STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air

by James Swallow

  James was laughing behind her hand. Scott shot her a look and tossed her undershirt back to her. There was a second when their looped dog-tags caught, but then he was stepping away. “Duty calls?” she whispered.

  “I, uh…”

  She snorted at him and turned away. “What, you wanna cuddle? Go on, get going.”

  He zipped up the vest and opened the storage compartment door. Satisfied he wouldn’t be seen exiting, Scott pushed out and broke into a jog, working hard to erase any lasting impression of his non-regulation activities.

  The second time around Eli closed his eyes when the teleporter thing swept over him, but what struck hard was the immediate and instantaneous shift in the sensory environment around him. On the trip from Earth, he’d quickly gotten used to the temperate atmosphere of the Hammond, with its recycled air and quietly humming deck plates. But now he was somewhere else, under a bright, hot sun that burned yellow-orange. He felt lighter on his feet and a little bit dizzy. Eli took a couple of experimental breaths and tasted air that was hot, clean…and alien.

  He turned slowly in place. Chloe, Rush and the senator were standing nearby, taking it all in along with him. The first thing Eli saw were concrete battlements, like some modern rendition of an ancient stronghold, with piles of sandbags and guys in desert-pattern camo looking watchful and ready for anything. He looked to see what they were facing and realized he was less than six feet away from the sheerest drop he’d ever seen. “Holy…”

  The jagged stone fell away, down toward a rocky desert plateau that ranged away toward the far horizon. At the foot of the mountainside he saw the dark ribbons of runways, and parked on them were weird boomerang-shaped aircraft that looked nothing like any fighter plane he’d ever seen. In the distance, Eli could make out another range of razor-tipped peaks scraping the underside of a massive storm cell. Once again, a tremor of amazement ran through him. He’d felt it in the Hammond’s observation room over Earth, then in hyperspace, and now again. On some level he was glad he wasn’t getting jaded about the whole thing. Grinning, he turned back as an austere-looking officer in an all-black duty uniform came walking toward the group. Eli dropped the grin and tried to look calm, resisting the urge to scream Dude! We’re on another planet!

  The officer gave a nod to Chloe’s boss, who stood looking as pressed and poised as he would have stepping out of a limo at some swanky bash for D.C. politicos. “Senator, it’s my honor to welcome you to Icarus Base.”

  “Colonel Young,” replied Armstrong, shaking the man’s hand and flashing a practiced smile. “Let me introduce my executive assistant, Chloe.”

  Chloe was just as poised, and if anything, she looked even better than she had the first time Eli had seen her. He dimly registered another arrival from inside the base — a younger male officer, flushed with the effort of running — but the majority of Eli’s attention remained on the girl. He was starting to entertain the vague idea that perhaps they could have…a thing.

  Chloe smiled at the colonel. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

  “The pleasure’s mine,” said Young.

  “She’s also my daughter,” the senator added seamlessly.

  Eli’s hand twitched and he had to resist the almost physical need to slap himself in the forehead. A senator’s little girl? Oh right, good call, Wallace. Yeah, you were so in with a chance with her. He ignored the sarcastic voice in the back of his head and looked away. Eli’s gaze crossed that of the young officer — his nametag read ‘Scott’ — and they shared an instant of mutual guy telepathy. She’s real cute, but she’s off-limits.

  Young stepped up to him, and Eli felt the man’s eyes measure him in a single look. “You must be the—”

  “Contest winner,” said Eli, and for a moment he had a ridiculous vision of himself in a tiara and sash. “This place is…amazing.” He glanced up again and stared at the blocky muzzle of a very large cannon. “And that is a big gun.”

  The young guy gave a nod. “M-995 Glaive Kinetic Impact Weapon. Rail gun, five hundred rounds per minute.”

  Eli thought again about the things the information films hadn’t mentioned, and wondered what would need that much firepower turned against it.

  Young indicated the other officer. “This is Lieutenant Scott, Mister Wallace. He’s been assigned to you.”

  Eli blinked. “I need a bodyguard?”

