Sabine Bauer - Mirror, mirror

"Here's to you, Teyla." He punched in the coordinates for Athos again.

Then he held his breath, again taking in the scale of destruction in the control center. Whatever had happened here, the devastation was worse than it had been after the Wraith had laid siege on Atlantis.

One by one the chevrons engaged, and then the event horizon blasted toward him, vaporizing the rest of the debris that had half blocked the gate.

"Okay…

With a deep breath, he nudged the jumper forward and into the wormhole. The freezing flash of disorientation he'd come to expect as a given of wormhole travel escalated to the power of ten, and a last conscious thought screamed that there had to be a malfunction. Then awareness snapped to black, leaving his panic to explode the second he emerged on the other side. Except, whatever scenario he'd pictured, it wasn't this. He instantly nursed a bizarre mental image of Jumper One being flipped over, shaken around a bit, and spat back out in the direction where it'd come from. Which wasn't how it worked. Wormholes were supposed to be strictly one way. Apparently this one hadn't read the manual.

To the best of his knowledge, he'd managed an all-time first; he'd gated from Atlantis to Atlantis.

But eventually facts percolated through; unless somebody had done a record-breaking cleanup job, this wasn't the Atlantis he had left. It was pristine by comparison. As a matter of fact, the control center almost looked as it had when the expedition first arrived; completely deserted and still, dark, consoles and equipment covered with dustsheets. Also, it definitely had that uncanny, slightly muted underwater feel to it. Above, the hangar doors opened, as if extending an invitation. Fine. For the time being, John shelved an inordinate number of questions and, with practiced ease, maneuvered the craft up into the jumper bay.

"What the hell?"

It wasn't so much finding his accustomed parking space taken up by Jumper One Mark II. It was the decor, if that's what you could call it. Somebody had gutted the jumpers' crystal banks, smashed the crystals, and scattered the remains on the floor. The result looked like an explosion in a glass factory, and it couldn't possibly have been accidental. Whoever had done this must have intended to disable every single jumper in the bay-and they'd succeeded spectacularly.

John felt a nasty little chill slither up his spine, engaged the cloaking device, and nudged his craft into the farthest corner of the hangar, mind racing and tactical instincts kicking in with a vengeance. Bad news: he was completely unarmed. Every shred of gear he'd had lay at the bottom of an other-dimensional version of the Lantean Ocean. Good news: from what he'd seen so far, the rampage had been confined to the jumpers, meaning there was a chance that he could pick up what he needed from the small armory by the hangar door. The trick would be getting there.

Then again, maybe not.

If anyone were actually manning the city, incoming gate traffic should have created a slightly stronger response than it had just now, namely zip. Of course, there always was the possibility that they had set a trap and were lying in wait for him. No way of telling for sure without a life-signs detector. He mechanically reached toward the compartment that should have held the device and came up empty. Somebody had removed it. Meaning that the nearest life-signs detector probably could be found-

"In the armory," he grunted in resignation. "And it's not gonna walk over here."

He pushed himself out of the chair, wincing at a stab of pain. The bones had knitted, but the leg was wrecked all the same. Carson Beckett might have been able to fix it, but not Teyla with the means she'd had at hand. She'd barely managed to save his life. Shuffling into the rear compartment, he scowled at the crutches. Teyla had insisted he keep using them, but unless he found occasion to hit somebody over the head with them, they'd only get in the way. That aside, he was sick to death of the things.

The hatch slid open on the chaos in the bay. All over the floor, crystal shards glittered like freshly fallen snow, and the hangar was quiet enough to sustain the illusion. For long moments he stood on the ramp, listening. The stillness remained unbroken, no furtive shuffles from men in hiding, no soft intakes of breath, no accidental clink of weapons. He was alone.

Which didn't change the fact that the distance to the armory and the exit door seemed like a mile.

Too bad, John. Standing here, wanting a skateboard won't shorten it.

A skateboard would be fun, though.

He gimped off the ramp, flinched at the crunch of crystal under his feet, disproportionately loud in the silence of the room. Behind him the hatch closed, concealing that unsettling hole in reality and, with it, Jumper One. He'd made it almost to the front of the hangar when he spotted it; something had been dragged from one of the jumpers, parting the shards like Moses the Red Sea and laying a trail to the exit. Where the concrete was bare it showed a track of dull brown smears and spots.

Somehow he didn't think it was rust. Jaws clenched, he followed the trail back to that jumper. Inside, lying on the floor among more crystal shards, he discovered a bloodstained wrench. The only thing reassuring about it was the fact that whoever had wielded it must have seen themselves forced to resort to to-tech weaponry.

See? Should have taken the crutches, John.

The jumper yielded nothing else, so he headed over to the armory. It seemed untouched alright. Really untouched.

"Damn!" he whispered.

If the armory was anything to go by, the expedition had never reached Atlantis in this timeline. There should have been guns and rifles and ammo crates-in short, samples of the entire arsenal they'd brought with them to the Pegasus Galaxy. What he found were a couple of racks of spare drones and selected other items of Ancient technology. No weapons. At least none he could readily identify or use. On the upside, atop a shelf at the back of the room sat a dozen life-signs detectors. He grabbed one, mentally crossing his fingers.

A heartbeat later he sighed in relief as the small screen lit up. It showed two bright dots as the only inhabitants of the entire city. The dots were engaged in an odd, slow-motion choreography of stop and go. The speed-or lack thereof-was deceptive, and it took him a couple of seconds to realize that he was looking at a hunting pattern; Dot B was stalking Dot A, the scene of the chase gradually moving from the control tower to the storage and maintenance structures on the East Pier, which told him that Dot B had to know its way around-there were thousands of places to hide or set up a nice little ambush out there. Either the dots were stone deaf and hadn't heard the klaxons, or they'd decided that their chase was more important than an incoming wormhole and potential company.

John decided to hook up with Dot B. He'd always had a soft spot for the underdog. Besides, a bit of quid pro quo-assistance for information-might help answer the intriguing question of what the hell was going on here. Dot B was headed up toward the generator station at the East Pier. Good thinking. One little dot could wreak a surprising amount of havoc with the systems that were fed through there, even when the city was submerged.

Given the dreamlike pace at which the dots were moving, he'd have a good chance of intercepting Dot B at the station. John cut across the control center to the nearest transporter, which brought him out at a terminal within two hundred yards of the pier. The transporter door slid open on a blur of movement.

The round shattered the touch panel on the cabin wall, missing him by a hair. Instinct or a sixth sense had made him spin out of the way. Without stopping to think he dived out of the cabin-a dead end now that the panel was gone-hit the floor like a sack of cement, rolled over, and scrambled for the cover of a pillar.