2215 — Outer Colonies, Sector Theta-42
The dust storm over New Thessalonica never stopped. It carved into metal plating, wormed into every sensor coil and air filter. The colony was halfway between a mining hub and a fortress, full of angry voices and half-charged rifles.
Atop the old municipal spire, Acting Governor Ayla Serrano watched the latest transmission on loop. Her fingers twitched at her side, not quite touching the old sidearm she wore these days like a second skin.
The feed showed UNSC Troopers raiding a suspected radical safehouse.
It also showed them killing three unarmed civilians.
"They said they were going to de-escalate," Ayla whispered, as if the storm could hear her.
Behind her, Colonel Dhar of the Colonial Guard answered with silence. He didn't need to say anything. Everyone knew: that footage was already viral. Already spreading.
Already fanning the fire.
New Albany, Earth — UEG Grand Hall
Director Eryn Halbek was furious.
"—do you understand what you've just done?!" she snapped, slamming her palm onto the table of the emergency security council. "That cell was weeks away from detonating an antimatter charge on Palisade Station. We stopped it."
Chancellor Yao leaned forward, steel in her voice. "You executed civilians on live broadcast."
"They were shielding radicals!"
"They were unarmed."
The room erupted in shouting, arguments, denials. Halbek barely heard it. Her mind was already elsewhere—running simulations, weighing fallout.
Too late.
The vote was already moving forward in the Colonial Assembly.
Some say it was the massacre on New Thessalonica. Others say it was the intercepted ONI black op on Vega II, where a Colonial governor's shuttle was bombed mid-flight, with "deniability" stamped all over it.
Maybe it was both.
Maybe it was everything.
April 17th, 2215 — A day that would burn into history.
From Earth to Mars, the UEG stood before its people. Chancellor Yao's voice was calm. Too calm.
"The colonies have rejected peace. They have armed themselves, radicalized their children, and declared sovereignty through bloodshed.
Therefore, with deep regret and absolute conviction, the United Earth Government now recognizes a formal state of war."
Hours later, Ayla Serrano's face replaced hers in the colonies.
"We did not ask for war. We asked for dignity.
For the right to choose our future.
We did not fire the first shot, but by God, we will not be the ones to stand down."
In a hidden vault beneath Enceladus, Hargreave and Rasch watched both broadcasts play in parallel.
The screen split. The Earth. The Colonies.
Two fires, burning toward each other.
"They've crossed the line," Rasch said.
Hargreave didn't reply. He simply stared, eyes hollow.
"It's begun."
UNSC's First Full Deployment
May 2199 — High Orbit above New Thessalonica
The hangar of the UNSC Vigilant Pyre was alive with thunder. Dropships roared, weapons clamped into place, and the new ODST combat rigs hissed with steam as shock troopers prepped for drop. In every corridor, the smell of metal and adrenaline soaked the air.
Commander Hale Vasquez walked the line, his armor freshly painted, his helmet under one arm. He looked down the row of men and women, ODSTs and Helldivers alike, all waiting for the green.
"Today, we don't take prisoners," he said. "Today, we show the colonies that we own the skies."
Behind him, on the screens, the fleet of the 7th Expeditionary Force shifted into final positions. Carriers, drone-hives, escort destroyers—all aligned like a wall of firepower against the broken surface of New Thessalonica.
The UNSC had no illusions—this war would not be clean. But their first objective was simple:
Crush the Colonial Guard's ability to fight.
Dozens of drone carriers opened their bays like yawning mouths, releasing swarms of autonomous fighters. They moved with cold precision—dogfighting manned colonial squadrons, overwhelming local orbital defense stations.
"We are engaging resistance at Platform Theta. AI nodes are locking onto enemy jamming towers—repeat, jamming is being cleared for orbital bombardment."
UNSC Magneto-Kinetic Weaponry lit up the sky. Giant slugs pierced the atmosphere like falling stars, hammering colonial artillery, airfields, and fuel depots.
From orbit, the planet bled.
