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Shadows of Archon II (part 17) - The Return of the Forerunners
Posted By: Wado<wyamauchi@msn.com>
Date: 22 September 2002, 10:04 pm
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Inside a docking bay in the UNSC cruiser, the Moon of Orion, John observes the flight deck crew busily preparing a strange looking craft. The craft is less than 10 meters long and is triangular shaped. In the middle of the craft is a sphere, just large enough inside for one person to sit comfortably.
It's going to be a tight fit for John with the fusion bomb that he must take with him on the mission. He looks over the mission plan just one more time. "Cortana, why don't they have any one else that can fly this craft?" asked John.
"Chief, they have other pilots but the only one qualified to pilot the craft and complete the mission was killed when his transport was destroyed by Covenant raiders outside of rings of Saturn. You are the only one left that can do it."
"Only one huh. That's not a good sign," said John. "Cortana, tell me about this craft"
"Chief, I've uploaded all the information the UNSC knows about the XX1," replied Cortana. "Its exact origins are still unknown, but we do know that it is not Covenant. The craft was found over one hundred years ago buried in ruins found on Mars. It has no manual controls but instead uses direct neural inputs. Only biological beings can control it, there has been no success in getting an AI to interface with it. It does not have shields but its armor has the property of nullifying energy. It also is a stealth design, not showing up on any scanners except as a small null field. It has no weapons or jump drive that we know of, but its normal space engines are far superior to anything we have ever seen. It also has a highly advanced inertial dampener field."
"A mighty ship of the past," said John, "but with no weapons. Do we always have to do things the hard way? No, don't answer that Cortana. Let's get going." John lowers himself into the XX1. The area is cleared and the ship launches.
In the XX1, John becomes the ship. He cuts through the blackness of space and feels the wind in his face. He hears the engines of far away ships and sees their engine trails as sparkling bubbles. A few minutes pass and he arrives near Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.
"Chief, I'm picking up communications from the UNSC," said Cortana, "and they are in battle against the Covenant. Scans show more than a dozen Covenant destroyer and frigate signatures, and one cruiser dead ahead. That's our target."
"Give me a nav point Cortana, I'm heading in," said John.
John pilots the XX1 up to the Covenant cruiser known as the Divine Retribution. John does not remember seeing a Covenant ship quite like this -- An armored fortress in the shape of a tube with soft curves leading to four wings and massive engines.
As John approaches the ship, the XX1 skips off of its shields a bit before John is able to match speed and vectors. The energy absorption properties of the XX1 allow it to slowly phase through the shields.
"Chief, follow the nav points," said Cortana as the XX1 bumps a few times into the outer hull of the Covenant cruiser.
"I'm trying Cortana, it's like flying in whirlwind," replied John, "and where is a way into this cruiser?"
"Chief there's the docking bay ahead, we can phase through the bay door shields," said Cortana, "but chief we are running out of time, I'm picking an energy increase in the cruiser's plasma mauler weapon. It's getting ready to fire. We can't let it, all the people on Titan -- they'll be killed."
"Stick to the main mission objective, Cortana," said John. "We must destroy this cruiser. Saving Titan is a secondary objective. I don't think we can do it."
"Yes Chief, nav point to docking bay set," said Cortana. "I only wish there was a way."
"Cortana, what is it like inside the plasma mauler right now?" asked John.
"Million degree plasma held in strong magnetic forces," replied Cortana.
"Can this ship take it?" asked John.
"Yes, the energy and magnetic forces would be nullified by the XX1's armor," replied Cortana, "but once the weapon is fired, the force of the beam would likely be enough to easily destroy the XX1. We have maybe one minute until it is ready to fire."
"Set the nav points right down the barrel of the weapon," said John.
Following the nav points John pilots the XX1 down the enormous barrel of the plasma mauler. No regular sensors work in here due the extreme magnetic forces and plasma. John feels his way down the barrel using the impact sensors of the XX1; he is flying blind in all other ways.
"Chief, according to my calculations, I believe we have reached the core of the weapon," said Cortana.
"This will do, if I'm right they are increasing power to the weapon right now," said John.
John is correct; the power increases to extreme levels but the Covenant still detect the power drain in the weapon. Thinking that it has malfunctioned, they shut the weapon down. John must wait now, he could set off the fusion bomb in the weapon core, but it is well armored, the bomb would do nothing.
About a minute passes and a small access door opens into the weapon core. Out of the door pops a white Covenant Grunt. He looks up and says, "Aaaah!"
John jumps out of the XX1 and strikes the Grunt in the head. The Grunt slams into two other Grunts who were in the corridor behind him.
The Grunts seem dazed but not knocked out. A hit like that would have taken out those Grunts that John fought on Halo. These guys seem tougher, but John is not one to over analyze a situation. He draws his M6E pistol and makes short order of them.
