"I fear the worst. The ancient Skrellian language is extremely difficult to decipher - as they are so alien to us there are many words and concepts that simply do not translate. Added to that difficulty is the fact that the data in the ships archives is heavily corrupted. Despite these obstacles I believe I have gleaned some reliable information and it makes most grim reading. It seems probable that at least 90% of the Skrellian fleet failed to escape the nova blast. Even though they were accelerating away from the home planet at over 50 gees, the ships could not outrun the certain doom that overtook them. The planet's crust fractured and its atmosphere was blasted away under the pressure of the immense heat from the exploding star. At the same time the escaping fleet was lashed with a massive outpouring of hard radiation. Although travelling now at a significant percentage of light speed, the deadly charged particle deluge was much faster. Many ships had their shields instantly overloaded, torrents of radiation obliterating the massed data banks inside with catastrophic results. Only a few vessels were able to weather the particle storm and those that did were certainly heavily damaged. Despite the translation issues I am now forced to conclude that the Skrellian ships were in fact crew-less. I cannot be sure of precise numbers but it is clear that the entire Skrell race, some 8 billion alien souls, were still on the planet when the nova blast struck. An entire advanced race was gone in the blink of a cosmic eye. My heart quails at the thought of such a loss. It's clear that no biological life could exist on the Skrell ships either. The super fast acceleration of the fleet would totally crush any biological life, even with the best inertial conversion fields thus the unavoidable and tragic conclusion is that all Skrellian life was destroyed by the nova. The few surviving ships, damaged and radiation scarred, limped on into the cold vastness of space. Incapable of faster-than-light travel, the remnants of the fleet travelled for eons until at last, after countless ages, one of these ships finally arrived in Inthandonian space bearing its strange alien cargo". Excerpt from the treatise "The Skrellian Atrocity: Origins of the Wizard Wars" from the Collected Grimoires of Bolgaradol Smekter, Uber-wizard of the First Age, the only person known to have entered a Skrellian Seedship and escaped with his mind intact. ************** Models created with trueSpace 7.6, 2d texturing and minor post work done with the GIMP. Rendered using Vue 6 Pro Studio. Check out www.wizitch.com for related art.