User:Pandorym/Negev

Physical Characteristics
Though only a little over half the size of Earth, Negev is composed almost entirely of the element Rutherfordium. The element is formed at the planet's core, pushing the depleted Rutherfordium that has crumbled to a sand-like texture and is no longer radioactive outward. This causes the planet to grow a approximately one foot per year. Because Rutherfordium is so dense the world has a vast amount of gravitational pull despite its size. It has no atmosphere, resulting in frequent meteor impacts. The craters caused by these impacts are the sole feature that distinguishes any one area of the endless grey plains from another. The world's core is still young and very hot, and that combined with fairly close proximity to its sun results in high temperatures. Ultimately it is more like the Moon or Mercury than Earth.

Discovery
In 2504 a TerraTek Corporation survey ship seeking rich mineral deposits to be mined picked up a planet from which strange sensor readings were emanating. The crew investigated briefly, discovering that deposits of Rutherfordium, a radioactive element unstable on Earth, lurked beneath the surface, somehow sustained despite the fact that it normally lost its radioactive properties after a while. Fearing the possible effects of the intense radiation that would be unleashed and the sheer amount of immensely heavy material that would have to be moved should any mining operations take place, the vessel charted the world's location and promptly left for more promising sites. Despite this hasty retreat one of the crewmembers, Roderick Gunney, was fascinated by the blasted world, which (if not for its deadly underground pockets) might have been earthlike.

After being injured during an expedition and forced to retire from surveying Gunney wrote a book, Mirrored. The book discussed how, just as the ancient Israelites saw Palestine as their promised land, another race might see such a world as the one he had visited as a paradise. He proposed the thought that, to be a true paradise, a place must inflict enough evil on its inhabitants to make the good more pronounced, thus allowing those who are both victims and beneficiaries to experience emotions such as joy, hope, and love to a greater extent than those who lived lives of luxury. His writings quickly attracted a cult following that attempted to balance joy and sorrow, calling themselves the Order of the Mirror. When he died in 2506, a year after his book was published, many members of the Order wished to take their beliefs to the ultimate extreme: to actually travel to the world he had witnessed and live upon its surface.

Colonization
Throughout UNSC space followers of Gunney's theories pooled their resources, buying and refitting three scrapped and barely spaceworthy bulk freighters. It took until 2509 for their plans to come to fruition, but on August 7th of that year the transports Agony, Bliss, and Neutrality lifted off from Manaus, Brazil and began their journey to a world of which they knew nothing but what they had read. Disaster struck just three months into the seven month journey when the Neutrality, which had been poorly repaired, was torn apart by slipspace radiation, killing an estimated 500 people (including one of the Order's leaders). Many of the less dedicated members of the Order were horrified and demanded to be returned to Earth, but the remaining leaders of the group managed to convince them to stay by pointing out that it would be just as dangerous to turn around as to finish the journey.

The remaining ships arrived on time, setting down on the sandy surface of their destination on March 7, 2510. It was a simple matter for the shipboard scanners to confirm the reports of radioactivity beneath the surface, but far more startling discoveries were made within a week of the initial landing. The "sand" on the surface, each grain of which was a half centimeter to a centimeter across, was actually the remnants of the Rutherfordium that had lost its radioactivity, falling apart when that force no longer held the pieces of mineral in a semi-stable form. The Order also discovered that the planet's core was producing Rutherfordium and expelling it in mineral form at the precise rate required to maintain the level of radioactivity. As each new layer broke down into "sand", however, it pushed all the other layers upward. In short, the desolate planet was slowly growing.

Due to the planet's lack of an atmosphere and the fact that the colonists lacked the resources to terraform it, the Order was forced to remain inside the ships that had already held them during their long journey. To help sustain the air supply they planted their crops, taken along due to the overly optimistic belief that the planet would not be hostile to plant life, within the ships, both using them for sustenance and oxygen. While some members of the Order were disheartened by the hostility of the new world others embraced it, stating that it was indeed the ultimate place in which to live out Gunney's philosophy. The colonists gradually practiced coping with their world's heavy gravity, eventually leaving gravitational controls active only in the plant cultivation sectors. On May 12, 2510, the leaders met to officially name the planet. Deciding against the original idea, "Zion", the Order chose a name fitting both their biblical connections and the philosophy they followed: Negev, after the fearsome desert in southern Israel/Palestine.

