STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air (6 page)

The problem was, she couldn’t shake the nagging concerns that had plagued her ever since Icarus had been given the green light. Carter had more than enough to do with the
Hammond
and the challenging missions the ship had taken on, but she found herself wondering if she was just a little envious at being the one to stand by and let someone else make this discovery, especially after so long on the cutting edge with SG-1 and then during her stewardship of Atlantis.

But it was more than just some rivalry. On some deep level, Sam wasn’t sure if she entirely trusted Nicholas Rush; she couldn’t read his motivations, and that bothered her. She pushed that thought away. “I’m ready to assist in any way I can, doctor,” she told him.

Rush gave her a last nod and turned back to his work. “If the need arises, I’m pleased to know I can call on you,” he said.

For better or worse,
Carter thought to herself as she left,
I hope he knows what he’s doing.

If in doubt, take solace in a snack.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the healthiest of philosophies, but it was one that Eli could connect with, and so he ventured down to the
Hammond
’s mess hall in the hopes that if the USAF could send a man across the stars, they could send some pizza and a few cans of soda with him as well.

He still hadn’t quite got his head around the whole shipboard day-night cycle. The
Hammond
worked on something called ‘Zulu Time’, with the crew running in shifts similar to the way sailors did on submarines. Eli gathered a few things on a tray and wandered among the people in khaki flightsuits and nondescript work gear. Technicians and military types were not exactly the kind of people he had a lot in common with. And then he saw the girl.

She was
hot
. That was the first thing that came to mind, and, to be honest, the second and the third thing. She reminded Eli of all the girls he’d ever thought were way out of his league. Truth was, if they’d been back on Earth, he’d have given her a wide berth and found a place somewhere else, but here, out in the interstellar deeps, she was a fellow civilian aboard a boatload of airmen and scientists, and that meant they had something in common. He glanced at the other tables, the techs and the grunts. It wasn’t really a tough choice to make.

She looked up at him and smiled as he approached. “Hi.”

He gestured with his tray at the empty seat opposite her. “You mind?”

She gave a gracious nod. “Go ahead.”

Eli sat and noticed that she’d picked a spot where the view through the mess hall window was clearly visible. The tunnel of hyperspace effect stretched away from them, off into infinity.

She saw him looking. “First time on a space ship, too?”

“Me?” He attempted to feign a cool, knowledgeable air. “No, no. I’ve been on lots of… Various…” The attempt dried up pretty quick, so he abandoned it. “Eli Wallace. Hello.”

He got a nod in return. “I know.”

The answer wrong-footed him. “You’ve heard of me?”

“I have.”

“Wow.” Eli considered this for a moment. “That almost never happens.”

“They say you’re brilliant.”

He was liking her more and more by the moment. Cute and clearly an excellent judge of character. “Oh, they,
them
, they’re so…” He was in danger of trailing off again. “And you are?”

“Chloe. I work for Alan Armstrong.” She paused, and Eli realized he was supposed to know who that was. “Senator of California?”

He nodded sagely. “Ah, yes, yes. I’ve heard of California.”

Chloe favored him with a brief smile. “He’s also the chairman of the off-world spending committee, but you couldn’t know that part. I’m his executive assistant.”

“Wow,” he repeated, wondering after Washington guys and their ability to attract the gorgeous. “My last job was more in the burgers and fries field. How’d you hook up something like that?”

“Well, I was a political science major at Harvard,” she demurred.

Eli nodded again. “I hear that’s a good school. For a while there I was at—”

“M.I.T.” said Chloe. “I know.”

“Really?” She knew a lot, and to be honest, Eli wasn’t sure where to go with the conversation, but Chloe was pretty, and she was friendly, and he didn’t know if the planet they were going to even had people on it, let alone, y’know,
girls
. He smiled winningly back at her and took a sip of his drink. “So what else did
they
tell you about me?”

