Mirror, Mirror

by Sabine C. Bauer

  "Charybdis is out to kill us," wheezed Rodney. "Or me at least." He started coughing, a horrible, gurgling hack that seemed to get worse by the second.

  "Crap! " growled Ronon. "You're coughing up blood, McKay."

  CHAPTER 24

  Charybdis -223

  hatever it was the local physician had given him, it kept his headache within tolerable proportions. Or maybe he simply was getting better, though looking back on the last few days-or millennia, who knew?-John Sheppard wasn't willing to bet on the latter. If they ever returned to their Atlantis, Dr. Beckett would have a field day.

  The local doc, confronted with several dozen victims from the rift, had been as sanguine about treating John as John had been about being treated, and so, by tacit agreement, the therapy had boiled down to the universal Take an aspirin and call me in the morning. Which was fine by both of them, except John was less than confident that there actually would be a morning.

  "It's getting worse," said Zelenka. He was riding shotgun, staring through the jumper's viewport and at the travesty that pretended to be a sky.

  Worse was an understatement, if John had ever heard one. The atmospheric color scheme had changed to a moldy ochre streaked with black, successfully suggesting something not even remotely breathable. That was one thing. The other, and presumably the one that had grabbed Zelenka's attention, was a large bird of prey straight ahead. The raptor, an eagle or near enough, flapped drunkenly, clearly straining to maintain altitude. Suddenly it went limp and plummeted in a mess of splayed wings and swirling feathers.

  "This isn't good," murmured Zelenka. "Not good at all."

  "Funny you should say that..." John grunted, glumly watching a second bird drop just a little off to the east from where the first had died of an atmosphere turning to poison. "How long do you think we've got?"

  "Difficult to say." Zelenka leaned back into his seat. "I'm guessing it depends on tissue saturation, which in turn would be dependent on body weight. That bird had what? Thirteen pounds`? Fourteen?"

  "Sounds about right."

  "The average weight of a person is a little over ten times that. You're good at mathematics. You figure it out." Another sigh. "The little ones will go first. Soon."

  "Then we'll just have to hurry up, won't we?" John tried to inject it with as much optimism as he could muster, which wasn't a hell of a lot.

  Zelenka didn't dignify it with an answer, which John took as a request to goose the jumper into a speed that pushed its safety margins, particularly considering that the pilot's vision got a bit blurry every now and again. Obviously aspirin didn't fix that. Well known fact.

  As the jumper leaped forward, the two technicians in the rear compartment stirred nervously and steadied various items of equipment they considered breakable and/or indispensable. John adjusted the inertial dampeners a fraction, to make sure that they'd get their booty up to the mountain camp in one piece. Whether it'd do any good there was a different question.

  The previous evening's powwow had ended without a consensus, unless you counted an agreement to disagree. Zelenka's girlfriend, Selena, still insisted on finding a way of scrubbing the planet's entire atmosphere, while Radek, perhaps for not entirely altruistic reasons, was just as adamant about getting the gate to work. It put a certain strain on the relationship to say the least, especially when Zelenka had shanghaied their two technicians to retrieve a bunch of equipment from the city.

  If you could still call it a city. John had seen a fair share of destruction, but never on that scale, except maybe in a movie. As a matter of fact, he'd doubted they'd find anything useable. Surprisingly, the building that housed the lab had been relatively intact if all but inaccessible the conventional way. That problem, however, had been one of the easier ones to solve; Zelenka had directed him to the right floor, and John had put the jumper into a hover outside a huge shattered window. The whole salvage operation had taken less than three hours to accomplish.

  Now they had a pile of electronic gadgetry John couldn't readily identify, but the fact that the two geeks had gone into paroxysms of delight over it probably was cause for cautious optimism. They also had not one, but two ZPMs, which, as Rodney had never tired of pointing out, was A Very Good Thing.

  Of course, it also could turn out to be the equivalent of owning an oil refinery but no car to drive...

