Operation: WORM BOX

One thing I'm adding to the lore is a massive counter-intelligence undertaking that happened in tandem with the Cole Protocol; Operation: WORM BOX. The gist of it is that the viral scavengers involved with the protocol don't just wipe a ship's navigation data, they fill the nav computer with fabricated colonies. Lots of them, in fact. Entire sectors' worth of them. These sites do seem believable and are around real stars, just not ones actually settled by humans. And there are hundreds of them, thousands even, scattered across a kilolightyear radius from Sol. The data in any given ship's nav computers never gave the full picture, but always suggested a sphere of influence much larger than in reality. Petabytes of AI-generated "historical" data, news, forged pictures and footage, and other artifacts related to these decoy colonies are also planted to sell the story, along with cryptic, sometimes mutually contradictory references to a greater human presence further inward along the Orion Arm as well as the implication of a considerably longer starfaring history than a mere two centuries. A few actual lesser colonies are included as a deliberate, calculated sacrifice to throw the Covenant off (most of these being colonies with a notable insurrectionist presence). All active human nav computers are to be filled with this diversionary data; there's a vast operation across the outer colonies to cover the local networks and ships. Empty ships with their computers and nav logs full of the decoy data are left on the Covenant's path for the express purpose of having their databanks scavenged.

This is one of the main reasons why the war took as long as it did, and what also made it so exhausting for the Covenant; considerable resources were spent on wild goose chases painstakingly sweeping empty systems, because the Covenant could never know which leads were real and which ones weren't. Additionally, decoy signal sources were planted in many of the systems via probes, prompting more thorough investigations and taking up more of the Covenant's time searching each system. The Covenant did, however, establish forward operating bases in a number of the decoy systems, and even discovered Forerunner relics in a handful of them. To this day, no ex-Covenant know the full extent of the human sphere; then again, not all humans do either; with virtually all star charts having been replaced, most of the relevant individuals dead, and new unsanctioned colonies springing up over the years, it is increasingly difficult to build a complete picture.