The Final Screen

View the final screen.

For seventeen years the renegade Pfhor scoutship
jumped between the closely packed stars of the
galactic core: charting and discarding  nearly
seven thousand systems before finally falling into a
slow orbit around the second planet of a dim star
ninety-seven light years from the gravitional
center of the milky way.

Probes were contructed and launched, with engines
and instruments whose sophistication would have astounded
both the Pfhor from whom technology had been
stolen and the human programmers of the AI whose
mad genius had directed their fabrication.
The outlines of continents were mapped, and along
them the radioactive ruins of ancient cities
were discovered, buried under the shifting
sand and rock of a global desert.

The tireless, nearly immortal cybernetic crew of the
ship were the genetically engineered descendants of
the dead world below- the first of their race in
a thousand years to return to their ancestral home.  
They came to search through the devastation of the
ancient war in which they had been enslaved,
to find a weapon or some piece of knowledge
with which they could fight back against their oppressors.

All over the ship, dancing through the wreckage
of the Pfhor computer core,
 
DURANDAL WAS LAUGHING