STARGATE ATLANTIS: Mirror Mirror by Mirror Mirror (SGA-9)

Author:Mirror Mirror (SGA-9) [Retail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fandemonium Books
Published: 2020-06-30T19:48:37+00:00

chapter 14

Charybdis +4

The climb had been over slick, jagged rock, complete with water cascading toward them, and Elizabeth was soaked to her skin. The hem of her skirt was slapping around her calves, feeling colder and soggier with every slap.

“Be careful not to get caught up here.” Torch in one hand, Major Sheppard crouched in the narrow cleft at the top of the incline. “It’s a pretty tight squeeze, and the rocks are sharp.”

Yeah. Elizabeth’s fingers had the cuts to prove it. No need to remind her.

“Do you want a hand?” he asked.

“No. I’m fine. Just get out of the way there.”

Even to her own ears her voice sounded dull, weighed down by the thousands of tons of mountain above their heads. Which was not the best of thoughts to hang on to. With a grunt she pulled herself up another two feet, then another, clamped her hand over the edge of the drop, wiggled and kicked her way up into the cleft, crawled through, and finally tumbled out into yet another rock chamber. She’d long lost any sense of how many hours they’d been on the move. Somehow time had become submerged in an endless sea of misery — aches, fatigue, cold, wetness — together with the quickly fading memory of the last rest they’d taken.

Same as the sight of daylight for that matter. Her best guess was that they were no nearer the surface than they had been in the chamber where John had woken up at last — if indeed they were even that close. Though several of the passages they’d come to had led uphill initially, virtually all of them had dipped sooner or later, and she had a distinct sense of being deeper inside the mountain than ever before. So far they’d been spared the flashfloods — perhaps the hail hadn’t melted yet? — but on more than one occasion they’d been wading hip-deep in ice water. Compared to that, the little trickle down the rock wall was hardly worth writing home about.

Elizabeth pushed herself to all fours and rolled sideways into a sit. The others obviously felt the same as she; they sat slumped against the walls, eyes closed, and there seemed to be a tacit agreement that, for the next fifteen years at least, nobody would walk another step. With a sigh that fell just short of contentment, she tucked her legs tighter to her body and wrapped her arms around her knees for warmth. Besides, the chamber really was too small for four people; if she tried to stretch her legs, she’d kick John, though it was questionable whether he’d even notice. He looked half dead, and perhaps, she thought grimly, he actually was. For a while now she’d been worrying whether he’d sustained something worse than a mere concussion; a skull fracture, for instance. Not that there was a damn thing any of them could do about it…

The thought, disheartening as it was, gradually morphed into some kind of warm fluffiness.

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