STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air (21 page)

Eli pushed the grisly notion aside and peered at the console in front of him. The kino’s-eye-view passed through another of the heavy bulkhead doors that lay half-open, and then into a smaller space that had an internal design different from the other corridors he’d seen so far. The kino floated through the dim chamber, turning, and its field of vision fell across a heavy chair that immediately reminded him of a jet fighter’s ejector seat, but more curved and over-engineered. The kino kept turning, revealing more consoles, until it settled upon a viewport that looked out into space. In front of it, Eli saw what had to be a dashboard of flight controls. “I think… I think I’ve got something interesting here.”

Rush looked up from his console across the room as Eli grabbed a radio and spoke quickly into it. “Greer? Listen, I found what looks like a cockpit. Maybe a shuttle, or something. It’s close to where you are, past the next junction.”

“
Copy that,
” said the Marine. “
We’ll go take a look-see.
”

Rush’s screen changed to bring up the ship’s internal schematic, flickering through the deck plan to lock in on the area where Greer’s team were. “It looks like there are two shuttles there, attached to individual docking sleeves. Airlocks at each access point.”

Eli nodded, looking at the same display. Red warning glyphs were blinking steadily on the edges of the screen. “Well, if I’m reading this right, that whole section of the ship is leaking air like a screen door.”

Greer led the way at a swift pace, with Franklin following and Lieutenant James bringing up the rear. The civilian’s dour manner was starting to grate on the Marine some. “We’re all gonna die,” he said.

“Shut up, Franklin,” Greer retorted. He had no time for whiners.

“I’m just saying what everyone’s got to be thinking,” came the reply.

He gave the man a fierce glare. “I said,
shut up
, or you’re gonna be the first.” That seemed to do the trick, and Franklin’s face colored.

Up ahead, Wallace’s floating camera thing was bobbing gently by an opening in the wall. Greer’s first impression was of an airlock setup; the SGC gave all off-world servicemen training in basic airlock operation for shipboard emergencies or situations on worlds with hazardous atmospheres.

James was by the far wall. “There’s what looks like a video screen set into a panel here.”

Greer looked into the drone’s lens. “This is the door?” he asked. It was partially open, and on closer inspection the frame around it seemed to be slightly distorted, as if it had suffered an impact. The air near the hatch was much colder than the rest of the corridor.

“
That’s it,
” said Eli, over the open channel. “
Can you close it?
”

Greer moved to the panel and tapped the same controls he’d seen Franklin use on the other bulkhead doors. The hatch grumbled and rattled in place, but it did not cycle shut. He shook his head. “It won’t close.”

Franklin took a step into the shuttle itself, shining his flashlight into the gloom. “It looks like the whole front of this thing is compromised,” he began. “Could have been an asteroid strike from outside, possibly…”

Greer followed him and Franklin stopped, looking over the spiderwebbed glass of the canopy. Both men saw great petals of torn metal where something of great force had ripped into the shuttle’s nose and opened it to space. Beyond, a flickering bubble of energy was all that was keeping them from being blown out into the void. Greer resisted the immediate urge to back out.

“
I can’t close it from here, either,
” reported Eli. “
There’s something wrong with the mechanism.
”

The Marine cast around and found he’d stepped through a second hatchway inside the cabin of the smaller craft and not noticed it. “There’s another door on the back of the shuttle, but no control pad,” he noted.

“
Maybe we can close it off locally.
” Greer heard Rush’s voice in the background. “
Don’t touch anything. I’m coming down.
”

“He’s coming down,” James said dryly. “I feel better already.”

Rush insisted that Eli remain in the control room, but as he wasn’t — as Eli oh-so-eloquently put it —
the boss of him
, he went along anyway, eager to take a look at what he’d discovered via the kino. Anything to keep his focus off imminent death was a good thing, he reflected.

