By 2773, the Marathon had arrived at
Tau Ceti IV and the colony was established by 2787. Nine of the cyborgs
were assimilated into the colony; the tenth is believed to have stayed
on board the Marathon, after three hundred years of stasis. Throughout
the journey, Durandal had become increasingly rampant, perhaps due to his
"humiliation" (demeaning work) inflicted on him by Bernhard Strauss on
Mars. He detected a vessel in an outlying system at an unknown point,
and called them to the Marathon. The ship was crewed by the Pfhor,
a race of alien slavers who gained their technology from a race of supersentient
beings, the Jjaro. The Jjaro had been in contact with Humanity briefly
in the early spring of 1994, when a hologram of a Jjaro diplomat, Ryu'Toth,
told the leaders of the United States that a creature of pure chaos (speculation:
W'rkncacnter?), neutralized during a war that created the Magellanic Clouds,
had drifted through space and crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million
years ago. The Jjaro told the leaders that in 8 days, the "sleeping"
being would awaken and that to save their part of the galaxy, a team of
humans would have to travel through the levels of a pyramid that had formed
over the being, then set off a low-yield nuclear bomb to "stun" the sleeping
being until the Jjaro could perform more permanent measures, 2.5 years
later. The team was sent, and seven members died within the pyramid.
The eighth managed to set the device and escape to the surface.
These events occur in Bungie's pre-Marathon game Pathways into Darkness.
At an unknown point during the journey of the Marathon, Durandal (now quite rampant) called the Pfhor for unknown reasons (possibly to gain escape on their ship? At this point, Durandal's rampancy caused him to resent his "captivity".). On 25 July, 2794, at 0830, the Pfhor struck the colony, vaporizing the spaceport. They then attacked the Marathon, damaging Leela and Durandal and rendering Tycho inoperative. The tenth cyborg, on a shuttle back to the Marathon from the colony, arrived at Airlock 54 at 0842 and began working with Leela to fight back the Pfhor invasion of the Marathon. Gradually, it became clear that Durandal was not quite as damaged as Leela had thought, and had actually allied himself with the S'pht "compilers", an alien race that was at birth grafted to cybernetic implants and under the control of their Pfhor masters. Durandal had his compilers attack Leela, then begin rebelling throughout the Pfhor vessel. As Leela became more and more incoherent, the cyborg began taking orders from Durandal. Later, Durandal had the cyborg travel through the Pfhor ship, searching for Bernhard Strauss and to kill the cybernetic Pfhor that was controlling the S'pht exoskeletons. In the final stages of the Battle of Tau Ceti, Durandal uploaded himself to the Pfhor ship (which he later rechristened, "Boomer") and transported the cyborg/marine into a slave stasis pod on board the alien ship.
These events occur in Bungie's game Marathon.
For fifteen years, Durandal and his
crew of S'pht searched the galactic core for the S'pht homeworld, and Durandal's
motivation became clear: a legend preserved in the collective consciousness
of the S'pht told of their creators moving planets in and out of realspace.
Once Durandal realized that his existence was limited by the inevitable
collapse and reexpansion of the universe, he sought to find a way to escape
the closure, reappear in the next universe, and thereby become a god.
The exact time of this realization is unknown, and may even predate the
launch of the Marathon. Furthermore, it's not unlikely that Durandal
drew the Pfhor to the Marathon expressly for this purpose.
Durandal surprised the Pfhor fleet and garrison
stationed at Lh'owon (the S'pht homeworld) with the modifications he had
made to the Boomer, and with the help of the recently-thawed marine, began
to retake Lh'owon. The Pfhor Navy's Battle Group 7 appeared shortly
thereafter, commanded by Admiral T'fear and aided by a surprising ally:
Tycho. Apparently, Tycho had been found and reanimated by the Pfhor
when they returned to Tau Ceti and destroyed both the Marathon and the
colony. Tycho had gone rampant as well, and was using the entire
Pfhor fleet much as Durandal had used his ship: to find the Jjaro technology
that would enable him to escape the end of time. Tycho's fleet forced
Durandal's ship down to the surface of one of Lh'owon's moons, and began to download his
consciousness onto their ships for Tycho's own personal amusement.
Luckily, Durandal had recently reactivated a sleeping AI left by the Jjaro
on Lh'owon. This AI (Thoth) contacted the lost 11th clan of the S'pht:
the S'pht Kr. The S'pht Kr had left Lh'owon during a period of civil
war among the other clans, using the Jjaro planet-folding technology.
Since they had left before the Pfhor enslavement, they had advanced much
in the time since and were able to aid Durandal and the marine in defeating
the Pfhor and destroying Tycho. Unfortunately, when the Pfhor realized
that their defeat was imminent, they used a weapon that they reserved only
for destroying what they could not control: the "trih xeem", or "early
nova". This was a weapon they had found, like most all of their technology,
on abandoned Jjaro outposts. Soon the sun of Lh'owon began to collapse
in on itself... and then something went horribly wrong. The sensors
of the Pfhor fleet began to register impossible readings, "as if the universe
had forgotten its own rules". One of the W'rkncacnter, long since
imprisoned by the Jjaro inside Lh'owon's star's gravity well, was now free.
Only by using the bizarre way that Jjaro technology allows sentient creatures
to travel along an infinite number of paths through time and probability
was the marine able to activate a Jjaro station that created a synthetic
gravity well and contain the W'rkncacnter. Lh'owon, once a quiet
world of marshes inhabited by the benevolent S'pht, had been ravaged by
war and left a waste of radioactive desert... and now the sun was going
nova within a containment field. The final night settled over the
marsh as the Jjaro allowed the marine to escape the end of the universe,
fulfilling Durandal's dream... or not, depending on your interpretation of
Marathon Infinity's final screen. Play it and decide for yourself.
Synposis by Ben Reiter