Halo: First Strike

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Template:Ratings {{Book Info |name= Colonel Ackerson's plans, which were extensive lists on "Her Spartans", a star chart reference, and a third file received armor upgrades and Spartan Frederic-104 discovered several symbols which ultimately led to a huge tunnel that led into an even larger room. In the center of the room, there was a crystal. The Spartans and Halsey found that if they walked straight towards it, it would bend the space around them and, if brought to Slipspace, would allow them to travel further using the same amount of energy used in the same vessel. They retrieved the crystal, but the Covenant found them due to emission of radiation from the crystal. They landed forces inside the giant room using reversed gravity lifts, and Isaac-039 and Vinh-030 died while fighting the Covenant. Justice, the two men (Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson) witness Polaski practicing how to drive a Covenant dropship. As they enter Reach in real space, they see what has happened to it after the Covenant glassed the planet. They move the flagship closer as they notice that, during the glassing of Reach the Covenant "missed" a spot. The small fleet - consisting of a dozen cruisers, two assault carriers, and three squadrons of seraphs - ask why a flagship is at Reach. While on the ship, the survivors hear a U.N.S.C. E-band transmission. The E-band transmission is 5 notes "Oly Oly Oxen Free". No one on the bridge recognizes it - except the Master Chief. The section then returns to the year July 14, 2523. The memory plays the time when the Spartans played capture the flag against Tango Company.

Back on Ascendant Justice, the human crew debate whether they should go down to Reach in the reinforced Covenant dropship. Cortana looks around to see a spot which can be a extraction site to pick up the people going down to Reach. On the way down, cruisers start to surround them in their dropship. The humans find a canyon with some movement in it. Before landing Master Chief says the code for "Oly Oly Oxen Free" and says to land them in a safe spot where the survivors would find them. The Chief wanders out alone to see if there is a trap - if there is, he wants to trigger it. Haverson backs him up. At the bottom of the ramp Chief senses a single signal. The friend-or-foe tag wasn't working, so the signal isn't working. The Chief drew his pistol and turned to see it was a Spartan. The Spartan was Anton-044 (he had disabled his FoF tag so the Covenant wouldn't attack him). He led the Master Chief to the entrance of a cavern, where two Spartans, Grace-093 and Li-008, were operating chainguns that were bolted to the sides of two boulders. The Master Chief and Anton, followed by Grace, went into the cavern. Inside, Vice Admiral Danforth Whitcomb was standing at foldout card table, which was the headquarters for Camp Independence.

Admiral Whitcomb asked why the Chief was here, instead of a mission with Captain Keyes deep in Covenant territory. The Chief told him about the events that happened on Alpha Halo, and while he was telling the story, Haverson and the others from the dropship arrived. Haverson asked Whitcomb how he was alive, and the Admiral told Haverson that while everyone was evacuating, he had stay behind because the U.N.S.C. was working on a new bomb called a Nova. Whitcomb armed the Novas with failsafe tampering detonators and a countdown timer. Whitcomb had a team of Marines, Charlie Company, to help arm the Novas, but they were wiped out, but he then saw Red Team on coded COM and 'asked' to borrow a few Spartans, who armed the Novas and give the Covenant trouble with hit-and-run exercises.

The rest of the Red Team was trapped underground in the tunnels beneath the mountain in the CASTLE facility. The Chief's group used a Covenant dropship to rescue the remaining Red Team. They entered a huge cavern filled with Covenant forces - a few Elites, Jackals, and mostly Grunts that were clearing a cave-in. They landed the dropship a half a kilometer away from the Covenant forces. They destroyed the Covenant forces and three Spartans, Kelly, Fred, and Will, emerged from cover. Whitcomb asked if that was everyone and Fred replied that there was one more. That person turned out to be Dr. Halsey who was holding a fist-sized crystal. They were about to leave when they detected Covenant forces. They were surrounded by thousands of Covenant forces on each of the 12 levels of the gallery, and crowding the balconies were Grunts, Jackals, Elites and several pairs of Hunters. They all prepared to open fire on them, when a Hunter pair roared with rage and fired their weapons at the Master Chief and his team; the rest of the Covenant forces opened fire a split second later but fire was directed at the hunters as they are under orders to take the crystal intact and the hunters had violated it so they had to be killed

Back in space, the Ascendant Justice emerged from Slipspace into a frozen Oort cloud to hide from the Covenant forces because they knew that the Ascendant Justice wasn't one of theirs. Cortana eavesdropped on the data streams of the Covenant, using the dissected Covenant AI to help. Cortana discovered that the Covenant forces were heading to Earth.

