This scene is easy to imagine. A young man sits down to eat supper with his family.
"Father, I was thinking about taking lessons in space flying this fall."
"Huh what good will that do the farm if the son is away flying some freighter or what ever several light-years away?"
"Well father if you remember the crops all burned this summer."
"All the more reason for you to stay here and help out."
"Help out with what?
The crops are ruined and most of the field is covered with that Stardestroyer."
This would be a good time to explain what happened the summer before.
One fine day Fjap and his father were readying themselves to go out to the fields and dust-sprey the weeds that were threating the crops. Fjap scanned the sky for the Stardestroyer that had been hovering in orbit over Anoat for the last two weeks. It was an old Victory class Destroyer but it had loomed rather majestically over the planet. Fjap had gone to town and noticed that the spaceport was buzzing with activity. Strange crafts hurled themself in and out of the port and big lifters either landed or took off and all these crafts headed for the big ship in the sky.
Fjap's father shot one glance up at the big ship when his son commented about the size of that thing.
"Huh they should load this thing with some crop dust. That way it will be of some use."
"Come on father. This is a warship capable of bringing fiery destruction down on unsuspecting planets."
"If only it could bring dustful destruction on our fields down on unsuspecting weed then it would be of some use.
Besides A ship of this size will never escape unnoticed into an atmosphere, or a star-system,
so it wouldn't just pop up one day and begin raining fiery death down."
Fjap agreed with his father although he felt that his father was a bit uninterested about the big ship.
His father went to work on the crop duster and had a small trouble shooing the pigeons off it. These pigeons were fat lazy and extremely stupid. All of a sudden wailing siren went off in the town and the strange crafts shot off into all directions like disturbed insects. In the sky lightning started flashing in every colour. Mostly green. Something was happening right next to the Star destroyer. Loud noises could be heard and something started burning up in the atmosphere. It dove in an ungraceful arc and slammed into the earth, exploding. Fjap and his father stood dumbstruck and looked into the sky. All of a sudden the Destroyer spewed forth a big guzzle of flame and started turning, ever so slowly. It pivoted on its axle and its nose took a dive towards the planet. More flame erupted from its big belly and it began a steep dive towards the earth.
Fjap's father frowned.
"Is this what you meant when you said that it would rain fiery destruction on a planet."
Fjap looked confused.
"Nooo I don’t think so. I always thought they would like fire their laser or something."
"Then it is safe to assume this is not how a Star destroyer is supposed to act?"
Asked Fjap’s father.
"Yes I think so." Answered Fjap.
The Star destroyer began falling faster and it seemed to twist it self while falling. It wasn’t twisting it self, it was breaking apart. The front end of
it fell away while the backside merely continued its curve.
"Fjap this thing that is heading this way...It is heading THIS way, right?"
Asked Fjap's father nervously. Fjap stared.
"Yes father." And without a word the pair of them turned and ran towards the speeder they had arrived in. Fjap looked over his shoulder and saw the
immense bulk of the Star ship become even more immense.
"Run father, run." He urged his father.
"I'm a running son. You just keep on running son."
Fjap didn't need any urging and together they ran. Fjap was a bit quicker so he threw himself into the drivers seat and started the engine. Three seconds later his father made a running jump into the car and screamed: "Get us out of here." Fjap hammered his foot down on the accelerator and sped away from the field. Fjap's father looked behind them and kept on screaming. Fjap risked a backward glance. He wished he hadn't. Precisely at that moment the Bridge hit the ground, immediately followed by the rest of the VSD. The noise was incredible. It had began as a low rumbling and worked its way up to a high pitched roar through bone rattling hum to teeth breaking whine while maintaining its ear threatening vibration.
Then the shockwave hit the speeder.
Several acres of field slammed into the small craft while most of the breathable air in Anoat rushed ahead and took every thing with it. The blast formed a cushion between the fragile craft and the land, now vertical and settled it down in a small recess in the field, which was as before mentioned, vertical. Fjap closed his eyes and took his foot off the accelerator. Better to ride it out there he thought. Fjap's father closed his eyes and covered his ears. Fjap wondered if he would ever get the hair out of his eyes as the force of wind settled it permanently back-to-front.
