“By reaching out, ordering the movement of ships from beyond our galaxy, ships that brought the plague to Faun Hakkor—”
“How could it communicate? It was hidden nak*d and half-dead on a lost cinder of a world. And then—we froze it in a timelock!
You are confused, Forthencho. Besides, the Primordial gave us information, and with it, we saved bilions of human lives.”
“That is far from the whole truth. Humans themselves discovered what needed to be done to preserve ourselves and our descendants against the Shaping Sickness.”
“That has ever been in dispute between us,” Riser’s old spirit countered. “It may always be argued this way, or that. But it is why we are here. This knowledge, however acquired, is what forced the Forerunners to preserve remnants of those they defeated, rather than wipe us from the slate of history, as they had so many others before.”
The Lord of Admirals responded with bitterness, “That may be so, but it only puls thin curtains on your disgrace.”
“Look around you! The Primordial is here. The Shaping Sickness is here! Forerunners are dying—but we live on! And that is what the Primordial promised!”
“It said no such thing to me.”
And so it went for much of that night, back and forth, round and round. I tried to catch the important details, but they were too strange, too frightening—those visual impressions, like my nightmare of the Captive, what the old spirits caled the Primordial—but stamped with a mark of authenticity. . . .
The threads of different ages tangled until I did not know who I was, who was feeling fear, who was feeling any emotion. . . .
My most lasting impression of that long night: Riser lying down on the ground and giving smal cries of distress, but the voice within kept pushing out through his lips, expressing that ancient agony of knowing al those you love have either died or are about to die, in many strange ways— memories and knowledge overwhelming and incomprehensible even to these dead spirits, to the fundamental children that lie at the center of us al.
It is too much even now!
The Lord of Admirals is not testifying before the true Reclaimer.
I am Chakas. I am al that remains of Chakas, and stil I am haunted!
I give up being Chakas. I withdraw! Please stop your recording, Reclaimer.
I am unstable.
Exquisitely painful.
I am breaking apart.
We are all dead, and even our bones are dust!
*AI TRANSLATOR BREAK*
Science Team Analysis: Monitor has shut itself down. Whether this is due to prior damage is not known. AI Translator reports that before the shutdown, twin streams of language appeared in the data stream, conflicting with or overriding each other. Monitor memory may be defective, or more than one stream of memory may be incompletely integrated. Repairs are still impossible.
The monitor must recover on its own.
Resumption of response streams may be problematic.
Thirty-two hours elapse.
ONI COMMANDER: “I have to say, I’m having difficulty with all this information. ‘Arks?’ There’s more than one?”
SCIENCE TEAM LEADER: “The Halo as described is also larger than any we’ve encountered. That could imply a larger Ark, right?”
ONI COMMANDER: “Hmmh. There’s still a high probability that this machine is a decoy, and all of the information it’s giving us is a ruse. However ancient, the Forerunners might have anticipated an eventual human resurgence, and possible rematch, and prepared for it. To the extent that this testimony could demoralize our troops, we may be playing right into their hands.”
SCIENCE TEAM LEADER: “That would imply a truly astonishing level of prescience, given that Forerunners vanished from our galaxy a thousand centuries ago, and left us on Earth as little more than a bunch of wandering savages.”
ONI COMMANDER: “Forerunners didn’t vanish completely, did they?”
SCIENCE TEAM LEADER: “We disagree about the possibility of a ruse. Everything the monitor has related ties in with other Forerunner records we have discovered—including the Bornstellar Relation found on Onyx. There is no possibility of recent communication between those points. The data matches, and so it is almost certainly accurate.”
POLITICAL TEAM LEADER: “The Commander’s concerns have been noted. But all information gathered thus far with relation to the Forerunners has been sequestered and will have no effect upon team morale. The interest of the overall Halo/Shield Alliance in the facts and inferences these sessions have produced is sufficient to override all our lower-level concerns.
Interrogation will continue.”
ONI COMMANDER: “With all due respect, ma’am, we have already seen that this machine can breach our security with alarming ease.”
