I had seen portals before, but none so large and powerful, so ornate, so ful of opportunities. Each of those violet holes could open onto a different place in our galaxy. “That’s where we’re going?” I asked.

Before my question could be answered, I saw three of the pits of darkness flow together at the center of the webwork. The entire web shimmered, and through the combined holes emerged five large cruisers—and right behind them, a ful y activated fortress, arriving long tail first, bristling with armament. As soon as they were through, and al owing for a brief few seconds of reconciliation, during which time the ships radiated dim, expanding shel s of blue, the smal er craft began to fan out to distant points, nearly al beyond the limits of my vision—except for the fortress.

This was nothing like the dismal old hulk that had stood guard for so long over the San’Shyuum. Sleek, clean, perhaps twice the size of the Deep Reverence, the fortress was heading directly toward the rotational axis of the nearest Halo.

“We should depart from this region,” my ancil a suggested. “These are forces arriving to protect the capital.”

“The instal ations wil not al ow themselves to be attacked,” the councilor said.

“They wil defend themselves. Even if they are not under the control of Mendicant Bias, there wil be violent confrontations.”

I will program battle code. My other memory was final y proving useful; the Didact worked with my ancil a and the Falco began to broadcast protective signals.

From the fortress’s long tail, replete with gun mounts and weapons bays, thousands of swift attack vessels began to pour forth, fanning out, radiating to positions above the inner surface of the Halo. Our sensors now picked up swarms of smal and midsize craft emerging from the Halo itself, and identified them as dedicated sentinels—used only for Halo defense.

They are controlled by the installation monitors. The monitors are programmed to assume that all who attack an installation are enemies—whatever they look like, or whatever codes they possess.

“That makes no sense,” I said.

It does if you understand the ways of the Flood.

“Then make me understand!”

There is no time.

Already, in rapid succession, more cruisers were emerging from the portal, straining the webwork until it radiated a fierce reddish glow. The portal fabric began to visibly separate—hard-light strands exceeding even their extraordinary tensile strengths. Clearly, these newly arrived forces were prepared to sacrifice both themselves and the portal in their haste.… Mendicant Bias has exceeded its present ability. It can control only five installations out of twelve. The others will maneuver to save themselves. They will attempt to access the portal.

Seven of the huge rings—not including the one that had just appeared—once again rearranged their array. One Halo from the pentagon broke formation, sending cascades of violet energy from drive engines spaced along its rim. It moved to joined those not in the Contender’s control.

These seven began to align in paral el, re-creating the tunnel effect. The five under the Contender’s control had completed their spoke-and-hub preparations.

They are primed. They wil fire—we must leave now! We must go through the portal!

The first fortress’s fighters moved in, surrounding one of the primed Halos and engaging its sentinels. Simultaneously, four cruisers sent white-hot beams to points around the targeted instal ation. Sentinels intercepted some of those beams, partial y deflecting them but also absorbing and sacrificing. Other beams struck home, carving canyonlike gouges across the mottled inner surface and blowing blue-white plumes of debris and plasma from the edges. The interior spokes began to shimmer and fade. The Halo could not hold together against this onslaught. It bent inward, wobbled. Fascinated, I watched as huge sections of the ring twisted like ribbon, giving way to destructive nodes of resonance, then rippled in sinus waves—and separated with agonizing majesty.

The entire Halo was breaking apart. It would not complete its priming and firing sequence. Keeping track of the remaining eleven instal ations in the melee was exhausting. The other four primed instal ations, however, were successful y fending off fighters and cruisers and had fanned out to cover at least half of the capital world, as if preparing for an awful sunrise.

Their spokes were now forming golden hubs.

Glory of a Far Dawn pushed closer to watch with me. Her hands clenched. “I should be there!” she said. “I should be protecting the capital!”

An unexpected horror shook my ancil a. “The Librarian’s specimens—so many worlds are stored on the Halos, so many terrains and beings! What wil happen to the fauna?”

