STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air

by James Swallow

  “The life support system is on,” said Rush, “but for some reason it’s not working properly. The atmosphere is too thin, we can all feel it.” Greer couldn’t argue with that. He had a headache that just wouldn’t quit. “I’m attempting to reset the system.”

  Which all sounded reasonable enough. But Wallace wasn’t buying any of it, shaking his head, pointing at Rush. “He has no idea what he’s doing.”

  Greer did not like Rush, not even a little. The man was unfriendly, arrogant and clearly convinced of his own superiority. The Marine had heard all about him from the other jarheads on duty in Icarus, as well as seeing the man’s behavior for himself once or twice. And like Armstrong had said, none of them would have been in this mess if Rush had just let Riley dial Earth. By now they could have been in Colorado, with a cup of coffee and a debrief instead of waiting to choke to death.

  He raised his G36. “Step away from that thing,” he said.

  Rush paid no attention to the Marine and ran his hands over the control pad, locking in commands one after another. He reached for the interface disc.

  “That screen says what you’re doing is going to overload it!” Eli snapped.

  Rush gave the kid a pitying look. “Eli, please. Don’t interfere with what you don’t understand.”

  “Is that what it says or not?” insisted Wallace.

  The scientist glanced up as Park and Brody appeared at the doorway, and looked at them as if expecting support. When he didn’t get it, Rush’s manner turned stormy. “Eli, you only think you know what this screen says because we embedded a rudimentary version of the Ancient language into that game you played.” He tapped the console angrily. “This is not a game! This is life and death!”

  “Don’t touch it, Rush,” said Scott. From the corner of his eye, Greer could see the lieutenant also had his hand on his weapon. Greer started thinking about where he could put a round into Rush that would knock him down but not kill him.

  “Oh, for the…” Rush’s hands tightened in annoyance. “Listen to me. When oxygen levels aboard this ship fall below a critical level, it will become increasingly hard to concentrate! We have to do this now!”

  “What you’re doing could blow the whole ship,” insisted Eli.

  “Are you sure of that?” said Scott.

  “No!” snapped Eli. “But I don’t think he is either!”

  Greer saw a flicker of doubt in Rush’s eyes and he knew immediately that the kid was right. The scientist was taking a big risk with all their lives. He gestured with the barrel of the rifle. “Back off now, or I will shoot!”

  “No,” said Rush.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. “Lower your weapon, sergeant,” said Scott.

  Greer’s hand stiffened around the grip of the G36. “He’s already screwed us once. I’m not going to let him do it again.”

  Scott hesitated, his gaze shifting from Rush to Eli and then back again.

  Rush was stock still now, his hand hovering over the console’s interface wheel. “I am going to press this button,” he said, calmly and firmly, taking on a lecturing tone. “It is going to fix life support and then we’ll all be able to breathe much better and think more clearly. You can shoot me for it if you want, but if, however, there are any negative consequences to resetting the system, I suggest you might still need me to help resolve them.”

  Eli threw up his hands, and Scott knew this was on him now. He spoke directly to Greer. “I know we’re in a tough situation, Sergeant, but I am giving you an order.” He took a breath. “Hold your fire.”

  There was a moment when he thought that Greer might just go ahead and put a bullet in Rush anyway, but then the Marine relaxed and let the G36’s muzzle drop, his thumb flicking the safety catch.

  Rush didn’t want for him to change his mind, and stabbed the control key. The room went silent, and Scott found himself holding his breath. After a couple of long seconds, he glanced up at one of the air vents in the ceiling. There was no sound of fans turning, no rattle of the grilles. “So?”

  The scientist’s shoulders sagged and he glared at the readouts on the console. “I suppose that would have been too easy,” he muttered to himself. “At least I didn’t get shot for it.”

  Eli looked up. “Apparently, that did nothing.”

  Scott turned and beckoned Brody and Park into the room. “Okay, show’s over. Get in here and make yourselves useful.”

