STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air

by James Swallow

  “The first six symbols lock down a point in space,” continued Jackson, who never once seemed to lose enthusiasm for his subject, “while the seventh represents the point of origin.”

  On the screen the chevrons around the ring flashed orange-red and locked in place. Eli wasn’t sure what he thought would happen next, but it certainly wasn’t a thunderous whoosh of noise and an explosive plume of what first seemed like liquid silver. His eyes bugged. “Whoa.”

  “An unstable energy vortex emerges from the gate and settles into the event horizon or ‘puddle’ as we like to call it,” noted Jackson, with a grin. “Later, it was discovered that using an eighth symbol would actually dial another galaxy, like the addition of the prefix numeral one to a long distance phone call.”

  Eli used his fingers to mime a phone at his ear. “Ring ring. Intergalactic Pizza, can I take your order, please?”

  Each time he thought he’d seen all the recordings had to offer, Doctor Daniel Jackson reappeared with something else to tell him, but after a while Eli began to feel beaten up by the sheer volume of information that was being thrown at him, without even a moment’s pause to process it. He was like a boxer, slammed one too many times around the head, only here it was mind-busting ideas and the general level of sheer you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me that was wearing him down.

  If crossing the gaps between galaxies wasn’t enough, Jackson was now talking about a ninth chevron that could take them still further, and some of the data Eli glimpsed on the screen seemed a lot like the code he’d cracked in the game. “It is believed an unprecedented amount of power is required to reach the mysterious destination,” said the scientist. “Icarus Base was established on a planet discovered two years ago to have a uniquely powerful core made of a mineral called naquadria. The entire purpose of the project is to hopefully one day dial the nine chevron address found in the Ancient database.”

  Eli rocked back in his seat and buried his hands in his pockets, still trying to process it all. His fingers touched the worn plastic of his cell phone and he drew it out and looked at it. The device was totally useless to him, but he hadn’t been able to leave it in his cabin, as if on some level holding on to the stupid thing was keeping him connected to Earth, and to his mother. He closed his eyes and sighed.

  Marion Wallace grabbed the phone off the kitchen wall after the second ring and held her breath. “Eli?”

  “Hey, Mom. How are you?”

  “Okay. Work was busy, as usual.” She stopped, catching herself before she launched into her regular daily round of bitching about her day at the Fine Dine and all the small indignities she suffered there. She missed not having Eli there to hear them out.

  She thought about when she’d come home the day before, the day he missed the interview, and found a very polite young lady from the military waiting at the front door. She’d had some things to tell her, and a check for a large sum of money.

  “Where are you?” Marion asked. At first she was afraid that Eli had done something wrong, maybe got mixed up with bad people in one of those game things of his. She’d heard on the news that terrorists used those chat-rooms and on-line games to meet and talk about hurting people. The polite young lady has assured her it was nothing like that, as she gathered up a bag of Eli’s stuff.

  When he replied, there was a strange crackling echo around his voice, like you got when someone was making a transatlantic phone call. “It’s top secret.”

  She heard the sadness in his voice. “Eli…”

  “I’m serious, Mom. I can’t tell you anything more than that. But don’t worry, I’m fine.”

  Marion sat on the kitchen stool, and for a moment she felt a terrible, incredible sense of distance from the voice on the other end of the line. “I don’t understand. Why couldn’t you at least tell me you were leaving? You just upped and went, no explanation….”

  “That was part of the deal,” he said, and she knew he was keeping something back from her. “I’m sorry, but did you get the letter from — ”

  “The Air Force, yes, I got it.” She nodded across the empty room. The letter was there on the kitchen table where she had put it after the polite young lady had left. It talked about ‘valuable contributions’ and ‘important work’ and ‘national security’. It talked about other things, too, without saying them. Paid doctor bills and cleared debts.

  She sighed. Of all the options her son could have been looking at as a career, serving his country was not something Marion Wallace would ever have put on the list. She heard an odd rumble in the background. “Are you on a plane now? You sound like you’re in an airplane.”

