A distant sun

The time is a couple hundred years into the future.

Mankind has found a way to travel faster than light, but intersteller voyages can still take years, even decades, to complete. Still, we are reaching the stars, establishing colonies, finding resources to send back to the depleted earth.

We've colonized a dozen worlds. We've begun to explore a dozen more. Still, other than a few single-celled organisms, and even fewer multi-cellular organisms, we have encountered nothing else like ourselves. No sapients, no other civilizations, nothing.

There are those who find this unlikely. There has to be other life out there, complex life with the capability to form civilizations and explore worlds like us. Still for decades, there was nothing.

Then, one day, on an airless rock orbiting a distant star, ruins were found. An outpost, deserted hundreds of thousands of years, and nearly gone due to the ravages of time. Someone else was here. Someone not us.

As we expanded outwards we started finding more of these, though all had been deserted for thousands of years. Traces of traces. Nothing to indicate much about them, other than they were here and they built things and then they cleaned up after themselves and left.

Who were they? Where did they go?

Computers and scientists extrapolated from the sites of their known outposts, drawing a line to an area of our galaxy, one that we had yet to explore. A search of radio frequencies turned up nothing of a possible intelligent origin. Still, in our desperate loneliness to discover that Other, we sent a mission to that area, a highly advanced ship with the latest, most sensative sensors and scanners to look for them. The ship's crew consisted of the most exceptional men and women from the thousands of volunteers, on a voyage that could take over a century.

The ship's odds of finding anything, considering the unimaginable gulf they had to search? Not good.  Still, there was no harm in trying, it was thought.

What they find answers the question--what happened to the ancient ones? But it raises another question--will they survive long enough to let anyone know? For the ancient ones were fighting a terrible threat, one that eventually destroyed them. And it's still out there, waiting . . .

(Stay tuned for a track list.)