She could see it in her mind as she walked. The wide, diffusely lit hallway, leading to the control center, bustling with people on errands, leaving their shift or starting it. There were smiles and nods, a joke, or a junior officer's wary berth around Rodney McKay. More people, all with familiar faces, in the control center itself, and-
"Teyla! Stop!"
The shout rang of warning, exploded the reminiscence, froze her in place. "What?" she hissed.
"You almost… tripped." Something seemed to constrict his throat, flatten his voice.
Of course. She had tripped. Fallen even, the first time she'd come down here. Then she'd gathered herself, shaken her head, patted around, until she found the obstruction. Under threadbare garments it had had desiccated, leathery skin, arms, legs, a face she'd been unable to recognize by touch alone. Like all the others. Their very facelessness had made it easier to forget, and forgetting had been a necessity. Remembering and wondering how they'd died and how long it had taken them would have turned every waking moment into a nightmare. In time she'd learned to navigate the macabre obstacle course in the control center without so much as touching any of them.
Teyla heard the crutches rattle to the ground, a thud, a soft grunt as Major Sheppard maneuvered himself to the floor. He would want to find out. He could. It wasn't his nightmare. Not yet.
"Who is it?" she asked softly and against her better judgment. "Can you still recognize them?"
"No." The word was bitten off and spat out, too rash and too quick.
"Don't lie to me, Major Sheppard." She said it gently, so as to take the sting out of the words.
"You don't need to-"
"I do."
"Would you believe me if I said I don't know him?" There was a trace of relief in his tone, and she understood perfectly.
"It is a man?"
"Yes. Tall, powerful, by the looks of what's left, long dark hair-dreadlocks-dark skin. No uniform. Lots of leather… I've never seen him before."
"Ronon," she whispered, surprised by a fierce spike of grief and remorse, still fresh and corrosive, even after all these years.
Ronon had been with the team, with her, when they'd activated Charybdis on Mykena Quattuor. If she had been taken to this place, this time, he might have been, too. But there were countless versions of all of them, so who was to say whether this was the original Ronon? Who was to say whether she really was Teyla Emmagan or merely a mirror for all of Teyla's con- ciousnesses? Not that it mattered.
She was the prophet, ancient and blind, as it befitted the oracle. "His name was Ronon Dex. The Wraith destroyed his world."
"I liked him." Not even a question, a simple statement of fact. "I mean, I will like him… when I-"
"You understood each other. Trusted each other. He was on our team."
"Oh. I did like him." He tugged her arm. "Help me up "
She hauled him to his feet, and a few minutes later they reached the gallery in the control center. There'd been more bodies along the way, she knew, just as there were dead men and women sitting at the workstations here, but John Sheppard had carefully and without comment steered her around them. Now she heard a faint hitch in his breath, instantly knew what he'd seen.
"When I first discovered this place, I guessed what it was, but I couldn't be sure. Not until I found the Stargate." She wished she could see it, too, just one last time. "This is your way out of here."
"It still works?"
"I don't know." She vaguely gestured in the direction of where the dialing console had to be. "The glyphs aren't raised, so I couldn't-"
"Of course." He moved to the console. A couple of swishes-he was dusting it off. Then soft tapping noises as he touched the glyphs. "First planet we ever dialed," he murmured, and she could hear a smile in his voice. "Kinda fitting, don't you think?"
Athos had been her home world, a lifetime ago. Or many. "Are you trying to flatter me?"
"No. It's the only gate-address- that came to mind."
Her chuckle broke off when the clang of the first engaging chevron echoed through the vast room. The second, the third, one after the other, until the seventh chevron locked and the vortex of the establishing wormhole roared into the control center and collapsed into a hush, punctuated only by the watery lapping of the event horizon.
"Obviously it works," he said. "Now would you care to show me what happened?"
Mykena Quattuor was a pathetic little dust ball, Mars without the canals or the romance, sullenly veering ever closer toward its primary, as if it knew that going out in a blaze of glory would be the one act that might imbue its existence with a modicum of interest. Well, either that, or it'd go down in the annals of the Pegasus galaxy as the site of salvation.
According to Boy Wonder it was going to be the latter.
John Sheppard stole a glance over his shoulder at the computer console that sat, securely tied down, in the aft compartment of Jumper One. Ikaros, going walkies at last. The kid-kid? — had begged, wheedled and thrown tantrums, but the decision to keep him on Atlantis unless his presence on Mykena Quattuor was absolutely necessary had been unanimous. That had been four weeks ago. Since then, Zelenka and McKay had turned the Charybdis device upside down and inside out-and made no headway whatsoever. Okay, they'd agreed that it probably wasn't a bomb and that the lights came on when you flicked a switch, but that was just about the extent of it. Enter Ikaros, who'd said the obvious: I told you so.
Must be nice to have superior intelligence.
Rodney probably could relate, but John would just as happily settle for flying a jumper. On the horizon beyond the view port, almost exactly on the dividing line between day and night, the light of the giant sun hit a glittering protrusion and refracted in a symphony of reds. Prompted by his thought command, the jumper opened a channel to the surface.
"Hey, Charybdis? From up here you guys actually look pretty. Like someone's dropped a mammoth garnet in the desert."
"If that's supposed to be poetic, don't give up the day job" The radio belched static, which suited Rodney's mood. In the past week he'd cycled from fractious-even-by-McKay-standards to completely insufferable. "Otherwise I'd be grateful if you could postpone any further outbursts of lyricism until we're finished here, Colonel."
"And a glorious good morning to you, too, Rodney. Ikaros and I should be with you in ten. Sheppard out."
He made it in nine thirty-seven. When he emerged from the airlock into the inner structure of the enormous assembly of man-grown crystals that formed the shell of Charybdis, a foursome of technicians pushed past to unload his cargo from the jumper.
In their wake McKay leaped out at him like a kiss-a-gram from the birthday cake. "Colonel!"
Fully expecting Rodney to burst into song at the slightest provocation, John pretended not to have seen him and headed for the control chamber. McKay being McKay-in other words, lacking the take-a-hint gene-the dodge didn't work terribly well.
"Colonel! I… uh… I'd like to apologize for being a little crabby lately."
Not on your life. For Rodney to apologize, events of a certain order of magnitude had to occur first. Such as the annihilation of the better part of a solar system. John kept walking.
"Colonel… John!"
Okay, the first name treatment was cause for worry. McKay didn't really do first names, not with him, anyway. In fact, John harbored a sneaking suspicion that Rodney secretly enjoyed using his rank-something about rubbing in how he was mere military, helpless without the guidance of a scientist. Or something. Only, right now the roles seemed to be reversed, which had John putting on the brakes. Despite a distinct sense of deja vu all over again.