The pod door blew open with a vicious hiss of gas from the pneumos as Luna was scrambling over the dusty soil towards it.
“Lu?” came a weak voice from within. Then a moment later, the pale face of Asta appeared in the dark doorway, the blood on her forehead darkening and drying even now.
Luna fell to her knees in front of the doorway, her hands pressed to Asta’s cheeks, repeating her name over and over.
“What?” she said groggily.
“How do you feel?” Luna asked urgently. “Do you feel sick? Dizzy? You hit your head pretty hard-”
“Who are you?” said Asta. “Where am I?”
Luna’s whole body felt as though it had been thrown through a spin-wash, the tingling deadness of absolute horror creeping into her fingertips.
Then she saw that Asta was smiling, and pushed her away with an exclamation. “I thought you were…”
“Well, I’m not. I feel fine. Aside from the broken glass in my face, anyway,” Asta said. “Where do they keep the medikit in these things anyway?”
Luna stood up, red-faced, and opened the little red compartment in the open door which bore the white dog sigil of one of the lesser medical guilds. Inside was a canvas pouch marked with the same symbol. This Luna carefully opened and extracted the contents of:
One roll of bandage; one surgical needle; one spool of micro-filament thread; one bottle of medical-grade alcohol; one bottle of wake-up tablets.
“It’s bare-bones, isn’t it?” said Asta, looking at the items, unimpressed.
“Well, we do have two,” muttered Luna. “I’ll go and see if the other is the same,”
It was. At the very least, they wouldn’t run out of bandages.
“Let’s pack up. We should try to find water before it gets dark,” said Luna, pointing at the sun distressingly low in the blue-green sky.
A search of the rest of the emergency kit in the pods yielded several more useful items, including a couple of heavy-duty backpacks and pop-out emergency shelters.
“I’ve always said we needed a holiday,” said Asta.

The dry, hardy grass that seemed to clump up everywhere notwithstanding, there was no sign of life in the broad valley they found themselves in. They left their pods down in the dip and set off along the shortest axis, up the side of one of the hills that surrounded them. Luna looked back down at the escape pods, twinkling silver in the light. That was the last she’d see of the life she knew for a long while. She could feel it, even then.
At the top of the great sandy hill, Asta pointed suddenly and said “trees.” Trees were a good sign. Trees, hopefully, meant water. Water meant survival.
These trees were tall like palms, swaying back and forth, with narrow leaves bordering on being cactuslike spines. They seemed to Luna to be beckoning them closer, a swaying invitation to join them and find the water.

The sunlight was taking on a purple-maroon colour by the time they arrived at the trees, a thicket of the tall palm-cactuses surrounding a deep blue pool.
“My canteen is almost empty,” said Luna. “Thank heavens for that!”
“The water would last longer if you took smaller sips,” said Asta. “You have to ration.”
“You did and I didn’t and look which one of us is thirsty now,” said Luna with a smirk. Asta rolled her eyes.

They made camp quickly – one shelter for them, one for supplies, half-burrowed into the sandy earth with their survival tools, facing each other. Luna threw a sheet over the two circular openings, making a makeshift tunnel between them so they could move from one to the other without risking exposure to any parasitic insects that might call this air home.
By the time they were finished it was dark, and only just time for Luna to rush down to the water’s edge with a collapsable bottle and fill it up through the mesh-filtered opening. As soon as the water entered the bottle, it was being chemically purified by a carefully-deployed electroradioactive structure in the neck, to come out of the tap at the base of the bottle crystal clear and fresh. The escape pod survival kit industry depends on repeat business, after all.
As she held the bottle underwater, the moonslight refracting through the surface giving her crazy glimpses of the microcosm world beneath, she thought she saw a dark shadow move. But the next moment, a wide, flat pond weed drifted by, and it was nothing after all.
She pulled the bottle out, weighed it in her hands, and took it back to the shelter. It would be good to drink in the morning.

“Got it?” asked Asta when she got back inside the dark tent, the faintest green-tinted light coming through the material of the roof. She was answered by the reassuring slosh of the bottle as Luna shook it; it sounded weighty, full of soon-to-be the stuff of life itself.
It was then that the whole mess of the day descended on them. They had started out well, all things considered – or at least, they had started out well for them. A drop-off: a payday. These were the standard terms of business for their line of work.
“Did that ever go south on us,” said Luna into the air, collapsing onto the bedroll with a sigh beside Asta.
“Did it ever go south on us what?” Asta said. Then she ran over the sentence again and understood it this time, as an intensifier. That didn’t worry Luna. That was just how it was with her. She more than made up for it as a business partner with her technical skills.
Not that she was just a business partner. Luna propped herself up on her elbow. In the gloom that her electronic eyes were now getting adjusted to, she could just make out the upturned face of the other woman, all impressionistic angles and curves in pale green.
She reached out her arm and gently shifted closer to Asta.
“What do we do now?” she whispered.
“Get some sleep,” Asta sighed, pulling Luna’s arm down and wrapping it around her waist. “We’ll need it in the morning.” She rolled onto her side, her back to Luna.

