She could feel its million legs clawing at her as its serpentine body tried to wrap itself around hers.

  “No!” she said through her teeth, forcing the hideous maw away from her face. “I’m…not…your…dinner!”

  Of course it ignored her. If there was a brain in there at all, it was just complex enough to tell the thing to eat and eat often.

  She tried to shift her weight, to get some leverage against it, but its lower coils already held her legs fast. The tiny legs had encircled her torso by then and were in the process of squeezing off her air. She had minutes, maybe seconds, to think of something, but with that slaughterhouse of a mouth bearing down on her, she had no attention to spare.

  Her lungs burned as they struggled against the increasing pressure. Her heart raced. This thing was going to kill her, right here in the sopping decay of the alien jungle, and then it would eat her or drink her blood or whatever it did to survive.

  The giant maw forced her hands back and back again until it was in kissing distance of her face. She felt the crushing tightness around her stomach and chest forcing her breath out in short ragged gasps.

  She told herself to fight, but her arms were numb and there was music and her mother scolding her about something and why did her head hurt so much?

  Then there was a sound she recognized, a humming noise that brought with it a flash of incandescent light. Suddenly the monster was gone.

  Standing nearby, with a phaser in his hand, was a big man in a mud-spattered Starfleet uniform. His thick mustache did nothing to hide the look of profound relief on his face.

  “Keru!” she rasped at him as she struggled to stand again. “Took you long enough.”

  “Sorry, Commander,” he said, moving to help her. “I’ll try to be quicker next time.”

  Keru’s report was better than expected, considering. He and the others, Troi and Ra-Havreii, had materialized close to each other along with many of the survival supplies they would need.

  While Troi and Ra-Havreii tried to get their malfunctioning equipment working, Keru had concerned himself with searching the jungle for Vale, Jaza, and Modan. There was no sign of the latter two as yet.

  “Something’s interfering with the combadges,” said Keru as he let Vale walk on her own the final few meters to their camp. “Dr. Ra-Havreii is working on the problem. I located as much of our gear as I could. Some of it is still missing. I was actually looking for it when I found you.”

  “Lucky me,” she said.

  “Me too,” he said, managing a grin.

  Vale was glad of Keru in that moment. He was a rock, as unshakable as they came, and without his support, she wasn’t sure she would be able to continue, in light of their larger dilemma.

  “We can’t be sure what happened, Christine,” said Troi once Vale had gotten some field rations in her and injected herself with a broad-spectrum inoculant.

  The counselor looked surprisingly unfazed by the current circumstances, which somehow irritated Vale. She was alert, relatively free of mud and other detritus and working, as best she could, to assist the engineer with his repair of the communications pack.

  Ra-Havreii, by contrast, seemed little more than a robot, working away in silence on whatever task was set him and looking none of his companions in the face or speaking. His body was there, but as was increasingly the case with him, the Efrosian’s mind was far, far away. This time Vale didn’t begrudge him that. She wished she could escape too.

  “I’m sure, Deanna,” she said. “I know what I saw.”

  “And I know what I felt,” said the other woman. “But the Enterprise-”

  “We’re not on the Enterpriseanymore, Counselor,” said Vale, suddenly angry and wanting to hit something, many times, as hard as she could. “ Ourship is dead. Everyone on it is dead. I saw it happen. I don’t know how it got so close so fast, but I know what I saw. So, please, shut up about the Enterpriseand let me try to figure out how we’re getting out of this mess.”

  “I know what you’re feeling, Chris,” said Deanna evenly. “I feel some of it too. But my own experience tells me to wait until we have real solid proof of whatever happened to Titan. You may not like to hear it now, but Will and I have been in this place before and survived. I’m not declaring him dead or any of them dead, until I see it.”

  “You’re in denial,” said Vale.

  “You’re not qualified to make that assessment, Commander,” said Troi. Then she went back to work with Ra-Havreii without another word.

  They had limited resources and fewer options, so Vale’s eventual plan was about as basic as they came: Find the shuttle. Find Jaza and Modan, alive if possible. To that end, armed with phasers and the four now working combadges, they had set off in opposite directions, each describing a circular search pattern that would eventually bring them back to the camp, hopefully with the shuttle’s location and with their two missing companions in tow.

  Troi was left to work with Ra-Havreii, and it was all uphill. He wouldn’t speak, or, if he did, it was only to ask for some tool or to correct her clumsy attempts to follow his repair instructions. Beyond that, the engineer had folded up inside himself and, she knew, was currently building a very solid door to lock himself behind.

  She understood it. His response, while somewhat unhealthy, was neither unnatural nor unexpected. He had helped to design Titan, after all, as he had all the Luna-class vessels.

  He’d already presided over the destruction of one such ship and now had suffered through a second. Troi would have been surprised, considering his mental state even before their current troubles, if he wasn’t somewhat withdrawn now. The problem was, if they were to survive, he would need to process this and get through it sooner rather than later. Much sooner.

  She could feel his emotions boiling inside him like an infinite sea of lava beneath his apparent calm. It was too much energy to bottle, and if he couldn’t let some out now, the eventual blow would be as catastrophic to him as what had happened to the Luna.

  “Xin,” she began again. “This was not your fault. You know that.”

  “Yes, of course, Counselor,” he said eventually and obviously lying. “This was just an unfortunate result of dangerous explorations.”

  “Yes, Xin,” she said. “We don’t even know that Titanwas destroyed.”

  “Commander Vale seems fairly certain,” he said.

  “Chris is under a lot of pressure,” said Troi. “It helps her to think the worst has already happened.”

  “A prudent response,” he said, reaching for the isolinear filaments.

  “Not really,” she said. “Only a natural one. Pessimism is a waste of intellect.”

  He worked away in silence, apparently puzzled at the tricorder’s stubborn resistance to his ministrations. None of the energy-manipulating devices had worked properly at first. Something about the transport or the nature of this planet had scrambled them. Watching him work on the thing, methodically resetting commands or repairing damaged filaments, gave Troi a deeper understanding of how his mind worked.

  He was an entirely compartmental being, having simple but solid walls drawn between his emotions and his intellect in a way that reminded her of Vulcans but that was infinitely more complex. Vulcans shoved all their emotions behind the same wall, denying them access to the surface of their being. Ra-Havreii didn’t have a single wall but a maze. He certainly felt things and showed it, but only what and when he wished. She wondered if all Efrosians were this way or if it was a particular quirk of the engineer’s.

  “One of my colleagues on the Lunaproject felt that way,” he said eventually, frowning over the exposed guts of the tricorders in his lap. “Dr. Tourangeau felt that our work was in the nature of a competition, with us setting ourselves against the limitations imposed by nature and finding ways around them. ‘Sometimes you get the sehlat,’ he would say. ‘Sometimes it gets you.’ ”