John makes his way with the fusion bomb to behind the plasma mauler's core. Cortana identifies the main power conduits between the engines and the mauler weapon. With a mauler weapon the engines must be directly linked to it, otherwise the power surge needed for the device might overload the rest of the ship.
John plants the bomb and makes his way back to the XX1. In all this takes only a few minutes. Before the Covenant has any idea of what happened, the XX1 has blasted out of there and the bomb explodes.
The bomb takes out the power conduits and starts a chain reaction that blows out the main engines on the covenant cruiser. The ship is crippled and its shields drop.
John and Cortana watch the battle from afar. The Covenant forces desperately fight to protect their cruiser from the Terran forces. The Covenant refuses to retreat so long as their cruiser still fights; and indeed their cruiser, the Divine Retribution, does gloriously fight on -- its point defense weapons firing constantly at incoming missiles while its plasma pulse cannons blast away at enemy ships.
A few HAVOK II missiles make it through the defenses and strike the cruiser. The explosions punch holes into the hull of the cruiser, but the cruiser has strong armor and many strong bulkheads and sectioned off areas. In the end, the HAVOKs do little more than destroy small sections of the cruiser, leaving the cruiser's superstructure well intact.
John sees the Moon of Orion in flames, but it still fights on too. More UNSC forces arrive out of slip space including three more Terran cruisers: the Belle of Liberty, the Star of Venus, and the Smite of Winter.
The battle rages for another hour. When it is finished, there are no Covenant survivors. In all it was a victory for the Terrans, but the losses were great, at least 200 fighters and more than twenty ships including two cruisers.
John does not know how many humans, AIs, and others lost their lives in the battle today. One thing is obvious to John however; the Terran weapons are nearly ineffective against this new line of Covenant ships.
------------------------------------------------
The Return of the Forerunners
Far away from Earth, Val and the original Cortana wait in Destiny's Blade. Their current location is outside the Elite home system of Sanctum.
Val gets up and starts to pace. "Cort, I'm tired of just waiting around, when are going see some action?" asked Val.
"We must gather more information," replied Cortana, "and besides if you want to pass some time, you can experiment more with your armor."
"Right, the Archonian Shadowguard armor," replied Val. "It's so light I forgot I was even wearing it. Let's see; its shields can extend out to become bladed weapons. It can blend with its surroundings and can fire bolts of force, energy, and flux as well as a bunch of other goodies. Where should I start?"
The Shadowguard armor was a gift to Val from Princess Kira -- the armor has been specially modified for a human and with the ability for Cortana to upload into it. The armor resembles an ornate and less bulky version of Spartan armor, only hundreds of generations more advanced along the lines of Archonian technology. Created by the Star Guardians of future and past, its craftsmanship in unparalleled, a lost art that has yet to come.
Val activates the shadow properties of the armor. She becomes darker than a moonless night from deep under the deep blue sea. She cannot be seen in the light, only her shadow exists.
As Val experiments further with the armor, Cortana monitors communications. One particular broadcast signal keeps coming from the planet Jengi in the Sanctum system. This appears to be of a debate going on in the Covenant Senate. A white-colored Elite with a pointed head who goes by the name of Othello keeps rambling about the coming of Judgement Day and how only the true Covenant will survive. Othello apparently is a leader of a group called the Knights of Purity. The opposition is a black-colored Elite wearing flowing green and gold robes and with a pointed head. Her name is High Priestess Galandra. She represents the majority called the Covenant Common Faith.
Just as the debate starts to get really old, Cortana is alerted. Destiny's Blade has detected tiny rips in the flux or fabric of space and time. This is the distinctive signature of a temporal interphased drive. This is the trail of a large ship, not a Covenant ship -- most likely Forerunner, perhaps a cruiser. It is very hard to detect the ship though.
All the races from the Forerunner days including the Archons and Nomdians have developed highly advanced jump drives. However beyond that, they differ. The Forerunners never quite got stargate technology to work like the Archons or Nomdians managed to. Instead the Forerunners developed in the lines of temporal physics with their larger ships having something described by the Nomdians as temporal interphased drives.
The temporal interphased drive allows the ship to shift its slip-stream spatial harmonics -- in a sense moving through multiple dimensions at the same time, not really in any one dimension. Although not instantaneous travel like stargates, it is very fast and has the advantage that the ship gains a highly advanced form of cloak that makes it nearly invisible to all scanners, combat sensors, and targeting systems -- Opposed to stargates that generally broadcast the position of the gating ship. As a side note, it's not confirmed but the Nomdians believe that the temporal interphased drive poses a serious risk to the survival and sanity of the crew. The Archons also think it poses a risk, but cannot explain what the risk is exactly.
Cortana focuses the scan and is able to get a better lock on the position of the Forerunner cruiser just before the cruiser heads into the tail of a passing comet. She pilots Destiny's Blade and follows stealthily after the cruiser and into the comet tail.
-- Next, Humanity's Best Hope --
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