The Golden 15 Years
The period from the planet's naming to the Order's first contact with the Covenant was referred to by the Order as "The Golden Fifteen Years" due to the success of their colonization efforts. The year 2511 saw the first births of the second generation of Order members, with the birth rate far offsetting the death rate. By the following year many families were pushing to have dwellings outside the crowded vessels established. By cannibalizing the engines from the ships, which everyone was sure were no longer necessary, the colonists managed to create heat-resistant molds into which molten Rutherfordium was poured, creating sealed prefabricated dwellings that gave the impression of personal houses. While many colonists remained in the vessels that had brought them so far, others populated the beginning of the settlement dubbed Dannah.

By 2515, despite the young age of the second generation, the town had more than doubled in size. The ships were roomy, for it was largely only the Order's leaders and those working on the agricultural sectors. Due to the remoteness of the system, named Eliakim by its sole inhabitants, it had been six years since any of the colonists had received news of happenings on Earth and its colonies. They were content in their isolation, however, going so far as to use the meager weapons of their ships in an attempt to fire on a malfunctioning exploratory probe drawn to the Rutherfordium on the planet after losing its guidance systems. This scare brought to mind the worry that someone might try to take their new home, or at least rule of it, from them, setting the stage for the rise of perhaps the Order's greatest leader of all time.

As the colonists became frantic about their almost complete lack of weapons, let alone training to use them, they pointed accusing fingers at the leaders (who had given little thought to defense). At the head of those declaring their dissatisfaction with the old government was Ana Espinoza, a visionary woman who had seen the entire journey from Earth as a declaration of independence that gave them the right to live their lives they way they wished, and was determined to defend that right with everything she could muster. Knowing that they had brought little that they could use to fight with them, Ana suggested that they use the tools most available to them: knowledge of the planet and its abnormalities. Under her watchful eye a defense force, christened Oppression's Reflection, was trained to leap, run, tumble, and fight in the high gravity of Negev, then use that very force combined with momentum and immense strength to make staves and swords of Rutherfordium into deadly weapons against those attempting to use devices designed for lower-gravity environments.

Espinoza was appointed unanimously to be the new leader of the Order, and immediately she took action. By cannibalizing the sensor systems of the Bliss and wrapping them in several Rutherfordium shells she created a network of early warning beacons set across the planet. The colonists could monitor these beacons from the Agony, allowing them to instantly be aware of any attempted landing or orbital contact via crude radar. Her next act was to design an apocalypse weapon: if it seemed that all was lost, the Order could tunnel through the upper layers of the planet, reaching the point where Rutherfordium was created in a liquid state, and unleash it upon their enemies in a last act of defiance. Noting that all of her contributions were military, she attempted to change her reputation and oversaw the construction of the first school building in 2516. She also initiated a program to train colonists to properly operate the limited medical equipment they had been able to bring with them.

Espinoza remained head of the Order until 2521, completing a multitude of projects to expand the new settlement during her tenure. She retired at the age of sixty, and was not expected to live past sixty-two. The Order became a true democracy, remaining in this state until 2525. The growth rate remained constant, with the second generation reaching their teenage years by the end of the Golden Fifteen Years. Defense protocols were laid in place based on prior knowledge of the UNSC fleet by some of the colonists, and Espinoza's doomsday weapon was made possible with a series of sealed tunnels and gates. It became known as the Elijah Project, and a series of regulations regarding its use were put in place to ensure that it was never fired prematurely.

The Covenant War
The Order, still strongly isolationist, was completely unaware of the beginning of the Human-Covenant war. They were unknowingly protected by the Cole Protocol, which protected their system in case Covenant forces tried to use it as a staging point to move further into UNSC space. When a battle occurred in an adjacent system, however, damage to the scanners of one of the participants (the Covenant Addict-class Frigate Hidden Triumph) caused it to detect the Rutherfordium deposits as a Forerunner artifact. With most of the other Covenant ships engaged in heavy battle the vessel's captain decided to land on the world in order to enact repairs and recover the supposed artifact, tempering possible news of his mid-battle retreat with his presentation of the Forerunner device to the Prophets.

