“They’re not at all happy with what they remember,” I said.
“They’re accessing unpleasant truths—the thoughts and recollections of human warriors. Defeated, bitter—and about to be executed.”
“She took their essences before they were killed?”
“She had nothing to do with what happened in those days. It was warrior policy to preserve what we could of foes before they were removed.”
“Removed,” I said.
“And in this instance, we had excellent reason to harvest memories,” the Didact continued. “Even before we went to war with humans, they were fighting another foe. A most hideous scourge we had yet to encounter, and about which we still know very little.”
I looked inward. “The Flood,” I said. This much knowledge was open to me: images … emotions, but all jumbled and incomplete.
“That was their name for it. While they fought us, they defeated that other enemy and pushed it beyond the edge of the galaxy—an epic battle. We did not know of their victory until we defeated them. And we wished to learn from them how to fight the Flood, should it return—as seemed inevitable. However, for obvious reasons, they felt no compulsion to share their secret. They kept it distributed among themselves, hidden from all our techniques.”
“Surely, humans did not fight this ‘timeless one,’ the missing captive.”
“No.” The Didact lifted his long arm and swept it slowly along the visible limb of the San’Shyuum world, emerging into day. “It predated the humans who excavated it. It predated the Flood. However, I shared the humans’ opinion that whatever it was, it was extraordinarily dangerous.”
“And still, you spoke with it.”
He seemed conflicted that I knew about this. “You see that much. Aya.”
“How could you penetrate Precursor technology? What did you ask of it?”
“That will emerge when you are ready—and in full context,” the Didact said. “Our weapons have been removed, but this ship is still full of powerful tools. You, for example. And the humans. The Librarian has been conducting her surveys and research for the thousand years I was in exile, and seems to have learned a few things she does not dare pass along directly. Things perhaps even the Council has not been told. But through you and the humans, indirectly … you have been placed on a slow fuse, timed for the proper moment … and even I have no idea when that might be.”
“It all sounds awfully inefficient,” I said.
“I’ve learned to trust my wife’s instincts.”
“Did you share your knowledge with her before you entered the Cryptum?”
“Some.”
“Did she share her knowledge with you?”
“Not much.”
“She didn’t trust you, then.”
“She knew my circumstances. Once my Cryptum was discovered and I was released, it was inevitable that I would eventually be forced to serve the Master Builder and the Council, whatever my objections. But she gave me some time, a delay, before that happens. We have this journey to make and questions to ask. In context.”
The ship’s ancilla appeared and informed us we were now permitted to approach the largest San’Shyuum world.
“Bring your humans here,” the Didact said.
“They are not my—”
“On your actions they will live or die, serve as heroes to their species, or be snuffed like tiny flames. Are they not yours, first-form?”
I lowered my head and complied.
Our ship continued its downstar fall along a stretched elliptical orbit. If we decided to abort, we could whip back out and make a break for the quarantine shield … hoping, I suppose, that the codes would still work and we’d be released.
Faint hope.
TWENTY-THREE
FINALLY WE WERE close enough that our sensors penetrated the smoky haze that covered the shadowy ruins of San’Shyuum cities. The destruction hinted at from afar was now manifest.
Chakas and Riser watched with us on the command deck, faces deadpan. Riser examined me with a puzzled expression, then wrinkled his nose. Chakas did not even glance at me. If they felt horror, awe, memory … they did not reveal this to us. Already I saw how much they had changed, how much they had grown. They were almost entirely different beings from the ones I had met on Erde-Tyrene. We all were.
At least, I told myself, my service was voluntary—of a kind.
“There,” the Didact confirmed, and swept his finger over the magnified images: trace signatures of engine plumes visible even through the waste heat of cities on fire, the outlines of fleets of landed or hovering ships, some of them larger than ours, many smaller. “Lifeworkers don’t carry weapons,” he said. “Builder security is here, but they’re lying low, hiding in the obscurity. They must know I’m here. Let’s take a deeper look. There—Preservation- and Dignity-class escorts. Hundreds of swift seekers, Diversion-class war machines. All this, to protect a few Lifeworkers? What happened down there? Is she still in the system?”
His voice carried tones of both resignation and despair, and a touch of hope—as if defeat and capture and whatever worse things he had imagined might all be worthwhile if he could only see his wife again.
We were within a hundred thousand kilometers of the planet when the ship’s ancilla announced that our last escape orbit was being cut off. “Many ships are moving downstar through the quarantine shield. They are allowed full functionality, power and speed, and are now matching our course and trajectory.”
I spun around as more than a hundred flashed into sensor view, most smaller than ours but a few substantially greater and no doubt packing tremendous firepower.
“Interdiction,” the Didact said. “The Confirmer did indeed help set the trap.” He made one final attempt to shift our orbit upstar, but confinement fields swept in to prevent us from achieving maximum speed, and of course we could not enter slipspace. We were like an insect caught in a bottle, buzzing in futility.
When the Didact had gathered as much information as he could, he said, “Something has provoked the San’Shyuum to rebellion.”
