I am recording this beacon in in the hope it will serve as a warning to the curious, to any kindred fools who voyage across the stars.

We were ten, all of us adventurers by nature, explorers in an interstellar ship. When scanners registered the planet we were delirious, a green world before us after years in the void. We detected abundant plant life, nothing else. We were eager, we were foolish, and after little debate we all boarded the lander.

It was more beautiful than we imagined. What we at first took to be low hills turned out to be buildings, buried under many meters of dirt and foliage. Buildings! We explored with renewed vigour, knowing we had uncovered evidence of long dead intelligent life. While scaling one of the structures I cut myself. Perhaps that’s what woke them. That breath of iron in the air.

Jin was the first to go I think. He wandered off by himself, saying he was going to investigate some interesting readings. When he didn’t return after two hours we activated his tracker and followed. That’s when we saw one. A creature, bipedal, roughly our shape, yet somehow twisted, wrong. We tried communicating in words and signs but all it did was groan, moving toward us in jerks and spasms. We tightened our grip on our weapons, unsure of what to do. Suddenly the thing leapt at Perl, tearing at his suit and biting him. Ket shot it dead, but not before Perl’s arm was a ragged mess. We patched him up as best we could and continued, panic rising in us.

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After an hour we had not reached Jin’s marker, and Perl was deteriorating fast. His skin was pale, his pulse slow. We decided Tult would take our one rifle and escort Perl back to the lander. The rest would follow after we got Jin.

At first I mistook it for a cave, but as we entered I realised we were now inside a labyrinthine artificial structure. We activated our suit lights, adopting patrol formation. Jin’s suit was at the end of a long corridor, torn asunder. The body was nowhere to be seen.

We heard them before we reached the exit. A deep, throbbing rumble. I peaked outside, saw dozens of the creatures, searching. We checked our weapons and tried the comms. Only static. There were still more outside when we made a break for it. We shot our way forward. I think we made it 500 paces before they got Ket. We fell back to a building, dismayed at how low our ammo-charges already showed.

That was two days ago. We are trapped here. There numbers have only grown, whilst we have lost two more. We were foolish and now this world will be our tomb, of that I’m sure. So take heed my fellow Centaurians, and any who may follow after us: do not come to this third rock from its star, for it is death.