by Various
When I reached the peak of the ridge, I took in a stunning sight: our world’s twin suns began to shift behind the enormous shadowy gas giant, glinting off its roiling atmosphere with an explosive burst of radiance. This lasted only a moment before the onset of dusk, as stars suddenly began to pierce the deep blue sky. The bright, coalescent clusters of light resembled a glowing moss I had seen on another world. I could not recall which one—it was so long ago.
In the meantime, my wife had emerged from our home, carrying a basket and a blanket. We would dine under the stars tonight. She met me on the ridge just in time to witness the last light prior to the cool darkness of twilight taking over the view. A sweet but pungent gust of lavender rushed up the cliffside to greet us. It was the coral: the scent of this world, full of vibrance and life. The smell made her smile.
She and I were very different: I loved the glory of the stars, and she adored the glory of the life that orbited them. This was the way it had always been, and the very reason we chose this world as our home.
“It never gets old,” I said.
“No, it doesn’t,” she responded, glancing at me from the corner of her eye before spreading out the blanket. I helped pull it taut near the ledge and we sat down, staring out across the sea, soaking it all in for a moment. Down the hill toward the stable, our son had just finished stowing the plow. From our perch, we could just barely make out the steady and determined grimace on his face as he finished the task. He always needed to do it exactly right.
“You know he takes after you,” I said.
“There’s a little of both of us in him,” his mother replied. “I’m just the parts about him you like the best.” She was right.
She was always right.
“Tell me one of your old stories, Father.”
One of my old stories. The tales from before my son had been born, from before the life we had on this world. To him, they were only legends and myths—that was a good thing. They should stay that way, remaining in a galaxy and a time far removed from our own, something he would never experience out here, in the fields.
It had taken years for the dark dreams of that time to end. Those scars ran deep, almost too deep, but eventually they subsided. Now, all that remained was a torrent of dim memories, loosely connected events, all of it ancient history. Tragedy upon tragedy. My past was a trail of corpses and dead worlds. How it all went wrong.
“Which one do you want me to tell you about?”
All three of us were laying on our backs across the blanket, my wife tucked into my arm and our son under hers. I smoked from a small ivory pipe: crushed flowers of a sweet plant that gave off a pleasant and rejuvenating aroma. A large cerulean moon now climbed above distant mountains that sat opposite the sea—our homeworld’s sister satellite. Over the course of the year, both spheres would dance their way around the impossibly massive anchor planet they orbited.
“Tell me about Halo,” he said, thumbing the rim of his weathered hat.
“Halo? Are you sure?” my wife asked him.
“Yes. Tell me one of those stories.”
Halo. This wasn’t the first time I had told him a story about the ringworld weapons, but my reaction was always the same. The mentioning of its name was enough to summon a storm of memories to the fore. What could I honestly say about it that wouldn’t frighten my son out of his wits? The reality that it was capable of wiping an entire galaxy completely clean of any thinking life? That it was just as majestic as it was deadly and ruinous? How would he even begin to understand that? Could he ever bear the truth—and if not now, when he was older?
Perhaps one day . . . but for now, it would still be clothed in myth and the periphery of the past. Vague and distant, something that I alone remembered.
“There was once a warrior who tracked his old enemy to one of the Halo rings—”
“A strong and brave warrior?” my wife asked for the child’s benefit, not hers.
“By the measure of some,” I confessed. “This warrior led a vast navy to a Halo that his enemy had made into a stronghold. They fought for days in the skies above the ring, until the enemy had been worn down and his vulnerabilities were exposed,” I said this with expressive gestures, and then paused to inhale the pipe’s warmth in my lungs.
“The enemy was out of options. His ships had been ravaged, his weapons demolished. He was completely beaten . . . but he was a cunning foe. If he could not have the Halo for himself, he would not let the warrior have it. Or anyone else, for that matter.”
“So he tried to destroy it?” my son asked.
“Yes. He attempted to rip it apart with the gravity of another world. But the warrior refused him this final effort. Using the vessels under his command, the warrior drew in from all sides and laid hold of the Halo ring, reshaping its form as the gravity sought to rend it to pieces. Then he tracked down the enemy and captured him.”
“What happened to the enemy?” he asked with a yawn.
“He was given a just punishment for his crimes. And the warrior reversed all of the evils the enemy had caused on the ringworld. He . . . tried to make everything right,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “Even if only for a time.”
I stopped for a long moment, taking in a few breaths from the pipe.
“He’s asleep,” my wife said, lightly touching the back of her hand on his cheek. That was what a long day working the fields does. It was no longer effortless for our kind.
My wife nuzzled in closer to me. She was incredibly beautiful under the pale light from the moon and stars. The hard years of laboring alongside me had not made her any less lovely. In many ways, she was even dearer to me now than ever before.
“Do you remember it well?” she asked.
“Halo?”
“Yes. Do you remember the one from your story?”
“It is still vivid in my mind,” I said, closing my eyes. “Those massive bands reaching up like arms into the sky: they were blue-green and rich with life within, and a cold ashen metal without. I can still see its shape, twisted and fractured in the cracked viewport of my ship. I remember watching it shrink into the distance just before we left. Even back then, when machines of that scale were ordinary and expected . . . Halo took my breath away.”
