Unyielding Hierophant
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Unyielding Hierophant | ||||||||||||||||
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Destroyed during Operation: FIRST STRIKE, September 13, 2552. | ||||||||||||||||
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- "I'm not sure what that thing is. Don't look like any 'uneven elephant' to me-—more like two squids kissing."
- — Avery Johnson[4][2]
Unyielding Hierophant was a large space station operated by the Covenant during the Human-Covenant War. It was used as a mobile command-and-control base for the Covenant fleet,[5][6] alongside operating as a refit hub[1] and support base for hundreds of starships. In 2552, the station was present in the Tau Ceti system and used as the site for an enormous fleet massing, done in secret by the Prophet of Truth, who intended to use the station's attendant fleet to attack the human homeworld Earth.[5][6] However, the station, and the majority of its fleet, were destroyed by a team of SPARTAN-II supersoldiers in a daring mission dubbed Operation: FIRST STRIKE.[7]
The station was an example of a Covenant harborage; a massive city-station used by the Covenant to centralise the power of High Charity and keep their various worlds in line; so important that even hierarchs struggled to move them without great caution. Unyielding Hierophant was one of two such harborages lost during the war with humanity, the other being the Ring of Mighty Abundance, an orbital construction ring encircling the planet of Zhoist.[1]
Overview[edit]
Design details[edit]
Unyielding Hierophant was an enormous construction, even by the standards of the Covenant, comparable in scope only to the Sh'wada-pattern supercarriers. Its design consisted of two teardrop-shaped bulbous sections connected at the centre, each 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) in length (or a total of 30 kilometres (19 mi) from end-to-end). A ring was present at the middle of where the two sections joined which could dock with various Covenant spacecraft for repair, refit, and rearming; this ring was capable of individually docking with at least 60 Covenant ships as large as a carrier. Long spokes connected the ring to various points on the bulbous hull, along with a series of thin, filament-like tubes that extended from the bulbous sections to cover the surface of the ring.[8]
The interior of the station was hollow, similar to an O'Neill cylinder. Inside the curved inner surface was a city containing spires, pyramids, and temples that served as living spaces for the station's crew. A beam of light was constructed running through the centre of the space to provide the illusion of daytime on a planetary surface. Decorative elements in the interior included waterfalls in which water flowed along the inner walls in spiral patterns before flowing "up" into the middle of the space to meet large towers built on the opposite wall. Internal transportation was managed via a series of catwalks that crisscrossed the space alongside tubes with capsules that moved passengers about. Banshees (and presumably other aircraft) flew about the space, along with flocks of "headless birds" and large clouds of butterflies. This construction was achieved thanks to the Covenant's mastery of anti-gravity technology. The outer hull had a large transparent window that could be used to view the external docking bays. John-117 felt that this level of ornamentation was excessive for what he had assumed to be a military station.[3]
The station was powered by two pinch fusion reactor complexes, one located in each lobe, each capable of generating 512 terawatts of energy. The energy of the combined reactors is used to power a protective energy shield that can, according to Cortana, "repel the collision of a small moon". The reactors' control system is isolated from the station's general proselytization network, meaning that it cannot be remotely accessed.[3] Each complex housed 512 individual reactors (presumably each capable of generating a single terawatt), externally looking like flattened spiral seashells, stacked in rows and columns eight deep. Each reactor was the size of a Pelican dropship and gave off massive amounts of heat. The reactors gave off errant bursts of plasma, which was collected by magnetic vortices within the chamber into wispy clouds. Upon seeing the complex, John-117 wondered if the site had been built into a small asteroid originally, with the rest of the station built around it. The station had its own artificial intelligence which was used for internal security.[9]
At the time of the station's destruction, a fleet of over 500 warships were present near Unyielding Hierophant. These included carriers, Ket-pattern battlecruisers,[8] Sinaris-pattern heavy destroyers,[10] and a handful of Rasus-pattern interdictors.[8]
Service history[edit]
At some point prior to around mid-September 2552, the Prophet of Truth had managed to discover the location of Earth, the homeworld of humanity. Secret from the other hierarchs, Truth began to amass a fleet of over 500 warships at Unyielding Hierophant in the Tau Ceti system.[7] At this time, the station was orbiting an unnamed world. The orders to begin amassing at the station were intercepted by Cortana and a small group of human survivors from the Fall of Reach, who had managed to commandeer a Covenant Ruma-pattern light carrier Ascendant Justice.[5] After escaping Reach, news of these orders pushed Vice Admiral Danforth Whitcomb to immediately move the carrier back to Earth so that the UNSC Home Fleet could be warned of the imminent invasion. However, the SPARTAN-II cohort of the survivors instead pitched an alternate idea dubbed Operation: FIRST STRIKE: use one of Ascendant Justice's Dextro Xur-pattern Spirit dropships to infiltrate Unyielding Hierophant and destroy it from the inside, dealing a major blow to the Covenant and giving humanity a fighting chance.[6] Whitcomb initially refused to consider the plan, though ultimately agreed - noting that the Spartans were on their own and on a one-way trip.[11]
The mission began at around 0530 hours Military Standard Time on September 13, 2552