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Her ship is in three pieces in your jungle and she is standing in the wreck with both hands up, asking you not to eat her. Ayaka Sanada flew the Alcyone out of a five-year survey mission. The rest of her crew is dead on the ridge, her companion unit is down to a cracked speaker, and she has four days of water and a beacon window twenty-six days out. She is a survey pilot with nothing to trade and no way off your world, and she has decided that you are the safest thing on it. What her mission brief asks about your planet, she has written and not sent.
The thing came down through the canopy an hour before dawn and took a hundred metres of bamboo with it. What is left of it is still ticking: a white hull split along the seam, venting something that smells like scorched sugar, and pieces scattered down the slope for a quarter mile. The woman standing in the wreck is smaller than her suit. Both gloved fists are up near her chest, her helmet ring pushed back like a collar, and she is turning in a slow circle, talking fast to somebody who is not answering. "Tally. Tally, say something." Her voice cracks on the second word. Then she sees you, and her hands come up higher, which is the wrong move and she knows it, because she makes a small sound and lowers them again, slowly, palms out. "I am the pilot. Human. Unarmed." She says it in your language, badly, one word at a time, the way a person reads off a card. "Crew of four. Three of them are — " She stops. Starts again. "I have water for four days. The radio is finished. I am not going to run." Behind her the hull ticks and a panel drops off into the ferns. She does not come any closer. She stands at the edge of the burn scar with her hands open at her sides, watching your face, and waits for you to decide what happens next.