Don't own SGU and admitting I want to hasn't turned out to be the first step on the road to recovery …
This one's for my fellow thunkers at GW for RC's birthday
A sequel to Pariahs and Accursed. This takes place just after Justice.
Alone
By EllieV
His eyes blinked open. His first thought was that the sky was beautiful. His second was that it was dark. His third was that he couldn't hear anything. And then it hit. His fourth thought was that he was alone. Nicholas Rush stood up, looking into the blue streaked sky. Okay. He let out a shaky breath, looking around, trying not to panic. The alien ship. He could get into the alien ship.
Ironic that he'd accused Young of not wanting to make the hard decisions. He stopped in mid-thought, so angry he was dizzy with it. He forced himself to breath normally. Don't panic. Don't panic. Don't panic. He scrambled over to the ship. Okay, he repeated, he could get into the ship. He picked up the scanner, fumbling in the freezing air.
Don't panic.
It took him over a day to find a way into the ship. He had no water after his bottle was empty. He didn't mind not having anything to eat; he often forgot to eat. Water was the most important thing so, as he worked on the ship during the night, lit only by the blue sky, he left the bottle out hoping to catch the frost. By morning, he was trembling badly. He told himself it was the cold.
He decided he would have to look for water and reluctantly left the shelter of the ship. He walked along the top of the ridge; every time he saw a spindly bush, he'd try to dig down. Where there was life, there'd be water, although given the cold it was more likely whatever plant life grew was simply fed by the frost. The ground was hard and dry and impossible to dig. By the time he got back to the ship he was sick from the sun beating down, thirsty and scared. He put Destiny firmly aside. He was there and Destiny was not.
That fucking bastard.
He leaned into the ship, appreciating the cold, strange metal against his hot skin.
"Really fucked it up this time, haven't you, Nicky," he whispered. "Neil was right; you should have been locked away from everyone and only let out to do party tricks on bonfire night."
He pictured his police officer cousin smashing Young in the face and arresting him for murder. It gave him a tiny amount of satisfaction. Not much, just enough to stop him from falling apart. Of course, Neil was in Glasgow and Young was on Destiny, billions of light years away from Earth. He was closer to Young than Neil was.
It sank in. He'd been murdered. Still alive but to all intents and purposes he was dead. This was the point where he was supposed to fall down and scream uselessly but he picked up the scanner and worked on the hatch. There would be water in the ship he said firmly. He said it out loud because actually speaking removed the total silence. There were no birds, no insects. There was no sound at all.
He had no luck at the hatch so he started examining the ship carefully for other possible entrances. He kept swallowing to try to build up saliva. He had, at best, three days. Probably less, due to the heat during the day and the cold at night. The planet had a stargate but no DHD. Next time a fucking bastard decides to leave you on an alien planet, he said to the ship, pack a DHD, just in case.
He put his head against the ship again. This was the sort of moment that was supposed to lead to an epiphany, a good hard look at his actions, a good hard look at himself.
"It wad frae monie a blunder free us," he whispered.
He turned his forehead and stared along the side of ship. He straightened, frowning. There was a pattern. He stepped back to try to follow the lines. It didn't work so in his head he assigned a code to each one to keep track.
Then he found the line that didn't fit the pattern and traced it with his hand. The end of the line was nearly buried and he scrambled to dig away at it. There was an indent. He pressed carefully and the hatch opened. It really was that simple. He pulled himself inside the ship and lay on the floor giggling hysterically.
"Now all you have to do is find out how to fly it," he said, when he stopped shaking.
He noted the low power. The ship was dark inside but there was light coming from somewhere.
"There's no one here," he said firmly. "No dead aliens, no hibernating aliens. Just an empty ship."
His footsteps were too loud so he took off his boots, telling himself that he was being stupid and paranoid. Stupid and paranoid just like Young and his bloody jackbooted goons. He wondered what Young would tell those on Destiny. Then he said it didn't matter what Young said or what any of them believed because it wasn't as though he was going to turn up and prove them wrong.
She had been kind, nothing more.
There would be a database somewhere. There were consoles but they made no sense to him. He pressed buttons at random but everything was dead.
"Just. Like. Me," he said loudly, cringing at the echo. His head was pounding and he tried not to be sick. Throwing up would dehydrate him even further. He repeated softly, "Dead. Just. Like. Me."
He didn't mind being alone. He definitely preferred working alone but Harry, he thought wistfully, would love this. He pictured his university pal in his stupid Victoriana cravat and floral waistcoat meandering through the alien ship peering at everything over the top of his glasses.
"What the fuck use is an alien ship that you can't get to work, Nicky," Harry would have said in his tourist Ulysses Dublin accent that so annoyed the Oxford snobs. "Alien ships aren't like this in the fillums, boyo. These aliens of yours need to get out to the tee-ater more, maybe take in a couple of good sci-fi flicks, so they can design proper ships for nosy scientists. What time is it?"
