Corinthia Hansen - ONI
The United Rebel Front went completely to ground.
Lots of other allied insurrectionist groups went silent too, entire families vanishing from the grid and this time it wasn't because of us. The last few years had gotten bad, our spies were eliminated at horrific rates, rebel cells escaped more and more often. Meanwhile major assassination attempts like the one on Jarald Anders ended up becoming traps, with the rebels being long gone when our men walked into their bombs. Avery barely survived that and Anders, of course, escaped.
At the time some of us in ONI were worried, the Front was one of the bigger rebel groups. With them gone the Secessionist Union would take over and they were often more violent and less restrained than the Front. I was halfway convinced that they had either buggered off or killed themselves in a suicide pact like the cult they were.
Then small attacks happened, the reports of aliens came in and ONI collectively shat its pants. The UNSC had gone full in on the 'aliens do not exist'. If the invasion was happening... Well that would shit the bed on our credibility, especially with the outer colonies. So we covered up incidents as much as possible, tried to have politically reliable people on the frontier, and hoped that it was all an exaggeration.
Harvest killed any hope of keeping anything quiet. The colony had been too big, too settled, and had too many connections to the other worlds. The Covenant attacked and Harvest pleaded with us, with anyone, for help as they were slaughtered. Unfortunately, for us, the Front arrived first. It was the first time we encountered the Front's new fleet, a fleet we didn't know existed. They told the people on Harvest that we had lied to them, that we were going to leave them to die, and then said that the Front would cover their evacuation.
As much as I hate the pricks... they followed through. Casualties would have been much higher without the Front escorting the fleeing civilians. But they went beyond fending the Covenant off from the evacuation fleet. Despite being outnumbered, they obliterated the Covenant's ships sent in pursuit. All of this was captured on tape, all of this ended up on the net.
It gave us hope. After all, if some ragtag bunch of idiots could handle these guys? Then our superior fleet could easily handle the problem. With the escaped civilians, we couldn't hide Harvest. With the tapes on the net, we couldn't hide the Covenant. Now that everyone knew about the Covenant and now that everyone knew how well the Front did against them, we were committed to taking Harvest back.
That said we couldn't just blow the Front out of the sky after they had been seen covering the civilian's escape so the Admiral told them to buzz off, that we would handle it. What happened next was a slaughter. Not the Front, they dutifully left. No, we were slaughtered.
We failed despite several attempts, the numbers and tech of the Covenant proved to be too much. We were forced to leave and the world was glassed. Harvest was a humiliating defeat and ONI was reamed out when the news of it got out. We were given the choice of either admitting that the Front had outplayed us and set us up, thus looking incompetent, or looking like we were evil.
The current head chose evil. He said that we did what we did because we needed to buy time at all costs, time to reverse engineer Covenant tech and be able to fight them long term. I think he understood just how utterly enraged the rest of the UNSC would be at him, I think he understood that he would be executed.
And he was, but ONI's reputation was spared. A part of me however wonders if he was telling the truth and someone had leaked the information. Or if we had purposefully leaked the information in the first place. No matter. The issue was that we were now at war, a total war, and we would not have humanity unified under us. Like jackals the Front promised their protection to worlds if they left us and joined them, and they had no desire to share their technology with us.
As much as I would like to crush the Front, the fact remains that every Covenant trooper fighting them instead of us gives us time. The cruel nature of the war might just have made their prophecy that we would abandon the outer colonies to save ourselves a self-fulfilling one.
After all... Why would we waste resources on saving rebelling provinces?