Mirror, Mirror

by Sabine C. Bauer

  Weaving like a snake, the crack raced toward them at breathtaking speed, ripping the earth, widening into a maw as it went and swallowing everything and everybody that didn't get out of its way-goods, people, a ground glider that had been nosing its way through the crowd and now toppled sideways into the rift, its driver and passenger hanging on desperately.

  "Oh my God!" Elizabeth gasped. "John, the gate!"

  He'd realized the second she said it, felt fingers of ice running up his spine, hated the sense of utter helplessness. The fault was heading directly for the Stargate, and all they could do was sit there and watch. If they lost the gate, they more than likely lost any chance they'd ever had of making it back to their Atlantis. Then, as abruptly as it had begun to open, the fault stopped within scant feet of reaching the Stargate, leaving an eerie calm in its wake.

  Time seemed to stand still, and the only thing moving was the dust that rose in silent coils above the chasm. Then, slowly and inexorably, the wails started and gradually built into a concert of misery. First it was the survivors crammed along the edges of the fissure, then there came other, fainter screams drifting up from below.

  "John..." whispered Elizabeth.

  "I know." The life-signs detector showed upwards of thirty people trapped in the abyss. And those were only the ones who had survived the fall. Even as John was staring at the detector's small screen, several of the bright blips winked out. "Crap," he muttered. "Hang on!"

  The chasm was easily wide enough to fly a jumper in, and John did just that. Pulling up steeply, he turned into a loop, and then forced the nose of the little ship almost straight down, heading for the bottom. Within seconds he realized that he wouldn't get there. The further he descended the closer the walls grew, a gloomy prison of soil and rock-and remnants of a longburied structure.

  "Atlantis," stated Elizabeth.

  "Yeah."

  It no longer came as a surprise and merely confirmed his earlier assumption that they'd come straight back to an othertimely version of the planet they knew.

  At just over sixty meters down he was beginning to run out of space to maneuver in and slowed the jumper to a virtual stop. Hovering, he rechecked the life-signs detector. There should be two victims just ahead. Several others showed below his current position, and his throat tightened at the sight. There might be time to pick up ropes and helpers crazy enough to abseil from the jumper, but right now it made more sense to try and rescue those people who were lucky enough to be within easy reach. In the long run more lives would be saved that way.

  "Get ready to open the hatch," he said to Elizabeth, who gave a sharp nod and hurried aft.

  Squinting into the gloom, John eased the jumper forward. He didn't spot the victims until he was almost on top of them. Caked in dirt and unmoving, they could have been part of the earth, and it was impossible to tell whether they were male or female, though one of them definitely was a child. They lay slumped on a narrow ledge, with nothing beneath them but darkness.

  And then there was movement; a pair of eyes snapped open, seemingly staring straight at him with a mixture of hope and terror. He swiveled the jumper around until it hovered at a right angle to the wall, with mere inches to spare at bow and stem, and carefully backed up until he nudged the rock just below the ledge.

  "Now!" Peering over his shoulder, he watched as Elizabeth opened the rear hatch, admitting a small avalanche of dirt, tornoff roots, and pebbles into the jumper. "You need a hand?"

  "No!" She didn't look back, but there was a smile in her voice. "I think we'll be fine."

  The rescuees were mother and child, and they'd gotten lucky. When the ground had opened beneath them, they'd slipped rather than fallen, bouncing from ledge to ledge and root to root until that outcrop had finally stopped their slide. Between them they had all of two broken bones; all other damage-a comprehensive assortment of scrapes and bruises and plain shock-was relatively minor. John and Elizabeth plucked twelve more people off the fault walls, all in similar condition; the worst injury being what looked like a skull fracture. It made John wince in sympathy.

  Some forty meters east and a little further down from their current position-it was going to be a very snug fit-the ground glider John had watched drop into the chasm was wedged between the walls. According to the life-signs detector both people aboard were still alive, and they were going to be the last victims he'd be able to pick up on this run. The approach was tricky, but he just about managed to ease the jumper into line with the bow of the glider.

