Of course they do.

Sleep did not last long. The canister alarmed motion detection after a couple hours and then again an hour after that. With bleary eyes, Snipher checked the readouts each time but caught no image of the creatures or people he had heard in the bushes earlier.

Little Rest

His nightmares got even worse after that. One minute he found his beard and phallus missing; the next minute a massive green creature appeared out of a jungle and chased and charged and trampled him.

Nightmare beasts chased him through what little sleep he found.

The chase faded from his sleepy awareness as he heard the chime of someone signaling the hatch to open from the outside. Trying to return to deep sleep behind his closed eyelids, he tried to ignore someone pulling him by an elbow and a knee. He felt the insulating blanket lift away and the soft warm flooring material slide out from under him, allowing icy cold air to whip around him and cold ground to hit him in the side of the body and head. The protective arm he tried to wrap around his skull and sore temple was pulled away by the wrist at the same time as his remaining knee, leaving him pulled spread-eagle on the ground as he tried to blink his eyes awake to see the strangers surrounding him.

In the dim pre-morning light he could barely make out the natives. They looked human to him, mostly naked, and of greenish skin tone, some more than others, a couple women and several men, organized, of moderate physique, lean and muscular, with leaves and vines and tendrils as decorations wrapped around their limbs or perhaps growing out of their bodies, or ...

They looked human to him, mostly naked, and of greenish skin tone...

His body began shivering uncontrollably. He had to reign in his rapid and disorganized observations and thoughts right now to protect his rapidly dwindling health. He started his breathing patterns and muscular contractions to try to build up heat in his core. These people of course were genetically adapted to these **** conditions, it appeared.

"Lift him," said one of the women in perfectly unaccented modern English. All the men pulled Snipher upright and kept hands on him. The woman who spoke drew a standard issue utility knife and advanced on him. He tried to speak, but before he could begin more than the first syllable, she gripped his beard, lifted his chin, and held her knife to his throat. He froze, thoughtless. Cold mortal fear sunk down into his gut. She sawed the knife back and forth, crudely cutting, until his beard was severed completely. She inspected the hair in her grip.

... and held her knife to his throat.

She stepped even closer to his face, looking deep into his eyes. He could not look elsewhere, he could not think about anything but her beautiful face as she took hold of his shrunken soft penis. "That is a good sign, but we can be certain only by removing his fluids," she said to the others while still probing the interior of his soul with her eyes.

He felt the blood rush away from his brain as his unruly phallus stretched and hardened at her command. It was hers to take if she wanted. She pulled and pushed at him, never loosening her iron grip on him. He could not even think of resisting. He tried, "I don't ... I ... Your," but his mind was unable to do anything but submit to her will. With all the natives watching him, he climaxed in her physical and spiritual grip. His attempted words turned to grunts and mindless howls of ecstasy. His body obediently pumped and pulsed his semen into her hand. He felt he could barely remain standing as he gave her all of him without reservation.

Finally she looked away. "This will work," she said to her minions. She sheathed the knife. Snipher easily recognized that all of them were tense with anticipation. She sniffed at his fluids on her fingers then tasted a drop, then swallowed it. "It is the same as Mallory and McNyter, whose fluids and corpses made us," she told the crowd, who took it as the greatest of good news. She touched fingers with each of her followers one by one. And each took and licked their allotted smudge of semen with the reverence of a religious communion.

Snipher's brain started to function again, if only a little. Those names were familiar. They were names of the expedition crew! Snipher realized he had had a one-step plan in the back of his mind since he heard the word, "corpses," and felt that this was the time to enact it. He ran.

Apparently he had picked the right time, as the brutes lost their grip on him.

He ran.

He ran in the only path he knew, to the abandoned rover. He doubted he could continue all the way to the lost lander without being caught, so he flung open the rover's door and slammed it behind himself. He had to manually lock all the doors, windows, and hatches, but it was fairly safe for a few moments to think.

relative safety

He felt for the first time truly naked. His wrist devices were back in the MEMS cannister along with his janitorial mop and its potential arsenal of caustic chemicals. He couldn't signal his shuttle to pick him up without them, nor could he signal the cannister to start taking on any gas lighter than air and float over to drop him a life line. What did he have left inside himself? He could guess plenty of chemicals which would be very bad for the survival of humans and plants, but what evolved on this world was neither really. He had no guarantees what would work on them. It would take time to experiment to develop a weapon, and he just did not have any such time.

He did have his physical mind-over-body training. He was quickly adjusting to the thin air and cold temperatures again. In moments he would probably be as physically fit as a native. But they outnumbered him and knew the terrain better as well, undoubtedly.

The rover proved useless in terms of operational high tech sensors, travel, and weaponry. Even as a fortress it was far from impenetrable. He did find a nice large crowbar and a joggle tool strong enough to bend metal or smash skulls. They might be enough only if they could buy him time to reason with the natives or intimidate them.

He had to think fast. What did he know they wanted? Or feared?