Strands (6b/8) - Wait A Minute
Previous Part
Marc didn’t have the ATA gene, so the city had never really hummed to life beneath his touch like it did for Sheppard, or had done for Markham. Still, he hadn’t been aware of the vague sense of comfort the city brought him until it was no longer there. They crept down the familiar hallways of the city, corridors he had walked and patrolled a hundred times, and it just felt wrong. Shadows seemed longer and darker, the lights seemed duller and their steps seemed to echo even further. It may simply have been Marc’s imagination, but he didn‘t think so.
McKay was a nervous wreck, jumping at every little sound, causing the hair on the back of Marc’s neck to rise. As they got nearer to the centre of the city, they were forced to back up and hide when people crossed their paths. Marc frowned as they ducked back around a corner for only the second time in ten minutes. It seemed too quiet. They were near the centre, almost at the labs. The place should have been crawling with people, but they were slipping though with too few problems.
It was too easy.
McKay didn’t seem surprised by this. In fact, the closer they got to the labs, the more at ease he seemed to be. He began to walk beside Marc instead of trailing behind him, and as they rounded the last corner, he took the lead, striding past Marc towards the lab that was McKay’s even in his own universe.
“McKay, wait!” he hissed, reaching out to grab him by the sleeve. “You can’t just walk into your lab. We don’t know who’s in there.”
McKay rolled his eyes at him.
“Who else would be in my lab? I share with three others, but they would be under orders to investigate power surge. None of the other scientists are allowed to touch any of my work, and no soldiers ever come down here.”
“Never?”
McKay snorted. “Never. They are too busy polishing their guns or fighting to kiss the Commandant’s boots to come down here. Besides, what would they do?”
As they spoke, Marc moved in front of McKay once more and made his way into the lab, gun first. It was clear, exactly as McKay had insisted it would be. The scientist huffed past him and went straight to a bulky, black computer, pressing buttons on the surface. It started with a low drone of components and McKay fidgeted in front of it as it booted up slowly. By Marc’s standards, the ’laptop’ was clunky and old, a throwback to the 1990’s. But looking around the lab, it seemed to be the height of technology. It made sense, he supposed. After nearly sixty years of fascist rule, of stifling independent and creative thought processes, of killing or deporting anyone who questioned the authority, it made sense for that universe to be technologically behind the level that Marc’s own reality was.
“Give me watch,” McKay broke Marc‘s reverie, clicking his fingers in his direction.
“Why?”
“So I can figure out how to get back to your reality, idiot,” he snapped. “You said you weren’t listening when they were explaining how, but that it had something to do with infra-red beam on your watch.” He clicked his fingers at him again. “I need it.”
Marc undid the strap and handed it over. McKay grabbed it out of his hands, eyes lighting up, and began poking at the buttons, muttering to himself in German. He began typing quickly, connecting leads and cables to the Atlantis mainframe and scrolling through pages and pages of information. Marc was quickly lost and took up position by the door in case anyone came through, in order to make himself feel useful.
Two hours later, McKay was still muttering to himself, and Marc hadn’t seen or heard a single soul pass the lab in the entire time he was standing watch. It was disconcerting, to say the least. It was the middle of the afternoon: there should have been more people around. Unless they were all around the mirror room, and if that was the case, it was going to lead to a whole new set of problems when McKay figured this out and they could make a break for it.
He slowly walked the perimeter of the room, taking in the papers and experiments littering the surfaces. He may be more cowed and a lot thinner than the McKay Marc knew, but some things never changed. Some sections of the room were tidy, and he guessed that they belonged to the other scientists that McKay shared the lab with, but anywhere that McKay had taken as his own was a mess. He leaned over a desk holding several Ancient artifacts, all neatly labelled and tagged, but the carefully written notes were in German, so he moved on.
“Will you stop that? It’s distracting,” McKay snapped at him.
“Stop what?” Marc asked, freezing in place.
“Fidgeting and prowling around, looking like want to shoot something. I thought soldiers were supposed to be stoic and silent.”
“Well, Doc, I don’t know about you, but I don’t like not knowing if anyone is coming. I can’t be caught flatfooted. Can you call up the internal sensors or something? It would at least give us some warning.”
McKay shook his head fearfully. “I cannot do that. Orders from Commandant Sheppard himself. All non-essential systems are to stay off until he says so. I would be punished severely if I disobeyed order.”
“Why does he want the sensors down?”
“Because we are in space, yes? To keep moving, we need power. No power, we are dead. We’ll get stuck and we are dead. To keep city flying, we are on minimal power. Only tiny portion of the city is lived in and everything else is powered down, including internal sensors. Nothing was supposed to be able to get in city while we are in space.”
“Lucky us,” Marc answered. “So, no sensors?”
“No sensors,” McKay confirmed. “Why else you think that you and your friends haven’t been captured and questioned by now?”
“Well, that makes more sense,” he muttered.
McKay muttered something back in German, and Marc didn’t need to speak the language to get the gist of it.
“So, you have no sensors. How do you know if something is wrong in one of the labs? Why don’t you have guards on patrol down here, anyway?”
“All the soldiers are guarding critical areas such as the gate room, or the medical labs,” McKay told him, poking at the watch again.
“And you don’t consider labs full of shiny, alien technology to be critical?”
“Well, of course I do!” McKay rolled his eyes at him. “But Commandant Sheppard has other ideas of what’s important. We have not many soldiers left; the ones we had were re-assigned.”
Marc’s attention was immediately caught and he turned to face McKay, who was squinting at the watch face.
“You’re down on soldiers?”
“Ja,” McKay answered distractedly.
