Mirror, Mirror

by Sabine C. Bauer

  "Oh no..." McKay seemed to contemplate an immediate return to the burning guard wing.

  "What?" hissed Ronon.

  "I know that guy. Worse, he knows me. He presided at my trial, so-called. I have to-"

  "Stay put!" Ronon flung an arm around teenage Rodney's scrawny shoulder and pulled him close. With his other hand, he grabbed Teyla's arm. Happy families. "Let me pass!" he roared, breaking into a run, straight toward the overdressed prune, and doing his best to look as wild-eyed as the rest of the gathering in the courtyard. "My wife and son! I need to get them to safety!"

  For a moment the man just gaped at them. When it finally sunk in that Ronon wasn't about to change course, he jumped back a couple of steps, bony hands helplessly waving in the air as if to flag up his outrage. "Your wife and son? Why did you bring them?" he asked incongruously, perhaps in an attempt to reestablish some kind of authority. "Women and children are not allowed here!"

  A fountain of laughter bubbled up his throat, nearly choking Ronon, but instead of giving in to it, he grabbed his charges tighter and charged past the man and toward the archway and the portcullis.

  "Stop them!" the prune squealed at no one in particular. His shrieks caused a brief stir among the other bureaucrats in the courtyard; then they seemed to decide that the fire in the fortress was a more immediate concern and ignored their colleague.

  Ronon had the portcullis in his sights, those squeaked-out orders were sliding off his back together with the rain, and for a precious second or two he felt something akin to relief The rumble of bootfalls echoing from the archway convinced him of the error of his ways. A detachment of guards came thundering into the courtyard and gave McKay's friend a second wind.

  "Apprehend these people!" the guy shouted again, this time with considerably more authority. Apparently he had regained his composure.

  "You're hurting me!" Teyla hissed softly, and Ronon realized that he was clenching his fists in an effort not to succumb to instinct and freeze.

  He let go of both her and McKay, wanting his hands free to be able to draw his sword. Whatever else happened, Ronon Dex wasn't going to go down without a fight. Besides, from what he'd seen of the soldiers here, he probably had a betterthan-average chance of taking out the entire detachment singlehandedly. He hoped. And-

  The guards galloped past him, Teyla, and McKay as though they'd never heard the prune's order. And maybe they hadn't. As they passed, Ronon could all but smell their fear. Something had happened, and he had a pretty good idea of-

  "Sirs!" the leader of the detachment yelled. "They've broken down the gate. The city gate has fallen!"

  Yep.

  The timing couldn't have been better. A furtive glance over his shoulder told Ronon that even the prune had forgotten they so much as existed. He bustled his charges into the shadows beneath the archway and through to the portcullis. The sole guard, Teyla's friend, was still on duty, but Ronon was in no mood to enter into negotiations over why he was bringing his `captive' back out again, together with an escaped prisoner. Without so much as waiting for the surprised man to open his mouth, he landed a solid right hook on the tip of the guard's chin, knocking him out cold.

  "That felt good!" Grunting happily, Ronon watched as the guard crumpled into an ungainly heap at his feet. "Been meaning to do that since I first met the guy."

  "Glad to see those charm school classes are finally paying off," muttered McKay.

  "If you can talk, you can run. Let's go!" Ronon grabbed Teyla's arm again and began guiding her down the lane at a brisk jog.

  Here and there the rain-laden darkness above the rooftops had turned an ugly, pumping red; burning houses where he and Teyla had left their fire-starters. The noise was obvious now, or maybe he just hadn't been paying attention while they were still inside the fortress-screams of panic as people tried to get away from or extinguish the fires in the heart of the city and, from the direction of the gate, shouts and the metal-clad sounds of fighting.

  Ronon winced at the thought of them having to push their way toward the gate against the onrush of an angry mob, but you didn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Besides-

  "What in God's name have you started here?" McKay panted from behind, more than a little apprehension in his voice. "A palace revolution?"

  "We didn't start it. Much."

