STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air (2 page)

Reaching out across some vast and incalculable distance, exotic energies that were the precursors of a rip in the fabric of space-time brushed the intelligence of the device, and the ship that surrounded it. With a groan of collapsing energies, the tempo of the vessel’s vast drives slowed, and it fell back from the near-light speed velocities of its normal cruise to a more sedate pace.

Steady, patient devices buried in the walls came to life with resonant gusts of atmosphere, flooding the chamber with breathing gasses, while concealed elements in the floors and the walls poured new heat into the room, warring against the void-chill soaked deep through the starship’s hull. Long-silent warning sirens came to life.

The great steel circle trembled, awakening. With a rush of sudden motion, the entirety of the ring began to rotate about its axis, spinning, orienting itself for the instant when it would accept a rush of power that had come to it from far across the cosmic void.

At once, the spin halted and every chevron about the circle flashed a brilliant, star-bright white. From the inner space of the ring, dead air was transformed into a glittering, shining wave front. It thundered outward across the chamber, punching a channel through the substance of the universe itself. The storm-roar echoed down the empty corridors of the vessel, before dying away into a ripple of light and color.

The Stargate was open; and in the next second a human being came hurtling through it, too high, too fast, too hard.

Matthew Scott wasn’t exactly a stranger to pain. He’d taken enough of it in his time. Fights in bars, rough play during high school sports, and that incident during jump training… But those had just been physical impacts, just the brute force collision between meat and obstacle. This was something outside his experience.

The lieutenant had heard the theory. Once in a while, the mention slipped into the conversations of the old dogs who’d served on the early SG teams, the guys who were now instructors or base commanders. He’d heard them talk about something they called ‘the Hard Gate’. It had happened a fair few times in the early days of the Stargate program, or so the stories went. Something about the way the gate on Earth wasn’t initially
exactly
synched up with the gate it was dialing out to. If it was just a little out of whack, you came out the other end covered in frost. But if the mismatch was above a certain tolerance, then it off-set your kinetic energy. You took a careful, easy step through the entry gate, but when you reached the exit end of the wormhole, well, the cumulative error in synch had accelerated you up some. The bigger the distance, the worse it would be. Of course, the dialing computers were quickly upgraded to deal with this problem and the incidence of a ‘Hard Gate’ dropped to almost nothing, and even on those rare occasions when it did occur, it usually only affected the first guy through the puddle, as the gates quickly cross-talked and stabilized the connection. But pity that guy walking point, though.

All this flashed through Matthew Scott’s mind in the half-second or so between leaving Icarus Base behind and being shredded into a discorporated matter stream, then reintegrated to find himself flying through the air like he’d been shot from a cannon. The bright light and noise of the Icarus gate room, then the rush of the wormhole, were replaced by icy blackness — and for an instant Scott was gripped by the fear that he’d emerged through a planet-orbiting space gate, like they had out in the Pegasus galaxy; but then a steel floor came up out of the gloom and slammed into him, blasting the air from his lungs in an explosive wheeze.

He rolled over on to his back, blinking away the pain. The watery shimmer of wormhole-light cast a cold, polar glow over everything, surrounding him with jumping, fluid shadows.

A woman’s scream, thin and reedy, snapped him back to the moment. Scott turned, ignoring the jags of pain all down his side, and looked toward the open Stargate. People were coming through after him, boiling across the threshold in rough disorder, one after another. Another man, then a woman, both of them carrying heavy packs, both of them yelling out as they collided with the floor, crashing into each other hard enough to bruise or maybe break bone. They barely got clear before more surged through behind them, and with each new arrival the chill air filled up with cries of panic and surprise. It was like watching a flood, and in amid the mayhem, baggage and vital equipment were getting knocked around or cast away.

Scott didn’t see any uniforms among them and he grimaced reflexively.
Civilians. Take them out of their comfort zone and they fall to pieces.
He turned the pain from his bruises into annoyance, and that propelled him to his feet. Someone was going to have to play traffic cop here, and he was the only person in the room with bars on his collar.

