Halo Conversations From The Universe: The Turning Points

[Laskar]

<\ FILE: HOSPITALITY_SEASON_ATTITUDE.txt Date: 8/21/2552
<\ USER: N/A
<\ ENTRY: 31-2684/84215
<\ CLEARANCE: [Declassified, 11/2591]
<\ TYPE: Chatroom log
<\ SUBJECT: Investigation into Secure Network (SecNet) communications between civilian consultant Harlan Edwards (Edwards) and Warrant Officer James W. Sherman (Sherman).
<\ OBJECTIVE: Understanding the early awareness of Covenant incursions into the Epsilon Eridani system.
<\ NOTES: Timestamps and location tags omitted from transcript. For additional information, see [HERE].

Edwards: Hey. You awake this time of morning?

Sherman: I am. What’s up?

Edwards: Nothing major. Battle Group Leviathan just sailed back into town. Wondered if you’d heard the news.

Sherman: Heard the news? You know for a fact that I’ve seen the damage, inside and out. Comes with the job.

Edwards: Is it true?

Sherman: Is what true?

Edwards: Come on, what else could I be asking about? Don’t play coy.

Sherman: I’m not being coy. I have no idea what the rumor mill is saying on Csodaszavaras so I can’t comment as to its accuracy until I know what is being said.

Edwards: Well, everyone knows that Battle Group Leviathan got beat up pretty hard. Word is that Stanforth pulled a trick out of his hat and gave the Covenant more than he got. A lot more.
Edwards: People are saying it’s our best victory since we lost Admiral Cole.

Sherman: They’re not wrong.

Edwards: Damn. And the Iroquois?

Sherman: Battle Group Leviathan should have been the opening act, because what the Iroquois did stole the show.
Sherman: Let me put it this way. Section Two isn’t going to shut up about Captain Keyes for the rest of the year, and they’re not going to make a damn thing up. They don’t have to.

Edwards: Holy shit. Keyes really rammed a destroyer?

Sherman: Ripped away all the ventral armor, survived, and patched up enough to take part in the following action.

Edwards: /Holy shit/

Sherman: And that’s not all, folks. Everyone is tight-lipped about it, but to a trained eye such as mine, it is quite clear that there is /another/ set of impact damage on the bow. The Iroquois rammed another ship later in the battle, possibly a heavy bomber or a picket ship.

Edwards: Damn, Keyes. They gave you the keys to a hotrod fresh off the lot, and you’ve already totaled it.
Edwards: He better watch out. I bet if Section Two get their way, he’s never going to fly again. They’ll get him stuck behind a desk for the rest of the war. We can’t afford to lose him like we lost Admiral Cole.

Sherman: We can’t afford to bench him. We couldn’t afford to bench Admiral Cole, and the war has only gotten worse.
Sherman: Section Two shaves off the rough edges and puts a smile on it, but the war has gotten so bad that we’re pulling Halcyon cruisers out of the boneyard and refitting them

Edwards: Shame.
Edwards: Well, I can’t keep you busy. Next time you swing by Port Savaria, give me a call. We’ll give the High Hill Bar and Grill another try.

Sherman: Wait.

Edwards: Yes?
Edwards: I’m still here.

Sherman: Are the smart AIs acting weird over there?

Edwards: Weird how?

Sherman: Are they saying anything weird? Cryptic references, change in affected emotion?

Edwards: The only AI I’m in regular contact with is Enoch, and he’s busy running tests on the you-know-what. Nothing weird coming from him, just annoyance that we have to pause work every five hours so BXR can punt an ore shipment into Reach’s orbit.

Sherman: Pause work? BXR’s mass driver really draws that much power?

Edwards: Has ever since they expanded the mines. I told them that this facility needed its own power supply when they built it, but nobody listened to me. “The power grid has plenty of room for expansion,” they said. It’s got nothing to do with the megawatts available, and everything to do with the fact that the mass driver is a big inductive load that drops the power factor by about a third.
Edwards: But no. I haven’t noticed anything amiss. Why?

Sherman: Something that Ardeth said when Battle Group Leviathan showed up. She spent two minutes talking about a bit of history that was so obscure, I had to look it up.

