Reclaiming the Mantle

[Lord Hierarch]

You are Reclaimers.

We are the last of those who gave their lives to protect this galaxy. You are interlopers into our domain, beyond the rim of the Galaxy like those who crafted us in their image. You have allowed the Goa’uld to grow and Elder Races to cull. Your time is at an end - for we have come to reclaim the Mantle you forsook.

We are the Forerunners.

This is our answer.

.

The endless space around the star system was bristling with signs of life. The blackness of the void was enhanced by the teasing twinkling on bright little stars and the bright white fog that formed the galactic core. The broken brown and black planet near the center of this star system did show many signs of life and activity, an endless cycle of mining and manufacturing by masses of miner’s number in the millions. Hovering amid black fumes and coils of smoke emanating from vast manufacturing complexes buried deep within the crust of the dying planet were countless shipyards arrayed in the shape of the Eye of Ra.

This planet was once the birthplace of a technologically advanced civilization that had begun exploring nearby stars, wide-eyed in hopes of meeting other races to answer the age old question every space faring race asked at one point in their existence: Are we alone. Nary had a century passed before the race received their answer in the forms of Goa’uld Ha’tak’s. Virtually unopposed, the ancient Goa’uld leveled the plant’s cities from space, casually dropping Naquadah bombs and unguided rocks down to the planet before enslaving the race. Broken, the captives did little to resist and held the honor of being one of the first of many advanced races that the Goa’uld would conquer for thousands of years.

Their descendants continued the work their ancestors had started – mining the riches of their world and aiding their God in repelling outside threats and the advances of preying Demi-Gods and rival deities. On occasion radicals would attempt to sabotage work efforts, hoping to draw their oppressors out and incite mass rebellion. But these attempts rarely last long under the steely gaze of their hawk-headed guards, and many looked away whenever these saboteurs were caught. No one wanted to attract any more attention than needed.

Small mining crafts, reconfigured Tel’tak’s and Al’kesh, flew to the surface of two small moons that and spent hours mining the valuable ore, ore which centuries of mining were being taken from greater depths of the moons, and from chamber and shafts that took days to climb out of. But the guards didn’t care because if one miner died in the depths of the moon for another would simply take his place – there were plenty on the planet below. If a shaft collapsed another would be started – there was no use in digging slaves out.

The planet was the crown of jewel of Ra’s domain, the most advanced manufacturing site in the far-flung Goa’uld Empire. On average the planet produced a hundred attack ships per year, aiding Ra in subduing rouge Underlords or reminding daring System Lords why he ruled over the empire for tens of thousands of years virtually unchallenged by the rest of his brethren.
The dozens of lethal Ha’tak’s that patrolled the system weren’t limited by the 104th Council Accord, and because of that their weapon systems, Hyperdrive and other key systems weren’t limited like the ships the lesser Goa’uld, even the System Lords, used. One the rare occasion a Goa’uld would attempt to seize a few ships and each their force never made it past the fourth planet before being destroyed by converging attack pyramids.

However the age of Ra was ending. Because even as the miners continued digging deeper in search of Naquadah and Trinium, even as new Ha’tak’s and fleets of Al’kesh, Death Gliders and armor for thousands of Jaffa were being forged within the fiery depths of the manufacturing complexes, on a distant world half way across the galaxy, a desert world was being visited for the first time by explorers from a half-forgotten world and hallmark the beginning of the end for the sprawling Goa’uld Empire and the restart of an Old Age.

But for today, it would begin with a rupture in subspace.

The distortion was felt by every ship in the system, even those at the far edge of the system at the Oort Cloud. These ships froze in space, lurching forward as their momentum carried them on their courses. The Jaffa onboard these ships were confused as they desperately tried to maneuver the ships before realizing that their subspace engines had failed.

A handful of ships in orbit above the planet, a constant reminder to the natives below of the power their Gods held, had the honor of seeing the tip of an alien vessel come through the rupture. Subspace sensors tried to analyze the anomaly, and promptly crashed from the distortions the rupture was causing. Jaffa on the planet below and on the ships soon realized that even communication was down, and the ships on the far edge of the system began hollowing for help.

The ship that emerged from the rupture was a dull gray and vaguely semi-triangular, and utterly dwarfed the handful of Ha’tak’s that it had emerged over. The Jaffa on them could only stare in amazement at the alien ship, feeling for the time doubts about the superiority of their God. Shivers went down their spines at the sight of the timeless ship, and buried memories of monstrous misshapen creatures and majestic beings wielding incredible power were dredged up from the depths of their subconscious for a brief flash before fanaticism took over.

