STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air

by James Swallow

  Armstrong started forward toward his daughter, and Eli trailed after him, but Johansen blocked the politician’s path. “Senator, give me a hand, please.” She gestured at an injured man lying at her feet. He was one of the number crunchers from the base labs, and looking very much the worse for wear.

  Armstrong was still focused on Chloe. “But my daughter is—”

  “She’s fine, I saw her,” said the officer, her voice all hard edges and command school brusque. “But this man isn’t, so give me a hand!”

  Belatedly, Eli realized that he ought to be helping as well, and moved in to give some support to the pair of them. The woman gave him a nod and he placed her face. Her first name was Tamara; he’d heard some of the other Air Force guys calling her ‘T.J.’ She looked like the type of person who could flick from severe to smooth in a heartbeat.

  “Over here,” she said, and Eli and Armstrong dutifully followed her to a clear spot to put the guy down. Tamara bent over the scientist, and so she didn’t see Armstrong grimace in pain, his face going pale. The senator’s hand went to his side, and Eli opened his mouth to speak; but the man was already walking away, his job done.

  “Are you okay?” Chloe asked, coming to her father.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” said Armstrong, covering his moment of pain as they walked off. “Where the hell are we?”

  Eli stood and watched Tamara work, suddenly at a loss for what to do with his hands.

  Nicholas Rush took the curved stairs two at a time, almost bounding on to the upper level of the chamber — the gate room, he corrected. His hands dropped to the rail around the edge of the upper balcony and he flinched. For a second he could have sworn he felt an electric tingle run through him, a giddy thrill at the sheer amazement of standing here, in this place, seeing this sight. His gaze flicked down to the rail. The metal was old and pitted, but worn smooth from the action of hands upon it. Rush wondered how long it had been since a human being had stood where he stood now, touched the metal that he was touching. Millions of years ago? It was staggering to consider. The construction of the chamber was like no Ancient technology he had seen. The metallic structure was repeated everywhere, on the walls and the rails. Below he’d found a console of similar design, but it hadn’t responded to any of his attempts to activate it.

  He looked up and stared out across the room, across the chaos below. Some fifty, perhaps sixty people had now arrived through the open Stargate, disordered and afraid, some literally forming a pile of bodies and equipment in front of the shimmering wormhole. Rush blinked and realized that this was the first time he had looked back to actually see the Stargate he had come through. The white glow of the active chevrons burned hard in the dimness, illuminating a construct clearly different from the gate designs found in the Milky Way and Pegasus galaxies.

  Perhaps that’s the original pattern, he wondered, the classic model? He filed away the thought for later consideration.

  People were still trickling through, fleeing in panic from the calamity unfolding back at Icarus, all that distance away at the far end of the wormhole. Rush knew that on some level he was supposed to be afraid, but he didn’t feel it. He looked down at the people, at the soldiers and civilians, his so-called colleagues and the rest of the make-weights, and he found himself looking right through them.

  He took it all in, the Stargate, the walls of gray steel and the air of old and ancient days; and it was all he could do not to break into a smile. The only emotion he could bring to light was pride.

  Scott had given up on the radio and gone back to doing what he could at his end — namely, motivating the Icarus refugees with sharp words and in some cases, your actual kick in the ass. By this point, a good percentage of the people coming through were airmen and jarheads, and they were trained well enough that when a motivated-looking young first lieutenant barked an order in their direction, they did what they were told, double-time.

  The civilians, though… They were utterly unready for this. Icarus was supposed to be a cushy, low-traction posting where scientists did things with boxes of blinky lights and generally had nothing more to worry about than running low on pudding in the mess hall. They just weren’t trained for everything to go from fine to FUBAR at the drop of a hat.

  So, like they told him at OCS, if in doubt, shout. Scott drew in a breath and snarled at every civilian in earshot. “Clear this area! There could still be more incoming!”

  Airmen and Marines would have moved. The civilians mostly just hesitated. They were still working off the shock of it all, and the gate journey was just one more thing on top of everything else that had happened.

