In a ragged circle of fungus, a small purple gem appears.

The gem tastes the weak orange light. The arid dust. The mild sensation of lightness.

Nothing appears to be urgently moving in its vicinity. Nothing appears to be highly _energetic_ in its vicinity.

Maybe it can fix that. It starts to put out extremely small tendrils, nothing it can't afford to waste, questing for lines and places of power.

The orange light of the dwarf star is diffuse, filtered through the overcast sky and dust in the air.

The surface is broken up by boulders, hoodoos, cracked earth concealing cavities, and long fissures and trenches that seem to replicate the cracks in the dry earth on a much larger scale, like a fractal.

There are very few craters, despite the lack of any other planetary bodies in this solar system to catch asteroids or comets.

The first layer of the surface is of soil and clay, and this extends down to a depth of fifty meters before reaching a new type of porous rock that acts as an aquifer and seems synthetic in character. This synthetic rock layer is pierced through by a complex tangle of pipes carrying silt and water at high pressures in different directions, mainly towards the distant mountains, and those pipes are notably warmer than the surrounding rock. Weak lines of power, but plentiful. Hundreds of meters deeper still, the tendrils can sense no more flows of energy: the pipes cease, and the synthetic aquifer is replaced by some substance that is opaque to their senses.

A direction!

Tiny slender tendrils retract, bringing their energy back, building up their mass around the little crystal until they can bind themselves together in weak, scuttling legs.

Something stronger might be needed later, but this form is cheap and inconspicuous, and there is no clear hurry.

But - motion, a plan, an impetus - towards the distant mountains, conserving energy, weaving glittering eyes to better maintain a cautious watch on the suspiciously barren landscape.

As the crystal scuttles towards the mountains, over broken ground and around hoodoos, there's suddenly a pulse of power, one that eclipses anything sensed before. It's distant, not visible before the horizon hundreds of kilometers away, but from the direction it can't be far over the horizon unless it's a truly astronomical source out in space.

After perhaps a minute, there's another pulse like it. Then silence.

So far away...

The gem re-evaluates its options, glowing slightly with what it could scavenge, such a taste but so hard to catch...

Caution wars with curiosity. Curiosity wins. It could scrabble for untold aeons across this barren land without finding anything again so interesting.

When the next pulse hits, it is bigger, it is more ready, and it pulls more into itself.

And starts to run. The lack of a repeat only makes it more determined - more frantic...

The landscape is vast and desolate, whipping past beneath the legs of the gem.

About an hour later there's another pulse, and this one is repeated after five minutes. If the gem is capable of triangulation, it will be able to place the source about ninety kilometers away, not yet visible.

Two hours after that, the source of the waves of power activates again, now only eighty kilometers away. This time, there are effects visible to the naked eye (or local crystalline equivalent): a shining point of light rises up from the mystery emitter atop a pillar of billowing clouds of vapour, ascending slowly into the sky.

Is it getting away?

Too slow. Not capable enough. It tries to add to its construction, longer legs, but it doesn't really understand articulation well enough and they tangle and catch.

Caution is whispering to it again, is this all it is going to have to work with, should it plant what it has rather than using it to build itself?

But there is no other sign of life. Maybe it will come back. Maybe there is more of them. Maybe it can at least taste whatever traces it left behind.

It surges onwards, but trading off between speed and storing enough of the energy to change plans.

Several minutes into the ascent of the point of light, a shimmer passes through the sky. Thousands of sparkling points of light glint for an instant in a sequence from one horizon to the other, like a school of fish turning around underwater.

The point of light stops climbing and falls in multiple pieces. Shortly after, there's another pulse of energy, then nothing for hours.

Hope; despair; determination.

The pieces fell - maybe they will be findable.

As the power source does not come back and does not come back, it re-absorbs some of its exuberance of form, concentrating on sensory apparatuses over speed.

It's got to make it last until it gets there, to the nearest fallen shard of power, and also to be able to find where 'there' is from that brief memory of light.

It refuses to give up yet. The distance to a piece is surely less than the distance to the mountains.

It takes most of a day-night cycle to reach the first piece, but the crystal is in luck: the rotation of the planet meant those pieces landed closer to it than where the point of light rose up from.

The first three pieces are disappointments, twisted lightweight metal alloys heady with the scent of high-energy chemical compounds but coated only with their combustion products.

The fourth piece is the prize: Buried under three large brightly-coloured sheets of thin fabric and tangled up in thin strings connecting them together is a conical metal object, of a size comparable to the crystal itself.

The blackened exterior of that piece bears blocky glyphs, partially obscured, reading "THFIN", and is dotted by tiny crystal lenses. Inside, there is a partially melted disc of gold with a surface textured in irregular patterns, a black cube that resembles diamond and seems to have some complicated internal structure, a tangle of fine metal wires and equally complicated smaller crystals, and lastly a chunk of heavy metal that hums with the steady emission of ionised helium by its decay. Every few minutes, the assembly produces a brief chirp of radio waves.

The gem has no idea what the exterior patterns might mean, but gently wraps itself around the cone, insinuating extremely careful tendrils to avoid displacing anything important in its functionality.

They shrink back from the chunk of heavy metal - a little bit too hot to touch, there - but gradually it weaves in and through and around it, and stands up again on many small legs, having incorporated the object into itself, nested carefully for safe-keeping.

A beat of energy like its own internal surging, but more regular - not as fast as the intruders it barely remembers, but still - a heartbeat.

This completed, it faces another decision. It could plant itself here, grow its own tendrils of magic - but the light was visible for a long way around. Others may come. Extending wispy tendrils out to taste the air, it tries to recall the landscape it has fled across - looking for a better hiding place.

