STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air

by James Swallow

  And then there was pain, pain and silver fire and darkness and cold. Then another voice, a woman but not Emily. Not his wife.

  “Colonel?”

  Tamara bent down over Young, trying to pick out any signs of awareness from him, but his eyes were rolled back into his head and he started to twitch and jerk. His legs kicked against nothing, scraping across the dark floor of the alien gate room.

  The medic gritted her teeth and glanced around. She found the girl from the dinner in the officer’s mess, the senator’s daughter. What was her name? Zoë? Chloe?

  “Hey, you,” she called. “Help me.”

  The girl came over, her face pale with worry and borderline shock “Is he—?”

  Tamara grabbed an unused injector pen from her medical kit and opened the colonel’s mouth, wedging it in between his teeth. “Hold him down,” she told her.

  The girl — Chloe, yeah, that was her — looked at her with fear as Young convulsed. “Can’t you do something for him?”

  She shook her head. “He’s having a seizure. I’m trying to prevent him from causing further injury to himself.” Tamara swallowed, dry-throated. “There’s nothing else I can do.”

  Gently but tightly, the lieutenant held her commanding officer’s head and let the spasms run their course. Chloe looked on, her expression one of shock and alarm.

  Scott walked slowly down the corridor, stepping evenly, panning the muzzle of the G36 left and right in steady arcs. The assault rifle had a flashlight slung under the barrel on a rail, and he used it to throw a disc of illumination out in front of him.

  Everywhere the light fell, he saw walls of dark metal, pipe work, conduits. Everything had a heavily-engineered, boiler-plate feel to it, as if whoever had built this place had decided that endurance was more important than elegance. It reminded the lieutenant of an old steam locomotive he’d seen as a kid; he actually saw gauges, the real dial-and-needle kind, bolted on to mechanical hubs in the walls. Thinking about it, there was a sort of logic to that — electronics and digital hardware were never as resilient as old-fashioned analog tech.

  He reached out a hand and laid his palm on the wall. At first he’d thought the gate had spat them out into some kind of underground bunker, perhaps the Ancient equivalent of Cheyenne Mountain or Icarus Base; but there was a subtle vibration in the floor and the walls that felt like the running of distant engines, and then there’d been that weird moment of motion-sense after the gate had cut out. The metal was chilly and a little damp, and there was the faint smell of ozone and rust in the air, like a junkyard after a thunderstorm.

  He moved on. Still no sign of Rush yet. The man wasn’t anywhere in sight. Scott had left the gate room behind and started moving down the first corridor he came across, figuring that maybe the scientist’s curiosity had got the better of him. He was just hoping now that if there were any locals hereabouts, they hadn’t already killed and eaten the man; or perhaps there were lethal deathtraps scattered all over the place, and Rush had fallen foul of one and been, what, vaporized?

  Ahead of him the corridor presented a broad circular hatch that was larger than any of the others he’d passed so far. He advanced on it.

  Scott’s boot touched a plate of decking and it gave a creak, giving slightly under his weight. He froze, and in that moment sensed something moving behind him. He spun in place, bringing up the rifle, the safety catch snapping off.

  “Whoa!” The glow from the flashlight caught Eli Wallace’s face and the terror in his eyes. He had his hands up like a robbery victim. “It’s me!”

  Scott scowled and lowered the gun, glancing at the creaky floor plate. That was all it was, not a trap, just old and a bit rusted. “What are you doing here? I told you to help Greer.”

  “I did, uh, for a little bit,” Eli replied. “But I figured I could maybe, y’know, help you better.”

  “And how are you gonna do that, exactly?”

  Eli didn’t answer, instead halting in front of the large hatch, his eyes narrowing.

  “What?” said Scott.

  He pointed at lines of symbols across the midline of the hatch; dots and circles and wavy lines. “I’ve seen this writing before.”

  “In the game?” Scott recalled what he’d heard about the secret test Wallace had been a part of.

  Eli nodded. “Yeah.” He ran his fingers over the surface of the metal door. “Roll d-twenty, check for traps,” he muttered to himself, and then touched a disc in the center of the hatch. It opened immediately and Scott brought up the rifle, pushing Eli aside.

