Halo: The Saga

          One of the reasons Halo is so highly regarded is that behind all the action-packed game-play lies a carefully crafted, incredibly rich story. Three novels have been written to give greater background to the characters and events in the game, all of which I recommend reading even if you're not a fan of the game as the books tell a compelling sci-fi story. To get you up to speed on what has happened so far, pull up a seat as I tell you the tale of Halo. Major spoilers abound, so if you want to read the books for yourself, I would recommend not continuing.

          It is the 26th century and humans have colonized other systems throughout the galaxy because of overpopulation on Earth. However, political instability and rebel factions threaten to plunge mankind into a civil war. Dr. Catherine Halsey develops a secretive experimental program called SPARTAN-II to create super soldiers destined to become the strike force of the UNSC (United Nations Space Command, Earth's unified government) army. She travels around space monitoring promising six-year-old children who have ideal genetic composition as potential test subjects. After kidnapping 75 children and leaving behind flash clones in their place, she and the kids return to a secret facility on Reach, one of mankind's largest military bases, and rigorous military training begins. One of the kids, named John, stands out with superior leadership. He will become the one we know as Master Chief.

           The Master Chief first illustrates his superior leadership through a mission where he and all the other Spartans are dropped in the wilderness, with scrapes of a map. The Spartans were 8 years old at this time. John (Master Chief) led the young Spartans in attacking personnel that were guarding a Pelican. The other Spartans accepted him as their leader.

            When the kids reach 14 years old, they begin a series of highly experimental bioengineering augmentations that make them physically faster, more powerful, alert, and intelligent. However, less than half of the original group survived the surgeries. The survivors become elite soldiers for the UNSC, and the Master Chief chooses a few other Spartans to go on their first real mission with him. These Spartans were friends of his from the beginning and some of them are still with him at the beginning of HALO 2.

              One day out of nowhere, a mysterious force attacks the human planet Harvest and completely destroys the planet with a plasma orbital bombardment. Their technology is far superior to anything the humans have, and the new enemy declares a holy war on humanity, declaring that human annihilation "is the will of the Gods". This new threat forces the SPARTAN program to accelerate to its final phase: project MJOLNIR.

           MJOLNIR is an advanced armor that can disperse energy weapon attacks, comes equipped with a computer to interface with neural implants, and amplifies strength and speed. However, normal humans don't have the reaction time or the strength to operate such armor, which is why Spartans have been created. The technologically augmented Spartans inside MJOLNIR suits create a lethal combination that stands to be the only hope against a superior enemy.

           Nearly twenty years have passed, and an all-out war has erupted between humans and the confederation of alien races known as the Covenant, who are united in their fanatical religious devotion. Though the Spartans win every ground operation they are assigned, there are too few of them to turn the tide of the war and the humans are hopelessly outmatched in space combat. As the Covenant juggernaut steamrolls through space and destroys human settlements, human beings are pushed back on the defensive and are on the verge of becoming extinct. The Outer Colonies are gone, and billions have been murdered. With the number of remaining human worlds dwindling, keeping the Covenant from discovering the location of Earth becomes a top priority.

         However, humans are desperately putting up a fight wherever they can. Commander Keyes, in command of the ship Iroquois, seemingly pulls off a miraculous victory near the planet Sigma Octanus IV against 4 Covenant starships, which retreat after a brief skirmish. He is promoted to Captain afterwards, but he discovers to his dismay that the Covenant had launched 34 drop ships to the surface of the planet that are converging on the major city of Cote d'Azur. Master Chief and a team of Spartans are deployed to the planet to eliminate the invaders and reclaim the planet.

          Upon reaching the city of Cote d'Azur, the squad encounters a brand new Covenant race they have never seen before, floating creatures that roam throughout the city and disassemble and reassemble human machinery. They speculate that these creatures are scientists or engineers. Something else seems odd; normally the Covenant destroys without abandon, but a museum is being mysteriously protected. Inside the building, Master Chief discovers that two Covenant Hunters are analyzing a rock with jewel-like inclusions and transmitting messages to space. He and his team manage to kill the two monstrous beasts, steal the rock, and set off a nuke that wipes the Covenant presence off the planet at the cost of a major city.

         Meanwhile, a ferocious space battle is taking place around the planet of Sigma Octanus IV. Suddenly the Covenant fleet scatters and retreats, again a very uncharacteristic move on their part. Apparently they have gotten what they sought on the planet. But as the fleet takes off, an automated tracking probe attaches itself to the hull of the Iroquois...

