Friends At The Table

15,000 years or so before the September Incident, it went something like this:   Somehow, they'd survived. They'd peeled across the galaxy itself, launched by the combined force of a half dozen stellar combusters. Shielded by Rigor's endless mass, they'd subsisted on machine-assembled proteins and nutrients, suffering in the lonely dark at high speeds.    They weren't quite candidates, but they were the closest thing Rigor had. So it stung, in so far as Rigor can be stung, when they slipped from its grip in the light of the Golden Branch. As the bulk of its body bore deep into the ice of Ionias (and deeper still into slumber), they wrenched free from it and found land elsewhere, taking bits of the machine god with them.   There was a debate among the survivors, though. What to do with the remnants? With living technology that protected and provided for them in the dark just as it had once exploited and used them?    Some survivors joined under the banner of a young, charismatic leader--Chess Kesh--whose optim