"That's quite a feat for such a small boy."
"I'm young not small."
I was reading a lot of theories based upon time travel, this may give some validity to them.
The last portion of the book Ghosts of Onyx left us with a group of spartans and or spartan 2's "trapped" inside a dyson sphere containing a planet that arced upward in all directions. Could that possibly be this? [see halo reach picture]