Sabine Bauer - Mirror, mirror

Every breath tasted of metal, and the more air he tried to suck in the less oxygen reached his lungs. Rainbow-colored stars sparked before his eyes, his headache had assumed a whole new dimension of intolerable, and he was feeling dizzy-not really advisable when trying to pilot an aircraft. The air scrubbers were working overtime, but the carbon monoxide, pushed up from somewhere below and filling the fault, could freely flood the jumper as long as the hatch was open. Without the scrubbers, they'd already be unconscious and dying, and John knew it.

As soon as they were safely aboard, Elizabeth slapped the hatch controls, and the door slipped shut with a pneumatic hiss. Then she came staggering toward him, blue-lipped with cyanosis. John barely caught her before she fell, half carried her back to the cockpit, and dropped into the right-hand seat. Her hands were shaking, and she was breathing in rapid, shallow gasps. "I'm good," she panted. "I'm good."

"Easy," he said, startled at the rough sound of his own voice. "It'll get better in a second, and you don't want to hyperventilate."

Wrestling down the instinct to yank at the controls and race to the surface-a recipe for disaster, given the state he was in-he coaxed the jumper into a gentle climb. After a couple of minutes he felt a little less lightheaded, his vision cleared, and the relentless hammering in his skull let up by a notch or two. In the rear, the frantic yelps for air simmered down and gave way to whispers of conversation and soft moaning from the injured.

"We'll have to be more careful when we go back down," Elisabeth murmured.

"We won't. Go back down, I mean."

"But-"

Wordlessly, John pointed at the life-signs detector that rested on the center console. Its screen was completely dark now. Elizabeth turned a shade paler and closed her eyes.

At last the edge of the chasm crawled into view, and John felt more grateful than he'd ever expected to be at the sight of a sickening red sky. There was no risk of injuring anyone now; scared of the fault ripping open even further, the majority of people had peeled well back from the edges of the abyss. Their mood had changed completely, bowing to the contingencies forced upon them by this new disaster. They had established cordons of men who held back anyone curious or crazy enough to try and sneak a peek into the rift. In the cleared area between the crowd and the edges of the fault they'd improvised first aid stations to take care of those victims who'd landed within reach of the surface and had been recovered from there.

John brought the jumper alongside the largest of the first aid posts. The men and women manning it, presumably physicians and nurses who'd been among the evacuees-Is there a doctor aboard? — stopped what they were doing and backed up a few steps when the hatch opened. Then the first of the walking wounded staggered from the jumper, supporting each other, and the medical staff relaxed visibly. A few daring souls watching from behind the cordon broke into cheers that spread through the crowd and proliferated into a round of applause. It definitely beat the earlier scenario.

By the looks of it, the medics had performed way more than their fair share of triage lately. They went about their job quietly and efficiently, and though it seemed unlikely that they'd even met each other before today, they fell into the odd choreography of emergency treatment with practiced ease. Within minutes of the jumper's arrival every person who had been aboard was receiving medical care.

Elizabeth had helped offload a couple of the wounded and disappeared to talk to whomever, which was fine by John. Let her handle the meet-and-greet for once; diplomacy was her job, after all. Blowing out a long breath, he leaned back in the pilot's seat and tried to relax and somehow bring his headache under control. Failing that, he'd at least have a few minutes in which to groan without anyone listening while he tried to figure out where to go from here. They'd have to start asking round and see if anyone knew a Dr. Radek Zelenka. At least there was no shortage of people to ask, and now they had a goodwill-

Okay, half a — Minute. He heard the footfalls first.

"John!"

He levered his eyes open and awkwardly turned to see Elizabeth heading up the ramp. "Yeah?"

"I've talked to one of the doctors here. She's agreed to check you out."

"I'm fine," he growled. "We don't have time to-"

"We don't have time not to." She had that ornery look that she usually only wore in her office. "You're the only one who can fly this jumper, so consider it an order, Colonel."

"Yes, ma'am." He supposed he could have argued, but it would have taken too much energy. Instead he managed to inject his reply with a degree of reluctance that left no doubt as to his real feelings. Unfortunately she knew him too well to even acknowledge it, so he'd just have to get up and play along, wouldn't he? Suppressing the last of those groans, he pushed himself from the seat and attempted a jaunty stroll to the rear of the jumper. Apparently the act fell a little short of being convincing.

"Fine, my a… foot." Elizabeth marched him down the ramp like a prisoner.

They headed for a hastily erected tent behind the actual triage area. If you could call it a tent. Basically it was four posts in the ground, holding up a tarp that in turn sheltered a handful of pallets, all of which were occupied. Among the patients here were the last two people they'd rescued. The woman who'd piloted the glider was still unconscious, but her passenger seemed to be fighting fit again, though still not much cleaner than when they'd pulled him from the foot well.

A guy after John's own heart, he was swatting away the ministrations of a nurse. "I don't care! I need to see the person who was flying the jumper!"

"The what?" asked the nurse, her face a picture of confusion.

Gateship she probably would have understood, John thought wryly and sent a silent apology to Lieutenant Ford, wherever he might be. He grinned. For starters this was a break he hadn't dared to hope for, and his and Elizabeth's job had just become considerably easier. That aside, it might get him out of being prodded by alien doctors, however qualified.

"The jumper," John said, smiling at the nurse. "The ship out there. Dr. Zelenka, I presume?"

Radek twisted around. "Colonel Sheppard!" Then his eyes grew even wider. "Dr. Weir! Thank God, I've found you!"

There probably was very little real benefit in debating the issue of who had found whom. John let it slide. "Good to see you too. You haven't… uh… founded a cult by any chance?"

"A cult?" Zelenka's expression mirrored that of the nurse a few seconds earlier. He seemed older, a good twenty years, if the lines in his face were anything to go by. And his hair was shorter, though he still managed to sustain that unkempt look. Otherwise, and discounting copious amounts of dirt, he looked himself, no wavy beard, no fanatical gleam in his eye, most of all no indication of protracted drug use.

"Give over, John." Elizabeth stepped beside him, and she, too, was smiling with relief. "Hello, Radek. We need to talk."

"Move, move, move!" Ronon felt a little like a cow herder, except the current situation wasn't exactly bucolic.

A hand wrapped around one arm of either, he had Teyla to his right, McKay to his left, and was bullying them up the stairs toward the guardroom at a run. Teyla wasn't the problem-she could have gone twice as fast, Ronon suspected-McKay was. Now that the adrenaline and the first buzz of the escape had worn off, the guy was seriously flagging. And, much to his dismay, Ronon couldn't even blame him; after three days in that cage, with hardly any sleep, no food, and plenty of exposure, it was a miracle Rodney was even conscious, and never mind his running a stair-a-thon. In consequence, Ronon considered himself honor-bound to bully as subtly as he knew how.