JOHN JACKSON MILLER
This story takes place near the end of the Forerunners’ three-hundred-year war with the Flood, a little more than 100,000 years BCE (Halo: Cryptum, Halo: Silentium).
Ancilla, can you confirm what I just saw?”
The electronic voice at the back of Adequate-Observer’s mind responded: “You will have to be more specific.”
You can read my mind, the Forerunner thought. How is it that you do not already know what I mean?
He growled in frustration and hurried from one window of the station to another. No, there was nothing special outside—and if there had been, it was gone now. The station was rotating too fast. From each port he beheld only clouds racing through the darkness of the gas giant Seclusion, the same picture he’d seen for the past fifteen solar years.
Adequate-Observer was a lookout who rarely saw anything. Rated a Warrior-Servant, the Manipular had neither gone to war nor been of much service. Filed away far from inhabited space, he stood guard over this gas-mining station designated as Seclusion Spiral. A pinwheel ten kilometers across, the station twirled along atop the clouds of an immense eternal storm on the planet. Rows of electrostatic collection devices lined each of five colossal vanes. A single collector could draw enough exotic particles from the storm to supply the needs of a Forerunner world for a solar year.
Even after all this time, Adequate still didn’t know what the particles were, or why the Forerunners needed them. His ancilla—his armor’s mental assistance system—had explained it all once, but it hadn’t made much sense to him. The universe was teeming with things to know; an individual could easily get bogged down with useless trivia. Adequate didn’t require the specifics of what happened to the product of Seclusion Spiral, so he didn’t clutter his mind with it. Sometimes it was better that way.
In truth, having an ancilla handy had given Adequate an excuse to forget many things. The designers of his armor had intended to create a symbiotic relationship between wearer and suit, and in this, they had succeeded perhaps too well. Adequate-Observer had no need to think about the big issues or the small ones anymore. Keeping track of his location on the station? The ancilla handled that. Bodily functions? The ancilla regulated them. On days when he was feeling particularly frustrated with his assignment, he was tempted to ask the ancilla to move his arms and legs for him while he made his rounds.
Yet he never resorted to that option. It felt too much like cheating—and he worried that his superiors would find out. The ancilla answered to them too, after all. If his masters wanted a robotic drone, they would have sent one. No, his great hope was getting off the station and into the fight against the biological terror known as the Flood, and the only way to prove his worth was to do his job, such as it was.
That meant spotting things, even when his own ancilla didn’t believe him.
“There it is again,” Adequate said, pointing as a mass darker than the surrounding maelstrom swept past. “Something is out there. In the storm.”
“There are more than six hundred known substances circulating in the winds of the vortex,” the artificial intelligence responded. “You could have seen any one of them.”
“I have been here for fifteen years, ancilla. I know what is outside.” He really didn’t, not with any specificity. “Whatever that object was, it was not dust. It was solid and dark—mostly.” He frowned. “You are controlling my combat skin. The armor’s sensors must have seen the same thing I did, correct?”
“If the sensors noticed anything, nothing exceeded parameters enough for the systems to issue an alert. But there is a simple way to find out. I am rerunning the imagery now. Tell me when you see it.”
Adequate stood still as a statue and closed his eyes as the ancilla, through the symbiotic mental interface in his armor, replayed the seconds in question. Since the images were being piped directly into the theater of his mind, shutting his eyes was unnecessary—in theory. In practice, since receiving his first Warrior-Servant combat skin as a young Manipular, he had never been very good at shutting out the outside world.
The ancilla did its job, and the moment reappeared to him, as clear as any memory he ever had. “There,” he said, when an amorphous form peeked out from the clouds.
“Evaluating.” The image froze, and Adequate saw symbols dancing alongside the dark blob, the result of his ancilla’s studies. “Spectroscopic analysis is unrevealing—but the strongest possibilities are all Class-D ices, which accrete in the upper elevations of the atmosphere near here and get swept into the storm.”
Adequate’s brow furrowed as he tried to concentrate on the image. “What is that in the center? It seems to be”—he tried to focus—“It almost appears to be a light.”
“There is intense electrical activity below us, Adequate. Anything that drifts into the cyclone is bound to be struck by lightning.” The ancilla paused. “Does that resolve the matter?”
“I suppose,” he replied. “That is all.” The image vanished from the part of his mind that his ancilla had access to but remained in his living memory. It was a curious thing, and he had seen something like it twice before during his posting. But he had never mentioned it, certain that if it were anything special, his ancilla would have caught it.
He was only an Adequate-Observer, by nature.
He was also sure his ancilla was correct that nothing could survive in the storm below. He rose for every duty shift relieved that Seclusion Spiral only rode the top of the great storm. Immense enough to encapsulate whole planets, the storm had raged on the gas giant’s equatorial region for half a million years so far and showed no signs of dissipating. As long as it churned and wobbled its way across Seclusion’s relatively warm midsection, the dynamo would run indefinitely.