  It was Ron Greer’s voice that cut through the stunned silence. “You heard him, people!” he roared, drill-sergeant loud. “Move move move!”

  That lit a fire under them, and finally the people in front of the gate began to shift away, but not quick enough.

  Greer threw him a look and Scott nodded to the stocky, dark-skinned Marine. “Where’s Colonel Young?” he asked.

  “He was right behind me,” said Greer, nodding back toward the open wormhole.

  Scott turned to the gate in time to see the last man come through; and he pitied the poor son-of-a-bitch, because the black-clad figure was buoyed on a brilliant blast of fire and smoke that crashed out of the gate behind him. The force of the discharge blew hot, charred air into the gate room, bringing with it the stink of burnt plastic, ozone and other smells that Scott didn’t want to think too much about.

  He barely had time to process all that when the Stargate gave a rattling hum and went dark. The wormhole vanished into quantum foam and all illumination in the chamber was extinguished. The screaming started a second or two after that.

  Someone shouted “Lights!” and a bright beam stabbed out of the darkness, sweeping across the room. Scott saw smoke-dirty faces caught in the sodium glare, staring out into the dark, desperate and afraid.

  More flashlights blinked on, and Scott snatched a MagLite from the grip of a nearby airman and went searching. A cold, unpleasant certainty was settling in on him, and as much as he didn’t want to confirm it, he knew he had to.

  His beam fell on the crumpled form of the last man through, and Scott’s jaw set. “Colonel?”

  Colonel Everett Young grimaced with pain and tried to lever himself off the deck without success. Scott moved closer, and tried very hard not to think about the fact that Young was the first survivor he had seen that outranked him.

  The colonel blinked owlishly and focused on the other officer. Scott’s CO looked ten years older than his normal hard-edged forties, the pain taking all the life out of him. “Where are we?” he coughed.

  Scott bent down to support the colonel’s head, holding him up so they could converse face to face. “I don’t know, sir.” Kinda hoped you’d have that answer. “Are you…?”

  Young tried to move but the effort drained him. “Lieutenant,” he began, and Scott knew what he would say next before the words left his lips. “You’re in charge.”

  He was going to argue, but the colonel put an end to that by losing consciousness. Scott cursed under his breath and settled the man back on the deck; and that was when he realized his hand was wet. He shone the flashlight on his palm and it was crimson with Young’s blood.

  In an instant he was standing and calling out. “T.J.! Get over here!” He turned and spotted her bent over an injured scientist.

  Tamara ignored the order for a moment. She took the hand of another civvie — a woman, one of the other eggheads from Icarus — and placed it carefully over a wound she’d just bandaged. “Keep pressure here until the bleeding stops.” Then she was striding over to him, her expression unreadable.

  Scott stood back and let her take a look at Young. “Is he okay?”

  The medic bent down. “I don’t know.”

  “We need him,” he hissed, in a low, intense voice.

  Tamara didn’t look up. “Yeah. I got that. Just back off, Matt. Give me some ro
om to work.”

  “Right.” He did so, and found his hands tensing into fists. How all of this had landed on his shoulders was beyond him. It wasn’t what he’d expected. Not at all.

  Scott’s flashlight caught a thickset figure in a hoodie at the edge of its illumination and he went after him. “Wallace!”

  The genius turned to him. He looked as dazed as everyone else. “Uh…”

  “What is this place?” demanded Scott. “Do you know what planet it is, or if it’s a ship, or whatever?”

  Eli held up a hand, apparently afraid that he was about to get blamed for something. “Look, I just did what Rush told me to—”

  Scott seized on the mention of the other man’s name. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know, he went through the gate ahead of me.”

  The lieutenant nodded. “Yeah, he made it, I saw him.” He moved into the middle of the chamber, calling out “Rush! Rush, where are you?”

  Greer approached, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Went that way, I think. Up the stairs over there.”

  Scott accepted this with a nod. If anyone was going to have answers, it would be the Brit doctor. He took a step and a sullen rumble echoed through the decks. He had the sudden sense of the whole ship tensing around them, like an animal coiling its muscles before pouncing; then a second tremor resonated through, and Scott felt a brief sensation of motion and velocity that faded a heartbeat later.

