B00AQUQDQO EBOK

by Bear, Greg

  I pointed to a grayish patch on Uthera’s limb, even now sliding into darkness—but still, as it did so, shaping a visible bump against the thin starfield beyond. “Try focusing on that.” I said.

  “It is of considerable size,” the residue said. “Yet it does not appear to be a natural feature, nor a Forerunner construct. Ship will take a closer view.”

  That view—grainy and shimmering, as if through a rising column of hot air—revealed what I had dreaded most and seen only once, ten thousand years before: a spore mountain.

  The Flood.

  “The object rises fifty kilometers above the planet’s datum and measures four hundred kilometers across the base, at its greatest diameter. It intersects many Forerunner constructs and appears to have arisen at the center of a major city, which city is, if memory serves—if this is truly Uthera—”

  A matter of little importance to me at this moment. “Will ship respond to my commands? Will you?”

  The residue considered, then flashed a geometric shape—a complex polygon. “Do you have proper codes for assuming command?”

  The codes I carried in memory were over a millennia old—but they might appeal to this poor remnant, or the ship with which it was so delicately linked.

  “Try this,” I said, and spoke a string of four hundred intricately looping nonsense words and numbers of the sliding, nonintegral varieties favored by Builder systems.

  “Checking,” the residue said.

  Sharp-by-Striking came up through the transit opening, but this time in proper fashion, rising slowly, accompanied by a sigh of freshening air. “Tubes and conveyors are working, sort of,” he said. “What did you do?”

  “We’re waking up,” I said. “What about our comrades in the hold?”

  “Murky, but clearing a little. Not long until they burst. One appears to be a high-ranking Builder,” Sharp said, confirming my observation. “Still has armor.”

  “Not Faber—?”

  “Not the Master Builder.” He grimaced in disappointment.

  “Too bad,” I agreed. We shared a moment of darkness, touching the sixth fingers of our left hands in vengeful sympathy.

  “But possibly one of his subordinates, fallen from favor,” Sharp said. “If the armor still functions, perhaps it can help control the ship.”

  “And the other?”

  “Catalog,” Sharp said grimly. “Carapace looks damaged. It may not come out alive.”

  Here again, the Master Builder’s ironic touch was evident. No doubt Catalog had been sent to him by Juridicals to conduct an interview—only to be frozen in stasis and dumped here with the rest of Faber’s garbage.

  My wife had supplied me with fully updated armor after I left my Cryptum. That had been taken from me, so my knowledge of more immediate events was spotty at best. I had no idea what might have forced the Master Builder’s hand. Having captured me, he should have been inclined to bring me to trial before his corrupted Juridicals. He had not. That implied that even before my capture, his situation had already started to decline.

  If Catalog came out alive, if it could still hook up to a Juridical network—and no doubt it would want to, after what it had experienced—we might reach out to the ecumene and report our status.

  Uthera was infested. Any attempt to land and conduct repairs would end in disaster. None of the worlds here would be of use. How had it gone so far wrong?

  “What do you know about the last few years … or however long I’ve been out of action?” I asked.

  “Without armor, my knowledge has huge gaps,” Sharp said. “In the end, Faber took no one into his confidence. Except Mendicant Bias.”

  “You know about that?”

  “The Master Builder was under arrest, on trial. Without warning, Halos conducted an attack on the Capital. Some said Mendicant Bias was trying to rescue Faber, but I think not.”

  The details were coming together. Sharp’s expression told me as much.

  “Faber escaped. You went with him,” I said.

  He marked a Y over his forehead and the bridge of his nose, a Warrior’s admission of guilt. “With the help of the Warden, who removed Faber from the capital and delivered him to me. I commanded a fast frigate, one of six that may have been carrying high-ranking members of Builder Security.… We were ordered to flee the Capital system, even though it was under attack.”

  “And?”

