This post started off as a one-off response to a writing prompt in the Freewriters Community. Then I wrote a part 2 (with the outcome literally determined by a coin toss).
But that naturally leads to a part 3, which is where this short series comes in. I felt that doing it in just one post really wouldn't give enough time to build up a bit of suspense 😀 Enjoy !
Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio
Governor Dafang sat with his head in his hands. Last night had been a disaster. Despite his directive for settlements to put up drones and watch stations, it seemed most of them hadn't understood the urgency. He blamed himself.
His secretary, Pirib Horthen, came through the door and laid two more dataslates on his desk to join the hoard that already cluttered up the surface. The man did it almost with reverence, and a look of sympathy on his face. He'd come from Tarnyu with Dafang, and knew the pressure the governor was under.
"You might want to look at the second one, Sir. There's some video. It's not nice, but it might give some useful information."
Nodding, Dafang picked up the slates and added them to the two already in his hand. Woodside and Sunnypeak, and now Fairvale and Merry Hollow. Whose idea at Colony Central was it to give barren gravel plains jolly names ? It's not like they'd help anything grow there, and few of the colonists were volunteers.
He looked over the reports; three of the four were just like Greenfields. Just... gone. Raked over and left as nothing but pretty patterns engraved into the rocky soil. Five hundred people in each, missing or worse.
But Merry Hollow was different. There were still the spirals and concentric circles dragged through the rock, but the buildings had been left standing. The dataslate was from Pilot Wardek. The man had flown out there to investigate. Dafang waved a hand over the slate to activate the report.
Wardek reporting a tinny voice emerged from the slate. Landed at Merry Hollow. All civilians appear to be missing. The ground is churned up in the same way as at the other settlements, but the buildings are mostly intact. Mostly. The internal concresin floors have somehow been broken up into granules from dust to small pebble sized and given patterns that are continuations of the ones outside.
There was a pause in the report. Then Wardek's voice continued.
We found some other evidence. The settlement had not set up watch stations or drones, but we found the administrator's log. In it, he'd recorded a complaint from a Mrs Miggils. She wanted to bring his attention to a strange noise coming from beneath her dwelling unit, a kind of soft, low-pitched grinding sound.
Another hesitation. Then Wardek's voice continued, sounding disturbed even through the distortion caused by the small speaker on the dataslate.
There was one other thing. In a dwelling unit assigned to the Farmall family, we found a baby monitor. It had video. It's pretty inconclusive, but concerning. Playing the relevant part now.
The slate's screen switched to the recorded data. It showed a child's bedroom, dark and peaceful. Then there was a sound, like a bucket of pebbles being stirred. Out of sight of the camera, a child's scream was heard, cut off after just a second with a strangulated choke.
A couple of seconds later, an arm emerged onto the screen. It looked like a child's, but blackened and moving jerkily. Unnaturally.
It was impossible to see the body it was attached to, but the arm reached over from the bed towards the light grey extruded wall. It was clutching a wax crayon, a red one.
With jerky motions, as it if was just a robot appendage being controlled somehow and utterly unfamiliar with the body it was using or what a crayon was for, it drew on the wall. It looked like a single word:
The report finished, and governor Dafang sat back in shock.
As he did, Secretary Horthen returned.
"Sir, there's someone here from the latest batch of colonists who says she has vital information. She says her name is Doctor Helen Thwaites, and you're the only one she'll speak to."
Previous posts in this series;
- https://peakd.com/hive-161155/@alonicus/24-january-2025-mariannewests-freewrite-writing-prompt-day-2626-mother-love - the post that started it all, and introduced the spine-spiders
- https://peakd.com/hive-199275/@alonicus/escape-from-the-caves-of-meranda-iv - the sequel, where the science team escapes back to base and recommends the planet not be colonised. They were too late.
- https://peakd.com/hive-199275/@alonicus/the-colony-on-meranda-iv-part-1 - we meet the Governor Dafang and get the first hints that the colony isn't going to plan
- https://peakd.com/hive-199275/@alonicus/the-colony-on-meranda-iv-part-2 - Governor Dafang takes a trip to the Greenfields settlement, only to find it is not there any more
- https://peakd.com/hive-199275/@alonicus/the-colony-on-meranda-iv-part-3 - a fractious meeting of the co0lony's government, and a worrying foreshadow
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STOPOh excellent! And spooky!