Toni's head swiveled about, trying to glean some clue as to his location. He tried to shout, only to have the sound smothered by the cloth in his mouth. It tasted of sweat, and Toni knew it was part of the undershirt Ian had given Kaiser to protect him from the sun.

His prisoner was on the warpath and his camp was unprotected. He thought of the possibilities, and they terrified him.

The stranger reminded him that it was all his fault. He should not have turned his back on the earthling. He should have remembered the dagger. He should have remembered the pistol as well. Each realization was like a punch to the stomach. But when he thought on it a little harder, he realized that his first mistake was having spared Kaiser's life on that day at the plantations.

He forced himself to calm down and think of a way out of the mess. He decided to test his bindings and gave them a good yank, only to feel his right arm's wounds tear open and begin to bleed. He cried into the cloth in his mouth and then tried to spit it out. The effort proved impossible; a strip of cloth wrapped around his head was holding it in place. He then tried to stand.

The tree he was bound to was a thick pine, but the wide strap that confined his arms afforded him enough space for the necessary acrobatics. Finding a knobby outcrop about a foot above the ground, he put his boot on it and threw himself up and forwards, tucking his body into a tight roll. His boots scraped against the trunk, sending bark everywhere and slowing him down a little too much. He fell hard on his head, only his right leg managing to get clear, his bound arms still hugging the other leg as well as the tree itself. The jolt of the collision sent shockwaves throughout his body and he felt his wounds tear open a little more. He screamed with the pain again, almost choking on the cloth as he tried to suck air in.

Finding himself in a very awkward position, Toni's heel found the knob and he jumped again, his left leg finally managing to clear the tree as he fell onto his side, still hugging the cursed pine. With enormous difficulty he stood again, his twisted body set in an upside-down hug. He leaned against the trunk and tried to grab his own wrists, working blindly.

Finally he gave up, realizing that they were still too far apart, and tried to kick at the bindings of his left wrist instead. They were too firm to slip off; he had been bound with his own rifle-strap.

I suppose that's what Kaiser would call poetic justice, heh? the stranger sniggered.

Cart-wheeling over his head and on to his other side, he kicked at the bindings on his other wrist. They were slick with blood and gave a little. Desperately he pressed his boot's edge against the bulge of the strap, ignoring the pain shooting up his arm, and felt it slowly begin to recede. The knot slipped off his swollen wrist with a particularly vicious kick.

Without delay, Toni lay on his back and pulled the pistol out of his pocket, loving the feel of steel against his palm. He chambered a round, pointed the weapon to the sky and fired off three shots, praying that he was not too late. He rose unsteadily to his feet and began to search the ground around the tree for drag-marks. They proved to be easy to find.

Moving as fast as he could, Toni followed the trail back to the camp and arrived there in under a minute. His comrades were already awake, hands gripping rifles in expectation of a fight, and they stared at their arriving comrade as if in shock. Ian appeared particularly surprised to see him.

"He's gone ..." was about all Toni could say.

"We know ..." Hannah replied, her expression grim, and she pointed to the only prone figure among them.

Ray had been sleeping on his back when Kaiser found him. He still lay that way. The only change was the gaping wound that had almost separated his head from his body. The body lay in a pool of blood. The damage seemed almost impossibly great and Toni approached the corpse in horrified fascination, taking note of the almost peaceful expression on its face. The cut had been clean, and it appeared to have begun well on the right side of his throat and ended well to the left, having only been stopped by bone. His dagger had done all that. He noticed the depressions in the ground where Kaiser's knees had made an indent as he sat astride his victim, preventing him from making a sound.

So this is how a professional kills, he thought numbly.

He turned to Ian and pointed the pistol at his right shoulder. The weapon kicked satisfyingly in his hand with a sharp crack, the projectile striking its target perhaps a little more to his left than he would have preferred. Ian's face became even more surprised, and the Lacrau that he had been holding moments before slipped from his hands to hang from its strap.

Sueli fell to the ground and began to cry again.

"What are you doing, Toni?" Hannah demanded.

