The Invasion Of Sol System

The Invasion of Sol System

"Strategic battles usually occurred in orbit, not ship to ship battles like in naval fights, but planned and expertly executed orbital combat. The usage of intelligent and guided projectiles and orbital mechanics to an advantage was paramount. Human fighters and dropships where more accomplished in certain atmospheres and planetary based conditions, whereas orbital drones and autonomous combat machines were employed heavily many other places. Nuclear weapons and retrofitted terraforming technology that had been used to make several planets habitable like earth were acquired and adapted for combat. Geologic survey and alteration nuclear charges, orbital lasers for climate control and daytime lighting, fusion-antimatter reactors and other massive, peacetime technologies were organized into the war effort. The aliens seemed very capable of surviving and continuing combat operations after or during these sorts of attacks, but strategies to largely cripple their efforts were refined for efficiency by the end of the war. At the Battle of Olympus Mons for example, the invasion force had begun construction on a massive fortification and mining complex that would have effectively claimed their forces the entity of Mars. The human warships Vengeance Spoken, Justice Commanded and Executor Ordained all focused a targeted orbital assault on the construction, ending in a 40 charge nuclear detonation which vaporized over 500 kilometers of Martian surface. The alien invaders were devastatingly dealt a serious blow, at the cost of severe damage to the human ships. It is generally agreed that this battle stopped what would have become a war ending invasion of Earth by the aliens." - A Common Record and Remembrance of the Invasion of 2400

Honestly one of the most chilling parts of Halo. When I first heard this, first playing Halo CE, I knew it had meaning that was beyond what was being presented here. And then, after reading Silentium, truly knowing that context, I was astounded. Rereading those words, and then hearing that mechanical, eternally cheery but somehow almost eerily, grotesquely solemn and serious tone echo with an answer down the eons: chilling. Fucking. Chilling. Halo knows how to make you shiver. And it’s fan-fucking-tastic. Also, show some love to Haruspis (hopefully spelled correctly), her page is lovely.

halo: combat evolved (2001) | halo: silentium (2013)

“Now, old friend, we have the most important job in history - perhaps in all time. You may very well outlast all of us here. You may see the new galaxy emerge.” I stop and turn away, looking out of the Ark’s citadel towards the now-cooling forge and the mining site beyond. “Tell me, Chakas, if this was your choice, after all we have seen and survived… would you fire the rings?”

He does not respond. I don’t know that I expected a response. It is a question asked by way of farewell. And much of his memory will be erased upon arrival at his new station in the name of compartmentalisation, if ever the logic plague were to re-emerge.

For a moment, I wonder if he will remember any of this at all.

