STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air

by James Swallow

  “Check this out,” said Eli, indicating a screen on one of the consoles.

  Scott peered at it and saw a bobbing first-person view of a corridor; the image had to be coming from the lens he’d seen on the front of the sphere. “It’s a camera.”

  “Flying camera,” Eli corrected. “I was gonna call it a Kino, you know, after the Russian word for—”

  Scott made a winding up motion with his free hand. “Moving on…”

  He shrugged. “I figure maybe we can use it to check out damaged areas of the ship.”

  “That’s good,” admitted Scott. They could operate the thing like an unmanned aerial vehicle, as a drone scout. “Where is it going now?”

  Eli shrugged again. “I don’t know, doin’ its thing. I haven’t figured out all the controls yet, but there’s lots more of ’em.” He moved to the mechanism on the wall and reached into it. Eli’s hand returned with another of the spheres and Scott understood that the machine had to be a dispenser unit, of sorts.

  Eli tossed the sphere at Scott and the lieutenant went to grab it; but instead the device just floated in mid-air. Eli gave it a gentle tap and it drifted across the room, orienting itself to aim a lens at him. “See?” said Eli, pointing at the console.

  Scott looked and saw the sphere’s-eye view of him. He looked tired and not really in the mood for games.

  Eli went back to the dispenser again. “Here, you want one too?”

  “It’s not a gumball machine,” snapped Scott, frowning.

  Eli drew his hand back like he was a kid caught reaching into the cookie jar. “Okay, okay,” he said.

  Scott paused and slung his rifle, which Eli liked a lot better than having it waved in his face. After all, as far as he knew, he only had the one pair of underwear with him. “Sorry,” said the lieutenant. “Guess we’re all feeling a little…”

  “Crabby?” offered Eli helpfully.

  The other man gave him a nod. “Something like that.” He took a breath. “So, you found where they keep the, uh, kinos. What else have you figured out?” Scott beckoned him out into the corridor and Eli followed him.

  “What, that’s not enough?”

  “It’s a start,” said Scott, “but remember the air thing? Tick-tock.”

  His shoulders sagged. “Ah, come on, give me a break. This is only my second spaceship, man. And the first was like, yesterday.”

  Scott eyed him, and Eli suddenly felt bad about griping. The lieutenant had to be feeling the pressure a heck of a lot more than he was. “Icarus Base was my first SGC assignment after training,” he admitted. “I haven’t been at this much longer than you.”

  Eli considered that. “Did they beam you out of your house?”

  Scott showed a brief grin. “No, you got me there.”

  They walked in silence for a moment. “You, uh, got any food on you?” said Eli.

  Scott shook his head. “No.”

  “Tylenol?”

  “Headache?”

  Eli rubbed his face. “Yeah.”

  Scott nodded, and Eli knew that the other man was feeling the same tight pressure behind the eyes, the same bone-deep throbbing in his skull. “Me too.”

  They headed back to the control room and found Rush at work on the main console, scrutinizing the schematics of the ship Eli had discovered earlier. The scientist was using the interface wheel to move back and forth across the deck plans of the vessel. Scott immediately noticed a series of red indicator glyphs blinking steadily on the plan view.

  Rush looked up as they entered and his eyes widened as one of the drone spheres followed them in, drifting behind Eli like an obedient dog at heel. Scott hadn’t even noticed it moving with them.

  “What is that?” said the scientist.

  “Flying camera ball,” Eli announced, with a flourish. “I’m calling it a Kino.”

  “Don’t ask,” Scott added.

  Rush’s expression turned to one of charmed amazement and he came over to take a closer look, smiling widely. “Wonderful…”

  Eli pulled a hand-held device from his back pocket and showed it off. “Comes with a remote,” he said. “I thought we could use it to look around.”

  Scott interrupted the two of them before the conversation went off track. “What do you have, Doctor?”

