Cryptum

  Enough to fight a major battle, if not a war.

  What was the Didact planning? Was he truly thinking of rebelling against the council that ruled the ecumene?

  He had taken me along—taken us along—perhaps to avoid killing us, but at all events to keep us close, to keep us quiet. I was in the middle of something too enormous to contemplate. Something far beyond the abilities of a Manipular, however clever, to comprehend.

  All my young life I had lived on an invisible cushion of civilization. The struggles and designs of thousands of years of history had brought me to this pinnacle. I had had to exhibit only the tiniest minima of self-discipline to inherit the place my family had planned for me: the life of a privileged Forerunner, the very notion of which I found so restraining.

  My privilege—to be born and raised all unaware of what Forerunners had had to do to protect their position in the galaxy: moving opposing civilizations and species aside, taking over their worlds and their resources, undermining their growth and development—reducing them to a population of specimens. Making sure their opponents could never rise again, never present a threat to Forerunner dominance, all while claiming the privilege of protecting the Mantle.

  Mopping up after the slaughter.

  How many species had collapsed beneath our hypocrisy, stretching how far back in time? What was myth, what was nightmare, what was truth? My life, my luxury—rising from the crushed backs of the vanquished, who were destroyed or deevolved—

  And what did that mean, precisely? Had the humans defeated by the Didact and his fleets been forced into sterility, senescence without reproduction, or had they been forced to watch their children subjected to biological reduction, to becoming lemurs again?

  The ancilla would supply only scattered images of a select few, under the protection of the Librarian, transplanted to Erde-Tyrene. Under her influence, equipped with her geas, these pitiful remnants had in a few thousand years grown into a population of hundreds of thousands and regained many of their ancestral forms. If Erde-Tyrene had been their true planet of origin, then these later transplants and interventions must have muddied the fossil record beyond all sense.

  I stood on the outer perimeter of the largest of the weapons bays, studying the slender, aerodynamic shapes racked overhead, the heavily shielded hulking transports beneath them, stacked on pallets and suspended in and silver and blue hard-light grips. I listened to the faint, almost inaudible tick, tick, tick of form-fit stasis fields maintaining the vessels and weapons in prime condition. The Librarian’s ship-seed had been designed with far more than just escape in mind. The Didact once again had a full-blown ship of war at his command. A ship filled with death.

  A planet-breaker—suited to a Promethean.

  How could a Lifeworker, even one as great as the Librarian, have arranged for such awesome might? Not alone, surely. Not without the help of Builders.

  I had always been taught that the most sophisticated and ornate intellectual abilities and social talents came with the first mutation—the end of youth, the end of being a Manipular. Out here, away from rate and family, mutation to first-form was impossible.

  These problems were beyond my understanding, far beyond any solution. Wrapped in melancholy, I ascended to the command center, where the humans had stripped off their armor and fallen asleep. I stood over them, longing to shed my own armor, as well—longing for all of us to return to Djamonkin Crater and take our chances again on the merse-studded lake, lose ourselves on the ring island and recapture those all-too-brief moments of foolish adventure, wearing only rough sandals and crude hats, pointlessly hunting for improbable treasure.

  The real pinnacle of my life to that point.

  But there would be no returning to that innocence.

  Never again.

  * * *

  The ship pushed away from the sad gray hulk of Charum Hakkor. The journey to Faun Hakkor would take just over thirty hours.

  I compelled the humans to suit up if they wanted to live. Acceleration was extreme, of course. Riser and Chakas watched with me as the stars wheeled and the ship powered into full reaction drive, grabbing the vacuum energy and expelling a violet streak of virtual neutrons, which winked out as soon as their lives were discovered by the doubled hand of time.

  We stayed within our armor until the ship found its proper orbit. Time slowed to a crawl. I tried to teach the humans how to access diverting games but they were not attentive. Finally, excluding me, they played mysterious finger games over and over. I was about to learn by long observation their rules and elements of strategy when the Didact rejoined us in the command center.

  Our armor unlocked.

  Faun Hakkor came into view. Our orbit adjusted to allow a looping pass. We would not linger, we would not land.

  “I’ve inspected all the planets with long-range sensors,” the Didact said. “The information they glean is not one hundred percent compelling at such distances, but…”

  “Where did humans fight the hardest?” Chakas asked, approaching the Didact. He looked up at the Promethean with a clear gaze and without fear.

  “Where their interests were most crucial, of course. Charum Hakkor saw some of the final and worst fighting.” The Didact drew himself up before this accusing human. “Your people—if I may call them that—were most cruel when they savaged worlds where Forerunners had resettled other species. The pressure of their growing populations was strong. They annihilated fifty defenseless systems and sowed their conquests with human colonies before we coordinated and drove them back to the outer reaches of the spiral arm. They believed—”

  “In creating many souls,” Chakas said, eyes dull, as if looking inward, “I’m learning much about my ancestors.”

  “Makes unhappy,” Riser commented.

  “Switch to full view,” the Didact ordered, perhaps to break out of this conversation.

