Mirror, Mirror

by Sabine C. Bauer

  Elizabeth was turning to him, panic written all over her face, about to shout his name, and John, feeling himself slot into unity with his other self, prayed that this was the beat that he'd missed before. "Rodney! Pull the plug! Now!"

  McKay executed a classy fish dive toward the generator, and even as he was watching him, a horrible conviction slammed into John-he was late, again, after all that. The ephemeral shape of Ikaros brightened into a whirl of colors, blossoming above the core unit of Charybdis, stretching toward the ceiling, expanding to fill the interior of the dome and suffuse them all. Rodney hung suspended mid-flight, horizontally in the air, fingers splayed and-

  His motionless body began to shed an unearthly golden light. It feathered out into glowing coils, wrapped around the rainbow whorl that was the union of Charybdis and the Ikaros program, snaked through it like a weaver's shuttle though the warp, in living, pulsing threads of gold, compacted the destructive iridescence-it reminded John of nothing so much as a kid kneading the mother of all snowballs-and hurled it back into the core of Charybdis.

  In the end it was utterly and oddly unspectacular. The radiance of the crystal core dimmed and winked out, and the dullness spread outward like ripples in a pond to climb the walls of the dome. The being Ikaros had become hovered serenely where his holographic counterfeit had risen only seconds ago. Two of those luminous octopus arms gently lowered Rodney to the ground.

  He will be alright, a disembodied voice assured them. I've healed him.

  Personally, John thought Ikaros might have done that a little sooner.

  I couldn't. I wasn't complete before.

  Ah. It made sense in a weird sort of way. Not all of him had found its way into Rodney the first time round... only the matching personality traits. John grinned, stared up at that uncanny lightshow. "So you're fully ascended now?"

  Somehow the Day-Glo squid managed to throw out a nod.

  "Correct me if I'm wrong, and I'm not complaining or anything, but if you're ascended, aren't you supposed not to inter fere?"

  The air rippled with silent laughter.

  Rectifying interference could be defined as un-interference, don't you think... nephew? Besides, now it will have been me who has written that rule, so I suppose I rate a little wiggle room.

  John didn't even try to wrap his head around the sequence of tenses and its implications. He'd had enough of temporal paradoxes to last him a lifetime. And then some.

  You should go now The crystal lattices are disintegrating, and the dome won't be stable for much longer I'll see you around.

  "Is that a threat?"

  Another ripple of laughter, and Ikaros rose toward the apex of the dome, bled through the ceiling. For a moment John could still see a shimmer of brightness shining through the walls, then that was gone, too. The crystal structure dimmed, dullness spreading like a blight.

  "Should have put the kid over my knee while I had a chance," growled Ronon. He stood leaning against the wall, arms crossed in front of his chest, his face haggard with fatigue, but he was smiling.

  "For once in my life I agree with you." Rodney climbed to his feet and cautiously poked at the remnants of the Charybdis core. "It's dead. He wrecked it. And you probably can scrap that naquada generator, too. I'll just have to-"

  "Rodney!" Elizabeth and Radek shouted in unison.

  Across the chamber, past the brewing argument, Teyla looked at him, her eyes back to their rich, dark brown. Charybdis had never happened, and she had never been blinded by it. She smiled at him. "Maybe we should go home, Colonel..."

  Home.

  There was a thought.

  "Yes. Let's go home."

  EPILOGUE

  ongratulations." Carson Beckett flicked off his penlight and pointed at an eye chart on the infirmary wall. "You also read the really wee bits in the bottom line over there, so I'd say twenty-twenty vision. Better than that. Whatever it was that affected your eyes, Teyla, it's cleared up completely."

  "Thank you, Dr. Beckett "

  "You're welcome." He cocked his head, looked at her quiz- zingly for a moment.

  She knew her thanks had sounded a lot less self-contained than her usual self, but then, no eye exam could measure the vibrancy of color, the richness of texture, the warmth of the smiles she saw. And it couldn't measure what it meant. Nor could she adequately explain it.

