Thirteen: One to Succeed a God
Many of the Forerunners were gone by the time the Fleet returned to the Ark. The Mantle's Approach was still docked with the station, so they weren't gone gone; the Didact had expressed the intention to hunt down the enemy Gravemind that had sent John to their world, if indeed it existed here as well. The Forerunners had decided that before any penance they might serve, they still had a duty to safeguard future generations from the Flood. They would do another sweep through the Large Magellanic Cloud, before also sweeping the Small Magellanic Cloud and the rest of the Local Group - or at least the parts of it that could be reasonably reached by the Flood.
And then… they would fade.
John disembarked from the Cryptic Whisper and stepped out onto the Ark. He had never really had a chance to appreciate the construct before; both times he'd been more focused on doing his duty than sightseeing. Now he finally had the chance, at least for a while.
Cryptic Whisper had let him and several others out onto grassy hills on a wide plain. In one direction, there were mountains in the distance that pierced the clouds above, thick forests giving way to deep snow on their flanks; in another was the tall metal wall that ringed the Foundry. In a third direction, the plain turned to golden dunes that ran down to a wide and salty sea.
It wasn't a bad place to while away a hundred thousand years of waiting, but John knew they couldn't stay. They would have to go elsewhere, make their own home. See what was left of the ecumene while they could, make whatever repairs they thought prudent…
Hm. Humanity had only ever come to the Lesser Ark. Could they remake the Greater, and claim it as their own? It would give them an extragalactic base of sorts, so they could monitor the Array and every other Forerunner installation they had access to (which was more than a few). And now there was really no one to refuse them the use of what supplies and facilities remained to the ecumene; at this point, they were the ecumene.
The rest of the Fleet had caught that line of thinking. The Miners and the Builders were already making plans for improvements and debating if they should move its location closer or further away or just change its position relative to the Milky Way, while the Lifeworkers were discussing what species they would keep there and in what form.
John rolled his eyes but let them talk. Rebuilding the Greater Ark would give them all something to do, at least for a time.
Audacity and several other Forerunner ships emerged from Slipspace over the Ark - several ships he didn't recognize. He queried Déjà, and she confirmed that they were piloted only by the surviving Forerunners from the Ark - and that some people were missing.
They were heading for their "camp," where they had all been living for the past hundred years during the Reseeding. John frowned and returned to the Whisper, and Winterspell carried him over to them.
They were all silent, grief-stricken.
They also had a new Monitor with them. The Didact introduced him as 000 Tragic Solitude, the Monitor of Installation Zero-Zero. John raised an eyebrow - he didn't remember ever encountering or hearing from said Monitor while on Zero-Zero before - but he still greeted the ancilla with courtesy.
Then the Didact told him what had happened. "Before the Firing - mere moments before the Firing - I received a message from the Librarian and the Ur-Didact. At first, I thought it false, a trick, and with all that happened, it slipped from my mind until recently." He rubbed a hand over his face. "But when I opened it, it was real. They told us that the Firing of the Array didn't just target the neural physics of the star roads - it also destroyed the Domain."
That made John go tense, inhaling sharply. The Domain was gone?! But at the same time, there at last was an explanation for its overpowering sorrow the last time he had tapped in, the overwhelming amount of data it had poured into him, demanding that he remember.
The Fleet had. They still carried all of the data inside themselves.
(As a very brief aside, John told the teams preparing to reconstruct the Greater Ark that they would have to include server banks to store the Domain's data. They agreed without even batting an eye.)
"The Librarian said that we needed to find a way to restore the Domain, even if most of its data was lost," the Didact went on, unaware of the Fleet's secret, "for the sake of the future. Splendid Dust knew many secrets of the ecumene and directed us to the Organon, which generates the Domain field.
"But there was a Precursor ancilla, a knowledge engine - Abbadon. It was… quite upset, about the Firing. It killed Keeper-of-Stone-Songs and Sorrow-for-Lost-Voices, and Growth-Through-Trial-of-Change died inserting the deadbolt key to reset the Organon. We do not know what became of her, save that she vanished in a flash of light."
"We presume that the Organon is using her patterns as a base to restore the Domain," Chant-to-Green said softly, "but how long that will take or if she will return and in what form… we don't know. There's still so much we don't know, even here at the end of things." She looked almost wistful.
The Didact gently took her hand. They had been close for a while after the Great Cataclysm, then drifted apart. It seemed that they had been reconciled. "Splendid Dust wished to atone for our crimes and chose to be composed to become the Monitor of the Ark. He will safeguard the installation until the Reclaimers come."
John raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
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It took nearly three years of preparation for the last Forerunners to finally be ready to depart. They had one final duty and needed the supplies to do it, so as the more numerous of the lot, the Fleet handled most of the acquisitions on their behalf, while also taking the opportunity to survey what was left of the galaxy.
Most Forerunner installations were still intact, but all the Precursor ones were gone. The tether on Reach had turned into a volcano, and that John remembered. The UNSC Geological Survey Group had found Mount Erebus II to be extremely odd, and now at last there was an explanation. Sort of.
The major cleaving of the Mother Crystal - which the Forerunners chipped flakes from to power their Slipspace drives - was still where they had left it when they were done equipping their own ships, so they let it be and departed.
They returned to the Ark, and the Didact called John to him. The few remaining command-level Forerunners - barely a hundred - were also gathered with him in the Ark's Cartographer.
The Didact formally welcomed him in old Digon, a greeting John returned. Then the Forerunner signaled for him to kneel, which he did, and said, "We of the Second Ecumenical Council are leaving this galaxy behind, but we do not wish to leave it unmoored, unguided. You already carry the thousand-year wisdom of the Librarian, and we who remain have nothing more to offer that she cannot give you. We do therefore bestow all our authority upon you, military and civilian, to act in the interests of the people and to lead them as best you can.
"We also grant your Fleet a new name. For so long, you have been the Fleet of Shadows, working in darkness for the protection of the light… but now there is nothing left, save you. We have no doubt that you will endure until even the end of the Living Time. Therefore, you will now be the Last Fleet.
"Rise, Supreme Commander of the Last Fleet, Protector of the Ecumene, and take up your mantle."
John stood, and the Didact extended a hand. The Spartan gripped his arm in return, and light rippled from the Didact's armor to his own; a transfer of command and control, along with all the Forerunners' access codes to everything they had had ever built. He blinked, Déjà already sorting the information for him.
When the Didact released him and stepped back, the human bowed at the waist, at last greeting the Forerunner as an equal. "I am honored beyond words," John said formally, "and all of us will do our best to safeguard the galaxy and let her people grow free of fear."
The Second Council all bowed in return and bid a formal farewell.
The more personal farewells were saved for later, when they were about to depart. Then the Didact pulled him into an embrace, much to John's surprise. The Forerunners had adopted some more human mannerisms, like smiling, but he still hadn't expected it. Even so, after a moment, the Spartan returned the hug.
At last the Didact stepped back and said, "Farewell, my brother in arms. I wish you better luck and greater success than anything we had."
"Thank you," John replied, "Good hunting."
And then they were gone.