STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air

by James Swallow

  “Of course,” said Rush, as if he were surprised that the colonel would suggest anything else.

  Young walked up to the gate as Corporal Gorman stepped through, and then Sergeant Spencer a beat behind him. Both of the men gave him a weary nod; their expressions spoke volumes, and Young’s heart sank.

  James came through a moment later and halted, giving him a grim look. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said simply.

  He nodded. “You did your best, Lieutenant. Stand down.”

  “Sir,” she replied and walked away, past Rush, Brody, Riley, Wray and the others who were gathering around the console, watching the ticking countdown clock on the auxiliary screen.

  Ninety seconds now, by my estimate, thought Young. When time zero showed on the monitor, the Destiny would shut that gateway forever and blast away from this star system at superluminal speeds. Any chance the desert world might have had to save them would be lost.

  He raised his radio to his lips. “Eli, do you read me?”

  “Right here,” came the weary reply.

  “Don’t wait,” he said. “You make sure you get through with enough time to spare.”

  Eli’s reply was lost in the sudden clatter of an alarm tone that began to sound through the gate room and the corridors. On the screen, the countdown timer was flashing red.

  “Alert signal,” called Riley. “The ship is preparing to jump to FTL.”

  “Less than one minute remaining,” said Rush.

  Young nodded. “Eli? It’s time.”

  “Okay,” said Eli, retreating up the stone ramp. “Just a second.”

  “You don’t have a second,” said Young’s voice. “Get back here, that’s an order.”

  He was still working the kino, eyes glued to the remote, even as he took steps toward the wormhole. The field of vision from the drone device swept the landscape, looking for any sign of Scott and Greer.

  The image panned over the tops of the dunes, and blurred past something. “Whoa!” said Eli, stabbing at the control and reversing the scan. The image bobbed back and found its target.

  Two men, running as fast as they could, hobbling, headlong. Scott and Greer, a heavy pack being dragged between them.

  “I see them!” he shouted, fumbling with his radio. “I see them. They’re carrying something…”

  Greer’s voice broke in over the open channel. “We’ve got it!” he bellowed. “Don’t go! We’ve got it!”

  Eli gauged the distance between the men and the gate and his gut filled with ice. Only moments remained, but it wouldn’t be enough. With damning certainty he knew there was no way Greer and Scott would reach the Stargate before the Destiny cut off the wormhole. “They’ve got the lime,” he reported. “And they’re not going to make it…”

  The hooting alarm was becoming more and more strident as the time-to-disconnect shrank toward nothing. Rush looked up as Riley made the call. “Thirty seconds!”

  If they left the others behind, it would be death sentence for all of them, not just the men the stranded on the planet, not just Curtis and Palmer, but every single person who had fled from the destruction of Icarus Base; and Nicholas Rush was not about to die, not after so much, not after finally finding his destiny. He refused to be denied it.

  “Somebody give me a radio,” he snapped. Their only hope now was to ask someone to risk their life for all of them. Lieutenant James handed him her walkie and he spoke into it. “Eli, it’s me, Rush. I want you to stick your arm into the event horizon…the ‘puddle’…”

  Rush felt every eye on him. “Seriously?” came the young man’s reply.

  Young stepped closer, and he could see that the colonel understood what he was attempting. “Are you sure?” said the officer.

  Rush released the talk button. “No,” he said honestly.

  “He’ll be torn apart…” whispered Wray.

  Rush disregarded her words, continuing. “But I would bet there’s a safety protocol that will prevent someone from being cut off from the ship while en route.”

  “Like elevator doors,” muttered Brody. “Same thing.”

  “What if there isn’t?” said Young.

  Riley called out the count. “Twenty seconds.”

  He had no time to debate the merits of his theory, and spoke urgently into the radio once more.

  “Eli, do it!”

  He stood at the very surface of the fluid-like event horizon, seeing a weird, distorted reflection of himself in the matrix of the wormhole. Turning, Eli saw Scott and Greer, both of them dredging up whatever energy they still had left in them for one final, headlong sprint. But they were still some distance away. Still too far away.