Section 4: Gambit

As it turned out, the Covenant forces weren't shooting at the group, but rather the Hunters. They had orders not to harm Dr. Halsey's crystal, and they risked harming it by shooting at the Master Chief and the others around him. The Covenant then proceeded toward the group. Whitcomb signaled for Polaski to pick them up; they got whisked out in the nick of time. However, while going up the grav lift, the Covenant begin to use it to push them back down. When Anton-044 opens the door to fire Jackhammer rockets up the shaft, Dr. Halsey's crystal changes shape and completely disables the Grav Lift. Once they exit the tunnel, the crystal returns to normal.

In the Ascendant Justice, Cortana had used Engineers to combine the Covenant ship with another ship - the UNSC Gettysburg. She needed two reactors for her maneuver. She jumped into Slipspace, and jumped out right in the middle of the Covenant fleet, at the rendezvous point. The Chief's men got into the Gettysburg-Ascendant Justice (G.A.J.). However, when Cortana jumped back into Slipspace, they didn't go into normal Slipspace, and they dragged the Covenant fleet with them. The fleet opened fire, but the plasma behaved erratically - doing loops, curving, teleporting, etc. During the fight, Elites that had survived the purge of the Ascendant Justice blew a small hole in its hull. The Spartans and Polaski went out to repair it, but ran into the Elites. They fought, but Polaski, Li, and Anton were killed and Kelly was mortally wounded. Desperate to escape, Cortana attempted to jump back into normal space. She succeeded, leaving the Covenant stranded in Slipspace, destroyed by sudden decompression of the extended slipspace field created by the crystal.

Section 5: Massacre at Eridanus Secundus

In the G.A.J., Halsey told the Chief that Kelly would live. She then talked to him about Johnson and his survival against the Flood. She revealed that Johnson has Boren's Syndrome, the only known defense against the Flood (see full article for details). After he left, Halsey and Cortana discussed the crystal and found that it can warp space, gravity, and even time. When her group had found the crystal, the Chief and his group were transported back in time.

For repairs, the group headed to the Eridanus Secundus asteroid belt, home of a rebel resistance. During not-too-friendly negotiations, a Covenant ship dropped out of Slipspace (it found them because the crystal emits radiation upon exit from Slipspace). Despite malfunctioning plasma turrets, the crew of the G.A.J. decided to engage it. When Cortana informed them that the magnetic coils used to shape the plasma aren't working, the Chief came up with the idea to use the magnetic coils of the Gettysburg's MAC gun to shape it. During the fight, Halsey took Kelly away for a secret project, and Locklear, whom she had given the crystal to protect, blew it (and himself) up so the Covenant couldn't get it.

Section 6: Operation: FIRST STRIKE

"Don't look like any 'uneven elephant' to me-more like two squids kissing. Whatever it is, damned glad its going to blow up. Nice job-almost as good as if we sent in the marines."
— Sergeant Johnson

While the crew of the G.A.J. were able to retrieve a few shards of the crystal, they had more important things on mind: the Covenant invasion of Earth. Cortana knew that they were gathering at a battle station called the Unyielding Hierophant. The Chief came up with a daring plan to blow up the station and put a sizable dent in the fleet: he and the Spartans will go to the station in a modified dropship, infiltrate the station, and blow up the reactors, with help from a copy of Cortana's subroutines.

