First Contact

Chapter 810: Ultimis Diebus Hominum

It should have just been a routine salvage mission. A wreck from the Terran-Precursor War that had drifted through space for centuries. A cold, dead warship that was lost with all hands, representing millions of credits in salvage.

For the crew of the Good Luck Chuck, it was a exercise in horror.

Coming this summer, a new immersion into fear: Yorktown, Do You Read? Staring: Fe'ermo'o, Acturmo'o, and Yektik the Telkan. Rated: Age of Majority

The discovery of Terran "horror movies", "psycho-thrillers" and "slasher-flicks" filled a need that I never knew I had. From a young age, I knew I had to make them for my fellow Lanaktallan, who had never known real fear. The terror of the other, the fear of the unknown, the fright of the normal becoming skewed.

I'm proud to accept this award for Dead Terrans Still Kill Five - Return of the Anasazi Death Weaver*, on behalf of my production crew.* - Acclaimed film writer, director, producer Fylmo'o, at the Nineteenth Lanaktallan Movie Awards.

The anomaly occurred in twelve perfectly placed locations across the vast protocontinent. A thick obscuring mist rose up from the ground, covering tens of square miles, rising hundreds of feet into the air. Shapes could be seen within, lights flashing and moving within, and strange muffled sounds came from inside the thick white fog.

The Atrekna moved out to examine it. Those on the scene first noted that the slavespawn had moved away from the mist, displaying signs of discomfort and agitation if they were too close.

According to the Atrekna's sensitive phasic senses, there was nothing there. Literally nothing. It was blank, empty. Radar, sonar, laser ranging, all vanished into the fog, swallowed up by the obscuring mist. As darkness fell on the eastern edge of the protocontinent, the mist began to softly glow, a pale white inside with a bluish tint at the outside.

The Atrekna moved up slavespawn and ordered them into the fog.

Slavespawn that entered reported back everything was fine as they moved in. They had zero visibility, the ground beneath their feet oddly damp and cold. They moved deeper in, finding nothing until a sudden spike of fear, then excruciating pain, then nothing. Small ones had a sudden spike of fear, then nothing. Medium and large ones had a moment of agonizing pain. Then nothing.

An Ohm Class slavespawn was ordered in by the nervous Atrekna into the fog.

It rumbled into the fog, which swallowed it without even a swirl. It bumped nothing, encountered nothing, in the fog, unable to see or sense its surroundings.

There was a moment of agonizing pain.

Then nothing.

The Atrekna ordered in servitors. At first, just in typical servitor clothing, then in protective equipment, then in equipment more at home fighting on airless worlds.

Nothing. They had a visibility of less than two meters.

One by one they just vanished. A few registered pain. One had time to scream. Two fired their weapons.

Then nothing.

The Atrekna sent several Young Ones into the fog. The first grouping had only their own powers and skills to protect themselves.

The fog was nothing. Not water vapor. Not any type of gas. Just... fog. Nothing. It felt both sickly warm and vaguely clammy at once.

Phasic powers and psychic ability was snuffed almost immediately.

One by one they vanished.

One had a split second of fear, managed to scream, fired off its psychic blast.

Then nothing.

More Young Ones were sent in. This time in exploration gear. Then protective gear. Then combat gear. Three sets even went into the fog inside of a phasic combat globe.

They vanished.

The Atrekna set up observation points and just waited. They tried sending in constructs of phasic crystal and robotics.

Once they moved into the fog, transmission ceased. Even robotic servitors vanished.

A year went by. One rotation around the stellar mass.

A year and a day exactly.

The Atrekna at the observation posts had become bored. Most worked on their own research, plots, plans, and projects, leaving the basic work to the servitors and slavespawn.

A slavespawn saw an Atrekna stumble from the fog. It fell on its face, then got up shakily.

Its skin was a pale purple, almost white.

It stumbled forward, looking around, making audible noises of distress.

Two of the servitors hurried out to the Atrekna, helping it inside the observation post. It kept keening in distress, the psychic emanations garbled and confused.

One of the Atrekna recognized it as one of the Young Ones that had been tasked with exploring the mist. It alerted the Overmind even as the servitors tried to calm it.

Nearly fifty Atrekna arrived to find that Atrekna that had come from the fog huddled in the corner, rocking back and forth. The Atrekna at the observation station told the newly arrived Atrekna that the found one was almost catatonic.

