by Martha Wells
The jumper spun sideways then end over end. The inertial dampeners didn't go out, but the view flipped crazily in the port, the ground changing place with the sky. John heard the collective gasp, but the rumble was already dying away. He felt the yoke ease up and brought them smoothly out of the spin, taking them up and away into the upper atmosphere.
John let his breath out, feeling sweat break out all over his body. He looked back at the others. Teyla was gripping the arms of her chair, Rodney's hands had left permanent dents in John's shoulders, Zelenka looked faint and was holding hands with a very pale Miko. Ronon just looked impressed, but he was gripping the hatchway tightly. John said, "Everybody okay?"
"We were upside down," Zelenka said weakly. Miko patted his arm.
"I think we are well." Teyla looked up at Rodney, her brow furrowed in concern. "What was that?"
John twisted around to see that Rodney's face was white with shock. Rodney's throat worked and he said, "It's unstable. That sensor spike, right before the blast-It's not a Stargate."
Miko stared at him blankly, then gasped in horror. Zelenka took a sharp breath, shaking his head, saying, "No, no, Rodney, it cannot be."
Teyla threw a bewildered look at John, and he shook his head. He didn't have a clue. His first impulse had been to make a "that's no moon, that's a space station" joke, but he didn't think anybody would appreciate it at the moment.
Rodney stepped back over to his seat, bringing up a screen on the laptop there. "Look at the readings," he grated out. "They're distorted because of the intermittent power source, the instability, the energy bursts-That's why we couldn't find the damn power source, it doesn't need one! It's drawing it off subspace; it is the power source! That's why it's up here and the city and the `gate are on the other moon, why the jumper port is kilometers away!"
"Okay," John said warily. "What is it?"
Rodney said, "It's a Quantum Mirror."
CHAPTER TWO
hey needed a place to land so they could run a systems check and they needed to make a transmission to base camp, so John took the jumper back to the spaceport dome. It was far enough away to shield them from any discharges the Mirror might make, and he felt a pressing need to find a bolt-hole at the moment, even if it was just a powerless Ancient port with a broken roof.
Teyla and Ronon hadn't had the benefit of reading the SGC reports about the more portable-sized Quantum Mirror discovered in the Milky Way, so Rodney launched into an explanation. The Mirror could access a huge number of other realities, all alternate versions of this one. They could run into Atlantises that had been destroyed by the Wraith, or that had collapsed from explosive decompression on the bottom of the ocean, and those were just the good options. There was also the strong possibility they would run into realities where the Wraith had taken the city and forced the expedition to reveal the location of Earth, or where Atlantis and then Pegasus had been colonized by the slave population of a Goa'uld-controlled Milky Way. Rodney went on and on, coming up with one horrific scenario after another, until Miko looked sick, Zelenka pale, Teyla was wide-eyed with dismay, and Ronon just looked like he thought they were all insane. As the domes of the deserted spaceport appeared in the jumper's port, John finally shouted, "Rodney, stop, we get it! Going through the Mirror is asking to be screwed! We'll all be evil and you'll have a beard! Now calm down!"
"I just want to make certain everyone completely understands the unimaginable danger!" Rodney shouted back, red-faced and upset.
Teyla leaned across the cockpit to squeeze his arm soothingly. "It is all right, we understand."
"Yes, Dr. McKay, we do," Miko told him gently. "Do you need an aspirin?"
"Dammit, no, I don't need an-All right, give me the damn things," Rodney grumbled, grudgingly accepting the tablets and a water bottle.
"You are preaching to choir, Rodney," Zelenka added. "No one can imagine the unimaginable danger like we can.
Leaning in the cabin hatchway, Ronon said, "I don't understand."
John gritted his teeth. He really wasn't in the mood right now for Ronon's caveman act. "Ronon."
"I understand what it is," Ronon clarified. "I don't understand why we're still here with it."
Rodney sighed and pressed the water bottle to his forehead. "Because we have to find out if there's the slightest chance that it could lead us to living Ancients. If it can't, we have to try to shut it down before the Wraith find it."