The shuttle had the same technological hallmarks as the rest of the ship, the same boiler-plate and drop-forged look to everything, which made it doubly disturbing to consider what amount of force would have been needed to smash through something so sturdy. The pattern of the wreckage seemed to chime with Franklin’s idea of an asteroid hit. Even a tiny, dime-sized micrometeor could have done massive damage if it had collided with the shuttle’s prow at a high enough velocity. The shock from the hit was clearly what had warped the outer door, and without some heavy duty metalworking gear, there was no way they could fix it.

The chair Eli had seen through the kino was in the middle of the shuttle’s cockpit, likely set up for a pilot-commander. Rush settled himself into it without hesitation and began to work a set of keypads in the arms of the seat, while Franklin probed at the edges of the impact strike.

“The shield keeping the air inside is obviously not a hundred percent effective,” said the scientist.

Rush’s head bobbed in agreement. “No, it probably wasn’t designed to compensate for the amount of damage the ship has sustained.”

“Gotta wonder where that damage came from,” said Greer. “Might not all be from space rocks.”

Franklin clearly didn’t want to consider that option at the moment. “Is there a way of boosting the shield? At least in the areas where we need it the most?”

Panels of data were appearing now, and Eli watched as Rush paged quickly through them. “We haven’t found a way yet. It seems to be operating at maximum capability as it is.”

Eli saw him touch a glowing glyph; then from behind them the open inner hatch of the shuttle let out a creak of metal and slammed shut. Immediately vents in the walls hissed and Eli’s ears popped as the air inside the small craft was drawn out. “Open the door!” he shouted, his voice almost a squeal.

Rush tapped the glyph again and the process reversed itself, the hatch sliding back open again.

“Well,” Eli managed, panting. “That’s not good.”

“What just happened?” said James.

“It looks like we have a way to seal off the leak,” Rush replied.

“But only from
in here
,” added Greer.

Rush nodded. “I didn’t say it was the best way.”

Young looked up as the hatch opened and Tamara stepped in. He shifted slightly and did his best to ignore the shooting pains in his back, but he was pretty sure that Johansen saw the tightening of his jaw. “Lieutenant,” he said, with a nod.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

He pointed downward. “I can do this now.” His feet moved a little, twitching in his boots. “Couldn’t do that an hour ago.”

She gave him a weary smile of encouragement. “That’s great. That’s a very good sign, sir.”

“I’m still waiting on Doctor Rush.”

Tamara nodded. “I told him you wanted to see him. He said he’d get to you just as soon as he could.”

Young grimaced. “Yeah, I just bet he did.” He took a breath and looked Johansen in the eye, measuring the woman’s expression, gauging her stress level. “I don’t have time for this, do I?”

Tamara leaned against a table and her shoulders sagged. “Two problems,” she began. “We’re venting atmosphere from a damaged shuttle. But even if we can seal that off, the life support system is past its expiration date. We’ll build up our carbon dioxide to lethal levels in a day, just by breathing in and out.”

“That explains my headache,” noted the colonel.

“You already had one,” she replied.

Young thought for a moment. “Soda lime. Maybe one of the cases—”

She shook her head. “Left behind at Icarus.”

He let that sink in. It was worse than he had expected, but they couldn’t afford to lose focus now. “We’ll find a way. That’s what we do.”

Tamara looked away. “Most of us aren’t even supposed to be here.”

Young pressed on. “How did the ship get damaged?”

“We don’t know,” she told him. “It certainly looks like it’s been through a battle, at least in the sections we can access. We’re still cut off from most of the vessel. It’s huge.”

“This shuttle,” said Young. “We can’t just close the hatch?”

The medic shook her head. “Eli says the outer door is stuck fast. There’s an inner hatch, but that can only be shut from the inside. They tried jamming something into the shuttle doorway to keep it open long enough to let the person inside get out, but it just opens again. Some sort of safety mechanism, like in an elevator. Rush says he can’t override it.”

The colonel considered her report. “And the air… How much longer do we have?”

Tamara’s aspect turned grim. “Every other leak we can find has been shut off. As it stands, Rush says if we don’t get the shuttle hatch closed, we’ve got just over an hour.”