  “What the hell was that?” said Greer.

  “I don’t know.” Scott hesitated, then snapped out an order to the Marine. “Sergeant, get these people settled down. Start making an inventory of everything we brought through as soon as you can. Try to figure out who and what we have. No one leaves this room.” He shot a look at Wallace and, as an afterthought, thrust the MagLite into his hand. “Eli! You help him!”

  The guy took the flashlight and panned it around, and his face changed as he got the first good look at the place they were in. Eli’s mouth dropped open.

  It was then, just by chance, that Scott noticed for the first time the writing on the t-shirt Eli was wearing beneath his hoodie. It was white text on a red background, some kind of nerd joke, just three words: YOU ARE HERE.

  Yeah, he thought as he walked away, wherever the hell that is.

  72 hours earlier

  CHAPTER ONE

  The skies above the planet Omegus IV were a curtain of atomic flame.

  SkullCruisers from the nine fleets of the Star Mongols lay in orbit, their neutronic blasters raining blazing particle death down upon the last bastion world of the Phoenix Brigade. Time ebbed away; soon the photon shell protecting the planet would break open like a Y’kin’la egg, and the peaceful Omegusi would perish…and all because they had been unlucky enough to evolve on a world that had once been a home to the time-lost Precursors.

  The warriors of Phoenix Brigade, the galaxy’s most steadfast defenders, had tracked the hyper-advanced Precursor technology from star to star, in hopes of uncovering the most powerful of the super-science relics the lost civilization had created — the device the Earthmen had nicknamed ‘Prometheus’; but the Star Mongols, the pirates of a million looted planets, were not willing to let the device fall into the hands of the lawful and the noble.

  If they could not have Prometheus, then they would obliterate it.

  Queen Xaria of the Omegusi bent her knee before the elite Phoenix Brigade warrior and bowed low, her golden hair cascading down over her blue-skinned shoulders and the low-cut gown that revealed the swell of her breasts.

  “Lord Captain,” she began breathlessly, indicating the stone temple before them. “Our laws forbid us from entering the Temple of Dakara, but it is said that the force you Earthers call Prometheus lurks within. I grant you passage into the holy spaces, so that you might deliver us from the space brigands who come to pillage our world.” The Queen waved her scepter and the mystic force wall crumbled. “Enter, hero, if you dare.”

  The warrior began to move, but the Omegusi ruler had one more thing to say. “Warrior. If you do this, I will give you my hand in matrimony. All that I have will be yours. I ask only that you give me your true name before you embark on this final test.”

  The Phoenix Brigade warrior paused before answering. “Oh, yeah, right. My name is, uh, ELIsDaMan.”

  “That is a sucky handle, though,” said the tinny male voice in the headset. “It doesn’t have…whaddayacall, dignity.”

  Eli paused, lifting his hands from the keyboard of his computer to reach for the open can of Mountain Dew at his side. He snorted into the microphone at his mouth. “Oh, right. And I suppose Babes_DigMeee is a noble and heroic name?”

  “It’s an accurate one,” came the reply, winging its way across the continental US from Kansas, where Eli’s gamer buddy Josh was busy fighting hordes of Vacuum Dragons instead of working his night shift at the local branch of Buy More.

  “In your dreams.”

  “Yes,” agreed Josh, “Frequently, in fact.”

  Eli sipped his Dew and rolled his eyes, before hunting out a slice of cooling pizza from the box at his feet. As he went for it, his gaze passed over the clock atop his bookshelf and he very carefully ignored the fact that it was past two in the morning. Instead he drummed his fingers in time to the opening riff of Van Halen’s ‘Atomic Punk’ as it issued from a well-worn iPod.

  “How can you listen to that dinosaur rock, man?”

  Eli made a face. “You have no appreciation of the classics. No wonder you keep getting ganked.”

