Most of an hour had passed since the soldier had found himself here, though he couldn’t really remember all of it. He seemed to be fading in and out of consciousness. Still, he could feel time pressing in upon him. His mind, when it could focus, was screaming for him to find out what had happened, but the subconscious D.I. continued to slap it down hard. Forget what you can’t control, it hollered, veins standing out in it’s incorporeal neck. Ignore what you can’t control. Do the job at hand and do it right. Then do the next. The last shreds of the ruined trousers fell free and he tackled the boots.

The boots looked like something from a holotoon — like what a cartoon animal might wear. He didn’t really want to contemplate cutting himself free of them, but it wasn’t like he had a choice. They were harder than the BAs because the insulating foam had expanded like popcorn and then hardened into a lumpy shell. But he eventually got them hacked clear. I must look like a blistered waffle, he thought wryly as he massaged blood back into tortured feet, but at least he seemed to be whole.

Gingerly he ran his hands over his aching body. Rips and tears from toes to cowlick, but no broken — a half-throttled scream tore itself from his throat as his roaming hands found the great, mottled bruise beneath his left arm that marked a broken rib. Okay, one broken bone. Tenderly, he probed the bruise, tendons standing out on his neck with the effort to deny the agony. No, not broken, further examination suggested. Only cracked. Probably. A finger in each ear came back unbloodied. Well, no more bloodied than when they’d gone in, in any case.

Carefully, he traced the junction of steel and flesh where the living tissue of his face joined the prosthetic mask, from the bridge of his nose nearly to his right ear, hairline to the bottom of his cheekbone. No tearing there, either, and the steel was miraculously undamaged. He breathed a sigh of relief at that.

Amazingly, beyond an overall singeing, innumerable cuts and contusions, an outrageous pattern of burns, and a partial peeling, only the one serious injury. That made even less sense than the missing fjord.

Naked, save for the remains of the electric blue, skin tight Lyrran longhandles that covered him ankles to waist, he turned back to his weapons. Although his combat knife had survived somehow, neither his Marauder nor the spool sword had. He pried the handgun from the melted holster, only to find the telltale granular whiteness of destabilization. The laser sight inset beneath the barrel had literally exploded. He didn’t even bother with the magazine or power pack — the pistol was so much scrap. The spool sword was still on fire and would continue to burn for the foreseeable future. He wasn’t about to go any closer to it than necessary.

The rifle, when he picked it up, confused him even more. While the buttstock and action showed the same granularity as the pistol, the barrels were just gone. Not blown apart or smashed, just... gone. It looked as though something very powerful had sheared the fore section of the weapon clean just forward of the magazines. No signs of melting, no jagged edges, no crushing, just a sharply angled slice. A quick glance around showed him that, wherever it was, the weapon’s missing portion wasn’t in this clearing. Shivering, he let the ruined ordnance fall to the dirt beside him.

He didn’t even want to look towards the bloody pile of battle armor, or the helmet that had come off in three pieces. That stuff was supposed to be proof against high velocity shell fragments and even small arms at moderate ranges, and he’d cut it free like rotten canvas.

“Well, Toto,” he muttered the ancient incantation softly to himself. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” The waves of pain were firmly under control, although he could feel the panic gnawing at the bars of its mental cage. He was struggling to cope with too many impossible things before lunch and had neglected to pack the tea. What in the hell had happened?

The disorientation, the dizziness, all the rest... the symptoms almost fit with his memories of the training flights they’d been forced to endure; phasing without the drugs that made it endurable to human physiology. But he hadn’t phased — couldn’t have phased. Leaving aside there hadn’t been a phase ship anywhere within a hundred thousand klicks of the fjord, the things didn’t work inside a star’s gravity well. And even phasing without drugs didn’t fry circuits or destabilize plastic or metal. That came from lack of shielding, which lack also turned living flesh into goo, which he’d somehow avoided.