  For a moment, he betrayed a little excitement in his words. “No, no. Trust me, it’s nothing like that. It’s intelligence work. What you can know is in the letter, but I want you to know that they’re going to look after you.”

  “You didn’t have to do this. I pushed you too hard to get a job.”

  “No, no, Mom… This is good. Really, it’s the kind of thing I always dreamed of. I know it’s going to take some getting used to, for both of us… But I just couldn’t say no.”

  Marion felt a stab of sadness and pushed it away before it dared to become the start of a sob. “Okay. Okay, Eli. I know you’ll do great. Just do your best.”

  “I’ll call you again soon,” he said. “Love you, Mom.”

  “Love you too.” His mother’s voice crackled and faded, and for a moment he couldn’t be sure if she had been crying. The channel cut and Eli put down the headset connected to the intercom in his cabin, and sat heavily on his bunk.

  He sat there alone, watching the waves of hyperspace flash past the window in the steel wall, feeling every bit of the light-years of distance.

  She rapped on the hatch with her knuckles, and from within came a distracted voice. “Come in.”

  Entering the cramped visiting officer’s quarters, she saw Rush bent over a laptop and a scattering of papers, his attention buried deep in his work. Before she could speak, he gestured at a covered tray from the ship’s kitchen on a nearby shelf. “I’m done with that,” he said.

  Her lips thinned. “I’ll be sure to have one of my crew square that away for you, doctor.”

  Rush looked up in surprise. “Colonel Carter.” He recovered quickly and gave her a flat smile. “I’m sorry.” Immediately, he was closing the lid of the laptop. “What can I do for you?”

  Carter kept a neutral expression on her face. “I didn’t have the chance to speak to you before we broke orbit. I wanted to check in before we reached Icarus Base.”

  “I appreciate your interest, but I’m fine,” he replied. Rush nodded at the computer. “I’m sure you understand I have a lot of last-minute checks to go over…”

  He was trying to dismiss her on her own ship; Carter resisted the urge to sit and folded her arms instead. In truth, she wasn’t really sure of her own motives in approaching Rush, but she felt like something needed to be said to the man. Carter had made no secret of her reservations about certain elements of Project Icarus from the get-go. “General O’Neill has given the Hammond clearance to remain in orbit for a few days after we drop you off. We’ll provide additional sensor coverage of the planetary core for your tests.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Rush began.

  “I disagree,” said Carter. “The Hammond has the most advanced and up-to-date sensor package in the fleet.”

  Rush hesitated and then nodded. “No, you’re right, Colonel. Your help will be appreciated.” He smiled again. “Your input and experience is valuable.” He paused. “I know there have been some…concerns among certain members of the SGC about Project Icarus. I know that both yourself and Rodney McKay put forward alternate approaches for the ninth chevron venture.”

  Carter’s option had involved the use of a staged naquadria-fusion energy source for the Stargate, while McKay had suggested constructing an artificial black hole using Lantean technology to provide the mammoth power needs. Sam still found it hard to accep
t that the IOA had, in the end, gone with what she saw as a more risky venture. The highly volatile core of planet P4X-351 was the cosmic equivalent of a powder keg awaiting a lit match, but the colonel suspected that political issues rather than scientific ones had been the driving force here, as both Sam and Rodney had earned the ire of the IOA in the past.

  The problem was, she couldn’t shake the nagging concerns that had plagued her ever since Icarus had been given the green light. Carter had more than enough to do with the Hammond and the challenging missions the ship had taken on, but she found herself wondering if she was just a little envious at being the one to stand by and let someone else make this discovery, especially after so long on the cutting edge with SG-1 and then during her stewardship of Atlantis.

  But it was more than just some rivalry. On some deep level, Sam wasn’t sure if she entirely trusted Nicholas Rush; she couldn’t read his motivations, and that bothered her. She pushed that thought away. “I’m ready to assist in any way I can, doctor,” she told him.

