A/N: Over 200 reviews! Holy freakin' cow. (I didn't pass out as I predicted in the Ch. 7 author's note, but I did feel unabashedly giddy and generally euphoric. . . which, if you think about it, is way better than fainting anyway.)
Sorry this is a couple of days late. I got sidetracked with another story ("Climb"). It wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote and posted it. What's a writer to do?
Thanks go to beta Stealth Dragon. And thank you to everyone who's reviewed. Heck, thank you to anyone who's stuck with the story-- whether you reviewed or not. (If you'd like to review, however, there's still time! A couple of more chapters to go after this one. I'd hate for anyone to miss out on the great and wonderful fun that is reviewing. :0)
Their explanations ran together, Radek's Czech-accented words tumbling under Ronon's gruff ones. McKay had never seen Radek interrupt Ronon, let alone try to talk over him, and the fact he was forcefully unwilling to yield the floor to the big Satedan screamed important!
McKay got "device," "dimensions," and "cross" from Radek. But Ronon's words were the ones that caught him.
"Aiden Ford?" McKay exclaimed loud enough to be heard over Ronon and Radek together and silence the two men. He gaped at Beckett. "Is the IV still messing with my head or did he just say Sheppard's out there talking to Ford?"
Eyes wide, Beckett looked just as stunned. "Aye, he did."
"But Ford isn't — "
"No."
"Because when we compared universes, you said — "
"And he did," Beckett said helplessly. "Just the same as yours."
McKay looked at him askance, almost accusingly. "Well apparently not, because he's alive and well and having a chat with . . . ." he trailed off as his gaze fell on Radek. The other scientist nodded miserably and McKay felt his heart stutter a beat. "No. No, no, no, no, no. We've been stable for four shifts now. Four. Nothing different except the length of time we spend here and there, and even that's been predictable. Nothing new has happened to alter — "
"Nothing new?" Radek asked, incredulous, raising the tablet in a gesture that suggested he'd like to throw it at McKay. "Do you remember why you're in that bed?"
McKay's grip tightened on the rail. "Oh I did not do this. Do not go blaming this on me."
"I'm not blaming," Radek said in a tone that contradicted his words. "Maybe this would have happened eventually, yes. But your attempt to overload the device hastened the thinning of the barriers between realities and now —"
But rather than continue the argument McKay started yanking heart monitor leads from his chest, wincing as each pad pulled at his sore skin but moving adrenaline-surge fast.
"Bugger!" Beckett exclaimed and jolted forward just as McKay yanked off the last lead, sending the heart monitor into a high-pitched wail. Beckett slapped off the alarm with one hand and used the other one to snag McKay's wrist just as he started ripping his IV tape away. "Rodney — "
McKay wrenched his hand free and continued tearing at the tape, his frenzy leaving him slightly out of breath. "This is so incredibly, horribly, disastrously not good, Carson, you have no idea."
Beckett caught his wrist again and this time held it as McKay tried to jerk away. "Aye, the barriers have thinned so drastically that dimensions are starting to bleed together. I'm not oblivious," Beckett said off McKay's astonished look. "Now calm down." His eyes flicked to Ronon. "Is the colonel all right out there with Lieutenant Ford?"
"For the moment. They're talking about the duty roster."
McKay blinked. "What?"
"Ford said it was lucky he ran into Sheppard because he had a question about the duty roster."
McKay looked at the blaster still in Ronon's hand. "Your holding him at gunpoint didn't clue him in?"
"He thought I was kidding." Ronon grunted. "Asked if we were still on to spar tomorrow."
"The colonel told you to inform us of this new development while he kept Lieutenant Ford busy," Beckett surmised. Ronon grunted again, a clear and unhappy well it certainly wasn't my stupid idea to leave him.
Beckett's grip had loosened and McKay pulled his wrist away. "Get this stuff off me, Carson. Nap time's over."
Beckett's jaw set hard and McKay got ready for a fight. He had a hundred and one reasons why he needed to get out of that infirmary now, and he was prepared to spout every single one of them until he either A) convinced Beckett he was right, or B) bought enough time to surreptitiously disconnect himself.
"Dr. Beckett," Radek broke in, his voice slightly tremulous. "You better unhook him from the machines."
Beckett glared at him. "Son, I'm sure you're trying to help, but —"
"No," Radek said, tapping his head with a grimace. "We're about to shift."
McKay didn't feel anything. He was hazy, yes. His chest twinged at odd intervals and his muscles felt thick, heavy. Headache, though? No. Vertigo? No. He was half-convinced that Radek was crying wolf to get Beckett to release him, but the Czech scientist looked vaguely ill as he hurried to the backroom muttering about retrieving the laptops. McKay knew he wasn't that good an actor.
