She wakes up with a headache. She's lying on a bed of some sort. Lights are shining around her. Someone else is in the room with her. What's going on? What's today? Oh, right! It's her birthday--July 28! She must be... 37? 38 years old? This must be her birthday party! Did she pass out during the singing? The lights must candles for her cake!
"No, that isn't right," Julia reminded herself as she became more conscious. Her birthday was yesterday, and she celebrated it in space with Yuki and Lamont. She's supposed to be in orbit until August 2! Where is she now?
Commander Julia Hernandez de Huerte hurriedly focused her eyes and looked around her, expecting to see herself in the inside of her capsule, with her fellow astronauts dead and the spacecraft itself seconds perhaps away from disintegrating in some kind of botched reentry. Instead, she found herself strapped to something like an operating table in some kind of medical facility. Across the room from her, she could see her stocky and (incredibly sexy, were she to admit it) male pilot, 31 year-old Lamont White. Near the door, on another bed, was Mission Specialist Dr. Yuki Kamionna--a smaller, younger woman than Julia, albeit one with enough feist and book smarts to tower over everyone else in a room back on Earth. Everyone was naked.
"Hernandez! Julia! Can you hear me? We gotta get outta here, Commander! We gotta find a way out!" Lamont was still shouting, having realized he was finally starting to get her awake. Yuki, meanwhile, was moaning groggily with her eyes still closed. Just then, five short figures with large heads came in, chattering to each other in an unknown language. One of them held inserted what looked like very a long needle into Lamont's scrotum, apparently probing his body for data to store in a handheld device, causing Lamont to cry out. Three other aliens each lowered a metal helmet onto one of the astronauts and started waving wand-like objects around in the air. Now it all made sense. Julia remembered their frantic message to mission control over a secure channel after Yuki noticed strange lights outside approaching the capsule.
All three astronauts had been through the secret debriefing, of course, before launch. They had been made aware of the somewhat unlikely possibility that they would encounter extraterrestrial craft in Earth orbit, and that they might even be removed from their own spacecraft in the worst case scenario. If they survived and returned to Earth normally, then obviously they could never public discuss the encounter. If they survived and were brought back to Earth somewhere by the aliens, then they would be placed into something like witness protection and would be declared dead; the space agency would attribute their deaths to an accident during reentry. If they didn't survive or were never returned to their spacecraft or to Earth, then there wouldn't be much anyone could do about that, but the government would never admit that their death or disappearance had anything to do with aliens. Julia hoped they would survive.