This morning, I felt true mortality for the first time. And not just my own. I now understood the deep old symbol for Time—the sweeping opposed hands with lightning between, extended fingers triangulating the pinch of most efficient fates from which there is no return.

Chakas interrupted my thoughts with a touch on my shoulder. I turned and saw him standing behind me, looking out at the pil ars with a look of bitter dread.

“They’re coming from the east,” he said.

“Across the lake, over the merse?”

“No. The sky is fil ing with ships. The Librarian no longer protects us.”

“Does the Didact know?”

“Why should I care?” Chakas said. “He’s a monster.”

“He’s a great hero,” I said.

“You are a fool,” Chakas said, and ran back through the trees.

NINE

THE SHIPS MOVED slowly in a great, waving gray and black line from east to west, like a ribbon of steel and adamantium slicing the sky. So many!—I had never seen so many ships in one place, even on ceremonial days on my family’s homeworld. What I could not understand was the reason so many were necessary, if in fact they were here to capture and incarcerate just one old Warrior-Servant.

Even a Promethean, it seemed to me, did not merit such a show of force.

But everyone around me seemed to think I was a fool, even a simpleton. I kept to the inner beach, lying on the sand, watching the ships arrange themselves in tight whorls spiraling in toward Djamonkin Crater. At the center of the whorl, a great Builder ship—the largest I had ever seen—and a great Miner vessel, easily outmatching anything owned by my swap-family, held steady in a dyadic cloud of buffer energies. The air itself began to feel stiff and harsh with the pressure of so many ships hanging in slow suspension.

A shadow of a nearer, darker sort crossed my face, and I angled my head to see a war sphinx just a few meters away, rising on its curved legs.

“The Didact requests your presence,” it announced.

“Why?” I asked. “The entire galaxy is coming to a bitter end. I’m just a piece of waste matter not worth flushing.”

The sphinx took a step closer, unfolding upper arms tipped with tangles of flexible grapples. Hard light flashed blue along al its joints.

“So it’s not a request, eh?” I said, and pushed to my feet. “Do I walk? Or are you offering me a ride?”

“Suck it up, Manipular,” the sphinx intoned. “Your presence wil be useful.”

I felt for the first time that there might be more than just a mechanical intel igence under its pitted skin. “He wants me to witness him being arrested,” I said. “Is that it?”

The grapples flashed like the agile fingers of a pan guth master. “These ships are not here to arrest the Didact,” the sphinx informed me. “They are here to demand his help. He wil of course refuse.”

I had no response to this. Instead, I fol owed the sphinx quietly through the trees to the inner shore. Since the sphinx seemed to have found a new purpose—tel ing me what was what—I ventured another question.

“What’s with the mountain? Why tear it down?”

“It is the Librarian’s doing.”

“Oh.” That told me nothing, of course—but it was intriguing. Something big was happening, that much was obvious. Without my armor, I wasn’t fit to meet my superiors—or even other Manipulars, for that matter—but the fact that the Didact stil knew I existed and required my presence was also intriguing.

I looked around the inner shore. Then a glint caught my eye, and I looked up toward the base of the mountain, the cloud-piercing pil ars—and saw the other war sphinxes flying across the inner lake, climbing rapidly to several hundred meters.

I looked around. The inner beach was deserted. “Where is everybody?” I asked.

The sphinx’s control cabin hatch pul ed aside with a fluid sigh. “You wil join the Didact. Get in.”

I knew enough about the protocol of warriors and their machines to understand that I was not being recruited into a glorious, defiant fight to the finish. And then it dawned on me—the humans might be riding in sphinxes as wel .

Why were we so important?

I tried to crawl up the pitted ancient surface. The grapples extended around and aft, providing stirrups. I climbed in through the rear hatch, and it sealed behind me.

The cabin inside was spacious enough for a mature Warrior-Servant, only slightly smal er than the Didact himself—giving me plenty of room but no comfort because nothing was shaped to accommodate a much smal er and almost completely naked Manipular.

