In the close, the downfall of the Primarion Gerontocracy began innocuously enough, as these things so often do, with a vain and ambitious man pressing a button.

That this was done with considerable pomp and fanfare in front of the entire population of the Primarion civilization was ultimately inconsequential. Had it been done in secret, in a darken – room with malice and intent meant nothing – the outcome would have been justifiably the same – as the seeds that would herald the end of the centuries – long dominion of the B’Queth overlords over their more numerous, short lived V’Saal subjects had been laid so very, very long ago.

Although, in retrospect, it could be argued that – albeit being unwitting heralds of their own apocalypse, the Gerontocracy did hold some small degree of culpability for the events that would shortly spiral out of their control to end millennia of hegemony and subjugation.

These facts would, ultimately, be born out at the antipathies of this unfortunate chapter of Galactic History. Of course, by this time, it would ultimately cease to matter.

The Universe can be funny like that.

Postured – magnificently upon the Concourse Triumphant, grinning a terse grin at the massed crowds that stretched out before him, the Grand Gentarch Verlan spared a withering glance at the obsequious Starfleet Commander that had so deftly outmaneuvered him and spared the V’Saal Separatist, Representative Fur’an, from the carefully arranged show – trial.

~Touché Commander~ Verlan allowed.

Verlan had not clawed himself to the top of the precariously internecine back – biting heap of self – interest, that was assuredly the Gerontocracy proper, without learning to evolve with the narrative.

 As the venerable B’Queth Head of State frowned down at the Auto – prompt screen he reflected that Commander Nathan Allen and his meddlesome – Federation – was a problem that he would deal with & with finality, in the very near future.

~ Optics Indeed! ~ The Grand Gentarch inwardly fumed, even as he mugged a broad smile and nodded graciously to the Starfleet Officer in a magnificence of bonhomie. ~ I’ll soon wipe that self – satisfied smile from your smug, stupid face Commander and then you and your Separatist proxies will soon come to understand the weight of resolve at the business end of the massed Primarion Home Fleet!! ~

Holding his withered, age – spotted hands aloft to signal the beginning of official proceedings, the accompanying martial music that for hours had suffused the great square suddenly swelled to a crescendo and then with a deft movement accompanying his gesture – he snapped his hands dramatically down and the square fell to silence and his reedy voice was suddenly amplified a hundred – fold by the floating circlet of media – drones as it carried across the crowds.

 “Children of the Great Primarion Gerontocracy!!!” Grand Gentarch Verlan addressed the masses as they cheered, “Today we gather together under familiar skies to witness the ascension of our great cause, our steadfast peoples to the onward & inevitable auspices of Galactic – history !!!”

Commander Allen, standing just behind Verlan on the lofty podium, smiling for the media – drones, had to admit, for a controlling, unashamedly – totalitarian old bastard, Verlan was a remarkably good public – orator.

Then again – being the meat of their trade, so many Dictators so often were.

The Grand Gentarch once again raised his steady hands and the crowd quietened accordingly as he nodded – stentorily towards Commander Allen.

“For ten years now, our great nation had hosted emissaries from the United Federation of Planets. For ten years now, we have shown our forbearance and steady judgement as the Gerontocracy has represented the Primarion system and all of its peoples on the Galactic Stage!”

“For ten years – our patience has ruled supreme!”

Nate’s face betrayed nothing of his inner feelings on the veracity of these statements – Diplomacy was the prime mission of Task Fleet 72 after all.

“FOR TEN YEARS!” The Grand Gentarch pumped his fist and the media drones focused on the rapt faces of the crowd, as they chanted back.”

“TEN YEARS!!!”

“AND TEN YEARS MORE!” Verlan pivoted patriotism into shamefaced jingoism.

“TEN YEARS!” The Grand Gentarch clamored, whipping the crowd to a frenzy.

‘AND TEN YEARS MORE!” Verlan Verland near screamed at the microphone and punched the air between him and the well – prepared masses.

“And on this day, the quality of our resolve, the purity of our culture and the strength of the Primarion will be joined to that of the wider Galaxy as, today, we bring online the Subspace Communication Network and join all of our peoples together in a new Golden Age of peace and understanding !!!”

To this the crowd went wild, their cheers a cacophony of ecstasy as the Old B’Queth mounted the dais with great solemnity and reached down to press the button.

Commander Nathan Allen discretely tapped his comm-badge and opened up a channel to the USS Sacramento, as the California – class Starship orbited overhead, lost in the haze of azure – sky.

