HALO: EPISODE ONE
PART ZERO: PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 000-A: PER AUDACIA AD ASTRA
It is the year 2552. Humanity has united as one and achieved what had been thought impossible by countless skeptics: scientists, religious leaders, military minds, the citizenry - its has spread past the confines of the solar system and built cities upon alien worlds, it has given itself a new purpose: to boldly go where no man, woman, or child has gone before, to search for the frontiers of our galaxy, to go per audacia ad astra.
But this massive paradigm shift in human culture from an amalgamation of war-torn nations fighting for domination to a spacefaring interstellar civilization did not come in the blink of an eye, nor did it come without cost - in both currency and human life.
After the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, the United Nations rose to power, and many looked forward to a future in which the UN would become some kind of super-nation, absorbing and obsoleting the empires of old, replacing them with a world democracy.
When humanity set its sights on the starts in the 20th century, almost the exact opposite happened. The world fragmented into spheres of democratic and communist identities, the United States of America and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics taking center stage in a war without battlefields.
Technology developed at a rapid, almost incomprehensible pace as the world embarked on a blitz towards the new millenium: Computers, automated assembly lines, artificial intelligence, lasers, holography, jet engines, wireless phones, networked electronics, voice recognition, high definition images, hydrogen fuel cells, biotechnology, cybernetics - spaceflight.
Of course, not all these advances were arbitrarily for the good of the people: stealth bombers, infrared cameras, radiological bombs, laser sights, unmanned fighter jets and tanks, laser tripwires, hydrogen bombs, biological warfare.
For the most part advances in military technology were intended to be used to protect the populace, according to the various nation-states of Earth. However, for some, these new tools of destruction were but a means to an end. They were the key to power. They were a way to turn the whole world into one united force of democracy or socialism.
However, as humans expanded to Mars, to Jupiter, to the Moon, to Saturn, to the farthest reaches of where the sun's gravity held sway, so too did these clashing viewpoints, until finally, they ran out of room. One side had to fall, and so became the first war in recorded history to be fought somewhere other than terra firma.
The nations of the world, however, were not powerful enough to defend the Earth. Not alone.
The United Nations Space Command was born - the first united human military force.
The UNSC launched a campaign against the tyrants of the interplanetary void, and in the process tore the world asunder. The Earth and her colonies had been crippled. Humanity was on the brink of ruin. There was nowhere left to go.
So humanity turned to the stars.
In 2291, two scientists made a breakthrough never thought possible, and broke the light barrier. Slipspace, as humanity dubbed this phenomenon, was the gateway to alien worlds ripe for colonization. Humanity was still alone, but no longer would it have to remain cooped up on its homeworld.
Of course, this idyllic future was far too good to be true.
Somewhere in the heavens, they were waiting. Some malevolent force beyond the scope of human comprehension, something terrible, something that would drive us to extinction.
"They" came in the form of a genocidal collective of alien hordes, laughing in alien tongues at our desperate efforts to survive as they wiped or worlds off the face of the galaxy one by one until the present day. They are the instrument of the gods, they are the blade of the cosmos, they are the Covenant.
They have all but destroyed us, and nothing, not even the UNSC can save us.
But there is one thing that might at least buy us time.
It is out there, somewhere in the far reaches of the Milky Way, where one man must do battle against the genocidal hordes of the Covenant in a desperate gambit to survive. But he will need allies. He will need weapons. He will need all the training, all the weapons, all the advantages he can get, for the Covenant do not play fair. They do not relent. They know one goal, one vision: they are hellbent on our eternal damnation, our destruction. They are not fighting a war against us. They are killing us. They are slaughtering us. We are cattle, we are the Jews before Hitler, we are ants under the great cosmic magnifying glass.
This one man must fight with every fiber of his being, with the greatest will to live ever known, for this is not just combat.
This is...
COMBAT EVOLVED