I could not answer. None of the usual niceties of slipspace—if they could ever be cal ed that—applied. None of the metrics were available to our sensors.

But we had traveled a very great distance indeed. I could feel that in my bones and nerves.

THIRTY-NINE

THE SMALL FALCO’S power loss now affected life support. Worse, our armor’s integrity and even its protective capabilities had been damaged by the contradictory surge of instructions from Mendicant Bias.

“Where are we, real y?” the young councilor asked, peering through the single smal port. “I can’t see anything.”

Glory of a Far Dawn hung back in the rear of the craft like a wounded animal—not so far, of course. I could reach out and touch her. Al the joints of her armor had cracked. One leg and one arm had been bent back beyond the breaking point.… Yet she refused to cal attention to herself.

She did not want to show her pain.

“We’re in what remains of a debris cloud,” I said. “I saw stars earlier—very far away.”

We were weightless, the air was growing foul, al of us were injured—the guard most severely. There was likely no food to sustain us. Even though the armor could recycle our wastes, lacking additional raw materials and running out of its own charge of energy, it would not fil our needs for long.

“Mendicant Bias,” I said. I could not tel whether Bornstel ar or the Didact was bringing up this topic. Something had broken down al my internal barriers. I was now privy to most of the Didact’s wisdom, his imprint—but its usefulness at this point seemed doubtful. Stil , I—we—wanted some questions answered. “The Didact oversaw the Contender’s planning and inception, and was present at its key quickening. But he was removed from any contact with Mendicant Bias a thousand years ago. What’s happened since?”

“Mendicant Bias was charged by the Master Builder with conducting the first tests of a Halo instal ation,” the councilor said.

“Charum Hakkor,” I said.

“Yes. Shortly thereafter, the Halo entered slipspace on a scheduled mission—and vanished. Mendicant Bias went with the instal ation. That was forty-three years ago.”

Forty-three years on the first Halo … in the presence of the captive? Did they communicate?

Can that ever make sense?

“It might have been strained by contradictory instructions from the Didact, from the Master Builder.…”

“Not likely,” I said. “Mendicant Bias was ful y capable of working with contradictory commands. I’ve never known a more capable ancil a, more powerful, more subtle … more loyal.”

“What do you know about the captive of Charum Hakkor?” the Councilor asked.

“This subject was to be part of the Didact’s testimony against the Master Builder.… But I suppose none of that matters now. Stil , I’m curious.”

“I suspect the captive made its way, or was transported, to the first instal ation.”

“But what happened?”

“Stil unknown. The Contender would likely have been brought any unusual specimens for examination.”

“Would Mendicant Bias have been able to communicate with the captive? It is said by some that you actual y spoke with it, using a human device.…”

I saw that as if it had happened yesterday. And I noted that the councilor was addressing me as if I were the Didact. “It was not a real conversation, and not in the least satisfactory,” I said.

Looking down into the deactivated human timelock, and beyond that secondary cage, tuning the Precursor tool, so small and simple—merely a smooth oval with three notches in its side.… “The humans found a way to activate at least one Precursor artifact,” I said.

“What was that?”

“A device that could selectively and temporarily open access through the captive’s cage.”

Seeing the great, ugly head, its compound eyes assuming a new glitter as its consciousness rose from the quantum somnolence of fifty thousand years.… It spoke in a Forerunner dialect, one I could barely understand—archaic Digon.

I remembered clearly what it said, but it took time for the context to become clear. Context is everything, across all those centuries. It spoke to me of the greatest of Forerunner betrayals, the greatest of our many sins.

I told the Librarian and no one else … and her researches changed drastically.

As did my design of Forerunner defenses against the Flood.

“And now the Contender has returned and assumed control of as many instal ations as it could command … only to direct their power against the capital itself. It seeks the destruction of us al . Why?” A look of horror crossed his face. “Is the captive part of the Flood? Does the Flood now control Mendicant Bias?”

“Unknown,” I said. “But I think not. It was something other … older. And we have no way of knowing whether the Halo strike did its intended damage.”

