It had only been a couple of hours up in that infernal tree and Faust and the doctor had already gone through most of their remaining drinking water. They’d both been in survival situations before and knew that they had to conserve what water they had but at the rate they were perspiring they simply had to keep their fluid intake coming. It wouldn’t do them any good if their water lasted a week but they themselves didn’t last 12 hours.

They both hoped that it would be far sooner than that when someone from the Honshu would come looking for them but there was no guarantee. Tarsik could have dispatched someone to follow them as soon as he found them missing early in the morning or he may not get concerned until nightfall. Should night come and they had yet to return surely the captain would send out a search party in the morning, but at the rate they were going they’d be well dehydrated even if they were rescued by noon the next day. At least the large tree provided a tiny bit of shade from the hostile sun.

The vicious turkey-things down below had not left, even for a moment. They seemed content to wait for their prey to come down and make a run for it. Their screeching had become so constant that despite it, and thanks in part to the heat, the pilot and doctor had started to drift off. They were wedged well into the notch between two thick branches so they were not concerned about falling out. Their heat-induced sleep was fitful and they woke every few moments to the reality of their situation only to doze off once again a moment later. Sudden silence can wake one as easily as a sudden sound can so when it came Faust shot up and the doctor stirred next to her.

“Doc. What happened?”

“What?” he said as he tried to rouse himself and rub the sweat from his eyes. The question soon became apparent to him as well and he asked one of his own, “They stopped?” he looked down at the forest floor below them and saw none of the talon-footed little monsters that had treed them. Was this a tactic? Surely they weren’t that smart. His instinct said that they couldn’t be but he’d seen plenty of highly intelligent predatory species on a multitude of worlds.

“They left.” Emily muttered, mostly to herself.

The doctor suddenly realized the graveness of the situation and sat up fully, “This is not good, we need to climb higher.”

“What? Why?”

“My dear there is only one thing that predators fear and that’s bigger predators.” he said as he wrestled to get his pack on. “If we are stuck in this tree and something the size of the Rex that the captain killed comes this way it will be like picking apples from a tree. Climb!” with that he started up the tree himself. His sweaty hands could barely find purchase and his boots made scraping sounds as they slipped against the bark.

“Doctor.”

“Pilot Faust, start climbing, now!”

“Doctor I don’t think it’s a predator they’re running away from.”

Her statement startled him and he slid back down to where she was.

“Look.” she pointed at the sky towards the east.

“My gods.” was all the doctor could say as he saw the wall of darkness closing in from that direction. It was a storm like they had seen the previous afternoon, no doubt about it. The dark blue of it occasionally flickered, lightning. “What the hell do we do?” the doctor thought to himself, “We stay in this tree and we get doused and fried by lightning, we hit the ground and add in the possibility of being eaten.”

It was almost a certainty that the predators had all fled back to their burrows and dens but there was, of course, no guarantee of that. For all they knew there might even be specialized predators that hunted during the storms.

“I don’t know what to do.” the doctor admitted.

“I don’t either.” Faust replied with equal sincerity. “Do we bolt for the ship and hope all of the animals are hiding?”

The doctor shook his head, “It took us five hours to get this far, it’ll take at least an hour back at full run, even without the stops for specimen gathering we made on the way in. Neither of us have the stamina left for that and we’d never outrun that storm. I’d say we’ve got less than 15 minutes before that hits us.”

“So what? We hole up in a tree during one hell of a thunderstorm??”

The doctor admitted that the prospect did not sound very appealing. He’d seen first-hand the power of the lightning that had nearly ended Tsankov and had dazed Ansul and Riley. Suddenly Faust turned her head, as if she heard something the doctors more aged ears weren’t capable of. She put her hand against his chest as if to silence him. A moment later he heard it too. It was the familiar hum of one of the Honshu’s scouters.

“It sounds a little ways off.” the doctor commented.

“Mmm-hmm.” she agreed. “Hard to tell but it sounds as if it’s been programmed for quick flyovers, a large-pattern grid search. Captain was probably just trying to figure out where we are.”

“Will it see us in this tree?”

“It’s possible, but I don’t want to leave it up to chance. You still have that dart-tracker?”

The doctor looked confused, “Yes it’s in my pack with the specimens we collected.”

“Good, pull it out.” she wasn’t asking, she was ordering.

The doctor unzipped the thick material of his expedition pack and fumbled around for the tracker. He was startled and quickly withdrew his hand when he felt something moving inside the bag.

“What’s wrong?”

He paused for a moment to compose himself, “One of the specimen containers must have opened.”

Surely enough he unzipped his bag all of the way and a black newt with blue and green spots scurried out of it and up the tree, quickly out of sight.

“Tracker.” Emily demanded.

This time his hand went straight to it and he pulled it free of the bag. He went to hand it to the pilot when she objected, “No.”

“I thought you wanted it?”

“No....I want you to shoot me with it.”

The doctor was flabbergasted, “What?! No!”

Emily began to lose her patience, the doctor was an extremely intelligent man, probably the smartest man onboard the ship, but he didn’t know a whole lot about planetary operations for a rocketship.

“Doctor, that scouter is conducting a visual search. It may, or may not spot us up in this tree. It will, however, without-a-doubt pick up the signal from a tracking dart.”

The doctor hesitated a moment then attempted a nervous smile as he pointed the gun at his comrade. “Are you sure you want me to shoot you at point blank range?” her scowl was enough to deter him from any further hesitation, “Okay. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

With a nearly-silent hiss the tracker module lodged itself deep into the flesh on Emily Faust’s left thigh. She winced, it did hurt more than she cared to admit, but it was bearable. At the moment her swollen eye was still more of a concern than a tiny tracker module smaller than a grain of rice. It was then, looking down at her thigh that she noticed the doctor’s leg, which he’d managed to keep hidden for the last couple of hours.