  “I don’t need any help—” began Rush, as the other two scientists moved to study the consoles before them.

  Scott indicated the silent air vents. “Clearly, Doctor, you do. Just get it done.” The tension in the moment and the lack of oxygen was getting to him. He rubbed his eyes and stepped away into the corridor. Out here, the air tasted worse, all tinny and metallic. He spoke into his radio. “Gate room? Scott here.”

  Tamara held her walkie to her ear. “Go ahead.” The lack of airflow already made it clear that whatever was supposed to be working, wasn’t, but she tried to keep the weariness from her voice.

  “This may take a little more time, T.J.,” he told her. “Just hang in there.”

  She wanted to ask him exactly how the hell she was supposed to do that, but instead she just nodded to herself and said “Copy that.”

  Tamara clipped the radio back on her gear vest and gave a shallow sigh. All around her, the Icarus evacuees were sitting down on the deck, not moving or talking, trying to conserve what oxygen they still had. She felt the energy draining from her, moment by moment, and silently cursed whatever fate it was that had dragged her into this situation. Tamara Johansen had plans, she told herself, and who was it that got to say she couldn’t fulfill them? A flare of resentment flickered inside her, but it had nowhere to go, and it guttered out just as quickly.

  She looked to where Young was lying. He was probably going to sleep through it all, she reflected, never once wake to know what outcome would befall them. From the corner of her eye she saw another face she knew, all distressed dark hair and anxious eyes. Camile Wray, the IOA’s human resources liaison at Icarus. Former liaison, she corrected.

  The last time she’d seen the woman was in her office. Tamara remembered it clearly, standing in front of her desk, the letter of resignation and all the attendant paperwork in a neat pile under Camile’s elegantly manicured fingers.

  Wray hadn’t even bothered to read the letter, instead asking “Does Colonel Young know about this?”

  “He knows.” Tamara didn’t waste time with specifics. She thought that would be it. Forms signed, paperwork done. A rubber stamp in the right place and it would all be over.

  But Wray wouldn’t drop it. “Are you sure I can’t change your mind?”

  “No,” she’d insisted. “This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.” It almost sounded like she meant it.

  “Two weeks ago you told me you would be re-enlisting,” Wray went on. “You said this was the best experience of your life.” The woman had leaned forward and given her a hard look. “Something has to have happened.”

  Tamara had replied with the answer she rehearsed. “The scholarship came through. I guess I’ve just been too afraid to admit what I really want. Afraid I’d fail if I tried.” Wray didn’t call her a liar, but her expression had said it plainly. “Come on, Camile,” she said. “I know better than to try and hide anything from you.”

  Wray gave a small smile at that. “You didn’t even tell me you had applied.”

  Tamara Johansen had plans, said the voice in her head. “There’s nothing else going on. You know I’d tell you.”

  “Unless you were protecting someone.”

  “I’m not,” she’d insisted. “Like I said, I guess I hadn’t made up my mind.”

  And that was where she’d ended it, walking out of the office, the choice written there on the papers, in black and white.

  But all that happened before some force bigger than her had snatched the wheel of her life from Tamara’s hands and wrenched it hard over, o
ff the road she chose and on to this path.

  She blinked away the moment of reverie, and snapped back to the present. Tamara watched the colonel there on the floor, his chest rising and falling, rising and falling.

  Eli snuck a look across the room at Rush, past the tower of control interface systems, but the scientist didn’t seem to notice. He felt pretty guilty, actually, considering what he had thought to be a difference of opinion had turned into a situation where his big mouth would have resulted in Rush catching a bullet.

  He winced at the thought of that and wondered if he should apologize. Eli shook his head slightly and tried to focus. The lack of oxygen was making his mind wander. He’d already caught himself thinking about how he could apply lessons learned from watching episodes of Lost in Space to their current situation, and wondering if one of the compartments along the corridor was actually the home of a cute-but-sassy robot.

