Mirror, Mirror

by Sabine C. Bauer

  Very poetic, Rodney. The shower of blood was one of the Plagues of Egypt, if I understand your bizarre mythology correctly. Who is Egypt?

  "Not who. What," Rodney replied tiredly. "It's a country. Now shut up "

  "Excuse me?" Right ahead of him, Teyla turned around, forcing him to stop. Her head was cocked, face lifted his way, blind eyes gazing just past his.

  It was disconcerting. Was she trying to keep up appearances or was it old habit? And just when and how had she lost her sight anyway? He'd never found time to ask.

  Maybe it's a topic for a nice fireside chat, Ikaros suggested acidly. Always provided that big brute out front'll ever let us rest, of course.

  This time Rodney remembered not to voice his answer. That was habit, for sure. Speaking out loud. Like normal people would. People who didn't have adolescent prodigies stuck in their heads. Why him, dammit?

  I said `Shut up!' Rodney hissed silently. And I can't see why you would need a rest. You're not the one doing the walking. Not to mention the acrobatics or the climbing over heaps of corpses.

  The latter wasn't a hyperbole. Or at least not much of one. You didn't have to be a genius to tell that the battle for the city gate had been vicious. Brutal and primitive, just like the weapons used.

  When they'd finally reached the gate, the fighting had been over and the passage under the archway littered with bodies; some of them peasants or dwellers of the shantytown, but mostly guards-killed by whatever means the panicked multitudes had found handy. Though well past the gate now, Rodney thought he could still smell the sweet, coppery stink of death. It clung to the rags he was wearing, to his hair, his skin, and it made him gag.

  "Rodney?" Teyla renewed her badgering.

  "Fine. Fine. Why can't I just think out loud like everybody else, huh? And why wouldn't I be fine? I mean, look at it!" he added, pointing at the vista ahead, realizing too late that she wouldn't be able to see what he meant. He flushed with embarrassment, grateful that she couldn't see that either. Another habit, pointing. He couldn't help it. It was normal. When you were trying to show people something, you pointed, right?

  God, she probably thought he was cracked.

  Maybe they should just switch topics. Talk about something harmless. Recipes. Hair care, maybe.

  Ahead, in the middle of what was left of the street, their intrepid leader, Ronon, had ground to a halt, arms stiff, fists balled as if he were trying to contain... what? Fear? Outrage? Despair? Any of the above was appropriate given the sight, brilliantly illuminated by the conflagrations that were spreading all over the city.

  Past Ronon stretched a seemingly endless expanse of black, churning water, still lapping higher with every passing moment. Most of the shantytown was gone, washed away and drowned as though it had never existed. Racing too swiftly, the flood hadn't even left any token debris bobbing on the surface to mark the place where a few thousand people had lived and, in their majority, died.

  Ronon spun around, stared at them, and for the first time since he'd met the man-upside down, as it happened, Rodney being strung up by his ankles-Rodney McKay saw something like defeat in his eyes.

  "We've got to find a way of crossing the river," Ronon said, not sounding as if he remotely believed in the likelihood of such a contingency.

  For once Rodney agreed, with the sentiment if not with the half-baked notion of paddling across... that. They'd simply have to wait. The Stargate didn't work anyway, so what did a few days matter? Surely the rain would stop eventually and the water levels would fall to something less life-threatening, wouldn't they?

  Don't be an ass, Rodney! You know exactly what's going on. Or at least you sense it if you don't believe what I've been tell- ingyou for days now Charybdis is doing this, and it wont, stop. Not until we're all dead. Until you're dead. You're the key.

  "What key?" he yelped, not caring who heard him. Who'd died and made him the Ringbearer, anyway? "Look, keys are things I lose. They have this habit of getting away from me, so I don't think it's a good idea at all to-"

  "Rodney." Teyla's hand clasped his shoulder, oddly reassuring, as if she were anchoring him somehow. "Rodney, let us talk to Ikaros."

  So much for reassurance.

  "Are you crazy?" The Satedan slugger seemed to feel the same way. That was twice inside five minutes. A little disconcerting, if you asked Rodney, but nobody did.

  "Ikaros is here," Teyla observed casually. "He is with Rodney."

