On Yndyeri Duvo, the Kiskashin line-pirate was experiencing a glow of pride in his mercantile skills. He had managed to resell the Human colony report (tagged with some Human cultural profiles) to a wandering Vusarkan academic, a Piraseri market haruspex and a Makhori scholar with an obsession for all things Human-related. There had been other interested parties, but he decided against further delay in relaying it to Lord Mysterious. Besides, new merchandise was continually arriving: time might be a function of the space–entropy continuum but it was also money, thus money was intimately bound up with the structure of the universe. As he delighted in explaining to the clients and customers to whom he turned his attention as the Human colony report flashed away through the local systemnet to Duvo’s sister planet.
Off the western coast of Yndyeri Tetro’s single massive landmass, something stirred in the depths. The waters sparkled and teemed with life all the way from the shallow shoreline out to the continental shelf, until they plunged into descending gradations of shadow, increasingly turbid realms of oceanic gloom thinly populated by rare grotesque creatures. Only a meagre radiance reached the lower depths, reducing jutting features to vague, blurred outlines, yet a ragged trench gaped there, a sheer-sided fissure full of ancient, impenetrable night. And down, further down, where the last vestiges of surface light died in the intense darkness, where a cold, crushing pressure threatened obliteration, down there amongst unseen, undisturbed debris, an awareness stirred.
But it was an awareness without consciousness, an awareness of the environment: sea temperature, tides, currents and the presence of threat-level objects passing above or below sea-level. Awareness of the subjective physical, the balance of mechanical and organic, and the entropic state of both, which was not good. Objective assessment of repair and regulation systems, and of overall integrity, which was well below optimum. And awareness of the information that trickled in via its receptors from time to time, of the ancient biocrystalline matrices which deconstructed, analysed and searched for matches to an array of images in two, three and four dimensions as well as any linguistic equivalents. It was a search that the awareness had repeatedly and tirelessly undertaken for centuries upon centuries, without a single instance of success.
Until now, when the memory buffer received a data packet detailing the discovery of a lost Human colony world called Darien.
The awareness stripped the Darien report down to lists of phrases and words, and stacks of images: its analytic processes sorted them into levels of potential meaning, discarded the obviously trivial, then sorted through the visual data. When it came to the stills and motion images of some ruins which the Humans had uncovered near their settlements, additional processing capacity was quickly brought online as the images were examined down to extrapolated resolutions. The awareness devoted more resources to the analysis, and when it was finally certain it opened pathways in the biocrystalline matrices and let power from the duality core flood through them.
Tailored glands were stimulated, capillaries relaxed, and enzymes leaked into the heavily shielded organic cortex. Synaptic transfer spread through neural nets dormant for long ages, opening up level after level, augmenting the awareness, feeding a burgeoning brightness…
And he awoke to the steel pains of his aged, wounded body, lying on a cold seabed on an alien world in an alien universe. He knew that his aeons-old purpose and duty must have come round at last, otherwise he would still be sleeping, and that was a joy which in some ways helped him to endure the torment of old, old injuries. But when he reached for the memories of when and how he had been damaged, there was nothing, a gap where familiar recollection should have been waiting to be relived. He felt the panicky edge of fear and subdued it, focusing on discovering the reason.
What he found was a terrible swathe of decay which had eaten into one of the biocrystal chines of his cortical augmentation. His awareness function had failed to detect it as the sensor web had itself been affected, and the worst of it was that the rot was still advancing. If unchecked, it would in just a few years kill him.
His thoughts were wry with a black humour. <To have survived these limitless chasms of time and all the trials that came before is still a great achievement. And now I have the opportunity to deliver unto my brothers and sisters a final victory. I am of the Legion, and although individual knights may fall, the Legion must triumph. The laws of convergence must triumph.>
The analysis of the Darien report was before him, but he decided he would institute a final recovery trawl through the corroded biocrystal while he assessed the data.
He saw the world Darien, a place of lush vegetation and a living landscape of mountains and rivers; he saw the moon and recognised remnants of the enemy’s defences with no sign of his presence…
With the powers of their machinemind planetoids, the Legion of Avatars cut through the extrinsic and intrinsic layers of material existence and opened an unstable fissure in the face of reality. In vast phalanxes they fled from a dying universe into this one, then used the planetoids to tunnel up through the hyperspace tiers of this one in search of a new home, a new dominion…
He saw the colonists, the Humans, saw all their weaknesses and saw how weak they were in the face of the political realities surrounding them…
There had been a battle, a gargantuan struggle spread across many thousands of star systems, a savage, resounding clash in which whole worlds and entire sentient species were eradicated as a matter of course…
He saw the visual data, the near-complete ruins amid the forest, recognised more of the enemy’s work and wondered if it held their deadliest weapon, the one that had defeated the Legion even in the full glory of its might. If so, it could be turned to their advantage…
Fragmentary memories were being recovered… in hard vacuum, a close-quarters grappling struggle with one of the enemy’s sentient machines, hooked and edged extensors searching for purchase on each other, then one of his greater tentacles found the jutting edge of a hull plate, wrenched it aside and thrust a high-energy lance into the vitals… the knights of the Legion of Avatars gathered in a council of war, their millions waiting in curved ranks and arrays within the flickering gloom of a deep, desolate tier of hyperspace, all intoning the catechisms of convergence… and an old, old memory of his own cyborg-form not long after his transformation, the long, armoured carapace patterned in dark reds and greens, the ten greater, articulated tentacles and the six lesser ones tipped with every kind of effector from tearing chainclaws to delicate manipulators, a magnificent new body which had freed him from the pains of the flesh… then a part of him realised that there was no memory of his organic appearance from before his ascent to biomechanical immortality, nothing except the vague recollection that his chosen cyborg-form was utterly different from his old body…
He assessed the Darien situation and the strategic implications of its location as well as the fact that the Humans were dispatching a mission to their lost colony. Then he considered various possible journey routes, but not for himself. With its battered substructures, leaking carapace plates, stuttering main drives, and near-defunct sensor array, his biomachine body might be able to drag itself into orbit but the lengthy voyage to Darien would be too hazardous. He would have to delegate that grave responsibility to lesser agents, three Instruments to carry out the task, each one an abridged simulacrum of his own persona, each one created out of his own neural substrate, each one a small loss, and a small addition to his freight of pain.