Ikjuttar

"Do not approach system. Localized hegmatter event; residents contain. No superluminal vehicles permitted. Do not approach system..."

- The Ikjuttar's sole message to the Covenant

The Ikjuttar (Qers'nok for "Elusive ones") are a secretive and isolationist Covenant fringe culture seemingly confined to the Xiale system, located in the far trailing-side reaches of the Orion Arm. According to their transmissions to the Covenant's emissaries circa 1890 CE, the Ikjuttar had devoted all of their resources as a civilization to a slow-burn war of attrition against a localized hegemonizing swarm of indeterminate nature and origin. Interestingly, they seem to lack a slipspace travel capability, yet have access to a high level of technology likely of Forerunner origin; namely, their home system is fortified with exotic defenses that entirely stymied the Covenant's attempts at invasion: any ships that crossed inside Xiale's cometary cloud simply disappeared entirely, and were never seen or heard of again. The Ikjuttar are hypothesized to have used a targeted slipspace field generator to shunt the incoming Covenant ships into higher dimensions they were unable to escape.

Because of the seeming impossibility of even entering the Xiale system, combined with the potentially volatile nature of the Ikjuttar's single-minded mission, the Covenant left them to their own devices, while simultaneously keeping watch on them in case the object of their containment efforts were to spill over from their meager sphere of influence. As such, knowledge on the Ikjuttar is patchy at best. No one knows what they look like, and their society and culture can only be guessed at from the rather curt transmissions they sent to the Covenant. The Ikjuttar have no presence outside their home system, and have only been communicated with remotely a handful of times. The Covenant leadership largely suppressed knowledge of the Ikjuttar's existence, lest their authority in the Covenant's sole primacy over Forerunner technology be potentially undermined, and they are generally seen more as an obscure myth than an actual civilization. Technically speaking, the Covenant has been in a constant state of war with the Ikjuttar for about seven centuries, and their conversion, when brought up, was regarded as being "ongoing". In practice, however, the Covenant has only maintained a listening post in a nearby system, with occasional scouting forays into the neighborhood of the Xiale system. The range of the Ikjuttar's slipspace interdiction system is not known for certain, so ships must tread a fine line not to travel too close.

Owing to their mysterious nature, the Ikjuttar are an endless source of fascination for Covenant scholars, and theories regarding the species abound. Even as on-side surveys are impossible, remote observation of the Xiale system has yielded some results. It is evident that the system is heavily industrialized, and a debris disk or possible Dyson swarm obstructs light from the primary star. Space traffic remains common as of the latest reports. Surveys have also revealed biosignatures suggesting an ammonia-based biochemistry on two of the system's inner planets, which may hint at the Ikjuttar's biology. A prominent theory goes that the Ikjuttar are simply lying, and are using the threat of the von Neumann swarm to deter outsiders from exploring (or invading) their system. According to another theory, the Ikjuttar were wiped out by the von Neumann swarm long ago, and the only presence in the system now is the swarm posing as a biological species.