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The crew in the command center seems to freeze in place; the very air cools sharply, perhaps because so much of the Gravemind is subject to decay, improperly integrated, bits of its victims littering the deck or floating past …

  [TT: Lacunae of some length]

  … a noxious mass filling half the command center. I can see that the Gravemind’s integration has proceeded to the next phase, forming a more distributed anatomy, and perhaps that is why it is shedding dead tissue; like a developing fetus, it is undergoing a kind of self-sculpturing. What it may eventually look like, I cannot tell; no more attractive than any other Gravemind. Larger and even more asymmetrical.

  GRAVEMIND: We sense a possibility of danger.

  The voice is cold and precise, beautifully melodic, pointing to the power of thought of which it is capable, growing sharper by the hour.

  MENDICANT BIAS: Under normal circumstances, what remains should not be capable of reforming a significant combat force, yet somehow they have found a way. What danger could there be?

  GRAVEMIND: Forerunners surprise even those who created them. Their treachery is matched only by their resourcefulness. One of them, the Master Builder, arouses our interest. Tell what awaits us in that mess of moons.

  MENDICANT BIAS: A portal, always open, stretches far outside the ecumene to a shadow fleet of technological monstrosities—no doubt led by an inferior metarch, Offensive Bias. This fleet guards the Ark, the last bastion of Forerunner resistance and the final repository of all sentient life.

  GRAVEMIND: Then we must find the Ark.

  The Gravemind focuses on me. I cannot move, cannot flee. A mass of tendrils sprouts from what I perceive to be its center, arches out over the few meters between us, grabs hold of my carapace … Worms through to my biological core. I am pulled from my carapace, all but severed from system and memory. The pain is excruciating. My sense of self fades with alarming speed.

  Again I am in the thick of Gravemind thought processes. But our connection moves in both directions. I am surrounded by Gravemind—enormous spaces of memory and will as slow and deadly as thick lava, scorching all resistance, then covering, molding over … I can barely even hope to conduct an interrogation from within, but that will be my last impulse.

  I will not give up!

  Vaguely, the Gravemind becomes aware … but my persistence is rewarded.

  During our debate, the Gravemind hinted at a vast reserve of rules accumulated more than half a billion years ago, a huge library of experiences and disputes codified into the total wisdom of the Precursors.

  I am there. I can see it, judge it! It floods me with case history.

  The High Juridical was correct! Those who created us, who formulated the very concept of the Mantle, were themselves rich with distilled precedent. I can see their rules written in our genetic codes! We are creatures of Precursor law down to the very chains of molecules within us.

  Precursor hatred of Forerunners is central to establishing motive. They say Forerunners rose up, unprovoked, and destroyed them. The Precursors did not defend themselves. They marveled at the power of destruction, of reorganization. Their law includes the necessity of violating the very nature of law … And so they created the Flood to allow themselves the pleasure of watching, at a later date, the progress of their most violent and aggressive creations …

  I detect deliberate contradiction.

  How can this be? Can such sublime mentality be so distorted?

  And yet … So rich! So infinitely deep in meaning and broad in scope, I am overwhelmed. The Gravemind studies me, loves me so intensely it will eat me, absorb me into its very center.

  I twist in a spiral of laws once brilliant but now evil, cutting, carving—setting evil precedents. A shredding maze of forensic infection. No truth anywhere.

  All illusion!

  In agony.

  With infinite amusement, it withdraws its tendrils and my carapace is resealed. Gravemind informs me I will be delivered back to Forerunner territory, carrying a shard of itself deep in my memory.

  To spread fear and pain.

  Burn me!

  Extinguish my memory! I beg you!

  Better that Catalog never existed!

  STRING 25

  FIVE ADDITIONAL FRAGMENTS: BATTLE TACTICS OF THE WARRIOR CIRCLE

  [TT: The timing and location of these battles have not been established. “Sphere” in this context is a hypersphere made up of complexes of two and three-D surfaces, or membranes, shortened in this translation to “branes,” extending into higher dimensions that combine vectors of transit, but also scalar tactical probabilities—a difficult concept to grasp, but essential to understanding Forerunner warfare. The idea of combining what amount to many-dimensional maps with scalars describing outcomes, and adjusting both as outcomes are determined, is peculiarly adapted to interstellar engagements involving slipspace travel.]