“Get outta the way!” Securing his weapon, he darted forward, waving his hands and shoving stumbling figures away from the line of exit through the Stargate. “I said get outta the way, damn it! Make a hole!”

He gave a pale-faced guy in a lab coat a forceful push and almost stumbled right into the woman standing behind him. He saw dark hair framing Asian features, and eyes that were so lost and terrified he suddenly felt bad about dismissing the fears of the civvies so quickly. He remembered her name; Camile Wray, one of the suit-and-tie brigade posted to Icarus by the International Oversight Advisory.

“Where are we?” she said, her voice high and tight with tension. “This isn’t the SGC! Why didn’t we come back to Earth?”

Scott wasn’t about to stop and discuss the matter of their swift exit. “There was no time to explain!” he snapped, and propelled her out toward the shadowed edges of the room. “Go!”

With swift motions and barked orders, the lieutenant started to make a dent in the chaos of the evacuees, dragging dazed newcomers out of the path of those following on behind, directing them to gather up fallen packs or just move away with whatever they’d been given to haul through. It was a hysterical moving day crossed with a haunted house ride, only much less fun than it sounded.

Other people saw what he was doing and joined in. Lab coat guy came back and began to copy Scott’s actions, pulling new arrivals aside, guiding them off into the dimness. It wasn’t enough, though. Too many people were spilling through, and they were coming faster than the folks on this side could deal with them.

The lieutenant took a breath and keyed the handheld radio clipped to the breast of his combat vest. “This is Scott,” he said, “I need you to slow down the evac! Everyone’s coming in too hot, we can’t handle them!” When a reply didn’t come back in the next instant, he tried again, calling for his commanding officer. “Colonel, come in! Do you copy me, over?”

Still nothing. He advanced toward the gate’s event horizon, threading through people picking themselves up off the deck, or bumbling around like lost children. Without thinking he reached down and helped a civilian get to his feet.

The man stood up and Scott recognized another familiar face. “Doctor Rush?”

Nicholas Rush blinked and gave him a weak nod by way of a thank you. The man had a face that hinted at a hard life, eyes that could go right through you. Scott wondered if that was for show, or if that was who Rush really was.

“Lieutenant,” he said, and Scott saw right away that the man wasn’t the least bit afraid. If anything, the scientist looked…
interested
. Scott moved on, leaving Rush behind. Sure, the guy was some kind of super-genius, but there was something about the man’s attitude that didn’t sit right with the young Air Force officer. He shook the thought away; this wasn’t the time to dwell on that. He had a job to do.

Scott tried the radio again, catching sight of Curtis, one of the base’s USMC contingent. The Marine had an unconscious woman cradled in his arms, and there was blood marking her face from an ugly cut over her forehead.

Curtis shouted loud to be heard over the noise. “I need a medic here!”

“Sergeant!” Scott called out to get the man’s attention, and pointed away with the radio. “Get any casualties off the line. Move ’em first, patch ’em later.”

The Marine scowled back at him but accepted the order with a nod and moved off.

Scott tried the radio a third time. “Icarus Base, respond!”

All that came back through the open gate were more bodies.

Eli Wallace was
most definitely
a stranger to pain. One could even suggest that he had done his best to live a life where his exposure to any pain-causing vectors was as minimal as humanly possible. Eli considered the eating of brutally spicy food, the occasional paintball tournament and an annual game of street hockey the only places where pain was allowed into his life. He didn’t view this as a failing on his part in any way; rather, Eli imagined that it made him smarter than most people, who willingly busted themselves up for what he considered to be no good reason.

So coming though the Stargate at the head of a crowd of terrified people and being slammed into a steel floor was not something he was prepared for. Eli scrambled back to his feet, fighting down the raw, animal urge to panic, and ran his hands over his chest and legs, desperately afraid that he was going to find something in the wrong place.

