McKay’s free hand turned in the air. “Several, actually,” he said absently. “Oh boy. This is… Incredible.”
“And not in a good way. I’m getting that.”
“Fenrir’s new project was a super-weapon, something so powerful it was capable of obliterating entire star systems…” Rodney shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe what he was reading. “A sun killer. Good grief. He built a collapsar bomb.”
“Nightfall,” murmured Sheppard.
McKay waved the data pad at a graphic of a device, a cylindrical module bearing the ‘isa’ rune that had appeared earlier. “That’s it.”
“How does it work? Is it a beam, a missile?”
McKay shook his head. “It’s the ultimate in scorched-earth devices. I mean, forget your nukes or your fusion warheads, those are like firecrackers compared to a collapsar device.” He stuffed the data pad under his armpit and made a globe with his hands. “Every star has a finite life span, right? After so many billions of years they burn out and implode —”
“Collapse.”
“Right. But some go beyond that super-compacting level, they go past the point of no return and become a singularity, a collapsar!” Rodney was speaking rapidly now, animated by the lethal power of what he was describing. “A gravitational maelstrom so powerful that nothing can escape it, not even light itself, something that is literally a death star!” He closed his hands into tight ball. “A black hole.”
Sheppard turned back and looked at the solar system model he had seen earlier, a small orange star orbited by a spread of six planets. “And that would be goodnight for any planets in the vicinity.”
McKay nodded. “See, that kind of stellar collapse takes a long time to come about. I mean, most species would have either evolved far enough along to leave their planet behind before this could ever happen to them, or else they’d have been exterminated in one of their star’s earlier expansive phases. But Fenrir figured out how to make a sun go black in minutes.”
“How is that possible?”
He worked the pad and brought the cutaway of the star to the front of the forest of images. “We know the Asgard have an deep understanding of cosmology, temporal physics, matter-energy transfer… This is a merging of all three.” He pointed at the heart of the star where a diamond-shaped glyph had appeared. “The collapsar bomb is beamed into the middle of the star and it generates a fast-time field.” Sheppard watched as a globe of white energy expanded out of the device. “Everything inside that radius experiences the passage of time at a vastly accelerated rate, we’re talking a trillion years in a nanosecond.” The image expanded until it was filling the room.
Sheppard nodded grimly as the enormity of what he was watching became clearer. “It eats the heart out of the sun. Turns it rotten inside.”
Suddenly the graphic vanished and became a hyper-detailed image of the star and its worlds, moving about their orbital paths, turning before them in silence.
He felt giddy for a moment at the stark transition and rocked back on his heels. The colonel felt as if he could reach out and touch the glowing sun.
“And then…” McKay’s voice was hushed. “Instant stellar collapse.”
Silently, the star died in front of them. The glowing sphere seemed to shake, trembling like a soap bubble in a breeze, suddenly vulnerable. Flares erupted all over its surface, turning it into a furious churn of energy; the color of the sun shifted, darkening as its spectra was broken apart. Sheppard’s breath caught in his throat as the orange star flickered and contracted, as if an invisible hand were tightening around it.
Then came the flash; the murdered sun pulsed brilliant white, the image throwing stark, hard-edged shadows across the walls of the compartment. He reflexively looked away, the intense light pricking his eyes.
“X-rays,” said Rodney. “An output equal to billions of hydrogen bombs.”
Sheppard blinked away the purple after-image from his retinas, and watched an expanding sphere of the radiation shockwave swell. It crossed the orbits of the inner worlds first, then reached inexorably toward the larger planets and the gas giants further out. He saw one desert globe as it passed within arm’s length of his face; the wave kissed it and it turned black. “Nothing could survive that.” His throat was dry.
McKay shook his head. “Any habitable world is burnt to a cinder. The radiation turns the atmosphere into plasma. A planet-sized firestorm.”
Now the star began a final, inexorable spiral toward implosion, the wreckage of the sun and the halo of stellar material crowding it drawing back, retreating inward. The single point of light grew darker and darker, the orbits of the devastated worlds twisting as gravity grew stronger. The shattered planets coiled in, falling toward a second death.
There was a final, brief eruption of color, and then the star was gone; in its place, a featureless ball of blackness surrounded by a disc of dead matter.
Abruptly, the image froze and Sheppard gasped; without realizing, he’d been holding in his breath. “That’s a pretty damned final solution,” he admitted. “Deploy that in a system infested by Replicators and you’d wipe them out. The speed that happened, they’d never even have the time to jump into hyperspace.” He turned to Rodney. “But this has gotta be a theory, though, right? I mean, tell me they didn’t actually build this thing?”
The color drained from McKay’s face and he looked up from the data pad in his hand. “John… What we just saw… That wasn’t a simulation. That was a recording of an actual real-time sensor log. Fenrir’s weapon killed six planets. One of them had a pre-industrial culture living on it.”
A hot flare of anger struck him. “Why the hell would he do that?”
The panes of text returned, the image of the dead sun vanishing. “It was a error. A misfire.”
“An error?” Sheppard snapped. “A whole star system ripped apart by mistake? That’s a pretty damned big screw up!”
McKay nodded. “There’s a report here, written by none other than Thor himself.” He paused, reading. “Fenrir was running a test of the collapsar device’s deployment system, against the advice of the Asgard Council. He had been warned that it wasn’t ready, but Fenrir didn’t agree. He wanted to certify it ready to use against the Replicators. It was never supposed to trigger.”
“But it did.” Sheppard ran a hand down his face. “Holy crap, how do we know he doesn’t have more of these things on board that ship of his?” He moved to the intercom panel. “I’m calling the bridge. We’ll get Odyssey to send Atlantis a flash traffic message, warn Carter —”
“Wait!” McKay grabbed his arm. “This is an Asgard we’re talking about, remember? Don’t forget, most of the cutting edge tech on our ships is based on hardware they gave us! And that includes our FTL communications.”
“Meaning any signal we send Fenrir could read and decrypt.” Sheppard was silent for a long moment. “We have to go back, then, warn Atlantis in person. Download everything you can pack into a hard drive. We gotta jet, right this minute.”
But McKay’s attention was on the screens of data. “Just a second,” he said, his eyes widening. “There’s more here. Another holographic file, bearing Thor’s personal seal.”
Sheppard hesitated; what he had seen troubled him greatly, and he couldn’t get the image of the dying star from his mind, imagining the same horror unfolding inside Atlantis’s sun, the same monstrous storm of boiling atmosphere engulfing the ocean planet and the city of the Ancients. But too he understood that they needed to know the whole story before they returned the Pegasus galaxy.
“Okay,” he said. “Run it.”
“So,” said Corporal Kennedy, “you’re an Asgard, then.”
The tall alien creature standing across the corridor from him gave the soldier a curious, doll-eyed look. “This is a Risar,” it explained. “It is a fabricated short-span genetic construct drawn from optimized Asgard DNA, retro-evolved for greater physical strength and motility.”