New drop pods sliced through the clouds. Sleek, angular, and equipped with advanced thruster corrections, they hit like precision meteorites.
ODSTs hit dirt.
Helldivers hit deep.
And behind them, automated combat drones and armored crawler tanks rolled out from dropships.
Urban centers became war zones in minutes.
"This is Alpha Team, District Four. Civilians evacuated. Target building breached—radicals using schools for comms relays."
"Bravo Two down! Sniper fire from the upper dome! Requesting drone strike now!"
UNSC forces moved in calculated sweeps, deploying recon nanodrones through sewer grates and side streets. They hunted not just radicals—but also colonial moderates trying to flee, caught between loyalty and survival.
As cities burned, ONI systems teams moved in behind the frontlines. They disabled planetary media nodes, took control of comm arrays, and initiated Blackout Protocol—total information control.
To the rest of the system, the planet went quiet.
Then, a new message appeared on official frequencies:
"New Thessalonica is under UNSC Protection. All hostile elements have been neutralized. Civilians will be processed for security clearance. Long live the Unified Earth Government."
Officially, Operation Leviathan was a success.
The colonies had seen the strength of Earth's resolve.
But the losses were real.
Entire families displaced.
Urban sectors flattened.
Moderates turned militant overnight.
Some radical cells escaped, scattering like ash to other systems.
And above it all, Halbek watched from Earth, silent.
"One planet at a time," she whispered.
"Until there's no more war left to fight."
2215 — Outer Colonies, Tantalus System
The world of Corvinus had always been quiet. A dry-world, fringe colony with more sand than soil and skies full of copper dust. But tonight, it burned.
Colonial forces had retreated here after the fall of New Thessalonica. What remained of local governance had collapsed under the weight of UNSC orbital bombardments. But in the dust of defeat, something new was rising.
A banner.
Black, red, and silver—etched with the stylized wings of the old Atlas logo.
"We are not rebels.
We are not terrorists.
We are liberators."
The message came through all encrypted civilian channels, hijacked by a former Atlas comms engineer turned revolutionary. On every world still under colonial sway, it was the same:
"The Earth tyrants have turned our homes into ash.
But we have not forgotten. We have not forgiven.
This is our declaration. This is our uprising."
—The Liberation Broadcast, Loop Cycle 01
Gone were the fractured cells and scattered ideologies. What replaced them was coordinated—militarized, organized, and armed. They called themselves The Colonial Liberation Fronts (CLF), and they operated from abandoned Atlas outposts, using hidden caches of advanced technology that had lain dormant for years.
In subterranean vaults and deep-range deserts, they reactivated Arcblade drones, power-assist exosuits, and shielding platforms long thought destroyed during the collapse of Atlas.
"Some of this tech predates Jovian War escalation," whispered one ex-Atlas scientist, now working with the CLF. "Stuff Hargreave buried when he knew they'd come for him."
They dug it out.
They reassembled what they could.
They modified the rest.
In backwater labs, Atlas plasma-weave armor was grafted onto colonial gear.
Ghost stealth cloaks were redistributed to insurgent strike teams.
And AI fragments—once deemed too unstable—were installed into field command units.
Wherever UNSC cracked down, Liberation propaganda followed.
Posters in alleyways.
Drone-hacked holograms over city skies.
Illicit datastreams seeded into public networks.
"You are not alone.
You are not broken.
Fight with us. Build with us. Be free."
To many, it was noise.
But to the disenfranchised, the orphaned, the angry—it was gospel.
Not all Atlas personnel had vanished into shadows. Some had bided their time, living among civilians, watching Earth's grip tighten.
Now they moved.
Commanders. Engineers. Tacticians.
Reconnecting underground bunkers.
Powering up forgotten forges.
Converting cities into fortresses with hidden walls and cloaked defense grids.
One such remnant, known only by the codename "Helix", sent a direct message to surviving CLF commanders:
"We made this tech for the future. Not for tyrants. Not for war. But you can use it. You can make it mean something again."
