- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Halo: Reach if you have read the book is not about ODSTs, the protagonist is Master Chief
"By 2552, many of Humanity's Inner Colonies have been destroyed by the Covenant and Reach was next. In a move of desperation, the Office of Naval Intelligence Section-3 SPARTAN division orders the execution of a secret plan to capture a Covenant ship using their SPARTAN forces and find their home world in order to capture a Prophet, one of their religious leaders, and then use the Prophet as a bargaining chip to negotiate a truce.
To aid the Spartans in this mission, an AI, Cortana, is created based on a younger Doctor Halsey. John is introduced to Cortana during a live-fire mission to test their capabilities working together, and they perform spectacularly. With Cortana's aid, John manages to overpower a full squad of ODSTs using live-fire rounds, pick his way through a minefield, destroy automated chainguns attacking him, and even evade an airstrike.
Every Spartan-II except for Gray Team, because they are too far away to be easily recalled, boards a specially outfitted Halcyon class cruiser known as the Pillar of Autumn (under the command of Captain Jacob Keyes). The Pillar of Autumn moves out towards the edges of the system to make a Slipspace jump to begin the mission.
This plan, however, is interrupted when a massive Covenant fleet of over 300 ships enters the Reach System. Captain Keyes orders the Pillar of Autumn back towards Reach, but the Master Chief convinces him to allow the Spartans to continue their mission by finding a damaged Covenant ship to capture and take to Covenant space. Reach's fleet, about a hundred ships and twenty Orbital Defense Platform on hand, engages the Covenant fleet, but takes massive losses. However, the Super MAC platforms manage to repulse the initial Covenant assault.
The Covenant return and land troops on Reach with the objective of destroying the generators for the Super MAC Cannons, the only things which are stopping the Covenant. At the same time, the UNSC realizes that the Circumference, a Prowler, is still docked at a station orbiting the planet of Reach just before its fall and has not initiated the Cole Protocol. John takes Linda and James to deal with the Circumference, while the rest of the Spartans were sent down to the planet to defend the Orbital MAC generators.
The Battle of Reach.John's team crashlands their Pelican on the station which the Circumference is docked on, and they move towards the NAV data. However, James's thruster pack for maneuvering in vacuum is hit by a Needler shard and explodes, sending James flying uncontrollably into space. John and Linda proceed to the Circumference, where they find Sergeant Johnson and his Marines, including Jenkins and Bisenti, also fighting to wipe the data. With John's help, the Marines are successful, but tragically Linda is shot by five seperate plasma blasts. The humans fall back to the Autumn, but Linda dies of her extensive wounds and is placed in a cryotube. The humans are also unable to locate James.
The surface of Reach is also overrun. The Spartans which John sent to the surface are presumably overrun and all slaughtered. Without the generators, the Super MAC Cannons fall silent and are destroyed by the Covenant, who soon proceed to begin glassing the planet. The remaining UNSC ships are all destroyed, except for the Pillar of Autumn, when Cortana plots an exit vector in compliance with the Cole Protocol, though not completely at random. She had decrypted Forerunner glyphs found by the Master Chief on Sigma Octanus IV. The NAV coordinates led the Pillar of Autumn to what the Covenant had been searching for: Halo, an extremely sacred Forerunner artifact. The book ends with Captain Keyes looking through view screens at the ring talking to Cortana about it. After the jump they orbited a giant planet beside installation 04 before the Covenants external and internal battle, The Pillar Of Autumn."