  Beyond was a wide open room populated with a few narrow support stanchions and a couple of low couches. Light fell across the chamber in waves, cast from one entire wall where the steel and iron ended and thick, age-worn windows ranged from floor to ceiling. Beyond the portal, far below a dark, metallic cityscape stretched away; but it was the remainder of the view that captivated them.

  Stars, drawn by impossible speed into swirling streaks of phase-shifted light, raced past at unknowable velocity. Scott felt a momentary head-swim and shook it off; it was like standing on the prow of a sailing vessel racing into the night.

  “We’re on a ship?” said Eli.

  Scott found himself nodding. That explained the engine sounds. He saw a figure standing at the window, his hands on the glass. Rush; the man was lit by the light of alien suns, and he seemed utterly lost in it.

  “The design is clearly Ancient…” said the scientist, his voice distant. “In the truest sense of the word. Launched hundreds of thousands of years ago… Perhaps more.”

  Scott blinked and pushed the majesty of the sight to the back of his thoughts. The view from this observation room was breathtaking, but they were not here to sightsee. “Doctor Rush,” he began.

  The other man didn’t acknowledge him. “We seem to be moving faster than light speed, yet not through hyperspace…”

  “What are you doing?”

  “How far has it traveled in all that time?” Rush asked the question, still enrapt in the starlight.

  “Doctor Rush!” Scott stepped to him, raising his voice, finally breaking the man’s reverie. The scientist glanced at the lieutenant as if he hadn’t even known he was there. “We’ve got a lot of wounded. We need to get home.” When Rush didn’t answer him straight away, Scott put all the force he could into the next word. “Sir?”

  Eli gave him a look; wherever Rush’s head was at, it wasn’t here.

  Young’s seizure finally, mercifully subsided and Tamara settled him down on the deck, using a folded gear vest as a support for the colonel’s head. His breathing was steady but shallow and sweat filmed his pale skin. She sighed and glanced at Chloe. “Thanks for the help.”

  “Will he be okay?”

  I have no idea. The words almost tripped out of her mouth, but she forced them down and gave a curt nod. “We’ll have to see.” She stood up and ran her hands over the thighs of her uniform trousers, leaving trails of blood and dirt on the dark material.

  Tamara glanced around. There were just so many of them, people huddled in groups or clustered around the inert Stargate, cold and afraid and hurt, and all of them were looking to her for help. But I’m not a doctor, she screamed inside, I’m just a field medic. Sew you up, send you back to base where the real physicians are, that’s what I was trained to do. Not this.

  A man’s shout reached her and Tamara saw one of the scientists, Franklin, stumbling away from a wall, tugging at his jacket. She ran to him and caught a whiff of a pungent, acidic stink.

  “Ow! Damn it!” Franklin had his jacket off now, and threw it to the deck. He was pulling at the shirt underneath, craning to look at his shoulder.

  “What is it?” said Tamara.

  “I don’t know…” She couldn’t recall ever having seen the guy this animated before. What Tamara remembered of Jeremy Franklin from the times she’d seen him on Icarus was a circumspect middle-aged man with a perpetually hang-dog expression. His shirt was slightly discolored wh
ere something had soaked into it. Tamara peeled it back and saw a patch of inflamed skin.

  “It burned me,” offered Franklin.

  She bent and prodded the man’s jacket. There on the shoulder was a blob of black ooze, gritty, with the consistency of thick oatmeal. The chemical smell was coming from it in tiny wisps of white vapor.

  “Is that acid?” said the man. “Where did it come from?”

  Tamara glanced around. Franklin had been sitting on a gear case, half-asleep with his back to the wall. She looked up and saw a grate a little way up, air grumbling through it from some concealed atmosphere processor. Stepping closer, she saw more of the thick goop trickling slowly from the mouth of the vent, dropping in fat gobs to the deck; Franklin had been right under it.

  And then, with a rattling clatter, the fan behind the vent stuttered to a halt and the air flow ceased.

