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The Covenant
==Society==
The Covenant, governed by the Prophets in a theocratic manner, are extremely religious, worshipping the Forerunners, an unknown ancient race who have left behind many artifacts of technologies. There is speculation that several races of the Covenant are actually descended from the Forerunners, but this is entirely unsubstantiated. It is believed that the Covenant conquer alien races and force them into the alliance, adding to their ranks. Their society uses a caste system with the following races (names are rough translations by the UNSC)..
* ''Prophets'' are the highest level race with their near divine status. They are depicted sitting on hovering seats.
* ''Elites'' are the generals of the Covenant military. They stand 7' tall and wear armor, with the color indicating rank, and use a shielding system similar to that of the MJOLNIR armor used by the Master Chief. They are both physically strong and capable of coordinating their units with brilliant battle tactics.
* ''Brutes'' are considered the personal bodyguards of the Prophets according to the third book(The First Strike). As of this writing, they are known to be very strong, quoted of being capable of tearing apart a Hunter. They have a hairy gorilla-like appearance.
* ''Hunters'' are like walking tanks, with their massive size (8' in their normal contracted stance and 12' full sized), near impenetrable armor, and hand mounted cannons. They are known to operate in pairs. In the game, they have an exposed region in their back that can allow a quick and easy kill via one pistol shot.
* ''Jackals'' are the scouts of the Covenant, with their superior senses. They are 4' tall and carry a weak energy shield. Their appearance is bird-like.
* ''Engineers'' are the engineers of the Covenant. They float via air sacs and manipulate machinery with their many tentacles. Engineers are capable of quickly learning the functionality of new technology.
* ''Grunts'' are the work horse of the Covenant, as the name implies. Despite their obvious cowardice and stupidity, they are extremely large in number. They breathe a methane mixture and thus must wear a large tank on their backs. They are 3'6" tall.
Level by level
Pillar of Autumn The stronghold of Reach has fallen to the Covenant, delivering humanity a crippling blow. A lone Halcyon-battle cruiser made a blind jump from the destruction away from Earth and into uncharted space. The Pillar of Autumn meets the enemy even there, finding the gas giant Threshold, it s moon Basis, and floating in between these two celestial mammoths Captain Keyes finds a strange artificial ring-world, Halo.
Master Chief, perhaps the last warrior from the elite Spartan II program, is awakened from cryo-sleep. He battles through a ship incised by boarding parties and barraged by Seraph fighters to escort the ship s powerful AI, Cortana, out of the cruiser to keep the Covenant from learning the location of Earth. After fighting through the debris-laden halls of the vessel, he reaches the last remaining lifeboat, and with Cortana in tow, makes the trip down to the ring.
Halo
The Chief s lifepod makes a hard landing, crashing onto a cliff overlooking a vast ocean. All the other Marines on board died in the crash. After skirmishing with Covenant ground troops and Banshees, he reaches a hilly valley where Marine survivors are fending off an onslaught from atop an alien bunker. Master Chief helps Sergeant Johnson and the other humans repel the attackers, and as Foehammer picks up the survivors, she drops off a Warthog buggy for the Spartan.
Master Chief drives through a vast artificial cave system and across a light bridge, once again reaching the grassy world outside. He rounds three combat zones, assisting groups of stranded Marines eliminate dropship after dropship of Covenant. Before being whisked away to Alpha Base by Echo 419, Cortana learns by hacking into the Covenant battlenet that they have captured Captain Keyes.
Truth and Reconciliation
Cortana leads the Master Chief and a group of UNSC Marines out to a desert plateau in the dead of night to make a daring raid directly into a Covenant battle cruiser, the Truth and Reconciliation, that is hovering near the ground. Battling alien encampments through the twisting paths, the small human assault force reaches the gravity lift. Following a brutal battle with squads of aliens emerging down from the ship, the Master Chief, Cortana and reinforcements brought by Foehammer are taken up into the belly of the beast.
After skirmishes in the halls and several large battles, the Master Chief reaches the brig, where Captain Keyes and several Marines are being held. After the Chief eliminates a commander Elite and two Elites using a never-before-seen cloaking technology, he frees Keyes and company from their cells. Cortana accesses the Covenant battlenet, and learns that the Covenant believe that -Halo- is a weapon of unimaginable power. After escorting the captain from the cruiser and into a hijacked dropship, the Master Chief and Cortana are given a new mission.
The Silent Cartographer
An inconspicuous island on the ringworld is where Cortana believes the Silent Cartographer, the maproom of the Halo, will be found. The humans have to find the maproom first if they are to reach the control room before the Covenant can use Halo as a weapon against them. Pelicans fly in the Master Chief and a contingent of ODST s into a hot LZ, covered in enemy presence. Master Chief battles through a D-Day-like invasion, before setting off in a Warthog to search for a passage to the Cartographer.
