Chapter 18: Unwelcome Visitors

Earth, Sol System, Orbital Defense Ring 4

Corporal Garnet walked into the scanning center for the orbital defense ring and sat down at his monitor. He logged onto his computer and checked his messages before going to his work. Garnet expected it to be the usually slow day of ferrying around pleasure crafts, freighters, and UNSC crafts. But almost immediately transient contacts popped up throughout the scanner grid he was watching. He opened a COM channel to one of the other scanning centers.

"Corporal Garnet here, have you been getting some ghosts on your scanners?"

"Yes, we've been getting them all over, we're sending some Longswords to find out what they are."

"Okay, Garnet out." He closed the COM channel and continued to keep an eye on the blips that kept coming and going.

"This is----sword ec—Two Nine Four--- Eraph-." Garnet immediately responded but all he got was static. He replayed to message and his heart froze, he replayed the last two seconds and heard the same word Eraph. Garnet quickly put two and two together and realized what he was saying: Seraph. The Corporal immediately turned one of his scanners to where the Longswords had been engaged. The scanner swept the area but couldn't detect anything due to the huge floating debris field from the attack on Earth years ago. He turned on the camera and checked the area. What he startled him. Floating within the debris field was an enormous Covenant chip. The 7km long craft was angled so that it was pointing towards Earth but also not sticking out of the debris. Garnet's hand slowly hovered toward the FLEETCOMM 7 transmission button but stopped an inch short. In the camera more ships started to appear out of slipspace. They were all carriers, close to 3 ½ km long but dwarfed by the huge ship. Then more ships appeared, they were battle cruisers, frigates, and destroyers. They all surrounded the huge ship and just waited. His finger finally found the button and he tapped it. The picture he was looking at was being sent to every single ship in the Sol System, unfortunately a large chunk of the Terra Fleet was near Jupiter for training, but the signal would only take a few minutes to reach them. Almost as if on cue the Covenant group started to move out of the debris fields and into the shadow of the Moon. Garnet quickly had the computer count the amount of ships that had jumped. In a second a number appeared on the top right of his screen, Ninety-Eight. Even though that was still a large number, the Humans had been able to repel attacks of near a hundred and fifty. All around him people came rushing into their stations and started to receive all of the COM chatter that had picked up. Garnet picked up on certain conversations about "A fleet twice the size as the first attack," and "Three of the huge ships had been spotted." One of the scanning center's officers walked in and started to get things under control.

"We're rotating to face outwards, we need a better view. Corporal Garnet, alert all MAC and Super MAC guns of the situation. Petty Officer Johnston, send a COM to the marines on the surface to get into position to defend the MACs, we'll need them…" Garnet stopped listening and got to work, but he went one step further and sent a transmission to all of the orbital defense crews that Covenant were in the Terra region. Once he finished that he checked back on the group that he had spotted and zoomed in on the Moon. Every few seconds there was a flash that lit up the shadows. He was about to shut it off when the shadow was lit up from something bright. Garnet decided that his center needed to see this. The Corporal brought it onto the holo-projector and watched with everyone. He quickly glanced out their view port and saw that they weren't looking at the hologram but were looking at it live. The huge scanning center had rotated out and he was looking out towards the Moon. The shadows receded as whatever was causing the light got brighter. Then almost instantaneously there was a blinding flash. They waited for a few second but nothing happened. Then they saw the remains of plasma wash out into space.

"What the hell?" someone said behind Garnet. But the more surprising thing was that the Moon started to spin faster. The dark side of the moon, for the first time in human history, would be facing the Earth. All of the people in the center looked on in amazement as the pockmarked surface of the Moon started to slowly as it rotated faster. The first signs of the plasma shot came into view; the blackened chunks of the surface didn't look any different until the ground started to be glowing orange from the superheated plasma. As the sun started to hit the surface large chunks of the Moon that had blown off reflected the light. As if the group wasn't in enough shock as it was the Covenant fleet started to appear from the shadows.

"Sir, computer calculations show that the moon is still in it's orbit, but just with an accelerated rotation, looks like one half gravity now."

"Thank-you petty-officer, but we've just lost Moon Alpha base and Bravo base is now pretty much useless since they can't even point toward Earth now." The petty officer didn't respond which was probably smart.

"This is the Trafalgar 2, Terra defense is incoming and should be in arriving from our slipspace jump near the Moon." The last part hit everybody hard. But Garnet had to hand it to the Trafalgar 2's Captain; he knew the time difference and had sent the message to coincide with their arrival. Sure enough, the Terra defense fleet appeared out of slipspace. It was an awe-inspiring sight to see close to five hundred ships appears at once. Maybe we will have a chance to win, Garnet thought.

Author's Note, sorry it took so long to update the story, I've been pretty busy and only would have set aside enough time to write it thanks to a person asking me not to leave it. Sorry I forgot your name but, your wish has been granted.