  Scott cocked his head. “Tour guide.”

  “Oh,” he replied, a little crestfallen.

  Rush spoke up for the first time since they’d arrived. “Shall we go inside?” He had an expression on his face that Eli has never seen him show until now — excitement.

  The doctor took the lead, and he seemed to have no trouble winding his way through the corridors of the base. Eli glanced up as they passed inside, seeing a huge sigil on one wall. The symbol of the base was large, repeating the image of a single white feather over an orange sun that appeared on Young and Scott’s uniforms. It sat in a blue ring with nine stars. Nine, like the chevrons on the Stargate, Eli thought.

  Ahead, the senator kept pace with the doctor while Chloe and the colonel followed on. Armstrong frowned as he walked, adjusting the sleeves of his shirt. “I’ll be interested to see where all our appropriation money is going in this place,” he began. “I’m thinking you could probably shave a few dollars off the budget just by turning the heat down in here.”

  “Actually, cooling the place is what costs money, sir,” noted Young.

  Rush gave a nod. “We located the project here precisely because the core of this planet generates so much power. A lot of heat comes with that.”

  Eli had to admit, the temperature was a little uncomfortable. He watched the concrete walls and marble floors pass by and wondered why, with a whole empty planet of real estate out there, the Air Force had kept to the same identical style of narrow-corridored bunker they used on Earth. He glanced at Scott. “Ever get claustrophobic down here?”

  “Safer in here than out on the surface,” replied the lieutenant.

  “Why?”

  Scott didn’t look at him. “Dinosaurs, man.”

  Eli gaped. “Really?”

  “No.”

  Another officer passed them, a woman with the nametag ‘James’, and Eli could have sworn he saw a smile pass between them. He elected not to press the point about the dinosaurs for the moment.

  “This way,” he heard Young saying. “I’m sure Doctor Rush is eager to check the preparations.” The group turned a corner, and ahead Eli glimpsed a partial view of a chamber full of light and motion.

  “What’s in there?” he asked.

  The lieutenant gave him a crooked smile. “The star of the show.”

  Scott stepped into the room just a beat before Wallace did, just so he could watch the expression on the guy’s face when he saw the gate room for the first time. Eli’s jaw dropped open at the sight of it and Scott grinned. It got everyone like that. It didn’t matter how many times you’d seen it on video or in pictures, in the flesh the Stargate was a stunning sight to see. Even now, with technicians clustered all around it and a ton of diagnostic equipment hooked up to the thing, it was still striking. Armstrong and his daughter were being led around by Rush and the colonel, and they made a good play at being guardedly impressed, but Eli wore all his reactions openly, hiding nothing.

  To Scott’s eyes, it was somewhere between a sculpture and piece of perfect engineering. It was a remnant of something far bigger than the human race, than Earth and everything else, and it seemed to radiate great age and huge power even when it was silent and motionless. He remembered the first time he’d plucked up the courage to go up and actually touch the thing. It looked like burnished steel, but it felt like no metal on Earth.

  “Unbelievable,” managed Eli.

  “Yeah, it is.” Scott nodded. “Good to remember that. It’s weird how fast you can start to take something like this for granted.” The Icarus gate room was a little different from the one back at Starg
ate Command, slightly narrower in span, and built on raised, shock-absorbing platforms to handle the backwash of power transfer.

  Not watching where he was going, Eli almost tripped over a cable snaking over the floor, and he caught himself. “So… If the Stargate can instantly transport you to another planet, why did we have to f1y here in a spaceship? They got one of these on Earth, right?”

  “We had to take this one off the grid. Something to do with how this one is tied into the planet for power.” He indicated the festoons of cables crowding the base of the gate like roots from a tree. “Apparently, it’s been modified to only dial out, because incoming wormholes are too dangerous. You’re the genius. You can probably tell me better.”

  Eli gave a rueful smile. “All I did was solve a puzzle in a videogame.”

