Their faces fascinated me, but nowhere among them could I find Vinnevra. A few resembled Gamelpar, purple dark of skin and reddish brown of hair, with broad, flat faces and warm, inteligent eyes.
But Vinnevra was not here.
Age. Diversity. Very few young. That gave me my first shalow clue. Then Riser returned, dragging with him three other cha manush—a male and two females. On Erde-Tyrene, I had found females of Riser’s people to be quiet and reclusive, until they had made firm acquaintance—and then, al too familiar, quick to poke and make rude inquiries, nothing off limits, everything either wonderful or funny. I had never been quite sure how to deal with Riser’s women, or his female relatives—on those few occasions when I interacted with them—for Riser seldom invited me to his home, and seemed to prefer going out on jobs with me and his other young ha manush minions.
But now he had two females in tow, of that ageless puzzlement of cha manush years. Cha manush grizzled in their adolescence but seldom turned al gray or white, as my people did.
“Everyone is missing bits,” Riser told me. His companions stood a few paces back, nostrils flexing, watching the rest of the crowd.
They held hands, and one gestured for Riser to join them. He backed away from me, but nodded meaningfuly, eager to convey something important. We could barely hear each other in the rising babble, so he signed out: All from Erde-Tyrene. Younger fell from sky with us. Old ones brought here long ago.
Others gathered around, too tightly for my comfort, but I did not discourage them or express any distress—for the story was coming out, the familiar story, that within them they had al once had old spirits, old warriors, each distinctive and opinionated.
To a one, young and old, those inner voices were now silent.
I tried not to conspicuously stare at the missing pieces of their backs when they turned, raised their arms, gestured. But I could not help myself. Al of us on that wide-open, elevated platform—under that looming planet and starry sky, looking out over the stretch of Halo that had been the home of so many for so long—every single one of us had been wounded, sampled—“stung deep.” We al limped, old and young—and we al cringed when we moved.
But the important question, immediate and crucial, was, why were we here? What did the machine master of the wheel intend for us? For I had little doubt that Riser was correct, that the green-eyed ancila was behind al this. Did that mean it was now alied with the Didact, or with the Librarian, the Lifeshaper herself?
Had the wheel been reclaimed by the Lady?
Something else was missing in my thoughts, something that made al these theories pointless. I seemed to have misplaced a memory about a child. There was a child. . . . The child was in control . . .
held sway over the green-eyed machine. We had been introduced!
But I could not remember its name, and I certainly could not remember its shape.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
THE GROUP PARTED to open a passage. They craned their necks to see what was coming, rising over the edge of the platform. I caught a flash of briliant green. A monitor—larger than any I had seen so far, at least two meters wide—came into view and moved between the parted humans.
“Welcome to our instalation’s new command center,” it said in a beautiful, musical voice neither male nor female, nor much like a Forerunner’s.
Al of us, young and old, were pushed back by invisible forces until a circle cleared in the middle, about thirty paces across. As Riser and I were nudged back, I remembered the moments on the Didact’s ship when the entire hul seemed to vanish, giving us the sickening sensation of being suspended in space.
At least here there was the gentle mercy of a floor—a deck, as the Lord of Admirals would have caled it.
“Al bid welcome,” the beautiful voice said, “to the new masters of this instalation.”
At the center of our ring of frightened people, a number of hatches slid wide in the floor, and through these rose more monitors —smaler but otherwise almost indistinguishable from the large one.
Each had a single glowing green eye. As they rose, the hatches closed up beneath.
There were now more than forty monitors crowded inside the circle, surrounded by humans old and young. Al stood out in sharp detail against the deep backdrop of stars and the ever-growing red and gray planet, which now covered a third of the sky.
The nearest of these new monitors puled up before Riser and myself. It projected an image I instantly recognized—though I had never seen him before, not through my external eyes.
Male. Human. I looked the image over cautiously, closely, noting that his shape was similar to mine, though broader in shoulders and thighs; arms long and powerful-looking; hands thick and backed with patches of hair. A flatter, broader head and a great, square jaw.
“A strange reacquaintance,” the image said.
Unlike us, he appeared in raiment traditional for a high-ranking commander in the old human fleets: a rounded helmet that covered al but the forehead and the ears, a short coat over armor plates, a wide belt cinched just below the ribs, and form-fitting pants that revealed a bulging shield around the genitalia, which might, it seemed to me, have been more than a little exaggerated.
Like the ancilas, he was translucent—a ghost of a ghost, a whispering within made manifest without, like Genemender back in the Lifeworkers’ preserve. Yet having carried him within me for so long, I would have recognized him anywhere.
This was Forthencho, the Lord of Admirals.
“We’re being given command,” the image said. “Believe this. It is true. The time for our victory has arrived.”
Riser touched my hand. I broke from my fascination to glance down at the little one. He clenched his jaw and made a smal shake of his head. His meaning was clear enough. He was incapable of further judgment or action. We had both been carried so far beyond any human wisdom or experience that any move we made— anything we might say or do—was equaly likely to produce a good outcome or a bad—equaly likely to pul us deeper into Forerunner madness, or propel us out and up.
The image of the Lord of Admirals continued. “We have been carried by these descendants, our vessels, for many years. And now we are brought here, for this moment, by a machine that has long since turned against Forerunners. It wishes us to defeat them— to cause them misery and dismay. And so we shal!
“But there is no way yet to know our total strength, or how far we may go . . . with our new command, but this we do know, finaly: after ten thousand years, we have a chance to avenge our cruel mistreatment.
“We have urgent work to do al around this infernal wheel,” the Lord of Admirals continued. “Forerunners have cocked things up magnificently before having the grace to kil each other or die of the Shaping Sickness they wished to communicate to us. The wheel itself is in jeopardy. There is little time, and so extreme measures have been authorized.”
The larger monitor rose up, a faint display of lacework energies playing across its features. It hovered over us al—the inner circle of machines and the outer of the humans.
Al around, the apparent openness of stars and planet was overlaid by vivid, glowing displays. The sky became like the inside of one of the old caves, filed with instructive images and stories masterfuly tuned to our ignorant needs. I seemed to both see and feel a sharply defined awareness of how we al needed to behave, to act in concert.
The image of the Lord of Admirals favored me with particular attention. “You have a decent mind, young human,” he said. “We have traveled wel together. I wil place you beside me at the center of this weapon’s control and command. If together we can save this Halo, then we wil use it to strike against the heart of Forerunner defenses. But the time between now and then wil be very difficult.”