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Chapter 0 of Halo: Fellowship in Blood
Posted By: gamer02<gamer02@hotmail.com>
Date: 25 February 2004, 3:08 AM
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Prologue, Part 1
"X-Ray six-niner-zero, do you read me?"
"I repeat. X-Ray six-niner-zero, do you read me?"
"we.....woun......own..."
"SERGEANT, DO YOU READ ME?"
"SERGEANT, COME IN!!!"
"COME IN, DAMMIT!! COME IN!!!!"
"SHIT!"
"They're gone, sir. I couldn't have gotten it any better than that."
"Fine. Make a general fleetwide query as to the whereabouts of dropship X-Ray six-niner-zero and her squad, and keep running recon flights of the planet. Oh, and prepare a dropship, fully armed, I'm taking the Master Chief and some ODSTs to find Sergeant McCoy and his squad."
Prologue, Part 2
After the fall of Reach, and the subsequent destruction of the "Ringworld" designated HALO-04 by the Spartan II Master Chief John-117, there was a terrifying calm before the storm - the Covenant invasion of Earth. During this 4 ½-month period, UNSC forces reinforced their positions at the few key colonies left. While it seemed impossible, the enlistment rate quadrupled; training time was cut down even more as a result. This was true almost to the extent of instructors saying, five minutes after you got there, "Here's your gun, now go defend your race." After only the first month, 178 000 newly trained marines were ready and equipped to kick some Covenant ass. They were accompanied by 27 000 hastily-promoted ODSTs, 12 000 new Special Forces officers, 4500 new Rangers, and an undisclosed number of new or maybe not new ONI agents that do not exist (in addition, this sentence ended at the word 'Rangers', and you are drawing this from your imagination).
The strange thing is that they survived. Only 61 000 of those marines were K.I.A. or M.I.A., and of the 3 043 000 marines that were already deployed in the 15 remaining Inner Colonies, only 287 000 were lost. Projected losses were in the range of 120 000 and 1 009 000 respectively.
Reach's importance was, obviously, only topped by Earth's, but even then her planetary defences were just barely more than Reach's were. This quickly changed. In one week, the number of Super MACs orbiting Earth went from 25 to 60; not to mention that a pair of 150 gigaton nuke mines were placed at the two most likely inbound slipstream vectors of a Covenant fleet. Also, each Inner Colony remaining was given 10 Super MACs.
Of the 15 colonies, 6 were being actively fought for, and many wondered why it was not all of them. For example: the system of Epsilon Eridani (Reach's home system) was right next to the system of Theta Eridani, which was home to Post colony. They were so close that slipstream jumps could not be calculated between the two, a longer route had to be taken around. The Covenant had completely ignored this system. Some captains running troop deployments to the system even reported that they could pick up Covenant warships barely in sensor range, and they were sure they themselves could be seen.
It seemed as though even the ONI spooks were confused with the Covenant's pickiness with invading the remaining colonies. News reporters would get the rare opportunity to confront an ONI representative and instead of getting the usual and much-expected "No comment", they would be looked at strangely and ignored.
Finally, the UNSC Hammerhead, a Jones-Class Destroyer, flew past the battle site around Reach at Slipstream and managed to drop a probe, although not ordered to do so. Half the crew had been allowed to stay awake, and all who witnessed the data coming through are not likely to forget it. The telemetry showed that there was a large debris field with mixed UNSC and Covenant signatures, the UNSC debris was roughly consistent with the amount of lost ships, 134. The Covenant debris, however, was much more than estimated. Various numbers came from each of the 3 ships that had survived the battle, but all were between 92 and 126 accounting for covenant losses. The telemetry from the debris clearly showed that the mass floating there was consistent with that of about 200 to 217 destroyed Covenant warships.
Luckily, the captain of that vessel (Louis Dougherty) didn't give a damn about ONI debriefings, and proceeded to turn his ship around and head for Earth, following the Cole protocol to the letter so he wouldn't get yelled at. Of course, he simply had to broadcast to every friendly in sight that there was a Covie graveyard at Reach, and that his ship had found out why the bastards weren't invading like a mouse on cheese right then. ONI sent him a letter to shut him up, but that just made him yap louder, and nobody minded. In fact, the cheering was so loud when the news reached Earth that ONI gave up and started officially broadcasting it themselves.
At 2 months after the fall of Reach and the destruction of HALO-04, the Covenant had actually retreated from 2 of the colonies under siege, but then they decided to attack another 3, the battles for which were still being fought at the end of the 4 ½ month period, when Earth was attacked.
One of these was Fellow colony, the outermost of the remaining Inner Colonies.
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