You bet they do.

Sleep did not last long. The canister's motion detectors alarmed 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, only trees swaying in the breeze.

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.

Shifting nightmare beasts chased him through what little sleep he found.

The chase faded from his sleepy awareness as he heard the chime of his alarm. He had not had nearly as long nor as deep sleep as he needed, but the sun would be rising soon, and he needed to get his circadian rhythms in sync with the local day and night to best survive here.

He slurped a quick light liquid breakfast and started his core-warming exercises as he programmed the MEMS cannister to begin taking on helium or hydrogen or whatever lighter-than-air gases it could find. He exited and sealed the hatch behind him and began to look for an appropriate place to empty his bladder and relieve his morning erection.

He looked around, checked the tree canopy overhead, sniffed the air. There was nothing but the natural scents of the 'woods'. He checked his gut for that weird unexplainable feeling that one is being watched. All good. Leaning on his mop, he relaxed and let his urine start to stream downhill and waited, still listening for trouble.

When the huge insectoid creatures dropped from the trees to surround him, (displaying their razor-sharp claws and mandibles), despite all he had heard about frightened people emptying their bowels, Snipher's sphincters seized up tight for fighting or fleeing. His mop was a lightweight bludgeon, but a good swing of it to one of the creatures' thorax did an amount of damage sufficient for him to begin the fleeing portion of his not-quite resolved plan to survive.

The creatures gave pursuit.

These creatures of course were genetically adapted to these **** conditions, it appeared. Including the light gravity, lighter at least than Snipher's home world and the standard artificial gravity of the Wyldspace. But that left their skin much thinner than his. It turned out, he was a tough customer on this world. His strong leg muscles had him able to bound like the rest of these wild animals, but they did not help his traction. Trying to whip himself around the hollow tree too quickly left him lying on the ground amongst the large bugs crawling in and out. Without a thought, he grabbed a large slower arachnid and tossed it at the huge creatures pursuing him. The first and second living projectiles were caught in mid air and popped into the monsters' mouths and devoured like popcorn. The bugs did not seem to have the weapons potential he had hoped.

The bugs did not seem to have the weapons potential he had hoped.

Not wasting another second, he rolled to his hands and knees, to a sprinter's stance, to a run.

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 expedition's lander ship without being caught, but the rover was right there. 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 finally had a moment to think. The monsters might be able to break into the rover, as he presumed they had done before, but he had the time to list his options. He had his wrist devices along with his janitorial mop and its potential arsenal of caustic chemicals. He could signal his shuttle to pick him up, but not in this hilly terrain with all the 'trees'. He could signal the cannister to float over to drop him a life line, but only after at least a couple hours for it to be flyable again. He probably didn't have that much time. 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 and insects, 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 accommodating the thin air and cold temperatures again. And certainly by nightfall the MEMS cannister would be ready for him again, should he live that long. Considering his dense muscles, he was probably as physically fit as the apparently carnivorous insect/crustaceans, which he deduced (or presumed) had eaten the Mallory expedition. But the creatures outnumbered him, and they knew the terrain better as well, undoubtedly.

The rover proved useless in terms of operational high tech sensors, travel, and weaponry. There was not a single piece of protective clothing either. 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 intimidate the creatures or find a weakness aside from physical trauma, one that rivaled Snipher's own weakness to claws, fangs, and other razor sharp body parts of wild animals.

He had to think fast. What did he know they would prefer to eat? Or what they feared?