STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air

by James Swallow

  The bombardment was unrelenting, each shot pounding the Earth ship, harrying it wherever it turned. White streaks of missile fire lanced out, scoring retaliatory hits, and Hammond’s railguns spat high-velocity kinetic kill rounds into the void on flickering tails of tracer. Close by, fighters hastily scrambled from the ship’s launch bay wheeled and turned as they engaged Death Glider elements launched by the Ha’taks. The battle was brutal and swift, but the balance of it was turning fast, and not in the favor of the Earth forces.

  Here we are again.

  The bitter thought crossed Samantha Carter’s mind as she pressed herself back into her command chair, her arms flat on the panels at the side. Through the wide viewport that filled one side of the Hammond’s bridge, she could see nothing but the hot orange flares of energy transfer as the Ha’taks swept around for another fusillade of beam fire. Circuit-breakers sparked and flashed and jumping-jack shorts lanced through the support systems. She took a breath and coughed, her throat seared by the acrid stink of burnt plastic.

  “Missile status,” she snapped.

  “Reloading…” reported Major Marks, her second-in-command. “And ready. Green lights from all gun decks, ma’am.” Marks had recently transferred over to Carter’s ship from the U.S.S. Daedalus, and like his new commander, he was no stranger to the brutal dance of space combat.

  “Return fire. Hit them hard.”

  “Firing!” Marks stabbed a control and Carter felt the Hammond shiver as the ship released another wave of nuclear-tipped fury at her enemies.

  “Colonel! I have Icarus Base on the comm!” called a voice from over her shoulder.

  Carter nodded. “On speakers.” She heard the crackle over the bridge intercom as the channel connected and spoke again. “Icarus, this is the Hammond. What’s your status, over?”

  “About to ask you the same thing,” came the reply. Carter didn’t know Everett Young all that well, but she was familiar with the man’s reputation as a careful, calm operator. Young didn’t say anything to belie that now, but Carter could still sense the tension brimming in his voice. “Who crashed our party?”

  “Three Goa’uld motherships. They started shooting the second they came out of hyperspace. Dropped out almost on top of the planet. We had no warning.”

  “Lucian Alliance?” said Young.

  Carter nodded as her ship rocked again under another barrage. “That’s my guess.” Her lip curled. “They haven’t introduced themselves and they don’t respond to any hails.” She didn’t add the question that was burning at the back of her mind: exactly how did a bunch of space-going drug runners find out about this base?

  As Greer and the others raced to their combat positions, Young strode forward over the blocky concrete battlements of the base, sweeping the night sky with a pair of high-powered binoculars, pressing his radio to his ear. “Our shields are holding…for now,” Carter was saying, “But we’re not the target. They’re just making sure we keep busy.”

  Young caught sight of something high up: flashes of faint light, like distant fireworks. He let the binoculars fall on their straps and scrutinized the men and women all around him, crews on the emplaced railguns, missile quads and conventional thirty-mil cannons. They were all cranking their weapons upward, hunting for the enemy. “What’s coming our way?” he asked, for a second hearing nothing but the wind through the mountain peaks.

  “It’s not good.” Static laced Carter’s reply. “We read a full squadron of gliders and a heavy troop transport. Our CAP of 302’s cut them down some, but the others blew past and went straight for the surface. The rest of them will be on your doorstep in about three minutes.”

  Young considered that for a moment. A troop transport. That meant a ground attack in force. He had no illusions; this battle would be hard-fought. He sniffed the air and smelled ozone, doubtless wafting in from the places where stray shots from the Ha’taks had come slamming down into the planet’s surface. Young keyed the walkie again, talking into the general guard channel. “Received and understood, Hammond. We’ll take it from here. Colonel Telford, did you copy all that?”

  “Roger that,” said Telford crisply.

  Young moved to the very edge of the fortification and glanced down to the foot of the mountain, where stark sodium-white light was spilling across the runway apron from the mouth of an open hangar. Blade-winged shadows were moving down there, angling out to face the sky.

