“We are farther from other Forerunners than anyone in verified history,” Keeper said. “All honor to those who crafted Audacity!”

We toasted these Builders with the last of our nectar, and the crew resumed armor. Birth-to-Light was already evaluating the fresher light from Path Kethona. A second-form Lifeworker, she was capable and experienced; we had worked together many times before.

“Looks barren,” she said.

A practiced eye can detect the effects of advanced civilizations on a starfield, as technologies harness and affect the raw radiation emitted by so many stars. And fresher light carries more information, more detectable entanglements. The light from these stars was less than a thousand years old.

“Perhaps,” said Chant-to-Green, our youngest. “But it’ll take time to know for sure.” I had taken a special liking to Chant; earnest and focused, with an intensity that hid her naivety, she reminded me of my own daughter, lost at Charum Hakkor. That one had of course been a Warrior-Servant. Still, Chant-to-Green was like the daughter I might have had, had I not married outside my rate.…

I made my own measurements. The stars indeed appeared untouched, color shifts entirely natural. I could not be as sensitive as the instruments wielded by Audacity, but my instincts told me that this small satellite galaxy was as close to lifeless as any region of stars I had ever experienced.

“It feels young,” said Dawn-over-Fields, our second Builder, the quietest of our group and the oldest, other than myself.

“Youth can last billions of years for a galaxy,” I reminded them. “Civilizations burn like grass fires on a dry prairie. Suns explode and kill. Nebulas spread new elements and seed new suns … and it all begins again. Our own galaxy has gone through many such cycles. We are just the latest.”

I had been about to say “the last.”

* * *

The last leg of our journey, a few thousand light-years, was accomplished without incident. But the most strenuous phase of Audacity’s reconciliation forced us back into armor and sleep for many hours.

That completed, Keeper and Dawn confirmed the ship’s fitness.

A detailed sensor sweep of the satellite galaxy’s billions of stars again revealed no communications of any variety known to Forerunners. Path Kethona appeared free of technological civilizations, and based on a close-in analysis of the few planetary systems, free of most forms of life as well.

The focus of our probing expedition was to be a star deep within Path Kethona, on the outskirts of the Spider nebula. This star had over a million years ago attracted the attention of a female of the now-subsumed rate called Theoreticals. She had been called Boundless. Soon after her death, her rate had been forcibly merged with the Builders.