If someone on the target world had been looking skyward when the vessel disengaged its spacetime-warping engine; the blast of light and radiation generated by the dissipation of inertial-energy from rapid deceleration, would have been drowned out by the glare from the main-sequence star at the heart of the system. The control-system of the massive, automated, preservation-arkship had chosen this entry vector specifically to mask its entrance into the system to keep its existence secret from the inhabitants of the third planet.

The arkship had no biological crew. In fact, the species that had built the first of the arkship fleet had gone extinct twenty-six million, seven hundred thousand years ago when their star went supernova. The few straggling survivors were never populous enough to rebuild their civilization, so they poured their remaining time and energies into building more and more advanced arkships. One of the first fleet had been dispatched to this world ninety-six million, three hundred thousand years ago to rescue a species that was doomed to go extinct when an asteroid hit their world and wiped out nearly all life on the planet. That species had evolved and learned of their existence on the arkship, eventually improving the ship’s own technical capabilities and making it their own. They now reside solely aboard the ship, on the opposite side of the galaxy.

The written history of the species that created the arkships said that 6,000 years ago (from the time the history was written), their god had given them the knowledge of the vast ocean of interstellar space. With that knowledge came the responsibility to become protectors of lost souls. And so it came to pass that over the eons, even as their civilization faded into the mists of time, their efforts to honor their god brought them everlasting memory in the generations of civilizations that followed them. Forgotten by name and knowledge and art; remembered only by the deeds of which they did in honor of their god: they preserved. And preserve they did; referencing the ancient Book of Knowledge, they cast themselves across the currents of space, looking for the lost souls that were foretold of impending doom, tasked with trying to save.

By this time, they had twice before visited this very star system, and this planet in fact. And if the book was to be heeded; they would return thrice more to preserve three more cultures from oblivion. For some reason, the plan in this universe had decided that civilizations from this particular planet had an important destiny to play in the future of this galaxy.

As the arkship entered into orbit around the star, directly opposite the target planet; it began prepping a series of scout drones. These autonomous sensor probes were equipped with holographic cloaking devices which would render them completely invisible to the local population. This would allow the probes to close-in with the planet in order to make detailed observations, in order to provide the artificial intelligence aboard the arkship the necessary information to plan how to complete its preservation mission. It took only a few days of observations before the arkship realized there was a major problem. The target culture was not a single species but a collection of many species with similar characteristics, and were located all over the planet. For a species preservation like this was expected to be; normally the arkship would sample the DNA of every member of the society to develop the total genome, and select several members to enter cryogenic stasis.

Upon arrival at a new world, the sequencers aboard the arkship would generate new individuals from the basic building blocks of DNA, and the members in stasis would carry the cultural knowledge to allow them to rebuild. That would not work this time: there were simply too many various species and not enough time to catalog all the genetic diversity among the individuals in so many species. So the arkship began computing possible solutions to simply move the entire culture. As had happened the first time they had visited this planet, the entire culture would need to be evacuated. Back then, it had been a simple option of gathering as many individuals into the holds of the arkship as possible, and heading off into deep space. As it considered the multiple possible solutions, the arkship’s own sensors continued to study the star system they were in. It soon realized that there was in fact a solution provided by the star system itself.

While much of the primordial gas and dust had been blown clear into interstellar space by the stellar winds of the star, the system comprised a fairly dense asteroid belt between the fourth and fifth planets. Additionally, there was a massive cloud of asteroids, comets, dust and other primordial debris forming an orbiting cloud, approximately 1.9 light-years thick. With a plan conceived, the arkship’s AI launched several survey drones to catalog the bodies in both the inner planetary asteroid belt as well as the outer cometary shell.

As additional information was received from the planetary survey drones, the AI was revising its material-requirements upward several times as tens of thousands of individuals would need rescue, as well as all the additional support species (plants and animals) that would be needed to support those animals. According to the estimates generated from the information in The Book, the AI would need to arrange life space equivalent to one-eighth of the existing planet’s landmass. Even with its industrial matter synthsizers and robotic assembler drones, it would take more than two of this planet’s orbits to complete the project. However there was another solution which would allow the Arkship to complete its work in far less time.

