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"Something heavy." He recognized the voice of Kamiya and turned his head. The room spun again, and he heard someone else manage to put a rather vehement curse in the air. Was that Sophia? He felt as if his mind had been packed in ice. Mike shook his hand and looked around.
"What . . ."
"You got beaned on the head." Sophia's voice said, and he sighed a little. "Luckily, you aren't dead. Unluckily, you'll probably be out of it for a bit."
"Just my luck . . . was there anything of value in that storage? Did we even get into it . . . what about the snakemen?"
"Shoot Kamiya, I told you we should have let him sleep. Gimme that. . ." Mike felt a needle and then everything around him dissolved into a warm darkness called sleep . . .
Again, Michael awoke to notice he was on a bed. Not HIS bed either . . . he sat up and realized he was in the bunker still. His head still felt foggy, but not as slow as it had when he . . . when was that? The room spun as he tried to get up. There was Sophia, sleeping in a chair. He stood slowly, and walked over.
She blinked awake to find him hugging her tightly and she shook him off after a short laugh. "Feeling better aren't we Mike?" She pushed him away, then bit her lip. "I don't think you should be up . . ."
"Never mind that, what did we find in the storage room, Soph?" He started towards the door and stopped. The only light going was a lantern. "So we didn't get the lights on . . ."
"Nope, you were supposed to do that and instead you got hit on the noggin." She tapped her head. "Thick skull, otherwise you would have been dead. As it is you only have a minor concussion." She stood and shook a finger at him. "Don't you *ever* do that again!"
He shook his head and grabbed at the door as the room spun around him again. "Ok, ok, I won't." He stumbled down the hallway and looked around. There was nobody in sight . . . he saw Sophia walking with a plasma rifle, and raised an eyebrow.
"Mike, if I was responsible for watching you and making sure you weren't dead, I wasn't going to settle for the AKs." She hefted it and smiled. "The snakemen had these . . ."
"Let's get that door open . . ." He held out a hand and she helped him through the bunker. He passed a couple of the Colf Force team, who favored a glance but said nothing . . . he didn't know if it was concern or disgust he was seeing, but it made him colder inside than the weather did. They reached the Engineering room and Michael turned to Sophia for a second.
"Wait, Soph . . . why did they look at me like that . . ."
"Don't pay any attention to them." She said firmly. "Ignore it." She pointed to the generator, and he swore he saw the same sort of expression flicker on her face, and suddenly understood. "Can you fix it now?"
"Yes, I think I can." He examined the generator and after a few minutes, had the jam which had kept him from operating it before out of there. They were looking at him that way because he'd failed . . . he closed his eyes and leaned hard against the generator for a second. Even Soph . . . he looked at the jury-rigged patch in the power lines and tore it free, taking the time to work it through better. Nobody was happy with him now; they'd been expecting him to do his job and instead he'd been stupidly taken out by a piece of metal!
He got the cold feeling that if it had been a plasma shot, that look would have been different.
The generator hummed to life, and he sighed. "There. Finished." He stood slowly, and turned to Sophia. "Now I'll open the door."
"You need to rest, Mike." She shook her head. "Just tell us the code and we'll get it open."
"Damn it, don't you think I can do it?" He almost snarled it, then sighed. "I might as well do what I wasn't able to . . ." He walked past her like a whipped dog, and turned to the storage room. He heard her behind him, calling Captain Wychin on the radio, asking him to come down and that they were ready to open the door.
He touched the keypad near the door and sighed. He felt so inadequate . . . each time, he'd been almost useless. All his worth was in the technical expertise he'd used while in X-Com. He couldn't shoot, he couldn't climb, and he could barely operate machinery. So what good was he? He sighed and resigned to wait for Wychin, before he'd draw conclusions about how the team was recieving him.
Written on November 1st by "Michael Thornside"