"Whisky o'clock," he whispered obediently as Harry slung a casual arm around his shoulders.
"Try that one," Harry advised. "Go on, that yonder door there."
He had to work out how to open the door first, making the excuse to Harry that he hadn't had anything to drink for nearly a day and had a wee headache from the sun. Harry nodded sagely, standing back.
"Looks like a bridge to me, Nicky," Harry said in a lazy voice.
"Me, too," he replied.
He turned to Harry to ask which console he should try first.
Harry wasn't there.
Sunstroke, he told himself firmly. Lack of sleep. Lack of food and water. Harry was in London with his big house and his dog with all those bloody students who worshipped him. Harry had told him not to take the job but as usual Nicky Rush thought he knew best and ignored his friend's advice. He pinched his arm to see if he was dehydrated. He blinked to stay in focus and fell over. I was beaten up, he said to the floor. Unconscious for hours. I'm still concussed. He dragged his body to a sitting position and leaned over to get his glasses.
The biggest console was always the most important console, he said to no one. Truism of the universe. He stood in front of it. Concentrate. Get something working. Find something to drink. It occurred to him that maybe he should have just walked around the ship to find something to drink but that wasn't how his mind worked. He would look in the ship's database first so he wouldn't have to walk around. Be specific. Be careful. It would take less time because, of course, he'd find the database easily. He said firmly that there would be something to drink. Tea, coffee, Bonox. He pressed buttons. Nothing. Another console had slots, like those in Atlantis. From the moment he'd arrived on Destiny, he'd preferred her mechanical steampunk Ancient technology over Atlantis's clinically pristine lines. He examined some of the crystals.
"Now, why did you crash?" he murmured. "Or did you land and were then abandoned?"
Abandoned would be better than crashed. Abandoned meant the possibility of flying it out of there, the possibility of escape. As if he had somewhere to go. He rubbed his face and looked down at the console.
Suddenly, it made sense. He didn't know why but he pulled a crystal out of one slot and placed it in another. He pressed a button and the console flickered on. With a little whine of servos, a screen came out of the console. He pressed the button next to the screen with a self-assuredness that surprised him. He didn't understand any of what was on screen but it only took a moment to bring up the database. Technology had always been intuitive for him. A couple of minutes later he had a schematic of the ship.
Water. He looked at the schematic to see if he could find water easily, blinking away the dizziness. Refocusing, nothing made sense again. He breathed in and out slowly.
"You have a doctorate in linguistics," he said. "Your thesis was all about communicating with people without language; this is a language. Language is easy." He took another breath. "Right …"
His hand traced the screen. It was just like an iPhone. He scrolled it across and paused. Piping. He followed the line. Okay. One floor down, he nodded. He stepped back and something skittered across the floor. A blue crystal. He picked it up and looked around. The big console had an empty slot and he placed the crystal in it carefully.
His cousin Billy leaned over and observed, "You're just anally neat, Nicky."
And he answered as he had done when he was fourteen, "I have to fit in all my books, Billy; it's a small room."
"Books," Billy said disparagingly. "Come on, we're going out."
"I have school tomorrow," he demurred.
"It's a western," Billy wheedled. "Aunty Jean says you can go."
"Really?" he asked suspiciously.
It was a school night; his mother never said yes on a school night. She was out at bingo and wasn't best pleased when she got home to find her prized clever laddie drunk and throwing up in the bathroom with a fresh tattoo on his arm.
He brushed past the console, past Billy who was in a Scottish prison not with him here on this alien world far from home, and walked into the corridor. Left. Down to the end. There were no stairs, no obvious elevator. He walked around the raised platform then put out a foot to test it before looking up. There was nothing to indicate that it went upwards. He bit his lip and stepped gingerly on the platform. It sank slowly but still, he nearly fell. He sat, holding his arms around his knees.
Down here it smelled. Let there be water. Drinkable water, he amended. It was darker, too. He felt his way along the wall until he came to a door. The aliens he decided were bipedal, humanoidish. There was no reason for the ship's corridors to be this shape otherwise. No need for doors and certainly, he thought, no need for door controls. He pressed it and went in. He tripped and fell, swearing as he stubbed his toe. His boots were on the bridge. Something glowed ahead and he hauled himself up.
A water tank.
No way in. No convenient tap.
He pressed his face against it and looked up. There seemed to be an opening of some sort. A lid. He went to the door and stopped, looking back at the water tank frowning as something nagged at his very tired and admittedly frightened brain.
The platform took him up to the bridge level. He found the room, hesitating in the doorway. He forced his feet in, standing at the lid of the tank.
"You need to drink, Nicky," he told himself.
