Cryptum Read online

  “Settlements? I thought Forerunners didn’t need new planets—that we’d achieved maximum growth.”

  The Didact sighed. “There are many things Builders do not teach to their young,” he said. “Earlier displacements around Orion and in toward galactic center forced us to move native populations from their home regions to new, outer systems. The Librarian and her staff cataloged and searched for the most appropriate matches, those stars most like native suns…”

  “You shuffled planets?”

  “Yes,” the Didact said. “Humans are naturally purists. They resent having to live with other species. In fact, they’re among the most contentious, bigoted, self-centered…” He looked back at Riser and Chakas. “I never understood how my wife tolerated them.”

  “Forerunners don’t like living with other species, either,” I observed.

  “Yes, but for good reason,” the Didact said. “We enforce the Mantle. We must focus and protect and preserve all life—including ourselves.”

  I had been taught this principle often enough, yet now it rang incredibly hollow. “The humans wanted to be left alone,” I said.

  “Oh, they were expanding as well, and happily displaced and destroyed on their own. The San’Shyuum are not naturally inclined to war. They are a handsome, intelligent race, besotted with eternal sexuality and youth. They hoped to spend their lives in luxury. For all that, their science was extraordinary. I suspect that given a few more centuries, humans and San’Shyuum would have fallen out with each other.… Humans would undoubtedly have devastated their more effete allies. We saved them that trouble.”

  “You devastated both,” I said.

  “We made a pact with the San’Shyuum. For the humans, there was no pact. The Librarian managed to save some. More than I suspected.”

  “Pardon the insolence, but your relationship with the Lifeshaper does not seem ideal.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. Brace yourself, Manipular. This ship is still young.”

  There were several more groaning shudders and then a great, shivering bounce—which must have been impressive outside our cabin buffers.

  The ship settled and all sense of motion ceased.

  The horizon outside appeared grayer and more rugged. Strange, spiky mountains rose everywhere, but closer scrutiny revealed these could hardly be natural formations. The outlines were slumped, rounded, decayed, but still monumentally artificial. Once, these ruins had formed the anchors and foundations for the superstructures of an ancient Precursor world—their system-linking, unbending filaments. But something had reduced those supposedly irreducible foundations and the filaments themselves to slag. The very thought chilled me. Precursors built for eternity!

  “Atmosphere is not optimal,” my armor reported as we descended the egress tube. What the ship sensed and measured, we all knew instantly. Riser and Chakas were not happy. Riser tried to climb back up the wall of the tube, but it rebuffed him.

  “You should have seen this world in its prime,” the Didact said. “It was magnificent. A center of mysterious, dormant power that humans could live among, look at, but never begin to comprehend. Now … look at what we’ve done.” Anger and dismay mixed in his tone.

  “How?” I asked. “How do you destroy Precursor artifacts? They’re inviolate, eternal.”

  “They understood the universe in ways we never will. We can’t unlock their secrets—but now, apparently, we can destroy all they ever made. That’s what I call progress.”

  TWELVE

  THE SHIP HAD come down near the perimeter of an arena many kilometers wide. The irregular walls of the arena consisted of huge chunks of rubble, tens of meters in size, broken along crystal planes. The planes glinted in the low light of a blue-white sun, a blinding point near the horizon.

  The atmosphere on the surface was cold, thin, poor in oxygen—the sky above thick with clouds of stars in one direction, almost empty in the other. Out there, beyond the diffuse edge of the galaxy, was the emptiness of intergalactic space, a void that Forerunners found unattractive—a vastness of few or no resources between far-flung islands of great wealth and energy.

  We were satisfied with the resources of this galaxy, for the time being, and rarely looked outward. So I had been taught. But, as the Didact was so quick to point out, there are many things Builders do not teach their young.

  Armor protected us against the harsh conditions and supplied our personal needs without difficulty, but that was not immediately obvious to the humans. They clutched at the apparent openness of their wraparound helmets, slowly realizing that both fingers and faces were covered with a thin, adjustable film of energy.

  The Didact walked west, toward the blue star, his shadow long behind him. I followed his diminishing figure. Hundreds of meters across the arena we came to a broad, circular pit. Targets upon targets … This reminded me of the ring island and the sandy field around the Didact’s Cryptum. Eerie to say the least. I did not like this place. Once I would have welcomed a chance to visit this world, but all my ideas of what the Precursors had to offer had changed.

