Forerunner temporal manipulation 4

Clench: Forerunner strategy that utilised slipspace travel, nonlinear causality, and probability manipulation to conduct interstellar combat operations.
(Halo Warfleet; pg.90)

FIVE ADDITIONAL FRAGMENTS: BATTLE TACTICS OF THE WARRIOR CIRCLE

[TT: The timing and location of these battles have not been established. “Sphere” in this context is a hypersphere made up of complexes of two and three-D surfaces, or membranes, shortened in this translation to “branes,” extending into higher dimensions that combine vectors of transit, but also scalar tactical probabilities—a difficult concept to grasp, but essential to understanding Forerunner warfare. The idea of combining what amount to many-dimensional maps with scalars describing outcomes, and adjusting both as outcomes are determined, is peculiarly adapted to interstellar engagements involving slipspace travel.]

FRAGMENT 1

Having escorted the last Forerunners to safety, we have repositioned the last of our fleets, including those that protected Path Kural.

Their tactics have proven effective in skirmishes on the Lines of the Jat-Krula sphere.
The Falchion, former defender of the Orion complex, is one of the nine commanders trained during the Didact’s exile. For nine hundred years the Falchion worked with the Builders, but remained inwardly loyal to Warrior-Servants and the Didact, unlike many of his colleagues.
The Falchion is in command of our first clench.
Four themas stand in peril of total infection.

Warrior-Servants stand ready across nineteen systems formerly linked by star roads. Engaged in the clench: twelve fully capable Fortress-class battle stations, of limited mobility due to space-time debt, which will act as apex control for seven hundred thousand more nimble Harrier-class vessels.
Opposing them: over one hundred thousand captured and infected Forerunner ships, most powerful in this context likely being four hundred dreadnoughts.

The first flex of the membrane, leading to the clench, begins at the extreme interior margins of Path Terrulian in the 78th Thema, a cold, pre-stellar dust cloud fringed with cooling, iron-hearted stars and vast numbers of stony and icy planets and asteroids.
(Halo:Silentium; Ch.25)