  Eli gave a deep sigh. This is without a doubt the most insane thing I have ever done, he told himself. With a wince, he extended his arm and pushed it through the surface of the rippling portal, all the way down past his elbow, then filled his lungs for a frantic shout. “Come on!”

  A strange cold-hot prickling tingle enveloped his limb, and he could still feel it intact in there, wherever there was, maybe trapped in some weird state of pre-dematerialization, waiting for the rest of him to come through.

  Over the radio, he heard Sergeant Riley begin a ten second countdown.

  “ Five. Four. Three.” The sergeant read off the time as the Ancient digits dropped toward nothing. “Two. One. Zero.”

  Rush found that he was holding in his breath, and he released it slowly. A second elapsed, then two, then three, and still the alarms blared. He could feel a low rumble through the deck beneath his feet, but the Stargate remained active, the chevrons shining brightly. I was right…

  “Got something here,” said Riley. Rush saw on his console that the countdown clock display had now been replaced by a panel of warning text flashing an angry crimson. Judging by the tremors from the distant engines, it didn’t appear that the FTL jump had been aborted, only delayed — the question now was, for how long?

  Young barked into his radio “Eli! Eli, are you still there?”

  In the next moment, two dust-caked figures crashed through the open wormhole and collapsed to the floor in a crumpled heap. A heavy back pack came with them, landing with a dull thud on the deck plates. Rush was already moving forward as Eli came stumbling through a heartbeat later, staggering to his knees. He was barely through before the event horizon disintegrated behind him and the gate went dark.

  Rush couldn’t help but grin as the young man rolled over on to his back and clasped desperately at his arm, grabbing at it to be certain that the limb was still attached to him. “Well done, Eli,” he said quietly.

  Around them, the walls moaned as the ship shuddered, mustering itself for a discharge of power. The engine note built to a rattling whine that culminated in a sudden, giddy sense of motion-without-motion, and Rush swayed a step before steadying himself.

  “Great,” coughed Eli from his position on the floor. “Warp speed.”

  “Good work,” said Young as he approached. “All of you.”

  “Hey, thanks,” Eli replied. “Is it okay if I pass out here for a little while?”

  He didn’t feel like he needed the crutch that Becker had made him any more, so Colonel Young left it back with the supplies and took a slow and steady walking tour of the Destiny. Everybody on board had come to within a few breaths of dying and all of them had faced it with a strength he hadn’t credited. Alan Armstrong had given his life to keep them alive. Scott and Greer had performed above and beyond the call of duty. T.J. had stepped up when she was needed the most. Eli Wallace had shown great bravery in a moment when a lesser man would have shirked the responsibility. Even Rush, after everything the man had done and despite whatever selfish agenda he was pushing, had come through in the end.

  He stopped to watch Rush supervising Volker and Park as they assisted in the revitalization of the carbon dioxide scrubbers. Scott’s find on the planet had provided them with more than enough of the limestone compound for their immediate needs, and with it they’d co
oked up a batch of milky fluid that would do the job and keep everyone breathing for the foreseeable future. They filled the filter pods and slotted them back into the walls, one after another.

  Young passed by the control room chamber, and found a tired but elated Eli working with Brody. On the main holographic display, the life support system indicators that had remained an ominous red began to switch over to a stable green as each one of the air scrubbers was replenished. He kept walking, on toward the crew quarters, and in the corridor he felt the faintest breath of a fresh breeze against his cheek.

  Young stopped and looked up toward the atmosphere vents and took a deep breath, allowing himself to savor it. Moving on, past the storage compartment where Camile Wray had gathered a few of the civilians, he heard them laughing with relief as clean air started coming from the vents. She saw him pass by and they shared a nod. For all of them, Young included, it seemed like an age since they had been able to breathe deeply.

