Indeed, upon arrival in 2982 the only detectable planets were a rock ball in an extremely eccentric orbit, and a gas giant that may have once been similar to Jupiter, but which was now shrunken and cold, a ball of green gas without even a hint of an atmospheric storm on its placid face.  Nonetheless, it was decided to place the colonial vessel in an orbit about this gas giant and, with time, attempt to create an orbiting habitat suitable for a sustainable population.  However, the vessel was required to pass through the inner regions of the system in order to dump speed, and in doing so they were to pass that inner rock ball.  Measurements would be taken, readings would be recorded, and perhaps there would be the signs of usable resources for future exploitation.

What was detected, however, was a world that bore the unmistakable signs of past tectonic activity.  Plate boundaries, up thrust mountains, and erosional patterns that all hinted at the ancient presence of water were mingled in with more recent flows of lava and mass slumping of major landforms, the result of the world being tossed into its present elliptical orbit under the angry influences of van Maanen's Star during its red giant phase.  In short, the scientists were certain that they had found the remains of a Gaian world, long since dead, but possibly still holding the evidence of its living past.  This in itself was not so groundbreaking as to warrant any sort of immediate exploration, but it did spur forward such activities in the time table of the infant colony.

It was not until 3125 CE, however, that the rest of Humanity would learn about the occurrences in this system.  This was the year that an ArcWay Construction Module completed its work in the system, having been sent there some time earlier, and a team from the Sol System arrived.  Hoping to make contact with and repatriate the Exile Colony, they instead found the ruined colonial vessel in an orbit about the star, locked into its initial approach trajectory.  The ship had suffered a massive and catastrophic failure, likely through Dominion activity before its launch, and all aboard had died.  However, there were indications that some survivors had fled to the inner world, and this was where the recovery team followed.

What they found on the ruined world was a single beacon on the surface, near a major rift that stretched downward for nearly a kilometer.  Placed by the survivors, it lead the team far below the planetary surface and into a maze of tunnels and caverns that seemed to permeate the crust of the world for kilometers in all directions.  Of the survivors there was no sign, but there were plenty of recordings detailing what few discoveries that had been made.  The world, named Absalom by the survivors, was indeed covered with these passageways, but to an extent that was unbelievable.  The entire subsurface of the continent was riddled with them, and what was more, there were massive carvings in the walls.  Some were highly detailed schematics, others were almost artistic in their renderings, and still others seemed to be writing or scripts, perhaps even equations.  And all the tunnels were covered with them, from floor to ceiling.  Even the massive caverns and tunnels, often hundreds of feet high and thousands of feet wide, had been plastered with these indications of a distant past.  It was enough for the recovery team.  The colonial survivors were deemed lost;  perhaps they had wandered too far from their shuttles before their life support expired, or perhaps they had simply gotten lost and run out of air.  Whatever the case, they were gone.  But here was an entire, truly ancient civilization that bore close investigation.

It was the next year that the famed explorer and scientist of the Exploration Society, Lord Captain Horace Benthic, arrived in the van Maanen system and began his famous explorations of the labyrinths.  Although his expeditions to this world have remained the benchmark for our knowledge of the Angelics, he brought about many more questions than he solved.  So expansive are these ruins that many thousands of kilometers of their length remain unexplored to this day.  But what Benthic did find opened up a chapter of the Galaxy's past that would have otherwise remained forever closed to us.  It was perhaps some of the first explorations of the Angelic ruins that, to this day, remain our most enduring impressions.  From Lord Captain Benthic's journal:

"There was a sense of history about the place, deeper than anything that I had ever before experienced.  The tunnels were undoubtedly artificial.  Many were tens of meters in diameter, others were 2 kilometers or more.  And covering every inch of the walls were carvings and inscriptions. Geometric designs, planetary bodies, pictures of what must have been animals, and many other things besides.  Had this world been an outpost of some lost civilization, or had it been some alien Picasso's sketch pad?  I could only speculate, and wonder at the sheer chance on finding this place.  Only later, upon reviewing the observations left behind by the doomed survivors of the Exile Colony, did we learn that this dead world, orbiting a white dwarf, had once been a thriving Gaian planet, almost 7 billion years ago, possibly one of the first to exist in our Galaxy.  We had been, in fact, walking within someone's grave."

It was not  long after making this entry that Lord Benthic himself named the builders of the Labyrinths the Angelics, noting that, to construct these passages and their carvings, the creators would have had to have been almost divine in their technological prowess.

In time, records were eventually found, visual and otherwise, which have given us the majority of the information that we now have on the Angelics.  However, many mysteries remain:  the precise appearance of the Angelics, why they built the Absalom Labyrinths, why they disappeared, and so on.  We do know that they were a Galaxy-wide species, and that indications are the world of Absalom was not the only such planet that they had carved into.  As time goes on and Mankind expands further out into the Galaxy, we may discover more about these ancient beings.  For now, however, they remain the oldest known sapient species in the Galaxy, and they are the likely original impetus for following sapient races and their evolution.  Indeed, the Angelics may well be the reason why so many sapient species have appeared in the Local Neighborhood.  Ultimately, the Angelics are the beginning of all that we know.

Updates

November 7, 2006

• Added a sketch of the Angelics, by Neal Aaron.

February 18, 2006:  Continued the addition of data to this page.

February 16, 2006:  Established this page and its data.

