the blatantly Darwinian imperative to eliminate all possible competitors, all possible threats to their existence.
In fact, this radical form of natural selection had dominated the galactic scene ever since sentient life had first emerged, some eight billion years before. In any given epoch, it took only a single intelligent species with technic aptitude and a lack of empathy for anything Other to emerge from the cauldron of its birthworld and insure its survival by eliminating all possible rivals. Galactic civilizations rarely overlapped perfectly in terms of their scientific and technical levels; with each encounter, one species tended to be older than the other, usually by many thousands or tens of thousands of years, and hence far more technically advanced.
As new civilizations emerged and achieved technical capabilities permitting space flight and long-distance communication, most wondered why the skies of their worlds, which should have been humming with the signs of advanced civilizations, seemed so silent, so empty. Each time new races, new civilizations took their first tentative steps out beyond the worlds of their genesis, We Who Are, sooner or later, detected their efforts from their scattered bastions, descended upon their worlds, and relentlessly exterminated them. Hence, the silent sky.
But like the Children of the Night, the One Mind, and so many others who’d come before, We Who Are were not omnipotent. The vast, sprawling spiral of the Galaxy, possessing some three hundred billion stars, is far too large, with far too many worlds, for any one race to monitor every possible lifeworld, every emerging sentient species.
And there were so many of these. …
In the outlying regions of the Galaxy’s Perseus Arm, within the dense polar jungles of the warm, inner world of a class-G5 star, a race of brachiating mollusks—morphologically, at least, they somewhat resembled certain members of that terrestrial phylum—swung from the interwoven branches of sessile thermovores not unlike Earthly trees. The species was young, as yet, but had developed an elaborate philosophy based on mating calls, territoriality, music, and mathematics. One day, they might have much to offer an evolving Galactic polylogue, but they hadn’t yet developed electronics or radio, much less the instantaneous magic of quantum-coupled communications. The huntership-communes of We Who Are had passed through this star system several times within the past ten thousand or so years, but not noticed the species’ thriving, arboreal cities.
Not yet.
Closer in toward the galactic core, within the teeming star clouds of the Sagittarius Arm, on the rugged, tide-strained volcanic moon of a superjovian gas giant, a race of armored paraholothurids built water’s-edge hive-cities of compacted excrement and composed palendromic epics celebrating their having been chosen as slaves of the sky-disk they saw as the eye of God. Natural radio emitters, they broadcast the glory of the one true religion to the stars. We Who Are had detected those signals and searched for their origin; so far, they’d not found the holothurids’ world, for they tended not to think of planetary bodies outside of the star’s liquid-water habitable zone as a possible abode of life.
That particular blind spot had given them trouble more than once in the past, and likely would again.
Closer in still toward the galactic hub, near the merging of the Norma and Scutum-Crux Arms, a fiercely radiating type A star blasted its unusual coterie of rocky worlds with intense radiation. Bathed in abundant radiant energy, Life had emerged on the innermost world and, borne by the local stellar winds, had seeded the other, outer planets of the system as well. Sentience had arisen here a few million years before, rising among several of the numerous, fast-evolving taxas of selenium-germanium chelated crystalline chemovores that constituted the local biosphere. Here, again, the manipulation of naturally occurring radio waves became the basis for communication, and, again, those manipulations had been detected in the depths of space, light-years distant.
The pace of crystalline life, however, tends to be slow, too slow for We Who Are to distinguish that life from the inorganic chemistry of accreted minerals. Those received artificial signals had caused the local We Who Are node some considerable concern, but it was clear that the problem soon would take care of itself. Type A giants are short-lived stars, their lifetimes on the main sequence lasting less than half a billion years. The local star already was showing signs of instability, and soon the abundant radiation that made life and sentience possible here would become that life’s executioner.
Twenty-three thousand light years from the Galaxy’s center, within the smear of stars and nebulae known as the Orion Arm, a world called Chiron by its most recent inhabitant, represented two distinct threads of civilization within the Galactic scene. Bathed in the yellow and orange hues of a double star, the world’s continents were battered and cratered by an intense celestial bombardment of half a million years before, and everywhere stood the somber and silent ruins of a golden civilization swept away by the firestorm. They were known by those who’d come later variously as the Ancients and, so numerous were the crumbling shells of their hell-blasted world-cities, as the Builders.
The Builder civilization had been a brilliant concord of machine intelligences arisen and evolved from various organic precursors; the asteroids that had destroyed Chiron had been flung into the planet by We Who Are, whose hunterships had sought out the Builders’ colony worlds scattered widely across perhaps a third of the Galaxy and in like manner, relentlessly and methodically exterminated each one.
Chiron was also known to its more recent colonists as Alpha Centauri A-II. Just four and a third light years away lay the G2 star called Sol, and the homeworld of an ambitious, carbon-based, oxygen-metabolizing species of sexual mammals that called itself Humankind. Within the past thousand years, an eye’s blink against the span marking the rise and extinction of myriad expressions of galactic life and sentience, humans and their artificially sentient machines had left the world of their birth to venture to the worlds of nearby stars, beginning with Chiron, and going on to assimilate numerous star systems scattered throughout an oblong realm measuring perhaps eight light centuries across at its greatest extent, four at its smallest. They’d encountered other intelligent species—the primitive An, the advanced but retiring N’mah, and the benthic species of brilliant mathematicians known to them as the Eulers—all three the shattered remnants of past encounters with We Who Are.
And, more than once within the past handful of centuries, Humankind, too, had attracted the xenocidal attention of We Who Are, and the destructiveness of those encounters was rapidly escalating. Most recently, a human battlefleet had used an ancient system of stargates to reach an important node of We Who Are near the Galactic hub, and there used Euler technology to detonate the star.
The resultant nova had finally caught the full attention of the Galaxy’s overlords.
And they moved now with blatantly uncharacteristic haste to obey their racial hard-wiring and eliminate once and for all this new and potentially serious threat to their survival.
The final clash, the final Armageddon would come soon, and, when it did, it would do so on a scale unknown since the extinction of the Builders.
1506.1111
First Platoon, Bravo Company
Carson Gate/Cluster Space