           Master Chief returns to the safety of Reach to give a de-briefing to the top brass of the UNSC and is reunited with Dr. Halsey. They can only conclude several facts from the entire operation: the Covenant went to considerable lengths to obtain one piece of mineral rock, the pattern of inclusions in the rock matches the transmissions that the Covenant were beaming, the pattern isn't random, and it doesn't match any known Covenant dialect. They speculate that it might be a remnant of another alien race.

             With the possibility of yet another alien threat, Dr. Halsey is given the go-ahead to finish the ultimate stage of project SPARTAN. She brings out her smart AI Cortana, who was created from a clone of Dr. Halsey's brain, in preparation for perhaps the most important mission for the Spartans yet. Military intelligence hypothesizes that there is a leadership caste in the Covenant hierarchy called the Prophets who are nearly worshipped as gods. The Spartans' mission is to ride with Captain Keyes on his new ship The Pillar of Autumn and disable a Covenant ship. Then they will board the ship and take it over, find the location of the Covenant home world and capture a Prophet to negotiate for a truce.

            To help the Spartans with the mission, Dr. Halsey unveils the final stage of the SPARTAN program: the real MJOLNIR armor. The ones the Spartans had been using were merely a fraction of what the armor should be. The new armor comes equipped with regenerating Covenant shield technology as well as the capability to house a smart AI that can provide tactical strategy and intel on the fly. Cortana picks Master Chief as the Spartan she wants to ride with.
 
             But just as they are getting ready to embark on their important mission, The Pillar of Autumn receives an urgent transmission: Reach is under attack from over 300 Covenant ships! The Covenant has discovered the location of Reach from the tracking probe. Reach's massive orbital defense cannons obliterate a third of the fleet with the opening salvo, but it's too late; hundreds of Covenant drop ships are already planet side. The Spartan mission is aborted, and Master Chief sends most of the Spartans down to the surface to fight the invaders while he and a small team try to destroy the navigation data on a captured human ship so that the Covenant can't discover the location of Earth. Master Chief succeeds in his mission, but he loses everybody on his team during the escape. The battle for Reach is quickly over, and the swarm of Covenant forces completely overwhelms the military base. The Covenant are now virtually on the doorstep of Earth. Master Chief is forced to escape the battle and leave behind all the other Spartans on the ground. He now believes himself to be the last surviving Spartan.

            Cortana discovers that the markings on the rock discovered on Sigma Octanus IV seem to be highly stylized navigation symbols, so she sets course toward the coordinates and puts most of the crew aboard The Pillar of Autumn, including Master Chief, to sleep using cryofreeze to rest for the long journey.

        Upon reaching the destination, they discover a gigantic ring-shaped structure ahead of them floating in space, roughly ten thousand kilometers in diameter. The object is clearly artificial, yet it possesses atmosphere and Earth-normal gravity. Covenant ships are already lying in wait for The Pillar of Autumn, and the humans are quickly attacked. Master Chief is thawed and ordered to protect Cortana at all costs. The ship has no chance of surviving against the Covenant, so Captain Keyes decides to crash land onto the ring. The crew aboard escape from the doomed ship via lifeboat pods to land on the ring as well.

       Upon landing, the humans discover Covenant drop ships landing all over the surface. Apparently, the Covenant is very interested in this structure. Cortana hacks into Covenant transmissions and learns that the enemy has secured The Pillar of Autumn and captured Captain Keyes to bring him aboard the Covenant cruiser The Truth and Reconciliation. Master Chief heads out to rescue Keyes. They enter the cruiser via a gravity lift and manage to find Keyes in a holding cell. Keyes reports that his captors were talking about the ring-shaped world and called it Halo. Cortana intercepts some messages that claim Halo is a weapon of unimaginable power and discover that the Covenant are searching for the control room to it.

         Keyes gives Master Chief a new mission: beat the Covenant to the control room so that the Covenant can't use Halo against humans while Keyes goes off in search of a weapons cache. Cortana finds out that the Covenant believes a map room called the Silent Cartographer will lead to the location of the control room, so they find the map and then proceed to the control room. Once inside, Cortana is shocked to learn that the Covenant have discovered something horrible in the ring and orders Master Chief to stop Keyes from opening the weapons cache before it's too late.

