A Shield of Deception
Posted By: Jahan<jahanandish_sam@hotmail.com>
Date: 29 December 2002, 5:26 am
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"How dare they! What rights do they have for its destruction?" raged the looming image of a golden-clad Elite, towering above a stoic scientist. The latter's brain-tails lashed in the air, quivering at the mere sight of the looming Elite.
"They had no foresight nor in hindsight could do anything to prevent the destruction of the human ship, Pillar of Autumn. Most of the surviving human forces were assimilated by the ones calling themselves the, *Flood*." Answered back the scientist.
"Still, those fools could've attempted to sent a more powerful strike force than a few squads of Black Ops Elites and Grunts with only light support from our Hunter forces" re-stated the golden-armored Elite. It set its gaze upon a silver-armored Elite standing adjacent to the doorway leading out of the command room.
Having left its personal communications unit back in its quarters the golden-clad Elite barked orders toward one of the silver-clad Elites guarding the doorway.
"Go to the bridge and send the following messages to Warlords Darius and Xerxes. Have Darius's forces search for the forerunner HALO's and Xerxes's fleets bolster their fleets as a rear-vanguard against any wayward Consul fleets"
"Yes, sir!" reported the lower ranking Elite as it rushed through the doorway toward its appointed task. The scientist nodded at the Elite and floated away from the room, the remaining silver-armored Elite escorted back to the engineering area of the Covenant command cruiser, Judicial Blade.
***
Several million kilometers in deep space...
Aboard Warlord Darius's command ship, Vigorous, the message was received and it and its fleet began jumping into slipstream toward the vastness of space, near the former location of installation 04 of HALO. Finding the expected debris of floating remains of Covenant ships as well as spinning splinters of the HALO installation the ships began combing through the databases of salvageable remains of Covenant warships.
A scout ship burns through heavy wreckage and retrieves the memory cores of a Covenant database from the Shield of Right, a former Covenant Assault Frigate and escort ship. It proceeds to load the memory core into its holding bay via magnetic grappling and returns to its mothership, Fire of Truth.
The scout ship unloads its inestimable cargo by a pair of orange clad-armored Elites. It took much effort for the powerful Elites to haul it to the Science lab aboard the Fire of Truth. Finally reaching its destination, the doorway separated and was immediately set down upon a violet tabletop. Several Scientists at once swarmed around it, extracting data and information streams from its memory core.
The calligraphy of the uniformed Covenant language was not unlike that of Persian. Of course the Scientists and Elite technicians wouldn't know such things since all data relative to Earth and Earth history is wiped clean from any UNSC memory core or AI data streams.
Each symbol represented a certain letter in present, past or future contexts. Multicolored calligraphy and Covenant numerical letters dotted throughout the whole scripture of the data within the memory core.
It took a combined effort of Elite technicians and Scientists over 16 hours just to decode the entire message from the Warlord presiding over the fleet in pursuit of the human warship, Pillar of Autumn. Whatever that had occurred within 96 hours upon installation 04 frightened most of the troops stationed groundside. Several times a force known as, the Flood was mentioned...and with graphic detail.
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