“Doc, this is important,” Marc said, coming to stand in front of him and causing the doctor to jump. “You don’t have that many soldiers in the city. Why?”
“Because of the Wraith,” McKay replied, a strange look something akin to hope in his eyes. “You do not have the Wraith in your reality?”
“Oh, we got them,” Marc replied and McKay’s face visibly fell. “They haven’t gone through most of the military though.”
“Then we were not as lucky as you,” McKay told him grimly. “The Wraith have taken many of the military and almost as many scientists in their attacks. We are cut off from Earth and cannot get new people. Why do you think we are moving the city? If we stayed on the planet, we would die. So we fly to Earth to get more soldiers and weapons...” He paused as if the subject was unpleasant to discuss and then finally snapped, “Now, let me get back to work.”
Marc let him be, mulling it over in his mind as McKay began muttering to himself again. If they were down on soldiers, then getting back to the mirror room might be easier than he had thought it would be. They may even have a chance in hell of surviving this whole debacle now, which was more than they had before. And if they were very, very lucky, they could have a clear run back to the mirror room.
“Hey Doc,” he interrupted again, and smirked when McKay heaved a great sigh of irritation.
“What is it now?”
“How’s it coming?”
“I am beginning to see how this would work,” McKay explained in the same tone as before. He turned the computer towards Marc. “The original device to control it is almost same technology. The watch is just a very, very simple version of it. Each universe has a frequency, like a radio, ja? We just need to find your frequency. See here,” he pointed to the screen where several frequency wave patterns were displayed. “This is frequency recorded during power surge when you came through. It is our frequency for this reality. And this,” he pointed to another wave pattern, “is frequency in memory of watch from last reality. I should just need to dial it same distance back to get your frequency.” He looked at the digital watch with something akin to wonder. “This watch is computer. So tiny! Is amazing. If it works like I think, I will find your universe’s frequency. I just need time.”
“Time is something we don’t exactly have a lot of, Doc,” Marc reminded him, taking up position by the door again.
“Then be quiet, and let me work.”
In retrospect, they had been lucky to get such a long period of interrupted time in the lab. Not ten minutes later, Marc heard footsteps just outside the door and had barely enough time to step back into the shadows and raise his gun before the door slid open and a tall man in the same colour uniform that McKay wore strode in. Marc recognised Kavanagh instantly from the pony tail and the way he got right up into McKay’s face. There’d never been any love lost between them in his own reality either, and Kavanagh missed Marc’s presence completely as he marched right up to McKay and began snapping at him.
It was in German, so the conversation went completely over Marc‘s head, but the sneering tone was familiar to him. McKay had frozen when Kavanagh entered, and was now gripping the edge of the table nervously, eyes flicking madly between Marc and the intruder. Kavanagh sighed and repeated himself and McKay finally answered in rapid-fire German while Marc moved silently closer. His grip tightened on his gun as he got behind Kavanagh, then turned it so the muzzle was pointing away from him. He didn’t want to have to shoot him. Kavanagh was an innocent in all this, in a manner of speaking, and he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Besides, Marc couldn’t take the risk that the gunshots would be heard and more people, guards and soldiers specifically, would come to investigate.
McKay tried to be calm, but his eyes kept flickering to Marc as he moved closer, and just as he reached them, Kavanagh turned around. He looked at Marc in horror, mouth hanging open before scrabbling for the radio on his belt. Marc raised his gun and brought the butt of the P-90 down hard on the back of his neck. Kavanagh collapsed to the ground and lay there, unmoving, while McKay started stammering and went white as a sheet.
“You have killed him!” he exclaimed, backing away from Marc as he bent down to check Kavanagh’s pulse. His babbling increased to hysteria as his back hit the wall and he looked fearfully at him.
“Relax, Dr. McKay,” Marc said, straightening. “He’s not dead. He’s just knocked out. But I don’t know how long he’ll be out for.” He walked towards the twitchy scientist with his hands raised, speaking to him as if he were a spooked horse. “We’re running out of time, Doc. Fast. You need to figure this out now.”
“I…”
“Dr. McKay, if you don’t do this, then we are all dead.”
McKay nodded, pushing off from the wall and straightened his spine. He went back to the desk, glancing nervously at Marc and Kavanagh, before turning his back to his computer. Marc used some spare cable he’d seen earlier to tie Kavanagh’s hands behind his back and hauled him up so he was leaning against the wall. He checked his airway and was relieved to find that that he was still breathing. Then he stood, keeping a wary eye on Kavanagh’s unconscious form and gripped his gun tightly, ready for another interruption.
Fifteen minutes later, McKay broke the silence with an exclamation of triumph.
“I think I have it,” he said, pointing to the computer. Marc moved closer, noting the wave patterns on the screen. “From co-ordinates I recovered from memory in the watch, this is where you started the trip. Now, I dial it back same distance and I get,” he pointed to the third pattern.
“The reality we originally came from,” Marc finished for him, a rare grin on his face. “Dr. McKay, you are a genius.”
“Ja, I knew this,” McKay answered seriously. “We leave now, yes?”
“Yes,” Marc confirmed, checking Kavanagh’s restraints to ensure they were secure. He was still out cold, but the longer they lingered, the more likely he was to wake up. Marc took the radio from his belt and tucked it into his own. He couldn’t understand anything that was being said, but at least Kavanagh would have to run to get assistance when he did eventually wake. “What did he want from you, anyway?” he asked as McKay opened a drawer and picked out some presumably personal items. Marc caught the flash of a small notebook and a photograph of a young woman with blond hair before they were stuffed into his jacket pocket; then he turned, and began typing some sort of code rapidly into the laptop.