“The response of our warships was magnificent,” the guard said, her voice weaker stil .

“It was magnificent,” I agreed. “But if Mendicant Bias has been suborned, and the Domain has been permanently blocked…”

“The war may be lost,” the First Councilor said.

“Never,” the guard said. “Never! You are the heir of the Didact, unless he be found, and if that happens, then you are his second-in-command. Either way, you are my commander. We wil never give up. It is so, aya.”

I reached back instinctively. My armor withdrew from my hand, and my fingers brushed past her facial protection to touch her forehead, which was hot. She was in bad shape.

“Your courage becomes mine. I am privileged,” I said.

The guard’s eyes closed.

We drifted. Our armor failed.

We slept. Al of us. I dreamed of only one thing—or perhaps it was hypoxia.

I dreamed of the captive’s glittering eyes.

FORTY

SOMETHING SCRAPED AT the outside of our craft like tree branches in a slow wind—delicate, tentative. The first to return to consciousness, I dragged myself up to the port and looked out at a vast swirl of stars, so many and so far away I could not distinguish most of them.

A galaxy. I hoped our galaxy and not another.

The Falco slowly rotated and a complicated silhouette moved across the spiral cloud. It took several long moments before I could make out slender shapes attached to that silhouette, like a wide rosette. Slowly it dawned on me that I was looking upon another array of instal ations: six rings, each rising from one of the petals of an enormous flower.

Then, to my astonishment, six straight shafts of light flowed outward from the darkness at the center of the flower and through the Halos, il uminating the insides of the rings as wel as the main body of the flower.

The Falco kept turning. The edge of the port obscured one view and the other side revealed another. My other memory—now become my memory—could not recal anything about this association, this shape against the galaxy and the dim void beyond.

But in the back of my thoughts, a dim female grayness reappeared. “We have returned,” my ancil a said. “We have arrived at the Ark.”

Incredulous that the armor stil had any power, I turned my eyes away from the port and looked at the outlines of my fel ow passengers. Neither moved. I thought they must be dead.

“How far?” I asked. But the glimmer of the ancil a had again faded, and I was alone, utterly alone.

I had forgotten about the scraping.

When I looked back to the port, I was astonished to see another face staring back at me—a face framed in a headpiece and wrapped in the protective field of ful y active armor. And beyond that face, three other figures, long and graceful.

Lifeworkers.

Groggily I tried to make sense of these perceptions. Lifeworkers were maneuvering outside the dead shel of our craft. I made a weak gesture through the port. My ancil a flickered in and out. Then I felt a hint of something other than stale fetor against my face. Power was being external y fed to the craft, and from there to our armor—even the broken armor. Yet they were not breaking our seal or opening the Falco to rescue us. Instead, they were guiding the craft intact to a larger ship I now saw floating a few hundred meters away.

A voice spoke to me now—female, soft—through the cracked remains of my headpiece. “How many? I count three.”

“Three,” I confirmed, my mouth dry, my tongue swol en and cracked.

“Are you from the damaged instal ation that attempted to return to the Ark?”

“No,” I said.

“Is there infection?”

“I don’t think so. No.”

“How far have you traveled?”

“From the capital. Shouldn’t … talk for while.”

The face withdrew, and we were absorbed in a protective field. We had been cautiously inspected, cleared … drawn within the ship … then deposited on a platform. Up and down returned. Tal figures walked past, but I could not hear what they were saying.

Then the Lifeworker who had first appeared in our port motioned for me to draw the others toward the center of our craft. I tried to do that, pul ing in the councilor’s limbs, even moving and arranging the guard when she failed to respond.

They then broke open the depleted, dead bulk of the Falco’s outer shel , split it wide, and Lifeworkers surrounded us with their instruments and monitors, bringing comfort and relief. They removed the remains of our armor, then took up Glory of a Far Dawn and surrounded her in a golden softness. Her eyes opened, and she seemed astonished—then, embarrassed. She struggled—but was patiently subdued and carried away from the platform, into a healing chamber.