There were a bare seat, a variety of antiquated displays, and control tubes designed to hook up with armor. Standing on the seat, I could see through the slanted, forward-looking direct-view ports that gave the sphinx’s features the il usion of a disdainful, downward gaze.

I felt only a little bump, and then we were away, wheeling about to join the general migration toward the dismantled mountain and the mysterious pil ars. Above the island, the spiral of ships held position and did nothing—perhaps locked in some sort of dispute.

Wherever the Didact was, there was likely to be trouble. I could not imagine the power he had once wielded—that he could stil , after a thousand years, provoke legions of Forerunners to seek him out and assemble their ships above the island.

We crossed the inner lake in minutes, a leisurely pace for craft designed to drop from high orbit, sweep continents, and decimate cities. The only thing these old machines lacked, I thought, was a direct connection to slipspace. But I didn’t know that for sure.

The sphinxes circled the lower reaches of the pil ars, then passed between and dropped to a central, octagonal platform. There, they settled in a protective el ipse, just as I had first seen them only a few days before.

The hatch opened. I emerged and slid off the rear curve. From another sphinx, Riser poked out, clearly agitated. Not tal enough to see out the ports, I thought.

The Florian ran over and stood close, wringing his hands and trembling.

“Something in there with me,” he muttered, then smirked up at me and wiped his forehead with one hand. “Not alive. Not happy. Very bad!”

The greater, doubled war sphinx arrived last and settled in the center of the el ipse. As if at its touch, the platform vibrated under my feet, then began to rotate.

Al around, the pil ars and the base of the mountain—and the ships in formation high above—also seemed to turn. The spiral of ships took on a hypnotic, whirlpool fascination.

We felt none of this motion, but stil , Riser grunted in dismay.

The Didact descended from the doubled sphinx and walked on his trunklike legs to confront us. “You’re being kidnapped, young Manipular,” he grumbled as the pil ars sped up. “The humans have to come as wel . Apologies to al .”

I looked down to avoid getting dizzy, even without the sensation of spinning.… “Why apologize now?” I asked.

The Didact’s expression did not change—he did not react in the least to my insubordination, whelp that I was, agitating against the Promethean’s thousands of years of life and experience. He simply looked outward, drew his brows down in concentration, and asked, “Where’s the other human?”

“Stil hiding,” Riser said. “Sick.”

Chakas chose this moment to poke his upper body out of the hatch of his transport. He looked woozy. His descent down the sloping back of the machine lacked any dignity, and he landed on bent legs, then slumped to one side and vomited.

“Bad sky,” Riser said stoical y.

The Promethean regarded this sign of human weakness with the same emotion he had shown to my insubordination. “In a few hours, al signs of my stay here wil be erased. No one wil be able to prove I was ever here.”

“Can’t the ships see us?”

“Not yet. But they obviously know something.”

“Why so many?” I asked.

“They’ve come to ask my help—or arrest me again. I think the former, and I think I know why—but I must not help them. I’ve stayed here too long already. It’s time to leave. And al of you wil come with me.”

“Where? How?”

My answer arrived even as I spoke. The platform was stil rising. The circling pil ars sprouted bulkheads, beams, and stanchions—al the necessary parts. The skeleton of a slipspace voyager was growing around us, almost too rapidly to track —until the pil ars were wal ed in, the sky and the swirling ships vanished, and we were completely enclosed.

Chakas stumbled over to stand on my other side. Clearly, he might throw up again. A disgusting practice and to little purpose, I thought.

I was flanked by humans, with the Didact before me, his back turned and arms extended, as if commanding the voyager to rise and grow by the very gestures of his hands—which might have been the case.

“They might notice that,” I suggested.

“From where they are, they see only a solid island and the water of the lake,” the Didact said. “The ship wil grow and launch—and then they wil know. The Librarian designs beyond her station. She has always planned wel .”

“She made this for you?” I asked.

“For our greater cause,” the Didact said. “We fight for the grace of the Mantle.”