That, he understood. What the ancilla had never been able to dispel his confusion about was how it was possible for Adequate to move about on the station without being tossed around or becoming violently ill. The forces of gravity and motion were somehow constantly being compensated for—not just at the station’s hub, but along the hallways several kilometers long heading out to the tips of the twirling vanes. The Builders responsible for the station clearly knew things far beyond his comprehension. He’d stopped asking about how the station functioned after the first solar year.
Still, there was something odd about what he’d seen. He idly tapped against the window with his boltshot, his trusty directed-energy pistol. Trusty because it was always at his side, not because he’d ever had occasion to use it. What benefit was it in this place?
“Your metabolic rate is increasing,” the ancilla said. “Would you like me to have your armor apply a minor relieving agent?”
“I have no need for it.”
“Perhaps you would like to discuss your concerns instead. I theorize your agitation may be at least eighty-four percent explained by tomorrow’s arrival of the annual transport ship.”
“Eighty-four percent.” He shook his head and started walking up the hall, continuing his rounds. “How do you calculate these things?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
“It is,” he said. “And do not think that I am concerned about the visit. I already know what will happen to me when the tanker arrives. Absolutely nothing.”
Adequate-Observer watched through the stockroom skylight as the tanker disengaged from its docking portal atop Seclusion Spiral’s hub. The Forerunner had waited anxiously through the six work shifts it took for the vessel to load up on a solar year’s worth of exotic particles; the transfer of personnel always came at the end.
And, as always, Adequate had not received orders to depart.
The experience was worse this time. He had looked on in dismay as all twenty of the other soldiers posted on the station had been reassigned to faraway places to fight the Flood. Never before had Adequate seen so many retasked at once. How bad must the struggle be for the Forerunners?
Apparently not bad enough for them to want him.
And so he had remained, mutely restocking the supply shelves as his exultant companions from the previous year exited the station. The newly arriving Warrior-Servants said little to him as they entered, and he said nothing in return. What was the point, really, in learning anything about them? They would be gone in another year too, and Adequate would be trapped, same as always. Never to fight, never to evolve as he spent the last useful moments of his life spinning in the dark.
He spoke to his ancilla only after the tanker vanished from sight. “Did they provide a reason?”
“No. They never do.”
That fact, Adequate didn’t need reminding about. In previous years, his ancilla had tried to cushion the blow, rationalizing that the Forerunners in charge of things must value his service and knowledge too much to let him leave this place. It could be argued, after all, that after fifteen solar years, he was now the wizened master of Seclusion Spiral, trusted with mentoring an entirely new staff of neophytes.
Yet the ancilla did not argue that notion this time, and Adequate would not have believed it anyway. He knew the truth about himself. He was no sage, no expert. The past year’s class of Warrior-Servants had not made any effort to look to Adequate for guidance and advice, and he had not offered any. The crew that had just arrived was even less likely to need his help.
From their service records, his ancilla had already determined that half of the new arrivals were more experienced. One called Capital-Enforcer had once stood guard at a facility visited for three daily cycles by the Librarian herself. What was there for Adequate to say to such distinguished people? Why, there was no need for his teachings at all. The departing sentries’ ancillas had already transferred everything else they needed about serving on the station.
And the sum of that was: walk the halls, look out the viewports, repeat.
Worse than useless.
The last of the newcomers having departed for their new quarters, Adequate looked back out into the darkness. There was nothing to see, of course.
He went back to his shelving.
Hub detail. It was the one day in twenty-one when Adequate’s routine changed at all. He watched from the center of the station as his new companions prepared their boltshots and headed in groups of four into the spoke passageways to police the enormous, labyrinthine interiors of the vanes.
Because the desired particles settled in the atmosphere at night, Seclusion Spiral could only do its collecting during the day; as a result, the Forerunner designers simply programmed the life-support systems to shut down outside the hub during the night hours. That meant twenty of the twenty-one on staff were gone at once, four per spoke, leaving the automated command center and living quarters all to Adequate.
It was no day of leisure. Adequate collected the refuse the squad had generated and worked to clean the galley; it was already clear to him that his new teammates were more slovenly than the last. Another sign that things were going badly in the war with the Flood. Discipline during off-duty hours was one of the first things to suffer.
He’d recently seen that in action. Normally, when two or three new replacements arrived, upheaval was limited: they worked to integrate themselves into the established social order on the station. Not so this time. The twenty newcomers had already bonded on their flight in and had quickly realized from Adequate’s service record that his career was at a dead end. Since her arrival, Sprightly-Runner, the jokester of the new crew, had made constant sport of him.
“Such a wonderful modern facility,” she’d remarked in passing. “With just one out-of-place antique.”
“Adequate is a beautiful name,” Sprightly had stated another time. “You really should use your honorific title with it.”
“I do not have a title.”
“Of course you do. It is ‘Barely,’ correct?”
Barely-Adequate had been his designation around the hub barracks ever since. He didn’t understand why he deserved such cruelty.
“Ignore their taunts. Understand that they do not wish to be here either,” his ancilla explained.
