Forerunner Solute has to be distributed manually, right? Silentium specifically mentions it as having to be essentially crop dusted before firing the Array.
. . . out of the bellies of the great ships, thousands of lesser ships drop and spread like mosquitoes . . . Many trail yellowish curtains like tainted rain. This is solute, which will cause every animal killed by Halo action to instantly decay into component molecules.
I ask because it makes me wonder if when the rings fired, people in space would have died but not been decayed. Correct? All of those forerunner ships that went derelict when the rings fired should be full of bodies, no?
Or am I missing a key detail?
That would make a lot of sense. Spaceships overwhelmingly would have been likely to fall into Gravity Wells such as planets or stars and therefore overwhelmingly been destroyed. Any corpses on ships which still had atmosphere would have suffered from decomposition, but would eventually presumably have lost any contents to the vacuum of space
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The librarian couldn’t put Forerunner Solute to every planet and ship, so yes every animal and people without it became corpse
I don’t like this Forerunner Solute and all of this explanation about the Halo functioning. I wish they didn’t give any explanation about how the Halo works, that they leave it as a technology so advanced that we couldn’t even understand the explanation and just take it for magic
Tbf, the explanation given might as well be magic.
That said, I really enjoy Greg Bear’s work. His trilogy is probably my favorite Halo work of all, or close to it.