Thursday War Significants

Here are all the important passages in Thursday War that relate to the forerunners, Didact, and Halo 4.

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 Phillips compared this cartouche with his hand-drawn notes. It was much starker than the previous one—six symbols of one design, one of another, with a smaller nonrepeating symbol beside each and two separate lines that could have been headers. He was certain he’d seen these before, or at least part of them. He was still looking through his notes when BB spoke.
“The top line says access, or pathway, or connection,” he said. “The row beneath that—I’m uncertain. But the lines below that all contain the word for circle. Loop. Ring.”
“Halos. Please tell me it’s Halos.” Everyone thought there were more out there, on standby to be activated and wipe out all life, but finding and decommissioning them was another matter. “With locations.”
“It could well be, but I can’t see any coordinates. Just ordinal numbers. And something that might be relative bearings.”
“So … one through seven, yes?”
“Correct.”
“Why the symbols? Why are there two sets of symbols?”
“Location, perhaps, and the assumption of the person who created this was that others knew what that symbol was shorthand for. Or status.”
“You mean status status, or black, red, amber status? Like the security alert escalation?”
“I mean on or off, locked or unlocked, up or down—”
And then it hit Phillips right between the eyes. Status. One of the Halo rings had been destroyed.
He counted again, comparing the shapes. No, there are six like this, one like that. Did I remember right?
But these symbols must have been here for thousands of years. They were carved into the stone. How could they mean what he thought they did? How could they be indicators of functioning and nonfunctioning Halos when one of them had only been deactivated in the last year?
“Sorry, I was getting too excited,” Phillips said. “I really thought this might be a status panel, but it’s just stone.”
He reached out to touch the symbols, the ones he now thought of as on-off switches. The layer that he could feel and but not see yielded and he found his fingertips against the intricately detailed shape. He could feel it.
“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you, Professor,” BB said.
Phillips stepped back. “Yeah, if that was a big red button, I might have wiped out half of the galactic core.”
“Well, you’ve activated something. Look.”
Phillips felt his stomach knot. He looked, but he couldn’t see a damn thing except the cartouche. “What?”
“Look at the symbols at the top. They’ve changed.”
“They haven’t. It’s just stone.” Phillips looked up at the ceiling and scanned 360 degrees in case he was missing something that BB had detected. “Nothing’s changed.”
“It has. I can compare every microframe I’ve recorded.” BB was persistent but polite. “I don’t know what the words meant before, but they’ve changed, and now they say to find someone or seek something beyond, or higher, or better. I’m sorry that this is rather vague. Halsey left copious notes and some of them are a little too fulsome and extrapolative.”
What had he triggered? What did he have to strive for or aspire to? He was thinking in puzzle terms and juggling the language when an idea struck him, one that came straight out of the initial question he’d put to BB.
Black, red, amber status? Like the security alert escalation?
He was an academic learning to be military intelligence the hard way, and the way he thought was changing from anthropologist to marine. The cartouche wasn’t telling him to do something spiritually uplifting. It was telling him he had to find someone senior to him.
Maybe it was like any weapon of mass destruction on Earth. They usually needed more than one person to validate the launch and activate it, just to be on the safe side. Maybe the garrison here hadn’t been trusted to fire Halos on their own. How he’d been able to get the stone to react—and why the Sangheili hadn’t already tried this—wasn’t half as important right then as working out what the hell he’d done.
“Oh, bugger it, BB,” he said. “I think I might have just primed a Halo.”
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Phillips ran his fingertips carefully over the plain sections of the cartouche. BB saw the status icon shift again. It had returned to its original form.
“There, it’s reverted,” BB said. “Panic over.”
Phillips’s gaze darted back and forth between the image on his datapad and the cartouche. Eventually he seemed satisfied that the symbols at the top had changed back to the way they’d been before.
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“Very well.” Phillips had complete confidence in him. BB hoped he had grounds for that. “We have what seems to be a repeater panel of the Halo status. And there’s also another panel with a reference to the regulator or regulations, the one with the negative phoneme, except there’s additional material.”