The First Councilor tried to stand to survey the broken shel of our rescue craft.

His strength failed him. More Lifeworkers carried him away, as wel .

Somehow, I had retained the most strength—or so I thought. But my turn to give in came quickly enough.

No sleep, no dreams, just a warm, nutritive blankness, neither dark nor bright. For the first time in a thousand years, I felt at home.

The Librarian is near.

FORTY-ONE

WE HAD JOURNEYED to a point far outside our galaxy.

We had been rescued and taken to the factory where the ring-shaped instal ations were made, equipped, repaired … as wel , the ultimate repository of the Librarian’s col ection of the galaxy’s life-forms.

The Ark.

I took a regenerative walk through the brightly il uminated forest surrounding Fifth Petal Station. Nearly al the light this far from our galaxy came from the diurnal glow of the elongated plasmas, casting the strangest shadows. The rings themselves were canted at different angles on each petal, rotating constantly within enormous hoops of hard light to maintain their integrity.

On each of the instal ations, the Librarian’s aides and monitors supervised the laying down of the Lifeshaper seeds, containing al the records necessary to create and restore unique ecological systems on the inner surface of each ring. I could see evidence of their work even from where I stood—mottled patches of early-stage jungles and forests, the tan of desert, sheets of ice … Earlier, when I had voiced puzzlement at the contradiction of Halos supporting these living records, my nurse and guardian, a Lifeworker named Calyx, explained that the Librarian had equipped most of the Halos with living ecosystems, and stocked them with many species from many worlds—selecting from those multitudes that been gathered over the last few centuries, and now populated the Ark’s great half-circle.

She had hoped to preserve many more species by using the Halos; the Master Builder, after agreeing to her plan, had decided it would be useful to test captured specimens of the Flood on the Halos before they were fired—to learn more about them.

Sacrificing those populations, of course.

I could not understand how the Librarian’s pact with the Master Builder had been arranged or implemented. But I admired her stamina. She had proven my superior in every regard. And now that I was here— Something like the Didact, though not him— I wondered how much I could possibly contribute.

Looking up at the great Halo’s upper reaches, I felt dizzy and steadied myself against the toppled trunk of cycad. Nearby, something like a smal tank passed by on many pumping legs, a gigantic armor-plated arthropod almost three meters long.

It ignored me, for I was not the rotting vegetation it favored as a meal.

When the plasmas dimmed, it became obvious that the sky was stil fil ed with danger. In the battle of the capital, only one instal ation had survived passage through the portal without breaking up. It had returned to the Ark, and now rotated off to my right, visible through a green wal of ferns. Its interior surface had suffered great damage, and so it was being scrubbed clean, its few remaining specimens rescued and constrained. A new surface was in preparation, with a replacement set of seeds.

What wreckage had passed through the portal stil threatened this extraordinary construct. The domain of the Librarian—but also the centerpiece of al that the Master Builder had hoped to achieve—had to be constantly protected against impacts. In the dark, it was easy enough to fol ow the many vessels that patrol ed the debris field; they were tiny glints in a varicolored haze that reminded me so much of the clouds in our Orion complex.

But this haze was not primordial and nurturing of suns. It was the death shroud of a great, perhaps crippling defeat—the final battle, perhaps, of a Forerunner civil war—and it was fil ed with careening fragments of shattered rings, broken ships, demented or damaged monitors, cut loose from al their disciplines, from the metarchy—lost and worse than useless—and of course, the frozen corpses of hundreds of thousands of Forerunners.… I walked through the forests day after day, and in the dark as wel , guided by smal er cousins of the armored arthropod, bearing blue-green lanterns above their tiny eyes and showing me the way.

Night after night, I watched the rings’ tentative hard-light skeletons form spokes, stabilizing them before their planned release.… Studied the strange shape of the hard-light hubs at the center of those rings, which had once been designed to direct the deadly energies of the rings when they were fired.… If they were fired. That seemed very unlikely now.