“These stars are haunted,” Chant-to-Green said softly. The others looked at her with some distaste.

I suggested that Audacity make the bridge opaque. The object below was too distracting. Dispiriting.

“For the moment, we’ll move off and focus our study on the planets,” I said. “If the spheres are Forerunner, then this system may hold other surprises.”

“Something Audacity can’t see?”

“Possibly.”

Our armor slowed us again as we traveled downstar several hundred million kilometers. I had instructed Audacity’s ancilla to monitor changes and wake me—but not the others—if something significant occurred.

It did.

After reviving me, Audacity revealed that, less than seven hundred million kilometers from the star, sensor readings were abruptly and erratically changing. From our upstar orbit, significant details had been veiled. We were able to see more clearly the nature of the inner worlds.

Some Builders believed, as an article of faith, that Forerunners had once possessed superior technologies long since lost. If ancient Forerunners had created those spheres, then placed a veil over this system, a veil that had persisted for ten million years, then that tradition seemed entirely justified.

All very intriguing. But the larger questions remained unanswered: What happened here, so long ago—and why? And how did it end?

My crew and I had come here to study Flood origins. But mysteries were piling upon mysteries.

* * *

The crew again rose from slowness. Audacity had taken up a nearly circular orbit around the fifth planet, a murky gas giant surrounded by seven rings of icy debris.

“A star road!” Clearance said in awe. “And huge!”

From the seven rings, a narrow great band dropped inward to touch the planet’s slushy, cold outer layers. As we moved around to the opposite side, we saw another, very slender road rising below the rings, then sweeping downstar in a smooth, tremendous curve, like a single strand of spider silk strung between neighbors—neighbors only in the sense that they were a mere forty million kilometers apart.

As we watched, the star road slowly flexed, automatically adjusting to changing forces, all the way downstar to the last tiny, sun-skimming chunk of rock.

And it was not alone. Many more star roads had been strung around the inner system, forming a great web—but with substantial gaps, deletions where automatic adjustments had not sufficed, where not even Precursor technology could correct the chaotic imbalances, and the web had crumbled. All the planets had once been connected, strung together. At opposition, some of the webs would have had to loop up and over the star, like swinging ropes in a child’s game.

But these children played enormous games.

The web was doubtless Precursor, far more impressive and possibly more ancient than anything seen in our galaxy. But just as dormant. Just as dead and abandoned.

Or so Forerunner scientists assured us. How many times had skeptical Lifeworkers attended the mandatory Builder lectures on this dogmatic assertion? The many explanations of how a structure could adjust and adapt, yet have no real inner life or process …

And because star roads and other Precursor artifacts merely adjusted, and never changed in other significant ways, we accepted. We believed.

Keeper was jubilant. “Forerunners must have collaborated with the Precursors, long ago! More glory to Builders—glory to all!”

I could not follow his reasoning—but it might not be wrong. All things seemed possible here: time-shifted probability mirrors, upstar veiling, massive complexes of star roads.

Chant, Keeper, and Clearance moved to the opposite side of the bridge to carry out their own analyses. Not all were heartened by what the deeper evidence was telling us.

“Downstar, around the middle rocky planets … We see vessels of a very different design,” Dawn said. “Much smaller.”

“Forerunner—I’m sure of it,” Keeper said. “They appear to be dead hulks. No activity. Undoubtedly prehistoric. I’ve seen their like as symbols in Builder rituals.” He glanced at me, embarrassed to be telling secrets. “The teachers told us such ships were sacred vessels. Nobody ever thought we might actually find them.”

“There are no energy signatures. All are inactive,” Audacity confirmed. “Dormancy possible but unlikely.”

The look of awe and longing on Keeper’s features was instructive. Clearly he had been schooled in Builder mysteries. He was being prepared to move high in Builder society. Which was likely why he had been sent on this mission.

