And so my expedition—whether it was the second, or the first—was designed to once and for all confirm the extragalactic origin of the Flood. That sealed the deal with both the Old Council and the Builders.

Builders have always been superb shipwrights. The construction took ten years. Permission from the Old Council to make the journey took another ten.

I understood their delay.

Travel across even a few light-years through a portal or jump requires mending breaches in causality. Forerunner ships crossing between systems create a buildup of space-time resistance, a polluting effect that gradually limits both transport and communication—and may also interfere with access to the Domain. When the buildup is eliminated—as reconciliations are made and aftereffects fade into the quantum background—more journeys become possible.

But moving even a single small ship over one hundred and sixty thousand light-years in just a few jumps, without long pauses, creates a monumental backup. The journey to Path Kethona could slow or even halt transportation throughout the ecumene for over a year. Nevertheless, the intrigue of making history and solving one of the greatest mysteries was irresistible. Builders worked hard to forge consensus, as I knew they would.

That a Lifeworker was in command—worse still, a Lifeworker associated with the Didact—was an irritation, but not insurmountable. Who else was more qualified to study the origins of the Flood? Or understand the nature of Precursor beginnings? For of course the Precursors themselves were believed to have traveled to our galaxy from Path Kethona, billions of years ago.

We christened our ship Audacity. Less than one hundred meters in length and thirty across the beam—modest, lightly armed. A crew of seven, including me: one Miner, three adventurous Builders, and two Lifeworkers were selected from well over a million volunteers.

No Juridicals joined our crew. At that point, there was no reason to suspect we were about to uncover the greatest crime in Forerunner history.

* * *

Our ship emerged from its second jump, the middle distance—eighty-seven million light-years from the Orion complex, sixty million light-years from the irregular margins of our galaxy. I stood on the transparent bridge, surrounded by the dim specks of far galaxies, and for a horrid moment, imagined my spirit set free to wander home at a walking pace, utterly alone, barely recognizing the impossibly distant and freezing haze of our home galaxy.

The Didact would have reveled in such vastness. Perhaps in his Cryptum, he was even more isolated, more directly in tune with the singing whine of the indescribable that flows around our lives.

Emptiness.

Vastation.

Nothingness.

Humans believe in nothingness, in zeros. It is one of their distinguishing traits. They keep inventing nothing. Forerunners know otherwise. Even where there is very little matter, each cubic centimeter of space is crossed by a crucial density of radiation, fundamentally linked with far places and ancient times.