Author: proximalflame

The images kept coming; the planet had been bombed ruthlessly. Not with nuclear weapons, but with asteroids. Something had sat above it and hurled rocks – little ones, big ones – at a defenceless world over and over. Analysis put the first strike and the last one 2, maybe 3 days apart. “They wanted it,” Jacob mused. Karen looked up from her readouts. “What?” “They wanted the world. Look at this attack – it was meticulous. Here, this island city – first, all the bridges connecting it to the mainland were taken out with smaller meteors, then the city was blasted with one big one. No one was supposed to get out. But the dams, the nuclear power plants, the oil rigs – they haven’t been touched. There’s been collateral damage from the tsunamis and earthquakes, but whoever did this tried to leave as much of the infrastructure intact as possible.” “Without those pesky inhabitants,” the younger woman replied bitterly. Jacob nodded. The asteroid bombardment had been followed up with the atmospheric dispersal of a bio-weapon. One specifically targeted to the dominant species on this planet. It was unlikely that many of the inhabitants had survived the relentless bombing, but those that did wouldn’t even have had a chance to die from starvation. “How much of their industry survived?” he asked. There’d be time to feel like a grave robber later; right now he had a dying ship to fix and not enough resources to do it.