Six days since the drop ship came down. The hull had split along the port side when it skidded through the white-leaf forest, scattering the comms array across half a klick of ridge. No outbound signal. Nearest Rhy'sani outpost, four days' hard march through terrain none of them had maps for. So Elias called it a repair timeline, and everybody else called it what it was: Stranded. That part they could live with. It was the other thing that had the camp on edge.

Hesh stood at the cargo ramp with a grease pencil and a running tally scratched into the bulkhead.

"Two ration packs," he said. "Both mylar blankets. And the water tabs are down another full strip."

Merrick didn't look up from the receiver he was rebuilding. "Recount."

"I recounted twice."

"Then count again. People under stress lose track—"

"Merrick." Keegan was sitting on an ammo crate near the treeline, elbows on his knees. "I had that cache in my scope from twenty-two hundred to oh-four hundred. Nothing crossed the ground. Not a hexapede, not a grazer, nothing." He let that sit. "So either you think I can't watch a crate for six hours, or it didn't come across the ground."

Merrick set the receiver down. "It's a forest. Things come out of the canopy."

"Then where's the scat? Where's the prints?" Keegan pointed at the deck plates around the supply pallet. They'd dusted them two nights back with fine ash from the cook fire. Bootprints—theirs, all accounted for. Nothing else. "We put down ash, we strung tripwire with cans on it. Wires are still taut, cans still hanging. Something's taking supplies out of the middle of a guarded camp and it's not leaving so much as a footprint."

"Riley's worse," Hesh said quietly.

Elias looked over from the ship's open panel.

"Took him to the cache this morning," Hesh went on. "He gets interested, four, five steps, then just quits. Circles, whines, gives up. Like the trail ends in midair."

That landed harder than the inventory. Riley didn't quit. Riley had tracked a man through a flooded riverbed once. Elias came down off the ramp slowly, wiping his hands.

"Show me what's missing," he said. "Everything. In order."

"Food first two nights. Then the multitool. Then wire, paracord, the blankets, tabs." Hesh tapped the tally. "It's not just eating, Dad. It's taking materials."

"Animals don't take purification tabs," Elias said. "And they don't leave the food to grab twenty feet of cord." He was quiet a moment, looking at the treeline—pale leaves doing nothing in the still air. "Something on this rock is choosing. And it's smart enough to beat tripwire, a dog, and a scout sniper's overwatch. That's not a animal problem. That's a people problem."

"Could be K'thari," Merrick said.

"K'thari don't steal blankets, they take trophies." Keegan spit into the dirt. "And they're not subtle. If it was them, we'd have been hit while we slept, not picked at."

"If it's smart enough to do all that," Merrick said, "it's smart enough to know we're hunting it. So stop hunting it like we're stupid." He stood, crossed to the tally, and drew a line under it with his thumb. "Change the game. It's been watching our routine for six days, so break the routine. Loudly."

Elias caught on first. "Give it a deadline."

"Move the cache into the ship tomorrow. Say it where the whole forest can hear you. Seal it up, done, no more free groceries." Merrick shrugged. "Whatever it is, if it wants that stuff, tonight's its last shot."

Nobody spoke for a second. Then Logan, who hadn't said ten words since sunup, said, "So we're the trap."

"We're the trap," Elias agreed. He looked around the circle of them. "Here's how it goes. Tonight we turn in at full dark, all of us, lights out, like we've quit. Bait stays out—fresh ration pack, the last of the water tabs, right there on the ramp. Logan sleeps three meters off it. Doesn't sleep. You know what I mean."

Logan gave a single nod.

"Keegan, you're off-site. Two hundred meters east on the ridge, ghillie, thermal. Don't watch the camp—it got past you watching the camp. Watch the approaches. Canopy line, river side, the deadfall. Merrick, low ground west, opposite axis. Hesh, with me inside as second echelon. Riley stays kenneled with me." Elias held up a hand before Hesh could object. "Because every theft's happened with the dog secured. It knows. So we let it think tonight's the same."

"And the rules?" Hesh asked.

"Nobody fires unless I say so." Elias said it flat, leaving no room. "If it's got hands and it's making choices, it's someone. We are not killing the first contact on this planet over a ration pack. Anybody got a problem with that, say it now."

Keegan lifted a shoulder. "Long as it's not eating my ration pack, we're square."

---

They played it out exactly as scripted. Loud talk at dusk about sealing the cache at first light. Full lights-out an hour after dark, earlier than any night prior. The camp went black and quiet.

Two hundred meters east, Keegan lay in the ferns with his thermal scope, breath slow, watching the treeline. The bait sat on the cargo ramp, tabs in a little foil strip beside the ration pack, starlight catching the mylar corner of a blanket laid out as temptation.

Three meters away, under a wool blanket, Logan breathed slow and even, sidearm under the blanket's edge.

Hesh crouched by the gap in the hull plating, rifle slung, watching the white canopy swallow his dog for the third dawn running.

"He's doing it again," he said.

Logan was already awake, sitting up in his rack with the look of a man who'd been waiting for this. "He comes back every time."

"Fed. He comes back fed." Hesh pulled his gloves on. "That's the part I don't love."

They went out through the gap single file. The forest floor crunched underfoot. Pale leaves, brittle even this far from the crash burn, and the early light came down strange through the white canopy. Riley waited twenty meters out, tail sweeping, then turned and trotted with the confidence of a dog who'd made this trip enough times to have opinions about the route.

That was the thing Hesh couldn't shake. Riley wasn't tracking. Tracking was meandering—nose down, casting back and forth. This was a commute.

"He knows where he's going," Logan said.

"Yeah. I got that."

Hesh keyed his radio. "Spectre actual, we're mobile, following Riley northeast."

