Stasis shock is a bitch, there’s no getting around it. I gasped as the cold hit me, smashing through my sluggish faculties with unrelenting force. Darkness enveloped me and my muscles screamed when I moved them. It wasn’t from overuse or fatigue, but because they were frigid and stiff, unused to movement after so long. I raised my hands to my face. Thankfully, muscle atrophy was not as big of a concern as you'd think. We'd come up with some ways around that, electrical stimulation, certain drugs and some other neat tricks to stimulate the muscles. That was a very good thing in my opinion. If I'd had to drag myself out of stasis with sticks for arms I'd probably have cried.

I still had all my fingers and as the rest of me warmed up I did a quick check of all my other parts, wiggling my toes and using each of my muscle groups in turn. Everything seemed intact and nothing was bleeding as far as I could tell. I pressed my palm to the transparent door of the stasis pod and pushed. Relief flooded me when I realised there were no alarms and there was still breathable air onboard. I’d half-expected some kind of emergency alarm.

Going from being almost entirely still and frozen for an extended period of time to very much alive and thawing is not a pleasant experience. Add to that the experience of being in complete darkness and I was far from a happy frozen sardine. We termed it ‘stasis shock’ because coming out of stasis was an unpleasant shock at the best of times. It took some time to readjust to things when you woke up from stasis and the trace amounts of the stasis drugs left in your system took a while to clear from your system. Everyone kept hoping for better stasis tech, but the fact we’d developed it at all was a minor miracle.

“Everyone alright?” I asked, breath fogging into the still cold air of the escape pod. With audible effort, I managed to stagger across the metal deck plates to an empty seat. My bare feet stung as they pressed against the cold floor and I dropped myself into a collection of padded seats mounted on the walls. I watched the rest of my team shake themselves from their slumber. I’d never experienced stasis sleep before, as I’d told Carver, but I’d read a few manuals on it out of sheer boredom in the time after our escape from the Spear, but before our artificial sleep. A cocktail of drugs, bio-engineering miracles and probably black magic allowed us to wake up normal, with no lasting side effects on the body, as far as we knew. It didn’t mean we wouldn’t feel like shit, but it did mean we wouldn’t end up looking like the human equivalent of a thawed tomato.

Sometimes, if you were unlucky, your body would reject the stasis drugs, making it all but impossible for you to ever undergo the process properly without being rendered extremely ill. The drugs still worked, but your body went nuts. Fortunately, a quick injection during basic training was enough to determine if you would reject the required drugs or not. The allergic reaction if you did reject them was nasty, but it was better than the alternative. Civilian freighters sometimes had to deal with that coin toss since the drugs were expensive, but most bigger companies and first-rate militaries weren’t inclined to lose a skilled asset to something as mundane and avoidable as a fatal stasis allergy, so they usually shelled out the cash.

I remember asking one of my Drill Instructors how often the stasis pods failed to revive someone properly, just after my training platoon had been lectured on their function and use. The Drill Instructor just smiled at me when I asked him that question. I drew my own conclusions from there. Suffice it to say, I was very happy no one was suffering a medical emergency and that a mild headache and freezing our asses off were the worst of our woes.

Before I could stroll further down memory lane, I saw Chen stumble out of the pod, looking annoyingly awake and alert. How he’d managed that I didn’t know, the rest of us seemed like sluggish zombies by comparison. Goosebumps covered everyone’s skin, but Chen seemed less affected than the rest of my team. I figured it might be something to do with his sheer body mass. He was stronger and bigger than I was by a noticeable margin, he had to be to operate and carry various heavy weapons and gear.

“So, we’re alive.” Chen said, rather redundantly.

“We are.” I grinned, feeling my face alternate between feeling numb and cold. “The computer woke us up. I haven’t checked it yet, I figure we can all warm up a bit first before we see why we’re awake.”

“I don’t know about you, but I’d appreciate a heated seat or hot soup right about that.” He took a seat to my right, wincing.

I could only agree with that, nodding. “You alright?”