For a moment, the weight of the memory overcame me like a swift tide. I was suddenly back there, long ago, with my ship’s frigid deck below me. I watched Halo’s band slowly spin, set against the roiling blackness of an abandoned star system. The fortress world was an elegant kaleidoscopic spool of color, yet still inordinately powerful beyond reason. Halo brought our entire world down around us and cost us everything. It had made us exiles to the furthest reaches of space.
As if waking from a dream, I shuddered and snapped my eyes wide open, returning to reality. I shifted to see if my wife too was slumbering. She hadn’t. She was just staring at me with a reassuring smile. She put her head on my chest and closed her eyes, listening to my heart as it steadied.
“Are you happy with our life here?” I asked.
“I am,” she said softly.
“I mean, truly happy . . . given all that has happened?”
“This is life—real life. The three of us together. It is the way it was always meant to be. Nothing could make me happier, whether on this world or any other.”
By the time my pipe had died down, she’d fallen asleep. But I could not.
One by one, I wrapped my wife and son in the blanket as I took them inside the house, laying them on the mat in our straw loft. After retrieving a bundle of wood for the hearth, I lit it with an onyx flint we kept above the mantle. It was one of the first things I made when we arrived here.
Confident that this would keep them warm, I grabbed my cloak and set out from the homestead. I walked the full extent of the farm, and then deep into the shallow tablelands that stretched toward the inland interior.
This walk was not a normal evening ritual, but tonight I felt provoked.
Compelled by the ima
ge of Halo freshly seared into my mind, I set out through the deep country, pushing into a series of rolling golden fields before the foothills of the white-capped mountains rose before me. I knew the place I was headed; it wasn’t far.
As I scaled the first set of steep rises, I quickly came to a narrow ledge that forced me to sidle my way along the mountainside, ascending into snow and ice. Looking back toward the valley, the light was soft against the hillside, and from here I could see most of the tablelands, from the deep and dark forests to the east to the immense crimson sea on the west. Herds of grazing bovids were scattered across a distant clearing, while a small flock of gulls wheeled upward in the predawn sky—but otherwise, the sight was completely still, like a picture. I could even see my home built into the cresting ridge, a brown speck set against countless lines of harrowed soil.
That was home. I’d been here longer than I had been anywhere else before.
After climbing a good way, I finally reached an obscure and well-hidden cleft. Turning around to face the mountain, my eyes were met with a familiar shape.
Audacity.
Mostly buried under the snow, the slender starship was carefully perched here, leaning out over the edge toward our homestead. Its visage was impassive but vigilant, like a silent guardian that kept watch from a distance.
I approached the exposed entry portal and placed my hand on the seal. The ship immediately recognized me and opened its maw, allowing me to climb inside.
It somehow felt colder in here than outside; this was a ship that had seen a thousand burning stars in its long and forgotten history, and had now been abandoned to the elements.
As I moved into the recesses of the ship, my respiration came out in ragged tendrils—I was breathing harder. I always did when I made this trip. It was now much more taxing on my body than once upon a time.
At the back of the ship was a dun obelisk, a vertical structure that detected my approach and opened by sliding two doors out from its center. In front of me was a hulking suit of armor—old and imposing. Its helmet appeared to wear a stern countenance, and the chestplate and pauldrons had been pocked with damage from a hundred bitter wars. All of this was distant to me, but it was still my past. It wasn’t a myth. It wasn’t a legend.
Not long after we activated Halo, the handful that remained made plans to leave. We committed ourselves to a single purpose: exile. We would let the white disc of the galaxy proceed with plans that had been prepared for its future, while we escaped to alien stars, spreading our numbers out such that our species’ days would be fixed. Our kind would not live forever. My wife and I gave our ship to the mountain, and we gave up all of Audacity’s trappings and comforts: unequaled technology from ten thousand generations.
I looked at the top of the obelisk where a cuneiform pattern was etched. It had the bearing of the armor’s owner. My old name:
BORNSTELLAR-MAKES-ETERNAL-LASTING
We left our armor here in the ship—armor that could have kept us alive for millennia. We forsook it and everything from our past, and started anew. Me, my wife, our son. We would return to the roots of my people, millions of years before. Simple farmers who lived and loved and died. I would fail my namesake, that was for certain—nothing about me would be eternal or lasting—but I would not fail the soul my people.
That would be eternal.
What we once were before our pride, before the wars, and before Halo. We were noble, kind creatures who served one another and recognized our small place in the greater story. That is how we would be on this world. That is how the last chapter would be told.
Our new life here would be the end of our great journey.
DON’T MISS THESE OTHER THRILLING STORIES IN THE WORLDS OF
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Hunters in the Dark
Peter David
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Matt Forbeck
Broken Circle
John Shirley
THE KILO-FIVE TRILOGY
Karen Traviss
Glasslands
The Thursday War
Mortal Dictata
THE FORERUNNER SAGA
Greg Bear
Cryptum
Primordium
Silentium
Evolutions: Essential Tales of the Halo Universe
(anthology)
The Cole Protocol
Tobias S. Buckell
Contact Harvest
Joseph Staten
Ghosts of Onyx
Eric Nylund
First Strike
Eric Nylund
The Flood
William C. Dietz
The Fall of Reach
Eric Nylund
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Interior design by Leydiana Rodríguez
Cover design by Alan Dingman
Cover art by Isaac Hannaford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-5011-4067-9
ISBN 978-1-5011-4068-6 (ebook)