STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air

by James Swallow

  “You son of a bitch!” Telford’s reaction was immediate and furious. The Death Glider spun away from its kill and the colonel bore down on it, the death of his wingman blinding the other pilot to his presence long enough for Telford to put his guns on the enemy. In a jousting pass, Telford raked the target with the railgun cannons in his 302’s nose and ripped Chavez’s killer open. The Death Glider exploded and he rode out the shockwave, coming hard about.

  “Red Four lost,” he said into the radio. “Red Flight, report.”

  “Red Five. I’m hit but I can handle it,” Kanin replied.

  “Red Three,” grated DeSalvo, voice tight with effort. “In a turning fight. Damn, these creeps are serious.”

  “On my way,” Kanin reported.

  Telford throttled up, diving after the transport, but even as he aimed and fired his next missile salvos, he knew it wouldn’t be enough. The injured ship was already bellying down toward the desert and its turret gunners were quick, throwing up sheets of fire to knock down the AIM-120s before they could strike home.

  He broke off and went down on the deck, swooping low over the grounded, smoldering vessel. He grimaced as he saw a horde of troops boiling out of the craft, and strafed them with the railguns, but the damage was already done. The enemy was advancing on Icarus Base. Small arms fire licked at his wings as Telford pulled up and turned for another pass.

  The colonel toggled the ground communications channel. “Icarus Base, do you read? This is Telford.”

  “We read,” said a voice. It was Colonel Young, and in those two words he made it clear he knew this wasn’t going to be good news.

  “We didn’t get to the transport before they offloaded…” Telford turned a practiced eye over the lines of enemy soldiers. “You’ve got at least a thousand ground assault troops coming your way. I repeat, estimate battalion strength enemy foot mobiles inbound to your perimeter.”

  “Understood,” said Young, the numbers registering in the cold, unforgiving tactical calculations of his thoughts. A glider howled overhead, low enough that he could have thrown a stone and struck the belly of it, and off to the colonel’s right a Marine with a M249 SAW machine gun tracked the craft, pouring fire into it as it went, a fountain of expended brass shells arcing over his shoulder. In the next second, Young heard the snarling whoop of a Goa’uld energy weapon and a bolt of fire struck the Marine dead where he stood.

  “We can slow them down, but there’s not a chance in hell we’re gonna be able to stop them…” Telford’s voice was tense with exertion. “Lock the doors, and we’ll meet up back at the SGC!”

  Young let off a burst of fire from his M4 in the direction the hit had come from and ducked back into cover behind a wall of sandbags. “Do what you can, Colonel. Icarus out.”

  He took a breath and switched to the base alert frequency. The order he was going to give was the one that no field commander ever wanted to voice, but the choice had been taken from him the moment this planet had been targeted for conquest. His eyes flicked to the dead Marine, lying beside his still-smoking gun. We can’t win this.

  Close by, a non-com behind one of the railguns put his shoulder into the weapon and hauled it around, coming to bear on another Death Glider as it wailed through the air.

  “This is Colonel Young,” he said. “All non-essential personnel muster to the gate room for immediate evac. All combat personnel, fall back to standby positions and prepare to disengage.” He changed channels again. “Sergeant Riley, do you copy?”

  There was a momentary pause before the gate technician came on the line. “Sir, yes sir.”

  “Override the lockout protocol and dial the Stargate to Earth.”

  Fire erupted from the railgun as the glider powered in toward the battlements on an attack run. Riley’s reply was lost in the heavy snarl of the cannon as the kinetic kill rounds shredded the fighter’s cockpit and sent it into a corkscrew spin directly toward the gun emplacement.

  Moving without thinking, Young vaulted up and grabbed the gunner by the scruff of his armor vest and dragged him off the mount. The two of them spun away into safety just as the glider slammed into the railgun and detonated.

  The back blast threw the pair of them, commander and enlisted man, into a head-over-heels tumble down the access gantry and back into the base.

