Sorry for the slow pace of updates lately. Unfortunately, I expect that they'll continue to be sporadic for the next couple of weeks ... probably one or two new chapters per week. I'll try to get back on the more frequent schedule as soon as I can!

With a sudden crouch and a snap of her legs -- she dove, a slim golden body in a ruffled pink swimsuit, breaking the surface of the pool and vanishing beneath with barely a ripple. Graceful as a seal, her sleek form darted under Rodney's legs and tickled the bottoms of his feet with trailing fingertips.

He broke the surface of the pool, gasping and treading water, his strokes awkward and clumsy next to her easy grace. "Stop it!"

Jeannie followed him up, water flooding between her teeth as she laughed at him. It wasn't mocking laughter -- there was nothing cruel in her. But she was better than him at this ... had always been, and enjoyed it.

"You're going to drown me."

"If you sink, I'll pull you out," she told him impishly, paddling circles around him with a lazy backstroke.

The worst part was, she meant it. The only thing worse than having your sister be a better athlete than yourself ... was having your sister rescue you from drowning. He'd never live that down in a million years.

"And then I'd do mouth-to-mouth!" she continued to threaten, sticking out her tongue and wiggling it at him.

"You wouldn't!" He circled to follow her, his legs churning under the surface in an effort to keep himself afloat. It wasn't his fault that Jeannie was a better swimmer -- he was a sinker. He had a handicap. Jeannie floated with no effort, and it was no wonder that she was good at it, then. Just watching her made his limbs feel clumsy and heavy. He could feel the water dragging him down.

"No, no, Mer." There was an urgency in Jeannie's voice that he didn't remember from that lazy summer day, so many years ago. "You have to keep swimming."

"If I sink, you'll pull me out, remember?" It felt good to let himself go, to give over to the draw of the water on his arms and legs. Though the sun was warm on his head, he still felt cold, and that drew him down, too. They should keep the temperature in the pool turned up higher; it shouldn't be this cold.

"I wish I could, but I can't." There was fear in her high-pitched child's voice. "Nobody's going to save you, Mer. You have to do that yourself."

Okay, this water was definitely really freaking cold. Panic seized him, because he couldn't move -- it felt like he was trying to swim wrapped in a blanket. It was cold and dark, and all he could see of Jeannie was the sunlight on her golden hair.

"Swim!" she screamed at him, and though the voice was his sister's, the note of command in it made him think of Sheppard.

He broke the surface, coughing and gasping and shaking, trying to understand that he was actually still alive. Or, alive for now, anyway -- the water spun him around, ducked his head underwater and sent him glancing off something that might have been rocks or ice or submerged tree limbs. He scrabbled wildly for something, anything, to stop his headlong rush down the river -- and the answer to his unvoiced prayers came in the form of a low-hanging sweeper branch coated in ice. He smacked into it and then clung like a barnacle until he was able to wrap his arms around it and slowly, painstakingly, drag himself up onto the ice at the river's edge. He collapsed into the snow on the bank, dripping wet and shivering, with adrenaline thrumming in every fiber of his body.

After a moment he raised his head and stared dazedly at the snow in front of his face. It was red. Snow shouldn't be that color. Oh wait. He'd been shot. The last thing he remembered was a sensation like a giant fist punching him simultaneously in the chest and face. Raising a shaking hand, Rodney touched his forehead. When he brought his hand away, the glove was soaked with blood. He stared at that for a minute, too, before finally understanding what it meant. Okay, he'd been shot in the head. Strangely, there was no pain at all. In fact, he wasn't feeling much of anything. But he remembered being shot in the chest, too -- that feeling like a sledgehammer knocking the air out of him, sending him over the edge of the cliff into freefall. He sat up, reeling a little, and opened the front of his parka with fingers already clumsy from cold.

His fingertips touched the edge of his vest, felt wonderingly at the hot burn of a bruise underneath. No holes. No blood. And, dazed as he was, it took him a moment to put the pieces together. The vest! It had actually stopped the bullet. The damn things worked! No wonder Sheppard made them all wear them ... hot, heavy and uncomfortable as they could be. Not that he'd ever in a million years admit that Sheppard had been right about something.