  Somehow Dr. Beckett seemed to grasp the gist of it though. "Never mind." He grinned. "Go on. Get out of here. You can go check on Colonel Sheppard. If he's hopping around like a yoyo send him right back to me."

  "I will." She returned his grin, slid off the gurney she'd been sitting on, and headed out into the corridor.

  It was busy at midmorning, people bustling along, on errands or changing shifts, some on their way to the mess for a break, others returning from there. Voices, brisk footfalls, laughter, and a sense of purpose-life. She'd spent a lot of time in the corridors and common areas lately, more than usual, because she needed to soak in this buzz. It went a long way toward dispelling the lingering memories of these same hallways filled with silence, ancient dust, and the staleness of death.

  Without consciously intending to, from sheer habit perhaps, she ended up in the control center. At least she could make good on her promise to Dr. Beckett. Not entirely surprisingly, Colonel Sheppard was there, perched on the desk in Dr. Weir's office. He'd been released from the infirmary only the previous day, after a week of strict bed rest to tend a severe concussion. Toward the end of it he'd almost wept with boredom.

  so Rodney got nowhere?" he asked.

  Dr. Weir shook her head. "Apart from managing to repair the naquada generator he found nothing. Which left him more than usually frustrated... and frustrating." She gave a pained grin, then discovered Teyla hovering in the door. "Oh. Hi. Come in. What did Dr. Beckett say?"

  "I am fine."

  Colonel Sheppard perked up. "Does that mean we can take up our sparring sessions again?"

  As invited, Teyla took a couple of steps into the office and cocked an eyebrow at him. "Since, in your case, that would qualify as hopping around like a yoyo, I would be required to send you back to the infirmary."

  " I sense a lack of due respect. What do you think, Elizabeth?"

  Stifling a grin, Dr. Weir tapped a sheaf of printouts sitting on her desk. "I think you both should have a look at this."

  The look in Colonel Sheppard's eyes said that he'd just estimated the height of the stack of paper as too high. "Reading's contraindicated for concussion. Can you give us the Reader Digest version?"

  "I can." Weir's grin broke free, indicating that she knew exactly what he was playing at. "But you still should take a look at it. I guarantee you'll find it fascinating. More fascinating than War and Peace." She settled back in her chair, steepled her fingers under her chin, and the grin disappeared. "I've asked the historians to do some further digging into Ikaros. What they came up with... differs a little from their original research. It seems Ikaros was the one who introduced the Ancients to the possibility-of ascension."

  The Colonel let out a low whistle. "He taught them?"

  "Yes. And there was no suggestion of that previously. It looks like we've changed history after all. The ramifications-"

  Would go unexplored for the moment.

  The klaxons sounded, announcing an incoming wormhole and cutting her off mid-sentence. Weir shot out from behind the desk. "It's probably Sergeant Stackhouse," she said, heading for the door. "He and his team were on a trade mission to Delana. They're back early..."

  Teyla and Colonel Sheppard followed her out into the control center and watched the routine procedure unfold. Blackclad soldiers took position on the stairs and the gallery, weapons trained on the Stargate, ready to defend Atlantis should the need arise. This time it didn't.

  The wormhole had barely established when Sergeant Stackhouse tore from the event horizon, leading a group of about thirty people, all of them looking as bedraggled and singed around the edges as he. "Get Becke
tt down here!" he hollered up to the gallery. "My men are bringing through a couple of wounded."

  "What happened, Sergeant?" Dr. Weir was hurrying down the stairs, Colonel Sheppard and Teyla in her wake.

  "Meteor storm. They got clobbered bad. The team and I couldn't even make it to the village. These folks"-a sweep of his arm indicated the refugees-"had hunkered down near the gate. We basically took them and ran. They need our help, ma'am."