“My ass is sore.” Chen chuckled, casting his eyes around the room. “Nothing seems to be broken though, so in a minute when things stop aching, I’m going to go find some clothes.”

I chuckled. “Mine too, hell my everything is sore.” I looked up at the ceiling, more out of habit than anything else. “Proc, raise temperature to twenty-five Celsius.”

“Raising temperature to twenty-five degrees Celsius.” A soft female voice said in flat digital tones.

The processor's voice was very clearly artificial, but I was glad for that. Realistic simulations of human voices unnerved the hell out of me. I was just glad that the processor or ‘proc’ for short, on the escape pods didn’t try to mimic a human voice. There was always that uncanny valley effect that creeped me out to no end. I found that strange given that we had good enough tech to produce flawless voices that sounded human. We just didn't. I assumed the reason was political or financial, or maybe there wasn't much of a market for it.

Chen disappeared through a doorway as I sat there willing myself to return to a state that didn’t resemble a half-thawed snowman. I flexed the muscles closer to my extremities. willing blood to flow through my body again and distribute heat around my body.

“Why the hell didn’t it warm the pod up before it woke us up? Stupid machine.” I exhaled sharply.

Larsen make her way across the room on unsteady feet to sit next to me and I nodded in greeting as I got up.

“Stay here. I’m going to see what we have to eat besides MRE’s.” I told her before I disappeared through the same hatch Chen had taken.

“Leaving already? Was it something I said?” She asked as I walked off. I could only laugh, my throat protesting and remind me it was sore and cold.

The next room over was quite a bit larger than the little stasis room and it acted as the main hub for the inhabitants of an escape pod, complete with a central table, large screen display and storage cupboards. I looked around and found a now-clothed Chen already digging around in a cupboard built into the wall. Watching Chen’s ass as he rummaged around for food wasn’t terribly entertaining, so I moved on rather quickly. Almost immediately I noticed something that caught my attention. I moved to the corner of the large room to get a closer look at the object of my interest.

A stage one fabrication unit sat snugly in the corner, darkened and deactivated right now, but it was supposed to assist in repairs in case they were needed, or in extreme cases in setting up shelter if we landed on an inhabited world. A stage one unit was for emergency use and was above the size of two or three fridges put together. A stage two unit was intended for general use on a larger scale and so was more like the size of a small car. A stage three unit was usually employed on battleships, battlecruisers or as part of colony efforts on new worlds. Stage three units were the most capable, but also the largest, physically speaking. The earliest models had been the size of apartment blocks. Refining them had resulted in every stage becoming more compact, but it was still four or five times the size of a stage two unit. Just one of the stage three units was too big to fit in our pod. Each stage was an increase in size and capability, but they all functioned more or less the same way using a combination of 3D printing, nanotech and A.I. designers. Our particular fabricator wasn’t likely to be inadequate for whatever we dreamed up, thankfully. To me it looked like a bit like an oven, only instead of racks inside and a door it had a platform inside for fabrications to rest on.

The unit took up about three square metres of space, a good quarter of the room we were in. The side facing me was transparent, thick tinted glass obscuring the mechanisms within slightly. I stepped closer, squinting through the material. I could just make out six spindles of steel and a variety of polymer tubes arrayed in a ring above a flat slab of inoffensive grey. I knew that slab had some anti-adhesive properties, or at least I assumed it did. I wasn’t an expert in fabrication technology by any means but I knew it had its roots in old 3D printers and those relics certainly had anti-adhesive build platforms.

I looked up above the fabricator and noticed a small slanted chute between it and the ceiling, large block letters denoting it as the input chute. I quickly found a similar chute jutting out from the bottom of the fabricator, with similar words to advertise the output. I turned as I heard heavy footsteps beside me.

“Chicken soup, or peppered steak?” Chen held up two large sachets in his hands, the brown shade of an MRE was as nostalgic as it was unmistakable to me. Both were fair options and neither was one of the varieties that would leave you wishing for mountains of toilet paper. I expected we would all leave those until last.