They were bred for loyalty, not for their intelligence, after all.

Cannons swiveled upward.

Without a second thought, globs of molten plasma erupted from the cannons around the superstructure of the pyramid ships, and streaked towards the ship with hundreds of megatons worth of explosive energy per bolt. Meters from the hull, the bolts smashed into flares of blue light, harmlessly splashing against the hull-hugging shields of the ancient ship.

Energy collected along the lateral lines of the ship and lashed out. Pillars of plasma sliced through the shields of the Ha’tak’s and through the Naquadah hulls, casually cutting the ships apart with the finesse of a doctor. The AI on the ship looked at the sliced remains of the ship with a mix of pity and curiosity. It deployed a few attack drones to retrieve pieces of technology from the ship, technology that had vague similarities (albeit crude parallels) to the technology on its ship.

Done with its deed, the ship fired its engines and continued on, having already scanned the world and the system, tagging the wayward ships scattered in the system for study and destruction later on. The inhabitants of the ship weren’t pleased at the condition that the planet had been reduced to. Tens of thousands of years ago, the planet had been a jewel, a reminder to their kind of the destructive power they wielded and that for all of their history, they were not infallible. It came across a space station three kilometers in length, ornate and engraved in a language that the AI had never come across before. It filed the lettering away and proceeded to send a few dozen drones to dismantle the station, allowing the plasma bolts to harmlessly splash against the shields of the ancient Dreadnaught.

There was work to be done.

A message was sent to the others waiting at the far edge of the galaxy and Warrior-Servants were sent planet side to cull the planet of its oppressors. It would take a decade, the Ancilla, noted, before the planet would look anything like it used to. Without their facilities or galactic infrastructure to support them, a task like this would have to be rushed, lacking the detail that Lifeworkers put into redesigning or crafting a planet like this.

Charum Hakkor would rise again.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Great start to a story. There are so few good SG/Halo stories out there its good to see one. So you're going with the new Forerunner Saga book timeline eh? Well that will be interesting. Looking forward to another chapter.

[Lord Hierarch]

I'm restarting the story :p


We are the Forerunners.

We were once a mighty race, the preeminent species in the galaxy. We were not the first race to roam the stars but we were the ones to take on the Mantle of safeguarding its species long after the Precursors vanished. Under our guiding care we shepherded a hundred thousand younger races, relieving them of the burden of conflict. We uplifted countless races as our Ecumene brought vast swaths of the galaxy under our control, crafting a hundred thousand worlds and birthing stars to breed new life forms. Where there was conflict we mediated and, at times, intervened.

For a hundred thousand years we believed in the Mantle, our laws and society, our actions and traditions based on what the Mantle meant. It never occurred to us that our ancestors, shaped in the images of the Precursors, built it to justify the genocide of the Elder Race. This truth shattered our view, broke us in the middle of the war.

The war…

The Flood came to the galaxy once before, a mutated plague from a distant galaxy meant for the Precursors. When the humans discovered the carriers it patiently waited, allowing humanity to spread it before it chose to strike. Before our distant relatives could contain the infection, the Flood rose against their discoverers, seizing hundreds of worlds as it tore the Human-San’Shyuum Alliance apart. Desperate to evade the Flood they dared break the ancient truce with my people, seizing worlds under our protection and world’s home to our kind. In retaliation, unaware of the pestilence ravaging their worlds, we brought our wrath down on their barbaric race and destroyed them.

It was until after the war that we came to know the truth that I came to know. I was shamed and distraught by what we had done. Yet the Flood had been repelled, thrown beyond the galaxy by a human bio weapon in the final years of the war. The secrets to the weapon were lost to us but it was inevitable that the Flood would return to plague as again and I sought to stop that. Yet the existence of the Flood, terrified the Council, and despite my victories against humanity my order, my entire caste, was thrown aside in favor of a series of super weapons that would render ships and soldiers relics of the past.

Yet I was not deterred.