The side of his head was starting to sting sharply, and he instinctively pressed his hand against his hairline, feeling the heat of the blood soaking through his glove. He had no way to find out how badly he was hurt, but he could still think -- sort of -- and his brains weren't spilling out, so presumably he was going to live for a little while longer. Looking down at the fresh blood smears that he'd left on the front of his coat, he found that he was tracing their bright swirls with his eyes, fascinated by the way they merged and blended with the older bloodstains from Cora's death. He shivered at that thought, and it turned into a long, uncontrollable shudder that worked its way up to the surface from deep inside him.

Okay. Soaking wet in a blizzard. Halfway delirious and getting worse. Bad, very bad. He got to his feet, staggering a little and holding his hand pressed against the side of his head in the hopes of stemming that red tide just a little.

Jeannie's words from his dream -- hallucination, memory, whatever -- came back to him: Nobody's going to save you, Rodney. You have to do that yourself. The exact opposite of what his subconscious, in the form of Sam Carter, had kept trying to drill into his skull in the sinking puddlejumper. But just as Sam had been right then, Jeannie was right now. Caldwell had probably given him up for dead, and had his own problems anyway -- he wouldn't be wandering around in a blizzard looking for one wayward scientist. Sheppard and the rest of Rodney's team were light-years away. The only friends he had on this world, Elizabeth and Radek, were both in far worse shape than he himself -- and this sent a bolt of guilt and fear through him, because they needed him to look after him.

That was what really got him moving, because he was all they had. And damned if he was going to die out here and leave them at Armstrong's mercy.

He began walking, stumbling a little, looking for a place to climb the cliff.

------

It was nearly dark, but not totally ... the dim, diffuse glow that illuminated Sheppard's limited field of vision gave enough light that he could distinguish the ceiling of the puddlejumper.

Slowly he oriented himself in space. He was lying on his back, with one of his legs cocked up at a very awkward angle across the arm of the puddlejumper's pilot's chair. His head hurt and so did everything else, but there was no stabbling pain, no burning in his chest when he drew a cautious, experimental breath. And it wasn't cold in the jumper, so he must not have been unconscious for very long.

He worked his leg free of the pilot's chair and winced as his heel thudded to the floor, then pushed himself cautiously upright. The twilit world around him teetered and then steadied. He felt himself over quickly, finding lots of bruises and a nasty knot at the back of his head, but no broken bones -- he'd had worse falling off his bike as a kid.

Leaning on the back of the pilot's seat, he stood up and waited again for the world to settle down and stop spinning. The floor was nearly level, and from the lingering warmth inside the jumper, he didn't think the hull had been breached. The front viewport was nearly covered with snow, allowing a small amount of light to filter in -- just enough to see by. He guessed that the little ship had plowed nose-first into a snowdrift, which had probably dumped enough inertia to save him from a very messy end. His recollections of the crash were a confused blur of rending metal, violent motion, and snow flying against the viewport; it amazed him that either he or the jumper had survived more or less intact.

His hands ran over the controls and, to his surprise, the ship powered up. However, he could clearly see that they wouldn't be going anywhere for a while, if ever. He wouldn't know the extent of the damage until he looked at the outside, but the diagnostics were showing a whole board of red lights. The drive system was totally offline, and there was no way in hell he could fix it by himself. He could probably cobble together some sort of makeshift solution for a chopper -- he'd had practice at that, not to mention a couple years of aerospace engineering training that he'd never mentioned to Rodney -- but Ancient technology? Forget it.

"Daedalus? This is Sheppard. We got a problem here."

It was a long shot, and he wasn't shocked when nothing came back but static. Still, he tried the Daedalus again, then Lorne, and then, just because he couldn't help himself, Rodney. No answer on any channel.

"Damn," he whispered, and went into the back, thanking any deity that happened to be listening for Perry talking him into taking cold-weather survival gear with him. In a few minutes he was thoroughly bundled, with a P90 on his shoulder and life signs detector in his hand. As he powered down the jumper to minimal systems, he wondered if the LCS would still work in extreme cold. Well, only one way to find out.