  Rush gave her a last nod and turned back to his work. “If the need arises, I’m pleased to know I can call on you,” he said.

  For better or worse, Carter thought to herself as she left, I hope he knows what he’s doing.

  If in doubt, take solace in a snack.

  Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the healthiest of philosophies, but it was one that Eli could connect with, and so he ventured down to the Hammond’s mess hall in the hopes that if the USAF could send a man across the stars, they could send some pizza and a few cans of soda with him as well.

  He still hadn’t quite got his head around the whole shipboard day-night cycle. The Hammond worked on something called ‘Zulu Time’, with the crew running in shifts similar to the way sailors did on submarines. Eli gathered a few things on a tray and wandered among the people in khaki flightsuits and nondescript work gear. Technicians and military types were not exactly the kind of people he had a lot in common with. And then he saw the girl.

  She was hot. That was the first thing that came to mind, and, to be honest, the second and the third thing. She reminded Eli of all the girls he’d ever thought were way out of his league. Truth was, if they’d been back on Earth, he’d have given her a wide berth and found a place somewhere else, but here, out in the interstellar deeps, she was a fellow civilian aboard a boatload of airmen and scientists, and that meant they had something in common. He glanced at the other tables, the techs and the grunts. It wasn’t really a tough choice to make.

  She looked up at him and smiled as he approached. “Hi.”

  He gestured with his tray at the empty seat opposite her. “You mind?”

  She gave a gracious nod. “Go ahead.”

  Eli sat and noticed that she’d picked a spot where the view through the mess hall window was clearly visible. The tunnel of hyperspace effect stretched away from them, off into infinity.

  She saw him looking. “First time on a space ship, too?”

  “Me?” He attempted to feign a cool, knowledgeable air. “No, no. I’ve been on lots of… Various…” The attempt dried up pretty quick, so he abandoned it. “Eli Wallace. Hello.”

  He got a nod in return. “I know.”

  The answer wrong-footed him. “You’ve heard of me?”

  “I have.”

  “Wow.” Eli considered this for a moment. “That almost never happens.”

  “They say you’re brilliant.”

  He was liking her more and more by the moment. Cute and clearly an excellent judge of character. “Oh, they, them, they’re so…” He was in danger of trailing off again. “And you are?”

  “Chloe. I work for Alan Armstrong.” She paused, and Eli realized he was supposed to know who that was. “Senator of California?”

  He nodded sagely. “Ah, yes, yes. I’ve heard of California.”

  Chloe favored him with a brief smile. “He’s also the chairman of the off-world spending committee, but you couldn’t know that part. I’m his executive assistant.”

  “Wow,” he repeated, wondering after Washington guys and their ability to attract the gorgeous. “My last job was more in the burgers and fries field. How’d you hook up something like that?”

  “Well, I was a political science major at Harvard,” she demurred.

  Eli nodded again. “I hear that’s a good school. For a while there I was at—”

  “M.I.T.” said Chloe. “I know.”

  “Really?” She knew a lot, and to be honest, Eli wasn’t sure where to go with the conversation, but Chloe was pretty, and she was friendly, and he didn’t know if the planet they were going to even had people on it, let alone, y’know, girls. He smiled winningly back at her and took a sip of his drink. “So what else did they tell you about me?”

  The facility on P4X-351 had been up and running for a couple of years now, long enough for it to have lost that new-build smell, for the staff to have got settled in and the military contingent to learn the angles of the place. Icarus Base, as it was designated, was the only piece of civilization on the entire world — unless you wanted to count the weird little colonies of primates that existed down in the equatorial zone — an outpost of the human species far from home where people were planning on going even farther still.

  Icarus was around eighty souls, all told, the split of that something like sixty-forty in favor of the eggheads. Hewn from the living rock of a mountainside, it had been picked as the location for ‘the project’ because it was off the beaten track and because it didn’t have a Stargate. At least at first. They shipped one in from some former Goa’uld slave world, where the locals had got so sick of invaders turning up out of the blue that they just wanted to opt out of the whole gate network thing.