Edwards: Wow.
Edwards: What was she talking about?

Sherman: Radar. Pearl Harbor. World War Two.

Edwards: Wait, I know that last one. The second World War was the first one to use nuclear weapons, right?

Sherman: It was the first time that a lot of technology was used. Jet engines. Nuclear weapons. Machine cryptography. And it was the first war that radar was used, too.
Sherman: The United States was drawn into World War Two when Japanese aircraft slipped past the defenses of a naval base in the Pacific Ocean. It was a surprise attack, and they sunk several battleships.

Edwards: Did they not have radar at the time?

Sherman: Radar was primitive. A flock of birds or a rain squall could be mistaken for an aircraft. But that’s not what Ardeth was talking about.
Sherman: The first wave was spotted, but the officer in charge of the radar station was new, and he mistook the wave of Japanese for a small flight of American bombers that was due in at the same time at about the same heading. For security reasons, he couldn’t tell the operators about that flight of bombers, even though everyone knew they were coming. The operators had never seen a radar signature that big, but they didn’t tell him.

Edwards: Oh. One of those cockups. Everyone's got a piece of the puzzle, but nobody is brave enough to speak up. Plenty of FUBAR to go around.

Sherman: Quite.

Edwards: Does she think that the Covenant are here? In the Epsilon Eridani system? And it’s being covered up or mistaken or... I don’t know. What?

Sherman: I don’t think so. She just told me that anecdote and asked me “How were they supposed to know?”

Edwards: Oh...
Edwards: Well... I think that if I was qualified to answer this question, my job title would be “Computational Psychoanalyst” and I’d have a nice cushy office in downtown New Alexandria. But I think that Smart AI think just like we do. That’s what we built them to be. They’re like us, except they think faster and they’re immersed in rivers of information.
Edwards: The problem is, once you have all that data, you have to interpret it. And the world isn’t crystal clear. It’s full of noise, assumptions, red tape and black ink. It’s got us Humans in it, and you can guess just how hard we make it to predict the future.

Sherman: I suppose.

Edwards: Look. Sigma Octanus is pretty close to home, all things considered. We won, but this was still a hard-fought battle. Ardeth is afraid, and she’s looking for where the Covenant will come next. She’s looking at all the data, and she’s probably not seeing a haze that could either be a flock of birds or an assault carrier. She’s probably seeing a fuzzy nothing where a fleet of Covenant ships could be hiding.
Edwards: Think of it this way. A Covenant ship could pop in at the edge of the Epsilon Eridani system, and we wouldn’t know for hours because of light lag. All the while we’re sitting here, completely unaware, the Covenant could be taking the measure of our defenses.
Edwards: You know this. I know this. We’ve been thinking about it every day since the war started. But Ardeth hasn’t. She’s just five months old. Just because she’s smart doesn’t mean that she’s emotionally mature, or that she’s come to terms with that constant worry of what-if-they're-out-there.

Sherman: Heh. Maybe you should go for that cushy office. And maybe a holographic lounge chair for your patients.

Edwards: I’m just calling it like I see it. And I’m not worried. If the Covenant were spotted in the system, we’d know about it. You couldn’t possibly miss the fireworks.

Sherman: Nothing weird going on, even at the edges?

Edwards: Well, the Piss-Offs are raising Hell down in Visegrad.

Sherman: The who?

Edwards: People’s Occupation. They’ve infiltrated the local Hungarian population, making trouble for the UNSC’s local infrastructure. They’ve got a lot of sympathizers in those farming communities. Lot of farmers pissed off about the comm dishes.
Edwards: They’ve raised enough Hell that the Rangers have been sent to root them out. Not heard much since then. Probably a lot of door-to-door fighting going on down there that we’re not going to see on the news.

Sherman: I don’t see what their problem is. A communications dish doesn’t take up that much acreage.

Edwards: Well, no, but each comm dish needs about a hundred square kilometers of exclusion zone around it, for security. Sometimes the UNSC just grabbed a mountaintop and called it good. So the Piss-Offs have been interfering with our comms, the UNSC Army sent in units to hunt them down, and the civilians in the area have been growing restless. And don’t let this spread around, but the communication blackouts make people think that the PO’s will try to grab ships, like on New Harmony.

