STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air

by James Swallow

  But now they were here, and that goal was beyond her. Or was it? She looked at her fellow escapees. Scientists, mostly, and soldiers. Both persona types locked in their ways, at opposite ends of the spectrum. In the days ahead, someone like her, someone with her skills at handling people, could prove invaluable. She could have purpose.

  Behind her, the hatch opened and Young hobbled into the compartment, walking with difficulty. Wray kept her expression neutral as she noticed the Marine, Greer, at his side. “Colonel…”

  Young took them all in with a look. “Senator Armstrong is dead.”

  Camile’s eyes widened. “My God. What happened? I’d heard he was injured…”

  “He’s bought us some time,” said the colonel, and abruptly Camile understood what Armstrong had done.

  “To do what?” she said.

  Young answered without answering; he seemed to make a habit of that when he dealt with Wray. “We’re working on it. First up is trying to dial the gate back home.” He winced as he spoke, clearly in pain.

  Some of the others were talking eagerly, clinging to the faint hope the word ‘home’ engendered. Camile moved closer, studying Young. “Should you even be on your feet?” she asked.

  “No,” said Greer, with an edge of annoyance.

  Young threw the sergeant a look. “Well, I am on my feet, and right now we’re going to try to get home.” His gaze met hers. “I need your help, Camile. You know these people. Spread the word. Try and keep things as positive as you can.”

  A dozen questions popped into her head. Was he serious about the Stargate? How much air did they have left? Was he just lying to keep people calm? Do we really have a chance at survival out here? But she asked none of them, because Wray knew as well as Young did that right now, the Icarus refugees needed hope almost as much as they did air. “I can do that,” she said.

  He gave her a nod. “Good. Thank you.”

  He found her on the observation deck.

  Scott peered into the starlit room to see Chloe sitting on the floor, staring out into space. Out beyond the window, the sweep of the Ancient ship framed the strange shimmering colors of the Doppler-shifted stars. For a moment, he considered leaving her where she was, letting her have her quiet, her moment of reflection; but he couldn’t walk away.

  He thought of the intensity of emotion that had washed out from Chloe when he held her as her father perished. The poised and perfect young senator’s aide he had met less than a day ago was breaking apart, and she had no one to help her shoulder the pain. Scott walked in and took a seat on the floor next to her, offering what he could just by being there. He said nothing and let Chloe find her way.

  After while, she spoke, quiet and heavy with emotion. “I’ve never done anything like that before.” She showed him the bruises on the knuckles of her hands from the wild punches she had thrown.

  “He’ll be fine,” Scott assured her. “Rush isn’t quite as noble as he says he is, but I don’t think he really intended for us to get stuck this way.”

  “You think he had no choice?”

  Scott considered that. “If he’s lying, then he’s a lot crazier than I want to believe.” That thought made him uncomfortable, and he pushed it away.

  Chloe fell silent for a long moment, before taking a low breath. “I just… I can’t believe my dad is gone. I watched him die and I still just can’t accept it.”

  He could hear the emotions in her voice, the disbelief and the pain. Scott glanced at her. “Tell me about him.”

  Chloe looked back, her brow creasing in confusion, as if she thought that was a odd thing to ask of her. “Why?”

  He looked back toward the stars. “The man died so I could live. I’d like to know more about him. I owe him that much, at least.”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything.”

  Chloe thought on that for a little while, and he saw the faint ghost of a smile on her face. “No matter how tired he was, how long he had worked or what was going on in his life, he always had time to listen to me,” she said. “I’d go on and on.”

  “About what?”

  She looked away. “Everything. The world, school, friends, guys…” The smile grew a little more as she remembered her father, reconnected with him. “He never preached, never told me what to do even though sometimes I wished he would. He just listened.” Chloe took a breath and there was a faint catch in it. “Then he’d tell me he loved me. When that didn’t help, he’d break out chocolate ice cream.”

  In spite of himself, Scott smiled. “I’d kill for some right now.”

  Chloe went on, the words she needed to hear coming from her own lips, not his. “The worst was if I had a fight with my mom. He never took sides.” She shook her head. “God, my mom… He was her whole life. She probably thinks we’re both dead.”

  Scott watched the play of emotions on her face. “I didn’t know him, and now I wish I’d had the chance. All I do know is that he wanted you to go on. He loved you.”

  “I know.” Her voice seemed to come from very far away.

  He wanted to say more, but he had nothing else to give her. Anything else would have just been empty platitudes, and Chloe deserved more than that. Scott slowly got back to his feet. “I gotta get back to the search. Are you going to be okay?”

  She gave him a look. “I don’t know.”

  He felt the same way. “Fair enough.”

  Eli felt numb.

  He’d experienced death in the same way that most people his age had; through the funeral of an elderly relative or the distant, removed passing of someone they knew at second hand. But Eli had never been so close to something like this, to a man making the choice to end himself by his own hand. People had died back there on Icarus, and Eli knew that on a disconnected, intellectual level; but he hadn’t known them, hadn’t seen their last moments as he had with Armstrong, watching him seal himself into the shuttle via the unblinking eye of the kino, watching Chloe’s sorrow and fury at her father’s sacrifice.

