The woman was herded with the rest of her people down the rubble littered main street of the smashed city that until yesterday had been their home. Her clothing was in tatters, barely enough of it left to grant her some level of dignity. Even so she was lucky, many of the people walking beside her had no such vestiges of their former lives.
They all knew of the destroyers, though no one knew who they actually were. They came from very far away in great starships and numbers so vast that they could overwhelm any resistance. They would fall upon a planet and smash whatever civilization stood there, taking most of the population as slaves and killing the rest. This was all that was known of them, as told by the occasional survivor found upon a ravaged world by a passing star ship.
The woman had heard the stories and nightmare tales for as long as she had lived, now she finally knew what the destroyers looked like. She saw one of them beating a child in the street. They were small, this one only slightly larger than the child he was beating, but they had enslaved soldiers that were large and physically very powerful. These soldiers had been the key to taking her world so easily.
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Suddenly the woman screamed and ran at the little destroyer, she had realised that the child he was beating was her daughter. She never even covered half the distance between them before a soldier standing to one side raised his weapon to shoot, there was a flash from the muzzle and then…
The crowds of new slaves were herded past the dead woman, none of them eager to spend their own lives in such a futile attempt to stop the destroyer from beating the child. Finally the child fell to the ground, her injuries too great for her legs to support her any more. The destroyer kicked her several more times before turning and walking away, followed by his personal guards.
The child didn’t even weep, she crawled part of the way towards the body of her mother before falling still, another lifeless body reaching for the one that had cared for her all her life among the thousands of other corpses. A footnote to the destruction of a civilization.