After a while Fjap dared to take his hands off his eyelids and saw his father's lips move and he must have been saying something because a large vein stuck
out on his forehead. That vein only showed itself during Big Yelling’s. A typical Big Yelling went something like this: "WHY ON EARTH HAVEN'T YOU
FINISHED WITH...almost everything" Fjap saw his father pointing furiously at something over their heads. Fjap looked straight ahead. There he saw the
ground move faster than he liked so he looked up.
"Ohhh shit" he screamed.
Ahead was a 20-m. drop straight down into KlesKles ravine. Although it was rapidly filling with the fields normally behind them
Fjap saw that it could seriously damage them if they hit it. Just before they hit it Fjap floored the accelerator and the speeder sped forward and by a mixture of fluke and skill they hit the right time to do it and drove down the steep wall. In the bottom a really nice piece of scenery had settled in a heap and the speeder slammed into it and the rest of the fields on top of it.
Nothing moved for quite a long time. Then there came another of those easy to imagine scenes; A dirty hand suddenly shot skywards, stretching to the freedom. Then it slumped like a dead D'es plant. Nothing happened for a long time. More time passed, then the hand moved ever so slightly and managed to free the rest of the body it was attached to. Then the same hand plus the other dug for a moment and managed to unearth another body. Fjap and his father sat quietly for a while. The main blast had passed them and they could hear it, well maybe not hear it, more like felt it, in the distance moving away. Fjap had a peculiar ringing sound in his ears. He shook his head trying to clear his head but it didn't work. He looked up but failed to notice the falcon spiralling upwards, although he would have usually done. His father stood up and started walking home. His gaze went upwards on he noise the falcon.
" Fjap did you see this?" he asked and pointed at the falcon. Fjap looked up but didn't see anything and said so. His father looked at him strangely because Fjap was usually the first to notice these things. It was as Fjap was somehow connected to the nature and he had often baffled his parents by being acutely perceptive of things going on around them. Fjap shrugged his shoulders and tried to get the ringing out of his ears. It was if someone had shut down a radio station that has been in the background and there was nothing left but overwhelming silence. There was of course still much commotion in their D'es fields because it takes a while for a star destroyer to fall to the earth. After a while they stood up and headed home. This was one of the worst ecological disasters that had hit Anoat for a long time. You had to go all the way to the last Ice Age to find destruction and earth rearranging of this proportion, although several strange landscape architects had managed to come pretty close.
An interesting fact of the Anoat ecology is that the Hopping Falcon is the most unusual predator. It has actually managed to heighten its flying skills so much that it manages to make a micro-jump within the planetary gravity mass. It seems that when the falcon dives from the height of 6 thousand meters, accelerating far beyond free fall it somehow enters a form of hyperspace and remerges seconds later after covering a whole lot of distance in real space. Biologists have speculated that somehow it is able to detect microscopic gravity-masses of its intended victim to revert to real space. This is an truly remarkable feat giving the fact that the prey it lives on is the Flabby Pigeon who falls from a tree faster than flying the distance.
Another interesting fact is that quite often neither bird survives the impact of a falcon travelling at near light speed.
A lone pigeon flapped across the sky with much trouble. Then it crash-landed on the ground, as it is the closest it can get to actually settle down. The pigeon looked around for some time and then settled down in picking on some seeds that somehow had managed to be on top of the ground instead of being buried several feet under it. The falcon spotted its favourite prey on the ground and struggled for some extra height. When it reached desired height it pummelled down and when sufficient speed was reached it performed the famous micro jump. The pigeon, unaware of the coming danger went on picking out its favourite prey, seeds that could not run away.
The falcon appeared few meters above the pigeon, which was unusual because they usually converted to real-space only centimetres from it, this confused the falcon greatly and it tried to fight gravity. It failed miserably and instead of bearing down on the pigeon it slammed into the ground and left a small crater. The pigeon looked smugly around and kept on picking at the seeds.
What the falcon failed to realise was that during the falling of the Star destroyer the pigeons had gone through several stages of evolution in seconds and had ended up with the one that saved them from the falcon, but unfortunately not from the falling pieces of metal. The pigeon population had dropped dramatically but it had left them with the perfect answer to the falcon problem. The pigeons came denser and extended their body mass several meters into the air. When the falcons came near them the sudden change in gravity they went into real space and when they failed to find the pigeon in the next ten centimetres they got disorientated and tried, as this unfortunate falcon, to get into the air to try again.