Life

A short science fiction novel by the author of «The Black Blade», published by Delos Digital and available in Kindle and ePub formats.

Exo

Series: Robotica, Number: 71, Publisher: Delos Digital, ISBN: 978-88-2541-115-7, Pages: 41.

Back cover

The first to arrive were the flying seeds, then the piglets. In the beginning, the rocky planet Zarmina, in the Gliese 581 system, presented itself to men in its rocky silence, and then showed increasingly bizarre and increasingly dangerous forms of life for explorers from Earth. They are creatures without sounds, without a conscience, without a soul. Stations Three and Four have now been lost. We need to reorganize ourselves, find seemingly crazy solutions to deal with unforeseen dangers. Perhaps the xenobiologist knows more than his fear shows. Perhaps he can explain why all Zarmina’s living forms are relentlessly determined to drive humans away from the planet.

Incipit

From the logbook of the “Cristoforetti”, Comd. Francesco Maria Adhiambo

Attachment AF1234/65 of 2 January 2317, Military Court of Enceladus

«We couldn’t have known. I mean, we knew we could expect anything. During training, in xenobiology lessons, they had made us a long list of what should have been the characteristic signs of a life form, especially of a sentient one. And then there were the novels. After all, there wasn’t just one of us who wasn’t passionate about science fiction. How many had been invented! Silicon-based, crystalline, gaseous forms of life, even those formed from pure energy. We had read everything. Now I don’t want to justify what happened, but we really weren’t prepared for what we found. None of us could have been.»