No, of course we won't. Not unless we want to fly a jumper. Not unless we want to get out of this sub-oceanic tomb, make that non-memory happen, recover his life, and hers.
John felt his fingers clench, barely kept himself from shaking her. Instead he scooped up the crystals, checked on the chairs and under the table to make sure he had them all, stuffed them into his pockets. Fourteen, in all. That wasn't too bad. If he could get her to tell him exactly where she'd pulled them, he might be able to fix the damage. He grabbed her hand.
"Show me " Teeth grinding, he added, "Please."
"Not now." She frowned, digging her heels in. "We're expecting guests."
Great! Last time it'd been an invisible contingent from the State Department and a Dr. Simon Wallace who seemed to be part of her personal furniture. As far as stultifying evenings went, it'd been a riot. Largely because she'd insisted he carve a turkey that was as undetectable as the guests.
"They... phoned," he heard himself say. "They'll be running half an hour late."
"Oh." She wasn't convinced and let him know it. "Well, I'll need that time to straighten out the mess you've made. Honestly, John! And you could at least go and shave."
He'd love to, if she just told him where she'd hidden his knife. Probably somewhere along with the rest of his weapons-that particular midnight exploit of hers had taught him the value of insomnia. Still, the shaving issue was leverage of a kind. "I'll shave, if you come with me now and show me. We've got plenty of time."
"I don't know..."
"We can get more of these." He held out a crystal on his open palm, smiled. "You said there were lots and lots of them, remember?"
"Really?"
"Really."
Abruptly she set off, dragging him with her, almost at a run. They made it to the jumper bay in record time. The door slid open, and stepping through, taking in what had happened, what she had done, he felt as if he'd slammed into a wall. He let go of her, just stood there, trying to breathe, trying to hang on to that ounce of hope he'd found and feeling it drain away as if someone had pulled a plug.
It was no longer a question of the glass being half empty. More like the glass being broken to bits.
The hangar floor was littered with crystals, a few of them intact, many-too many-of them smashed. On each of the jumpers the hatch stood open, so she must have gotten to all of them. How had she...? Of course. She'd watched him release the hatch a dozen times or more.
"Elizabeth, what did you do?" he whispered.
"I don't like them," she pointed out with a sweeping gesture at the crippled jumpers. "We don't need them anymore. This is prettier." Smiling, she gathered a handful of splinters and let them tinkle to the floor again.
Barely paying attention-it wasn't as though she could add to the wreckage now-he stepped out into the bay, gingerly tiptoeing around glitzy ruin. The tip of his boot struck a shard, slightly bigger this one, and John realized that this crystal was still whole. He picked it up, numb and without really knowing why he bothered, and added it to the small hoard of survivors in his pockets. It was something to do, he supposed. It beat sitting on the floor, howling. Probably.
He found a total of twenty-three good crystals. They'd make a nice wind chime.
Straightening up, John stared at the nearest jumper. Might as well try, he guessed. More pertinently, he had no choice but to try. It wasn't just a question of being able to leave now. Without at least one ship, they'd starve to death-unless he disengaged the ZPMs, got the shield to fail and the city to rise, so they could go fishing on the pier. Until the Wraith dropped by for target practice.
Balancing his stack of crystals, he walked up the ramp.
"We have to go back!" There was a terse edge to Elizabeth's voice. "We have guests, remember?"
"They'll have to wait." He was utterly past caring to play house with her.
"They'll leave if we make them wait."
Excellent! He'd buy a beer for the first one out the goddamn door!
The interior of the jumper was a mess. He could see how she'd done it now: open every single hatch within reach and see what's in there. Aside from the main control junctions, she'd ransacked equipment stores, tool boxes, supply cabinets and strewn their contents over every square inch of flat surface inside the jumper. He harbored no illusions of any of the other jumpers looking any different. Where it came to stuff like this, Elizabeth was nothing if not methodical. The only piece of good news was that she hadn't gotten to the crystal banks that were hidden behind the seats' backrests.
