Ascendant Justice

''This article is about the Covenant Flagship. For the blog, see Ascendant Justice (blog).''

Ascendant Justice was a Covenant supercarrier. It was the flagship of a scouting party sent to Installation 04 after its discovery by the Fleet of Particular Justice. In 2552, it was captured by SPARTAN John-117 and the other human survivors of the Battle of Installation 04.

Background
It had seven plasma turrets and was noted to have three thousand Covenant personnel, mostly composed of Huragok, along with an unusually small crew of combat personnel: a light company of Unggoy and only a hundred Sangheili. There were apparently enough Huragok on board to merit them having an access tunnel of their own. John-117 noted that he "...hadn't seen anything like this on the Truth and Reconciliation," and that it was "armed like a ship of war, yet had the support staff of a refit vessel." It possessed a crude associated intelligence construct and software for replicating AI matrices.

History


Shortly after the Fleet of Particular Justice arrived at Installation 04, the Ascendant Justice and a small group of ships were sent into the system from High Charity, arriving before or early on in the Battle of Installation 04.

During the Battle of Installation 04, the Prophet of Stewardship alternated his base of operations between the Ascendant Justice in orbit and the Truth and Reconciliation on the ring. When Supreme Commander Thel 'Vadamee sent a single infantry unit to relieve the Prophet for his constant force misappropriation, Stewardship ordered the Ascendant Justice to destroy them on approach, warning that any other affronts to his leadership would result in equally lethal fates. 'Vadamee then assembled a strike force to retake the Ascendant Justice and physically relieve the Prophet of leadership until the humans were eliminated, but Stewardship left for the Truth and Reconciliation before they arrived, leaving orders for the crew to arrest Thel 'Vadamee if he continued to interfere with the Consecration. When Thel's force arrived on the Ascendant Justice, no shots were fired and the crew acknowledged his authority.

When Installation 04's destruction was imminent, the Fleet of Particular Justice moved into cover behind Threshold. The Ascendant Justice's scoutgroup remained to search the wreckage for transmissions from survivors. It was soon boarded and captured by a small team of UNSC survivors, which included John-117; Staff Sergeant Avery Johnson; Lieutenant Elias Haverson; Corporal Locklear; Warrant Officer Sheila Polaski, and the AI Cortana. The survivors then used Ascendant Justice to return to Reach and evacuate a small number of SPARTAN survivors, Vice Admiral Danforth Whitcomb and Dr. Catherine Halsey, as well as a Forerunner artifact from the planet, attaching to the wreckage of the UNSC frigate for additional power. They then escaped through Slipspace toward the Eridanus System, becoming the first ship to ever go into Slipspace so close to a planet. En route to Eridanus Secundus, Ascendant Justice was forced to engage multiple Covenant warships, including several cruisers and s, in an alternate Slipspace dimension caused by the Forerunner artifact. Furthermore, some surviving Sangheili crew members had sabotaged the Ascendant Justice's main power conduit, forcing the SPARTANs to go on an extravehicular mission on the outer hull. This mission resulted in the deaths of the entire surviving Sangheili crew, but also killed Warrant Officer Polaski, and SPARTANs Anton-044 and Li-008.

The ship received assistance from remaining rebels in the small asteroid colony of Eridanus Secundus, who provided personnel and repairs for the ship's weaponry, before being discovered by the Covenant. Though the Ascendant Justice engaged the initial Covenant forces in ship-to-ship combat, reinforcements arrived en masse, forcing it to abandon the colony to the Covenant.

After fleeing from Eridanus Secundus, the crew of the Ascendant Justice discovered the Unyielding Hierophant, a Covenant refit-and-repair station, which was being used to service a Covenant invasion force that was poised to invade Earth. Vice Admiral Whitcomb then initiated Operation: FIRST STRIKE, in which the UNSC-commandeered Ascendant Justice the remaining SPARTANs near the Unyielding Hierophant in a heavily modified Spirit dropship, and started a self-destruct sequence in one of the station's reactor rooms. The SPARTANs managed to escape from the station and travel to the far side of a nearby moon where the Gettysburg was waiting for them.

Vice Admiral Whitcomb and Lieutenant Haverson had detached the Ascendant Justice from the Gettysburg and taken it in a slingshot orbit around the moon. Vice Admiral Whitcomb pretended to have the Forerunner crystal by using a hologram and challenged the Covenant to come and claim it. The Covenant did not want to fire on the Ascendant Justice because the crystal was supposedly on it. The two used the momentum from their slingshot orbit to crash into the station even after the Covenant had cut the ship's engines off with laser fire. Whitcomb then ordered John-117 to see what was left of the Covenant and then "...hightail the intel back to Earth." The last few seconds of visual and audio record from the Ascendant Justice showed the door crashing to the ground and the Admiral opening fire with an SMG. The reactors on the Unyielding Hierophant then overloaded and exploded, destroying the Ascendant Justice and over four hundred enemy vessels. Only a few Covenant ships survived the catastrophe, which delayed the Prophet of Truth's plan to invade Earth. Both Vice Admiral Whitcomb and Lieutenant Haverson were killed. The Ascendant Justice's Slipspace drive allowed the Gettysburg to reach Earth and warn the UNSC leadership of the Covenant's plans to invade Earth.

Only four members of the Ascendant Justice's original Covenant crew survived its capture. A Special Operations Sangheili who engaged the Master Chief in hand-to-hand combat was shot and pushed into an escape pod, and a few Huragok that were taken to Earth on the Gettysburg were turned over to the Office of Naval Intelligence.

Trivia

 * While aboard, Cortana successfully completed the first recorded in-atmosphere slipspace jump, a feat previously believed to be impossible due to the complexity of factoring in a planet's gravitational field. This information was later leaked to the Covenant fleet around Reach by the ship's AI. In-atmosphere slipspace jumps were subsequently performed by Covenant forces during the Battle of Earth.
 * During the Didact's attack on Earth in 2558, Cortana used the AI replication matrix from Ascendant Justice to split off the rampant elements of her personality construct array; this enabled her to operate in a quasi-normal state for a brief period. Much as she had done on Unyielding Hierophant years prior, she used these clones to infiltrate the Didact's ship, allowing the Master Chief to destroy it.

List of appearances

 * Halo: First Strike
 * Halo: The Flood (2010)
 * Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary