This is the first opportunity that I have had to get something logged about was has been happening since we all arrived here last week. It could be the last thing I record for a while as we have been incredibly busy tidying things up. Our spare time seems to be diminishing as each day passes, because of the amount of work that we do: It's wake up, work, go to sleep, wake up, work, go to sleep at the moment.

 

Craile's World is a mess.

 

I really wish that I had not been posted here. Everything has gone. Everything and everybody completely destroyed.

 

This new colony isn't much more than a blackened, crumbling mixture of buildings, bodies and bits of raw flesh. Every construction has been raised to the ground and every person dead!

 

Murdered!

 

None of the officers have said anything about what happened here (bad for morale, they say), but everybody is certain in their own mind about what caused this atrocity.

 

Some of the more experienced, battle-hardened soldiers in our company, the likes of Wyx and Trenton say that they have seen this type of destruction before on other worlds, many times before, and on a much larger scale than what we have had to deal with here.

 

Thank God. I've never had to do this type of work before, nor do I hope to ever again. The others have experienced the shovelling up of the guts and body parts of other humans.

 

Its such a tragedy that such evil and heartless events have happened here on Craile's World. A tragedy and waste. There was no need for them to do it: Craile's World posed no threat to them at all. They came here and destroyed the colony just because they could - as a demonstration of their power and as a warning to any potential resistance to them.

 

Eighty-six men, women and children massacred in their homes. The colony had only been established eight months ago. People had volunteered to be the founders of a new Earth settlement. They had worked hard to build homes, plant crops, of a life. Now, it was all gone. For all their efforts, death had been their only reward.

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

 

Nobody can possibly imagine the horrors that we have seen here.

 

I don't want to be here.

 

I want to be back home on Earth, doing my ld job and doing what ordinary eighteen year olds do. I hate the military life; this is my first tour of duty and it sickens me. The supply of volunteers for the military had virtually dried up, an so conscripting had started. I was one of the unlucky ones, I suppose. I'm surprised they haven't started recruiting children and elderly.

 

Before I was brought here I had never seen a corpse. Now, I've seen hundreds. I'm not sure how I'm coping with all this, really. Yesterday, myself and some of the others were on 'clearing up' duty around the living quarters of the settlement. I thought it was bad enough when I found somebody's head, but that was nothing compared to what Van der Hoist had found: the body of a child. The child belonged to a friend, someone he knew very well, from their days in school.