STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air (17 page)

One of the Marines reached for the intercom phone, while the other reached for his gun.

He had expected it to be something like the Stargate; the same sort of giddying effect of moving across the event horizon from one location to another, but what Rush experienced was something much more subtle. It was almost like the fade between scenes in a film, or the slow blink of an eye. One moment he was there in the dimly-lit cabin of an Ancient starship, the next he was in a bright room staring at the faces of two armed men.

He felt peculiar, strangely out of proportion to his body’s image of itself. He looked down at his hands and saw a black communications stone gripped in one of them.
It worked.

Using means that human scientists had only begun to guess at, the communications stones were capable, by the simple interface of dermal induction, to open up a two-way quantum conduit between the beings holding a pair of stones linked to a single base unit. But rather than transmitting voice or a visual component, the stones enabled the transmission of a consciousness.

He turned his head and saw a face looking back at him from the monitor near the video camera, bespectacled and slightly unkempt.
Lee
, he thought.
Couldn’t I have connected with someone more…important?

It wasn’t as if Rush’s actual brain was now inside the body of William Lee, however, or vice-versa. What made him who he was, was still inside his skull, in his body back on the ship — but the stones allowed him to move and speak through Lee’s body, controlling it like an operator working a telepresence robot. Rush frowned for a moment, hoping that his erstwhile partner in this message wouldn’t damage
his
body or walk it into some as-yet unseen danger aboard the Ancient ship; but that was a chance he was going to have to take.

He looked back at the Marines, and when he spoke it sounded odd and distorted. “My name is Doctor Nicholas Rush,” he said. “I want to talk to your commanding officer.”

“Are we sure it’s him?” said O’Neill, following Harriman toward the comms lab. “We have a procedure for this kinda thing, right? Like, code words or something?”

“It’s Doctor Rush, sir,” said the sergeant. “I’m sure.”

O’Neill entered the lab and saw Bill Lee sitting on the edge of the table and looking at his fingernails. When the man glanced up at him, the general felt an odd twinge of recognition. Even though it wasn’t Rush,
yeah
, it was Rush all right. Something in the turn of the lip and the look in the eyes were just like those of the man he’d accompanied to Eli Wallace’s home a few days ago. It was like Lee’s flesh was just a coat that Rush had slipped into for the interim.

“General, I am reporting from on board an Ancient space ship, which seems to be well beyond our known universe.” It was strange to hear a Scottish accent coming from Lee’s mouth, but if O’Neill had any lingering doubts about who was talking to him, the tonality of the voice swept them away.

He held up a hand. “Wait, back up. You’re on a ship, not a planet. Who’s with you?”

Rush shrugged Lee’s shoulders. “I don’t have an exact count. Several dozen. Someone else was working on that.” A smile crossed his face. “The point is, I did it. I successfully made a connection to the nine chevron address.”

O’Neill folded his arms. “What you were supposed to be doing was evacuating non-combat personnel.” He pointed at the floor. “To
Earth
.”

The other man nodded. “Colonel Young gave that order, yes,” he admitted. “I overrode that decision.”

O’Neill’s first impulse was to demand to know exactly
why
Rush had thought it was okay to ignore a ranking officer’s command in favor of a science experiment, but he held back on that for a moment. “Where’s Young now?” he demanded.

“At the moment, he’s unconscious. I’m sorry to say he’s not doing well, actually. He was injured during the attack.”

“And what about Senator Armstrong?”

“He’s fine…” Rush/Lee took a step closer. “But if you’ll let me explain… Dialing Earth was not an option. The core of P4X-351 had become unstable as a result of the attack and—”

O’Neill spoke over him. “The planet’s been vaporized.”

Rush nodded Lee’s head. “And if the resulting blast had come back through the wormhole to Earth, it would have been catastrophic!”

He was right, of course, but the man’s explanation was still pretty damn thin. “So, instead of dialing any number of other planets in our galaxy, you took a bunch of unqualified people halfway across the universe? How was that a better idea, Doctor?”

