Okay. At this point I'm going to 'step out of the story', as it were, and let you in on a few secrets that will hopefully help everyone know where I'm coming from. Unlike the previous chapters, this one finally shows what's been happening to our Malcolm 'on the other side'. That's not a reference to death, by the way. I just felt like being obtuse! No, seriously; this one was a headache and I won't pretend otherwise. I thought it would be only fair to show this, but for reasons of the plot and keeping some cards up my sleeve you might find yourself screaming at me by the end of it for leaving you where I leave you. Sorry. That's why I set Wednesdays to update rather than whenever it was ready. I've always found it's far more bearable knowing there's a part coming, somehow!

Rest assured all will be answered. Eventually. For now, here's what happened to Malcolm.

TEN

Lieutenant Malcolm Reed lay very still, against every clamour of his goosefleshed body telling him it was a moment he couldn't afford. This stone-weighted instant felt like waking from a faint, this moment of gathering awareness, the sensations of things outside of him coming to his attention for the first time; there was a hum in his muscles and an itch in his heavy bones, a swarm of wasps trying to sting their way out. He ignored it. He ignored it and concentrated on lying still, aware of sounds in the distance, but unable to place them.

Not waking up, he realised as feeling crept back into the pervading numbness and the prickling bites of those tiny, persistent internal wasps. Not waking up, but he could understand how the mistake had been made, even encouraged. This was a change of his state of existence, at the very least. The trouble being that he didn't remember a single thing. Nada. Nothing. Zip.

He must have been beamed up without warning, snatched from there to here, but something about that immediate assumption didn't sit as comfortably as it should. Not just the temperature, the blissful coolness on his exposed face and hands, although there was that . . . why would the Enterprise crew have transported them aboard, without advanced comm contact? There had been no apparent danger on Tut, despite the mysterious, dense menagerie of biosigns that had registered on their scanners and failed to materialise in practice. If they were back on Enterprise, then that left a shuttlepod stranded planet side . . . it didn't make sense. But the acidic, mouthwash tingle in his skin, like a gulp of frosty air after a eucalyptus tablet, could only have been caused by a molecular disturbance of some kind. That tingle was singing soprano through every inch of tissue in his body, and it was rising to a strained falsetto as he thought it.

Of course, the storm. T'Pol and the rest of the bridge crew must have been concerned about the coming of the storm over their landing site and transported them back until it had passed. That, at least, made sense. It was logical.

He rolled onto his back and clamped his hand to his temples, careful not to open his eyes. Not just yet. He could see muddy light through the lids, silty and dull brown instead of the limpid, vein-tinted orange of the transporter pad's lights through the skin. He had no desire to meet it head-on until this headache had crawled back into whatever recess of his mind it had come from, and taken the temporary amnesia with it. Funny, the transporter had never had such unpleasant side-effects before; he wondered, a little shy of the nonchalance he was aiming for, if everything had been put back the way nature intended this time. Because he had the mother of all headaches, and everywhere was silent. Absolutely, unfathomably, silent. Except for those not-quite-rhythmic, rumbling booms like all three phase cannons fired in deep-throated unison. Had he gone deaf, too? If this was the transporter pad, then where was the operator? Where was Commander Tucker with his unconscionably gung-ho attitude and his unsettling habit of informing Malcolm what a close shave he'd just had? Either they were in the middle of a battle, and those booms were precisely what they sounded like, or else . . .

A sudden drop of water struck his upturned face and trickled slowly, inch by sickly-cold inch, down the shelf of his jaw, carving a cool, wet trail like a kiss. It was so cold it burned. He brought a hand up, unsteadily, and pawed it away with the back of his knuckles. The trail over his chin continued to sting, and now his knuckles stung, too.

The booms came again, like broken glass crushed underfoot. Sharper, now, sharp enough to cleave through his headache in one surgical stroke. Not phase cannons, but thunder. Around him, in stark, individual drops that heralded an onslaught, rain began to patter; slowly, one by agonising one, a couple smacking noisily into his uniform. Some rang musically above him as if they fell on metal, others giving the dull, wet thunk of pebbles against a window. Rain. Fat, pregnant, heavy rain.

There was nothing for it now but to open his eyes and get on with it, whatever 'it' may turn out to involve. So he was still on Tut, he assumed, caught in that oncoming storm, stretched out under that turquoise sky with its deeply venomous marine-blue clouds.