The possible hiding-places include:

At the top of a nearby hoodoo, offering commanding views of the surroundings but plainly visible to any aerial adversaries.

Wedged into a deep ravine. The crystal had crossed this at a point narrow enough to leap across, but the crack in the ground widened out into a jagged valley. Well-concealed, but without many options for escape.

Travelling onwards towards the source of the much greater pulses, which looks to be nestled between several bluffs that provide shelter from every angle but which the crystal has not yet explored.

Caution tells the gem: nestle deeply in the earth, grow in power, grow a place of power around you.

But curiosity is a greater drive. Nothing has seemed dangerous here at all, yet. Nothing that can threaten the precious heart of power it has retrieved.

And at the source... there might be _more_.

More power would serve both caution and curiosity.

Carefully, looking out for anything else that moves or glows with power, no longer in a great hurry to outrun starvation - but also not in a great need to conserve resources - it begins to move towards the source.

The source is visible at the heart of the formation of bluffs.

It resembles a sphere of polished black metal, around 10 meters across, with no signs of any erosion or damage, in stark contrast to the windblown rock formations surrounding it. That core is hard to look at, the outline never quite coming into focus, the pristine surface nauseating and vertiginous, as though it's vibrating in place at high frequencies. It's enclosed within a dense bramble of thorny arms, bent and angled, interlocking. The entire structure is transparent to much of the electromagnetic spectrum outside of the visible and thermal range. In the latter part of the spectrum, it is noticeably cooler than the surroundings.

Interlocking thorny arms, bent and angled... an intrinsic memory, a feeling of power to be tapped, is trying to rise up.

The gem carefully circles the sphere, studying it, drinking in all of the details, experimenting with ways of sensing.

There is something very like this, that it could - make? become? - that would help it...

But it will take a long time to surface.

It reaches out a thin tendril, achingly slowly, ready to cut it loose if danger is provoked, to gently contact those twisting arms and attempt to quest within them.

Building something this far outside itself is not a fast process at all, not without a much greater expenditure of power than it currently intends to put forwards, even with its heart here to restore it.

Both the sphere and the cage around it are impenetrable, both in terms of lacking any openings and with the material itself seemingly immune to deformation.

There's one point on the surrounding cage that stands out as anomalous: an organic-seeming growth on the exterior surface, patterned in twists, curves, and whorls that spiral in with mathematical perfection.

Before that feature can be examined further, the exterior arms move and change shape in defiance of their prior immovability. They go from enclosing the sphere in a spherical cage to rearing back like snakes around it, creating an opening.

The sphere itself turns to complete darkness, projecting another of those massive pulses that the crystal detected before, and up close the crystal can now detect an ongoing hum of energy as ripples of green lightning cascade across the surface of the black singularity.

Out of the perfectly opaque sphere emerge three bipedal figures. Their silhouettes resemble those inscribed on the half-melted golden disk, and their body plan resembles the monkeys the crystal has seen, though oddly proportioned. In place of a face they have a reflective golden curved panel that pans around. Their hands are curled around complex metal objects. Wrapped around the figures are bands of a different material that attach large containers to their backs. Their surfaces are composed of a single material, matte and flexible, the colours matching the exterior of the metal fragments and with the same glyphs as on the cone: "PATHFINDER", they read, along with smaller sets of glyphs that differ for each biped reading "GUNDERSON", "MALOMER", and "LEIGHTON". MALOMER pushes a wheeled trolley carrying more sealed containers in front of him.

These figures emit body heat. The items they carry in their appendages and on their backs contain several more localised power sources, mostly resembling the heavy metal from the cone on a smaller scale, and they also bear several more chunks of light metals that connect to them for some purpose.

"One small step for us, one giant leap for transhumanity," LEIGHTON says in English. Her head emits a transmission of radio waves for the same duration.

"You don't have to say that every time," GUNDERSON responds, in the same language but with a much more weary tone.

None of the three figures have noticed the crystal yet. Twenty seconds after the arms first moved, they flow back into their interlocking positions and the caged singularity winks out with another pulse of energy.

Movement!

Movement is dangerous. As soon as the portal rears back, the gem drops the very end of the tendril, scuttles for cover, and leaves only the rest of the tendril draped across the ground to detect what happens next.

A set of extremely complex creatures burst forth from the object, making highly complex animal calls to each other. Maybe if it stays round the corner, they won't pick it up. They can't hurt it, but they might damage its heart, which seems more fragile and to which it has grown rather attached.

Its heart beats - a radio pulse - 

"Leighton?"

"Yes, Gunderson?"

"I'm picking up some unusual telemetry here."

"...By 'unusual telemetry', do you mean that the nose cone of the scout rocket we were sent to retrieve has somehow landed within metres of the Gate, despite the Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly of the rocket it was launched from?"

"...not just my sensors, then. It should be right nearby, judging by the signal strength. I'll reconfigure my antenna to play hotter/colder, I was expecting to triangulate over a day-long trek."

"Securing the perimeter," says Malomer, unpacking a large mostly-cylindrical object that contains a compact but powerful energy source. "Hide and wait for the scheduled reopening if I scream or miss a check-in. Don't bother going for my stack."

More animal chatter. It's quite complicated animal chatter. They don't seem to even be having a dominance contest or anything. They're just... chattering.

And their hide patterns are interesting. They're very precise in some areas, but not camouflage.

Really this is quite fascinating. The gem might be putting more sensory buds on the tendril than is necessarily wise in the presence of danger, especially as escape will be slowed down by having to carry the heart.

One such animal will walk right past the tendril, as Malomer patrols in search of whatever horrible creature is going to kill him this expedition.