“Allen to USS Sacramento.” He murmured.

“Sacramento – actual – here Captain. Go Ahead.” Came the steady voice of Lt Commander Vodrova in his ear.

Nate smiled as he waved to the crowds and commanded.

“Aleks, tell Lieutenant Hyland that it’s time to reach out and touch someone.”

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

USS Sacramento

(Primarion – Prime Orbit)

Bridge,

Stardate: 2401.6.14

14:13 Hrs. (Planetary Time)

“Aleks, Tell Lieutenant Hyland that it’s time to reach out and touch someone.”

Commander Allen’s voice came over the bridge audio feed and Lieutenant Commander Aleksandra Mariana Masolvaya Vodrova swiveled in the command – chair and motioned to Lieutenant Samantha Hyland, as the ever – efficient Communications Officer sat poised with an expectant look worn on her fine Scandinavian features.

“COMMs.” The Executive Officer of the USS Sacramento ordered with a nod. “Bring the Subspace Communications Network online.”

“Aye Ma’am.” Sam nodded as she swiveled her chair back to face her Communications – board. She could see that all readouts were optimal, Jai – Hui’s Engineering team really had done a great job in threading the Primarion system throughout with the network of Subspace emitters and relays – to link the system with the Federation.

She keyed the controls expertly and brought the vast, distributed lace of technology to life.

“Subspace Array is online. All telemetry showing active attenuation and optimal signal – traffic.”

Samantha turned to the XO with a wide smile on her face and the feeling of a job well done.

“The Primarion system is now live and connected to the Federation Net Ma’am!” she announced proudly.

__________________________________________________________________________________

 The Reliquary of Ost

Great Ost Desert

Primar – Majoris #7

Stardate: 2401.6.14

14:15 Hrs. (System Time)

 Almost imperceptibly, the sand around Professor Jonas Hyland’s feet began to thrum with a gentle oscillation of a deep vibration.

Myriad golden particles of strata glittering in the unrelenting glare of the hard twin suns as they cascaded gently over each other – a tsunami of tiny movements lost in the vastness of the great circle of the Reliquary’s main arena, as the stones of Reliquary itself were dwarfed by the vast expanse of the Great Ost Desert, burning under a scorching sky.

Had anyone cared to look down (and who really has the prescience of mind to do so at the moment when everything changes?), a particularly astute observer might have noticed that, over time, the sand forming beneath their feet began to coalesce into intricate shifting geometric patterns – actually dancing a secret dance to a strain of silent orchestra in resonation.

Nodal lines formed and endlessly dissolving, the grains of sand whispering a complex song of tessellation describing the writhing mathematics of a forgotten alien equation.

That this phenomenon went unnoticed, undocumented and unremarked upon was one of those tiny ironies in the endeavor of scientific discovery.

 The majority of the Federation science – team that had been dispatched some four days past, were taking respite from the Mid – day suns and were following the Federation News Network’s coverage of the activation of the Primarion Subspace Communications Network – the penultimate relay of which hung some 12 Kilometers above their heads in Geo-synchronous orbit.

It had been a very popular gathering with drinks and a welcome distraction from the confounding constraints put upon the team, by their B’Queth ‘hosts’ during their short tenure in this singular place.

For his part, for the longest time, Professor Jonas Hyland did not notice the suddenly motile sands of the floor of the Reliquary acting like a gigantic Chladni plate experiment beneath his feet – so absorbed was he on matters that he considered of greater import.

The Universally – feted Xenoarchaeologist was deeply entranced with his studies and suppositions regarding the (obviously) damaged section of the Hieroglyphica – wall – with several sensors and other instruments running a series of complex scans and experiments, all designed to satisfy a theory that had been forming in Jonas’s mind of late – to the exception of all other thoughts.

That the damage to the section of wall was (so obviously) not the product of a natural meteorological weathering event, collapse of the surrounding stone form-work or other such random happenchance was obvious even to the most distracted scientist.

The Tricorder beeped in his hand and Jonas stared down at the screen, sheltering his eyes from the desert glare and adjusting the cloth head-dress he had come to adopt (an affectation of the ancient V’Saal desert – dwellers).

He considered what the instrument was asserting.

The stone and the Basalt-Quartz substrate beneath the accepted architectural – bounds of the great arena obviously evidenced signs of decaying electrons on the sub-micron level.

The tell – tell signs of exposure to the stimulated emission of photons on a narrow-focused wavelength.

