"We didn't know." - Former Grand Most High Sma'akamo'o, from I Have Ridden the Hasslehoff

The Atrekna had used the planet long ago, nearly a hundred and twenty million years ago for the New Universe, over a billion years ago in the Old Universe. It was a system that was lush and resource rich and the Atrekna had been careful to shepherd the system's resources carefully. It was carefully protected, with the Atrekna only using the hyperatomic plane to reach the system.

Vast shipyard construction facilities and gas giant spawning seas were carefully overseen by the Atrekna. Not the common ones that merely produced AWM craft and Dwellerspawn to be temporally replicated.

This unnamed system was where the research took place.

After the hyperatomic plane was scorched and the vast engines of the AWM were rendered useless and the superluminal travel organs of the Dwellerspawn were rendered useless at best, fatal at worst, the Atrekna in the system worked hard to develop new methods of travel.

And failed.

Eventually, the Atrekna were forced to retreat. Temporal shifting and recursion had been getting harder and harder, the autonomous war machines had rebelled, and the Mantid had fled their regions with the Lanaktallan invading the Atrekna areas.

The system had been lost to time.

The Atrekna Dalvanak was literally millions of years old by the time the Old Universe collapsed during an ill-advised attack upon the New Universe. He had been alive for the Second Gathering, which had been repulsed and nearly ended up in the Old Universe being invaded by the military forces of the New Universe.

He had moved through the New Universe, examining its laws and rules. Determining what was different between the Old Universe and the New Universe. He had altered his ship, examined the species, and once even found himself in close quarters combat with the beings made up of rage and hatred that the New Universe had spawned after the Old Universe had been forced back tens of millions of years ago.

He had found ancient facilities where the psionic crystal storage matrixes still existed and coaxed them, nursed them, nutured them back to life. He had examined the memories and knowledge within those crystals, seeking out more knowledge.

As time went on he began to believe that his people would meet their end in the New Universe. Violently and painfully.

Still, he was loyal to his people.

He dutifully reported his findings when he could. Often he found himself challenged by Young Ones and Ancient Ones over the heretical nature of his discoveries, which were heresy by the sheer nature of the basic facts that the Atrekna were no longer the dominant predator of the New Universe.

When he had reported that the Hive Lords were extinct, defeated by the Mad Lemurs and brought into the arms of insanity with a joyous laugh of freedom, he had been challenged as if defeating him would make all of Dalvanak's discoveries false.

When he had reported that the Herd Lords were extinct, that the Atrekna's plan had worked, he was against challenged, as if killing Dalvanak negated simple fact.

He studied the lemurs and their allies. The Old Races were wiped away by the Mad Lemurs of Terra and their allies. Races from the Galactic Core, old beyond fathoming, were smashed aside with a roar of rage and defiance. Precursor Autonomous War Machines, the size of continents, were smashed into junk with the defiant roar of 'jawnconnor' and the scream of biological victory.

He returned several times to his people, often feigning outrage and challenging Ancient Ones, recovered through temporal recursion, to fights to the death. Rather than let the bodies of the Ancient Ones be reclaimed by slavespawn, he took them with him.

On his strange and twisted ship Dalvanak moved the bodies to a device that he and he alone possessed. He used psychic surgery to remove the defeated one's brain and place it within the device he had crafted from unholy knowledge that had been whispered to him from places best left unsaid. He used his psychic abilities to wrest the Ancient Ones's secrets from them.

Dalvanak used them to build a shrieking array with. He used the shrieking array to do the computations for his temporal planar shift drive, to move between dimensions in a plume of roaring chronotrons.

It was he who found the system. Sunk deeply into the fabric of the universe tens of millions of years ago, the sun looked faint and purple if it could be detected at all.

When his ship sliced through the temporal barrier and into the system Dalvanak expected to find nothing more than wispy vapors of a supernova contained by the system. Instead, he discovered that the research system was largely intact.

The interesting thing to him was that the containment had broken on a research species and they had spread and evolved. Not too much, but they were beyond hunter gatherer and settled down into tool using agrarians who were moving from bronze to iron after only a few hundred thousand years. A species of warm blooded reptiles who had overcome hunt-eat-breed to form a cooperative society that expanded very slowly.

That interested Dalvanak only slightly. That planet was used, previously, for testing slavespawn against captive species with high tech level in order to gauge efficiency.

The vast ship building facilities and spawning seas held little interest to Dalvanak.

It was the research and development sections that held interest to him.

Working quickly he moved all of the stasis field held artifacts to his own ship and left the system, heading for his secret lab orbiting a dark neutron star. It was a place of tangled chronotrons, twisted timestreams, and fractured time/space planes.