  FRAGMENT 1

  Having escorted the last Forerunners to safety, we have repositioned the last of our fleets, including those that protected Path Kural.

  Their tactics have proven effective in skirmishes on the Lines of the Jat-Krula sphere.

  The Falchion, former defender of the Orion complex, is one of the nine commanders trained during the Didact’s exile. For nine hundred years the Falchion worked with the Builders, but remained inwardly loyal to Warrior-Servants and the Didact, unlike many of his colleagues.

  The Falchion is in command of our first clench.

  Four themas stand in peril of total infection.

  Warrior-Servants stand ready across nineteen systems formerly linked by star roads. Engaged in the clench: twelve fully capable Fortress-class battle stations, of limited mobility due to space-time debt, which will act as apex control for seven hundred thousand more nimble Harrier-class vessels.

  Opposing them: over one hundred thousand captured and infected Forerunner ships, most powerful in this context likely being four hundred dreadnoughts.

  The first flex of the membrane, leading to the clench, begins at the extreme interior margins of Path Terrulian in the 78th Thema, a cold, pre-stellar dust cloud fringed with cooling, iron-hearted stars and vast numbers of stony and icy planets and asteroids.

  The Falchion is informed of a high density of enemy vessels arriving through neural physics transmission. They materialize slowly, characteristic of Precursor transit, shedding multiverse residues at a rate that makes them temporarily vulnerable to the Falchion’s immediate response.

  The presence of Forerunner forces within this region is apparently a surprise.

  So begins the clench. While the re-emerging enemy forces are most vulnerable, still surrounded by a haze of alternate realities, the Falchion orders a carefully pre-positioned series of stabbing harrier attacks. The cloaked harriers engage first not with obvious and traceable beam weapons or projectiles, but entrained local asteroids, delivering them through gravity slings into the emergence field of each arriving enemy vessel.

  The asteroids interfere with the collapsing function of each emerging ship; in effect, either forcing them to abandon the transit, or to combine asteroid mass with the ship’s.

  The result: half of the arriving vessels dematerialize in brilliant flashes, while the other half desperately reposition by a few thousand kilometers. This affords a multi-pronged force of uncloaked harriers opportunity to engage in open beam attacks, swiftly destroying another third.

  The remaining enemy ships, largely intact but no longer in fighting trim, are examined by ancillas assigned to the Falchion, and the ships’ designators are fed into sentinels which then deploy from an apex fortress. They gather with harriers to penetrate shields and hulls, board the vessels, and quickly reprogram all control ancillas. Triumph seems assured. A hundred more such actions could guarantee victory.

  Our sentinels and monitors have supposedly been proofed against Gravemind logics. But upon ship entry, they are not successful; transmissions show all succumbing. The ships filled with infected Forerunners are deemed lost, and
destroyed one by one.

  FRAGMENT 2

  Despite isolated victories, the conquest of the Capital System is nearly complete. Strategic control of the ecumene now passes to the greater Ark—it has effectively become all that remains of Forerunner governance.

  FRAGMENT 3

  Some facts regarding the most recent and devastating incursions. From the diffuse outer reaches of our galaxy to the tight-packed stars around the central Eater, Precursor artifacts have continued their methodical process of confining and deactivating Forerunner fleets, then carving them into manageable units to be parasitized, converted, and re-tasked. Only a few vessels have been able to self-destruct—less than one half of one percent.

  A very few ships have been reclaimed and purged of Flood infection. Due to rampant deception and possible corruption, this program has been suspended.

  The logic plague is now pandemic. It is no longer limited to direct Gravemind communication, but can be passed through interactions with any Flood-infected individuals, or even ancillas.

  Suppression fields emanating from retasked star roads and double-bow formations often finish by completely deactivating uninfected ancillas throughout a sector.

