Am I not the Didact, in truth, in my mind? Am I truly less? How could I not foresee that this problem would rise so quickly to the level of a crisis in command?

But I have. The sum of a fight among equals, or with a superior, is to allow the other’s strength to put him where you want him. There is one personality who may yet unite us all … if he plays his new role well. A tremendous risk, that.

A new voice from outside the circle breaks the pause. The strongest among us has arrived.

“You can’t fault this new Didact. I outwitted his original twice before, you know.” The Master Builder’s slighter figure enters the Cartographer behind the single projected Halo, and for a moment he is cast in shadow. “I forced him into exile, practically sealed him into his Cryptum, and when he returned from that exile, I lured him, hooked him like a silly fish—and sent him to an even darker fate. I ask you, who’s the greater strategist?”

The Master Builder joins the circle, then moves to the center, his penetrating black eyes searching all with benign amusement. He lingers on my face only for a moment, with a sidelong after-glance. “If anything,” he says, “this new Didact is a sharper and more capable character, certainly now. As for the other … The old Didact and I have just had a brief visit. Whatever business he has here will soon be completed. He already makes preparations to leave.”

“We desperately need a strong central command!” Bitterness announces. “And we need it now!”

“I believe it’s obvious who that commander must be.” The Master Builder has resumed his characteristic bravado—but something is missing. Something has hit him very hard—and left a mark in his demeanor. He struts and shrugs out his arms, as if preparing for physical labor. “Tell them, Bornstellar-Makes-Eternal-Lasting. Tell them how I knew we’d all be here, doing precisely what we’re doing now, many years ago. You were there, after all.”

I do not hesitate to give him his due. “The Master Builder tested Halo on Charum Hakkor,” I say. “With startling results.”

Faber moves around the circle, examining the commanders with some, but not all, of his old, wicked energy. “Long ago, while overseeing Halo field design, I had a suspicion—an insight—that the Halo’s energies might also nullify neural physics. That insight was proven brilliantly correct. When the Halo fired, tuned to my select energies, it destroyed all Precursor artifacts in the system. Serendipity, perhaps. Or brilliance. You decide.

“But fair is fair. After my test, and its unexpected consequences, I made the mistake of gathering up the timeless one, the Primordial—the last Precursor, so it later claimed. An incredible scientific specimen, I thought. I did show caution. I imprisoned the Primordial in a stasis field. Yet, somehow it got loose again—clever thing—and provoked an unfortunate dialog with Mendicant Bias. Our first example of an ancillary infection, and a rather dire one.

“For that I am entirely to blame. All my triumphs were shunted aside by the revolt of Mendicant Bias … whose design and creation I share with the Didact. Let us not forget that! Our servant turned against us. I became an outcast. A failure.” He forestalls unvoiced objections with a raised arm and splayed fingers. “And yet … what a discovery! And herein lies our last hope in this awful war. We still hold the one weapon which is capable of stopping the Flood—this Halo.”

He continues to pace restlessly around the circle, as if hoping to draw forth encouragement, justification. I tell myself, silently, how much I hate this Forerunner.

“The original Didact was wrong, I was right. But it takes his duplicate to finally listen to reason.” He glances again in my direction. The weakness is almost blatant. “These Halos were specifically tuned to fire a linear blast of energy which disrupts and ultimately wipes out neural physics, destroying both the Flood and its Precursor weapons. With it we will bring unparalleled destruction upon our attackers, putting an end to this war once and for all.”

He looks back to the commanders. “But if we fail here, know that another Ark has already been created,” he says, “and from it more efficient, smaller Halos. They form a weapon array far more powerful than even this ring.” He points to the lone holographic Halo. “When these newer Halos are spread throughout the galaxy, they will form a network capable of purging all sentient life. These are our last defense. Without them, the galaxy will be dominated by the Flood. But we must not let it come to this.”