Even as I went into exile, abandoning the fight even while others continued the struggle, my wife continued our plans, building Shield Worlds and cataloging the millions of races in the galaxy. When the Flood returned in forms the Council had never planned for, quarantines were erected and a hundred worlds cut off from the Ecumene. I slept through this, unaware of the return of the Flood or of the betrayal of my Bastard Child… and the release of the Prisoner. When I awoke I returned to witness the fall of the San’Shyuum, my death and resurrection, the fall of the Capital and the final phase of our war against the monstrous Flood. Under my leadership we took drastic steps to stem the tide once the quarantine failed and we began encountering the parasite armed with technology beyond our own understanding.

Despite the terrible things we did it was not enough. I sacrificed a hundred worlds to the Flood, billions of sapient beings, to test viral weapons. I ordered the premature collapse of stars to wipe out hundreds of ships and heavily infected worlds and even authorized the use of Slipspace weapons to create a spatial line across the galaxy. I doing so I abandoned trillions of my own caste to the Flood, one of my greatest sins. As we fought on every front the Flood continued spreading, and we came to understand why. A final weapon, akin to the Halo weapons, a weapon meant by a nearly dead races that superseded my own, meant to wipe us out.

In the final years of the war I committed my greatest sin. Forerunners were sent to Shield Worlds protected by legions of specialized Sentinels that came too late to aid the war. Others fled the galaxy, waiting in Dark Space as the line collapsed and we, the Warrior-Servants, the sword and shield of the Forerunners, waited at the Ark. As they approached, millions of ships blotting out suns, I was at the control room of a Halo, standing before a monitor as I asked uttered one last question, my last words.

“What would you do?”

It never answered, even as I placed the Index in the Core, even as shields of Hard Light surrounded the ring, even as the energy pulse coursed through the galaxy, even as the prodigal Halo Rings wiped a thousand civilizations out and brought the reign of my people down. It stared at me, following me as we departed for the Ark, the battle that raged between the Flood and ships now under the control of the last Metarch Ancilla. The survivors of the Halo Effect, far fewer in number that I had hoped for, said our last words to the thousands of index species that had been saved, and departed.

My wife and her caste would reseed the galaxy, settling down and watching over these races, shepherds in the shadows. But those of who fought, we politicians and commanders, the last of the Warrior-Servants, the Builders, Engineers and Miners, those of us who had aided in the fall of our people in someway, turned away. We had failed in the Mantle, failed our race and damned ourselves to extinction. Our time was at an end in this galaxy. However contrary to the legends of many lesser races we did not go so quietly. This galaxy was cleansed of the Flood and Forerunner, but there were other threats, threats from beyond. Relics from the Precursors revealed their ultimate, a fate that no one had ever expected.

The Precursors lived.

Given the chance, given what they planned for us so long ago, it was inevitable that they would return to finish what the Flood hadn’t. We who failed in upholding the Mantle gathered our ships and war machines and prepared ourselves to travel into Dark Space, beyond Forerunner curiosity, beyond the Mantle and into another galaxy, to the Precursors. The Halo’s we leave behind would remain a monument to our sins, the last records, the last bastions, of our legacy, a legacy of murder and sacrifice.

You came here through the Lost City, the crown jewel of our decadent creators, searching for the ones you called Ancients. Instead you’ve found us, their children and conquerors. The galaxy has been ravaged by a new parasite, deadly in its own right. These Asgard failed to uphold the Mantle, and you strive to shoulder the burden. You needn’t worry for we have moved past blaming ourselves for our failures.

We are the Forerunners.

This is our answer.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Wow, that was even better than the first one. I am really looking forward to more of this story now. Interesting to see how you're going with it.

[Lord Hierarch]

I am the Didact.

I am here as a monument to all your sins, the last of the Promethean’s and the last founding member of the Second Ecumene. This is my second body, stolen from a young Manipular who hadn’t fully realized what had happened to him until the very end when we became one. He’s still here, waiting for me to step down when our work is done, to reclaim his body.

He will wait for many centuries.

The work has only begun.

This record our arrival, our contact with the Precursors, the ones you call the Ancients, and our brief war with them, is not perfect. So much of my memory has been lost; too many things have been jumbled. What was and what is has been mired with fact and fiction. The loss of the Domain in the war against the Flood has destroyed our history and what I say is from not just my memories and the memories of Forerunners lost in the war.

It is not a comfortable sensation.

We arrived in this new galaxy barely a year, recorded Capital time, at cruising speed. The force I commanded to this new galaxy, to challenge this threat, was one of the largest I personally commanded. Ironically, it did not match the firepower a fleet its size should have. The bulk of our military had been lost during the fight for the Ark, and what few warships remained lingered with my wife, the Librarian, to aid in reseeding the galaxy of life.

