What's the stalling speed of a puddle jumper?
Million dollar question, and he probably should have found out before now At a guess, twice as high as that of Earth's most famous flying brick, the space shuttle. Abysmal, in other words. He's right. The moment he's thinking it, the jumper starts shaking, giving him his answer; and he eases the stick forward to let it pick up speed again.
Arms and shoulders cramping with tension, he plays the game all the way down, fights barely responsive controls to balance air speed and angle of descent, and, at the last possible moment, fuels what little power the engines have left into the inertial dampeners to cushion himself from the impact.
The last thing John remembered clearly was hitting the surface of the water and being tossed through the cabin like the crash dummy in a road safety commercial advertising the benefit of seat belts. There'd been a crack, audible even over the noise of the impact, when his lower leg snapped. After that, things became alternately black, wet, and cold.
"Ow," he growled again.
"You have my thanks for saving the village and my people," the old lady said softly. "It was a very brave thing to do."
"You're welcome." Then it occurred to him that, despite her promises, he'd got no closer to believing the woman really was Teyla than he'd been five minutes ago. On the upside, Drink this all of it had been taken out of his face. Good. It smelled as vile as it tasted. "So, how does this-"
"Don't talk so much, Major." A hard old hand sought his shoulder and gave it a brisk pat. The woman smiled. "I know I provoked it, asking you to remember, but now let me do the talking. You wish to hear how any of this proves that I am indeed the Teyla you knew?"
"You could start by explaining why you're a few decades older than me all of a sudden."
"Shh. I said Don't talk so much. From now on be quiet. You may nod," she added graciously. "These… visions… you experienced after the impact that knocked you off course?"
Obediently, John nodded.
"They were no visions. They were real." She must have felt him move in preparation for protest, and her hand pinned his shoulder to the cot. "Alternate realities, all colliding in a single, focal point in space-time. They were caused by entropy."
"Entropy," parroted John, unable to stop himself. It was too crazy to believe. She was crazy. On the other hand, he had felt it. The splintering of his being into uncounted selves.
"A rift in the fabric of space-time. It has been unraveling ever since, threads becoming tangled, tearing, crossing others they should never have touched."
"I know what entropy is… How? What caused it?"
"We caused it." A tear rolled down her withered cheek. "And you cannot begin to understand the destruction it brought"
«We?„
"Our team. The Atlantis expedition. I. At a time in the past that should have been your future."
His throat tightened. He couldn't be sure if her… if Teyla's story was true, but one thing was beyond a shadow of a doubt: she believed what she was saying. Every word of it, and one word stood out-destruction.
"Teyla?" Reaching for the fingers that still clamped his shoulder, he realized for the first time that his hand was bandaged. "Tell me what happened."
She let out a shuddering breath, seemed to come to a decision. "I will do better. I will show you. This will not be easy for me. Nor for you. Brace yourself"
"For what?" The question was barely out when he knew, sensed her sliding into his mind with the same absolute poise that had always controlled her physical movement. Oh yes, this was Teyla alright. "I thought it only works with Wraith," he whispered. "Last time I looked I didn't have Wraith DNA…"
"But have I had many years to practice. Do not be afraid, Major Sheppard. Leastways not of me."
Chapter four
Suppressing a yawn, John stepped from one foot to the other. Sitting on the floor wasn't an option, was it? Nu-huh. Dust showed up real well on black BDUs. Given that Colonel Caldwell had picked up where Everett left off and made it his mission in life to find fault with everything Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard did or thought of doing, staying presentable would mean less grief and static all round. In other words, the lieutenant colonel would just continue to lean against the wall, propping up a P90, babysitting Drs. McKay and Zelenka in a part of town proven to be detrimental to one's health, and waiting for the fun part of the evening to start. Well, it had to happen sometime. He hoped.
"Elizabeth, there's something you need to see," Rodney's voice droned from somewhere inside a console at the center of the room. Though similar in some ways, the device seemed different from the terminals they'd discovered so far. Larger, more rough and ready, more quaint, in the same way a Commodore 64 would look quaint next to an i-Book. "No, next year will be fine!" snapped McKay. "That's why I'm calling you now!"
"If it belongs to archive system, there must be holographic interface," Radek Zelenka pointed out for the fifth time. When he was agitated he tended to lose track of his articles.
Or maybe it was exhaustion. The Czech scientist didn't seem to have gotten any sleep since they'd found this lab-if it was a lab-and his habitual unmade-bed-look had received an interesting makeover. John nursed a mental image of a cot where someone had died a slow death that involved a lot of thrashing. Typhoid, maybe. Or malaria… He embellished the picture by making it an epidemic that had struck down the entire family. They'd all died in the same bed.
"Ahoj! Are you deaf?' Zelenka hollered at the pair of legs that stuck out from under the console.
The legs gave a startled twitch, which was accompanied by a hollow clunk from inside the device, which was followed by silence. The legs looked limp.
Could be the fun part had just started… John frowned, fractionally worried. It was the silence that got him. Experience had taught him to expect wailing and gnashing of teeth. "Rodney?"
No reply. If possible, the legs looked even limper.
"Could be I — was wrong…" John disengaged himself from the wall, grabbed the legs, and pulled.
McKay was surprisingly heavy. Which, come to think of it, would be natural for a guy who believed that seventeen meals a day constituted a healthy diet. Under the skeptical eye of Zelenka, John kept pulling, exposed a midriff-literally; the shirt had ridden up, and his life was now complete-a chest, a neck, and eventually a sullen and perfectly conscious face.
"I'm bleeding," announced McKay, holding up his right forefinger by ways of proof. The microscopic smear of blood on it must have come from the scratch on his forehead. "Severe head trauma, possibly intracranial hemorrhage. We all know what that means, don't we?"
"No," said Zelenka. "Tell us."
"You had to ask for it, didn't you?" John muttered darkly and let go of Rodney's ankles.
"No, but he'll tell us anyway, and he enjoys it more if he's asked."
McKay looked wounded. It cost him a valuable second, during which Elizabeth Weir entered the lab, Teyla and Ronon Dex in her wake, thus preventing a lecture on the consequences of endangering the greatest mind in the known universe.
"What happened?" she asked, staring at Rodney.
"I presume my pupils are fixed and dilated?" he said.
Okay, they were now crossing the pain threshold. John flicked on the flashlight mounted atop his P90 and shone the beam, interrogation-style, directly at his teammate's eyes. McKay yelped and slapped an arm across his face.