Tamama wrinkled his nose at the rusty, rained-on, scrap-heap smell outside. The overcast sky was easier to look at than a bright screen in a dim cave, and it eased his headache a little as he walked.

Tan shrubs dotted the rocky landscape. From a distance, their myriad stems gave the impression of leafy life. Curious, Tamama brushed one of them with his fingertips, and the brittle plant crumbled to dust.

Turning pointedly away from that, his eyes landed on something white contrasting with the ground a few yards away. He approached the object and picked it up—a plastic lid the length of his forearm, shallow and rectangular. The Keron Army logo was visible on one side.

Scanning ahead, he saw more things sticking out against the dull wastes. A length of mud-soaked gauze, trimmed at one end and torn at the other, was caught in a dead bush's protruding root system. Not ten paces away was a pill bottle with its cap missing.

Tamama crouched and picked up the bottle in his free hand. "Medicine?" Painkillers, the label read, extra-strength. He peeked inside; empty. That meant the tiny white dots at his feet were the dissolved remains of its contents. Tamama sighed, tossed the bottle over his shoulder, and stood.

A short walk farther rewarded him with an area free of bushes and full of twisted metal. An ejected chair from the platoon's ship laid in the dirt like a fallen monument. Its safety belt was severed clean through the middle, matching the slash in the backrest, and spatters of something darker than the ground's rust stained the front.

"This must be where Kururu said he landed." Tamama sidestepped sharp green pieces of ship hull as he investigated. Then he saw something that made his heart leap, and bounded toward it.

He stumbled to a stop. A first-aid kit, matching the lid he had, was mired face-down in the mud.

Tamama set the lid aside, sank to his knees, and pulled the overturned box free. Nearly everything useful was ruined, except for a roll of gauze that had been tucked at the bottom of the kit.

He picked it up, rubbing at the frayed end with one finger, and stuffed it under his cap.

Kururu typed an automatic rhythm, reconstructing the map program from memory. Code advanced line by line in a panel on the left side of the screen, while real-time changes showed in a window to the right. Data loss from the crash left him working with a fragmented program, but all he needed was time to get it running properly again—he'd created it, after all.

But restoring the code for life signal detection wouldn't bring back what wasn't there. For the moment, he focused on finding a specific signal, separate from the ones he monitored on a daily basis.

It couldn't have gotten far, because it had been right in his face when he'd woken up.

Two lines from completion, the map grid filled with blinking red dots. They vanished, and a yellow dot showing Kururu's location winked into existence as he finished.

He fullscreened the right panel and zoomed out to find Tamama's current location a short distance to the north. The private had found his way to Kururu's crash site, and his blinking black dot meandered around the square.

"The hell's he doing?" An arrow flashing in the upper-right corner indicated another signal detected off-screen. He tapped the zoom key again.

After three presses, a third dot appeared on the map. It was large, orange, and approaching Tamama at a rate of fifty yards every three seconds.

Kururu swore under his breath and key-comboed open a comm link. "Get your ass back here. That thing's nine seconds from chewing your tail off."

Unresponsive static, then: "What thing? What're you—"

The enemy signal took another leap, and the black dot froze.

Tamama's incredulous squeal cut through Kururu's headphones. "It can jump?!"

Kururu slapped the ground next to his laptop. "No shit it can jump!" Tamama responded with stammering whimpers. The map couldn't express the difference between him and a flea the size of a Pekoponian house. "Now get outta there, it's not like you can fight it any—"

"Tamama Impact!"

Kururu shifted back from the computer and sighed, massaging the area above the bridge of his glasses with two fingers. He uncrossed his legs for the first time in over an hour, and hunched his shoulders as renewed circulation needled his nerves.

The dust-covered bandage on his lower-right leg nearly matched the cave floor by that point. He eyed it for a moment, then focused on the screen again.

Meanwhile, the little black dot jerked away from the large orange one's constant lunges. Tamama was heading for the cave, but his yelping over the comm link meant the flea was doing its best to make a meal of him. When Tamama managed a small gain on the flea and stopped, Kururu could already hear the next words in his mind.

"Tamama..." The flea's dot closed the short distance, nearly eclipsing his. "Impact!"

The beam's roar filled Kururu's headphones, and Tamama's dot skipped south across the screen. Kururu watched the cave entrance. Two seconds later, Tamama shot through the opening tail-over-teakettle and slammed upside-down against the back wall.

Kururu crossed his legs again, hiding the bandage from view. "So, was your little expedition worth it? Make any bloodthirsty new friends?" He chuckled.

Tamama stared up at his feet with a groan. "Why didn't you tell me the frickin' space flea was still around before I went outside?!"

"Why wouldn't it be?" Kururu smirked as Tamama rolled over and sat up with a huff. "Did that near-death experience jog your memory, by any chance?"

Tamama gave him an incredulous stare. "What?"

"You went flying off a cliff and landed on your head. I watched you bounce." Kururu relished how that made Tamama wince. "So you probably forgot why you did it in the first place."