  Abruptly, we appeared to be suspended in space, the ship gone from around us. With some twitching and fumbling, getting used to this experience, we could all look down upon Faun Hakkor unfettered.

  Almost a match in size for Charum Hakkor, this planet was covered with a mottled carpet of green and a few scattered, high oceans locked between mountains—completely different from Charum Hakkor, even beautiful … at first glance.

  “I could live there,” Riser said.

  But the sensors were telling us a different tale. Only now did we see evidence of past destruction, highlighted by ancilla commentary—slash marks, craters, vast flattened and burned regions, now overgrown, but outlined in red and blue, with dates of strikes, counterstrikes, and lists of Forerunner ships engaged in the long-ago battle.

  And then—beside those lists—other ships, other names. Human names. Chakas flinched at some of these names as his ancilla translated for him.

  “Faun Hakkor was the origin of the Pheru which humans so deeply valued as pets and companions,” the Didact said. “The reserve forces defended it fiercely but their numbers and installations were minimal, so the planet kept most of its original flora and fauna…”

  “Something’s changed,” Chakas said. “It doesn’t look right.”

  Riser walked around us—an outlandish figure in his armor, striding across an invisible deck. “Who lives here now?” he asked.

  The Didact requested scans of the planet’s present biota along with lists of the flora and fauna that had survived the battles nine thousand years before. In the records of the survey conducted by the Lifeworkers, likely after the end of hostilities, I saw hundreds of species of larger animals ranging in size from a meter to a hundred meters—some clearly aquatic, others huge land carnivores or sedate prairie-grazers. This list was compared with what the sensors could now locate.

  One by one, the larger species dropped out.

  “No animals larger than a meter,” the ship’s ancilla reported in a precise, clipped voice.

  Next came a range of historic species less than a meter in size—tree-hoppers, burrowers, small carni
vores, seed-eaters, flying creatures, arthropods, clonal sibling societies … the Pheru.

  One by one, they dropped off the current list. None to be found.

  Next came flora, including dense arboreal forests. Many of the original trees had acquired a kind of long-term intelligence, communicating with each other over centuries using insects, viruses, bacteria, and fungi as carriers of genetic and hormonal signals, analogous to neurons.… That list also quickly emptied. There were remnants—dead forests and jungles covered with a false green carpet of primitive plants and symbiotic species.

  All that remained, apparently, were mosses, fungi, algae, and their combined forms.

  “Nothing with a central nervous system or even a notochord,” the ship’s ancilla reported. “No fauna above a millimeter in scale.”

  “Where are the bees?” Riser asked. “What will bear fruit if bees are gone? No little meats to hunt. Where are they?” His voice rose to a sad squeak.

  “Flowering plants are few and in decline,” the ancilla continued. “All oceans and lakes and rivers are sour with decaying matter. Sensor results indicate extensive ecosystem collapse.”

  The Didact could stand no more. He cut off the virtual view, and we stood again on the deck of the command center, the fading lists flapping away if blown by discouraging breezes.

  “We have become the monsters,” the Promethean said. “It has returned in such force that Forerunners will destroy everything that carries even the smallest seed of reason … everything that thinks or plans. This is to be our last defense. A crime beyond all reason, surpassing all previous sins against the Mantle.… What will remain?”

  I wondered what it he was referring to—the prisoner released from Charum Hakkor?

  Something worse?

  He called up a chair suited to his size and sat to think. “You wonder what forced me to enter the Cryptum. It was my refusal to agree to this plan even in its early stages. With all my being, I fought against the design of these infamous devices, and for thousands of years forestalled their construction. But my opponents finally won. I was reprimanded by the Council, bringing shame upon my rate, my guild, my family. Then I became the infamous one—the conqueror and savior who refused to listen to reason. And so, I vanished.”

  “No sympathy here,” Chakas said, eyes sharp.

  “Defiant to the last,” the Didact observed, but without anger—as if all his anger had been sucked away by the vision of these barren or dying worlds.

  Riser lay down and curled up in misery. “No bees,” he murmured. “Starving.” Chakas knelt beside him.

  “There is one more journey we must make,” the Didact said after a time. “If that quest fails, we have no other option. Nothing more to contribute.” He swiveled to face Chakas and Riser. “Humans refused to surrender in the face of overwhelming force, and so they were reduced. Their allies were less stubborn, less honorable, and were accorded a less severe punishment. The San’Shyuum were stripped of all weapons and means of travel and confined to a single star system kept in strict Forerunner quarantine. One of my former commanders oversaw that quarantine. Perhaps he is still in charge.…

  “We will go see how fares the last of the San’Shyuum. But first, I need time to think and plan. I will go below. The humans will be sequestered in their cabin.” He looked them over dubiously. “I don’t think they like me.”

  He gave the command and the ship complied. In minutes, we entered slipspace, and the Didact departed the command center.

  THIRTEEN

  HOURS LATER, WE emerged. The effects passed more slowly than usual, indicating we had gone a very great distance indeed, perhaps beyond the range of normal particle reconciliation. There might be dilation effects when we returned.

