STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air

by James Swallow

  Air

  James Swallow

  Based on the scripts by Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper

  An original publication of Fandemonium Ltd, produced under license from MGM Consumer Products.

  Fandemonium Books, PO Box 795A, Surbiton, Surrey KT5 8YB, United Kingdom

  Visit our website: www.stargatenovels.com

  METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER Presents

  STARGATE UNIVERSE™

  ROBERT CARLYLE LOUIS FERREIRA BRIAN J. SMITH ELYSE LEVESQUE

  DAVID BLUE ALAINA HUFFMAN JAMIL WALKER SMITH

  Executive Producers JONATHAN GLASSNER and BRAD WRIGHT

  MICHAEL GREENBURG RICHARD DEAN ANDERSON

  Developed for Television by BRAD WRIGHT & ROBERT C. COOPER

  Created by BRAD WRIGHT & ROBERT C. COOPER

  STARGATE UNIVERSE © 2011 MGM Global Holdings Inc. STARGATE: UNIVERSE is a trademark of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All rights reserved.

  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc TM & © 2011 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  Photography and cover art: Copyright © 2011 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  WWW.STARGATE.MGM.COM

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written consent of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Acknowledgements:

  The author would like to thank John Scalzi, Brad Wright, Lawren Bancroft-Wilson, Joe Mallozzi, Karol Mora and Jon Rosenberg for their assistance in getting some air under the wings of this adaptation.

  Author’s Note:

  This novel is based on the Stargate Universe episodes “Air, Part 1”, “Air, Part 2” and “Air, Part 3”. Certain scenes and story elements have been adapted for the purposes of novelization.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  PROLOGUE

  In the deeps, in the places where the light of suns burns faint and the reach of gravity fails, nothing lives.

  The void is inimical to life. Out in the darkness and the unremitting, absolute cold, the sheer absence of anything but scatterings of free hydrogen, cosmic rays and stellar dust means that nothing can survive.

  The frail, weak meat of organic life perishes in moments. Blood and fluids flash-boiling and freezing all at once. Organs detonating under pressure violation. Skin disintegrating, precious breaths torn away. The dark punishes anything with the temerity to invade its realm; and in the infinite emptiness of it all, those who die are lost and forgotten.

  But still they come, in search of something. Knowledge and power. Purpose and redemption. Life challenges the darkness to find its destiny.

  Against the reach of the endless night and the ocean of stars, the ship thundered on, its voyage unending.

  It was vast, by the human scale of things. If an observer could have stood upon the dorsal hull of the vessel, they would have seen canyons of old steel and domes of azure glass, great battlements of black iron and crenellations raised high; and beyond, dwarfing all else, a steep-sided ziggurat straddling the craft’s mid-line. From close in, the dimensions of the construct could only be guessed at.

  If one could stand at steps removed, far enough out beyond the glowing wake of energy that sheathed the vessel in transit, then the full shape of it would be revealed. From a sword-tip bow growing out to an enormous axe-blade stern, the ship cut through the dark. It might have been a weapon, thrown far by a defiant enemy, or a graceful carving cast adrift by artisans and thinkers. It moved quicker than the pulse of starlight itself, warping the nature of space about its long, ornate flanks. The ship’s course was straight and steady, set down by minds long dead and maintained by thinking machines that had shepherded the vessel across countless light-years.

  The kiss of the void belied the age of it. In places, the hull metal was as shipyard-bright as it had been the day it had been forged; but elsewhere the passage of eons was visible in pitted, corroded towers and broken spires. And there were other scars upon her, scars that might have been marks left by the fury of a singularity, the blaze of a mad sun, the hammer blow of a comet. Or perhaps not; perhaps they were the wounds of tooth and claw from enemies who had died trying to take the ship for themselves. The disfigurements of old battles, lost to time and long forgotten.

  Within, the ship was not quite silent. Through each deck, mighty engines as large as mountains made their power known with a steady, bass rumble that reached everywhere, resonating up through old iron floor plates and arching walls of dense gunmetal. The vessel had a pulse of machine-life to it, as slow and careful systemry continued on an endless cycle of duties, following programs that had been laid down in an era before humans had walked upright.

  But it was faint indeed. Pale traceries of oxygen ice layered the lengths of the ship’s endless, frigid corridors. The cold and dormant spaces within the hull were dark and bleak. As it had been for so long — Decades? Centuries? Millennia? — there were no footsteps, no voices, no simple human sounds. If there were ghosts, then they did not make themselves known.

  And then, without warning, in the heart of the craft the stillness was shattered forever.

  There were many spaces inside the ship that resembled the chamber, long halls of arching iron ribs that rose up from a worn deck to meet a darkened, forge-built ceiling. Turns of copper-sheathed rails guided flights of stairs up from the lowest level to a higher ring of balconies that looked down upon the still, cold room. Here and there, sculpted consoles emerged from the deck plates, faces turned upward, each one catching a glitter of faint light across glassy, inert panels.

