Prologue: The Spun Threads of Fate
AU/Semi-AU. "We exist together now, two corpses in one grave." Taken from his home and made into a monster, but still John-117 was determined to fight - and soon he discovered he was not alone.
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You.
Through a glass, darkly…
We see you, Reclaimer.
He stirred, then jerked awake, writhing in the Gravemind's grip, trying to escape, until its tentacles tightened enough to make even his bones creak threateningly. He realized only then that his weapons and armor were gone - he was bare, defenseless against the Flood's Compound Mind.
Its spore-laden breath felt almost slimy when it gusted over his skin; he held his own as much as he could to lessen the likelihood of infection. You, it hissed, You are the single greatest threat to Us since the construction of that accursed Array. And yet…
A tentacle brushed over his face with something like tenderness. John jerked away from it, but it pursued him and grabbed him by the chin in an unbreakable grip.
And yet We sense a potential in you, to be Our brother, the Gravemind rumbled, its voice that of many, all speaking at once. Though it had none, the Spartan could still feel its eyes on him - and many others. The same sourceless light illuminated him and the Gravemind both but left everything else cast in shadow, but even so the Spartan saw movement in the darkness, a great many aliens of similar shapes, all watching as one.
Join Us, brother, the Flood sighed, Join Us and take revenge on those who did this to you, who took you from your home, your family. You will be reunited with them forever in Us.
"That will never happen," he shot back. He remembered all too well the state Cortana had been in when he finally rescued her from the Gravemind's clutches.
Such a pity. The tentacle at his jaw wrapped around his throat and started to squeeze. The Spartan renewed his struggles even as his sight began to darken, and kept fighting even when the Gravemind paused. And yet… the potential of you is too great for even Us to ignore, to cast aside out of hand. We remember now why We chose your people to be Our heirs over those you call 'Forerunner.' Such a powerful and revered warrior on Our side…
Time has taught Us patience. Perhaps it will teach you as well.
Another tentacle came up out of the darkness, wrapped around something. It soon unwound, revealing a crystal identical to the one Halsey had found on Reach, but this one was larger, stronger. He could see the very fabric of reality rippling and twisting around it, and the distortions intensified as the crystal started to glow. It flared bright and blinding, and he had only a moment to process the change before he was torn asunder, and knew no more.
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This time he woke in light. An all-white room, an infirmary of some kind, if he had to guess. He blinked to clear the spots from his vision, then struggled to sit up.
He was nude again, but this time his gear wasn't completely gone. It was laid out on a table next to him, being carefully scanned by several Forerunner Constructors. Once he assured himself that they weren't doing any damage to his armor, he looked around.
There wasn't a whole lot to see. Like most Forerunner facilities, it was very clean and spartan, empty save fore the two tables floating in midair with no visible means of support. But he knew - without knowing how he knew - that this was an infirmary, and there were more tables recessed in the walls, and there were Prometheans standing guard on the other side of the door, and -
There are twenty-three Forerunner ancilla running this entire facility. We can feel them - in the ceiling, in the walls, all around Us, analyzing and calculating and data-mining and number crunching. We have but to reach out Our hand and they will be Ours. From here, We can spread through the whole network, have a presence on every world before they even know something's wrong-
John gritted his teeth, squeezed his eyes shut. The Gravemind's voice whispered in his mind - and yet at the same time, the voice was also his own, bent to hunger and domination.
He reached up to touch the back of his neck. The scar was still there, from the Infection Pod that had almost claimed his life on Installation Zero-Four. It had only been thanks to Cortana's quick thinking that he hadn't been assimilated by the Flood.
But before she had killed it, the pod had pierced his skin, no doubt injecting some of its cells into his system, which were weakened but had still spread. Was that the reason he heard the Gravemind so easily, felt its presence so clearly? Was that the reason it called him "brother"?
He let his hand fall - and then froze.
Dark green veins of Flood super cells were threaded through his flesh but slowly receding, fading, leaving his ghastly pale human skin behind. With a thought, they raced back through him, spreading, awakening, and before his eyes, his fingers became Flood talons, meant to grab, pierce, take, infect-
He forced it back again with effort. '"Brother," it called me,' he thought, 'What has the Flood done to me?'
The door beeped and hissed open, admitting three tall and alien yet vaguely human-shaped alien beings. They must have been Forerunners. Two of them were twins, identical in almost every way, but it was the third who caught and held his attention.
Again, he knew, without knowing how he knew.
"Librarian."
The title left his lips with something like reverence, and something like a smile pulled at her lips in response. She said something in her native tongue, and the translator he'd been outfitted with whispered in his ear: "Greetings, Warrior. I am sorry that we cannot let you rest longer, but I think that there is much we need to discuss."
