Stargate Genesis

Episode 2: Pilot, Part 2

"Destiny's Ashes"

Dr. Lisa Park awoke, gasping lungfuls of toxic air. Everything hurt. An alarm was wailing impossibly loud all around her. She struggled to open her eyes, only to discover she had gone blind. Or had she always been blind? She couldn't remember. Park felt around herself through the smoke. Her hands pressed against the cold sides of the pod. She shivered and rubbed her hands against her sides, trying to get warm. Where was she?

Destiny. She was aboard the Destiny, and the entire crew had gone into hibernation in stasis pods in order to make the jump to the next galaxy, where they could refuel. Something had gone wrong. There shouldn't be this much smoke - it hurt to breathe. Dr. Rush would know what was wrong.

Park felt for the sides of the pod and pushed herself forward into the hallway. Her legs gave out from under her and she fell to the floor. She needed to find the others. Colonel Young and Eli. The floor was so cold. She tried to stand up but her legs wouldn't listen. Someone would come to help her. Greer.

She heard voices echoing down the hall. He was coming for her. She tried to call out, but her voice stuck in her throat and came out as a hoarse whisper.

"Ron! Please help me..."

The voices faded. Park felt herself drifting off to sleep. She didn't feel cold anymore. She didn't feel anything.

~~00~~

Ginn lay on her back with her head on Eli's lap. She smiled up at him as he ran his hand through her hair. Pale blue light filled the room from the glow of faster than light travel through the window.

"I'm so lucky to have you, Eli," she said sweetly.

"Ha! I've been wearing the same shirt for months. Real winner right here," he laughed.

She reached up and touched a hand to his face.

"You really are beautiful, you know," said Ginn.

The ship lurched violently. Eli snapped awake. The fantasy in his mind dissolved like a handful of salt dropped into an ocean. He was aboard the shuttle. The computer screen told him that they had just been hit with another solar flare. The wreckage of the Destiny floated by outside the window.

"Everything alright?" asked Greer, sitting in the co-pilot seat.

"Uh... yeah, everything's fine," said Eli. "Shields are holding."

"Bad dream?"

"Good one, actually."

~~00~~

"Rodney, don't tell me you broke my ship!" hissed Sheppard into his radio.

"If anyone broke the ship it was you," came Rodney's curt reply. "I told you before we left that the wormhole drive was never meant for this kind of sustained use. It requires regular cool down periods, and the strain of all these jumps is starting to affect primary systems. I'm going to have to shut it down for a while."

"And exactly how long is a while?"

"Oh, maybe 12 hours?"

"Can you make it go faster?"

"Only if you want all of our de-molecularized bits to be spread across half the universe."

"Rodney!"

"Fine. I'll see what I can do."

Colonel John Sheppard composed himself and looked around the deck.

"Status report?"

"That last jump caused a small fracture in the hull of the starboard 302 bay, but emergency shields are up and a repair crew is headed there now," said Major Burnette. "We'll have main shields up in another hour and the turbulence we've been experiencing should stop.

"Good," he said. "And the nacelles?"

"We don't have nacelles, sir," said Burnette. "You're thinking of the Enterprise."

She looked over at Sheppard. "Colonel Sheppard sir?"

"Yes, Major?"

"Do you think we'll make it in time?"

"We'll have to, Major."

~~00~~

Eli was staring out the window at floating debris when Greer spoke up, breaking a ten-hour silent streak.

"Did you check all the pods, Eli?"

Eli turned to look at him. The truth was he hadn't checked all the pods. There hadn't been time.

"I tried. There were so many. I didn't even think you were alive, I mean, Ginn told me..." stammered Eli.

"Ginn told you?!" bellowed Greer. "Did you check all of them? Even Lisa's?"

A tear edged its way down Eli's face. He tried to look at Greer but he couldn't bear the anger plastered over his face.

"I'm sorry, Greer. I tried..."

The two of them fell into silence, each contending with the ghosts that floated in space outside the shuttle.

Eli noticed a red light flashing on the dashboard.

"What is that?" said Greer.