         Master Chief is airlifted to the last known location of Keyes, a swampy area in the middle of a jungle. He runs into a panicked Marine who screams gibberish about hiding from monsters. Master Chief proceeds to a nearby building and finds a recorded videotape from a dead soldier's helmet. By playing the video back, he learns that Keyes and company opened a door that the Covenant had sealed and unleashed a horde of bulbous, parasitic life forms that promptly killed them. Soon after that, a swarm of the creatures overwhelms Master Chief and he fights back, but there are too many.

            Master Chief runs into 343 Guilty Spark, a floating artificial construct who controls groups of cylindrical machines called Sentinels that help eliminate the parasites. Guilty Spark calls himself the caretaker of Halo and says that someone has released the Flood. Promising to help Master Chief destroy the life forms, Guilty Spark teleports Master Chief inside a dark building and guides him toward something called an Index.

        Guilty Spark leads Master Chief back to the control room and hands him the Index to insert in a slot, apparently to activate Halo's defenses and destroy the Flood. However, Cortana is still in the control room and indignantly informs Master Chief of the truth. Halo does kill the Flood, but only because it destroys the Flood's food, i.e. all sentient life forms. The only way to stop the Flood is to starve it to death, and Halo was designed to wipe the entire galaxy of all life. What's more, this particular Halo is designated Installation 04, with an unknown number of similar structures floating elsewhere in space that were built by the Forerunners, an advanced civilization that existed hundreds of thousands of years ago.

          Halo was created eons ago by the Forerunners to study and contain this parasitic species. Because of the extreme danger the Flood posed from their ability to multiply exponentially and take over the neural systems of intelligent species, they created a prison to contain the Flood and so they lay dormant for a hundred thousand years. But when their prison was opened by the Covenant and humans, they escaped and feasted on the bodies of their rescuers to quickly multiply.

           Cortana seizes the Index and refuses to return it to Guilty Spark, who promptly orders the Sentinels to attack Master Chief. He and Cortana manage to escape, and she suggests that detonating The Pillar of Autumn's fusion reactors will trigger a massive explosion that will destabilize the ring and destroy Halo. Cortana finds the ship's crash site, but she needs the neural implants in Captain Keyes to activate the fusion core detonation. She teleports Master Chief to him, a handy trick that she picked up from Guilty Spark, but they're too late, as Captain Keyes's life-force has already been absorbed by the Flood. Luckily Cortana is still able to learn the detonation code from his neural implants.

        They return to the ship and start the detonation sequence, but Guilty Spark teleports in to shut it down. Master Chief is forced to manually destroy parts of the engine to destabilize the reactor and cause an explosion. With only minutes left before the ship explodes, Master Chief makes a mad dash into a fighter plane parked in one of the docking bays and escapes just in time as The Pillar of Autumn detonates and Halo is destroyed.

       Back out in space, Master Chief discovers a handful of human survivors in another ship as well as a small group of Covenant ships. They land inside the landing bay of a Covenant ship and capture it so that they can take advantage of its Slipspace abilities (similar to warp speed in Star Trek or hyperspace in Star Wars) and return home. Cortana assists them in their mission by entering the Covenant network and keeping track of the enemy locations. However, she notices that she had copied so much information about the history of Halo from the Halo network that she's a bit sluggish.

        Once they have control of the ship this ship would be a Covenant flag ship that housed a Prophet, they gain control, but there are still Covenant soldiers on board.

       Cortana is amazed at the superior Slipspace technology the Covenant possess that allows them to maneuver through space with pinpoint accuracy. The rest of the crew wants to return to Earth and share the discovery, but Master Chief wants to return to Reach and salvage serviceable UNSC craft. Secretly however, he hopes to find a few of his Spartan teammates on the ground still alive.

         What Master Chief doesn't know is that five of his Spartans are still alive. Normally, when the Covenant destroy a world from space, they bombard every square centimeter of the surface. However, this time the destruction wasn't total, and the Covenant neglected to bomb the area around a human facility located deep within a mountain. Instead, they send an army of forces to converge on the mountain. The team of Spartans manages to make their way into the facility and is reunited with Dr. Halsey.

        Inside the abandoned facility, Dr. Halsey works on healing the Spartans' wounds, and replacing defects in their armor, with the new MJOLNIR V armor, which is still in its testing stages. The MJOLNIR V armor gives a variety of upgrades, including: double shielding, faster refelxes, and just upgraded all around. The Spartans also discover new weapons, such as the Battle Rifle, which fires 3 shot bursts, and 6 shot bursts when using the scope. The find a high caliber pistol, that doesn’t come with a scope, and submachine guns, which they can dual wield.

