Eli Ascending
Chapter One
Eli Wallace stood on the observation deck of the Destiny watching the ship fly out of the galaxy and into darkness. There was a space between galaxies that extended forever, a space scientists believe is filled with dark matter, but where no star lives. No planets. Nothing.
He tried to ignore this new reality, focus on what had preceded everything up until this moment. Leaving home after completing a computer game no one else could figure out. Being transported onboard one of the several deep space ships the Air Force operated between solar systems that allowed access to planets without Stargates ... and some with, finding himself escaping through a Stargate billions of lightyears from Earth into a ship, the Destiny, sent on a mission almost a million years before.
Prior to the day he was recruited, space exploration or travel was an abstraction found in fiction and movies. Both of which Eli enjoyed, but nothing he thought he’d be a part of. After leaving MIT for personal reasons, he’d floundered and was unable to keep a job down. Not that he was incapable, but out of boredom. He knew, even if he refused to admit it to himself, there was more out there than he was letting himself grasp and hold on to.
Now he was on the Destiny billions of light years from home with no way of leaving the ship and, quite possibly, no way he would be alive in two weeks time.
In truth, his choice to remain out of stasis was one of necessity. The choices were limited to Rush, Colonel Young, and him. For Colonel Young to remain outside of stasis meant death, not that Colonel Young wouldn’t attempt to do something. Ultimately a power play by Rush to solidify his place as leader. If Rush had stayed outside, there was no guarantee he’d fix a stasis pod or allow life support to turn off, leaving Destiny to float in the void for a thousand years. If the loss of three years seemed too much for Eli and the rest of the crew, the loss of a thousand or more was completely unacceptable, impossible to understand.
When it came down to it, Eli felt he had no choice. He didn’t feel more qualified or capable, nor did he think himself smarter or better than anyone else - even though that seemed to be consensus. The reality of sacrifice or the Hail Mary pass at the last seconds of gameplay was him. If Destiny and the crew were going to survive, then he had to be willing to sacrifice himself.
He’d worked through those thoughts again and again. His mind wondering if he’d screwed up. Rush was selfish, that was true, but he wasn’t evil. Was he? Colonel Young was an officer with lots of experience and very capable, though how capable in terms of ancient Ancient technology was up in the air. Could he save himself?
At each question and in each scenario Eli hazarded, he realized the same thing. He had to be the one to try. No one else could do it. From the very first moment on board until now, it had been Eli who’d Macgyvered a fix or found a workaround. He’d almost taken them home, only later to discover that he’d sent the entire crew back in time and Colonel Telford back to Earth. The paradox of time travel was more than he wanted to conceptualize and after trying he pushed it aside.
There was only one thing he could do, one thing that would save his life, and that was to find the materials needed to fix the stasis pod.
He refused to consider the alternative.
***
For Eli, there was a process that allowed him to work through problems. Unlike most people, he guessed, he didn’t look at things in a strict progression and, instead, looked at the conceivable ends while working the problem from the middle out. His method wasn’t foolproof, though it often led him to solutions like a keno sled or dialing the ninth chevron with Earth as the origin. Things like that were the kinds of problems that lent itself to his kind of thinking.
A stasis pod, while both simple and complicated, was entirely different. It was a stasis pod. They were built with materials that were available throughout the universe and assembled and programmed with very specific purposes in mind: to keep individuals perfectly preserved for an indeterminate length of time. Someone had to come up with the technology and logic and programming, just not him. In truth, before finding the stasis pods, he’d never considered the possibility outside of a handful of science fiction novels.
For Eli, it was entirely possible he could sideways-engineer a solution to the problem, but that would require resources that weren’t available, obvious. At least, not immediately. Instead, and without the discretionary efforts of Colonel Young and the military, or even Rush, he had the run of Destiny. He could explore in ways that were forbidden until now. After all, logically, if a stasis pod existed and the Ancients built the ship, then other systems had to work on the same principles and it was also possible there were other areas of the ship with stasis pods.
Until now, the crew had focused on remaining alive and keeping the air flowing, starting a hydroponics farm, and not blowing up. They’d focused on getting home or finding, under truly desperate circumstances, a habitable planet to call home. What they didn’t focus on as much was a complete understanding of Destiny and the compatibility of systems as well as parts to other systems and areas potential replacement storage. Under rules of conservation, it made sense that the number of spare parts would be reduced to a bare minimum with many of those replacement parts working across many different systems.
All he had to do was find those spare parts. Or a stasis pod. He wasn’t all that particular.
The ship was definitely old and nearly derelict. A relic of times long forgotten. In truth, Eli had no understanding of the Ancients or their ways and only had a rudimentary grasp of their language. That’s to say, he could read it and understand the underlying meaning, but would be seriously hard-pressed to communicate properly in Ancient. Which didn’t mean he couldn’t, he simply lacked experience. A commodity Colonel Young had insisted Eli acquire. A commodity Rush tried, very hard, to keep out of everyone else’s hands.
When his mind started working the problem and figuring out the steps to solve it, Eli turned from the view on the observation deck and went straight to the bridge. What he wanted wasn’t going to be easy, nor was he immediately hopeful, but if he didn’t try he was going to die. And for Eli, having come so far, dying wasn’t really an option. If he could fix and solve other problems, then this one would be a cakewalk.
***
Rush had found Destiny’s bridge and hidden the fact for weeks. He’d claimed he was studying it, getting ready to reveal it to Colonel Young and everyone else. Eli had his doubts. That wasn’t Rush’s style. He knew that from the moment he’d laid eyes on the man, and General O’Neill. Rush bordered on psychopathy and yet he was the mind behind most of the major accomplishments and understanding leading up to Destiny and the Icarus Project.
To Eli, Rush was more the trickster god, a malicious being that got its jollies out of tormenting and torturing its victims. For Rush, that meant the crew of the Destiny and, especially, Colonel Young. Those two men were locked in mortal combat and even when they agreed on things, underneath was a churning fire waiting to explode once again.
Finding the bridge had allowed the crew to stop forcing consoles and operational systems to do things they were never designed to do. Good thing too, since that was the point when they really started running into other races. None Terran in appearance or anything even close to human, which meant none of the Ancient seed ships had been occupied or even carried the seeds for human-like life.
The closest they’d come to taking control of the situation, getting ahead of the reality of being separated from Earth and Stargate Command was the bridge and now it was the only thing connecting Eli to the crew and life. With no help from Earth possible and no reprieve from the crew, he did what he’d been wanting to do for a very long time, use the bridges consoles and the underlying data processing power, to control the kenos and search the ship.
With Rush and Colonel Young asleep, the ability to experiment and really see what they could do seemed like the most logical and reasonable use of time and resources. After all, he couldn’t explore the ship alone and he’d had his own close encounters with failing shields and compartments exposed to the vacuum of space.