Worst of all, they had collectively decided the dirtiest assignment on the station should again fall to him: gathering up packs of the occupants’ waste for delivery to the digester units, one located at the end of each vane. Microorganisms inside the units broke down the foul matter to generate power, while releasing unwanted gases into the atmosphere. He didn’t know why the relief stations were not constructed near the ends of the vanes in the first place. All he knew was that he was tasked with the detail—again.
He didn’t care—and had no desire for the others’ companionship. Increasingly, he had taken to spending his off-duty hours outside the quarters and in the command center: there he could avoid harassment while studying the monitors in search of his pet phantom. At least he had not made the mistake of mentioning to the others that he’d been seeing things outside. Why provide them with any more ammunition?
The completion of his chores gave him a chance to return to his search. He had always known how to operate the visual sensors located on Seclusion Spiral’s hull; it was part of his basic training for posting here. The hostile environment outside made checking the sensors a fruitless task for the watch keepers, who focused instead on their similarly futile inspection marches to the vanes. A true invader from space would be detected and announced by the station’s core computer.
The radar emitters, consequently, pointed up. With his ancilla’s help, Adequate found he could direct one partially downward. Four times, the sensors had found something moving in the storm—perhaps. But the data made no sense. Whatever was down there was traveling slower than the surrounding winds, almost tacking against them—quite peculiar behavior for an ice fragment or a bit of debris. Adequate hoped the change of seasons on Seclusion would allow him a better opportunity.
“Ancilla, will the winter make the storm easier or harder to—”
Klaxons sounded all around. He heard an agitated voice in his helmet. “This is Capital-Enforcer! Come in, hub officer!”
“Hub here,” Adequate said.
“Alert, everyone! I have a missing officer—and hostile movement here at the end of Vane One. It’s the Flood!”
It had happened. Something had finally happened.
Adequate’s circulatory system went into overdrive, prompting his ancilla to apply calming agents. The injections didn’t work. How else was he supposed to react? For fifteen years, his only foes were boredom and ridicule. Yet now, here at the end of the galaxy, the great enemy had come.
He had remained on hub detail watching the command center’s monitors while one guard from each of the other spokes emerged from the tunnels and headed into Vane One to assist Capital-Enforcer. That effectively doubled the number of warriors on the scene, he thought—until his ancilla reminded him that the wretched two-legged monster stalking the halls was a former teammate.
He saw it in flashes and glimpses. Sickly green in color with a blotchy hide, the creature’s long limbs flailed against the bulkheads as it clumsily lumbered through the halls of the vane. A combat form, he knew from his studies: scraps of Forerunner armor remained lodged in its hide, artifacts of the individual that once had been.
He only then wondered who that person was. Dutiful-Marcher, he learned when his ancilla checked the roster to see who was missing. How horrific must it have been, Adequate wondered, for the warrior to find his body erupting into that dreadful form? What would his last thoughts have been?
And was he in there, somewhere, thinking now? Adequate hoped not—especially when he saw blazes of light. Gunfire struck the combat form, ripping into its body. Adequate moved from monitor to monitor to get a better view. For a moment, it seemed the threat was ended—
—until the sick, glowing bulge on the back of what had once been Dutiful’s body burst open, spraying steaming ichor and releasing—what? He could not tell, for they were moving so quickly.
His ancilla, however, had already figured it out. “Infection forms.”
Capital-Enforcer and his companions had turned, falling back as garish pods propelled themselves across the floor and walls of the vane’s hallways on twisted appendages. Adequate switched from scene to scene, seeing in one moment the frantic warriors, turning to shoot—and in the next, virulent carriers rushing toward them, seeking new hosts.
The defenders’ boltshots spoke again and again, shredding some attackers, missing others. Adequate longed for something to do—and then got his chance.
“Hub officer,” Capital called out. “Close bulkhead one-stroke-four!”
Adequate quickly sought out the control. It would sever part of one part of the vane from another, and help prevent the Flood from accessing the spoke that led to the hub. He activated it, and watched with satisfaction on a monitor as the bulkhead slammed down, squashing a gruesome infection form.
He was unaccountably happy. His first strike against the Flood, against anything, had been delivered. But his reverie was cut short when his ancilla, tied in with the core computer, reported. “Sprightly-Runner is in danger.”
“She’s working Vane Two.” Adequate hurried to another set of monitors and beheld the female Forerunner fleeing for her life up the long tunnel, not even stopping to fire. Behind her, Adequate saw on the reverse angles, was a raging mass of pursuing infection forms—as well as one of the combat forms, even more energetic than the one he’d seen earlier. Its limbs thrashed against the walls and ceiling, propelling it forward.
It wasn’t just one vane infected, Adequate realized. There were two sources for the Flood, unconnected. The only place they met was in the hub—where he was.
He watched helplessly as Sprightly outraced the horde. “She must reach the next cutoff!” he said. Emergency bulkheads existed every eighty meters, ready to close off the tunnel behind her. He called out to the screens. “Run!”
“We should quickly drop the temperature in the spokes,” Adequate’s ancilla said. “It may retard their speed and growth.”
“Show me!” he replied.
