Book 2: Chapter 10: Genocide
Mario
November 2176
Zeta Tucanae
It took seven years plus change to get from Beta Hydri to Zeta Tucanae, although less than three years ship’s time. I spent almost the entire voyage going over the records from Beta Hydri 4. I didn’t want to believe that someone could have done that. I wanted so much for it to be a natural disaster of some kind.
But the evidence was, if not conclusive, at least pretty damned convincing. Someone had killed off an entire planet and collected all the bodies—literally all the animal life on the planet—then mined all the metals from the entire system. My mind kept playing all the movies where aliens came in and tried to strip the Earth. This was worse. They killed everything, and they left nothing. But how? And why?
I sighed and dismissed the theorizing for perhaps the thousandth time. I couldn’t know without more information. But I wasn’t going to wait. I needed to report this to Bill. The Bobs needed to be warned.
I couldn’t know in advance if Zeta Tucanae would be stripped of metal as well. If so, I would just skip to the next system, and keep doing so until I either found a good star system in which to build a space station or had traveled back close enough to simply transmit a message to Bill with shipboard comms.
I did the usual cautious approach into the star system, watching for Medeiros, aliens, other probes… it would be funny if I wasn’t so nervous.
I didn’t actually know if there were more Medeiros clones out in the galaxy, but since Brazil’s plan had been to keep producing them, it seemed a reasonable concern. Bob had prevailed against him in Epsilon Eridani, but that had been as much luck as anything.