He fights through multiple swarms of Covenant before finding a tunnel leading underground, into the island itself. After deactivating security for the installation, he treks down claustrophobic corridors and ramps to reach the maproom. Cortana finds the control room on a holographic map, finding that it is in some sort of shrine. As they move towards the surface for Echo 419 to evac them from the scene, Captain Keyes drops out of contact. Cortana gives Foehammer coordinates for the control room, coordinates that force the pilot to fly the Pelican underground.
Assault on the Control Room
Master Chief begins his assault underground, doing combat with a countless number of Elites and Grunts (many of them sleeping) in heavily metallic hallways before reaching a bridge across the canyon outside. The weather is behaving naturally, which Cortana finds strange for an artificial installation, and a dropship of Marines sets down. The Chief fights through another tower set inside the canyon walls before reaching the outside again, this time on solid ground, where the humans have been engaged.
He cuts through the aliens filling the valley in Ghosts, Warthogs, and even a Scorpion tank. Down the way the Chief and Cortana break off from the ODST s that assisted them throughout the fight, and continue to fight the Covenant and the elements until reaching the sphere-like control room, with the holographic image of Halo orbiting Threshold in the center. Cortana is put into the ring s mainframe, and is bombarded by vast quantities of information. Her initial excitement and the gargantuan amounts of knowledge are replaced with concern. She doesn t explain to the Chief, but sends him quickly to stop the Captain, who was looking for a weapons cache but found something far more sinister...
343 Guilty Spark
Echo 419 drops Master Chief into a dank, foggy swamp where he finds a crashed Pelican broadcasting a distress call. No Marines can be found. He moves on through the water, which is knee-deep even for the Spartan, and the environment grows steadily stranger. There are friendly indicators on his motion tracker, but no humans are there. When he reaches the gateway to the underground, the Covenant troops stationed there come under attack with human weapons, but as always, the Chief can find no allies. He takes the lift down to the wide, quiet rooms below that are strangely empty. Except for the bodies. Mutilated and bloody Covenant corpses are everywhere. Master Chief keeps moving, searching for the captain, anyone, and sees his first fellow human since leaving the dropship.
The Marine holds a pistol at the Chief, threatening him and ranting about monsters that killed his squad. He had clearly become shell-shocked, or worse, and Master Chief had to move on without him. The tight halls and vertical rooms become emptier than before. Until he opens one door, and the lifeless body of Pvt. Mendoza falls into his arms. He goes further into the room, covered in shell casings, and finds the memory chip of Pvt. Jenkins. The record shows Keyes, Sgt. Johnson, and a number of Marines going down the same path the Chief had just taken. They find the door the Chief had just opened. A Marine unlocks the door, as the Covenant had locked it down tight, on the captain s orders, and the nervous group enters. Once inside they receive a panicked radio transmission from a squad under attack by some new kind of alien. A strange skittering is heard in the room. Banging. A door bursts open, and hundreds of meter-long tentacled Flood infection forms burst out. The group fires frantically at the mass of enemies are cutting into their bodies. Sarge and Keyes keep firing as multiple Flood are attach to their body, before Jenkins falls to the ground and the screen goes dark.
Master Chief takes the chip from his helmet and infection forms swarm him in similar fashion. After popping waves of enemies into a foul-smelling mist, Flood-mutated Elites begin to attack. Master Chief fights his way back up to the surface, over the bodies of fallen Marines and Covenant. Masses of Flood throw themselves at him with no concern for themselves, fighting tooth and nail and using their tentacles as whips. The Chief meets a lost contingent of Marines, who fight alongside him to a squat building where Foehammer is set to pick them up. Out of nowhere, grey, cylindrical flying robots join the fray; as they are apparently fighting for their side, the Marines and Chief don t open fire. After the last mutant is torn apart by shotguns or the robot s laser weapons, the Spartan is teleported on top of the bunker. Giving little explanation to why he is there, the Monitor of Halo, who calls himself 343 Guilty Spark, takes the Chief with him to stop the Flood outbreak.
The Library
The Monitor has zapped the Chief into a dark, cavernous hallway crawling with Flood. 343 hums to himself as Master Chief slogs through wave after wave of enemy. The floating, blue AI also chatters on and on about the particulars of the Flood, the Spartan s Mjolnir armor, technical difficulties (this is a rather broken library), and the -Index- that he needs your help to get. After blasting, pounding and generally tearing the Flood a new one for several floors of darkened caverns, the Monitor gets what the Chief was fighting for, the Index, and the two teleport away.
