“Or they were abandoned, left here with nothing,” Clearance said. “Judging from the mineral evidence, life didn’t exist before it came here with the Forerunners. There is a fair percentage of radioactive ore, however, and the oceans—such as they are—are rich with deuterium.”

“They could have escaped if they had wanted to,” I concluded. “Weapons?” I asked Audacity.

“Nothing that can harm us,” the ship responded. “They live and work by fire alone. And not a great deal of that.”

“But why?” Chant asked.

Audacity entered low orbit.

“We’re intercepting sounds,” Dawn said, and with a lift of her fingers, played for us words being spoken in a small village just a few hundred kilometers below. We understood nothing.

“It’s not ancient Digon?” Keeper asked.

“That reached its peak less than three hundred thousand years go,” Dawn said. “We have no idea what form of Digon, if any, even existed when the fleet left our galaxy. Ship will gather sounds from as many points a possible, but already, the language seems far simpler than our own.”

“Simpler language is often more advanced, syntactically,” Keeper said, and brightened at a thought. “Their technology and structures might be hidden—they might be in defensive mode, hiding them! There could be threats in Path Kethona we do not recognize.”

“More likely, they chose to suppress technology at the deepest level,” Dawn said. Keeper fell back in dismay. He could not bring himself to believe Forerunners would ever abandon advanced engineering.

“No doubt they still dig,” Clearance said with a smug air. “They’ve become Miners. All of them. How else would they find stone and clay?”

I have difficulty knowing when Miners are trying to be funny.

None of us had ever seen Forerunners so abject and primitive. They averaged about two thirds the height and mass of a healthy Manipular. Their structures were rarely taller than one or two stories, or wider than five or ten meters.

“How can we learn anything from them?” Keeper asked. “How can they maintain any sort of culture?”

“They likely rely on oral histories,” Chant said. “We’ve seen it in other species.”

“Maybe they’re some sort of Flood residue—an inept crossbreeding,” Keeper said.

“The genetic heritage is clear,” Chant insisted. “At the cellular level, they aren’t very different from us. I think the first group to arrive made the best of a tough situation. They could not overburden meager resources. But there are other animals down there, some serving as beasts of burden.”