The new Atrekna looked up, saw the others gathered.

It stood up slowly.

Its stomach suddenly bulged with the wet tearing sound of separating tissue. Its feeding tentacles moved aside to reveal the tightly puckered mouth.

It opened at the same time as the rescued Atrekna screeched.

Stinging insects swarmed from the Atrekna's maw, covering the observing Atrekna and servitors as the found Atrekna slowly deflated.

One of the servitors ran to the lab and helped two others jury-rig a flamethrower.

They fought their way free from an observation station full of insects. The Atrekna that fell to the insects, the insects burrowed inside of, reanimating them, replicating, until the Atrekna was stumbling around as a semi-sentient hive of stinging and biting insects.

The servitors blew up the observation station and ran off into the woods.

It took the Atrekna almost a week to find them. They were a hundred kilometers from the observation post and living in a cave.

The observation stations were put on high alert.

One reported that there was an Atrekna at the entry portal, claiming to be one of the Atrekna inside the observation post, telling the Atrekna inside that the Atrekna that looked like it had ambushed it and dumped it outside.

An hour later the observation post stopped reporting.

A servitor combat team, backed up by five Atrekna in a combat globe, arrived within six hours.

It was empty. As if it had never been crewed.

A phasic imprint on the wall was simply 'them' and nothing more.

The Atrekna ordered the observation post crewed and issued out weapons.

Another observation post kept repeating that everything was all right. Even when unprompted, it kept reporting that everything was all right. Even requests for clarification or attempts at getting the observation post to state anything else was met with 'situation normal nothing to report' instead of anything else.

Atrekna armed up light they were going to fight the Inheritors and arrived at the outpost.

It was crewed only by the skeletal remains of servitors and Atrekna. Cobwebs and dust was everywhere, as if it had been abandoned for years.

One Old One urged the others to blow up the observation post.

He was mocked and derided, the others settled down to crew it while the Old One left.

Three hours later it began to broadcast "situation normal nothing to report" over and over.

The Old One boarded a private spacecraft and left.

This time, the observation post was abandoned. Cobwebs, dust, debris was everywhere. Observation portals were left open and dry leaves filled the rooms. Only a jury-rigged beacon had power, broadcasting "situation normal nothing to report" over and over. A cringing servitor shut it down and breathed a sigh of relief when nothing happened.

When he turned around, all of the other servitors and Atrekna were gone. There was knee deep mist inside the observation post.

The Atrekna found him a month later, living in a cave, eating moss and small insects to survive.

The Atrekna conferred.

The post was left abandoned and a new one slated to be rebuilt.

The Atrekna moved military vehicles, combat trained servitors, and combat slavespawn around the patches of fog.

The fog expanded slightly. Only a few miles in every direction.

Swallowing the observation posts, the servitors, and the slavespawn.

After nearly a month, it drew back.

The observation posts were empty. Some were festooned with cobwebs, others were pristine, others were nothing but empty buildings, even the piping and wiring stripped out. Some combat vehicle remained. Some were intact, others battle damaged, others looked to be decades, centuries old. The shells and chitin of some slavespawn remained, all of them looking as if the slavespawn molted or died and rotted away.

The Atrekna held multiple Conclaves about what to do about the mist.

They had no answers.

They tried orbital strikes. Antimatter charges. Directed energy weapons.

The fog barely swirled.

An atomic was detonated.

The fog wasn't even moved by the blast wave.

The Atrekna knew it was some kind of trick. It had to be. There was no scientific reason for the fog to be naturally occurring. It had to be some sort of Inheritor trick.

But it didn't make sense.

So they assigned more crews to the observation posts.

And watched.

-----

The Ancient One blinked as consciousness resumed.

The female lemur was standing in front of a 2.5D display, examining a triple-helix made up of three interlinked ladders. She was expanding parts, looking at the data, then putting it back.

The Ancient One considered pretending to be unconscious again.

She called him a he and he was afraid to think of himself as anything but he.

Noncompliance meant agony and often painful lingering death.

There had been a long time where he had been vivisected, sometimes alive, had medical tests performed on him while he was alive. He had been forced to complete equations after being given an example. Had been forced to solve simple then complex puzzles.

Failure meant painful, agonizing death.

