The New Legacy Massacre Chapter 1: Distress
Posted By: Psycho-Monkey<Chimpywashere@gmail.com>
Date: 10 May 2007, 11:19 pm
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Part 1: Distress
Planets were coming up short now in the war. As the Covenant ravaged each hunk of rock controlled by the UNSC, the quicker UNSC realized that they had a shorter amount of to react. While true that losing a planet means one less planet to spend resources on to protect. The Covenant seemed to have a habit of traveling to every human-controlled planet and wipe out any trace of human existence on it. This habit of the Covenants' slowed them down... a lot. Usually allowing the UNSC to rally up enough forces to try to uselessly protect the next planet on the Covenant's hit list.
Every planet lost was a sign to the UNSC that the inevitable was coming all too close for comfort. The UNSC realized this in the beginning of the war. That is, until the invention of the Jump drive came along from the wonderful labs of ONI. Everyone knows that the speed of light is the fastest any object can go in this universe, with the Jump drive one simply "jumps" into the area desired using another universe. The schematics were very vague with any scientist trying to explain simply saying, "You simply don't have the math to understand the concept."
Thus new hope rose, the Jump drive was faster than slipspace - roughly ten times faster- and most of all, nearly untraceable. The technology required to trace a "jump" is way out of the Covenants league, ONI scientists were sure of it. This meant that colonization could effectively be taken beyond this galaxy, far away from the war and the Covenant. In a sense, this plan was an example of divergent evolution. A small group leaves the original population to colonize a new area. The originals would definitely be lost in the process, but ONI was making sure that the plan was kept a secret from the majority of the population. Messages were sent not via transmissions but simply sent over by hand- written on paper nonetheless. After the messages were read, they were effectively disposed of.
However, the Jump drives were very expensive, and only equipped to a couple thousand of ships. Most of those ships were used to safeguard the new colonies, while only a couple were used on reconnaissance in the war front. The colonization effort has been in effect ten years into the war.
Thus, the Colonies were formed. There are around five planets, each having a growing population. Every two years a new planet is found with a stable atmosphere to colonize. Although the Colonies have had their share of failures in colonization, ninety percent were successful. Aside from colonizing planets, bases were also made on large asteroids. Most were considered to be planets, but then the scientists were reminded of the Pluto debate and instead called them asteroids. Refugees from the lost planets back in the Milky way was the bulk of the Colonies total population. The reason the refugees had to move out to a new life was because the remaining planets couldn't carry anymore human beings as their population quotas were far beyond exceeded. So in a way, two birds were killed with one stone.
New Legacy is the homestead of the Colonies. Legacy was essentially the equivalent of Earth and the first to be colonized. The planet had a population consisted of mainly refugees. The one trait that was discovered first in New Legacy was it's abundance of resources. As a result, Legacy was one of the largest industrial planets in the Colonies; building ships and building materials to help the newer additions to the Colonies. New Legacy was obviously the new shining hope in mankind's future.
The Covenant arrived with minimal warning. It is still unknown as to how the Covenant found about the Colonies and even how the location was determined. Either way, the guarding ships of New Legacy were very unprepared for the onslaught of Covenant cruisers drifting menacingly in front of them. The battle was lost, (I regret to say that the ships couldn't put up that much of a fight) this class of UNSC ships simply weren't designed to have a stand-off with hundreds of Covenant cruisers. Hundreds of debris and dozen of huge chunks of once proud UNSC ships drifted aimlessly around New Legacy. The Covenant, not one to usually admire their destructive art, quickly took orbital positions over New Legacy and unloaded millions of drop ships; in which the series of events that followed created the largest secretive clusterfuck known to the UNSC and insultingly christening the clusterfuck, The New Legacy Massacre.
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