Alexei Belitrov, formerly a Major in another world's version of the 
Red Army, was having a good day. His current case manager, 
whose name he hadn't yet bothered to learn, had procured for him 
several novels he hadn't been allowed access to, not the least of 
which was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. He'd been 
waiting over three years before they approved that one, allowing him 
to finally carry on the story of a young wizard and his friends. Of 
course, it helped that his English lessons had accelerated past the 
rudiments and into more advanced grammar and literature. 


Alexei had also been given more music to listen to. He was quite 
interested in the French duo who insisted on wearing ridiculous 
masks in public; their work was actually really catchy. Not as 
nuanced as Tchaikovsky, but there's only so many times you can 
listen to the 1812 Overture before it grows stale. 


And, most importantly, this week marked the fifth year anniversary 
without the nightmares. Alexei hadn't set his chronometer to be 
counting that, but it had been anyway. There were some things 
Alexei felt were better left forgotten, drowned in fiction provided by 
his Skinny Crow captors. 


So it was quite a change in pace whena sapient, 
ectoentropic lump of thermite shaped like a 
gigantic flea fell through his roof and on top of him while he lay 
reading, shouting in what sounded to Alexei like broken Chinese. 
Alexei's immediate reaction was to scream in pain, which did no 
good because Alexei had lost the function in his vocal cords 
sometime in the mid 1960s. Instead, something between a high- 
pitched tone and radio static was picked up on all radio receivers in 
range. It should be noted that no radio receivers were in range 


because, as the ball of thermite fell onto the bed, it continued to fall, 
straight into extrauniversal space. To the ball of thermite, this was 
mostly natural, but to Alexei Belitrov, it was absolutely terrifying. 


When, eventually, Alexei came to, he realized that he was ina 
rather familiar corner of the multiverse. In front of him lay several 
dead soldiers, attired! similarly to himself. Alexei judged that they 
were German, because their weapons were attached to their arms 
like bracelets, instead of bolted down like his own weapons had 
been. 


"Sorry, comrade," Alexei whispered as he removed the nearest 
soldier's primary weapon, a large caliber machine gun. "| need this 
more than you do." Weapons sweeps were always nasty work, but, 
had Alexei died in his own time, he wouldn't have minded his own 
men taking what they needed. He repeated the process for the 
soldier's secondary weapon, a 23 mm semi-automatic shotgun. He 
searched the nearest dead men for proper supplies and excess 
ammo, to complete his loadout. 


Feeling properly equipped for the first time in over 25 years, Alexei 
set about finding the thing that had brought him here and dealing 
with it. His final course of action would be settled later... 


Zao, formerly an Oxidist officer in the Southeastern Biological 
Synocracy's army, was having a rough day. His current opponent 
was a much younger Oxidist, one who'd hardly seen combat and 
was still springy and young.2 Their scores were matched, and had 
been for the last few hours; every point Zao scored would quickly be 
matched by his opponent. Right now, Zao was one point behind. 


Now most people? would be disoriented by extradimensional travel, 
but this isn't true for Oxidists. The Synocracy built them specifically 
to be able to teleport themselves within attack range of the 
Imperium's Mark 24 Landships. So, as the tennis ball hurtled 
towards Zao at several hundred meters per second, it was perfectly 
natural for him to jump through the multiverse in order to catch it. 


What Zao did not anticipate was that, as he fell through the 
multiverse, he'd catch one crackling claw on the edge of the wrong 


layer of reality and slip back into the Foundation universe.4 Nor did 
he expect to pick up a hitchhiker along the way. For that matter, he 
had no way of knowing the hitchhiker would be a fellow veteran. 


So, when they finally stopped falling, Zao was really surprised to see 
an unconscious monstrosity of a man occupying much of the same 
space as himself. Zao was further surprised to see that there were a 
large number of dead soldiers that looked fairly similar to his 
hitchhiker on the ground close to where they landed. He didn't recall 
having visited this particular corner of reality in the past, but 
generally speaking he trusted his multidimensional sense of 
direction implicitly. 


It was a pretty fucked-up corner. Most of the trees were long-dead, 
blasted and scattered. What little greenery still stood looked sickly. 
The sky was overcast, the land barren, and the lack of bugs and 
birds pretty damn eerie. It reminded Zao of the war. 


The unfortunate stranger seemed alive, if unconscious, and Zao felt 
a pang of guilt- accidentally running into someone mid-game was 
faux-pas enough, but carrying them out of their home reality was just 
unforgivable. It might be a good idea to look for water or something 
for when his unfortunate hitchhiker woke up. So, he rolled off, 
looking for supplies for his armour-clad victim. If he could find a local 
or break in on some regional radio transmissions to figure out just 
where the hell he was, that would be an added bonus. 