“He said he had orders to find me to find out why I wasn’t at the room with the rest of the scientists,” he told Marc as he typed. “I told him I had received no orders to go there and that I had my own work to do. He was trying to order me to room when you hit him.” The screen went blank and McKay straightened, satisfied. “I have wiped computer memory,” he told Marc, “so they will not know what I was looking at.”
“Good, Marc nodded, then indicated to Kavanagh on the floor. “Your absence has been noticed then, and not just by this guy. We have to get to Stackhouse and Markham and get to the mirror, now, before someone else comes looking for you. Or him.”
“I am ready,” McKay told him, grabbing the watch as they slipped out of the lab, locking the door behind them.
The trip back to the others was no different than the one before, but every single cell in Marc’s body screamed at him to run, to get the hell out. It was only a matter of time before Kavanagh woke up, only a little longer than that before he got free and got help. They had a very short window of time to get to Markham and Stackhouse and for all of them to get back to the mirror before all hell broke loose. With that in mind, they moved as quickly as they dared through the corridors, McKay panting and sweating but keeping up with Marc’s steady pace. He was even catching on, flattening himself against walls while Marc scoped out the next corridor. In any other situation, his determination would have been amusing, but now, he was just grateful for it.
When they eventually made their way back to the storage room where Stackhouse and Markham were holing up, Marc knocked three times on the door, and called through to Adam. He opened the door and was met by two P-90s, but they quickly clicked the safety back on when they saw it was really him. McKay followed him inside and collapsed against the wall, red faced and gasping for breath. Marc felt a little guilty for his punishing pace, but knew McKay understood the urgency.
“How did it go?” Adam asked, looking at Marc but keeping one hand out towards Markham in case he fell. Markham was standing now, a little unsteady on his feet, but he was standing under his own steam.
“McKay figured it out,” Marc told them. “It’s a frequency thing, like a radio. We just have to tune into the right station. But we ran into some complications.”
“What happened?” Markham asked.
“Kavanagh happened. He came in looking for McKay and I had to knock him out. He’s tied up now, but I don’t know if he’s awake yet or not. Either way, we need to go. Now. You think you’ll be able to walk or do we have to carry you?” he asked him.
“I’ve been practicing,” Markham replied, walking forward with only a slight wobble in his steps. He paced the breadth of the room several times, and seemed steadier by the time he had finished and came to stand beside Adam again. “I can keep up.”
Marc flicked his gaze to Adam, who nodded in confirmation, seeming a little more at ease in Markham’s company. Marc wondered what the hell had gone down when he was in McKay’s lab.
“Good.”
“We need to do something about the soldiers,” Adam said, checking his ammo. “There’s hardly any around the mirror: just scientists. I think it might be a trap. We’ll have to distract them somehow.”
“Leave the scientists to me,” McKay said, straightening from his hunch by the wall. “As Kavanagh said, I was ordered down there. I will make minions go away for short time.”
“Good,” Adam nodded. “What about those soldiers?” he asked Marc.
“According to the good doctor over there,” he nodded towards McKay, “we may just be in luck. The Wraith have taken out a lot of their men, so they’re down in numbers. And the ones they do have are assigned to more critical areas. There’ll probably only be a few between us and the mirror.”
“Excellent,” Markham said. “Looks like we’re good to go.” He and Adam grabbed they packs they had left in the corner and moved towards the door, listening for signs of life. Marc grabbed his own from where he had left it, making sure they had left no evidence behind and raised an eyebrow at McKay, who visibly gulped and nodded. Marc unclipped the Beretta from his belt and gave it to McKay, who blanched in horror.
“Just in case,” Marc told him. “Do you know how to use it?”
McKay nodded shakily and tucked the gun into the back of his trousers, tightening his belt to keep it secure. Markham palmed the door control and Adam stepped out into the corridor, gun raised. He checked the area before motioning them all out of the storage room.
They were Marines, well, he and Adam were anyway, and they were damn good ones at that, but it was still slow going. Markham kept up well, only stumbling once when he turned quickly to track a noise which turned out to be McKay dropping the watch in his nervousness. Markham caught himself against the wall with one hand while he blinked to clear his head, and Marc felt a small twinge of guilt at how hard he had hit him. Only a small one though; he didn’t regret what he had done and would do it again in a heartbeat. McKay mumbled an apology and tightened his grip on the watch. Markham nodded at him carefully and raised his gun again.
They were almost within sight of the mirror room when they first ran into someone. They heard low, muted footsteps in the adjacent corridor and quickly backtracked down the hall. A scientist Marc didn’t recognise, dressed in a uniform identical to McKay’s was walking towards them, scribbling in a notebook as he did. He never even looked up from his work as he walked, navigating the corridor with ease. Marc motioned McKay forward, but McKay shook his head frantically, nerves setting in.
“McKay,” he hissed, prodding him forward. “We don’t want to have to hurt him. Just get him to go another way. Go.”
McKay stumbled forward, then seemed to suddenly grow a spine and marched around the corner. They could hear him speaking loudly and sharply to the other man, barely letting him get say anything in his own defence. Adam smirked beside him as he listened to McKay, and Marc guessed it was one the patented Rodney McKay ‘My God You Are All Morons’ rants and smirked briefly. He’d been on the receiving end of those rants often enough himself, and was just glad he wasn’t now. Whatever he was saying, it clearly worked and McKay successfully steered him down a different corridor, away from both the mirror room and themselves.
“Nice work, McKay,” Adam said approvingly as they joined him in the hallway. McKay looked like he wanted to be sick, but beamed under the praise.
“Just once more then we can get out of here,” Marc reminded him and McKay gulped again but followed them anyway.