  The vessels that have not been converted are severely handicapped by loss of their AIs.

  FRAGMENT 4

  … estimated two out of three remaining battle fleets destroyed or parasitized. All surviving vessels appear to have been assimilated into Offensive Bias’s fleet. The Flood-controlled …

  FRAGMENT 5

  … Catalog is NOT IMMUNE to the Flood/Gravemind logic plague.

  There is peace in subjugation …

  JURIDICAL NETWORK SUSPENDED.

  DO NOT ACCESS. DO NOT ACCESS.

  STRING 26

  CATALOG

  THE UR-DIDACT HAS returned to his home planet of Far Nomdagro in his personal ship of war, Mantle’s Approach. His privileges have been restored, but he is not in command.

  Catalog has been reassigned to him, without his objection—to my surprise.

  The IsoDidact has not yet arrived, nor has the Librarian. She and the Ur-Didact have not seen each other for a thousand years.

  The Ur-Didact stands motionless in the middle of their estate’s main dwelling, clad in a new suit of combat armor, a dark presence in a grim, chaotic scene. Council agents ransacked the private quarters as well. The house is in a state of perilous confusion. In two of the six wings, chambers and rooms climb up and over each other and rearrange randomly beneath the glowing night sky.

  He has attempted to restore some order, but the quarters where he and his wife raised their children and lived through their brightest and darkest centuries are too traumatized to recover without demolition, wiping, replacement.

  Many of the Librarian’s specimen stasis bubbles have been breached by Council agents attempting to find evidence against her. Their contents set free, many of them attacked each other or fled. Mangled cadavers have been arranged in odd heaps by house monitors. Few are now alive to eat or to be eaten.

  He approaches a badly injured tarantovire, fifty times his size, a gentle beast of intelligence and wisdom.

  “She will return soon, old one,” he murmurs, stroking the great head behind one glazed and fading eye. “What will she find? A broken and crippled home, a broken and crippled husband.” He glances at me, still stroking the leathery hide. The beast is dead. “We have become our own enemy, Catalog.”

  I am too saddened to reply, and it takes a great deal to sadden a Juridical.

  Glowing clouds of interstellar gas slide below the horizon, remnants of the supernova wavefront that passed a thousand years ago.

  The Ur-Didact summons memories of children from long ago. The young ones leap and scamper about, and I glimpse the Didact in those far-gone years, reaching out to lift a young female to his shoulders, or parrying a stick playfully swung by a young male, or bending to pet a furry creature held by another child … a pet not unlike a small human, I think. There is something different about this Didact from his younger, projected self. Something I cannot completely understand.

  “No war, no fighting,” he murmurs. “Eternal bliss, progress and development without pause! Impossible dream.”

  “The Librarian’s dream?” I ask, too boldly.

  “Not at all. She understands life! How could they not? Peace and cooperation, never painful or deadly competition—that’s what they must have desired. They understood nothing about their creations, really—else why open themselves to that sort of rebellion? Madness! It could only lead to madness.”

  “You speak of the Precursors.”

  He ignores my question and asks his own:

  “What is this other like, the foolish Manipular I was forced to imprint?”

  “To my knowledge, he has conducted himself well, even impressively,” I say.

  “I should not resent him. The choices they made…”

  “Precursors?” I ask.

  “Forerunners,” he mutters, shaking his great head. He stretches out his arms to imitate the image of his younger self, then moves into the image, until he is swarmed by translucent children, all of whom grew up and chose their father’s rate, all of whom died in the war with the humans. The sight is striking—a glowering old Warrior-Servant surrounded by happy youths. These memories must bring far more pain than relief or peace.

  And then I understand.

  These memories are not meant to soothe. They are meant to prepare. At a wave of his hand, the children vanish. The house seems to draw in a breath of cold wind. He slowly turns and examines me as if I am new and unfamiliar.

  “I reject the assertion that you are all the same,” he says. “The unit the Master Builder sent with us into the Burn helped to save me, of that I’m convinced. It performed with extraordinary courage. It was special. He was special.”