BB re-ran every symbol in the room, every phoneme, every pictograph, every vowel point. So … that implied an agent, so this one didn’t mean regulations. It meant someone who imparted them, taught them, instructed, and the negative phoneme … ah, there were two versions of it, one with the sense of not to be changed, not to be questioned, immutable, didactic—which seemed to be a noun—and one that was a command, an exhortation not to do something.
“There’s a reference to an inflexible teacher, I believe. A dictator, in the literal sense. A didact. There’s also a warning not to do something regarding that person—or rank of persons. It could mean anything, but it’s repeated several times, and—oh, that’s interesting. There’s another occurrence of that superior idea.”
Phillips had both hands flat on the wall now, but placed carefully in blank areas. “So, it’s something like don’t do X or Y regarding this rank or person … without the approval of a superior.”
“That’s a big leap, but why not?”
“It’s a control room. Or a guard house. It’s either the rules and regs written on the walls, or it’s an alarm center. Okay, perhaps I’m thinking too human. But everything we’ve seen says they had a lot in common with us. They weren’t methane-breathing globs of gel. Not that I’m being methanist.”
“I believe some of the symbols are coordinates."
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“Furry barrier … another furry barrier … and now the dictatorish didactic bit … whoa.” As his hand passed over the panel that warned not to do something, whatever it was, the symbols changed conspicuously. One of them lit up, red and blue. “Christ, is that light right in the stone? That’s some trick.”
“I really think you should leave it alone.”
“I hear you.” Phillips took a lot more images of the panel, then touched the plain section next to it and the lights went out. “I hope it’s not a burglar alarm. If we get a bunch of Forerunner cops kicking the doors down, you’ll know what it was.”
The panel in front of him was changing completely. BB watched the stone rearranging itself like coalescing mercury. Now the symbols offered a long list of options, locations judging by the string of numbers after each, and the engraving right at the top read …
“Doors.” BB was pretty sure now. “Portals. Entrances. Powered in some way. Expressway? Elevators? No, Professor, don’t touch them.”
Phillips took a deep breath and held it. “Let’s give it a go,” he said. “This might be the only chance I ever get.”
“Don’t you think that we should wait and—”
“Can’t,” Phillips said, and touched the first symbol on the list.

After this, I'll just summarize. Phillips ends up at another forerunner relic about 50km from where he was. He was teleported, but it didn't really do anything important other than take him somewhere. Not super significant. But basically we know that there are locations and statuses of Halos on these walls, but we don't know what kind of navigation system the forerunners used, so its useless until they figure that out.
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His eye was caught by an object in the flawless turquoise sky. When he looked up, it wasn’t a bird: it was a small device, flying under its own power. There seemed to be two kinds, one a gray, featureless cylinder, the other a more intricate metal egg that looked much more like human technology.
“What are those?” he asked.
<Monitoring devices,> Prone said. <They observe and measure. They look for Flood contagion. The ovoids are human surveillance machines.>
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“I want to know about the Forerunners,” he said. “I need to understand who and what they were. They were—are—our gods. Our lives were centered on them. But now we’re told they were never gods, and everything we believed in and sacrificed was for nothing.”
<What do you want to know?>
“Were they like us?”
<Not like you, and not like us. More like humans.>
That rankled. Humans always seemed convinced that they were unique and special, not simply one mediocre creature out of many species. “Do you remember them?”
<We remember, because we remember everything, but the memory is not direct. It has been shared many times over the years.>
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<Nobody ever came back to live in the cities,> Prone said suddenly. It was the first time he’d opened a conversation. <It was all made ready for them.>
The closer Jul got, the more wonderful the buildings looked. The structures were silver-gray and smooth, all heights and shapes, almost inviting exploration. He could hear the Warthogs in the far distance. He expected one to come roaring down the road that led into the city to head him off and tell him he couldn’t enter, but nobody intercepted him, so he carried on between the buildings and into a large square. The first thing that struck him were that the doors were all wildly different heights, some human-sized and some two or three times taller than him.
The silence was extraordinary. Jul wondered whether the not-quite-gods had been killed or had found somewhere even better to hide.
“So the Forerunners planned to shelter here until the galaxy was cleansed of the Flood,” he said. “They must have intended to re-create their society here. Their entire civilization. The Halo would have destroyed everything sentient outside when it was activated.”
