- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
In the book Halo: The Fall of Reach Dr. Halsey says, "Assembled here tonight are all the surviving Spartans save three, who are otherwise engaged on fields of combat too distant to be easily recalled." This means that there are three more Spartans. So maybe Master Chief is not the only one left.
in the E3 Realtime Demo, Sergeant Banks said, "When I asked for reinforcements, I didn't think they'd send a SPARTAN." I am going to take this as a clear statement that either the SPARTANS weren't all killed off on the ground assault at Reach, or that the second set of SPARTANS trained by Senior Chief Petty Officer Mendez (was he a CPO or SCPO?) made it!
In addition to the others in the "Fall of Reach", the Spartan James floated off into space with still about 80 minutes of air left... this may give way to him being able to come back.
After reading the Halo:First Strike, I found the file "S-III" that Dr. Halsey accessed in Colonel Ackerson's file quite interesting. I think it obviously stands for "Spartan-III" project, but more interesting is "CPOMZ." The "CPO" is an abbreviation used in the Navy for Chief Petty Officer, and it sure seems like "CPOMZ" is abbreviated for Chief Petty Officer Mendez. So he did go to train new spartans, and it would explain why Master Chief never saw Chief Mendez again on Reach; because the "512-character alphanumeric string" that follows "CPOMZ" is a "reference to a star chart" that is "not a destination to any location in UNSC-controlled space." (p130).
And I bet that is where Dr. Halsey headed off to with Kelly.
I had read Fall of Reach, and First Strike, and a part of the Chief's armor caught my attention. According to the books, there's a kind of reactive gel sandwiched between the inner and outer layers of the suit. This gel is supposed to be both pressure and temperature sensitive, and able to adjust its properties on the fly. I had recently read a news article about a substance that does just this. It's called magnetorheological fluid. Essentially it's metal particles suspended in an oil or other liquid. When an electrical current is applied the viscosity of the fluid changes almost instantaneously. And it isn't science-fiction or even science-theory. It's in use, and you can find the stuff inside the shock absorbers on the 50th Anniversary Chevrolet Corvette. There it's used to provide a comfortable ride without losing any cornering capability. The military wants to use it to make a bulletproof body armor that's both flexible and impervious.
Reference: http://halosm.bungie.org/story/spartan.html
[Edited on 5/5/2004 3:51:19 PM]