Two Betrayals
Upon returning to the Control Room, Master Chief learns of 343 Guilty Spark s supposed deception. After inserting the Index into the console, and thus giving it to Cortana, he learns from the infuriated AI that Halo s final weapon that the Monitor was trying to activate through the Master Chief doesn t kill the Flood, it kills their food. Activating the ring, which would in turn activate all of the other installations, would obliterate all sentient life in the galaxy to starve the Flood virus. Mankind would be wiped from the face of the Earth, among other planets. Guilty Spark seems genuinely puzzled by the Chief s ignorance towards Halo s purpose, and talks about another time in the past when the Reclaimer supposedly activated the ring s final weapon. When Master Chief refused to hand Cortana over to the Monitor, the AI sent his Sentinel robots to attack him. The Spartan now had a new, deadly enemy.
Cortana explains her plan to the Master Chief. First, they must destroy Halos pulse generators to slow the Monitor down if he finds a way toactivate Halo without the Index. Then they have to find the captain or his neural implants to detonate the Pillar of Autumn s fusion engines, creating an explosion powerful enough to destroy the ring. Fighting through Covenant, Flood and Sentinels they take the first step: destroying all three pulse generators in the canyon. Cortana then taps into Halo s teleportation grid, using energy from the Chief s armor, to get to the signal from Captain Keyes neural implants as fast as possible.
Keyes
After a shaky entry that had the Master Chief landing on his head, the two begin to explore a ship where the Covenant and the Flood are engaged in a brutal melee. Captain Keyes puts out a weak, shaky command for them to leave him. The two push on. Eventually stuck at a dead end, the Spartan is forced to drop into coolant below the ship, and find a new way to the captain. After intense fighting, he reaches the ships gravity lift and is taken back up.
As the Chief fights on towards the bridge he receives another desperate order from Keyes to pull out. As he gets nearer, they receive one last radio transmission from Keyes, of him moaning. His vitals are fading away. When they finally reach him they realize what has happened. Keyes When they finally reach him they realize what has happened. Keyes face and body are visible encased in a brown blob. The captain had become a Flood. But the Master Chief was forced to take the captain s neural implants directly from his now infected body, and leave what used to be Keyes behind as he left for the Pillar of Autumn.
The Maw
The Pillar of Autumn, once glorious in space and battle, lies scarred and burnt, in ruin on a deserted beach. The Master Chief breaks up what could have been a solemn moment by crashing his commandeered Banshee into the ship s bow. Happily alive after the crash, the two make their way to the bridge, and Cortana activates a countdown timer for detonation of the fusion drive core. Suddenly their plans are interrupted. The Monitor tapped into Cortana s data arrays, and stops the self-destruct sequence.
Cortana notices that Guilty Spark is in Engineering. The Chief develops a new plan, which is, in summary, blow the engines to hell. He fights through more of the Pillar of Autumn, battling Covenant, Sentinels and Flood alike (all of which are also battling amongst themselves), stocks up on rockets and grenades, and then begins to take out the engine s shields, one by one. Doing so initiates a -wildcat destabilization-, and the Chief leaves Engineering to rendezvous with Foehammer.
The Spartan with Cortana in tow takes a lift up to a Warthog bay. Fires are abundant, and there are explosions left and right as the Chief drives speedily down a Class Seven service corridor to freedom. He reaches the spot where Foehammer is set to pick them up, adrenaline still pumping. Echo 419 flies into view, but something s wrong. Smoke is trailing behind the Pelican. Foehammer is fighting a losing battle to maintain control as two Banshees fire mercilessly at her. An engine is hit, and she nosedives under the bridge the Master Chief s Warthog is sitting on, and radio contact with her is lost.
Losing Foehammer and the planned way of escape, Master Chief must fight on, racing for a Longsword docked farther down the track. He reaches it, abandons his Warthog, and dashes into the fighter as a herd of Flood combat forms trail him. He launches away from the ring. Behind the lone ship the Autumn blossoms in explosions. As the Chief and Cortana make it farther into space, a shock wave breaks Halo into several large pieces. The broken parts float away and into each other, destroyed by eerily silent explosions.
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This was humankind's first encounter with a group of aliens they eventually came to know as the Covenant, a collective of alien races united in their fanatical religious devotion. Covenant religious elders declared humanity an affront to the gods, and the Covenant warrior caste waged a holy war upon humanity with gruesome diligence.
On Reach, a secret military project to create cyborg super-soldiers takes on newfound importance. The soldiers of the SPARTAN-II project rack up an impressive record against the Covenant in test deployments, but there are too few of them to turn the tide of the war.