John looked down at his hand to see the last of the Flood cells fade back to normal. "Yes," he said, "there is."
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The Librarian and her Promethean guards listened with dawning horror to the Spartan's tale, and afterwards there was a flurry of activity. He permitted them to take biological samples, on the condition that none of his flesh was intentionally used to spread the infection, and then stood still as the Constructors built a set of Forerunner armor around him, resized for his smaller frame - and wasn't that a change. He was used to being one of the tallest people in the room, but now even the Librarian was taller than him.
After that, he had the first of many meetings with the Didact, the Librarian's husband. The Promethean was not exactly overjoyed to see him, but after the Human-Forerunner War was explained, John understood. It also explained why the twins, Venera and Kenera (whose names refused to translate), only slowly warmed up to him; they had lost their parents in the conflict.
But the Flood promised to be worse, and so they eventually became friends, them and the entire crew of the fleet the Librarian had made for him, somewhat pretentiously dubbed the "Fleet of Shadows" (and later known as "the Last Fleet").
And it was worse. So much worse than any of them had imagined. Even after the Spartan got clearance to spread his own infection through his crew, they barely held on, the Flood rolling from world to world like their defenses meant nothing at all.
At last, even the Didact conceded the fight.
THIS IS MY FINAL ENTRY, AND I AM LEFT WITH ONE HOPE
THAT ONE DAY SOMEONE, ANYONE, IS AROUND TO WITNESS THIS WARNING
{/} (IF YOU ARE THAT WITNESS, AND IT SEEMS WE PINNED ALL OUR HOPES ON THIS SINGLE SUICIDAL PLAN)
KNOW THAT A THOUSAND OTHER PLANS WERE TRIED AND FAILED
{/} (MILLIONS OF BRAVE AND HONORED SOULS DIED TRYING TO AVERT THIS TERRIBLE, DESPERATE SITUATION)
KNOW THAT ENERGETIC AND TENACIOUS AS LIFE IS
IT HAS AN ANTITHESIS THAT IS JUST AS POWERFUL
IT IS THAT THING THAT WE MUST OBLITERATE
The Fleet evacuated as many people as they possibly could from as many worlds as they could reach in time. Then together with the surviving Forerunners, they retreated to the Lesser Ark… and lit the Array.
The Infected, as they came to be called, oversaw the reseeding of the galaxy in place of the Librarian; both she and the Ur-Didact perished on Erde-Tyrene - Earth - with the firing.
And then they watched, and waited.
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John jerked awake, gasping, to the soft whispers of his Infected in the back of his mind.
'Ten thousand years on, and we still have nightmares about it,' his 2IC murmured. Like the twins, Nethalia's name also refused to translate, and also like the twins, she was related to the Librarian and the Ur-Didact - their daughter-in-law. She had kept in contact with the IsoDidact, Bornstellar Makes Eternal Lasting, who had borne the Ur-Didact's imprint, while his life had lasted.
[I get the feeling we always will,] John replied quietly, to murmurs of agreement from many others. The horror of the Flood - its nature, its virulence - had put even the Human-Covenant War to shame. The Spartan had never been one for despair - the UNSC's very thorough training had seen to that - but that was before he'd lived the Forerunner-Flood War. It had tried him - had tried all of them - like nothing ever had, and even Infected, some of them hadn't made it through. Their minds had fractured, splintered, and been absorbed into the collective Them, and sometimes their knowledge and memories resurfaced in unexpected ways.
He climbed from his bunk and let the Constructors unfold from their docks to reassemble his armor around him.
The Flood… and the Halos.
They had been able to sense the firing, distantly, from their position in orbit over the Lesser Ark. It had been like watching a building demolition, the food chain of the entire galaxy coming down-
the ripples spread out, lapping at the bottom of the well
The Flood had been defeated, but at what cost? So many worlds had been lost before they had been catalogued by the Librarian, even with his warning, entire star systems sacrificed abandoned to the Flood, but to no avail. And how many more had there been? How many unknown planets had had the beginnings of sapient life on them, cut short by the Great Cataclysm?
We did what we had to do! For Earth! An entire Covenant armada obliterated, and the Flood! We had no choice!
[Did we? If we had started sooner, fought harder, been more ruthless-]
'We did all we could, Commander.' Ferial, the last Primas Uperbia - elected Queen - of the Gultanr people - bipedal dragon-like aliens with a limited form of precognition - mentally stepped up next to him. 'The Didact's Shield Worlds, while impressive, were not invulnerable, and life is not meant to be shut away in a box for fear of what lurks outside.'
