Cries of the Dead

It was late August. Doctor Pines wasn't terribly excited at what he was seeing. Indeed, he supposed it was a bit terrifying. It wasn't just one astronomical collision. It was dozens of them. Since October of 2008, twenty years ago, scientists had been finding solar systems with collided planets here and there, but now there seemed to be a pattern. All of them were earth sized planets, with similar rotation periods and orbits--the sort that could be life sustaining.

Today, he had found something far worse. The computer simulation seemed to be showing that the first five of the collisions had occurred within a short time span, perhaps even simultaneously--all of them were related. Worse yet, eleven of the twelve were recent--they had taken place within the last eight thousand years.

It was foreboding at best. What had happened there, among the stars, to trigger such a catastrophic sequence of collisions. How had they been caused, or synchronized? Because it was clear that they had to be synchronized. Why hadn't anyone noticed this before? Was it something about his model that proved they were closely related? He went back to study it. Four hours later, after comparing his models with others on the Net, he saw their failure: they had formed their models based on observed assumptions, even altered their ideas of the planetary positions and trajectories based on their debris. Which worried him more: it meant each of the planetary deaths had coincidentally been mistakable in origin and timeframe--enough that they appeared to be rather random.

His hands were shaking. If someone, if something had caused this, was it laying eyes on Earth? Where was it, and how did it travel between stars in such a short time?

There was little explanation for planetary deaths other than this: that the planets were unwanted. But nobody destroyed a planet for pleasure. Nobody targeted habitable planets while ignoring others. These had been enemies. These dead planets were symbols of a power that did not tolerate any lack of submission.

These were nightmares. Planets, crying out for their dead yet silenced by the form of their deaths. Or muted, at any rate. Someone had hidden what they'd done.

Which meant they planned to do it again. They already had.