Raid on Anodyne Spirit

The Raid on Anodyne Spirit was a operation conducted by the Banished during the Second Ark Conflict in 2559. Their objective was to infiltrate the Anodyne Spirit and recover three fragments of a slipspace flake originally found within a Forerunner structure on Reach. With the fragments, Atriox planned to open a portal to Reach.

Background
After travelling to the Ark aboard the Anodyne Spirit, the Prophet of Truth had landed the Keyship amidst a Forerunner city perched atop an immense basalt sea stack in a region that the Banished would later dub Mahsko. The massive rock column was one of seven that arched toward a distant peninsula. When the Prophet left to initiate the Great Journey from the Ark's control room, he instructed some of the vessel's compliment to stay behind and defend it against intruders. Many believed the Keyship to have been lost in the battle that ravaged the installation.

Some time after the Flood outbreak on the Ark, Atriox decided that he would need to return to the Milky Way. However, this would be difficult since the portal to Earth had closed almost a year earlier and the only ship equipped with a slipspace drive that he had brought had been destroyed by a Spartan. There was another way, however. Rumor had it that there was a portal structure hidden on Reach that connected to the Ark. To open this portal, Atriox would need a Forerunner slipspace flake. Thankfully, Tartarus had recovered shards of the flake originally found on Reach and presented them to the Prophet of Truth, who transferred them to the Anodyne Spirit when it left High Charity. To retrieve these shards from the Keyship, Atriox dispatched three strike teams, each in their own Phantom dropship. Chieftain Minas would lead his team, as well as coordinating the efforts of the other two teams, led Okro 'Vagaduun, and Zeretus.

The Mission
Around midday, the three Phantoms approached the basalt column where the Keyship sat dwarfing the ancient structures surrounding it. With a strike team in each Phantom, they approached the vessel from three different angles. In the case that its point defense weapons remained active, this would keep the Phantoms from all being destroyed in a single blast. After Minas was confident that the Keyship showed no notice of them, he ordered each dropship to land at the massive primal crux that wraps around its central assembly. The Chieftain watched their approach through the open troop bay doors while his right hand man, Choros, stayed in the cockpit. The pilot of Minas's Phantom, Bomarus, landed the craft at the designated access port on the crux. The other two dropships followed suit.

Leaving the pilots to stay with their Phantoms, the three groups—consisting of Jiralhanae, Sangheili, Kig-Yar, and Unggoy warriors—approached the access port. Choros and his men secured the area as Itka, a Kig-Yar weaponsmith with a talent for hacking Forerunner technology, got to work on the door controls. While he spliced the door controls, Itka was confronted by both old and new security measures, the latter of which bearing striking similarities to those used by the Covenant. However, the Kig-Yar easily bypassed these and the door rumbled open. The strike teams proceeded cautiously into the dark maw beyond the open access port, finding themselves in a large, vacant corridor that stretched for over a kilometer. Soon enough, they came to the conclusion that the Keyship was indeed abandoned. However, they noted that the Forerunners were masters of autonomous machines and that there still could be dangers aboard.

Choros led the group deeper into the Anodyne Spirit; he had served the Prophets and Tartarus—his uncle—aboard the sacred vessel before Great Schism and was familiar with its layout, certainly much more anyone else in the strike force. The shards of the Forerunner slipspace flake that they sought would be stored in a location called the "Adytum," where the Keyship's own slipspace drive was situated. Finally, the corridor ended in a wall with several doorways and Choros led them through the fourth from the left. The strike force followed a smaller, dimly-lit corridor to a large chamber with vaulting walkways meeting at a central lift. Here, hundreds of transport cylinders waiting to be used to launch personnel up toward the bow of the vessel. After Minas found a cylinder that could accommodate all three strike teams, Itka input a special access code into the nearby interface. The Banished had managed to discover this code amidst the debris field of High Charity.

The lift door closed and the transport cylinder shot upward, reaching an alarming speed. When it came to a sudden stop, many warriors in the party were left disoriented. The lift door opened for them to find a vast chasm that looked to be a kind of park and common space filled with walkways and delicate platforms, all overrun with swaths of dense foliage. Clearly, the gardens here had gone unchecked for years. Flocks of birds could be seen flitting about in the space's upper reaches.

As Choros was explaining the purpose of this chamber to Blademaster 'Vagaduun, the Jiralhanae warrior was knocked to the floor by a plasma blast. The strike teams immediately dove for cover while under fire by plasma bolts and carbine rounds. Minas scrambled to Choros and moved the stunned, but uninjured, warrior to cover behind a stone barrier. As the Chieftain collected himself, he realized that their assailants were using Covenant weapons, meaning that they were not Forerunner machines. The Banished strike force pushed into the jungle of overgrown foliage to press a counterattack. It didn't take long before they had defeated the attackers and realized that they were Covenant Jiralhanae, suggesting that they had all survived within the Keyship for nearly seven years. Choros noted that the ship likely had enough supplies stored to last the crew seventy years, no less seven. Minas informed Bomarus back on his Phantom of the enemy presence on the vessel as they pressed onto their next destination before the Adytum, the clerestory.

List of appearances

 * Halo: Shadows of Reach
 * Sacrifice