..The target world now lay in view of most of the fleet. For several months the ranks of vessels quietly appearing in the system and concealing themselves behind the planet's satellite had swollen. The fleet was a field of dark little stars, stretching into the mind shattering darkness of space. New alien constellations formed and faded as fleets of vessels formed, readying themselves for an all out assault on the blue green world which now lay only a few light seconds away.
As military preparations were gaining pace a ressurection was taking place. The Somnium Stars were transforming. Millions of soldiers had been revived, spun up from a decades long digital limbo. Hundreds of thousands of attendant droids crawled and skittered amongst the neurone-like recesses of the forest-mind, to monitor and ensure that no soldier was beyond retrieval.
The technology involved in this mass resurrection was biological. Vast networks of specialised fungi, infused with generations old biotech had kept the soldiers bodies in a kind of state similar to sporulation; a specialised stasis used by fungi and other micro-organisms to endure periods of extreme deprivation.
The bodies of tens of millions of soldiers were immersed in the thick endless tangle that was the Fields. Every thick strand of fungal matter was possessed of a primitive sentience. Every single strand was a single component in a huge, living mind, that interfaced and communicated with on-board systems and networks.
Attendant AIs had uploaded themselves into the armies of droids maintaining this endless dark world garden, performing intricate and arcane rituals in a kind of symbiosis with the fungal forest-mind, doing its bidding.
Deep within the forest-mind a thin, ravaged hand was tearing feebly through a thick miasma of fungal strands and dense peaty soil. Like a pitifully weak hatching struggling from its egg, the creature buried within the stinking forest floor could barely make headway. Small muffled groans issued from the ground. Suddenly, the soldiers emaciated body spewed roughly forth out onto the forest floor, as the network of tendrils packed tightly around his body constricted, whilst simultaneously exuding a gelatinous ichor to facilitate this dark parody of birth...
