Mirror, Mirror

by Sabine C. Bauer

  Instead of a cool, scintillating blue, the event horizon leered at them dark crimson, reminding Rodney of nothing so much as a pool of burgundy-or blood. Either way the prospect of stepping into it was less than enticing.

  "What is it?" whispered Teyla.

  "The wormhole..." Dex cleared his throat, hedging for words. "Looks... different. Red. McKay?"

  Oh, that's right! Just leave it to good old Rodney to explain the mysteries of the universe at the drop of a hat. And never mind that he's at death's door. In more ways than one, by the looks of it...

  Go! Ikaros yelled. You have to go now!

  "I'm not going to-"

  Ifyou don't go, it's over! Charybdis will win!

  Doubts and scenarios tumbled through his mind, hot and fuzzy like socks in the dryer, but it always boiled down to the same thing: there was no other option. In a few seconds the wormhole, sickly or not, would shut down and slam the door in their faces for good.

  "I know," he rasped. "I know. Ikaros says go, and for once I agree with him. We don't have a choice"

  Dex lobbed him a double take, nicely executed. "You sure?"

  "No! Who do you think I am? God? Go anyway!"

  "You'd better be right about this..." With this resounding vote of confidence, the Satedan hauled and pushed them toward the gate and into that menacing sea of red.

  Instead of that short, sharp shock followed by oblivion, Rodney had a sense of melting and being pulled in all direc tions in a slow-motion, alien-tech rendition of some medieval torture rack. He thought he heard screams-Ronon, Teyla, perhaps Ikaros, perhaps himself-and bubbling through the screams came a single word burned into his mind in neon letters: redshf. He thought he was staring at it, puzzled in that moment before it all made sense, and then, blessedly, consciousness winked out.

  CHAPTER 25

  Charybdis -223

  lizabeth Weir dragged the back of her hand across her forehead, wiping off sweat for what felt like the hundredth time in the past hour. If she had any sense, she'd give up trying to figure out whether it was the claustrophobic lack of fresh air, or the oppressive colors of the sky, or factually rising temperatures, or a combination of all of the above. Fact of the matter was, knowing the reasons wouldn't stop her clothes from sticking to limbs leaden with fatigue and hypoxia. Fact of the matter also was that, as long as she managed to ponder such trivia, she wouldn't be contemplating the current state of affairs and cursing her own inability to change it.

  "Bring it down! Carefully!" Radek Zelenka stood by the dialing console, waving his arms like a conductor.

  His symphony orchestra consisted of two ground gliders and a handful of volunteers engaged in constructing a sturdy timber frame to stabilize the Stargate, which was still resting precariously on the bow of Jumper One. Behind the viewport Elizabeth could make out John Sheppard's face, a pale speck in the darkness of the cockpit. He would be flying the jumper manually, she suspected, compensating with minute movements of the stick for the tremors that still rocked the ground at irregular intervals and preventing the gate-and himself-from toppling into the rift.

  Ever since she'd watched him steer the jumper between the fault and the falling gate she'd been torn between anger and admiration. Anger still had the upper hand. It had been a quintessential Sheppard move, utterly reckless and without any regard for consequences other than the glaringly obvious. Yes, he'd saved the gate-for now at least-but chances were he'd been saving nothing but a completely useless piece of technol ogy. They had no DNA `key' that would allow them to leave, not to mention that any activation of the gate would only precipitate the death of the planet. In other words, he was putting his life and the only jumper they had at risk for what currently was a great big ring of dangerous waste.

  Right now Elizabeth would have given a great deal for a radio and the chance to read Colonel Sheppard the riot act. Again.

  And maybe that, too, was merely a way of distracting herself.

  "Slowly! Hold it there!" Radek shouted. "No! Right there."

  The difference between there and right there probably was less than an inch. Elizabeth bit back a smile. This was the Radek Zelenka she remembered, an improbable mixture of quietly meticulous and excitable.

