Chakas swung his arm out to Riser. “His ancestors have come back to sing to him, and he doesn’t know how to stop their pain.”

There was nothing more I could say or do.

Leaving the humans, I took a tour of the ship with the goal of learning why the Librarian felt her husband needed such a large means of conveyance. Energies of the vacuum be damned.

The ship having returned to space, its shape was once again an ovoid, at least eight hundred meters from stem to stern. Al visible hatches opened for me.

Nothing blocked my way. Lift entrances and transit corridors brightly il uminated at my approach, their wal s and floors immaculately clean—and no wonder. They were newborn. It was a young vessel, not even ful y acquainted with its own nature; like me.

I had spent enough time watching my father and his Builders design ships like this to understand the basics. Most of the ship’s interior was shaped from hard light of one cast or another, creating an adjustable decor subject to the wil of the captain. I guessed that half of the ship was matter and perhaps a third fuel, reaction mass, and of course the central flake of the slipspace drive, chipped from the original core, stil closely held in a location known only to the Master Builder, chief of rate and al guilds, the greatest of the great in engineering … possibly the most powerful Forerunner in the ecumene.

I impressed myself with a sudden deduction. The Librarian—if indeed she provided the seed for this vessel—must have connections to senior Builders. Only they could authorize the cleaving of a slipspace core.

For one of them to have given her that core, to fit that necessary device into the ship’s seed—hiding for al that time on Erde-Tyrene—could mean only one thing.

There was division among the Builders at the very highest level.

I felt a brief moment of pride at my cleverness, before it was overwhelmed by a thousand other questions—to each of which my ancil a professed that such information was “outside of my present range.”

Of course there would be no uplinks, because al entangled communication had to pass through proprietary encryption and could thereby be traced. The Didact was surrounded by silence, unable to update, unable to communicate what he had learned on Charum Hakkor. No wonder he was brooding.

To convey what he knew, he had to reveal his location, and of course he would have to reveal that he had been revived, he had escaped and was actively engaged in whatever he and the Librarian were planning.

That left the Domain, of course—not often used as a means of communication.

There was always the slight chance that crucial messages might be altered, even twisted. As a Manipular, I knew very little about the Domain, and the ancil a was unlikely to inform me about things forbidden to my youthful form.

More and more complicated.

I descended on the axial lift below the command center. The ship’s living spaces were a maze of cubicles and service facilities: empty mess chambers and gal eys, empty libraries and assembly spaces, training docks, armor repair, automated shops for refit and expansion. It could easily have accommodated five thousand Warrior-Servants and support crew.

The aft spaces, above the drive chambers, were fil ed with machines of war— hundreds of them, in compact storage as wel as ful y activated form, al far more modern than the sphinxes. Here were armed scouts and orbital picket cruisers to lay cordons and screens around larger vessels, thousands of anonymous, condensed combat wraps to convert personal armor, hand weapons … tens of thousands of hand weapons of al varieties, for any situation.

Enough to fight a major battle, if not a war.

What was the Didact planning? Was he truly thinking of rebel ing against the council that ruled the ecumene?

He had taken me along—taken us along—perhaps to avoid kil ing us, but at al events to keep us close, to keep us quiet. I was in the middle of something too enormous to contemplate. Something far beyond the abilities of a Manipular, however clever, to comprehend.

Al my young life I had lived on an invisible cushion of civilization. The struggles and designs of thousands of years of history had brought me to this pinnacle. I had had to exhibit only the tiniest minima of self-discipline to inherit the place my family had planned for me: the life of a privileged Forerunner, the very notion of which I found so restraining.

My privilege—to be born and raised al unaware of what Forerunners had had to do to protect their position in the galaxy: moving opposing civilizations and species aside, taking over their worlds and their resources, undermining their growth and development—reducing them to a population of specimens. Making sure their opponents could never rise again, never present a threat to Forerunner dominance, al while claiming the privilege of protecting the Mantle.

Mopping up after the slaughter.