All of which left him with some indisputable facts: he wasn’t in the fjord, his men were gone, the sky was... oh crap. The sky was the wrong blue.

* * *

The wood was angry; Thrush Dancing could feel that anger growing with every step. Something had happened that had never happened before, and the very trees were outraged. Fear clutched at her heart as she strove to fathom what sort of fell catastrophe could accomplish such. But she was still too far from the source to identify the cause, or even determine what sort of disturbance it was. The trees weren’t able to convey more than base emotion, though this they did with far more volume than ever she’d felt before. Quaking inwardly, she urged her sister to greater speed.

* * *

Three times around the clearing had both exhausted the soldier and convinced him that, however he’d gotten here, wherever here was, he wasn’t going back the same way. And he had to get back... he had people back there. People who counted on him.

Around him there was only the forest, trackless and dark, and pressing in about the clearing in a manner that suggested to him a vast age without the slightest tampering by man (to use the term loosely). The only hints of mechanical devices anywhere he could see were the shards and slivers buried in the surfaces all around the blast radius, at least some of which looked like they might once have been part of the cannon. There might have been a few chunks of K’trin’al armor as well, but those pieces were pretty small and their identification uncertain.

His comlink and micro-computer arrays were buried safely within his skull, and so still worked, he supposed. He could access the databases. The proper thought brought him a soft carrier tone and a small set of status indicators at the edge of his vision telling him things like temperature, atmospheric composition, gravity and the like. But no incoming signal, no co-ordinates, no sat or station idents. In fact, no data for any status beyond his own internal readings. And no amount of calling brought any response. He was well and truly stuck.

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Still, sitting here in the crud of some strange forest wasn’t getting him anywhere. It was time to go. Forcing himself back to his ruined gear, he knelt and gathered up the few shreds of Lyrran undershirt still clinging to the remains of the battle armor, as that material alone seemed to have escaped the destruction that had befallen the Terran made components. Further search of the gear reaffirmed that literally nothing else had survived the... whatever... in any useable form.

Even the knife scabbard crumbled at his touch, or at least it’s outer face did. Still, he pried the remains clear of the ruined jacket. There might yet be something he’d be able to do with what was left of it. He stuffed it into his waistband along with the other rags. He stared morosely at the knife for a few seconds. He’d have to carry it in his hand — there was no way he was going to have that razor edged bastard flopping on his hip with nothing between him and it but some thin blue cloth, never mind how tough that cloth was supposed to be.

Deciding arbitrarily on a direction he thought might be downspin, he grabbed the knife and set about the arduous task of regaining his feet.

The trees were like a woven basket — the soldier had never seen anything like it. As though some master bonsai craftsman had dedicated an entire, long life to creating the galaxy’s largest wicker container. The closer he got to the edge of the blast area, the tighter they seemed to weave. Had they been like that before? And each branch was part of a living plant. Bushes and trees, vines and ferns, all twined together in impossibly intricate latticework, who knew how thick. How the hell was he going to get through all of that with nothing but a twenty-eight centimeter knife?

Twice more, he circled the clearing as the fibrous cage seemed almost to writhe itself into tighter conjunction around him. At last, he paused and reached out a tentative hand, testing. He recoiled. The wood felt hot, nearly to flash temperature. More, it felt hostile. How was that possible?

Again, more slowly, he reached out to touch, this time, placing his bloodied hand upon the denuded trunk of a live oak that had borne the full effects of the blast, and showed it with torn limbs, missing bark, and shredded branches. His flattened palm touched the great tree and the shock that traveled through his arm was so sharp that he felt his heart pause.

* * *

“How can they be so big?” the young boy wondered aloud, awe coloring his voice.

“They join with the earth,” the half-remembered voice explained. “They reach deep within and it gives them the strength to reach the sky. It holds them up and they bring the sunshine down to it through their roots. Trees are the way the earth flies.”

“Don’t they ever get tired of standing in the same place?”