Tamama furrowed his brow at the ground, rubbing his temple with one hand. "We were on the ship to take the flea someplace where we could kill it. Sarge brought Gunpla with him to kill time, but Giroro threw 'em out the airlock, and—"

"Skip the sitcom. I was there."

"Oh, right. After all that happened, I woke up in my chair somewhere. Then..." Tamama gnawed at his lower lip. "I got up and, uh..." He dropped his head into his hands with a disgusted groan. "I don't know! I can't remember any cliffs or anything! It's all just a big blank."

"Welp." Kururu shrugged, and went back to rewriting code. "So much for trying to get anything useful out of you."

Tamama sat in silence after losing another match to memory loss. Morbidly, he wondered if he really did bounce, or if Kururu was just messing with him again. It explained the headache, at least.

Tamama raised a hand to his head again, and his eyes widened. "Oh yeah!" He slipped the hand under his hat to extract the roll of gauze. "Hey Kururu, look! I found this inside the first-aid kit. It's like the only thing that didn't get ruined."

Typing filled the lull after Tamama finished. Advancing lines of code reflected on Kururu's glasses, his gaze never leaving the screen. Tamama made an exasperated noise and turned away from Kururu to slouch against the rough cave wall.

He pouted at the gauze on its wide plastic spool, flipping it over in his hands. The frayed end caught on his fingers, and he stopped. A torn length of that gauze and an empty medicine bottle had led him to a slashed chair.

"Hey Kururu, what happened?"

Kururu's disinterested murmur floated over fingers tapping keys. "Whaddya mean?"

"When you landed." Tamama scrutinized the sergeant major. "Did something happen? I mean, you didn't just wake up and decide to camp out here, right?"

"That's pretty much how it went, actually."

Tamama shoved himself to his feet and arrived at Kururu's side in three steps. "Then explain this!" He thrust out the spool, holding it a few inches from Kururu's face. Kururu glanced at it, then went back to work.

Tamama's tail fin quivered. He threw the gauze down and said, "Fine then, be that way! But I saw—"

"Shouldn't you be more worried about what made the flea wake up in the first place?"

Tamama postponed his tirade. "Tama?"

"The entire point of carting it to a dead planet was to kill it while it couldn't fight back." Kururu kept a steady cadence on the keys. "So as for why ours did, maybe this place just wasn't dead enough. Maybe some echo of past civilization triggered it, or something. Far from a baseless assumption, with our luck." He triple-tapped a key, then rested his hands on his legs. "Now I have good news, and expected news."

Tamama sat so he was eye level with Kururu, and waited.

"Good news is, our guest decided to leave us alone, for now at least." Kururu turned the laptop toward Tamama. Two dots in the middle, black and yellow, surrounded by thousands of miles of wasteland. The space flea's conspicuously large orange dot was moving away from them at a good clip. "And, as expected, nobody else is showin' up. Unless you think they survived this long at the polar extremes."

"Maybe it's still broken," Tamama said. "You said the data got corrupted."

"Data that I just now rewrote." Kururu faced his laptop towards himself again, and adjusted his glasses. "You can go out and look for the others yourself if you don't believe me. I could use some alone time."

"They're not dead!" Tamama pounded his fists against his legs. "Sarge isn't dead!"

Kururu put a dramatic hand to his chest. "You insult me, sir. I never actually said they were dead. Just implied it."

Tamama screamed and launched himself at Kururu, pinning him against the wall and sending the laptop skidding away. Kururu planted both hands against Tamama's face to shove the private's clawing fingers out of reach.

"You heartless jerk!" Tamama berated his superior officer through the tears in his eyes. "How can you even joke about that?!"

"It's called gallows humor!" Kururu grunted as Tamama forced his elbows back against the wall. "Now settle the hell down, ya little—"

Tamama grabbed one of Kururu's arms to pull it away from his face, and latched onto Kururu's leg with his other hand for leverage. Kururu yelped and extracted himself from Tamama's grip with surprising speed, backing into the wall just a few feet away. Tamama caught himself on his palms, and whipped his head up.

Kururu was clutching the leg Tamama had grabbed. Without looking at Tamama, he muttered between carefully controlled breaths, "That hurts, you idiot."

The laptop screen shone on Kururu like a spotlight, the bandage wrapped around his lower-right leg in full view. When Kururu lifted a hand to examine it, Tamama wished the dark substance staining his palm was dirt.

Tamama stared, his rage dropping into his stomach. Then he hunted frantically for the gauze. "I didn't know you were... I'm sorry!" He sat up and brushed red soil off the exposed fabric. "Here, let me help."

"What's the point?" Kururu's words halted Tamama, who was already halfway across the cave with a few inches of gauze rolled out in his hands. "There's no disinfectant. We don't even have access to clean water."

A droning sound byte from a grainy educational film replayed in Tamama's mind.

"Yeah, we do." He tugged one of his earflaps. "Our hats can filter water and make it drinkable."

Kururu stared, waiting for the punchline. "You're kidding."

"It's true." Tamama rerolled the gauze and set it down. "I mean, it's supposed to be a last resort, but I think right now kinda counts as one. Be right back!" He ran out of the cave and into the dusky wasteland.

Kururu glared at his palm, and rubbed it on the ground.