The Spartans made it to the station without incident, but were forced to take a detour through a temple complex. There, they encountered Brutes for the first time. The Chief grappled with a Brute, and barely made it out alive. Grace was killed by Brute shots and her suit's fail safe system was activated, killing several Brutes and Grunts in the process. They still managed to make it to the reactors, and they were successfully rigged to explode. The remaining Spartans exited the station, but only saw the Gettysburg when they made it back to the G.A.J.. The crew had taken the Ascendant Justice's Slip space engine and installed it on the Gettysburg, while Whitcomb and Haverson had taken the Covenant ship. They broadcasted a message to the fleet that if they wanted the crystal's shards (which they had for proof), all they had to do was come and get them from the Ascendant Justice - which they had impaled into the central section of the Unyielding Hierophant. When the Unyielding Hierophant exploded, it destroyed some five hundred ships of the Covenant invasion force leaving about a dozen ships to attack Earth. The five human survivors of the operation, Master Chief John-117, Frederic-104, Linda-058, William-043,Sergent Avery J. Johnson and Cortana proceeded to a random location (under Cole Protocol) and then to Earth.

Section VII: Harbinger

In the epilogue, Tartarus gives shards of the Forerunner crystal to the High Prophet of Truth. The Prophet gives Tartarus orders to reward the survivors, then execute them, and punish the incompetent who lost Unyielding Hierophant; "make sure his fate matches the magnitude of his failure." In this epilogue, the Elite who was punished was most likely the future Arbiter, who had fought with the Master Chief and failed to kill him. Template:Spoiler End

Characters

U.N.S.C.

Covenant

Trivia

  • On the cover of the novel the artist's signature is showing below a Marine's arm behind the Master Chief.
  • The original cover of the book had a graphic error on the Master Chief's head. The top part of his head was a little to the right of the bottom part, causing a split in his head. This was later corrected in recent versions.
  • Chapter 11 is the only chapter that takes place on Earth in this novel, and the first in the series to take place on Earth.
  • On the front cover, it appears that the Master Chief's Plasma Rifle is firing a beam, not individual bolts of plasma.
  • In the novel an ODST wears a normal marine uniform instead of their regular space suit.
  • On page 38, it says that a Longsword has 110mm chain guns, but on page 58, it says that "The Longsword's landing gear deployed and raised the craft a meter off the floor. "Guns clear," Polaski announced. "Bye, boys." She brought up a targeting reticule and swept it around the bay. A hail of 120 mm rounds tore through the Grunts' cover.
  • Near the end of the book, it says that Ghosts are fliers, like Banshees, but this is probably referring to how Ghosts hover above the ground.
  • Except for the seventh section, all the sections are numbered using Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.); the seventh section is numbered using Roman numerals: VII. This is probably just another reference to 7 like the ones through out the Halo universe.
  • After the Unyielding Hierophant exploded, there were only a dozen Covenant ships left, give or take. These ships might have been the ones led by Regret that attacked Earth in the First Battle of Earth.
  • The Elite that SPARTAN-117 fought in Ascendant Justice was initially presumed to be the Arbiter, until it was realized that it was a Special Operations Elite, and not a Supreme Commander. Add to that the fact that the Arbiter's own ship was called the Seeker of Truth, not Ascendant Justice, and it becomes very unlikely that the two are the same character.
  • The Battle Rifle was first used canonically in Halo: Contact Harvest, and is first introduced to the Spartans during Halo: First Strike in the tunnels beneath Reach, but it was introduced to gamers in Halo 2.
  • On page 56 it says, "... the longsword spun 180 degrees." Later on it refers to it as a pelican drop ship that was previously destroyed when they sent it ahead of them as a diversion to attack the Ascendant Justice.
  • On the cover, between the "A" and the "L" in the word Halo, there is a Marathon symbol. This is the same for all of the Halo Novels.
  • The Longsword is referred to as the pelican in the bay even though it was destroyed on the way in.
  • After the successful capture of the Ascendant Justice it is stated that no one has ever captured a Covenant ship before, this is odd, since Major Silva commandeered the Truth and Reconciliation. Although this can easily be corrected by saying that they were not aware of that fact and that shortly after wards the ship was destroyed by Melissa McKay.

Sources


External Links

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