Calmness amid horror!
“The colony had been scoured. That is the best way to put it. Something had come down and ripped apart every bit of organic Terran life that existed in the colony, if it had to chew through metal, eternaplastic, or solid rock to do so. There had been one temporary survivor, who had lived through the initial attack by being ‘lucky’ enough to don a sealed environmental suit in time; several others had tried, and failed. Her air and water supply would have failed her about a week before we arrived.”
“Would have?” I didn’t really ask. “I guess she decided not to wait.” Rubicon’s shake of his head told me I had guessed right. “What did her Final Transmission say?” There’s always one.
“The usual: a first, panicked outburst; an attempt to take control of the situation via self-identification and a half-rational description of events; and then a semblance of a daily log. Followed by the usual descent into poetic madness and hallucinatory terror. There was mercifully little agonized screaming at the end, though. She had managed to rig her medical systems to dump all of its painkillers into her at once. It was very ingenious, really. We might try to duplicate the effect as a last-resort option.”