  Rush looked up irritably as a scattering of pebble-sized stones rattled off the elevated walkway leading up to the Stargate. Up above the hanging, swaying lighting rigs, the dark streaks of rents in the concrete ceiling were visible in the shadows. He frowned and absently brushed a layer of rock dust from his shoulder. The lights gave an ominous flicker as the distant report of gunfire and explosions went on and on.

  Lines of people were huddled in the access wells below the walkway, fear ready and strong on the faces of every one of them. For a moment, Rush studied them, wondering what each of them were thinking. He saw faces he knew — Park and Franklin, Brody and Volker, Boone and Palmer and all the others.

  They want to go home, he thought. He couldn’t blame them, but at the same time he couldn’t empathize with them. They all had something to go home to, after all, but what did he have? What was there back on Earth for Nicholas Rush except another failure? The last time he had been back, to pick up Wallace and go through yet another round of meetings with the IOA, they had demanded answers from him that he couldn’t give. He recalled looking into the eyes of Carl Strom, the current head of the oversight committee, and knowing that the man thought Project Icarus was a hiding to nothing. A fool’s errand.

  The pattern was repeating itself over and over: each time Rush would get close to the answer, but each time fate would reach in and snatch it away from him. But not this time. Not this time, not if Eli is really on to something.

  If the power wasn’t the problem…if it was the dialing sequence…

  Eli was waving his hand over the keys of the Dial-Home Device podium. “The symbols on the Stargate are constellations as seen from Earth, that’s what you said.”

  “Yes,” Rush nodded impatiently, wondering where Wallace was going with his train of thought. He glanced away, to where the technician was programming in the standard seven chevron coding that would open a wormhole back to Cheyenne Mountain and Stargate Command.

  Eli pointed at a specific symbol on the DHD; it was one that everyone involved in any aspect of the Stargate program remembered, the symbol that had enabled Daniel Jackson to open the gate, the symbol that every SG team wore on their shoulder patches. An inverted ‘V’ with a tiny circle above it. “So what if Earth is supposed to be the point of origin?”

  Rush frowned. “We couldn’t do this from Earth,” he insisted, “even if we had a hundred Lantean zero point modules. The only viable power source we could find is here.” He indicated the floor. “Light-years away from the Sol system.”

  Eli shook his head, his eyes wide. “But maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s the only combination that will work. Like a code.”

  The truth of the moment locked into place inside Rush’s thoughts. It was simple, but it made perfect sense. And how like the Ancients to make the final part of their greatest leap across the infinite void contingent on the world that had been so pivotal in their history. He felt almost giddy with the sense of it. Yes. He’s right.

  Rush turned to Riley. “Stop the dialing sequence.”

  The sergeant gave him a look and shook his head. “I have my orders, Doctor.”

  Rush dashed across the gantry to Riley’s console, his mind racing. If they returned to Earth now, then this planet and the Icarus Base facility would be lost to the invaders, at best; or torn apart by tectonic instability at worst. Without the core’s monumental power, it wouldn’t matter if Eli Wallace was correct about the origin symbol. No other known energy source existed that could pass the threshold for dialing the eighth chevron to reach the ninth. Everything Nicholas Rush had worked for, all these months and years of sacrificing himself, the destiny he knew was his…all of it
would be lost, and this time there would be no more chances. He felt a tremor in his hands at the thought of that. It would destroy him.

  Rush glanced at the power flow gauges and a thought formed in his mind. This was his last chance. He had to take control.

  “We… We can’t risk dialing Earth,” he snapped, shoving Riley aside. “Get out of my way!”

  Greer moved as quickly as he could with the dead weight of a bloody, unconscious man over his shoulder. His G36 rifle bounced off his thigh from its strap, and the Marine’s hand never strayed too far from it each time he turned a corner or passed a shadowed hallway.

  So far, he hadn’t encountered any enemy contact this deep into Icarus, but he knew the enemy already had their men inside the perimeter. He’d seen the tail end of the firefight in the hangar bay, as waves of troops had flooded in through blast holes in the doors.

