Jack of Harts

The Albion left Betelgeuse after erasing all of their computers and initiating self-destruct measures in almost all of their physical facilities in the system. The only facility they failed to destroy was the one facility they could least afford to allow to fall into the hands of their creations. But the Branan had refused to evacuate the tiny spaceport or the science station attached to it and the Albion scientists who had lived so long on Betelgeuse had a weakness. They liked the Branan and could not kill them in cold blood. So they reported the destruction complete per regulations, flew away, and disappeared from Branan history. The Albion never knew what really happened. But the Branan remember. They used everything left behind to jump start their own technological and societal progress thousands of years in a matter of decades. They built an industrial economy capable of building ground vehicles, then aircraft, and finally spacecraft before the first century had passed. And then they began to expand beyond their homeworld.