  Rush snapped back to his usual default glower. “Unfortunately, more bad news.” He wandered to the screen. “These processing nodes are scrubbers responsible for cleaning carbon dioxide from the air.” Rush pointed out the red symbols. “Here, here and here. This is indicating malfunction, and more are failing.”

  “What kind of malfunction?” Scott was thinking about the metallic ooze that Tamara had told him about.

  “I’m not sure,” admitted Rush. “Someone needs to take a closer look.” He zoomed in on an area of the map. “This one is closest, in the gate room.”

  Scott sighed. Right now all he wanted was a moment to sit a spell and take a breather, but he knew that if he stopped moving his fatigue was going to knock him down. He nodded. “Okay, I’ll check it out.” He toggled his radio. “Greer? I’m heading to the gate room. Meet me there.”

  Chloe took a little of the water and bunched up her handkerchief, then wet it and dabbed her father’s clammy forehead. There wasn’t a lot in the canteen, but Lieutenant Scott had just handed it over to her without question, without her even needing to ask for it. She wondered if that was all the water he had; how much did any of them have? So far, from what she could understand, none of the people who had gone out exploring had found anything that looked like a supply of drinking water.She sighed. All this thinking about it made her thirsty, but there were more important things to worry about.

  “Pat?” said a quiet, tired voice. “That you?”

  “No, Dad, it’s me, Chloe.”

  Her father’s eyes flickered open and he focused on her. “Oh, hey, princess.” He was drawn and haggard. “Where are we?”

  “One of the rooms, the quarters I mean,” she explained. “It’s not the Four Seasons, or anything…”

  “Better than the floor,” he managed. “What happened? There was Rush, and that stone…”

  “You collapsed,” she told him, holding back the fear from her voice. “We brought you here.”

  “How long was I out? What’s going on?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve been here with you.”

  He shifted on the couch, flinching with pain. “You need to know what’s happening, Chloe. This is important.”

  She felt the tears welling up inside her. “But I was so worried about you… And I’m so scared.” Chloe barely got the words out before she broke into a sob.

  Her father reached out and took her into an embrace. “One step at a time, honey,” he soothed. “One step at a time. You’ve always had an angel looking over your shoulder. It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

  She let him go and wiped her eyes. Chloe saw him grimace as he moved, pain lancing across his chest.

  “My pills…”

  Chloe shook her head. Lieutenant Johansen had been clear about the tablets. “You can’t take any more of those. Your ribs are very badly bruised. You’ll bleed internally.” She handed him Scott’s canteen and he took a shallow drink.

  He fought down the ache. “If I don’t take those pills, a bruise is going to be the least of my problems.”

  She felt a terrible weight pressing down on her. “I know.” More than anything, Chloe wanted to wish this all away, to open her eyes and wake from a terrible dream, to be back home on Earth. To have all this strange, alien gloom dispelled from her life, like storm clouds fading before sunshine. Her father met her gaze and he hid his pain well, trying hard not to let it show, trying to be strong for her. Chloe loved that about him, the selfless nature that he hadn’t let time or the compromises of political life strip away. It was a face he rarely showed the rest of the world.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said gently, “I’ll be okay. Go. Find out what’s going on out
there.”

  “I want to be here with you.” When she said it, all she could hear in herself was the scared little nine-year-old girl whose daddy had chased the monsters from her bedroom closet.

  He heard it too. “And I want you here. But right now, I want to know what’s going on just a little bit more.”

  She smiled slightly at that. Alan Armstrong was still as much a senator as he was her father, and always had been.

  “I’ll be here when you get back,” he assured her.

  After a moment, Chloe nodded, got to her feet and left him there.

  Her father kept a tight smile on his face until she was gone; and then he released a shuddering, pained sigh and pulled himself, inch by aching inch, into a sitting position.

  Scott and Greer exited the corridor and entered the gate room. The sergeant was wound tight with annoyance, and it was something the lieutenant had seen before, more times than was healthy. Ron Greer was a good Marine, one of the best, but he had real difficulty with his impulse control, and right now Scott didn’t want to add that to the laundry list of other problems that were stacking up.

