Whether you call it a Halo, the Halo Rings, or the Halo Array, there’s no denying the destructive power of these world-sized superweapons.
Vast enough to contain distinct biomes and networked throughout the galaxy by mysterious means, the massive superstructures/weapons known as Halos are one of the more imposing features of the Milky Way galaxy. But what are they for? And how did they come to play a role in humanity’s destiny? The answers lie hundreds of thousands of years before the rise of the UNSC and the Master Chief.
Halo Rings – The Secret History Of Humanity, The Forerunners, And The Flood
In order to understand the true purpose of the Halo Array, you have to understand the lost history of the galaxy. In the distant past, millions upon millions of years ago, the “transentient” race of beings known as the Precursors shaped life throughout the Milky Way. But they were struck down when the Forerunners. Their “children” rebelled against them for leaving the guardianship of life – a concept known as the Mantle of Responsibility – to humanity.
But this was not the humanity that most people think of as first arising in the cradle of Africa’s fertile crescent some 50,000 or so years before the Pillar of Autumn made its fateful journey. No. This was a humanity that predates that. Ancient humans once spanned the stars, forging a domain that spanned some 20,000 worlds along the Orion arm of the Milky Way.
The Aftermath
The destruction of the Precursors by the Forerunners led to two things: a protracted war with humanity and the creation of a voracious necromantic parasite known as the Flood. The war with the ancient starfaring humans (the true inheritors of power in the galaxy) was costly for the Forerunners. Especially once they realized that some of humanity’s “aggression” was actually meant to try and stop the Flood.
The Flood was believed to be some kind of corruption of the remnants of the Precursors – at least by the Forerunners. The humans who discovered strange powder in the Large Magellanic Cloud didn’t know what it was. They only knew that once it infected life forms, it corrupted their DNA and started harvesting and infecting whole worlds. The only thing that could stop it, past a certain breakpoint in biomass, was sterilization.
With the Forerunners left weakened by their war with ancient humanity, they faced a resurgent tide of the Flood. Considered an existential threat, not just to the Forerunners, but to all living entities throughout the galaxy (and beyond), the Forerunners concocted a plan to defeat the Flood by starving if of food – sentient life.
So the Halo Rings were created. A massive network of superstructures seeded throughout the Milky Way that. When activated would destroy sentient life, and the “neural physics” architecture of the Precursors, and starve the Flood of its food.
One Flash Of Light – But No Smoking Gravemind
The Halo Array was vast. Each Halo Ring was the size of a world: 10,000 km in diameter. For reference, Earth is 12,756 km in diameter. Originally the Halos were built much larger, but were scaled down due to difficulty moving them and structural instability.
The “surface” of each ring is 318 kilometers wide and 22.3 kilometers deep (a depth experienced, no doubt, by hapless Warthog crews falling into unlucky fissures). The overall surface area is about the size of one Canada, if you care to measure it. No Tim Hortons present, though.
Each of the Halo Rings has its own array of artificial gravity generators, creating a stable gravity field throughout the ring. Though these can be damaged, weakening local gravity, as the crew of the Pillar of Autumn experienced firsthand. But a Halo can repair itself from damage.
The resilience and size of these structures allowed them to serve as both research worlds as well as components in a galactic superweapon. Which is ultimately what they were. Each installation in the Halo Array could emit a superluminal phase pulse of radiation. A flash of light that disrupts neural physics constructs, kills life with the neurological complexity above a bumblebee, and in general left the galaxy devastated. Except for all the places where the Forerunners sheltered life, and held on to species of the Flood in containment for future study and exploitation.
A move which surely would never backfire and lead to the re-emergence of the deadliest threat to the living galaxy, oh wait.
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