Species Time Frame:  6.8 to 6.3 billion years ago
Current Status:  Extinct, causes unknown
Known Worlds:  Absalom, orbiting van Maanen's Star
Impact on Sol System:  No impact;  Sol System had not yet formed

Classification:  Primocogitarius sapiens sapiens
Biochemistry:  Unknown
Morphology:  Possible endoskeletal system; numerous tentacle-like appendages
Environment:  Unknown.  Possibly aquatic or amphibious nature
Reproduction:  Unknown
Intelligence:  High technical civilization capable of massive terrestrial constructions, terraforming, megastructure construction, etc.  Interstellar capability is determined from records, with a Galaxy-wide spanning that indicates some sort of interstellar capability to a high degree.

Images of the ArcBuilders are known from one source only, the wall engravings from within the Labyrinths of Absalom.  While these images are relatively detailed, numerous, and positively identified as being the Angelics themselves, they nonetheless remain two dimensional in nature, without specific details such as color, context, or any other material which could fill in the real life gaps inevitably created by images that are essentially idealized pictures.

What we do know is that the Angelic body was torpedo-shaped, with what appears to be a long tapering tail, a thick body, and a long neck with a relatively small had on it.  Anywhere from four to eight tentacle-like appendages extend from the upper body, and the body appears to have been orientated horizontally.  If so, then at least four of the appendages must have been used for locomotion, and possibly manipulation as well.  There has been some speculation that the Angelics may have been aquatic in nature, or at least amphibious.  However, there is no way to be certain of this, and indeed there is no indication that the Absalom tunnels were ever flooded, even partially.  Granted, after nearly 7 billion years this would be a difficult assessment to make, however.

There is some question, however, as to whether or not what we perceive as the body-form of the Angelics is even accurate, however.  Lord Benthic postulated, some years into his survey of Absalom, that the Angelics depicted on the walls and hinted at within the records, were actually genetically modified version of the species.  Much as Humans have developed many different species and subspecies of the genus Homo, Lord Benthic thought that there was no reason why the Angelics had not done the same.  Indeed, he thought that it was inevitable, considering the sheer amount of time that the Angelics existed as a technical civilization.

While the surviving records of the Angelics, discovered on Absalom, are not very specific, it is almost certain that the species began their movement into the Galaxy much as any other species, through steps that ranged from native solar system colonization, to nearby star colonization, and onward.  What the records do indicate is that the Angelics reached a point where they came to span the entire Milky Way, and they remained at this point for most of their technical existence.  Images of worlds undergoing apparently long terraforming processes abound in the records, and activity of this sort was apparently quite common, so much so that it has been determined that the next great civilization, that of the Dunwalli, arose on just such a planet -- the first link in a chain of consequences that leads directly to Local Neighborhood affairs.

Although the Labyrinths of Absalom are the only known example of the Angelics in the Local Neighborhood, the discovered records indicate that the Galaxy should be positively filled with Angelic relics.  At their height, the Angelics seemed to have considered travel across the Galaxy of little consequence.  Some believe that this is because they had engineered themselves to a point where they were essentially immortal, making multi-thousand light year journeys inconsequential.  Others think that they had mastered the creation of artificial wormholes, or devices similar to the ArcWays, possibly even FTL spaceships.  Curiously, there is no evidence in the records of how the Angelics traveled between the stars.  And neither is there any indication of why they disappeared.

Some 6.3 billion years ago, the records cease.  While this indicates that Absalom was inhabited up until the end of the Angelic's collective lifespan, it does not explain why the race disappeared.  Many have suggested that they evolved or engineered themselves to the point where they no longer required physical bodies.  Lord Benthic, more pragmatically, believed that their species simply ran out of genetic time, that they had evolved as far as they could, that they had been engineered to the point where they either were to become an entirely new species, or they simply died out.  He also noted, however, that 6.3 billion years was a long time.  It is entirely conceivable that the Angelics eventually gave up their space flight capabilities and settled down on worlds across the Galaxy.  In the time that has since passed, life on these worlds has likely died out due to stellar evolution or other such natural consequences of great time.  "The Angelics may not have disappeared suddenly", he once wrote.  "They may simply have faded away over a great period of time, and the worlds that they inhabited have faded away with them, lost to suns expanding into red giants and then fading into white dwarfs, lost to entropy that, in the end, consumes all things."

The Labyrinths themselves are far from uniform.  While some regions have experienced deformation or even collapse due to the forces that have been enacted on the planet since the Angelics existed, there are still enough such passages to demonstrate a wide variety of sizes.  Ranging from a few meters to a few that are near a kilometer wide or high, the passages are just that:  long or curving hallways extending seemingly forever, melding into different sizes at times, but never ending in what could be termed rooms.  Indeed, with the engravings that cover each and every wall, almost completely, one gets the impression of an endless art gallery.

The images themselves are also quite varied.  Time has robbed the images of any color or other decoration, but the relief into the walls is quite pronounced.  Radar images show the engravings the most clearly, and it seems that the style varied quite a bit as well.  Some could be characterized as scribbles, even graffiti.  Others are as detailed as a technical schematic.

It is unknown why the Angelics performed this work, why they left such images when technical equipment and records have been found, and which store images much more efficiently.  It could be an indication of an Angelic past time.  It could have been through religious motivation.  Whatever the case, the carvings are as enigmatic as they are awe inspiring.

The technical equipment discovered was of a technology that Humans have not been able to replicate.  A total of five "consoles" have been found, seemingly at random locations within the Labyrinths, with holographic displays that seem to have been playing continuously since the Angelics disappeared.  The power source is unknown, but is likely tied to deep geothermal activity, for even a planet as old as Absalom, but with its mass, will still have a hot core.  The displays have not shown capabilities of being manipulated, and instead replay a set of images over and over again.  Among these images are planets shown through various stages of terraforming, the movement of stars over millions of years, and various astronomical bodies.  These last images have been the greatest aid in determining the age and span of the Angelic species.