How many species had col apsed beneath our hypocrisy, stretching how far back in time? What was myth, what was nightmare, what was truth? My life, my luxury— rising from the crushed backs of the vanquished, who were destroyed or deevolved— And what did that mean, precisely? Had the humans defeated by the Didact and his fleets been forced into sterility, senescence without reproduction, or had they been forced to watch their children subjected to biological reduction, to becoming lemurs again?

The ancil a would supply only scattered images of a select few, under the protection of the Librarian, transplanted to Erde-Tyrene. Under her influence, equipped with her geas, these pitiful remnants had in a few thousand years grown into a population of hundreds of thousands and regained many of their ancestral forms. If Erde-Tyrene had been their true planet of origin, then these later transplants and interventions must have muddied the fossil record beyond al sense.

I stood on the outer perimeter of the largest of the weapons bays, studying the slender, aerodynamic shapes racked overhead, the heavily shielded hulking transports beneath them, stacked on pal ets and suspended in and silver and blue hard-light grips. I listened to the faint, almost inaudible tick, tick, tick of form-fit stasis fields maintaining the vessels and weapons in prime condition. The Librarian’s ship-seed had been designed with far more than just escape in mind.

The Didact once again had a ful -blown ship of war at his command. A ship fil ed with death.

A planet-breaker—suited to a Promethean.

How could a Lifeworker, even one as great as the Librarian, have arranged for such awesome might? Not alone, surely. Not without the help of Builders.

I had always been taught that the most sophisticated and ornate intel ectual abilities and social talents came with the first mutation—the end of youth, the end of being a Manipular. Out here, away from rate and family, mutation to first-form was impossible.

These problems were beyond my understanding, far beyond any solution.

Wrapped in melancholy, I ascended to the command center, where the humans had stripped off their armor and fal en asleep. I stood over them, longing to shed my own armor, as wel —longing for al of us to return to Djamonkin Crater and take our chances again on the merse-studded lake, lose ourselves on the ring island and recapture those al -too-brief moments of foolish adventure, wearing only rough sandals and crude hats, pointlessly hunting for improbable treasure.

The real pinnacle of my life to that point.

But there would be no returning to that innocence.

Never again.

* * *

The ship pushed away from the sad gray hulk of Charum Hakkor. The journey to Faun Hakkor would take just over thirty hours.

I compel ed the humans to suit up if they wanted to live. Acceleration was extreme, of course. Riser and Chakas watched with me as the stars wheeled and the ship powered into ful reaction drive, grabbing the vacuum energy and expel ing a violet streak of virtual neutrons, which winked out as soon as their lives were discovered by the doubled hand of time.

We stayed within our armor until the ship found its proper orbit. Time slowed to a crawl. I tried to teach the humans how to access diverting games but they were not attentive. Final y, excluding me, they played mysterious finger games over and over. I was about to learn by long observation their rules and elements of strategy when the Didact rejoined us in the command center.

Our armor unlocked.

Faun Hakkor came into view. Our orbit adjusted to al ow a looping pass. We would not linger, we would not land.

“I’ve inspected al the planets with long-range sensors,” the Didact said. “The information they glean is not one hundred percent compel ing at such distances, but…”

“Where did humans fight the hardest?” Chakas asked, approaching the Didact.

He looked up at the Promethean with a clear gaze and without fear.

“Where their interests were most crucial, of course. Charum Hakkor saw some of the final and worst fighting.” The Didact drew himself up before this accusing human. “Your people—if I may cal them that—were most cruel when they savaged worlds where Forerunners had resettled other species. The pressure of their growing populations was strong. They annihilated fifty defenseless systems and sowed their conquests with human colonies before we coordinated and drove them back to the outer reaches of the spiral arm. They believed—”

“In creating many souls,” Chakas said, eyes dul , as if looking inward, “I’m learning much about my ancestors.”

“Makes unhappy,” Riser commented.

“Switch to ful view,” the Didact ordered, perhaps to break out of this conversation.