I didn’t even have to consider his question and I reached for the peppered steak.

“Clothes are on the table.” Chen said, motioning with his head towards the table in the centre of the room. I nodded and went over and clothed myself in the Navy battle dress uniform on the table. It was unsurprisingly, a bit stiff and rigid. It always took a while to wear in new BDU’s. As I rolled my shoulders, I stretched this way and that, trying to soften up my new attire. I sat on the bench next to the table and broke a seal on the bottom of the MRE’s packaging.

“Why do these pods only have Navy BDU’s? Where’s the love for the Corps?” I asked, exasperated.

“I don’t know, maybe this one was never stocked with both?” Chen supplied.

“Yeah, maybe.” I said, unconvinced.

The chemical heating element of the packet had worked perfectly and I only had to wait a minute or two before I could devour the MRE’s delicious contents.

Nearby, Larsen watched, astonished as I scarfed down the meal with glee. “You actually like that stuff?”

“If they weren’t meant for emergencies, I’d have stolen them all and stashed them in our quarters.” I stated imperiously as I shoveled the last of the meal into my mouth. While there were some specific MRE’s I swore never to eat for fear of permanently ruining my digestive tract, like the four fingers of death, I would never admit to that. I couldn’t very well have Chen thinking I was too chicken to eat an MRE, nevermind the fact that it would’ve given any of us severe indigestion or constipation.

Larsen just shook her head at my claim. Most found MRE’s to range from incredible, to downright inedible, depending on what you got stuck with. There were a few that we all avoided like the plague, even if they were stuffed with nutrients and vitamins just like all the other varieties. I’d developed a soft spot for MRE’s during my first term of enlistment and made it a point to have a stockpile for when I wasn’t deployed. To me, there was just something about them and the ritual of preparing them that made them taste good. Though in hindsight maybe that was just the hunger talking.

“We should figure out where we are.” I said as I moved over to the large screen hanging above the room. I looked up at it, my implants pulling up a situation report with a thought.

Chen nodded his agreement as we finished our meals and he took a seat at the centre table in front of the big screen. I snagged another pair of clothes from an open cupboard and joined him. We quickly went to work deciphering the sensor data and navigational log. I didn’t like what I found, but I kept reading. A few minutes later, Carver came through the door with Larsen in tow and I tossed some clothes to each of them.

"We're in deep shit. Put those on, should be a few MRE’s somewhere around here. After you’re dressed, we need to talk.” I gave them a grim smile and Chen mirrored it with a similar expression beside me. I’d reread the contents of the log and sensor data three times now and Chen probably had too. We were well and truly fucked in the long run.

“Talk about what? The time in transit back to Port Urgo? Or maybe the incompetence of the ship’s I.T. department?” Carver asked, cranky from his cold nap.

I threw a disgusted look at him and I tossed the datapad I was holding at him. “Read the damn logs! We’re twelve-thousand fucking light-years from Earth, in orbit around a planet we’ve got fuck-all data on. I can’t even tell how we got here, let alone if our position is actually accurate. Do you get it now?” I asked scathingly.

Carver’s face had grown more serious as I spoke. His eyes darted minutely as he skimmed the logs through his implants. His mouth quickly began running a mile a minute, as per the usual for him when he was stressed. I could almost see the moment he figured out how screwed we were.

“You mean… we’re cut off.” His eyes widened. “That means we have no interstellar communications. None! It could take thousands of years before anyone on Earth even realises this planet exists! What the hell are we supposed to do now? We can't build a hyperdrive from bark and rocks!”

I resisted the urge to slow clap. It wasn’t really my style, but he’d gotten the point I was trying to get across.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. We have zero spaceflight capability, I don’t count this tiny piece of shit we’re on. From spectroscopic analysis and some other clues, we know that this world can probably support human life, but that’s about the only good news I can be sure of. We can make some guesses based on the composition of the atmosphere as to if it’s inhabited, but all we’ve really got are some scans of the atmosphere and static images. They’re high-resolution but they won’t tell us the whole story. I was just about to put them up on the board and go through them.” I gestured to the screen in front of us.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I noticed Larsen had been silent so far. It wasn’t unusual for her, but these were unusual times and the news was far from welcome. It was bad enough we’d had to abandon ship and leave behind all our personal effects.