“Doctor, you’re still bleeding!”

He glanced down at his own leg, “Oh shit.” he immediately looked up at her like he was ashamed for having let his language slip. She shook her head as if to tell him “Don’t worry about it.”

“I used one of the backpack’s straps to create a make-shift tourniquet while you were dozed off. I’ll need you to help me re-tighten it.”

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The little scouting robo did exactly what it was designed to do. During normal planetary operations on an uncharted world they would be dispatched to scan the area for signs of life forms, then later they would be used in conjunction with dart-trackers to track down interesting ones, typically of the sentient variety. Rarely did natives on uncivilized worlds just walk up and say hello when a rocket touched down. Normally the process took days or weeks of surveying the area, tagging a local with a tracker if necessary and then very slowly and carefully, often with the aid of food and/or trinkets, getting them to come close enough to talk to you. The Honshu’s little scouter picked up Faust’s life signals loud and clear once the doctor tagged her. Within moments it was closing in on their location.

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The captain and Jones were guiding a nega-grav sledge full of tools up the loading ramp, getting everyone and everything inside before the storm hit, when Herschel came running down the access tube which now served as more of a cylindrical hallway.

“Captain. We found Ramus and Faust!”

When they’d first noticed the storm rolling in his thoughts had jumped to the pilot and doctor before he’d concerned himself with getting everyone back on the ship. For leaving the ship without permission they’d surely hear about it when they returned but in the meantime the captain just wanted them safely back aboard.

“Where are they?” he shouted as he slapped a nearby crewman on the back, indicating that he should take over assisting Jones.

“About 4 kilometers out, the scouter is closing in on them right now. By the time we make it back up to the cockpit it should have found them.”

Tarsik was angry, angry that Faust would do something so childish despite his own admittedly childish behavior towards her. He slapped his tele-wave, “Faust you answer me this minute!”

“It’s no good sir, I’ve been trying off and on all day, neither of them are answering.”

The fact that the storm was closing in and they were both still failing to respond to signals did not bode well. The captain really hoped that when the robo found them they were both still alive and each still in one piece. Tarsik and Herschel ran down the access tube, the ladder having been removed since it was currently not necessary, and as soon as they reached the cockpit they could see the vid-wave the scouter was sending back on one of the monitors. Faust and Doctor Ramus were in one piece more or less, but they looked like hell.

“Give me audio.” Tarsik commanded.

“Of course sir.”

A chirp signaled that he’d been patched in, he grabbed his microphone and spoke into it, “Are you two alright?”

The little orb was hovering only about three or four meters from their spot in the tree so the captain’s voice came through loud and clear. They had to yell back to be audible but it was enough to communicate.

“I’m better off than I look,” Faust stated, “the Doctor not so much. Some kind of smaller predators treed us and he sustained a bite to the leg. We’ve got a tourniquet on it but the bite must have contained some kind of anti-coagulant because it’s still bleeding, slowly, but we can’t get it to stop. We’re also almost out of water with no safe way to get back to a clean source.”

“Well Faust I’m afraid you’re about to get all of the water you can handle.”

Even over the vid-wave it was obvious that she was not amused, “That’s not funny! Please tell me you have a plan Captain.”

He hesitated a moment before answering, “This is gonna be a tough one Faust. I really wanna get you and the doctor back here safely but there’s no way I can do it right now without putting other lives at risk.”

“I understand sir.” she yelled at the little floating orb, the wind was picking up and making communication more difficult by the moment.

“Herschel, move the scouter in a little closer.”

“Aye sir.”

As soon as it was close enough Faust reached out and grabbed the floating ball with her left hand, Doctor Ramus held onto her by the belt to keep her anchored to the tree. She could feel the brief tickle of the robo’s NG repulsors against her palm but Herschel shut them down remotely as soon as it was secure.

“Sir I know there’s not much the rest of you can do for us now, but can we at least see to it that the doctor gets something to stop the bleeding? The robo should be able to return to the Honshu and carry back a vial of clotting agent.”

Tarsik turned to Herschel, “What’s the carrying capacity of our scouter robos?”

“One quarter of a kilogram.” Ansul answered from the rear of the cockpit. The two men turned to see him at the opening of the access tube. The captain grabbed his microphone again, which was dangling by its spiral cable.

“Faust we’ve got one-quarter kilo worth of weight to work with. We’ll see what we can do.”

“That’s more than sufficient.” the doctor spoke into the robo’s receiver now, his face visible on the monitor but distorted by the wide-angle lens on its camera. “In Medbay, drawer 7A, slot 4, it’s called Traxic Acid, small glass vial.”

It wasn’t just the lens, the doctor really didn’t look very good, his normal deep color had faded and he looked as if the life was draining away from him. The bleeding alone would probably be manageable, but combined with dehydration it was really beginning to take its toll on the poor man.

“Got it.” the captain said, “Send that scouter back ASAP, we’re going to try and get it to you before that storm front hits.”

“Yes captain.” Faust replied and with that she tossed the little sphere into the air. Herschel engaged its NG repulsors and it was gone in an instant. The robot could cover the 4 kilometers in only a couple of minutes at full tilt and it could return just as quickly now that it knew exactly where they were.

The captain snapped off some quick commands. “Herschel, down to Medbay and get what the doctor asked for. Ansul, prep a Service survival tent, fabric only. If we’ve got the weight to spare after the medicine it’ll at least give them something to wrap up in and keep from getting drenched.”

“And its outer skin will work like a Faraday Cage should they get struck by lightning.” Ansul smiled.

Tarsik nodded, “Well, that’s the plan at least.”