Least of all me. None of the little bastards were anywhere to be seen, drawn by the noise. They didn’t obey the usual rules of wild animals, that if you made a lot of noise they’d usually run away in fear. The problem was, their natural prey usually made a lot of noise. Somehow the things had evolved to eat metal. The first few had hidden away on a crate from a salvage planet somewhere, bred to act as guard dogs and eat junk metal. More efficient that way on their home planet, they could be left to roam free. Here, this being a fairly new colony, there’s not exactly a lot of scrap metal hanging around, so they turned to attacking hoppers and other equipment. Their attacks on humans is part of their guard dog instincts, which in a way makes the deaths even worse, since it’s so pointless, just a vestigial automatic reaction. That didn’t make their attacks any less vicious or unforgiving.
I sighed, and turned to head back to my own hopper.
Two of them. Standing between me and escape. I reached for my pistol…