  "Figures. Always thought McKay was possessed." Ronon took a few steps forward, and peered over Rodney's shoulder at Teyla. "If I break his neck, I'll kill that bastard Ikaros?" He sounded altogether too hopeful.

  "Ronon!" murmured Teyla. "This isn't helping. We need to find out what Ikaros knows."

  Muttering something crude, Ronon backed off, clearing the view of the river. Rodney could have done without the reminder and stared dismally at a large, dark shape, twisting and bucking and groaning as eddies and undertow spiraled it downstream. The shivering gleam of the fires in the city and on the fortress painted unsteady red highlights on weather-grayed wood. It was a barn, or half of one, long emptied of its inhabitants and spinning sluggishly downriver. Rodney tried to make sure there weren't any decomposing cows floating past and suddenly felt himself drift out of control.

  "I'll oblige in a second," Ikaros said brightly, using Rodney's voice, using Rodney's arm to point at the bam. "I think right now we should try to catch the boat. The next one might be a while in coming."

  "What?" Ronon turned back to the swollen river, understood instantly. "Move it!"

  Teyla followed blindly-to coin a phrase-spurred by complete faith in Ronon, if not the presence she'd sensed inside of Rodney. The water seized her like a vise, brutally cold, as cold as the stream in her cave, she thought, gasping, and wondered in some distant corner of her awareness how many thousand years ago or from now that might have been or would be. What she could feel of her body was numb and clumsy and wanted to shrink into a nutshell just to escape from the breathtaking cold. She couldn't say whether her hands and feet were moving, maybe they did, maybe they didn't, she ordered them to keep kicking, paddling, she knew that much. But it wasn't enough. Soaked with water, her clothes were too heavy. Shaking, panting, flailing, she coaxed her fingers to reach for her throat, unclasp her cloak.

  They slipped, then an eddy grabbed her, pulled her under, whipped her into a helpless spin. She thrashed against the tow, no longer knowing which way was up, water burning in her lungs, fabric heavy as lead throttling her, her arms and legs aching with the effort, slowing. Slowing. An insidious voice in her mind whispered that there was no point in struggling, that letting go would be so much kinder, simpler. She listened to the siren song, conceding its rightness, relishing the ease of it, allowed herself to sink, and-

  If she screamed, she'd breathe in water, which would seal her fate, so she channeled her fury into renewed motion. She was Teyla Emmagan, she was a warrior, and she would not go out like this. Not like some unwanted whelp tossed into a pond to drown and knowing no better than to give in. When the time came she would go out fighting, but now wasn't the time. She hadn't decreed it yet.

  Forcing frozen limbs back into motion, she kicked and clawed away from the maelstrom, not sure whether she was heading up or down, but away at least, away. It had been up. Coughing and choking, she broke the surface and burst into sore-throated laughter when an oxygen-starved starburst of sparks showered through black nothing. Of all the things to see...

  The wisp of amusement flew apart like the sparks when realization struck. The black nothing was still there, behind that starburst, and the current had spun her round and round and head over heel. She had no idea where the others were, where she needed to go or how to orient herself.

  Stay afloat.

  She'd be washed up somewhere, take things from there.

  Stay afloat.

  Stay-

  Something snatched her cloak, hard, and her first reaction was panic and the instinct to
tear free. If she'd gotten snagged on a piece of debris, the river could drag her wherever it-

  "For God's sake, don't fight me! I've got you!" Rodney. "I've got you," he wheezed again, reeled her in on her cloak as if she were a catch of fish, and pressed her against a scrawny sixteen-year-old chest. "Contrary to the behavioral tendencies of my current age group I'm not trying to cop a feel," he spluttered. "So bear with me "

  It punctured her panic like nothing else could have. She half imagined she could feel a hot flush of embarrassment rising from his skin-imaginary or not, the warmth was welcome-and smiled, oddly convinced by a sense of safety. With strong, stubborn kicks and strokes, Rodney steered them in a direction she probably wouldn't have taken on her own, but then, on her own she'd likely have swum in circles. Suddenly she heard a differ ent sound over the roar of the river; the groan of timber joints pulled and pushed by the current to within an inch of breaking. She also heard what sounded like rushed footfalls, then a thump and the dry splintering of wood, and a string of curses.

