Catherine Halsey: Difference between revisions

The next day, after spending some time with the starholo, Halsey attended a funeral service on the ''Vanishing Point'' to honor the men and women of the UNSC Navy who lost their lives at Seoba. She stood near John and the five other Spartans who were not relegated to the ship's infirmary. After the ceremony, Hector Nyeto—now the de facto commander of Task Force Yama after Ascot's death—approached John to complement him and his team on preventing the Covenant from capturing the prowler. When Halsey pointed out that they had also managed to destroy a corvette, Nyeto enthusiastically added that they had also recovered the starholo, clearly trying to get on her good side. He then made a comment on how she might deduce something useful from the alien machine, to which she responded with a calculated smile. Because of Nyeto's seeming appreciation for the Spartan-IIs, John asked him if he would reconsider their sidelining. The lieutenant commander promised that they would see all the action they could handle, prompting Colonel Crowther to deny this one more due to their young age and the fact that the Spartans reported to him. This resulted in a shouting match between the two officers that ended in Nyeto relenting after being threatened with a report to a board of inquiry. After this shocking exchange, Halsey grabbed John by the arm and directed the Spartans out of the hangar toward the Black Daggers' quarters.{{Ref/Reuse|HSS16}}

===Etalan===

At 0626 hours on [[2526#March|March 31]] Halsey was in the middle of studying the captured starholo.<ref name="HSS20">''[[Halo: Silent Storm]]'', ''Chapter 20''</ref> The ''Vanishing Point'' had relocated to the deep space Rendezvous Point Sierra-Yama within the [[Polona sector]]. With a little luck and lots of hard work, the doctor was hoping she could trace the Covenant's slipspace routes back to the [[Fleet of Inexorable Obedience|invasion fleet]]'s primary [[Zhoist|supply depot]]. By this point she had already identified more than twenty transit nodes which opened near what she believed were [[Etalan]], [[Harvest]], and [[Netherop]], and four of these were near other nodes which led out of human-controlled space. Five days had passed before a new supply convoy had arrived at Etalan following the previous one's destruction, so Halsey surmised its point of origin had to be somewhere between one-half and three-quarters of that distance at the aliens' slipspace travel rates. She asked [[Déjà]] how certain the A.I. was about the size of the logistics base that the Covenant fleet must require, but she only reconfirmed what had already been calculated previously. Catherine was flummoxed, since there simply weren't any habitable worlds within four days of the likely transit nodes. Déjà deigned to point out there was one within ''five'' days of [[Transit Node Bhadra]], however. Implicit in this observation was the idea that the Covenant must have instantaneous interstellar communications.{{Ref/Reuse|HSS20}}  

Through researching Nyeto's records Catherine learned he had spent a lot of time with the infamous [[Robert Watts]] early in his career.<ref name="HSS21">''[[Halo: Silent Storm]]'', ''Chapter 21''</ref> She and Crowther told John that though they would leave him alone as the task force's commander for the time being, they planned on using him to mislead the enemy. Despite the improved slipspace efficiencies afforded by Doctor Halsey's understanding of the alien starholo, it still took the task force time to arrive at Transit Node Bhadra, more than two hundred light-years past humanity's farthest known exploration. It was Halsey who had named the transit node, and she likewise chose to call the [[sector]] of Covenant space they were invading by 0458 hours on April 14 [[Muruga sector|Muruga]], both [[Religion|Hindu]] names meant to honor Captain Ascot. Their target planet and its moon she called [[Naraka]] and [[Rudara]], respectively.{{Ref/Reuse|HSS21}} By April 15 Halsey had viewed reconnaissance videos which showed Naraka was encircled by a [[Ring of Mighty Abundance|ring]] of orbital support stations connected by a transit tube enclosed within what she called a trussing armature.<ref name="HSS25">''[[Halo: Silent Storm]]'', ''Chapter 25''</ref> In her estimation, if [[Sierra Force]] could destroy at least ten facilities and their connecting armature there was a ninety-two percent chance the ring's orbit would grow unstable and fall into a rapid, irreversible decay.{{Ref/Reuse|HSS25}} If only nine were destroyed, she predicted the odds of that happening dropped to seventy-one percent, and if only seven, forty-nine percent.<ref name="HSS27">''[[Halo: Silent Storm]]'', ''Chapter 27''</ref> Ultimately, [[Operation: SILENT STORM]] scored a giant win for the UNSC when the orbital ring was successfully brought down thanks to her Spartans and Crowther's ODSTs, but the colonel lost his life and Hector Nyeto fled from the rest of the task force during the mission.{{Ref/Reuse|HSS27}}