Halo: Fall Of Reach - Covenant
"Humans... your destruction is the will of the gods... and we are their instrument!"
This is the message from the aliens who destroyed the farming colony Harvest, killing over 300 people and leaving the planet a scorched cinder. Halo: Fall of Reach part one Boot Camp ends with this chilling declaration.
The alien ships have superior weapons and energy shielding, more than a match for the UNSC warships. To stand any kind of chance against this enemy, humanity must come up with something new...
Dr Catherine Halsey of the Office of Naval Intelligence takes her Spartans to the planet Chi Ceti IV to collect some experimental new armour ('Mjolnir') that has been developed especially for her supersoldiers. A Covenant ship attacks their escort en route to the planet, and the newly enhanced warriors soon have their first field test, led by Master Chief John 117.
Covenant, part two of Halo - Fall of Reach, sees our heroes pitted against opponents much more worthy than the human insurrectionists they were originally created to battle. The Covenant are technologically advanced but driven by a religious fervour to exterminate the human race. Can the Spartans - forged as the most efficient killers humanity can produce - even the odds?
They are certainly going to give it their best shot, of that you can be sure. This is pure action as the reader is dropped right into the middle of the war. The human colonies of the galaxy are now battlegrounds where humans wage (mostly futile) combat against the genocidal invaders. Where conventional military resources are not up to the challenge, the Spartans are ready to step in and deliver their own special brand of expertise.
It's all go in this chapter, with little in the way of contemplation or philosophising over plot or characterisation, but in 'shoot-em-up' spirit of the original game, a heady adrenaline-fueled rush is exactly what is needed at this part of the saga. Seeing how the heroes and the enemy do battle is all the story we need.
This still provides plenty to mull over, however. We still know tantalisingly little about the Covenant; their species, technology, weaponry and strategies. Is there any possibility of finding some empathetic common ground with the enemy, or are they just too alien?
Perhaps they are not all that different... Religiously inspired war is certainly not alien to humankind, as demonstrated by the bloody Crusades of the medieval period. Even genocide can have theological endorsement, as we see in the Old Testament stories of the Israelites arriving in the Promised Land only to find it - rather inconveniently - already occupied. The holy command to wipe the incumbent tribes utterly out of existence sets an early precedent that violence, war, even the wholesale slaughter of an entire race, can be considered just.
More recent genocides and pogroms keep this spirit alive, with the added notion of the enemy as being irredeemably different (foreign/alien) to oneself and one's own; the dehumanisation of the 'other' preventing any hope of unity and allowing all manner of atrocities.
Like their classical namesake, the Spartans stand ready to give everything to the fight, regardless of the odds. Such single-minded devotion is born of the desperate struggle for life itself and is noble in its own way, but is destruction of the enemy the only path to peace?
Until our heroes have the luxury to contemplate any alternatives, their duty is clear and they must be the warriors they were fashioned to be. In a war with no end in sight they are, as their creator Halsey states with clear conviction "humanity's best hope for survival."
Zak Webber
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