  “I’m just sayin’,” Greer went on, “she better stay out of my face.”

  Scott nodded. Camile Wray had no business interfering with a matter of military justice, and if Colonel Young had judged it field-expedient to drop all charges against Greer for his previous transgressions, then it was so ordered. “I’ll explain your personal space issues to her the next chance I get.”

  They walked into the room and looked around. Scott could see several of the air vent grilles in the walls and he cast around looking for the right one. “Rush,” he said into his radio, “we’re here. Where’s the node?”

  “Back of the room,” came the reply. “Near the staircases.”

  Greer nodded and pointed. “Oh, yeah. I see it.”

  Rush had his hands on either side of the control panel, leaning into it like a preacher over a pulpit lectern. “Have you located it?” he asked, glancing at the schematic on the screen.

  “Wait one,” Scott’s voice came over the walkie on the console.

  “What do you think they’re gonna find in there?” said Eli, his face pinched in worry. “The vent could be blocked, maybe. Rusted shut.”

  “Unlikely,” Rush snapped back, dismissing the young man’s concerns. “There wasn’t even any moisture in the air until we came through the Stargate a few hours ago.” He drummed his fingers on the panel impatiently.

  “A few hours,” Eli repeated, glancing at his wristwatch. “Wow, you’re right. It just seems like we’ve been at this for, I don’t know, days on end.”

  “Well, time is relative,” Rush said airily,

  “Yeah,” Eli went on, “But—”

  Rush gave him an exaggerated look. “Unless you actually have anything productive to add, please stop talking to me. You’re using up both the oxygen and my patience.”

  “Oh,” said Eli, deflated. “Okay.”

  As he went back to the control panel, one of the Air Force officers entered the room, the medic Johansen. “Doctor Rush? Colonel Young is awake and he wants to see you. Right now.”

  He held up a hand in a terse gesture. Couldn’t she see he was occupied? And as for Young, he wasn’t in any hurry to visit him. Rush knew full well what the dimensions of that conversation would be.

  Instead, he spoke into the radio. “There should be something of a grate over the processor node. You’ll feel air coming through it.”

  “That’s a negative,” said Scott. “There’s no airflow at all.”

  He frowned. “Can you remove it?

  “I think so.”

  “Give me a hand with this.” Scott drew his combat knife and used it to lever open the lip around the outside of the grille across the air vent. Greer leaned in and did the same. With both of them working it, the metal frame creaked and shifted.

  Scott got his fingers around the edges and pulled hard; the grille came off in one motion with a squeal of metal. An acrid smell assaulted his nostrils and his face wrinkled. “Gah.”

  “What is that stink?” muttered Greer.

  Scott trained his flashlight into the compartment in time to see a smooth-sided canister slide out of the wall on an automatic mechanism, probably triggered by the grille release. As he watched, the top of the canister rose up, and from within a thick black chemical slurry bubbled up, dripping down the sides in resinous strings. The flashlight’s glow revealed more detail behind the main part of the node; a nest of pipes and conduits. All of them were caked in gelatinous layers of the ooze.

  “That can’t be good,” said the Marine.

  “What do you see in there?” Rush was asking.

  Fat plugs of the viscous matter were dripping out of the open vent now, and pooling on the floor. “A problem,” said Scott grimly. “We see a very big problem.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Greer left Scott to deal with Rush’s problem and headed back out into the ship. Right now, aside from brute force or shooting something, there was nothing he could add to the situation, so he moved on. Standing around watching the science types debating made him itchy with the inaction of it, and he was wound tight. He hated the idea that he couldn’t do a damn thing to get out of this situation, and that manifested itself in annoyance; the nagging headache gathering at the base of his skull didn’t help any, either.

  Ron Greer did not deal very well with being helpless. It was one of the main reasons he’d joined the Corps in the first place, back when he was searching for someplace to aim his life. He didn’t want to go back to that feeling, not now, not ever.

