Mercy

Dr Geld did what he could for them in his primitive surgery - little more than a crack in the rock, furnished with the few bits of medikit salvaged from the lander. Another sand storm - elemental, yet not impersonal. Only a fool could now maintain that the phenomena was not purposeful, and malevolent.

Lacerations caused by the sand he could treat. It was the fine dust that killed, insinuating itself through the skin and into the tissues - and inevitably, it was the children who suffered most. Earlier, he had held a girl, limp as a still-born lamb yet clinging to life. She had evaporated in his arms, leaving only emptiness; another thing to dispose of.

At least it was quick, he thought. Quicker than dying of thirst - the eventual fate of all of them, surely, on this barren planet where every secretion, excretion, ejaculation must be recycled and reabsorbed just to stay alive for a little longer. Every drop of blood.

Perhaps, though Geld, that was the answer - that what seemed malevolence was in fact mercy.