Alexei couldn't exactly put his finger on it, but he had a gut feeling 
he was somewhere in Germany, and further that he wasn't alone. 
The tracks surrounding where he'd... fallen? Been dragged? Were 
curiously insectoidal, and something about the way the ground 
around them seemed drier bothered him. Almost as if the thing was 
radiating heat. Whatever it was, it had made no effort to hide its 
path, moving off with inhumanly long strides. Where it kicked off 
from the ground, the prints were deep, cracking even the hardest 
ground- whatever it was had a great deal of power in its legs. 


It had been a good long while since he'd had to move through rough 
terrain, and even longer since he'd been to Europe. It felt good. It 
wasn't as clean as Site-17's sterilized, filtered air, but the irradiated 


air of what he was sure, at this point, was Germany's Black Forest 
was somehow comforting to Alexei. It reminded him of the hot air 
he'd breathed in the last summer, before the War, working the 
community farm alongside his parents. What he wouldn't give to see 
that farm again. Of course, it was probably radioactive and useless 
for farming at this point, if not completely covered in debris. But still, 
aman can dream, right? 


Were Alexei still capable of regular respiration, he'd be breathing 
very heavily. It was tough work. The only exercise he'd done for the 
last two-and-a-half decades had been push-ups within the confines 
of his cell, and as the Foundation eliminated the restrictions on what 
he could and couldn't have, he'd been neglecting even that. But the 
Engineers had built his Armor well. It was meant for war. It was 
meant for long marches. So Alexei pushed on, let his Armor do most 
of the work, let its nervous system feel the muscles strain instead of 
his own. Now that he was back home, he might even find a 
Technician to do a full checkup on the state of his Armor. 


He was steadily moving uphill, and had been for the last five minutes 
or so. He suspected his target was seeking a vantage point. What it 
could possibly want with him was beyond Alexei, but it didn't matter. 
The tracks had gotten closer together- the thing had slowed down, 
and showed no signs of speeding up. It had to be close. 


Zao had decided that his best course of action on finding water 
would be to find a vantage point. Flying might be an unnecessary 
risk- if his experience had taught him anything, it was that open, 
rolling ground like this would almost inevitably be watched from 
above. Better to keep a low profile. So far, all he'd found were hills 
and broken landscape. He wasn't picking up any radio 
transmissions, either, which was even more eerie than the lack of 
birds. He couldn't see any trees tall enough to be worth climbing that 
were still standing. Not for the first time, he missed when his sensor 
package had been military-grade, when he could smell infra-red and 
taste the gamma emissions of Mark 24 atom forges on the wind... 


He'd been moving uphill for a while and still couldn't see anything of 
interest on the brow of the hill. He stopped, slowly surveying the 
horizon. The bug-man was on his trail, looking up at him from less 


than 30 meters away... 


Alexei could smell his quarry now, the Armor's insect-like nostrils 
twitching within their small pockets next to his eyes. It smelled like 
hot metal, the bursting clouds of thermite mortars. His instincts and 
training told him not to follow the path exactly- who knows what he 
might step in or trigger- but there wasn't much ground cover to work 
with. All he could do was keep his stance low and his eyes peeled. 
There was no telling what the creature's intentions were. He 
rounded a rill in the hillside and stopped, trying not to gawp at the 
thing that stood before him. 


Zao and his hitchhiker simply stared at each other for a long 
moment. The stranger broke radio silence, sending three 
simultaneous transmissions, only one in a language Zao 
understood. "What the fuck do you want from me?!" 


Before Zao could respond, the other man raised his right arm — 
There hadn't been a gun there before, had there? — and Zao felt a 
five-round burst of 12.7x108mm6& bullets whiz past him. He flattened 
his body low to the ground’, popping up a hesitant eyestalk. 


The hitchhiker — his enemy, apparently — was gone. Likely uphill, if 
he was smart. Still, flattened as he was Zao was reasonably 
confident he'd be difficult to see. He allowed his surface to rise up to 
combat temperature, reforming himself into a more compact, fast- 
moving form as he pondered his current predicament. 


Alexei was terrified. He was absolutely certain that the creature had 
been hit by at least one of his bullets, but it hardly seemed phased. 
He switched the safety on the shotgun off, hoping the creature 
wouldn't come close enough to make the rapid application of 00 
buckshot necessary. He checked his ammo packs, recounting to 
see if he had enough grenades. He hoped so. 


