“The Juridical link may not be open much longer,” Catalog warned. “There is a tremendous amount of traffic throughout the ecumene. Massive evacuations. If those wheels begin to move again,” it added, “all bets are off.”

For a moment, all of us were lost in even darker thoughts. Billions of Forerunners fleeing the Flood in millions of vessels … Before my exile, I had helped plan just such evacuations.

Sharp’s chest muscles gave a brief quiver. “The Flood may have us in a few hours,” he said. “I’d like to face that believing there is purpose to our sacrifice.”

“Of that I’m not yet convinced,” I said. I looked out across the night-dark orb of Uthera—switching from display to direct view, as if one or the other might hold answers to questions I was reluctant to ask.

I focused on Catalog. “Very well. Your channel is open. How did the Flood take over these systems? Query the Juridicals about that. Did they depose the commanders in charge of this zone’s defense?”

At first, my request seemed too much for Catalog. Again it withdrew its eyes and sensors and its carapace became smooth. But then it bristled. “All those answers are available, if they will be of service in removing us from this danger. Your testimony is most important.”

I turned to Sharp. “You were here, weren’t you? That’s why you’ve been returned. Why don’t you tell us what happened?”

Sharp drew up his knees. His face worked through a variety of expressions. Finally he said, “This system lies outside of the Jat-Krula protected boundary [TT: “Maginot Sphere”]. All systems beyond Jat-Krula have been left to fend for themselves. The ecumene—last I heard—was focused on preserving what lies inside the boundary.”

I was all too familiar with Jat-Krula. During one of our interminable civil wars, half a million years before my birth, Jat-Krula had been a formidable strategy of fortified defense, designed to control frequently traversed manifolds in the Orion complex.

Key to Jat-Krula was vigilance over all conceivable slipspace entries and portals—the necessary and most efficient avenues of slipspace travel. Millions of fixed fortifications had been spread like beaded curtains between hundreds of systems, standing vigil over a collective of jump solutions, protecting historic routes that supported trade as well as offensive and counter-offensive maneuvers.

Any major assault force, it was reasoned, must pass through this hyper-spherical boundary. And the boundary, so planners insisted, could at a moment’s notice be rendered impassable, solid—impregnable.

Then a legion of revolutionary Warrior commanders decided to forego crystal-mediated slipspace and instead flew twenty attack squadrons “naked” through a non-manifold array, bypassing the Jat-Krula defenses. The passage was savage. Their squadrons suffered fifty-percent losses—but the remaining ships emerged within the boundary and quickly overwhelmed fourteen key systems.