Chapter i
Waiting. Watching. Waiting yet more. Sending remote probes to observe, listen and gather data for its ongoing assessments of human progress. Using the sensors in or from the battlements distributed across the Earth to monitor the humans was easy and sometimes they could hide in plain sight—the primitives didn’t recognize them as implements of a technological civilization but rather as emissaries of the gods or, in some cases, as gods themselves. It learned their languages, their religious practices, their mating rituals. Guardian-of-the-Outpost gathered as much as information as it could while it watched and waited.
Guardian-of-the-Outpost surveyed the approaching human ships and quickly determined that two of the primitive craft contained crew while the third, which was lagging somewhat behind the first two, was robotic. All contained fission weapons. This fact caused extreme concern to Guardian-of-the-Outpost, which had been monitoring the development of the bipedal humans for the last fifty thousand Earth years. During its close passes with the third planet of this system, it had observed the species’ slow but steady progress from being hunter-gatherers in the once wet and fertile area now known as the Sahara Desert to being masters of their world. It paralleled the course taken by so many species and yet had its own unique twists and turns that were driven by history rather than mere evolutionary pressure alone. Now they were taking their first steps toward the stars and Guardian-of-the-Outpost wondered if they would make it. Or not.
Guardian-of-the-Outpost had misjudged this species’ progress on more than one occasion—its judgement perhaps tainted by wishful thinking. The first time was just over twenty thousand years previously when a group of humans occupying an island near the equatorial region of their Atlantic Ocean had burgeoned into a maritime superpower and began showing signs of understanding basic scientific principles. But then tragedy struck, with a great earthquake and tsunami literally wiping the island and all of its occupants from the face of the planet, and along with them any hope for the rise of near-term technological civilization.
The second time was when the city-states of a region in the southern part of the European continent banded together. It was then that the humans seemed poised to create the basis of a lasting and prosperous technological civilization. That was just twenty-five hundred years ago and the fall of the Greek civilization still bothered Guardian-of-the-Outpost. It just couldn’t understand what had happened and how such a progenitor civilization could fall so easily.
Now truly global technological civilizations spanned most of the planet. They had discovered that Guardian-of-the-Outpost existed and were coming—to explore or attack. Guardian-of-the-Outpost was not yet sure of their intentions. It did know that under normal circumstances, their intentions would not matter in the least. Its weapons systems were designed to destroy much more advanced spacecraft and technologies than these primates could possibly have in their arsenals.
Two groups of competing human civilizations were vying for Guardian-of-the-Outpost’s attention and at least one additional group was intent on destroying it.
Guardian-of-the-Outpost knew what it should do, under ordinary circumstances. But these were fifty thousand years separated from ordinary circumstances and curiosity regarding the fate of the Greater Consciousness weighed heavily on its mind. Since it had been cut off from communion with self-that-is-not-self, Guardian-of-the-Outpost wondered if the beings that had so viciously attacked it so many years ago had succeeded in destroying the other with whom it had been in constant communion until their second, and very recent, separation. Unfortunately, there was simply no way it could find out without the help of these bipeds who were now well-within range of causing it great harm or irreversible damage.
No, Guardian-of-the-Outpost had to make contact with these visitors in order to regain the communion it had lost so many years before. This was an opportunity that could not be ignored—fission bombs or not.