  Ahead the foothills sloped up into ochre twilight; you'd never have guessed that it was midmorning. In the evacuee camp a timid collection of campfires seemed to dim at the same rate as the people around them ran out of air to breathe. And maybe that impression wasn't entirely subjective-fires needed oxygen to bum.

  Clenching his jaws, John reduced the jumper's speed, and banked into a gentle curve for the approach to the solitary tent some two hundred meters below the main camp. Security forces had set up a perimeter, and along it a handful of grayfaced people still stood staring, either to catch a glimpse of the strangers who'd come through the gate or to gawk at that great big hole in the ground that had opened up the day before. From the air the fault looked like a vicious gash, as if someone had attacked the earth with a giant broken-off beer bottle. At its top end the Stargate perched like an undecided suicide on a rooftop. And here was hoping that between them they'd manage to talk it down... so to speak and always provided they were left with enough air to talk or do anything.

  The onlookers had spotted the approach of the jumper and were pointing, expectation and hope rolling off them in waves. Their shouts alerted Elizabeth and Selena, who came running down from the main camp where they'd been assisting the evacuees and generally trying to keep people calm. Even from up here John could tell that the exertion left them panting for breath. He winced.

  "It's happening too fast."

  "We have time," Zelenka assured him quietly. "Not much, but we still have time."

  John set the jumper down within a few feet of the tent-no use hauling the equipment any further than they absolutely had to. The rear hatch slid open, letting a thick metallic smell pervade the interior. He'd first noticed it in the city, but this was far more intense. A moment later his lungs felt as if they were squeezed in a vise.

  "You were saying?" he murmured.

  Zelenka had gone pale with shock. "I didn't think it was that bad yet."

  "Yeah, well. I guess we ought to hurry up."

  "Dr. Zelenka?" one of the geeks said from the back.

  Radek turned around. "What?"

  "Perhaps it's advisable to set up in here. It would save time, and I understand that the ship has a device that allows it to improve the air quality."

  The man had a point, though John couldn't help suspecting that there was a pinch of self-preservation involved as well. He exchanged a quick look with Zelenka, who shook his head. "We have to have access to both the Stargate and the dialing console. Besides, I don't think those people up there would take it quietly if they saw us holing up inside the jumper."

  Zelenka had a point, too. They could all do without another run on the ship, which was virtually guaranteed to happen the moment the evacuees so much as suspected that they were trying to barricade themselves.

  Not happy but willing to bow to reason-for now-the geeks gave identical dejected nods and began to unload.

  Half an hour later, the computers were up and running and connected to the mysterious gadgetry, and Zelenka sat hunched over a keyboard, a still cranky Selena hovering by his shoulder. If John had correctly understood the tirade she'd launched at Radek as soon as she'd entered the tent, she now was pissed that they'd defied her bleak predictions and returned from the city alive. The geeks scurried, obeying murmured orders, pulling wires, and calibrating things.

  John was itching for some way to make himself useful, if only to take his mind off the deepening nightmare outside, but there was no more flying or commanding or general soldiering to be done. He had to hand over the reins, and if he was perfectly honest about it, the loss of control bothered him as much anything else.

&nb
sp; "How long will it take?" Elizabeth had appeared by his side like a ghost. Dark smudges under her eyes made her look tired and wan, and he couldn't say if it was fatigue or the lack of oxygen. Probably both. Her breath came in short, shallow bursts.

  "No idea." He went for a smile. "Considering that Radek's been working on this for the past three decades, I figure he's due for a breakthrough... oh, within the next ten minutes or so."

  "Let's hope you're right." Her answering smile was as unconvincing as his own must have been. "The doctors up in the camp have set up oxygen stations. They're limiting supplies to the elderly and the children, but it's still not going to last long."

  The little ones will go first. Soon.

  He stared at Zelenka's back, willing the scientist to work faster. As if in response, Radek looked up at one of the geeks, nodded wordlessly. The man-John had been told his name and promptly forgotten it, because there were only so many details his head could process right now-pushed past them out of the tent and toward the dialing console that stood a couple dozen meters up the slope. The crowd along the perimeter stirred, murmuring and expectant. The Stargate, shrouded in unnatural gloom, seemed to share their expectation.