The AI directed him to the appropriate console, where he made the command. Adequate knew it would have been much easier had his ancilla been given the power to operate, rather than simply monitor, Seclusion Spiral’s systems—but then, a Flood-infected guardian might well inherit control of the station. It was to be avoided.
Adequate moved back to the monitors dedicated to the spoke leading to Vane Two. If Sprightly was fending off the Flood, he could no longer tell. “The surveillance imagery’s gone!” he cried.
“I do not know if it can be reestablished,” his ancilla said. “The Flood may have compromised one of the trunk lines, cutting power to the—”
Adequate didn’t hear the rest. Gripping the boltshot that had been in his hand since the crisis started, he dashed into the entrance to tunnel two, racing to save an individual who had never treated him with respect. “Crew, I am going to aid Sprightly,” he called into his helmet mic.
“Do not leave the hub!” someone yelled back. He couldn’t hear who had said it; there was too much gunfire in the background. Not to mention his own ancilla, which had never stopped urging him to turn around.
“This is unwise,” it said again after he had gone another fifty meters. “Sprightly is not answering hails. You cannot know what her condition is.”
“She is alone. That is her condition.” Adequate knew simple math. They had pulled one sentry each from the other four vanes to assist Capital-Enforcer: that left three in Vane Two. He speculated that both her companions had been infected: one was the combat form, while the unfortunate other’s body must have given rise to the infection forms. Sprightly would surely be next.
His ancilla would not be silent. “The hub must be saved, Adequate. This is the wrong course of action.”
“You said yourself the power is fluctuating. I may have to cycle the emergency bulkheads shut by hand. The hub must be saved.”
“Yes, but you should have tried to do it from the hub first.”
Adequate wasn’t going to do that. It might have meant closing Sprightly off, trapping her with the nightmare. Darkness lay ahead, but he knew where he was. Observation windows lined the tunnel to the right, where a few flashes of lightning could be counted on for illumination. It was one of his favorite sections to patrol, and the place where he had first seen the—
Something slammed wetly against the viewport. The jarring impact knocked the Forerunner off his feet. Rolling, he drew his weapon and pointed it at the window, wondering how the Flood could be outside in that environment.
But what he saw was nothing like any of the Flood forms he had ever seen in lectures. Instead, a thing with colossal transparent wings hovered in front of the observation port. The avian—for that is all he knew to call it—was more than twice his size, with a tailfin that darted madly around as the creature bobbed in the storm. At the being’s center was a crystalline carapace, within which he could clearly make out three natural lights: two blue and one red.
Forgetting completely about the Flood, Adequate stood and edged closer to the window. The lights in the avian’s gut seemed to pulsate as he did so. Were they eyes, he wondered, and were they watching him?
And had they been watching him all along?
“Ancilla—”
“Agreed,” he said, watching the beast fighting against the wind. Seclusion Spiral was spinning, yet somehow this thing was keeping pace with the spoke of the giant propeller without being swept away. It backed off and zoomed down into the blackness. Adequate ran further along the tunnel, hoping to see more—but it was gone.
“No avian species has ever been reported on Seclusion,” his ancilla said. “The planet is lifeless.”
“Evidently not. Unless it is with the—” Suddenly remembering, he turned back up the hall and started to run. He had since forgotten all about Sprightly.
“Stop!”
He didn’t ignore the ancilla’s warning this time, which brought up a magnified infrared view of the hall before his eyes. “That mass up ahead is Sprightly. Her body is exhibiting evidence of transmogrification.”
“It has her then,” he said. Reluctantly, he lifted his weapon. “You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
He started firing down the hall. He could hear screeching noises as his shots found targets. Sprightly, perhaps? Or more of the infection forms? He did not want to know. He just understood that he would have run straight into danger had the thing in the window not slowed his progress.
He stopped firing long enough to make a dash for a set of levers protruding from the wall. He started throwing them, intending to cycle the emergency door shut, leaving Sprightly—or whatever she was now—beyond it.
But he was only halfway completed when the station took over, with the door cycling automatically. Stymied, he said, “Someone must have accomplished that from the hub. I imagine someone else fell back to it.”
“We have another problem,” his ancilla said as Adequate turned to walk back down the hallway.
“I see it.” The light at the end of the passageway was gone. “They’ve closed all the bulkheads!”
He tried for several minutes to reach someone on his communicator—to no avail. Behind him, he heard something pounding against the door that had just shut.
“That would be Sprightly—as something else now,” Adequate said. “Can she—can it get in?”
“Eventually.”
“Can we get out?” He already knew the answer. It wasn’t possible to cycle open the emergency door ahead from his side.
“I may have a way,” his ancilla replied. “Check the inside wall, thirty-one meters ahead. Quickly—time is now of the essence.”
Adequate had walked the five identical tunnels to the vanes daily for fifteen solar years, but had never thought too greatly about the mechanisms behind the inside wall. Certainly, he understood there to be apparatuses bringing particles back from the collectors in the vanes—but he had never dreamed of opening one of the access panels. That was expressly forbidden—both in his training, and in the stark, stern verbiage just beside the latch. It was never intended to be opened under any circumstances.