"I don't feel the shift coming," he said worriedly as Beckett swiftly slid the IV needle from the back of his hand.
"You probably wouldn't feel a puddle jumper landing on you right now. The good drugs, remember?" Beckett told him as he pulled off the pulse ox. He paused and gave McKay a stern look. "Under no circumstances are you to consider this a release from the infirmary, you understand? You are too weak to go traipsing around the city. Your body cannot handle the stress right now."
McKay nodded in a way he hoped conveyed sincerity. "Of course."
Beckett narrowed his eyes, unconvinced. With little choice, he removed the nasal cannula, the thin plastic tickling the inside of McKay's nose as it was lifted away. As he swung his legs over the side of the bed, McKay sneezed once, twice, three times, reflex closing his eyes. When he opened them again, sniffling a little, Beckett was gone.
He meant to hop off the bed and sprint to his lab. Instead, he slid off and landed in an unceremonious heap on the floor.
He was spending way too much time on the floor lately.
"You okay?" Ronon asked, helping him up. "Leg?"
"Yeah, it just went out from under me." Either the pain meds were fleeing his system faster than any pain meds in the history of pharmaceuticals or the fall had seriously aggravated the gash in his leg. He was certainly feeling something now — prickling fire along his right calf.
"Wheelchair?" Ronon asked, eyeing the way McKay rubbed at the leg.
"Uh, no. Yes. No."
Ronon raised an eyebrow.
"Yes." Damn his pride. Wheels would get him to the lab fastest.
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McKay's ribs protested any stress, including the strain of wheeling the chair, so Ronon pushed, moving swiftly through the city's darkened halls as Radek jogged behind.
"A pinpoint explosion, localized and focused at the device's power source," McKay called behind him, tossing the suggestion just loud enough to be heard over the huff-puff of Radek's breath and the soft squeak of the chair's rubber wheels on the floor.
"We still can't locate the power source, Rodney," Radek said with exasperation. "And an explosion may only hasten the entropic cascade — "
"Fine, fine. We don't destroy it. We, uh, go the other way. Boost it, prop it up to solidify the barriers between dimensions. We can use the naquadah generators supplemented by the ZedPM and —"
"We don't have anywhere close to the kind of power it would take to sustain that for any length of time. It might buy us two, three minutes, but then the city would be completely without power and we'd be back —"
"— to square one, yes." He fairly growled in frustration. "Dammit!"
He stayed silent for a moment, thinking, watching the darkened side corridors skim by. Blackness. . . blackness. . . Sheppard. . . blackness. . . .
"Stop!" McKay shouted, barely resisting the impulse to grab the speeding wheels. "Ronon, turn around. Go back. Go, go, go. Sheppard's hurt. Second corridor on the right."
Ronon whirled the chair around so fast that McKay lurched forward, just managing to hang on to the arm rests as they did an about-face. Then suddenly they were there: Sheppard was slumped against the wall unconscious, one knee drawn to his chest, the other leg straight out in front of him. His face was pale, stark against his dark clothes and the shadowed hallway.
Ronon stopped the wheelchair just inside the side corridor and rushed to his side. "Sheppard. Hey, Sheppard," he said, doing a visual sweep for injuries. McKay noticed the dark spot on the side of Sheppard's shirt just as Ronon did. The Satedan carefully peeled the shirt up to reveal a bloody bullet wound just under Sheppard's ribcage.
"How bad is it?" Radek asked from behind McKay.
Ronon cautiously prodded the area around the hole, his fingers sliding on the slick blood. "Bullet's still in there."
Sheppard suddenly jerked awake, gasping as Ronon's fingers came too close to the wound. "Shit!" he said, panting out of pain or because breathing was a problem or both. "Nice to see you guys, but knock it the hell off with the touching."
Ronon lowered the shirt. "Ford do this?"
Sheppard shook his head a little and laid a protective hand over his side. "He shifted. Guy in a Genii uniform caught me as I was coming back to the infirmary. We traded gunfire. He's three corridors back. Badly wounded. Or dead."
McKay didn't like how Sheppard kept panting, how his sentences got shorter and shorter, how sweat dampened his hairline. "Ronon."
Ronon nodded. He saw it, too. "All right, Sheppard, let's get you back to the doc."
He slid one arm behind Sheppard's back and another under his legs and started to lift when the sickening thwack of a bullet hitting body came from behind McKay.
Ronon couldn't move fast enough to catch Radek as he fell.
