We consider the prospects for dark matter/energy unification in k-essence type theories. General mappings are established between the k-essence scalar field, the hydrodynamic and braneworld descriptions. We develop an extension of the general relativistic dust model that incorporates the effects of both pressure and the associated acoustic horizon. Applying this to a tachyon model, we show that this inhomogeneous "variable Chaplygin gas" does evolve into a mixed system containing cold dark matter like gravitational condensate in significant quantities. Our methods can be applied to any dark energy model as well as to mixtures of dark energy and traditional dark matter.

22 pages, 3 figures, title changed, typos corrected, accepted in Phys. Rev. D