The soldier leaned against the steep bank, teeth clenched, dangling his feet in the swift, icy current. Twenty-five years of socks and boots had softened the soles more than he’d realized. Two days of running barefoot had about done for them. He hauled one out and laid it across his leg, examining the raw, pink flesh critically. It had already blistered and the blister shredded, leaving the fresh skin exposed too soon. He wished for some salt as he dabbed at it. Brine would toughen them quickly, if not painlessly. Failing that, he would have to just tough it out and trust to the antibiotic implants.

The blocks were still keeping the pain at bay, but it was quickly becoming a losing battle as the intensity mounted. Besides, the niggling voice reminded. Pain is there for a reason. It’s supposed to tell you to rest before you run the soles off of your feet.

He stuck his foot back in the water and hauled the other out for examination. There was a cut on this one he couldn’t remember picking up. That was another problem with the blocks. Pain couldn’t warn you that you’d done something stupid if you couldn’t feel it.

He really should try and make some sort of shoes, he thought. Of course, that would take time and he could feel that pressing down upon him. Maybe later, if he didn’t find any—

He paused, both hands still cradling his aching foot. Just what exactly was the urgency? What was it he was looking for that was worth killing himself to find?

He eased the foot back into the icy river and gave thought, at last, to just what the hell it was he thought he was doing.

He’d awakened in this strange forest, with it’s oh so familiar but not quite terra norm vegetation and had immediately taken off running in a random direction, as though a brigade of spiders were on his trail. What sort of critical thinking had that been?

Looking back upon it, it didn’t make much sense. Nor was it like him to go haring off into the wilderness without some sort of plan. Had it been the strangeness of the situation? Yeah, right. He looked around wryly. Blue sky, green plants, brown earth. Way more peculiar than some of the hellholes he’d jumped into with both eyes open.

Reflecting on it, he played the scene over in his mind, chewing idly on a blade of grass. He’d been frightened — badly frightened. The post-hypnotic guards had done their jobs, but it remained that he’d been in a bad way mentally and no question.

He chuckled softly to himself, then. And what do you do with frightened troops? You keep them busy is what you do. Let them sit around and mope while they dwell on their fears and they fall apart. So he’d kept himself busy chasing through the woods looking for a mysterious civilization that might well not exist. Well, he thought to himself. It beats turning over rocks or digging ditches.

Well that was then, this was now. He wasn’t afraid anymore, just confused. Time for the cerebrum to start earning its keep.

He was in what looked very like a temperate deciduous forest, although there were some seriously strange anomalies. Mountain range of some sort, he thought, though it felt more like upper foothills than the bones of a true mountain. The air didn’t feel particularly thin, but that had as much to do with atmosphere as it did altitude, so there was no real way to tell beyond the vague impression that had been growing in the back of his mind that these weren’t true mountains.

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His readouts told him that it was just shy of twenty-two percent oxygen and all over 78 percent nitrogen, and that he could breathe it. That was all that mattered. Days seemed to be longer than Terran norm now that he’d been here for a few of them. Right at twenty-eight hours by his chrono, although it was still reading Zulu plus two and had him sitting beneath the sun in the middle of the night.

He held the gnawed grass stem up to his eyes. The plant looked Terran. How was that possible? Hell most all the plants looked Terran to his eyes, granted he was no botanist. Oh, he knew some healing plants and a few other tricks, but he’d not made a science of it. There was a database built into the mask’s circuitry, but on this subject it wasn’t particularly helpful. The programmers had been more concerned with alien botany than home-grown.

So he was off-planet, but surrounded by Terran flora. Terraformed world? Possibly. There were hundreds of them. Of course, the oldest of them had been terraformed what, five, six hundred years ago? Far more recently than the wall around that glade had been woven. He’d seen giants back away from the trail that had to be a thousand years old. And who’d build a forest this vast anyway? Didn’t make sense from a logistical standpoint. So he wasn’t on a terraformed planet. What did that leave?

A mystery surrounded by an enigma wrapped in a conundrum. Wasn’t that what that one guy had said? He was somewhere, somehow, and that was all he knew and all he was likely to know for the foreseeable future.

So where was he headed? Civilization? Absolutely nothing so far had given him the slightest hint that anything like that existed here. What did that leave? Well, here was water. He looked up and down stream shaking his head. He’d found his river, finally. Fifty meters upstream the water crashed down from a couple hundred meters above in a single, arching fall. Twenty meters downstream it vanished over a five hundred meter void. Looking out over that void —antepolar, he thought— the vista was solid green for kilometers on end. Off at the edge of vision there might be a plain, but that could as easily be the horizon. He’d no idea how big this rock might be, and so had no idea how far off the curve might be. In any case, for now at least, it was forward or back — he wasn’t about to climb up or down sheer cliffs in the condition he currently found himself.

There was that decision made. For the rest? Forward also seemed more or less down. Down would mean more and better chances of finding food, warmer nights, possibly even that civilization he’d been holding out in front of himself like a carrot. So he’d continue forward. In a bit.

He’d been here now most of three days, and hadn’t seen much of anything bigger than a squirrel. The sky, when he could see it, was impossibly blue and marred only by the occasional cloud. No contrails, no flashing reflections, no sign that anything at all used the upper atmosphere. Comms were still silent. No radio traffic at all, no satellite transmissions, no groundwave, nothing. He might be in a dead zone, but it was looking more and more like —if there were a civilization anywhere around— it wasn’t particularly developed. That was bad.

He looked over his shoulder, back up the hill towards the trail he’d come down. That clearing had been fresh. He was fairly certain it had been virgin forest right up until whatever force had deposited him there had showed up and displaced that section of local flora with him. No way home in that direction.

He turned back upspin. And it was becoming increasingly likely that there wouldn’t be any in that direction either. Still, nice as it was, he wasn’t going to accomplish anything sitting here dangling his feet in the current.

Looking around one last time for anything useful, he levered himself upright, looped the vines from last night over a shoulder, and picked his way carefully the two meters or so across the river, wishing again that he could figure out a way to bring some of it with him.

He resumed his journey, already looking for a likely tree.

* * *

“Now what do you suppose was so important about this place,” Swallow asked no one in particular. “That it was in such a hurry to get here just to soak its feet?”

“You feel it too?” Thrush asked.

“Hmm?” Swallow turned. “Oh, yes. Whatever has been driving it has given up. It smells different. Calmer.”

“And its pace has eased,” Thrush finished for her. “Shall we have a look?”