I walked around the bridge. The equipment was older than the ships we had fought with at Charum Hakkor. The Master Builder was nothing if not frugal with the way he disposed of his enemies. I wondered where he had found this one—perhaps in some surplus yard on an outlying planet, or a salvage orbit around one of his construction facilities.

I shouted instructions. No response. No ancilla presented itself either to assist or to deny me access.

Pushing aside dust and desiccated scraps of what might have been flesh, I spit onto a clear panel to clear what looked like dried blood. Clearly this vessel had seen desperate action. But what sort?

Through the smeared panel, lights faintly glowed. I swiped the surface again. The lights brightened—then flickered, threatened to go dark. The ship was still functioning—but just barely.

At least the air was not freezing—and still breathable, but dense, stale.

How far had we traveled, for how long, and from where?

To where?

A disquieting thought … That we had been sent on a long journey to no system in particular, moving at less than light speed, without benefit of jump or portal. When the power to the stasis bubbles declined, mine opened—to release me into a limbo of slow decline and death.

Was it possible I had underestimated the moral degeneracy or the raging fury of the Master Builder?

The panel lights glowed brighter. I danced my fingers over the panel and managed to summon a grainy display of what lay forward of the ship: a planetary limb, reddish and angry. I thought I recognized a distinctive swirl of continents, like paint stirred with a stick—a unique tectonic formation. This could be Uthera Midgeerrd, on the extreme outer reaches of the Forerunner ecumene, less than a hundred light-years from the unpatrolled borders of the galactic margin.

Before I entered the Cryptum, Uthera had been regarded as a far-flung outpost of Forerunner culture and design, distinctly anti-Builder in its sympathies, populated by half-renegade Miners and others who had deserted their rates. Perhaps the Master Builder found delicious irony in sending a Promethean to this undisciplined place.

Movement behind me. I turned to see a face peer over the rim of the transit tube. With a slow, cold shock, I recognized a fellow veteran of the human wars, a commander of one of my tactical squadrons—known at the time as Sharp-by-Striking.

“Distinguished company!” he murmured. “Is this the veritable Didact, come to join me in exile?” He pulled himself into the compartment and stretched his arms. He appeared much reduced by hardship—paler, very thin. “There are still two others … Harsh stasis. Doesn’t look good down there.”

We approached each other warily, then crossed arms, caught up in ancient emotions—not all of them pleasant. Sharp had opposed my grand strategy and been instrumental in convincing the Old Council my Shield Worlds were unworkable.

All that, of course, meant nothing now.