Beyond the Rubicon

Dark City offender R303, you have been found guilty of the charges brought before this court. It is my duty to sentence you to death under Section 2A of the Pangropolis Criminal Amendment Act 2118. However, should you accept the most generous offer of joining sector 3, Special Penal Battalion, your sentence will be commuted to eighteen years. What say you? So begins an almost certain death-sentence in itself, a journey to a remote planet across the vast emptiness of space, where R303 and his unhappy band of felons wake from cryosleep to find an all but deserted planet. They are ordered to land on the forbidding world and ascertain what has happened to the sixty colonists and their outpost. Has their disappearance anything to do with the alien organism that feasts on the warm flesh, blood and entrails of the trapped, still living, human prey?