“A laser…..” Jonas breathed as he interpreted the results and absorbed the impactions of the data. “They used a laser…”

Sometime long ago, probably some Millennia – past, someone had taken an industrial-grade cutting laser to this particular section of the Hieroglyphica and deliberately erasing the hieroglyphs etched into the sandstone and damaging the crystalline structure below – presumably also subverting or destroying the substrates’ ability to store and transmit the particular set of memories stored within – through the Reliquary’s unique method of Psionic abduction.

A technology so hopelessly archaic that it was useful to narrow down the period of time when such an invention had probably seemed “cutting – edge” to the Primarion.

“But who would do such a thing to such a singular monument and to what end?” The Professor breathed and licked his sun – cracked lips in consternation.

“Ah! Professor Hyland? “Interrupted the Arch-Dyspneal Vilem, as the plump B’Queth custodian of the Great Reliquary of Ost approached from behind – an unwelcome presence as ever. “THERE you are Professor!” The Arch-Dyspneal enthused, “Not joining the others to celebrate the triumphant unity of our peoples across the void h’mm?”

 Vilem’s voice could scarcely disguise his veiled contempt at this prospect.

Jonas shook his head tiredly and wiped the sweat from his brow. Tired at the strain of remaining civil. Tired of the obscuration that Vilem represented to the pursuit of the truth.

“I’m afraid my interests lay more in the past than the here and now Arch-Dyspneal.” Federation scientist muttered absently as he bent down to adjust a sensor embedded at the foot of the wall and frowned as he thought he saw a pattern movement in the sand at the shadow of his feet. He permitted himself the fancy of exhaustion – but the movement persisted again.

“Well, quite so Professor Hyland, quite so but I ………” Vilem began and then his voice tailed off…..

Jonas stared at the sand.

He could not believe his tired eyes.

The sand was moving.

Not only was it definitely moving, obviously made motile by dint some energetic force but the sand appeared to form into complex geometric shapes, merging and disappearing – one shape being subsumed and birthing another.

 The scientist in Jonas took action even as he gazed wondering at the phenomena – grabbing his Tricorder and slipping out a probe- he began to scan the sand with great interest.

“Vibration……It’s vibration.” He stated.

 “A Displacement variable measuring beyond the total excursion at plus 17,000 Microhertz per second. Triaxial measurements are by confirmed by accelerometer, velocity sensor, Radial – displacement curve – all the same. That can’t be – No seismology in the greater strata. There’s no supporting data suggesting a seismological shift in this region – the Geology just doesn’t support it. It doesn’t make sense?”

A growing pressure, beginning as an uncomfortable sensation in his nasal cavity, began to build in Jonas’s head.

It made his ears pop uncomfortably, and a dull headache began to persist at the base of his cranium.

He reasoned that he was most probably dehydrated and reached for his canteen but the slim – vacuum flask was dancing small circles across the top of the nearby equipment case and suddenly teetered off the edge – drenching the sand below in a dark circle of wasted water.

Jonas frowned cloudily and reached out to the stone surface of the Hieroglyphica to lever himself up to standing – the pulse in his head worsening, the uncomfortable sensation of pressure now pressing on the back of his eyeballs.

The sandstone surface was warm to his touch (as to be expected), but Jonas was also dimly aware that the steady vibration was now also permeating through the stone itself – translating down the lengths of his arm and suggesting itself deep into his muscle & bones.

“Arch-Dyspneal do you…?” Jonas Hyland began, turning to the B’Queth when he realized that something was wrong with Vilem.

Something very wrong indeed.

Arch-Dyspneal stood rooted to the spot, the vertiginous neck – fronds that typified both the B’Queth and the V’Saal races stood starkly out from his neck, throbbing and darkly suffused with blood.

Jonas looked up with sudden concern to look at Vilem’s face – a face which was convulsing – his neck jerking sporadically, bloated and taking on a darkly purple hue – a thin trickle of blood began to seep in thin rivulets from his terrified bulging eyes as they flooded red with oxygenated blood breaking from the capillaries– grisley evidence of the sudden force of excruciating pressure exerted upon his circulatory system.

Blood – red eyes that were fixed in horror and confusion at what was occurring to his feet.

Inexorably, terrifyingly, the pulsation of vibrating sand – ever forming disturbing and fractious patterns and shapes – was creeping up the B’Queth’s lower legs – like watching a macabre sandcastle building itself, falling apart, the re-building itself as it crept ever up Vilem’s lower – body like something insidious and determined.