<Yes,> Prone said. <This would have been their capital and their refuge.>
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“There weren’t that many of them, then.” If there had been billions upon billions, there would have been many more cities visible, unless the Forerunners had construction techniques he couldn’t even imagine, let alone see. Perhaps, though, this was a shelter for the chosen few, and the less fortunate Forerunners would have perished. “Only enough to populate this planet. Was this all they had?”
Prone drifted from doorway to doorway, looking as if he was lost. <Everything they had could be re-created here and reached from here. But no longer.>
The Huragok was an irritating mix of rational explanation and cryptic comment, but Jul still wasn’t sure which was which. “No longer what?”
<We did our duty. We still do our duty. It’s not our fault.>
“What isn’t?”
There was no point getting angry with a Huragok because it didn’t achieve anything. Sometimes they’d even flee to avoid confrontation, and Jul wanted this one to trust and obey him. He waited for the answer.
<The portals,> Prone said. He made a sad little keening noise, starting high and dropping to a low note that faded into a breath. <The terminals no longer work properly. They were not maintained, therefore there are no other Huragok there.>
That seemed perfectly clear. Prone and his brothers had maintained this world and the portals built here, but there was nothing they could do about the other end of the slipspace route, the destination portals. There was nobody left to maintain them. If anything told Jul that the Forerunners were all gone, it was that. He understood Prone’s depressed little sigh. There was something unutterably lonely about a tunnel through space that ultimately went nowhere.
“So they could travel all over the galaxy from here.” Jul started to see fragments of the Forerunners’ contingency plan for the end of the world. Even the gods had emergency procedures. “Or they could reach this shelter from many other places.”
<Once,> Prone said. He floated over to a wall covered in elegant carvings and held a tentacle out to caress the stone. <Once.>
“How long ago was this?”
<Lucy-B-zero-nine-one asked and I told her one hundred thousand years.>
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“So now we can breathe again, how sure are you about the Halo locations?”
“Not a hundred percent,” he said. “It’s almost certainly locations, or at least something that identifies them, but we haven’t worked out the Forerunner coordinates system. They might not have thought in terms of having a capital. Positions might be relative to other Halos rather than to a central reference point.”
“But how did you manage to activate a portal?”
“It had a lock thingie like an arum.”
“See, I knew you’d come in handy.”
“And now we know where the portal exited, we might be able to use that to decipher the system.”
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I WANT A HURAGOK TEAM ROUTINELY EMBARKED IN EVERY WARSHIP BY 2557. THIS IS WHAT GAVE THE COVENANT THEIR TECHNICAL SUPERIORITY. NOW IT’S OURS, AND WHEREVER THE REST OF THEIR HURAGOK WENT, EVEN IF THE SANGHEILI REACQUIRE THEM—OURS STILL HAVE THEIR UNIQUE ONYX LEGACY, AND THAT PUTS US WAY AHEAD.
(REAR ADMIRAL SAEED SHAFIQ, UNSC PROCUREMENT)
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<They were concerned about dangers,> Prone said.
“I can see that.”
<There was more to fear than the Flood. They had to leave warnings so that mistakes weren’t repeated.>

“Did they believe in gods?” If Magnusson was monitoring this, then she would think he was simply groping for his inexplicable faith again. “Is any of this religious in nature?” No, that was the wrong question. It assumed too much about Prone’s opinion, if he had one. “Do you believe the Forerunners were gods?”
<They created us.>
“Yes? No?”
<Gods are defined as eternal. Therefore gods can’t die. Forerunners could exist for very long periods, but they died. Therefore they were not gods.>
Jul knew he could rely on Engineers for logic. “So … did they believe in gods?”
<They knew there were those who came long before them.>
It wasn’t an answer, but it was interesting. He thought of the disappointing revelation that Prone had given him, that the Forerunners were more like humans than Sangheili. “Did the Forerunners have castes, like us? Were they warriors, priests, kaidons?”
<They had warriors. They had several castes.>
“Did they have names?”
<Yes. And some had titles. Librarian. Logician. Didact. Master Builder. Esthetist.>
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<I warned you not to touch the panel. The portals don’t work as designed. There are none of us at the terminals to maintain them.>
“You said they didn’t work.”