         She hacks into the network to discover that the markings on the rock stolen from Cote d'Azur also pinpoint their current location. As the Covenant begin digging into the mountain to unearth the facility, Dr. Halsey and the Spartans retreat into old mine tunnels deeper into the mountain, searching for a way out as well as anything that might give a clue about why the Covenants are so interested in this place. They stumble into an ancient, circular room, stretching more than 3 kilometers in diameter. In the center is a crystal floating above a pedestal, which the humans take just as the ceiling opens up and Covenant forces storm in.

        Back in space, as the stolen Covenant ship comes out of Slipspace and approaches Reach, the crew can see that a small square of land had been saved from bombardment. Hearing a signal known only to the Spartans being transmitted repeatedly, Master Chief is convinced that some Spartans are still alive and is determined to drop down to the surface. He and a handful of Marines take a drop ship down to the source of the signal and are reunited with a handful of Spartans hiding from the Covenant. They set out on a mission to reach the base of the nearby mountain and are reunited with the other Spartan team. What Master Chief sees is nearly jaw-dropping. The entire three kilometer wide cavern is packed full of snarling Covenant forces, holding their fire because Dr. Halsey is holding the crystal in her hand.

          Aboard the stolen Covenant ship, Cortana isn't pleased with how her thinking has slowed down and she decides to use a Covenant AI replication program she found to duplicate herself and free up some memory. But after the process, she realizes that she can now perfectly understand the Covenant language and discovers with horror that the Covenant have discovered the location of Earth and are preparing to launch a massive operation.

            As the Spartans and the other humans attempt to flee from Reach and the massive Covenant army in a drop ship, Covenant space ships surround them. Cortana takes over a nearby UNSC ship and rescues them from certain defeat. As they attempt to jump into Slipspace, the mysterious crystal twists shape and space becomes distorted. They manage to escape the Covenant, and Dr. Halsey concludes that the crystal can not only bend space, but time as well. Cortana discovers that the Covenant will rendezvous at a command station called Unyielding Hierophant before attacking Earth. The Spartans decide to launch a first strike at the Covenant there and delay the invasion of Earth.

             Meanwhile, Dr. Halsey effectively destroys the crystal so that the Covenant can't ever get their hands on it (this is a massive abbreviation). Throughout her entire life, she has always felt guilty for her role in the illegal kidnappings to start the SPARTAN program and the lives she essentially forced the kids to adopt. She finally repents and takes Kelly, one of the injured Spartans, to fly off secretly on a mission of her own without telling anyone.

              Before the Spartans leave on their mission to attack the Unyielding Hierophant, Cortana uploads a copy of herself to Master Chief. When the Spartans land at the Covenant command station, they are astonished at the hundreds of ships docked at the station. Master Chief links Cortana to the station network so that she can help shut down security and tell them where to go, but as the mission wears on, she becomes overwhelmed by the Covenant AI and is forced to replicate hundreds of times just to continue communication with Master Chief. All the Cortana copies are fragmented and eventually unravel.

           Luckily Master Chief and his team are able to set explosives on the central reactor and make their escape, but one of the Spartans died during the process, also in the station the book introduces a new Covenant species which will be used in HALO 2, the Brute. The Brute is a massive alien, stronger than a Hunter, one of them nearly strangles the Master Chief.

              Some officers take one of their drop-ships as they wait for the Spartan’s return and lure all of the Covenant Armada to the Station. This Station was the regrouping point for the Covenant, in order to launch their invasion upon earth. They lure the Covenant by broadcasting a hologram of the destroyed crystal which the Covenant sought after. The Covenant didn’t know it was destroyed. As all the cruisers gather up nest to the station, in order to pin down the USNC drop-ship. The station explodes, virtually destroying the armada. The Covenant have suffered a big defeat, but Master Chief and company have only delayed the inevitable Covenant invasion of Earth... 

           

            As you can see, the books lead right up to Halo 2, where we know that the Covenant will invade Earth. However, Bungie is keeping mysteriously mum about what will happen in Halo 2. There are many loose ends in the Halo story so far that may potentially be tied up in the game. Where has Dr. Halsey gone, and why has she taken one of the injured Spartans? Has Cortana's system become corrupted after coming into contact with Covenant AI, and will she become a liability to the humans? Will Master Chief be fighting side by side with the surviving Spartans on Earth? Will the other Halo installations come into the picture and will Master Chief have to return to them to save humanity? All these answers will hopefully be answered in the next chapter of the Halo saga.

- submitted by pc_gamer_analyst