"I'm guessing that's Stackhouse. And… me. With Ikaros," he murmured with a sidelong glance at the boy who was still sitting in the co-pilot's seat. "That's why it worked, isn't it? Why the gate brought us back? Your original is here."
Ikaros nodded. "Part of it anyway, but my program imprint in the quantum computer obviously was enough. And before you ask, no, I didn't know that, but there was no point in telling you. We had no choice, and hearing the probability of success just would have made you despondent and depressed."
Elizabeth resisted an urge to groan. It was too late anyhow. As Jumper One dipped into a pursuit course, hurtling after its double, she braced herself against the backrest of John's chair. He'd opened a com channel and tried to hail… himself. If you thought about it long enough, it gave you a migraine.
"YOU… he can't hear you. He's your future self," Ikaros said simply. "The timelines are still out of synch. They won't converge until Charybdis is neutralized."
"Great," snarled John. "And how do we do that?"
"With Rodney's help of course "
It was evident that no further information would be forthcoming, and John wisely directed his attention on the task of managing reentry in a damaged jumper. "Hold on," he warned. "This is going to be bumpy."
Bumpy was the least of it. As they entered the atmosphere, buffeted by rock-hard air, the interior of the ship turned into a sauna. And then some. Hot air seared her lungs with every breath Elizabeth took, parched her throat, while her clothes stuck to her skin, gluey with sweat. Dawn blended into dusk, day into night. Clouds streamed past, tore into tatters or obscured the view for seconds on end. Each time they cleared, the surface had leaped closer. Mountains rose at an alarming rate, valleys deepened. They shot out over an immense desert plain, and the temperature inside the cockpit began to drop at last. The ground seemed close enough to touch all of a sudden, racing below the ship in a blur, and then the glittering crystal dome of Charybdis's outer shell popped over the horizon, growing so rapidly that Elizabeth felt sure they'd collide with it.
They didn't.
Instead they struck the ground with a bone-rattling jolt, leaped into the air again for a new bump that segued into a succession of gradually slowing hops. Finally the ship ground to a standstill. In front of them the Charybdis dome gleamed serenely like a jewel.
There was a long moment of absolute silence, shattered by Ronon's roar. "Were you trying to kill us?"
Hands shaking, John let go of the controls. He turned around, pale as death, and attempted a grin. "Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Kangaroo and his crew hope you had a pleasant flight. Please make sure to take all your belongings with you when you disembark."
Radek gave a funny little noise that could have been any thing from a pained chuckle to a stifled sob. "Don't tell me. That's why you christened it `jumper'," he said faintly.
"Hey, you know what they say-any landing you can walk away from is a good one."
"Except I'm not sure I can walk!"
"We have to go!" Absolute urgency in his voice, Ikaros pushed himself from the seat. "There's very little time left."
"Yes," said John, sounding like getting up was the last thing he wanted to do. "Radek's only joking."
"That's what you think," the Czech grumbled.
Ikaros either hadn't heard or was ignoring him. Groping along the walls to steady himself, he stumbled into the aft compartment, where Ronon was still clucking over Rodney who hadn't moved. In a corner of her mind that seemed inured to everything that was going on, Elizabeth drew a small spark of amusement from the thought of how embarrassed the Satedan would be when Rodney found out.
"I shall have to borrow him again," Ikaros said. "Only for a little while."
"What? Borrow whom?"
By ways of an answer, Ikaros dissolved into that luminous cloud once more, slowly spun above Rodney for a moment, then wrapped him into a golden glow before vanishing as though he'd seeped through McKay's pores.
Moments later Rodney groaned, stirred, blinked and finally opened his eyes. "What did I miss?"
"Don't ask," growled Ronon.
"Oh good." He blew out a sigh, careful and shallow; an indication that his chest still wasn't much better. Then he pushed himself up, which in itself was a sign that things were off somehow. Rodney McKay had several strengths; heroism in the face of discomfort wasn't one of them. "We have to go."
Evidently John begged to differ. "Don't be an idiot, McKay! You're not going anywhere."
"Colonel, I'd love to argue with you till we're both blue in the face, but right now Ikaros and I have to get to Charybdis "
"Ikaros and you?"
"Like he said, he borrowed me." Rodney actually managed to stand up, wobbled, and almost knocked into Ronon before steadying himself. "Their timeline-the one we're chasing, the one where Charybdis is about to be activated-is showing signs of entropy already. It's getting erratic. Which means that, unless we cut the debate and act now, we'll… both overtake them and be too late, at which point Charybdis will probably gain permanency, because the only people who could conceivably fix this-in other words, us-have managed to miss the fulcrum event. All of which roughly translates as No time for blah-blah. Run. Run. Run."
John had barely set foot outside the jumper and felt the and wind sweep sand in his eyes, when he realized the implications of it all. Mykena Quattuor turned into the temporal equivalent of a cakewalk. One second he and Ronon were dragging Rodney and his passenger across the dunes and toward the Charybdis dome, the next everything around them seemed to liquefy and then congeal again.
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!"
Someone was yelling in his ear, driving spikes of pain through his head. But he hadn't had a headache then, had he? "I'm sorry, Rodney," he rasped. "You were right. You-"
"Colonel Sheppard!"
For a moment the quicksand that was time in this place let go of him, spat him out just outside the airlock, dizzy and disoriented and staring at the haggard face of Rodney McKay who, coincidentally, looked like death warmed over.
"Don't buy into it!" The voices of four McKays dopplered all around him. "It's past! It doesn't matter!"
Yeah. Right. Easy for the Rodneys to say… Through the tilting world and whirling images around him, John tried to focus on something, anything that looked like it might be stable or linear or in any way reassuring. He found nothing, nothing at-
A hand closed around his, small, strong, calloused, providing a focal point. "Trust me," Teyla said. "It can't distract me."
He thought he must have nodded, shouted, "Hold on to each other!"
Never knowing whether anyone had heard him, he saw himself age beyond comprehension or reckoning and float, a heartbeat later, thumb-sucking and barely formed in an amniotic sac-2001, it's a movie, Teyla-and through it all followed the tenuous tug of Teyla's hand, until at last past and future splintered apart and left him standing inside the crystal-studded central chamber of Charybdis.
John had an odd sense of overlapping with another, fainter version of himself, not quite matching, edges a little blurred and fuzzy but growing more defined with every breath he took, and he realized that they must have made it just in time-the second they completely coalesced with their alternate selves here in the chamber would be the defining moment. Not a moment even, but that imaginary, infinitely brief space between moments, just before they all made their mistakes and history would quite literally repeat itself.