Dalvanak moved his ship to the vast slavespawn craft he had lured to the location and then lobotomized, clearing entire sections for his use and the use of his servitors. He ordered the simple spawn to move all of the stasis containers to his laboratories and set about examining them through the stasis fields and containers.

It was with some discontent that he received another summons to appear before the High Convention. He put his servitors asleep, made sure that the slavespawn craft would stay in place, and used his strange and twisted ship to report.

There, he admitted to the High Convention his discovery of the research and development facility.

The Convention became so logically obsessed with the existence of such a thing that he was able to slip out, murder a few Ancient Ones and Young Ones, and take them aboard his ship to ferry them to his dark labs within the lobotomized bulk of the slavespawn craft.

His ship vanished in a flare of chronotrons and a burst of static as his craft slipped between the dimensional sheer forces. His specially designed and adapted hull shielding, taken from destroyed autonomous war machines, writhed and twisted with blasphemous runes and images. His psychic senses were half-stunned by the thousands of gradients of shades of purple that streamed through the unshielded spaces of his craft where no chronotrons existed and any that appeared were devoured by matter that had no right to exist.

During his travel scraping between dimensions he moved up to the crystal bubble embedded in his ship's conch shell. He disrobed and entered the bubble, dragging behind him a living Ancient One who had once used their mastery of temporal mechanics to recursively bring slavespawn forces onto the battlefield. An Ancient One that had mocked Dalvanak's maimed features and hand.

Dalvanak could taste the twisted and scorched energies of the hyperatomic plane destroyed by the Herd Lord's desperation as he used his psychic powers to pull the Ancient One behind him, overwhelming the other Atrekna's motor and phasic controls. He lifted the Ancient One onto the twisted sculpture crafted from lemur bone and sinew and impaled them upon the sharp graven spikes.

**I need your eyes to see** Dalvanak told the unlucky Atrekna. He reached up with two of his remaining feeding tentacles, using the thin hollow barbed bones hidden inside to spear the eyes deep into the optic nerve and withdraw them from the doomed Atrekna's head.

Dalvanak turned from the screaming Ancient One to approach the crystalline wall of the bubble. It was thick crystal engraved with runes that Dalvanak had learned controlled and channeled the energies of the destroyed hyperatomic plane.

He hovered in place, lifting the eyes up even as he covered his own with a strip of cloth. He reached out with his psychic senses, seeking communion with the powers he had discovered lived in the dead universe and the burning universe.

When he was finished with his communion he moved over to the barely living Atrekna and with one slash of a curved and graven knife, spilled the other's guts out into an engraved bowl. He moved the entrails around, examining them, nodding to himself.

Satisfied with what he learned he left the crystal bubble and the mortally wounded and dying Atrekna and returned to the comfort of the tissue filled shell at the center of his craft.

He had learned much in his dark communion. His eyes, no longer white but a deep violet with a burning orange slit pupil, stared into the darkness around him.

He meditated on what he had learned as his ship slid out of the shattered planes and into the small bubble that slowly orbited the neutron star. From there, he went to his labs and ensured his projects were proceeding according to his plans. While some of the results were unexpected, Dalvanak did not restart the experiments but instead let them keep running.

He had learned from those dark powers that true scientific discovery did not lie with discovering what he expected to discover but instead with the simple phase: this is strange.

A psychic signal alerted him that things were occurring in the forgotten research system and he moved to the room where his biomechanical terminals were located.

The dark science he had discovered and researched was far from what any Atrekna, even a Hive Lord, would dare examine.

The melding of the biomechanical and the electromechanical. Of phasic and psychical. Of temporal and dimensional. Of crystal and electron. Of the shrieking array and the supercomputing quantum array.

Melded.

He settled down and watched the replay.

As Dalvanak had suspected, the Convention had sent Conclaves and Quorums to retake the research system. They had missed Dalvanak's surveillance systems where they hovered between two fractured microseconds, placed in the shifting grinding sliver of space between two dimensions, made both real and unreal through Dalvanak's dark sciences.

Dalvanak watched as the slavespawn superluminal craft arrived in the system.

As he had suspected, the Atrekna immediately moved to harvest the small species that they found on the sole habitable planet.

Dalvanak had known his 'peers' could not resist and so had taken samples of the small species and put them on a world that he and he alone could find to allow them to flourish. He found their simple minded worship of forces beyond their control to be satisfying in a cold way.

The slavespawn were half finished with harvesting the creatures when, as the being that Dalvanak took dark communion with had foreseen, things suddenly went sideways for the Atrekna.

