The ground came up hard, slamming the breath from his lungs! Everything was spinning, and he could feel his morning rations trying for free air.

“What—?” muscles spasmed, and he felt himself curling into a ball as the pain that was fast becoming his whole universe fought him for control of his body.

Disorientation was total and absolute. Up was an abstract, and down was wherever he happened to be looking at the moment. Wide-stretched eyes swung wildly left and right, and he could feel the blood sluicing along the inner surface of his skull, lapping at his forehead from the inside. The rations made a break for freedom and his stomach muscles went into full cramp. His mouth locked open, sending anything not firmly attached to his stomach walls spewing out into the dirt. Panic clawed its way as near the surface of his mind as it had ventured in his adult life.

Eighteen years of training and conditioning kicked in all at once, triggering post-hypnotic responses, and his pulse slowed almost of its own accord. He felt his stomach muscles loosen minutely and was able to close his mouth long enough to swallow before opening it again to pull deep, drowning-man draughts of air into starving lungs.

Shaking hard enough to rattle bones, he rolled to his knees, hands dropping to the ground, anchoring and steadying him as his subconscious struggled to quell the growing panic, separate it from the pain upon which it fed, and force the lizard brain back into its cage. Concentrate, it told him. Observe. Gather. Process.

Something had gone catastrophically wrong.

His right eye —the cybernetic one— hummed sub-audibly as it cycled through its twelve modes, giving him his surroundings in ranges from ultraviolet to infrared. None of them told him what the human eye on the left hadn’t — he was in a temperate rain forest, or something that closely resembled one, spang in the middle of a small bowl of steaming earth that looked as though it had been blown into the fabric of the canopy with a fairly sizeable thermobaric charge.

What the hell had happened to the fjord? Ten seconds ago there’d been an ice-locked fjord! He’d been there with — what had happened to his men? Where was the team? They’d been in a fjord to kill a sonic cannon....

He’d killed the cannon, hadn’t he? Yes. Yes, he had. More than three quarters of the team had fallen to get him close enough, but he’d managed to launch the primed det charge into the cannon’s beam even as the K’trin’al tech had triggered it. He remembered the shot, remembered Ochibi’s face as the gunny had gone down, half his leg blown away... Gunny.... No! Mourn later, process now. He remembered the blast. Too close, that blast.... A flash, blindness, and now he was... where?

Swiping absently at the visor controls of his helmet before realizing the visor wasn’t there anymore, he forced his head higher, taking in the details of his surroundings. Signs of an explosion were everywhere — shattered and fitfully burning trees, scorched forest duff, metal and plastic shards protruding from everything for half a hundred meters. There went that neat death theory he’d begun formulating. Were he dead, he wouldn’t be laying in the middle of a blast crater... would he?

Of his men, dead or alive, he could find no sign. Nor any of the K’trin’al hunter/killer team they’d been sent down to intercept.

The forest was utterly silent; no hint of breeze, no sound of life. Wait... silent? He could see patches of burning brush at the edge of the crater. There should at least be some crackling. He held a hand up to an ear and snapped his fingers. He could hear the sound, but only faintly. Blast deafness, then. Temporary, he hoped.

The second wave of pain hit him as he digested this, doubling him over again, ramming his face into the crater floor. Locking his jaw he struggled not to cry out.

Compartmentalize, the subconscious ordered, taking overt command again. Move the pain to where its voice is small. Postpone. Dampen. Eventually, his eyes opened again, and he was able to react on something other than a biological level.

Okay, the subconscious ordered in drill instructor tones; priorities: imminent threat, weapons, location, shelter, water, food. Each movement was pain, but he scanned his immediate surroundings, reaffirming what he’d already figured out. He was alone in a small clearing blasted out of dense forest by some unknown force. No imminent threat beyond the terror howling on the other side of the subconscious D.I.’s barricade.

Weapons. He located his rifle a few feet behind him. At least what remained of the rifle. A clawed hand felt for his Marauder pistol, but the holster seemed to have melted around it. A few seconds of scrabbling did no more than to further bloody his fingers.

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He reached back for the hilt of his spool sword and jerked his hand quickly away. It was scorching hot! Peering down beneath his armpit, he could see the edge of the basket and it was glowing. Sweet, Holy Mother! Containment breech! He stabbed his hand down for it and flung the smoking weapon sidehand as far away as he could, feeling his fingers sear with the momentary contact.

He watched as it rolled to an uneven halt well clear of him and hopefully far enough that he was out of the danger zone. He watched it smolder for what seemed a long time, wondering what sort of catastrophic event could cause power cell containment that strong to fail, and lamenting the weapon’s loss. Sixteen years of history in that hilt, and only just upgraded to level six. And there it lay on freaking fire, burning away irreplaceable trophies along with their contained memories. He shook his head sadly, but that hurt too much so he stopped.