“I took what I thought was our last chance to try and dial the ninth chevron,” he insisted. “We were successful. At that point, we couldn’t shut the gate down again.” He spread Lee’s hands. “I saved these people’s lives.”

A nerve twitched in O’Neill’s jaw. “Not yet you haven’t. Get them home.”

“General,” he pleaded, “this may be the greatest opportunity for exploration mankind has ever known…”

“Rush…” He couldn’t believe the man’s arrogance. Here he was, one second taking credit for a rescue, the next talking about lofty ideals without any concern for the people on that ship.

He kept talking. “We are determining the possibility of dialing Earth. I will do everything in my power to keep these people alive and safe.”

“Doctor,” began O’Neill, raising his hand; but then he halted as the expression on Bill Lee’s face shifted and returned to its more usual aspect. Rush had hung up on him.

“Doctor Lee?” said Harriman.

Lee nodded and reached into a pocket for handkerchief to mop his brow. “Oh, wow,” he began. “You’re never gonna believe where I’ve just been.”

“You alright?” said Scott, as they walked.

“Solid, sir,” James replied, without looking his way. “I’m trained for this.”

He lowered his voice. “I didn’t mean…” Scott noticed that Riley was listening to their exchange and fell silent.

Over the sergeant’s radio, the interchange between Greer and his team was also audible. “
How exactly do we know this ship is unoccupied?
” Franklin was asking.

“
Rush said the air came on just before we got here,
” Greer told him.

“
What about aliens that don’t breathe air?
” insisted the scientist.

Scott scowled and toggled his walkie. “Keep the chatter off the comms, people.”

“Franklin’s got a point,” said Riley, panning the MagLite in his hand slowly over the walls of the corridor. “I mean, if it’s this big, seems like an awful lot of ship for no-one to be on it.”

James shot him a wry look. “Atlantis was empty when they found that. The Ancients are all dead, Sergeant. Didn’t you read the special memo?”

“No ma’am, lieutenant,” he replied. “Those are only for officers, and I work for a living.”

“Maybe there
were
crew, one time,” James said, her tone turning sinister. “Maybe they got eaten by something. Or infected with some space virus.” She gave Scott a sideways look. “Maybe they died off and became extinct when there weren’t enough of them left to breed.”

“This isn’t the school yard, boys and girls,” said Scott, without looking back at them. “Talk less. You’re burning up our oh-two.”

Up ahead, the trio had to halt where the corridor came to an abrupt end in front of a large, heavy-gauge door. The lieutenant ran a hand over the surface of it, searching for a locking control he didn’t find.

“Can you open it?” said Riley.

Scott shook his head and reached for his radio. “Rush, this is Scott, come in.”

Eli heard the lieutenant’s tinny voice and found the source; a walkie-talkie sitting on top of the console Rush had been using. He stepped away from his own panel; as he’d been told to, Eli had dutifully pored over the multiple panels of the menu screens and found what seemed to be a map of the ship, although so far he’d had no success isolating exactly which sets of lines and chambers were those nearest to the evacuees.

Leaving Park and Brody to continue their work, he picked up the radio and spoke into it. “Hello? This is Eli. Uh, over.”

“
Where’s Rush?
”

“The bathroom, I think. If he found it.”
And didn’t flush himself
, he almost added.

He heard the irritation in Scott’s voice. “
I’m at what looks like some kind of bulkhead door. I was hoping that Rush could tell me how to open it.
”

Eli felt a little thrown. “Oh. Should I go look for him?”

“
No,
” came the terse reply. “
We’ll do it ourselves.
”

Scott clipped his radio back on his vest and shouldered his rifle, examining the surface of the bulkhead for possible handholds. “You two, give me a hand with this.”

Riley was hesitant. “What happened to being smart, sir?”

“Don’t touch, just look,” James reminded him.

“I changed my mind.” The lieutenant shot them a glance. “This could be the engine room for all we know. We gotta at least open a few doors.”

“Do we?” said the sergeant. “Do we really?”

“Space virus,” muttered the other officer darkly.

