Humanitys race to the stars was built on a house of cards. An ancient covenant with an unseen alien race and a technology dependent on Terras patrons propelled man into the universe. Then the covenant was abandoned, the technology failed and the human empire came to a crashing end. In the midst of the chaos, astral navigator Hafez Awad leads a dying starliner down to Cthulhu, a cold dark world on the fringes of the known universe. Once there, the survivors awaken a creature whose evil exceeds space and time, a thing that has lusted for revenge since the dawn of man. She is old and dying...