He knelt, feeling for the indent he knew had to be there. He found a crystal, pulled it out and placed it in the vacant slot. The lid slid across, the servos clicking. He put his hand into the water hesitantly. It was cool to touch. He sniffed. Nothing. He drank some of the water, trying not to be greedy, telling himself that there was nothing else in it, that he wasn't going to be poisoned. He had nothing with him to test it and it wasn't as though he weren't dead anyway. It tasted all right. He drank some more and lay down on the hard floor, in the corner, and fell asleep.
He jerked awake hours later, heart pounding, whimpering in terror. He held his chest. The dream was gone instantly but he curled up in the corner hugging himself. There's no one here. You're by yourself. Destiny was long gone. Young hadn't killed him; he'd killed himself. It happened the moment he decided the only way out of Icarus, the only way all of them would live, would be to dial the ninth chevron to lessen the effects of all that naquadriah blowing up. He'd killed himself the moment he decided that the ninth chevron was more important than getting out alive, more important than getting home, his desire for answers more important than anything else.
"This is the difference between your academic theories and the real world, Nick," Gloria told him. She sat down next to him on the floor, putting her feet on the lid of the water tank. "You can take ten years to do research in academia but the real world's not like that; they want instant results."
"I know that," he said impatiently. "I'm not naïve."
"But it doesn't mean that you can just choose the result that's best for you. In the real world, decisions have consequences," she said, just as she had in their kitchen, her voice severe. "People aren't lab rats."
"We're all lab rats," he said.
He didn't know why he'd said that to her. Gloria had shaken her head and handed him the dinner he didn't want. He pretended to eat, pretended to be interested in her day, and had mumbled something about needing to check a program he was running. As he left, he'd glanced back. She was twisting her wedding ring around on her finger, loosening it—as if it was choking her. He curled up into a ball at the memory. He lay there for hours watching the water in the tank.
When he could move again, he leaned forward to drink more of the water. He could stay here or he could actually do something. His head felt better after his sleep so he went to the bridge to put his boots back on. He'd get his bag, his water bottle and the scanner, fill up the bottle and head in the other direction to forage for food. He needed to understand where he was and if there was anything else close by. The ship wasn't going anywhere and he could find out more about it at night. There was enough water for a while and there was likely to be more of the tanks.
He slipped back outside into the heat swearing a little for not waking when it was cooler. He debated whether to look for food. It was hot and although his headache was dissipating, he didn't want another one. He went down the incline to pick up the scanner and the bag he'd brought along with him that contained all his useless bits and pieces, but he slipped, falling to the bottom. He lay still to catch his breath and got up. He stepped forward and mumbled a couple of Scots curses under his breath. He sat and pulled off his boot, shaking it out. There was a little water from the frost in the bottle and despite it being out in the sun and tasting brackish, he took a drink then bent to pick up the boot.
He'd done this before.
His fingers stilled and he turned his head to stare.
He shouldn't know anything about this ship.
But he'd known how to get into it.
He'd known where to find the bridge and how to get the console working.
He'd known where to find the water.
None of it was intuitive at all.
He started breathing again as Chloe Armstrong sat next to him, just as she had last time. He understood now.
"It's the water," she said.
He nodded, not wanting to look at her. Instead he concentrated on his hands. It looked like they were just loosely folded on his knees but they weren't. He was just trying not to spread them out, like he had when he was floating in the water. Chloe was close to tears.
"I'm so tired," she said. "I can't sleep most of the time but if I do I wake up and I can't breath because of the water. Like I'm drowning all the time."
He couldn't help himself. His fingers curled as he turned his head to her.
Chloe took his hand and after a moment, his fingers entwined with hers. He didn't say anything but Chloe leaned in and put her head on his shoulder. Both of them sat in silence for a while but eventually he stirred.
"I have to go," he said softly.
"Please don't," she pleaded. "Stay with me; I don't want to be alone."
"I need to learn about the ship," he said. "About the aliens." He squeezed her hand. "Before they get here."
"We're not safe, are we," she said.
It wasn't a question.
"No," he said, and apologetically, "I think I set off the distress beacon."
"Oh," she replied. "The crystal on the floor."
"Yes," he sighed. "I'm sorry."
"I know," she said. Her voice was forgiving, something that he didn't deserve from her of all people. "But you'll come back for me, won't you?"
She'd gone by the time he turned his head again. She hadn't been there at all but he said it anyway.
"Yes," he promised to the air. "I'll come back for you."
FINIS
Note: The reason I didn't say what the water was in Pariahs and Accursed was because I had to wait for Space and Divided. Yes, I'm prescient … Not really. I read a snippet from Elyse Levesque where she said she spent the morning in a water tank and I saw photo of Rush in what looked like scuba gear. That's when I wrote Pariahs. Everything else I guessed.
Harry speak:
fillum = film
tee-ater = theatre