Much of the early history of the galaxy is shrouded in uncertainty. Part of the problem was the Twis'rin: their religious beliefs held that they were the first and finest of the galaxy's sentient civilisations and, in the days before their chastening in the Galactic War, they had developed the habit of simply destroying any other civilisation that happened to cross their path. This ruined the historical record of dozens of planets, with only a few tattered fragments escaping the hellfire: the handful of works of native Pekkanese art still extant in the galaxy fetch an unfathomable price on those rare occasions when they come up for auction. But a few details have filtered through.

One thing that is certain is that the Twis'rin, in spite of their grandiose claims, were not the galaxy's first sentient species. Archaelogical evidence has been found on several worlds indicating that a handful of spacefaring civilizations occupied many of the worlds currently colonised by today's galactic power. What is lacking is historical evidence for the reason for their disappearance: since many of the ruins already found are in very small sites, the leading theory is that some natural disaster - possibly a supernova - wiped out the central planets of these ancient empires, leaving the small branches to wither and die.

The first of the modern species into space was the Twis'rin, who first sent a manned expedition out of their own star system over fifteen hundred years ago. Intelligent, xenophobic, and ruthless, the Twis'rin were perhaps not the best choice to begin touching the stars: their first manned expedition reached the Pekka system, where they found a primitive but intelligent civilization inhabiting the second planet, an ocean world ideal for Twis'rin colonisation. The Twis'rin opted to colonise it anyway by firing nuclear missiles from orbit at this civilisation without even introducing themselves and then going back into cyrogenic sleep until the radiation levels in the deep oceans were safe for colonisation.

This pattern continued for the next few centuries. The Doggeid and the Captab were the next of the major powers to reach space, doing so about nine hundred years ago: however, the destruction of a Captab colony that the Twis'rin mistook for the home of the entire Captab people taught both these species that staying away from the Twis'rin was a better course of action than diplomacy. When those two species met a new species, they passed the same advice onto them, and when the Captab were inadvertantly forced to make contact with the Balorim after their ship was stranded in their home Qualstreit system, they gave the Balorim the same advice.

It was the Balorim's ill luck that they could not heed that advice.