So there was his offensive capability rendered so much scrap. But he could feel the weight of the heavy combat knife strapped to his back beneath the combat ruck, and that, at least seemed whole. Drawing it, though, was agony itself.

Armed now, after a fashion, he let his breath out and allowed his head to sag back down momentarily as he struggled to gather the strength to raise it again. His whole body was on fire, it seemed, sharp daggers of pain slashing every inch of his hide. He half opened his eyes without moving his head, examining from a few inches away, the sleeve of his battle armor — and forgot about the rest of the D I’s list.

The material seemed brittle. Discoloration marred the plate, as though it had passed through something that had altered it at a basic level. He flexed the muscles in the arm and felt the tear as the material pulled at tortured flesh. It was as though the armor had melted to his skin. Gingerly, he eased his free hand over to pull the damaged garment carefully free of his arm. Like pulling a blood-dried bandage free.

And then he noticed the gloves. Or rather their lack. Shreds of the heavy Lyrran liners still clung to his bloody fingers, but the armored gauntlets had been reduced to little more than blackened ash that flaked away with every movement. Where the liners had failed, the skin of his hand was raw, as though it had been scraped with sandpaper. The damage to the sword was beginning to make more sense, though nothing else was.

Gritting his teeth, he reached beneath himself and untabbed the battle armor harness. The tabs broke off almost as he touched them, and the front plates sagged, pulling cruelly at the skin of his chest and stomach. He was now, the theory went, free to lift the armor plates off over his head. Only a couple problems with that, he thought muzzily. He didn’t even want to think about lifting his arms that high, let alone holding the heavy armor up. And the armor seemed to have fused with the jacket beneath it.

He took a moment to gather his strength and get the pain under control before unhooking the tiny sockets of the jacket’s heating grid with club fingers, trying the while to figure out how he was going to get the whole mess off without skinning himself in the process. The pain wasn’t getting any better as he knelt there, though, and he already knew what had to be done.

The combat knife wasn’t really the tool for the job, but with his belt knife and IFAK having suffered a fate similar to his pistol and spool sword, it would have to do. Carefully, grimacing with the effort, he niggled the razor edge of the long fighting blade beneath the cuff of the jacket sleeve. As he ran the heavy blade up the arm, the armored sleeve parted like a ration packet left too long in the sun. The lower side of the sleeve was harder because he had to raise the arm and twist, but he made himself continue. And then the other arm. Laying the knife aside, he took a couple of deep breaths and peeled the sleeves clear of his arms like bloody banana skins.

Brittle as it was, weakened as it was, he couldn’t force the blade through the actual armor plate, and the side and hip plates overlapped. Tears were streaming from his eyes by the time he was able to pull them clear, and he could feel blood flowing beneath. He was rocking back and forth gently as he gingerly ran the blade up the shredded cloth of the jacket thus exposed.

He’d ignored the ruck up ‘til now. The straps of the pack were rat-tail files sawing at his shoulders, and when it finally tore clear, it took the central portion of his “Jacket, Battle Armor, Arctic, Spec-Ops, MK XVI” and a goodly span of skin with it to the dirt. He didn’t scream, but his eyes glazed over and he couldn’t really see for four or five seconds. About that time, the chest plates dropped clear with a sodden thunk.

Spinning slowly, dizzily, on tortured knees, eyes constantly scanning his surroundings, he peered at the jumbled mess, whistling softly beneath his breath.

The ruck, suspenders, and hydration bladders were so much melted, frag encrusted goo. The ballistic plates and BA jacket had fused together, along with the aforementioned section of his hide where the heating coils of the jacket had gone a nice cheery red and burned into him even through the supposedly flame retardant Lyrran undershirt. The whole mess had glued itself together with the heat or vibration or whatever it was he’d passed through that had so damaged his weapons.

Looking down took all his courage. His pants had suffered a similar fate, he was sure, and the idea of prying the ruined armor from... a shudder ran through his whole body.

It took awhile, but he got the shakes mostly under control, and convinced what little remained in his digestive tract to stay put, at least for the time being. A couple more deep breaths in preparation, and he pushed himself erect, settling back on his heels, feeling the skin of his legs tear with the movement. Ever so carefully, he inserted the knife blade behind the waistband of the BA trousers, sucking in his gut despite the pain, and pushing gently outward.

A sigh that was all but a bark of laughter escaped him when the ruins finally sagged clear. The Lyrran undergarments, while somewhat the worse for wear, hadn’t failed him completely after all, no doubt due to the lack of heating coils in the BA trousers. Future generations of Storms were saved, always assuming he lived long enough to sire them.