Jonas moved to aid the Arch-Dyspneal – that base instinct for one animal to help another animal in need – but he found that could not. 

Professor Hyland frowned at a jerking pressure that tore at the skin of his palm, turning back to where his hand rested on the stones of the damaged section of the Hieroglyphica.

He could not move his hand.

That animal instinct quickly gave way to a pervasive panic. Jonas’s mind struggled with the growing pressure in his brain, and he frantically tried to remove the hand led flat on the now – noticeably vibrating stone wall – with his other free hand.

It was like the hand was fused to the stone at a cellular level.

Jonas’s mind was effectively paralyzed by an awful trifecta of blind panic, the growing sense of pressure he could not stop physically building in his skull and a kaleidoscope of Psychic images, emotions and flashes that began to assault and invade his consciousness at random – the Psionic effect of the Reliquary seemed to come unbidden in a hectic flood & react to the local phenomena unfolding around him.

Try as he might, he rallied but felt his mind begin to buckle & fragment under the combined sensory assault.

He was dimly aware of a terrible keening noise that seemed to be emanating from the Arch-Dyspneal, who seemed to be physically vibrating himself now. An awful, haunting clarion claxon of pain and terror – sounding as if it was being squeezed out of his neck under too much pressure – like that from the neck of a child’s party – balloon.

But Jonas Hyland’s attention was firmly fixed on his hand – with mounting horror and incomprehension.

The sandstone was now vibrating to the extent that it was actually slowly turning to sand itself. Its reassuring state of solidity giving way to a motile dust – causing his hand to sink deeper into the stone itself. The exquisite hieroglyphs, triptychs and iconography of the adjacent undamaged sections of the Hieroglyphica beginning to erase themselves in a blur of motion and run slowly down the wall to join with the mass of the desert.

More screaming now – Dr Auguste Prideaux, the expedition’s Geophysicist (a warm, gregarious man – great singing voice, can’t remember lyrics) stumbled into the harsh glare of the twinned suns from the pressure – tent where his fellow Federation Scientists had just been witnessing the activation of the Subspace Array. Auguste writhing in evident agony & desperately clutching his head as he ploughed face – first into the sand and moved no longer – his life blood staining the turbulent sand a hue of dark muted crimson – brown.

Jonas didn’t even notice when Arch-Dyspneal Vilem, his well – dressed corpulent bulk vibrating so fast now, that his bones began to break internally. Ribs fracturing awfully, one – by – one with a sickening wet detonation of violent separation. Vilem began to rise into the air – seemingly born aloft by the rising sands that had reached all the way up to his lower chest, embracing, compressing and squeezing the life out of the B’Queth with the certainty of an awful mechanical compression.

Jonas didn’t even register the copper, slaughterhouse stench of blood & wet throw of viscera that festooned down upon his back as the Arch-Dyspneal’s head exploded from the tremendous pressure that had built up in his body – his cranium coming apart like the hideous detonation of a cork suddenly being released from the caged pressure of a champagne bottle.

His own face was awash with a dim glow of blue light that seemed to be emanating from the decaying stone (his hand sinking still further inwards some part of him noted with distraction), a gradually brightening glare that seemed to match the intensity invading his mind and thoughts – exposing the ancient structure below that – transfixing him entirely in the mental and physical realm – made of him something entirely other.

Jonas felt something reaching out, something infinitesimally old and utterly compelling – taking the shell of his consciousness in its crushing embrace and forcibly melding its own impossible intellect with his own in a breathtaking violation.

Jonas tipped back his own head back, desperate to scream, to assert some desperate flare of his own humanity as he felt his mind and the terrible, nightmarish Psionic Visions flow together with a frightening intensity.

His mouth worked autonomously – just like Arch-Dyspneal Vilem’s had, but he could make no intelligible sound.

All throughout the wide amphitheater of the Inner Reliquary, that was tens of hundreds of feet across, the sand shifted, cavorted and danced with the whorls of geometric and geodesic patterns – rising now like horrific waves and then running flat – suggesting morbid movement below. The irresistible flow capturing some of the remaining Federation Scientists – caught up in the literal tsunami of sand and sound now – clawing helplessly as they sunk – compelled to beneath its terrible turmoil – eyes wild with uncomprehending fear – drowning a dry death.

Somehow, spared this fate by the irresistible force that had taken him over, all Professor Jonas Hyland could manage was an uncomprehending gaze, as if like a latter-day Prometheus chained to the rock (and the violently – resonating crystal substrate underneath) his bulging eyes drawn to the smaller circular structure at the very heart of the arena – the sort of parabolic depression that described the center of the ancient structure.