  "Watch where you're stepping!" Rodney yelled, making her ears ring.

  Scrabbling noises, accompanied by cussing, and then Ronon shouted, "Teyla! Reach up!"

  She flung up an arm, gasped as calloused fingers snapped around her wrist and pulled, threatening to tear her shoulder from its socket. A splintery wooden edge dug into her bel- ly-eaves?-and she found purchase there with her free hand and pushed herself up, anything to ease the strain on her arm. Shingles under her fingertips, rain slick and mossy, but enough were cracked or missing to hold on. Between Ronon's and her efforts, she rolled out of the water and up onto the roof at last and lay there panting, struggling to control the shivers that all but shook her bone from bone.

  The roof heaved under her, dipped a fraction, as Ronon leaned further over the edge to haul in Rodney. She didn't stir, merely listened to the now familiar scrabbling, a curse or two, Rodney's groans, a couple of heavy thuds that marked success. The two men had slumped onto the shingles, and for a while all she heard were their harsh breaths, her own coughing, the creak of strained wood, and the ferocious bellow of the river.

  Finally, the coughs eased to occasional hiccups, her lungs hurt a little less, and Teyla was able to draw enough breath to speak. "Thank you, Rodney."

  "You're welcome. Feel free to mention my conspicuous heroism whenever you see fit." There was a pause during which he spluttered up what sounded like a pint of water. "I don't suppose anybody had the foresight to bring a thermos with hot soup? Something hearty. Chicken noodle, maybe. I haven't exactly been stuffing myself lately, so if you want to ensure my continued functioning, you'd better-"

  "McKay!" Ronon's deep voice cut through the diatribe like a knife. "You were going to explain Ikaros."

  "Nothing I'd rather do."

  Eavesdropping was childish and frowned-upon, but Teyla couldn't help it. She sensed reluctance, resentment, fear too, and a stirring of the presence inside Rodney as it slowly, embarrassed almost, rose to the surface. No doubt in her mind that this was, in fact, Ikaros. It bled all the awkwardness and anger of a teenager, and this one was angrier than most, and for good reason probably. A lot of the anger was directed at itself, not that it would ever admit that.

  "Rodney was right in trying to stop me," it said. "Unfortunately the way he went about it was more than usually asinine."

  As it spoke with Rodney's voice, she saw the images unfolding in its mind. Those last moments on Mykena Quattuor, Ikaros joining with his creation in a column of swirling light, and Rodney sailing through air and into that light in an attempt to prevent what had been inevitable already. She also felt the merging of entities, Ikaros and Rodney, both terrified by what was happening to them, and a third...

  "Charybdis is with you?" she croaked, vaguely registering that she sounded almost as terrified as Rodney and Ikaros had felt. As well she might. If it was true, then nothing either Rodney or Ikaros told them could be trusted, because the one trait that marked the Charybdis entity was an all-consuming will to survive, no matter what the cost.

  "Yes," said Ikaros. "And it's getting stronger. It's attempting to... stop us from resetting events."

  Ikaros didn't say kill us, but that was what it-he-had meant.

  Ronon didn't quite stifle a growl. "You mean you knew that thing was sentient when you let it loose?"

  "I didn't know!"

  "But you suspected." The silence that followed proclaimed that Ronon had stumbled upon the truth. "McKay was right. We should have fried your circuits."

  "Can you repeat that?" This was Rodney rather than Ikaros.

  "We should have fried-"

  "No. The other bit. The part where you said McKay was right."

  "Fine. You were right. Does it make a difference?"

  "It might, the next time."

  "If we don't reach the Stargate and get off this planet, there won't be a next time "

  Ominously, there was no reply.

  Teyla scraped a handful of rain off her face, absently thinking that this didn't make a difference either, given how soaked they were. "Rodney?"

  When he finally spoke, he sounded beaten, and it wasn't just the crushing exhaustion they all suffered. "Get off this planet? That's your master plan?" He gave a sour laugh. "I suppose it struck you as the least stupid out of a staggering number of pisspoor options, but where exactly do you think we'll be going?" Some shuffling indicated that he must have sat up. "Assuming that the ZPM I found is still functional and that I'll be able to reconnect the dialing console, you do realize that we'll never get off the planet, don't you? All the gate will do is flip us into a different timeline, which, judging by our combined experiences, will probably be worse than this.

