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tricky thing had been what to do with her suit. That old Prime Directive thing cropping up—and wouldn’t Gold have a field day with that one. But the real issue was her suit had an emergency transponder-locator beacon, sort of important if she wanted off this rock. Once she’d beached, there was no way she could lug it along. So she’d stayed in the suit, hiking northwest and away from the inland sea.
    Eventually, she’d found the stream and a good place to construct a shelter. There were tumbles of boulders humped and jumbled here and there, and she found a wide ridge with a sixty degree incline and a cave of sorts that led back for about fifty meters. Thumbing on her emergency transponder, she wedged her helmet and suit into a fissure but pocketed her combadge. The opening to the cave was wide enough for her to squirm into, if needed. Of course, this might also mean that an animal could do the same thing, but she hadn’t seen any animals so far. There were birds here and there, black specks silhouetted like cinders against smoke-yellow clouds. A heck of a lot of bugs, though, especially those nearly-invisible no-see-ums swarming in an undulating ball around her head.
    The bugs made sense. In the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe, insects would likely adapt and survive. That was bad because she wasn’t exactly sure what there was for food, and she wasn’t eager to go grubbing for, well, grubs . If she had a chance to spy out a few of the local inhabitants, that would help because if they were similar physiologically (and she’d just have to take a guess since she was pretty near blind without a tricorder), she’d likely be able to tolerate the food.
    Thinking about getting food and water, she wasn’t watching where she was going. Her toe hooked on an exposed root, and she stumbled, went down, wood spilling out of her arms. Her right ankle complained. She cursed. Starfleet regulation uniform boots were made for civilized life on a civilized ship, not hiking.
    She picked herself up, dusted off, retrieved her wood. Food and water, they were just two problems out of a gazillion. She hadn’t exactly aced survival training but remembered that Starfleet’s version was predicated upon a few givens. For example, Starfleet pretty much figured you had access to tools or some kind of gear: phaser, a tricorder. Something. Another was that if you ditched, well, you had the shuttle for shelter and you could stay pretty cozy, break into your survival stores and wait to get rescued.
    Rescue. That was the key. Starfleet kind of drummed that into you. Your people were going to be looking for you even if you were just a plasma smear or a slew of subatomic particles. You were important; your absence was felt, and someone somewhere would worry. So she figured they were worrying: Gold, Gomez, even Tev. Not to mention the folks on DS9 who probably missed Bashir. She counted on that much.
    But the problem was surviving until they found her. If they found her. She didn’t have tools. She didn’t have the runabout. She’d debated about trying to find what was left of the Missouri , maybe scavenging bits and pieces but mostly sticking close because that’s where her people would look first. But the shuttle had gone far south toward that city and was too far away for her to get there in anything like a reasonable amount of time. From what she’d seen, there wasn’t much left of the Missouri anyway—and, to be honest, she wasn’t really sure she was ready to face what might be left. Of the runabout. Of Julian, mainly, if he was still in there. Maybe she should be stronger. Right now, she wasn’t.
    Worse than having nothing (if there was such a thing as something worse in a situation verging on the totally catastrophic), she didn’t really think they’d ended up anywhere close to where they’d been going. In the few seconds she’d had at the sensors, she’d drawn a blank: no Starfleet buoys to ping, no recognizable stars. No