Halo: Primordium (28 page)

The wolf-orb grew each night. Thirteen thumb-widths, almost.

Somehow Riser and I nodded off, perhaps interrupting the old spirits’ conversation. Just as light returned, we jerked awake, sensing a change in the air—and a soft sound like wind.

The rail wagon
whooshed
over our heads.

We al stood up and stared. The wagon was just a moving dot, already kilometers away.

“Something’s working again,” Vinnevra said. Mara whistled and grumbled, and Vinnevra agreed with her—whatever it was the ape had said.

“Walk more?” Riser asked her.

“No.” Vinnevra looked around, hands on her hips, and shook her head firmly. “This is where we need to be.” And it was—if we listened to those inner guides.

Stil, we looked around—nothing but dirt, no water, no food, no shelter—dismayed but hardly surprised. The skin on my face and arms was brown and flaking and Riser was pinking and patchy.

Mara was stil losing fur, though out here, there were no nesting birds she could tempt.

We were a mess, but it was so
good
to know we had finaly arrived.

Again.

The sky bridge taunted us with its graceful silence.

It didn’t happen right away, but after my thoughts had blurred into an agony of thirst and hunger, and the sun was beyond unbearable, and madness seemed near—

The ground shivered.

“Not now,” I tried to say with a thick tongue and crusted lips.

Riser didn’t speak, just lay back flat and clasped his hands over his face.

Then the ground crumbled and split in sections. We crawled every which way until the trembling stopped. When I roled over to look, a platform had broken through the dirt. Shuddering clods marched off its flatness until it was pristine white.

Along the platform’s edge smal poles rose up and benches shaped themselves at the center.

We waited. Anything might happen. The Primordial itself might pop out of the platform and reach out to grab us.

Halo night swept over and the tops of the poles shoved out little blue lamps that cast a steady glow across the platform. We watched al this, not moving, for many minutes, but then, as one—

even the ape—we stood up and walked painfuly toward the platform, stepped onto it, and peered up at the lamps.

Riser crawled up on a bench and began picking his feet. I hoisted myself to sit beside him, and Mara joined us. We waited some more. Every so often, my little friend would look up and wrinkle his nose.

Vinnevra kept near the outside of the platform, ready to run if anything bad started to happen. Of course, there was no place to run.

Then we heard a faint humming sound. Across the shadowed land, a star glowed way out along the rail. I watched the star move toward us down the wheel’s shaded curve, trying to figure how far off it was—many hundreds, perhaps thousands of kilometers.

off it was—many hundreds, perhaps thousands of kilometers.

Moving fast. It grew to a bright beacon that threw a long beam ahead through the dusty air, and then—another great wagon rushed down upon us—and we fel flat on our faces!

It stopped instantly, silently, right over our heads, ten meters above the platform. Wind folowed and pushed at Mara’s nimbus of fur.

The wind spent itself in gritty dust devils, spinning off into the darkness.

The humming became a low, steady drumming.

Vinnevra had found the strength to run off. I couldn’t see her.

The rest of us stood up under the transport.

A disk cut itself out of one side and descended to the platform.

Again, I flinched—but it was just a disk, curved like the part of the wagon it had come from, blank on both sides. A series of smaler poles rose up around the outside of the disk, minus one, where, I supposed, we were expected to step up and get on.

I caled hoarsely for Vinnevra. Finaly she came out of the darkness and stood next to me.

“What do you think?” I asked. It didn’t much matter whether we did this thing or stayed here. We were being reeled in. We didn’t have much time left either way.

She took my hand. “I go where you go.”

Mara climbed aboard, pushing sideways between the poles. We al folowed. The disk lifted us through the air, tilted us at an angle—

I was afraid we might slide and fal off, but we didn’t—and then inserted us through the hole in the side of the transport.

I thought I saw three doors, was about to decide which one to take, but then—there was only one door, and we were inside. The disk sealed itself tight. No cracks, no seams—very Forerunner. The air was cool. Mara had to bend over to fit under the ceiling, which glowed a pleasant silvery yelow.

A blue female appeared—the wagon’s ancila, I guessed, human-looking but about as tal as Riser. The image floated at one end of the transport, toes pointed down. She raised her arms gracefuly and said, “You have been requested. We wil take you where you need to be.”

The wals became clear and seats rose up that fit al of us—even a kind of low couch for Mara, who preferred to lie on her side.

