One: Machine World

The garden wasn't something he had expected to find on a Warrior-Servant world. It must have been the Librarian's influence, bringing the bright plants to Far Nomdagro. Some of them appeared pitch black, but he had it on good authority that they captured the light of the sun and released it at night in a soft blue glow.

John sat in the shade of something akin to a short but wide palm, clad only in loose white pants that were much too large, even for him, and yet were the smallest available in the house. The Librarian's aides had taken his MJOLNIR armor for study - and they were probably going to take it apart as well, which he was not happy about. But he'd been promised a set of their armor, newer, better than even the bleeding edge of human tech, so he would deal. With any luck, their studies would get them all some answers.

"My wife tells me that you fell from orbit."

The Spartan jerked his head up and beheld a Forerunner who towered over him, nearly twice his height, a Warrior-Servant with a deep scowl, the twins from before standing calm behind him near the entrance to the garden.

This must be the Didact.

"And landed practically on our doorstep," the Forerunner continued, eyeing him with unashamed distaste.

John knew how to deal with officers who didn't like him, though with the ODSTs it had been because he was a Spartan, not because he was human. Still, he let his face go blank and calm and rose to salute respectfully. "I'll have to take her word for that, sir," he answered, moving to stand at parade rest, "I don't remember it. One second I was - where I was, and then I was waking up in your infirmary."

"Hm." The Didact still eyed him, but seemed pleased at his show of respect. Then he circled him, looking him up and down. "I see that my old enemies have retaken at least one of their ancient forms, even after we laid them low. My wife's work, no doubt. She always had held your kind in a strange sort of favor. From what year do you come?"

"Human year 2552, or somewhere around there. I was - in stasis, so I don't know the exact date. But based on what I was told in my world, it's roughly a hundred thousand years from now."

That got a reaction from all three of the Warrior-Servants. Both of the twins straightened, and the Didact's brows climbed nearly to the top of his head. "And yet we are strange to you," said the Promethean, "You have never seen our like before? Not once?"

"No sir."

He rubbed a hand over his chin. "That is troubling. I see now why my wife thought it prudent to call me in."

John hesitated to speak without being spoken to - the Didact was big enough and strong enough that all he would have to do is grab and squeeze if he thought the Spartan was being insubordinate - but he needed intel. "Is something happening?"

"Those who are 'in the know' are making our cases for how we shall proceed against the Flood, when it comes." The Promethean took note of his reaction - tightened fists, clenched jaw. "You know it."

"I've fought it. It's monstrous." He took a deep breath, tried to let his tension drain away.

Some undefinable sensation made him look up in time to see the Librarian enter the garden. Her gaze was soft as she approached. "I see you've met. Spartan, my husband, the Didact, protector of the ecumene. Husband, SPARTAN John-117 of the humans' United Nations Space Command."

The warriors inclined their heads to each other.

"Come, both of you. There is much to be done."

They followed her inside. "We have had a breakthrough in compatibility," she informed them, leading them into a lab of sorts. The MJOLNIR armor was laid out on one of the tables, a few Huragok poking at it, turning pieces between their many tentacles. "The Huragok have successfully copied over all the data from your armor, Spartan. If you wish to have it back, it is yours, but I recommend wearing one of ours; they are more advanced, and if this breaks, we will not be able to fix it, not easily."

John nodded. "Fair enough."

She turned to another Lifeworker. "Chant, can you assist?"

The younger Forerunner - Chant-to-Green - nodded and gestured for John to join her at an armor station on one side of the room. It looked vaguely similar to a UNSC station if he squinted, so he hesitated only a moment before stripping and stepping in, starting only a little when the system came online with a hum.

It wasn't enough to cover the sounds of the Didact and the Librarian talking. "He has told me much," the Lifeworker was saying, "but the recordings from his armor, and the echo of the imprint his world's version of me left within his people..." She shook her head. "I saw it, Didact. He only encountered a small hive, but it moved so fast! I fear that our plan will not be feasible."

"So we should - what? Follow the path of the Builders and Faber? Advocate absolute destruction against the Mantle's teachings?"

"Didact…" She sighed, and held out a hand. The Promethean took it, and energy glimmered between them.

The Didact's eyes went distant as she gave him the data from the MJOLNIR, then he let out a long breath. "Mantle have mercy. It is monstrous. An abomination even greater than the Array."

"It is." She shook her head, grief-stricken. "Everything we have built will mean nothing in the face of this."

