His business is war, and the picture before him is the result of it. Endless streams of energy, like the rain, poured down on the planet. Monstrous charges of blinding death spewed from hundreds of cannon barrels, overcoming in seconds the cold vacuum separating the planet's orb from the Royal Navy's ships.

The planetary shield had long since fallen silent, allowing a sea of lilac fire to ruthlessly burst into the fouled atmosphere, and tear apart the sparse cloud cover, literally vaporizing the weather phenomena. Walls of colourful death collapsed uniformly upon the surface, sweeping away everything in their path. The devastation he saw with his own eyes was frightening and mesmerizing.

Positioned along the planet's equator at the best possible angle, the ships of the Royal Squadron fired incessantly on the surface, the combined power of their salvos enough to utterly devastate it. Turrets blazed red, spitting out charge after charge. The gunners had to take their turrets out of the cannonade one at a time to avoid systems failures - to allow the ice vacuum and the built-in systems to cool the metal in the turrets. But, the silence of one turret in an entire battery, of which there were four on Valor alone, did not bring the natives on the surface any salvation.

The energy rain evaporated the remains of bodies of water that had been polluted by their careless hosts: small seas of seas and small rivers. Rare clouds scattered by fire at the beginning of the bombardment, obeying the universal law of the water cycle in nature, turned into volatile vapour, soaring into the upper layers of the atmosphere, where they turned into dirty clouds of impossible colours. Such clouds, which had been natural bodies of water until a few hours ago, interfered with the aiming of fire. If, of course, there had been one; but, no one was shooting the natives from aboard the starships.

A royal order ordered the complete annihilation of the planet's population. Turning it into a lifeless wasteland that would remain so for dozens of generations. Fire from orbit scorched the remnants of the forests, adding clouds of smoke to the vomit-coloured clouds from the fires breaking out across the planet's continents. The flames scorched centuries-old trees, incinerating them to a state of volatile black dust in a fraction of a second. Shrubs evaporated, leaving not even a trace on the charred soil that had finally lost its fertile layer...

But who could call this piece of incandescent slag, shimmering through the fog with a bardic glow, soil? Only a very optimistic expert. Because there's not a grain of earth left on the planet. Not a grain of sand, not a piece of silt or turf. It's all burned up in celestial carrion. Not a blade of grass will ever grow on this planet again, because all plants, which were few even before, were burned up-if not in the bombardment, then certainly from the raging fires. All the useful minerals that the local soil could be rich in were transformed into billions of atomic chains that will never come together again. Any seeds burned in the fires of hell.

Never again will there be the slightest piece of green on the planet.

No more cliffs or steep precipices. No more gentle hills, or plateaus as smooth as a flight of thought, used as runways. The stone sculptures of nature have perished, shattered into pieces, turned into incandescent streams of rubble. Crushed by precise hits, they swept across the plains in torrents of rockfall that crashed down on the heads of panicked natives, maiming and killing them. But perhaps it was all too quick, even merciful, to die with your vital organs crushed by a giant boulder.

For those who survived, there was far more suffering awaiting them.

The biosphere fought for itself to the last man. Mother Nature sought to protect her wayward children by revealing to them the grottoes and caves previously sheltered by the thickness of the oceans, where they could wait out the storm.

If the storm would ever end.

But, streams of lilac messengers of death kept falling from the sky for days on end. The hardest rocks crumbled, unable to withstand the high temperatures, splitting into pieces, exposing to orbital gunners the shortest routes to the planet's bowels. Where before there had been no wind at all, fiery whirlwinds now raged, destroying the planet's precious supply of oxygen. They swept across the planet in random cataclysms, inevitably engulfing the rapidly shrinking population of the planet in their deadly embrace. The natives were burned to the ground - those who had time to understand how unfair life was. Such "lucky ones" evaporated in a fraction of a second.

But the unfortunates had already had time to experience for themselves what it's like when an irresistible force turns your hair cover alive from its proximity to the open flames that have already engulfed everything around it into a smoking mass, the stench of which is eating into your nostrils, cutting your throat and causing tears to form in your eyes. How it erupts, unable to withstand the physical laws of the universe. How you and your clothes turn into a blazing fire in the blink of an eye, only to burst into flames because there is nothing to put it out. Any moisture on the planet--even your sweat--has long since evaporated. Everything under your feet is red-hot.

And finally, your skin begins to dry and crack, like the handiwork of a primitive shaman who stretched the unblown skin of the stranger he killed over a drum. At first, it's just a tedious itchy feeling, an echo of dehydration. Then, it gets worse. And when your body is just screaming for just a little moisture, the idea that there is moisture inside you pops into your head. That runs through your veins. In a fit of madness you try to get at least it, at least as hot, but fluid... However, all in vain... The heat becomes so unbearable that your desiccated skin, if you were lucky not to get under one of the fiery tornadoes so far, simply ignites. Because it's so dry now, it flares up from any nearby source of the fire.

And you burn. You suffer and howl like an animal while your muscles and sinews feel unbearable pain coming into contact with the open flames. If you're lucky, you die of pain shock.

But, that's what would happen to an ordinary humanoid. The inhabitants of this planet are far harder than others. So, charred and burned, with a body devoid of flesh, with snow-white bones flashing through gaps in the smoked meat, he still hopes to escape. To reach any cave, to take shelter...

But, it doesn't get there. Even if the cave is only one meter away, at arm's length, it won't help.

Because your burned lungs, partially burned out from inhaling the heated air, together with another portion of the heat, will bring to your gut flakes of ash. The same ash that will clog your chest, which you will try to spit out, hoping to get rid of the ubiquitous lung companion of disaster.

But, you can't.

Because even as the rocks crumbled, the sand turned to glass and evaporated the next second, as the rubble rolling from the breaking mountains turned into a viscous red-hot basalt wave, those who bombard your planet set the final stage. They have triggered the eruption of volcanoes, which, every second, spew out millions of tons of ash and red-hot lava from the planet's bombarded core, which will never cool down, but will continue to flood the scorched-to-slag surface of the planet until the red-hot substance of the core penetrates every crevice and crevice and burns the corpses of the dead.

Everything will go on until through the dusty clouds of smoke and stench the scarlet light of the incandescent surface comes from below.

And only then will the fire from heaven cease. Because the besiegers have had their way - never again will there be life on this place, either organic or artificial. From now on, the landscape of this world is a lifeless desert, where only bacteria accidentally brought to the surface by a meteor will survive for several centuries.

The King commanded it. His word was the law.