  “The Master Builder’s personal security overwhelmed our crew. I recognized them by his sigil. They killed all but me. That’s the last I remember.”

  “I must have been on that frigate as well. Did you know?”

  “None of our crew knew.”

  Perhaps everything was already lost. Perhaps the Burn extended across the entire galaxy. If so, surely the Master Builder would have fired off his beloved wheels, his Halos! Unless they had all been damaged or destroyed while attacking the Capital.

  Sharp said he knew nothing about that, or how many Halos might remain active. His ignorance of events that must have transpired while he fled with the Master Builder was not convincing. But we had little time to argue.

  He pointed to the displays. “We’re attracting attention.” Tracking symbols flocked around tiny points of light moving into position along the limb of the planet, coming up from behind its curve—and then appeared far out in the system. The symbols blossomed into readouts of size, class, capability.

  “Forerunner vessels,” Sharp said. “Newer. Powerful. Hundreds of them.”

  The new ships were communicating with our own—perhaps trying to take command.

  “They say they’re in control of this system,” Sharp interpreted from the battle displays. “They welcome us—invite us to join them.” He looked at me dubiously. “To surrender. What are they still doing here, in the Burn?”

  “We need to release the others,” I told him. “They’re our last hope.”

  * * *

  The remaining stasis bubbles were in the final stages of depletion and decay. Sharp and I worked out means of forcing the issue. Warrior-Servants, exerting all their strength, can wreak real havoc—and we did just that. We grabbed for heavy, hard implements. Fortunately, the ship was old enough that its re-shaping capabilities were minimal, and it soon yielded pieces of interior framing, furniture, and console supports with sufficient mass to be swung with real effect.

  We battered. Fully energized, a stasis bubble can resist almost any imaginable force. But weakened, they shimmered and radiated in the ultraviolet with each of our coordinated blows. We were desperate. And for once, we were in luck. The fields blackened, then popped with a burst of brilliant blue light.

  We had just enough warning to avert our eyes.

  The Builder sprawled across the deck—female. Her armor spasmed and she lay curled up like a dying insect, face beaded with sweat, skin dark and blotchy.

  For a moment, we wondered whether she was infected.…

  Her eyelids flickered, opened. We backed away. Then Sharp moved in and turned her over, gently twisted her head around, looked into her eyes.

  “She’s not sick,” he concluded.

  Catalog lay on the deck, twitching, unable to raise its five limbs. Its carapace was scarred and crazed. It had suffered a lot of punishment.

  Neither looked strong. Nevertheless, Sharp grabbed up the Builder and I took Catalog, and we dragged them to the main bridge.

  The ship was still working to revive and return to full duty. The effort was both noble and pitiful.

  “Very old … hulk,” the female Builder observed, struggling weakly to free herself from my grip. I let her go, then caught her again as she fell forward. “How did I get here?”

  “We were dropped into this ship and sent to a Flood-infested system.”

  To this she responded with an unbelieving glare. “They wouldn’t do that!”

  “Look for yourself.”

  Sharp lifted Catalog, tried to set all its limbs under it, then let it down gently. Three of the legs held, the ot
her two folded. It fell back with a heavy thud.

  “I was giving testimony … to that one!” the Builder said, standing without help. Her skin color was also improving. “Faber’s personal security found us. They tried to stop a Juridical deposition! I couldn’t believe it—”

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  She struggled to concentrate. Her ancilla was not being much help, I guessed. “On Secunda,” she said. “An emergency Council. Many Builders were facing extradition and arrest. I was among them.”

  “You were turning Council evidence to protect yourself,” Sharp suggested. He glanced at me and shrugged.

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  “We heard there was an assault on the Capital system. The most powerful Builders scrambled to find protection. Monitors turned against them. The last thing I remember is Catalog being thrust into stasis. I must have been next.”

  My worst fears about the ascendancy of the Builders had never imagined this level of perfidy.

