STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air (15 page)

He winced at the thought of that and wondered if he should apologize. Eli shook his head slightly and tried to focus. The lack of oxygen was making his mind wander. He’d already caught himself thinking about how he could apply lessons learned from watching episodes of
Lost in Space
to their current situation, and wondering if one of the compartments along the corridor was actually the home of a cute-but-sassy robot.

That’s the hypoxia talking, Eli,
he told himself,
get a grip.
He had full-blown nausea, coma and blue skin to look forward to unless they could fix the air.

He moved past Brody and Park, both of them engrossed in their own explorations of the Ancient consoles, seeing Scott and his Marine buddy by the doorway. The military guys looked bored; without anything to shoot at, they probably both felt a little surplus to requirements.

Eli took a breath of stale air and moved closer to Rush, glancing over his shoulder. The scientist was using the rotary interface to spin through panels of text, jumping from one menu panel to another. As the strings of lettering whirled past, Eli suddenly spotted something that seemed out of place. “What’s that?” He was asking the question before he was even aware of thinking it.

“I don’t know,” admitted Rush. “Another subsystem?”

“Doesn’t look like life support,” he added.

“I know.” He completely missed the irritation in the other man’s tone.

Eli extended an arm and pointed at the screen, invading Rush’s personal space. “Why don’t you try this—”

The scientist glared at him. “Do you mind?”

Eli tried to look around the other man. “I can’t see otherwise.”

Rush let out a sigh. “Fine.” He spooled back to the data-panel Eli had been talking about and flipped through a layer of menus before pressing the screen.

Immediately, a glimmer of light flickered along the far wall of the room, drawing everyone’s attention. Projected from some hidden source, a large window of holographic light phased into being, and it filled with thousands of dots of light. Park and Brody left their consoles behind and came closer, eyes wide.

“What are we looking at?” asked Scott.

The display was moving, drawing back, zooming out from the initial starting point. The dots of light merged, forming a banner of glowing color. Eli gasped as he recognized the shape of a galactic spiral arm.

“It’s a star map,” breathed Rush. “A navigational chart, perhaps.”

The hologram continued to pull back, the spiral arm becoming more defined. “That’s the Milky Way,” said Park. “That’s
our
home galaxy.”

Rush nodded. “I believe what we’re seeing here is a visual log of this ship’s route.”

Eli saw a faint blue dot that stood out among the white and yellow of the stars, and pointed at it. “So this is where we are right now?”

“No,” said Rush, flicking a glance down at his console. “That is where the ship originally embarked from.”

“Earth,” said Brody.

Eli felt a curious smile on his lips, and suddenly the ship didn’t seem quite as alien as it had a moment ago. They were all from the same place, more or less.

Rush turned back to the console and began manipulating the keypad. In response, a glowing line marking the ship’s course drew out across the star map like a lengthening thread, and the image continued to change, the barred spiral of the Milky Way shrinking as the line moved into the void of intergalactic space.

Park spoke again, awed. “It’s leaving the galaxy.”

“It did,” Rush corrected. “Long ago.”

The line went on, passing by another pool of shimmering stars. “That was Pegasus,” said Brody.

The galaxy-shapes grew even smaller, contracting into dots as more and more points of light crowded in from the sides of the screen.

“So, those points are more stars?” asked Scott.

“No.” Eli shook his head, and the words came from his mouth, but he could hardly hold the magnitude of them in his thoughts. “They’re
galaxies
.” Eli felt giddy and put out a hand to steady himself on the console. This time, he knew it wasn’t the bad air. He couldn’t look away from the screen. The distance was incredible, unthinkable. It was literally
astronomical
.

“This ship has traveled a very, very long way,” Rush said quietly.

“How far?” Scott insisted, the scale of the image clearly lost on him. “Rush, where the hell are we?”

Eli watched the line moving on and on, further and further.

“Several billion light-years from home,” said Rush.