  That’s the hypoxia talking, Eli, he told himself, get a grip. He had full-blown nausea, coma and blue skin to look forward to unless they could fix the air.

  He moved past Brody and Park, both of them engrossed in their own explorations of the Ancient consoles, seeing Scott and his Marine buddy by the doorway. The military guys looked bored; without anything to shoot at, they probably both felt a little surplus to requirements.

  Eli took a breath of stale air and moved closer to Rush, glancing over his shoulder. The scientist was using the rotary interface to spin through panels of text, jumping from one menu panel to another. As the strings of lettering whirled past, Eli suddenly spotted something that seemed out of place. “What’s that?” He was asking the question before he was even aware of thinking it.

  “I don’t know,” admitted Rush. “Another subsystem?”

  “Doesn’t look like life support,” he added.

  “I know.” He completely missed the irritation in the other man’s tone.

  Eli extended an arm and pointed at the screen, invading Rush’s personal space. “Why don’t you try this—”

  The scientist glared at him. “Do you mind?”

  Eli tried to look around the other man. “I can’t see otherwise.”

  Rush let out a sigh. “Fine.” He spooled back to the data-panel Eli had been talking about and flipped through a layer of menus before pressing the screen.

  Immediately, a glimmer of light flickered along the far wall of the room, drawing everyone’s attention. Projected from some hidden source, a large window of holographic light phased into being, and it filled with thousands of dots of light. Park and Brody left their consoles behind and came closer, eyes wide.

  “What are we looking at?” asked Scott.

  The display was moving, drawing back, zooming out from the initial starting point. The dots of light merged, forming a banner of glowing color. Eli gasped as he recognized the shape of a galactic spiral arm.

  “It’s a star map,” breathed Rush. “A navigational chart, perhaps.”

  The hologram continued to pull back, the spiral arm becoming more defined. “That’s the Milky Way,” said Park. “That’s our home galaxy.”

  Rush nodded. “I believe what we’re seeing here is a visual log of this ship’s route.”

  Eli saw a faint blue dot that stood out among the white and yellow of the stars, and pointed at it. “So this is where we are right now?”

  “No,” said Rush, flicking a glance down at his console. “That is where the ship originally embarked from.”

  “Earth,” said Brody.

  Eli felt a curious smile on his lips, and suddenly the ship didn’t seem quite as alien as it had a moment ago. They were all from the same place, more or less.

  Rush turned back to the console and began manipulating the keypad. In response, a glowing line marking the ship’s course drew out across the star map like a lengthening thread, and the image continued to change, the barred spiral of the Milky Way shrinking as the line moved into the void of intergalactic space.

  Park spoke again, awed. “It’s leaving the galaxy.”

  “It did,” Rush corrected. “Long ago.”

  The line went on, passing by another pool of shimmering stars. “That was Pegasus,” said Brody.

  The galaxy-shapes grew even smaller, contracting into dots as more and more points of light crowded in from the sides of the screen.

  “So, those points are more stars?” asked Scott.

  “No.” Eli shook his head, and the words came from his mouth, but he could hardly hold the magnitude of them in his thoughts. “They’re galaxies.” Eli felt giddy and put out a hand to steady himself on the console. This time, he knew it wasn’t the bad air. He couldn’t look away from the screen. The distance was incredible, unthinkable. It was literally astronomical.

  “This ship has traveled a very, very long way,” Rush said quietly.

  “How far?” Scott insisted, the scale of the image clearly lost on him. “Rush, where the hell are we?”

  Eli watched the line moving on and on, further and further.

