Halo : Shadows of Reach – Special Excerpt Voiced by Steve Downes (Demo VOST)

The situation monitor on the forward bulkhead remained in blackout mode, waiting for the Owl’s hull temperature to drop far enough to deploy the nose cameras. It didn’t matter. John-117 had inserted onto dozens of glassed worlds during his 34-year combat career, and he knew what to expect : a blanket of silver-limned clouds hanging over vast sweeps of heat- fused ground. Mats of lichen and algae starting to take hold in scattered pockets of dust and mud. Black-bottom ponds licking at mirror-smooth shores, spider-veined river systems draining into half empty seas… and not much else. The Covenant was gone now, save for a few hold out factions still clinging to their hatred of humanity or a lost hope of transcendence.

00:54 - But during the war, the aliens had rained monsoons of hot plasma down on hundreds of worlds, burning soil and melting bedrock, boiling oceans and filling the air with superheated vapor. Any creature that had escaped instant incineration had suffocated on superheated smoke, or seared away its feet fleeing over molten ground, or emerged from hiding to eventually starve while wandering barren expanses of ash-impregnated lechatelierite. Nothing survived at covenant plasma bombardment, John knew that. But this was Reach, the closest thing to a home he and his fellow Spartan-IIs could remember, and he wanted to see for himself how it was faring these days. He needed to. Operation : WOLFE was supposed to be a simple mission, just a 2-kilometer descent into the ruins of CASTLE Base to recover the assets Dr.

Catherine Halsey needed to save galactic civilization, again, 01:56 - from a rogue AI. Cortana. Two years ago, Cortana had been John’s AI, residing in his Mjolnir armor, connected to his mind through a port in the back of his skull, and she– Damn, it was happening again. John could hardly think of Cortana’s name without finding himself in a battle against his own thoughts, replaying the entire incident in his mind and wondering what he might have done differently. It wasn’t a bad neural lace of hypnotic suggestion or anything like that– he was just… He checked his heads-up display for the go time. ETA 27 minutes. Enough of a window to get himself sorted and focused.

02:41 - John had known before their last battle together that Cortana was descending into the final stages of “rampancy”, a sort of inevitable AI schizophrenia, as her mind literally outgrew its neural matrix after seven years of existence. But with the faith of humanity hanging in the balance, he allowed to Cortana infiltrate the control systems of a primordial enemy vessel, sacrificing herself so he could destroy a devastating weapon threatening Earth. And it had worked. Until Cortana returned from the dead. Things had really gotten off the rails then, John had made some decisions he regretted. Worse, he dragged the rest of the Blue Team into the mess along with him, going AWOL to uncover the mystery of Cortana’s rebirth and rescue her… from what ? Herself ? Transformed by residing for a year in an ancient quantum information repository known as the Domain, Cortana had returned more intellectually capable than ever, with a host of long-hidden massive “Guardians” at her disposal. She had wasted no time issuing an ultimatum to every world in the Orion arm of the galaxy: accept her rule and live in peace, or defy her and suffer the brutal consequences.

04:05 - John’s second-in-command, Fred-104, called it peace-through-menace, but that was an understatement. The Guardians were so powerful they could neutralize entire worlds and knock fleets out of orbit, killing thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, when huge vessels crashed down on the towns and cities below. And Cortana had also corrupted an army of human AIs into aligning with and spying for her. Now, interstellar civilization was sinking into a nightmarish surveillance state, with the situation worsening each day. And John could not help feeling responsible.

04:46 - Had he ordered Cortana to stand down when her deterioration began to accelerate, she would never have been drawn into the Domain… but he would never have destroyed that Forerunner weapon… It was all just going in circles. There had been no good choices in any event, John knew that. He had done the best he could under such terrible circumstances… right up until he disobeyed orders and went AWOL, and had to be doggedly hunted down by his superiors and fellow Spartans. Someday there was to be a reckoning for that decision. Just not now. Now, he had a job to do. John checked the ETA 25 minutes. Still plenty of time, but during the previous day’s pre-drop threat sweep, the Special Delivery’s mothership, an Eclipse-class prowler named Bucephalus, had picked up surface chatter suggesting there was a low-intensity conflict underway in the Arany Basin.

05:47 - It hadn’t been much, just a few transmissions as one group of humans warned another about an enemy patrol, followed a few minutes later by a trio of heat flares that could have been anything from plasma strikes to missile detonations. There had probably been more to the battle, of course, but the Bucephalus’s instruments weren’t sensitive enough to pick up small and medium-arms fire from orbit. Just the artillery. John and the other Spartan-IIs had grown to maturity on Reach, so he’d always paid special attention to any mention of it in the intelligence reports routed past him over the years. He knew that not much had happened on the planet since the Covenant plasma bombardment. A handful of salvagers, both human and alien, had started to visit Reach after the glass cooled, and two years ago, a small colony of rehab pioneers had set up somewhere on the continent of Eposz.

06:43 - The Arany Basin was located on Eposz, so it seemed likely that the conflict involved the rehab pioneers somehow. But even that was not a certainty. The intelligence reports had grown extremely rare after Cortana issued her ultimatum, and the few John had seen did not refer to Reach. The fight could be between anybody, 2 salvage companies, the rehab pioneers and a salvage company, different rehab factions or a hundred of other possibilities. All John knew for sure was that the conflict location was good news, because Blue Team had no intention of entering the Arany Basin. Sure he would have liked to check on the pioneers and see how they were doing.

07:25 - Reach was the only home he could remember, and he would have liked some reassurance that it was in good hands. But that wasn’t the mission. .