And to Dust We Shall Return.

Good training

The problem with jungles, Nim thought bitterly as she pushed aside yet another spike laden branch, is that they were just too darn keen to show off. No amount of flowers, she was sure, should be able to use so many colours in the spectrum at once. Colours with names like blurple, and jorange, and crushed raspberry. All squashed up together in a Technicolor fudge pretending to be foliage. And that was only the plant life. The insects, when they could be distinguished from the plants themselves, had their own particular aesthetic going on. Which mostly involved being small, and making very loud very high pitched buzzing sounds centimeters from her ears. That’s when they weren’t trying to bite her. Which they did. Frequently.

If this was nature, thought Nim, swatting lamely at something vaguely claiming to be a mosquito. Then it was nature via a cheap tiki bar on theta prime. Gaudy, crowded, and quite likely to give you a headache in the morning. Not like the windswept wastes of her home world. That was nature too. But it was sensible nature. The kind that encouraged early morning runs on frost hardened ground, and a clip round the ears if you didn’t eat your vegetables. The kind of nature in short, that made people strong and determined and hardy. Nim groaned, and ran a hand through her damp fur, but not alas, people who were built for high humidity.

 After a half hours’ worth of sweating and muttering and hacking at bits of shrubbery, she at last stumbled into a clearing. Nim took off her pack and slumped gratefully against a tree. Her union training told her she should find shelter before nightfall, but the growing ache in her knees was providing a very nice argument to the contrary. So instead she sat there a while, and listened to the drip drip dripping of water from the leaves, and the trilling of strange creatures in the thick sweet air. Until, from the depths of the suffocating stillness her ears caught a sound. A light, and hesitant sound, as though someone was trying very hard *not* to be heard. Nim reached for her rifle.  On the plains predators hunted in packs, so she had learned very young to be wary of footsteps in the dark.
 Seconds passed. The water kept on dripping. The insects kept on trilling. And to the untrained eye all was calm and still. It was only the telltale snapping of a twig, the quiver of a leaf, which kept the adrenaline pumping through Nim’s veins. Then, without warning something burst form the undergrowth. Nim’s fingers closed around the trigger, but before she had could take the shot…she stopped. For instead of some wild and ravenous beast, the animal she saw caught between the crosshairs…
Was a rabbit.

 At least it looked like a rabbit. It was small and white and fluffy, with pointy little ears and luscious dark eyes that stared endearingly back at her. Nim lowered her weapon. Her ears growing hot with embarrassment. ‘So this is what it's come down to?’ she muttered. ‘The chief security officer…balking at the sight of a fluffy little bunny.’ She scoffed, and hitched the rifle back over her shoulder. ‘You just count yourself lucky I'm a vegetarian, Otherwise you’d make a real nice stew for dinner.’ but the rabbit, who seemingly had no concept of vegetarianism or its role in interstellar politics. Merely gazed unblinkingly back at her. 
Now a logical person may, at this point, begin to question just what a white rabbit was doing in the middle of an alien jungle. However when you have just trekked six miles while suffering from heat exhaustion, logic tends to be a little late showing up. 

There was a hissing sound, followed by a snap, and Nim whipped around just in time to feel something wrapping around her leg. Fumbling she tried to prise it off but the thing, whatever it was, clung on to her with all the grim determination of a parachutist who has just remembered they are afraid of heights. Desperately, Nim aimed her rifle at her feet and fired. And with a snap, the tendrils broke. Leaving their cut ends writhing in the gloom. But it was too late, more had already come to replace them. Tendrils, she now saw to her horror, which were attached to the rabbit. Only it wasn’t quite so rabbit-like anymore.