I twist in a spiral of laws once brilliant but now evil, cutting, carving—setting evil precedents. A shredding maze of forensic infection. No truth anywhere.

All illusion!

In agony.

With infinite amusement, it withdraws its tendrils and my carapace is resealed. Gravemind informs me I will be delivered back to Forerunner territory, carrying a shard of itself deep in my memory.

To spread fear and pain.

Burn me!

Extinguish my memory! I beg you!

Better that Catalog never existed!

String 25

STRING 25

FIVE ADDITIONAL FRAGMENTS: BATTLE TACTICS OF THE WARRIOR CIRCLE

[TT: The timing and location of these battles have not been established. “Sphere” in this context is a hypersphere made up of complexes of two and three-D surfaces, or membranes, shortened in this translation to “branes,” extending into higher dimensions that combine vectors of transit, but also scalar tactical probabilities—a difficult concept to grasp, but essential to understanding Forerunner warfare. The idea of combining what amount to many-dimensional maps with scalars describing outcomes, and adjusting both as outcomes are determined, is peculiarly adapted to interstellar engagements involving slipspace travel.]

FRAGMENT 1

Having escorted the last Forerunners to safety, we have repositioned the last of our fleets, including those that protected Path Kural.

Their tactics have proven effective in skirmishes on the Lines of the Jat-Krula sphere.

The Falchion, former defender of the Orion complex, is one of the nine commanders trained during the Didact’s exile. For nine hundred years the Falchion worked with the Builders, but remained inwardly loyal to Warrior-Servants and the Didact, unlike many of his colleagues.

The Falchion is in command of our first clench.

Four themas stand in peril of total infection.

Warrior-Servants stand ready across nineteen systems formerly linked by star roads. Engaged in the clench: twelve fully capable Fortress-class battle stations, of limited mobility due to space-time debt, which will act as apex control for seven hundred thousand more nimble Harrier-class vessels.

Opposing them: over one hundred thousand captured and infected Forerunner ships, most powerful in this context likely being four hundred dreadnoughts.

The first flex of the membrane, leading to the clench, begins at the extreme interior margins of Path Terrulian in the 78th Thema, a cold, pre-stellar dust cloud fringed with cooling, iron-hearted stars and vast numbers of stony and icy planets and asteroids.

The Falchion is informed of a high density of enemy vessels arriving through neural physics transmission. They materialize slowly, characteristic of Precursor transit, shedding multiverse residues at a rate that makes them temporarily vulnerable to the Falchion’s immediate response.

The presence of Forerunner forces within this region is apparently a surprise.

So begins the clench. While the re-emerging enemy forces are most vulnerable, still surrounded by a haze of alternate realities, the Falchion orders a carefully pre-positioned series of stabbing harrier attacks. The cloaked harriers engage first not with obvious and traceable beam weapons or projectiles, but entrained local asteroids, delivering them through gravity slings into the emergence field of each arriving enemy vessel.