They made it to the mirror room without further incident, stopping at the end of the corridor. Adam took his hand held scope out of one of the pockets of the his BDUs and assembled it quickly before moving to the corner and checking the entrance to the mirror room. After a quick recon, he backtracked down the hall to where they were waiting.
“We have two guards on the door,” he told them, putting the scope away. “Even if McKay can get the scientists away, they’re probably not going to move. The door is closed so I don’t know how many there are inside. You’ll need to get as many of them away as possible,” he said to McKay.
“I can do that,” he said, standing a little straighter.
“We’ll wait here,” Marc told him, indicating the corridor to their left. He hoped it led to the same few store rooms it accommodated in his reality. If so, people hardly ever went down there, and if they did, they could always duck into one of the store rooms. Again. McKay could hopefully herd the others down a different corridor completely so that wouldn’t have to be an option. He handed McKay the radio he had stolen from Kavanagh. “It’s too dangerous to speak to us on this, but when it’s clear, click on it twice to let us know. We’ll take down the guards and get into the room.”
“We won’t have long,” Markham said, “so as soon as they’re clear, signal us and get to work on the mirror. We’ll be there soon.”
McKay still looked fearfully at Markham, but he got a mumbled ‘Yes, sir,’ from him, so Marc counted that as a win. He ignored Markham’s wince.
“Good luck, McKay,” Adam said, clasping his thin shoulder. McKay staggered under the weight a little, before glaring at Adam, prompting a smirk.
After a steadying deep breath, McKay turned and stormed down the corridor. He didn’t look back.
The three of them remained on high alert, weapons raised and ready. No one spoke, ears straining for any sound from the atrium. But, since Lantean builders were good, and the rooms were solid and mostly soundproof, all they could hear was the bored conversation of the sentry guards. After a few minutes, they heard the door open and the sound of a dozen babbling voices flooded the corridor. The guards shouted over the din, obviously trying to figure out what was going on, but McKay’s voice boomed even louder. From their vantage point in the isolated corridor, they heard the voices rise then fade away as they passed through the hallway parallel to them.
‘He did it,’ Marc thought, grimly satisfied. After another minute of waiting, their radio clicked twice and they moved into action.
Adam took point, followed by Markham while Marc himself brought up the rear. They stopped at the corner where Adam had gone before, waiting while he checked the corridor with his scope. He signaled that there were still two men posted at the door. On a silent count of three, he and Adam stepped out into the hallway and each fired a single shot. The guards hadn’t even had a chance to look their way, and when they went down, they stayed down. Markham joined them as they ran to the end of the corridor, kicking the guns out of the way and checking for pulses. Both guards were dead and he and Adam grabbed one each under the arms while Markham opened the door. They dragged the dead men inside to where McKay was standing between them and a cowering scientist.
“Zeleka?”
“Idiot wouldn’t leave,” McKay told him irritably.
Suddenly, the two radios crackled to life; bellowed orders resonated across the airwaves and echoed around the room to the sound of booted feet running.
“McKay, the mirror,” Marc snapped, grabbing the guards’ guns and closing the door. Adam was talking to the other, spooked scientist in broken German, trying to calm him, while McKay ran to the computer already hooked up to the mirror. Markham came to stand beside Marc as he faced the door, body tense and poised for action. For a long moment, the only sounds were the frantic clacking of the keyboard, Adam’s broken German and Zelenka’s whimpering.
McKay started cursing and typed faster, moving to the mirror with the watch.
“I think... almost there...”
The mirror flickered to life, showing an empty room on the other side.
“That’s not it,” Marc said, eyes flickering to the mirror before becoming focused once more on the entrance to the room. “There’d have to be some of our guys on the other side guarding the mirror, even if they’re not expecting us to have survived. Now that they know about it, they wouldn’t just leave it where anyone could come through without warning. It’ll take them a few days to decide what to do with it.”
“Yes, yes. Is next reality,” McKay said impatiently, fiddling with the watch. “I just need to dial it back a small bit.”
“Dial faster,” Marc hissed through gritted teeth. He could hear, currently in the distance but getting closer, the sound of footfalls pounding down the hallway as soldiers rushed to the room.
The Mirror flickered again, and there was nothing: no stars, no rooms, no people. Nothing. McKay worked on the watch again, and Marc ignored the way Markham’s jaw tightened as the blank space that was once his universe disappeared.
“Hurry!” Adam shouted as the sound of boots drew even closer.
This time, the scene was better. He saw people, familiar faces, people he had worked with before, activating their radios and shouting silently into them, no doubt calling for reinforcements. He saw guns being drawn and aimed at the mirror, while scientists were hustled back out of the way. This was it. Home.
“That’s it!” Adam shouted, moving towards the mirror. “Come on.”
Marc crossed the room to McKay while Markham ran to the mirror. He grabbed McKay by the arm, dragging him away from the computer.
“Come on.”
“I need to wipe the memory,” McKay said, shoving his watch at him.
“There’s no time,” Marc said, pulling him away towards the mirror.
They were almost at the mirror when McKay broke his grip and grabbed the Beretta Marc had given him out of his belt. For one heart stopping second, Marc thought he was going to turn on them, but instead he unloaded the clip into the computer, destroying it completely. As the machine exploded in sparks, the door opened and a dozen or more soldiers flooded the room, led by a familiar face.
Sheppard took in the three of them in a split second and looked to McKay, who still had the gun in his hand. Without blinking, he raised his own weapon and McKay went down with a howl of pain and the bright red spray of arterial blood. Distantly, Marc heard Adam shout his name, and felt himself being pulled backwards towards the mirror. For a moment, he gazed into the watery blue eyes of the man they had promised to save but didn’t resist when Adam grasped his hand and slammed it against the glass.