CHAPTER SIX

The evening rain drummed hard on the roof of the staff car as it turned on to Jefferson Davis Highway, heading south past the Arlington National Cemetery toward the imposing edifice of the Pentagon. Jack O’Neill blinked away a twinge of fatigue and glanced down at the file on his lap, before frowning and putting it to one side. He tried to remember that last time he’d been in a car where he
hadn’t
had a landslide of paperwork with him. It had gotten so that he was still in the office even when he wasn’t in the office, even the brief moments of respite he liked to take during the drive into DC snatched away by a mountain of reports and requests…

Not for the first time, O’Neill wondered how his former CO General Hammond had managed to handle all this stuff and make it seem so effortless.

The car took the Pentagon exit and made its way through a series of priority checkpoints before pulling to a halt outside a nondescript side entrance along the flank of the massive building, far from the public eye. Inside, along with all the myriad other components of America’s military machine, was a department whose nature and purpose was unique among them all.

Homeworld Command was a global joint-ops division, something that had evolved out of the USAF’s Stargate Command and the sister organizations in the nations that were part of the International Oversight Advisory. Gone were the old days, back when it was just the Air Force poking around in outer space. Jack recalled a time when there were only a handful of SG teams on sorties through the Stargate, when the whole program was viewed as some massive boondoggle that would likely blow up in their faces. Now the Stargate was a major factor in the military structure of not only the United States of America, but of the planet Earth. It still amazed him that the existence of the gate remained a secret to the world at large; but then that dumb
Wormhole X-Treme!
TV show had helped a lot, ruining the credibility of anyone who came sniffing around. It was O’Neill’s understanding that the Air Force had borrowed the idea from the FBI, who had set up a similar disinformation strategy back in the early nineties to draw attention away from one of their secret departments.

A woman in a captain’s uniform came down the steps with an umbrella in her hand and opened the car door. O’Neill walked back with her toward the building. “Captain Sharpe.”

“General.” Helen Sharpe was a recent addition to O’Neill’s staff and she had a manner that was brisk and direct. A former officer aboard one of the SGC’s starships, she’d returned to Earth and turned her fiercely competent skills to Homeworld Command’s advantage. “I’m sorry we had to recall you from the senator’s dinner party, but this couldn’t wait.”

“Yes, I’m quite disappointed,” O’Neill replied, pokerfaced. “Because you know how much I love being in a room full of politicians, with nothing to eat but those little sticks with cheese and pineapple on them.”

They entered the Pentagon and moved swiftly toward an elevator, which dropped sharply into the sublevels below the street. “I took the liberty of having an airman get you a club sandwich, sir.”

Damn, she’s efficient.
“So, on a scale of one to ten, how big a deal is this gonna be?”

They arrived at the next security checkpoint. “With respect, sir, I can’t discuss that with you until you’ve been cleared.” She gestured at a tall scanner archway that was of noticeably off-world origin.

O’Neill saw two Marines in full body armor, one with a loaded and ready P90, the other with an active zat’ni’katel energy pistol, guarding the door. He knew that two more would be on the other side, and another squad of five were in a room just down the hall in case the panic button was pushed.

Someone had turned the security dial way up, and he frowned. “Is this really necessary?” he asked. “I was here about three hours ago. We talked about how much I was looking forward to the party, remember?”

“General, you’re the one who has faced off against invisible monsters, parasitic aliens and shape-changing killers. You know that there’s security, and then there’s
security
.” Sharpe took O’Neill’s identity pass and swept it through a reader.

“Identify for voice print check,” said a soft, synthetic voice.

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud—” began the general.

“Voice print check approved,” replied the computer. “Proceed to imaging scanner.”

“Fine.” O’Neill stepped through the arch and no alarms sounded. “Am I still a person?”

Sharpe nodded and the two Marines went from combat stances to attention. “Welcome back, sir.”

