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Foresaken Forefathers Part Two: Righteous Rebirth
Posted By: Havok and AlphaBravo343<Tactical_Havok@hotmail.com>
Date: 13 May 2003, 3:21 AM
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Together, the remnants of Humankind and the Forerunner began the process of reconstruction. Earth, once a lush paradise of green and blue, was now charred and blackened from the long months of war. The top UNSC military commanders had doubted that anything could ever live for a sustained period of time with the planet's depleted resources.
They, however, had greatly underestimated the godly power of the Ancients. From the great warships in orbit, thousands of large, spherical glass balls were ejected out into the atmosphere. From some unknown power source, they kept a stationary orbit just inside the stratosphere. The Forerunner scientists had informed the human command structure that the balls were replenishing the atmosphere that had been burned away from the low-orbit naval gunfights that had taken place over the last weeks. The ozone, after hundreds of years of decay, was being rebuilt; toxins were being absorbed through filters in the glass spheres and neutralized.
On the ground, great machines tilled the land as far as the eye could see. Landscapes that had been glassed over by covenant weaponry were being rejuvenated and oxygenated by the machines. They also injected nutrients into the soil that greatly increased the growth rate of flora and fauna.
Human cities, devastated worse than the firebombing during World War Two, were being cleaned away. Huge mountains of twisted metal and concrete littered the countryside, cleaned away by huge Forerunner robotics. The robots had eight legs, and four great arms, each molded into some unknown tool. The machines cleared away the rubble that were once vast human cities, containing populations of several hundred million. The rubble was heaped up, and then loaded onto mammoth cargo shuttled, which ferried the waste into orbit. Once in orbit, the trash was ejected from the ships on a trajectory intersecting the sun.
In the place of the old human cities, a new wonder arose. Forerunner architects and technicians rode shuttles down to earth and picked out the sites for a new Empire's cities. The great plains were left to the animals of earth. The Forerunner chose other, stranger locations for their cities. Tall, graceful spires reached up out of deep canyons, enormous buildings stretched for mile underground, and the capital of the Human/Forerunner Empire was a sprawling, flowing metropolis constructed on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean
The UNSC military was upgraded enormously; weapons technology advancing several hundred generations. Projectiles were all but thrown away, in favor of the devastating power of Forerunner laser technology. All UNSC ships were completely overhauled. New beam cannons were added, as well as much more precise gravity drives and navigation equipment.
Now the average Marine wielded firepower equivalent to a scorpion tank, and armor almost equal to MJOLNIR. The Spartans themselves were equipped with Forerunner armor suits. These were different colored than those worn by Forerunner troops to differentiate between them.
The human population of earth before the Covenant attack had been somewhere in the vicinity of eight billion. After the last remnants of the covenant soldiers had been wiped off the face of the planet, humans numbered just above four billion. Billions upon billions of innocents had been executed. Of the five billion who had been conscripted into the military, only a scant few lived to tell about it. With all of her colonies extinguished by covenant fire, four billion humans had survived to this point in time. Four billion, compared to the hundreds of billions who had been alive before the war.
Through the greatly superior forerunner technology, the human defense forces were bolstered almost beyond comprehension. Fast grown clones replaced the haggard but determined forces defending earth. These soldiers were built by forerunner geneticists to be the perfect combatant.
Unwavering under enemy fire, smart, fast, and deadly, these were the first wave of human shock troopers. Thousands were spawned each day, with basic military training and discipline already ingrained into their bodies. One could see the troopers muster for parade ground inspection, assembled into ranks as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of millions of shock troops in black uniforms, menace in their eyes.
New and powerful combat cars and tanks churned the earth and mighty ships swept around the planet in close orbit, ready to take on its military cargo. This force was being assembled, and the fight was now going to be taken to the Covenant.
Earth bulged to the seams with humans. But these were humans were ready to fight. A military force the human race has never before seen has risen up from the ashes that were earth. They will defy the Covenant onslaught, and emerge victorious.
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