  The shouts were getting louder and below, where the lane joined the city's main thoroughfare, the speckled glitter of torches swung around the comer and surged up the road like a swarm of pissed-off fireflies. And the torches kept coming, a rising tide of lights and noise, sweeping their way. Ronon tried to weigh the risk of being spotted and potentially killed against his increasing sense of urgency when it came to stopping Charybdis. It was no contest, really. Death would delay them indefinitely.

  A little further down the road gaped a dark alleyway, once closed off from the lane by a wooden gate that had half torn from its hinges and now creaked and clattered in the storm. He ducked in, pulling the others after him, and wedged the gate shut behind them.

  The alley was cramped with items discarded from the houses on either side, heaps of trash harboring things that squealed and swished and scurried through the darkness. They stank, too. Or maybe that was the garbage. Ronon found he no longer cared. Somehow this unplanned stop and the semblance of safety provided by the rickety gate had shaken loose a mountain of fatigue, piled up since he forgot when-when, if ever, had he last slept?-and now hurtling down on him in an avalanche of exhaustion. All he wanted to do was obey that overwhelming urge to sit and rest, slide down the gate and slump into a puddle, heedless of the wet and cold. A pair of shivering shadows, McKay and Teyla had already done just that, finding a wall and an old crate respectively to lean against.

  Out in the street the clanging of weapons and the shouts from throats roared hoarse closed in and wrapped him in a blanket of threat.

  "Kill them!"

  "Drive out the Ancients!"

  "Torch the city!"

  "Kill them all!"

  Torchlight leaped through between the rickety planks of the gate, streaked unsteadily over his companions' faces-McKay's lips were moving; he seemed to be caught up in a spirited discussion with himself-and chased rodents back to their burrows amid squeaks of outrage. The throng outside, filling the street to bursting point, pushed and bumped against the gate again and again. Sooner or later the tired wood and metal would give. So much for safety.

  We can't stay here," Ronon whispered. Ignoring their mutters of protest, he pulled Teyla and McKay to their feet again, flinched when one of them, in rising, knocked over a stack of garbage that came clattering around their feet. "Quiet!"

  For a couple of seconds they all froze, but the stampede outside the gate continued unchanged. If anyone had heard the noise, they probably were too busy to investigate. More likely, though, the mob was deafened by its own racket. For now.

  He guided Teyla's hand to grab an end of Rodney's shirt and pulled a reluctant McKay in behind himself. "Make sure he keeps moving!" he snapped at Teyla.

  Then he set off at a staggering run, dodging trash and rodents tumbling in his path, barely daring to hope that this wouldn't be a dead end.

  It wasn't.

  Closed off by a similarly wonky affair as the gate they'd encountered first, the far end was a mere two hundred yards or so down the alley, and it led out onto an apparently deserted side street, so quiet you'd think this was a night like any other. Ronon held back on a sigh of relief until he'd checked and double-checked and found this first impression confirmed.

  "Have you given any thought to where we go from here?" Teyla demanded.

  He swallowed a sharp reply. She was right. She was right... He'd been thinking like a runner, as always, tackling each problem as it came along because all that mattered was surviving this second right now; only when you'd managed that you could start worrying about the next and the one after that and so on. Teyla was thinking like a leader of people, as always, wanting the larger pi
cture to determine means of long-term survival.

  We get out of the city, try to cross the river, and head for the Stargate," he said at last.

  "And what then, Ronon?" she asked. "What then?"

  "We-" He cut himself off, suddenly seeing what she was driving at. They had no DNA sample to guide them to another original, and unless McKay could figure out a way of making the Stargate work regardless... "We're stuck," he croaked.

  Charybdis -223

  "In other words, we're stuck." John Sheppard short-circuited the debate among the scientists by jumping to the inevitable conclusion. "We're stuck," he repeated with a finality that made Elizabeth shiver.

  The faces around her settled into varying permutations of glum, and she very much doubted that hers looked any more cheerful. The woman who'd been with Radek and flown the glider sagged a little further into herself and absently stroked a bandage that covered a deep cut on her forehead. Two younger men who at some point had materialized from the crowd-apparently they'd been trying to get a colleague to the hospital earlier in the day-glanced at each other and, by mutual consent, seemed to suppress a shrug or sigh.