  The chamber was unremarkable but for the one thing that set it apart, the great object that could not fail to draw all attention. At one end of the hall, rising from a slot in the deck, a heavy ring of metal, gray as sea-ice, dense as cast pewter, stood sentinel. Its circumference was separated into nine sections, each bordered by a sculpted arrowhead of steel, bone and tarnished gold; and in turn each section was divided into four leaves of metal, each etched with a string of symbols resembling lines, circles and dots.

  Reaching out across some vast and incalculable distance, exotic energies that were the precursors of a rip in the fabric of space-time brushed the intelligence of the device, and the ship that surrounded it. With a groan of collapsing energies, the tempo of the vessel’s vast drives slowed, and it fell back from the near-light speed velocities of its normal cruise to a more sedate pace.

  Steady, patient devices buried in the walls came to life with resonant gusts of atmosphere, flooding the chamber with breathing gasses, while concealed elements in the floors and the walls poured new heat into the room, warring against the void-chill soaked deep through the starship’s hull. Long-silent warning sirens came to life.

  The great steel circle trembled, awakening. With a rush of sudden motion, the entirety of the ring began to rotate about its axis, spinning, orienting itself for the instant when it would accept a rush of power that had come to it from far across the cosmic void.

  At once, the spin halted and every chevron about the circle flashed a brilliant, star-bright white. From the inner space of the ring, dead air was transformed into a gli
ttering, shining wave front. It thundered outward across the chamber, punching a channel through the substance of the universe itself. The storm-roar echoed down the empty corridors of the vessel, before dying away into a ripple of light and color.

  The Stargate was open; and in the next second a human being came hurtling through it, too high, too fast, too hard.

  Matthew Scott wasn’t exactly a stranger to pain. He’d taken enough of it in his time. Fights in bars, rough play during high school sports, and that incident during jump training… But those had just been physical impacts, just the brute force collision between meat and obstacle. This was something outside his experience.

  The lieutenant had heard the theory. Once in a while, the mention slipped into the conversations of the old dogs who’d served on the early SG teams, the guys who were now instructors or base commanders. He’d heard them talk about something they called ‘the Hard Gate’. It had happened a fair few times in the early days of the Stargate program, or so the stories went. Something about the way the gate on Earth wasn’t initially exactly synched up with the gate it was dialing out to. If it was just a little out of whack, you came out the other end covered in frost. But if the mismatch was above a certain tolerance, then it off-set your kinetic energy. You took a careful, easy step through the entry gate, but when you reached the exit end of the wormhole, well, the cumulative error in synch had accelerated you up some. The bigger the distance, the worse it would be. Of course, the dialing computers were quickly upgraded to deal with this problem and the incidence of a ‘Hard Gate’ dropped to almost nothing, and even on those rare occasions when it did occur, it usually only affected the first guy through the puddle, as the gates quickly cross-talked and stabilized the connection. But pity that guy walking point, though.

  All this flashed through Matthew Scott’s mind in the half-second or so between leaving Icarus Base behind and being shredded into a discorporated matter stream, then reintegrated to find himself flying through the air like he’d been shot from a cannon. The bright light and noise of the Icarus gate room, then the rush of the wormhole, were replaced by icy blackness — and for an instant Scott was gripped by the fear that he’d emerged through a planet-orbiting space gate, like they had out in the Pegasus galaxy; but then a steel floor came up out of the gloom and slammed into him, blasting the air from his lungs in an explosive wheeze.

  He rolled over on to his back, blinking away the pain. The watery shimmer of wormhole-light cast a cold, polar glow over everything, surrounding him with jumping, fluid shadows.

  A woman’s scream, thin and reedy, snapped him back to the moment. Scott turned, ignoring the jags of pain all down his side, and looked toward the open Stargate. People were coming through after him, boiling across the threshold in rough disorder, one after another. Another man, then a woman, both of them carrying heavy packs, both of them yelling out as they collided with the floor, crashing into each other hard enough to bruise or maybe break bone. They barely got clear before more surged through behind them, and with each new arrival the chill air filled up with cries of panic and surprise. It was like watching a flood, and in amid the mayhem, baggage and vital equipment were getting knocked around or cast away.

  Scott didn’t see any uniforms among them and he grimaced reflexively. Civilians. Take them out of their comfort zone and they fall to pieces. He turned the pain from his bruises into annoyance, and that propelled him to his feet. Someone was going to have to play traffic cop here, and he was the only person in the room with bars on his collar.

  “Get outta the way!” Securing his weapon, he darted forward, waving his hands and shoving stumbling figures away from the line of exit through the Stargate. “I said get outta the way, damn it! Make a hole!”

  He gave a pale-faced guy in a lab coat a forceful push and almost stumbled right into the woman standing behind him. He saw dark hair framing Asian features, and eyes that were so lost and terrified he suddenly felt bad about dismissing the fears of the civvies so quickly. He remembered her name; Camile Wray, one of the suit-and-tie brigade posted to Icarus by the International Oversight Advisory.