“Larsen, what are you thinking?” I asked.

She came out of whatever thoughts she was having, flicking her eyes over to me, then back to the log displayed on the screen in front of us. She was concerned, but not overly so. It had always been one of her defining traits. Her ability to be cool under fire, or pressure, was the stuff of legends. It kind of pissed me off, actually. Wasn’t it the team leader who was supposed to be always in control and completely composed? They taught as something along those lines in OCS, or Offficer Candidate School, but Larsen was a natural.

“I’m thinking we need to land and see if we can make a life here. If we really are twelve thousand light-years from human space there’s nothing we can do. We certainly can’t do anything crazy like try and fly back home in an escape pod. The way I see it, we need to prepare for a permanent stay down there.” She shrugged resignedly.

“Carver?” I saw him fiddling with a datapad as its screen flashed between menus.

“Yes? What?” He snapped at me, irritated.

“Can you get us down there in one piece?”

“I have no idea what the weather is like down there, or if the air is carrying any pathogens. Even if we got down there, I don't know how long we’d last. There could be megaflora or an army of talking bears for all I know. You know habitable doesn’t mean safe, right?”

He’d made some good points, but as Larsen had pointed out, we didn’t have any other options. We’d been lucky just to wake up near a suitable planet and not in the vicinity of a frozen gas giant, or worse, the void of interstellar space.

“I’ll take that as a yes, then. Keep working on a solution, alright? The sooner we get down there, the better.”

"It’s not like I was going to give up.” He said under his breath, rolling his eyes.

Chen stood up, eyeing me quizzically. “Why the sooner the better? Do you know something we don’t?” They all looked at me, with the exception of Carver. Not with suspicion, exactly, but confusion and curiosity. They didn’t completely understand my urgency, they didn’t see it yet.

I thought about how best to phrase it, looking them all in the eyes. “Okay, do you all think we went from floating in the middle of nowhere to this star system by ourselves?” I let that idea tumble in their minds for a moment, then I continued. “Someone had to have moved us here. Do you think whoever brought us here might be coming back? Or that they’re the friendly sort?”

"Well, they saved us, right? What if they are friendly?" Chen asked.

"Do you really want to take that bet?" I asked him.

His silence was a clear and unambiguous answer.

“We have a lot more options down there than up here if they do come to check on us. That’s assuming of course, they’re not watching us already.” I finished.

To flawlessly transport us thousands of light-years to an inhabited planet without leaving a trail or trace would have required some kind of artificial intervention whether it was advanced technology spoofing us or directly editing the data in the pod’s systems. Either way, we had clearly piqued someone or something’s interest. That made me nervous.

The only alternative was that we drifted into the orbit of an inhabited planet in another star system before the stasis pods failed and automatically revived us. That was so unlikely it wasn’t funny. Our present circumstances being a result of pure random chance? That was about as likely as Chen wearing a mini-skirt and taking up pole dancing in full view of the Vatican.

Carver spoke up first, shaking his head softly as though I was a simpleton, that annoyed me, but I tried to ignore it.

“And you think hiding down on the planet will be safer than being up here, if they do come back, if in fact there is a 'they' at all?”

I shrugged. “We have to go land somewhere anyway and we don’t have much to do up here except eat and sleep. Do you want to live up here until the food runs out?” I replied with a pointed look.

Carver sighed, tapping at his datapad aggressively. “I’ll start looking for a spot to touch down but if this thing breaks it’s not my fault." He sighed, muttering to himself. "I swear whoever maintained this did it with tape and wishful thinking.”

That didn’t reassure me. “I won’t hold it against you. How long?”

Carver clicked his fingers, thinking hard as he looked at his datapad. “Diagnostics are already done, but I’ll need a few minutes to pull up the planetary data and find a decent crash site. Call it… a few hours?”