"But still…" When the Librarian looked up at him, the Didact said, "There was still Flood remaining, enough to make a Gravemind, old and strong, that sent him here. So clearly the Builders' Array did not eradicate all the Flood."

"It did enough," she returned, "It saved the galaxy, so that we could repopulate it."

"And yet what became of us? What became of our people?" he nearly demanded, "The Spartan never encountered one of us - this Covenant seems to believe the Array let us transcend mortality to become gods. That tells me that we - are there truly none of us left? The Flood destroyed us all?"

"Not all of us," she said, "Reseeding an entire galaxy is not something that could be done by machines alone - there must be a living touch behind it."

"Then what became of them? Where there truly so few left behind that we could not…?" He shook his head. "No. I will stay the course. With my Shield Worlds, many will be saved, instead of only a few."

The Librarian gazed sadly at him. "I wish it were that easy, my love."

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The Didact left not long after, making his wife sigh again. "Stubborn, isn't he?" she said with something like a half-smile, mostly visible around her eyes as she nearly glided over to check the progress of the armor growing up around him, "Part of what drew me to him once. The strength of his conviction. Some days it felt like he willed it and the universe made it so."

"I know the type." Doctor Halsey had been the same, and Cortana after her, but thinking of them was painful. He might never see them again - probably wouldn't. What hope was there for him to return home to his universe? He barely understood how he'd arrived in this one.

"You do, don't you." Her smile turned faintly sad before fading. "But we have a task ahead of us. Even with the alterations the Flood has worked in you, I can see my fingerprints in your making, and I am hoping that your world's version of me might have left you something - knowledge, memories, embedded in your DNA. With the right triggers, we might be able to wake it."

"What do we need to do?"

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He had never seen Earth like this, clear and clean and natural. There were humans, of course, countless varieties, some even with cities, but the planet wasn't built up like it had been in his time. No skyscrapers or planes or automobiles or ships - nothing like he remembered, at least. There were ships and airships, but primitive, mostly of natural materials, and nothing even close to spacefaring.

It was hard to believe that humanity had once had an interstellar empire - and one day would again. He opened his mouth - and then shut it again with a snap, jaw going tight. Cortana wasn't here; he couldn't ask her for intel on what was happening below.

But even as he thought that, his armor's ancilla appeared in the back of his mind, wearing his AI's face.

"No!" he snapped at her, his voice thick with Flood influence, "Not her! Anyone but her!"

The ancilla vanished as suddenly as she'd come. Then after a minute or so, she slowly filtered back in. Now she looked like Déjà, the AI that had aided Doctor Halsey in training the SPARTAN-IIs. "Is this acceptable?"

He let out a breath and relaxed, pushing the Flood back down where it lurked under the surface. "Yes," he answered, "I'm - sorry. It's just - too soon after..."

The ancilla nodded as if she understood. John knew she didn't, not really; though impressively swift and intelligent, most Forerunners' personal AIs weren't "smart" - they took in data, but they didn't really learn on their own or seek it out of their own volition. "Would you like to see below?"

"Just a general overview, and any significant events happening right now." There would be time later to go further back, and learn the specifics of the Didact's (and the twins') dislike of his species, and humanity's own lost history - what the Forerunners knew of it, at least. He thought it would be a lot, but it remained to be seen if that was true.

The ancilla brought up the data for his perusal, and peruse he did. Some part of him - that had its roots in the Flood, he was sure - was hungry for knowledge about the universe as it was now, wanted to devour everything he could clap eyes on, but he couldn't deny that he was curious on his own as well. What was the universe like now? What was humanity like?

Pretty boring, from the looks of things. When the Forerunners reset a species' evolutionary clock, they did the job well, despite even humanity's stubbornness. They'd re-evolved in a lot of ways, but it was still all petty squabbles over land and food and family - and it didn't seem like the Forerunners were much better at the core, just on a far larger and grander scale.

"Anything?"

John looked up as the Librarian came over. It took a moment for him to recall what she was speaking of, and he paused for a moment to think. "Nothing… definitive, ma'am. Something that might be something, but I don't know for sure. It's hard to say. I don't exactly know what to expect, or what I'm even looking for."

"Understandable. We can go down to the surface for a time, if you wish, but there are also other places we can try, though they will have to wait until later. I am being called to testify before the Ecumenical Council."

John nodded and said, "There was a place, in Africa - that continent there, about here - where a Portal Generator was constructed."

"That sounds as good a place as any."

He rode with her and the twins down to the surface. The sleek transport was so smooth that he almost didn't notice they were moving, and the landing was just as soft and slight. The Forerunners didn't even know what kind of luxury that was, just seemed to think that was their due.