  “If we can get to the transport before they land their troops, we stand a chance of making them think twice.” Telford’s voice was muffled by the closeness of an oxygen mask.

  “I concur,” said Young. He could see the twinkling lights in the sky now without the binoculars, and they were closing fast. “Good hunting, sir.”

  “And to you, sir.” Telford’s voice cut out and the next sound Young heard was the roar of turbojets as a flight of F-302 interceptors swept away down the runway. He watched them angle up into the night, raptors on the wind in search of prey.

  “Keep moving!” Scott shouted the command and gestured with his free hand, the other staying close to the G36 assault rifle that he’d snagged on the way to the safe zone. He shot a glance over his shoulder at the disordered snake of people moving down the corridor, civilians and non-essential personnel who, according to the regs, were instantly deemed liabilities the moment the base attack alarm began to sound.

  Part of him desperately wanted to be up there on the battlements behind a big thirty mike, ready to give a bloody nose to whomever it was that was knocking at their door; but Matthew Scott had his orders, and he had his duty — which was to get these people out of harm’s way.

  New impacts slammed into the rock somewhere far above them, and the whole of Icarus Base resonated with the force of the blast.

  At his side, Eli Wallace choked out a gasp as a lengthy crack passed down the length of the wall. “Oh crap.”

  “Keep it together, Eli,” Scott told him. “It’s just a little further.”

  “Shouldn’t we be, y’know, heading out of here, instead of deeper in?”

  “Remember that ‘instant transport to another planet’ thing?”

  “We’re gonna gate out of here?”

  Scott nodded. “That’s the idea. We hook back up to the network, dial you out, and—”

  “Kawoosh,” said Eli, with a weak grin. “And then what, you and Young and the others, you’re gonna follow us?”

  Scott’s lips thinned. “If we have to.”

  “But—”

  Whatever Eli had to say was snatched away by another impact that hit so hard, Scott felt it in the bones of his skull. The vibration actually bounced him off his feet and he stumbled as rock and concrete gave way overhead. A rain of heavy, choking soil washed over him and he heard shouting and screaming.

  Shaking himself, Scott turned to see the corridor behind him blocked by a wall of fallen rubble. Dazed by the collapse, people were milling around in the settling dust.

  The lieutenant found Eli as the young man climbed back to his feet. “What was that?”

  Scott ignored the question and pointed past him in the direction they’d been heading. “You know what ‘double-time’ means?”

  “That’s like, military-speak for ‘run real fast’, right?”

  He nodded. “So do it, Eli. Get to the gate room, and don’t wait for me.” He slapped him on the back. “Go now!”

  Wallace and a few of the others disappeared off down the corridor, but enough of the civvies were still in shock. “Let’s go, people!” he called. “You need to move to the gate room!”

  Scott waded through them, pushing them in the right direction. A face rose out of the dust before him and he saw the cute girl, the senator’s daughter. Her pretty face was twisted in an expression of absolute fear, tears streaking her cheeks. “It just collapsed….” she was saying, “My father… And there could still be people trapped on the other side!”

  He glanced around. Senator Armstrong and a few of the other scienti
sts were nowhere to be seen. His hand was on Chloe’s wrist, and for a long second he thought about taking her to the gate, by force if need be, but he couldn’t summon the sheer coldness to do it. “The rest of you, keep going!” he snapped. “Don’t stop until you reach the gate room.”

  “I’m not going!” Chloe insisted. She went to the rock pile and pulled at the stones, dragging them away, tearing the skin on her fingers.

  “Me neither,” he told her, and then spoke into his radio. “Ops, this is Lieutenant Scott, I’ve got a dozen or so people cut off from the gate room down here, corridor six-alpha.”

  “Copy that,” said a harried voice. “No assist available at this time, Lieutenant.”

  Chloe shot him a panicked look. “Wh-what does that mean?”

  He paused for a moment. “It means we have to do this on our own.”

  With the base’s meager flight of interceptors out gunning for the troop transporter, there was no air cover to stop the enemy’s aerial strike element from screaming down on Icarus Base, bringing fire along with them.