Abruptly, we appeared to be suspended in space, the ship gone from around us.

With some twitching and fumbling, getting used to this experience, we could al look down upon Faun Hakkor unfettered.

Almost a match in size for Charum Hakkor, this planet was covered with a mottled carpet of green and a few scattered, high oceans locked between mountains— completely different from Charum Hakkor, even beautiful … at first glance.

“I could live there,” Riser said.

But the sensors were tel ing us a different tale. Only now did we see evidence of past destruction, highlighted by ancil a commentary—slash marks, craters, vast flattened and burned regions, now overgrown, but outlined in red and blue, with dates of strikes, counterstrikes, and lists of Forerunner ships engaged in the long- ago battle.

And then—beside those lists—other ships, other names. Human names. Chakas flinched at some of these names as his ancil a translated for him.

“Faun Hakkor was the origin of the Pheru which humans so deeply valued as pets and companions,” the Didact said. “The reserve forces defended it fiercely but their numbers and instal ations were minimal, so the planet kept most of its original flora and fauna…”

“Something’s changed,” Chakas said. “It doesn’t look right.”

Riser walked around us—an outlandish figure in his armor, striding across an invisible deck. “Who lives here now?” he asked.

The Didact requested scans of the planet’s present biota along with lists of the flora and fauna that had survived the battles nine thousand years before. In the records of the survey conducted by the Lifeworkers, likely after the end of hostilities, I saw hundreds of species of larger animals ranging in size from a meter to a hundred meters—some clearly aquatic, others huge land carnivores or sedate prairie-grazers. This list was compared with what the sensors could now locate.

One by one, the larger species dropped out.

“No animals larger than a meter,” the ship’s ancil a reported in a precise, clipped voice.

Next came a range of historic species less than a meter in size—tree-hoppers, burrowers, smal carnivores, seed-eaters, flying creatures, arthropods, clonal sibling societies … the Pheru.

One by one, they dropped off the current list. None to be found.

Next came flora, including dense arboreal forests. Many of the original trees had acquired a kind of long-term intel igence, communicating with each other over centuries using insects, viruses, bacteria, and fungi as carriers of genetic and hormonal signals, analogous to neurons.… That list also quickly emptied. There were remnants—dead forests and jungles covered with a false green carpet of primitive plants and symbiotic species.

Al that remained, apparently, were mosses, fungi, algae, and their combined forms.

“Nothing with a central nervous system or even a notochord,” the ship’s ancil a reported. “No fauna above a mil imeter in scale.”

“Where are the bees?” Riser asked. “What wil bear fruit if bees are gone? No little meats to hunt. Where are they?” His voice rose to a sad squeak.

“Flowering plants are few and in decline,” the ancil a continued. “Al oceans and lakes and rivers are sour with decaying matter. Sensor results indicate extensive ecosystem col apse.”

The Didact could stand no more. He cut off the virtual view, and we stood again on the deck of the command center, the fading lists flapping away if blown by discouraging breezes.

“We have become the monsters,” the Promethean said. “It has returned in such force that Forerunners wil destroy everything that carries even the smal est seed of reason … everything that thinks or plans. This is to be our last defense. A crime beyond al reason, surpassing al previous sins against the Mantle.… What wil remain?”

I wondered what it he was referring to—the prisoner released from Charum Hakkor?

Something worse?

He cal ed up a chair suited to his size and sat to think. “You wonder what forced me to enter the Cryptum. It was my refusal to agree to this plan even in its early stages. With al my being, I fought against the design of these infamous devices, and for thousands of years forestal ed their construction. But my opponents final y won. I was reprimanded by the Council, bringing shame upon my rate, my guild, my family. Then I became the infamous one—the conqueror and savior who refused to listen to reason. And so, I vanished.”

“No sympathy here,” Chakas said, eyes sharp.

“Defiant to the last,” the Didact observed, but without anger—as if al his anger had been sucked away by the vision of these barren or dying worlds.