“Well, how many’s a few? Two? Three?” I asked, dissatisfied.

“Two. Two hours and eleven minutes. Happy? I’ll know more later.” Carver said, equally exasperatedly.

“Could you please not say crash site?” Chen shuddered.

“Well, this thing isn’t designed to land. It hits the ground hard. Do you want me to lie?” Carver asked, rolling his eyes.

“Yes, actually, I’d love that.”

Carver responded with all possible sarcasm. “Fine then. We’re going to float down there on a cushion of clouds and rainbows. Happy now?”

Chen nodded, chuckling softly. Very. I’ll see what we have in the way of supplies.”

I eyed the fabricator in the corner of the room, then turned to Carver. “Carver.”

“Yes?” He didn’t bother to look up from his datapad, apparently an absent-minded but annoyed response was all I qualified for.

“That fabricator, can we build something with that?”

“You’re going to have to be a little more specific.” He said dryly as he looked up at me.

“Suits, guns, ammo, that sort of thing.”

Carver looked up from his datapad and considered the question. “I don’t know. Maybe? Does it really matter right now? We don’t have anything to build with.”

“I just thought that maybe, we’d like to have full magazines to shoot when we run out of the ones we have on us. We didn’t exactly bring an armoury with us.”

“What, are we going to be fighting an endless wave of lizards?” He paused, glancing down at his datapad again. “It should be feasible. We have all the right blueprints but I don’t know where we’d get the raw materials, somewhere down there I suppose.”

“Then it’s possible?” I asked firmly.

“I said maybe. If we can find the raw materials, and this thing,” he pointed to the fabricator nearby, “doesn’t break. We can probably build something given enough time, whether we actually do... I'd say it's fifty-fifty.”

“That good, huh?” I asked.

“Well it’s not like what you're asking for is easy. Usually you have at least a few units for this type of stuff, not one guy and an escape pod. ” He pointed out. “But I’ll do my best.” He said, when he saw me rub my eyes. Dealing with him wasn’t half as bad as I made it out to be, but it was still a pain in the ass half the time.

“Thanks.” I said, relieved.

“Yeah, yeah, thank me after if it works.” A few moments later and Carver was immersed in his data pad again. It was times like these that I wished I’d been cross-trained as a tech. Of the four of us, Carver was the only one who really had anything to do right now and rushing him would be a pointless endeavour, no matter how much we wanted answers..

We sat on our hands for nearly forty minutes, occupying ourselves with busywork, exercise and snacking. By the time Carver had an answer for us we all felt mostly human again, or at least, I did. The rest of my team looked more like functioning human beings though and not three frozen vegetables so I considered that an improvement.

“Alright, I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.” Carver called out, and we crowded around his seat as he gestured at the wall screen above us.

“We can land, but if we’re going to do it soon, then you should know the planet is not uninhabited. I managed to grab some images of the surface.” He gestured, a small prompt materialised in my field of view. I accepted it without a thought, watching as the space in front of me transformed into a three-dimensional map, complete with coastlines, valleys and a dozen other geographical features.

I blinked in surprise. It was more complete than I’d expected. It didn’t cover the whole planet, but it did have most of the northern hemisphere mapped. “You got all that in forty minutes from this little pod’s sensors?”

“We’ve actually been orbiting for about eleven years, plenty of time to aggregate the data gathered and clean it up.” He explained.

“I’ll take your word for it.” I said, disturbed by the idea of so much time passing as we’d slept.

“Where are we going to land?” Chen asked, his brow furrowing as he studied the map.

“We’ve mapped the weather and seasonal changes quite well. I’ll mark some of the best locations.” Carver said, glancing around at each of us for a moment.

“I know I just woke up from stasis, but does that look like a fire to you?” Larsen asked, pointing to a bright spot near the sole continent’s north-east side.

“That it does…” I trailed off, eyes scouring the rest of the map as I reached out and zoomed in on different parts. The resolution on the pod wasn’t amazing by modern standards, but you didn’t need amazing for the kind of reconnaissance we needed done.