Reluctantly, as if unveiling a new nakedness, he magnified and shifted the images for all to see. Thousands of ships were arrayed in clusters around the wide-vaulting star roads. These old ships were massive enough—most in the range of one or two kilometers—yet sleek in their obvious power, and, to my eye at least, thoroughly aggressive, deadly looking. Yet indeed of an oddly familiar pedigree, as if even what the most ancient Forerunner voyagers had wrought was still recognizable to their descendants millions of years later.

“It must have been horrendously expensive to bring them here,” Chant-to-Green said.

“Almost certainly—if just moving our tiny ship nearly bankrupts the ecumene!” Keeper said. “But why? What were they doing here?”

“Cheaper to abandon them once their work was finished,” Clearance said, breaking from his trance.

“But what was their work?” Keeper asked, clearly frustrated, conflicted.

“Any dozen of them could have surveyed an entire system,” I said. “But we see hundreds of thousands.”

“A tremendous fleet—and clearly a battle fleet,” Clearance said. “Sent here to kill on a massive scale.”

Indeed, a fleet of this size could have targeted myriads of stars and planets—and how many of those worlds had once been inhabited by Precursors?

Keeper flashed from frustration to anger. “We don’t know that! Builders would never have ordered such a thing!”

Clearance took this opportunity to agree, but with a twist. “Rates weren’t the same back then,” he said. “Warriors might have served at the top. Builders would have worked for them.”

“And Miners?” Keeper prodded. “Where would they fit in?”

Clearance did not take the bait.

“This is not what we came to study,” Chant-to-Green said. “We’re here to learn the origin of the Flood. Forerunners are not responsible for that … are they?”

Silence.

“We have to get closer,” I said. “Ship, move us downstar to within a safe distance.”

“How safe?” Audacity asked.

“Ten million kilometers. Send greetings in earliest Digon. Perhaps Keeper can instruct you in some sort of clandestine Builder grammar.”

Keeper agreed before he caught himself. Our eyes met. Curiosity trumped any fealty to secret societies. “Builders will want to know the truth as much as any of us,” he said.

“If those vessels turn out to still be active,” I said, “jump us back to the outskirts of the system. If necessary, jump us to the margins of the cluster.”

“You don’t trust our ancestors?” Chant asked.

“She understands Warriors,” Keeper said in an undertone. I do not enjoy having my thoughts spoken for me, but could not disagree.

The things around us that do not change may be of the greatest efficiency, but least capable of refinement. All their options are burned into design and instinct. They react swiftly and without thought.

These ancient vessels appeared extremely efficient. We could only hope they were truly dead.

* * *

Audacity carried us farther downstar. The magnitude of the Precursor structures overwhelmed all. Compared to this system’s artifacts, Charum Hakkor seemed a primitive village. And yet wherever those great interplanetary bridges stretched, ancient ships—Forerunner ships—gathered in disciplined rows, as if still on alert, still watching, waiting.

Chant-to-Green stated clearly what we were all thinking. “These ships may be older than any recorded language. We have only a vague idea what Forerunners were like then. The most ancient records have long since disappeared.”

Those had likely been eras of digital storage, the least enduring and the most subject to centralization and disastrous failure.

But we had much larger concerns.

“We need to select a likely-looking vessel and find a way to board,” I said. “It isn’t impossible these ships came here on a similar mission.”

My crew soberly assessed the implications.

“We’ll send monitors,” I said.

Clearance was not convinced. “Our machines are less likely to be recognized than one of us,” he pointed out. “We have changed less than they have.”

“Did they even wear armor back then?” Chant asked.

“Unknown,” I said. “Builders keep the deepest rituals. Something Keeper knows might stretch back to those times. Ancient phrases, meaningless today.”

“I was just beginning that degree of induction,” Keeper said, uncomfortable once more at being singled out. “Other rates have traditions and rituals, too.”

“Warriors were purged of their rituals during the civil wars,” I said. “As for Miners…” I looked to the one Miner in our crew.