  All things being equal, the Marine Corps and Air Force contingent at Icarus should have been more than a match for them, but whoever was pulling the strings of this operation knew that, and had made up for it with the sheer weight of numbers. Greer grimaced. Maybe the 300 Spartans had worse odds, but that was about it. Like it or not, Icarus Base was going to fall, and soon.

  He rounded a corner into the main corridor and found what he was looking for. “Medic!” he called.

  Lieutenant Johansen came to the sergeant’s side as he carefully lay his burden down on the floor. The injured man was barely breathing, and his face was a mess of blood.

  From her shocked reaction, Johansen clearly knew the guy. “Oh my god… Doctor Simms.”

  Greer blinked and looked again at the man he’d rescued. He hadn’t even recognized the base’s chief medical officer, the officer’s face so messed up it looked like he’d been attacked by a razor-wielding psycho.

  “What happened?” said the lieutenant, as she started to work on Simms, tearing bandages from her medical pack.

  “He caught shrapnel from an explosion,” Greer explained. “He was helping pull the wounded back from the surface.” The sergeant saw Johansen busy herself with a nasty injury at the doctor’s neck. Blood was seeping from it, matting his collar to his skin.

  Greer stepped back to let the lieutenant do her job. He’d seen wounds like that before, and he had his doubts that Simms would survive it. Without another word, he paused to check his G36 once again and made to head back the way he came.

  Strong fingers gripped his arm. “Greer!” He turned to find Colonel Young standing beside him. His commanding officer was smoke-dirty and he smelled like spent cordite. “We’re pulling back.”

  Greer jerked a thumb at the corridor. “There are still people out there, sir!”

  Young shook his head. “The Hammond has already started beaming up anyone pinned down on the surface —”

  The sergeant’s mouth twisted. When the hammer came down, he wasn’t the kind to rely on any of that Buck Rogers sci-fi crap the flyboys liked so much. “Someone’s got to make sure,” he retorted.

  “Sergeant!” Young snapped, with enough force that Greer’s ingrained Corps training stopped him dead. “I’ve got people cut off from the gate room, trapped by a rock fall. The base is shielded, which means the Hammond can’t get a lock on them to beam them out. So I need you here, to help them.”

  Greer relented. An order was an order. “Sir, yes sir. Where are they?”

  “Corridor six-alpha—” Young halted as the medic gave a shallow, choked sob. Both men looked as Johansen’s desperate attempts at resuscitation proved fruitless. Tears streaked the lieutenant’s face, making tracks down her dust-smeared cheeks.

  “T.J.,” said Young, touching her shoulder. “Tamara, stop…”

  Johansen drew back her hands and gave a shuddering sigh. “I was just talking with him a couple of hours ago.”

  “You can’t help him any more,” the colonel said. “We’ve gotta save who we can.”

  Hunter Riley watched the Scottish scientist as he worked the console, erasing the Earth gate address and beginning the initialization sequence over again. He hesitated, unsure how to proceed. The man had practically tipped him out of his chair, and now he was in the process of countermanding the orders of Riley’s superior officer. The sergeant wasn’t exactly sure how chain of command was supposed to work with civilians like Doctor Rush. He was the lead scientist here, but this was still a military base. Rush was here on a mandate from the SGC and the IOA, though, and Riley was pretty damned sure that all those three-letter acronyms overshadowed his stripes. What the question boiled down to was, Will I end up in the stockade if I lay a hand on this guy? He thought about what had happened to Greer and hesitated.

  Like a lot of his family, Riley was career Air Force, and the Stargate program had already claimed one of his relatives, a cousin of his who’d been lost on the Atlantis expedition. He didn’t want to be the next one who had a flag sent to his parents in lieu of a coffin.

  “Doctor Rush,” he began, “I’m going to have to ask you to step away from the console.”

  The scientist ignored him and entered the final symbol of the gate address, this time substituting the local glyph for the Earth symbol. Rush stared up at the spinning, rumbling gate with hope in his eyes. It was like he didn’t even see the rest of the people in the room.