  A little hesitant at first, the technician dialed an address, and there were more murmurs as the chevrons lit up one by one. The wormhole established alright, but the event horizon oozed outward sluggishly; a large ferocious animal objecting to being awakened. An off-color animal.

  "What in God's name is that?" Elizabeth whispered.

  "Propanakrale!" yelped Zelenka, and John assumed that, whatever it meant, it echoed his own and Elizabeth's reactions.

  Viscous black and orange swirls pumped through what should have been a clear blue, watery surface, as if they were trying to mirror the sickly colors of the sky. The whole arrangement conveyed the distinct impression that it was damaging to a person's health. If the gate had looked like this when Dr. Jackson first opened it, nobody in their right mind would have gone through, no matter how intriguing the prospect of intergalactic travel.

  "What is this, Radek?" Elizabeth asked again.

  "It's..." The syllable seemed to get stuck somehow, and he cleared his throat and tried again. "It must be Charybdis. It's entropic effects are beginning to disrupt the space time continuum. I never thought it would progress this quickly." His fingers danced over the keyboard, chasing graphs and figures across the monitor screen. At last the images froze. "There! You see, recent data had made me suspect that something was causing the Stargate system to operate through time rather than space. This shows that it's definitely happening. Every time you dial coordinates, you will reach a different timeline, not a different location."

  "But that's..." Elizabeth shook her head. "Radek, God knows I'm no scientist, but that seems to be a huge leap to me. We're talking about time travel here, and even the Ancients"-she shot a quick glance at Selena and amended-"I mean our Ancients, weren't able to get a handle on that. The machine they built never worked properly."

  "You're right." Zelenka's sudden enthusiasm suggested that, at least for the moment, he'd clean forgotten about the mess they were in. Lucky man. "And I even think the Ancients' tampering accelerated the spread of the disease that apparently killed them all. Basically they must have caused a similar problem to what we're looking at here; entropy, only on a vastly reduced scale."

  Weir tried again. "But-"

  "On a quantum level," said Zelenka, answering her initial question, "time is immaterial. Everything happens instantaneously. You might say that dimensions as we define them don't exist. At the very least they don't matter. So it's not a big leap at all between space and time-or between the Stargate as a means of intergalactic travel and the Stargate as a time machine. What I can't explain is why the wormhole did transport you when it won't transport other travelers. It could be some kind of safeguard against the Grandfather Paradox, in which case it may be possible to circumvent it, although-"

  It started as a soft growl, gradually overlaid with a brighter rattle as the tent, the equipment, the world at large began to shake. The term death knell leaped into John's mind, and he couldn't shake it off again. Selena's shout broke through the noise.

  "Shut it down! Radek! Disengage the wormhole! Look!" She was staring, horror-struck, at a different monitor, the one that showed a breakdown of the atmospheric composition. There were spikes and troughs, denoting elements, and some of those spikes-no idea what they stood for; chemistry wasn't John's thing-were climbing unchecked even as they looked. "It's the Stargate! The Stargate is poisoning the atmosphere"

  It sure looked like it, though in actual fact it probably was more complicated than that. If John had understood Zelenka's theory correctly, then there was a chance that any activation of the gate would speed up the entropy-just like the fault had opened up almost immediately after he and Elizabeth had arrived here. In plain English that meant the Stargate made stuff worse.

  Obviously Zelenka agreed. His hand slammed down on a small peripheral switch, and that orange and black obscenity collapsed in on itself. The relentless climb of the spikes on the monitor slowed to a crawl. Not so the tremors. Once stirred, the earth would keep going until it was finished, John supposed. Except-

  He was already running before anyone else had recovered from their shock. Shouts of surprise slid off his back like water, and he leaped out of the way of the geek who approached the tent on a collision course with him. The rear hatch of the jumper still stood open, which was a small blessing. A few seconds saved right there. He slapped the hatch release racing past, barely hearing the hum of the closing door as he flung himself into the pilot's seat. Coming to life at a mere thought, the small ship lifted off, and turned its nose toward the gate.