Marc didn’t have the ATA gene, so the city had never really hummed to life beneath his touch like it did for Sheppard, or had done for Markham. Still, he hadn’t been aware of the vague sense of comfort the city brought him until it was no longer there. They crept down the familiar hallways of the city, corridors he had walked and patrolled a hundred times, and it just felt wrong. Shadows seemed longer and darker, the lights seemed duller and their steps seemed to echo even further. It may simply have been Marc’s imagination, but he didn‘t think so.
McKay was a nervous wreck, jumping at every little sound, causing the hair on the back of Marc’s neck to rise. As they got nearer to the centre of the city, they were forced to back up and hide when people crossed their paths. Marc frowned as they ducked back around a corner for only the second time in ten minutes. It seemed too quiet. They were near the centre, almost at the labs. The place should have been crawling with people, but they were slipping though with too few problems.
It was too easy.
McKay didn’t seem surprised by this. In fact, the closer they got to the labs, the more at ease he seemed to be. He began to walk beside Marc instead of trailing behind him, and as they rounded the last corner, he took the lead, striding past Marc towards the lab that was McKay’s even in his own universe.
“McKay, wait!” he hissed, reaching out to grab him by the sleeve. “You can’t just walk into your lab. We don’t know who’s in there.”
McKay rolled his eyes at him.
“Who else would be in my lab? I share with three others, but they would be under orders to investigate power surge. None of the other scientists are allowed to touch any of my work, and no soldiers ever come down here.”
“Never?”
McKay snorted. “Never. They are too busy polishing their guns or fighting to kiss the Commandant’s boots to come down here. Besides, what would they do?”
As they spoke, Marc moved in front of McKay once more and made his way into the lab, gun first. It was clear, exactly as McKay had insisted it would be. The scientist huffed past him and went straight to a bulky, black computer, pressing buttons on the surface. It started with a low drone of components and McKay fidgeted in front of it as it booted up slowly. By Marc’s standards, the ’laptop’ was clunky and old, a throwback to the 1990’s. But looking around the lab, it seemed to be the height of technology. It made sense, he supposed. After nearly sixty years of fascist rule, of stifling independent and creative thought processes, of killing or deporting anyone who questioned the authority, it made sense for that universe to be technologically behind the level that Marc’s own reality was.
“Give me watch,” McKay broke Marc‘s reverie, clicking his fingers in his direction.
“Why?”
“So I can figure out how to get back to your reality, idiot,” he snapped. “You said you weren’t listening when they were explaining how, but that it had something to do with infra-red beam on your watch.” He clicked his fingers at him again. “I need it.”
Marc undid the strap and handed it over. McKay grabbed it out of his hands, eyes lighting up, and began poking at the buttons, muttering to himself in German. He began typing quickly, connecting leads and cables to the Atlantis mainframe and scrolling through pages and pages of information. Marc was quickly lost and took up position by the door in case anyone came through, in order to make himself feel useful.
Two hours later, McKay was still muttering to himself, and Marc hadn’t seen or heard a single soul pass the lab in the entire time he was standing watch. It was disconcerting, to say the least. It was the middle of the afternoon: there should have been more people around. Unless they were all around the mirror room, and if that was the case, it was going to lead to a whole new set of problems when McKay figured this out and they could make a break for it.
He slowly walked the perimeter of the room, taking in the papers and experiments littering the surfaces. He may be more cowed and a lot thinner than the McKay Marc knew, but some things never changed. Some sections of the room were tidy, and he guessed that they belonged to the other scientists that McKay shared the lab with, but anywhere that McKay had taken as his own was a mess. He leaned over a desk holding several Ancient artifacts, all neatly labelled and tagged, but the carefully written notes were in German, so he moved on.
“Will you stop that? It’s distracting,” McKay snapped at him.
“Stop what?” Marc asked, freezing in place.
“Fidgeting and prowling around, looking like want to shoot something. I thought soldiers were supposed to be stoic and silent.”
“Well, Doc, I don’t know about you, but I don’t like not knowing if anyone is coming. I can’t be caught flatfooted. Can you call up the internal sensors or something? It would at least give us some warning.”
McKay shook his head fearfully. “I cannot do that. Orders from Commandant Sheppard himself. All non-essential systems are to stay off until he says so. I would be punished severely if I disobeyed order.”
“Why does he want the sensors down?”
“Because we are in space, yes? To keep moving, we need power. No power, we are dead. We’ll get stuck and we are dead. To keep city flying, we are on minimal power. Only tiny portion of the city is lived in and everything else is powered down, including internal sensors. Nothing was supposed to be able to get in city while we are in space.”
“Lucky us,” Marc answered. “So, no sensors?”
“No sensors,” McKay confirmed. “Why else you think that you and your friends haven’t been captured and questioned by now?”
“Well, that makes more sense,” he muttered.
McKay muttered something back in German, and Marc didn’t need to speak the language to get the gist of it.
“So, you have no sensors. How do you know if something is wrong in one of the labs? Why don’t you have guards on patrol down here, anyway?”
“All the soldiers are guarding critical areas such as the gate room, or the medical labs,” McKay told him, poking at the watch again.
“And you don’t consider labs full of shiny, alien technology to be critical?”
“Well, of course I do!” McKay rolled his eyes at him. “But Commandant Sheppard has other ideas of what’s important. We have not many soldiers left; the ones we had were re-assigned.”
Marc’s attention was immediately caught and he turned to face McKay, who was squinting at the watch face.
“You’re down on soldiers?”
“Ja,” McKay answered distractedly.
“Doc, this is important,” Marc said, coming to stand in front of him and causing the doctor to jump. “You don’t have that many soldiers in the city. Why?”
