Sabine Bauer - Mirror, mirror

"Hold tight!" Ronon yelled again.

The warning came a scant heartbeat before the second impact, this one brutal enough to break her grip and hurl her off the roof. Tumbling through thin air, she instinctively curled into a ball, arms wrapped around her head to protect her neck and skull, and braced herself for another bath in freezing water. Instead she struck unforgiving rock and began sliding through dense undergrowth back towards the river. Dazed, she clutched for a handhold. Thorns and brambles ripped through her fingers, tearing skin. She tightened her grip, oblivious to the pain, and finally eased to a standstill. For what seemed like an eternity she simply lay there, winded, while the rain hammered down on her.

Little by little the roaring in her ears ceased, and she heard shouts. Ronon, calling her name, again and again.

"I'm here! Ronon! Here!"

From above came the crackle and snap of breaking branches, and a small avalanche of pebbles and soil trodden loose peppered her face. He found her wrists, clenched his fists around them, and pulled her to her feet and up the cliff.

"Where is Rodney?" she croaked.

"Right here. Not doing so good, though." Ronon eased her to the ground, muttering. "At least we're on the right side of the river. Probably by accident. I swear Charybdis is out to get us."

"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."

Whatever 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.