Scott ignored the comments and put his shoulder to the door, trying to force it. The metal creaked under his weight, and reluctantly Riley and James stepped in to assist him. With all three of them working it, the door gave a groan and shifted slightly.

A strident tone issued out from the console where Eli had drawn up the map, getting the attention of everyone in the control room. He dashed over in time to see the map moving and re-orienting itself. Text he couldn’t decipher moved across the upper corner of the screen in a slow train. “Hang on!” he said into the radio mike. “Whatever you did, stop it.”

The tone ceased immediately, and Eli took control of the panel, navigating around the map of the vessel.

“
Is there a problem?
”

“No.” Eli hesitated. “I think. I don’t know. Just keep doing what you were doing.”

“
All right
…”

The tone sounded again, and this time Eli managed to realign the map to show what seemed to be a length of corridor. Blocking it was a thick line that was highlighted in stark crimson.

“I think I found where you are,” Eli told them. “The door is flashing red.”

“
Can you open it from there?
” said Scott.

Eli hesitated. “Red is usually bad, isn’t it?”

“We don’t really know if the Ancients actually saw color the same way we do,” offered Park, “or even if they had the same cultural cues, so red might not—”

Eli waved her into silence as Scott spoke again. “
Maybe it means the door is stuck. Just try.
”

His finger hovered over the touch screen; suddenly Eli was glad he was in here instead of out there with them. “Okay… You should probably step back.”

He leaned in and swiped his fingertip across the door symbol.

Scott and the others moved away a few paces and waited. For a long second, nothing happened; then it happened all at once.

There was a loud, crashing grind of eons-old gears, and with slow, stately progress, the bulkhead door began to slide open, a thin patina of old rust flaking off it. The moment the lip of the door cleared the frame, a rattling rush of air whipped around the opening.

“
Whoa!
” called Eli “
Not good! I see more red! That whole section is flashing now!
”

Scott was transfixed for an instant, seeing past the opening doorway and into the compartment beyond. A corridor the mirror of the one they stood in stretched away, but only a few meters distant it became a torn, jagged mess of shattered metals and broken panels. Long sections of the walls and the ceiling had been ripped away, leaving great gouges like the claw-marks of some massive beast. A sparkling sheet of energy was visible through the holes, and beyond it the void of space.

“We’re venting atmosphere!” shouted Riley.

“Close it!” Scott bellowed into the walkie, feeling the pull of chill vacuum dragging the breath from his lungs. “Now!”

“
Eli
!”

He heard Scott shouting his name and he almost panicked, his hands trembling over the panel as death and darkness came thundering into the ship through a door that he had opened. He swiped the icon again, and nothing changed. Fear was rising like a tide through him, and Eli felt himself sweating as the massive hatch continued its slow, inexorable motion toward the open position.

Maybe it had to open all the way before it closed again? Maybe the door won’t close without some code key or something?
The thoughts tumbled around in his mind.
Maybe I’ve just killed three people and am about to flush out all the air for the rest of us?

“I’m trying!” he snapped, working the screen, flipping back through the interface panes, stabbing at anything that looked like it might be the right symbol.

Then in the next second the shrill alarm fell silent and the screen blinked back to the state it had been in before anything had happened.

Eli gingerly reached for the radio and keyed the mike. “Hello? Did…that work?”

He heard Scott panting. “
We’re all right. The door shut. You did great
.”

He sagged against the console, relief washing over him. “Let’s not do that again.”

“
Yeah,
” agreed the lieutenant, with feeling. “
Okay, we’ve established why that hatch was closed
.”

Now he knew what he was looking for, Eli swept around the local area on the map-screen, finding more doors with the same flashing red halo. “It looks like a lot of others are closed for the same reason. We’re only occupying a fraction of the ship right now, but it goes on forever…” He halted, as a sudden and unpleasant thought occurred to him. “But if there are damaged areas of the ship that aren’t sealed off, that could be our problem. We could be bleeding air every second…”

Eli looked up as Rush entered the room, still holding the case, with an expression of self-assurance on his face.