  Suspended from the glider he'd been guiding in hung a giant `A that would form the still missing side of the support frame. Its legs gently touched the ground, bobbed a little, scaring up a cloud of dust, slid into pre-dug holes and settled. Two of the volunteers began to shovel dirt into the holes, tramping down on the soil to compact it around the legs of the frame. It struck her as an absurdly primitive way of salvaging something as advanced as the Stargate, but Radek had assured her it would hold. Probably. For a while at least, certainly long enough to get Sheppard and his jumper out from under the crushing pressure of the gate.

  More volunteers were clambering up the frame now, bolting gravity clamps to the top of the contraption, seemingly indifferent to the bizarre contrast between the rough and ready timber frame and the high-tech devices that were supposed to hold the Stargate. Whatever worked... There were no other viable options, at least none that didn't involve threading stuff through the rings-which would be useless the second the gate was activated; the vortex of an establishing wormhole instantly vaporized everything it touched.

  The leader of the volunteers directed a glance at Radek, received a brisk nod and a thumbs up. "It looks good! We'll calibrate as soon as-"

  "Radek! What in the name of sanity are you doing?" Selena had shot from the tent, somewhere between concerned and furious, hollering at the top of her lungs.

  Afterwards, Elizabeth wouldn't be able to say if it was Selena who'd alerted her or the familiar blue glow that glinted from the outer ring of the gate as the first of the chevrons came to life. She felt herself go numb with shock and vaguely registered that some of the noise she heard were her own screams.

  "It wasn't us! We didn't dial out!" Radek yelled at Selena, then spun around, wide-eyed, to shout at the volunteers. "Get down! Get downnow!" He whirled back. "Selena! The clamps! Activate the clamps!"

  The third chevron locked and lit up on the Stargate, and the woman simply stood there like a doe in the headlights. Suddenly, with a shudder that racked her entire body, Selena snapped from her trance, wheeled around and disappeared into the tent. Within moments, red indicator lights flared up on the clamps and the whine of the jumper's overworked engines dropped in pitch by a couple of notes. Elizabeth risked sucking in a breath, if only because it stopped her from chewing her nails. Five chevrons.

  "For God's sake, Colonel, get out of there! That's an order!" Even as she shouted it, she knew he couldn't hear her. Or, if by some acoustic accident he had heard, would later claim he hadn't. If there was a later...

  Jumper One began backing away from the gate, a fraction of an inch at a time, until Elizabeth wanted to climb up there and push. The clamps held, but the wooden construction groaned under the strain, as did the men hanging on to the ropes that had yet to be fastened to poles driven into the slope and intended to counterbalance the weight of the Stargate. By the time the sixth chevron lit up, you could actually see clear space between the bow of the jumper and the gate, but the ship was still well within reach of the vortex. Now it just hovered, as if holding its breath. Everybody was, it seemed, watching and waiting to see whether the Stargate would stand. And then the seventh chevron locked.

  The jumper shot up and sideways. With a hair's breadth to spare, the vortex exploded past the small ship and sent it dancing in the backwash of the engaging wormhole -until John got it back under control, pulled it into a steep loop, and brought it around, backing toward the gate in the wake of the retracting event horizon.

  "What is he doing?" murmured Elizabeth to no one in particular.

  "I guess he's trying to catch whatever comes out of that." Radek had joined her and was staring at the event horizon in dismay. "It's getting worse," he whispered.

  That was one way of putting it. For Elizabeth's money
, the event horizon looked terrifying, a deep, joyless red, as if the wormhole were sucking the lifeblood out of everything living and breathing in the universe. And if Charybdis acted as they suspected it would, this notion wasn't far off the mark at all. She fought off a shiver, watched crimson reflections play across the hull of the jumper. The rear hatch gaped open, a black void punched into shocking red.

  "It's taking too long already. I don't think there's anyone coming through," said Radek.

  He probably was right. Maybe someone, somewhere, in the same kind of desperate quandary as they, had attempted to escape destruction and dialed this address, but without a `key' nobody would be able to travel. And for all she knew, she and John Sheppard and now Radek were the only ones aware of-

  A trio of figures tumbled from the wormhole and into the jumper, slack and floppy-limbed like puppets cut from their strings.