He’d actually been looking forward to going through the Stargate for the first time, but being forced to do it under such dangerous and near-frantic conditions had worked up a whole array of fears in his mind. He’d closed his eyes as he went through, but all he could think of was the fate of poor Jeff Goldblum in
The Fly
. Eli patted his face, and felt a rush of relief when he realized it wasn’t coming off in his hands.

He barely had time to register that before a big, heavy equipment case burped through the wormhole’s event horizon and whizzed past his head, narrowly missing him. The case hit the deck in front of him and cracked open along a seam, disgorging its contents in a wide fan.

Nearby, a figure in a black combat uniform was leading one of the other scientists out of harm’s way. Eli saw the woman’s face and his eyes flicked to her name badge — Johansen.
She was a medic, wasn’t she?

“I think my arm’s broken,” said the man.

“Take it easy, Volker,” she told him, moving him aside so she could concentrate on people with more immediate needs.

Eli turned back to the gate in time to see the next thing coming through; a middle-aged man, in a suit that was probably worth more than every item of clothing Eli owned put together. The first word out of the man’s mouth was “Chloe?”

“Senator Armstrong?” Eli hesitated, not sure what he should do to help the politician. He glanced around. Armstrong’s daughter had been in front of Eli in the scramble to go through the gate; she had to be close by.

The senator didn’t seem to notice Eli and pushed past him. “Chloe? Where are you?”

“Dad!” A voice called out from across the room and both of them turned to see a young woman in what had to be the most inappropriate outfit for their present circumstances. “I’m over here!” Chloe Armstrong somehow managed to remain looking dynamite in her designer dress, even though it was peppered with rock dust.

Armstrong started forward toward his daughter, and Eli trailed after him, but Johansen blocked the politician’s path. “Senator, give me a hand, please.” She gestured at an injured man lying at her feet. He was one of the number crunchers from the base labs, and looking very much the worse for wear.

Armstrong was still focused on Chloe. “But my daughter is—”

“She’s fine, I saw her,” said the officer, her voice all hard edges and command school brusque. “But this man isn’t, so give me a hand!”

Belatedly, Eli realized that he ought to be helping as well, and moved in to give some support to the pair of them. The woman gave him a nod and he placed her face. Her first name was Tamara; he’d heard some of the other Air Force guys calling her ‘T.J.’ She looked like the type of person who could flick from severe to smooth in a heartbeat.

“Over here,” she said, and Eli and Armstrong dutifully followed her to a clear spot to put the guy down. Tamara bent over the scientist, and so she didn’t see Armstrong grimace in pain, his face going pale. The senator’s hand went to his side, and Eli opened his mouth to speak; but the man was already walking away, his job done.

“Are you okay?” Chloe asked, coming to her father.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” said Armstrong, covering his moment of pain as they walked off. “Where the hell are we?”

Eli stood and watched Tamara work, suddenly at a loss for what to do with his hands.

Nicholas Rush took the curved stairs two at a time, almost bounding on to the upper level of the chamber —
the gate room
, he corrected. His hands dropped to the rail around the edge of the upper balcony and he flinched. For a second he could have sworn he felt an electric tingle run through him, a giddy thrill at the sheer amazement of standing here, in this place, seeing this sight. His gaze flicked down to the rail. The metal was old and pitted, but worn smooth from the action of hands upon it. Rush wondered how long it had been since a human being had stood where he stood now, touched the metal that he was touching.
Millions of years ago
? It was staggering to consider. The construction of the chamber was like no Ancient technology he had seen. The metallic structure was repeated everywhere, on the walls and the rails. Below he’d found a console of similar design, but it hadn’t responded to any of his attempts to activate it.

He looked up and stared out across the room, across the chaos below. Some fifty, perhaps sixty people had now arrived through the open Stargate, disordered and afraid, some literally forming a pile of bodies and equipment in front of the shimmering wormhole. Rush blinked and realized that this was the first time he had looked back to actually see the Stargate he had come through. The white glow of the active chevrons burned hard in the dimness, illuminating a construct clearly different from the gate designs found in the Milky Way and Pegasus galaxies.