  I stood alone in the command center, looking out across the tremendous, dim whirlpool of a galaxy, and called up a chart to see where we were. Spirals and grids spread quickly. At least this was our home galaxy. The ship was in a long, obscure orbit, high above the galactic plane, tens of thousands of light-years from any feasible destination.

  I moved through the ship, seeking the Didact. He was just a few decks down, in a medium-size storage bay separate from the larger weapons bays. Here, the war sphinxes had arranged themselves in their characteristic ellipse, each gripped by a gleaming hard-light buffer.

  I watched him from behind a pressure arch that swept across the broadest dimension of the hold. He seemed to be speaking to an assembled group, like a commander addressing his warriors.

  “I’ve never been naïve enough to believe following duty led to glory, or experience elevated one to wisdom among Forerunners,” he said, his deep voice echoing through the chamber. “My young ones, I wish you were truly still here to counsel me. I feel weak and isolated. I fear what I will find when I walk among Builders again. Their rule brought us to this impasse. What we learned long ago from the humans…”

  He saw me behind the arch, then stretched up his thick arm and gestured for me to join him. I did so.

  The Didact was alone with his war sphinxes. I saw no others.

  “Why have we traveled so far?” I asked.

  “Multiple slipspace journeys can be tracked by core authority, if the journeys are rational. This is not a rational journey. For several more jumps, we will now be harder to track.”

  The Didact walked around the interior of the ellipse, touching one sphinx, then another. “These contain what is left to me of my warriors from long ago.”

  “They’re Durances?” I asked. Beneath my armor, my skin crawled at the memory of a sphinx upbraiding me, telling me to suck it up, and my intuition that there was something more than an ancilla within. Riser had felt it, too.

  “No. Warriors do not observe the niceties, as you may have noticed, Manipular. In battle, our dead are seldom in any condition to have their complete essences harvested. All I have left to me are the final interactions my children had with their machines—fleeting samples of their thoughts and memories, before they were killed in action … kept to be studied by their commander, to see what can be learned for future battles. I was their commander, as well as their father.… I have never had the heart to erase them.”

  “Do they still offer you their opinions?” I asked, regarding the sphinxes with a shiver.

  “Some judgment remains,” he said, looking down upon me. He laid a big hand on my shoulder. “You are not such a fool as you make yourself out to be. If I asked you what I should do,” he said, “how would you answer?”

  This caught me in a vise of contradictions. “I would think long and hard,” I replied. “I have not the knowledge.”

  “The Librarian selected you and imprinted the humans—she seems to think you can help. And despite our many disagreements, I have rarely found her to be wrong.”

  He struggled inwardly for a moment, features flashing anger and sadness, confusion, then resolve. “My tactics before the Builder and Warrior councils were too blunt, my politics far too direct and naïve. The Librarian was always correct. That is not easy to admit.”

  A chorus of voices rose from the sphinxes—etched and hollow. I could understand only a few chopped phrases:

  “They are out there, waiting…”

  “Thousands of years wasted!”

  “The solution was lost, Father … Lost!”

  “If what the Old Ones made is loose…”

  I stepped away from the ellipse, terrified.

  The sphinxes fell silent. The Didact stood among them, shoulders bowed.

  “Who were they?” I asked, suddenly feeling that here was much more than a commander and his dead soldiers.

  “These were our sons and daughters. The Librarian’s and mine,” the Didact said. “They became warriors and served in my fleets. They died in battle. All of them.”

  I did not know what to say or do. His grief was palpable.

  “Their final communications, their last commands and patterns and memories, stored in these machines, are all I have left. All that matte
rs to me personally other than my oath … my duty. But I need help, more than they can even begin to give. The Librarian chose you to help me. But how?”

  For a moment, he seemed lost, as if unable to decide which course came next—oddly indecisive for a Promethean. Then he asked a non sequitur question. “The humans … how much time did you spend with them … observing, before we left Erde-Tyrene?”

  “Ten days,” I answered.

  “Do they still have their honor?”

  “Yes,” I said without hesitation.

  “She’s testing me, my wife, isn’t she?”

  “I know very little about the Librarian.”

  The Didact waved that off. “You’ll never know her the way I did. She possesses a sense of humor rare in all Forerunners and impossible to find in Warrior-Servants … or in most Builders. It would be like her to summon me from my peace and set me this challenge.”

  “What does she want you to do?”

  “When I served as commander in chief of Forerunner forces, I always had the support of an expert staff … dozens of fellow Prometheans, each backed by the very finest ancillas of long military experience. I’m not used to working alone, Manipular. I think better with a staff. But what she has given me … a Manipular and two humans … one of them docile and very small…”

  Riser was not all that docile—the little Florian had bitten the Didact—but I did not contradict him.

  “To reach full efficiency, a Promethean’s staff shares most or all of the commander’s knowledge. It’s a tradition of long standing.” He extended his armored hand. A dark red field spread along his fingers, as if the hand was dipped in glowing blood.

  Here was something completely unexpected. Frightening, even. “I am not your equal,” I objected. “I have not your experience.…”