Merrick's voice came back grainy. Static chewed the edges of it—the atmosphere out here ate signals like rust ate iron. "Copy. Keegan's got visual on you till the treeline. After that you're in the dead zone. Check in at the river or I send people."

"Roger. Out."

They crossed the silica stream twenty minutes later. Water the color of antifreeze, clouded and bright, and Riley never broke stride, splashing through the shallows like the planet's weird water was old news. On the far bank the ground climbed, rock formations stacking up into a shallow ravine, and the dog sped up. Ears forward. Tail high and swinging wide.

Not alert-tail. Happy tail.

"Logan."

"I see it."

They crested the ravine together and stopped. Below, tucked into the roots of a massive white-leaf tree, was a camp. A fire pit lined with river stones, coals banked and smoking, threads of white curling up through the canopy. A rack of stripped branches lashed with cord, hexapede meat hung in dark strips. A pile of cracked bones, marrow-sicked clean.

"Dog's a traitor," Logan said flatly.

"He's a recruit." Hesh swept the tree line with his eyes, rifle staying slung. "Somebody's been within a mile of that wreck nine days running, and our early warning system's been having dinner with them."

Logan stayed still, scanning the camp with that slow methodical sweep. He pointed at the fire, then at the dark mouth of a hollow beneath the roots. "Fire's alive. And there's no tracks leaving."

Meaning whoever it was, was home.

Riley had already trotted down into the camp like he owned the place, circling the fire pit once before planting himself at the threshold of the hollow, tail going hard, and barking. that sharp, bright, announcing-himself bark he used for family.

Hesh blew out a slow breath, unslung his rifle, and set it flat on the ground in plain view. He stepped down into the camp with both hands loose and open, Riley's name dying in his mouth because the dog obviously wasn't going anywhere.

"Riley's freeloading off you," he called out, voice level, carrying. "Nine days of our rations he's turning his nose up at. Figured we should introduce ourselves and—apologize. Or settle the tab."

The wash looked like all the others, a dry trench floored with crusty pale sediment, threaded through pale trunks. It saved him twenty minutes, and it ate him for it.

Four klicks out, the ground simply stopped being ground. The crust folded under his boot like stale bread, and he was dropping, three meters, maybe four, into a hollow that smelled of sulfur and old water. He got the rifle clear on instinct, but his ankle got no vote at all. It went under him wrong, and the sound it made was a sound he'd heard on other men and never once wanted a turn at.

He sat in the dim pit for a full minute, breathing through his nose.

"Okay," he said out loud, because saying it made it real, and real things could be managed. "Assess."

The radio was a casualty. Cracked against the rock face on the way down, housing split, battery somewhere in the gravel behind him. The rifle was fine. The leg was not. He got a forearm under the rock and dragged himself to the slope, tried to stand, and the world went white at the edges for a second. Fuck.

He loosened the boot laces before the swelling could trap the leather, hissed through his teeth doing it, and lashed the ankle tight with his sling and a dead branch. Then he did the math out loud, because Merrick wasn't there to do it for him.

"Sixteen hundred check-in. I miss it, they know. Dark's what—three hours after. They won't move till first light through that brush, so that's..." he checked the sky through the hole above, "roughly fourteen hours. Sitting still in a hole, no kit, no heat. That's a coin flip."

He looked up the slope of the wash. Back the way he'd come was four klicks of collapsed crust waiting to finish the job.

"Or I meet them halfway and stay warm doing it. Moving target's harder to eat, too." He got his elbows set. "Congratulations, Russ. You talked yourself into it."

---

He dragged. half a klick an hour, less where the litter was loose. The sun leaned west and the light went from harsh to honey to something low and mean. He talked the whole way, low and steady, a running commentary to nobody: "Right elbow's got another hour in it, maybe two. That's optimistic. We're being optimistic today I fucking guess."

Somewhere north, faint, came a sound like a mill saw biting green wood. Then again. Then a chorus of it, and something screaming briefly. Keegan went flat in the litter and did not move for several minutes, he didn't bother to count, until the sawing faded east.

"Love this planet," he whispered. "Gonna write it a review."

By dusk the river fog was rolling up out of the low ground, blue-white, and the cold came down with it like a door closing. Two klicks, maybe. His hands had stopped arguing and started resigning. He was working out whether a broken sniper could survive a night in a hollow log on spite alone—

The forest stopped making noise.

Dead stop. The insect drone cut off mid-phrase, the way it does when something moves through it that everything else has already voted on.

Keegan stopped too. Controlled his breathing. Four counts in, six out. His right hand crept to the rifle and settled there without lifting it. A peace gesture or a threat, he genuinely didn't know which one he meant yet. Because out past the fog, at the edge of where his failing eyes could swear, the white trunks stood in a line, one piece of that line did not match.

It had been there a while. He had the ugly, crawling certainty it had been there for the last hundred meters, watching him drag himself along like a wounded thing, because that was exactly what he was.

He cleared his throat. Worked some moisture back into a voice gone dry.

"So here's my situation," he said to the treeline, level and conversational, the way a man talks when he's got one card left and decides to play it face up. "I've got a broken ankle, no radio, six hours of daylight gone, and I'm about two klicks short of people who will tear this valley apart looking for me. I've also got—" he patted the pockets he could reach without moving, "a compass, a genuinely excellent knife, and whatever's left of my dignity, which frankly you've already seen, so the inventory's yours to appraise."

The fog drifted between them. He didn't blink, but he decided he was in a particularly chatty mood tonight, he was probably losing it at this point. Talking to something that likely didn't even understand him.

"If you're deciding whether to eat me, I'll tell you up front I'm mostly gristle and bad decisions. But if you're deciding something else..." he tipped his head an inch toward the darkening east, "I could use a consult on the local real estate. Something with walls. Or failing that, an opinion on hollow logs."