"Keep your eyes out for Kaiser ..."

"I said, what the hell are you doing, Toni?!" she shouted as Ian's disbelieving eyes followed the blood flowing from his wound to its source.

"KEEP YOUR FUCKING EYES OUT FOR KAISER!" Toni roared. Just as quickly he calmed down again and turned towards Ian.

"You are under arrest for aiding and abetting in the escape of a prisoner of war. I do believe that falls under treason, am I right?"

"You shot me ... I did nothing to you –" Ian sputtered incredulously.

"You did everything to deserve this. And if you open your mouth again, they'll have to wire it back together."

"It was your watch, your watch, not mine –"

Toni approached Ian at speed. His senior didn't even bother to evade the assault as Toni's boot crashed against his jaw. The bone didn't quite shatter, although the impact did produce a satisfying thunk. Ian collapsed to the ground and lay there, cradling his wound.

He disarmed the fallen soldier and removed the rifle-strap from his weapon before binding his wrists with it.

"Toni, would you care to explain this?" Hannah insisted, her rifle fixed on the surrounding trees.

Toni recounted what he had seen during Ian's watch; of how their senior had had an opportunity to only appear to properly bind their prisoner, and how, when Toni had taken Kaiser to relieve himself, he had been distracted by a sound much like a rock thrown into the trees. He also explained how Kaiser had not been in possession of Ian's MEWAC undershirt at the time. And yet that very same shirt had been used to gag and hood him.

"And you think that will hold up in a court?! He's a Templeton, you IDIOT!" she exploded at last.

"You know there's no way Kaiser could have escaped without somebody helping him, not the way we were doing things," he insisted.

"You're bleeding again ..." she muttered, looking him up and down. "Can't you do anything without bleeding?"

A very upset Sueli kept watch while Hannah treated Ian's and Toni's wounds. The effort ended up taking much more time than expected, and before long the first tentative chirps of dawn could be heard.

Ian made a difficult situation easy by shutting up for good. Simplifying things even more, Sueli renounced her claim to the throne about as soon as seniority came under discussion. Thus Toni found himself the acting senior of the group, or at least what remained of it. Finally they broke camp, leaving Ray's body where it lay.

The smell of smoke caught Toni's attention, and he led the group to higher ground to contemplate what he supposed was Kaiser's parting gift. A string of forest-fires extended out to their south-east, the nearest no more than a few kilometers away.

"The Winds will make that spread for days ..." Hannah breathed, appalled by the destruction.

"What worries me is that the fires are pointing out our axis of retreat," Toni said, once again reminding himself that he was responsible for the mess.

"How do you think he set them?" she wondered.

"Did you see Ray's travel pack? He must have taken it before he left, along with the box of matches from his survival pouch. And his rifle. And his pistol. Damn."

"Maybe we should go ..." Sueli suggested apprehensively.

They set off again in a hurry, eager to get as much distance between themselves and the fires. They were fortunate in that the rising winds were blowing north-west-north, so there was little risk of losing a race against the inferno. Surprisingly, however, they found the wilderness surrounding them begin to teem with escaping wildlife, mostly several species of deer, but also wild boar and even a harassed-looking pair of foxes. The sight of the fugitive creatures pulled at the heart-strings of the femmes, but Toni surprised himself by seeing only Meat On The Run, and his trigger-finger began to itch for the chance to take one down.

He may have never thought of himself as a hunter before, but he had never found himself starving in the woods before either.

It was about mid-day when Toni saw a solitary boar trotting anxiously by about sixty paces to their right. It wasn't much to look at, but he decided it would do well enough. Setting his Lacrau to semi-auto, he aimed at the beast's shoulder-blade and fired off a shot. The result was almost comical; the creature leapt into the air almost as high as its own shoulder and took off at full steam as soon as it landed, shrieking as it went. It zigged and then zagged, and then disappeared into the forest.

Sueli gave Toni a dirty look, and then looked pointedly elsewhere; Hannah began to laugh, and she kept laughing until a quarter-hour afterwards, when they happened upon its carcass. Fear of pursuit quickly gave way to hunger, and before long they were trying to figure out how to gut a particularly hairy pig.