  Everything about my ideas was changing.

  Chakas and Riser, I noticed, had decided to follow me, if not the Didact. That was foolish. I had nothing to offer anyone. I was an empty husk. I was trying to rebuild something of my personality, reshape myself into a defiant and discerning ego—but it was hard. What did Forerunners possess that could do this?

  How could the Precursors have left their heritage so vulnerable?

  The vast pit dropped several hundred meters to a smaller version of the arena. Then I noticed a thin overburden of slagged, charred material, crunching like cinders beneath our feet: not gray-silver, not broken along crystalline planes—and therefore not Precursor. We walked with slow precision down the slope, balancing gingerly on smaller chunks of rubble, leaping from chunk to larger slab, stepping around more dangerous jumbles. This entire area must have been paved at one time. Someone had overbuilt the arena. The Precursor structures were at the bottom, possibly tens of millions of years old. The higher, charred ruins were likely human or San’Shyuum.

  We were descending through layers of awful history.

  My ancilla chose this moment to reassert her presence. “May I attempt to reconstruct your relationship with the prior ancilla? I will need to access your memory.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, irritated at the interruption—but also relieved. The silence among these atrocities of war had become almost poisonous.

  “I can better serve if there is continuity, of a sort,” she said.

  “All right. Tell me what I’m seeing,” I said.

  “This is Charum Hakkor, though not as the Didact left it, nor as the Librarian last saw it.”

  “What happened here?”

  She fed me a series of vivid images. “The Didact’s fleets cut off this system from the replenishing armadas of the San’Shyuum. Humans had laid their strongest fortifications on foundations of Precursor ruins. They used unbending filaments to link their orbital platforms, and fought for fifty years against repeated Forerunner assaults, until finally they were defeated. Most of the humans, and not a few of the San’Shyuum who were here, committed suicide rather than submit and be removed to another system.”

  “What can destroy Precursor artifacts?”

  “That is not in my base of knowledge.”

  “The Didact knows. Query his ancilla.”

  “Not yet permitted. He has, however, supplied you with the necessary information to assist him, should you agree to do so.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be giving me much of a choice.”

  “Soon you must make a significant choice, but we have not reached that point.”

  “I chose to follow him.”

  The Didact interrupted. “No wonder they sought me out,” he said in what for him passed for an awed whisper.

  We stood before a broad cylinder capped with a shattered dome, blown up and out like a ragged crown. Part of the wall had col
lapsed, and we were able to enter the interior of the cylinder through that breach.

  We picked through rubble—what seemed to be both human and Precursor walls and thick containment structures—until we came to a staircase rising to a circular walkway five meters wide, the far side about fifty meters away. This had apparently once served as a gallery designed to look down upon something contained below, within the core of the cylinder. The inner parapet consisted of angled panes of transparent material, hazed and starred by impacts from some long-ago explosion. Little more than the walkway and the inner cylinder below were intact.

  Overhead, the shattered crown of the dome allowed the last of the blue daylight and a few unwinking stars to light our path. The Didact approached the inner parapet, his armor actually glowing at his inner turmoil—as if preparing to deflect major damage. This was what he must have looked like going into battle.…

  Below, half-hidden in shadow, an intricately shaped mold filled most of the pit. The mold had once snugly encapsulated something about fifteen meters tall, ten or eleven meters broad and almost as thick—far too large to be any variety of human or any rate of Forerunner.

  The armor’s ancilla made no comment, supplied no information.

  I thought I discerned what might have been cushions or braces for a number of long, multiply jointed arms, ending in shackles or gloves designed to grip hands bigger than my own body. Hands with three thick digits and a central clasping thumb … or claw.

  Two pairs. Four arms, four hand-claws.

  Pushed up and aside, three meters wide, like a huge hat tossed on a table, was a restraining headpiece. A ridged conduit flowed down one side, presumably the back. Apparently, the head confined by that helmet had once trailed a thick, sinuous, articulated tail.

  A cage. A prison.

  Empty.

  The Didact said, “In the name of the Mantle and all I honor—I hope it is dead, I fear it is not. They have unleashed it.”

  “What did they keep here?” I asked, standing close to the Didact, like a child cleaving to his own father for protection.

  “Something the Precursors left behind long ago,” the Didact said.

  “Yes, but what was it?”

  I broke my entranced gaze long enough to see that the humans had followed us onto the walkway. They stood beside me, staring into the pit, eyes searching, jaws agape.

