I HAVE SEEN this before. I remember the awful sensation. I cannot close down my sensors. I am a machine. The sensation is not optimal, but I do not feel what living things feel, in the presence of the Composer. Though I remember it too well.

The Librarian watches it all, her body seemingly in conflict with her armor, as if she would reach up and tear at her twisted face—beyond any expressible sadness. Such anger mixed with so much grief, both ancient and new …

Our path is cleared, for the time being. I wish I could feel despair. I wish I myself could grieve. My people are gone! All that remain from the Librarian’s collection are on the transport linked below. The last hope of my entire species.

The Librarian stops her contortions and recovers enough control to tell me that she and I will part ways. I will return to the transport and take the surviving specimens—including my friends—away from here. “You must find Bornstellar, he will take you to the lesser Ark. That is where we must hide the specimens.” But what about her safety? What does she plan to do?

I must obey. Still,

Something

Is being born in me. Something hidden is emerging. I feel its potential. It is not entirely obedient. Have I been affected by the logic plague? No.

I am still Chakas.

I am still human!

String 33

STRING 33

ISODIDACT • GREATER ARK, OMEGA HALO

THE SHEER POWER mounted by the Flood is staggering.

Well over a million Flood-infected ships have taken up attack positions about the greater Ark. Their arrangement is familiar enough—the peculiar gapped spiral sweep favored by my original, each segment capable of wheeling in three dimensions in response to attack from any direction. That tactic has been adapted by the Flood’s new commander—Mendicant Bias.

Mendicant Bias was deactivated and disassembled after the destruction of the Capital system, to the extent that any Contender-class metarch can ever be eliminated from the systems it once controlled. Its parts were spread throughout the ecumene for later study. But many of those regions where it was stored have been overwhelmed by the Flood, and the metarch’s fragments were apparently recovered, restored, reassembled—and reactivated by a Gravemind. The Flood’s forces are marshaled by a twisted machine, the first victim of the logic plague—and a creation, in part, of the Ur-Didact.

Father to son, I tell myself.

Against the tightening cage of reshaped star roads, the former Forerunner vessels are little more than a cloud of mosquitoes pouring through a deadfall of trees.

Bitterness and the Examiner float beside me as our fleet transport carries us from the greater Ark to the parking orbit of the Omega Halo.