STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air (19 page)

He picked up the radio, giving Wray a last, iron-hard glare, and replied. “Copy that. On my way.”

A few corridors away across the span of the ship, Scott moved down the middle of a long passageway, his eyes flicking to every shadowed corner, his rifle slung across his chest. So far, they hadn’t encountered anything that could be classed as a threat aboard the vast Ancient derelict —
not unless I want to count my own damn stupidity
, he chided himself — but Scott wasn’t about to slack off on his vigilance. Now, as the falling oxygen levels would start to take their toll on people’s alertness, it was more important than ever to be careful. He’d already screwed up once by opening that hatchway; he wasn’t going to make that kind of mistake a second time.

“
Go past the next junction.
” Rush’s voice crackled over the open radio link. Scott kept walking, glancing up at the low iron ceiling, wondering if the scientist was even looking at the same piece of corridor that he was in. So much of the interior of the ship had a similar, modular look to it, like a lot of Ancient construction. He could imagine the walls and the floors being stamped out of moulds or cut from massive plates of red-hot steel, welded together like warships in old newsreels of dockside shipyards.

“
There should be an elevator at the end of the hall.
” Rush’s voice snapped him back. Scott blinked. His mind was starting to wander.

“Copy that,” he replied. “I see it.” Scott found an open hatchway and a conventional-looking elevator car behind it. Stepping carefully inside, he looked for and found a small control panel.

“
We’ve got what looks like another compromised area one level down
,” continued Rush. He sounded a lot more in control now he was back in his comfort zone, Scott reflected.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m on my way.” The lieutenant reached out to press one of the keys on the control pad and saw movement out in the corridor, back the way he had come. He stopped dead, snapping his G36 to the ready.

He wasn’t alone. From around the corner of the curving corridor came a spherical object, not much bigger than a softball, floating at chest height with no apparent means of support. It had a silvery, metallic tone to it, similar to the careworn steel walls all around him. Gently, it drifted past, and on one side of its surface he saw something that might have been the impassive mono-optic gaze of a lens. It kept moving, and Scott pulled his rifle up, taking aim as it drifted on. He blinked.
What the hell was that?

“
Are you there yet?
” Rush’s voice was so sudden and so loud over the open channel that it made him twitch in surprise.

The lieutenant toggled the radio and hissed into it. “Radio silence, please. Scott out.” Leading with the rifle, he left the elevator and went after the floating sphere, his finger resting on the trigger-guard.

Pain rushed in from every corner of him, and he gasped as his eyes opened. He tried to focus, but all that he could feel was a pounding series of dull impacts coming from the inside of his skull.

Young turned and realized he was lying on some kind of bed, in a room where the lights were soft. He felt groggy and it was a struggle to focus.

“Easy, Colonel. It’s okay.” He knew that voice.
Tamara
. For a second, he thought he had been talking to Emily… But then memory caught up with him and he remembered where he was.

“What’s going on?” he managed. His tongue felt thick, his mouth bone-dry.

“We almost lost you, sir,” she said. “You were thrown clear across the room.” Young tried to sit up, but his pain had other ideas. Tamara put a gentle hand on his chest. She shook her head. “I need you to stay still.”

He relented, and for the moment, eased back down. He blinked at the walls around him. The place looked familiar and alien all at once. “Where are we?”

She checked his eyes with a pen-light. “Aboard a ship. It’s Ancient. Rush says its thousands of years old, and we’re probably on the far side of the universe.” Tamara paused. “I say that out loud and it still doesn’t seem like it’s real.”

Young tried to process all that, and a question immediately rose to the top of his thoughts. “What’s he doing to get us home?”

“He says he’s working on it, but right now we have bigger problems. The life support system isn’t working properly. We may not have much time left if it can’t be fixed.”

The colonel nodded. He’d already noticed the air seemed thin in here.

Tamara went on. “You should also know he used the communication stones to contact Earth. He says General O’Neill put him in charge.”

Young’s jaw stiffened, and he felt a surge of anger. Typical of the man to take advantage of any situation. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he began, and tried to rise again.

“Sir…”

He got only a little way before his body betrayed him and the pain forced Young to give up the attempt.