Empty slots yawned from the overhead compartment that housed the drive pod systems. Which crystal went where, or whether any of the crystals he'd salvaged belonged there in the first place, was anybody's guess. Thing about control crystals, they all looked the same to him. Rodney might have made sense of them, but John Sheppard wasn't Rodney McKay. Under normal circumstances he'd have considered it a blessing, but right now it put him at a distinct disadvantage. The one thing he had in abundance, however, was time. He'd just keep going until he got it right. Maybe. John experimentally inserted a crystal into the top left slot. It didn't fit. Well, that was good. If it boiled down to square pegs in round holes, at least it gave him something to go on.
"Don't do that." Elizabeth had been watching from outside the jumper. Now she reluctantly headed up the ramp, muttering to herself. "You're not supposed to fix it. I don't want you to."
Tough. The fifth crystal didn't fit either, but he still had thirty-two to go.
"If you fix it, you'll leave. I don't like that." She was hovering behind his right shoulder, getting agitated, distractedly fingering tools, pieces of equipment.
"Don't touch anything." Schooling his face into an expression intended to telegraph something between calm and serenity, he turned around. "I have to fix it, Elizabeth. And I will have to leave, so I can try to make things right again."
"I don't like that. Things are right."
"No. No they're not," he said gently, turning back to the compartment again.
If he'd continued to focus on her, he might have stood a chance. As it was, he only saw blurred motion from the corner of his eye. Whatever it was she'd grabbed from among the clutter-foot-long and shiny metallic-struck his temple. His skull slammed against the bulkhead for a sensational explosion of pain, then things went black. As he tumbled deeper into that velvety, anodyne zone, he thought he heard Elizabeth's voice.
"I'm sorry, John."
Charybdis -908
He lay on his back on a considerably less than comfortable straw pallet and strained to listen into the pitch darkness of the bunkhouse, which accommodated eighteen serfs. Opposite his luxury cot was a tiny casement-unglazed, because these good folks had either lost the wherewithal to provide such minor creature comforts or never had possessed it to begin with. Either way, the communal bedroom was draughty. He'd pointed out the above-average likelihood of this causing some serious health issues, but nobody had seemed interested. He'd promptly caught a persistent head cold.
By now he could identify individual snores. The resonant, metronomic saw and whistle for instance was Sahar, the foreman. The rattle, apnea, and snap belonged to Sahar's wife, Rilla, who was in charge of the pig swill (the one the serfs ate) and lately had been stretching the periods when she didn't breathe to alarming lengths. Probably because the snap came out much louder when you were at the brink of anoxia. For variety's sake, the ancient farmhand, Bordan, didn't snore but cough, whereas the maid communicated in delicate honks, like a very small goose-an apt enough description of her character and intellect. These were the highlights, but he also was intimately familiar with everybody else's nightly noises, which attested to the amount of sleep he'd been getting.
The sky past the casement was beginning to gray, and he scrunched his eyes shut and began counting. At seven-five seconds early, actually-the shrill ring of the dawn bell scattered the snores, hoots, honks, and wheezes. They were replaced by moans and grunts as people reluctantly rolled o
ut of bed. He stretched, absently catalogued the daily array of aches-his back and the mattress were incompatible-slipped on his clogs and shuffled for the door.
The morning was overhung by leaden clouds, shedding a misty veil of drizzle fine enough to creep into your pores. He couldn't recall when he'd last seen the sun or felt dry, for that matter. Prayer was held on a muddy rectangle formed by the main farmhouse, a barn, and the bunkhouse. Most serfs had already assembled, and he squeezed in at the back, behind the broad shoulders of a couple of butcher's apprentices that would keep him well out of sight from the front. He preferred it that way, because it saved him the trouble of feigning enthusiasm over the drawn-out incantations in honor of the Ancestors.
"...and protect us from the evils of Ikaros and let us rejoice in practicing simplicity and moderation," Sahar intoned.
"May the Ancestors grant us simplicity," the crowd bleated back.