  “Oh, that’s not good,” she said to herself. Tamara snatched up her radio and spoke into it. “Lieutenant Scott, come in. We’ve got a problem in the gate room.”

  “This is Scott,” said the officer, turning away from Rush and shooting Eli an expression that said What now? “Go ahead, T.J.”

  “One of the air vents just shut down in here. It’s coughing up some kind of acidic slurry.”

  Eli took a deep breath and frowned. “The air’s getting pretty thin in here, too.” He hadn’t noticed it at first, thinking that perhaps he was just giddy with awe at the sight outside the window, but his chest was starting to ache. He looked for and found air vents in the walls of the observation room and waved his hand in front of them; nothing was coming through.

  “What does that mean?” Scott was saying.

  Rush turned away from the window. “It means that the life support systems are not working properly.” Suddenly, the distant, dreamy look on the scientist’s face was gone and he was back to his more typical acerbic, narrow-eyed focus. “We should probably do something about that.”

  Eli nodded and pointed. “What he said.”

  Scott raced back to the gate room as quickly as he could, and he found himself panting hard, the thinning air beginning to make itself apparent. He tried to run some quick and dirty calculations in his head, but he gave up when he realized he didn’t have all the data. He didn’t know for sure how many people had made it through the gate, or how many rooms and corridors on this ship had air in them, or how long those vents had been working. Trying to put a number on it was a waste of time. He wondered about what the airflow thing meant. The ship was obviously old, so was it just a matter of decrepit systems that had fallen apart when the Stargate’s activation had triggered them? Or perhaps it was something else — Scott had glimpsed the size of the ship they were on. A lot of room out there. Maybe it wasn’t so derelict as he thought, maybe there was a crew somewhere who didn’t like the idea of gatecrashers. “We come in peace,” he said aloud. The silent walls didn’t answer him.

  Rush had said something about finding a ‘control nexus’ a way down the corridor past the observation room, so Scott had sent him and Eli off to take a look at it in hopes of stemming this newest problem. Maybe we’ll catch a break, he thought, we’re due it. Bombed by raiders, thrown who-knows-where through the Stargate, lost and alone and now facing the threat of suffocation; this wasn’t exactly how Scott had expected his first field command to go.

  He halted before reaching the gate room and took a second to compose himself; his instructors at officer candidate school taught him that a commander had to look capable and sound confident in order to engender conviction from his men, even if he didn’t feel it. Like it or not, these people were relying on him now — at least until Colonel Young woke up.

  If he wakes up. Scott frowned at that thought and dismissed it. One damn problem at a time.

  He came back into the room to find a knot of people clustering around Johansen, bombarding her with questions that she couldn’t answer. Most vocal of them was the senator. Alan Armstrong; Scott had seen the guy on the news one time, arguing over some point of military spending. He was using the same tone of voice on Tamara as he had back then.

  “You need to start giving us some answers,” he demanded.

  Scott slung his rifle and called out. “Can I have everybody’s attention? Please, be quiet!” When that didn’t work, he snapped out a shout. “Hey! Listen up!”

  That got him about a second of actual calm before Armstrong felt the need to fill the silence. “What is going on?” The man’s words were a little gaspy; he was practically hyperventilating.

  Scott figured he wouldn’t sugar-coat it. “We’re on an Ancient spaceship. That’s all I’ve got.” A murmur went through the crowd as they processed this new piece of information. “What that means is—”

  Armstrong butted in. “It means that we need to use the Stargate to get us all home!”

  Scott raised his hand. “That is definitely on the list of things to do, sir, but—”

  The senator wasn’t listening. “You can consider that an order, Lieutenant!”

  He could feel the mood of the evacuees turning angry and fearful behind Armstrong’s lead. “Colonel Young put me in charge—”

  “Then do your job and get these people back to Stargate Command right now!” snapped the senator.

  “We’re working on it.” Scott’s cool fractured. “But do you see a DHD anywhere?” He gestured around angrily.

  “A what?” snapped Armstrong.