“But they have no weapons.…”
“Had no weapons. The Confirmer has not been attentive. Clearly, they are still slippery customers.”
“Commander of the response fleet orders that we submit and stand down,” the ship’s ancilla said. “I am ordered to hand over control. Shall I comply?”
“No choice,” the Didact said. He looked around, as if still trying to find a way to run, a place to escape. I watched him with a doubled awareness, sharing in a strange, incomplete fashion his emotions and memories of previous defeats, flashes of dead comrades, entire worlds destroyed in apparent retaliation.…
More than I could stand. I backed away, bumping up against the humans.
“What will happen to us?” Chakas asked. “We’re not even supposed to be here.”
“They will punish,” Riser said.
I could not answer. I did not know.
A second ancilla appeared beside the ship’s. The two engaged in some sort of contest, not physical but conducted throughout all the ship’s systems. Their images merged, twisted geometrically about each other, then spiraled up and vanished.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“AI suppressors,” the Didact said. “Instant debriefing and transfer. Our ship has been stripped of knowledge and control.”
We were feeling the full strength of a Forerunner warship’s most modern weaponry, wrapped and stunned like a fly in a web. Close-in confinement fields flashed around the command center. We felt gravitation cease. At odd angles, the Didact, the humans, and I waited helplessly in semidarkness, blind to all outside activity. Our own ancillas fell silent under the AI suppressors beamed from outside.
Finally came total darkness. Minutes passed.
Riser was praying in an old human dialect not heard in ten thousand years. Its cadences sounded familiar to me. The Didact had once studied human languages.
Chakas was s
ilent.
Slowly, my armor started to fail. My breath came hard and shallow. Something sparkled to my right. I tried to turn, but the armor had locked up and now held me immobile. An orange glare increased to unbearable brilliance, and I saw our bulkheads and control surfaces melt and collapse—while new walls of hard light fought to rise between us and the vacuum. Even under siege, stripped of nearly all higher functions, the Didact’s ship was valiantly trying to protect us.
Our world became a twisting, free-form struggle between destructor beams and new construction. I watched in numb fascination as the struggle ramped up to a pitch I could not track with my natural senses … and then slowly subsided.
Our ship was losing.
Half of what was left of the control center—abstract and angular and much smaller—fell away and vanished. I briefly saw the curved flank of a sleek Despair-class hunter-killer, glinting and flashing as it reflected the dying glow of our hull’s destruction. We drifted free. Our air rapidly staled, and we were surrounded by vacuum.
Into my narrowing point of view came three powerful, fully operational seekers—longer, sleeker, versions of the Didact’s old war sphinxes. They lacked the scowling features of the older machines—depersonalized, dark, fast.
One of them cut through the new-grown walls and circled behind us, then dropped aft, penetrating interior bulkheads, searching for other occupants. Through shredded layers of ship’s decking, I watched it release the war sphinxes—only to smash them like toys, slice them into sections, and then reduce those to sparking dust.
The sphinxes offered no resistance.
Another took the Didact in tow, bouncing in his armor like a child’s toy on a string as he was hauled from the dying ship into the depths of space.
The third lingered near me but took no action, as if awaiting instructions. Then, just as my vision shrank to a purplish cone and I thought I had taken my last breath, the seeker swept out its manipulators, seized my armor, and tugged me from the broken hull, not toward a flotilla of ships, but outward, around—and finally, down.
We were all being unceremoniously dragged to the surface of the San’Shyuum world.
TWENTY-FOUR
PARALYZED, WRAPPED IN a transparent field like a bubble, unable to talk to anyone, my ancilla deactivated by suppressors, I had an ever-changing ringside view of what Forerunners do when their anger and fear takes charge.
They have no warrior discipline.
The atmosphere below was a swirling soup of smoke and fire. Warrior craft and automated weapon systems were mostly too small to be visible, but I saw their effects—darting beams of needle light, glowing arcs cutting across continents, gigantic, stamplike divots punched into the crust and then lifted up, spun about, overturned. I had never seen anything like this—but the Didact had.
His memories offered commentary and context as the grappler dragged me down toward that hell.
For some time, my involuntary point of view spun away from the planet. Looking outward, I saw weapons and ships in higher orbits transit like frantic stars, the blinding sun—and then, the sparkling, dissolving hulk of the Didact’s ship.
The ship that the Librarian had seeded inside the central peak of Djamonkin Crater—a bent, broken mass still pitifully trying to reassemble.
A ship that never even had a name.
Several times, the grappler and I passed through pulses of ionized gas and superheated plasma that tingled my nerves and throbbed in my bones—without actual sound.
It slowly became obvious that the decimation of the San’Shyuum world was not all one-sided. The planet itself was a source of plasma pulses and other firepower. More interesting, I caught sight of a craft silhouetted against the stars that looked like nothing made by Forerunners—a flat platform surrounded by billowing, silvery sails, flapping in and out like the bell of a jellyfish, as if trying to swim clear—but not succeeding.
The bell dissolved, the platform broke up. Bodies spilled, tiny and motionless—and then all of it was gone. I spun around again. The planet seemed close enough to touch, maybe a hundred kilometers below, nighttime emphasizing the dying glow of what might have been forests, cities.