End Of An Era

Making dinosaurs is hard. You know that? Hah. Of course they are, everyone knows that. The first cloned animal was a sheep, you know that one? Dolly? Yeah, yeah. A sheep, a little fury bastard they cooked up in a lab after a billion or so tries. Dolly led right here, a little furry cutesy critter to the resurrection of animals that had been dead for sixty five million years. Extinction is forever, they used to say. Money conquers all, even killer asteroids and the spans between eons. Ha. I can't exactly say how they did it, no one who worked on the process or at the preserve can. Patented the whole thing, the animals genomes. Patented them right down to the molecules. Classified down to the red ink the scientists and engineers used to create their dinosaur formula on the back of napkins. It took a long time, I can tell you that. A long fucking time. But eventually, they did it. They made dinosaurs. Fifteen species, mostly from the Late Cretaceous with some specimens of the very, very Late Jurassic. Dinosaurs! Everyone is so apathetic about it now, barely even care we recreated the basis of every child's greatest dream. Anyway, yeah. We cloned them, manufactured them. Altogether we had about two hundred and twenty, two hundred and thirty specimens by the end of the cloning and maturing process. We looked and looked for a place to put them, a wild zone. We talked to South American tribes and American business tycoons and Chinese land-sellers. We went everywhere and anywhere. Some places were utterly gorgeous but we passed em up. Eventually, we managed to buy an incredibly large tract of land from a dying Canadian-American oil baron up in Alberta. Absolutely pristine place, nestled between cliffs and mountains. Clear rivers, misty forests, two entire lakes. Just absolutely fantastic, you'd think God himself had sent us a piece of the Cretaceous itself. So, we set to work. Building massive, ten foot thick black concrete walls and subtle moat-fencing, security systems, animal feeding schedules and platforms. We hired architects from nearly ten different countries, and Christ they weren't cheap. Elevated luxury cabins, lodges inside and outside the preserve, bar outposts near both lakes. Expensive, but worth it. Utterly worth it. Paleontologists and biologists primarily from Europe, America and China signed on, helping us keep the animals happy and healthy. We surely helped a lot of science papers in the time, didn't we? Hah. Who knew they'd ever actually interact with the real thing? But they did. They informed us the best they could on eating habits, behavior, territory construction. We followed them to the letter. By the end of then, another five years of development, we were finished. The animals were released entirely, the architects and engineers and paleontologists went home, the lights turned on. And Christ, what a dream that was! You have no idea, no goddamn idea how amazing it was. The first night it began, when we really were finished. It was unlike anything anyone has ever experienced. Or will ever experience again. Up in the night sky the auroras unfolded, I remember. All sapphire and gem greens, blues. Rich auburns flailing with the untouchable violets. Out in their habitats the dinosaurs sounded, their ancient voices once again upon the air. They sing, not like their birdlike cousins but like whales. They make noises you can actually feel in your chest, feel in your bones and blood. Alien, unearthly. For five years, it was the best time of my life. The animals lived and bred and died, they moved, they ate, they mated. They where alive. The wealthiest of the wealthy came and paid great sums to look at them, to marvel, to drink right there on the balconies of their elevated lodges and watch living dinosaurs. Real life, living dinosaurs! It was amazing, unbelievable. Almost ridiculously awesome in every sense of the biblical awesome, of the utterly grand and titanic awesome. I knew there were people pocking around. Competitors sneaking and searching at what we were doing, studying. We hid ourselves and our work well, more so than on this project than any other. They wanted to know, badly. And eventually, they did. They found us out, our competitive nemesis. Her and her goddamn orbital satellites, eyes in the sky. I look up now and any stars that don't match I flip the bird, hoping her magnified cyclops acolytes will see me from all the way up there. She found out, probably hitting and scratching some low executive when she did. She always liked hitting and scratching, she liked the fear. Hah. Of course she did! But, anyway, I'm getting of track. The witch found us, found us good. She mines up there, you know. Asteroids, comet cores, space debris collection and dispersion runs. All up there in the blue shadow of the earth. And she knew exactly what she was going to do. It was empty that month. November, chilly and all of the leaves such a rich rusty red, rusty yellow. Gorgeous as always. The animals were doing the usual as twilight rose and the sun bowed, golden streamers in the sky mixing with liquid purplish black above and metallic reddish pink below. Thunder clouds off to the west, mighty thunderheads craggy like mountains and illuminated within by the occasional strike of Olympian lightning. I was there, in my own private lodge on a nearby mountainside. I could see the whole park, from end to end and side to side. Nestled between the mountain cliffs, a slice of prehistory right here in our world. The fireplace crackled and roared, music playing softly. I remember the stupid and ignorant smile on my face, magnifying the interactive systems on my park-facing glass window to see the various dinosaurs moving across the land. I watched, unaware. It came like the thunder out west but so much louder, so much more furious and hateful. A blinding star tearing out and down from above me, down toward the reserve. It seemed so painfully slow when I saw it, so unreal. I looked dumbly, frozen. I knew in the depths of me already, already knew what was happening and why and how. I stood frozen, slamming open the glass door to reach my balcony and look out, terror overcame by defeat within myself. I watched. It was a horrendously pretty sight as the golden-white-blue light of the asteroid came lower and lower. It cast unearthly shadows across the landscape and the dinosaurs upon it, the light of their doom, of their end catching their eyes as it neared its journeys end. It came to rest at the end of the Preserve, the base of a large mountain face many kilometers away. The light was blinding, so painful that it continued to taunt and dance even after I had shut my eyes closed. Dancing in the black ocean of fear and crumpling defeat within me. For moments it was painfully silent as an enormous, nightmarish blossom of reddish black light built and expanded from the vaporizing mountain. Fires many hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of meters in size sprang upward and then were cast forward by the disturbing breath of impact. Vaporized mountain rock, contorted screaming air, fire all mixing and pushing outward at supersonic speed from the epicenter which now glowed a furious, infernal molten red. The shockwave was visible, a shattering presence which bent and broke trees as it passed forward, throwing every single auburn colored leaf into beautiful, terrible storms. Autumn in a single second. The lakes were thrown forward and out of their bases. When it reached me, every pane of glass was shattered and I felt cuts across my body, a horrifically booming sound in my ears not even a fraction of what must have resounded down there in the valley. I crumpled forward, still watching as tears and blood ran down my cheeks, watching that vaporizing cloud gain more and more and more ground. Wildfires danced and grew, lightning strikes emanating from within the cloud. Within moments, less, the entire horrific holocaust was over. The unstoppable cloud of death swept over everything in its path, finally slamming into the base of the mountain below me and redoubling back upon itself. Within I could see dancing fire and molten ground, already rapidly cooling to an ashen and glassy mix. The animals were gone, the Preserve gone. Every last bit of it gone. I was evacuated soon after, rising up above the hellscape and away. It was contained by the mountains and valley crooks surrounding the impact, largely burned out within several weeks. When I returned, I was greeted by a husk. The forests were practically nonexistent, anything still standing barely a charcoal black skeletal sketch rained with ashen obsidian stone. Lodges and cabins had been completely annihilated, buried beneath that oncoming wall of oblivion. No living things remained. The dinosaurs were lost, entombed and exterminated once again. We looked for months, searching every cranny and nook and crag. Nothing. I still return there, sometimes. That hallowed ground. It is silent, not even the wind wishes to speak over this grave. I breath in the air, leaning against a stone. It is silent.

