Got a new story in mind. Got an opening salvo. Any comments anyone? This had been a blue world once. The skies shone pale blue over shimmering lakes and seas in the equatorial belt whilst north and south, bright white ice caps glistened. On the shores of the gentle lakes and seas, intensely dark green vegetation hid delicate and spindly gossamer life. A vast ecosystem spread around the world. Beneath this, a seething microscopic biomass extended several miles into the planet, up through the surface and far out into the skies. That was when the lights were in the sky, gentle ghostlike greens that danced far above the ice. Those days however had long gone, and with their passing the world began to die. The clouds began to thin and the rains stopped. The sensitive membranes of the great animal kingdoms were the first to suffer, ripped apart by invading cosmic rays. Even the hardiest vegetation could not survive without water and soon, all that was left was bare iron rich rock and a handful of disappearing salt rich poisonous lakes. On one of these last days, a dim red sludge eked out the last of its existence along such a lake as the reddening skies above began to flash. Something was happening not just above this world but all around the sky. As night fell an extraordinary sight revealed itself. The sky was full of comets, everywhere – as far as the eye could see. This world’s life was born in such skies, but that was long ago. In the outer parts of the solar system something had gone wrong and the storm in the skies began a frenzy unlike anything seen since the birth of these worlds. Now, arriving from the dark side of the planet, an astonishing sight approached. Angry clouds obscured much of the body but it was clearly an ancient world – one which had been sent careering out of the outer solar system at the same time as the rest of the ghosts in the sky. This was a minor planet dressed up a comet – a cryovolcanic world thrown from its orbit and sent boiling into the baking inner worlds. It hit at 30 kilometres a second, instantly vaporising the North of the planet with the power of a million billion atomic bombs and excavating a crater in minutes that covered half of the entire planet Bright red molten rock sprayed out from this world, much of it falling into orbit or racing toward the south of the planet. However, millions of tonnes escaped from the tug of the planets gravity and out into interplanetary space. One chunk of this rock cooled rapidly as it left orbit, so much so that the centre of the rock had never really heated beyond 150 degrees for more than moments. Some of the last micro-organisms that had lived on this world happily in the seething hot saline seas near the volcanic vents of Olympus mons found itself freezing, and it remained so for centuries.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Aug 2013 19:23:42 +0000
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