The sun was rising over the desolate land. Its rays leisurely stroked the grains of sand and small pebbles that densely dotted the steppe stretching over the entire horizon. And somewhere in the distance, girdled by ribbons of dried-up, half-filled with sand rivers, towered majestic, towering mountains. These are the remains of giant artificial water tanks destroyed by a terrible war that has engulfed humanity for many years. But those days are over, and only rhizolite crystals from the vault and fairy tales that, like many years ago, their mothers tell children before going to bed remind them of the events of antiquity. After listening to interesting stories, children grow up and become irrepressible romantics. They dream of meeting people who don't live under the protection of domes. These domes covered only a few surviving city-states. Once they saved many lives on the territory of the continent of Kasia, called Eurasia by ancient geographers, and now stationary shields keep people from harmful solar radiation, with a bluish flicker reminding of the once blue sky.
Science, thanks to which the weapons that devastated the earth were created, is now helping humanity to survive. Scientists are revered in each of the cities. After all, they multiply and pass on knowledge to others and work tirelessly to restore the former appearance of our once very beautiful planet.
The twenty-first century gave birth to many brilliant people, whom descendants remember with gratitude. In the two thousand fiftieth year, after the construction of a new scientific town in Russia, which later grew very much, science began to flourish. The government patronized scientists and the best minds from all over the world began to come here, but the state did not forget about its citizens, they were allocated countless grants for promising projects that increasingly surprise the public of self-taught inventors, flocking to Altair in great numbers. Altair is exactly the name of the most beautiful and modern city of that time, whose inhabitants, as it turned out later, would advance science for many centuries to come. It was there that the great physicist Anatoly Nikolaevich Gavrilov, who changed the world, was born.
His research as part of a scientific group, which he later headed, brought to the world one of the most significant discoveries in the last hundred years-the technology of converting electromagnetic waves into attraction attraction, which opens up unprecedented opportunities for people. This effect was named after the discoverer-the Gavrilov effect, which began to be used in almost all technology and many industries, mainly in attraction generators operating on new physical principles, creating gravitational fields capable of both attracting and repelling any bodies and particles. This discovery excited the heads of all scientists and inventors of that time. Rallying together, they created a huge number of devices and apparatuses. One of the most important of them is positron storage.
Thanks to the experimental positron trap created by designer Nikolai Tverkov, based on the Gavrilov effect, physicists from the 14th scientific group managed to develop an industrial installation capable of storing antimatter indefinitely. And with this, the era of studying the properties and practical application of antimatter began. These studies made it possible to create not only an extremely efficient rocket engine, a gravity module, a neutrino communication system, but also the most powerful weapon -a neutron bomb, also called a neutromodule, which is a direct descendant of nuclear bombs.
The discovery of methods for long-term storage of antimatter was gladly accepted by military scientists, who began to use antimatter as a new explosive. When 1 kg of matter and 1 kg of antimatter interact, annihilation occurs and an amount of energy is released equivalent to the energy released during the explosion of 42.96 megatons of TNT. The most powerful nuclear device ever exploded on the planet, the Tsar Bomba, weighing 26.5 tons, released 58 megatons during the explosion. The neutromodule's ratio of device mass to energy output was truly amazing and left far behind the Temer limit for thermonuclear weapons, in which the most effective energy output does not exceed 6 kilotons per kilogram of device mass, and in a module weighing 10 kg with an antimatter mass of 1 kg was approximately 4,300 kilotons per kilogram of device mass. Fortunately, this weapon has not been used in wars for a long time.
In 2077, these developments helped to avoid a collision of the earth with a huge comet. To combat the cosmic threat, urgently, after an unsuccessful attempt to destroy a celestial body by an unmanned rocket, the first controlled spaceship was designed and built, equipped with an antimatter engine and the most powerful shield of the type "sphere" that existed at that time. The crew consisted of three people who would later become heroes. The ship had two positron torpedoes on board, with which the comet was successfully destroyed. This day, September 8th, 2077, in world history became the date of the beginning of deep space exploration at a new level, and twenty years later humanity extracted resources from meteorites and asteroids to the fullest, and the 2100th year was marked by the construction and sending into space of the first research corvette, pushing space with the help of a warp engine. A great many starships appeared, and every child dreamed of becoming a space pilot.
People have realized their dream-they have escaped to other planets. At the beginning of the 22nd century, the first colonization expedition to Mars was sent. With the cheapening of flights, space tourism developed, the first research bases on the Moon and Mars were abandoned long ago. In their place, cities have grown up, drowning in greenery. They were protected by energy domes, ensuring the safety of their population. Cities on Mars and the Moon united into communities, and then into states. And then, after the revolution on Mars, there was a major space conflict that broke out because of Phobos, one of the satellites of Mars, on which the Earth Coalition planned to build a transshipment station for resource-producing starships. With this, the planet-state of Mars was fundamentally not in agreement. As a matter of urgency, Phobos was declared the property of Mars. The point of no return was the destruction of a group of cargo cruisers of the 1st echelon of the Earth Coalition, which were preparing to land on a Mars satellite.
This conflict has become the largest of the existing ones. For the first time, military operations were conducted in space. More than four thousand starships and more than 200 million soldiers and civilians on both sides were destroyed. The Moon was also involved in the conflict. Battles were fought both in space and on the surface of planets. Despite the ban on the use of positronic weapons, they wiped out the majority of the world's population. The remaining few cities located in Eurasia survived thanks to the most powerful domes. During the fighting, all spaceports and communication centers on the planets were destroyed. People were cut off from each other, the governments of the states had only a few small ships at their disposal and did not dare to use them. The Earth suffered the most during the conflict. The surface of the planet turned out to be completely uninhabitable, a thick layer of the atmosphere was lost, all living things that were not protected by domes died. During the war years, giant water reservoirs were destroyed, some processes took place in the bowels of the earth, due to which almost all the water went deep into the planet. The seas and oceans have dried up, and all the water that is available to people is extracted from huge wells located in every city.
Humanity has been living in such conditions for several decades, slowly restoring the planet. Factories have been built to purify the air. Although an all-terrain module or a protective suit is still needed to move outside the dome, the air is already breathable in some places of the planet.