  A wave of sleek-winged Death Gliders howled over the tops of the fortifications, pulse-bolts shrieking from their heavy cannons. Rocky outcrops clipped by the blasts blew apart into scattershot fragments, taking down men like shrapnel from a fragmentation bomb. Other hits seemed to simply erase whole sections of the battlements, defenders and guns turned to smoke in a heartbeat.

  Young stabbed a finger into the air, yelling out his orders over the general channel. “Concentrate your fire on the gliders! Pour it on!”

  Ropes of tracer snaked across the sky and clipped the wings of one of the Goa’uld fighters, ripping divots from the scarab-shaped body in chugs of thick black smoke. The craft stalled and fell away, vanishing below the line of the fortification to explode against the mountainside. The big railguns were slow to traverse and track, but when they found their mark the electromagnetically-accelerated tungsten quarrels they fired bored right though the hull metal of the Death Gliders and out the other side. Young saw one ship take a hit through the cockpit and tumble out of control, veering into the path of its wingman, destroying both craft in a ball of flame.

  But there were too many of them, and as the hot stench of cordite and laser-burned air stung his nostrils, Colonel Young saw the specter of defeat closing like an oncoming storm front.

  Angry at the thought, he raised his carbine and tore off rounds into the belly of a glider as it roared over his head.

  Eli pushed his way through the building knot of people crowding the entrance to the gate room and glanced around. The sounds of hit after hit were almost a steady rhythm now, and each new impact brought another rain of dust down from the ceiling. He flinched as a long, low groan sounded through the metal decking surrounding the Stargate. He’d expected the thing to be open already, and people moving through like a crocodile of school kids on a field trip; instead it was silent and inert.

  Eli caught sight of Rush over at one of the consoles. The Air Force tech, Riley, was craning over his panel. “Doctor, I’m reading a dangerous energy spike in the core.” The digital gauges were flicking up toward the redline, and Eli remembered the last time that had happened. Not good.

  “It’s the bombardment,” Rush snapped, shooting an angry look upwards, as if he could beam his irritation through the rock at the invaders. “Whomever is attacking us doesn’t understand the instability of this planet’s geological structure…”

  That caught Eli’s attention immediately. Instability? Was this planet some giant earthquake waiting to happen? He wondered again about what he hadn’t been told about this project.

  Rush looked up, saw him, and sprang at him, grabbing his arm. “Good, you’re safe. Help me with this, Eli.” He propelled him over to the dialing computer, a tower of electronics wired into the crystalline guts of an incongruous mushroom-shaped device. On the podium’s surface was a red hemisphere surrounded by rings of keys, each sporting one of the gate’s star-sign symbols.

  “With what?” he managed.

  Rush tapped the console. “The ninth chevron.”

  Eli jerked with surprise. “What?” Icarus Base was being taken apart, stone by stone, apparently by one of those let’s-not-tell-Eli-about-it alien threats, but Rush was still fixated on his project. “Listen, forget that, we all need to get the hell out of here!”

  And to underline his point for him, at that moment another bone-shaking blast rocked the base. Rush met him with a steady eye. “If that bombardment continues, the stability of this planet will fail. The radioactive core of P4X-351 will go critical.”

  Eli felt the blood drain from his face as the full import of Rush’s statement registered with him. “You mean explode? The whole planet?”

  The doctor nodded. “It took us two years of deep space surveys to find this site. The properties of this world are unique.” A strange intensity glittered in Rush’s eyes. “This may be our last chance.”

  “If my math works…” began Eli, thinking it through.

  Rush spoke over him. “We can’t assume that—”

  “I said if,” he insisted. “If I’m right, then it’s not a power issue, it’s the gate address.”

  Rush was shaking his head, turning away. “We’ve known the first eight symbols of the sequence for years.” He tapped the dialing panel. “The ninth symbol has to be the point of origin. That’s how the Stargate works, that’s how it’s always worked.”

  Despite the desperate circumstances, despite the looming threat of death — or maybe because of them — Eli felt a sudden surge of excitement. This was the game puzzle all over again, a problem he knew he could solve, if he could just come at it from the right angle. “So, what…. What if this isn’t the planet you’re supposed to dial from?”

