“What will happen to us?” Chakas asked. “We’re not even supposed to be here.”
“They will punish,” Riser said.
I could not answer. I did not know.
A second ancilla appeared beside the ship’s. The two engaged in some sort of contest, not physical but conducted throughout all the ship’s systems. Their images merged, twisted geometrically about each other, then spiraled up and vanished.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“AI suppressors,” the Didact said. “Instant debriefing and transfer. Our ship has been stripped of knowledge and control.”
We were feeling the full strength of a Forerunner warship’s most modern weaponry, wrapped and stunned like a fly in a web. Close-in confinement fields flashed around the command center. We felt gravitation cease. At odd angles, the Didact, the humans, and I waited helplessly in semidarkness, blind to all outside activity. Our own ancillas fell silent under the AI suppressors beamed from outside.
Finally came total darkness. Minutes passed.
Riser was praying in an old human dialect not heard in ten thousand years. Its cadences sounded familiar to me. The Didact had once studied human languages.
Chakas was silent.
Slowly, my armor started to fail. My breath came hard and shallow. Something sparkled to my right. I tried to turn, but the armor had locked up and now held me immobile. An orange glare increased to unbearable brilliance, and I saw our bulkheads and control surfaces melt and collapse—while new walls of hard light fought to rise between us and the vacuum. Even under siege, stripped of nearly all higher functions, the Didact’s ship was valiantly trying to protect us.
Our world became a twisting, free-form struggle between destructor beams and new construction. I watched in numb fascination as the struggle ramped up to a pitch I could not track with my natural senses … and then slowly subsided.
Our ship was losing.
Half of what was left of the control center—abstract and angular and much smaller—fell away and vanished. I briefly saw the curved flank of a sleek Despair-class hunter-killer, glinting and flashing as it reflected the dying glow of our hull’s destruction. We drifted free. Our air rapidly staled, and we were surrounded by vacuum.
Into my narrowing point of view came three powerful, fully operational seekers—longer, sleeker, versions of the Didact’s old war sphinxes. They lacked the scowling features of the older machines—depersonalized, dark, fast.
One of them cut through the new-grown walls and circled behind us, then dropped aft, penetrating interior bulkheads, searching for other occupants. Through shredded layers of ship’s decking, I watched it release the war sphinxes—only to smash them like toys, slice them into sections, and then reduce those to sparking dust.
The sphinxes offered no resistance.
Another took the Didact in tow, bouncing in his armor like a child’s toy on a string as he was hauled from the dying ship into the depths of space.
The third lingered near me but took no action, as if awaiting instructions. Then, just as my vision shrank to a purplish cone and I thought I had taken my last breath, the seeker swept out its manipulators, seized my armor, and tugged me from the broken hull, not toward a flotilla of ships, but outward, around—and finally, down.
We were all being unceremoniously dragged to the surface of the San’Shyuum world.
Source: Halo: Cryptum