His psychic abilities had been tested. How much he could levitate if he was carrying it. How much he could levitate touching the object. How much he could levitate and at what distance. The range of his psychic attacks. The power of his psychic defenses.

If the female lemur, who insisted "Call me Dee" with a predator baring of meat tearing teeth, suspected the he wasn't putting forth the maximum effort, tried to hold anything back, personally tortured then killed him in new and painful ways.

The Ancient One closed his eyes.

It was rare for her to kill the same way twice. Oh, sure, she used the sharp bladed knife she often toyed with, but she never cut the same way twice.

"I know you're awake, Ess-Twelve," the female lemur said. "I woke you up because you're the smartest of all of your purple friends. An IQ of one-thirty-two. Eight points above the next highest, twenty-one points higher than the lowest of you. Low pattern recognition, but that's consistent across all of you precursor races," her voice was low, soft, sultry.

The Ancient One felt his bladder release.

That tone of voice meant the most pain. Maximum negative stimulation.

He knew that S12 meant "Subject Twelve".

He also knew that she had seared it into the flesh above the phasic band he wore over his third eye.

She had used her smoke stick.. the cigarette to burn the number into his forehead, idly smiling and staring off into space as she did so.

He had seen the other Atrekna in her power.

They too had numbers crudely burned into the flesh of their high foreheads.

"I'm still constantly amazed that your species are experts in biology, in creating macro-life for biological warfare as well as life forms down to bacteria and viral forms. You can breed spore emitting organisms with the spores tailored to do exactly what you want to who or what you want," she said. She turned away from the screen and stared at S12.

"Yet you know nothing about DNA itself," she mused. She walked forward, pulling a pack of cigarettes from nowhere. She tapped the pack against the opposite palm and a single cigarette thrust out from the pack. She put it in her mouth, put her hands together, rolled them, and the pack was replaced by the flint and steel lighter. She lit the cigarette, snapped the lighter closed, and rolled her hands, the lighter vanishing.

"But at one time, your race must have," she said. She pulled a stool over and sat down, her naked flesh deforming the cushion. She waved at the display of the triple-helix. "Sometime, in your past, you did the triplex connection to ensure your species suffered little to no genetic drift or erroneous cell replication."

She reached out and patted his chest.

"Additionally, someone pared away all the extraneous DNA from your genetic code. There's no 'junk code', no remnants, nothing that gets in the way. Your DNA is designed in such a way that the older you get the slower you age due to cellular replication errors," she said. She took a long drag off her cigarette and blew the smoke above her, into the air, tilting her head back as she exhaled for a long moment.

"At one time, your people had mastered the genome," she said when she was done exhaling smoke. She leaned forward, her teeth baring in malevolent pleasure. "Now? Your people have no idea about anything smaller than a virus."

She stood back up and moved over to the screen, which shifted to show complex cerebral tissue on one side and neurons firing on the other.

"You use your powers to detect things down to fifteen nanometers with Type-Seven Crystalline Devices, all the way down to three hundred nanometers with specifically exercised and trained phasic powers," she said. She shook her head. "Not small enough to see picobots or nanobots. Not fine enough to see DNA strands."

She turned around, moving back over and sitting on the stool again. She held the cigarette over S12 and tapped it, the hot ash falling on his sensitive skin. He grimaced and she bared her teeth wider.

"But the fact your DNA sequence is so small, pared of anything extraneous, makes it much easier to sequence," she said. She exhaled toward the ceiling again. "I was taught by the best about gene sequencing." Her smile when she lowered her head and looked at S12 made him try to void his bladder again.

"It became very obvious to me that you are from another dimension, since the parings were, at first, almost unrecognizable. You use different acids to combine to create your building blocks," she took another drag off her cigarette and leaned on her elbow after planting it in S12's midsection. She held that long sharp blade that S12 had learned to fear, spinning it in her fingers. "Experimenting, I found something interesting."

She looked down, still smiling, her voice still soft and throaty.

"Your DNA is actually designed, probably redesigned, to alter itself to other dimensions. In sixteen tests, your DNA modified itself within seconds to the system used by the dimension the DNA was now exposed to," she said. She tapped his chest with the point, drawing dark purple blood. "The DNA sequence that allowed this was fairly clean, fairly obvious, and," she smiled again, drawing out the silence.