The creature was getting closer, Alexei could tell. The thick metal 
smell was getting stronger, and the rising smoke from downhill could 
only mean that it was combusting the scrub. His Armor was built to 


survive flash temperatures up to 200° C, but that didn't mean heat 
wasn't uncomfortable, and if his thermal sensors were anywhere 
near right this thing was definitely hotter than 200°. 


Alexei started to low-crawl uphill, away from the end of the path the 
creature had blazed when he paused to listen. It seemed the 
creature had stopped. Alexei turned himself over, so he could sit up 
and look over the log that was his cover, getting a grenade ready so 
he could throw it, should he have to. Just as he was lifting himself 
up, the creature, smoke pouring off it, landed a few meters away, 
almost immediately setting the ground alight. It looked smaller, 
somehow, but it moved in almost perfect silence- there was nothing 
mechanical about it, despite the rust-red colour of what he could 
only assume was its hull. Acting automatically, Alexei threw the 
grenade, lifted himself to a standing position, and began to run away 
from his pursuer and its rapidly-combusting landing zone, too 
unnerved to check if his aim had been off. 


Zao's first soldierly instinct was to set the hillside a-blazing, but that 
was quickly overridden by other, more reasonable thoughts. What if 
this man doesn't know | don't mean harm? | should at least try to 
reason with him. Maybe he can help me figure out where we are. 


He made an experimental leap, cooling himself down as he did so- it 
would take a few seconds before he wasn't hot enough to melt steel 
on contact. He aimed for a slight rise near a large fallen log, which 
seemed to offer a good vantage on- The hitchhiker was already 
there, arm coming around with a grenade in its hand. Before he 
could try to explain their situation, the explosive detonated in his 
face. 


Zao engulfed the grenade, letting the airburst spend itself deep in 
his superheated metal guts. Diplomacy, it seemed, had failed. He 
spat out a chunk of molten slag and turned up the heat, lengthening 
his limbs to a configuration perfectly suited for running on rough 
terrain. 


Alexei could feel the oncoming wave of heat. The thing moved 
lightning-fast, driving a rippling wall of burning vegetation before it. 


The brush behind Alexei were catching on fire. The grenade hadn't 
killed the thing, then. He'd have to try something else. In front of him 
was another large trunk, at least three meters in diameter. On either 
side, the ground fell away into a pair of matched gravelly 
streambeds- if he descended, he'd be even more exposed. He had 
no choice but to turn and face his attacker. 


The creature was about ten meters away and closing fast. Behind it, 
nothing but scorched desolation® Alexei prepared two more 
grenades, hoping it would buy him time to scramble over the fallen 
tree, or at least get some distance down one of the streambeds. 
When the thing was about five meters off- it showed no signs of 
slowing down- Alexei raised his left arm, fired two shots from the 
shotgun in rapid succession, and tossed the grenades. 


The creature bent and twisted like seaweed in a strong current, 
moving past the buckshot. It extended an arm that reminded him of 
the footage on white blood cells they'd shown during medical 
training, engulfing the explosives before they could detonate. Still, 
his hostile gesture seemed to make the thing pause- it ground to a 
halt, shapes that could only be armour coalescing on its red-hot 
surface. Alexei could only hope that it would take the thing some 
time to regain its momentum. Long enough to get as far away as 
possible. In the meantime, grenades were all he had. 


Zao was unimpressed by the quality of the man's explosives, but if 
there was one lesson he'd learned it was that overconfidence in the 
face of seemingly inferior firepower had killed more Oxidists than he 
could count. His kind were resilient, but unstable- the added energy 
from, say, repeated detonations could overcome their ability to 
thermally self-regulate.? He hardened his outer layers, letting himself 
cool off a tad. The insect-man treated grenades as if they were 
candy to be given to larvae and children- hopefully he would not be 
so liberal with whatever heavier weaponry he was presumable 
carrying. 


Then another thought crossed his mind: /s he even worth it? | can 
probably find my way home from here pretty easily. | don't need to 
waste my time with this nonsense. 


He was only moderately surprised when three more grenades 
bounced off his outer shell and exploded. 


You know what? Fuck this guy. 


There was no thought to it- the thing was an immobile hard target, 
and he had explosives to spare. Letting the handful of grenades fly 
free, Alexei spun, vaulting over the mammoth log and descending 
into the wider of the two streambeds, which ran eastwards, away 
from where they'd landed. 


Zao was getting too old for this shit. Tennis, he could handle. 
Sapient tank factories, he could handle. Special Containment 
Procedures, he could handle. He'd even known a few people who'd 
had insectoidal splices, and they were fine, upstanding citizens. Hell, 
he preferred a hexigrade body plan, whenever possible.