The two Fortress-class vessels, both a hundred kilometers long with a quarter of their size being dominated by an ornate half-dome, dominated the fleet with their imposing figure, dominating its predecessor compatriot, a thousand year old Fortress-class vessel half their length that had served with me during the Charum Hakkor campaign. While the two larger vessels boasted more formidable defenses and array of weapons on their tails, I was sentimental and took the aged vessel as my flagship, the Star Everlasting. It was an ironic name. My people were scattered, the Ecumene shattered and my faith, my understanding of the galaxy and the Universe broken beyond repair. I had come to accept the reasoning for the anger the Timeless One had to my people, I had learned of the reason a thousand years before the Flood returned. But the Mantle had guided me for most of my life, and to have everything I knew about it ripped away… not all Forerunners took it well.

Several cruisers and dreadnaught supplemented the defenses and a dozen repurposed planet crackers held Slipspace units that held dozens of my brethren, frozen outside of time. The rest of the 200 ships were composed of mining ships and luxury liners, world crafters and exploration ships.

In total, there were fifteen thousand Forerunners.

I wanted to weep.

The forces I sent to Charum Hakkor to lay waste to the planetary surface and the cities that the humans had erected on the hallowed Precursor ruins had been larger, significantly so. Even in the waning days of the war against the stinking Flood menace when it make standard practice to blast a planet’s surface from high orbit rather than send Warrior-Servants, I had many more warriors under my command. It was a depressing number, and only two thousand were true warrior-servants, not the half-mutated First Rates that had been forced into our Rate. The very thought made me ill – my Rate had been dirtied.

We arrived at a budding young star at the edge of the galaxy, an anomaly and one that, two thousand years later, we discovered was the work a species much older than our own though ventures into the galaxy never unearthed any indication of colonization by this race. To this day the name of the species eludes us as well as their fate – where had they gone?

Regretfully though, the roots of the Halo effect had worn down our bonds. It was natural for our Rates to split apart upon arrival. Too much had been said between us during the war, too much guilt placed on the shoulders of the Builders by my own and too much anger directed upon the Warrior-Servants and the Prometheans in particular. Above the other rates, we’d been charged with protecting and safeguarding the Ecumene – a task we failed at. It didn’t help that I had been the one w ho wiped the majority of our race out. I did entertain the thought of having the ships under my command force the others to stay but to do so would only bring further conflict and chaos to our species – dangerous in this alien galaxy, especially with such a dangerous race so close, metaphorically speaking. We needed space to grow and understand our being, to find something to fill the gap the Mantle once occupied. We fought to defend our race, but our race was now history. The Ecumene was gone, and our people numbered in less than a hundred thousand.

We dispersed, and I was lenient enough to loan my flagship to the Miners for protection and give the Builders and Engineers a few Dreadnaughts as well. Their individual ships left the fleet with them, and I was left with but a few thousand warriors and others in Slipspace pods. However we all understood our duties, and despite our feelings we kept in communication, always alert for any signs of the Precursors. Ironically we grew closer because of this split, walking past our differences and insults to rebuild what was left our people.

Through conflict, we grew strong.

How ironic.

It was only a blink of an eye for us before twenty years passed and we could claim twenty six planets for ourselves. Those worlds would become the heart of our new Ecumene, our new domain. The Miners exploited them, using their cudgel ships to strip vast tracts of land of their resources, digging into the mantle and crust for the metals that lay underneath.

The majority of us stayed on our ships, refusing to give the comforts of Forerunner society, however bare they were. We had never had the need to consider plans on rebuilding the Ecumene, never planned on losing access to the Domain, traveling to another galaxy or face the danger of extinction. Plans had been made before our departure but talking and putting those plans into action were two completely different tasks.

I don’t think we realized that until we started implanting the plan. In hindsight, we could have done better.

The Engineers stripped their ships of tools necessary to fabricate new materials and build homes for us to rest in. Though we didn’t tire, there were times when we needed to leave our armor, to experience the alien star on our skins and observe the strange stars around us. Yet we were always vigilant, always listening for the tell-tale blips of superluminal communication through Slipspace or unusual eddies in real space, anything to indicate the movement of the advanced civilization we knew was lurking in this galaxy. Though this galaxy was small compared to the one we called home, ‘small’ was an understatement in terms of interstellar distances. There were a billion stars in the galaxy, more or less.