The Lifeshaper succeeded in her struggle with the Master Builder. She coopted the installations.… I found myself again taking control of the Falco. We accelerated out of the widening zone of battle, toward the portal, now a single huge violet radiance against the blackness of space.

Three of the seven fleeing Halos were lined up, also seeking entry. They, too, were being harried by cruisers and were now attacked by swarms from the second fortress. Sentinels from these instal ations mounted a vigorous defense, pushing back their attackers. The rings maintained their integrity.

Before we could reach the hel ishly glowing webwork with its single yawning and badly distorted portal, the first Halo began its passage.

For me, under the influence of the Didact’s battle mode, time fragmented into several streams. I saw the movement of the instal ation in fast mode, but—in excruciating slow motion—directed the Falco to avoid bursts of plasma energy and disintegrating swift attack vessels. Part of me seemed to fight through many lifetimes, through clouds of fighters and debris, away from ever-increasing danger.

A second instal ation was about to fol ow the first through the portal. A third lined up.… The portal webwork was obviously about to tear itself to pieces.

We must leave this system before the other installations fire! We will approach the third installation and enter the portal along with it.

“Where wil the portal take us?” my ancil a asked, growing even tinier as her duties were reduced.

It does not matter. Any place other than this.

“Why would they prime and fire?” I cried. “That wil kil everyone here, disintegrate the metarchy—Forerunners wil lose their history, their heart and spirit—”

Mendicant Bias has turned against us. But I do not believe it has sufficient resources to control more than five installations at once. Other installations are following older instructions, priority protocols—they defend themselves, but are struggling to break free of the Contender’s rule. They may reconnoiter outside our galaxy—at the Beginning Place. The Ark.

And we must join them.

THIRTY-EIGHT

I NO LONGER have access to the record maintained by that ancil a. She faded long, long ago, during another battle and another time, taking with her so many details, so much of my transformation and emergence.

The problems I face trying to bring back and explain these events are manifold. I was then two beings confined in one body. How much of this effect was accidental and how much deliberate was far from clear to me.

I suspected … I feared … but I could not know.

And thus my memories were separated into two compartments, one of which has declined with time and circumstance, and the other of which—the survivor, as it were—is very different from either of my two personalities at that time.

Memory without an ancil a is in large part a reconstruction, a reimagining based on clues locked in chronology and checked against outside sources. But no outside sources remain. So much of Forerunner history … But I get ahead of myself.

This is the closest truth I can manage. It wil have to suffice. There is no other.

What did I actually see? Do I actual y remember our close approach to the Halo just as it entered the portal …

* * *

The smal rescue craft plowed and glided and glowed through the great ring’s inner atmosphere, no doubt resembling a meteor. We were briefly pursued by sentinels, and some shots even grazed our shields. But we were not armed and offered no return fire; they turned their attention elsewhere.

I flash on brief moments of breathtaking, awful splendor, sharpened by terror: the rapid approach of the Halo’s inner landscape, our first close-up glimpse of thin layers of clouds, rivers, mountains, desert, vast stretches of green, then thousands of kilometers of engraved silver-blue, naked foundation material interrupted by towering, four-pronged power stations—al unadorned by hard-light decor.

The Halo was almost halfway through the portal. Our smal craft flew up from its skim of the atmosphere, into a welter of debris, sentinels, and pursuing fighters jockeying for dominance and the proper tactical positions to break up the instal ation before it finished its transit. But they were insufficient to accomplish this task. This Halo was about to make its escape.

Then—the unexpected. While the enormous yet ephemeral band of the Halo slowly disappeared into the violet-black maw at the center of the portal, something bril iant white pushed through from the other side. Compared with the Halo, it was tiny, but considerable in its own right: a third fortress. Council security was cal ing in al available might to secure the system.

Even before it had emerged halfway, the fortress began to loose clouds of fighters—at this distance, they resembled a puff of pol en from a flower—and fire its weapons in a sequential radiance. The inner curve of the Halo, even protected by waves of hard light, could not stand up long to this assault from within its own radius.