That the latch did not work was not surprising in the least. Hearing the station suffering behind him as the Flood tested the emergency bulkhead, Adequate applied his boltshot to the latch, silently apologized to his administrators, and fired.
The handle finally moved—and the panel started to unseal.
“Be careful,” his ancilla said. “The area inside is under extreme pressure.”
Adequate stood off to the side of the door and forced the panel open.
He was startled when the expected breeze went the other way, blowing from the hallway into the opening. Once the mini-gale subsided, he stepped before the aperture and shined his built-in helmet light inside.
“There’s—” Adequate stopped in mid-statement. He couldn’t understand what he was looking at. “Shouldn’t this be filled with harvested particles?”
“Correct,” his ancilla said, “if it were in operation. Materials collected by the vanes are conveyed to the holding tanks at the hub by gases under pressure.”
“Perhaps the Flood attack deactivated the collectors?”
“No. The fact that you were able to open the service hatchway at all indicates that the tube was never pressurized. Your armor’s sensors also do not indicate the presence of many remnant particles. Adequate . . .”
“What is it?”
“Based on my calculations, this vane of the station has not been used in more than ten solar years.”
“Ten years . . . ?” Adequate couldn’t quite believe it. He climbed inside and looked to and fro. “How could a vane have been out of service this long without the station’s systems knowing about it?”
“Unable to form a conclusion at this time. It also seems unlikely that this one section alone could have been out of service. I now believe that none of the vanes could have been in operation.”
This admission stunned Adequate. “That . . . that is impossible.”
The ancilla projected a cascade of physics equations onto the inside of his faceplate. “Unless all the transfer tubes are pressurized, Seclusion Spiral’s rotation would go out of balance. Its precession would be noticeable, and would have to be corrected for. The only possible conclusion is that, in the last decade, this station has not collected a single particle.”
“Are you damaged? They send a tanker here every year. They spend six days filling it, while the service crew inspects the station. They just did it a few weeks ago!”
“I do not have enough information to speculate further. But you must seal the panel quickly, before the Flood arrives. Simply reenter the hub from the central storage tank hatch.”
The ancilla was correct about how to get back into the hub, but wrong about how easy a task it would be. The entire journey was in the dark, with Adequate looking behind him in panic at every sound, fearful the Flood had entered the chamber. Several times, he had attempted to contact others aboard the station—but they either could not hear his calls, or were too busy to answer.
He hoped it was one or the other.
The main collection tank was hardest to navigate, narrowing and splitting into seven smaller hexagonal passageways. It took precious time for Adequate to figure out that six went to filtration systems, while the seventh headed for the tank—and he’d been forced to crawl on his stomach to get into it, then make an acrobatic leap for the handle of the exit hatch.
He’d found the hub abandoned, with bulkheads shut on all but two tunnels. The monitors dedicated to watching the spokes and vanes showed nothing. “Someone’s been here,” Adequate observed. “They must have closed these other bulkheads.”
His ancilla established a new connection with the central computer. “There is a message here from Capital-Enforcer’s ancilla on the hub’s core computer,” his ancilla said. “Power has been lost to the transponders that relay messages between personnel.”
That was both bad news and a relief. “Capital’s alive.” He looked to the two open tunnels, leading to Vanes Three and Five. “Where is he?”
“Capital’s ancilla reports that they sealed the spokes leading to Vanes One, Two, and Four—there must have been an outbreak on Four—and that our surviving personnel have entered the tunnels for Vanes Three and Five, expecting that the hub here will be overtaken soon. Capital’s ancilla says here that they intend a last stand.”
Adequate looked from one open tunnel to the other. “Should I follow? And if so, which way?”
“I lack sufficient information to advise.” A pause. “But I do not agree with my fellow ancilla. There is no reason to believe the spokes are any more defensible than the hub—especially when the vanes at the far end were the sources of the Flood infestation to begin with.”
How did it get there in the first place? Adequate wondered. It was highly improbable that the Flood could have arrived here independently. Yes, Flood spores could spread on meteors and comets, as well as derelict space equipment hurtling around the stars. But Seclusion was exactly that—secluded, far from other systems and slipspace corridors alike.
It made no sense that the Flood could have arisen from below: nothing should be able to survive beneath the furious clouds.
But he had just seen otherwise.
“Could the avian have brought the infestation?”
“It is unlikely. If the Flood were already present down in the storm, it logically should have found the station before now. You have said you have seen the avian before.”
“I’m pleased you believe me now.”
“The timing makes me suspect something else.” It took milliseconds for the ancilla, in concert with the hub’s command computer, to examine its theory. “Yes. The infestation likely began in the replacement digester units just installed by the service team.”
“The apparatus that breaks down waste. That’s why the outbreak started on the tips of the vanes.”
“Correct. They bring in fresh pods of microorganisms annually. Flood spores must have been mixed in with them and been awakened. The malleable seals would have given them a means of escape. They must have infected several of our sentries, taking them directly to combat forms—and their bodies gave rise to the infection forms we now see. I also suspect the Flood is drawing on the biomass in the digester pods to create an environment that might exponentially increase the rate and severity of infestation.”