Finally they gave up trying and hacked off its hind-quarters instead, surrendering the remainder of the feast to nature. Toni estimated that each leg still carried more than five kilos of meat on them, and felt that the effort had been a worthwhile. One was stowed away in Toni's pack, the space there having become ample due to their dwindling rations. The other they placed over a campfire, where they spent the better part of an hour roasting and slicing their way to a distended belly.

By the time they resumed their march, Toni found himself looking over his shoulder at the darkening sky to the south-east. The winds were picking up by then, and it seemed that the blaze had finally established itself in the land.

With no feeble earthling to slow them down, the group began to make good time over the course of the remaining afternoon. The air stank of smoke and Toni realized that the winds had changed again, an event not too uncommon for that time of the month, although by the twentieth they could expect it to radiate from the Thau's pupil and become very, very strong.

Nature's Dusk came earlier than expected, and Toni suspected that the smoke had something to do with that. They pushed onwards nevertheless, a mute Ian almost leading the way in haste. Toni knew what he was thinking, but in the meantime he simply enjoyed the fact that he didn't have to constantly prod his prisoner into movement.

They finally pitched camp at the military crest of a steep hill, not so much because of hunger or lack of sleep, but mostly because their legs had begun to fail beneath them. As the femmes set about foraging for firewood and Ian sat on his rump with a defeated expression, Toni collected the Mark 4 comm boxes and began to mess around with the pendant cables' male-female interconnections. He ended up connecting two cables in a line, with the third and fourth spreading out from its end to make a capital T.

"You think that's wise?" Hannah asked as they returned with armfuls of rotting wood.

"It won't be a good idea to transmit, but at least we can try to passively scan frequencies, can't we?" he proposed.

He tried to climb a tall pine and quickly realized that the task would require two working arms, and so he gave up instead and sat opposite Ian. They tried very hard not to stare at each other as they awaited the femmes' return.

"My, how in hell have men survived so long?" Hannah quipped as they returned with another load. She turned to Sueli with a cocky grin. "Look at them! Faces busted up, arms slung, unable to climb an itsy tree, they're practically an endangered species ..."

Toni tried not to smile. It hurt his ego too much.

Before long, camp was set and a fire sizzled, what remained of a boar's leg roasting from a spit. Hannah climbed the tree and stretched out the antenna, leaving him to try to figure out the communicator's functions. Before long Toni could hear the steady crackle of static over the comm, and he set the mode to frequency scan, carefully keeping his fingers clear of the PTT.

It did not take long for the scanner to pick something up. A simple non-repetitive clicking code was being transmitted from somewhere to their north-east.

"What, you improvised a Geiger counter?" Sueli asked, in high spirits due to the impending meal.

"Nope. I think it's a signal from Lograin." he replied with a frown, catching everyone's attention.

"Press decode ..." Hannah suggested after a moment of silence.

He fixed the frequency and pressed the decode button. Surely enough, after a few moments of listening, the device's display presented him with the decoded message.

SOURCE: LOGRAIN AIR BASE (UNCOMPROMISED)

DISTANCE: 685.7 KM

MESSAGE: ALL WILD ROSE SURVIVORS MUST REMAIN PASSIVE ON COMMS UNTIL 500 KM FROM BASE. NO EVACUATION WILL BE ATTEMPTED BEYOND 500 KM RADIUS OF BASE. UNMIL FORCES STILL ACTIVE BEYOND ORIGINAL CONTACT LOCATION.

"How can they be so sure about their distance to us?" Hannah asked, apparently not too happy with the number. Toni smiled.

"All radios and transmission towers have synchronized atomic clocks. These emergency signals are sent at precise times, so the receivers only need to measure the delay in signal reception to calculate their distance to them. Direction's another matter, though. Our antenna is non-directional, which is another way of saying we're 685 clicks away from Lograin without a clue as to azimuth."

"We'll just have to keep following the trail ..." she muttered.