Sherman: Or the UNSC Upon the Parapet. And that was such a shitshow that the UNSC can’t let it happen again.
Sherman: Look. Whatever the local brand of Innies are up to, I don’t think Ardeth is worried about that. If she’s talking about Pearl Harbor, she’s worried about us getting caught with our pants down around our ankles. She’s worried about an intelligence failure allowing the Covenant to get the jump on us. Here. And I don’t see how that’s possible.

Edwards: Well, our first line of defense is the Slipstream Remote Outposts. You know how spotty those are. They frequently miss inbound transients, and they can’t tell the difference between one of ours and one of theirs.

Sherman: They’re getting better. One managed to detect the inbound fleet at Sigma Octanus and get off a warning in time for the Iroquois to get positioned.

Edwards: Good for Sigma Octanus. Fact remains that the UNSC pours billions into that program because of its potential, not its performance.

Sherman: It’s hard to miss a whole damn fleet. And once /any/ Covenant warship arrives in the system, we’ll know. You can’t possibly miss a slipspace exit rupture.

Edwards: Not if they’re in the outer edge of the system. It’ll be hours before we see the flash.

Sherman: It’s not going to be half a day, not like the early years of the war. The UNSC has been building that FTL comm buoy system around Epsilon Eridani. As soon as one of them sees the exit rupture, it’ll sound the alarm on a direct line to HIGHCOMM.

Edwards: That buoy system isn’t complete. The average time to detection is still three hours.

Sherman: Three hours when the Covenant used to have twelve. If the Covenant take their time and scout the system like they’ve done before, it’s going to cost them the initiative.
Sherman: Between the RSOs and the FTL buoys, we’re going to know that the Covenant are coming. Ardeth is worried about another Pearl Harbor, but I can’t see it happening here.

Edwards: I guess. Not unless they do something crazy like follow a freighter in and piggyback in on their slipspace rupture.

Sherman: What. You can do that?

Edwards: It’s tricky. You’ve got to ride on a larger ship’s wake and make some really precise exit calculations. Pirates and smugglers do it now and then, but not in a system as well monitored as Epsilon Eridani.
Edwards: It’s kind of obvious when two engine signatures originate from the same slipspace rupture. The only way to do it here is to rely on blind luck and hope to get lost in the traffic.

Sherman: What if we can’t see the second ship?

Edwards: Why?

Sherman: Rumor has it that the second ship that the Iroquois rammed was a stealth ship. It didn’t show up on sensors until the crew knew where to look.

Edwards: Like a prowler?
Edwards: The Covenant have prowlers?
Edwards: /Shit!/
Edwards: What the Hell is going on in Visegrad?

A/N: So, this is a challenge for myself. I'm writing data drops, in-universe documents that each tell a part of a tale. Since they're part of the Daybreak Alternate Universe continuity, they're in the same continuity as Not All Who Wander and some other stories that I'm writing with some colleagues.

This data drop in particular was my favorite to write, because it touched upon a whole lot of cool concepts that Halo hasn't addressed in canon. Stuff like how light-lag gives the Covenant yet another advantage in the war, or how AIs aren't emotionally mature when they are first created. That last one in particular is pretty neat, because a lot of science fiction treats artificial intelligences as beings of pure intellect. Halo doesn't go down that route. Smart AIs are known to have algorithms that regulate their emotions, and we've seen them develop affections for Humans and for each other. Stands to reason that Smart AI aren't whole when they are created, but have to grow emotionally and spiritually over their short lifespans.

 

[Laskar]

<\ FILE: BRONZE_TELOS_MENTION.txt DATE: 8/30/2552
<\ USER: DISPATCHER
<\ ENTRY: 31-5873/12043
<\ CLEARANCE: Classified (NOVEMBER)
<\ TYPE: Audio Log (Translated)
<\ SUBJECT: Audio log recovered from a battlefield in the Visegrad mountains. Initial analysis indicates that the log contains the private reflections of an Elite Zealot regarding the eminent demise of Humanity. For additional details regarding its provenance, see [HERE].
<\ NOTES: This document contains insights regarding the complicated feelings that Elite warriors have in regards to Humanity, as of late 2552. It might warrant declassification and dissemination among low-level analysts and diplomats.