His look seems to cut the air. “A few of you have been Warrior-Servants. Brave, honorable, and yet the heirs of those who committed the unspeakable crime that began this madness. A crime against our creators. Remember that in your long dreams, when you confront the Domain.”

Suddenly, Faber’s armor slumps; his energy seems to dissipate. “But know this. The original Didact was impressed by a Gravemind to serve as messenger. The Gravemind was aware of my activities, purging infected Forerunner vessels and restoring them to service. It sent the Didact my way … deliberately, with a message.”

“What message?” Bitterness asks.

“My family, my wives and children, went into their own exile. They relocated on a system in Path Kural, now part of a Burn. All have been gathered by the Flood. All have been made part of a Gravemind.” His face contorts. He shouts around the circle, “My wives! My children! Addressing me from within a Gravemind, taunting me, accusing me! Through my enemy! If we carry out our designs, they say all will die, and nothing of value will be left to me. The Didact actually took pleasure in delivering this message. ‘This,’ he says, ‘is what you have done, with your Halos.’”

Bitterness bows not in submission, but in joined grief, before the Master Builder. “Our sorrow is with you,” she whispers.

“All sorrow is with you,” the Examiner affirms.

I stand my ground, but this is the support Faber sought, the support he needs. He looks up. “Who better to understand our task, then? I would give anything to have been wrong, I would give everything not to be a Forerunner in these times. As I live and breathe, I am sickened by the truth—sick at my core. Yet by order of the remaining Council, sadly reduced, I have resumed command. The galaxy is ours to lose.

“Let’s put an end to our hideous mistakes. But when we’ve survived, when we’re finished with our awful task, forced on us by the iniquity of Warriors ten million years ago—who among us will ever be able to face the Domain?”

None of the others meet his haunted eyes. Deliberately, I avert mine as well.

“Who, Forerunners?” he cries, then pushes through and departs the Cartographer.

The commanders stand in respectful silence, then turn, as one, toward me.

“The Master Builder’s fate is here. And so is ours,” Examiner says. “Someone must go to the other Ark and prepare for the unthinkable.”

My task is now clear.

“The Graveminds know they still face a tremendous threat,” Bitterness says. “They know of the existence of the greater Ark. But they may not yet know the whereabouts of the lesser Ark. You must go there and take command. The Flood cannot be allowed to claim victory. They must be stopped, if not for our kind, then for others who may come later.”

The commanders look out beyond the image of Halo and Ark, toward the great dim spread of stars that is our galaxy.

The star roads are coming.

We can all feel them.

STRING 30

THE LIBRARIAN AND THE UR-DIDACT

MY HUSBAND … HAS become a child again.

But not any sort of child I’d be proud of. Not any sort of child I would trust.

He has stripped off his armor and wanders about our quarters, looking at the things his duplicate has gathered, artifacts and objects of study, remembrances of the time when he was away, in exile or lost, and I briefly had another husband—very much like him.

But no longer. There is no question of him making any attempt to reconcile, of that I am certain. I hardly recognize what he has become.

Still, he has requested this meeting, with the implication that it will be our last.

I sit on a suspensor that takes color and shape beneath me, and he sits beside me, his great head dropping between his thick knees. “Can you know what it was like to be in the Cryptum, leaving our situation to you, while all this spun out of control?” he asks.

I take up his great hand and unfold it, running my own smaller finger along each muscular digit. The hand reflexively closes. Our bodies still carry instructions built in from times long before memory.

“No,” I breathe. “I hope it was peaceful.”

“Quiet, as much as there can be sense or sensation. The Domain can only tell the living what they already know,” he says. “Or what they’ve stored in its expanses. I wandered through all the corridors … so they appeared, anyway. Centuries of wandering through hallways and caverns and even deeper, darker places, lined and fitfully aglow with ancestral records and memories, upwellings of past visits, rarely by me, sometimes by our ancestors … on occasion, our descendants.”

“Descendants?” I ask.

