Book 2: Chapter 77: Completion
Bill
April 2221
Delta Pavonis
It took a little over four years for the Others to strip Delta Pavonis.
It was an impressive speed, until you realized that exponential behavior was involved. They brought a huge complement of autofactories, which they used to produce equipment, which mined resources for the production of more equipment. At some point, they stopped building equipment and started loading the cargo vessels. Finally, they harvested most of the equipment they’d built. The fleet that left the system consisted of only cargo vessels and death asteroids.
Once they were gone, we moved in to examine the damage. The asteroid belt and any small moons in the system had been stripped, of course. What really hurt was the state of Delta Pavonis 4.
The Others hadn’t been concerned with ecological damage, obviously. They’d left the planet a dirty ball of mud. All the green had long since faded to a dull brown. The blue of the oceans was replaced by a mottled grey, and the ice caps had either melted or been coated with dust and soot.
Every major city had been demolished. The lack of corpses was, in a way, a blessing. But it left a ghostly, empty tableau that would have been completely appropriate to any of a hundred post-apocalyptic movies.
I took it as long as I could, then I turned off the video feeds, put my face in my hands, and wept.