  Dr. Weir sighed. "Sergeant, we-"

  Obeying an impulse Teyla didn't dare to explain, her fingers gripped Weir's arm. "My people will take them in, Dr. Weir."

  She took a step forward to face the leader of the refugees, a grizzled man, haggard with fear and fatigue, at his side a skinny girl of about six or seven years of age. At Teyla's approach the child looked up, eyes wide in a grubby face.

  "I'm Pima," she said, smiling. "What's your name?"

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Originally from Germany, Sabine C. Bauer holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Birmingham and trained at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. She subsequently worked as a stage director and producer in the UK and United States, and in 1999 started writing Stargate SG-1 fan fiction.

  Her first novel, STARGATE SG-1: Trial By Fire (released in 2004), was the first Stargate novel published by Fandemonium. Since then she has written a second STARGATE SG-1 novel, Survival of the Fittest, and edited several others, as well as contributing two short stories, `Juju' and 'Genealogy,'to the Stargate Magazine. Her short story `Tesla's Slippers' was included in the science fiction anthology Journeys of the Mind.

  In 2005 Sabine emigrated to Canada, now lives on the British Columbian coast with a mastiff and a motorcycle, and is working on an original novel.

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  SNEAK PREVIEW

  STARGATE ATLANTIS: ANGELUS

  by Peter Evans

  orrors often start off small. 1

  A suggestion of a footfall outside the bedroom door, late and close to sleep, and the careful testing of a handle. The far-off sheen of ice on a night-time road. A tickle behind the eye. Little things, caresses at the edge of consciousness, too subtle to fear. It is only when these horrors have been given time to grow and fester that they become known for what they are.

  The handle turns, and the door swings inwards.

  The ice is an oil-sheened slickness under tires that no longer grip.

  The tickle grows into a grinding headache, resistant to drugs, resistant to prayer, steadily building day on day...

  So it was with the horror that took Atlantis. It began small, almost too small to see, but it was only awaiting it's chance to metastasize. Despite later recriminations, no-one could have foreseen it. Even Colonel Abraham Ellis couldn't, though the horror began with him.

  He never saw it coming. It was too far away, at the end of a tunnel made from swirling blue light.

  The tunnel was an illusion, Ellis knew; some weird artifact of the hyperdrive engines. He had no idea why the strange, supercompressed universe his ship was flying through should appear the way it did, no more than he could explain the careening sense of headlong motion he had experienced the few times he had been through a Stargate. In fact, while he knew the specifications and capabilities of his ship down to the last kilo of thrust, Ellis could claim no real knowledge of how the hyperdrives even worked, let alone how Apollo appeared to be lit blue and silver by a light that probably shouldn't be there.

  The mystery didn't bother him. As long as the drives did their job, flinging the great ship between the suns at untold multiples of lightspeed, he was quite content to let them get on with it. Let fuller minds than his ponder the true nature of the light flooding his bridge. The Asgard had, in all likelihood, taken its secret with them to their collective grave.

  No, what was really bugging Ellis was the unmistakable, and quite ridiculous feeling that Apollo was falling.

  He closed his eyes momentarily, settled back in the command throne, took a long breath. All the familiar sensations were still there - the faint vibration of the deck through the soles of his boots, the cool metal edges of the throne arms, the click and chatter of the systems surrounding him. Somebody walked across the bridge behind him, and he heard their footfalls on the deck. But with his eyes closed and his senses grounded, the falling sensation wasn't there at all.

  He opened his eyes. Through the wide forward viewport, between the weblike support braces, the hyperspace tunnel soared and shone. And once again, Ellis was dropping down into a pit of blue light.

  "Dammit," he muttered, very quietly.

  Major Meyers glanced up from the weapons console, one eyebrow raised. "Sir?"

  In response, he just nodded curtly at her panel. Meyers' attention hastily returned to the firing solution she'd been working on.

  She hadn't looked up at the viewport, Ellis noticed. In fact, she'd tilted her head, almost unconsciously, as if to avoid looking at it.

