STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air (23 page)

“Chloe, stop!” said the lieutenant, but his words fell on deaf ears. Johansen entered the control room and Scott called to her. “Little help here?”

The medic reached out to the girl. “Chloe…”

The anger still hard in her eyes, the violence in Chloe’s manner finally ebbed and she shrugged herself free of Scott’s grip. Breathless and crack-throated, she glared at the two officers. “Get away from me.” She turned back toward Rush and Eli. “All of you.”

He’d expected a reaction to Armstrong’s death, of course, but not something so extreme. The girl’s bright, politic manner clearly concealed a fierce spirit. Rush filed that thought away for later consideration. For now, he had to stamp down on any suggestion that the senator’s choice could be laid at his feet. “Miss Armstrong…” he began, attempting a soothing tone. “You’re in shock. I understand. Everyone deals with tragedy in different ways. You’re looking for someone to blame.”

Chloe’s glare was icy. “I’m not looking,” she told him.

“I am sorry about your father,” he continued. “He certainly would not have been my choice, he was a good man…” Rush paused, feeling for the right words. “But this is not my fault. I didn’t create the situation that forced us here. There was no other way.”

His statement had the opposite effect he wanted it to, and for a moment it seemed as if the girl was going to take another run at him. Johansen saw the flash of anger in her expression and moved to where she could intercept Chloe if the need arose.

Rush pressed on, trying to make her understand. “It may not matter to you right now, but this ship may be the most important discovery mankind has made since the Stargate itself. You know that the Icarus Project was something your father believed in, enough to risk his career to support it.”

Chloe was silent for a long moment; her father’s advocacy for the project had not been without its problems, and it was an open secret in the upper echelons of the SGC that Alan Armstrong had used up a lot of his political capital getting Icarus the funding it needed. “What difference does it make if we all die?” she said, at length.

He tried a different tack. “A number of people died in the attack on the base.” Faces drifted through his thoughts; good thinkers, highly competent scientists, colleagues whose insights Rush had respected; many were not among the escapees and he assumed the worse. “People I worked with closely for the last few years, people I knew well.”

“I’m sure some had more value than others,” Chloe shot back.

That gave him pause, but he kept talking. “As human beings, all of them were invaluable. I promise you, I am going to do everything I can to make sure no one gave their life in vain.” He took a step toward her. “Please, just give me a chance.”

She didn’t say another word. Instead, Chloe turned, swallowing her anger and pain, and left the room. Rush reached up to wipe a comma of blood from his lip, and watched her go.

Camile Wray looked down at her hands and stared at them as if they belonged to someone else. It was a small thing, a silly thing really, but she’d always worked hard to keep her hands looking good. Manicures and skin creams. A careful daily regimen. It was true what they said, that a woman’s hands were the first to betray her age, faster then her eyes, her face. She managed a wistful smile; Sharon always made fun of her for thinking that way, gently mocking her vanity, always reminding her that it was quite acceptable for women like them to grow old, as long as they did it
dis
gracefully…

The smile became brittle, broke apart. Camile’s hands were dirty, the nails cracked, the skin torn in places; and with a deep sigh, she wondered when she would ever feel Sharon’s touch on them again. She looked up at the metal walls around her, at the small knot of people taking refuge in the storage space.
We are so far from home,
she thought.
We’re all lost together.

Camile thought on that for a moment. What would her part in all this be? Back on Icarus, she was a functionary at best, and if she was honest, a paper-pusher with ideas above her station. Right from the start, she’d felt as if her posting to the isolated research base was a make-weight assignment, far from the center of things, away from the corridors of power where the policy of the International Oversight Advisory was shaped. But if a man such as Richard Woolsey could be promoted to command of a facility like the city of Atlantis, then Camile Wray believed she could do the same, if not better.

But now they were here, and that goal was beyond her.
Or was it?
She looked at her fellow escapees. Scientists, mostly, and soldiers. Both persona types locked in their ways, at opposite ends of the spectrum. In the days ahead, someone like her, someone with her skills at handling people, could prove invaluable. She could have purpose.