Dalvanak had known that there was something out there in the darkness of the New Universe. Not some ancient race from a galactic core. Not something from the early days of the universe's birth.

No, this thing in the darkness was different.

The unknowable being that Dalvanak took communion with had whispered to Dalvanak that this thing was unlike anything that Dalvanak or his fellow Atrekna had ever encountered in all of their trillions of years of history.

The ships that suddenly arrived in system were not streamlined, nor were they pleasant to look at. They had not arrived of their own violtion, instead they had been pulled forward or backwards or perhaps even sideways by a temporal recursion copy attempt. Instead of slavespawn, the Atrekna instead were rewarded with dozens of strange and crude ships.

Heavy, bulky armor, engines that glowed with a sullen light, weapons that Dalvanak could hear echo screams in the silent spaces of the Cosmos's hidden places. Some landed on the surface of the planets, the rest attacked the Atrekna fleet with crude and effective weapons that stated that the makers could have made more sublime weapons but they were satisfied with the barbaric crudity of the weapons and defenses they did possess.

On the surface of the planet the small species was defended by this newcomer, who wielded phasic power with a heaping slice of madness and fully dollop of rage. He watched, carefully in order to ensure his spying was not detected, as the Atrekna found themselves facing a foe that did not have the elegant mastery of phasic energy that the Atrekna did.

They were the typhoon to the Atrekna's breeze. The atomic blast to the Atrekna's scalpel. The meteor strike to the Atrekna's gentle touch.

Dalvanak watched as the newcomers did not just kill the Atrekna. He watched the Atrekna that were captured alive hammered onto stakes and crosses, thrown alive onto stakes of wood and metal, crushed and mangled with rocks.

As the being who gave Dalvanak dark communion had promised, the hidden ones were revealed when Dalvanak sacrificed enough of his fellow Atrekna to lure the hidden ones out of hiding.

He watched as a screaming hidden one leaped from hiding with a rock and caved in the skulls of Elder Ones. Watched as military forces of the hidden ones shredded slavespawn. Silently observed from hiding as the psychic lightning cascades of the hidden ones shredded the life from the Atrekna Conclaves.

He saw a hidden one missing an arm and part of their face pick up a stick from the ground and stab it through an Atrekna's head before using their great strength to tear the others limb from limb, succumbing to wound shock and blood loss only after the Atrekna were dead.

Even after their heart no longer pumped blood from the stump.

The hidden research system was deep inside a well and it took nearly two decades for the last of the slavespawn to be killed.

And devoured.

Roasted on open flame, eaten raw, left to decay before being liquefied and used as seasoning.

Dalvanak had been forced to move his research bubble closer to the neutron star to use the gravity and the appearing chronotrons to give himself 'more' time to examine what happened in the research facility.

It was complete savagery.

Dalvanak went to his ship, moving away from his private laboratories, and to where a gravitational flux ensured that any signal put out from it would arrive within hours. There, Dalvanak sent the signal and the temporal disruptors 'failed' and the research system began to 'rise' back into realtime.

On his way back to his hidden labs he again took communion, tearing free the eyes of a prisoner so he could see through their eyes the dark being that whispered and teased him.

A being that whispered a truth that Dalvanak could not ignore.

His people were doomed.

The Mad Lemurs of Terra were gone. That much nobody could change.

But nature abhors a vacuum.

Dalvanak had learned that particles would appear from nowhere in a perfect vacuum in the New Universe.

The dark insane malevolent being that Dalvanak communed with as he scraped between the burning hyperplane and the stillborn universe had whispered to Dalvanak that something worse always appears in a vacuum.

Now he had seen it.

He had seen what madness, what hellish being, what rough beast slouching forward to be born, was coming for the Atrekna and all who threatened the small beings of the universe.

The ones who had thrown down the Hive Lords and made mounds of their skulls.

The ones who had planet cracked the Devestators.

The ones who had cast down and devoured the Vrzt'kikak.

The ones who would never stop fighting.

Never stop screaming.

Never stop killing.

As he sat in the crystal bubble lodged into the flesh of his ship, the clear crystal engraved with runes that channeled and commanded the energies of hell and death, he heard the dark malevolent being whom he communed with whisper to him their name.

The savage ancestors of a people who had forgotten the faces of their fathers.

The lurkers in the dark.

The whisper in jumpspace.

The screams of Hellspace.

The caress of Deadspace.

He heard their names whispered and the stolen eyes he used to see burst into greasy flame.

He whispered the name back and felt the twisted energies of death and eternal fire caress him.

They were not coming.

They were here.

They were...

Earthlings.