Zelenka buried his face in his hands. "Oh, God."
You can say that again, John thought grimly. As they reached the spaceport, he slowed the jumper, directing it into a hover above the broken dome. The HUD popped up, telling him the immediate area was still negative for life signs and energy signatures, and that the terrain sensors detected no instability in the floor below or the struc ture itself. He eased the jumper down, past the curved surface of the dome.
The jumper's outer lights came on, revealing bluegreen metal walls and multiple levels of empty landing racks. Below, the stone floor was covered with windblown sand, and a half-open hatch led deeper into the structure. The others were quiet, watching as the spotlights illuminated the giant space, so much larger than Atlantis' jumper bay.
John let the ship settle to a gentle landing and switched all the systems over to standby. He leaned back and stretched, but his spine refused to unknot; he suspected that wasn't going to change for the next few days. He eyed Rodney, who sat slumped glumly in the jump seat, his expression set and grim. Worried about him, John asked, "You okay?"
"Oh, sure, yes, I'm fine." Rodney rubbed a hand over his face. "We need to call Elizabeth."
John raised Lorne on the jumper's comm system quickly enough, though there was a few seconds of transmission lag. John briefly outlined the situation. Lorne, who had been in the SGC, obviously didn't need Rodney to tell him about Quantum Mirrors. He said, "Colonel, that's... Damn."
"Yeah, that's what we said," John agreed. "Dial Atlantis and patch me through to the gateroom."
That took a few minutes. By the time the connection was made, Miko had connected a laptop to the outputs in the rear cabin, running through a full system diagnostic, while Zelenka was opening panels to do the manual checks. The others were sitting on the bench in the back, passing around the selection of packaged snack food from the jumper's supplies. Tied to the comm system, John waved at them, trying to get them to bring him something. He was saying, "Dammit, there is a vanilla one left, I can see it in the box," when Elizabeth's voice came over the comm: "This is Weir. What's going on up there, John?"
"Well, the good news is, we're not dead," he told her, swinging the chair back around again.
"Always nice to hear," Elizabeth responded, a wry note in her voice. "The bad news?"
Rodney came forward hastily, dropped a package of cupcakes into John's lap, and sat down in the shotgun seat. He said, "We found the source of the power signatures. It's a gigantic Quantum Mirror."
There was silence on the other end that had nothing to do with the brief transmission lag. "How gigantic?" she said finally.
John ate the cupcakes, while Rodney outlined their little adventure so far. Zelenka came forward to listen, leaning on the back of Rodney's chair.
Rodney said finally, "It comes down to this. The Ancients could have built this thing as an alternate method of evacuating Pegasus at the end of the Wraith war. If they were able to find another reality where Pegasus was uninhabited, where it had never been colonized by the Ancients, where the Wraith never existed, it would have been a viable option. The Mirror's circumference isn't nearly large enough to accommodate a city-sized craft like Atlantis, but you could move an enormous amount of people and supplies through with smaller cargo ships. It would be much more efficient than dialing the Atlantis `gate back to Earth multiple times. But we have no idea if they were successful, whatever they were trying to do with it."
Sounding thoughtful, Elizabeth said, "We've certainly never seen any indication in the Atlantean database that the An
cients had an evacuation route other than Earth. And do we know if this thing has been active all this time, or if these power fluctuations you're seeing are recent?"
"Well, yes, that's the problem." Rodney waved a hand in agitation. "One of the problems. We have no way to tell without exploring the installation to look for monitoring equipment. But I find it hard to believe this thing has been sitting here for ten thousand years releasing massive bursts of energy and activating the monitor on the base moon, without the Wraith ever noticing. I think it was dormant most of that time, that this activation is recent." He drew a sharp breath. "I think we've been lucky."
John had to agree. Except for the lucky part.
Elizabeth asked, "How do we know the Wraith haven't already found it?"