"Follow the trail for the next two hundred clicks?!" Sueli cried. "That's more than four days' march, and the Winds will have hit us by then. No one sends rescue missions against the Winds!" She began to weep again.

"Then we'll have to find shelter for as long as they last," he suggested, disliking the defeated tone of her voice. "We've already proven we can hunt, but what we really need to do is find shelter that can stand up to the Rains. It might be a good idea to leave the valley up ahead and climb the Dogspine range. I'm sure we could find a cave or something along those lines."

"How far up ahead is it?" she asked hopefully.

"A hundred clicks or so. Enough to get there in two days and settle down for the wait."

"Alright, we will do that if we must ..." Hannah agreed.

Toni tested Ian's bindings before going to asleep, noticing with satisfaction how the winds rustling the treetops had cleared away the smoke. They did not set a watch for the night.

Toni was roughly shaken awake in the morning, finding an alarmed Hannah urging him to rise. He felt strangely heavy and had difficulty making out the camp, and he finally realized that it was almost completely obscured by smoke. He picked up a crackling sound uphill, and his eyes widened in alarm as he saw an enormous tongue of flame reach towards the sky.

"You're kidding me!" he exclaimed.

"I wish! We have seconds to scoot!" she shouted as she began to stow her sleeping bag.

Feeling drunk with sleep, or with carbon monoxide poisoning, now that he thought about it, he quickly gathered his things and removed Ian's bindings, and before long they were making a running descent of the hill. By the time they had reached its base, the entire heights were ablaze, and a strong wind was pushing the inferno further towards them.

Then he remembered that he'd left the pendant cables hanging in the tree.

"Oh, no ..." he exclaimed, hating himself over yet another blunder.

"What?"

"Never mind ..."

They kept up the running pace and slowly managed to outrun the wildfire, moving over the MEWAC trail since it was relatively clear of obstacles. Toni wondered for how long they would have to flee, knowing that it was only a matter of time until they exhausted themselves.

"We march and we run ..." he decided.

The group spent the following two hours marching and running in equal intervals, trying to keep up a respectable pace until they finally began to feel a steady north-easterly again. Only then did they rest.

"We've lost the cables," he finally admitted.

"I know," she replied, not caring to discuss the matter further.

There really wasn't much else to say and so, after the pause for rest, they set off again. After a while they realized that the forest was ominously silent, as if dawn had not yet arrived.

"It hasn't ..." they concluded after a short discussion.

Toni felt cheated of his sleep.

There were, however, only two things that could be done about the matter. After a short debate the group opted for the more unpleasant choice, and they each swallowed a pill from the meager remainder of their combat kits, each capsule containing enough delayed-release Ampakines and caffeine to keep them going for twenty hours. Beyond that boundary, only a double-dose would be able to keep them from falling into a deep, exhausted sleep.

Toni didn't want to think about what would happen to him after a double-dose of combat pills' effects had worn off. As the group set off yet again to follow Main Force's trail, he quietly decided it wasn't worth the risk to find out.

As they progressed along their north-westerly course, Toni made an effort to tune out his surroundings and focus on an imminent problem.

MEWAC had timed their operations to take the greatest possible advantage of the twelve-day window of good weather, but as Capicua's orbit took the planet out into deeper space, the humidity that was slowly building up would eventually condense into rainclouds. Before that, however, the winds would pick up as the hot air from its solar pole began to trade places with the more temperate and humid air from the sea that surrounded Thaumantias. A powerful and continuous wind would eventually sweep the landscape and test every tree's will to stand. Few animals would dare to be out in the open when such winds were raging. But once the humid coastal air had made it in deep enough, and as the planet swung out at its furthest distance to the red sun, the winds would die down and the downpour would begin, as the saturated atmosphere cooled down enough for the trapped moisture within to be finally released.

To sum things up neatly, if the Great Winds didn't kill them, the Great Rains most certainly would. And he honestly couldn't see himself hunting during those days, which meant that no hunger he had felt before would compare to what the Cap had in store for them over the following fortnight.