“All right, everyone. Listen up.” The harsh voice brought me out of my verser transition coma, and I woke with a splitting headache. Around me, were dozens of people sitting on benches. They had rubberish suits in varied, bright, primary colors.



Sometimes, recovering from transition, especially if you have not done it in a while, can be like waking up with a bad hangover.



So when this too loud voice yelled out a list of names, I put my hands over my head, and groaned. The others sang out in altogether too cheerful voices.



“T for Tadeusz!”



“Here.” I croaked before I realized what I was doing. No one else spoke to contradict me.



The voice of the roll caller came closer which meant that although I felt better, the stimuli was greater so I continued in my bleakest misery.



Someone grabbed me impersonally under my arm, and lifted me with surprising ease.



“Wouldn’t have figure you for the type, Tadeusz. But the rules are the rules. You’re first.”



“Hunh?” I said eloquently as I was drawn through the crowd in what appeared to be some metal-sided locker room filled with young men and women. They put on a metallic seeming but quite light backpack.



“You know what to do.” The obvious NCO type told me.



“No I don’t!” I yelled back over a sudden increase of noise and wind.



“Always a card, eh, Tad?” Then he shoved me backwards out the door with a deft push-kick.



I flipped head for head and kept on even as the spaceship dwindled away from me. The curve of the planet below me chiilled my brain, and it started working again.



Obviously, I was on a practise mission for either a sport team or a military effort. And that meant, the metallic device on my back was some sort of parachute or rocket. I’d bet on rocket because I was way too high for a parachute.



If I had to fall to parachute level, then I’d black-out from lack of oxygen.



Come to think about it; why wasn’t I already feeling oxygen deprivation? I wondered as I tilted myself into a nose dive to accelerate and help control my flight. It doesn’t help your thinking to see a planet rising and setting in front of you every fifteen seconds.



A glimmering around me in all directions at a variable distance of between two and three feet told me the answer. A forcefield held in the air from the spaceship for me to breathe.



Still I needed to get down faster. At this rate, I’d breathe all the oxygen in my bubble before I hit the ground about ten minutes from now.



So I pulled off the backpack, and started to examine it. A number of straightforward controls with large pictograms that were readily decipherable told me much.



Whoever designed this did not respect the intelligence of its user that much, but freedom of action seemed to be assumed.



I fiddled with the forcefield control for a bit, and only once did I open a tiny hole in the shield which I promptly closed by reversing the direction of the nob.



“Tadeusz, um, what are you doing?” The sergeant’s voice came over the backpack.



“Altering the forcefield to increase velocity due to a more efficient teardrop shape.” I replied blandly.



“You know T, the techies get all upset when you call the Dimensional Gradient a forcefield, but I don’t care. What I’m wondering is why you are not heading toward your target, the big blue thing to your left. Remember your mission.”



“Perhaps you’d better brief me on that mission again.”



“T, I swear, okay, okay, I’m cool. T, look, land on the back of the mech in orbit like I’ve told you about five hundred times, and make your way inside. Please don’t mess up this practise, what with the generals watching and all.”



I looked to my left and saw a distant blue dot not that far below me. I could not make it.



“Fraid I can’t do that. I’m going to have to land this puppy on the planet.”



“The jokes on me, you got me, now get over to that mecha. You don’t have enough fuel to land with your rocket pack.”



“Ah, well then we have a problem. I honestly don’t remember.”



“Amnesiatics admininstered in his drink during last night’s party. Probably the Opposition’s agents.” A different voice came on sounding more intellectual and quite grave.



I listened for a while as they discussed plans to rescue me. It seemed hopeless was the consensus.



That freed me to try out a scheme I had. I started manipulating the forcefield again looking for just the right configuration that would allow control and stability and be a lifting surface.



It took me nearly twenty minutes, but I found myself in a giant spiral toward the surface in my forcefield glider.



Problem was I was running out of air. The solution required opening the backpack grille, and pulling out a small marble sized ball that was green for Oxygen. I cracked it with my titanium nails, and sweet blessed O2 rushed out of the pressurized marble.



Ten minutes later, I landed, or more accurately, crashed. But I got up and walked away from it to the surprise of my watchers, and I refused medical treatment which the military backed up calling me “a real fighting man” in public and “a stupid troublemaker” in private.



They took me back to Sam’s Sledgehammers, a proud group of twenty hundred ton mecha. A mecha is a giant humanoid robot of at least fifty feet n height. Ours were one hundred twenty feet tall.



My particular one was painted black and grey as I was in the scout element. It had a name painted on its hull.



‘Tyrantsmasher.’ I felt goosebumps go up and down my back. Why did it seem like I was already living here, when I’d never seen anyone here before? And if this was a doppleganger of me living here, then why such advanced technology?



“Hey, Tad, nice job. The Boss says an extra fifteen for you for today’s work.” A desperate and restless sort came up to me while I studied the Hammer. I raised an eyebrow.



“Yeah, the Boss said you’d act like that, but you did good. The mission is probably detained for a week while they go through the theories

of what happened. What went wrong, and so on.”



I nodded.



“Should we be talking so openly?”



“Err, yeah, I’d better push on. Got more floors to clean, and when I have to supervise a mopbot for five acres that is just too much.”



Now it seemed like my doppleganger was a traitor. Just what was going on here?



Tadeusz