  The female examined my face in disbelief. “You’re the Didact! We’ve spent a thousand years looking for you. You betrayed us in our time of greatest need.”

  I have had long experience controlling anger. Mostly my efforts succeed. “Is your ancilla still working?” I asked, voice steady.

  She closed her eyes. “Weak—still there.”

  “What was your function?”

  “I helped design installations to fight the Flood,” she said.

  “Halos?”

  “Yes. In their later stages.”

  I could not help myself, hearing this. I pounded my fist against a bulkhead and produced the strangest, most demented of grunts.

  “You’re laughing!” the female said indignantly. “Only animals do that.”

  “And humans,” I said, covering my mouth as another fit came upon me.

  Sharp looked aside, ashamed for me.

  At the last, Forthencho, the greatest human general, my most challenging opponent, as the Lifeshaper and I had prepared for his reduction at Charum Hakkor, had smiled—and then had made just such sharp, grunting noises.

  In later years, I dreamed about that sound, that emotion. I came to understand and even appreciate it. Something had brought forth that human-like rictus, had made me smile as I entered the Cryptum, causing my wife to fear for my sanity, I suspect.

  But why now? Something churned in the back of my thoughts … A dark complex of evidence and induction. Part of me understood something my intellect found repellent. The Primordial’s last statement to me from the timelock. The puzzling development of human resistance to the Flood. The Lifeshaper and the Council collaborating with the Master Builder to preserve human personalities, human memory and history, in part through the use of Composers …

  The unprecedented destruction of Precursor artifacts at Charum Hakkor.

  Before I could voice my suspicions, fortune turned direction.

  “Ship is waking,” the Builder said, looking down at her hand as if it might be deceiving her. “We won’t have to rely on the damaged ancilla. I think my family may have designed this class of vessel—thousands of years ago. I’m asking it to survey its capabilities.”

  * * *

  The female Builder’s name was Maker-of-Moons. She came from an old family long involved in the manufacture of fast, heavily armed ships.

  “I knew your father,” I told her. “He served the Master Builder—performed his dirty tricks. Your father was directly responsible for forcing me into exile.”

  Sharp gave her a rueful glance.

  Maker’s armor took an automatic stance, a defensive mode, but she stared me down and forced it to relax.

  “He died ten years ago,” she said. “Assassinated at the orders of the Master Builder.”

  “I did not know.”

  “How could you, Didact? You abandoned us.”

  I held back another useless grunt. Obviously, while waiting for the ship to assess, and our enemies to close in, there was little more we could do.

  This was the time for stories.

  Maker was less than two thousand years old. The Master Builder’s strengthening grip on the Council had led to difficult times even for Builders, especially those who, unlike her father, were not part of the general corruption.

  Maker’s first assignment had been to improve upon existing plans for Halos. But she found a fatal flaw in the Master Builder’s original design. “They were too damned big,” she told us. “Transporting a Halo produces an enormous debt in reconciliation. There was no way the original Halos could all be sent to where they were needed with sufficient speed and flexibility. I could not follow through.”

  This flaw, she said, had been discovered only during final testing of the first installations. Worse, the Ark built to manufacture them was not capable of making smaller Halos. A few of the deployed Halos were theoretically capable of shedding segments and thus mass and size, but for all their power they were remarkably delicate. Self-reduction entailed too many dangers—instability and collapse being the most obvious.

  Nobody had listened to her. After decades of work and frustration, getting nowhere, she had resigned in protest.

  She gave me a stern, searching look. “For my obstinacy, I was brought up before the Juridicals. My father intervened. On Faber’s orders, Builder Security executed him.” She nudged Catalog with her armored foot. It reacted like a sleepy insect. “This was my confessor. The Master Builder ordered us both placed in stasis.”

  With a quivering groan, Catalog attempted to stand on three limbs and managed to extend a number of complicated looking eyes.

  “I am Catalog,” it announced.

  “We know,” Sharp said.