"Easily sequencible into other living creature's DNA," she said. Her eyes glittered as she stood up and walked back to the 2.5 screen, tapping it with the point of the blade. The view shifted. "With the data and knowledge I possessed on creating limited size dimensional areas, pocket dimensions or demi-planes to you, combined with the information you and the rest of Subjects gave up, it allowed me to alter your DNA in interesting ways."

The screen showed differently shaped Atrekna, even some covered with hard chitin plates that had short spikes all over the plates.

"This allowed me to force evolution upon multiple test subjects exposed to these controlled limited artificial dimensional spaces," she said.

S12 managed to force a single word out.

"Why?" he asked.

She smiled, tapping her naked leg with the flat of the blade, the point pressing lightly into her skin without breaking it.

"Why am I doing this?" she asked. Her smile got wider. "I told you."

He shook his head as much as the band across his head would allow him. "No. Why?"

She laughed, an insane, maddened thing. "Ah, why did I do that?"

S12 nodded. He could see no use in it.

"I wanted to see if there was any reason to keep a single one of your misbegotten species alive for any possible reason the universe would want you around," she said, her face going serious, cold.

She moved away, out of his vision, and he stared at the white ceiling.

"I could discern no reason to keep a multi-dimensional parasite alive," she said from beyond his vision. "Even examining the possibility of weaponizing you to protect the human race proved less than worthless," she said.

"You are a parasitic species from a dead universe, as you informed me repeatedly. Your ability to manipulate time allows you to rapidly take over entire galaxies in a span of years, decades at the most. From there, my simulations show you would rapidly take over other galaxies in a rapid expansion and within centuries would have infested the entire universe. You would strip mine systems, devour stellar masses, even harvest nebula, for no other reason than to prolong your existence," she said. He heard the zap of a waste disposal and knew she had discarded her nearly finished cigarette. "While the universe obviously has some reason, maybe just pure entertainment, maybe just preprogrammed situations, for life to exist within it," she paused a moment. "You are not of this universe."

She laughed then, a maddened sound.

"Which means, I'll be doing the universe, and every creature in it, a favor by wiping out your parasitic species," she laughed. "There will be no 'worse outcome' like meddling in temporal mechanics and time travel. The universe itself will not stop me. No, I am free to completely wipe you out like the vermin your species is."

There was gurgling sound and the thump of something soft against macroplas.

The woman laughed, a malicious, evil sound.

"Settle down, S7. I just want to show you to your best friend in the whole wide world, S12," the female lemur said.

There was the squeaking of wheels and S12 looked down to see what was being pushed over.

It was a tank of nutrigel on a stand with wheels at the base.

Inside was an Atrekna brain and spinal cord, with long strands of fiber off the spinal cord. There were three vertebrae still attached to the spinal cord, loosely spaced. All three eyes were still connected by nerve tissue.

There was a lemur jawbone, engraved with the lemur rune for the number seven on the bone, with teeth floating in the tank.

"Say hello to S7 and his new look," the female lemur said. She started laughing, making S7 thrash slightly in his tank and S12 try to draw back.

"I removed everything he didn't need," the female lemur said. "He's survived quite a long time like this. I'm actually impressed. Additionally, by infusing the nutrigel with microfinely ground Type Seventeen Crystal, he actually regained some of his psychic powers."

**kill me** S7 said. S12 could faintly hear the agonized whisper from his fellow Atrekna.

The female lemur laughed. "I plan it. Very soon. Right now in fact. Not that it will stop my next experiment," she said, still laughing. She suddenly stopped laughing, lunging forward and pressing her forehead against the tank. "Goodby, S7."

She pulled off her headband and screamed with rage.

S12 saw S7 suddenly explode, filling the tank with liquefied Atrekna cerebral tissue.

The lemur jawbone swirled and thumped against the clear macroplas as the female lemur stood up straight, putting the headband back on.

"You die so easy," she said softly, almost as if she was surprised.

S12 mouthed the next words with her.

"I spend more effort keeping you alive than I do wresting answers from you," she said.

She moved over to S12, staring down at him.

"I wanted you to see what is in store for you, S12," she said softly. She lifted an empty hand and snapped her fingers.

The robotic nanosurgeon lowered from the panel that opened in the ceiling.

"It works best without anesthetic," she said, smiling and lighting another cigarette.