“Also lost,” Clearance said. He glanced at Keeper. “Builders suppressed them.”

“Lifeworkers have never accepted the greatness of the past,” I said, hoping to forestall debate about who did what to whom. “There was never an age of perfection.”

“You say that, even in the face of this?” Keeper asked as we passed over a sweeping segment of star road. Extremely light, immensely strong—and totally unresponsive. Star roads surrounded the inner worlds like a highly attenuated bird’s nest. “Half the mass in this system was converted to Precursor constructs. It’s like being inside a huge puzzle.”

“Greatness is not always measured by size,” I said. “The smallest lives rule.”

“I wonder what our ancestors thought, seeing this,” Dawn said. “Maybe they came here to worship.…”

But none of us could be convinced that so many ships represented an attempt to reach out and show appreciation.

That left us with the choice that already seemed most obvious. Forerunners had come here in force to react to an extreme challenge—or to exact some form of vengeance. Then they had abandoned their ships. Had they sacrificed their own lives in the process? If the challenge they faced had involved the Flood, or what the Flood might once have been …

All possible. But if Forerunners were still here, they were well hidden.

We chose an outlying group of seven vessels and cautiously approached. The flotilla did not respond, even when we were easily within threat range. It consisted of two first-order ships, each about a five kilometers long—dwarfing Audacity—and a number of sixth- or seventh-order ships, four hundred meters in length, slender dark hulls, possibly logistics support or interdictors designed to protect the two larger vessels.

We had no idea what sort of arms they had once carried.

Audacity continued closing. We came within a kilometer of one of the sixth-order vessels and kept station in a negligibly higher orbit.

“No response,” Audacity said.

Chant and Keeper continued to focus on the near ships, refining whatever might be gleaned from immediate light.

Nothing significant. No change.

My ancilla and I had been together for over two thousand years. On this journey, I had requested that it express low-level running commentary on our situation, including crew behavior.

But now—it surprised me. For the first time in decades, it suddenly appeared in personified form, blocking my view, and requested my complete attention.

“Statistical analysis of long-range entanglements may have found life in a nearby system,” it said, and revealed a star about ten light-years away, little more than a slow-burning orange blot in the middle reaches of the Spider. “Three small, rocky worlds and one very cold icy giant. Life only on the innermost world—very faint. Ambient surface temperature so close to the star allows liquid water for all of that planet’s orbit. Oxygen, methane, sulfur compounds, the slightest hint at this distance of chlorophyll.”

“What sort of life?” I asked. “Surely not technological.”

“No. The nature of combinations point to a highly unusual circumstance.”

“Unusual in what way?”

“Organically active, but with uniquely Forerunner profiles. No other genetics.”

“That’s all?”

“Our search has been thorough. There are no other organic signatures within the Spider or all of Path Kethona.”

Beyond curious! Life arises wherever there is the right chemistry and an outflow of energy, a wet haven that radiation can warm before fleeing to the darkness of space. A cluster of stars this great should have thousands of organically active worlds, from ice-wrapped moons to rocky planets to self-warming gas giants. Yet Path Kethona—but for one system—was dead.

In a way, that made our job easier.… But it also disturbed me. If the faint traces around the small orange sun were purely Forerunner, then it seemed most likely whatever lived there descended from those who had arrived ten million years ago.

And that meant Path Kethona had either undergone a tremendous extinction event, or indigenous ecologies had never evolved.

Keeper drew my attention back to the nearest ship. “Still inert. Likely safe to approach and board.”

The ship’s surface bore a haze of micrometeor scratches, like sand-tumbled quartz. The erosion had blasted away centimeters in some locations, giving relatively useless insight into the dusty sweeps of comets through which the ships had passed again and again.

Old things wear down.

“There’s a possible seamless hatchway forward of the drive nodes,” Keeper said. “Observe the deeper strike grooves. Hatches probably served as rescue ports and may not have been as hardened as the rest of the hull.”