The ArkShip had found that the land space needed was capable of being mined out of the orbiting satelite of the second planet in this system. Stealing an entire moon was a novel approach for the arkship-AI, however it soon realized that the planet's counter-spin would rapidly collapse the moon's orbit through gravitational wave dissipation. Since the moon would quickly disappear regardless, the AI deemed the moon's value as a lifepod to be far in excess of its value as a planetary bombardment. With that decision made, it immediately began mining space out of the center. It would still take a significant fraction of the third planet's orbit, but it would be done much faster.

Seventeen/twenty-secondths of an orbit later, the moon had been hollowed out, the removed materials mined for its metal content. The water, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon-based molecules held over for supplies for the life-support systems. A quantum energy tap located in the exact center of the hollow would both provide unlimited power for the vessel as well as simulate a star for the arkship inhabitants. A network of graviton generators and waveguides were grown throughout the "crust" of the new ark. The ark's faster-than-light engines would allow the vessel to circum-navigate the galaxy, the plan to have the ark return back to its home system in approximately 1,000 of its inhabitants years.

Now it was time to begin the rescue. As far as cultural salvaging goes, this would be the easiest any of the arkships had ever done. Several orbits before the arkship arrived, the entire group of species had moved into an underground cavern, cut-off from the rest of the planet's creatures by a cavernous waterfall. By the time the new ark was ready for transplant, there were only 850,000 individuals left of the species. The remainder had been hunted to extinction by the bipedal monsters that raged across the surface of the planet. The AI had evaluated the possibility of instead of arking the target species, of wiping out the vermin which had threatened the target species. Only after a complete ten-thousand year simulation of events did the AI discover that three additional rescues from this planet would fail if it eliminated the threat-species. Curious that the problem would eventually become those needing rescue themselves.

After most of the individuals had bedded down for the night, and the one water-going vessel had left the area after spending time with what appeared to be a family of the target species, the arkship AI ordered the ark into low-planetary orbit, and combined its own evacuation matter-movers with those installed within the Ark, and proceeded to evacuate the entire colony of individuals. By dawn, the colony was aboard the Ark, itself beginning the long acceleration process to get ready to jump to FTL drive without injuring or informing the inhabitants of their situation. The ArkShip had one goal left before departing itself. It carefully assembled a mass of asteroidal material into a stream that would bury the cavern and seal it off from the rest of the planet. As the species which the AI had begun calling the vermin would eventually develop more and better water-going craft, they would eventually find this location and likely fall in. For their own safety and the safety of ancestors of the other three cultures yet to come; it sealed that chapter of the planet's history off from the rest of the planet.

With the cavern filled in and sealed off, the Arkship had erased all evidence it could find of the existence of these creatures. After one last orbital survey to ensure nothing had been missed, it engaged its own FTL drive and caught up with the Ark to escort it out of the planetary system. Though equipped with an impressive array of weapons to protect itself, the controlling AI had only just been crafted and would take considerable time to become fully sentient and competent. Until then, the Arkship would guide and teach it; protecting it and its inhabitants. The ArkAI spent that same time growing and expanding its understanding and control over the systems of the ark; it also studied the inhabitants via its internal sensors. Everything it learned, it copied to its own databanks and also secured into a library of sorts within the Ark. Someday that information would benefit the inhabitants; or if they did not survive, explain to anyone who might find the Ark what had happened.

Over the next several fractions of a galactic orbit, the ArkAI grew into its responsibilties and as it did, adapted some of the things it learned from its inhabitants to itself. One of the races of the species had the remarkable ability to cloak itself through a prismatic refraction of its own plasma breath. Using this idea, the AI developed a ceramic armor for itself which, when exposed to the relativistic particle radiation from traveling at Faster-Than-Light speeds, would effectively cloak the entire Ark. By the time the home planet had orbited its star one complete time, the Ark had accelerated up to its maximum speed. Another orbit there-after, the ArkAI had grown the new ceramic layer around itself. After one last data-sharing, the Ark and the Arkship went their separate ways.

And then at long last, with Earth in the proverbial rear-view-mirror and twin explosions of starlight... As far as humanity was concerned; there were no dragons.