He joined in mechanically, knowing that someone was bound to notice if he remained silent. As far as he was concerned any more simplicity would set these good folks firmly on the road to wooden clubs and flint arrowheads. That aside, it might be much more conducive to morale if the working population were fed breakfast instead of platitudes. His morale definitely would improve.
Around him, the assembly was breaking up, and with a baleful glance at the monochrome sky, he trudged off in the direction of the sties and the restless squealing of the hogs. Ravenous and eager to be let out, they were snapping and jostling each other in the pen, interrupting their shove-fest only to glare at him malevolently. Making sure his feet were well out of harm's way, he climbed up a couple of the rough-hewn planks of the fence and undid the latch. More jostling, as they all vied to be first through the gate.
It wouldn't be so bad if, at least occasionally, he got to enjoy the fruit of his labors, but luxuries such as scrambled eggs and bacon were reserved strictly for the nobility in the city below.
Suddenly he could taste the salty, savory flavor of a rasher of bacon on his tongue, knew without a doubt that that's what it was. His stomach growled in response, dispelling this odd sensory memory of something he couldn't recall ever hav ing eaten in his life. Trying to ignore both his hunger and the vague unsettled feeling the bacon episode had left, he grabbed a sturdy stick that was leaning against the fence-state-of-theart agricultural technology-and plodded after the hogs uphill and toward the forest.
The soil on the path, saturated from months of rainfalls and churned up by a thousand trotters, stuck to his clogs in heavy clumps, layering itself under the soles, until he felt as if he were walking on platform shoes. The animals had no such problems and briskly trotted toward the shelter of the trees. By the time he caught up with them, they'd reached a small clearing and looked like they were going to settle in for the day. Sadly for them, he had no intention of sitting here till dusk and soaking through and catching his death. Okay, he'd soak through anyway, but he could at least make a bid at staying warm.
He singled out the lead animal and brought the stick down on its bulging hindquarters. At the third wallop the hog got the message, hissed in outrage, and began moving deeper into the forest, drawing the other animals after it. Repeated taps with the stick steered it uphill on a barely visible trail. Driven by something he couldn't or wouldn't clearly define, he kept going, higher and deeper into the forest than he'd ever taken the hogs before.
The trail was all but overgrown, but the footing had improved. There were flagstones, meticulously laid once, though frost and tree roots had cracked them long ago and allowed weeds to sprout through the gaps. Still, the workmanship was beyond anything they'd be capable of now. His curiosity piqued, he walked faster, no longer caring whether or not the hogs kept up.
At last the trail opened out into a glade. Except, no glade he'd ever met came complete with stairs. Broad and sweeping they arced down toward an arena of sorts. Maybe an amphitheater. He'd heard about places like that, but he'd never visited one; the theaters, much like scrambled eggs and bacon, were reserved for the nobility. Either side of the stairway stretched tiers, half swallowed by the forest. Where he imagined the spectators to have sat or stood, centuries-old trees had breached the tiers and branches protruded through what must have been a railing once. At the far end of the arena below, upstage center as it were, rose a large stone ring, wreathed around by creepers and bearded with moss.
Spurred by a bout of inquisitiveness strong enough to startle him-their culture discouraged inquisitiveness -he shouldered his way past some bushes and headed in among the trees. He began scraping the topsoil off the ground and within minutes found the floor beneath. Not stone, not wood-wood would have decayed ages ago-but some smooth, shiny material that somehow struck him as oddly familiar, as oddly familiar as the entire layout of this place. He pushed further into the undergrowth and found what at first glance looked like boulders. They weren't. They were tables, or benches maybe, overgrown to the point of being barely recognizable. Only, he did recognize them. He'd seen them before, though when or where he couldn't begin to fathom. There would have been people sitting here, operating devices now forbidden.
And-he'd known every single one of them.
He'd been one of them.
The impact of the notion sent him reeling back a step, and he tripped and almost fell. As he tried to regain his balance, he trod on a twig. It snapped with a loud crack. Trembling, he spun around, saw the object he'd stumbled over. Not a rock. Not a branch, either. And he was starting to guess what this place was. He shouldn't be here. He should leave. For some reason that wasn't an option, though.
