STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air (34 page)

“Great,” coughed Eli from his position on the floor. “Warp speed.”

“Good work,” said Young as he approached. “All of you.”

“Hey, thanks,” Eli replied. “Is it okay if I pass out here for a little while?”

He didn’t feel like he needed the crutch that Becker had made him any more, so Colonel Young left it back with the supplies and took a slow and steady walking tour of the
Destiny
. Everybody on board had come to within a few breaths of dying and all of them had faced it with a strength he hadn’t credited. Alan Armstrong had given his life to keep them alive. Scott and Greer had performed above and beyond the call of duty. T.J. had stepped up when she was needed the most. Eli Wallace had shown great bravery in a moment when a lesser man would have shirked the responsibility. Even Rush, after everything the man had done and despite whatever selfish agenda he was pushing, had come through in the end.

He stopped to watch Rush supervising Volker and Park as they assisted in the revitalization of the carbon dioxide scrubbers. Scott’s find on the planet had provided them with more than enough of the limestone compound for their immediate needs, and with it they’d cooked up a batch of milky fluid that would do the job and keep everyone breathing for the foreseeable future. They filled the filter pods and slotted them back into the walls, one after another.

Young passed by the control room chamber, and found a tired but elated Eli working with Brody. On the main holographic display, the life support system indicators that had remained an ominous red began to switch over to a stable green as each one of the air scrubbers was replenished. He kept walking, on toward the crew quarters, and in the corridor he felt the faintest breath of a fresh breeze against his cheek.

Young stopped and looked up toward the atmosphere vents and took a deep breath, allowing himself to savor it. Moving on, past the storage compartment where Camile Wray had gathered a few of the civilians, he heard them laughing with relief as clean air started coming from the vents. She saw him pass by and they shared a nod. For all of them, Young included, it seemed like an age since they had been able to breathe deeply.

Across the corridor was the room he’d rested in earlier — not that there was a lack of places to sleep here. Young wondered if Rush had been right about the
Destiny
never actually having a crew in the first place. If that was so, then why have the rooms at all? It was one more question about this craft that needed to be answered. Perhaps, now they weren’t struggling for their next breath, they could think about finding some answers.

He entered and Tamara looked up from where she sat next to Franklin. The scientist’s shoulder was heavily bandaged and the detritus from her work on his injury lay in a blood-stained pile on the table. She gave Young a weary nod and he returned it.

“How is he doing?”

Tamara sighed. “He’ll be okay once the sedatives wear off and he wakes up. It’ll hurt him like hell for a while, though, and his arm probably won’t work as well as it did. I’m just a meatball surgeon, but I did my best.”

“I know you did,” said Young.

She went on. “I took a look at Scott and the others. The lieutenant has some wicked sunburn. Can’t help him with that, though. He’ll have to tough it out. I sent Chloe to get him rehydrated.”

“What about Greer and Eli?”

“You know Marines, sir. There’s a reason they call them ‘leathernecks.’ As for Eli, he’s holding up pretty well. Just glad to be alive, I guess.” Tamara seemed to sense what Young’s next question would be and she moved to deflect it. “I made sure they all got enough to drink, but we need to be firm on the rationing. There’s no telling how long its going to be before we can get more food and water—”

“Don’t worry about that for now,” he said. “How about you, T.J.? How are you doing?”

She looked away and blew out a breath. “I… I don’t know when I last slept. Broke my watch coming through the Stargate. I guess I’m just strung out…” Tamara managed a weak smile. “But I’m alive. Where there’s life, there’s hope, right?”

“So I’ve heard.”

The smile faded. “But I can’t help thinking about Andrea Palmer and Sergeant Curtis. And Chloe’s dad. Sir, we’ve been out here no more than a day or so, and we’ve already lost three people.”

Young gave a solemn nod. “I know how you feel. But there’s nothing we could have done.”

She looked away. “How are we going to survive? We’ve got air now, but we need food, water, we need to figure out how this ship operates…”

“One problem at a time,” he told her. “One day at a time. That’s what we have to do.” He paused. “Palmer, Curtis, Senator Armstrong… They all made their choices. Now we have to make ours. Do we pull together and get through this, or do we fall apart?”