Rush craned over Franklin’s shoulder, watching the man as he removed the panels around the hatch control mechanism out in the corridor. The other scientist continued to work inside, despite all the compelling evidence to the contrary, convinced that he could find another way to access the shuttle hatch controls from out here.

He’s wasting time. All our time
, Rush thought to himself. From what he could determine, the shuttle was a completely separate vehicle from the main body of the starship, with its own operating systems, controls and apparatus. There appeared to be no cross-connections with the panels in the corridor, doubtless as some kind of safety measure to prevent accidental opening of the airlock and the resultant explosive decompression.

Perhaps, given enough time, Franklin’s dogged refusal to see sense might be proven right — Rush imagined it was probably possible for someone who knew what they were doing to dig down into the shuttle’s hardware and jury-rig a method for remote access. But the escapees had only just scratched the surface of the Ancient systems underpinning this vessel, and with the limited amount of equipment they had with them, it could take weeks, even months before they knew enough to run that kind of bypass. There was only one way to solve this problem, and it was the simplest and most expedient method; it was also the most ruthless.

Lieutenant Scott had arrived, and Greer gave him the basics of the situation in his usual terse, aggressive manner. Scott’s expression never changed, but his eyes betrayed him to Rush; the young officer was thinking exactly the same thing that the scientist was.

“Bad air is better than no air,” said Eli, studying the video screen on the wall. The monitor was showing an interior view of the shuttle’s cockpit.

“A day is better than an hour,” Scott added, reluctance heavy in his voice.

Rush folded his arms. They all knew what needed to be done. There was no sense denying it. “Someone has to go in there and close this door.”

“And die,” said Franklin pointedly. “Just so we’re all clear about what you’re saying here.”

“That part, we all understand,” said Scott, staring at the doorway.

He gathered them in the control room to go over the situation one more time. Scott could have made a decision then and there, down at the shuttle, but the truth was he wanted to put it off, to have a moment to try and assimilate what he was being asked to do. With Colonel Young still off his feet and command still technically resting on the shoulders of one Matthew Scott, where they went from here was up to him.

And ordering someone to kill themselves was not something that the lieutenant had any kind of handle on. Oh, back in training they had talked about how an officer would eventually find himself in a situation like this, where he might be forced to order men on missions that would more than likely result in their deaths. They talked about the greater good and duty and all that stuff. But that applied to combat, to battle with the enemy, to soldiers who had taken an oath to put their life on the line for their country. What was before him here and now was nothing less than an order to commit suicide. A cold equation, one life in exchange for fifty or so others.

And even then, it wasn’t really a trade of life for lives — it was literally a trade for
breathing room
. Locking off the shuttle would net the rest of them no more than a day more at most, and that still might not be enough time to solve the bigger problem of the busted air scrubbers. Whomever stepped up to this might give their life for nothing, just so the rest of them could see the end coming and die a little slower.

And how could he ever order someone to do it? To look a subordinate in the eye — Riley or Greer, Spencer or even Vanessa — and tell them to go in there? What was he supposed to do, throw it open to volunteers? Draw straws, run a lottery? Or was it that the responsibility fell to him, and him alone? As defacto commander, perhaps the only choice he had was actually no choice at all.

Tamara and Rush stood there, along with Eli and the senator’s daughter, all of them waiting for his decision.

Eli was speaking into the glassy eye of a kino, reporting to it like he was the presenter on some documentary show. “My head is pounding,” he told the machine. “Heart rate is accelerated. It’s getting hard to breathe, as our very lives are vented out into space.”

Rush rolled his eyes at Wallace’s dramatic delivery and Scott took a step toward him. “That is going to get old very fast,” he warned.

Eli pointed at the drone. “This needs to be documented.”

“No one is going to see that,” said Scott.

“How do you know?” Eli insisted. “We made it here. Someone else could too. If we die, maybe it will help them to know what happened to us.”

“We’re not dead yet,” said Rush firmly.

Eli turned back to the kino to continue his narrative. “I’m starting to have slightly blurred vision,” he noted.