“Would you like refreshments?” the blue lady asked. “The trip wil not be very long, but we see you are hungry and thirsty.” None of us hesitated. Water and more of that pleasant-tasting paste, in bowls, floated out on several smaler disks, and we ate and drank. . . . My lips seemed to fil out, my eyes felt almost normal again, not covered with grit. My stomach complained, then settled in to its work. I could feel the humming, drumming of the transport through my butt and my feet.

The blue lady took away the refreshments before we made ourselves sick. We waited, ful, no longer thirsty, but stil expecting bad things.

“We have three passenger compartments today,” the ancila announced. I saw only one, the one we were in, and it looked just a little smaler than the wagon’s outside. Where were the other two?

“Our journey wil begin shortly.”

Don’t trust any of it,
Lord of Admirals advised me. I didn’t need to be warned. We had been
requested.
That meant somebody knew we were here, and wanted us. And that, coming from any Forerunner, was likely not a good thing.

Vinnevra sat looking out at the passing, darkened land. I leaned forward—I was sitting behind her—and touched her shoulder. She turned her head and stared at me, half-asleep.

“I don’t blame you for anything,” I said. “I hope you’l let me off the hook, too.”

She just looked ahead again, nodded once, and shortly after that, she fel asleep.

I too saw very little of the journey. And it was a long journey.

When I came awake, the transport had passed into day and was crossing a rugged, rocky landscape, al gray. Clouds flew by. I wondered if we ourselves were flying now but couldn’t see the rail, so there was no way of knowing.

Then something big and dark flashed past just a few meters from the wagon. At our speed, even that brief passage meant the wal or building or whatever it was must have been very large.

The lights inside the transport flickered.

The blue lady stood at the front of our cabin, eyes fixed, body changing in slow waves between the shape of a Forerunner—a Lifeworker—and a human. Her mouth moved, but she did not say anything I could hear.

The transport gave the merest shiver, then stopped with hardly any sensation. The disk-door fel away from the side, but this time fast, landing with a resounding clang somewhere below.

That didn’t sound right.

Suddenly, I could feel, then see, shuffling, moving forms al around us—coming and going in slow waves. I seemed to stand in three different interiors at once, with different lighting, different colors—different occupants.

Riser let out a thin shriek and leaped to clutch my arm. Mara pushed her head and shoulders up against the ceiling, arms held high, trying to avoid the things moving around us in the awful guttering half-light.

Vinnevra clutched the ape’s side, eyes wild.

Everything suddenly got physical. Dust rose around us in clouds.

We were surrounded, jostled. Pink and gray lumps bumped into us as they shambled forward, trying to reach the exit. They might have been Forerunners once—al kinds, even big ones as large as the Didact—but they were hardly Forerunners now. One turned to look down at me, eyes milky, face distorted by growths. Tendrils swayed below its arms, and when it turned toward the exit, I saw it had another head growing from its shoulder.

Al were partialy encased in what seemed at first glance to be Forerunner armor—but this was different. It seemed to flow of its own wil around their deformed and rearranged bodies, as if struggling to hold them together—and keep them apart. These maleable cases were studded with little moving machines, rising up and dropping back from the armor’s surface like fish rising and then sinking in water—al working as hard as can be to constrain, organize, preserve.

Poor bastards. They’ve got it bad—the Shaping Sickness.

“I know that,” I said, under my breath.

But it’s been held back, retarded. Only prolongs their misery

—but perhaps they remain useful, maintain their services to the
Master Builder.

I wasn’t sure of that, not at al. Perhaps something that controled the plague was caling them in. Perhaps they had become slaves of the Primordial—of the subverted machine master of the wheel.

“They were with us al along!” Vinnevra whispered harshly.

“Why didn’t we see them?”

Bright lights moved just outside the door—monitors with single green eyes. Floating before them—under their control, but physicaly separate—metal arms and clamps guided oval cages.

One by one, the clamps circled the transformed and encased occupants, tightened, lifted them, and inserted them into the cages, which then floated away. With what few wits I had left, I counted twenty, twenty-five, thirty of the plague-stricken things.

The interior stabilized.

The blue lady announced, in her human form, “You have arrived at your destination. You are now at Lifeworker Central. Please exit quickly and alow us to service this compartment.” Except for us, the transport again seemed empty.

TWENTY-FIVE

ANOTHER MONITOR—ALSO
green-eyed—met us as we dropped down from the open door—no steps, no conveniences. The disk wobbled and clanked beneath our weight. Mara descended as gently as she could but the disk slammed down, then wobbled as she got off.

The transport was streaked with dust and a thick green fluid.

Once we were off, the hole in the side filed in—grew a new door, I suppose—then the transport swung around and about on the rail, this time hanging down from the bridge, below the platform.