There was no stopping the ice.
It was the full manifestation of the nuclear winter that was choking the glassed world of Messa. In the closing years of the Covenant's genocidal campaign against the Human race, they'd brought the might of their gargantuan navy to bear on the agricultural planet, who's denizens had named Messa .
They'd proceeded to burn it, as they had with dozens of worlds they'd found.
Vast, immense, amounts of white hot plasma were poured onto the surface of Messa, from the weapons bays of dozens of the Covenant fleet's backbone, the CCS battlecruisers, methodically unleashing the scorching bombardment over square mile after square mile of the world they were orbiting, having turned to ashes, vaporized particles, and molten debris every last Human vessel present in the system, military or otherwise.
Yet again. It was a scene that had played out dozens upon dozens of times throughout Humanity's galactic empire: another planet, another world reduced to nothing but a charred graveyard.
A frozen graveyard. Cold, frigid, and dead. Countless denizens of Messa died, killed outright by the glassing plasma, which burned and slagged everything, or by the new ice-dominated climate, which had frozen and buried everything. There was virtually no hint they'd ever existed at all; they were now part of the slag from the glassing, or entombed within the ice.
As the planetary climate crashed under the glassing, the glaciers and snow appeared.
The worst effects of the nuclear winter. At first, they were actually combined with the plasma, a utterly lethal mix of fire and ice. Soon, though, the real masses of ice began to appear, from where the Covenant had concentrated thier attacks: further north, and south.
The ice that emenated from there was essentially an extension of the polar ice caps; monumental amounts of perfectly formed ice that had begun to creep its way north and south, fanning out from the poles, repaving the land with a new one, of ice.
They were gargantuan in scale, hundreds of meters by cross section, stretching and running out for the length of a whole nation, across the surface of what had once been Alluvion. They had a vanguard of snow preceding them,blanketing everything, as temperatures worldwide fell to levels that were hardly able to support life.
What , cities, and towns weren't now slagged ruins, were quickly consumed by the tide of the winter. The glaciers, not at all akin to the ones that had existed on Earth during its own Ice era, spread with staggering speed ( for ice ), brutally crushing and sweeping over swathes of the face of Messa, glassed or not.
Messa was now another Hoth
The melted ruins of were soon buried under the tides of ice walls, massive, shimmering formation of blue-white ice that didn't slow down, and couldn't have been. What had already been burned and blasted, heaped beneath snow, was just crushed away by the relentless advance of the ice. The glaciers moved like rivers, and everything else was just something else to be swept over
Which they did.
Less than a year from the glassing event, virtually all of Messa was buried with ice.
Except, for a narrow band of habitable land, that wrapped around its equator.
Fully boxed in by landscapes of snow, with the collassal glaciers taking up a generous ammount of the planet's lower and upper hemispheres, there was still some of Messa that had escaped the effects of the glassing.
A belt of ice and snow free land, wrapping fully around the planet's equator. It resembled a belt, a strip, standing out with striking, bold sharpness against the expanses of white.
It wasn't wide by any measure; less than a hundred miles. On either side, the imposing, other worldly looking cliffs of the edges of the ice walls loomed, running to the horizon. Plains of snow, reaching right up to the edge of warm, Meddateranian climate land, complete with thriving foliage, gradually rolling hills adorned with groves of bushes, winding rivers and streams, and tightly packed forests.
That had once been the bulk of Alluvion's surface. Empasis on ' once ', becasue after the glassing, that narrow band of land was all that was left, fully boxed in and surronded by the fearsome ice cliffs, and the snowfields that accompanied them. Often, ie several times a week, gusts of frigid air from there swept over the belt, battering it with stinging coldness
But, aside from that, the belt remained free.
And lived in, too.
Though most- the majority of- Messans had been killed, some, roughly a qaurter- had lived. Masses of colonists had congregated in the belt.
Some had arrived in large groups and caravans, while others had tricled in as ones, or fours. All of them had no clue or idea how far the glassing's plasma, or the ice-climate, would reach. They had just done what was the only thing you could do while the Covenant were reducing a planet to glass- run.
And they had. Fleeing anywhere they could, as everything was burned around them. Fleets of vehicles embarked from the cities, slightly smaller ones from the towns and settlements ( Say it again, Preston. Say it ! ), as everyone ran for it. Many of them failed.
So, many. The Covenant made a point of erasing every city and sizable population center to ashes that they could, and the snarled up, miles long jams extending out from them were perfect targets for their plasma storms. The raging, barreling liquid fire took most of the colonists out, and in the aftermath of it, those who had somehow escaped from it, were soon scattered in the mangled confusion, and slowly succumbed to the subzero tempretures, stranded out the wastelands.
But, not all of them.
There hadn't been a full census, obviously, but by the account of those who'd made it, around an eighth of all of them were still alive. One eighth of the 5 million who'd lived on Alluvion.
They were all that was left, and they had to forge a new life in the belt. All over , they slowly, but steadily and began to rebuild, crafting villages and town from anything and everything they could find. They began to repair and upkeep the smaller towns that had been abandoned during the panicked exodus of the Covenant's arrival, and worked to forge a new existance.
They were greiving, they were angry, both at the absolute extremes of what anybody could feel who'd had their home planet subjected to a Covenant glassing.
And they weren't the only ones.
Messa had been glassed and frozen, but to do it, the Covenant had first had to deal with its defenders.
The human warships that had stood over the planet, and fought the attacking alien alliance, had fought with tenacity, courage and skill; all typical of Human forces from when the Covenant had first begun to strike Human worlds. They inflicted casualites, and they'd held the enemy up, but, against the full might of a Covenant armada, they ultimetley had no chance.
Like the colonists on the world they were charged to defend, most of their number were deceased .
But, just as with the colonists, there were those who had lived.
They were the last of the Colonial Administration Authority. Distrusted and looked down on by the UNSC, for thier supposed connections with the Innsurection, the CMA had nevertheless struggled on, with second hand hardware, and accusations of collaborations with the terrorists.
But, for the CMA garrison at Messa disproved that with their actions. They'd proved themselves, and although they'd been decimated, they were not beaten
They were still the stewards of Messa
And there was work to do