As Jonas Hyland slowly felt everything that made him human coming apart, he finally let out a penetrating scream that resonated around the circle of crumbling stone.

From the parabolic depression in the middle of the Reliquary – tens of meters across –stabbed a screaming, massive, ragged shaft of awful, blindingly intense blue energy that seemingly spat from the very earth below the Reliquary and pierced the sky above, boiling off the cloud – base as it went howling heavenward and slamming into the Subspace Relay satellite that flew high above.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Somewhere, deep beyond the Gamma Quadrant.

Stardate: 2401.6.14

14:19 Hrs. (Universal Time)

 It was considered old even when the stars themselves were young.

It’s vast, ancient comet – streaked flanks reflected the cold, dead light of systems that had died trillions of lights – years past – places that it had visited long – ago during its infinity – spanning wanderings.

Places that it no longer had any reasonable memory of. With countless time compressed into its existence – who would waste subjective time thinking about such things?

It moved at sub-light speeds, its ponderous bulk describing a trajectory of travel that could not readily be described as empires and stars came and went with such frightening regularity to its venerable perspective – such things would seem to be comparable the blink of an eye – had it possessed such organs to speak of – which it did not.

Mostly, its own long-thoughts often took Millenia to form as it plodded its way inexorably through the cold cosmos (with an effort it could shift to thought processes and relativistic speeds but had not had to do so since that last time when it had had to deal with its mistake with the creation of a race that would eventually come to be known to the Gamma Quadrant as “The Founders”).

Its dreams spanned the very history of the Galactic Diaspora, and the echoes of its memories were writ large in the crushing depths of collapsing gravity wells and the screaming energies of tachyon – embrace of Black Hole event horizons that its kind had once been birthed in, before they gradually faded from the memories and realms of the involved species and effectively sublimed to another realm of being – leaving it as a lonely oddity and singular traveler of the void.

Alien in all ways that there was to be, in ways that made sense only to itself, it’s phenomenal mass and eternal span of being meaning that it had no predators, natural or otherwise. To all extents – it was omnipotent, it was enduring, it was pervading and more than anything else it was infinitely, but occasionally curious.

Currently, it was lonely.

For reasons that it had entirely forgotten – it had the not-often-indulged-in capacity for retrospection. 

Sometimes it would leave a seed – a shard of itself calved off and left in its wake – as it progressed onward with its epoch – spanning exodus amongst the unforgiving stars.

Whilst not possessing what any sentient race would recognize as comparable intellect or cognizance, these discarded shards of itself would act independently and as they saw fit. Sometimes shaping (or reshaping) whole ecospheres, sometimes altering the trajectories of comets or other celestial bodies – merely to conjecture the impact of such a change on the balance of probability.

 Sometimes it liked to experiment with the creation of life itself – just to see what would happen and to introduce a little chaos into the picture.

Eventually, predictably, some of its shards would eventually return (tens of centuries or millennia later, after all – all was relative in the end) or sometimes not.

It cared little for these shards and often forgot that it had even created such progeny. Taking the long – view it held that these things mattered very little in the overall scheme of the Universe. This one – at least.

When such rare reunions were warranted, it would rotate its leviathan bulk to welcome them home – subsuming their fragmented crystal structure back into its own, joining again, like a parent greeting a child and hearing from them all that they had gathered during their long exile.

Now it became dimly aware of a very distant clamoring from one such shard, one that it had quite forgotten about so very, very long ago – calling distantly to it through the ephemeral realm of Subspace.

Normally, it would not even register such an entreaty – shards cleaved, left, were lost, evolved to become some contiguous but separate being in their own right, sometimes returning, most times not – ultimately just carried on.

Every being craved distractions in an infinite Universe.

Truthfully though, in the last recent 400,000 years or so it had been aware that it may be verging on a state approaching boredom and when it so rarely did – it found itself in the uncharacteristic mood to break its endless solitude. Thus, when one such Shard reached out to call to it, it gathered the phenomenal locum of energies, kilometers deep within its deep, cold crystal core and instigated a signal back to it’s distant source– with a corresponding beam of blindingly intense blue energy.

So, the ancient Gigalethine Crystal Entity sent out the responding clarion – call through the skein of Subspace & began the fond process of bidding its errant child homewards, for once mildly eager to consume & share in all the revelations that the Shard had learned during its Eons’ long sojourn………