Vertigo City

 was the capital and largest city on the UNSC colony world Astanchia. With nearly 150,000 inhabitants, it held all but a twentieth of the planet's small population.

The city maintained a trio of space elevators, one of which was a high capacity variant. The elevators each connected to the Orion orbital station and helped in shipping Astanchia's mass quantities of ore.

First Battle
On April 6th, 2652, a Covenant detachment attacked the planet and its poor defenses. Within hours, Vertigo City had gone under control of the Jiralhanae occupational force and thousands of the citizens there were killed, taken prisoner, or forced into slavery.

The day after, Battlegroup 7/A-2 arrived in-system and engaged the Covenant force. Three quarters of the Covenant assault group was destroyed in the conflict while the battlegroup lost only a third of their vessels which was thanks in part to the Turkey-class Supercruiser and Celtic-class Attack Carrier in the battlegroup. A number of special forces teams were deployed in the city's outskirts and infiltrated the city. Using state-of-the-art stealth technology, the special forces extracted any civilians they could before detontating a fifty-kiloton nuclear weapon in the city, eliminating nearly twenty-five thousand Covenant soldiers (an intercepted report stated that a large Forerunner structure may have been located under the north area of the city, which would explain why there were so many soldiers).

Second Battle
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