The Old Empire

The Old Empire was a human civilization that travelled between stars and left star maps, orbital stations and other technology behind. The Gilgamesh followed its maps to a system where an Old Empire distress beacon was still transmitting. The name itself was imprecise, as Holsten Mason points out, and the humans of the Gilgamesh knew the civilization mainly through its surviving relics.

Remains in space

Earth’s later spacefarers recovered maps and charts from failed satellites, ship fragments and broken orbital stations. Some of the stations held the vacuum preserved corpses of Earth’s former inhabitants. The maps showed where the Empire had travelled. They guided the Gilgamesh to the system containing Kern’s World.

The distress signal came from the Second Brin Sentry Habitat, an automated installation near Kern’s World. It identified the planet as quarantined under the Exaltation Program and warned the Gilgamesh not to approach. The habitat’s systems were still active thousands of years after the Empire’s fall. The surviving technology could also kill: it destroyed the ship’s drones and interfered with the Gilgamesh’s systems.

The Empire had begun terraforming other worlds. The Gilgamesh crew later found an unfinished terraforming station, a hollow cylinder divided into compartments. It had been left behind when its engineers departed, probably for Earth. Its life support and other systems had been damaged by an electronic plague. This was the first terraforming station anyone had accessed, and its records gave Holsten new material to study in several Imperial languages.

The war and its aftermath

Holsten tells Avrana Kern that factions within the Empire fought a civil war. Both sides used weapons he could not identify. He describes the conflict as devastating higher civilization on Earth and destroying the colonies. He says the Empire’s electromagnetic weapons and electronic viruses disabled engines and artificial minds, leaving some colonies unable to support life. These details come from Holsten’s account, which he frames as a reconstruction from the limited historical record.

The Gilgamesh crew also knew of colonies on moons in Earth’s system. Guyen argues that automated base units could establish a foothold on a moon near Kern’s World. Holsten doubts this plan, recalling that the Empire’s colonies had failed because they were not stable or self sufficient. The book gives no exact account of how long the war lasted.

After the war, Earth suffered a glacial period. Holsten describes a postwar industrial society that may have lasted almost a century before the atmosphere blocked sunlight and the ice spread. He treats estimates of the human population during the cold period as uncertain. The ice preserved poisons and sicknesses that later contributed to Earth’s continued decline.

Later views

Holsten once studied the Empire, but the discipline had fallen out of favour by his time. His society saw the Empire’s weapons and waste as causes of its own decline. He also recognizes that his people depend on the Empire’s technology and records. Even at the unfinished station, the Gilgamesh crew can use only fragments of what they find, and the old systems remain difficult to understand.

Unanswered questions

• How long did the civil war last, and which factions fought it?
• How far did the Empire travel beyond the locations preserved on its star maps?
• What did the Exaltation Program involve beyond the quarantine around Kern’s World?