Halo Array
From Halopedia, the Halo wiki
- "Halo doesn't kill Flood, it kills their food! Humans, Covenant, whatever—we're all equally edible! The only way to stop the Flood is to starve them to death. And that's exactly what Halo is designed to do: wipe the galaxy clean of all sentient life!"
- — Cortana during the Battle of Installation 04.[1]
The Halo Array, sometimes known simply as Halo[2] or the Array,[3][4] is a network of colossal ring-shaped superweapons individually known as Halos or Halo rings, constructed by the Forerunners.[5] The Halos were also referred to by the Covenant as the Sacred Rings,[6][7] and labeled as Installations or infrequently referred to as Fortress Worlds[8] by the Forerunners and their monitors.
The first array of twelve Halos was constructed by order of Master Builder Faber circa 98,445 BCE with the intent of being an ultimate weapon, one that would secure the preeminence of the Builder rate in Forerunner society.[9] Later, the weapons would be refined further and a new array of six smaller and significantly more lethal installations was constructed; the newer Halos are known as the "neoteric" rings.[10] Eventually, eleven were destroyed and/or lost while the remaining seven were used by the Forerunners as a last resort when combating the parasitic Flood.[11] All sentient beings in the galaxy were killed, robbing the Flood of hosts and starving it to death.
In addition to serving as weapons of last resort, Halo installations are also research facilities dedicated to containing and studying many different kinds of life forms. The life forms that were hand-selected by the Librarian included marine life, fauna, and land vertebrates. With the Master Builder's permission, the Librarian would research each animal to detect if their bodies reacted to Flood infection. The research on the animals would be more deeply analyzed if they did become infected. The Librarian's studies also helped determine if the rings could be used to repopulate the galaxy as part of the Conservation Measure.[11][12][13]
Background[edit]
- "After exhausting every other strategic option, my creators activated the rings. They, and all additional sentient life in three radii of the galactic center, died, as planned."
- — 343 Guilty Spark during the Battle of Installation 05[14]
As it is known in modern times, the Halo Array is a network of seven ring-shaped megastructures created by the Forerunners, designed to exterminate all sentient life within the Milky Way galaxy.[14] Built following the Human-Forerunner War, these ringworlds were later used as a last resort against the Flood, a parasitic extra-galactic species that threatened to consume every sentient life-form in the galaxy. By activating the rings, the Forerunners wiped out every sentient being in the galaxy, effectively starving the Flood to virtual extinction, though specimens were kept in a number of Forerunner containment facilities, including the Halo installations themselves.[15]
A total of eighteen Halo rings existed during the reign of the Forerunners; an older array of twelve 30,000-kilometer-wide rings produced by the greater Ark and six 10,000-kilometer rings, constructed at the newer lesser Ark. Of these, only seven survived to be included in the final Array. The Halos were originally deployed in orbit over large gas giants.[16] However, as of 2557, Installation 03 orbited a rocky planet.[17] Installation 04 maintained an atmospheric mining facility in its anchor planet Threshold's atmosphere until it was destroyed by the Covenant.[18]
Though separated by thousands of light-years, the installations are networked together and capable of remote activation at the Ark, their extragalactic construction foundry. Each Halo installation has a maximum effective range of 25,000 light-years in every direction.[19][20] The method utilized by the array to conduct this "mass sterilization protocol"[21] involves the superluminal conveyance of a burst of cross-phased super-massive neutrinos, tuned to emit a harmonic frequency that destroys the nervous system of any life form within range. Simpler organisms lacking a neural system are unaffected, along with inanimate structures. Precursor technology, however, is extremely susceptible to damage from the Halo effect due to its quasi-living neural physics composition.[22][23]
The Halo Array in its entirety has been fired only once in known history, approximately 100,000 years ago, by the IsoDidact in order to stop the Flood from overwhelming the galaxy. All beings in the Array's effective range, including Forerunners themselves, were wiped out by the Array's pulse,[14] with the exception of those who took refuge on the shield worlds. A number of Forerunners survived at the lesser Ark but chose to exile themselves from the galaxy.[24] The array has come close to activation four times since; Installation 04 was almost activated by the Master Chief, Installation 05 was activated by Commander Miranda Keyes at the behest of the Jiralhanae Chieftain Tartarus, Sergeant Johnson was forced by the Prophet of Truth to activate the Array from the Ark, and Bobby Kodiak was forced by 000 Tragic Solitude, the Monitor of the Ark, to activate the Halo Array from the Ark as a revenge. None of these attempts were successful; the first was stopped by Cortana, while the other three attempts were halted by UNSC and Sangheili intervention. A replacement Halo for the destroyed Installation 04 was activated outside of the galaxy, meant to eliminate the Flood massed at Installation 00. Upon firing, its incomplete state caused the ring to shake itself to pieces, with the resulting explosion damaging the Ark. However, some Flood forms survived the activation.[25]
Each of the Halo installations manufactured at Installation 00 is given a sequential designation number based on their order of construction, beginning from 01,[10] and is overseen by a single monit