It wasn’t morning when she woke up and for a moment, in the dark and the heat of the insulating shelter, she panicked and memories of institutions made themselves uncomfortably known. But she held onto Luna’s hand and took deep breaths, and placed herself back in her own body, in the present moment. Something was moving outside, next to the supply tent. Something big.
Up on her hands and knees, she crawled past Luna (always the heavy sleeper of the two) and pressed her eye to the one-way transpex window in the shelter door. All she could see here was a shadow, a hulking round thing, and it occurred to her that the stroke of luck that had been this planet’s extraordinarily earthlike conditions might also be the other kind of luck. The kind that gets prefaced by curses.
As she was watching the snuffling shadow move in the darkness outside the tunnel between the shelters, it moved again and there was a great tearing sound.
“What?” said Luna blearily. From outside there was a wet sucking sound, and then the smacking, fleshy noise of chewing.
“Our food! It’s eating the food!” hissed Asta.
“What is?” Luna said.
“I don’t know! Some kind of boar, sounds like!” Asta said, urging Luna towards the door. “Do something!”
Luna grabbed the water bottle, poured a little water into her hand and splashed it in her face to wake herself up. The boar was nearly five feet tall and couldn’t believe its luck. It hadn’t had a meal like this in its entire life.
“Hey!” said Luna, pulling a silvery-bladed knife from her boot sheath. It flashed in the moon’s glow, driving a spike of light into the boar’s eyes. The thing roared and pawed the ground with one of six hooves. Asta was behind her now; Luna bared her teeth. It was a standoff in danger of rapidly turning into a fight.
Luna wasn’t waiting for the boar to make the first move. She wanted to stay clear of those teeth, of the fleshy, grasping maw, a sugary Boost-i-bar half-eaten and drooping from the corner like an old-fashioned comedian’s cigar. She let out a roar of her own and lunged diagonally, raking the knife across the boar’s thick hide. It squealed and turned with shocking nimbleness to follow her, and she realised with a sting of despair that she had barely made a scratch through the chain-mail of thick black bristles that made up the hog’s coat.
Asta watched as Luna dove out of the reach of the great boar once, twice, paralyzed by the stinking immensity of the creature. Then Luna tripped, and it knew it had her. It advanced slowly, its tiny black eyes sharp and full of a very specialised predatory intelligence.
For all that, it never saw the rock coming. Asta brought it down like a hammer on the boar’s skull once, twice, three times, and she didn’t stop.
“Asta!” Luna cried, as she scrambled to her feet. Asta turned, a wild look in her eye, full of protective vigour.
“What?” she asked.
“You’re just making it mad!” Luna shouted. The pause in the pummelling let the boar get its bearings, and it threw Asta into the air with a powerful ram.
She fell to earth at the base of one of the tall, swaying palm-cactus trees, and looked around, dazed.
“Up the tree!” came a voice from somewhere. Was it inside her head?
“Good thinking, brain,” Asta said out loud, and wrapped her hands around the trunk of the tree.
She wasn’t going to make it up. Luna watched her struggle to get a foot off the ground while the great black boar prepared for a last vicious charge. She steeled herself. This was going to be rough.
The boar charged. Luna ran, leaping into the air at a right angle to the mighty animal and bringing a foot down on its squat piggy head, springing high up into the tree adjacent to Asta’s. She let herself fall upside down, her legs tightly wrapped around the trunk, and reached for her partner’s arm. A quick wrench, and Asta was just high enough to avoid the boar as it slammed into the tree, sending a shudder through both women.
“Oh, my,” said Asta. She turned to Luna. “We did it!”
Luna nodded. “We did.” She looked down at the unconscious boar. “Don’t look now, Asta. I’m going to replace some of our food stocks.”
“What do you mean?” said Asta as Luna dropped nimbly to the floor and retrieved her knife from the ground.
Just as she was prepared to do the dirty business of survival, however, she was halted by a cry from above.
“Lu, wait! The sun is rising! And – you won’t believe this – there’s a city!”