OK, that last one had a LOT of hidden information.

First of all: The Combine:

The Combine was a dictatorship government that came about due to to the Mantids attacking the Sol System and other colonies as well as allies. Full blown: "Everything is military related" type government devoted to defeating the Mantids and ensuring that the human race and its allies survived the Mantid War. They picked up what they could to fight, but a LOT of information was lost, most of the top scientists were lost, and if it wasn't for research stations scattered around that the Mantids didn't know about, as well as the Digital Artificial Sentience Systems Doomsday Vaults as well as the Terran Bolos (which carry human history and science in their databanks), they would have had to start damn near from scratch.

The Combine used mat-trans to beam troops to the surface. They used power armor and had FTL ships, largely jumpspace and jump-gate.

Now for some history you might not have picked up on: The invasion of the Mantid homeworld was a disaster and caused the collapse of the Combine, which led to the Imperium.

The Imperium: First called The Imperium, it's labelled by historians in two wars: Pax Terra Imperium and The Imperium of Rage. They managed to bring the Mantid War to its ugly conclusion and invented the 1% Line used by the Terran Confederacy.

OK... now, let's get into information:

Dark Side Station:

The Combine found a neutron star that whispered and had odd gravity and radiation effects making the surface survivable. They built a facility on the ground and one in orbit. Before it could be manned for scientific investigation, the Mantids attack.

Because of the bubble and Taynee fucking with everything inside the bubble becomes a tangled mess of temporal resonance, time loops, temporal paradoxes, with only Taynee able to understand the what and the how.

The Neutron Star:

Is full of dwellerspawn/devourers. The hive mind is growing more inside, it's the hive-mind that is creating the gravitation and radiation effects, using the gravity effects to steer the neutron star toward a world that it can spawn more of themselves. The Dwellerspawn are the bioweapons that attack Telkan and other worlds. They 'infect' neutron stars and use the gravity lensing ability to travel to other planetary systems

So basically, it's an egg.

Dee Taynee

Past:

Dee Taynee (obviously not her real name) was a DARPA researcher from the 20th Century who helped devise mat-trans and its applications. This includes creating supersoldiers, time travel (very glitchy), matter transmission, possible FTL uses, all the stuff you could use mat-trans for. When the Cold War ended, suddenly things like Overproject Whisper (Thank you James Axler) underwent Congressional Oversight. Taynee was amoral and just plain fucking evil back then to the point where, rather than risk it coming out what she did, they just cryogenically froze her rather than lose her genius and expose everything Project Whisper did. She holds 'weakness' in contempt and believes there is no such thing as 'only human' because she believes that the human race is without limits.

She's an amoral psychopath with a super-genius IQ.

Pre-Story/Beginning

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When the Mantids glass Earth, humanity is desperate. Most of the scientists died on Mars, Mercury, Earth, and the like. They're able to find out (through luck?) about Overproject Whisper and that Taynee is in an underground Continuity of Government site in cryostasis. Finding out she's THE premier mat-trans scientist, hell, a scientist, they take her to Dark Station One.

Remember, Taynee just needs "one chance" and is a supra-genius caliber. They were dumb enough to give her tools and she behaved long enough for her chance. In one timeline, when the comms and everything crashed. In another, she sent Falmo'o back to free herself.

She then uses her knowledge to drain the information out of everyone's brains (as seen when Falmo'o is hooked up) to catch herself up on science and technology. (The visor flashing thousands of times a second is downloading information directly into her brain. When that body dies she's remade by the mat-trans system, which she's using for cloning, with all the previous data in her brain, and just picks up where she left off. Now, I know, having knowledge isn't the same as using it, but I tried to show her intelligent enough and scary enough that she not only understands what the knowledge means but how to use it)

The crabs were hallucinations caused by him slowly going crazy.

The condition of the station was a clue as to what time period he was in.

The melting that the bodies did was the mat-trans 'reclaiming' the biomass. The hint was the steam/fog around the bodies

Middle Story:

She realized that "the bubble" would mat-trans anyone registered back to the station, so she sent the Demands Answers back in hopes that it would not only bring her more people to interrogate, but give her an idea of where they were and if she could escape.

The ship showed up, not lineally, but in different orders. Once it had been blasted, she knew for sure that it was out of order but it was getting somewhere. So she built the mat-trans and put a "copy" of herself in the buffer of the mat-trans and ordered the two Lanaktallan to "go home" with the mat-trans on a timer once planetary gravity was detected.

She also investigates the star, discovers the psychic hive-mind (everyone else can only hear whispers, she's still got enough human basic psionics to hear voices), rips it apart learning everything she can from it, but gets contaminated by it.

End Story:

Taynee weaponized Falmo'o's farts. Every time he farted it would have been normally benign bacteria and viruses that had been tailored as bioweapons for an unknown purpose.

Falmo'o knew, from the one time he jumped in the mat-trans, that it's the action of the door clicking shut that started the process. A simple piece of duct tape kept the lock from engaging which prevented the mat-trans from working.

The Confederacy had bombed the planet into radioactive ruin and the radiation eventually destroyed Taynee.

TL;DR: Taynee was a 20th Century scientist put in cryogenic stasis rather than it be exposed what she had done who is thawed out by the Combine after the Mantid Attack because she's the only Mat-Trans scientist they can find. She escaped prisoner status, uses the mat-trans to clone herself and everyone else while she learns about everything, is still an amoral psychopath. She rips apart the minds of the dwellerspawn in the neutron star for power and knowledge. She clones and rips apart the minds of the Combine, Imperium, and Lanaktallan troops for the same thing. She realizes she can't escape normally, the 'bubble' will send her back to the station/mat-trans, so she loads herself into the buffer, clones Falmo'o and one other Lanaktallan, and 'let's them escape' back to their homeworld. Only Falmo'o has the other Lanaktalln slap a piece of tape over the latch so the mat-trans won't engage and radiation eventually destroys the computer systems she's hiding in.

What does this have to do with the main story:

The Whisperer in the Dark: Those were Dwellerspawn NOT adjusted by the Lanaktallan or created by them, meaning: They are NOT Precursor War weapons.

Combine and Pre-Combine: Humans are doped with psychological medication.

The Lanaktallan aren't complete morons and they surround their own herd with other species's herds as protection for their own herds. You get an idea of how they used covert action against the other races to keep them in place.

Mat-Trans drives you crazy because of the fact that the particles brush Hellspace, formerly a hyperatomic plane where FTL was usable. Burnt by the Lanaktallans.

Unrestrained human rage is deadly to Lanaktallans.

The human race has played with REALLY dangerous technologies.

If you have any other questions, ask.