  Along the edges of his vision streaked the people at the perimeter, hands clapped over open mouths in that universal gesture of frightened astonishment and incomprehension, but John's attention was riveted on the gate itself and the bizarre dance it had begun. At first it had been a mere shudder, but now the large metal ring was hopping and shaking itself into a fullblown rumba, working loose from its fastenings and slowly tilting forward.

  It could have keeled backward just as easily, but of course that would have meant things were actually going in their favor. Duh!

  John gave an angry little grunt. This would be interesting, to say the least. How much did a Stargate weigh? He was sure that the exact tonnage could be found in some manual or other, or that somebody must have mentioned it in the course of those endless briefings prior to the departure of the Atlantis expedition, but right now nothing sprang to mind. So it probably was as good a time as any to find out how powerful the upward thrust on those jumpers really was... and he'd better find out while he still had some leverage to speak of.

  Careful to avoid putting unnecessary pressure on a chevron and potentially damaging the mechanism, he nosed the bow of the jumper against the upper curve of the gate. For a fraction of a second he achieved a precarious balance; the Stargate steadied and ceased its wobble, then it started to lean on the jumper, weighing it down, making its hull groan and forcing its bow downward.

  "Son of a..." John hissed between clenched teeth, resisting the temptation of just stepping on the gas and knocking the damn thing the other way.

  Instead he opened the throttle a fraction at a time, trying not to think of what lay below and what his chances of survival would be if the jumper took a nosedive and ended up at the bottom of the ravine with a Stargate on top. The engines shrieked with the strain, and a battery of warnings lit up the HUD like a Christmas tree. John felt sweat pouring down his neck and back-the ultimate in absurd, as it wasn't him doing any of the lifting. Then, agonizingly slowly, the Stargate reversed its motion, still pressing down heavily, but rising and, at least for the moment, safe despite the quake rattling on around it.

  Eventually a faint, final tremor rumbled its last, and John risked relaxing cramped shoulders and various other parts of his anatomy. Other than almost top
pling the Stargate, the quake seemed to have done very little damage. Their lab tent was still standing, so was the awning over the dialing console. Along the safety perimeter, people who'd dived to the ground rose, dusted themselves off sheepishly. In the evacuee camp above folks were dousing minor conflagrations and beginning an equally minor cleanup.

  So far, so good.

  Just as he was about to let out a sigh of relief, two things occurred to him: a) he and the jumper were stuck here for the duration, and b) in the unlikely event that anybody should take it into their heads to dial out, he and the jumper were toast.

  Charybdis -908

  "How is he doing?" Teyla asked between gasps.

  "Same as before," replied Ronon without losing his stride-such as it was.

  The trek up from the river valley back to the farmlands and beyond to the ruins of Atlantis had proved a gold-plated nightmare. He'd carried Rodney all the way, counting his blessings; Charybdis could have seen fit to turn McKay into a morbidly obese middle-aged slob instead of a scrawny teenager. That aside, he was still alive. Heavy as lead, his body relaxed in unconsciousness, but alive. Ronon had carried enough corpses to be able to tell the difference.

  Day had broken a while ago, diffidently and without adding much in the way of light, and it was still raining. In other words, they were still wet as drowned rats, but at least they were warm now, muscles burning from the exertion. They'd seen hardly anybody on the road; a handful of youngsters driving cattle and an old man on an ox-drawn cart. Each time they'd ducked into the bushes by the roadside and waited until the traffic was out of sight; precaution as much as necessary rest.

  For the past hour or so, ever since they'd passed the last farm in the valley, there'd been no further encounters. Ronon was picking his way carefully, trying to spare McKay any unnecessary jolts or, worse, a fall. The footing was treacherous, slippery with mud and uneven with roots and rocks, but at least they were somewhat sheltered from the rain and, more importantly, from any prying eyes. Other than their own harsh breathing, the only sounds now were the soft tap-tap of raindrops sliding from branches, the occasional crack of a branch trodden on, and here and there the rustle of a small animal scurrying through the undergrowth.