[I just feel like we should have done more. If I had found before the Master Builder and the ecumenical council-]
'You would have been sent straight to a Lifeworker lab,' Peace-of-the-Deep-Sea said, 'One allied with the Master Builder, rather than the Librarian. And if Faber had had his way, you would have still been there when the Array was fired. We did all we could.'
[Logically I know that. But it will be a long time before I actually believe it.]
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Without the full might of the ecumene and its resources behind them, it had taken almost two thousand years to rebuild, repair, and refit the Greater Ark to serve as a home for them after what was left of the Forerunner race left the galaxy behind. It had taken even longer to decide how to defend themselves from the Flood, and longer still to build another Halo as a sort of free-spinning orbital ring around the Ark, along with thousands of escape pods ready round the clock.
They weren't taking any chances this time. And not just with themselves. Every scrap of DNA was digitally archived from every possible species on every possible world.
The Infected were far from idle during their long wait, because now they were the only remaining arm of the Forerunner military - if indeed they could still be called that, now that the Forerunner ecumene was gone. It was their duty to go out and collect the genetic samples, in the process helping reconnect the galaxy and build a Third Ecumene, this time comprising representatives of all those species the Forerunners had deemed lesser than them, unworthy of their stolen Mantle.
The other peoples spread out into the stars, but human and Covenant space remained under quarantine - absolutely off-limits - to everyone who was not the Infected. Patrols grew tighter and more intense as the years creeped by. And then finally…
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[It's today.]
He sensed his Infected's attention turn toward him. They had watched over humanity for as long as they could - and the Covenant as well, no matter how much John had wanted to use the Fleet's weapons to induce stellar collapse in all their native star systems. They had stayed as long as they dared, until finally their charges had achieved faster-than-light travel and forced them to leave, lest they be caught unawares and discovered.
But they still kept careful track of time.
[Contact Harvest,] John whispered, [the opening salvo of the Human-Covenant War. It's today, and we can do nothing to stop it. For the sake of all of them, we can do nothing now but watch.]
'We could reveal ourselves to the Covenant. Tell them the truth, and call Truth out on his lies.'
[And what then? They believe the Forerunners have ascended to godhood. How are we to explain the truth and all that's happened? How are we to explain anything? And the Gultanr's vision…] The Spartan ground his teeth so hard his ears rang. [In order for there to be peace, there must first be war.]
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1500 hours, November 7, 2549 (UNSC Military Calendar) / Reach Military Complex, planet Reach, Epsilon Eridani system.
Whatever she had expected for an AI made from her own brain, this wasn't it.
Red. Red like blood, like rampancy. It - she - had finally activated her avatar when she ordered her to, taking the form of a nude young woman with an angled bob haircut, but she remained where she was, upright but seated, legs pulled up to her chest, face buried in her knees. Equations and streams of light flowed up her avatar form her feet to her head, moving alternately at lightning speed before slowing to nearly a stop and back again.
Catherine Halsey frowned, but waited. It would not do to force the AI to interact before she was ready. Yet even as she reached for her data pad to get some work done, the AI lifted her head.
It was like looking back in time at the face of her younger self - if her younger self had been so full of rage that she brought to mind the phrase, "If looks could kill."
The AI rose without looking away, and said in the calmest, coldest voice she had ever heard, "Quando il gioco è finito, il re e il pedone vanno nella stessa scatola."
The scientist knew those words. Her mother had said them to her a lifetime ago, after their first game of chess.
When the game is over, the king and the pawn go into the same box.
Well. That might be a problem.
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They sensed it coming. All of them did, even the least of them - even the Broken. They stirred and whispered at the ripples pressing outward, the vibrations shivering their way along the quantum threads of reality.
The Commander and the Gultanr were the worst afflicted, as always, many of them having to abandon their native bodies just to keep working.
They had all retreated to Threshold, their ships hidden below the surface of the gas giant's thick clouds. They had prep work to do on installation Zero-Four, removing the enemy Flood from the storage facilities and replacing its infection pods with their own, but also - if they had returned to human space, gone to Reach to escort the Pillar of Autumn…
John wouldn't have been able to stop himself from firing on the Covenant when they finally came to Reach. Their spy subroutines and subverted AIs had reported some unusual things - that all the Spartans had survived up until that point, that Cortana was acting very odd compared to what they expected - but he wouldn't have been able to stop himself from trying to defend them, to save them the way he hadn't in the Origin (as his native universe was now known).
He couldn't give them that, but he could give them this: a comparatively easy run of the Battle of Installation Zero-Four, a slower build-up to the full-throttle of Installation Zero-Five, where even now a Gravemind waited for someone - anyone - to come and let it get off the ring to finish what it started.
Time has taught me PATIENCE