Wrong. He opened his eyes to an expanse of sky boiling with black cloud, black as any storm sky on Earth, directly above him; but it was ringed with ragged metal like the hole from a serrated pastry cutter, a circle of sky in a corrugated ceiling. Inside and outside at the same time. Nothing was familiar except for the untethered certainty that he had been somewhere like this before. Like, and unlike. Light and shadow, stained with poisonous blue and trembling with insipid shapes and writhing hieroglyphs, swam across him where he lay; they skated over the floor like searchlights. Everywhere was a contradiction, and brought a sensation of discomforting quiet.

Another raindrop shattered apart on the back of his hand, and this time he let out a startled cry and yanked it back against his chest. Smoke spiralled in lazy, unreal threads of white from the bright spot of pain in the largest index knuckle.

It burned. This particular little shower wasn't water.

It was acid.

Malcolm ducked another and rolled clear of the black-edged skylight, into the safety of the roofed shadows. He was in a small, rusted iron cabin, glassless windows looking out of two facing walls of the four, the corners thick with shadow and dust. He backed into the nearest, still nursing his singed hand, and thought, frantically. He pushed away every question as to what had happened away; what mattered was the situation he found himself in now.

Acid. Weak acid, not enough to remove his skin off with one drop, but corrosive none the less, and scalding as steam. Already, in the centre of the room below the gaping blast-hole in the roof, the metal floor was beginning to smoke. Soon, it would begin to melt.

It would all melt.

He trained hawk eyes on the smouldering floor, squinting a little against the gloom, and did a quick calculation. Holes were beginning to appear in the plating, irregular and sheared, and the size of dimes. Soon they would be the size of saucers; say, in thirty seconds. Within a minute they would be the size of dinner plates, and they would start to merge. Then all those little holes would become one big hole.

And then, if the clouds hadn't exhausted themselves and he was still here, then he was in trouble. Quite gargantuan, never-in-his-wildest-nightmares trouble. If he was still here.

The ceiling was bulging downwards as he looked quickly over the empty room, the scoop it made concave above and convex below, the deepening bowl-shape probably filling with acid rain like a bathtub. And when that sagging, warm-taffy bowl-shape at last gave, it would release not just drops, but a flood of acid. A deluge. He'd be skinned alive.

If he was still here.

Through the glassless window to his left, Malcolm could make out the downward slope of a steep, scrubby hill, devoid of trees or buildings; just a stretch of weak brown grass, discoloured and worn. The cloud seemed to end at its foot as if a line had been drawn in the sky, and where it ended, likely the rain ended, as well. If he ran, exposed and without protection, he would arrive at the finish line as nothing more than a pile of bleached bones. Nobody, not even the greatest of all the Olympic gold medallists in history, could run at the kind of speed that would be needed to make that distance in less than a minute, and a minute would be about thirty seconds too long. He figured he could withstand that chemical barrage for twenty seconds, maybe thirty. It would hurt like the worst case of sunburn in living history, worse even than the agonising sunburn he'd suffered under that dose of gamma rays and UV a year ago now, but he would be intact, and alive. He would be clear.

Thin stalactites of glooping iron trailed down from the warped and buckled ceiling like creeper. Thick, molten globules struck the floor in smoking, hissing pools. He had ten seconds, maybe less, before he was quite literally toast. Or, to be more precise, fried bread. He wasn't ashamed to admit it; he was scared. This certainly hadn't been covered in Starfleet training. Maybe if he got out of this alive he'd devise a new exercise for interns; the How-To-Survive-A-Molten-Metal-Acid-Storm conundrum.

There was a cabinet at his back, its door hanging askew on aged hinges that groaned as he tapped them. It was flat, perhaps a metre square, and solid, its edges eaten away and corroded a crumbling red. Malcolm took hold of the edge and tugged, a plan slowly solidifying in his mind. The door gave way under his hands easily, the rusted hinges snapping clean in two. He was left holding a sheet of iron like a shield, which he dropped on the floor. He tested it with his foot gingerly, dragging it back and forth. It slid without catching, its smooth surface slippery enough to skate over uneven ground.

He hoped.

Five seconds. He set to work and tore the rest of the cabinet free with his bare hands, gouging great rusty scratches in the palms, but not caring. His knuckle and jaw were competing for most painful area, both throbbing their discomfort into his blood. And his blood was up. Very up.

Three seconds. Two . . .

Malcolm dashed for the room's only door, the cabinet held tight over his head and chest, and kicked it open. It thumped back dully against the outer wall with a hollow clang. Outside, the hillside flared with torn scars of neon lightning in the deluge of acid rain, and the ground smoked and fizzed, spitting live sparks like firecrackers into the saturated air.

One. Behind him, the ceiling caved in with a final, conciliatory squeal. Acid plummeted down into the little disintegrating room behind him like the Red Sea after the exodus. He didn't plan on becoming a drowned Egyptian.

