kafra?”
“It is possible, my Lord. The ch’epta who entered with us were afraid. One cried out… Perhaps the situation was not as clear-cut as I had thought.”
At that, the robed advisor leaned down towards Neheb-Kau’s mask. There was a brief, whispered exchange. Carter tried to listen in, but the chamber was too full of echoes.
Then Djetec straightened, and Neheb-Kau spoke aloud. “Human, you tried to steal the Ash Eater from me. Attempted to access the Pit’s control matrix.”
Carter shook her head. “That’s not true.”
“The damage you caused has been catalogued,” said Djetec.
“I’m not denying that we tried to access the control system, but we weren’t trying to steal anything. We were just trying to get home, that’s all. When the Pit took off we were trapped.”
“I am told you very nearly succeeded,” replied Neheb-Kau.
“We did?”
“Indeed. Given more time, you would either have taken control of the Pit’s primary systems, or caused the hyperdrive to explode.”
“Oh.” Suddenly, the throne room seemed rather cold. “Okay.”
“Which implies considerable knowledge of our technologies,” Neheb-Kau went on. “You say you have worked against Apophis, alongside your traitorous companion. In so doing, have you learned of our machines?”
“I know something about them.”
The mask tipped, quizzically. “Impressive. You are a scientist among your people?”
There was little point denying it. “I am, yes.”
“As am I.” There was something in the Goa’uld’s awful voice that might even been a smile. “I too study technologies alien to my race. And have been persecuted. Human, we have much in common.”
That drew a swift, sideways glare from the thin-faced advisor. Carter could see that the man had not approved at all of the comparison, but if Neheb-Kau had noticed, he didn’t show it. In fact, he seemed almost eager to engage with Carter.
“You have questions,” he was saying. “We scientists always do. Let me answer them for you.” He reached to his pectoral and pressed a gem.
The room shivered. There was a grating, a deep, sonorous grinding, continuous and powerful and frightening, like vast blocks of stone sliding one against the other. For a moment Carter couldn’t determine what the sound was or where it was coming from, until she realized that the sloping rear wall of the chamber was moving.
The entire wall was sliding downwards, and at its upper edge, the glossy black of its facing gave way to an even deeper darkness.
It was a window, she realized. The wall was a viewport, a section of the ship’s angled outer hull that was as transparent as air. Outside, she saw space, a velvet night spattered with diamond pinpricks. Entranced, she stepped forwards, hardly even seeing the gold-clad guards bringing their staff-weapons to bear on her, or the naked slaves cowering behind the throne. She was looking at the stars.
Samantha Carter had seen the depths of space before, untold times. But not like this. The stars were wrong. Their profusion was impaired, misshapen. At the top of the viewport she could see hardly any, but as the sliding wall dropped entirely away she saw that there were far more below her.
And along the right-hand side of the viewport, there were none at all.
It took Carter several seconds to work out that there was a planet there, a dark crescent, almost featureless against the night. Its surface was black, with just a faint, ruddy glow of reflected sunlight giving it any solidity at all. If Carter concentrated on it, she could just make out a texture, a slow roil of cloud, but as soon as her eyes moved it was gone again. Black on black, impenetrable.
It was an oddly disturbing sight. Carter had never seen a world that looked so utterly dead.
The ship was above the ecliptic plane. If the whirling disc of the galaxy could be thought of as horizontal, her voyage aboard the Pit of Sorrows had taken her up, either directly or at a steep angle. The ship was still aligned in the same plane, so there seemed to be more stars beneath Carter’s feet than above her head. It was a strange feeling, vertiginous and dizzying.
The grinding of the viewport shield had ceased, replaced by a softer noise. Behind her, the platform was rotating.
“It has a certain beauty, does it not?” Neheb-Kau’s voice was hushed, even the Goa’uld vibration behind it suppressed. “From the surface, even more so… A magnificent desolation, an endless sea of ash beneath a leaden sky…”
Carter couldn’t think of anything less attractive than the corpse-world beyond the window, but she refrained from saying so.
“My Lord,” said Kafra, his voice strangely subdued. “If I may leave your presence briefly?”
“The sight too much for you, old friend?”
“There is a matter I must attend to. A minor thing. I shall be but moments.”
“Very well.” The Goa’uld waved him away, as one might shoo away a fly. “Human, forgive my First Prime. He finds this world disturbing. You and I are of sterner stuff.”
Carter watched Kafra walking out, the golden doors swinging open at his approach. “It sounds like you’ve been down to the surface.”
“Long ago. But I never forgot it. Human, I have seen wonders beyond your comprehension, worlds of ice and fire.” He was almost whispering now. “But nothing I have experienced matches this nameless world.
Nothing
. It affected me greatly.”
Carter looked back at him, and past him. At the black chamber, lit with small fires, the low ceiling, the silent and terrified slaves… “I can see that.”
A thunderous expression had appeared on Djetec’s face. Carter spoke quickly. “But what brought you all the way out here?”
“Legends,” replied Neheb-Kau. “Rumors. Scraps of data collected over a thousand years. The lost history of the race which ruled the galaxy long before the Goa’uld.”
“The Ancients.”
He laughed. “Those sickly fools? Before even them… Long before, when the stars were young, they left this world and built an empire to which even the Goa’uld cannot aspire. Human, as we are Gods to you, we would be worms before them.”
No wonder Neheb-Kau had sought the place out, Carter thought. The promise of any technological advantage would draw such a creature like blood draws a shark. Not, judging by the state of his vessel, that it had done him much good. “But they must have died out too, surely?”
