Seoba Ice Quarry

The Seoba Ice Quarry was a large abandoned ice quarry on Seoba, the third moon of Biko. In March 2526, it was the site of a heated battle between the UNSC Navy and Insurrectionist forces.

History
Prior to 2424, colonists established this quarry to mine ice that would be sent to Biko via mass driver. Built on the side of a mountain, the mass driver facility would launch thousand-ton payloads of steel-encapsulated ice into the planet's exosphere. Here, the capsules were intercepted by their purchasers, then guided into the stratosphere and attached to a dirigible so they could be floated gently to their final destination. By 2424, the terraforming process had finally paid off and Biko had developed a climate humid enough to generate its own rain. As such, both the mass driver and the quarry were decommissioned and abandoned.

In early 2526, the Biko Independence Army planned to overthrow Biko's government in preparation for the Covenant's impending arrival at the colony. This ice quarry was chosen as a suitable staging ground for the coup. However, the UNSC's Task Force Yama had also selected the quarry as their own staging ground for a daring operation to board Covenant warships and destroy them from the inside using nuclear weapons. On March 18, 2526, Task Force Yama arrived and planned to practice the mass deployment of their 21st Space Assault Battalion ODSTs and Spartans. Operation: ICE DANCE quickly became a warzone when the prowlers detected the insurgents hidden amidst the ice.

Topography
The ice quarry's main pit was over ten kilometers in diameter and shaped roughly like an octopus, with multiple long curving canyons radiating from the central cavity. The walls of the cavity were pocked with oddly shaped cave entrances of varying sizes.

Locations

 * Assembly chamber 4L430
 * Subsurface maintenance grotto 6M430

List of appearances

 * Halo: Silent Storm