  From what he'd seen before maneuvering into place, the glider's windshield was broken, and the pilot lay slumped over the dashboard, bleeding from a head wound. The passenger was curled up in the foot well, and John thought he'd seen a twitch of movement-though, admittedly, it might have been a reflection. Neither of them looked as though they'd be able to make it over into the jumper under their own steam.

  He was about to go aft and help Elizabeth when the alarms went off. She'd opened the hatch, and practically at the same moment an air quality warning flashed up on the viewport display, quickly changing from amber to red; the carbon monoxide levels were high and climbing. In a minute they'd be off the scale altogether. Simultaneously the life-signs further down in the fault were winking out in rapid succession. Each dying light felt like a personal blow to John, but there was no time to indulge his sense of failure. They had to get out of here.

  "Hurry up!" he yelled, stumbling into the rear of the jumper.

  His passengers still were too shell-shocked to respond to the situation, and Elizabeth was struggling on her own to pull the first of the glider victims-the pilot-into the jumper.

  "Hey! You!" John hollered at a man who was staring holes into the floor.

  The guy's head came up, and he gave John a dull glance as if to say Who? Me?

  Might as well assume he'd said it. "Yes, you! Come and lend a hand, will you?"

  For a moment the man continued to stare uncomprehendingly, then a shudder went through him and he blinked and rose and joined John. Together they first relieved Elizabeth of the pilot, whom they left in the care of a couple of other rescuees, then they started hauling the last victim aboard-the passen ger. He was as hopelessly mud-caked as everybody else and out cold, and despite his slight build he felt heavy as sin. Dragging him free of the foot well, across the hood of the glider, and into Jumper One seemed to take ages, and John no longer needed a display to tell him that the air quality had reached an all-time low.

  Every breath tasted of metal, and the more air he tried to suck in the less oxygen reached his lungs. Rainbow-colored stars sparked before his eyes, his headache had assumed a whole new dimension of intolerable, and he was feeling dizzy-not really advisable when trying to pilot an aircraft. The air scrubbers were working overtime, but the carbon monoxide, pushed up from somewhere below and filling the fault, could freely flood the jumper as long as the hatch was open. Without the scrubbers, they'd already be unconscious and dying, and John knew it.

  As soon as they were safely aboard, Elizabeth slapped the hatch controls, and the door slipped shut with a pneumatic hiss. Then she came staggering toward him, blue-lipped with cyanosis. John barely caught her before she fell, half carried her back to the cockpit, and dropped into the right-hand seat. Her hands were shaking, and she was breathing in rapid, shallow gasps. "I'm good," she panted. "I'm good."

  "Easy," he said, startled at the rough sound of his own voice. "It'll get better in a second, and you don't want to hyperventilate."

  Wrestling down the instinct to yank at the controls and race to the surface-a recipe for disaster, given the state he was in-he coaxed the jumper into a gentle climb. After a couple of minutes he felt a little less lightheaded, his vision cleared, and the relentless hammering in his skull let up by a notch or two. In the rear, the frantic yelps for air simmered down and gave way to whispers of conversation and soft moaning from the injured.

  "We'll have to be more careful when we go back down," Elisabeth murmured
.

  "We won't. Go back down, I mean."

  "But-"

  Wordlessly, John pointed at the life-signs detector that rested on the center console. Its screen was completely dark now. Elizabeth turned a shade paler and closed her eyes.

  At last the edge of the chasm crawled into view, and John felt more grateful than he'd ever expected to be at the sight of a sickening red sky. There was no risk of injuring anyone now; scared of the fault ripping open even further, the majority of people had peeled well back from the edges of the abyss. Their mood had changed completely, bowing to the contingencies forced upon them by this new disaster. They had established cordons of men who held back anyone curious or crazy enough to try and sneak a peek into the rift. In the cleared area between the crowd and the edges of the fault they'd improvised first aid stations to take care of those victims who'd landed within reach of the surface and had been recovered from there.