  It wasn’t hard to blame them. There was this pattern that the cultural historians at Stargate Command had noticed repeating over and over in the Milky Way and Pegasus galaxies. Civilizations that had been monkeyed with by the Goa’ulds, the Asgard, the Ancients, or any one of a number of alien races, they tended to cluster their settlements all around their gates, sometimes for commerce, but more often than not for safety in numbers. Earth had been lucky; two Stargates there, but both of them had been buried in the distant past so no damn thing could come through. Not like some worlds, planets full of people who lived in fear of the next ‘kawoosh’.

  It could be argued — and it often had — that the chain of events started when the first Earth gate was unearthed in Giza was the worst thing that ever happened to mankind. Maybe some of those threats out there would have come calling eventually, and maybe they wouldn’t. All you could be sure of now is that we were all in the thick of it, players on a much bigger game board. Out of our league, some said.

  But here we were at Icarus Base, about to do something else that some folks said was a bad idea. Challenging a new boundary, testing some different set of limits, because, well, that was the kind of thing that human beings did. No-one seemed to want to comment on who it was exactly that had chosen the name for the facility, though.

  The irony of calling the project after a guy who had crashed and burned after pushing his own limits too far was not lost on First Lieutenant Matthew Scott. Once upon a time, he might had taken that as some kind of sign. A bad omen. But these days, Scott was more interested in the here and the now. He’d left all that other stuff behind. What Scott cared about was taking the moment, and owning it.

  In the hot space of the compartment, there was little enough room to maneuver, but they’d gotten into the practice of it by now, so there were fewer skinned elbows and uncomfortable bruises than there had been. Scott pushed forward and buried his face in Vanessa James’s chest, pressing her hard against the wall. She gasped and laughed, her arms snaking around his back, pulling him still closer. Their dog-tags were caught up and bunched, digging into his clavicle. He planted a hungry kiss on her neck and she reacted.

  Human contact. In the alien dark of outer space, what they were doing was practically an affirmation of the spe
cies. At least, that’s what he’d say if they were caught by a superior officer. That wasn’t likely to happen, though. Bases were like small towns, where everyone knew everyone else’s business and kept their silence, for fear their own secrets might get out. Plus Matt and Vanessa were very careful. They made sure they knew the times when other couples were, uh, coupling, and kept away.

  She gasped, and so did he, moving up to kiss her, and James did that thing where she looked away from him. Scott wondered about that sometimes, about what it meant. He thought he had a good handle on the dimensions of their relationship; First Lieutenant and Second Lieutenant, so they weren’t fraternizing too far out of rank. No strings on either of them — and in the military where you could be transferred or, y’know, killed, at the drop of a hat, that was standard operating procedure. Vanessa seemed to treat sex like it was an extreme sport, and that was just fine with Matt. She’d never made it seem like there was any more to it, and he didn’t need the complications of all the other stuff. The baggage.

  Any more thoughts he might have had on the subject were abruptly cancelled by the growl from his walkie, hanging from his gear vest by the door. “Scott, this is Colonel Young. Come in please.”

  All the passion bled out of the moment like air from a stuck balloon, and Scott cursed silently, glancing in the direction of the radio.

  Young’s voice continued. “Our guests have arrived a few minutes early, Lieutenant. What’s your position?”

  James snapped out a laugh at the question, sultry and mocking in equal measure. He sighed and disengaged an arm, reaching for the walkie. She grabbed his wrist and her eyes glittered. “Not yet.”

  “Lieutenant.” Young was moving from terse enquiry to full-blown order now. “Drop whatever you’re doing and get your ass up here.”

  He let James go and she fell back with an amused yelp. “You heard him.” Pulling himself together, Scott snatched up the radio and squeezed the talk button. “On my way, sir.”