Chapter 56

A week earlier, above Harvest, Admiral Cole's fleet had engaged the Covenant's Fleet of Glorious Interdiction. On the UNSC side Admiral Cole had assembled 10 ships consisting of 4 Frigate class ships, 2 light carrier class ships, 3 Light Cruisers, and 2 Destroyers.

Once the battle began, the Frigates were the first targets of the Covenant Fleet, and they didn't last long under heavy fire from the Covenant Battlecruisers and heavy destroyers. Admiral Cole focused fire on the much easier target's which were the heavy destroyers.

Onboard one of the carriers was a team of Spartans. Admiral Cole sent them to board one of the Covenant heavy destroyers to take it out from the inside. Meanwhile on the surface, ODSTs were deployed to the surface to reinforce the current ground forces.

While the Spartans boarded the Covenant ship Admiral Cole coordinated with the rest of his fleet to take down the shields of one of the heavy destroyers. With a well-executed precision volley of MAC rounds, the destroyer's energy shield fell leaving the hull of the ship without protection.

The Spartans, by that time, were already deep within the other Covenant Destroyer, wreaking havoc. Their goal was to try and take control of the ship, if they were unable to then they would just destroy it from the inside. The Spartans, led by their squad leader, moved throughout the ship taking down any opposition in their path.

Back on the field of space, Admiral Cole's ships fired their Autocannons at the vulnerable Heavy Destroyer whose shields were down. The heavy destroyer responded by returning fire at the forward most ship which was one of the destroyer's however by this time the ship's MAC cannons had finished recharging.

Admiral Cole ordered another volley against the unshielded Covenant ship. As the MAC rounds hit its target, internal explosions could be seen all over the ship for a few seconds before the ship blew up. The explosion from the Covenant heavy destroyer caused a shockwave to travel through space rocking all ships in vicinity.

The Spartans onboard the other heavy destroyer had momentarily lost balance from the shockwave but soon recovered seconds later.

With this engagement, Admiral Cole had lost 3 of his Frigates leaving one heavily damaged and one of the destroyers had lost power to its engine leaving it vulnerable to Plasma torpedoes. The situation was dire, but he had been in worse.

The Spartans onboard the Covenant ship, having sensed the shift in momentum, pressed their assault. Slicing through the alien resistance like a hot knife through butter, they made their way to the heart of the destroyer: the command center. A determined firefight erupted, but with superior tactics and ferocity, the Spartans prevailed, but the Covenant had already rigged the ship to self-destruct leaving the Spartans with no choice but to fleet the ship.

Back in space Admiral Cole was looking at his tactical screen and had saw an opportunity. The Covenant Fleet had spread out to avoid another shockwave from an exploding ship. Admiral Cole ordered his disabled destroyer to engage its emergency thrusters - a one-time burnout maneuver that could send it hurtling towards an enemy ship like a missile. The captain of the destroyer acknowledged this while ordering his crew to get to the ships escape pods. Once it was reported that all escape pods were away, the captain had the ship's onboard AI pilot into one of the Covenants battlecruisers.

At the same time, onboard the boarded heavy destroyer, the Spartans had evacuated the ship before it self-destructed itself. Moments later the ship exploded causing another explosion which knocked the damaged frigate off course causing it to drift in space as it was heavily damaged.

By this point the amount of damage done to his fleet was a lot. One of the carriers was boarded by Covenant pods, while the other destroyer shields had just failed, however the two light cruisers shields were still up but were on the verge of collapsing.

The last remaining Covenant ship, which was the Arbiter's capital ship had received orders to stall the UNSC ships for a little longer. The ship's acting captain had complied and fired its plasma weapons towards the other destroyer targeting its weak spots disabling the ship in an instant.

The battle was looking a little close, but Admiral Cole believed that they could claim victory against the battlecruiser. But in the next moment his belief vanished as another group of Covenant ships were detected exiting slipspace. Upon seeing this victory was no longer guaranteed, especially when one of the new Covenant ships was even more massive than the battlecruiser.

"All ship's jump to warp speed, get out of here!" Ordered Admiral Cole. They no longer had the tactical advantage, and he wasn't going to waste any lives. They had already picked up the escape pods from the other ships and the light carrier had successfully defeated the Covenant boarding party.

Once Cole gave the order to retreat, every UNSC ship that was operable jumped to warp speed. The only one that couldn't be the destroyer which had been disabled. But the captain of the ships knew what he needed to do as Cole had come up with this a protocol for situations like these. The captain ordered all crew to escape pods while ordering the Ship's onboard AI to self-destruct once the last one was away. Their goal was to prevent the capture of the ship which would give away the location of Earth threatening humanities home world.

The Covenant ship which had appeared was a Supercarrier followed by 3 more battlecruisers and a few light cruisers. Onboard was the Prophet of Regret who was notified of the vault's capture and wanted to come see for himself what it contained.

For now, Harvest had been lost as fighting on the ground intensified between the Covenant and UNSC forces.

Meanwhile a week later, after Axel's new appointment as Chairman it was time for him to start implementing some new military technology to replace current military vehicles, spacecraft, etc.

New creations:

-(Unmanned Multipurpose Vehicle)

-(New Orion Dropship)

-(New Gunship)

-(New Light Carrier)

-(New Destroyer)

-(New Battlecruiser)

-(New Frigate)

-(New Cruiser)

-(New Heavy Carrier)

-(New Multirole Fighter)

These designs would be utilized as the future for the UNSC navy. But to produce them they would need resources which brings up the next thing that Axel created which is a massive mega structure to harvest stars called the star lifter.

To build just one of them would take around 4 years because of its size and he would need to gather all the resources to build it. But once it's done, they will not have to worry about a resource shortage anytime soon.

(Star Lifter Image)

The last thing he needed to create was a powerful new energy source. Luckily, he had Forerunner ships in his possession that scientists and engineers were constantly studying. Recently in the past months Catherine and a group of scientists had made a breakthrough in learning about the concept of the energy used within the Forerunner ships.

Upon learning of the concept, the Monitor had explained to them a more in-dept description of how it worked. The energy was called Vacuum energy, and it is an underlying background energy that exists in space throughout the entire universe.

One contribution to the vacuum energy may be from virtual particles, particle pairs throughout the universe that blink into existence and then annihilate in a timespan too short to observe.

Vacuum energy originates from the beginnings of infinite numbers of alternate realities. When harnessed for power supply, these fledgling universes are drained of energy in their infancy, resulting in their premature deaths.

All Forerunner technology utilized the practically infinitely available vacuum energy as a power source, making possible their myriad of technological marvels.

Catherine had sent over this information to him as she herself delved deeper into the new energy source. While Axel began to look over all the information and the details of the new energy source to create it.

If he was successful, he would have created a new energy source for humanity that would work for centuries to come and didn't need fuel to be powered. So, for the next few days he would spend that time in lab on Algolis until he created the new energy source.