La Chispa

The star loomed ever larger in the windows, and the squeaking
from the turbine had gotten so bad that it could be heard
throughout the entire ship, if anything in the ship had ears willing
to listen. Something could almost listen, though; the strange
creatures in the hold had stopped eating, and had gone back to the
metal spheres they had come out of. They sat in the spheres, their
outsides slowly turning into a hard, bone-like material. The ship
drifted ever closer. By now, the icy planet almost filled the great
windows in the front of the ship; the surface was not visible, and
there was no light to illuminate it, but one could tell where it was by
where the stars behind it weren’t.
The hard cases in the hold began to undergo their final metamorphosis.
The outside surfaces darkened, and began to crack. Only
then, when the ship was within a month of landing, did the ship’s
inhabitants crawl out. They woke up with a sense of purpose; all
the memories they needed to survive, all the instincts they needed
to run the ship, were embedded in their genetics. They looked over
the log from the last generation, and shook their heads sadly. It was
going to be a short cycle; they had to get to work immediately. The
turbine was oiled, the mechanics of the ship carefully inspected.
The unused light-collecting heating panels were sadly folded up and
stowed away. The ship was within days of landing, and it was a blur
of activity.
When the day came for the ship to land, this activity increased
a thousandfold. Environment suits were prepared for use,
and mining vehicles were oiled and polished. The atmospheric collectors,
the most recent of the many innovations aboard the ship,
were expanded for use during the ship’s descent. The ship’s log was
dutifully filled out: a log, not for them, but for the next generation.
The navigational engines had switched off, and the landing engines
had come online. The ship turned as it hurtled towards the icy mass
of rock, so that it would enter what little atmosphere that existed at
as shallow an angle as possible. The ship was a buzz of activity as
it hurtled towards the planet. When it was close enough, the great
landing engines switched on, slowly bringing the ship to a gentle
landing on the surface of the planet. Now, less than a year from
their hatching, the inhabitants of the ship could begin their great
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