  Scott felt a pang of sympathy for the guy. He was in deep here, and still scrambling to get it all straight in his head. “Hey, you figured out something that Doctor Rush has been trying to figure out for months. Which, by the way, a lot of people were glad to see happen.”

  That seemed to lift the guy’s spirits a little. Scott looked away and saw Young leading the others to where the Icarus expedition team were standing at parade-ground attention. He beckoned Eli after him. “Come on. The dog-and-pony show’s this way.”

  Rush was talking with Senator Armstrong as they came closer. “We’re prepared for anything,” he said.

  “I’m sure you will be.”

  Armstrong moved down the line of the team members to the man himself, the mission commander standing tall closest to the Stargate. “And of course, you know Colonel David Telford.”

  The senator nodded. “Ready for this, Colonel?”

  Telford gave Armstrong the same no-nonsense stare he turned on Scott and all the other junior officers. The guy had a face like tawny granite, so Vanessa had once said; he was every inch the poster boy for the Air Force’s new, bold expedition into the unknown. He gave a crisp nod. “Just give the word, sir.”

  Armstrong spared Rush a sidelong glance. “I gave the word quite a while ago, Colonel. I’m just here to see how my one-point-six billion dollars is being spent.”

  Scott gave a flat smirk as a polite chuckle went down the row and stopped short of rolling his eyes. He caught Young watching him and made sure his expression was neutral again.

  Rush was as animated as he got, indicating the silent Stargate with the sweep of his hands. “As you know, Senator, up until now we have been unable to channel the precise, massive amount of power into the gate necessary to unlock the Stargate’s ninth and final chevron.” He smiled slightly. “However, thanks to some ingenuity from young Mister Wallace, that problem has finally been solved.”

  Hearing his name, Eli gave a sheepish smile and a wave. “Hi.”

  Colonel Young didn’t seem that convinced, however. He turned a dour look on the doctor. “With all due respect, we’ve heard that before.”

  “This time we’re sure,” insisted Rush.

  “That’s what I figured out?” said Eli. “A lost space-phone number?”

  Rush ignored the comment. “I embedded the Ancient mathematical proof we required to solve the ninth chevron equation into the game, and then engineered Eli’s solution into a practical and workable application.”

  Armstrong accepted this, tapping his finger on his lips. “What do you say we get on with it, then?”

  The doctor nodded to one of the technicians over at the main control console. “Go ahead.”

  The group moved clear of the gate room’s central space as power began to flow into the systems. Hunter Riley, the sergeant on the dialing computer, looked up and caught Scott’s eye. A few days ago, over Icarus’s floating poker game, Riley had made a bet that Rush would give the gate a run-up less than an hour after arriving. Scott checked his watch and frowned. He owed the non-com a ten-spot.

  Riley started the sequence and the inner ring of the Stargate began to rumble around, chevrons clanking and illuminating as they locked into place. A trio of the civilian techs — Park, Brody and Franklin — were working in unison with him, monitoring every moment of the process.

  Eli studied the gate as the chevrons began to lock, one after another. “We’re dialing now?” he asked.

  “A test,” said Rush. “To see if we can get a connection.”

  Young nodded. “If we do, we’ll send an automated reconnaissance drone through, see what’s on the other side.”

  Armstrong’s daughter was close by. “And then they’ll go?” she asked, looking at Telford and the expedition team.

  Rush shook his head. “No, we’ll shut down again and assess the data we get before we send the away team.”

  Scott glanced at Eli. “If it works,” he said, his voice low.

  “Just as long as they don’t dial up a black hole, or something,” muttered the civilian.

  “Don’t sweat it, that won’t happen again.”

  Eli paled. “Again?”

  “Chevron eight encoded,” announced Riley, but his words were lost as a heavy rumble reached up from the stone beneath their feet. In moments, an earthquake-tremor vibration was shaking the whole room.

  “What’s happening?” Eli asked.

  “I don’t know,” Scott told him. “We’ve never got this far before.”

  The clattering gate continued its spin, and Scott knew that something was wrong. It shouldn’t have taken this long to engage. Jets of steam vented from emergency heat ducts in the support frame, and random sparks of power fluttered around the heavy clamps holding the Stargate off the ground. Rush was leaning forward, his brow furrowed, almost like he was willing the alien machine to work.