  John brought the jumper alongside the largest of the first aid posts. The men and women manning it, presumably physicians and nurses who'd been among the evacuees-Is there a doctor aboard?-stopped what they were doing and backed up a few steps when the hatch opened. Then the first of the walking wounded staggered from the jumper, supporting each other, and the medical staff relaxed visibly. A few daring souls watching from behind the cordon broke into cheers that spread through the crowd and proliferated into a round of applause. It definitely beat the earlier scenario.

  By the looks of it, the medics had performed way more than their fair share of triage lately. They went about their job quietly and efficiently, and though it seemed unlikely that they'd even met each other before today, they fell into the odd choreography of emergency treatment with practiced ease. Within minutes of the jumper's arrival every person who had been aboard was receiving medical care.

  Elizabeth had helped offload a couple of the wounded and disappeared to talk to whomever, which was fine by John. Let her handle the meet-and-greet for once; diplomacy was her job, after all. Blowing out a long breath, he leaned back in the pilot's seat and tried to relax and somehow bring his headache under control. Failing that, he'd at least have a few minutes in which to groan without anyone listening while he tried to figure out where to go from here. They'd have to start asking round and see if anyone knew a Dr. Radek Zelenka. At least there was no shortage of people to ask, and now they had a goodwill-

  Okay, half a -Minute. He heard the footfalls first.

  "John!"

  He levered his eyes open and awkwardly turned to see Elizabeth heading up the ramp. "Yeah?"

  "I've talked to one of the doctors here. She's agreed to check you out."

  "I'm fine," he growled. "We don't have time to-"

  "We don't have time not to." She had that ornery look that she usually only wore in her office. "You're the only one who can fly this jumper, so consider it an order, Colonel."

  "Yes, ma'am." He supposed he could have argued, but it would have taken too much energy. Instead he managed to inject his reply with a degree of reluctance that left no doubt as to his real feelings. Unfortunately she knew him too well to even acknowledge it, so he'd just have to get up and play along, wouldn't he? Suppressing the last of those groans, he pushed himself from the seat and attempted a jaunty stroll to the rear of the jumper. Apparently the act fell a little short of being convincing.

  "Fine, my a... foot." Elizabeth marched him down the ramp like a prisoner.

  They headed for a hastily erected tent behind the actual triage area. If you could call it a tent. Basically it was four posts in the ground, holding up a tarp that in turn sheltered a handful of pallets, all of which were occupied. Among the patients here were the last two people they'd rescued. The woman who'd piloted the glider was still unconscious, but her passenger seemed to be fighting fit again, though still not much cleaner than when they'd pulled him from the foot well.

  A guy after John's own heart, he was swatting away the ministrations of a nurse. "I don't care! I need to see the person who was flying the jumper!"

  "The what?" asked the nurse, her face a picture of confusion.

  Gateship she probably would have understood, John thought wryly and sent a silent apology to Lieutenant Ford, wherever he might be. He grinned. For starters this was a break he hadn't dared to hope for, and his and Elizabeth's job had just become considerably easier. That aside, it might get him out of being prodded by alien doctors, however qualified.

  "The jumper," John said, smiling at the nurse. "The ship out there. Dr. Zelenka, I presume?"

  Radek twisted around. "Colonel Sheppard!" Then his eyes grew even wider. "Dr. Weir! Thank God, I've found you!"

  There probably was very little real benefit in debating the issue of who had found whom. John let it slide. "Good to see you too. You haven't... uh... founded a cult by any chance?"

  "A cult?" Zelenka's expression mirrored that of the nurse a few seconds earlier. He seemed older, a good twenty years, if the lines in his face were anything to go by. And his hair was shorter, though he still managed to sustain that unkempt look. Otherwise, and discounting copious amounts of dirt, he looked himself, no wavy beard, no fanatical gleam in his eye, most of all no indication of protracted drug use.

  "Give over, John." Elizabeth stepped beside him, and she, too, was smiling with relief. "Hello, Radek. We need to talk."

  Charybdis -908

  "Move, move, move!" Ronon felt a little like a cow herder, except the current situation wasn't exactly bucolic.