“You shouldn’t be trying to move yet,” insisted the lieutenant.

“I don’t have a choice.” He bit out the words and took a shaky breath. “I can’t… Feel my legs.”

Tamara rested a hand on his arm. “Neurapraxia is a temporary paralysis that can follow a concussive injury,” she told him, with book-rote diction.

“But you don’t know if it’s that.”

Her hesitation answered the question before she did. “You’d need an MRI scan and a qualified doctor to read it to know for sure if there’s any spinal damage.” Tamara’s face fell. “We don’t have either. Hopefully, it’s just the nerves in shock. Best I can do is insist you remain still.”

He studied her; right now, she should have been the one giving him the support, but Young sensed rightly that Tamara needed it more than he did. “Your tour of duty was over two weeks ago. You should be in some classroom in San Diego.”

“I was going to go back on the
Hammond
,” she admitted. “And it’s Seattle, sir. That’s where I got my scholarship.”

He nodded. “I’m sorry.”

She looked away. “That part is not your fault.”

He was silent for a moment before he spoke again. “Tell Rush I want to see him.”

“Yes, sir.” Tamara got up and left him there.

In the dimness, Young tried to move his leg, just a little. Tried, and failed.

Scott paced the sphere-thing down the halls of the ship, watching it bob gently like a feather caught in an updraft. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he could detect the faintest humming sound coming from it, perhaps the noise from some kind of propulsion system. Then he checked himself; he was automatically assuming the thing was a device, a mechanical construct, maybe a robot — but there was nothing to say it wasn’t an organic, living being instead, albeit of a kind he couldn’t fathom. He thought back to when he’d been in the corridor before, that whole
Star Trek
moment he’d had — was this the ship’s way of answering him back?

Still, he had no idea if the sphere was harmless or of hostile intent, so he was erring on the latter. For all he could know, the object might be like the lure on an angler fish, encouraging him to follow it so he would walk himself straight into a trap.

Out of nowhere, a side door along the corridor opened and Eli Wallace stepped out in front of the lieutenant. He balked at the sight of the assault rifle being aimed in his direction. “
Whoa
!” he shouted. “Not again!” Eli stepped carefully out of the firing line.

Wallace seemed unconcerned by the presence of the sphere, which continued on its way down the corridor. “What is that thing?” said Scott.

Eli’s face split in a grin. “Oh, it’s cool. Come here, I’ll show you.”

He ducked back into the room he’d just left and Scott warily followed him. The chamber was laid out in a similar fashion to the control room they’d found elsewhere, with the same kind of consoles; but the large mechanism on one wall was a new feature.

“Check this out,” said Eli, indicating a screen on one of the consoles.

Scott peered at it and saw a bobbing first-person view of a corridor; the image had to be coming from the lens he’d seen on the front of the sphere. “It’s a camera.”

“
Flying
camera,” Eli corrected. “I was gonna call it a
Kino
, you know, after the Russian word for—”

Scott made a winding up motion with his free hand. “Moving on…”

He shrugged. “I figure maybe we can use it to check out damaged areas of the ship.”

“That’s good,” admitted Scott. They could operate the thing like an unmanned aerial vehicle, as a drone scout. “Where is it going now?”

Eli shrugged again. “I don’t know, doin’ its thing. I haven’t figured out all the controls yet, but there’s lots more of ’em.” He moved to the mechanism on the wall and reached into it. Eli’s hand returned with another of the spheres and Scott understood that the machine had to be a dispenser unit, of sorts.

Eli tossed the sphere at Scott and the lieutenant went to grab it; but instead the device just floated in mid-air. Eli gave it a gentle tap and it drifted across the room, orienting itself to aim a lens at him. “See?” said Eli, pointing at the console.

Scott looked and saw the sphere’s-eye view of him. He looked tired and not really in the mood for games.

Eli went back to the dispenser again. “Here, you want one too?”

“It’s not a gumball machine,” snapped Scott, frowning.

Eli drew his hand back like he was a kid caught reaching into the cookie jar. “Okay, okay,” he said.

