She was famous in the trader bars and cargo ports for having the worst luck in the galaxy. She was also famous for being able to escape any bad situation that came her way. Some astute people observed from time to time that if it weren't for the first thing, she'd never have needed to get good at the second one.

Crashing a ship due to circumstances beyond her control -- that didn't even begin to qualify as bad luck for her. She crashed a ship once every six months. That was routine. Ho-hum.

Crashing a ship on a planet inhabited by a previously unknown species? Who apparently didn't like visitors? Now, that was more like it. That was about par.

Communication was out of the question. These creatures had a phenotype so far from "human biped" that she couldn't figure out which part of them to talk to. They had a long tentacle-looking kind of thing with a spike or fang on the end, and she hadn't been able to tell whether it was a tongue or a tail. Also, their language sounded like someone squeaking their fingers on a rubber balloon. If her throat couldn't make their sounds, then their throats -- or whatever they had -- probably couldn't make hers.

She was a little hazy on some of what happened, because the landing hadn't been very clean, and pulling herself out of the miraculously intact cockpit and climbing and clawing her way through the kilometer of strewn, crumpled, sharp-edged garbage that used to be the rest of her ship took a lot out of her. When she got clear of the wreck, she collapsed.

Maybe she got whatever this aching wound was on her side while she was climbing out? She couldn't remember. She didn't want to take off the dressing to look. Everything in this horror pit was either covered in dirt or slime, and that included the parts that were writhing. She didn't need to risk making it infected, whatever it was. Nice of them to patch her up, anyway. Guess that meant they didn't actually want her dead.

That didn't necessarily mean they had anything pleasant in mind for her, though. She wished she could read whatever they'd printed onto her skin. Was she a prisoner? Well, yes, she was obviously a prisoner, but for how long and why? Forever? She couldn't try to ask them, even if she could have made herself understood; she hadn't seen a single one of them since they'd put her in whatever this place was.

She'd lost track of how long she'd been there. It could have been days, or weeks. When thirst had finally gotten unbearable, she'd drunk from one of the putrid-smelling pools of viscous liquid that were all over, waiting for her to step into (or fall into) unexpectedly. It had been an act of sheer desperation and she'd half-expected to die from it, but she hadn't. It had made her a little nauseous, but nothing else. In fact, it also seemed to satisfy her hunger. Or maybe she was just too distracted to think about being hungry.

The thing was (she reflected for the thousandth time), this planet wasn't especially far off the usual routes. Humans had to have landed on it before. In fact, someone would have had to have landed on it on purpose before now. Probably quite a few times. Why hadn't she heard any reports about it? Why hadn't there been any gossip or infodocs or even a nav warning not to approach the system? If other humans had landed there, it just wasn't believable that they'd all kept quiet about it. So had they all been killed? OK, but then why wasn't she dead?

One way or another, it didn't seem like she wanted to wait for answers. There had to be a way out of this place. There was always a way out. She'd escaped worse places before. Nothing was escape-proof. But she'd searched a lot, non-stop, every day, and so far she hadn't found it.

She paused to take another drink. She was thirsty a lot lately. Climbing around searching among the tentacles was hard work, she supposed. Or maybe it was something else. She'd started feeling like parts of her body were ... off. Not quite right. Her tongue was swollen, she was sure of it; it felt like it was taking up her entire mouth, trying to choke her. Parts of her would feel irritated one moment and then switch to being numb the next. Her mouth had the most horrible taste in it all the time -- though that was probably just from the glop she'd been drinking constantly.

She swallowed the last of her cupped handful of whatever-it-was and realized suddenly, violently, that she was about to be ill.

She bent over, tensed, prepared for a spew onto the ground, the lurch, the spatter ... but it wasn't that. She was expelling something solid. And she wasn't -- that wasn't the right word. It was extending, unfurling, coming out of her mouth, protruding without stopping.

When she got back to her feet, and tried to focus cross-eyed at the thing in place of her tongue, she realized where she'd seen it before, and why no humans had ever escaped this planet.