  Across the corridor was the room he’d rested in earlier — not that there was a lack of places to sleep here. Young wondered if Rush had been right about the Destiny never actually having a crew in the first place. If that was so, then why have the rooms at all? It was one more question about this craft that needed to be answered. Perhaps, now they weren’t struggling for their next breath, they could think about finding some answers.

  He entered and Tamara looked up from where she sat next to Franklin. The scientist’s shoulder was heavily bandaged and the detritus from her work on his injury lay in a blood-stained pile on the table. She gave Young a weary nod and he returned it.

  “How is he doing?”

  Tamara sighed. “He’ll be okay once the sedatives wear off and he wakes up. It’ll hurt him like hell for a while, though, and his arm probably won’t work as well as it did. I’m just a meatball surgeon, but I did my best.”

  “I know you did,” said Young.

  She went on. “I took a look at Scott and the others. The lieutenant has some wicked sunburn. Can’t help him with that, though. He’ll have to tough it out. I sent Chloe to get him rehydrated.”

  “What about Greer and Eli?”

  “You know Marines, sir. There’s a reason they call them ‘leathernecks.’ As for Eli, he’s holding up pretty well. Just glad to be alive, I guess.” Tamara seemed to sense what Young’s next question would be and she moved to deflect it. “I made sure they all got enough to drink, but we need to be firm on the rationing. There’s no telling how long its going to be before we can get more food and water—”

  “Don’t worry about that for now,” he said. “How about you, T.J.? How are you doing?”

  She looked away and blew out a breath. “I… I don’t know when I last slept. Broke my watch coming through the Stargate. I guess I’m just strung out…” Tamara managed a weak smile. “But I’m alive. Where there’s life, there’s hope, right?”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  The smile faded. “But I can’t help thinking about Andrea Palmer and Sergeant Curtis. And Chloe’s dad. Sir, we’ve been out here no more than a day or so, and we’ve already lost three people.”

  Young gave a solemn nod. “I know how you feel. But there’s nothing we could have done.”

  She looked away. “How are we going to survive? We’ve got air now, but we need food, water, we need to figure out how this ship operates…”

  “One problem at a time,” he told her. “One day at a time. That’s what we have to do.” He paused. “Palmer, Curtis, Senator Armstrong… They all made their choices. Now we have to make ours. Do we pull together and get through this, or do we fall apart?”

  After a moment, Tamara nodded. “Not really a choice at all, is it?”

  “No,” he agreed.

  Eli looked up as Rush entered the control room, passing Brody on his way out. “Hey, we’re not dead. That means this was a good day, right?”

  Rush gave a snort. “That all depends on how you define good, Eli.”

  He held up his hands. “I have both my arms; I am alive. Yeah, I’ll go with good for that.”

  The other man fell silent and studied him. Then he spoke again. “Thank you for trusting me. I know there’s not a lot of that going around at the moment.”

  “Hey, if anyone knows how Stargates work around here, it’s you, right?”

  “Yes,” replied Rush, without weight.

  “And it’s not like I had a lot of options,” admitted Eli. “Suffocate on the ship, die of thirst on the planet, lose an arm. None of those are exactly enticing.” He paused, considering his motivations for a moment. “The truth is, I knew you weren’t going to let us all die.”

  Rush raised an eyebrow. “Why? I doubt Sergeant Greer would have agreed with that.”

  Eli gestured around. “Because of all this. The Destiny.” He nodded to himself. “Without that mineral stuff, everyone would have died, you included, and you don’t want to lose one second of being here, do you?”

  “Of course not,” Rush replied. “I’d be a fool not to. This ship, everything it represents…” His gaze turned inward. “We have to know it, Eli. We have an opportunity here greater than any other explorer in human history. We can’t refuse it.”

  Eli saw that odd light in Rush’s eyes again, and something occurred to him; a sudden, cold realization. He doesn’t want to go home.

  The man blinked and went back to working the console, the moment vanishing. “We should keep digging through the layers of the system,” he said, all business again. “We’ve only just scratched the surface here.”

