Former Sergeant First Class Renya Perez stood near the edge where the shelter met the sands of Ghalaran. She didn’t consider herself the sergeant who landed here so many years ago. The sands had smoothed it away as they had the decals of the three ships that crashed here with her. The sun bleached away all but the stoic metal. Reyna could smell rust in the air, and knew this would mean the rainy season should begin soon.

Ghalaran’s deserts exhibited a peculiar dryness, not because it rarely rained but because it had mostly evaporated before it reached the sand. Reyna’s mind was not occupied by thoughts of harvesting the water, the last few remaining hydration droids would be taking care of that. She thought only of the date. On the unified calendar, it had been approximately six years, eight months, and five days. Two thousand five hundred days had been the estimated time it would take their distress signal to reach the nearest inhabited planet. There had been a couple dozen of them, then. Now only Reyna remained.

She wondered if she would still be alive when a rescue arrived in seven more years. If they could even come straight away. If the signal had even made it through. The service droids left might last that long, but she knew there was precious little she could do if any of them broke of malfunctioned. Woz had tried to show everyone a few things before he went. There never was enough time to prepare.

The sands rapidly began to cool as the sun crept below the horizon. Reyna walked out towards a rocky cliffside past the desolate crafts that once bore the names UEE Vespucci, Magellan, and Earhart. Reyna had crewed the Vespucci as medical personnel. She had also been the only survivor from the Vespucci. Twenty crewmates from the Magellan, and thirteen more from the Earhart had been the entire remainder of six hundred crew aboard the vessels. None of them had been sure what caused the crash. None of the navigators had survived to report the incident, virtually no one from the three bridges had. Only fourty four disparate souls emerged from the wrecks.

Reyna looked down at the wreckage from the cliff and added the last of the five hundred and ninety nine identification plates from crew uniforms. Some were bent and plied and hurned beyond legibility, but she had kept careful track of how many she had retrieved. It had started as something to pass the days. Before the rest of them had passed to the desert. If nothing else, she was determined to be here still in seven more years, to take them home.