POLITICAL TEAM LEADER: “Also noted, Commander.”
Thirty-two hours elapse.
Monitor light resumes glowing.
AI Translator receives and converts a new response stream.
AI TRANSLATOR COMMENT: What follows is a multilevel, noncontiguous and ambiguous narrative. Some phrases, perhaps many, may not be translated accurately.
INTERROGATION RESUMES WITH: RESPONSE STREAM #1352 [DATE REDACTED] 1270 hours (Repeated every 64 seconds.)
What am I, really?
A long time ago, I was a living, breathing human being. Then, I went mad. I served my enemies. They became my only friends.
Since then, I’ve traveled back and forth across this galaxy, and out to the spaces between galaxies—a greater reach than any human before me.
You have asked me to tell you about that time. Since you are the true Reclaimer, I must obey. Are you recording? Good. Because my memory is broken and covered with thorns. I doubt I’ll be able to finish the story.
Once, I was Forthencho, Lord of Admirals.
Chapter Twenty-One
WITH DELIGHT I felt the moving muscles and living body of the one I inhabited, in whom I was slowly being reborn. . . .
My memories seemed to rise from scattered pieces, like a building blown to pieces and dropped into a deep wel of thick fluid . . . then sucking in reverse from that awful mire and reconstructing itself chunk by chunk, year by year, emotion by emotion.
How could I be here? How could I live again, through what miracle, or—more likely—what awful Forerunner technology?
The Composer! So many possibilities and capabilities tied up in that strange name. . . . A Composer of minds and souls!
But because of its talents, used by the Librarian, I was here.
I did not feel guilt. To this young human, so lambent in emotions, so confused in thought and action, I felt both gratitude and irritation, because he was strong, and I was weak. He was young, and I was . . .
Dead.
The emergence that became me seemed so delicate at first, capable only of brief interruptions, wry comments, like a flea hiding in an elephant’s ear. A strange sensation indeed, nudged along by strangely familiar observations, stimuli forcing me up and out, like iron bars prying up stones in a field: Forerunner ships, the Didact himself, the arena where the Primordial had once been stored—and then released!
Ho w could the Forerunners have been so stupid? Was it deliberate?
So strange, the familiarity of this boy’s emotions— recognizably human—and yet separated from my existence, I learn, by ten thousand years of history.
I remember those last hours in Citadel Charum.
The Librarian walked slowly, reverently, among the captured, the wounded, the dying, the last survivors of Charum Hakkor. She was accompanied by other Lifeworkers as wel as many hovering machines.
One by one, as we were laid out under the shel of the Citadel— rows upon hundreds of rows, stretching off to the limits of my blurred vision—the Librarian paused, bent over, knelt beside us, spoke to us. Strange indeed that such a simple and elegant face can appear so compelingly beautiful, so filed with empathy.
She expressed sadness at our condition, and her servants administered relief for my pain.
Perhaps it was an ilusion, like the absurd belief in this boy that the Librarian touches us al at birth. Stil, I do not deny this memory.
Beside her stood the Didact, a great, hulking presence, my sworn enemy for fifty-three years of continuous battle. Yet he had not aged. Forerunners live so very long; human lives are like candle flames flickering and guttering before their steady torches.
Even though we had stripped off our uniforms, doing our best to erase al evidence of our identities and ranks, the Didact found me, the Lord of Admirals, who had opposed him longer and more successfuly than any other. He bent beside me, hands clasped as if he were a supplicant before a shrine. And this is what he said to me: “My finest opponent, the Mantle accepts all who live fiercely, who defend their young, who build and struggle and grow, and even those who dominate—as humans have dominated, cruelly and without wisdom.
“But to all of us there is a time like this, when the Domain seeks to confirm our essences, and for you, that time is now.
Know this, relentless enemy, killer of our children, Lord of Admirals: soon we will face the enemy you have faced and defeated. I can see that challenge coming to the Forerunners, and so do many others. . . . And we are afraid.
“That is why you, and many thousands of your people who may contain knowledge of how humans defended themselves against the Flood, will not pass cleanly and forever, as I would wish for a fellow warrior, but will be extracted and steeped down into the genetic code of many new humans.
