Sabine Bauer - Mirror, mirror

"Rodney! Stay with us!"

"Gah-hmpf," said McKay. Presumably it wasn't an endorsement of her idea. But at least his eyes were focused now, staring up at the cloud-laden sky, squinting away rain. "Where are we?" he croaked at last.

"At the Stargate." Ronon crouched beside him. Fingers ftun- bling with cold, he pulled the dog tags from under Rodney's sodden shirt. "You need to tell me where you found these."

"Huh?"

"The dog tags? Which heap of bones did you take them from?"

Another groan, and McKay turned his head, trying to catch a glimpse of the jumbled remains over by the consoles. "God… How should I know? The hogs got in there… Pick one."

Teyla's eyebrows shot up. "Hogs?"

Ronon squashed that line of conversation before it had a chance to get off the ground. "Not good enough, Rodney. We need to find Colonel Sheppard. That means you need to find the bones belonging to these dog tags."

Evidently, McKay didn't enjoy the prospect. "No."

"You have to. So get up and-"

"No, I don't. You have to dig a little. I buried the skull over by that tree," he gasped, flapping his hand at a large conifer.

In the grander scheme of things that qualified as excellent news. Ronon grinned. "McKay, you area genius."

Tiredness temporarily forgotten, he climbed to his feet and scrambled to the tree Rodney had indicated. Sure enough, nestled between two gnarled roots was a patch of recently disturbed soil. He dug with his bare hands, and it was easy enough, what with the rain and the earth already having been loosened. Within minutes he returned to Teyla and McKay, holding the skull like atrophy.

McKay stared at it drowsily. "I knew him well, Horatio. He was a fellow of infinite jest…"

"What?"

"Literature. You wouldn't know it."

That urge to string the man upside down from a tree returned, but Ronon resisted it. Just. You had to look on the bright side. Supposedly this was an indicator that McKay was himself and reasonably functional. "You're sure that's the skull that went with the dog tags?" Ronon snarled.

"Yes. I'm sure." McKay glared daggers at him. "Can you see any other buried skulls? No. Didn't think so."

"Just checking."

"Just wasting time," McKay retorted. "Help me up."

"I don't think that's a good idea, Rodney," Teyla cautioned.

"I know it's not a good idea. But the console doesn't work, and unless Chewbacca here is proposing to dial in manually, I need to…" Woozily, he pushed himself to a sit, frowned at the greenery, chattering to himself. "I know there is one… Question is, where did I see it?"

"See what?" growled Ronon.

"Help me up!"

That was only half the job, as they found out soon enough. McKay's legs clearly had developed a will of their own, and he could barely stand, let alone walk on his own. Held upright by Ronon, he waddled through the mud, staggered through the undergrowth, dragged himself around the remnants of desks and equipment. Meanwhile the cascade down the stairs turned into a mucky waterfall, flooding the area around the gate. If they didn't hurry up, they'd have to swim into the wormhole, and Ronon never wanted to swim again for as long as he lived.

Suddenly McKay stopped in his tracks and seemed to almost collapse with relief. "Thank God!" he wheezed. "There it is!"

Half buried in the mud stuck a roughly cylindrical object, the free end looking like a metal ball. Dull and dead and caked with dirt as it was, Ronon might have overlooked it, but, given McKay's obsession with energy sources of any kind, he probably could smell the things at a distance.

"Okay. I know where it goes. Stay put." Ronon eased McKay back to the ground, propping him against the nearest console.

The naquada generator seemed to be cemented into the soil, and its weight didn't help. It took some hefty pulling and twisting, but at last the mud gave up its prize, and the generator slid free with a slurp. The hole it left behind instantly filled with water. Obeying a half-baked notion that these gadgets were supposed to be clean, Ronon wiped his sleeve over it, succeeding only in evenly distributing the dirt. If this thing still worked, he'd spend the rest of his life-however short — proclaiming the existence of miracles.

He shot a brief, doubtful glance at McKay, saw that the scientist either had passed out again or was about to, and shrugged. Never mind. He'd now got his bearings around what was left of the control center and knew where to find the dialing console. Grunting and swearing, fingers slipping on wet, mud-slick metal, he dragged the generator alongside the console and sat back on his haunches, swiping rain from his face. The power, provided there was any, wouldn't just amble over into the console, so he'd better find some kind of wiring-or at least a conductor other than water.

Rodney forced a bleary squint at the scene in front of him. Dex crouched by the naquada generator, a collection of metal objects in varying states of preservation spread out around him; everything from rusty thumbtacks to blackened strips of aluminum foil. It took Rodney a couple of seconds to make sense of it. The thinking behind this arrangement was surprisingly astute, which, of course, he couldn't admit, so a snide remark would be in order. Except, nothing sprang to mind. Nothing, apart from blood-red swirls of pain and nausea that started spinning every time he so much as contemplated moving. And, of course, he couldn't admit that either. If he did, Teyla would descend on him with the canteen and make him drink some more-increase hydration to counteract the fact that he was slowly but surely bleeding to death; he'd grasped the concept and also knew that eighty percent of it was wishful thinking. Besides, if he drank any more, he'd probably burst like a melon. Or pee his pants.

The aluminum foil might work, even if it only had flexibility to recommend it. He'd have given anything for a couple of decent connectors. He'd have given anything for Dex and Teyla not expecting him to work yet another miracle.

And he could wish till the cows came home. Nothing was going to happen until he made it happen. Business as usual, in other words. In the first instance he had to cover the astronomic distance between the erstwhile control desk he was leaning against and the dialing console. Should be fun…

Fingers slipping in freezing mud, he tried to push himself off the ground and failed dismally. He couldn't even sit up straight.

"Help me," he croaked, upsetting the sawdust that seemed to have taken up residence in his alveoli. It provoked a coughing fit, and the sawdust congealed to merrily whirling saw blades. Something warm-warm, now there was a change-trickled down his chin. He swiped at it, and the back of his hand came away smeared with a mixture of filth and blood, in what likely enough was an incipient violation of McKay's First Law of Self-Preservation: Do Not Die.

The Satedan had deigned to make his way over, stared, and refrained from commenting for once. Instead he hauled Rodney to the dialing console and the paraphernalia gathered there. It was pitiful. The generator casing was badly corroded, contacts and switches dull and packed with dirt. There was no way of telling just how long the device had been rotting in this place, but its design was based on the prototype developed by Sam Carter and that had been a lot sturdier than it needed to be. So, despite the sorry state it was in, the generator should still work, as long as the core was intact… theoretically.

From there his mind naturally segued back to Sam Carter, a shock of blond hair, that dazzling smile, and those amazing-

Wow.! Ikaros produced the mental equivalent of a wolf whistle.

Of all the precocious little… "Stay out of that comer of my head," Rodney hissed. "That's private!"

Sony.