The jumper's door would only go down halfway, due to snow blocking it. Sheppard jumped off the side of the ramp, wincing as the motion jarred his still-sore skull, and then walked around the outside. When he saw the side of the ship, he whistled softly. One of the drive pods had been very nearly torn off, and the other one was obviously damaged. The rest of the vessel was streamlined enough that the pods had taken most of the impact with the cliff -- he never thought he'd be pleased to see that. If it wasn't for the pods, there would probably be a gaping hole in the side of the ship right now. Still, it was amply clear that this ship wasn't flying again anytime soon, even if he could find somebody capable of fixing it ... namely Rodney.

Sheppard cloaked the jumper and then stood for a moment, fixing his surroundings in his mind. One of these days, all jokes aside, he really was going to forget where he parked the thing, and this had the makings of one of 'those days'.

A sheer rock face towered above him, presumably the same one he'd hit. He'd fallen between that and a snow-covered stand of rocks that made him think of the erosion-sculpted "castles" in the New Mexico desert. He decided not to dwell on the thought of how close he'd come to hitting those rocks, which probably wouldn't have left enough intact pieces of jumper to make a Tinker Toy set. As it was, the jumper had come to rest in a snowbank sandwiched neatly between the two rock faces, which provided some amount of shelter from the storm and made it less likely that the ship would be entirely covered with snow by the time he came back. As it was, the snow blowing across the surface of the cloak created a weird ripple effect. Even cloaked, it wasn't terribly well-hidden, but in this, it didn't have to be -- you'd almost have to know where it was to find it even without the cloak.

Sheppard wiped snow from the screen of the LCS with one gloved thumb. It was reading a number of life signs in his general vicinity, but none particularly close, and none in pairs. He sighed, and oriented on the nearest cluster. A brute-force search, in this mess ... he may as well just sit in the jumper and wait for rescue. But that wasn't an option, not for him, so he started walking.

Should've brought snowshoes too, he thought as he struggled through the snow. In places, where it had been scoured away by the wind, it was only ankle-deep and the walking was easy; then, three steps later, he might sink without warning up to his waist. His thighs and hips quickly began to ache from the difficult motion of lifting his feet out of the drifts.

After he left the shelter of the rocks, the wind hit him full-force and he stopped to snug his parka hood around his face. Exposed skin quickly began to ache from the cold, and icy bits of snow stung his cheeks and eyelids. He'd always kind of liked winter, and he'd never minded the cold even in Antarctica ... but he'd rarely been in situations when he couldn't stop somewhere and get warm, either.

Early Arctic explorers used to say that the wind could drive a man mad. Sheppard had first heard that story when he transferred to Antarctica, and at first he'd thought that it was just one of those hazing things that seasoned hands always told the new guy -- but after he'd been at the bottom of the world long enough, he'd started to see what they meant. The wind in these sorts of storms didn't just make a single, unified sound; it was a whole range ... shrieking and crying and sobbing, low moans like a creature in pain, high squealing that sounded just like some kind of electronic feedback. Sheppard didn't feel in any particular danger of going mad, but it did annoy him because it made his sense of hearing nearly useless. Time and again he thought he'd heard a human voice -- a cry, a groan, a low conversation just on the edge of hearing -- only to stop and realize that it was nothing but the wind keening through the pines and rocks.

When he first heard the howl, he thought it was another of the many and varied sounds of the wind: a rising, shivering wail, dying away to a series of coughing, hyena-like barks. But then it came again, and lifting under the first came a second from another throat.

Remembering the pack of wolflike creatures that he'd flown over earlier, Sheppard unslung the P90 from his shoulder, and checked the LCS. He was getting a cluster of life signs from somewhere to his right. No ... a cluster plus a lone, blinking dot -- which the pack was rapidly closing upon.

It could be almost anything. An old or sick member of the wolf pack, maybe, being chased down by its brethren. Some lone critter lost in the storm. No way to know.

Then he heard a gunshot, ringing clearly through the noise of the storm. There was no mistaking that sound for anything else.

He started to run.

------

TBC