  “Dial Home Device,” offered Tamara. “Runs the Stargates.” There were a couple of copper-colored consoles lurking at the back of the room, but nothing that resembled the usual dialing podium.

  Armstrong changed tack. “I want to speak to whomever is responsible for this. Where is Doctor Rush?” The politician’s face was coloring, his voice rising. “He sent us here! This is his fault!”

  Scott’s patience was about done. “Just shut up for a second, will you?”

  Armstrong’s nostrils flared with anger. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that—” He choked off the end of the sentence and coughed hard, one hand reaching up to clutch at his chest. He dove into a pocket and came back with a pill bottle, tapping a red and white capsule into a shaky hand.

  Scott’s annoyance subsided and he pulled his canteen from his belt, offering it to the other man. Armstrong waved it away and took the pill dry, swallowing it with effort.

  His daughter came to him, taking his arm. “Dad, please…” she began, leading away to a place where he could sit down.

  The lieutenant took a breath. “Look, I’m sorry,” he began again. “I’m trying to explain the situation. We are on a ship but we have no idea where we are in relation to Earth.” Or anywhere else, for that matter. He fixed Armstrong with a firm look. “With all due respect, sir, the reason you may be having a hard time breathing right now is because the ship’s life support system is not functioning properly.”

  That piece of information finally got Scott the quiet he’d been wanting all along. He nodded in the direction of the corridor. “Doctor Rush is working on that problem right now, but I need everyone with any knowledge of Ancient systems. We need all the help we can muster.” He scanned the faces in front of him. “Adam Brody and Lisa Park, are you here?”

  Two people gingerly raised their arms. One was a guy in his forties, the other a woman with shoulder-length hair. Both had the look of career academics about them, and both were clearly way out of their depth in the current situation.

  “Okay, you two come with me.”

  Brody hesitated, indicating one of the nearby panels. “These consoles just came on, shouldn’t we—”

  Scott shook his head. “Nobody touch anything yet. Right now, Rush needs your help.” He saw Sergeant Greer standing nearby and gave him a look. Greer didn’t need to be told and just nodded, gathering up his weapon. “Everybody else, just stay calm, and stay put. Please.”

  Tamara spoke close to his ear. “I’ll try to make sure no one else wanders off, but I’m swamped down her
e.”

  “I know.” Scott saw Young where he lay on the floor. “What about—?”

  She answered his question before he could finish it. “The colonel’s still out.”

  “Keep me posted,” he told her, and stepped away, with the Marine and the two scientists following on behind.

  Greer insisted on taking point even though the lieutenant explained he’d already checked out the corridors. It never hurt to have a set of Marine Corp eyes look over things, just to be sure. Park and Brody talked amongst themselves, half excited by what the saw all around them, and half terrified.

  Scott pointed. “It’s just up this way.” Greer threw the officer a look and Scott’s brow furrowed. “What? You got something on your mind, sergeant?”

  He shrugged. “I was thinking. You just told a United States senator to quit his bitching back there. I guess you’re not in a hurry to get those captain’s bars.”

  Scott made a face. “Ah, who cares if he puts me on report,” he said, after a moment. “Joke’s on him. We’re probably all gonna die out here anyhow.”

  Greer gave a gallows-humor smirk. “And here was me thinking you were a ray of sunshine, sir.”

  Scott had a retort, but he forgot it as the sound of raised voices filtered down the corridor toward them.

  “That’s Doctor Rush,” said Park.

  Then Greer very clearly heard the Wallace kid say “Stop! You’re going to kill us all!”

  “Ah hell,” said Scott, “what now?”

  They broke into a run and raced down the length of the corridor, turning into a hexagonal-shaped room with a complex thicket of cables, tubes and conduits snaking up from the center, rising from floor to ceiling like a ragged pillar. Angled consoles like those in the gate room were arranged around it, and Rush stood behind one of them, his face back-lit by the glow of an active screen.

  “What’s going on?” Greer demanded. He saw lines of blocky lettering — Ancient text, it looked like — streaming across the display. Rush was working a circular interface pad, like a scaled-up version of the one on the front of an mp3 player.