As a child she used to look out the window late at night and watch the stars, imagining herself among them. When she’d grown up she’d found a proper job (as a mining engineer) and become boring (apart from a brief and disastrous stint in a punk band) but never quite gave up on that dream. And now she was here, stranded alone in the grey wastes of an alien world, far from home.

She hoped the base would notice she’d been cut off but knew they wouldn’t care. She was good at her job but not indispensable. Saving her while the solar flare was on would be harder than finding someone to replace her.

Except she wasn’t alone There was something coming her way: a strange black thing with many eyes. There was something oddly familiar about it. Then she remembered that she hadn’t just seen this thing before, she knew what it was like to see the world through those eyes. And then she remembered something else, something too big and strange to put into words, and wondered why she suddenly felt naked without goggles.