<I said they no longer worked properly. I said that none could come here.>
“So they go somewhere, but not where they were intended to go?”
<Which is very dangerous.>
<Some intended destinations we know. Some we were never allowed to know, only that they were there for those who had supplementary information.>
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<Why did you inscribe that?>
“In case I needed to find my way back. Why?”
<Do you know what it means?>
Jul was intrigued, but tried not to look too interested. He had to assume he was back under surveillance now. “No.”
<That’s something you must avoid,> Prone said, turning around again. <Never touch it.>
“Why?”
<The Didact,> Prone said. <Hidden even from us. Hidden when the Librarian made her sacrifice.>
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“We’re now working on the basis that the portal I stepped through went to the wrong terminal,” Phillips said at last. “Which does give us a solution for more of the numbers if we factor in the locations of the Halos we know about.”
“They’re definitely relative to each other, rather than a central reference point,” BB said. “But they seemed to use a different system for identifying and locating the shield worlds, possibly because there were so many.”
“Hey,” Devereaux said, holding up the sheet and pointing. “Just curious. Is this the symbol for a negative?”
“Negative number?” Phillips asked, not looking up.
“No, a negative word.”
“That’s the one,” BB said.
“Well, this is just crazy pilot babble, but if the temple was some kind of command center, why is this the only thing they say ‘not’ about?”
Phillips folded his arms and rested his cheek on them, gazing at her. “Explain.”
“Go around any UNSC building and look on the walls. It’s all ‘you mustn’t do this, you mustn’t do that, don’t enter here, don’t touch this,’ yadda yadda yadda. But the Forerunners only used this negative thing once in all these tunnels, and it’s about the teacher or teaching. This didact-instructor-lecturer-whatever. If this is all about Halos, you’d expect lots of warning notices—like ‘don’t press this big button, or the galaxy might go bang.’ But the only warning anywhere looks like it’s about this teacher. Which is kind of scary.”
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I WOULDN’T TRUST JUL AS FAR AS I COULD SPIT, BUT WE’RE LEARNING A LOT SIMPLY BY WATCHING WHERE HE GOES AND HEARING WHAT HE SAYS TO THE HURAGOK. SOMETIMES WE LOSE HIM FOR A SHORT PERIOD, BUT THE HURAGOK HAVE CLEAR ORDERS AND THEY’LL OBEY THEM. HE’S ENGAGED THEM IN CONVERSATION ABOUT FORERUNNER PORTALS MORE THAN ONCE, BUT IF HE MANAGES TO OUTSMART THEM, HE CAN’T LEAVE THE SPHERE EVEN IF HE FINDS A VESSEL. ALL I HAVE TO DO TO BRING EVERYTHING TO AN INSTANT HALT IS DETONATE THAT HARNESS. THE HURAGOK SAY THE PORTALS ARE UNSTABLE OR NONFUNCTIONING ANYWAY, BUT I’M STILL NOT TAKING ANY CHANCES. BY THE WAY, THE GENETICALLY MODIFIED IRUKAN IS READY TO DEPLOY ANY TIME YOU SAY THE WORD. IT’LL CROSS-POLLINATE AND OVERWHELM THE NATIVE STRAIN COMPLETELY IN LESS THAN THREE YEARS. IS THIS ANY TIME TO BE SQUEAMISH? OR HAVE WE DECIDED THAT IT’S MORE MORAL TO FRAGMENT A GENOCIDAL ENEMY AND SACRIFICE MORE HUMAN LIVES THAN IT IS TO STARVE THEM? WHEN DO WE DECIDE THAT ENOUGH SANGHEILI HAVE DIED, ADMIRAL? WHAT’S OUR CRITICAL MASS OF THREAT?
(DR. IRENA MAGNUSSON, ONIRF TREVELYAN, TO CINCONI)
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“I still don’t understand how such a powerful, advanced species could just disappear,” Jul said. There were a lot of insects around today, some of them brilliantly colored like flying gems. “However big a catastrophe might have befallen them, it makes no sense that every single one was wiped out. Did they escape to another galaxy? Did they manage to manipulate time so completely that they hid in it?”
<These are fascinating questions,> Prone said. <But we have no answers. We waited. We still wait, in case they return with more orders for us.>
“Do you believe they will?”
