“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 infamous 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 eating said MRE was all but torture and 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." I told them. "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.

“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 real data on and it's been eleven damned years since we climbed into stasis. 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 jump drive 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." I examined the scans of the surface. "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 everything up on the board and go through it all.” I gestured to the screen in front of us.

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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 Officer Candidate School, but Larsen was a natural at it.

“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. 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 lying to our sensors or directly editing the data from the pod’s controls was anyone's guess. Either way, we had clearly piqued someone or something’s interest. That made me nervous, especially since they seemed to have vanished before we'd regained consciousness.

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 while to pull up the planetary data and find a decent crash site. I'll have to prep for landing too. 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 crankily.

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

“Well, this thing isn’t designed to land exactly. 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 face 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 empty the ones we have on us. We didn’t exactly bring a full armoury with us.”

“What, are we going to be fighting an endless wave of lizards?” Carver 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 to build anything. Somewhere down there I suppose.”

“Then it’s possible?” I asked firmly.

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