After a moment, Tamara nodded. “Not really a choice at all, is it?”

“No,” he agreed.

Eli looked up as Rush entered the control room, passing Brody on his way out. “Hey, we’re not dead. That means this was a good day, right?”

Rush gave a snort. “That all depends on how you define
good
, Eli.”

He held up his hands. “I have both my arms; I am alive. Yeah, I’ll go with
good
for that.”

The other man fell silent and studied him. Then he spoke again. “Thank you for trusting me. I know there’s not a lot of that going around at the moment.”

“Hey, if anyone knows how Stargates work around here, it’s you, right?”

“Yes,” replied Rush, without weight.

“And it’s not like I had a lot of options,” admitted Eli. “Suffocate on the ship, die of thirst on the planet, lose an arm. None of those are exactly enticing.” He paused, considering his motivations for a moment. “The truth is, I knew you weren’t going to let us all die.”

Rush raised an eyebrow. “Why? I doubt Sergeant Greer would have agreed with that.”

Eli gestured around. “Because of all this. The
Destiny
.” He nodded to himself. “Without that mineral stuff, everyone would have died, you included, and you don’t want to lose one second of being here, do you?”

“Of course not,” Rush replied. “I’d be a fool not to. This ship, everything it represents…” His gaze turned inward. “We have to
know
it, Eli. We have an opportunity here greater than any other explorer in human history. We can’t refuse it.”

Eli saw that odd light in Rush’s eyes again, and something occurred to him; a sudden, cold realization.
He doesn’t want to go home.

The man blinked and went back to working the console, the moment vanishing. “We should keep digging through the layers of the system,” he said, all business again. “We’ve only just scratched the surface here.”

“Yeah,” said Eli, for the moment keeping his thoughts to himself. “You’re right about that.”

Scott lay on the bunk and watched the patterns of the stars flash past the window in the far wall. He lay in the cool darkness of the room and didn’t move; parts of his skin felt raw and tight, and he had to be careful how he sat on the bed. Even the slightest touch of cloth on his sunburn felt like someone rubbing sandpaper over him. He couldn’t remember ever being this exhausted, not even after the worst days of basic training. Scott felt like he had been crushed up, wrung out and thrown away; but he was still breathing, so that had to count for something.

The streaks of starlight flying by had a lulling, almost hypnotic effect on the lieutenant — or maybe that was just the fatigue. He felt his thoughts drifting, falling back to those moments on the desert world.

Scott had not dwelled on thoughts of Father George for a long time, and to relive those moments so vividly now, to sense the old man’s presence close to him… He couldn’t help but wonder what it could mean. Part of him wanted to rationalize it away; it was heat stroke, some kind of hallucination brought on by dehydration, maybe. Another part of him, something he’d buried deep, kept to himself, had other answers that he didn’t want to think about.

And then there was the strange dust-vortex shape he had seen, the ‘swirl’. He hadn’t spoken to anyone about it yet, and he wondered what he could say if he did. Scott was convinced that the twisting spiral of sand had been real, even if everything else wasn’t. He remembered the static charge he’d felt when it touched him, the way it consumed the water he dripped from his canteen. He had not imagined that; he had not hallucinated the way it had helped him, saved his life —
and everyone else’s
, he thought.

Perhaps it had been some kind of alien life form, something native to the white deserts, possibly sentient, possibly not. Then again, Scott thought about the stories he’d heard, the barrack-room rumors about the aliens the SGC called the Ancients. Weren’t they supposed to be made of pure energy? He wondered if that could be possible, that the people who had built this starship might still be out here somewhere, watching over the craft, taking an interest in the new arrivals huddling in its corridors. And then there was the other possibility. Scott had grown up listening to stories of angels, of ethereal beings that gave assistance in times of great need. Maybe there hadn’t been any harps and haloes, but he couldn’t deny that
something
had looked out for him.

