2017 RHP Prose Contest
09 Mar '17 16:063 editsOriginally posted by vanderveldeA apologize. I got notified that last parts of this story was omitted (I suppose due length, so it did not fit in body PM):::: Here's the entry Number 9 again::::
[b]Entry No 9
SPHERES
When the recon mission landed on the surface of the planet, they found what they expected: a desert planet surface. They set up their camp in the open plane as planned and went to sleep.
The next day they found those small spheres, the size of basket balls distributed around their camp. They went to investigate a ...[text shortened]... trail of the spheres was virtually free of dust.
But then there were tracks on the floor...[/b]
Entry No 9
SPHERES
When the recon mission landed on the surface of the planet, they found what they expected: a desert planet surface. They set up their camp in the open plane as planned and went to sleep.
The next day they found those small spheres, the size of basket balls distributed around their camp. They went to investigate and found them to be hollow spheres of milky Quartz.
This started the discussion about the water question. During the observation time several measurements had found water in the atmosphere and several had found none. This was one of the questions that warranted a manned search. The unmanned rovers had just found the sandy desert, consisting mainly of Silicates with very low amounts of metal ions.
A hollow sphere is not a very common feature to be found on desert planets without geological activity. So the team decided to open one of the spheres to find out more.
They collected three of the objects which seemed to be blown around by the wind in very strange patterns and brought them into their lab module. There they set a drill to the first one. Due to the spherical form and the sand polished surface it was hard to handle. It seemed like it had a life of its own. But after a few attempts they managed to fix the sphere to drill a hole into the Quartz.
After a few inches the drill hit the hollow volume. Surprisingly a big amount of dust came out of it, indicating that the pressure inside exceeded atmospheric. Of course the drilling had created some dust, so the planetologers had put on face masks, but the dust coming out of the sphere seemed to make breathing impossible.
While the Leader of the team was switching the air conditioner to higher flow to filter the dust the two other spheres, which they had brought in began to roll around the laboratory in astonishing speed, kicking the humans off their feet. They fell to the floor and observed how the trail of the spheres was virtually free of dust. But then there were tracks on the floor, were the Metal was eroded away, and when the spheres began to roll over the humans their space suits dissolved. Fleeing the laboratory was impossible since the atmosphere outside was toxic…
The Captain of the mother ship was confused when the recon team didn’t report on time. The surprise grew when the visuals of the recon camp just send white noise. And then the telescope found no trace of the camp on the landing site.
A new recon team was prepared to find out what had happened and struck camp on the plain desert. They set up the equipment and reported to the mother ship, that the wind seemed to be stronger than anticipated since they had observed a milky sphere the size of a basket ball to vanish at a rather high velocity.
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