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Warning: This is a survival story and contains scenes that some readers may find unpleasant.

Beta'd by VesperRegina, to whom I am, as always, indebted.

He shook the last drops of water from his hands, and stood up.

The night was coming. It was imperative that he find shelter, because he had no idea how cold it would get. At least he'd found water, and drunk his fill, so that wouldn't be a problem. Food might become so, though he wasn't particularly hungry yet, but in a forest like this there was bound to be something he could harvest or trap. Right now, however, he wasn't confident enough to simply throw up a bivouac and light a fire. He had the strangest feeling that he was under observation, and the strength of that conviction made him want to find some very defensible place to shelter in. When he had that, he would set about lighting a fire.

The briefing – such as it was – had assured him that he was alone on the planet except for the creatures native to it. It was not inhabited. He simply had to survive there for three months. At the end of that time, the people who'd left him there would come back for him. If he was still alive, he'd have passed the test. If he wasn't, well...

They wouldn't bother looking for anything left to bury.

It could have been a chilling thought, but for Ensign Malcolm Reed it was oddly comforting. He liked things to be clear and straightforward, and it didn't get a lot clearer or more straightforward than this.

He'd done his basic survival training for Starfleet, at which he'd excelled – as he did in most of his subjects, because he put in the work. It made sense that the training to be a field operative for Section 31 would be a lot more stringent. Working under cover, there would be periods when he'd have no-one to call on for backup if he got into trouble. Quite long periods, perhaps. His new handlers would have to be sure he could cope.

He was under no illusions that the next quarter-year would be easy for him, but he was confident that he wouldn't have been placed here if survival was impossible. The loneliness that would have been one of the worst challenges for most of his colleagues was to him an object almost of indifference. He had no liking for casual chit-chat at the best of times. Here, he could rely on nobody but himself.

The forest appeared to be located on rising ground, and he began following the course of the stream upwards. He had no way of knowing how readily available water was on this world, and since it was one of his basic survival needs he would not abandon it willingly. Basic geology suggested that higher ground was likely to be stonier and less thickly vegetated; the first would hopefully provide him some kind of sturdy bolt-hole, and the second would provide less concealment for anything that might have the idea of sneaking up on him.

He followed the stream patiently for a few hours. The sun had been high in the sky when the shuttlepod had dropped him off, but it was declining by the time the trees thinned and he got his first clear look at the heights above.

He hadn't been allowed to look out of the shuttle, so it came as a shock to find that he was in terrain that back on Earth he'd have expected to find in the Himalayas. The forest appeared to occupy a valley, but all around it jagged, white-capped peaks soared towards the sky.

It was stunningly beautiful, but at that moment admiration for its beauty was not his foremost reaction. He had been given no information as to what season this area was in, or what variations in temperature or weather conditions he might expect. It was wholly possible that winter was setting in – and at these altitudes it would be a winter that he would be very hard pressed to survive without stout shelter, warm clothing, and above all, plentiful stocks of food.

He gathered himself together. It was pointless to lament his lack of even a scanner or a phase pistol; all he had were his training and his wits, plus the one thing he'd been allowed to bring with him – a twenty-five centimetre survival knife that would probably be the difference between life and death. Those were what he would have to use.

Ahead of him the ground grew sharply steeper. The stream appeared to have its source high above; possibly it was melt-water from the base of a glacier, for it dropped in a silver string down several vertical faces of rock further up, bursting into spray where it encountered an outcrop.

The broken look of the rocks suggested that there would be caves, or at least fissures, in which it might be possible to take shelter. The lack of vegetation, however, suggested that food would be hard to find.

The nagging sense of being watched was still with him. He swung an uneasy look around. The forest had thinned out, but there was still enough undergrowth to conceal anything that really wanted to stay out of sight.

Water and protection had to be his priority. Ideally he could find somewhere sheltered enough to let him build a fire, and fire would see off most predators. As he'd walked he'd stripped vines from trees where he could find them and put together a keep net, which he'd filled with pieces of dry wood from fallen branches. A stand of bursting plant-pods had supplied him with the native equivalent of cotton, which he'd stuffed into his pockets for use later. He'd already hunted out a stone from the stream bed that would produce a satisfactory spark when struck with the hilt of his knife, and thus provided he was confident that actually starting a fire would pose little difficulty. Keeping one going for a long period might prove more problematic, but he'd worry about that later, when the cold prickle at the back of his neck was no longer nagging at him.

He paused long enough to gather some more brushwood, with thoughts of the night to come and what might be prowling in it, and then when he had as much as he thought he could carry without over-burdening himself he set off again, once more staying close to the stream. There was an area perhaps half a mile higher up that looked as though it was of a more brittle stone than much of the rest of the massif, or perhaps it had been exposed to some form of extreme stress at some point. It was riddled with fractures. Perhaps one of them might be large enough to afford him shelter in which to wait out the night; and then next day, when hopefully he felt safer, he could set out to do a little more exploring.

His boots were well-made and sturdy, with good grip on the soles. It was fortunate, because the stone had split into huge plates and the surfaces of these were so smooth that even with the help of his footwear it was hard going. In between each slab were treacherous rivers of scree that were even worse; he attempted to negotiate a way up by one such, and ended up sliding more than twenty metres back down before he managed to regain control. After that he was more wary, and contented himself with looking for crevices that provided toe- and finger-holds that would help him ascend almost on hands and knees.

He was within perhaps a hundred metres of a split in the rock that he'd picked out as potentially large enough to hold him when something flashed past him, and he identified its fleeing shape as something that resembled a rabbit. The fact that it was running past him rather than away from him set alarm bells shrilling in his brain, and he jerked around to look behind him.

His instinct had been sound.

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