  "Of course we can then repeat the process and visit other timelines ad infinitum." Rodney sighed. "Ikaros has a theory. In the simplest of terms, Charybdis has enabled the Stargate system to let an infinite number of CTCs intersect with a Cauchy surface. There's-"

  "Can't trust anything Ikaros says," Ronon cut in. "Even if I understood it "

  He was right, and Teyla's own instinct was not to trust either of them, but the notion that they'd been bounced through time rather than space made some sense at least. "What is that, CTCs?" she asked.

  "Closed timelike curves." There was impatience swinging in Rodney's voice. "In a CTC time bends back on itself. Think rollercoaster-" He stopped himself, his frown audible. "On second thought, don't think rollercoaster. I don't really want to have to clear that up as well. Time runs in a loop, endlessly. Which, coincidentally, would explain-"

  "Why you're sixteen and I was over seventy in my timeline," she finished for him. "Our ages are all over the place, but using the Stargate readjusts them."

  "Yes. Thank you. That never would have occurred to me," he snarled. "So, as I was saying, trying to activate the gate won't get us anywhere."

  "Got us here in time to save your neck," Ronon observed dryly. "And Teyla found me. Gate works just fine if you've got the DNA of the person you want to hook up with."

  "You had my DNA? How? Not that I'm nosy or anything... His tone shifted abruptly. Ikaros resurfaced with a snort. "DNA? That's a bit pedestrian, though the general idea has some merit. In actual fact it's the unique combination of quantum states characterizing an individual that the gate system recognizes. A similar concept, I grant you, but- For God's sake!" Rodney again. "Does it matter? I want to know how they came by my... quantum states."

  A shuffling noise indicated that Ronon was moving. He shuffled some more, then there was a yelp of disgust from Rodney, and Ronon said, "Thumbs up for perception."

  She understood then and a small, desperate urge to laugh did battle with revulsion and won, hands down, when she conceived the mental image. He must have still kept the alternate Rodney's pickled ear in his pocket, forgotten until this moment.

  "That is revolting!" yelped Rodney, followed by a breath of relief Apparently someone-either he himself or Ronon-had tossed the offending body part into t
he river. "Where did you get it?"

  "Don't worry. He didn't scream.

  "Didn't scream?"

  "He was dead."

  "You might try sounding a little less amused!"

  "I might," Ronon conceded, sounding unrepentant.

  His words half drowned in the labored groan of tearing wood. An eddy had grabbed the roof and yanked it into a violent series of jounces. A bone-rattling impact, and a few moments of utter stillness. Then the joints burst, shrieking in protest, and their precarious raft shot forward again.

  "Whatever you do, don't move!" bellowed Ronon. "And hold tight!"

  Needlessly. Lying motionless, barely daring to breathe, Teyla held on for dear life, feeling the list of the structure, feeling that it wanted to capsize and would if they so much as shifted a millimeter.

  "Hold tight!" Ronon yelled again.

  The warning came a scant heartbeat before the second impact, this one brutal enough to break her grip and hurl her off the roof. Tumbling through thin air, she instinctively curled into a ball, arms wrapped around her head to protect her neck and skull, and braced herself for another bath in freezing water. Instead she struck unforgiving rock and began sliding through dense undergrowth back towards the river. Dazed, she clutched for a handhold. Thorns and brambles ripped through her fingers, tearing skin. She tightened her grip, oblivious to the pain, and finally eased to a standstill. For what seemed like an eternity she simply lay there, winded, while the rain hammered down on her.

  Little by little the roaring in her ears ceased, and she heard shouts. Ronon, calling her name, again and again.

  "I'm here! Ronon! Here!"

  From above came the crackle and snap of breaking branches, and a small avalanche of pebbles and soil trodden loose peppered her face. He found her wrists, clenched his fists around them, and pulled her to her feet and up the cliff.

  "Where is Rodney?" she croaked.

  "Right here. Not doing so good, though." Ronon eased her to the ground, muttering. "At least we're on the right side of the river. Probably by accident. I swear Charybdis is out to get us."