“The Domain keeps its secrets only with difficulty. It wants, it needs, to spread knowledge. It wants to tell us when we’re being foolish, but it can only replay the emotions and memories of those who came before. Still, rarely, it violates its own rules.”

“What about our descendants?” I persist.

“I felt their touch, their love. And yet, they were fading. The Domain is filled with sadness. A deep shadow has fallen over everything Forerunner. When I was pulled up from all that, pulled out of the Cryptum and revived … I couldn’t remember. But now I do—in part. Horror brought it back. The Gravemind returned it to me. It forced me to listen.”

My husband swiftly removes his hand from mine and stands to summon his armor, stretching to allow it to surround him. “I need to fight against what it told me, what it has done to me, to all of us. I need to fight with all of my might and will, and everything I can gather … every weapon and resource. But I have been undercut from the very beginning by that Manipular, Wife. The worst thing I’ve ever done was imprint him. And so, forgive me in advance for what I must do. And know why I do it.”

I am about to ask what this is, that requires any forgiveness, let alone mine—but alarms sound before I can speak. The Didact starts up, and for a moment, there is that old, brutal sharpness, that old readiness for battle. The ancillas gather around, foremost the image of the Offensive Bias.

“The Ark is under attack,” it says. “Large concentrations of star roads are emerging in near space.”

“How much time?” the Didact asks.

“Hours, no more,” the metarch responds.

The IsoDidact is doubtless already taking action, in concert with the Builder commanders—putting the entire Ark on full alert. I need to get to the Halo! My specimens, the last humans …

But what I see in the abyssal night around the greater Ark is enough to freeze me through and through. Somehow, the old artifacts have been transported in such amazing density that the galaxy beyond is barely visible, as if viewed through a weave of shadowy bars.

The Ark is surrounded, and every second the star roads squeeze in. Already our radius of action is down to a few million kilometers.

I can’t bear the thought of the loss of all my specimens, of the greatest concentration of our lifelong efforts, of all our work!

“How can we repopulate the galaxy if we lose everything here?” I cry.

The Didact’s look is strangely sly. Devious, as if he has a delicious joke he wishes to tell, but not yet. An expression I’ve never seen before. Horror compounds upon horror.

“After I finish my task, I will depart in Mantle’s Approach,” he says.

My mind races. I can expect no assistance from the Didact, that much is obvious. The Ark is far too large to move. The Halo might be able to escape. But there are not nearly enough functional vessels to rapidly shift our Forerunners there. They could have been moved if we had begun shuttling them weeks ago! Or if we had put them on the Halo in the first place.

Our mistakes have finally compounded.

The trap is closing.

“How can we save them all? How can we ever get free?” I ask. “And where do we go?”

“There is no way out, only through,” he says, his eyes narrowing. “If you wish to survive, you must leave now. When the Flood is finished, there will be nothing left of this place.”

The Didact stretches a long arm in the direction of Path Kethona. “The star roads will keep clear of Halo’s firing path. That will open an escape route,” he says. “But it will not remain that way for long. You must escape in Audacity while you have a chance.” He sucks in his breath, staring at the Ark’s surface. “Traitors. And yet … even in the midst of our most monumental failure, I will seize another solution.”

The Didact locks his helmet and leaves with hardly a backward glance. He does not even offer to escort me to Audacity.

I am lost in a sink of misery and confusion. If the Ark is destroyed, and all my specimens, what is the point of my own existence?

And then I know. We must move everything—as much as we can—to safety. It is our only solution. I send the briefest of messages to Chant-to-Green who is hidden within a keyship on the far side of the Burn. If her vessel is capable, she will obey. She cannot fail.

I then contact the only presence on the Ark that I know can help.

STRING 31

MONITOR CHAKAS

SENTINELS AND ATTACK harriers rise in swirling clouds around the Ark, like flocking birds over the plains of my birth. I make inquiries, but the Ark’s channels are consumed with preparations for evacuation as well as for combat. Yet how can so many different species be evacuated? And to where? There are not nearly enough transports.