  Once all the injured had been seen to and the physicians relinquished their claim, Radek and his friend, Selena, had requisitioned one of the triage tents. Together they'd moved it a good ways up the slope and improvised a field lab from six folding chairs, several laptops donated by concerned citizens, and a bagful of data crystals, which the two latecomers had volunteered to retrieve from the wrecked glider. It wasn't much to look at, but, as Radek had pointed out repeatedly, the processing power, while not exactly up to the standards they were used to from Atlantis, beat anything Earth could have rustled up at short notice. Elizabeth figured he was trying to reassure himself with the assertion.

  Because, so far, the superior processing power had failed to get him or anybody else anywhere.

  "I wouldn't exactly call it stuck," Selena retorted, sounding more than a little miffed. "It's not like this is some primitive planet. Radek is quite happy here, aren't you?"

  "Of course I am."

  The confirmation seemed to come as a relief to Selena, and Elizabeth began to suspect that Selena and Radek might be a little more than just colleagues. And why not? He'd been stranded here for decades. Compared to that she herself had been lucky. The vagaries of temporal flux that had arisen in the wake of Charybdis had exiled her for a mere four years. She shuddered.

  "See?" said Selena, satisfied. "This may not be your home, but it isn't a bad place. And staying here doesn't mean you'll have to give up all hope. Who knows? You may spend less time here than you think, because, naturally, we'll continue our research into the failure of the Stargate system."

  "When?" John hurled the question at her as if it were a missile. "In the next, oh, three days? Have you taken a look outside lately? The entropy created by Charybdis is wrecking this galaxy one planet at a time, and guess what? This one's next in line."

  "We only have your word for it that it's entropy or that it's even caused by this... Charybdis," Selena shot back. "And, by your own admission, you got it from some old hag who brews herbal teas for a living. Very sound scientific method, I must say."

  "Selena!" Radek interceded. "You mustn't underestimate..."

  It was the third time within the past two hours that the debate had arrived at this juncture, and Elizabeth didn't think she could take yet another rerun without starting to scream or throw things. She tuned out the voices and quietly slipped from the tent into what should have been dusk over this version of Atlantis.

  Except, you couldn't tell unless you had a watch and knew the time of day. The sky remained unchanged... No, that wasn't true, was it? The sky still was the same stomach-churning stew of reds, but, if anything, it had gotten worse, shot through with cankers of black, menacing and malignant, that belched great forks of heat lightning. A hot, violent wind had risen, chasing leaves, torn-off twigs, and small debris up the mountain before it. She squinted against the dust it whipped into her eyes, thinking that, maybe, the gale at least was a good thing. It might just help disperse the carbon monoxide that had pooled in and around the rift in the earth.

  The area was deserted now. As soon as the doctors had confirmed what had killed most of the people trapped in the chasm, a ragtag crew of police, firefighters, and soldiers, together with select volunteers, had cleared a wide strip of ground either side of the fault and declared it off-limits until further notice. Tamed by terror, the crowd had complied with the kind of listless docility she recalled seeing in the refugees from every war or disaster zone she'd ever visited. It was as if, after losing wherever they called home, any further evacuation merely served to numb them a little bit more, make them a little bit more indifferent to whatever misery would befall them next.

  They'd struck their camps, inasmuch as they'd had them, or else simply shouldered their belongings and trudged uphill to where they were supposedly safe and settled again. The mountainside was dotted with their campfires, small and struggling to survive in the wind, vanes of smoke slanted sharply. Elizabeth fancied she could feel their stares on her, some hostile, most expectant, hoping that, somehow, the strangers would work a miracle, open the Stargate, and lead them all to salvation. Part of her wanted to yell at them to stop staring and accept the inevitable.

  Just as she had to accept it.

