Halo: First Strike

Halo: First Strike is a 2003 novel written by Eric Nylund. It is based on the video game Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) and takes place between the end of the first game and its sequel Halo 2.

Halo: First Strike begins as The Covenant war machine reaches the Human stronghold, Reach. The book follows the unsuccessful Spartans on the planet's surface, the rag-tag survivors of the Halo bloodshed and confirms the culmination of all their fears: The alien threat is headed for Earth.

Summary

The last line of defense for the human fleet, the Super MAC guns (Magnetic Accelerator Cannon) are powered by planetside fusion reactors. Faced with the knowledge that these massive weapons are the only thing stemming the tide of alien warships, a team of Spartans is sent down to protect the generators...at all costs. However it is ultimately a futile gesture. Covenant ships drown the planet in a flourish of flames and plasma and the remaining battered Spartans are forced to flee underground where they bide their time and await for a retrieval force. A Spartan retrieval force.

Picking up from where the game left off, the Master Chief and Cortana are stranded in space. Laden with valuable intel and a handful of survivors rescued from the destruction of the Halo construct, they plan to return to Earth and do so by infiltrating The Covenant flagship, Ascendant Justice.

Once they secure the ship, the crew resolve to return to Earth with accounts of what happened on Halo and for the first time, a Covenant warship. The technological benefits for the human race would be enormous and might win them the war. Their first jump is back to Reach in line with the Cole Protocol. Because the protocol dictates that a human ship should never make a slip-space jump heading to Earth or any human populated worlds, the crew designates Reach as a 'hopping' point.

The Master Chief agrees, but with deeper intentions. As their commanding officer, John 117 (Master Chief) is anguished by the orders he gave the Spartans that he felt was tantamount to a death sentence. Master Chief seeks closure or even better, survivors.

There they pick up surviving UNSC forces, including a few Spartans, Doctor Catherine Halsey and Vice Admiral Danforth Whitcomb, who has armed the anti-planet "nova" nuclear mine. In addition to survivors, they also find that the Covenant have discovered the location of Earth and are about to deploy the entire Covenant fleet. It is revealed by Dr. Halsey that Sergeant Avery Johnson survived the Flood encounter because he was diagnosed with Boren's Syndrome, which he contracted on the planet of Paris IV. The Sergeant used an entire crate of plasma grenades to fight the covenant just long enough for evac - he gained a high dose of radiation resulting in nerve damage that prevented the Flood from overpowering his nervous system. The UNSC forces rendezvous with the rebels of the Eridanus asteroid field. Dr. Halsey sedates Kelly-087, taking her on her mission that the others do not understand. It presumably relates to the DNA anomaly Kelly had that was mentioned by the A.I., Kalmiya. Determined to buy time for Earth to prepare for the inevitable onslaught, the Master Chief and his Spartans decide to go to the fleet's rendezvous point and disrupt its initial operations in a decisive first strike. John and the rest of his Spartans infiltrate and destroy the Covenant space command and control center, the Unyielding Hierophant. They completed their mission, but it cost Grace's life. The surviving Spartans head back to Earth to warn them of the Covenant's upcoming invasion.

It ends with a scene in High Charity, showing the High Prophet of Truth and the Brute Chieftain, Tartarus, discussing the loss of Installation 04 and the fate of the "incompetent one" (ie. the Supreme Commander of the Fleet of Particular Justice, who is given the role of the Arbiter in Halo 2), who lost Ascendant Justice.