“This is not my wish nor my will. It arises from the skill and the will of my life-mate, my wife, the Librarian, who sees much farther than I do down the twining streams of Living Time.
“So this additional indignity will be inflicted upon you. It means, I believe, that humans will not end here, but may rise
again—fight again. Humans are always warriors.
“But what and whom they will fight, I do not know. For I fear the time of the Forerunners is drawing to a close. In this, the Librarian and I find agreement. Take satisfaction, warrior, in that possibility.”
It gave me no satisfaction. If I were to rise again, fight again, I wished only to once more match myself against the Didact! But the Didact and the Librarian passed on, moving down the endless rows of our defeated. The Lifeworker machines—through the strange, ever-changing, multiformed presence of the Composer, a machine?
a being? I never saw it clearly—sent patterns of blue and red light over our broken bodies, and one by one, we relaxed, breathed no more. . . . Set free our immortal wils.
I lost al time—al sense.
Yet now I was alive again, in the body of a boy on an unknown Forerunner fortress—a weapon of immense power.
For a time, I had hoped there would be an aly within the old one caled Gamelpar, who had the beautiful dark skin of my own people —but he died before any connection could be made. The girl, Vinnevra, his granddaughter, did not seem to carry ghosts.
But the final irony—the one who had befriended this boy, my host, for so very long—the little human with the wrinkled face and white-lidded eyes—contained the last impression of my most despised human opponent, whom I blamed for everything that had happened, including the defeat at Charum Hakkor. How had we been brought together? How could Yprin Yprikushma have found her way into this little, narrow-wristed monkey-man?
And yet, she at least was someone I knew, someone from my time in history, my own age. The dead do not have the luxury of hate. The ties to past emotions are slender and frail.
We warily put aside our past differences and spoke with each other for as long as we could, before our hosts rose up and deposed us, and this much I remember even now: Forty years before the last of the human-Forerunner wars, it was Yprin Yprikushma who had been summoned to the murky boundaries of the galaxy, upon the discovery of the smal planetoid within which some inteligences, long ago—perhaps the earliest
Forerunners themselves—had imprisoned the Primordial.
And it was Yprin who had excavated that planetoid, found the Primordial preserved in viscous hibernation in an ancient capsule— barely alive even in the sense in which it lives. She it was who recognized the Primordial as a major curiosity, the most ancient biological artifact we had yet encountered, and transported it to Charum Hakkor.
Charum Hakkor! The greatest repository of Precursor antiquities, an entire world covered with the artifacts and structures of that enigmatic race. Inspired by these indestructible ruins, humans had centuries before made this world the center of human progress and advancement.
It was here on Charum Hakkor that Yprin and her team of researchers discovered how to revive the Precursor, and then constructed the timelock to subdue its baleful power. It was here where she conducted her first interrogations of that ancient and deadly being now held prisoner within.
At that time, we did not know—though some of us suspected— that the Primordial was itself one of the Precursors, perhaps the last Precursor. . . .
The answers given by the Primordial during those interrogations began the demoralization of our culture. It was the leaking of those extraordinary answers that began our ultimate downfal.
Folowing on that briliantly successful effort—that mind bending transmission of a devastating message—al Yprin’s prior accomplishments were besmirched, tainted.
And yet—it was Yprin who prepared our forces for combat with the far more advanced Forerunners. And she who encouraged our scientists and robotic inteligences to take what we learned in our early conflicts with the Forerunners, anticipating their technology, and thus making so many technological advances.
Her efforts gave us a few extra decades of triumph and hope.
Ironicaly, it was Erde-Tyrene that fel first, a tremendous loss both in strategy and morale, for it was the most likely to have been the birth-planet of al humans. We had lost those records and memories during the dark ages, before we encountered the Forerunners, but our own historians, scientists, and archaeologists had done their
work, analyzed the makeup and physiology of the humans spread across that sector of the rim and inward, and decided Erda was the genetic focus of al human activity—the planetary navel of our races.