Things... are actually went better than Wash was expecting them to be, right about now. Specifically, he's still alive, and Church is too.
They'd been trapped, with the Meta promising death for him and the EMP blast they'd primed ready to kill Church shortly thereafter, but his sarcastic and angry (...and traumatized, Wash reminded himself) AI companion had actually proven useful for once. Church had found some kind of alien portal technology the Project had confiscated after the war, and frantically guided Wash there and turned it on.
The portal activated, and in a flash of light, they were elsewhere.
After a few seconds of dazed confusion, Wash comes to his senses and looks around.
"...Where the fuck are we?"
They are:
on a farm.
There are fields of wheat, still green and not ripe yet, swaying in the wind. A very small goat, mostly black with white ears, is munching on a weed shoot it has nibbled from between the plants. It maaaaas at them. It's late evening, sun making itself known only as a splash of color in the west, the first stars starting to be visible. In the distance there's a barn, painted blue on the bottom and fading to white on the top.
Church is... having a pretty bad day, honestly, but he's not dead (or not... more dead...), so that's neat. He's trying not to think about the things he's learned in the last half hour.
Luckily, there's a lot of distraction available! He studies the camera feed data.
"Fuck if I know, dude. Looks like... some kind of farm?"
"Thanks, genius! I hadn't noticed. Are we in comms range of anyone?"
Wash stares at the goat for a while, then starts walking towards the barn, keeping an eye on the stars.
Church sighs and accesses the comm unit in Wash's suit.
"Uh... No? Nobody we know is anywhere near in range. There's... Substantial traffic on several frequencies, but... it's all unrecognizable. It's not noise, but... These protocols are completely unfamiliar."
...
"Wash, why the fuck am I familiar with data protocols?"
Wash sighs too. "I think you know the answer to that."
He stares warily at the goat, like he expects it to attack him, and then starts trudging toward the barn, his eyes on the stars. Do they look like anything he's ever seen?
Wash sighs, again. "...I was really into astronomy. Before... all this. And I have a pretty good visual memory."
He shakes his head. "Doesn't fucking matter, anymore. Start decrypting those comms protocols, we need intel."
"Well, we're stranded on an unfamiliar planet with completely foreign comms protocols, light-years away from anyone we've ever known or cared about. And I'm tired as shit, so I'm going to take a fucking nap once we get to that barn. So unless you have something else you'd rather be doing..."
Wash continues to trudge towards the barn, looking around cautiously, gun at the ready.
There are more mini-goats, weeding and maa-ing. There's a black barn cat sleeping on their little tiny-goat-house.
The barn turns out to have a house beyond it but while there's lights on inside nobody notices them right off.
The barn door is closed but not locked, and it has animal flaps inside. There's a dog in there, a brown one with fluffy fur and a feathered tail; the dog does notice them, as soon as the door opens, and starts barking, yip-YAP-yip-YAP.
"Fuck!" Wash hisses. He freezes, then crouches slowly, staring at the dog.
"Trying to get the dog to shut up before it wakes someone. ...Stop projecting, it's probably freaking him out."
Wash stays close to the ground and very still, attempting to look as nonthreatening as possible, for an unfamiliar person in power armor.
"Shit, right."
The holographic miniature blue power armor disappears.
...Wash stands up and exits the barn the way he came in, looking around worriedly.
The barking has attracted another dog, who appears to have been busy herding the tiny goats into their home for the night. "BORK BORK! BORK BORK!" goes the second dog.
Wash startles, pointing his gun at the second (unexpected) (hostile-seeming) (LOUD) dog in what is definitely a controlled and composed state of mind, his finger reflexively-
...Probably it's time to do something before things get too far out of hand.
"Wash, calm the fuck down, it's just a dog!!"
"...right."
He stashes his weapon, then starts jogging back the way he came, away from the stupid barn and (hopefully) away from the (loud) (startling) stupid dogs, too. Will they leave him alone?
"BORK BORK!" goes the second dog (black, curly, larger than the brown one in the barn), and it runs toward the farmhouse. "BORK BORK!"
Well, Wash will continue to run away from the farmhouse, and hopefully not end up starting a war on a potentially unknown planet!
"This is not how I expected today to be going", he pants.
"Yeah, tell me about it."
...Oh, there's something useful he could be doing, actually.
"I'm turning your suit lights off, so we'll be harder to see at a distance."
Being slotted into someone else's suit like this instead of possessing hijacking them completely is going to take some getting used to.