He crouched clumsily and picked up the skull. It was gleaming white and slick with the pervasive moisture, and it was human, like the rest of the bones. He sniffed it, wondering the same instant how he knew to do this, remembering a darkhaired, excitable man with a white coat and a strange accent. Both of which were immaterial now. The skull had no discernible odor at all, which meant its owner had died a long time ago. Among the bleached heap of bones that had once been a ribcage lay a couple of metal plates attached to a chain. Some kind of necklace or other ornament, perhaps. He set down the skull, snatched the necklace and frowned at it. The metal plates were embossed with several lines of writing: A name. Then a long number. Then AF. Then AB neg. Then Catholic.
He should not have been able to read this-or any other writing, for that matter. Literacy was the first evil of Ikaros. Shivering, he stared at the metal plates, knowing with absolute certainty that this should mean something to him. The name should mean something to him.
Sheppard, John.
Colonel.
That wasn't written on the plates, but he knew it was connected.
Colonel Sheppard.
A face floated free from that muddle of memories inside his mind. Young and annoyingly handsome, though the shadow of distrust in the eyes belied both youth and looks.
That might take a while.
He straightened up, stung as a whole slew of images flooded back. That man, that colonel, had been a friend, which was unusual, to say the least. He didn't have the kind of personality that allowed him to make friends, and he knew it. He cultivated it, because he'd realized early on that it kept people at arm's length. And as long as people remained at arm's length they couldn't hurt you, deliberately or otherwise, they couldn't make demands. It simply was easier this way. Sheppard's and his friendship, prickly and at times almost adversarial, had developed despite themselves, but it most certainly had been a friendship. At least until he'd almost killed the man, succeeded in killing another, destroyed whole worlds.
But even then it hadn't been irredeemable. It-
Startled by the sharp snap of another breaking twig, he whirled around, came face to face with a bunch of wet snouts and red, malignant eyes. The hogs had caught up with him, and for a moment he gazed at them uncomprehendingly. How in God's name had he ended up here, with them?
Squealing with excitement, the hogs pushed past him and toward that desolate
heap of bones.
"No!"
The fury was beyond anything he'd ever experienced. As hard as he could and without caring where it hit or how much damage it did, he brought his stick down on snouts, heads, haunches. The lead animal dropped the femur it had snagged and rounded on him with a shriek. A quick series of blows bludgeoned it into retreat, squeaking and snapping. The other animals trotted after it, and at last the herd vanished into the undergrowth.
Panting hard, he dropped the stick, turned back to the remains. His face was wet, he realized, and the rain had nothing to do with it. It was as though his rage had opened the floodgates to make way for every damn painful emotion that wanted to follow. There was a reason why his only permanent attachment had been a cat that preferred his neighbor's company.
John Sheppard, of all people, would have appreciated the irony of it.
Just as well that he wouldn't find out about it now. Nobody would. Why dismantle a carefully cultivated image, right?
He hung those engraved metal plates around his neck, made sure they were hidden under his clothing. Then he carefully gathered the skull. He'd find a safe place, bury it, though he couldn't really have said why, except that just leaving it here seemed wrong and that a burial, however unceremonious, would make him feel better somehow. And this was ironic, too. Dead was dead. He didn't believe in wakes, funerals, and other feel-good rituals. He was a scientist. He was-
Gasping and suddenly oblivious to the pouring rain, he sat back on his heels.
He was a scientist, a physicist.
He was a prodigy, a Nobel prospect.
He also was stranded in the armpit of the universe, herding swine in a Luddite theme park.
Why?
He still had no recollection of what had happened to make him end up in this place, but he'd find out. He owed it to himself. And then he'd get the hell out of here and look for the others. Colonel Sheppard, with that blithe military approach of demanding the impossible, would expect him to-he always had-and somehow this seemed a far better way of honoring the dead than wakes and all the rest of it.
Mirror, Mirror Page 9