"It's a warning," said Eli, scanning through the readouts displayed on the dash. "We're running out of power."

"I thought you said it might be a week until they get here."

"If I shut down all non-essential systems, I can probably buy us two days. But it's going to get cold in here."

"Do we have the communication stones?" asked Greer.

Eli looked away again, pretending to check the console. "No, I forgot to grab them."

~~00~~

"Sheppard, we're almost ready to jump again. It should only be another three hours," came Rodney's voice over the radio.

"Can we jump sooner?" Sheppard responded.

"Well, yes, but it would be risky and I don't think-"

"How many jumps do we have left to make?"

"If my calculations are correct, which, who are we kidding, they are-"

"Rodney!"

"Just one more."

Sheppard looked around the bridge. He could feel the eyes of every crewman on him; anxious minds pushed in on him from all sides. It had been almost two days since Stargate Command received Eli Wallace's distress call. There was no telling how long the people of the Destiny would survive.

"Orders, sir?" said Major Burnette.

He took a deep breath. We don't leave people behind.

"Take us out, Major."

~~00~~

When the Elizabeth arrived, Eli Wallace and Major Ronald Greer had already passed out from a lack of oxygen. Their shuttle was guided into the Elizabeth's bay and the two men were taken to the medical ward. The chief medical officer on board told Colonel Sheppard that if they had arrived even twenty minutes later, both of them would have died.

Teams were sent out to search the wreckage of the Destiny. Some pieces of ancient technology were recovered, but no recognizable bodies could be found. In the twenty hours necessary to bring the gate drive back to 100%, Sheppard continually sent teams to search for bodies. He took an F-302 out himself, only returning to the Elizabeth when the doctor ordered him to rest.

Eli Wallace and Ronald Greer did not speak during the journey home to Earth.

~~00~~

General Jack O'Neill squinted against the glare of the sun as he took the podium overlooking rows of coffins, most of which were covered with American flags, though some had Canadian flags draped over them. The coffins were all empty. Jack looked to his left and saw Sam, Daniel, and Teal'c standing reverently at attention. Further down he saw John Sheppard and Eli Wallace, the young man Jack had met five years earlier and sent to the Icarus base to help unlock the 9th chevron, not knowing the fate he would meet there. Eli had lived through more trauma in a few years than most people do in their entire lives, and he hadn't asked for any of it.

"We are here today to mourn the passing of many brave men and women who died in the service of all mankind," began Jack. An audience of civilians stood off to one side of the rows of coffins; among them were husbands and wives, newly widowed. Jack wished he could tell them all where their spouses had been. If only they knew that the loved ones they mourned now had travelled further among the stars than any other humans in history.

"The soldiers we bury today were among the finest I have ever known. I was proud to command them, and we were all lucky to have them in our lives," he continued.

Eli Wallace thought of Chloe, Scott, Young, and all the other members of the mission who had died in their stasis pods on Destiny. Their families were there at the funeral, crying for them. But not all the dead had family here to mourn for them. Not the members of the Lucian Alliance like Varro, and most of all Ginn. He felt a tear run down his face. Looking out across the field, he saw Greer standing alone, dressed in his uniform, one arm in a sling. Eli made eye contact with the only other survivor of the Destiny for a moment before Greer turned around and walked away. Eli didn't blame him; he could hardly stand to be there himself.

~~00~~

"Boom, headshot!" yelled Eli into his headset. "Suck on that!"

Three weeks worth of collected mountain dew bottles, dirty clothes, and pizza boxes lay around his bedroom, evidence of a return to his pre-Destiny lifestyle.

Eli's character was reloading his sniper as a frag grenade blew next to him, resetting him to a spawn point. Suddenly a message appeared over top of the game, and the controller stopped responding.

"What the hell?" he said, rolling his chair closer to the screen. The message read:

Is this what you've become?

"Hey guys, are you seeing this?" he asked into his headset. There was no response. Eli's character was shot on the screen behind the message, and after a moment reset to another spawn point. The controller was still unresponsive.

Dr. Rush was right about you all along, Eli.

"Right about what? Who are you?"

