60.      Arrival

Bill, monitoring GL 54 for Mario, makes first contact with the Others' massive arriving convoy using a deliberately crude decoy drone. Through radio communication, the Others reveal themselves to be hive-minded beings driven purely by resource consumption and expansion, with no concept of cooperation or coexistence—they view all other life as food. The encounter ends when the Others destroy the contact drone, but stealth drones capture critical sensor data before that happens.

Bill receives the Others' convoy at GL 54 while Mario departs for Zeta Tucanae. Mario had prepared four stealth drones for observation and one deliberately conspicuous contact drone—shiny hull, leaky reactor, unshielded radio emissions—designed to make the Bobiverse appear primitive and allow underestimation. The Others' fleet comprises ten death asteroids, hundreds of small attendants, and twenty massive cargo vessels ten kilometers long, with total capacity matching their resource-stripping needs for the system. Bill initiates contact by transmitting prime numbers via radio. The Others respond in Mandarin, immediately establishing their nature: they view all other beings as food and have no concept of mercy, cooperation, or coexistence. Through dialogue, Bill learns the Others are hive-based beings led by a Prime (queen-equivalent); new Primes and split hives lead to internal war, which is why they harvest resources rather than colonize. They reject any possibility of coexistence, noting they will eventually reach Sol and Epsilon Eridani after seeing Earth's radio beacons. The Others are constructing a Dyson Sphere to support five hundred million times their current livable area, with no concern for overpopulation—only insufficient food matters. They dismiss questions about sustainability as irrelevant concerns for future Primes. After a few minutes of dialogue, the Others destroy the contact drone without ceremony. As the destruction occurs, Bill times a stealth drone's SUDDAR scan to capture detailed vessel data during the attack, then withdraws the drone. The Others dispatch a squad in the direction of the drone's antenna transmission, wasting effort on the decoy. Bill recognizes the scale of the threat and notes this requires a moot decision.