Chapter 32: Distant Thunder

ACCESSING IMPERIAL RECORDS: OPENING DATA FILE: DOWNLOADING CONTENTS. ADDING RANDOM ADVERTISEMENTS. DATA CORRUPTION DETECTED. RECOMPILING… COMPLETE!

Good morning, Reclaimers! This installation is nearly complete! By my calculations, it will be ready to activate in approximately one month.

On a side note, anyone who's familiar with zipscool's A Razor's Edge, I may, I repeat, MAY, adopt the story. It was disbanded several months ago, and I have taken a real interest in it. Check it out, and tell me if you think I should. (I will not be putting any other books on hold for it. I will probably start in on that sometime in sometime next year, depending on how long my Halo-Mass Effect Crossover's first part takes.

Wish me luck as I try to tackle Halo 4 on Legendary. Holy shit, that's hard.

Again, big thanks to Winter's Sentinel for Beta… ing.

UNSC Forward Unto Dawn, Cryo Bay.

It's been 4 years since Halo was destroyed, and the Flood was erased from the galaxy. I've been sitting here for 4 years with nothing to do, except catalogue the Spartan's individual histories.

John is the only noteworthy one, though. He was taken at age 6 from Elysium City, Eridanus II, in the Eridanus system, in 2517. He was taken to Reach, where he was formally conscripted into the SPARTAN-II program. It was here that he met Samuel-034, and Kelly-084, who came to be his two best friends. During a survival exercise in the mountains of Reach, John-117 proved himself to be a capable leader, and became a squad leader for the trainees. In 2522, the Spartan candidates, all 75 of them, were augmented. Half of them died. John has always been the luckiest of the Spartans, and in my opinion, he is the best.

In 2525, just before the Harvest Invasion, John led a team into the heart of the Insurrectionist's base, and captured Rebel Colonel Robert Watts, the leader of the rebels. It was here that SPARTAN-117 received his first medal, a Purple Heart.

SPARTAN-117 was present for the Battle of Sigma Octanus Four in early 2552, as was James-005. It was here that the UNSC made first contact with the Covenant Huragok, Engineers, and Mgalekgolo, or Hunters. It was here that SPARTAN-117 also discovered, unknowingly, the coordinates for Installation 04, Halo. He and his team detonated a HAVOC Tactical Nuclear Device inside the capital city, Cote d'Azur. But the Covenant still glassed the planet.

John was then recalled to Reach, along with the rest of the Spartans, for a top-secret mission, the express purpose for which I was created.

The mission was to disable and board a Covenant ship, take it over, and find the Covenant homeworld, which we still didn't know was a gigantic space city. Then, the Spartans were to capture a Prophet, and return to UNSC space, in the hopes that the Covenant would be willing to negotiate peace for their Prophet.

Before they could get underway, however, the planet came under attack. There was an unsecured Navigation database, in complete violation of the Cole Protocol, if I may add, and John was sent with James and Linda-058, to secure it and its data, as it may have pointed to Earth, while the rest of the Spartans went planetside to defend the orbital defense generators. James was lost to space, but apparently was saved by the real NOBLE Six as the latter was falling from a CSO-class Supercarrier after NOBLE 5 detonated a Slipspace generator on it, and Linda was critically wounded while covering John as he secured the NAV data. So in essence, John became the last Spartan-II that I knew of. Linda was placed in cryosleep on the Pillar of Autumn, and later resuscitated and pressed back into service.

Then came Halo, Installation 04. The Chief was in cryo sleep, and had to fight his way to the bridge after waking up in the middle of an invasion of the ship. He came to the bridge unharmed, and Captain Keyes gave him me to protect. In truth, though, we were supposed to protect each other. John has always been Dr. Halsey's favorite, and since I am essentially her brainchild, I feel the same way. So we escaped the Autumn on a lifeboat that crashed on the ring. Sadly, no survivors but us. We searched for a few minutes, until we found another lifeboat beacon and a team of marines, Sgt. Johnson among them. John helped them stay alive against Covenant raiding parties, and then got them onto a Pelican bound for Alpha Base, where the survivors were congregating. The Chief took a Warthog to find more survivors. After finding all three groups, we went to Alpha Base.

I had already accessed the Covenant Battlenet and found that the entire surviving command crew of the Autumn had been taken prisoner by the Covenant. They were being held on the Truth and Reconciliation, which I had disabled in orbit around the ring. The surviving marines organized a raid on the ship, with the sole intention of rescuing the Captain and the command crew. There was heavy resistance along the way to the ship, and also inside the ship, but we managed to rescue the crew.

The Captain had overheard the guards talking about the ring, calling it 'Halo' and saying that it was some kind of superweapon. It was also here that John was informed of the survival of some of the members of Team Noble. He had mixed feelings about that. The Chief and I were given a new mission to find Halo's control center before the Covenant could.

After we escaped from the ship, the Chief and I went to find the 'Silent Cartographer' a map of the ring. We assaulted the beach where the Cartographer was located, along with a contingent of marines. The Covenant blocked access to the Cartographer before we could get in, so we had to disable the security systems in place. Once that was accomplished, we returned and found the location of the control center. It was in a polar region of the ring, so we had to grab a Pelican ride there. Only, the coordinates pointed underground.

We fought our way to the Control Room, where John put me in the ring's systems. I learned about the Flood here, and that the Captain's mission to find a Covenant weapons cache was going to release them. I made John leave without me, furious that I had not seen it sooner.

John went to the site alone, and found that the entire contingent of marines sent had been consumed by the Flood, save for Sgt. Johnson, who was unable to be assimilated due to his augmentations during Project ORION. He escaped, and found a squad of marines that was ordered to stay back and defend the entrance. They all made their way to a tower, where John first met 343 Guilty Spark, the Monitor of the ring.

He took John to a place called the Library, where the ring's Activation Index was hidden. Once they had found it, they came back to the Control Room. When the Monitor tried to activate the ring, I stopped him by claiming the Index. I also had to explain to John the true purpose of the ring: to kill the food source of the Flood. Spark turned on us then, and we had to eventually detonate the Autumn's fusion drive core to destroy the ring.

We drifted in space for a few days, eventually encountering a Pelican dropship and a Covenant Fleet. We found an ODST, Corporal Locklear, Johnson, a pilot, and an ONI operative onboard. We captured the Covenant's flagship, Ascendant Justice, and fled the system.

We then went to Reach, although on a randomized course as per the Cole Protocol, there was an ulterior motive here: John wanted to find his Spartans. He did, all six of them that lived, and he also found Dr. Halsey. In orbit, I found the intact wreck of the UNSC Gettysburg, and linked the Ascendant Justice to it, draining the power from the Gettysburg's reactor to power the Ascendant Justice's weapons. When John and his team returned, we left on another random Slipspace course, but Dr. Halsey had brought a crystal that bent Slipspace into something else.

During the battle above Reach, I had found that the Covenant had found the location of Earth, and was preparing a massive fleet to destroy it. We found the fleet, around a massive space station, Unyielding Hierophant, and destroyed the station, along with a good number of ships as well. We then returned to Earth in a Pelican dropship and warned the UNSC about this threat.

Wait… the alarms! What… Oh, no.

I need them. Now to wake them up.