The main nexus of Homeworld Command was a tactical information center linked to a network of similar facilities scattered around the world, in IOA-member nations; China, Russia, Europe and the UK, all of them had their own equivalents of this room, all of them working in real-time on the one thing that every nation could agree about — keeping the planet safe.

Digital charts of the world, near-Earth space and the solar system adorned the walls, and in the middle of the room there were ranks of desks with operations staff parsing a constant stream of data from ground based sensors, orbital satellites, as well as feeds from the new lunar base facility and even hidden scanner arrays aboard the International Space Station. Other members of O’Neill’s staff monitored information from much further afield, sifting intel from starships like the
Apollo
and the
Odyssey
, or from allied extraterrestrial groups like the Free Jaffa and the Tok’ra.

Sharpe left O’Neill to address a question from a junior officer as the general crossed to his office. A familiar face intercepted him; Master Sergeant Walter Harriman had been a vital part of the Stargate program from the very start, and O’Neill had made damn sure the man came with him when he relocated to Washington. Harriman’s expression was much the same as Sharpe’s; something serious had happened.

“Sergeant?”

“A six, sir,” said Harriman, anticipating the question he’d already put to the captain. “Maybe even a seven.”

O’Neill followed him to one of the wall screens. “Let me guess. Icarus?”

Harriman nodded. “We received a garbled subspace signal that cut out before we could make sense of it. All the evidence points to heavy localized jamming. All communications in that area have been completely cut off. The SGC can’t reach them either, but we managed to get in contact with the
Hammond
.” He tapped a few controls on a keypad and the screen switched to a standby mode. “I have Colonel Carter for you, sir.”

The general turned to the display as Samantha Carter’s face appeared on it. Behind her, O’Neill could see a slice of the
Hammond
’s bridge, and what appeared to be members of a damage control party working at blown-out consoles.
What the hell happened out there?
he wondered.

Carter looked grim, and she wasted no time with preamble and got straight to the point. “
General, we barely got away,
” she said. “
The enemy came out of nowhere with an invasion force, hit us before we could react.
”

“Who did this?” he demanded.

She frowned. “
We think it was the Lucian Alliance
.”

“What about Icarus Base?” He was dreading the answer.

The colonel’s lips thinned. “
We now have visual confirmation. The planet was destroyed. Vaporized.
”

“Good grief,” whispered Sharpe, from behind him.

“That explains why we haven’t been able to dial in.” O’Neill’s mind was already racing, thinking quickly on every possible outcome, every ripple that could spread out from the center of this terrible incident.

Carter went on. “
We managed to beam aboard most of our people from the surface before jumping to hyperspace. We believe that the enemy forces were also destroyed in the planetary collapse.
”

That meant no prisoners, and no prisoners meant nobody to interrogate as to the reasons why the Lucian Alliance — if they were to blame — had come to Icarus with malicious intent.

“
Any word on how they may have gained intel on our base?
” Carter was thinking the same thing.

O’Neill glanced at Harriman, and the sergeant shook his head. “No. We don’t even know why the attack was launched.” The general’s frown deepened; the last they had heard of the Alliance, that loose gathering of interstellar criminal factions were in the midst of an internal struggle, fighting one another to fill a power vacuum largely created by the actions of SG-1.
Maybe they solved their differences and turned on us instead,
he thought grimly. He looked up at the screen. “Casualties on our side?”

“
Twelve,
” said Carter. “
Eighty plus MIA. Icarus’s bunker shielding technology prevented us from beaming out anyone inside. How many got through the gate to Earth?
”

Harriman shook his head again.

“None.” And there it was; eighty people’s lives, cut down to one word.

The signal from the
Hammond
flickered, brief cosmic static washing across the image. “
None?
” repeated Carter, her brow creasing in confusion. “
Our sensors indicated that their Stargate was active for a full six minutes before the planetary core went critical.
”

“Well, they didn’t show up here.” O’Neill saw Harriman turn away and ask urgent questions of one of the desk operators.

“
Then where did they go?
”