Ahead, inside the Stargate, the wormhole engaged, and the event horizon surged outward as if to greet them. Then it settled back into the ring.
"What the…?" Dex had skidded to an abrupt halt, bringing them to a stop with him.
Instead of a cool, scintillating blue, the event horizon leered at them dark crimson, reminding Rodney of nothing so much as a pool of burgundy-or blood. Either way the prospect of stepping into it was less than enticing.
"What is it?" whispered Teyla.
"The wormhole…" Dex cleared his throat, hedging for words. "Looks… different. Red. McKay?"
Oh, that's right! Just leave it to good old Rodney to explain the mysteries of the universe at the drop of a hat. And never mind that he's at death's door. In more ways than one, by the looks of it…
Go! Ikaros yelled. You have to go now!
"I'm not going to-"
Ifyou don't go, it's over! Charybdis will win!
Doubts and scenarios tumbled through his mind, hot and fuzzy like socks in the dryer, but it always boiled down to the same thing: there was no other option. In a few seconds the wormhole, sickly or not, would shut down and slam the door in their faces for good.
"I know," he rasped. "I know. Ikaros says go, and for once I agree with him. We don't have a choice"
Dex lobbed him a double take, nicely executed. "You sure?"
"No! Who do you think I am? God? Go anyway!"
"You'd better be right about this…" With this resounding vote of confidence, the Satedan hauled and pushed them toward the gate and into that menacing sea of red.
Instead of that short, sharp shock followed by oblivion, Rodney had a sense of melting and being pulled in all direc tions in a slow-motion, alien-tech rendition of some medieval torture rack. He thought he heard screams-Ronon, Teyla, perhaps Ikaros, perhaps himself-and bubbling through the screams came a single word burned into his mind in neon letters: redshf. He thought he was staring at it, puzzled in that moment before it all made sense, and then, blessedly, consciousness winked out.
Chapter twenty-five
Elizabeth Weir dragged the back of her hand across her forehead, wiping off sweat for what felt like the hundredth time in the past hour. If she had any sense, she'd give up trying to figure out whether it was the claustrophobic lack of fresh air, or the oppressive colors of the sky, or factually rising temperatures, or a combination of all of the above. Fact of the matter was, knowing the reasons wouldn't stop her clothes from sticking to limbs leaden with fatigue and hypoxia. Fact of the matter also was that, as long as she managed to ponder such trivia, she wouldn't be contemplating the current state of affairs and cursing her own inability to change it.
"Bring it down! Carefully!" Radek Zelenka stood by the dialing console, waving his arms like a conductor.
His symphony orchestra consisted of two ground gliders and a handful of volunteers engaged in constructing a sturdy timber frame to stabilize the Stargate, which was still resting precariously on the bow of Jumper One. Behind the viewport Elizabeth could make out John Sheppard's face, a pale speck in the darkness of the cockpit. He would be flying the jumper manually, she suspected, compensating with minute movements of the stick for the tremors that still rocked the ground at irregular intervals and preventing the gate-and himself-from toppling into the rift.
Ever since she'd watched him steer the jumper between the fault and the falling gate she'd been torn between anger and admiration. Anger still had the upper hand. It had been a quintessential Sheppard move, utterly reckless and without any regard for consequences other than the glaringly obvious. Yes, he'd saved the gate-for now at least-but chances were he'd been saving nothing but a completely useless piece of technol ogy. They had no DNA `key' that would allow them to leave, not to mention that any activation of the gate would only precipitate the death of the planet. In other words, he was putting his life and the only jumper they had at risk for what currently was a great big ring of dangerous waste.
Right now Elizabeth would have given a great deal for a radio and the chance to read Colonel Sheppard the riot act. Again.
And maybe that, too, was merely a way of distracting herself.
"Slowly! Hold it there!" Radek shouted. "No! Right there."
The difference between there and right there probably was less than an inch. Elizabeth bit back a smile. This was the Radek Zelenka she remembered, an improbable mixture of quietly meticulous and excitable.
Suspended from the glider he'd been guiding in hung a giant `A that would form the still missing side of the support frame. Its legs gently touched the ground, bobbed a little, scaring up a cloud of dust, slid into pre-dug holes and settled. Two of the volunteers began to shovel dirt into the holes, tramping down on the soil to compact it around the legs of the frame. It struck her as an absurdly primitive way of salvaging something as advanced as the Stargate, but Radek had assured her it would hold. Probably. For a while at least, certainly long enough to get Sheppard and his jumper out from under the crushing pressure of the gate.
More volunteers were clambering up the frame now, bolting gravity clamps to the top of the contraption, seemingly indifferent to the bizarre contrast between the rough and ready timber frame and the high-tech devices that were supposed to hold the Stargate. Whatever worked… There were no other viable options, at least none that didn't involve threading stuff through the rings-which would be useless the second the gate was activated; the vortex of an establishing wormhole instantly vaporized everything it touched.
The leader of the volunteers directed a glance at Radek, received a brisk nod and a thumbs up. "It looks good! We'll calibrate as soon as-"
"Radek! What in the name of sanity are you doing?" Selena had shot from the tent, somewhere between concerned and furious, hollering at the top of her lungs.
Afterwards, Elizabeth wouldn't be able to say if it was Selena who'd alerted her or the familiar blue glow that glinted from the outer ring of the gate as the first of the chevrons came to life. She felt herself go numb with shock and vaguely registered that some of the noise she heard were her own screams.
"It wasn't us! We didn't dial out!" Radek yelled at Selena, then spun around, wide-eyed, to shout at the volunteers. "Get down! Get downnow!" He whirled back. "Selena! The clamps! Activate the clamps!"
The third chevron locked and lit up on the Stargate, and the woman simply stood there like a doe in the headlights. Suddenly, with a shudder that racked her entire body, Selena snapped from her trance, wheeled around and disappeared into the tent. Within moments, red indicator lights flared up on the clamps and the whine of the jumper's overworked engines dropped in pitch by a couple of notes. Elizabeth risked sucking in a breath, if only because it stopped her from chewing her nails. Five chevrons.
"For God's sake, Colonel, get out of there! That's an order!" Even as she shouted it, she knew he couldn't hear her. Or, if by some acoustic accident he had heard, would later claim he hadn't. If there was a later…
Jumper One began backing away from the gate, a fraction of an inch at a time, until Elizabeth wanted to climb up there and push. The clamps held, but the wooden construction groaned under the strain, as did the men hanging on to the ropes that had yet to be fastened to poles driven into the slope and intended to counterbalance the weight of the Stargate. By the time the sixth chevron lit up, you could actually see clear space between the bow of the jumper and the gate, but the ship was still well within reach of the vortex. Now it just hovered, as if holding its breath. Everybody was, it seemed, watching and waiting to see whether the Stargate would stand. And then the seventh chevron locked.