  My curiosity is intense. The Ur-Didact has yet to tell what happened on the hulk sent into the Burn. No other survivors have been found.

  “It—he—came between me and the Gravemind, just as I was being delivered up. Then monitors moved in. Grapplers held and froze Catalog. Before I could see more, I was removed.”

  The Ur-Didact shudders, then points his arm along a line that thrusts down through the planet. “She’s here. She’s in the system,” he says, as if sensing the Librarian’s presence across time and space. Instead of joy, however, he exhibits a peculiar bleakness, then contorted anger. He squares his body with mine. “Send Bornstellar to me when his ship arrives. Alone.” He stalks off to a side chamber, and when I try to follow, he waves me off. I am alone on the plaza, under the night’s knotted weave of interstellar mist.

  Only a few of the house monitors still function. Many hide in the shadows, eyes glowing like small animals. I am little more than a servant myself now, not of the Didact but of a system of reckoning and justice that may no longer exist.

  The shadows grow deeper and longer as the stars wheel westward and a great black torso of uncondensed nebula rises to zenith. One of the functioning monitors approaches. “We should all greet our mistress,” it says.

  “Of course.” I am now indeed at the level of these cowering servants. I wonder about the courage of the Ur-Didact’s Catalog. We are all the same. We are not all the same.

  But one or many, same or different, I must seek truth. And so I go with the monitor away from the plaza to the landing platform, which minutes later fills with light and echoes with thunder as a Lifeworker ship pushes through the heated air and comes to a pause just centimeters from the buffering arms of its hard light cradle.

  THE GATHERING

  The IsoDidact has reunited with the Librarian.

  Each is accompanied by Catalog. Catalog becomes a triad: one unit with three points of view. Three Juridical agents, brought together, create a personal network and share information. This affords a unique opportunity to observe the reunion of the Ur-Didact, the Bornstellar or IsoDidact, and the Librarian.

  Monitors—the few that s
till function—assign the gathering to a wing of the house only lightly damaged by the Council agents’ rough work. A long, wide hall proudly configures itself for the reunion of the two greatest defenders of the ecumene.

  For the time being, at the request of the Ur-Didact, the Librarian does not attend.

  The two versions of the Didact differ only slightly in mass and are much the same in shape. Both wear battle armor. The IsoDidact has fewer scars than his original, but both have obviously survived serious combat. Between them there is no preamble, no greeting or amenities. They know each other as well as one may know himself. Thousands of years of both life and experience, nevertheless, define the Ur-Didact, but something substantive is different, something unparalleled in Juridical experience with this Promethean.

  The IsoDidact is calm, expectant but not tense.

  The Ur-Didact speaks first. “I’ve never apologized,” he says. “It had to be done, what she and I did to you…”

  “I serve,” the IsoDidact says. “It was my privilege.”

  “You have been partner, and a good one, to my wife, while I could not … Husband or protector. While I was in my Cryptum she made her deals, got what she needed. You saw the results. Now our testimony, our evidence, has been gathered. Was there a great crime? Did we kill the last of our creators?”

  “We did. With full justification.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What were they like—the Precursors—when we sent fleets to hunt them down and destroy them?”

  “Unlike the Primordial, unlike the Gravemind on the rogue Halo. Unlike the Flood, almost certainly.”

  “Were they like you and me … Warriors??”

  “The Lifeshaper has not shared that knowledge with me,” the IsoDidact tells him.

  The Ur-Didact reaches out as if to touch his duplicate. The IsoDidact withdraws a step.

  “You feel it,” the Ur-Didact says.

  “Tell me what I feel.”

  “We are no longer the same,” the Ur-Didact says. “Look at that forsaken sky. The shadowy dust of old suns glowing deep inside with young light. New stars being born. Planets condensing like rain, covering themselves almost immediately in a velvet of life. When I was young, I saw a universe filled with threat and constant danger. It took the Librarian to teach me it was more beautiful than I could bear … Beauty second only to her own.”