  She had failed. John Sheppard, for once, had failed. That whole madcap scheme of somehow going back and making it all unhappen had failed. As a child she'd learned the hard way that, if you broke things because you were thoughtless or careless or both, you couldn't just turn the clock back and fix them, no matter how badly you wanted to. Somewhere along the line she'd allowed herself to forget that lesson, and back then it had only been a canary that hadn't withstood a week of I'll feed it tomorrow. This time it was a galaxy, a universe perhaps, and, on a less abstract level, all those people huddled around their choking little fires and their hope.

  Elizabeth wanted to scream.

  Instead, she whirled around to head back into the tent and almost collided with Radek. "It's getting a little stuffy and circular in there, isn't it?" His smile crinkled unfamiliar lines around his eyes. He was an old man. The realization forced another shudder from her, but if he'd noticed he didn't let on. "Don't let Selena get to you. She can be rather reluctant when it comes to wrapping her head around new ideas. But she's a good scientist. One of the best." A little proprietary pride there.

  She returned his smile. "I think anybody would have a hard time wrapping their head around this mess."

  "Yes." He fell silent and, just as Elizabeth had done earlier, gazed out at the blistered sky, the Stargate, and up at the refugees' new campsites. Finally he looked back at her. "Suppose we find a way and succeed in reversing Charybdis, what will happen to all these people here?"

  And how will you react when I tell you the truth? Like the other Radek in that other timeline?

  Stifling a gasp, Elizabeth searched for a palatable answer. It took too long.

  "I thought so," Radek murmured. "Selena suspects it, too, which is another reason for her reluctance."

  "And what about you, Radek?" she asked carefully, not sure if she wanted to hear his reply.

  "You mean will I react as... vehemently as my alter ego?"

  This time the gasp tore loose. "Colonel Sheppard told you?"

  Radek nodded. "He seemed unusually careful in talking to me. I confronted him. I agree that there was no point in keeping it a secret. That... man... he wasn't me, Dr. Weir."

  He could have fooled her, had fooled her, in fact, which was none of this Radek's fault.

  "Never mind," she said. "It was a difficult situation for all involved."

  "That is one way of putting it..." His eyebrows arched in wry amusement, then he sobered as his gaze wandered back to the evacuees. "I suppose some scientists would argue they're not real. They felt real enough to me for the past thirty years or so. They're good people, you know? The uni
verse will be poorer for their never having existed..." Radek sighed and segued to a seemingly unconnected train of thought. "Approximately a month ago our meteorologists discovered signs that the planet's atmosphere was breaking down at an exponential rate. They were working on finding a way of reversing the deterioration when all the rest of this started. The quakes destroyed most research facilities on the planet, which was when the government decided that evacuation was the only option. Except, they ran out of suitable ships inside a day, with eighty-five percent of the population still stranded here." He turned around to face her. "I guess what I'm saying is that, whatever happens, these people will cease to exist, and that disappearing in a flash is a kinder way to go than slowly suffocating in a toxic atmosphere."

  Breathing felt difficult enough even now, though Elizabeth wasn't sure if this was due to objective facts or the oppressive menace suggested by that sickly sky. Even that sliver of hope implicit in Zelenka's words did nothing to improve things. "How long?" she asked.

  "If it's going at the rate the meteorologists projected, we've got two days. Perhaps less"

  The sliver of hope imploded. "Two days?"

  "Perhaps less"

  She hated herself for asking, but it slipped out anyway. "What can you possibly achieve in two days that you couldn't in thirty-years?"

  Radek smiled a little. "More than you think maybe. Something happened when you and Colonel Sheppard came through the gate. It gave me an idea."

  CHAPTER 23

  Charybdis -908

  'hey were wading through bodies or so it seemed, but for all that the city was incongruously quiet now. That runaway train of fury had thundered its way up to the fortress to wreak whatever havoc it meant to wreak up there-or maybe to simply burst into flames, from its own rage or from the blaze that tore through the buildings perched on the hilltop. The fire was plainly visible now, and the water-logged night was lit up by a crimson halo that refracted in the raindrops like a shower of blood.