  “Several billion light-years from home,” said Rush.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The evening rain drummed hard on the roof of the staff car as it turned on to Jefferson Davis Highway, heading south past the Arlington National Cemetery toward the imposing edifice of the Pentagon. Jack O’Neill blinked away a twinge of fatigue and glanced down at the file on his lap, before frowning and putting it to one side. He tried to remember that last time he’d been in a car where he hadn’t had a landslide of paperwork with him. It had gotten so that he was still in the office even when he wasn’t in the office, even the brief moments of respite he liked to take during the drive into DC snatched away by a mountain of reports and requests…

  Not for the first time, O’Neill wondered how his former CO General Hammond had managed to handle all this stuff and make it seem so effortless.

  The car took the Pentagon exit and made its way through a series of priority checkpoints before pulling to a halt outside a nondescript side entrance along the flank of the massive building, far from the public eye. Inside, along with all the myriad other components of America’s military machine, was a department whose nature and purpose was unique among them all.

  Homeworld Command was a global joint-ops division, something that had evolved out of the USAF’s Stargate Command and the sister organizations in the nations that were part of the International Oversight Advisory. Gone were the old days, back when it was just the Air Force poking around in outer space. Jack recalled a time when there were only a handful of SG teams on sorties through the Stargate, when the whole program was viewed as some massive boondoggle that would likely blow up in their faces. Now the Stargate was a major factor in the military structure of not only the United States of America, but of the planet Earth. It still amazed him that the existence of the gate remained a secret to the world at large; but then that dumb Wormhole X-Treme! TV show had helped a lot, ruining the credibility of anyone who came sniffing around. It was O’Neill’s understanding that the Air Force had borrowed the idea from the FBI, who had set up a similar disinformation strategy back in the early nineties to draw attention away from one of their secret departments.

  A woman in a captain’s uniform came down the steps with an umbrella in her hand and opened the car door. O’Neill walked back with her toward the building. “Captain Sharpe.”

  “General.” Helen Sharpe was a recent addition to O’Neill’s staff and she had a manner that was brisk and direct. A former officer aboard one of the SGC’s starships, she’d returned to Earth and turned her fiercely competent skills to Homeworld Command’s advantage. “I’m sorry we had to recall you from the senator’s dinner party, but this couldn’t wait.”

  “Yes, I’m quite disappointed,” O’Neill replied, pokerfaced. “Because you know how much I love being in a room full of politicians, with nothing to eat but those little sticks with cheese and pineapple on them.”

  They entered the Pentagon and moved swiftly toward an elevator, which
dropped sharply into the sublevels below the street. “I took the liberty of having an airman get you a club sandwich, sir.”

  Damn, she’s efficient. “So, on a scale of one to ten, how big a deal is this gonna be?”

  They arrived at the next security checkpoint. “With respect, sir, I can’t discuss that with you until you’ve been cleared.” She gestured at a tall scanner archway that was of noticeably off-world origin.

  O’Neill saw two Marines in full body armor, one with a loaded and ready P90, the other with an active zat’ni’katel energy pistol, guarding the door. He knew that two more would be on the other side, and another squad of five were in a room just down the hall in case the panic button was pushed.

  Someone had turned the security dial way up, and he frowned. “Is this really necessary?” he asked. “I was here about three hours ago. We talked about how much I was looking forward to the party, remember?”

  “General, you’re the one who has faced off against invisible monsters, parasitic aliens and shape-changing killers. You know that there’s security, and then there’s security.” Sharpe took O’Neill’s identity pass and swept it through a reader.

  “Identify for voice print check,” said a soft, synthetic voice.

  “Oh, for cryin’ out loud—” began the general.

  “Voice print check approved,” replied the computer. “Proceed to imaging scanner.”

  “Fine.” O’Neill stepped through the arch and no alarms sounded. “Am I still a person?”

  Sharpe nodded and the two Marines went from combat stances to attention. “Welcome back, sir.”

  The main nexus of Homeworld Command was a tactical information center linked to a network of similar facilities scattered around the world, in IOA-member nations; China, Russia, Europe and the UK, all of them had their own equivalents of this room, all of them working in real-time on the one thing that every nation could agree about — keeping the planet safe.