  He heard Josh cough out a denial. “I’m not the one wasting my time. That puzzle, with the Queen and all? It’s a fake-out.”

  “Beg to differ with you.” Eli squared his shoulders and leaned in, hands dancing across the keyboard. On the screen, the noble warrior ELIsDaMan stormed forward and vaulted into the Temple of Dakara, toward a wall covered with heavy buttons made of stone. “It’s just a question of figuring out the code sequence. Get it right and you win. The core of the planet is the power source. You have to channel it into the weapon to destroy the enemy command ship.”

  Each of the buttons bore a set of symbols; some of them were blocky shapes that resembled letters, while others were strings of lines and circles. The latter reminded Eli of old Morse Code dot-dash notations.

  “Can’t be done, dude.”

  Eli thought otherwise. It all came down to math, and numbers spoke to Eli Wallace in a way that he couldn’t really articulate, even if he tried. It was just a thing that he did. He could see the figures strung together, even when they were cloaked under funny-looking symbols like they were right now. Get them in the right order and they fitted like the parts of a well-oiled machine. It was something he’d been able to accomplish ever since he was a kid.

  He tapped the keys and used the mouse to start his computer game avatar working at the stone buttons. “I’m doin’ it,” he reported. In moments, he’d unlock the game’s big prize, blast the bad guys and get the alien space babe.

  Josh’s confidence in him was underwhelming, however. “It’s one’a those programmer’s jokes. It can’t be solved. They just put it in there to mess with your head. Nobody has ever beaten it.”

  Eli felt a grin cross his lips. He saw the solution in his mind, plain as day. “Already solved it.”

  “You did not.” Josh was adamant.

  Pausing to take another sip, Eli cracked his knuckles and put his hand back on the mouse. “Shut up and watch this.” He knew Josh was peeking in on his feed from the Prometheus game server, and that was fine. He wanted a witness to his stunning victory. Eli tapped the controls and on the screen, his avatar pressed home the final glowing symbols. “Yeah. That’s it. Take that!”

  What he expected next was some fully-rendered, high-spec CGI cut-scene of ELIsDaMan smiting the Space Mongols and winning ultimate power. Instead, the on-screen view flickered and jerked, then reset, placing his character on a mountaintop that was many, many virtual miles from the Queen and her temple.


  “What the hell…?” He blinked, waiting for an error message pop-up, but nothing appeared. He’d simply been bounced right back to the start of the instance that had led him to the temple. Reset, just like that; and with it, months of careful gameplay wasted.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” Eli rested the urge to curse. “Nothing happened. I’m back at the beginning of the level…”

  Josh made a negative noise. “You are so full of yourself. Guess you’re not so smart after all, huh?” He broke up into sniffy giggles.

  Eli ignored him, shaking his head, annoyed at the arbitrary unfairness of the game’s glitch. “It worked,” he insisted. “The firing code locked in.”

  “Whatever. Look, I’m going to gear up with ChezeGod and the other guys for a raid on the Mecha-Centaurs, you wanna come with?”

  “No.” In disgust, Eli pulled off the headset and glared at his virtual self on the screen, as if it were the fault of Elite Lord Captain ELIsDaMan that the game had suffered some kind of brain-fart. “That was extremely unsatisfying.”

  For a second, he thought about bringing up his router dashboard, maybe checking the settings to make sure there hadn’t been some weird lag between his PC and the Prometheus game servers, but then his fatigue caught up with him and Eli realized that his eyes felt like sand and he hadn’t taken a pee in over ninety minutes. All those sodas had to go somewhere.

  Thoroughly irritated, Eli vowed that tomorrow morning would be spent posting a stinging rebuke on the Prometheus message boards about the glitchy puzzle, and he padded away to the bathroom, composing his retort in his mind, already thinking about sleep.

  Because of this, he was out of the room when the lights on his wireless modem began flashing furiously, as his anti-virus and firewall programs were swiftly and effortlessly penetrated.

  He awoke from dreams about cute girls with blue skin, to the sound of his name being shouted in that particular tone that only female parents are capable of making. The Mom-Sound.