  A hand wrapped around one arm of either, he had Teyla to his right, McKay to his left, and was bullying them up the stairs toward the guardroom at a run. Teyla wasn't the problem-she could have gone twice as fast, Ronon suspected-McKay was. Now that the adrenaline and the first buzz of the escape had worn off, the guy was seriously flagging. And, much to his dismay, Ronon couldn't even blame him; after three days in that cage, with hardly any sleep, no food, and plenty of exposure, it was a miracle Rodney was even conscious, and never mind his running a stair-a-thon. In consequence, Ronon considered himself honor-bound to bully as subtly as he knew how.

  Of course, subtly didn't really work with McKay, who ground to a dead halt, sniffed the air, and yelped, "What is that?"

  "Smoke," Teyla said pleasantly.

  "They probably haven't made this discovery on Athos yet, but on Earth we've known for quite a while that where there's smoke, there's fire. Common sense suggests to run away from fire, not toward it."

  "We're running past it," Ronon snapped, nipping the debate in the bud. "It's the only way out, so keep going"

  Without waiting for the comeback, he yanked McKay another couple of steps up. McKay did have a point, of course, but there was little Ronon could do about it, except hope that the fire hadn't spread into the hallway-though, given the pace they were going at, chances were that the entire fortress would have burned down by the time they made it up there.

  And he really, really shouldn't have thought that!

  The smoke was getting thicker by the second, and if it was this bad down here, he didn't really want to imagine what the hallway would be like. The good news was that they were all still drenched from the downpour, which might just save them now. He ran faster, forcing Rodney to keep pace with him.

  "It worked," Teyla whispered.

  "Too well," he grunted back.

  "What worked?" gasped McKay.

  "Stop wasting your breath and run "

  Finally they stumbled out into the hallway by the guardroom and into a wall of smoke. Black and all but impenetrable, it seemed to fill the corridor like a living thing, breathing malevolence. He pulled the collar of his shirt over his face and made sure that the others had similar makeshift masks-not that they'd be much good in the long run.

  Then again, all they had to do was make it to the door, wasn't it?

  Eyes streaming, Ronon squinted into the roiling smoke and realized that this might be taller order than he'd anticipated. From somewhere to his right came the whip-crack roa
r of flames, and he figured that they had to be near the guardroom door, meaning that they needed to carry straight on. That theory was refuted when he took two steps forward and hit a wall. For a second or two, blind panic constricted his throat, and it was all he could do not to start flailing and screaming like a madman. Then a hand caught his wrist and held on tight.

  "It requires some practice," Teyla croaked, a hint of amusement coloring her smoke-roughened voice. "I've got Rodney, too. Come with me."

  As soon as she started tugging him along, Ronon's disorientation increased. It wasn't the direction he would have taken, about ninety degrees to his intended course and followed in short order by a sharp right turn. Attempting to draw a mental map, he arrived at the conclusion that they inadvertently must have ended up in the guardroom itself and shuddered despite the stifling heat. If it weren't for Teyla, he might have killed them all.

  Trying not to breathe and scrunching his eyes shut against the biting smoke, Ronon staggered along. Within minutes he tripped down a couple of steps into a sudden onslaught of cold air and driving rain, and he silently vowed never to complain about the local weather again.

  They stumbled away from the building, coughing and choking and turning their faces up into the downpour to let it rinse off soot and grime. Behind them a series of window panes exploded in the heat, peppering them with shards and sending flames streaming into the night like banners. Across the courtyard people who'd run from other wings of the fortress were milling around in confusion, shouting for guards, servants, anyone they deemed qualified to fight the blaze. Someone spotted the bedraggled threesome fleeing the guard wing and pointed excitedly.

  Several men broke from the group, led by a short, elderly guy whose pinched looks reminded Ronon of a prune. His robes-a pompous affair of silk and fur hardly suited to the weather-trailed in the ever rising lake that flooded the courtyard and forced him into a forward list as if he were fighting not to be yanked back by them.