The facility on P4X-351 had been up and running for a couple of years now, long enough for it to have lost that new-build smell, for the staff to have got settled in and the military contingent to learn the angles of the place. Icarus Base, as it was designated, was the only piece of civilization on the entire world — unless you wanted to count the weird little colonies of primates that existed down in the equatorial zone — an outpost of the human species far from home where people were planning on going even farther still.

Icarus was around eighty souls, all told, the split of that something like sixty-forty in favor of the eggheads. Hewn from the living rock of a mountainside, it had been picked as the location for ‘the project’ because it was off the beaten track and because it didn’t have a Stargate. At least at first. They shipped one in from some former Goa’uld slave world, where the locals had got so sick of invaders turning up out of the blue that they just wanted to opt out of the whole gate network thing.

It wasn’t hard to blame them. There was this pattern that the cultural historians at Stargate Command had noticed repeating over and over in the Milky Way and Pegasus galaxies. Civilizations that had been monkeyed with by the Goa’ulds, the Asgard, the Ancients, or any one of a number of alien races, they tended to cluster their settlements all around their gates, sometimes for commerce, but more often than not for safety in numbers. Earth had been lucky; two Stargates there, but both of them had been buried in the distant past so no damn thing could come through. Not like some worlds, planets full of people who lived in fear of the next ‘kawoosh’.

It could be argued — and it often
had
— that the chain of events started when the first Earth gate was unearthed in Giza was the worst thing that ever happened to mankind. Maybe some of those threats out there would have come calling eventually, and maybe they wouldn’t. All you could be sure of now is that we were all in the thick of it, players on a much bigger game board. Out of our league, some said.

But here we were at Icarus Base, about to do something else that some folks said was a bad idea. Challenging a new boundary, testing some different set of limits, because, well, that was the kind of thing that human beings did. No-one seemed to want to comment on who it was exactly that had chosen the name for the facility, though.

The irony of calling the project after a guy who had crashed and burned after pushing his own limits too far was not lost on First Lieutenant Matthew Scott. Once upon a time, he might had taken that as some kind of sign. A bad omen. But these days, Scott was more interested in the here and the now. He’d left all that other stuff behind. What Scott cared about was taking the moment, and
owning
it.

In the hot space of the compartment, there was little enough room to maneuver, but they’d gotten into the practice of it by now, so there were fewer skinned elbows and uncomfortable bruises than there had been. Scott pushed forward and buried his face in Vanessa James’s chest, pressing her hard against the wall. She gasped and laughed, her arms snaking around his back, pulling him still closer. Their dog-tags were caught up and bunched, digging into his clavicle. He planted a hungry kiss on her neck and she reacted.

Human contact. In the alien dark of outer space, what they were doing was practically an affirmation of the species. At least, that’s what he’d say if they were caught by a superior officer. That wasn’t likely to happen, though. Bases were like small towns, where everyone knew everyone else’s business and kept their silence, for fear their own secrets might get out. Plus Matt and Vanessa were very careful. They made sure they knew the times when other couples were, uh,
coupling
, and kept away.

She gasped, and so did he, moving up to kiss her, and James did that thing where she looked away from him. Scott wondered about that sometimes, about what it meant. He thought he had a good handle on the dimensions of their relationship; First Lieutenant and Second Lieutenant, so they weren’t fraternizing too far out of rank. No strings on either of them — and in the military where you could be transferred or, y’know,
killed
, at the drop of a hat, that was standard operating procedure. Vanessa seemed to treat sex like it was an extreme sport, and that was just fine with Matt. She’d never made it seem like there was any more to it, and he didn’t need the complications of all the other stuff. The
baggage
.

Any more thoughts he might have had on the subject were abruptly cancelled by the growl from his walkie, hanging from his gear vest by the door. “
Scott, this is Colonel Young. Come in please
.”

All the passion bled out of the moment like air from a stuck balloon, and Scott cursed silently, glancing in the direction of the radio.

Young’s voice continued. “
Our guests have arrived a few minutes early, Lieutenant. What’s your position
?”

