“I was giving testimony … to that one!” the Builder said, standing without help. Her skin color was also improving. “Faber’s personal security found us. They tried to stop a Juridical deposition! I couldn’t believe it—”

“Where were you?” I asked.

She struggled to concentrate. Her ancilla was not being much help, I guessed. “On Secunda,” she said. “An emergency Council. Many Builders were facing extradition and arrest. I was among them.”

“You were turning Council evidence to protect yourself,” Sharp suggested. He glanced at me and shrugged.

“What happened?” I asked her.

“We heard there was an assault on the Capital system. The most powerful Builders scrambled to find protection. Monitors turned against them. The last thing I remember is Catalog being thrust into stasis. I must have been next.”

My worst fears about the ascendancy of the Builders had never imagined this level of perfidy.

The female examined my face in disbelief. “You’re the Didact! We’ve spent a thousand years looking for you. You betrayed us in our time of greatest need.”

I have had long experience controlling anger. Mostly my efforts succeed. “Is your ancilla still working?” I asked, voice steady.

She closed her eyes. “Weak—still there.”

“What was your function?”

“I helped design installations to fight the Flood,” she said.

“Halos?”

“Yes. In their later stages.”

I could not help myself, hearing this. I pounded my fist against a bulkhead and produced the strangest, most demented of grunts.

“You’re laughing!” the female said indignantly. “Only animals do that.”

“And humans,” I said, covering my mouth as another fit came upon me.

Sharp looked aside, ashamed for me.

At the last, Forthencho, the greatest human general, my most challenging opponent, as the Lifeshaper and I had prepared for his reduction at Charum Hakkor, had smiled—and then had made just such sharp, grunting noises.

In later years, I dreamed about that sound, that emotion. I came to understand and even appreciate it. Something had brought forth that human-like rictus, had made me smile as I entered the Cryptum, causing my wife to fear for my sanity, I suspect.

But why now? Something churned in the back of my thoughts … A dark complex of evidence and induction. Part of me understood something my intellect found repellent. The Primordial’s last statement to me from the timelock. The puzzling development of human resistance to the Flood. The Lifeshaper and the Council collaborating with the Master Builder to preserve human personalities, human memory and history, in part through the use of Composers …

The unprecedented destruction of Precursor artifacts at Charum Hakkor.

Before I could voice my suspicions, fortune turned direction.

“Ship is waking,” the Builder said, looking down at her hand as if it might be deceiving her. “We won’t have to rely on the damaged ancilla. I think my family may have designed this class of vessel—thousands of years ago. I’m asking it to survey its capabilities.”

* * *