Wait.

Listen.

Shuffling through the forest alone, Dolan stopped.  He leaned against a tree trunk and closed his eyes.  He allowed his awareness to expand.  All he could hear was the trickle of water moving through a creek and the sound of his own heavy breathing.  That he could hear little else was promising, he supposed.  That had to mean no sentient creatures were approaching him from somewhere out of sight.  He really was alone.

Moving without leaving a trace had been easier for Dolan in the dark and the rain, but the sun was rising now.  The rain clouds had dispersed.  Although it was getting brighter, Dolan was favoured by little direct sunlight because the tree canopy of leaves was layered thickly overhead.  The humidity was quickly rising, though, putting the all-weather material of his Starfleet uniform to the test.

Dolan consulted his tricorder.  The particle scattering field was still limiting the sensor range, but he noticed the scattering field had lessened in the past hour.  He could identify no signs of sentient plant-life within a kilometre radius.

Muttering to himself, Dolan repeated his mantra: “Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving.”

Although he had refreshed his first contact training in preparation for the duck blind, Dolan’s xeno-zoology training served him at this moment.  Well before he had fallen into the orbit of archaeology, he had joined Starfleet for the opportunity to visit industry-free planets such as this one to silently observe the animal life.  The muscle memory from a dozen holo-simulations returned to him as he followed the creek and fuzzy sensor readings to the source of the only two humanoid life signs on the planet.

“You won’t believe it,” Dolan said as he swatted small branches from his eye-line.  “I think I saw a large cat made entirely of tangled vines.  I hid in a bush so that it wouldn’t see me.”

“Oh,” Dolan said in crisp realization.  

Addae and Kellin looked at him.

Thinking aloud, Dolan remarked, “…I hope the bush wasn’t sentient.”

As he said that, Dolan slowly approached the pond where Addae and Kellin were wading, waist-deep.  Upon turning to acknowledge Dolan, the two of them padded towards him, comfortable in their nudity.  Silently, Dolan questioned why he was the fool parading around in layers of Starfleet uniform and his tattered isolation jumpsuit, careful not to leave behind even a scrap of the damaged holographic lattice.

“You found a tree-cat, but did you find the phaser?” Addae asked.  His tone was as casual as his stride, making his way out of the water and stepping into the trouser legs of his uniform.

“No,” Dolan said, shaking his head.

“We couldn’t find it either,” Kellin said.  The way he continued to wallow in the pond made Dolan question just how intently Kellin had looked.  When Kellin discovered his phaser was missing the night before, their initial search had been in vain.  The transporter had tossed them across the landscape, and Kellin’s charcoal-tinted hand phaser had proven impossible to find in the dark.  They had initiated three search patterns at dawn to ensure they found it before any of the planet’s lifeforms.

Somewhere along the way, Kellin and Addae had found each other.

Excitedly, Kellin raised his arms above his head and said, “But we found fresh water!”

“How did you test the safety of the water?” Dolan asked in no small alarm.  “I had our tricorder.”

“Yuulik beamed a water sample aboard the runabout,” Addae replied as he yanked up his trousers.  He followed Dolan with his eyes, watching Dolan unblinkingly.  “She tested the water two days ago.”

Scoffing, Dolan said, “She tested one water sample.  We don’t know she tested that water.”

“It’s fine,” Kellin said in that condescending timbre again, play-acting nonchalantly.  Kellin would likely defend his behaviour, claiming it to be kindness, but it came across as selfish to Dolan.  Kellin seemed discomfited by Dolan’s reaction, and his dismissal came across as suppression.  

Kellin did it again, reaffirming, “We’re fine.  Why don’t you get in the water, too?  We’ll see who can hold his breath the longest?”

“How can you just stand there?” Dolan asked, waving a hand at Kellin in the water and Addae lazily shrugging on his uniform jacket.  “Every minute we’re exposed here, we’re at greater risk of–“

“I hear you,” Kellin said, “This isn’t what any of us wanted, but we can’t do anything about it until Constellation finds us.  This is where we find ourselves.”

In the span of a blink, Addae disappeared.  He didn’t pivot and run.  There was no shimmer of an annular confinement beam.  Dolan’s mind couldn’t process what had happened.  In one moment, Addae was straightening the combadge on his chest, and the next, he wasn’t there anymore.  He had become an absence.

All Dolan could comprehend was the difference between himself and Kellin.  The truth.  Their verbal disagreement had been petty; Dolan knew that.  It didn’t mean anything.  The real difference was that Kellin broke into a sprint.  He ran toward the spot where Addae had been standing.  Dolan, instead, ran in the opposite direction, scrambling to escape whatever had happened to Addae.

That proved to be a mistake when everything went black for him too.