  John could tell from the various impacts that his newly acquired passengers were unconscious at the very least. A quick glance over his shoulder confirmed it. A tangled heap of three people, none of them stirring. Not that it surprised him. The really amazing part was that they still looked recognizably human after coming through that garish red mess. Which disengaged as he was looking, and good riddance to it. The thought of having to go through that in the increasingly unlikely event that they managed to persuade the Stargate to take them any where was enough to pitch his stomach into a queasy roll.

  "Welcome aboard, folks. Buckle in and enjoy the ride," he muttered. "Even though I doubt it's gonna be half as interesting as what you just did."

  Hatch closing, he peeled away from the gate at last and steered the jumper into a gentle landing alongside the tent. When he tried to let go of the stick, he realized that his fingers were curled into a claw, joints frozen around an ergonomically uncomfortable piece of plastic, and he had to make a conscious effort to straighten them. Getting up out of the seat was even less fun. For a moment there his vision blurred to black and he had to grope for support. Eventually the cockpit got bored with spinning, though his head showed no intention to follow that shining example and stop hammering. He'd have to wheedle a couple more of those nice Tylenol-type things out of the medics just as soon as he got a second. For now, though...

  John staggered aft and into a wall of stench, a potent combination of sweat, filth, blood and a bunch of components he didn't want to contemplate. Dead fish? Whoever his passengers were, they'd either had a really exciting time lately or their religion forbad the use of soap and water.

  Apparently it also forbad motion. None of them had moved as far as he could tell. Suppressing a curse and doing his best to ignore the smell, he crouched beside that pile of bodies. Their clothes were soaking wet and there was a puddle forming on the floor of the aft compartment. Obviously at least water was familiar then. Grimacing, he eased the topmost body of the heap. The weight made it a woman and on closer inspection the curves were obvious. He turned her over, wiped matted, muddy hair off her face... and sucked in a gasp that was somewhere between shock and pure disbelief. Dirt-streaked as they were, Teyla's features might have been unrecognizable, but she'd been on his team virtually from the day he arrived in the Pegasus galaxy. Teyla was a part of home. She also was... his fingers reached for her neck, found a pulse, weak but steady. She was alive.

  While he was still checking her for injuries, the person at the bottom of the heap groaned, a deep rumble, familiar in its grumpiness. "Get off-me!"

  What was left of the heap started heaving, allocated sets of limbs to their rightful owners, and then someone tall and broad and unimaginably grubby sat up, dreadlocks dripping water. Ronon's eyes snapped as wide as saucers when he saw John, and he broke into one of those rare smiles. Not that feral baring of teeth that suggested whoever was around should go and mess with somebody their size, but a genuine smile. "Don't take this the wrong way, Sheppard," he growled, "but right now I want to hug you."

  John grinned. "As long as you take a shower first."

  "Just show me where" A little stiffly Ronon scrambled to his feet, stretched, did a quick, habitual scan of his surroundings and relaxed when he recognized the jumper. "Can't believe we finally caught a break," he mumbled. "'Bout time, too."

  "How did you-?"

  Before John could finish, Ronon pointed at the skull lying next to Teyla. "Yours. I'm guessing you twigged on to that whole business with the `keys'?"

  "Yeah. Except, we ran out of body parts"

  "We?"

  "I've got Dr. Weir and Zelenka. The only one missing is-"

  "McKay!" Ronon dropped to his knees and rolled that last sprawled form on its back.

  Under the mudpack Rodney's face was ashen, drained of blood. The dirt stood out starkly from pale skin, and the shallow breaths he drew raised a soft wet whistle.

  John suppressed a curse. "What happened?"

  "What didn't happen?" snarled the Satedan. "He's cracked at least one rib, probably punctured his lung. The trip through that thing the wormhole turned into didn't help..." He flicked a glance at the overhead storage lockers. "You got any medical supplies left?"

  "I can do better than that," John said. "We've hooked up with the locals, and they've got some pretty decent doctors here."

  "Good."

  Ronon's reply was overlaid by the hum of the rear hatch opening on Zelenka and Elizabeth Weir. The worried look on their faces changed to the same incredulous surprise John reckoned he'd worn a couple of minutes ago.

  "Look what I found," he flashed them a quick grin.

