STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air Read Free Page B

of another civvie — a woman, one of the other eggheads from Icarus — and placed it carefully over a wound she’d just bandaged. “Keep pressure here until the bleeding stops.” Then she was striding over to him, her expression unreadable.
    Scott stood back and let her take a look at Young. “Is he okay?”
    The medic bent down. “I don’t know.”
    “We need him,” he hissed, in a low, intense voice.
    Tamara didn’t look up. “Yeah. I got that. Just back off, Matt. Give me some room to work.”
    “Right.” He did so, and found his hands tensing into fists. How all of this had landed on his shoulders was beyond him. It wasn’t what he’d expected. Not at all .
    Scott’s flashlight caught a thickset figure in a hoodie at the edge of its illumination and he went after him. “Wallace!”
    The genius turned to him. He looked as dazed as everyone else. “Uh…”
    “What is this place?” demanded Scott. “Do you know what planet it is, or if it’s a ship, or whatever?”
    Eli held up a hand, apparently afraid that he was about to get blamed for something. “Look, I just did what Rush told me to—”
    Scott seized on the mention of the other man’s name. “Where is he?”
    “I don’t know, he went through the gate ahead of me.”
    The lieutenant nodded. “Yeah, he made it, I saw him.” He moved into the middle of the chamber, calling out “Rush! Rush, where are you?”
    Greer approached, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Went that way, I think. Up the stairs over there.”
    Scott accepted this with a nod. If anyone was going to have answers, it would be the Brit doctor. He took a step and a sullen rumble echoed through the decks. He had the sudden sense of the whole ship tensing around them, like an animal coiling its muscles before pouncing; then a second tremor resonated through, and Scott felt a brief sensation of motion and velocity that faded a heartbeat later.
    “What the hell was that?” said Greer.
    “I don’t know.” Scott hesitated, then snapped out an order to the Marine. “Sergeant, get these people settled down. Start making an inventory of everything we brought through as soon as you can. Try to figure out who and what we have. No one leaves this room.” He shot a look at Wallace and, as an afterthought, thrust the MagLite into his hand. “Eli! You help him!”
    The guy took the flashlight and panned it around, and his face changed as he got the first good look at the place they were in. Eli’s mouth dropped open.
    It was then, just by chance, that Scott noticed for the first time the writing on the t-shirt Eli was wearing beneath his hoodie. It was white text on a red background, some kind of nerd joke, just three words: YOU ARE HERE.
    Yeah, he thought as he walked away, wherever the hell that is.

72 hours earlier

CHAPTER ONE
     
    The skies above the planet Omegus IV were a curtain of atomic flame.
    SkullCruisers from the nine fleets of the Star Mongols lay in orbit, their neutronic blasters raining blazing particle death down upon the last bastion world of the Phoenix Brigade. Time ebbed away; soon the photon shell protecting the planet would break open like a Y’kin’la egg, and the peaceful Omegusi would perish…and all because they had been unlucky enough to evolve on a world that had once been a home to the time-lost Precursors.
    The warriors of Phoenix Brigade, the galaxy’s most steadfast defenders, had tracked the hyper-advanced Precursor technology from star to star, in hopes of uncovering the most powerful of the super-science relics the lost civilization had created — the device the Earthmen had nicknamed ‘Prometheus’ ; but the Star Mongols, the pirates of a million looted planets, were not willing to let the device fall into the hands of the lawful and the noble.
    If they could not have Prometheus, then they would obliterate it.
    Queen Xaria of the Omegusi bent her knee before the elite Phoenix Brigade warrior and bowed low, her golden hair