Greedy and prideful; we will enjoy laying them low-

Shut up.

The humans didn't seem to notice them when they entered the market - at least not right away. But when they did…

They seemed to worship the Librarian. More than just bowing and scraping when they saw her, begging for her blessing or believing they already were blessed just by seeing her. The Spartan saw at least one temple and more than a few wayside shrines that bore a rough approximation of her image. "What did you do to them?" he asked when they finally had a moment to breathe.

"Many things," she answered, surveying the market below them. They had made their way to the terrace on the top floor of a boarding house of sorts. "Thousands of years ago now, mankind spread into the stars with an unexpected, desperate violence. Your people ran rampant over entire systems - at the time, we thought you were seeking worlds to settle. Perhaps some of you were, but that was not the only reason. We fought back - both us as a people and my family personally. The Didact and I lost all of our children in the conflict." She shook her head. "But we didn't know until it was all over… We were not your only enemy. Humanity hadn't been expanding - you were running."

"From the Flood?" John asked. His ancilla had been providing visuals and additional data while she spoke, but it was important to confirm.

She nodded. "Not much remains from that time in particular, but it started innocently enough. It came in the form of a powder discovered on ancient starships, reportedly short-chain organic molecules. When pets were treated with it, it made their fur softer and the animals themselves more friendly - at first. But then it started to change, grew malicious. The animals started cannibalizing each other, exhibited unnatural growths and abortions. Some humans had eaten the treated animals, and they showed the same alterations - and worse. The Flood - the Shaping Sickness, they called it - started to spread, too fast to be contained. You've seen it."

John nodded. He had seen it, far too close for comfort.

"By that point, entire star systems were beyond saving. We learned too late that your attacks on our worlds were not against us, but against the Flood that had already gained footholds there. But then something happened. Humankind seemed to engineer a genetic kill switch or an immunity of some kind that made huge swaths of the Flood die off and drove the rest to retreat."

"Did they tell you that?"

"An assumption from the time. We found healthy human worlds in sectors overrun with the Flood, which led us to believe you had developed resistance or even full immunity. I had been second-guessing that even before your testimony, but your people destroyed all your data on the Flood and none of our Warrior-Servants brought back any live samples. There was no way to know for sure."

She sighed. "In an attempt to discover your secrets, I arranged for humanity to be spared from extinction as proposed by the Ecumenical Council, and had the memories of your greatest warriors and scientists of the time planted in the genetic material of the survivors. I had hoped that in time, with the right triggers, those descendants would awaken their imprints and be more willing to talk with us than their predecessors."

"Humanity is not immune to the Flood. No one is. But if I have one of these imprints, there's nothing here that's making me remember."

"There are other places we can try, including a few in particular. We will go there next, after I return."

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The Librarian departed for the capital, Maethrillian, on a different ship, leaving the twins (who finally introduced themselves as Venera Chorenn Acaer and Kenera Chorenn Oleald) to take him back to Far Nomdagro. He kept mostly to himself, but the ship was small; it was unavoidable that they would run into each other.

"We lost our parents, in the war against humanity."

John looked up from his meal - he didn't think he'd ever eaten a purely vegetarian meal, not even during boot camp, but apparently the Forerunners didn't consume any meat at all - and found Kenera approaching. She sat down across from him, and the ship's ancilla sent her a meal of her own. She didn't touch it, not yet at least. "It is… hard for us. For me and my twin, and the Didact as well. We fought so hard for so long and lost so many people, and now we find out that it was all for nothing. Just someone else pulling the strings."

"I'm familiar with the feeling, at least a little. More from your end than mine, thought."

"Your - Human-Covenant War."

He nodded. "I grew to respect the Arbiter, Shipmaster 'Vadum, and the other Sangheili in the end, but we'd been fighting against each other for so long. It was hard to let go."

"And you lost family as well."

Another nod. "Not blood family - or none that I know of, at least. But shield-brothers and sisters, yes. We grew up together, trained together, fought side by side for decades. We were family in all the ways that matter."

Kenera gave a soft nod of her own. "It is the same with us. The Didact and the Librarian - their children chose to become Warrior-Servants, Prometheans, like him. Our parents had been his adjutants for a long time, so we knew one another, trained together at the war college. All of them died in the war, and although he has never said one way or another, both Venera and I believe that our parents were infected by the Flood.

"Perhaps this time your people and mine can fight together against our common foe."

"It would be an honor."