<All things may be possible. And this is the point of our existence.>
“Can you read all Forerunner symbols?” he asked.
<Yes.>
“Surely they told you the places they might go if there was a crisis, if only to help you to help them.”
<There were locations they didn’t reveal for our own safety.>
“Ah, because of the Flood.” That would steer Magnusson well away from Jul’s plan. “Is the Flood more widespread than this galaxy?”
Prone didn’t respond. Unlike humans, they didn’t seem able to lie at all, just answer or not answer. And what was this Didact? Perhaps he was another form of the Flood, or some enemy of the Forerunners. The only place Jul would be able to ask Prone that question was in the underground chamber. He needed to thicken his smokescreen a little more.
“This world alarms me,” he said. “I get lost walking through doors that I can’t even see.”
<These are for safety in case the Flood contagion breached this shield world. There are many such barriers within barriers that we can use to contain contamination.>
“Tell me if the Flood is still out there somewhere.”
<I can’t. I don’t know.>
“But the Forerunners must have known.”
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“Tell me why I must avoid the Didact,” he said. There had to be some portal connected with this. That was the name that had made Prone most anxious. Jul needed to know what the risks were when he worked out how to activate a portal and take the plunge into the unknown. “Is he the Flood? Is he another form of the Flood?”
<He was of the warrior caste. A Forerunner. He despised humans.>
“So do my people. I don’t understand.”
<If he still lives, then he may return from exile. He only knows war. He tried to fight the Flood. He tried to destroy the humans.>
This Didact sounded like a perfectly sensible person who knew a threat when he saw one. “How long has he been gone?”
<A hundred thousand years.>
“I think the Didact will be long dead by now,” Jul said kindly. He looked at all the potential portal signs on the walls again, wondering what his chances were of emerging into an environment that wouldn’t kill him. “Even gods die.”
<We are not dead.>
“Is there a portal to Earth? Show me.”
<That one. It doesn’t work now. Not at all.>
Ah, so he had some way of telling which ones were live. Of course: how else would he know the portals were faulty in the first place? Why didn’t I think of that before? Jul didn’t ask if one led to Sanghelios. He’d get around to that eventually, but subtly.
“Did the Didact use a portal? And the Librarian?”
<No. He is hidden.>
“You don’t know where he went.”
<We know the name but not the location. In case others used us to reach him.>
“Very well, what’s the name of the place he went? Not Sanghelios, and not Earth, obviously.”
<Requiem.>
Jul had never heard of it. It sounded like another myth-word, as vague and meaningless as the Great Journey. “Which is the symbol for it?”
<That one.>
It was one of the more distinctive ones that Jul had etched into his belt as a way of finding his path back to the chamber. “So he was sent to Requiem, but you don’t know where it is.”
<That’s what I said. We have to go back now.>
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“If I can, I will.” Phillips tilted his head on one side and looked down. He seemed to be staring at Jul’s belt. “Did you decorate that yourself? I never noticed the symbols before.”
Jul leaned back and looked down at the belt. “I’m trying to read the language, too.”
“The teacher.” Phillips pointed. “There was a lot about the teacher in the temple.”
Teacher? It was the Didact’s symbol.
“The Didact,” Jul said. “The warrior god who had to be concealed.”
Phillips nodded with that crinkling of the brow that indicated a wistful sadness. It probably wasn’t genuine. “The Forerunners certainly put a lot of prohibitions around him.”
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“Why can’t we see the portals, Prone?” Jul asked.
<They’re for us. We can see them.>
“That makes no sense.”
<There is no need.> Prone finished adjusting the harness and stepped back like a seamstress checking a garment. <This shield world has never been populated. The barriers are for maintenance access and can be sealed against contaminants.>
“But you can change that. You can make them detectable.”
<Change is not required. They are detectable. You and the humans can feel them.>
Jul waited for the guard to open the cell door. “What’s your most important duty, Prone?”
<To preserve this shield world and its security for when the Forerunners need it.> Prone drifted through the open door ahead of him. <Everything else is desirable but not essential.>
The Huragok was very clear. Jul envied that clarity, and also that endless patience, however misguided it might be. Jul thought in days and weeks. Prone thought in millennia.