Never! A tree knows where it belongs, and where God can find it if he’s of a mind, and the tree likes it that way. Listen carefully Brae, and you can hear them talking back and forth, God and the trees.”

The boy looked up and strained his ears for a long time, or what seemed so to a little boy. “But I only hear the wind and some creaking”

“You see? The tree creaks to tell God ‘here I am’ and God answers with the wind’s voice;‘and here am I’”

“God is the wind?”

“God is in the wind, and in the tree. That’s the secret of the trees, Brae. God and time and the earth — all of them are inside, and the tree stands tall to the sun and ponders them and how wonderful it is to be a tree.”

The boy moved to the trunk of the willow that shaded the family’s yard, eyes glistening and crinkled with his smile. Reverently, he reached out to touch the trunk...

Consciousness returned with an electric jolt, and he jerked his hand free. Now where had that come from? He shook his head, trying to clear the ancient and unfamiliar memories away. And when he looked up, a way had opened before him.

* * *

Thrush Dancing faltered in confusion. The anger was gone— no, she realized. Not gone... redirected. No, that wasn’t right either. She stopped in the trail, Swallow Courting coming to a halt close beside her.

“What is it sister?” Swallow wondered.

“I’m... not sure. Do you feel the change?”

Swallow concentrated, not as attuned to the trees as her sibling. “They’re still angry, but not at the same thing anymore,” she assayed doubtfully. “Or so it feels.”

Thrush nodded slowly, tilting her head slightly. “I think you’re right.”

“I can’t be right,” Swallow stated flatly. “Trees are slow to anger unless terribly provoked, but once angered, ever so much slower to veer from their ire.”

“I know this as well as you, Sister,” Thrush nodded. “But the evidence suggests that this is different. I wish I could know why, but I cannot ken much beyond their state, and the nearest tree-talker is two turns journey distant, if he remains where last we bespoke him at all. We’ll simply have to trust in our feelings and be ready for any other strangenesses.”

* * *

A single step within the forest and the sun might never have been. The world was sea green gloom amid the creaking of giants and rustling of leaves. The way that had opened, and that the lost soldier had taken with some great trepidation, was narrow as the blade of an axe, and seemed lain along the line of a dropped piece of string. He’d not have been able to call it a way at all if he’d spent more of his childhood behind a school desk and less following his friend Sylvan through the woods.

Sylvan. He stopped in the gloom, and squatted on the fallen pine he’d been traversing, staring unseeing up into the canopy. How long had it been since he’d thought of Sylvan. Five years? Six? It wasn’t good to think of the dead — not in this war. There were too many of them. Even family. Even, he rubbed absently at the faint scar that bisected his right palm, blood brothers. Something about this place, though. It brought the memories back, somehow.

That tree and his nana’s voice, his backyard willow, and now this. He could almost see Sylvan’s back ahead in the gloom, the eagle feather that was worth ten years in district prison just to own dangling from a knot in his thick black hair, the soft swish of the rabbit skin quiver against his jeans as he moved easily through the deep timber. Could almost feel the thrill that had raced through them both that time when a mulie doe had burst from a copse of cedar and nearly trampled them, and the laughter they’d shared as she’d bounded away with the speed of a commuter tram through seemingly impenetrable thickets.

Something itched on his cheek and as he rubbed at it, he realized he was crying. Christ on a crutch! He scrubbed hard at his face, wiping away tears and ghosts at the same time. What the hell was wrong with him? He was a grown man — a combat veteran with years of command behind him!

But he looked around uncertainly as he told himself this. For here, squatting on a log in his bare feet, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of years of silence, he realized that none of those things mattered as much as what he’d already known at twelve.

With a final, shudderingly deep breath, he straightened and moved forward, bare feet gripping the logs with a sureness that boots muted. His body was remembering, if his mind still refused. After awhile, the trail widened from an all but invisible thread to a near invisible thread, and the going got easier. His pace quickened, though he was still without destination.