The work of these unknown people on the surface?” Chen said, spying decidedly artificial structures, mostly made of stone and wood.

“This pretty much confirms it, yeah.” I agreed. “A primitive people by the looks of it, if they are people, I mean. I see stone walls and a large gathering of tents in some of these images. Some farmland further to the west. How old is this?”

“The images are a little over two years old.” Larsen replied, pointing to a small piece of floating text.

I frowned at her answer. “Our years, or local years?”

“Terran years.” Larsen confirmed.

I grimaced. “This changes things. I was going to say we could land in this flat grassy region near the city, but I think it’s best we don’t attract attention from scavengers or those looking to resettle. Primitive or not, I don’t like the idea of setting ourselves up in an exposed position either. These inhabitants could be hostile or friends with giant alien spiders for all we know. There’s a forest not too far from the strait, here.” I pointed out a narrow stretch of water, bordered on three sides by land.

Chen shook his head. “Bad idea. If we want to be able to transport anything to and from the pod we need a better location. I don’t see any laser cutters for those trees, do you?”

I had to concede his point. While it might not be impossible to transport supplies through the forest, it would be more difficult, especially if we had to transport heavy payloads in large quantities through the forest as well as dense brush and vegetation.

“Good point.” My eyes roamed over the image searching for a discreet location with defensible terrain that would allow for easy transport of raw materials. We’d need to build something if we hoped to survive here for any length of time. That would mean transporting raw materials, which meant this decision was an important one.

Larsen narrowed her eyes, fingers dancing over the display in front of her for a time.

“I’m going off a hunch and some still images,” she murmured, “but I don’t think the people on this planet are much more advanced than we were in the Middle Ages.”

“That’s good, but we don’t know that for certain. We have what, a few surveillance photos? That’s hardly enough to make a decisive judgment one way or another.”

“We could land and build in the city itself? It would provide decent protection from the elements and space for expansion once we had the basics built.” Carver offered up his opinion hesitantly.

I mulled it over in my head for a moment.

“It’s probably the best of a bad lot. No one builds something like that without some kind of important resource nearby. With any luck, we’ll be able to make use of it.” I stabbed my finger at the site of the blazing city, which had raged two years ago, leaving behind what was now a seemingly charred, destitute and abandoned city. “That’s where we land.”

Chen laughed in disbelief at my declaration. “What? Seriously? You think we’re just going to be able to set up a base on what is effectively someone else’s land, in one their cities and things will work out?”

I shrugged. “It’s a defensible position, resources are likely nearby and it’s unlikely anyone will visit for a while. We might even be able to make use of roads leading into the city. If it’s been abandoned for two years, why would that change now?” I looked at him pointedly. “We don’t have any better options, do we?”

He studied the map intently for a moment. “Alright, I'm still convinced we should land and build in the open, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Noted.” I replied with mirth. “If we’re attacked in the night by a band of marauding pirates, I’ll be sure to listen when you say ‘I told you so’.”

“Bandits, Ed, it would be bandits.” He scowled. “Pirates have ships and are sea-bound.”

Larsen cleared her throat. “Ready to breathe some fresh air?”

I looked around. “Carver?”

“As good a place as any, I suppose.” He said disinterestedly.

Nodding, I spoke up. “Proc, new task. Prepare the escape pod for landing.”

“Confirmed. Designate coordinates.”

I flicked the coordinates of a point just outside the abandoned city from my implants to the pod’s processor. A loud double chirp was followed by a simple instruction.

“Coordinates received. Read back.”

“Five-three Sierra, Lima Romeo, one-seven-five-two.”

“Read back correct. Confirm landing?” The monotone voice queried me. I responded without hesitation.

“Confirmed.”

Another double chirp. “Estimated time to landfall, thirteen minutes, fifty-eight seconds. Brace for turbulence and gravity shift.”

“You heard. Everybody strap in.” I led the way towards the padded crash seats in an adjacent room.