  “Where are we?” she said, her voice high and tight with tension. “This isn’t the SGC! Why didn’t we come back to Earth?”

  Scott wasn’t about to stop and discuss the matter of their swift exit. “There was no time to explain!” he snapped, and propelled her out toward the shadowed edges of the room. “Go!”

  With swift motions and barked orders, the lieutenant started to make a dent in the chaos of the evacuees, dragging dazed newcomers out of the path of those following on behind, directing them to gather up fallen packs or just move away with whatever they’d been given to haul through. It was a hysterical moving day crossed with a haunted house ride, only much less fun than it sounded.

  Other people saw what he was doing and joined in. Lab coat guy came back and began to copy Scott’s actions, pulling new arrivals aside, guiding them off into the dimness. It wasn’t enough, though. Too many people were spilling through, and they were coming faster than the folks on this side could deal with them.

  The lieutenant took a breath and keyed the handheld radio clipped to the breast of his combat vest. “This is Scott,” he said, “I need you to slow down the evac! Everyone’s coming in too hot, we can’t handle them!” When a reply didn’t come back in the next instant, he tried again, calling for his commanding officer. “Colonel, come in! Do you copy me, over?”

  Still nothing. He advanced toward the gate’s event horizon, threading through people picking themselves up off the deck, or bumbling around like lost children. Without thinking he reached down and helped a civilian get to his feet.

  The man stood up and Scott recognized another familiar face. “Doctor Rush?”

  Nicholas Rush blinked and gave him a weak nod by way of a thank you. The man had a face that hinted at a hard life, eyes that could go right through you. Scott wondered if that was for show, or if that was who Rush really was.

  “Lieutenant,” he said, and Scott saw right away that the man wasn’t the least bit afraid. If anything, the scientist looked…interested. Scott moved on, leaving Rush behind. Sure, the guy was some kind of super-genius, but there was something about the man’s attitude that didn’t sit right with the young Air Force officer. He shook the thought away; this wasn’t the time to dwell on that. He had a job to do.

  Scott tried the radio again, catching sight of Curtis, one of the base’s USMC contingent. The Marine had an unconscious woman cradled in his arms, and there was blood marking her face from an ugly cut over her forehead.

  Curtis shouted loud to be heard over the noise. “I need a medic here!”

  “Sergeant!” Scott called out to get the man’s attention, and pointed away with the radio. “Get any casualties off the line. Move ’em first, patch ’em later.”

  The Marine scowled back at him but accepted the order with a nod and moved off.

  Scott tried the radio a third time. “Icarus Base, respond!”

  All that came back through the open gate were more bodies.

  Eli Wallace was most definitely a stranger to pain. One could even suggest that he had done his best to live a life where his exposure to any pain-causing vectors was as minimal as humanly possible. Eli considered the eating of brutally spicy food, the occasional paintball tournament and an annual game of street hockey the only places where pain was allowed into his life. He didn’t view this as a failing on his part in any way; rather, Eli imagined that it made him smarter than most people, who willingly busted themselves up for what he considered to be no good reason.

  So coming though the Stargate at the head of a crowd of terrified people and being slammed into a steel floor was not something he was prepared for. Eli scrambled back to his feet, fighting down the raw, animal urge to panic, and ran his hands over his chest and legs, desperately afraid that he was going to find something in the wrong place.

  He’d actually been looking forward to going through the Sta
rgate for the first time, but being forced to do it under such dangerous and near-frantic conditions had worked up a whole array of fears in his mind. He’d closed his eyes as he went through, but all he could think of was the fate of poor Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. Eli patted his face, and felt a rush of relief when he realized it wasn’t coming off in his hands.

  He barely had time to register that before a big, heavy equipment case burped through the wormhole’s event horizon and whizzed past his head, narrowly missing him. The case hit the deck in front of him and cracked open along a seam, disgorging its contents in a wide fan.

  Nearby, a figure in a black combat uniform was leading one of the other scientists out of harm’s way. Eli saw the woman’s face and his eyes flicked to her name badge — Johansen. She was a medic, wasn’t she?

  “I think my arm’s broken,” said the man.

  “Take it easy, Volker,” she told him, moving him aside so she could concentrate on people with more immediate needs.

  Eli turned back to the gate in time to see the next thing coming through; a middle-aged man, in a suit that was probably worth more than every item of clothing Eli owned put together. The first word out of the man’s mouth was “Chloe?”

  “Senator Armstrong?” Eli hesitated, not sure what he should do to help the politician. He glanced around. Armstrong’s daughter had been in front of Eli in the scramble to go through the gate; she had to be close by.

  The senator didn’t seem to notice Eli and pushed past him. “Chloe? Where are you?”

  “Dad!” A voice called out from across the room and both of them turned to see a young woman in what had to be the most inappropriate outfit for their present circumstances. “I’m over here!” Chloe Armstrong somehow managed to remain looking dynamite in her designer dress, even though it was peppered with rock dust.