Tempestuous Ashen Planet

It took them thirty-seven years to get there.  Most said that it was to be a costly project, and such resources would have been better served elsewhere.  There were always two sides to every argument.

The day that the group set out on their long assignment, they said their farewells, for it would be that they would never see their families again.  It was a project not only for exploration, but one that could provide a new home, for the planet had shown signs of failing.

The seven explorers and their three robotic companions left the planet, and all that they had known.  They were on course for a distant planet; one that could provide a new life for their species.

It was a long voyage.  It was one that had it's share of risks, and dangerous situations.  Many times, their little exploration vessel suffered damage, attacks from space-born creatures, and other deadly encounters that exist everywhere from one solar system to another.

During the long travel, the group lost one companion to infection while collecting necessary resources within an asteroid field, and three others to a solar flare and it's radioactive effects.  It was to be expected.  They lost one robotic companion as two of them collected biological material that was necessary to produce valuable fuel for the explorers.

When the battered vessel arrived at the distant planet, the four surviving explorers found quite a discovery.

It was a planet of ash.  It was a planet of burned material that had formed from a long extinguished supernova that had occurred at some time in the distant past.  Gigantic spires jutted up from the highly alkaline seas, and within those, a strange teeming of life forms that had evolved within it's depths.

Strange poisonous clouds lined the skies in stranger formations, and huge spheres floated amongst them.  They provided highly corrosive rains, that wore away at the spires and other formations that continually jutted upwards into the ashen planet's alkaline skies.

Five moons shot around the planet so quickly, that caused the most turbulent of seas on most of the planet's surface.  Great monstrous creatures that had evolved from the smallest of life forms lumbered across the hostile surface; their monotonous voices and their massive forms caused fierce rumblings across a far distance from where they slowly moved across the ever-changing continents.

The four surviving explorers noted all of this.  They explored more of the violent planet, and discovered even more.  They looked at each other, and after a few moments, they gazed to each other.

"They said that we would fail.  They said that our quest was one for fools.  They said that we would perish long before we reached this planet.  What we say, is that now, at last, we have discovered our new beautiful home."  They said to each other, as they sent back signals to their failing planet, in hopes that soon many vessels loaded with settlers may make their way to their new home.