The Didact turned to face me as our chamber finished, and I saw we were within a large, ful y equipped command center. My father himself could not have designed a more advanced ship. I could easily imagine the outer hul , a gray, gleaming, elongated ovoid, at least a thousand meters in length. The power and the expense had to be enormous—but, cleverly enough, rather than hiding a finished ship, the Librarian must have left a Builder’s design seed under the central peak, updating it as new technology was revealed. Forerunner technology stil grew in spurts, even after mil ions of years.

She must have traded great favors for such an instal ation.

Displays flashed into action around the command center and showed views in many frequencies and aspects of the outer island, the distant wal s of the crater, and above, I saw as I craned my neck back, the assembled, searching ships.

A single bright star gleamed just outside the circle of vessels at the center of the fleet spiral. That star marked our voyager’s calculated point of departure. In early slipspace, we did not want to pass through anything as massive as another ship.

We lifted from the island. The command center displays revealed our motion; we felt nothing. At this point, the ships must see us, I thought. Such a large vessel must leave a definite trail!

I felt that brief sensation of unencumbering—of al history and memory being cut loose, and then painstakingly reassembled, as every particle of our ship and our bodies was wrenched from the doubled hand of time, and had to find new scalars, new destinies, far, far away.

“Aya,” the Promethean said. “We are away. It is done.”

The displays tracked our course. We were moving outward along the great spiral arm that held both the Orion complex and Erde-Tyrene—just a few tens of thousands of light-years.

Hours at most would pass for us.

Had I known where we were fleeing, and what we would find … Against the greatest and most solemn instructions of the Mantle, I might have kil ed myself then and there.

TEN

I KNEW ENOUGH about interstel ar travel to realize that time frames and reference-level fates were also adjusting. There would be no paradoxes, no curling or bunching-up of world-lines in slipspace. The secrets that lie between the streaking particles and waves that make up atoms are said to be vast. From those inner secrets, Forerunners have prodded sufficient power to change the shape of worlds, move stars, and even to contemplate shifting the axes of entire galaxies.

We have explored other realities, other spaces—slipspace, denial of locale, shunspace, trick geodetics, natal void, the photon-only realm cal ed the Glow.

But the vastness between suns is great and mysterious in a very different way.

Our familiarity with these distances has, I think, almost been lost because we cross them so blithely, but no Forerunner memory would be great enough—perhaps not even the combined memories of al the Forerunners who ever lived—to remember the second-by-second events of a simple walk between two neighboring stars, this far out in the galactic arm.

We fly over and above but just barely through al that. And yet—this journey, in this ship, seemed to me to last forever. I felt it in my unarmored flesh and bones. I was naked to space for the first time in my life. I hated it.

We arrived. And then, perversely, I regretted that it was over.

* * *

We looked down over a huge, bleak, rocky gray world, a slagged and singed corpse which must have recently supported life, for it stil wrapped itself in an atmosphere sufficient to al ow armored Forerunners to survive—if not our humans.

Chakas and Riser lingered in a corner of the command center. Riser tossed in restless half-sleep. Chakas looked out at us with a frightened, angry expression.

He knew he was far from home. He suspected he would never return. He owed nothing to Forerunners, least of al to the Didact.

I actual y worried for him—strangely enough.

“This used to be a Precursor hub world,” the Didact said. “Once, it was covered with tremendous structures—mostly intact. Extremely impressive.”

I looked down, prepared to be awed. I had never heard of such a place. It made sense that the higher forms would conceal real treasure.

The Didact’s voice deepened. “It’s changed,” he said.

“How, changed?” I asked.

We walked around the command center, past the humans, the Didact leading the way, as we surveyed hundreds of magnified images gathered from our first orbit.

“No orbital arches. Looks as if they’ve col apsed out of orbit. Look at those long, linear impacts. Everything’s corroded. I recognize hardly anything—not the arena, not the Highway, not the Giant’s Armory. Nothing, real y.”