“Ah, that is the one true answer, human.” Neheb-Kau gestured at the black planet, his rotted hand sliding horribly from his robe. “They are indeed gone, dead and vanished as though they never existed. Their hunger was too great.”
“Hunger?”
“For energy. At the start, to power their machines, their starships, their civilization. But over time, they adapted themselves to feed on pure energy itself. And as they became more powerful, they in turn required more power.”
It was an equation that had troubled Carter herself, on more than one occasion.
“They were voracious,” continued Neheb-Kau, obviously enthused by the subject. “They became creatures of pure appetite, nothing more; able to strip all energy from a sun in weeks, from a world in mere hours.” His voice was louder, now, filled with a breathy passion. “
All
energy, even from solid matter. Where they trod, only dust remained.”
Dust
. “Oh my God,” Carter breathed. “You mean —”
The Goa’uld was on his feet. “Yes… You see? Do you see? When their hunger for energy outstripped their means to acquire it, their civilization fell. Imploded!”
“My Lord,” hissed the advisor. “Your host!”
“They retreated, devouring their own empire as they went. Back here, to their homeworld, where the last of them fed on the only source of energy available to them.”
“They ate their own sun?”
“That first. Then each other. Until only one remained.”
Carter turned back to the window, stared out over that blighted, lifeless planet.
He eats the meal, the pot, the fire and the ash beneath…
It was a child’s phrase now, robbed of all fear, all meaning. Too old to remember. Nothing except scraps of rumor, fragments of legend, unimaginably old and corroded and terrible. Shards of story that should have been left to decay, to vanish, not pieced back together and brought into the light. Not followed, across gulfs of space, to reveal the dead homeworld of a carnivorous nightmare.
Laura Miles, she thought, sickened. Greg Kemp, dried and withered in the ruins of the Ash Eater’s victims. Lucas Harlowe. Anna Andersson — when the creature stripped all the energy from her, even from the very cells of her body, she became dust, inert powder.
“How can it be alive?” she whispered. “After all this time?”
“Life and death are distinctions that no longer apply. It exists, and it feeds. That is all. It has no mind. Unchecked, it absorbs all energy within reach. Nothing remains but ash.” Neheb-Kau slumped back down into his throne. The mask tipped forwards. “The last survivor of the most powerful race in all history, and that arrogant cretin Ra kept it as a pet. Threw victims to it whenever the whim took him…”
There was a breeze behind her, a subtle shift of the chamber’s spiced air. Carter looked back over her shoulder and saw Kafra hurry in. He paced quickly up to the throne, then dropped to one knee before it, staff held vertical . “My Lord, I bring news.”
“Speak.”
“Our long-range sensors have detected a fleet in hyperspace, heading towards us.”
The mask tipped towards Djetec. “They seek the prize?”
“It seems likely. Ra possessed many chappa’ai.”
“Then it is time to leave this beautiful world.” Neheb-Kau straightened in his throne. “Djetec, have the pel’tak made ready for my presence. I shall guide us back to our own domains.”
“You’re leaving?” Carter gasped.
The words left her lips before she could stop them. If there was a chance, however small, that the approaching fleet was somehow allied to Stargate Command, then she needed the throneship to stay right where it was. But now it seemed that Neheb-Kau was ready to take his new toy and go home with it.
“For now,” the Goa’uld replied “The time for confrontation with our enemies is not yet at hand.”
Kafra was getting up. “We are but one vessel, human. Would you have us challenge a fleet?”
Neheb-Kau barked a dry, thin laugh. “You forget, Kafra. When the Ash Eater is fully in my thrall, one vessel is all we will need. And then, our rise to power will be inexorable!”
Beside him, Djetec nodded sagely. “Until that day, we must retire. There is much to prepare.”
“And what of you, human?” Neheb-Kau’s mask turned towards Carter. “Whatever shall I do with you?”
Djetec leaned down to his master’s hidden head. “Be wary, my Lord. There is still much we do not know about this slave.” His eyes flicked to Carter. They were cold, like little chips of black ice, and somehow greedy. “Do not forget the weapon she carried. Does a scientist go armed?”
“I suppose that depends where she goes,” replied the Goa’uld. He sat back, his withered hands clasping the arms of his throne. “But still, she intrigues me. There is much we could learn from each other…”
“The God is most wise. Yet perhaps I might prepare her, personally. To make sure she presents no threat to your plans.”
Carter stepped forwards, her hands spread. “I’m no threat to you. And neither is Teal’c… And sir, I’m sorry, but I don’t see how we can be of any use to you, either.” She gestured at the black world outside the viewport. “You have the Ash Eater now, you don’t need us. All we want is to be allowed off this ship.”
Djetec’s expression had been getting increasingly furious as Carter spoke. “Silence, slave!” he snapped. “You dare speak to your betters in such a manner?”
“Betters?”
He turned to Neheb-Kau once more. “Please, my Lord, let me prepare her. She must be schooled in the proper manner by which to converse with a God.”
“My Lord Neheb-Kau,” said Kafra suddenly. “I respectfully disagree with your
Tjaty
.”
“What a surprise,” the Goa’uld replied.
“Determining whether the human is a benefit or a hazard is a matter for warriors, my Lord. For your First Prime. Is it not my duty to stand between you and all who would threaten you?”
“It is.”
“I will take charge of the slave, and her
shol’va
. When I see fit to pronounce them safe, I shall have them delivered to you.” He turned his dark gaze on the advisor. “After all,
Tjaty
Djetec, are you not required to prepare the pel’tak?”