It looked like there was another dust storm on the horizon. Sophie looked through the binoculars swinging from her throat, and she saw it coming; they had a bit of time, but ever since the disaster where the moon was ripped out of orbit, and the orbit of the planet was shifted so many lifeforms - plants and animals - were in danger of going extinct.

Sophie was currently working in the Amazon, steadily stripping the rainforest to craters, believing it made lots of sense to remove what was left of the forests, jungles, and rainforests, and contain them inside the domed cities that had been rapidly planned and built with the help of the robot drones in the hopes of continuing to live.

The oceans were harder, but again, it was possible to preserve the rapidly damaged oceans with cities to preserve what was there. Sophie was unsure how well the work would go.

Sophie turned to her colleague, Rimmer. "It's such a waste, isn't it?" She whispered as she looked out over the surface of the Amazon. The rainforests, forests, jungles and glaciers, savannahs and deserts had been steadily torn up and preserved like they were giant bay trees dug out of their pots and moved somewhere else.

"What is?" Rimmer was too busy with the supervision of the loading of the animals and plants in the suspended animation tanks to stop them from escaping to understand what she was saying.

"Doing this, look at it; we're tearing our planet to shreds to just save it."

"Yeah, but it has to be done, you know that, Sophie," Rimmer said consolingly.

"Yeah, but what if it doesn't work out?" Sophie asked pessimistically, making Rimmer roll his eyes.

"It has to, until we've worked out how to travel faster-than-light, and found another planet," Rimmer said. "We already have the research units in place, and we're studying that alien starship's technology."

"You mean those saucers of those aliens who came to the planet to take our organs?" Sophie said sceptically. "Do you reckon it will work?"

"I hope so, we can't stay on this ravaged piece of rock forever."

Xxxxx

The UFOs were in pieces and many components were scattered throughout the laboratory in the bunker. The technicians and scientists working on the equipment had been doing so for the last few years, since the moon vanished, and its loss had badly affected the planet's orbit. The Earth was now closer to the sun than it had been, and the planet was becoming a desert world rapidly; a world once the crown jewel of the solar system, teeming with animal life, green with vegetation, bright blue with water, and possessed a cloudy atmosphere with a wonderful collection of climates.

Now it was all gone.

Humanity had learnt some very painful lessons. First, so many of them had cared more about money, and keeping research of space travel to a minimum. The UFOs captured by SHADO during the war had given humanity a lift up and boosted their knowledge of science and technology, and they had opened the doors to the key to reusable space flight. The problem was space flight as in the days of the Apollo missions was expensive; towers of metal and equipment and tanks and tanks of fuel shooting into space, threatening to kill the crew as easily as gravity would crush them to death when the rocket blasted off.

The UFOs had changed that reality and made Moonbase Alpha, the Martian colonies and the laser-propelled sail ships possible.

But the World Space Commission had been slow to go further, but now things have changed and humanity needed to get out into space. That meant more Eagles had to be built, the Oort Cloud had to be mined; each planetoid and each asteroid had to be mined and hollowed out and made safe for human habitation; at the same time, observations had made it clear rogue planets drifting through space, came extremely close to the Oort Cloud.

The potential for them was endless.

With the rogue planets, it would be possible to colonise them and allow groups of humans to get out into space and live in the open, instead in enclosed cities. But at the same time, they would be used as launch pads for spaceships built in the asteroid fields that would be sent out into interstellar space, powered by massive Queller drives to random parts of the galaxy in the hopes of rebuilding the human civilisation on a planet where they would be able to live as they had in the past.

Fleets of Queller drive-powered spaceships had gone out into the Oort Cloud to both strip the asteroids and planetoids and start setting up the colonies while sending part of the mineral wealth back to Earth. The minerals would be used to build massive space colonies, which would be populated by every one of the survivors who were having children and would share them with the animals and plants salvaged from the growing wreck that was Earth.

But everyone was hoping for a miracle.

They were hoping for faster-than-light, and they were coming close to it.