Scott paused and slung his rifle, which Eli liked a lot better than having it waved in his face. After all, as far as he knew, he only had the one pair of underwear with him. “Sorry,” said the lieutenant. “Guess we’re all feeling a little…”

“Crabby?” offered Eli helpfully.

The other man gave him a nod. “Something like that.” He took a breath. “So, you found where they keep the, uh, kinos. What else have you figured out?” Scott beckoned him out into the corridor and Eli followed him.

“What, that’s not enough?”

“It’s a start,” said Scott, “but remember the air thing? Tick-tock.”

His shoulders sagged. “Ah, come on, give me a break. This is only my second spaceship, man. And the first was like, yesterday.”

Scott eyed him, and Eli suddenly felt bad about griping. The lieutenant had to be feeling the pressure a heck of a lot more than he was. “Icarus Base was my first SGC assignment after training,” he admitted. “I haven’t been at this much longer than you.”

Eli considered that. “Did they beam you out of your house?”

Scott showed a brief grin. “No, you got me there.”

They walked in silence for a moment. “You, uh, got any food on you?” said Eli.

Scott shook his head. “No.”

“Tylenol?”

“Headache?”

Eli rubbed his face. “Yeah.”

Scott nodded, and Eli knew that the other man was feeling the same tight pressure behind the eyes, the same bone-deep throbbing in his skull. “Me too.”

They headed back to the control room and found Rush at work on the main console, scrutinizing the schematics of the ship Eli had discovered earlier. The scientist was using the interface wheel to move back and forth across the deck plans of the vessel. Scott immediately noticed a series of red indicator glyphs blinking steadily on the plan view.

Rush looked up as they entered and his eyes widened as one of the drone spheres followed them in, drifting behind Eli like an obedient dog at heel. Scott hadn’t even noticed it moving with them.

“What is that?” said the scientist.

“Flying camera ball,” Eli announced, with a flourish. “I’m calling it a Kino.”

“Don’t ask,” Scott added.

Rush’s expression turned to one of charmed amazement and he came over to take a closer look, smiling widely. “Wonderful…”

Eli pulled a hand-held device from his back pocket and showed it off. “Comes with a remote,” he said. “I thought we could use it to look around.”

Scott interrupted the two of them before the conversation went off track. “What do you have, Doctor?”

Rush snapped back to his usual default glower. “Unfortunately, more bad news.” He wandered to the screen. “These processing nodes are scrubbers responsible for cleaning carbon dioxide from the air.” Rush pointed out the red symbols. “Here, here and here. This is indicating malfunction, and more are failing.”

“What kind of malfunction?” Scott was thinking about the metallic ooze that Tamara had told him about.

“I’m not sure,” admitted Rush. “Someone needs to take a closer look.” He zoomed in on an area of the map. “This one is closest, in the gate room.”

Scott sighed. Right now all he wanted was a moment to sit a spell and take a breather, but he knew that if he stopped moving his fatigue was going to knock him down. He nodded. “Okay, I’ll check it out.” He toggled his radio. “Greer? I’m heading to the gate room. Meet me there.”

Chloe took a little of the water and bunched up her handkerchief, then wet it and dabbed her father’s clammy forehead. There wasn’t a lot in the canteen, but Lieutenant Scott had just handed it over to her without question, without her even needing to ask for it. She wondered if that was all the water he had; how much did any of them have? So far, from what she could understand, none of the people who had gone out exploring had found anything that looked like a supply of drinking water.She sighed. All this thinking about it made her thirsty, but there were more important things to worry about.

“Pat?” said a quiet, tired voice. “That you?”

“No, Dad, it’s me, Chloe.”

Her father’s eyes flickered open and he focused on her. “Oh, hey, princess.” He was drawn and haggard. “Where are we?”

“One of the rooms, the quarters I mean,” she explained. “It’s not the Four Seasons, or anything…”

“Better than the floor,” he managed. “What happened? There was Rush, and that stone…”

“You collapsed,” she told him, holding back the fear from her voice. “We brought you here.”

“How long was I out? What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve been here with you.”

He shifted on the couch, flinching with pain. “You need to know what’s happening, Chloe. This is important.”