Semper Human by Ian Douglas

something here. How could the bastards be waging an interstellar war and not be aware of it?”
    Schilling cocked her head. “Just how much did your age know about the Xul, General?”
    The bulkheads of the Memory Room were at the moment set to display a panorama of the Galaxy as viewed from somewhere just outside and above the main body. Garroway couldn’t tell if it was a high-resolution computer-generated image, or an actual camera view from out in the halo fringe,but either way it was breathtakingly beautiful. The soft glow of four hundred billion stars shone behind Schilling’s head, a radiant corona of stardust.
    Watch yourself, Trevor, he told himself. You’ve just been hibed for way too long . A pretty girl, romantic lighting …
    Then he wondered if he’d just transmitted that thought. This new hardware was going to take some getting used to.
    If Schilling had mentally heard him, she gave no sign. She merely watched him, backlit by the eternal curves of the galactic spiral arms, waiting.
    â€œThe Xul?” he said. “Not a lot about their origins, really. Uploaded mentalities. They must have been a technic civilization like us, once, but at some point they embraced a kind of immortality by turning themselves into patterns of data—software, really—running on their computer networks. The xenosoph theory I was taught was that when they were biologicals, before they even achieved sentience, they evolved a hyper-Darwinian survival tactic—an extreme racial xenophobia that led them to wipe out anyone who might be or might become a threat. And when they uploaded themselves, they took with them their hardwired xenophobia. And that turned out to be the answer to the Fermi Paradox.”
    Schilling nodded. “We know it as the ‘Galactic Null Set Problem.’ The Galaxy apparently empty of technic civilization.”
    â€œOkay. Before we got off of our world, though, we didn’t know what the answer was. There were lots of possible explanations. Maybe civilizations routinely destroyed themselves as they developed bigger and badder weapons. Maybe the only way to survive for millions of years was to develop a completely static, non-expansive culture that stayed on the home planet contemplating its collective navel. Maybe all of the rest simply never developed technology as we understand it, or never moved out of the Stone Age. Or, just maybe, we humans were the first, the only civilization to make it to the stars.” He shrugged. “ Somebody had to be the first.”
    â€œAnd then we found out we weren’t the first.”
    â€œRight. Ancient ruins on Earth’s moon, on Mars, on the earthlike worlds of nearby stars. And, buried beneath the ice covering one of Jupiter’s moons, we found The Singer. A Xul huntership, trapped in the Europan world-ocean for half a million years. And eventually we did encounter other civilizations. But apparently the Xul had been hovering over the entire Galaxy for…I don’t know. A million years?”
    â€œWe think at least ten million, General.”
    â€œOkay, ten million years. So the Xul are sitting out there in their network nodes, just listening. When a radio signal suggestive of technic life comes in, they would trace it back to the source and smack the planet with a high-velocity asteroid.
    â€œYou people will be more up on this stuff than me. But we know a kind of Galactic Federation of beings we called the ‘Builders’ or the ‘Ancients’ were genegineering Homo sapiens and terraforming Mars half a million years ago, and had built planetwide cities on Chiron and a number of other extrasolar worlds. Along came the Xul and—” Garroway slapped the back of his hand, as though swatting a mosquito. “The Builders were wiped out. Then about ten thousand years ago, an enterprising interstellar empire had enslaved much of humankind and set themselves up as the gods of