“The tanker brought the digester pods,” Adequate said. “Did they report any problems?”
“Checking.” After a beat, the ancilla spoke again. “There has been no report of the supply ship reaching any waypoint following its departure here. It has not kept to its schedule.”
“No emergency call?”
“Negative. I conjecture that any Flood outbreak carried aboard the vessel could have debilitated it in slipspace.”
That meant an unspeakably horrible end for those aboard—his colleagues for the past solar year and longer. He could imagine them, all happily headed off to their new assignments and away from the purgatory of Seclusion and Barely-Adequate—only to find their flight and their lives cut off. He had not been particularly friendly with any of them, but his ambitions were joined to theirs. And now all were snuffed out.
Only afterward did he consider another implication. No one can come back to help us.
And then another thought, just as dark, struck him. “They did service on every vane,” Adequate said, looking from side to side in alarm. “That means Vanes Three and Five are no longer safe, after all.”
He did not wait for the ancilla to confirm his theory. Adequate chose the nearest tunnel and ran.
Vane Five was it, the last stand.
Adequate had only gotten partway down Vane Three when he had seen the Flood rampaging toward him—including, to his horror, the transformed figures of two more of his companions. He had retreated and sealed the tunnel, leaving only one option left. There, down the spoke leading to Vane Five, he had found Capital-Enforcer blazing away.
Adequate reached the warrior’s side and joined in the shooting. There was no accounting for what faced him now. He had lost track of how many comrades had fallen, had lost any sense of the mechanics of transformation. All he knew was that the station that had been his home, antiseptic and pristine, for so many years was in the throes of a rampaging disease. Its arteries and veins now coursing with enormous stalking bipeds, with herds of skittering infection forms.
And he and Capital were the only antibodies.
So many, so unimaginably hideous. Until today, he had gone fifteen years without firing his boltshot. Now, he didn’t want to take his finger off the trigger. Destruction was the only answer for such creatures. He targeted a greenish-colored infection form—and reveled as the running pustule popped. His weapon found the hulking combat form, knocking it backward but doing no damage. Less satisfaction there. He could no longer make out the straight lines of the floor, the wall, the ceiling: the whole spoke was alive. He existed to kill it.
Between the dual attack, the Flood’s charge abated. Adequate’s ancilla studied his armor’s long-range sensors and reported that the creatures were still up ahead, but regrouping. “We are the only ones left,” Adequate said to Capital as they huddled behind a half-closed emergency door for cover. “All the other vanes are sealed and infested.”
“We have to scuttle the station, plunge it into the gas giant,” Capital said, his voice grave. “Or it will sit here as a festering trap forever. Anyone who tries to board will suffer as we have.”
Adequate took the news with a combination of resignation and disappointment. Destruction in this manner was a standard protocol for gas mines and other similar stations at high risk.
“Do you have your master key?”
Adequate fumbled for it in a compartment on his utility belt. Capital found his own. “It takes both your key and mine to get into the catastrophic-response system. You know where to use it?”
“Yes.” The system was a fearsome-looking console in the hub, one Adequate had long preferred not to look at.
Capital put his key in Adequate’s gloved hand. “Take them both. If I fall . . . end it.”
Adequate stared at the pair of electronic keys. He had grown to hate Seclusion Spiral over the last few years, and yet . . . it was still his home. “Are you certain you don’t want to do it?”
“You have seniority. It is your duty to remain.” Capital fired another volley and looked back at him. “No less is expected from any of us. We were all sent here to sacrifice ourselves against the Flood.”
“Sacrifice ourselves? Here?” Adequate didn’t understand. “Why would the Librarian think the Flood would come here? This is the last place the Flood should want.”
“So we all thought. But I saw something out the window this morning that made me believe otherwise.”
Adequate’s eyes widened. The avian? “You saw it too?”
“I saw three of them.” Down the tunnel, chaotic movement. Capital turned back to his shooting. “Forget about me. Go!”
Adequate did as he was told, still not quite understanding.
Five great doors, all sealed shut—and the monitors in the hub that still worked showed the Flood gathering outside every one. Adequate had seen on the monitors that Capital had fallen and been transformed into what he had tried to destroy. It was only a matter of time before the monsters’ battering undermined the hub, Adequate’s refuge of last resort.
Yet here he stood for long minutes, motionless, with one key already placed in the catastrophic-response-system console. The other remained in his hand. He stared at it, trying to ignore the pummeling sounds coming from all around. Those sounds, and the voice of his ancilla, constantly urging him to activate the device and destroy the station.
He knew what he needed to do—and yet something in what Capital had said still puzzled him. In the last hour, he had learned more about Seclusion Spiral and its surroundings than he had found out in fifteen years residing here.
And all at once, it made sense. “Ancilla!”
“What, Adequate?”
“I know what’s been happening.”
“Of course you do,” the AI responded, as animated as it ever sounded. “We are under siege!”