Behind her, the hatch opened and Young hobbled into the compartment, walking with difficulty. Wray kept her expression neutral as she noticed the Marine, Greer, at his side. “Colonel…”

Young took them all in with a look. “Senator Armstrong is dead.”

Camile’s eyes widened. “My God. What happened? I’d heard he was injured…”

“He’s bought us some time,” said the colonel, and abruptly Camile understood what Armstrong had done.

“To do what?” she said.

Young answered without answering; he seemed to make a habit of that when he dealt with Wray. “We’re working on it. First up is trying to dial the gate back home.” He winced as he spoke, clearly in pain.

Some of the others were talking eagerly, clinging to the faint hope the word ‘home’ engendered. Camile moved closer, studying Young. “Should you even be on your feet?” she asked.

“No,” said Greer, with an edge of annoyance.

Young threw the sergeant a look. “Well, I
am
on my feet, and right now we’re going to try to get home.” His gaze met hers. “I need your help, Camile. You know these people. Spread the word. Try and keep things as positive as you can.”

A dozen questions popped into her head. Was he serious about the Stargate? How much air did they have left? Was he just lying to keep people calm?
Do we really have a chance at survival out here?
But she asked none of them, because Wray knew as well as Young did that right now, the Icarus refugees needed hope almost as much as they did air. “I can do that,” she said.

He gave her a nod. “Good. Thank you.”

He found her on the observation deck.

Scott peered into the starlit room to see Chloe sitting on the floor, staring out into space. Out beyond the window, the sweep of the Ancient ship framed the strange shimmering colors of the Doppler-shifted stars. For a moment, he considered leaving her where she was, letting her have her quiet, her moment of reflection; but he couldn’t walk away.

He thought of the intensity of emotion that had washed out from Chloe when he held her as her father perished. The poised and perfect young senator’s aide he had met less than a day ago was breaking apart, and she had no one to help her shoulder the pain. Scott walked in and took a seat on the floor next to her, offering what he could just by being there. He said nothing and let Chloe find her way.

After while, she spoke, quiet and heavy with emotion. “I’ve never done anything like that before.” She showed him the bruises on the knuckles of her hands from the wild punches she had thrown.

“He’ll be fine,” Scott assured her. “Rush isn’t quite as noble as he says he is, but I don’t think he really intended for us to get stuck this way.”

“You think he had no choice?”

Scott considered that. “If he’s lying, then he’s a lot crazier than I want to believe.” That thought made him uncomfortable, and he pushed it away.

Chloe fell silent for a long moment, before taking a low breath. “I just… I can’t believe my dad is gone. I watched him die and I still just can’t accept it.”

He could hear the emotions in her voice, the disbelief and the pain. Scott glanced at her. “Tell me about him.”

Chloe looked back, her brow creasing in confusion, as if she thought that was a odd thing to ask of her. “Why?”

He looked back toward the stars. “The man died so I could live. I’d like to know more about him. I owe him that much, at least.”

“Like what?”

“Anything.”

Chloe thought on that for a little while, and he saw the faint ghost of a smile on her face. “No matter how tired he was, how long he had worked or what was going on in his life, he always had time to listen to me,” she said. “I’d go on and on.”

“About what?”

She looked away. “Everything. The world, school, friends, guys…” The smile grew a little more as she remembered her father, reconnected with him. “He never preached, never told me what to do even though sometimes I wished he would. He just listened.” Chloe took a breath and there was a faint catch in it. “Then he’d tell me he loved me. When that didn’t help, he’d break out chocolate ice cream.”

In spite of himself, Scott smiled. “I’d kill for some right now.”

Chloe went on, the words she needed to hear coming from her own lips, not his. “The worst was if I had a fight with my mom. He never took sides.” She shook her head. “God, my mom… He was her whole life. She probably thinks we’re both dead.”

Scott watched the play of emotions on her face. “I didn’t know him, and now I wish I’d had the chance. All I do know is that he wanted you to go on. He loved you.”