“Because of the Wraith,” McKay replied, a strange look something akin to hope in his eyes. “You do not have the Wraith in your reality?”
“Oh, we got them,” Marc replied and McKay’s face visibly fell. “They haven’t gone through most of the military though.”
“Then we were not as lucky as you,” McKay told him grimly. “The Wraith have taken many of the military and almost as many scientists in their attacks. We are cut off from Earth and cannot get new people. Why do you think we are moving the city? If we stayed on the planet, we would die. So we fly to Earth to get more soldiers and weapons...” He paused as if the subject was unpleasant to discuss and then finally snapped, “Now, let me get back to work.”
Marc let him be, mulling it over in his mind as McKay began muttering to himself again. If they were down on soldiers, then getting back to the mirror room might be easier than he had thought it would be. They may even have a chance in hell of surviving this whole debacle now, which was more than they had before. And if they were very, very lucky, they could have a clear run back to the mirror room.
“Hey Doc,” he interrupted again, and smirked when McKay heaved a great sigh of irritation.
“What is it now?”
“How’s it coming?”
“I am beginning to see how this would work,” McKay explained in the same tone as before. He turned the computer towards Marc. “The original device to control it is almost same technology. The watch is just a very, very simple version of it. Each universe has a frequency, like a radio, ja? We just need to find your frequency. See here,” he pointed to the screen where several frequency wave patterns were displayed. “This is frequency recorded during power surge when you came through. It is our frequency for this reality. And this,” he pointed to another wave pattern, “is frequency in memory of watch from last reality. I should just need to dial it same distance back to get your frequency.” He looked at the digital watch with something akin to wonder. “This watch is computer. So tiny! Is amazing. If it works like I think, I will find your universe’s frequency. I just need time.”
“Time is something we don’t exactly have a lot of, Doc,” Marc reminded him, taking up position by the door again.
“Then be quiet, and let me work.”
In retrospect, they had been lucky to get such a long period of interrupted time in the lab. Not ten minutes later, Marc heard footsteps just outside the door and had barely enough time to step back into the shadows and raise his gun before the door slid open and a tall man in the same colour uniform that McKay wore strode in. Marc recognised Kavanagh instantly from the pony tail and the way he got right up into McKay’s face. There’d never been any love lost between them in his own reality either, and Kavanagh missed Marc’s presence completely as he marched right up to McKay and began snapping at him.
It was in German, so the conversation went completely over Marc‘s head, but the sneering tone was familiar to him. McKay had frozen when Kavanagh entered, and was now gripping the edge of the table nervously, eyes flicking madly between Marc and the intruder. Kavanagh sighed and repeated himself and McKay finally answered in rapid-fire German while Marc moved silently closer. His grip tightened on his gun as he got behind Kavanagh, then turned it so the muzzle was pointing away from him. He didn’t want to have to shoot him. Kavanagh was an innocent in all this, in a manner of speaking, and he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Besides, Marc couldn’t take the risk that the gunshots would be heard and more people, guards and soldiers specifically, would come to investigate.
McKay tried to be calm, but his eyes kept flickering to Marc as he moved closer, and just as he reached them, Kavanagh turned around. He looked at Marc in horror, mouth hanging open before scrabbling for the radio on his belt. Marc raised his gun and brought the butt of the P-90 down hard on the back of his neck. Kavanagh collapsed to the ground and lay there, unmoving, while McKay started stammering and went white as a sheet.
“You have killed him!” he exclaimed, backing away from Marc as he bent down to check Kavanagh’s pulse. His babbling increased to hysteria as his back hit the wall and he looked fearfully at him.
“Relax, Dr. McKay,” Marc said, straightening. “He’s not dead. He’s just knocked out. But I don’t know how long he’ll be out for.” He walked towards the twitchy scientist with his hands raised, speaking to him as if he were a spooked horse. “We’re running out of time, Doc. Fast. You need to figure this out now.”
“I…”
“Dr. McKay, if you don’t do this, then we are all dead.”
McKay nodded, pushing off from the wall and straightened his spine. He went back to the desk, glancing nervously at Marc and Kavanagh, before turning his back to his computer. Marc used some spare cable he’d seen earlier to tie Kavanagh’s hands behind his back and hauled him up so he was leaning against the wall. He checked his airway and was relieved to find that that he was still breathing. Then he stood, keeping a wary eye on Kavanagh’s unconscious form and gripped his gun tightly, ready for another interruption.
Fifteen minutes later, McKay broke the silence with an exclamation of triumph.
“I think I have it,” he said, pointing to the computer. Marc moved closer, noting the wave patterns on the screen. “From co-ordinates I recovered from memory in the watch, this is where you started the trip. Now, I dial it back same distance and I get,” he pointed to the third pattern.
“The reality we originally came from,” Marc finished for him, a rare grin on his face. “Dr. McKay, you are a genius.”
“Ja, I knew this,” McKay answered seriously. “We leave now, yes?”
“Yes,” Marc confirmed, checking Kavanagh’s restraints to ensure they were secure. He was still out cold, but the longer they lingered, the more likely he was to wake up. Marc took the radio from his belt and tucked it into his own. He couldn’t understand anything that was being said, but at least Kavanagh would have to run to get assistance when he did eventually wake. “What did he want from you, anyway?” he asked as McKay opened a drawer and picked out some presumably personal items. Marc caught the flash of a small notebook and a photograph of a young woman with blond hair before they were stuffed into his jacket pocket; then he turned, and began typing some sort of code rapidly into the laptop.