  Riley glanced at the console. He didn’t think for a second this was actually going to work.

  But then the gate vibrated with a tremor of immense power and the event horizon erupted into the air, cascading across the length of the chamber with such force that everyone flinched and instinctively hugged the ground.

  The noise of the vortex’s formation was louder and more intense than any active gate Riley had witnessed, invisible waves of cold and static radiating out across the room, making the hairs on his arms stand up. As the event horizon collapsed back into the metallic ring, a familiar rippling light danced over the walls and through the dust-filled air, the echo of the opening roar dying away.

  “That is impressive,” managed Eli, amazement and shock writ large across his expression.

  And it was impressive. The sergeant moved to one of the other consoles, checking the telemetry from the Stargate. His eyes narrowed. The wormhole was stable and showing the same kinds of readings he would have expected from a standard seven chevron link, but at the same time there was whole different layer of data streaming in that was totally new to him. Riley glanced at the energy transfer gauges and what he saw there gave him pause. Red tell-tales were blinking furiously, consumption and distribution graphs peaking well beyond the safe zone. “Power is fluctuating at critical levels.” He swallowed hard. “Doctor, we need to disengage.”

  Rush didn’t look at him; he was staring at the shimmering silver pool of the gateway, and by the expression on his face, you might have thought the man was looking into heaven itself. “I’ve done it,” he whispered.

  The Hammond rocked like a boat in a storm as another one-two punch landed on her forward shields, the energy-shock from the hits radiating back to the vessel itself. Colonel Carter hung on to her command chair and rode it out, unwilling to let herself be tipped out on the deck of her own bridge. It was all well and good that the ship had Asgard-designed gravity compensators on board, she reflected, but maybe a seatbelt wouldn’t go amiss either.

  “Marks, report,” she demanded.

  The major frowned at his readouts. “Shields are holding for now, but we’re not going to be able to take much more of this pounding, ma’am. Forward missile bays are off line, and we’ve got atmospheric venting on three decks. Damage control teams are en route.”

  “What about the evacuation?”

  Marks nodded. “The last of the wounded are coming on board now. Anyone else is inside the base itself and we can’t reach them.”

  “They’ll have to fend for themselves…” Carter muttered, frowning.

  An alert tone sounded on the major’s screen and he stabbed at a button. “The aft sensor pallet… I’m detecting a massiv
e build-up of energy from the planet. It’s almost off the scale…”

  The colonel saw the spike on the sensor return. The SGC had pretty big scales, considering the amount of high-power stuff they encountered on a regular basis, so anything that buried the needle was going to be, to put it mildly, a problem.

  She studied the radiation waveform on the screen and her blood ran cold. What she was seeing was an energetic resonance build-up taking place deep inside the core of P4X-351. The natural deposits of naquadria were conducting and reflecting energy back upon themselves, shaping a quantum-level effect that would grow and grow until it reached criticality. When that happened…the release of radiation from the exotic matter would be huge and devastating.

  Carter called out to the navigation officer at the chart console. “Get me a course to the nearest allied world with a gate, right now.” She looked back at Marks. “Recall our fighters. Radio Colonel Telford and tell him he’s got two minutes to get his people aboard before we go to hyperspace.”

  “Ma’am, what about the others inside Icarus Base?”

  Carter looked away, feeling hollow inside. “They’re on their own.”

  Young knew something was wrong the moment he reached the corridor leading to the gate room and saw the throng of people there, people who, instead of moving in a steady and orderly manner through the gate back to Earth, were standing around looking panicky and afraid. The tremors beneath his feet were a constant, unsteady pulse now, and he wondered how much longer the walls could still stand. He charged into the gate room and saw the open gate and more people who also weren’t moving through it.

  Rush looked over at him from the DHD, but Young glared past at Sergeant Riley. “What are you waiting for?” he demanded. “I ordered an evacuation!”

  Eli held up a hand. “He didn’t dial Earth,” he explained, and nodded toward the Stargate. “It’s the nine chevron address.”