Day 518

She'd recallibrated the rear sensor array for the fourth time that day. It still showed her the usual readings. The planet she was orbiting was still showing minimal signs of life. Great time to be bacterium she reckoned. So far nothing larger than microbes had been found by the remote controlled probes she'd sent down.

She was the only living being there, stuck monitoring the planet's surface in her little government funded observation craft. The only interesting occurrence was the regular seismic trembles the sensors picked up. So regular in fact that no matter how many times she recallibrated they remained exactly 4 hours apart. Nothing showed on the ship's viewing screen in spite of the sheer mass that seemed to be coming down upon the landscape. The last one came in at 8.7 on the richter scale and left no visible trace.

At this point she wasn't sure if she was following its wake or it was following her. She kept monitoring it either way, noting down the minor changes in seismic activity and the exact measurements. She'd dubbed the series of quakes "giant's feet" as they were so equally spaced apart they might as well have been footprints.

Lately the quakes had been getting closer and closer together yet their epicentres were spreading out further and further. Normally the quakes happened thousands of miles behind her craft but now they seemed to be drawing closer. It only got stranger when one of her remote probes was crushed by an unseen force of impact.

As she reviewed the recorded feed from the moments before it went offline she saw what had been causing these quakes all along. The screen showed a typical day on the planet though something was off about the scenery. A large black column seemed to be moving towards the probe at an incredibly fast rate.

At the last second the column rose up out of sight before the area around the probe became shadowed. There was a sickeningly loud crunch sound and the feed went dead. She had found life at last!

She had found life on a planet assumed to be dead and the life had found her too. Or lives as she saw similar scenes playing out across all of her probe's feeds until they all went down. The planet's surface was practically exploding with seismic activity that she wasn't even able to measure anymore.

All of the quakes were heading directly underneath her craft. where her small observation vessel shadowed the planet was now the epicentre of all seismic activity on the planet. Whatever life forms they were, they all seemed to be piling into one exact area, right below her as she floated just inside of the planet's atmosphere.

Her vessel began to pick up intense heat readings coming from the underside of the hull.