TYRANT

Forestalling the Flood required sacrifice. Worlds were burned to molten husks to deny the parasite new hosts, Forerunner citizens immolated themselves in fusion fire when infection forms overran final defensive structures, and starships jumped into suns to deny the Gravemind a vehicle to spread his malevolent influence. In this particular system, the Forerunner Miner rate had built a network of colonies buried deep inside rich planetoids, crafting comfortable warrens and workshops as beautiful as they were labyrinthine. Protected by layers of hard light and exotic matter, and fitted with energy projectors powered by seething natal universes, they were impregnable fortresses that the Flood broke themselves on . . . until the Gravemind itself turned an infinitesimal portion of its baleful intelligence to bear on the problem.

Grasping impossible filaments buried beneath reality by the long-vanished Precursors, Gravemind pulled at strands that twisted and warped real space. Walls made of collapsed starmatter cracked and shattered, entire fleets of kilometer-long warships vanished in flares of scathing light, and colony planetoids were ripped asunder; cracks in the Miner’s defenses into which the Gravemind poured billions of walking corpses, all cackling with one voice that drowned out desperate screams and final shouts of useless defiance. Those that survived the initial onslaught could only activate failsafes and await hordes of twitching Flood forms wearing the bodies of their families. The facility known as Zeta Hydronis Secundus, Site C by human explorers is one of the few mostly-intact Forerunner structures remaining in the system, a grim reminder that even godlike artifice can be undone by the minds and hands of mad and boundless tyrants.