Traffic is bad today. The endless stream of cars glitter beneath half sunlight-half dreary cloudscape, shinning with rain pelting their rooves and windows. It’s humid.

The hadrosaurs have little concern for such noisy, impatient metallic creatures. Their haunting calls ring out with unearthly notes and tragic, rippling rumbles, brightly colored crests, wattles, and quills vibrantly displayed. Every summer they pass this way, following unseen magnetic blossoms, East to West. The largest among them are sixty feet long, nearly twenty five feet tall. Docile. Majestic. In the distance, thunder rumbles.

A thousand radios crackly chitter, some more petulant than others.

The dinosaurs are unmoved, striding along the horizon, to ancestral homelands far, far away.

Mythic

In the ruins of our home Star, we found what remained.. Vast fortresses turned to cinders and tombs, bloodied hospitals that quietly turned in their dead orbits, battered guns a thousand kilometers long turned to colossal wrecks. The Worlds themselves were nothing more than hellish, desolate remnants; surfaces pulverized or infested with awful, feral terrors. Even the Sun itself bore the scars of a gargantuan battle, and we witnessed the mighty corpses from mythic weaponry which had drank the very soul of our lovely, memorable sun. Dead. Everything dead. Another system turned to wreckage and silence in the World-Killers' path. We passed on into the night, following. As we passed off into the night, we collected a trillion spirits; artificial intelligences and their vast, intricate records. We queried and sifted and studied, watching history unravel about the now long-dead worlds of humanity. The first readings from star systems distant as some Goliath approached, giant beyond all measure. Listening to frantic signals calling out from the void, from Epsilon Eridani to Tau Ceti to Barnards Star to Alpha Centauri, begging in the night for safety until their signals began to vanish one after another after another. Eighty billion human souls snuffed out in the cold blackness. The Solar System was awash in desolation, in fear. Vast battle-networks and entrenchments across millions of miles between worlds and moons were built, enormous interstellar arks constructed as failsafes for our species survival. As humanity waited, and waited, our hopes began to arise. Some believed the World-Killer had passed, had slipped on into the Abyss beyond us. Others believed that maybe it had met its own end at greater still terrors, slaughtered in an ecosystem awful beyond human conceptions. We waited in the Dark. When the Killer of Worlds arrived, the battle was not long. Grotesque ancient weapons of unstoppable power, built for purposes too sinister to even begin to contemplate, failed. The fleets of warships, the moons-turned-to-fortresses were crumbled. The Arks fled, and the Killer of Worlds gave chase. As we sail onward into the eternal night, I feel in my depths failure. Do we survive, amongst the stars? Or have all but us onboard this vessel met a final, horrendous End?

Anybody else have the feeling that Guardians don’t actually stick strictly to a single class, but actually blend tactics, abilities and “culture” from each class? Hunters that utilize the scholarly attitude of Warlocks, Titans who roguely wander the wilderness and believe more in Spear than Shield, Warlocks who vehemently maintain the City zealously and utilize their insight only within the walls, pragmatically? As somebody who plays a Hunter in a way that feels like a blend of all three class traits and characteristics, that’s what I’ve always felt. Guardians maybe Hunters, Warlocks and Titans, but are far more merged in just exactly how they are.

Headcanon Question of the Week #5:

How many Guardians are there? Is the population of Guardians equally split among the three classes, or are there more of one or two classes then the other(s)?