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Ceresport, Ceres that was, the largest city in the solar system. Probably the largest city in the galaxy. A mostly stony asteroid originally 975km at the widest point, it became a mass of tunnels and surface construction more than 1400 kilometers across. She was home to the headquarters of the Solar Transit Authority, seven of the ten largest shipyards anywhere, and more than 24 billion souls. Almost 2 billion more people called her home for reasons of vessel registration and taxes. In short, the last 720 orbits had been very kind to her founding fathers.
She glittered and winked in the darkness, utterly without regard for energy budget. The searchlights that stabbed out into the dark to draw attention to their accompanying billboards were augmented by the flash and snap of arc welders in the yards, and message lasers of all sizes and wavelengths. On approach, her control zone extended across a spherical region of space three hundred thousand klicks in radius, and her defensive net was at least as wide. Nothing reached her skin without close examination, yet she transshipped millions of tons of cargo every day. The crowning glory of a civilization numbering in the trillions, spread across every body of rock and metal in three star systems. And so very, very fragile.

When the rock came in from Epsilon Eridani, the STA spotted it outside the orbit of Eris, and flashed the message inward, but light is too slow. This rock was coming at just under 99% of c, and the message reached Ceresport just 93 minutes ahead of the monstrous projectile. All the message lasers, the energy and kinetic weapons, even one foolish/brave ramming attack, did nothing but change the million-plus tons of stone from a solid projectile to one made of superheated gases.
It slammed into the city squarely on top of the Hansey Sisters Vessel Fabrication Yards, which simply ceased to be in a moment of unimaginable fury. Passing through the space once occupied by the second-largest shipyard ever built by man, the mass of vaporized stone punched 500km deep into the most densely populated piece of rock there was. The shock waves raced throughout the structure, collapsing some spaces, opening others to vacuum. Pipes and tunnels burst open, mixing disparate atmospheres never meant to meet with an ocean's worth of water and sewage. She hemorrhaged air and all that lives in air to the outer darkness like a dying beast.

When the final counts were in, over ten billion corpses and parts of corpses were recovered, and some seven billion souls were confirmed to have survived. The rest were just...gone. With a transient population numbered in the millions, the true count of the dead will never be known, but it is certainly greater than eighteen billions. Thus started the First Interstellar War.

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