“Not that. I meant during the last ten solar years. I know why the particle transfer tubes are empty—why the collector’s systems have been offline all this time.” He paused. “I believe you know what I mean too.”
“Your reason centers are your private space, Adequate—I will not know unless you express the concept. But do it quickly, or—”
“The avians. I believe there are many more, down in the storm—and that my superiors must have known of their existence. You calculated that the station hasn’t been harvesting particles for more than ten solar years. Why is that?”
“I am unaware—”
“It is because ten years ago, the Forerunners discovered them here. But they mentioned nothing—because by then, they were aware of the threat the Flood posed. They didn’t want to open this new species to destruction.” He paused. “No, not destruction. Exploitation. Absorbing a species capable of thriving in the skies of a gas giant could provide the Flood with a unique and dangerous new set of capabilities.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
Adequate shook his head, frustrated. As intelligent as his ancilla was, it sometimes lacked in imagination—particularly when it came to visualizing worst-case scenarios. “Don’t you see? Imagine what this species could mean for a world under siege. The Flood could deploy the avians from their ships, never having to land, never having to sacrifice their vessels on entry. A Flood ship could endanger a whole world as soon as it was in range!” The thought alone nearly made him cringe. “That explains the measures that have been taken. The Librarian had to make sure the Flood never discovered the avians.”
More hammering from outside. “This order of events is illogical, Adequate. If they wanted to protect the avians of Seclusion from the Flood, they could have removed the station, rather than have it here attracting attention.”
“Possibly they were afraid the Flood would find its way here regardless. As long as any Forerunner knew the avians existed, the potential existed for the Flood to gain that knowledge too.”
“Then why did they not simply remove the avians themselves, through the Conservation Measure?”
“You know the conditions in the winds below. It might not have been possible. If any avians remained . . .” He trailed off. “Perhaps it was too late. That is why they left the station in place, with a skeleton crew. I believe Capital-Enforcer suspected we were here to be a decoy.”
“A decoy?”
“I know.” The concept was both enlightening and infuriating. “They realized the Flood would find Seclusion one day—and it did, via our tanker. And they knew what would happen next.”
The ancilla finally understood. “You would have destroyed the station—and with it, this infestation of the Flood.”
“Then this entire world would be cut off from the Flood, seemingly devoid of any viable hosts.” He turned over the second key in his hand. “So the other sentries and I have been here as a living shield, an offering. The Forerunners assigned us here to ensure that when the Flood finally arrived at Seclusion, it wouldn’t detect the avians. And the galaxy would be spared a potential Flood form capable of immediately rendering worlds defenseless because of their resilience to extremes.”
The ancilla paused long seconds before answering. “The conjecture is possible. Given the electrical interference of the storm below, the Flood could well be tricked into thinking that any bioelectrical activity in this region is localized to the station above.”
“So the Flood would consume us—and then leave what’s below alone.”
“The conjecture is possible.”
Adequate sighed. “I am no longer enamored of my assignment.”
The din rose. “Structural failure on door two is imminent,” the ancilla said. “What will you do?”
“My duty, I suppose.” Adequate took a look at the abominations on the monitors—and inserted the key into the slot on the console beside Capital’s. A panel whirred open, exposing a blinking green button. “Good-bye, ancilla. I am sorry you were not joined with a better Manipular.”
“I have no complaints, Adequate. Good-bye.”
Adequate awoke in darkness, with his body pinned upside down between a heavy object and a metal surface. Every muscle in his body screamed. If this was death, it was more painful than he’d been led to expect.
With extreme effort, he forced the massive structure trapping him backward. It was a data processing tower, he realized; it had come centimeters from crushing the life out of him against the hub’s wall. On his hands and knees, he struggled to get his bearings.
The command center looked as if a giant had shaken it like a toy. Every furnishing, every piece of equipment that could move had relocated. Woozily, he struggled to get to his feet. His body felt heavy. Was the hub accelerating upward? He couldn’t tell. The whole facility felt as if it were underwater. Above, the skylights had closed, protective shields locked into place. He could make out sizable dents on the ceiling nearby, artifacts of the great shaking.
“Ancilla? Ancilla?”
For the first time since he had been united with the automated assistant, Adequate failed to get a response. That fact terrified him more than anything that had yet befallen. Even though he had always felt apart from the group for fifteen solar years, he had never felt completely alone, thanks to his ancilla. He couldn’t imagine going on without it.
Adequate activated his helmet light and staggered around the chamber, righting equipment as he went. Finding one of the stations governing power, he tripped a switch and watched as several of the systems in the hub came back online.
He thought he heard wind coming through what was likely a broken seal in his helmet. Focusing, it resolved into a hum at the back of his head. Seconds later, it became a voice.
“. . . Adequate?”
“Ancilla!”
“I . . . apologize. My systems appear to have gone into hibernation during whatever happened.” A pause. “What did happen?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.” There were no sounds coming from the five doorways to the spokes, and none of the monitors displaying feeds from that part of the station had come back online. “Are you in contact with the core computer?”
“My connection is still resetting. Perhaps look out a viewport.”