  He stared at the console before him without really seeing it, dimly aware of Rush, Brody and Park busying themselves at the control room’s other panels. Senator Armstrong’s death made the threat facing all of them shift from an abstract to terrible reality. Maybe on some level, Eli had believed that they would never have to really face up to their own mortality; but now that was all torn away, and the truth of it was bearing down on him.

  “Eli…”

  He looked up and found Rush staring at him. “What?”

  “What are you doing?” The scientist looked irritated. “We need to keep working, searching the ship’s systems.”

  He shook his head. “I just watched a man die. Give me a break, okay? Don’t you care?”

  Brody and Park paused, watching the conversation. Rush shot them a look that said Back to Work! and then turned to Eli again. “Of course I do. But I’m concentrating on what needs to be done. I’m also learning as much as I can, as quickly as I can.” He tapped the console in front of him. “That is, in addition to running nine separate searches in the database in the hope of solving our life support issues.”

  “Right,” said Eli, frowning. “Have you found anything?”

  Rush paused, and when he spoke again Eli detected a note of melancholy in his voice. “Destiny.”

  He blinked. “As in ours?” Eli hadn’t figured Rush as the kind to make portentous statements.

  The scientist shook his head slightly. “It’s the name of the ship, translated from Ancient. Fitting, don’t you think?”

  Park spoke up. “I never much liked the whole idea of destinies and fates and predetermined events, myself.”

  “Destiny and fate are two different things,” said Brody. “Fate implies a path with no choice to it. Destiny is something else… Something you have to be a part of. Something with a choice to it.”

  Rush nodded. “I have also learned that the Ancients were never here.”

  That brought Eli up short. “Wait, I though
t this was an Ancient ship. You said they built it, just like they built the Stargates.”

  “They did,” said Rush. “They sent it out unmanned, planning to use the gate on board to get here when it was far enough out into the universe…but they must have learned to ascend before it was time.”

  Ascend? Eli wasn’t sure what the word meant in that context, but he saw Brody and Park both nodding at Rush’s theory. “They learned to what?”

  “It’s, uh, a bit complicated,” noted Brody.

  Rush took on a lecturing tone once more. “Ascension is a process in which consciousness converts to energy and no longer requires physical form.”

  He made it sound like he was talking about someone changing their shirt, not shifting from one state of being to another. Eli had read enough science fiction to grasp the concept of a corporeal entity transforming into pure energy, but the idea of a whole civilization doing it for real was a little harder to comprehend. But it did explain a lot; he’d wondered for a while why it was these so-called Ancients were willing to let Earthmen screw around with their funky technology and not kick up a stink about it. They were all gone, vanished off to Dimension X or some other higher plane of being. “That wasn’t in the video,” he said. Eli had been constructing his own theory about the builders of the Stargates ever since he’d first heard them mentioned, factoring in what he knew of conspiracy theories about Roswell, alien abductions and that kind of thing. Now it all seemed trivial and commonplace. All that stuff with little gray men must have been some big disinformation thing, he decided.

  Rush gave him an arch look. “There’s more than one video, Eli. Now, if you don’t mind, we all need to get to work.”

  “Sorry…”

  Young entered the gate room, and resisted the urge to glance over his shoulder at Master Sergeant Greer. The Marine was only doing his job, making sure that Young stayed standing, but the colonel was already starting to quietly resent having to lean on the young man for support. His legs felt like they were wrapped in needles, and every step he took, a little shock of agony went up his spine and rattled around his skull.

  T.J. had offered him something for the pain, but he had told her to keep it. Medical supplies were too important to dole out without good reason; and Everett Young’s reason wasn’t anywhere close to good. But he couldn’t stay in that cabin any more. People needed to see he was still alive, see that a senior officer was there to lead them. The alternative was to load even more pressure on to Scott, and he had enough; that or let Rush continue to pretend he was running this ship.

  Sergeant Riley had contacted him over the radio, and the technician’s excited tone was the first positive thing Young had heard since they’d fled here from Icarus. The colonel found him at one of the copper-sheathed consoles at the back of the chamber.

  “I think I got it,” he told him, as Young and Greer approached. “It wasn’t even that hard to find. It’s right here in the dialing program.” Riley tapped the screen, and on it Young saw something that looked a lot like the activation subroutines in use at Stargate Command, only here the familiar strings of angular constellation symbols were replaced with combinations of dots, circles and wavy lines.

  He gave the non-com a level look. “You’re sure?”

  Riley nodded. “Yes sir. It’s an eight symbol gate address input.”

  “You can dial this thing to Earth?” said Greer.

  The other man nodded. “There’s no point of origin indicated, though, but that might vary based on the location of the ship. And unlike the Giza-type Stargates, there’s only thirty-six symbols, not thirty-nine.”

  “Thirty-six,” echoed Young, “Same as the Pegasus Stargates.”

  “That’s right.” Riley nodded again. “I’m assuming that the ninth symbol represents some x-factor distance equation.”

  Young suspected that the sergeant would start giving him chapter and verse on the whole structure of the new kind of gate they’d discovered on the ship, but he didn’t have time to listen to it. “I don’t care about the details,” he said. “Start dialing.”