“He said he had orders to find me to find out why I wasn’t at the room with the rest of the scientists,” he told Marc as he typed. “I told him I had received no orders to go there and that I had my own work to do. He was trying to order me to room when you hit him.” The screen went blank and McKay straightened, satisfied. “I have wiped computer memory,” he told Marc, “so they will not know what I was looking at.”
“Good, Marc nodded, then indicated to Kavanagh on the floor. “Your absence has been noticed then, and not just by this guy. We have to get to Stackhouse and Markham and get to the mirror, now, before someone else comes looking for you. Or him.”
“I am ready,” McKay told him, grabbing the watch as they slipped out of the lab, locking the door behind them.
The trip back to the others was no different than the one before, but every single cell in Marc’s body screamed at him to run, to get the hell out. It was only a matter of time before Kavanagh woke up, only a little longer than that before he got free and got help. They had a very short window of time to get to Markham and Stackhouse and for all of them to get back to the mirror before all hell broke loose. With that in mind, they moved as quickly as they dared through the corridors, McKay panting and sweating but keeping up with Marc’s steady pace. He was even catching on, flattening himself against walls while Marc scoped out the next corridor. In any other situation, his determination would have been amusing, but now, he was just grateful for it.
When they eventually made their way back to the storage room where Stackhouse and Markham were holing up, Marc knocked three times on the door, and called through to Adam. He opened the door and was met by two P-90s, but they quickly clicked the safety back on when they saw it was really him. McKay followed him inside and collapsed against the wall, red faced and gasping for breath. Marc felt a little guilty for his punishing pace, but knew McKay understood the urgency.
“How did it go?” Adam asked, looking at Marc but keeping one hand out towards Markham in case he fell. Markham was standing now, a little unsteady on his feet, but he was standing under his own steam.
“McKay figured it out,” Marc told them. “It’s a frequency thing, like a radio. We just have to tune into the right station. But we ran into some complications.”
“What happened?” Markham asked.
“Kavanagh happened. He came in looking for McKay and I had to knock him out. He’s tied up now, but I don’t know if he’s awake yet or not. Either way, we need to go. Now. You think you’ll be able to walk or do we have to carry you?” he asked him.
“I’ve been practicing,” Markham replied, walking forward with only a slight wobble in his steps. He paced the breadth of the room several times, and seemed steadier by the time he had finished and came to stand beside Adam again. “I can keep up.”
Marc flicked his gaze to Adam, who nodded in confirmation, seeming a little more at ease in Markham’s company. Marc wondered what the hell had gone down when he was in McKay’s lab.
“Good.”
“We need to do something about the soldiers,” Adam said, checking his ammo. “There’s hardly any around the mirror: just scientists. I think it might be a trap. We’ll have to distract them somehow.”
“Leave the scientists to me,” McKay said, straightening from his hunch by the wall. “As Kavanagh said, I was ordered down there. I will make minions go away for short time.”
“Good,” Adam nodded. “What about those soldiers?” he asked Marc.
“According to the good doctor over there,” he nodded towards McKay, “we may just be in luck. The Wraith have taken out a lot of their men, so they’re down in numbers. And the ones they do have are assigned to more critical areas. There’ll probably only be a few between us and the mirror.”
“Excellent,” Markham said. “Looks like we’re good to go.” He and Adam grabbed they packs they had left in the corner and moved towards the door, listening for signs of life. Marc grabbed his own from where he had left it, making sure they had left no evidence behind and raised an eyebrow at McKay, who visibly gulped and nodded. Marc unclipped the Beretta from his belt and gave it to McKay, who blanched in horror.
“Just in case,” Marc told him. “Do you know how to use it?”
McKay nodded shakily and tucked the gun into the back of his trousers, tightening his belt to keep it secure. Markham palmed the door control and Adam stepped out into the corridor, gun raised. He checked the area before motioning them all out of the storage room.
They were Marines, well, he and Adam were anyway, and they were damn good ones at that, but it was still slow going. Markham kept up well, only stumbling once when he turned quickly to track a noise which turned out to be McKay dropping the watch in his nervousness. Markham caught himself against the wall with one hand while he blinked to clear his head, and Marc felt a small twinge of guilt at how hard he had hit him. Only a small one though; he didn’t regret what he had done and would do it again in a heartbeat. McKay mumbled an apology and tightened his grip on the watch. Markham nodded at him carefully and raised his gun again.
They were almost within sight of the mirror room when they first ran into someone. They heard low, muted footsteps in the adjacent corridor and quickly backtracked down the hall. A scientist Marc didn’t recognise, dressed in a uniform identical to McKay’s was walking towards them, scribbling in a notebook as he did. He never even looked up from his work as he walked, navigating the corridor with ease. Marc motioned McKay forward, but McKay shook his head frantically, nerves setting in.
“McKay,” he hissed, prodding him forward. “We don’t want to have to hurt him. Just get him to go another way. Go.”
McKay stumbled forward, then seemed to suddenly grow a spine and marched around the corner. They could hear him speaking loudly and sharply to the other man, barely letting him get say anything in his own defence. Adam smirked beside him as he listened to McKay, and Marc guessed it was one the patented Rodney McKay ‘My God You Are All Morons’ rants and smirked briefly. He’d been on the receiving end of those rants often enough himself, and was just glad he wasn’t now. Whatever he was saying, it clearly worked and McKay successfully steered him down a different corridor, away from both the mirror room and themselves.
“Nice work, McKay,” Adam said approvingly as they joined him in the hallway. McKay looked like he wanted to be sick, but beamed under the praise.
“Just once more then we can get out of here,” Marc reminded him and McKay gulped again but followed them anyway.
