Halo: Primordium (25 page)

“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.

Completing that survey, that analysis, encouraged her to believe she completely understood human psychology and culture. Yprin had advanced to Political and Morale Commander of al human forces.

I disagreed with that advancement, her rise to power. I had severe doubts that Erda was our planet of origin. Other worlds in other systems seemed more likely. I had been to many of them and had viewed their ancient ruins.

And I had seen evidence that Forerunners had also visited these worlds, were also interested in human origins—not just the Librarian and her Lifeworkers, but the Didact himself.

We defended Charum Hakkor against the Forerunner assaults—

which came in an unending sequence, one after another—for three years.

My own ships swept back and forth hundreds of times across the star system, pushing back pinpoint orbital incursions before they could establish corridors of least energy dominance.

In al such battles, within the vast reaches of a stelar system, hyperspacial technologies give only a slight advantage; tactics in such close quarters depend on stable positions established near planetary objectives, where triangulations of fire can focus on mass-delivery portals and turn them into logjams of debris and destruction.

Occupation of vast reaches of space means nothing. It is control of population centers and essential resources that determines victory or defeat.

But our ships were depleted month by month, our battle positions worn down year by year, as Forerunner ships ranging in scale from fortress-class behemoths to squadrons of swift and powerful dreadnoughts opened brief entry points and attacked from briliantly surprising angles, with sweeping, erratic arcs that reminded me of the scribblings of madmen—briliant madmen.

The hand of the Didact himself drew those reckless and daring entries and orbits.

Forerunner dominance of the advanced technology of reconciliation—repairing the causal and chronological paradoxes of faster-than-light travel, so crucial to journeys across interstelar distances—slowed and even blocked our own slipspace channels and interfered with the arrival of reinforcements.