“I know.” Her voice seemed to come from very far away.

He wanted to say more, but he had nothing else to give her. Anything else would have just been empty platitudes, and Chloe deserved more than that. Scott slowly got back to his feet. “I gotta get back to the search. Are you going to be okay?”

She gave him a look. “I don’t know.”

He felt the same way. “Fair enough.”

Eli felt numb.

He’d experienced death in the same way that most people his age had; through the funeral of an elderly relative or the distant, removed passing of someone they knew at second hand. But Eli had never been so close to something like this, to a man making the choice to end himself by his own hand. People had died back there on Icarus, and Eli knew that on a disconnected, intellectual level; but he hadn’t known them, hadn’t seen their last moments as he had with Armstrong, watching him seal himself into the shuttle via the unblinking eye of the kino, watching Chloe’s sorrow and fury at her father’s sacrifice.

He stared at the console before him without really seeing it, dimly aware of Rush, Brody and Park busying themselves at the control room’s other panels. Senator Armstrong’s death made the threat facing all of them shift from an abstract to terrible reality. Maybe on some level, Eli had believed that they would never have to really face up to their own mortality; but now that was all torn away, and the truth of it was bearing down on him.

“Eli…”

He looked up and found Rush staring at him. “What?”

“What are you doing?” The scientist looked irritated. “We need to keep working, searching the ship’s systems.”

He shook his head. “I just watched a man die. Give me a break, okay? Don’t you care?”

Brody and Park paused, watching the conversation. Rush shot them a look that said
Back to Work!
and then turned to Eli again. “Of course I do. But I’m concentrating on what needs to be done. I’m also learning as much as I can, as quickly as I can.” He tapped the console in front of him. “That is, in addition to running nine separate searches in the database in the hope of solving our life support issues.”

“Right,” said Eli, frowning. “Have you found anything?”

Rush paused, and when he spoke again Eli detected a note of melancholy in his voice. “
Destiny
.”

He blinked. “As in ours?” Eli hadn’t figured Rush as the kind to make portentous statements.

The scientist shook his head slightly. “It’s the name of the ship, translated from Ancient. Fitting, don’t you think?”

Park spoke up. “I never much liked the whole idea of destinies and fates and predetermined events, myself.”

“Destiny and fate are two different things,” said Brody. “Fate implies a path with no choice to it. Destiny is something else… Something you have to be a part of. Something with a choice to it.”

Rush nodded. “I have also learned that the Ancients were never here.”

That brought Eli up short. “Wait, I thought this was an Ancient ship. You said they built it, just like they built the Stargates.”

“They did,” said Rush. “They sent it out unmanned, planning to use the gate on board to get here when it was far enough out into the universe…but they must have learned to ascend before it was time.”

Ascend
? Eli wasn’t sure what the word meant in that context, but he saw Brody and Park both nodding at Rush’s theory. “They learned to
what
?”

“It’s, uh, a bit complicated,” noted Brody.

Rush took on a lecturing tone once more. “
Ascension
is a process in which consciousness converts to energy and no longer requires physical form.”

He made it sound like he was talking about someone changing their shirt, not shifting from one state of being to another. Eli had read enough science fiction to grasp the concept of a corporeal entity transforming into pure energy, but the idea of a whole civilization doing it
for real
was a little harder to comprehend. But it did explain a lot; he’d wondered for a while why it was these so-called Ancients were willing to let Earthmen screw around with their funky technology and not kick up a stink about it. They were all gone, vanished off to Dimension X or some other higher plane of being. “That wasn’t in the video,” he said. Eli had been constructing his own theory about the builders of the Stargates ever since he’d first heard them mentioned, factoring in what he knew of conspiracy theories about Roswell, alien abductions and that kind of thing. Now it all seemed trivial and commonplace.
All that stuff with little gray men must have been some big disinformation thing,
he decided.

Rush gave him an arch look. “There’s more than one video, Eli. Now, if you don’t mind, we all need to get to work.”