Probes from Earth first arrived in the Delta Pavonis system in 2118. They unfortunately found no earth-like planets there. The 4th planet, a gas giant, had a large, young moon that had an atmosphere, geologically active land masses and oceans. While not immediately habitable, this (along with the metals-rich asteroid belt) provided the resources required to build a small habitat in orbit around the moon which by 2160 was home to 170,000 people. The main activity was operating HE3 mining operations in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant - this led to the development of both Delta Pavonis and other nearby systems and by 2190 Delta Pavonis IVb became a major staging point for development ships. This all came to a sudden end 10 years ago, when the Gaar arrived in the system. This was not first contact with the Gaar; but what made this different was the immediate hostile actions they undertook. We now know, of course, that the Gaar were split into several factions which had even led to civil war - and not all of those factions were friendly or even neutral in their approach to human relations. We had just been lucky up till then. The image above was the last transmitted from Delta Pavonis; the ship which sent it was destroyed milliseconds later, presumably by the Gaar scoutships visible in the foreground. By this time the Gaar mothership had already destroyed the habitat. The mining operations were destroyed shortly after, but they did not have any capability for transmitting images directly back to earth. It is always possible that some transmissions will reach Earth in a little under 10 years time, when the 19.9 years required for those messages to reach us will have elapsed. There were no known survivours of the attack. =========== This image is an experiment on several levels: All modelled and UV'd in Hexagon, and textured in Vue 9 using only procedural textures. The asteroid field is an Ecosystem, and I have also experimented with using the z-plane data to add depth-of-field effects in Photoshop in post. Only commercial product used is the starfield background.