Due to mysterious reasons like hatching underground conspiracies and working for shady secret organizations being a total lazy jackass, yours truly had to disappear from the spotlight and minimize his blogging time. However, you have been granted special access to read his latest sci – fi story, which unlike his earlier works is actually complete. 😛
From this distance, the red giant looked hellishly insane – a raging inferno of hydrogen, helium and carbon. Even as they watched, fiery rivers coalesced and disappeared, the surface burned with a searing blood-red vengeance, and giant prominences which could easily have wrapped a dozen earths within it burst and crackled with its accompanying flood of radiation. It was a red giant in its very death throes, a star ready to go nova.
They watched with disinterested curiosity as the planet closest to its star emerged out of the red background. As finer details began to appear, they saw that it was a sterile world – its lands were scorched, atmosphere lost and oceans evaporated. It was a planet barren of a single bacterium and will never know life again.
The long space vessel landed on the night side of the planet with a careful grace. It was not completely dark; the land was suffused with a pearly glow from the sky. The scene in the heavens looked like a star-gazer’s dream: today the stars were a hundred times brighter than they had once been.
The first to descend to the ground were the Elgae, strange and intelligent winged creatures from a planet that was a hundred light-years from here. The searched the land for days, patiently hunting for signs left by the planet’s long gone occupants. On the third day, they found it.
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