  The Didact gave them a narrow glance, then walked around them to another point on the parapet. “An ancient construct … or a captive,” he said. “Nobody knows its origins, but what was confined here terrified all who saw it. Millions of years ago, it was confined in a stasis capsule and buried thousands of meters below the surface. Humans found the capsule and excavated it, but fortunately could not break it loose … not completely. They did devise a means of communicating with the prisoner. What it said to them frightened them deeply. With surprising wisdom, they stopped all attempts to communicate, then added another layer of protection, a San’Shyuum time bolt almost as effective as anything built by Forerunners. And they placed the capsule here, in the arena, as a warning for all to see.”

  Chakas’s expression, behind the faint mask of his helmet field, was stiff, his forehead covered in moisture. Every few seconds, another expression broke through this stiffness, grief mixed with inexpressible pain. I wondered what memories of their history the Librarian had passed along with her geas—memories only now being reawakened. What had his ancestors witnessed here? I could not know.

  The Didact turned away from the emptiness. His armor lost its glow. “How could it travel?” he asked. “Who would come here…” Then his face reflected a darkly obvious theory. “Those who conducted the test,” he said. He turned back and walked toward the staircase. “We must leave immediately.”

  Chakas continued to gaze into the pit. Riser said nothing, but the fur on his cheeks was wet with tears. Not sad tears—tears of rage.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “The Didact is leaving, and there’s nothing for us here.”

  “Once, there was everything here,” Chakas said, looking around wildly, seeing ghosts.

  “When we get back to the ship, tell me what you’re learning,” I suggested. Slowly, he broke from his spell, and he and Riser followed me down the stairs, across the arena, to the lift tube of the Didact’s ship.

  Minutes later, we were in space, looking down over Charum Hakkor.

  “We must examine other planets in this system,” the Didact said. “Whatever happened may have spread. Tell your humans—”

  “They’re not mine,” I said.

  The Didact looked me over critically. “Tell your shipmates that the Librarian, in her perverse wisdom, tried to create a team capable of helping me to explore and understand. That isn’t much, granted, but it’s what we have—ourselves, this ship, our ancillas and armor.”

  “There’s nothing down there,” I said. “Whatever you sought, it’s gone. Forerunners have moved on without you—and they must have their reasons. We should go back and turn ourselves in—”

  “Your ancilla hasn’t begun to fill in the gaps in your education,” the Didact said.

  “There’s hardly been time.”

  “This system has fifteen worlds. Precursor ruins are found only on Charum Hakkor. Humans settled two more: Faun Hakkor and Ben Nauk. The other planets were mined for ore and volatiles. We’ll try Faun Hakkor next. Tell your … tell the humans.”

  The Didact vanished into the lower hold. I stayed in the command center, close to Chakas and Riser, who huddled together, then hunkered down. Chakas seemed angry and confused—as much as I had learned to read human emotions. Riser I could not read at all. The Florian sat with eyes crossed, lips slack, hands folded, motionless.

  “Why does she curse us with these stolen memories?” Chakas asked, looking up at me. “I remember so many things I could not have lived!”

  “When you see old worlds, hear old tales, that brings up deep memories,” I said. “Part of your geas, I imagine.”

  “What is that killer going to do with us?”

  “I’m wondering the same thing myself,” I said.

  Chakas rotated to face away. Riser still did not move.

  “What do you remember?” I asked Chakas, kneeling beside him.

  “It’s all tangled. We were a great power. We fought long and hard. I can feel what they went through … ancient humans. Those feelings hurt. We lost everything. He defeated us and took revenge.” He bent over, tears dripping on the deck.

  Whatever I thought about the Didact, however much he impressed and frightened me, I could not bring myself to believe he had ever acted out of malice. “The Librarian must have equipped you with human essences from those times.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Memories gathered from captives, mostly. You aren’t those people, of course.”

  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. All visible hatches opened for me. Nothing blocked my way. Lift entrances and transit corridors brightly illuminated at my approach, their walls and floors immaculately clean—and no wonder. They were newborn. It was a young vessel, not even fully 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 will 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, still close
ly held in a location known only to the Master Builder, chief of rate and all 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 all 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 ancilla professed that such information was “outside of my present range.”

  Of course there would be no uplinks, because all 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 ancilla 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 galleys, 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 filled with machines of war—hundreds of them, in compact storage as well as fully activated form, all 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 all varieties, for any situation.