They made it to the mirror room without further incident, stopping at the end of the corridor. Adam took his hand held scope out of one of the pockets of the his BDUs and assembled it quickly before moving to the corner and checking the entrance to the mirror room. After a quick recon, he backtracked down the hall to where they were waiting.
“We have two guards on the door,” he told them, putting the scope away. “Even if McKay can get the scientists away, they’re probably not going to move. The door is closed so I don’t know how many there are inside. You’ll need to get as many of them away as possible,” he said to McKay.
“I can do that,” he said, standing a little straighter.
“We’ll wait here,” Marc told him, indicating the corridor to their left. He hoped it led to the same few store rooms it accommodated in his reality. If so, people hardly ever went down there, and if they did, they could always duck into one of the store rooms. Again. McKay could hopefully herd the others down a different corridor completely so that wouldn’t have to be an option. He handed McKay the radio he had stolen from Kavanagh. “It’s too dangerous to speak to us on this, but when it’s clear, click on it twice to let us know. We’ll take down the guards and get into the room.”
“We won’t have long,” Markham said, “so as soon as they’re clear, signal us and get to work on the mirror. We’ll be there soon.”
McKay still looked fearfully at Markham, but he got a mumbled ‘Yes, sir,’ from him, so Marc counted that as a win. He ignored Markham’s wince.
“Good luck, McKay,” Adam said, clasping his thin shoulder. McKay staggered under the weight a little, before glaring at Adam, prompting a smirk.
After a steadying deep breath, McKay turned and stormed down the corridor. He didn’t look back.
The three of them remained on high alert, weapons raised and ready. No one spoke, ears straining for any sound from the atrium. But, since Lantean builders were good, and the rooms were solid and mostly soundproof, all they could hear was the bored conversation of the sentry guards. After a few minutes, they heard the door open and the sound of a dozen babbling voices flooded the corridor. The guards shouted over the din, obviously trying to figure out what was going on, but McKay’s voice boomed even louder. From their vantage point in the isolated corridor, they heard the voices rise then fade away as they passed through the hallway parallel to them.
‘He did it,’ Marc thought, grimly satisfied. After another minute of waiting, their radio clicked twice and they moved into action.
Adam took point, followed by Markham while Marc himself brought up the rear. They stopped at the corner where Adam had gone before, waiting while he checked the corridor with his scope. He signaled that there were still two men posted at the door. On a silent count of three, he and Adam stepped out into the hallway and each fired a single shot. The guards hadn’t even had a chance to look their way, and when they went down, they stayed down. Markham joined them as they ran to the end of the corridor, kicking the guns out of the way and checking for pulses. Both guards were dead and he and Adam grabbed one each under the arms while Markham opened the door. They dragged the dead men inside to where McKay was standing between them and a cowering scientist.
“Zeleka?”
“Idiot wouldn’t leave,” McKay told him irritably.
Suddenly, the two radios crackled to life; bellowed orders resonated across the airwaves and echoed around the room to the sound of booted feet running.
“McKay, the mirror,” Marc snapped, grabbing the guards’ guns and closing the door. Adam was talking to the other, spooked scientist in broken German, trying to calm him, while McKay ran to the computer already hooked up to the mirror. Markham came to stand beside Marc as he faced the door, body tense and poised for action. For a long moment, the only sounds were the frantic clacking of the keyboard, Adam’s broken German and Zelenka’s whimpering.
McKay started cursing and typed faster, moving to the mirror with the watch.
“I think... almost there...”
The mirror flickered to life, showing an empty room on the other side.
“That’s not it,” Marc said, eyes flickering to the mirror before becoming focused once more on the entrance to the room. “There’d have to be some of our guys on the other side guarding the mirror, even if they’re not expecting us to have survived. Now that they know about it, they wouldn’t just leave it where anyone could come through without warning. It’ll take them a few days to decide what to do with it.”
“Yes, yes. Is next reality,” McKay said impatiently, fiddling with the watch. “I just need to dial it back a small bit.”
“Dial faster,” Marc hissed through gritted teeth. He could hear, currently in the distance but getting closer, the sound of footfalls pounding down the hallway as soldiers rushed to the room.
The Mirror flickered again, and there was nothing: no stars, no rooms, no people. Nothing. McKay worked on the watch again, and Marc ignored the way Markham’s jaw tightened as the blank space that was once his universe disappeared.
“Hurry!” Adam shouted as the sound of boots drew even closer.
This time, the scene was better. He saw people, familiar faces, people he had worked with before, activating their radios and shouting silently into them, no doubt calling for reinforcements. He saw guns being drawn and aimed at the mirror, while scientists were hustled back out of the way. This was it. Home.
“That’s it!” Adam shouted, moving towards the mirror. “Come on.”
Marc crossed the room to McKay while Markham ran to the mirror. He grabbed McKay by the arm, dragging him away from the computer.
“Come on.”
“I need to wipe the memory,” McKay said, shoving his watch at him.
“There’s no time,” Marc said, pulling him away towards the mirror.
They were almost at the mirror when McKay broke his grip and grabbed the Beretta Marc had given him out of his belt. For one heart stopping second, Marc thought he was going to turn on them, but instead he unloaded the clip into the computer, destroying it completely. As the machine exploded in sparks, the door opened and a dozen or more soldiers flooded the room, led by a familiar face.
Sheppard took in the three of them in a split second and looked to McKay, who still had the gun in his hand. Without blinking, he raised his own weapon and McKay went down with a howl of pain and the bright red spray of arterial blood. Distantly, Marc heard Adam shout his name, and felt himself being pulled backwards towards the mirror. For a moment, he gazed into the watery blue eyes of the man they had promised to save but didn’t resist when Adam grasped his hand and slammed it against the glass.