It took them two more days to make the long trek to the city, that was surrounded by farms for miles. Luna and Asta finally made camp on a ridge a short distance from the edge of that belt of tilled soil and wooden houses of all sizes.
“Looks pre-industrial to me,” said Luna, observing with her electronic eyes as farmers wandered inwards to their homes, the sun setting behind them. “We should be able to pass though. Two arms, two legs. Skin a little on the blue side, but we can talk our way. It’s not like they’ll consider the possibility of us coming from space.”
“We don’t know where they’re at, culturally. They might have ancestral memories of past visitors,” said Asta. “Remember Vordic-57?”
Luna waved the concern away. “An isolated incident. These people have no contact records in their entire history – or they’d have been mentioned on the planetscope.”
“And unrecorded?” Asta said. Luna looked at her sidelong with a smile playing across her lips.
“You can be very annoying when you want to be, darling,” she said.
“Only when I want to be,” Asta said. “I’m just saying we can’t rule it out.”
They retired to their single remaining shelter, now packed in among the remains of their supplies. Luna felt the warmth of Asta’s body pressed against her, and fell asleep contented.

That morning, Luna opened the door of the shelter and found herself nose-to-nose with a dusty iron tube. She looked up the length of it, and it revealed itself to be a long rifle, primitive metalwork giving way to a rough wooden stock. It was held in the hands of one of the bluish farmers.
“Can I help you?” said Luna, brushing sleep from the corners of her eyes. The farmer, who she now saw was backed up by two friends and a woman who she presumed had some sort of relationship to one or more of them.
The farmer said something incomprehensible in his language, a hard-sounding tongue that seemed to be built out of right angles. Luna looked at him in disbelief.
“You get any of that?” she remarked to Asta, who was now stretching her legs out in the way that Luna recognised meant she had been awake for a while and pretending to sleep.
“Not a word,” Asta said. “Isn’t your translator supposed to be designed for uncontacted languages?” Luna nodded. Her translator implant used frequency extraction to analyse the logical-emotional content of even the most complex tonal language and render it legible to herself, and projected the same to make her comprehensible to others.
“So why can’t we understand him?” said Asta.
“I don’t know!” hissed Luna. “Maybe his brain is the wrong shape!”
The farmer shouldered his rifle, and two of his friends stepped forward and dragged Luna out of the tent by her shoulders.
“Hey!” Asta shouted, scrambling towards her, but Luna held out a hand.
“Don’t provoke them!” she said. The farmer was now talking animatedly, gesticulating towards a field on the plain below them which was filled with livestock – giant boars, rumbling around the pasture and butting each other gently. “I think he thinks we poached our meat from his farm.”
“But-” Asta began, and then stopped herself. She tried to remember what little she had learned about uncontacted peoples in history.
The fact she kept coming back to was how badly it usually went for the civilised folks in those stories.
She stood up slowly and raised her hands. “No trouble,” she said. “No weapons, no trouble.”
The farmer with the rifle growled and trained it on her, barking something to his friends. One of them grabbed the long barrel of the gun and said something in a lower voice, admonishing his friend maybe.
Then they were all talking at cross purposes, the sharp sounds of their language scraping across each other like blades. The farmer lowered his rifle and turned to the woman, who had been staying out of it until this point.
Seeing her chance, Luna grabbed the gun, pulling towards herself and staying too close to shoot. The farmer fought hard, but without the steel-laced sinew of a seasoned space adventurer it was only a matter of time before-
The gun went off with a crack into the air. It was a single-shot weapon. Now it was little more than a fancy club for the purposes of this fight. Luna wrenched it away from the startled farmer and punched it forwards, knocking him back with the length of steel and wood between her hands. She raised the gun into the air and swung it, holding the men at bay.
“Asta!” she hissed. “Get behind me!” Asta was at her back immediately, and Luna levelled the rifle-club, jabbing at anyone who got too close.
The farmer whispered something to his friends and slowly the three of them started to circle, to surround the two. The woman said something to him, and they had a quick, chattering argument. Luna spun from one to the other of the friends – one had long, stringy hair, the other’s face was defined by a pronounced scar that gave his mouth the appearance of a permanent scowl. Long Hair to Mouth Scar and back she turned, Asta standing behind her and hissing a sharp little intake of breath at every sudden movement.
Long Hair nodded at his opposite number, and both men lunged at the same time. Luna swung, but the rifle-club was the definition of unwieldy and Long Hair easily grabbed it, using the momentum of the swing to wrench it from her hands and toss it aside. The farmer was still in hurried conversation with the woman, now a little way off. Luna blocked a swing from Long Hair on her elbow and ducked, feeling Mouth Scar move behind her. His grasping arms swung over her head, and she drove her elbow back into his belly. He let out a wheeze and staggered for a moment.
“I could really use a hand, here!” Luna said. Asta looked around for a moment, wondering who she meant the comment for. “Yes, you!” Luna said, wrestling with Long Hair as he tried to throw her to the floor.
Asta’s wild kick, the last resort of the last person in the galaxy who would call themselves a fighter, knocked Long Hair’s leg out from under him and the man went to the ground like a felled log. Luna looked at her in surprise. “Nice one,” she said, a moment before Mouth Scar hit her across the back of the legs with the rifle-club and put his arm around her throat. There was a sound like no sound at all and all of a sudden Luna felt the stinging edge of a blade at her throat. Mouth Scar yelled something in a slightly lisping version of the farmer’s harsh language, and Luna quit struggling.
“This guy means business,” she said to Asta.
“I can see that,” Asta muttered. The farmer had snatched up his rifle again, holding it in one hand with the shoulder end resting on the hard ground. He gestured to Mouth Scar, speaking forcefully, and Luna felt the edge of the blade release its pressure. Mouth Scar folded the blade back into its sheath on his belt, grumbling to himself.

The farmer tied their wrists with strips cut from the strong material of their own tent, and Long Hair led them like animals down the dusty road towards one of the big farmhouses.
“What are they going to do to us?” Asta asked in a low voice, in case their captor took offence. Luna had no answer.
“We can only hope there’s another opportunity to get free,” she said. “Before any more trouble comes our way.”
“If we knew where the ship came down we might be able to launch an SOS buoy,” Asta said. “There’s no way a signal will reach from the surface, but a probe might make it high enough to get through.”
“Try explaining any of that to these primitives,” said Luna bitterly. Soon, their thin bonds were traded for iron shackles and rope. Mouth Scar chattered excitedly to the farmer, who it now seemed had more of a paternal role than it had initially appeared, although he didn’t look old. Not old enough to be Mouth Scar’s father. The two women were led to a barn with two small straw beds in the corner, and when the farmer left them behind in there they heard the distinct sound of a heavy wooden bar being dropped across the door.
It was dark in there, only slivers of light coming through cracks in the walls, but still Luna made her way to the door. She hammered her shackled fists on the boards and yelled, threatening retribution, but no answer came. Eventually even she had to settle down. She went back to the beds and slumped next to Asta. Not long after that, the slim daylight began to die down.