“The Forerunners aren’t coming back,”  “You now know what happened in the world outside this sphere. We have found only the remains of their civilization.”
<They may yet wait somewhere or sometime else.> Prone speeded up. Perhaps he was getting frustrated with looking after Jul when he could have been tinkering with equipment. <They were not like you. They slept in thought.>
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<Requiem cannot be reached from here, because the Didact sleeps and must never be woken. Kelekos could be reached. If you can reach a place, we have no need to know its location. This terminal is for ingathering.>
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Eventually he found himself looking at the symbols carved into the walls. It was a strange time to find that he was starting to recognize Forerunner symbols a lot more easily. There it was: there was the symbol for the Didact, just like the one on his belt, and there was the symbol for Requiem. He spent a few minutes trying to match the symbols scratched into the leather with the carvings on the stone.
You were right about the humans, Didact. It’s a pity you aren’t around now to help Sanghelios.
Jul tried to recall what he could of Onyx, the place where the Forerunners had managed to make time pass at the precise pace that they wished, defying creation. He almost wished he’d had more time to work on Prone and tease more information out of him. There were military advantages in Onyx, technology that Sanghelios needed, but the humans had laid claim to it first. No matter: he would find a way to destroy them, or die in the attempt, and both options seemed the same to him at that moment.
“You can read the language of the gods.” Ilic tilted his head, and Jul realized he was fascinated by the belt. “You write it, too. That’s the symbol for the holy warrior who’ll return one day to save us.”
He was pointing at the Didact symbol. “The Didact,” Jul said. “Not even the Huragok were allowed to know where he went.” Jul was about to point out that he would be long dead now, but this wasn’t the time to crush any more hopes. “He despised humanity, as should we all.”
“And what’s this symbol?”
“It’s a place. It’s called Requiem. But I don’t know where it is. Nobody does.”
“Why?”
“Because the Didact went there, and for some reason the gods wanted it to be kept hidden.”
The bits that are missing probably looked like my belt, then,” he said. “What’s the line below?”
“I think they’re numbers. Holy numbers.”
Jul didn’t believe in divine hands shaping his life, but he did believe in the Forerunner gift for thorough records, and their astonishing technical skill. Numbers. What if this was a set of coordinates, like the engraved stone on Onyx?
Jul held the belt against the wall again and slid it from side to side to realign the symbols. Didact: yes, that matched. Requiem: yes, that matched, too. On the line below that, though, none of the symbols looked familiar at all.
New data. Or just my ignorance. But new data …
 Requiem, Didact, numbers. Perhaps this was the information the Forerunners wouldn’t give the Huragok. It had to be recorded somewhere. And why did the portal bring him here? Had it routed to another Forerunner garrison, one that was off-limits?
No, this was getting ridiculous. Even if this helped him locate Requiem, the Forerunners were long gone.
Their technology might still be there, though. Requiem might contain another cache like the one the humans had claimed.
“They are coordinates,” Panom said. “This adds greatly to our knowledge. We seek to record all the holy sites, but some remain hidden from us.”
“And which one is this?” Jul slid the belt back and forth again. “Which world?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I think this tells us where Requiem is,” Jul said. “Requiem.” He groped for the right words that would galvanize Panom. Hidden Forerunner technology was now the best hope that Sanghelios had to crush humanity, and Jul was determined to seek it out. He’d need Panom’s help to do that. These people were the only ones he could truly trust. “Don’t you see it? Requiem. That’s where the Didact was hidden. That’s where they say he waits.”
Panom took a couple of shaky steps backward. “This is why you were sent,” he said. “Now I understand.”
“What?”
“The gods sent you where you didn’t expect to be. They don’t make mistakes. They sent you because you had information we need—that Sanghelios needs. You know where the Didact is. Do you not see the answer to prayers in there?”
 “We must find Requiem. This is where I believe it to be.”
“Yes, let it be so,” he said. “We will seek the Didact, and ask for his help to cleanse the galaxy of humanity. You are blessed, brother. You have a special calling.”
Jul hoped the help was planet-crushing weaponry and obedient Huragok caretakers, but if the Didact was really waiting, that would be fine, too.