-----

Again and again, S12 found himself killed and brought back to life for the lemurs cruel and insane experiments. He found himself little more than a nervous system in control of a mechanical body. Another time he found his nervous system grafted to a slavespawn. Another time his nervous system had replaced that of a servitor. He floated in tanks of nutrigel with only a few inches of his spinal cord and his brain intact.

Always with eyes and the lemur jawbone engraved with the lemur runes for the number twelve.

At times he was pitted against other test subjects in a fight to the death. He won more than he lost, which seemed to please the insane lemur.

Twice he found himself existing only as data inside of a computer network. Once he was able to take control of the system enough to find out he was separated from any other system by meters of Substance-W and simple ferrocrete infused with base steel in a Faraday Cage.

Several times he was only data, driving robots that did everything from menial labor to fight other robots, servitors, or slavespawn.

Not putting forth his best effort was met with negative stimulation.

Putting forth his best effort was met with less negative stimulation. Sometimes even positive stimulation in the form of electrical pulses to parts of his brain.

S12 had realized what the mad female lemur was doing.

"Putting him through his paces" is what she called it.

She was testing him under every extreme condition she could devise.

She often examined his DNA as he was strapped, naked, to a table. She shook her head quite often and quietly berated him for having such trimmed down DNA she was unable to induce any mutation to it through exposure to different natural environmental extremes. That only under a few conditions did any differential appear between Atrekna.

"You are little more than copies of copies," she said softly. "Echoes of a parasite that devoured entire universes. Not even a fossil record of that species, but the trail left in mud by that parasite, nothing more than the evidence of the fossils of the creatures you parasited off of."

More tests.

"You are an evolutionary dead end," she stated one day. "You trimmed your DNA down to nothing. You cannot adapt. You cannot improvise. You cannot overcome. As a species, barring a tiny amount that is but a percentage of an infinitesimal anomaly within statistical deviation, you are little better than jumped up viruses."

She lit a cigarette, cupping her hands together and rolling them to make the pack and then the lighter vanish. She was sitting on a stool, completely naked, staring at him.

"You use parasitic larvae to reproduce. You literally produce nothing, as you have beaten aging. Your technology is largely a dead end. You have almost negative pattern recognition built into your brains. I can find no reason to stay my hand and not wipe your species from this universe. Your parasitic nature means that to put you in another universe ensures you will devour that universe in a short time," she said. She looked at him.

"Can you give me a reason to allow you to survive, S12?" she asked, cocking her head slightly.

S12 nodded. "We think. We live. We feel. We are sentient. We are sapient. We react to negative and positive stimuli. We struggle to survive as you do," speaking was painful, but the thought of touching her maddened thoughts with his own made him tremble with fear.

She laughed, shaking her head. "Oh, now you're a hippy, huh? Dude, like, we totally live, maaaaan. We're, like, alive. You should let us live because, like, we're all thinking and feeling creatures that, like, feel pain here," she laughed. "Do we not, like, both bleed if you cut us, maaan?"

S12 nodded.

Her face hardened, all mirth vanishing from it. Her gunmetal eyes went cold and hard.

"I don't give a shit," she said. "The Lanaktallan were of this universe and I was willing to exterminate them," she leaned forward slightly. "And, unlike you, I didn't hate them."

She stood up, moving away from him. She snapped her fingers and the bed raised up and tilted until he was almost standing upright.

The 2.5D screen in front of him came on as she moved up next to it.

"Well, S12. You should consider yourself a very very lucky parasite," she said, her voice back to soft and gentle.

"Why?" he grated out.

"Because now that I'm done squeezing every bit of data, information, and knowledge from you and your fellow parasites," she said. "I'm going to let you watch me exterminate your entire species from this planet as if they never existed," she said. She put her hand on his chest and pushed, lightly for her, but enough to make him groan as his ribs deformed slightly.

"And then, when I'm done here," she said. She slowly pulled her hand back.

"I will exterminate your entire species," she said.

S12 felt fear, but realized that she wasn't done yet.

"I've spent time infusing the oceans with nanites. The heat of the sun vaporizes the surface water of the oceans, uptaking my nanites by the trillions in each drop of water vapor. They float in the clouds until they rain down upon the land, the ocean, the mountains, the lakes, the rivers," she leaned forward. "The cities. The rain falls everywhere, carrying my tiny servants," she leaned back and smiled.

"It is time for me to reveal myself," she said softly. Her smile got wider. Her teeth seemed to grow, becoming long and sharp as her smile grew.