Near the brightening arc of sunrise, a glistening river was delineated against the shadow of dawn, studded with smoking pinpoints of orange. Burning ships—ships made to float on water.
There was plenty of time to feel sorry for myself, to regret all I had done, but contrary to all my self-expectations and past attitudes, I didn’t. Sorry about nothing, regretting nothing. Simply watching, waiting.… Waiting with a kind of contentment to die, if that was necessary and inevitable.
Wondering about our humans, who had had every reason to regret having anything to do with me. And who, if they still lived, might now be adding to their own awareness of past battles, old wars.
The main prize was of course the Didact. He had fled some duty too onerous to contemplate. He had fought against a Council decision, and losing that fight, he had hidden away, entered into an honorable if not permanent retirement.
But now his opponents had him again. That seemed more than significant—it caused a deeper anger than anything being done to me.
I shut my eyes for a moment.
When I opened them again, flares of atmospheric entry shot up on all sides. We were very close to the surface, less than sixty kilometers, and rapidly descending.
I spun again and saw space through a cone of ionized gases. Centered in that cone, something impossible appeared far beyond the panoply of ships and weapons exchanges: an enormous ripple that stirred the stars like a stick twirled through flecked paint. The disturbance swept across well over a third of my view, then was framed by an elliptical lacework of hard light.
I recognized that this was one end of a massive portal—designed to transport a great deal of mass on a continuing basis.
I watched without emotion as an enormous but delicate silver ring emerged through the purplish hole in the center of the lacework. Despite its size, the portal had opened far from the orbiting ships, well over a million kilometers outward from the orbit of the San’Shyuum’s dying world … far above war, death, the concerns of little creatures like myself.
“It’s big,” my lips tried to say, but again my breath hitched, my lungs heaved, I tried to suck up whatever air was left, but clearly, I was running out. The seeker was towing me all the way down to the surface with only the bubble as protection.
The ring far above shimmered. Within its delicacy, spokes of hard light shot toward the center and created a brilliant copper-hued hub fully a third as wide as the ring itself.
Half of the ring fell into shadow, the other half glimmered in bright sun.
The inner surface—it’s covered with water—
My tunnel vision narrowed around the ring, focused on it, and I noticed tiny details, clouds, clouds in shadow, impossibly tiny against such vastness … mountains, canyons, detail upon detail as my vision both sharpened and shrank inward, until it winked out altogether and I drifted through a thick pudding of nothing.
It was now that the Domain opened to me, without benefit of ancilla, interface, or past experience. It was new, deep, appropriately shapeless—that made sense. I was dying, after all. Then, it assumed a form, rising around me like a beautiful building with gleaming, indefinite architecture, not quite seen but definitely sensed, felt—a lightness that carried its own somber joy.
Here comes everybody, I thought.
And everybody who had ever visited the Domain said to me: Preserve.
The lightness vanished instantly. The building was being carved apart just as our ship had died.
More messages.
This time is coming to an end.
Preserve.
The history of Forerunners will soon conclude.
These came with a rising scream of anguish, as if I had plugged into a chamber where essences were pouring forth more than recall and knowledge—pouring forth frustration, horror, pain.
; Before the bump, and the sudden inrush of cold, clean air—breathable air, but with a sharp tang of soot and ozone—the Domain lifted up and away. I was grateful to be free of it. For a moment, I doubted I had seen anything but a reflection of my own emotions and predicament.
“Sometimes, there is a kind of broken-mirror aspect.”
Vaguely I wondered about the giant ring. Had I imagined it? It had seemed so real. Then a word flashed into my revived mind, echoing from the image I had just seen or imagined or conjured up from anoxia.
That single word connected intimately with the precious little the Domain had revealed to me: Death. Destruction. Massive power.
That word was Halo.
TWENTY-FIVE
JANJUR QOM • THE GREATER SAN’SHYUUM QUARANTINE WORLD
“WHAT IN HELL have they done to you, Manipular?”
The voice was mannered, cultured. I recognized its highly trained and inculcated tones, like powerful music rising and echoing through a great, solemn structure.
For a moment, I thought maybe this was the Domain again, speaking in a more physical and personal way. Not so, however. The voice was coming through my ears.
I could smell something other than burning—like the resonant, musky perfume favored by my father, far too expensive for my swap-father or other Miners … or Warrior-Servants. The voice was definitely not my father’s, however.
My eyes were open but showed only a darkness swimming with vague shadows.
“Turn off the suppressors. His armor can revive him. And I do want him revived.” Same voice, but not directed at me.
Another voice, less powerful, subservient. “We don’t know whether the armor has been counterequipped.…”
“Turn them all off! We have the one we want. Let’s get some additional details. I’m sure there’s a mad scheme lurking here somewhere.”
My armor loosened. Strength returned to my flesh. I had some freedom of motion but not much—the suppressor had been shut down, but physical shackles still held me. I seemed to hang from a chain or a hook in a grayish, echoing volume. I blinked to clear the blurriness.