He scuffed the flat cabinet door out onto the hill with his foot, yanked the scrap metal housing down hard over his head, and drop-started the makeshift sled. It shot off into the downpour, with him knelt firmly on top under the protective metal box, at a speed that would put those Olympic gold medallists to shame. One second, two seconds, three . . . the cabinet was beginning to melt and his boots, the most exposed part of him, were fusing into misshapen blobs of rubber around his feet, but he was a third of the way there, racing downward towards the clear sky beyond, almost there, just another few seconds . . .

There was a clap of thunder like a train hurtling full-speed into a brick wall, and a blinding flare of white-hot light speared down only metres from him. The sled veered alarmingly to the right and for a moment he thought the whole smoking rig was going to topple over, but it steadied and plunged on down. Lightning. If he wasn't so paranoid, he would perhaps have taken it for bad luck . . . but he was paranoid, and he knew that luck had nothing to do with it.

The weather was trying to kill him. And it wouldn't be the first time.

The cabinet was growing uncomfortably hot against his skin, red-hot, an oven shelf getting ready to roast a turkey, and pinprick shafts of electric-soaked stormlight had begun to pierce through as holes opened, sizzled, and grew. His uniform around his ankles and the jutting outside of his elbows was soaked and within moments would be in tatters, the acid slowly eating away the vulnerable fibres, the skin underneath beginning to prickle as his knuckle and jaw did. First the cotton, but next it would be his skin. Drops had begun to patter through the holes in the box, making tiny, singing spots of pain where they fell. Frying by inches. But he was almost there.

The second bolt of lightning hit its target. He didn't expect any different. Not now that he knew the cause.

The box, top-heavy and warping into a molten modern art sculpture, jolted to one side and wrenched Malcolm with it. He was pulled clean off the sled and tumbled onto the ground, uncovered, exposed, and instantly drenched.

He leapt up with a cry, bracing himself ready for the barrage . . . but it didn't come. Slowly his arms unclasped from their protective knot around his head, and fell, leaden, to his sides.

Around him, the air was dry. The clouds screamed above and to his four sides, a 360ยบ circle around him, the acid continued to pelt into the tortured ground . . . but he remained untouched. Of course. Malcolm warily took a few steps forward, testing this bubble as he had once tested something similar, on an equally overcast night a long time ago. It moved with him towards the line he had seen from the hill, towards the clear skies. He wasn't about to take this brief respite for granted. He ran.

But if the weather and the malevolent force behind it were truly trying to kill him, why protect him now? Why cocoon him from its own weapon, just when it had won?

The answer should have hit him like phase fire. It should have . . . but because it was too simple, too obvious, it didn't.

The line he had looked toward was there, like a doorway from one room to the next. He ran on under clear skies and over dry earth for a few seconds more; and then his legs buckled, and spilled him unceremoniously to the ground. There he lay, gasping, his lungs twin torches in his chest and his hand and jaw blazing fire at the gentlest, softest pressure.

But he was alive. He kicked off his melted boots, peeled back his uniform to his waist to leave only the half-dry, damp-spotted undershirt in place, and laughed, at last. It erupted from his startled mouth tight as cat gut over a guitar's fret.

"Go on, then!" he yelled at the seething storm mass moving off into the distance. He lay on his back, arms out at his sides, face to the sky, and although he shouted so loudly his lungs swelled and cramped in his chest, the taunt was perfectly calm. He knew what it was he spoke to. He didn't know where he was, or why he was, or what the storm wanted with him . . . but he knew how it had happened. "Go on, do your worst! You want to kill me, then kill me! Come on!"

The cloud did nothing. It was hovering over the crest of the hill, and in many ways Malcolm almost felt that it was looking down on him; not with anger, but with incomprehension. It watched the injured, exhausted human shouting at it in a voice so much smaller than its own, watched the man laughing maniacally, and did nothing. Slowly, coiling in on itself until all that was left was a dense fist of clotted black malice, the cloud pulled back, shrank, and withdrew over the crest of the hill.

And then he saw what he should have expected all along. Stark against a gunmetal skyline and cloaked with black, the figure held out one hand skyward in silent command, and the thunder sputtered its last and died in answer to the shrouded presence. The cowl slipped back and long hair streamed out in the failing wind, whipping the figure's face; but it remained motionless, making no gesture to sweep the hair away or descend the hillside toward him. Familiarity and alienation touched at his fevered skin and fell away, leaving its teasing, greasy echo.

But he knew, without much feeling but a dreadful knot of something that wasn't fear in his gut, that he - or it - would. When they were ready.

He had only to lie still, and wait.