  Rush snorted and gestured at the walls. “This is where we are.”

  “Yeah, I get that.” Eli nodded back at him. “But I’m just saying, what if we’re not supposed to be here? What if we, you and Icarus and all of this stuff is supposed to be somewhere else?”

  The scientist became silent. And over their heads, rock ground on rock as fire fell from the heavens.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Telford pressed the F-302’s throttle up to zone five full military power, and flicked the switches to bring the AIM-120 missiles beneath its wings from ‘safe’ to ‘armed’ status. “Red flight, our target of import is the heavy troop transport,” he began, speaking into his mask mike. “Valens, DeSalvo, Kanin, you three give their fighter cover something to think about. Chavez, you’re with me.”

  The colonel got a chorus of acknowledgments and he nodded to himself as the shapes of the enemy landing force became clear on his engagement-range radar. “Here we go, gentlemen. Break and attack.”

  Red Flight Two, Three and Five flicked into high-g turns and roared away from the v-formation, and from the corner of his eye Telford saw Captain Chavez’s Red Four move up to a strike posture.

  Then the screen of eight Death Gliders was on them and the night sky became a storm of orange fire. Telford slammed the 302’s joystick over hard, and the interceptor responded instantly, standing up on one wing to vector right past the diving shape of an enemy fighter. They were so close, the colonel’s jet wash buffeted the ship, but he had no time to spend worrying about it. Telford was relying on the rest of the pilots to keep the gliders off Chavez and him long enough to put a dent in the plans of the invaders.

  “Tally,” called Chavez, spotting their target. “Eleven high, angels fifteen and descending fast.”

  “Roger that,” said Telford. “Designate target.”

  “Copy. Red Four has the lead.”

  The two interceptors split and angled up toward the bulky shield-shaped starship. So intel said, each one was capable of holding hundreds and hundreds of men, and if they were bringing down mobile ring transporters into the bargain, then they’d have a line back to the big motherships in orbit and enough reserves of troops to occupy a small country. Telford’s scann
ers pinged a warning tone. “They see us.” He knew that on the ventral hull of the transport, heavy-wattage energy cannons had to already be tracking them.

  Out of nowhere, a flash of brilliant white appeared off in the distance and Telford heard a blare of static over his helmet speakers. “This is DeSalvo,” called a voice over the general channel. “Red Two is down, I repeat, Major Valens is down.”

  “No chute, no chute visible…” Kanin was gruff. “He’s gone.”

  Telford cursed. The numbers were against them, and every second the enemy was allowed to push closer to Icarus was a second closer to the end of them all. “Just keep the bandits off us,” he replied.

  Beam fire streaked down past his cockpit and Telford heard Chavez give an annoyed grunt. “Incoming.”

  Telford’s air-to-air missiles signaled a lock on the transport ship and his finger hovered over the firing stud. “Red Four, I got your wing.”

  “Copy,” said Chavez. “Fox Three!” The captain snapped out the firing call and Telford saw an AIM-120 leap off the rack and blaze away on a spear of white fire.

  “Fox Three,” he repeated, and released his own warshot, tracking in on the same target. The heavy transport veered away, turret cannons turning as it did, still spraying fire across the path of the F-302s.

  Chavez’s missile ran straight into a fan of energy bolts streaming from the enemy ship, but Telford’s shot spiraled pass the ball of smoke and fire and managed a glancing impact on the port aft quarter. The transport lost a chunk of hull metal and flames spat from the wound in the metal — but it was still airborne, still on target.

  “Hell no—” Chavez began, turning to follow the target as it dropped past their ascent. He didn’t see what the colonel saw, the winged shape trailing behind the transport, hidden in its thrust wake.

  Telford called out to the other pilot, but it was too late. The Death Glider pacing the troop carrier caught Red Four as it turned and unleashed a barrage of murderous pulse-fire into the F-302. The aerospace fighter came apart in a storm of metal; there was no explosion, only a whirlwind of steel and plastic.