Elsewhere... in the Halls of ONI
Director Halbek watched the intercepted broadcasts with narrowed eyes. Each time that red-silver wing appeared, she felt an old shadow creeping back into the room.
"Atlas was buried," she muttered.
Her assistant shifted uncomfortably. "We never found all the caches."
She didn't respond. Instead, she turned to the wall display—a growing web of colonial systems, blinking red.
"Then we burn the rest out of the dark," she said coldly.
"Before the system forgets who built the stars."
Liberation Front Strike Operation — Codename: "Silent Prism"
Planet Veridan, Outer Colonies
The moon hung low and sickly green above Veridan's equatorial ridge, its light fractured through atmospheric haze. On the outskirts of the mining city Karsen's Hollow, power flickered sporadically. Not because of a storm.
Because something had infiltrated the grid.
Down in the shadows of the abandoned rail interchange, five figures moved like smoke. No footsteps. No chatter. Just breathing.
Team Pale Lantern, one of the CLF's elite strike squads—each wearing retooled Atlas Infiltrator suits, powered by hybrid kinetic cells and wrapped in adaptive light-bending plating.
At their center moved Wren, former Atlas field engineer and now the team's lead tactician. Her face was half-burned from the Jovian bombings. Her eyes, unreadable behind the old optics gear.
"Eyes on the junction node. One uplink. Two sentries.
Cloak tight. No missteps," she whispered over the neural link.
Karo, the squad's heavy—carrying a prototype magnetic breacher across his back—grinned behind his mask.
"Let's give them something to find after we're gone."
ONI's Listening Post Theta
Buried under Karsen's Hollow was one of ONI's newest low-tier data relays. On the surface, it posed as an ore shipment log. Beneath, it cataloged civilian movements, encrypted comms, and early slipspace telemetry from outlying systems.
The Liberation Front wanted the data.
And more importantly, they wanted ONI to know they could take it.
They breached through an old magtram tunnel.
Wren sent a soft ping. The hardlight cloaks shifted with a shimmer.
Karo stayed in the rear with a shoulder-mounted auto-drone, reprogrammed from a decommissioned Atlas Sentinel.
Saffi and Iven, the team's twins, moved like ghosts—laying EMP spider charges along wall corners.
Rook, the youngest, looped the surveillance feed using a parasitic thread of Atlas code thought long-dead.
"Feed looped. Sentries blind. We've got sixty seconds."
Wren's boots hit the hallway like a whisper. The ONI technician she tackled never saw it coming. Just a gloved hand over the mouth, then a sharp pulse to the base of the skull.
One down.
At the core of the relay station, the data prism pulsed—six glowing hexagonal modules nested in a glass-fiber lattice. One held slipstream trajectory calculations. One held intercepted colonial comms. One—
"They're indexing terraformer AI readouts," Wren hissed.
"They're tracking Horizon's cores."
She nodded to Rook, who prepped the data siphon pod, a retrofitted Atlas shard AI—completely dumb, but fast and compartmentalized.
"Upload complete in forty-five."
Suddenly—
Ping.
Movement on Level 3. A patrol had looped back early.
Karo grunted. "So much for no contact."
Light fractured around him as he deactivated his cloak and stepped into the hallway. The heavy breacher on his back split forward into a twin-barrel grav-cannon, sending a pressure burst down the corridor that folded two ONI agents into the wall like paper.
Rook threw a scatterblind grenade, coating the area in static disarray.
Wren grabbed the drive and nodded.
"No kill zones. No delays. Extraction—now."
They moved up through the vent shaft into a ventilation tower built before the Fall of Atlas. Their evac? A cloaked skimmer buried in nearby dunes—its profile masked by false mining drone signatures.
As they emerged, the city lit up behind them.
ONI reinforcements were inbound.
Too late.
The skimmer rose into the clouds, silent and vapor-lined.
Three hours later, on a derelict fuel station deep in the Tantalus Belt, Wren uploaded the stolen files to a Liberation Front command node.
They had it all now: troop deployments, Horizon tech watchlists, civilian surveillance programs.
More than that, they'd proven a point.