  "My God," whispered Elizabeth. "Are they okay?"

  "They're a bit dented and they don't smell very good. Teyla's still out, Ronon's strictly unpresentable, but other than that..." He turned serious. "Rodney needs medical help right now."

  Somebody had carried her. Somebody familiar, and her first reaction of anger at being taken for helpless had come up against a memory of that bone-crushing trip through the wormhole and faded to nothing again. Teyla hadn't been able to see what Rodney and Ronon had seen in the Stargate, but she'd gathered that something was wrong. Rodney had said there was no choice, that they'd surely die if they stayed. He'd been right, and she'd known it even then... but they'd come very, very close to not surviving. She'd felt the rage of Charybdis, whitehot rage at their stubborn refusal to let it run its course, and she'd felt eons of time folded into nanoseconds, different versions, different lives, all of them trying to pull her apart. It had been nearly as bad as those endless moments after Charybdis had roared into existence.

  Now, as she slowly drifted toward consciousness a second time-to remain there, she promised herself-things didn't seem so bad at all. On the contrary. For the first time in what seemed like forever she was warm. Too warm, as a matter of fact, though that thought struck her as sacrilegious. She wasn't complaining. She was dry. She was warm. Not so long ago that had been all she wanted. At least in the short term...

  Teyla smiled.

  "Teyla?"

  This voice didn't belong here, shouldn't be here. Couldn't be here. Her smile crumpled into a frown. Maybe that terrible travesty of a wormhole trip had damaged her mind. It was possible, surely, and that meant-

  "Teyla, it's alright. You're safe now."

  Perhaps. But she was also quite mad, apparently. However, it might be best to simply play along. "Dr. Weir?"

  "Welcome back." There was a smile in the voice now, and a hand clasped Teyla's. "How are you feeling?"

  "Hungry ." Which was the truth. She was famished and only vaguely recalled when she'd last eaten... The bread and soup Ronon had brought her? When had that been? The morning before they freed Rodney. "Rodney is hurt," she stammered, aching with shame for forgetting about a team mate, however briefly. "He needs-"

  "Rodney's doing alright." Elizabeth Weir's soothing voice cut through her anxiety. "He's holding his own. It was touch and go for a while, and the doctors had to remove a lot of fluid from his chest, but he's resting comfortably now. And Ronon's fine, too," Dr We
ir added, anticipating Teyla's question.

  Yes. She could hear him now, arguing with someone. Teyla smiled, listened some more. There were quite a few people here, and a number of strange voices. A woman, two men; they, too, were arguing with a third man, older, by the sound of him, but familiar all the same. She should- "Dr. Zelenka!"

  It sparked a soft laugh. "Yes. He's here, too," Dr. Weir confirmed.

  "Hey, Teyla." A whole new voice, very close, very familiar.

  "And so is Colonel Sheppard," announced Dr. Weir.

  He had to be crouching by the bed or cot Teyla was lying on, and suddenly there was another hand on her shoulder. Alive and real. She'd barely dared to believe it. Somewhere, in the darkest corner of her mind, she'd feared that the skull that had brought them here had been his, that the real John Sheppard was dead. Provided that this one was the real one.

  "We..." She cleared her throat. "You're not the one I met... before. He was Major Sheppard... He found you, didn't he?"

  "Yes." It sounded charged, thick with grief and anger and guilt.

  She shouldn't ask, there was too much sadness there, sadness she didn't need, but she couldn't help it, felt a duty to know. "What happened to him?"

  "Junior saved our lives," he replied curtly.

  And paid a high price for it. The thought cut like a knife, but she was not given any chance to mourn him now or remember his bravery or acknowledge that, in every way that mattered, he'd been as real as the man sitting by her side now. She sensed it coming a split-second before the ground started to heave, just as an animal would. Except, what she sensed wasn't the earth preparing to strike, it was the scorn of Charybdis and its determination to destroy them so that it could survive.

  The tremor built, and as the jolts grew in violence the sounds all around Teyla seemed to climb over each other into a cacophony of noise. The clatter of equipment shaking and falling, the far-off wails of panicked people, closer by yells of frustration or warning, and the electronic screams of life-support machinery.