Remember the mission.

The message disappeared.

"Dude! Do you want us to lose?" came a voice over the headset.

"No, sorry," said Eli, finding that his controller was working again, though he had racked up 5 more deaths in the game.

Eli looked at the clock on his nightstand. It was three in the morning.

The doorbell rang. Eli ran down the stairs and opened the door to find the pizza delivery guy, holding the extra large pizza and energy drink he had ordered.

"Hey, man."

"Extra large with pepperoni, sausage, and extra bacon?"

"That's me," said Eli, reaching into his pocket to grab his wallet.

"Remember the mission, Eli."

Eli stopped what he was doing and looked at the delivery guy.

"What did you just say?"

"I said your total is twenty eighty-six."

"Right." Eli paid for the pizza and then closed the door. He picked up the house phone and dialed the secure number General O'Neill had given him. It rang once before someone answered.

"This is Sergeant Harriman. How can I help you, Eli?"

~~00~~

Jack dropped opened the cooler sitting on the dock next to him and grabbed another Bud Light. He opened the can and took a long drink. The fishing pole he had propped up against the chair, line cast into the water, stood perfectly still. He could see the reflection of the trees on the far side of the pond.

"Catch anything, General?" came a voice from behind him.

"What are you doing here, Eli?" asked Jack, not turning around.

"Walter said I might find you here," said Eli.

"Want a beer?" asked Jack as he reached into the cooler again. "Have a seat."

"Thanks, General," said Eli, taking the can and sitting down on the cooler.

"Call me Jack, please. I'm off duty," said Jack.

"We have to finish what Destiny started," said Eli.

Jack turned to look at Eli, setting his beer down.

"Do please continue..." said Jack.

"The Elizabeth can travel further in a week than the Destiny could in a millenia. Rush figured out that the ship had originally been sent by the ancients to find the origin point of a signal being broadcast from somewhere far beyond our galaxy. Rush believed it was a signal leftover from the creation of our universe; that it is coming from the point in space where sentience first evolved. I don't know if he was right, but obviously it was important enough that the ancients sent a ship there, knowing it would take thousands of years to arrive. Don't we owe it to them, to Rush, to finish the mission? To find out what the ancients were looking for? We already have a ship ready to make the trip, and for all we know, it might not take more than a few weeks to get there and back, and then -"

"Eli!" shouted Jack. "Shut up, will you! I agree with you. Now we just have to convince the IOA."

Eli took a deep breath. "Sorry sir, I just got excited."

"I know, Eli," said Jack.

Eli looked at the mountain of empty beer cans piled up beside the cooler he was sitting on, and then at the unmoving fishing pole at Jack's feet.

"There aren't any fish in this pond, are there?" he asked.

"Not a one."

~~00~~

Two weeks later, after a few long meetings with the IOA, Jack, Sam, and Eli stood in the gate room as Earth's Stargate spun.

"Incoming wormhole," said Walter. "It's Atlantis' IDC."

"Open the iris," said General Carter.

The familiar rush of the event horizon opening up within the ring of the Stargate cast a blue hue into the room., and no sooner had the wormhole settled than Colonel John Sheppard came walking through.

"John," said Jack.

"Jack," he responded, taking a look at Sam and Eli. "What's this all about?"

"You've been reassigned," said Sam. "I believe you've met Mr. Wallace?"

"Kino log entry 12. It's been 18 hours since Greer and I escaped the Destiny on board the shuttle. It's hard to believe it's been almost three years since I managed to repair my stasis pod. I'm not sure I would have tried so hard if I knew this was what I'd wake up to. I've had plenty of time to explore the shuttle's computer. Rush managed to transfer a good chunk of Destiny's archives onto the hard drive. A lot of the important stuff like addresses, including the original destination of the ship. I searched the computer a dozen times though, and I can't find any trace of Ginn. I guess there just wasn't room for her. I swear though, it's like I can still feel her presence, like she's sitting right here next to me."

Written by Caleb Palmquist

Story by Caleb Palmquist and Andrew Marron

Also available at stargategenesis/dot/com