Unyielding Hierophant

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Unyielding Hierophant
Ship history
	Covenant
Name:	Unyielding Hierophant
Operator:	Covenant
Fate:	Destroyed during Operation: FIRST STRIKE, September 13, 2552.
General characteristics Type: Space station (Harborage) Length: 29.9 kilometers (18.6 mi) Width: 10.0 kilometers (6.2 mi) Height: 3.2 kilometers (2 mi) Power plant: 2 512 terawatt pinch fusion reactors Slipspace drive: Borer Shielding: Energy shielding-equipped

"I'm not sure what that thing is. Don't look like any 'uneven elephant' to me-—more like two squids kissing."

— Avery Johnson

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, alongside operating as a refit hub 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. 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.

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.

Overview

Design details

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.

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.

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. 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.

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, Sinaris-pattern heavy destroyers, and a handful of Rasus-pattern interdictors.

Service history

Spartans fighting in Unyielding Hierophant.

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. 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. 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. Whitcomb initially refused to consider the plan, though ultimately agreed - noting that the Spartans were on their own and on a one-way trip.

The mission began at around 0530 hours Military Standard Time on September 13, 2552, and included Spartans John-117, Grace-093, Frederic-104, Linda-058 and William-043. The group reinforced the armour of their Spirit dropship with Titanium-A battleplate, lead, and carbon molybdenum steel I-beams so the ship could withstand immense pressures, departed and made the transition from Slipspace to normal space in one piece. After emerging, Cortana signalled one of the many Covenant tugs operating around the station's space to bring the dropship in for repairs. The Spirit was brought to a hangar bay capable of housing hundreds of space fighters and the Spartans managed to exit without alerting station security, thanks to the only attendants in the bay being Huragok engineers. They then inserted Cortana into the network, who was able to provide the Spartans with schematics and intel. After identifying the route to the reactor complex needed to destroy the station, Cortana instructed the Spartans to enter a conduit that ran the length of the station; a gruelling eleven-hour walk that ensured the Spartans could reach the reactor unhindered. They then crossed an open plaza on the station's interior to reach the reactor complex, losing Grace-093 in close combat with a Jiralhanae, before triggering the reactors to overload. Thanks to the AI copying program that Cortana had dissected aboard Ascendant Justice, Cortana was able to copy herself throughout Unyielding Hierophant's network, filling its internal communications channels with error codes and slowing the Covenant's ability to respond to the Spartans' presence.

The Spartans attempted to flee using captured Banshees, now taking heavy fire from the Covenant forces aware of their presence. After destroying one of the plaza's windows, they managed to escape, hijacking a floating Covenant dropship and intending to make their way behind the nearby moon to hide from Unyielding Hierophants imminent explosion. Amid the journey, they were intercepted on a UNSC communication channel by Vice Admiral Whitcomb, who explained that he and Lieutenant Elias Haverson had elected to hide Ascendent Justice in Tau Ceti's Oort cloud as to confirm the station's destruction, though ultimately came to the conclusion that with the weight of forces being brought to bear on Earth, even a fraction of the ships surviving the explosion would still be many dozens or hundreds of ships. As such, they detached Ascendant Justice from UNSC Gettysburg (a Paris-class heavy frigate that had been docked with Ascendant Justice since their escape from Reach) and provided the frigate for the Spartans to use to escape back to Earth. Meanwhile, Whitcomb manoeuvred Ascendant Justice into the heart of the Covenant fleet, using a hologram of the Menachite Forerunner crystal to trick the Covenant fleet into boarding his craft and crowding near the station rather than firing on him - keeping them within the blast radius. When Unyielding Hierophant's reactor blew, it left only a handful of surviving ships in the debris - estimated by John-117 to be no more than a dozen.

Aftermath

Only a small handful of ships limped back to the Covenant's capital-station High Charity, which were able to provide reports on the incident to Tartarus. After providing what little information was available on the station's destruction to the Prophet of Truth, Truth ordered that all battle-ready warships assemble at the site of Unyielding Hierophant's destruction. This fleet was later used by the Prophet of Truth to invade Earth, spurred into action early thanks to the Prophet of Regret launching his own parallel invasion effort with the Fleet of Sacred Consecration. Truth's fleet reinforced Regret's after Sacred Consecration were repelled by the UNSC Home Fleet, deploying Jiralhanae across Earth and beginning a month-long planetary siege.

In November 2559, remnant Covenant forces most likely serving under Luro 'Taralumee were involved in salvaging the remains of the station and its fleet. On November 13, SPARTAN-G059 was given a briefing in which the UNSC believed a warlord serving the Covenant remnant was conducting salvaging operations at Tau Ceti, leading to the Spartan (and her Winter-class prowler, UNSC From the Ashes) being deployed to conduct reconnaissance.

Production notes

Unyielding Hierophant was first given a visual depiction in Terminal #15 in Halo 2: Anniversary. However, this design is based on a fan design created by D4rkSt0rm99, who posted their fan-made silhouette for the station on DeviantArt in 2011. This design has since gone on to be reused in a piece of artwork produced by Leonid Kozienko for Halo Mythos: A Guide to the Story of Halo. D4rkSt0rm99 was later credited in the Halo Encyclopedia (2022 edition) as the concept artist for the Point Blank-class prowler, whose design was officially canonised in a collaboration between the fan mod Sins of the Prophets and 343 Industries.

The 2009 Halo Encyclopedia lists the dozen ships that survived Hierophant's destruction as the vessels of the Fleet of Sacred Consecration, used by the Prophet of Regret to invade Earth in Halo 2. This sentence was removed from the book's 2011 reprint, following later establishments that Truth's fleet were used to reinforce Regret's forces on Earth to glass New Mombasa and uncover the Portal at Voi during the events of Halo 3: ODST and after.

Trivia

A hierophant, according to Webster's Dictionary is a "priest in ancient Greece; specifically: the chief priest of the Eleusinian mysteries".

Gallery

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  A hologram of Unyielding Hierophant in Blue Team's debriefing.

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  A hologram of Unyielding Hierophant displayed in an ONI briefing room.

List of appearances

• Halo: First Strike (First appearance)
• Halo: Ghosts of Onyx (Mentioned only)
• Halo 2: Anniversary
  • Terminals (Hologram only)
• Halo 5: Guardians
  • Limited Edition dossiers (Indirect mention)
• Halo Mythos