“Four rocky planets,” Keeper announced. The small crew showed little outward excitement. Young and self-impressed, I thought, but still keeping taut discipline.

“And five anomalous masses,” Dawn added, pointing them out in virtual perspective.

“You theorized these masses existed before the sensors reported them,” I said. “How?”

“Slight deviations in the starfield. Very slight.”

“And perturbations in the orbits of two planets,” Keeper said, nodding in admiration at his crewmate’s sensitivity.

“They’re uniform in mass, appear to be uniform in diameter.… Could be failed stars,” Dawn suggested.

“Perhaps,” Keeper said. “But failed stars still release heat, if not visible light. These masses are colder than the interstellar void.”

The quiet that followed was properly respectful. We were thinking the same thoughts. We had seen similar masses before—in our schooling. Only a few still existed in our home galaxy.

“Precursor anchors?” Keeper asked.

“No visible bridges or threads linking them, or out between the stars,” Dawn said. “Not in this system. Not now.”

Even dormant, such constructs were thought to be unstable—perhaps dangerous. Audacity’s ancilla supplied us with records of previous Forerunner encounters. They were not encouraging. Ships vanishing … Surviving crews requiring extensive proto-geometric therapy to return their minds to a proper neural topology.

My crew was unsettled, but undeterred.

“We’ll approach with caution,” I suggested.

Keeper and Dawn linked their armor to mine, and together with Audacity we plotted a fine course across the two billion kilometers that separated us from the closest dark mass.

As a precaution, our armor locked our positions and reduced our chemistry. During the next few days, as our vessel followed a long hyperbolic orbit to the nearest cold, dark mass, we allowed Audacity to refresh our memories on Precursor architecture and all the other mysterious artifacts Forerunners had encountered, some of them billions of years old.

Assuming nothing … and yet knowing, as if by instinct, that we were close to the heart of a controversy that had perplexed Forerunners for hundreds of thousands of years.

Was Path Kethona the source of the Precursors? Or had it been the birth galaxy of another great, more primary race, active even before the Precursors … Or a race before that, on and on back through time to the great Glow itself?

Minds simmering under the tutelage of our ancillas, our bodies moved slow as glass as our ship plunged deeper into the system.

String 5

STRING 5

CATALOG

THE JURIDICAL NETWORK briefly opens, and Catalog takes the opportunity to send what it has gathered, then to supplement its understanding of the Librarian’s testimony.

In another system, Juridicals have deposed the Ur-Didact. Catalog is provided selections relevant to the Lifeshaper’s testimony, but she cannot be informed of his survival.

UR-DIDACT

After the capture of my ship in the San’Shyuum quarantine system, the Master Builder locked me into a weapons-grade stasis bubble, like some dangerous bomb.

I have no awareness of the time between.