“But also learned! I have spent my time within you going over and over old battles, studying al our past failures, and now, I have ful access to their new strategies! This wheel is but one of the weapons at our disposal—if we join.

“Out there, awaiting our commands, in many orbits around thousands of other worlds, in other star systems, are reserves of tens of thousands of ships of war—and more Halos. We wil be irresistible!”

The spirit’s enthusiasm had an acid tinge that almost made suffocation preferable to agreement. So be it, I thought. I held out my hand and then fel against the moist barrier that hemmed us in.

I seemed to see through this sham to the Captive, the Primordial itself. . . .

I was fading. Ilusion passed into ilusion—and I preferred my own.

Mongoose, the trickster, I remembered, had been responsible for creating humanity. It was Mongoose who had convinced Mud to mate with Sun and breed worms, and then teased and angered the worms until they grew legs to chase him over the grasslands.

Worms became men.

The wheel’s green-eyed master was a bit of a trickster, like Mongoose, playing jokes upon the humorless gods known as Tree and River, Rock and Cloud.

I choked out some words, I don’t remember what.

The mist and the closeness flew up and away, and al around I again saw stars—but no other people.

No other machines. The old spirit’s projected image and I were alone under the stars.

I could not help but suck in a breath as cool air swirled around me.

“I have told the great machine that you are wiling,” the Lord of Admirals said.

“But I’m not . . . willing!” I cried. Maybe I had agreed. Maybe I did not want to suffocate. Maybe I was just curious. I have always been too curious, and Riser was not here to correct me.

“Thirty others who carried warriors have chosen to join us in taking command of the wheel. Their courage reminds me of the—”

“Riser?” I interrupted.

“Very canny, that smal one,” the Lord of Admirals said. “I would have enjoyed having his kind serve under me.”

“You don’t understand him at al,” I said, voice rough. My deep unease had intensified. I did not feel at al wel.

“He wil play this game for as long as it amuses,” the Lord of Admirals said, “and for as long as he has a chance of causing Forerunners dismay and pain. He also wishes to attack the Didact personaly. This has been conveyed to me by my old opponent, Yprin.”

I knew that was a lie. In my weakness, I did not much care. I took a few stumbling steps around the platform, then straightened and focused on the red and gray world.

It seemed about to brush the sky bridge.

“We wil be stationed at key controls to help maneuver this Halo.

We have much work to do, yet even then, our chances are slim.”

The Lord of Admirals seemed to be having misgivings. His hatred, he must have known, was blinding him to the strangeness of this bequest.

“So . . . do we have a deal, young human?” he asked. “For now?”

“What wil happen if we survive?”

“We wil spread out to the fleets and launch an attack against the heart of Forerunner civilization, in the Orion complex. Never in al our battles did we come within fifteen thousand light-years of that prize!”

Madness, pride, shame, the delusion of a new opportunity . . .

What ghost, I asked myself, could pass up such a thing?

“You lied to the machine,” I said. “You told it I was wiling.”

“The least I can do, young human,” the Lord of Admirals said. “I need you. And if you ever wish to go home again—you need me.”

And why else, I asked myself—why else did the Lord of Admirals or the master of the wheel need me? One possible answer: everything here might stil center on the future actions of the Didact. I had met the Didact himself, had helped resurrect him from his Cryptum on Erde-Tyrene. I had spent many hours in his somber company. I had watched his ship dissolve and the Didact himself be captured by the forces of the Master Builder—captured and, very likely, executed.

But the Didact had also served as a template for Bornstelar.

When we parted ways, Bornstelar had been looking more and more like the old Warrior-Servant. I wondered how that had turned out. He had not seemed happy at the change. Had they taken Bornstelar aside, carved a chunk of flesh from his back, and instaled the Didact’s ghost into a machine?

Would we encounter that ghost and that machine, somewhere out there among the uncountable stars?