Reetch. That is what they call this world.
Reetch. It is not a word but a name.
Reetch. That word gave my translator so much trouble until we finally understood.

Not reach, but Reetch. The name of their homeworld.

I am sure of it. Seven times has the sun risen since our darkship inserted us into the highland mountains of this world. Seven days have we ranged through field and forest, taking the measure of this world’s sentries with holy instruments. I have seen the orbital defenses streaking across the horizon with my naked eyes. So many warships, so many starside fortresses. No other colony we have graced had such a splendor of might! This must be the Humans’ final redoubt! What world but their cradle would be so zealously guarded?

They deny it, of course.

The serfs we have interrogated speak only a mongrel language unknown to my translator, and so my interrogators have been unable to pry any information from them. A worthless task anyways. Surely such a lowly caste, banished to the mountains to till poor soil, knows nothing worth my time. And few of the soldiers we have captured are so fearful and shallow of spirit as to break under interrogation. Most just recite a litany of their name and their standing within their legion.

But one broke. And she told me everything.

Aneeka van Onselen. Capteen of the Aycompanee of the 231st Ranjurs, subservient to the Onotherd Ranjur legion. She was such a delicate thing to be a warrior in command of warriors. The mere threat of the Kig-Yar's ministrations made her babble like a child, and when she regained her composure, she told me so much. Strange. She is the first Human I have ever truly spoken to.

She came to Reetch years ago to train as a soldier, and again to be initiated into the Ranjurs, as did many of the warriors beneath her. She trained in the wilderness where we did battle, and she birthed her first litter of children in the city down on the plains. She told me that this world’s shipyards are most active of all, and when the Humans’ fleets are depleted in battle, they come here to re-arm and repair. Even the Demons were forged here, she was certain of it!

But when I asked her of the location of the Human cradle-world, she hesitated. The Humans have shed oceans of their own blood to keep the location of that world secret, and even she would not reveal it. But when I asked if Reetch is where the Humans climbed from the primordial muck, I saw the glint of terror in her eyes. That told me all I need to know.

I have fought the Humans since the first cycle of the war. From one tainted world to another I have chased them, and I know how jealously they protect the location of their cradle world. To have finally discovered it, to be among the first warriors to set foot upon its dirt, is the greatest victory I have ever known. A feeling most profound!

To think that I came here in search of relics!

And yet the cold shadows of doubt close in around my hearts. Devoted Supreme Abto Tel 'Muralumee awaits my testimonial. We have discovered the resting place of the Forerunner’s instruments, and we are ready for extraction. Even the interwoven defenses of this world cannot keep us out. And if I reveal that we have found the Human cradle-world, all of the fleets in this sector will be drawn here. All of them. Thel ‘Vadamee himself will descend with the indomitable Fleet of Particular Justice. The Fleet of Holy Respite will race him for the honor.

But what then?

The destruction of Humanity is the will of the gods, and we are their instrument. Their crimes are so great that the Mute Oracle violated its ages-old vow of silence to condemn them. Had not the Hierarchics intervened and pled on our behalf, the Oracle would have torn the Anodyne Spirit from High Charity and personally laid waste to Humanity. We can only choke back our shock that a race can be so fallen, and carry out the duty that was given to us.

But have the Humans not suffered enough?

We have purged world after world, sealing the Humans’ doom with vast glyphs of judgment. The Prophets tell us that the Humans are utterly in thrall to their machine intelligence masters, but this is not so! I have seen them fight with skill and great valor, and for the sake of their fellow warriors. They are not just puppets of the False Oracles. Even Aneeka nearly spent her life to take that of my shieldbearer.

Are they truly beyond redemption? When we discover the Holy Rings and enkindle their luminous wisdom, will every last Human be left behind?

My hearts lie heavy, for I do not know the answer. But I have my duty, and such questions are for men much wiser than I.

I will send the message. I will tell my master what we have found. And then perhaps I will pry the answers I seek from Aneeka. I have time. The Humans are mobilizing their armies against me, and my men suspect that Demons are on the march. Indeed, Aneeka swears it to be so.

So be it. My soul is riven with questions, but I know my duty.

Shon'ai.