The fortress’s commanders and ancil as must have known they were dooming themselves as wel as the Halo. The instal ation began a spectacular disintegrative sequence. The visible half of the ring bent in opposite directions, then shattered into five great arcs. We passed near the largest of these segments, perhaps a hundred kilometers from the inner surface. Released from the rotational integrity of the ful ring, the segment moved outward, given an additional outward twist by the asymmetric breakup. One end swept toward us like a great swinging blade. Minutes from contact, our craft kicked itself into a new course, and we crossed the width of the approaching arc with seconds to spare, buffeted by rising plumes of icy cloud.

Kilometer-wide swaths of forest waved like flags in a slow wind, shivered off a dust of trees—and broke apart into chunks. In the increasing violence, the surface released a storm of boulders, fol owed by immense cross sections of sedimentary layers, and final y, entire mountains, stil capped with snow.

Our doom seemed inevitable. Either we would be struck by the nearest rim wal or by the great clods and slivers of material spil ing over—or we would be caught up in flying volumes of ocean, now, in the shadow of the portal, freezing into spectacular ice sculptures, flying bergs and snow— I sat within the dust mote of our craft, incapable of speech. I had never witnessed anything so utterly awesome—not even the destruction of the San’Shyuum world.

My heart seemed to stop, my thoughts to go gelid.

Then—I felt the Didact’s icy discipline dissolve the gluey tendrils of my fear. Our craft was seeking a complex path up and over another section of ring, picking its way through the debris, when, through a nearly opaque layer of frozen mist, we spied the great leading dome of the fortress, trailing streamers of detritus like an avalanche of gray dust.

The dome had suffered awful damage. The fortress was out of action and in its last throes, but the chaos of destruction was not yet done with it. A curled, tortured loop of ring at least five hundred kilometers long spun from the debris cloud and cut through the fortress like a sword through bread. This impact shoved the great vessel out of our path, and in its wake, left a narrow void through which our sensors could see the rim of the portal, stil glowing, stil holding its form—a miracle, I thought— The Didact did not accept the existence of miracles. Did not accept them, but did not hesitate to take advantage.

Our craft seemed at the last to waft like a leaf between mountains and ice and the shattered hulks of spaceships, into the pulsing violet of the portal. I felt another kind of impact, another kind of jolt. We were in slipspace, but a slipspace strained and distorted and angry at so much abuse, barely real—barely any kind of continuum whatsoever— How far this jump took us, there was no way of measuring. We al offered sacrifice to the arcane demands of another kind of physics. We completed our unlikely passage, struggling to maintain any semblance of the real. The causal reconciliation was indescribable. I seemed to stretch and fil like a thundercloud with painful jolts of charge.

We gave away something ineffable, but stil — We survived.

Somehow, solidity—a useful thing—returned. On the far side of that journey, looking back at where we had been, we saw—nothing. The portal had col apsed.

We now drifted across an even greater void, without thrust or control, our power down to almost nothing. I thought I saw a distant speckle of stars.

Passing its shadow across those stars was a flower with a great, gaping blackness in its center.… Huge, unknown—dark.

My ancil a had been reduced to a vague gray ghost in the back of my thoughts.

With her feeble assistance, I struggled to ful y engage our sensors. They faltered— then returned, weak but usable. Strangely, we were surrounded only by a light haze of debris. Most of the remnants of the Halo, the dying fortress, and al of the other waste from that distant battle had never completed the passage. The portal had filtered and discarded useless material.

I wondered where it al was now, bits of instal ation and ships and thousands of crew, neither here nor there.… Amazingly, we had been among the pieces al owed to pass.

I turned to look at Glory of a Far Dawn. She was badly injured, I could see that— yet her face shone with something like joy—the raw joy of battle and survival.

As our eyes met, she drew back her emotions.

“Where are we?” she asked. “How far have we come?”