  “Yeah,” said Eli, for the moment keeping his thoughts to himself. “You’re right about that.”

  Scott lay on the bunk and watched the patterns of the stars flash past the window in the far wall. He lay in the cool darkness of the room and didn’t move; parts of his skin felt raw and tight, and he had to be careful how he sat on the bed. Even the slightest touch of cloth on his sunburn felt like someone rubbing sandpaper over him. He couldn’t remember ever being this exhausted, not even after the worst days of basic training. Scott felt like he had been crushed up, wrung out and thrown away; but he was still breathing, so that had to count for something.

  The streaks of starlight flying by had a lulling, almost hypnotic effect on the lieutenant — or maybe that was just the fatigue. He felt his thoughts drifting, falling back to those moments on the desert world.

  Scott had not dwelled on thoughts of Father George for a long time, and to relive those moments so vividly now, to sense the old man’s presence close to him… He couldn’t help but wonder what it could mean. Part of him wanted to rationalize it away; it was heat stroke, some kind of hallucination brought on by dehydration, maybe. Another part of him, something he’d buried deep, kept to himself, had other answers that he didn’t want to think about.

  And then there was the strange dust-vortex shape he had seen, the ‘swirl’. He hadn’t spoken to anyone about it yet, and he wondered what he could say if he did. Scott was convinced that the twisting spiral of sand had been real, even if everything else wasn’t. He remembered the static charge he’d felt when it touched him, the way it consumed the water he dripped from his canteen. He had not imagined that; he had not hallucinated the way it had helped him, saved his life — and everyone else’s, he thought.

  Perhaps it had been some kind of alien life form, something native to the white deserts, possibly sentient, possibly not. Then again, Scott thought about the stories he’d heard, the barrack-room rumors about the aliens the SGC called the Ancients. Weren’t they supposed to be made of pure energy? He wondered if that could be possible, that the people who had built this starship might still be out here somewhere, watching over the craft, taking an interest in the new arrivals huddling in its corridors. And then there was the other possibility. Scott had grown up listening to stories of angels, of ethereal beings that gave assistance in times of great need. Maybe there hadn’t been any harps and haloes, but he couldn’t deny that something had looked out
for him.

  There was a knock at the door and he looked up as Chloe entered, holding a full canteen. “Hey,” she said softly. “I brought you some more water.”

  He nodded at the bottle by his pallet. “It’s okay, I still have some.”

  She came in and stood by the end of the bed. “You really need to drink it. Lieutenant Johansen…. I mean, Tamara, was pretty insistent about it.”

  Scott nodded wearily. “I’m fine.” He suddenly felt awkward, unsure what to say to her. His mind flashed back to that moment in the corridor outside the shuttle bay, when Chloe had held on to him for dear life, as if he were the rock in a storm raging all around her. In that instant, a connection had been forged between them.

  After a moment, she spoke again. “Everyone appreciates what you did.”

  He sat up. “Did Rush say how long it will last?”

  “He’s not sure.”

  Silence stretched out between them, and he couldn’t let it go on. Scott’s experience on the planet had left him feeling hollowed out, alone, and he saw the mirror of his own feelings in Chloe. “How are you?” he asked. She shook her head and gave a numb shrug. “My parents died in a car crash when I was four years old.” He said it without thinking, uncertain of where the impulse came from.

  Chloe looked up at him, with genuine regret. “I’m sorry.”

  Now he had started talking about it, he found he couldn’t stop. “There was a priest who raised me… He pretty much drank himself to death when I was sixteen.”

  Her hand went to her mouth. “My God.”

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m not trying to diminish what you’re going through.”

  “I know,” she gave a slow nod. “I understand.”

  Scott looked past her, to the window. “I think my point is, some things you never get over. That’s just the way it is.” She came closer and sat on the side of the bed, taking his hand. “You go on through,” he continued. “As best you can.”

  Chloe nodded. She opened her mouth to speak, but said nothing.