CHAPTER 2

"Unscheduled offworld activation!" calls the gate tech, as the chevrons light and the gate springs to life. It is standard protocol to raise the shield, but only a moment later Colonel Carter gives the command to lower it: it's Colonel Sheppard's IDC.

"They're early," comments Carter in surprise, as Ronon and Teyla spill out of the gate. Teyla's eyes find Carter's.

"Stand by the raise the shield, Colonel."

Rodney is next out of the event horizon, looking as if he's fallen through, and Ronon quickly drags him out of the way. It's not a moment too soon.

The gateroom trembles as Sheppard flies out of the event horizon in a cloud of smoke and hail of debris. To his credit, the gate tech keeps his head and is already calling for a medical team.

The Colonel bounces and skids across the gateroom floor, finally lying sprawled at the foot of the stairs, covered in dust and surrounded by chunks of smoking twisted metal. Teyla is first to reach him, digging her fingers under his collar to check for a pulse and sitting back in relief when she feels the steady thrum under the skin.

The medical team aren't far behind, and she scoots back to give them room. The abrasions on the Colonel's face had looked minor, but serious injuries are not always visible. The air is thick with smoke and dust, but dealing with chaos is what the Atlantis team do on an almost daily basis, and they're good at it.

o0o

Awareness returns with noise. Confusing, blurring, senseless noise. His ears are ringing, and somewhere in the background there are muffled shouts. Panicking, his eyes snap open, and a blurred sea of faces swims into view. He tries to take a breath, but it feels like he's breathing dust, and he coughs and gags and can't seem to stop, and then the pain really hits, every cough like a knife in the chest.

Dimly he feels something cool and hard pressed to his face, and a strong hand supporting his head, but it is still taking all his concentration to try and draw enough air in. Through the coppery tang in his mouth he can taste the bottled oxygen, and he's grateful for it. His eyes slide shut, and he is lost again in a cacophony of blurred sounds.

More hands support him, feeling down his neck and back, and legs and arms, probing his ribs, and he doesn't know if his growl of pain is aloud or just in his head. Then finally, after an uncomfortable and disorientating rearrangement of his limbs, be finds himself being helped to sit up, and breathing becomes suddenly and mercifully easier.

He risks opening his eyes again, and this time the anxious and slightly blurred face of Dr Jennifer Keller greets him.

She mouths something at him, but he can't hear anything above the relentless ringing. He shakes his head, but it's a mistake. The nausea hits him like an express train and he just manages to get one flailing hand to rip the oxygen mask away so that he can roll sideways and vomit up the powerbar he'd eaten earlier. Red hot agony flares again in his chest and his eyes scrunch closed. Fortunately, a helping hand raises the oxygen mask back to his face, because he doesn't think he has the strength to lift his own hand. Not even when some idiot starts shining bright lights in his eyes and asks him inane questions about what his name is and what day it is. He answers succinctly to make them go away, but although his words are muffled by the mask, they're good enough.

o0o

Jennifer Keller wants to let her patient get his bearings before carting him off to the infirmary. He seems a little disorientated – to be fair, he's just been blown up - but thankfully there's no evidence of serious head injury: he didn't like the penlight much, but his pupils were equal and reactive, and he was quite clear on his name, rank, serial number and the date. Remarkably, his eardrums aren't even perforated, though she imagines that he can't make out much sound at the moment. She watches him breathe, holding himself tensely against one of her orderlies. His lungs now seem clearer, which is a relief – no red flecks in the oxygen mask from the coughing, which would be a warning sign of blast lung. But his breaths are shallow and almost too careful; an initial palpation indicates no broken ribs, but she's willing to bet that there are several cracked.

But on the plus side, his blood pressure looks OK, and there are only small fragments of shrapnel to remove, and none of them look deeply embedded or in places that could cause complications. Once he's safely in the infirmary she'll give him some of what her patients call the 'good drugs' and have him good as new in no time. Pursing her lips, she realises that he's been lucky. Very lucky. Considering the debris littering the gate room and the speed with which he was ejected from the stargate, he could easily have been killed, instead of suffering what are relatively minor injuries. The gurney stands empty, but Jennifer is happy that the Colonel is in no immediate danger, and as he's probably more comfortable sitting up than he will be lying down, she's content to leave him where he is for a moment. With a nod at the attending nurse, Keller stands and makes her way to Colonel Carter to report on Sheppard's condition.

Carter sees the doctor approach out of the corner of her eye, but a slightly hysterical chief science officer is still trying to explain what the hell went wrong with what should have been a cakewalk exploratory mission and how the military commander ended up flying across the gateroom, and one of the gate techs has started shouting something, too. Carter looks torn, but turns upwards to the gate tech, holding out a 'wait' sign to the others vying for her attention.

"It won't shut down, Ma'am, and I can't engage the shield."

"What?" In an instant, Carter is running back up the steps, with Rodney hauling himself after her. Jennifer turns to follow, not knowing what else to do, when there's a squelch of re-materialisation behind her, and something solid and fast moving slams into her back, knocking her to the ground, and sending her into a dizzying heap of tangled limbs, only yards from where Colonel Sheppard is now struggling to stand. She's aware of a pitter patter of falling debris, and there's more choking dust.

Stunned, she tries to push herself up, but there's something heavy lying across her, and she panics, breathing hard and scrabbling at whatever it is with frantic hands.

One of the military contingent reaches her first, and puts a strong hand behind her shoulder, and another on the side of her face, getting her to look at him. She can't remember his name, then laughs hysterically, breathlessly, when she realises it's there on his uniform. He's telling her to calm down, and not to move, and then she finally gets a good look at the object that's pinning her down. It's a body, face down, and it's dressed in the grey and black uniform of Atlantis. She can't see the face, just dark hair. And a large piece of twisted shrapnel embedded in the neck.

Professionalism takes over. Ignoring the stinging ache in her ribs and head, sore from when she landed, and ignoring the rest of the gateroom, Jennifer reaches across, careful not to touch the shrapnel, and searches with her fingertips for a pulse. There's the tiniest of flutters beneath skin that's slick with fresh blood. She shouts to the nearest corpsmen to hold the body steady while she eases herself out from underneath. There's no time to check properly for spinal injuries, because he's going to bleed out in minutes if she doesn't act now.

She's concentrating on keeping the spine aligned as she and the marines roll the body onto its back, so she doesn't see their expressions when they, along with her, get a proper look at the face. It's unmistakably Lt Colonel John Sheppard.

o0o

"What the hell's going on?" Colonel Carter's voice cuts through the chaos.

Jennifer risks a quick glance up, and for a moment as she meets Carter's eye, wondering what to say, she can see in her peripheral vision the two John Sheppards – the first one, leaning on Ronon but very much upright, with an oxygen mask dangling redundant at his side, and the second one, whose life is literally spilling out all over the gateroom floor. Someone's handing her a wad of something to pack the neck wound, and she's no choice but to focus on the life that's in her hands. Her fingers slip on the skin and on the shrapnel, but her heart sinks as the blood flow clearly slows – and not for the right reasons. There's a heart-wrenching moment when the eyes flicker half-open, and they're full of fear and pain, and then they're glassy and unseeing, and the flow of blood becomes just a trickle, and she knows it's all over. In all honesty, it was over the moment the shrapnel sliced through the carotid artery.

Jennifer deliberately and gently removes her hands from her patient, and gives a little shake of her head.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, looking anywhere but at the very much alive Colonel Sheppard who's now standing only feet from her. She doesn't want to see the expression on his face.

There's a full second of stunned silence, and then it's broken by McKay, with a strangled "Oh God," and then it's as if someone's pressed the button to re-start the chaos.