Though the Covenant forces set down on the opposite side of the planet from the Order's settlement, they were quickly detected by Espinoza's early warning system. Expecting to discover a UNSC troopship attempting to claim the planet for their government, the colonists deployed several squads of Reflection soldiers. While their advantages against projectile weapons were immense, they had never before encountered the Covenant and their plasma weapons, which were unaffected by high gravity. The Order's soldiers easily eliminated the first wave of defenders, Grunts and Jackals wielding mostly needlers (which had their ranges drastically reduced), and had begun to salvage the bodies in the mistaken belief that they had already won when a group including several Elites, Jackals with plasma pistols, and a pair of Hunters emerged and rained chaos on the unsuspecting humans.

In the first hour nearly half of the squads the Order had deployed lay dead in their space suits, and the remainder had been driven back across most of the planetary surface before making a stand in a crater and being surrounded by Covenant forces. Reinforcements from the settlement arrived, breaking through Covenant lines by striking rapidly from behind and forcing the two groups into a stalemate. Elites using active camouflage attacked the human camp at night, but were repelled once the alarm was raised because they were not used to fighting with melee weapons in high gravity. The following day a human force using salvaged Covenant weapons split the alien force in two, then encircled and destroyed one of the groups. Victory seemed to be at hand, but the remaining Covenant made for the settlement, hoping to inflict as much damage as possible and recover the (nonexistent) artifact before they retreated to their ship.

As the remaining Covenant forces arrived at the settlement, barely ahead of the pursuing Order forces, the civilian colonists realized their danger and took refuge within the ships. They fired the weapons of the vessels at their attackers, but due to the low power and terrible accuracy of the unwieldy guns any reprieve they received was temporary. Just as their last refuge was about to be breached the remaining human military forces arrived and drove the Covenant away. They were unable to entirely destroy the enemy, who escaped on the vehicles brought by their ship, but pursued them back to their landing site. Just before their ship was boarded they managed to send a short-range communication to their battlegroup, informing the remnants of their allied fleet of their whereabouts. Though the ship was captured by the Order the Covenant battlegroup arrived mere hours later.

They immediately knew that there was no forerunner artifact, but were unaware that the colonists were not in contact with the UNSC government. Fearing the consequences should their slipspace technology fall into human hands and desiring revenge for the deaths of their comrades, they prepared to glass the world. Though the Order did not know their intent they were aware of the threat posed by the small fleet. Swearing that they would rather die in a final blaze of glory than be slowly destroyed by alien oppressors, the colonists activated the Elijah Project, destroying every vessel in orbit and wiping Negev of life. The tunnel to the planet's core that had been created for the project quickly filled in with old rubble, but set back the planet's steady growth by almost five years. There were no survivors of the incident, but it was captured in a recording made by a barely-functioning TerraTek survey beacon left behind after the initial expedition.

Rediscovery
The survey beacon was recovered in 2558 by the crew of the UNSC Ace in the Hole. Its sporadic but detailed recordings told the colony's story from the arrival of the first ships to the activation of the Elijah Project, and with a little research the crewmembers were able to determine the date and reason the ships had left based on their identification numbers. Small observation probes had been released from the beacon, allowing the recordings to capture from close range the construction efforts, debates, and battles via constant transmission. The world was still too heavily radiated for the Ace in the Hole to safely land, but after salvaging the recordings the crew modified the beacon into a combination memorial to the strange heroism of the Order and warning to those who might not pick up the dangerous conditions of the planet.

Despite the official addition of the Eliakim system and the world it contains to UNSC star charts, Negev remained hostile to any and all life for so long that it generally saw little, if any, traffic. It was declared safe for habitation by a small committee in 2843, but no colonization attempts were made, and neither the official star charts nor the beacon in the system was updated to recognize this development. Negev became little more than an offhandedly mentioned figment of the past, the actions of those who once inhabited it forgotten by all but the most devout scholars of such knowledge.