Surrounded by this magnificence, this power, this deception and cruelty, al I wanted was to reach back to our days on Erde-Tyrene —to shield myself, my naïve, young self, from ancient grudges and eternal evils.

In a dream, one can never go back. It took some time for me to realize it was already too late. I can’t put into words al that I felt.

To be truthful, I no longer feel much of anything.

Al that I was, but for reflections in a cracked mirror, has been lost for a long, long time.

Chapter Thirty-One

STANDING BEFORE THE image of Forthencho, I knew that something inside me had also changed. I felt weaker, older—fading.

I pinched myself hard and felt almost nothing—no strength in my fingers. Very likely, we had been deceived into believing we were alone, so as not to witness the destruction of the braver individuals around us—those who refused to go along with the old ghosts and the green-eyed machine. Just another level of ilusion.

My whirling thoughts settled into immediate questions.

“Why would Forerunner machines let themselves be run by humans?” I asked. My voice sounded thin and weak.

“Maybe they can be fooled,” the Lord of Admirals said. “Some say that deep in our flesh Forerunners and humans are related.”

I did not believe that, not then. “Have you received your orders directly from the machine?”

“There are many duplicates of command monitors, just as when humans fought Forerunners.”

My vision seemed to flick in and out from clarity to bright but foggy bars of light. “What convinced it to turn on its masters?”

I could not stop my damned curiosity from working even if it sapped my last remaining strength.

“Given too much power, or contradictory instructions. Ful of itself, perhaps.”

Or convinced by forty-three years of intimate conversation with the Primordial.

Forthencho’s image wavered, then returned, larger and more solid-looking. “The machine does not hate Forerunners,” he continued. “But it knows they have been arrogant and need correction. And it takes an odd satisfaction in the prospect of having humans carry out that punishment.” The Lord of Admirals seemed to be growing into his role, just as I diminished. “This ancila has more power than any previous command monitor. The Didact gave it complete control over Forerunner defenses. When the Master Builder assumed the Didact’s rank, he came to believe that he might be punished for his audacity as wel as his crimes. If the Master Builder was to be arrested and imprisoned, then this ancila would take revenge on his behalf. Perhaps it is doing so now.”

The Master Builder had layered safeguards within safeguards.

The perversity of it al was dizzying. “Madness!” I said.

“But with much precedent in human history,” Forthencho said.

“Many are the reasons we lost battles. Now, the machine acknowledges only one other who possesses the proper inception codes, and thus the power to stop it.”

“The Didact,” I said. And there it was again—the most likely reason I was being kept around.

“Perhaps. But the Didact appears to have been eliminated. And if he did not pass such knowledge on to you . . . then the machine is stil safe.”

I wondered how much the ghost had studied my memory, how much he believed this to be true—and how much he was stil holding back from the machine.

“Our first task is to reorient the wheel and survive the planet’s close passage. We have several hours to prepare, no more.”

Our ilusion of isolation faded. We were no longer alone, but the platform was much less crowded. Flanked by monitors, we looked in dismay at each other. So few remained! The rest had defied the master of the wheel—and now they were gone. I caught a glimpse of Riser, many meters away, and was surprised he had chosen to cooperate—but also relieved.

Transports surrounded the high platform: sleek war sphinxes and other defensive vessels, as wel as ships of different design— rounded, less aggressive-looking. These carried no obvious weapons and might have once been used by Lifeworkers.

“They are here to take us to command centers around the wheel,” the Lord of Admirals said.

“It can’t be controled from one position?”

“Perhaps it can—perhaps it wil be. But damage is inevitable and some of us must survive. We have a much better chance if we are spread out.”

“It’s going to be that close?”

“Far too late to avoid it completely. If the planet doesn’t strike one side or another and tear the wheel to shreds, it could stil cause severe stress through its gravitational pul. Or—it could pass right through the middle of the hoop.”

“What are our chances then?”

“Unknown. Such a thing has never happened.”