  “Chevron nine…” Riley read the data from his screen. “Will not lock.”

  The doctor’s head bobbed in defeat, before he straightened. “We matched the power requirement down to the last EMU. It must work.”

  Over Riley’s shoulder, Scott saw indicator tabs shifting higher, toward the critical end of the dial. “Power levels in the gate capacitors are going into the red,” reported the technician, calm and clear despite the millions of gigawatts he was running through the system.

  It was Young, as base commander, who had the authority to drop the hammer. “Shut it down.”

  Rush turned. “Wait…”

  The tremors were getting worse every second. “We’re reading fluctuations from the output in the core,” said Riley. The digital gauges were all passing the red-line.

  “Shut it down,” repeated Young. “Now.”

  The sergeant didn’t hesitate a moment longer, and slapped the emergency switches to bring the spinning gate back down to zero power. The rumbling died away like a passing thunderstorm, and the static in the air faded with it.

  No-one spoke, leaving Rush to break the silence. “It should have worked,” he insisted.

  Scott saw Telford exchanging quiet words with one of his men as Young peered over Riley’s console to see the data track. “But it didn’t, and drawing power from the planet’s core is—”

  “Dangerous,” Rush broke in, his tone rising. “Yes, we’re all aware of—”

  Young gave the scientist a hard look, but what he said next was addressed to everyone in the gate room. “Regardless of what’s been spent and what is at stake, my first priority is to ensure the safety of the people on this base.” In Scott’s experience, the colonel wasn’t much for talking when he didn’t have to, but when he used that tone of voice, you could be sure that everyone damn well listened.

  The doctor relented. “Of course.” He stepped back from the control console and beckoned to Wallace as he walked away. “Eli, we’d better go over your equations again. Make sure that nothing was missed.”

  Eli’s hand went to his chest, pointing at himself. “You’re not seriously putting this on me?”

  Scott looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

  “Not my fault,” insisted Eli, shaking his head.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Rush felt t
he problem like an ache behind his eyes.

  He stood before the whiteboard and the scrawl of equation after equation, scanning the trains of numbers and mathematical symbols for what had to be the thousandth time, searching for the place where the disconnect was hiding.

  How many times have I been here? The question burned in him. There had been so many close calls, so many moments when he had been absolutely certain that the key to it all was just within his grasp. Ever since the beginning, since the day he’d discovered the theorem of the ninth chevron and dared to guess at its purpose, Nicholas Rush had been consumed by the hunt for the proof that would unlock it. But it always stayed one step away. Close enough that he could sense the shape of it, lurking just outside his comprehension, but always out of reach. It drove him on like a hand at his back, pushing him and pushing him. He stared at the numbers and saw them like an enemy he could not defeat, and Rush reached up and massaged the bridge of his nose, taking a long breath.

  It was galling enough that he hadn’t been able to solve the proof, not after years of research, first at Area 51 and then out here at Icarus. It dented his pride to admit that he’d been forced to accept the proposal of the blind test hidden in the Prometheus game. He’d actually laughed when that suggestion had been made — General O’Neill had been right, with all the collected intellects working on the Stargate program, the fact that none of them could solve the formulae was, well, embarrassing. It was a radical way of trawling for an outsider’s viewpoint, for a fresh take on the problem, but Rush had never believed that the game would net a solution, not in a million years.

  But you didn’t count on Eli Wallace, did you Nick? The voice in his head, warm and lightly mocking, was that of his wife. A slacker wunderkind solves your puzzle and suddenly everything is turned upside down.

  Rush had taken back every reservation he’d ever had about the secret test when Eli’s solution had been brought to him, stamping down the slight sting of resentment with the weight of elation at finding the final piece of the puzzle. After all, the majority of the work had been his, and while Wallace clearly had some level of raw, untrained insight, this was still Nicholas Rush’s project. Still his destiny to fulfill.