We need anonymity for the moment, to hide and rebuild. The few warships at our disposal would do nothing against the mightiest force the Precursors would throw against us. Despite our oath to the Lifeworkers to purge ourselves of the threat that Precursors represented we listened and waited. It wasn’t an easy task – my warrior-servants grew restless even as I busied them with maintaining order on our worlds and aiding in tearing off mounds of earth for excavation.

“We need to act,” one of them said.

I was on the command deck of the Luminous Star, one of the two Fortress-class vessels that I commandeered. The Miners were reluctant to give up control of the Star Everlasting though I trusted them not to abuse my trust. I didn’t look up at the young warrior-servant, barely two hundred years old and instead studied the planets that we, to use a loose, term ‘controlled.’

Another came: “Lord Didact-”

The holograms vanished, and I looked up.

They wore antiquated armor, stripped down to the bare necessities to host their Ancilla’s and keep them sustained. They were mockeries of our people, and the sight made my pang for my failure. There was not a day following the Halo Event that I did not consider how I could have done things differently. Hindsight was a blessing and a curse – too many battles were lost because I underestimated the Flood, underestimating the corrosive nature that the Cult of the Many-Faced God had on our society. “What is it?”

The first one stepped forward. “Your rate is becoming restless; we are warriors and guardians, not Miners or Sentinels. It is not in our genes to do manual work or use our weapons to bring down mountains or bog land, and even those tools are being taken from us.”

“The work of the Ecumene is greater than the need of my rate.”

They bristled. Cleary it wasn’t the answer they were hoping for but what else could I do? We didn’t have the infrastructure yet to build new ships or begin manipulating the fabric of space-time. There wasn’t a need for warriors, a need for battle – and many of those in my rate were young, hardened in a war that no Forerunner had faced since the war against the Humans. The youngest of them hardly knew a life beyond the war – initiated into a rate that threw themselves against the Flood with our awesome technology and weapons.

The troubles did not end there.

Reconstruction presented its problems not long after we formed the Second Ecumene forty years after our arrival. The name was something to keep our spirits high – the work of rebuilding our civilization was proving harder to be expected. Our ‘plan’ predicted we would have the necessary structures built to begin building ships larger than a transport vessel – that did not come to pass. There was also the issue that our civilization was spread thin – Novus Ghibalb, the capital of our humble Ecumene, hosted five hundred Forerunners.

Our furthest world, LP 72-e, was claimed by a small family of Forerunners of four, Miners. The planet was set aside for exploitation, rich in not just Naquadah but Neutronium, key elements needed for the armor our ships were built out of. Vast tracts of land were set aside on all our worlds and many Forerunners objected to our method of distributing the Sentinels.

These were tedious moments.

I did not enjoy them.

There was a reason I chose exile when offered it. The political war between the Builders and the Warrior-Servants destroyed me, stripping me of my favors and ties to the Council. Too much had been lost and I abandoned the fight, leaving others to continue it in the hopes that they would be able to do what I couldn’t. Unfortunately I failed to see that the others rallied around me – my voice alone carried more weight than most Prometheans.

However time passed as decades turned into centuries and centuries into millennia – time that we spent rebuilding, repopulating and recreating. Eight thousand years after the fall of the First Ecumene, 92 000 years ago for you, we claimed a hundred systems and half that many worlds in our name. Our population had grown and we encountered several alien life forms that we took our wing, uplifting them to sapience and indoctrinating them in our ways. We didn’t strip them of war and poverty though – we kept them in conflict, keeping them strong as to avoid the mistakes we made in the war against the Flood.

I still shudder at the memories.

How many worlds, I often ask myself, how many worlds had I decided to abandon when I issued the order for a galactic retreat. Hundreds of thousands of worlds relied on the Ecumene for protection having never had a reason to build a military force for millennia’s. When the Flood came for them, these worlds had not a single weapon to defend themselves with. The Gravemind took ample pleasure in this, sending one-worded messages to me through Slipspace in the languages of a hundred races that we once guarded.

While we had set-backs and losses, our Ecumene had grown strong. With the help of our alien wards we crafted ships that while were centuries ahead of their own science, were millennia’s in the past for us. Yet they served their purposes as automated probes, traveling through the stars, searching for worlds rich in the metals we needed and for any sign of the Precursors.

The Precursors – we never forgot why we came.

It would be 84 000 years before we met our makers.

I will end here.