Professor Robert Crater of the University of Chicago looked up from the bag he was loading and thought to himself how wonderfully beautiful Nancy looked as she stood at the porthole of their cabin on the USS Reliant, gazing out into space and at the brown-orange orb that was to be their new home for the next seven years. "I love M-113 already," she said. She turned her face to his, smiling, and added "I think we both will, Robert."
And Robert returned her smile. "Finally, to be alone." A life-long lover of solitude, Robert shunned large conglomerations of people whenever he could. Once he would have laughed at the very idea of his getting married, until Nancy entered his life and he'd found himself caring for someone enough to want to be with them for the rest of his days. She shared his love of lonely and remote places, so when the opportunity to study the ancient ruins on planet M-113 for an extended period of time came up, they seized it eagerly.
Robert was glad to beam off of Reliant, and gladder still when the starship left orbit. They chose as their base of operations a large, relatively intact structure they theorized might once have been a city hall or temple of the now vanished inhabitants of this desolate world. It was not particularly luxurious, but at least the roof and walls were intact. They watched their first sunset on this planet just outside the main entrance, Roger's arms encircling Nancy's waist from behind, his chin resting on her shoulder. "It's ours now," he murmured in his wife's ear as the first stars came out in the sky above the stone columns dotted all around. "Our own kingdom. And no one to tell us differently."
So they passed the next few years in happiness, digging through the sand, uncovering the relics of a dead civilization, and delighting in one another's company. And then one day, they discovered that the civilization they studied was not quite as dead as they had believed.