  Did she feel it as well?

  Ellis had heard of the phenomenon, but he'd always dismissed it up until now. Something that civilians might experience, perhaps, or the kind of mess-hall backtalk that went around when the ship was on a long haul and the usual bitching about drills and shore leave was wearing thin. As far as he was aware, there wasn't even a name for it.

  Just a feeling that some people had, when looking too hard and too long at the hyperspace tunnel effect, that it either tilted up towards the heavens or dipped right down to the depths of Hell.

  Ellis shook himself, angry at his own weakness, and got up. It was nothing, just a failure of perspective, a trick of the eye. Nothing that should be on his mind now, not when he was flying his ship into the middle of a war. "ETA?"

  "Seventeen minutes," Kyle Deacon reported from the helm.

  "Good. Meyers, get me the bomb bay. No..." He frowned. "Second thoughts, I'll head down there myself. Give McKay a scare."

  "Yessir. I'll call you before we break out"

  He walked past her console to get to the hatchway, and as he did, leaned down and tipped his head towards the viewport. "What do you think?" he breathed. "Up or down?"

  "Down sir," she replied, eyes fixed steadily on her readouts. "Definitely down."

  Out in the lightless gulfs of space, two great powers coiled around each other like monstrous serpents. And, like monsters, they fought and tore.

  A week before, Ellis had watched the blood of the two serpents spread across Colonel Carter's starmap in a series of vivid splashes: a brilliant, icy blue for the Wraith, a gory scarlet for the Asurans. Each splash, Carter had told him, was the site of a known engagement. Between these battle markers lay the serpents themselves, twisting wildly through each other in three dimensions - an approximation of the two powers' battle lines.

  The whole map, in fact, was an approximation, and therein lay the danger of it. "Most of this information is days old," Carter had told him, pointing vaguely at a cluster of splashes. "At best we find out about one of these engagements a few hours after it's over and done. Really, we've got no idea exactly where the fighting is going on."

  Ellis had peered closely at the map, a gnawing feeling of worry under his sternum. Carter had scaled the display to take in dozens of star systems, and already half of them were enveloped by the serpents and their terrible wounds. "Is there
anything you can be certain of?"

  "Just this." Carter had touched a control, and a small green dot had blinked into life in the centre of the display.

  "Let me guess." Ellis straightened up. "Atlantis."

  Carter nodded. "Trying to get a true picture of events over these kinds of distances is hard. Information travelling at C or below means that simultaneity is bunk - you can't tell if two things are happening at the same time because in relativistic terms there's no such thing as the same time. And information above C, like gate or hyperspace travel, plays havoc with event ordering."

  "So we're screwed." Ellis rubbed his chin, still glaring at the map. "We can't get a true picture of what's going on, and what we don't know could kill us."

  "Yeah," Carter said grimly. "If the Wraith find out where Atlantis is, they'll swarm us. If the Replicators find out, they'll do worse. The city's long range sensors are great at picking up moving objects, but as for what those objects are doing... Right now I feel like a kid caught up in a bar fight, hiding under the table. I can hear pool cues on heads, but I don't dare stick my own head out to see where the danger is."

  Ellis had been in a few bar fights in his time, although he had normally been wielding the cue. "But McKay says he's got a plan?"

  "Hasn't he always?" Carter had smiled at him, briefly. "He's gone all retro on us. A series of early-warning sensors, dropped into these systems here..." She touched another key and a chain of yellow dots flared into life and started pulsing. The map turned around on itself, stars swimming past each other as the galaxy rotated about the Atlantis marker, and Ellis could see how the yellow dots were spread evenly around it; close to, but never quite touching, the two serpents. "The sensors are stealthy - scanner absorbent, mostly passive... They spread out to form VLAs, then communicate with their relays through narrow-beam communications lasers. That's old technology, but they'll be pretty hard to spot."

  "And they send data back to Atlantis via subspace?"