The corners of her mouth split, revealing more teeth. Her eyes began to glow red. Horns burst from her forehead, blood running down her face.

"I am..." she stated.

As S12 watched, she suddenly began to grow. Her skin bubbled and warped, and as he watched the skin split to reveal dark brown muscles. She grew in height, her skin splitting and reduced to tatters. She shifted her shoulders, tearing free of her skin. She flexed her arms, the skin reduced to rags that slid down the muscle on black blood. The headband sunk into her flesh, the new thick brown skin overgrowing it until only the gem remained.

In front of him stood a nightmare.

Five meters tall. Three meters wide. Heavily muscled. A large head with horns, a massive maw with tusks. She threw back her head and roared as wings exploded from her back in a shower of blood and gore.

It stood there, its eyes glowing red, its exhalations smokey and smelling of hot blood and brimstone.

With a rattle, from its hand fell a barbed iron chain with brimstone and sulfur inlaid runes.

The creature leaned forward to stare S12 in the eyes.

S12 felt terror as the creature exhaled brimstone and hot blood smoke into his face.

"The Detainee."

She, it, whatever it was, S12 wasn't sure, stood upright, the wings slowly moving.

"It's time, my little pet, to bring my wrath, your terror, and fear to your misbegotten people and wipe them from existence," the creature rumbled. "But first..."

The smile was a terrible thing.

"It is time to place the gates of Hell."

-----

The Atrekna were alerted as the fog suddenly began to tatter and dissipate.

In moments, all that was left was a blasted field of twisted vegetation, exposed and scorched rock and barren dirt.

In the middle were massive constructs.

A mile wide circle of interlocked stone blocks set in black mortar. Each brick was engraved, the entire thing one big swirling pattern that burned with a lurid crimson light. Around the edges were plinths that had crystal obelisks, monoliths, and henge stands on them. The crystals were full of twisted metals of strange coloration and appearance, the crystals glowing softly.

Beams of light connected the crystals.

The light in the engravings grew brighter.

Two columns of fire roared up in the middle of the flat circles, a hundred feet high. A line of fire connected the two pillars at the top and bottom.

The Atrekna in the observation posts were screaming across the Overmind for more Atrekna to arrive, to fire orbital shots at the circles of cut stone...

...to do something!

The rectangles were empty for a moment.

A set of Substance-W doors clanged into existence, covered with inlays of bronze and burning iron.

The Atrekna weren't worried.

They had ships in orbit. They had slavespawn orbiting the gas giant, patrolling the empty spaces of the system, orbiting the stellar mass. They had servitor crewed ships in orbit.

Anything that happened on the surface, they could handle.

They waited.

Unaware that their bodies, their brains, their nervous systems, were full of tiny machines a dusting of atoms wide.

The doors cracked open with a boom that could be heard a thousand miles away.

-----

The Detainee looked at S12.

"Lo, I send forth my Heralds," she stated. She reached out, her talon tipped fingers touching S12.

Nightmares ripped at his mind.

S12 found himself stumbling from somewhere. Behind him there was burning heat, the sounds of screams of torment, and a hot wind.

There was a booming that sent him down on his hands and knees.

He looked up to see Atrekna inside of combat spheres rushing toward him.

The Atrekna had seen an Atrekna stumble from each gate at each location. The Atrekna, one and all, had been driven to their knees by the closing the vast iron door.

The combat orbs swooped down. Phasic power took hold of the Atrekna.

The Overmind recognized them as the initial twelve that vanished into the first gravitational anomaly. Each of them with runes seared into the flesh of their foreheads. Bands of phasonium alloy around their heads, the bands decorated with precisely cut gems and crystals.

Some tried to scramble away. Others tried to run. A few fought, trying to keep the Atrekna inside of the combat orbs from capturing them.

S12 shook his head as the combat orb flew back, away from the massive iron gates.

The other Atrekna saw he was shaking his head, making audible sounds of distress.

It took one a moment to understand what S12 was saying.

"no."

The combat orbs took the rescued Atrekna to the nearest city.

One rescued Atrekna per city.

S12 kept shaking his head, repeating one word over and over.

"don't"

He was pulled into building where research was performed. Other Atrekna informed him that he would be examined closely. Asked him if he could tell them where he had been, what had happened to him over the last thousand years.

He just kept repeating one word, over and over.

"run"

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