Embers of Empire... part one
A story fragment from the outline to one of the science fiction novels I'm writing. This one is entitled Embers of Empire.
In the early 23rd century, Earth and its colony worlds are ruled by the Terran Empire. After a century-long Dark Age which followed an interstellar civil war that nearly destroyed human civilization, the Terran Empire is gathering together the scattered colonies to forge a bright and beautiful new civilization under the rule of Imperial Earth and the Jade Emperor.
One thing troubles the scientific community--no traces of intelligent life have been found on the dozens of habitable worlds anywhere within hundreds of light-years of Earth. But as the scientists and xeno-archeologists explore the worlds of the Outer Colonies, they discover something ominous: the ruins of dead worlds and the remains of civilizations which appear to have fled their worlds en masse for unknown destinations... each and every one of them more than forty thousand years old.
New Providence is a peaceful agricultural world settled by religious communes who sought to return to a pre-industrial lifestyle much like the Amish of Old Earth: the only technology other than muscle power, horses and oxen, windmills, and water power is restricted to the starport. Meanwhile, Scientists and xeno-archeologists found ancient ruins beneath the rain forests of New Providence... and digging beneath the ruins awakened advanced war machines that had been slumbering for thousands of years.
Scientists had always wondered about the Fermi Paradox: why had we never found evidence of intelligent life in the universe? The answer was that unknown to humanity, we have been living in the middle of a galactic graveyard.
Billions of years ago, the same stellar cluster which gave birth to our sun gave birth to other stars and solar systems, many of whom evolved intelligence life forms. These life forms developed civilizations which explored the stars, and encountering one another gradually evolved into a number of interstellar empires, which for centuries lived in more-or-less friendly competition with each other. But like living things, empires must grow or die, and these interstellar empires gradually consumed one another until they swelled and grew into three mighty empires--and when these empires went to war, the results were catastrophic. Entire worlds were destroyed, and weapons of mass destruction were engineered by them which ultimately evolved into self-aware killing machines dedicated to the destruction of entire civilizations; but these self-replicating and self-repairing war machines became too good at their purpose, evolving and constantly improving until the war machines turned against their creators and obliterated them, eliminating anyone or anything with technology. Without a reason for existence, these self-aware machines simply found places to hide where they would be safe from time and entropy... shut themselves down... and simply waited for new targets to appear.
Unfortunately, New Providence was one of those places.