James snapped out a laugh at the question, sultry and mocking in equal measure. He sighed and disengaged an arm, reaching for the walkie. She grabbed his wrist and her eyes glittered. “Not yet.”

“
Lieutenant
.” Young was moving from terse enquiry to full-blown order now. “
Drop whatever you’re doing and get your ass up here
.”

He let James go and she fell back with an amused yelp. “You heard him.” Pulling himself together, Scott snatched up the radio and squeezed the talk button. “On my way, sir.”

James was laughing behind her hand. Scott shot her a look and tossed her undershirt back to her. There was a second when their looped dog-tags caught, but then he was stepping away. “Duty calls?” she whispered.

“I, uh…”

She snorted at him and turned away. “What, you wanna cuddle? Go on, get going.”

He zipped up the vest and opened the storage compartment door. Satisfied he wouldn’t be seen exiting, Scott pushed out and broke into a jog, working hard to erase any lasting impression of his non-regulation activities.

The second time around Eli closed his eyes when the teleporter thing swept over him, but what struck hard was the immediate and instantaneous shift in the sensory environment around him. On the trip from Earth, he’d quickly gotten used to the temperate atmosphere of the
Hammond
, with its recycled air and quietly humming deck plates. But now he was somewhere else, under a bright, hot sun that burned yellow-orange. He felt lighter on his feet and a little bit dizzy. Eli took a couple of experimental breaths and tasted air that was hot, clean…and
alien
.

He turned slowly in place. Chloe, Rush and the senator were standing nearby, taking it all in along with him. The first thing Eli saw were concrete battlements, like some modern rendition of an ancient stronghold, with piles of sandbags and guys in desert-pattern camo looking watchful and ready for anything. He looked to see what they were facing and realized he was less than six feet away from the sheerest drop he’d ever seen. “Holy…”

The jagged stone fell away, down toward a rocky desert plateau that ranged away toward the far horizon. At the foot of the mountainside he saw the dark ribbons of runways, and parked on them were weird boomerang-shaped aircraft that looked nothing like any fighter plane he’d ever seen. In the distance, Eli could make out another range of razor-tipped peaks scraping the underside of a massive storm cell. Once again, a tremor of amazement ran through him. He’d felt it in the
Hammond
’s observation room over Earth, then in hyperspace, and now again. On some level he was glad he wasn’t getting jaded about the whole thing. Grinning, he turned back as an austere-looking officer in an all-black duty uniform came walking toward the group. Eli dropped the grin and tried to look calm, resisting the urge to scream
Dude! We’re on another planet!

The officer gave a nod to Chloe’s boss, who stood looking as pressed and poised as he would have stepping out of a limo at some swanky bash for D.C. politicos. “Senator, it’s my honor to welcome you to Icarus Base.”

“Colonel Young,” replied Armstrong, shaking the man’s hand and flashing a practiced smile. “Let me introduce my executive assistant, Chloe.”

Chloe was just as poised, and if anything, she looked even better than she had the first time Eli had seen her. He dimly registered another arrival from inside the base — a younger male officer, flushed with the effort of running — but the majority of Eli’s attention remained on the girl. He was starting to entertain the vague idea that perhaps they could have…a thing.

Chloe smiled at the colonel. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

“The pleasure’s mine,” said Young.

“She’s also my daughter,” the senator added seamlessly.

Eli’s hand twitched and he had to resist the almost physical need to slap himself in the forehead.
A senator’s little girl? Oh right, good call, Wallace. Yeah, you were
so
in with a chance with her.
He ignored the sarcastic voice in the back of his head and looked away. Eli’s gaze crossed that of the young officer — his nametag read ‘Scott’ — and they shared an instant of mutual guy telepathy.
She’s real cute, but she’s off-limits.

Young stepped up to him, and Eli felt the man’s eyes measure him in a single look. “You must be the—”

“Contest winner,” said Eli, and for a moment he had a ridiculous vision of himself in a tiara and sash. “This place is…amazing.” He glanced up again and stared at the blocky muzzle of a very large cannon. “And that is a big gun.”