  It looked around and wobbled before us, making those peculiar internal clicking and slopping noises common to Catalog and disgusting—to my sensibilities, at least.

  This one did not look especially strong. It slowly rotated, two of its limbs tangling, and leaned toward Maker-of-Moons. “My assignment…” It nearly fell over, but righted itself at the last moment. “My assignment is this Builder.” It made stuttering noises for a few seconds, then apologized. “I appear to be damaged,” it said. “Something has attempted to access my processes.”

  “Did it succeed?” Maker asked.

  “Not that I am aware of. I may no longer be secure, however, and should not take testimony. As a precaution.”

  “Wise,” I said. “Can you add anything further to this Builder’s story?”

  “Is this ship capable of communicating?”

  “No,” Maker said.

  Catalog’s voice gained some strength. “There are Juridical channels available even out here. Unfortunately, their use for extra-Juridical traffic is forbidden.”

  Obviously we would have to supply persuasion. I assisted Catalog as it rotated its carapace again and focused its many eyes on the approaching ships.

  “Those are not allies, are they?” it asked.

  “Almost certainly not,” I said.

  It turned its eyes and other sensors on me. “You are the Didact, against whom the Council and the Master Builder lodged a formal complaint over a thousand years ago.”

  “I am,” I said.

  “That case has been dismissed,” Catalog said. “There are no longer proceedings against you.” It paused. “There have been dramatic developments since I was removed from the Master Builder’s presence. Many indeed. The Old Council was nearly destroyed by an attack on the Capital system. There is a New Council. But there is also…” It examined me more closely, with a suspicious backward lean. “Are you sure you’re the Didact? Because there is another, working with the Lifeshaper and given full authority.”

  So Bornstellar survived!

  “I imprinted a Manipular in case of my capture. That is likely him.”

  “So much to catch up on…” Its voice dropped and its words slowed. “Oh, my. Juridicals have reorganized. We have been found wanting. There was corruption.”

  �
��Indeed,” I said. I left Catalog to its catching up and asked Maker if this ship could be convinced to move to a more secure location while we studied our options.

  “I’m working on that,” she said. “It’s murky. The main ancilla was decommissioned, but whoever did it was sloppy. Emergency backups could still be cached.… I’ll need time.”

  In my experience, this was a statement expected of any Builder faced with repairs. Somehow it encouraged me. I was starting to like this Builder despite myself.

  “Oh, my,” Catalog announced again, and jerked itself to full attention. Its voice rose in pitch. “The Flood has entered over five hundred systems and infected thousands of worlds and entire fleets.”

  “Tell us something encouraging,” Sharp-by-Striking grumbled.

  “All of those systems have fallen silent, and it is assumed that their defenses have been placed at the disposal of the Flood.”

  “That isn’t what I meant,” Sharp said.

  Maker came up from her tech-reverie to announce, “The central ancilla is online! Still a classic Builder vessel.”

  “What about weapons?” Sharp asked, approaching the control display.

  Maker stood back to allow him access. “Stripped out before we were sent here. If the Master Builder dumped the Didact into a Burn, defenseless, I’d say it was personal.”

  “There were few kind words,” I agreed.

  Maker tried to sound optimistic. “It’s possible we’ll be able to maneuver within this system, but only for a short time. And no great distance—less than a hundred million kilometers upstar, twice that downstar. Better sensor response is now possible, however.”

  A sharp tone rang out as a small gray circle appeared in the display, above the limb of Uthera but in line with the plane of the ecliptic. The circle surrounded an almost invisible blur emerging from star-specked darkness. Neither we nor the ship could discern what this blur might be. Nor did it become more obvious as both the blur and the gray circle expanded.

  All we knew was an unidentified mass was closing fast from a distance of about two hundred and fifty million kilometers.

  “It’s a dark sun,” Sharp said. “Has to be.”

  “Nowhere near enough mass,” Maker observed.