There was a knock at the door and he looked up as Chloe entered, holding a full canteen. “Hey,” she said softly. “I brought you some more water.”

He nodded at the bottle by his pallet. “It’s okay, I still have some.”

She came in and stood by the end of the bed. “You really need to drink it. Lieutenant Johansen…. I mean, Tamara, was pretty insistent about it.”

Scott nodded wearily. “I’m fine.” He suddenly felt awkward, unsure what to say to her. His mind flashed back to that moment in the corridor outside the shuttle bay, when Chloe had held on to him for dear life, as if he were the rock in a storm raging all around her. In that instant, a connection had been forged between them.

After a moment, she spoke again. “Everyone appreciates what you did.”

He sat up. “Did Rush say how long it will last?”

“He’s not sure.”

Silence stretched out between them, and he couldn’t let it go on. Scott’s experience on the planet had left him feeling hollowed out, alone, and he saw the mirror of his own feelings in Chloe. “How are you?” he asked. She shook her head and gave a numb shrug. “My parents died in a car crash when I was four years old.” He said it without thinking, uncertain of where the impulse came from.

Chloe looked up at him, with genuine regret. “I’m sorry.”

Now he had started talking about it, he found he couldn’t stop. “There was a priest who raised me… He pretty much drank himself to death when I was sixteen.”

Her hand went to her mouth. “My God.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m not trying to diminish what you’re going through.”

“I know,” she gave a slow nod. “I understand.”

Scott looked past her, to the window. “I think my point is, some things you never get over. That’s just the way it is.” She came closer and sat on the side of the bed, taking his hand. “You go on through,” he continued. “As best you can.”

Chloe nodded. She opened her mouth to speak, but said nothing.

He looked at her. “We’re going to be okay. I believe that.”

She forced a smile.

“I believe,” he repeated, looking back out at the darkness and the light.

Against the reach of the endless night and the ocean of stars, the ship thundered on, its voyage unending.

Collected in one small area of its hull, the humans gathered together, ranging themselves against the unknown, struggling to understand the fate that had brought them to this place, working to learn the secrets of their new home.

Beyond them, the iron flanks of the vast vessel, this
Destiny
, ranged away in curves and constructs, devices and systems yet to be discovered, yet to be deciphered. But in among the sculptured lines of the Ancient ship, there lay something that did not belong.

Small, so much so that a casual glance might have missed the sight, but distinct enough that a second look would have revealed it. Something deceptive in its design, something alien and foreign, latched to the hull of the
Destiny
as a pilot fish might cruise on the skin of a cetacean. With a blink of fire, a ring of thrusters on the aft of the craft suddenly ignited and it detached, falling free, dropping into the faster-than-light slipstream of the larger vessel.

For a moment it kept pace with the
Destiny
, matching its incredible velocities point for point, riding alongside it; then the craft veered away at a sharp angle, vanishing into the red-shifted light of the passing stars.

The
Destiny
and the lives aboard her traveled on, the vista of the universe opening before them.

About the Author

James Swallow is the author of several books and scripts, and his fiction from the worlds of
Stargate
includes the novels
Halcyon
,
Relativity
and
Nightfall
, and the audio dramas
Shell Game
,
Zero Point
and
First Prime
, as well as short stories for the official
Stargate Magazine
.

As well as a non-fiction book (
Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher
), James also wrote the
Sundowners
series of original steampunk westerns,
Jade Dragon
,
The Butterfly Effect
and fiction in the worlds of
Star Trek
(
Synthesis,
the award-winning
Day of the Vipers, Infinity’s Prism, Distant Shores
,
The Sky’s The Limit
and
Shards and Shadows
),
Doctor Who
(
Peacemaker, Dalek Empire
,
Destination Prague,
Snapshots, The Quality of Leadership
),
Warhammer 40,000
(
Black Tide, Red Fury
,
The Flight of the Eisenstein
,
Faith & Fire,
Deus Encarmine
and
Deus Sanguinius
) and
2000AD
(
Eclipse
,
Whiteout
and
Blood Relative
).