BLISS DECIMATED! >MANASSAS, Alföld, Apr. 6, 2526/NS

An estimated five hundred million people are feared dead after the Covenant juggernaut turned its unprovoked aggression toward the peaceful planet Bliss on Feb. 13. Credible, anonymous sources indicate that the capital city Manikata — inhabited by nearly five hundred thousand denizens — was the first population center reduced to smoldering rubble and blackened char. As one rescue and recovery official noted, the city is “a boiling lake of molten glass and metal.” No word has reached us from any other part of the colony. None is expected. Once again, we are forced to struggle with the aftermath of incomprehensible atrocities committed against our colonial men, women, and children. Loved ones who died as their homes burst into flames, their ashes scattered by the shock waves of the Covenant’s devastating weaponry.

These people are forever lost to history. They are no longer the names and faces we remember. They have become meaningless statistics — peaks of data on a line graph that coldly calculates the rising casualties inflicted upon our people as this frivolous war drags on.

But what happened on the ground before the Covenant decided that they were through and it was time for them to leave? What have we done that could ever compel the Covenant to strive so zealously to purge all evidence of our existence from this galaxy? And what have the Covenant done on these worlds that would compel them to so violently and systematically scour all evidence of their actions? We may never know. There is nothing there anymore. As on Harvest, a tranquil farming community orbiting distant Epsilon Indi, just over a year ago, the unconscionable violence of Covenant aggression leaves us without a trace of their misdeeds save the silence from our once flourishing worlds. Not even bodies remain to provide us with any closure or even the narrowest view of their fate. We are left only to wait out the next inevitable tragedy that will befall us at the Covenant’s hands.

INTERSYSTEM NEWS . ref# X16-69898-01 Posted @ 9:15+0 MMT