  Riley reached for the control pad, and then paused. “Don’t we want to bring Dr. Rush in on this?”

  Young gave him a look. “You said this wasn’t that hard to find?”

  “No sir.”

  The colonel nodded. “Then he probably already knows and didn’t tell us.” He pointed at the console. “Get to it, Sergeant.”

  Eli worked through a dozen more levels of the ship’s — no, scratch that, the Destiny’s — subsystems, and it seemed like the deeper he went, the more he found. The size of the database on board the vessel defied measurement, so it seemed; and the problem was, with a library that big, locating a single book, such as the one labeled How Not To Suffocate And Die, was like finding your actual needle in a haystack. As much as he searched, however, he couldn’t stop his thoughts from wandering back to the events that had brought them all here.

  And Rush’s comment continued to nag at him. There’s more than one video. The question was, How many more?

  “Who is this Lucian Alliance, anyway?” The question slipped out before he was aware of thinking it.

  Rush looked up. “Where did that come from?”

  “I want to know who to blame for this,” Eli told him.

  “If it was them…” muttered Brody.

  “All right,” said Rush. “I suppose your security clearance is a moot point now we’re all out here. They’re a largely-human coalition from various Milky Way planets, that formed in the power vacuum left when the Goa’uld were defeated.”

  “The Goa’uld…” Eli repeated. The name felt odd as he said it.

  “An intelligent parasitic ophidian life form,” offered Brody. “They used human hosts, and ran slave empires under the guises of mythological deities.”

  “Right. Of course.” Eli decided to accept that at face value and move on.

  “The Lucian Alliance are criminals, mostly,” continued Rush. “A street gang with starships.”

  Eli considered that. “How did they find out about Icarus? Wasn’t it like, double secret?”

  “Yes.” Rush frowned. “I suspect there was a leak somewhere. Someone working on the inside, feeding them information.”

  “On the base?” Eli felt a chill at that; the idea of someone willingly opening the door to the death and destruction he’d seen made him feel sick.

  “Or Earth,” said Rush, looking away. “The legend surrounding the ninth chevron has been floating around our galaxy for a very long time, in different forms.”

  Eli’s hand closed around the remote control pad for the kino he’d left bobbing in the air nearby, and he activated it, careful not to let Rush see him do it. He had a sudden feeling that what the man said next would be worth recording.

  Rush pointed at the star map screen. “We found it means a variety of things to different cultures. Historical remnants appear on worlds in our home galaxy and out in Pegasus. Some believed that the Ancients received a subspace signal so old that it must have originated from the first intelligence to arise after the Big Bang, and that the ninth chevron was the only way to reach them. Some said it was a key to the universe itself, and once unlocked, you would gain untold power.” He paused, musing on his own words, apparently unaware of the kino drifting nearby. “If the Lucian Alliance learned we had discovered the address and a means to dial it, they would want that information.”

  “Enough to kill for it,” Park said, grim-faced.

  Eli couldn’t help but glance around at the dull iron walls, the dim lighting and the bleak, metallic décor. “This ship is a source of untold power?”

  A smile flickered over Rush’s face. “No, not literally. It has more to do with what this ship is doing, it’s mission of exploration and the information that the Destiny is capable of gathering.”

  He was starting to get the measure of it now. “If you know how to use it.”

  Rush nodded. “Yes. Perhaps the grand sum of that knowledge
could lead to a powerful understanding of the universe.”

  Eli saw that look in the man’s eye again, that glint of deep need. “That’s what you’re after, isn’t it? That’s why you risked everything to get here.” His lips thinned. “You think this ship is going to make you all-powerful or something crazy like that.” He had a sudden mental image of Rush plugging himself into some vast Ancient machine and transforming himself with a blast of cosmic energy, like something out of an old Jack Kirby comic.

  Rush gave him a patronizing look. “Eli, if there was a way to safely send all these people home and return with a properly skilled team to pursue this mission as intended, why wouldn’t I want to do that?”

  Admittedly, he didn’t have an answer for that. “I don’t know.”

  “Now,” he said turning to shoot a glare at the kino. “Shut that thing off.”

  Eli gave a sheepish grin. “You saw that, huh?”

  Rush was going to say more, but a tinny chime from his console drew the scientist’s attention. A new star map appeared on the display, and he quickly brought it up on the large holographic pane. Eli crowded in to get a better look, and Brody and Park followed.

  “Planets,” said Park. The imager projected a series of worlds on the monitor, one after another, lines of data scrolling quickly past each one before the display shifted.

  “What is it doing?” said Brody.

  Rush tapped his chin. “I attacked the life support problem every way I can think of. I asked the computer to look for any possible resources on board that might help us. But now it seems to be looking outside the ship.”

  Suddenly, the search program froze and an indicator panel appeared over the display. Rush’s manner immediately became one of alarm. “No…” he muttered.

  Eli looked back at the hologram; he was reminded of the kind of pop-ups he saw on his PC whenever the machine suffered a blue-screen-of-death crash error. Rush was already on his way out of the room, and Eli called after him. “What’s wrong?”