Adequate stumbled toward another console and activated a control. Above, shields slid down into one of the skylight window frames, unleashing a blaze of color. It took several seconds for Adequate’s eyes to adjust.
“I thought perhaps we had launched into space.” He squinted. “Where are we?”
“Open the rest.”
He did so—and the skylights ringing the circular room revealed a spectral sea. Tendrils of clouds swirled and danced back and forth, lit by near-constant flashes of multicolored lightning.
And everywhere were the avians.
He had wanted a long look at them. He had it now. Whole flocks of avians coursed across the sky, swooping about with ease and in comfort. There was none of the tentative, fearful nature of the being he had seen earlier. No, here, they had command—and “here” was not the place he had been before.
Adequate fell to his knees, and not just because of the pull on his body. “We are deep in the storm. We are in their home.”
Flying creatures soared past the windows, tiny microbursts of electricity flashing across their rippling forms. There seemed, somehow, to be a logic to it: was it perhaps their means of communication, Adequate wondered? He felt like one of the explorers he had heard of, living undersea on a strange world, communing with a culture that existed hidden from view.
And now there were smaller ones, identical in form and shape to the others but for their size, fluttering against the panes above. Not threatening the station, at all—but he could tell they were excited. And there, on another avian’s dorsal side, clung what he at first thought was a bumpy fin. On closer look, they appeared to be even smaller avians, still. Were they the species’ young, or something else? Every few moments, they flitted from the back of one adult to another. What kind of community might they have?
A minute in which he could not take his eyes from the skylight ended when his ancilla spoke. “Connection reacquired. The console function apparently did destroy the Flood—by shedding the station’s vanes.”
Adequate got to his feet and looked to the doors with alarm. “We would fall without them!”
“We did. And so did the vanes.” The ancilla paused. “According to the hub’s computer, when you toggled the control, the spokes holding the vanes explosively ejected. Cut off from the rotating hub, each one was slung kilometers away.”
“What happened to them?”
“They were swept into the electrical storm and ripped to shreds. The hub’s sensors saw it all, before it lost too much elevation.”
“So the Flood . . . ?”
“Gone. The computer believes the vanes were pulverized. No Flood infection could possibly have survived there—and no invasive elements have been detected on the hub.”
“But how did we survive?”
“We fell many kilometers—until the hub’s engines ignited.”
“They did? I thought the thrusters were only used to brake the hub when the station was deployed from orbit—and for elevation when it got caught in downdrafts.”
“It appears,” the ancilla said, “that the hub’s systems considered the loss of the vanes a catastrophic event—and that it fired the thrusters before we descended to a crushing depth.”
“It certainly felt catastrophic.” He paused and looked out the skylight again. “Can it take us back up?”
Another pause. “The central computer does not believe so. The crosswinds above are too strong. We appear to be hovering in a zone of relative calm within the vortex, at equilibrium between the tempest above and the pressure below.”
“How long can we remain here?”
“As long as the thrusters burn.”
“And how long is that?”
“Indefinitely. The stubs that used to hold the vanes deployed electrostatic collectors; they are now drawing power from outside. It should be sufficient to keep us stable—and for life-support needs. But you will feel slightly heavier for the constant acceleration.”
“I will live,” Adequate said. Then he smiled at that. I will live.
“The food pantry was freshly stocked—and for twenty-one,” his ancilla said. “With those reserves and your armor’s defalt sustainment system, you should be able to survive for . . . well, a lifetime. You will have the complete run of the living quarters.”
Adequate didn’t register the comment. His eyes were again on the avians, hovering outside. They flitted back and forth—and one paused particularly close, looking in. He wondered if it was the one who he’d seen earlier, above.
“If the avians live down here, why did they visit us at the cloud tops?”
“Insufficient information. Perhaps they consume for food the same particles Seclusion Spiral was designed to harvest.” The ancilla paused. “Or perhaps they were curious.”
“They are wonderful,” Adequate said. The avian outside glistened, electrical energy seeming to well from somewhere within its form. They could clearly fly to the top of the enormous storm, if they wanted to; in his mind’s eye, he could see them soaring the cosmos, using their mysterious internal power for propulsion. But he could not imagine them ever wanting to leave, not with such a lovely world here below providing all they needed.
“The Forerunners were correct to protect them from the Flood,” his ancilla said.
Adequate let out a deep breath. “It is a shame these magnificent things do not know what sacrifice has been made for them.”
“We may teach them, Adequate. We have plenty of time—and a number of methods by which the hub might establish communication.” His ancilla sounded almost excited. “Before long, you might be able to tell them the designations of all those who protected them—including yours.”
“I have never cared for mine.” Adequate chuckled, in spite of himself. “Spare me that.”
“No, I think you are Adequate-Observer no longer.”
He didn’t know what the ancilla meant. “I have not evolved.”
“I disagree. From today, I think you should be called Defender-of-the-Storm.”
The Forerunner mentally tried it on. “I like it.” He continued wandering the room, constantly looking up at the avians. “And perhaps they have stories to tell us too.”