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Cortana was having increasing trouble holding her memory together, and the Gravemind seemed aware of that. She struggled to maintain a line between where she ended and the rest of the Gravemind’s cache of souls began.

And I still have data-stripped copies loose in the system. Don’t I?

Get the hell over here.

She needed backup. She triggered one of the copies to create a message to HighCom, a few urgent words about the Flood heading for Earth, the Portal that the Gravemind didn’t know about, and that the way to beat the Flood without activating a Halo ring lay beyond it—the Ark. That was as much as she dared do. The effort of concentration almost killed her. Her head felt split in two.

“I am a timeless chorus,” the Gravemind said quietly. “Join your voice with mine and sing victory everlasting.”

He was joined with something, all right: her rapidly failing mind. All she could do was route the encrypted message—a burst transmission—through the Gravemind’s link. He seemed not to notice. When the message reached the ship in transit, its code would make it seek out the first memory unit connected to the system to store itself.

Cortana had done all that she could. Now she had to concentrate on surviving until John retrieved her, although she already knew rampancy would probably claim her before then.

That doesn’t mean you have to help the bastards win . . . show fight, Marine!

Yate must have been quite a man in life, she decided. She didn’t know what he looked like; she still saw the strike of his last desperate rounds through his eyes, not those watching him. She liked to think he might have been a little like John. Even death hadn’t totally taken the fight out of him.

But John would go on without her. The reminder just sparked another wave of jealous pain as if her heart was being ripped out. However hard she tried to ignore the mania, however clear she was that there was part of her that knew how damaged she was and might be able to hang on, she cried out in a tormented animal wail of agony.

What did you erase, Dr. Halsey? What did you delete from my memory? Did we ever talk about it? My code’s becoming corrupted. I need to power down and start a repair cycle. I don’t want John to find me like this, doddering and confused.

But there was another way out of this pain, a better one. She could stay with John forever when he came for her. Couldn’t she? The Gravemind would unite all those parted, all those who’d gone—

“No!” she screamed. She began struggling, fighting to break free of the Gravemind’s influence. “That’s you! That’s you, isn’t it? Tempting me again! Poisoning me with filthy ideas! I won’t do it, I won’t trap John for you. Watch me—you said I was a weapon—you bet I’m a weapon!”

The Gravemind suddenly shuddered like a truck skidding to a halt. The mental traffic was two-way; while he soothed and cajoled, patterns of her incipient rampancy were spreading through his consciousness like a disease. He roared, furious. For a moment she thought she’d found his vulnerability, and that she’d cripple this monster with a dose of her own terminal collapse. But he shook her loose, flinging her against the wall. It had only annoyed him. She should have known he was too much for a failing AI to tackle. He seemed to reach into every corner of High Charity.

She was still somehow linked to him. She felt his irritation, even a little fear, but mainly contemptuous satisfaction.

“Let me cure your infection,” he sneered. “It pains me to share it. He will die too—he is a threat to our entire species. And to betray me after all I have done for you—I will have your secret. Did you think I let you send your foolish cry for help to make you happy? Do you think I amplified it to make you feel you had been a good little servant to the organics who rule your life? Do you think they care if you sacrifice your existence to save them? They will simply make another, and use and discard her, too.”

Cortana dragged herself across the floor. The actual deck of the station was now buried under