"I think it's safe to say that if they had, they'd be here right now, exploring through it for new feeding grounds." Rodney flattened his hands on the jumper's console, frustrated. "The Quantum Mirror at Area 51 was unimaginably dangerous. Two seconds after Dr. Jackson discovered the thing it dragged him into another dimension where the Goa'uld were in the process of invading Earth. This Mirror has the bonus feature of being big enough to allow an invasion fleet to fly through it, as well as being unstable. But if it was used for evacuation and it's still set for the same destination, there may be living Ancients on the other side we could apply to for information or help."
"I don't think that is strong possibility." Zelenka took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "If a group did use it to escape, their first act once they were safely through would be to shut down the Mirror on their side, changing the setting, so no Wraith could follow them. It would not prevent another Mirror in yet another reality from finding them-the Mirror in Area 51 was kept shut down, but that certainly didn't prevent other Mirrors from accessing it.
"Yes, yes," Rodney agreed impatiently. "That's why Hammond ordered it destroyed. But there is a small chance that this Mirror is still set to the reality the Ancients fled to. If it isn't, I agree that our chances of stumbling on it among the countless numbers of other realities is infinitesimal. And attempting to look would be unimaginably dangerous." Rodney's mouth twisted sourly. "Judging by the SGC's experiences, any reality we access is likely to be far worse off than we are. Far worse off."
"You keep saying `unimaginable,"' Zelenka grumbled. "I told you, we can all imagine it perfectly."
"Hold it." John eyed Rodney. It had always been obvious that the Stargate networks, here and in the Milky Way, would have been built by interstellar spaceships. John felt like he was missing something as far as building the Mirrors was concerned. "So they had to go through first and build a Mirror just like this one in the other reality? How does that work? How do you get there in the first place?"
"No one knows," Rodney told him impatiently. "Quantum Mirrors exist in all realities simultaneously. Building one is a logical impossibility, but yet they exist."
John looked at Zelenka, who nodded and shrugged. John said, "Okay," and decided to go back to imagining the unimaginable danger.
"Let me sum this up," Elizabeth said, obviously trying to bring them back to the point. "You want to take a closer look at this installation, see if there's any indication that we could use it to contact the Ancients, and if not, shut the Mirror down."
Rodney leaned forward. "Exactly. We'll need to enter the structure around the Mirror. The jumper's sensors couldn't get accurate readings with all the interference from the Mirror itself; the installation could hold anything from a new Ancient database to a working ZPM." He added reluctantly, "I wouldn't count on the ZPM. Quantum Mirrors don't need external power sources; they are power sources, drawing the energy they need directly from subspace. I'd be surprised if the Ancients didn't have a way to tap into that, to use it to power the auxiliary systems in the building."
"What about the discharges?" Elizabeth asked pointedly. "Didn't the one you just experienced nearly damage the jumper?"
"I was kind of curious about that part myself," John admitted.
"Well, obviously, we'll have to land outside the installation." Rodney huffed in exasperation. "And I don't see that we have a choice. It's either leave the Mirror and chance the Wraith detecting it, or find out we've left open a portal to an invasion fleet from another reality, or-"
"I understand that, Rodney," Elizabeth reminded him. "Dr. Zelenka, what do you think?"
Zelenka folded his arms, looking uncomfortable. Sounding reluctant, he said, "This is too dangerous to ignore, Dr. Weir. If nothing else, we must try to shut it down."
L C John?"
John shrugged. He didn't see they had a choice either. "They're right."
The SCBAs, or self-contained breathing apparatus sets, each had an hour tank and a couple of spares, which could be refilled from the jumper's environmental system with a setup Zelenka had jury-rigged last year. Ronon had never used one of the breathing sets before, and John wanted to make certain Zelenka and Miko remembered their training with them, so he had everybody put a set on and they did a brief twenty minute sweep outside.
Also, everybody really wanted a look at the spaceport.
They could have spent a couple of days here, and John just hoped they would have a chance to come back. The place had been built to hold hundreds of jumpers and larger craft, the shape only teasingly hinted at by the landing slots high in the walls. They found passageways leading to two other domes, and even if all were empty, it would still be worth it to send a team back to look for tools and equipment in the repair bays.