As we finished securing ourselves in our crash seats, I slid out of my seat as the pod rotated, but quickly grabbed on tight to part of my seat and dragged myself back onto it. Securing myself there was the work of moments. I exhaled, feeling the adrenaline course through me. Noticing Chen's eyes on me out of the corner of my eye, I shot him a grin.

“Nothing to worry about! I’m fine.” I reassured him, making a show of tugging at the thick straps over my shoulders.

“Sure, sure, just don’t break your damn neck on me. I don’t want to be the biggest dumbass in this team if I can help it.” Chen’s scowl turned into a nervous laugh as a particularly rough shove reminded us of our current situation. Falling from orbit, that is.

“I didn’t exactly tell the damn pod to throw me out of my crash seat like I’d pissed on its favourite circuit board.”

“Actually…” Carver trailed off, ignoring my joke.

I stared at him, or in his direction anyway. “If you say what I think you’re going to say Carver and I don’t make it out of this, I swear to God, your ass is haunted.”

“Hey, genius.” Carver began. “If you died, so would I. How would you haunt a corpse?”

I laughed. “For you, Carver, I’d find a way. Though if I’m honest I’d probably haunt the shit out of the engineers who built this thing.”

The rest of the drop was done in relative silence, minus a bit of banter here and there. Larsen and Chen were silent, but Carver and I were two of a kind it seemed, preferring to toss witty insults and remarks around to avoid the fact we were falling to our death with nothing but a couple dozen parachutes to stop our descent. Some time later when the shaking had mostly stopped and we could feel the straps digging into the tops of our shoulders, I leaned forward as far as I could.

“Hey Larsen. This is fun right?”

She leaned her own head forward and turned to look at me. Her expression was flat and her reply short.

“I’m glad you’re not an officer. I draw the line at saluting someone as insane as Chen.”

“Hey, fuck you guys!”

I gaped like a fish for a moment. “You think I could be an officer? I’m touched, no fuck that! I’m insulted!”

“I didn’t say that!” She said, scowling.

“You were thinking it!” I countered.

Further banter, or alternatively screaming if something went wrong, was interrupted by the pod’s onboard processor giving us a warning.

“Standby, standby. Final descent in progress.”

Dull thumps rang out, causing the pod to shudder and shake a bit. First four, then a single larger one.

“Just the chutes deploying.” I said half to them and half to myself. “Proc, time to touchdown?”

“Fifty-four seconds.”

Larsen leaned out of her seat again looking over at me. “What’s the plan?”

“Proc, run a threat assessment and give me diagnostics on the pod and fabricator.”

“Affirmative.”

A few seconds passed, then I got the reply I was hoping for.

“Threat assessment complete. No threats found. Pod diagnostics complete, communications offline, retrorocket and aerobrake non-functional.”

While the threat assessment didn’t give me a lot of comfort, this being an alien world, the fabricator being intact and operational was good news.

I cleared my throat. “Well, looks like we’re all set. The plan, Larsen, is to get ourselves set up with the essentials and get the lay of the land. So who’s up for a little scouting mission?” I asked, more than a little eager to get outside and into some fresh air after being cooped up in one vessel or another for months.

“I’m staying here.” Carver said immediately.

“See if you can get the fabricator churning out some harvesters. We should have one or two already here, yeah?”

“Probably, yeah. I hope the drones work or we’re probably screwed.”

I nodded, he was right about that. “Who else is staying?”

“I’ll stay.” Chen raised his hand slightly.

“Okay, Larsen, you’re with me. Let’s see if we can find water and failing that, something to eat. Can’t eat MRE’s forever.” I turned to Carver and Chen. “You two, stay out of trouble.”

“No promises.” Chen said chuckling.

“What? Why me?” Carver asked, offended.

“Do you really have to ask?” Chen chuckled.

With the beginnings of a rudimentary plan in place, I didn’t have to wait long before we touched down. When the sound of shit breaking didn’t materialise, I breathed a sigh of relief. We settled down with little more than a harsh jolt so I unstrapped myself from my crash seat and got to work.