Reeves and Ijen looked almost as bad as Puller, having tended their pain‑racked teammate all night on their exposed perch.

“Why hasn’t the cadet ship picked him up?” Bobbie Ray demanded, his voice rising in fear. They were all looking up into the shimmering pearl grey sky.

“Didn’t you call?” Nev Reoh asked, nearly panicked at Puller’s streaky white pallor. He was already digging into his pocket to grab his own alarm‑summons. Bobbie Ray tried to stop him, but Reoh activated it anyway, not caring if they failed their own test. He wanted Puller off these rocks and in sick bay now.

They waited, expecting a medical team to appear or to hear a summons on their comm badges, keyed to the cadet ship overhead. But nothing happened, and there was no sound but the wind whistling around the rocks.

Ijen sat with her head in her hands, obviously too weary to get her hopes up that a different alarm‑summons would work. “Something’s happened to the cadet ship,” she said dully.

“What could happen to the cadet ship?” Reoh blurted out.

Reeves obligingly began to supply possibilities. “It was attacked, it crashed, the crew died of food poisoning, the life‑support system failed . . .”

“What are you saying?” Bobbie Ray demanded. “That we’re on our own down here?”

Ijen slowly raised her head. “Yes.”

Bobbie Ray didn’t believe it. Starfleet wouldn’t desert a bunch of their own cadets. There would be so many people protesting in the Federation Assembly that the Academy would never recover from the scandal. Even with the evidence right in front of his eyes, he couldn’t believe they would all slowly die on this waste‑planet.

“Maybe there’s something magnetic going on,” Bobbie Ray told them. “Something in the ionosphere. You hear about it all the time.”

Nev Reoh was nodding in support, still anxiously looking to the sky as if to expect the cadet ship to suddenly appear overhead.

But Reeves shook his head. “You helped deploy the satellites. This planet has a very weak magnetic field because it’s no longer tectonically active.”

“Well, it’s got to be something,”Bobbie Ray insisted. “Excited electrons in the stratosphere, or solar flares. We just have to wait for it to subside and they’ll come get us.”

Now both Reeves and Ijen were looking at him, their expressions dull from lack of sleep. “If we don’t get more water soon,” Reeves said, “we’ll be dead before that happens. We’ve explored as far as we dare to go alone, and we can’t leave Puller–”

“We’ll find water,” Bobbie Ray told them, glad to have a firm objective in mind.

Reoh hesitated. “Uh, that might not be so easy.”

“We’ll find water,” Bobbie Ray repeated, looking straight at the former Vedek, willing him to shut up.

“Uh, sure,” the other cadet agreed, cowed into submission.

It was difficult climbing down the rest of the way into the canyon, even for Bobbie Ray. He couldn’t understand why the other cadets had tried to descend at that point–it was obviously unstable. Perhaps the cadet ship was waiting to see how the other two handled the situation they’d gotten themselves into. But Bobbie Ray somehow doubted that. Puller was in real pain; no one in Starfleet could be that callous.

Bobbie Ray led Reoh down into the canyon, heading in the direction that Ijen and Reeves said appeared to lead toward a larger canyon. He and Reoh would be needing water soon, too. They had been looking for water all morning, in fact, and Bobbie Ray was becoming adept at recognizing the types of terrain that seemed like they should contain water, but in fact, didn’t.

“Sometimes you find seeps back in these overhangs,” Reoh said for perhaps the dozenth time.

Bobbie Ray folded his arms, waiting while Reoh crawled forward on his stomach under the sandstone ledge, feeling around cautiously with one hand. The only life‑forms they had discovered were long, ovoid insects with too many short legs that burrowed into the sand. He shuddered, thinking of where they had slept the night before, but at least he’d had the protection of the waterproof–he knew it would come in handy!

There was also a round‑bellied rock‑dweller that had extra‑long legs and lived in the dark places in the cracks. The Bajoran soon emerged, shaking his hand as if he’d encountered something scurrying inside. Bobbie Ray couldn’t help twitching his own hands, as if invisible insects were crawling across his fur.

“No water,” Reoh reported glumly.

Bobbie Ray started to say, “I could have told you–” when the sound of rocks falling further up the canyon made him stop.

“Starsa!” Reoh exclaimed to Bobbie Ray. He called out, “Star‑sa! We’re over here! Starrr‑sa!”

Bobbie Ray led the way down the canyon, heading further away from the sick‑camp, as he was beginning to think of it. They went much further than it had sounded, calling out all the way, but they didn’t see or hear anything else. Not for the first time, Bobbie Ray regretted that their comm badges were only linked to the cadet ship rather than the other cadets.

“Look at this,” Reoh suddenly said.

Bobbie Ray joined him at the base of a loose pile of sedimentary rock. A few had rolled beyond the pile, and nearby there was some sort of mark on the hard‑packed, rocky soil. Four parallel grooves dug deeply into the ground.

“What is it?” Reoh asked.

Bobbie Ray glanced around, unsheathing his knife. “I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t seem natural,” Reoh said hesitantly.

Bobbie Ray stuck the point of his knife into the groove and it sank nearly three inches. “Looks dangerous, whatever it is.”

“Try scratching the surface,” Reoh suggested.

Bobbie Ray jabbed at the dirt; he had to dig a few passes to make his ragged groove as deep. When he stood up, he kept his knife out–the only weapon the cadets had been allowed to bring on this test.

“It looks dangerous,” he repeated. “I figured this was too easy.”

“Easy? You call this easy? Puller’s chest is shattered, we can’t find Starsa, and all of us are going to die if we don’t find water soon.” Nev Reoh stared at him. “Easy?”

Bobbie Ray let him blather on, mainly keeping an eye on the surrounding cliffs. He led them out of the narrow chasm as soon as he could, certain that their best tactical situation would be to climb up on the plateaus.

Luckily, when they reached the top, they were on a long and winding plateau that was interconnected with several other large islands in the midst of the canyonlands. Nev Reoh pointed excitedly to a fluff of green vegetation at the bottom of one of the deepest canyons. “There has to be water down there.”

The sun was at its height, and the day grew hotter as they slowly made their way down into the canyon. But they were rewarded at the bottom, where there was a small seep in the wall. It trickled through a thick, green mat of algae before disappearing into the damp sand at the base of the cliff.

Bobbie Ray shoved his way through tall grass and tiny‑leafed bushes that grew protectively around the seep. Filling all five canteens took some time, as Reoh patiently held each nozzle up to the trickle. Bobbie Ray scouted the area, never going much further than a few hundred meters before Reoh’s worried call drew him back.

Bobbie Ray was certain he heard footsteps, and twice he turned to see the movement of a shadow. But on this planet they’d seen nothing capable of moving or casting a shadow–not a cloud, not a plant, not any animal.

As Reoh was capping the last canteen, Bobbie Ray stood over him, keeping an eye out for his stalker. He was certain he was being stalked. If Titus had come on the survival test, he could have assumed it was him, because that would be typical of the cadet. But Titus and Jayme had passed Academy‑approved survival tests the summer before their first year.

“I’m finished,” Nev Reoh announced, moving stiffly from having crouched so long next to the seep.