Standing with the others at the edge of the hatch that opened into the broken dome's lower levels, John shined his P-90's light into the depths. He could see it was mostly filled with the reddish sand, with a few straggly plants growing in it. "That's kind of depressing," he commented, his voice muffled by the breathing mask. It fit over the mouth and nose, and the tank attached to a stan dard pack.
Teyla nodded, frowning. "So much work went into this place. I hope it was not in vain." She looked up, directing her light over the empty racks. "I hope some of them escaped."
"I don't know." Rodney sounded grim. He turned around, looking up at the cracked roof far overhead. "The fact that this dome was wedged open isn't a good sign. Whoever was here last had to leave in a hurry, and lost power in the process."
"There is no sign of blast scars," Zelenka pointed out, obviously trying to sound optimistic.
"If the dome was stuck open the Wraith could have used the culling beam,"John pointed out. Miko made a little choked noise and Zelenka stared upward nervously. Yeah, probably shouldn't have brought that up, John thought with a wince.
"Thank you, Colonel," Rodney said, witheringly. "On that note-"
"Right." John nodded. The Mirror wasn't getting any less dangerous. "Let's go."
John brought the jumper in low this time, barely skimming over the ground. The HUD stayed active without him having to think about it, the sensors scanning for stray energy that might mean another discharge, as if the jumper was as nervous as they were. As they neared the building, Rodney leaned down to point over John's shoulder. "There. There's a door."
"Saw it." It was triangular, and set into the base of the structure above a short flight of steps. John put the jumper down about fifty feet from it, stirring up a small cloud of dust.
When John got the board locked down and stepped into the back, everyone was gathering their packs and fumbling with the breathing sets. He clipped his P-90 to his vest and asked, "Now what's rule one?"
"Ah, I know this one," Zelenka said, looking up with his brow furrowed earnestly. "That would be to not scream, unless something is eating us, and we need your attention immediately."
John slung the pack with the air tank across his back. "Okay, that's a rule, but it's not rule one."
"Oh, ah...everybody stay together?" Zelenka tried again.
"The rule is `don't be stupid! "' Rodney said with an irritable grimace, checking his tablet one last time. "That's the only one that matters."
Teyla interposed, "The rule is to stay with us at all times, do not rush ahead no matter what the temptation, and always let us examine an area first before you enter."
"I don't think you have to worry about that with us." Zelenka consulted Miko with a look. She nodded earnestly.
"Yeah, that's one of the reasons I agreed to bring you guys," John told him.
When everybody had their breathing sets on and their packs ready, John opened the ramp. The air released from the cabin caused another dust cloud, billowing out and away from the jumper. John went down the ramp first, Teyla with him. The ground felt weird under his boots, the fine powdery dirt shifting over the more solid rock, and he paused to take a long look at their surroundings. There was nothing they hadn't spotted from the air; the dusty pink plain, patchy with dry grasses and a few scrubby bushes, stretched away for empty miles, toward the foothills and then the mountains that rose in the north. The gas giant hung low in the sky, the red-brown bands a familiar sight now. John signaled the others to come out.
Rodney strode down the ramp first, his eyes on the life signs detector except for one wary glance around. Zelenka and Kusanagi followed him, with Ronon on their six. John used the jumper remote to close the ramp and set the cloak. Each team member had their own remote to get back in, and if something happened to John, both Rodney and Kusanagi could fly the jumper, though Rodney had a lot more experience at it than she did.
They moved toward the door, Ronon facing away from it to keep watch as John examined it thoughtfully. It was made of blue-green metal set into a stone frame, with square patterns embossed into the surface. Studying the detector, Rodney said, "Huh. I'm getting readings suggesting that the power is on inside." He sounded intrigued rather than worried. "This isn't a ZPM signature. I was right, it must be drawing power from the Mirror."
It meant they might not have to manually pry the door up. "Can you get it open?" John asked him.
Rodney eyed it, then stepped to the side, touching a small square set deep into the stone wall. The door started to slide upward, moving a little sluggishly. Rodney looked at John, chin lifted. "Of course."