  Ahead down the corridor, he saw Franklin and Lieutenant James at one of the doors. Franklin was working the control panel, sealing the hatch shut.

  James looked up as he approached. “What’s going on?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, man. The air filter’s full of crap.”

  Greer’s matter-of-fact pronouncement seemed to rattle Franklin. “That doesn’t sound good,” he ventured.

  “No,” the Marine agreed. He gestured ahead, up along the corridor. “Come on, they want us to keep looking around.”

  Franklin nodded. “I think there might be a larger compartment through here. That’s if the design follows the pattern of the other levels.”

  “Show us,” said James.

  The scientist moved forward, peering at the walls, pausing every few steps. After a moment, he came to another hatchway. “Here.” He pressed the door control and it grumbled open, letting a wisp of dust out into the passageway.

  Greer immediately stepped past the man and moved around the width of the door before entering, scanning the room beyond. It was a basic tactic for room clearance called ‘slicing the pie’, used by SWAT teams and soldiers in urban warfare, minimizing exposure while maximizing target awareness. So far, no one had encountered anything resembling other life aboard the derelict, but Greer knew that was no reason to get sloppy.

  Content that the room was as empty as all the others, Greer stepped in, with James and Franklin close by. It was an open space, dominated by four large tables and angular chairs arranged in a cross formation. Along the walls there were alcoves and storage lockers of some kind.

  “Looks like a mess,” said James.

  “Seems pretty tidy to me,” said Franklin.

  “Mess hall,” James added, with a roll of her eyes.

  “Oh. Right.”

  Greer moved to one of the lockers and opened it. Inside there were odd-shaped plates and cups, along with empty containers.

  “Lots of stuff to put food on,” noted Franklin.

  “But no food,” sighed the lieutenant.

  Franklin sniffed the musty air. “I suspect it would be a bit stale.”

  Greer went to one of the alcoves; it seemed to be a service station of some kind, with a draining sink and what had to be a faucet. He licked his lips, suddenly feeling thirsty. The Marine reached for the tap and halted, throwing Franklin a que
stioning look. The civilian gave him a none-too-helpful shrug.

  He frowned and turned the tap; the Ancients had been like human beings, so it wasn’t as if they drank acid or anything. It took a little effort to move it, and Greer was rewarded with a single, solitary drop of rusty-colored water.

  James gave a snort of cold amusement. “Bar’s closed,” she said.

  Tamara watched Brody as he carefully twirled a test tube full of oily liquid, dipping a testing strip into the mixture. Scattered around him was the contents of a chemical analysis kit and the metallic canister Scott had recovered from the inside of the air unit. Scott and Eli looked over Rush’s shoulder as the scientist probed at the mass of dark slurry with a pencil, while Volker and a few of the other civilians hovered nearby. Everyone had heard about the mess inside the pipes by now, and everyone wanted to see just what it was that was strangling the air from them. Tamara saw Chloe enter the gate room and approach. The girl looked like she had been crying.

  “Are you okay?” she offered.

  Chloe gave her a shaky smile, but said nothing.

  “It’s highly caustic, alkaline…” Brody was saying, peering at his results.

  Volker nodded. “Which is why it burned Franklin.”

  “Everyone’s respiration rate is elevated,” Tamara added. “People are reporting headaches, so it has to be—”

  “What?” demanded Scott, more interested in effects and not facts.

  Brody showed him the test tube. “This is the used-up residue of whatever magic compound the Ancients used to scrub carbon dioxide from the air.”

  “So now we have two big problems relating to the life support.” Scott shot a look at Rush.

  The scientist didn’t look at him. “Our first priority is to seal off any of the leaks.” He prodded the oily goop, and it smoked slightly, thin wisps of acrid vapor twirling upward. “If we can do that, I believe we can buy ourselves another day or so before the build-up of carbon dioxide kills us.” Tamara blanched at the man’s cold evaluation of their survival possibilities.