The Lord of Admiral’s monitor puled back his image and nudged me outward along the platform, toward a war sphinx. I had been aboard an older version of such a weapon, it seemed ages ago, and found this one familiar enough—a cramped but comfortable interior designed for a larger frame, but quite capable of adjusting itself to carry both me and the monitor.

The monitor found a comfortable cubby that opened in one bulkhead, and it settled in while I dropped back into the adjustable pads of a Forerunner couch.

Unlike the Didact’s war sphinxes on Erde-Tyrene, keeping vigil around his Cryptum, this one did not have a damaged warrior spirit.

I detected no hint of personality in its cool, precise displays or its pronouncements and warnings. Forthencho’s monitor had either taken over those processes or they had been wiped earlier in the master machine’s purge of the Halo’s rebelious countermeasures.

Al previous loyalties, al trace of Forerunner ethics—such as they were—had likely been leached away, replaced by a devotedly bland yet singular madness.

We lifted from the platform, pushed through a barely visible membrane, and swept out and away over the inner surface of the Halo. For the first time, I was able to survey long stretches of the landscape between the paralel wals and track the overarching sky bridge from a rapidly moving and lofty perspective. But I was too numb, too cold inside, to see much in the way of magnificence or beauty.

If we survived, this Halo would return to being a kiling machine.

I could easily imagine the great wheel being sent to Erde-Tyrene.

And so, I reached my decision. I had to do everything in my power to make sure we did not survive. Of course, I could not tel Forthencho this. My understanding was now separated from his.

Stil, as he had suspected, his sophistication—his ability to judge complex situations—had stayed with me, along with, I hoped, a bit of his old courage, his old wilingness to sacrifice himself for a higher cause.

If I succeeded, I would be kiling many hundreds of thousands of our felows.

I would be kiling Vinnevra and Riser.

The war sphinx flew a zigzag, looping a course above and along the band. Wrapped in the pale couch, I felt no discomfort as we abruptly changed direction, rising and dropping—diving into the atmosphere, shooting up again like a leaping fish, spinning about to see our contrail twist and feather behind us in the upper air.

As we traveled, my weakness and numbness gave way to isolated, cool curiosity.

I did not care.

I admired the wheel. I saw how thick the wals were to either side, and how wide in proportion the great swath of lands between —brown or green, mountainous or flat, burned away or left as bare foundation material.

We flew over the early phases of what might have become basins of oceans or great lakes, the foundation itself puling aside to create wide, comparatively shalow depressions, or rising up in irregular but suggestive reliefs over which, somehow, Forerunners might later paint dirt and rock.

This Halo had never been finished. Its potential had never been fuly exploited. It was designed to accommodate many more occupants—humans, certainly, but likely the inhabitants of hundreds of other worlds, as the Master Builder’s research on the Flood expanded.

Or the Lifeshaper herself had, in her devil’s bargain, hoped to create more preserves, save more life-forms, against the Master Builder’s planned wave of destruction.

“One hour until impact,” the monitor announced. I heard in its voice no trace of Forthencho.

The Lord of Admirals could be suppressed at wil.

Chapter Thirty-Two

THE WEAPON CONVEYED me—us—to a great, flat-topped wedge thrusting inward from a wal. At a quick estimate, this triangular expanse was about five hundred kilometers wide at its base, where it merged with the wal, and four hundred from base to tip.

Everywhere but the tip itself, the wedge’s upper surface appeared uniform and featureless. The looming planet suffused a pale rose glow across this expanse like dusk’s final light.

As we dropped, the tiniest of shadows became apparent on the tip of the wedge, structures that grew and grew against the immensity until I saw how large they were in themselves—easily a dozen kilometers high. A slender half-arch, like the upper part of a bow, stretched beyond the tip. From the end of this bow, slender cables spread an ornate sling to support another complex of structures—each of these also the size of a smal city.

Forthencho appeared to my left, looking not at the view through the port of the sphinx, but at me—a creepy focus on my own reactions.

“Tel me what you see, young human,” the old spirit said.

“It’s a command center,” I ventured.