Spotlight:

Book Report: First Strike

By Ben Barker

SPOILER ALERT! It's tough to discuss Halo: First Strike without dropping a few minor-ish spoilers. You've been warned …

Eric Nylund, author of the popular Halo: Combat Evolved prequel novel The Fall of Reach, knocks another one out of the proverbial park with Halo: First Strike, a prequel to upstart developer Bungie Studio's new Xbox game Halo 2. Nylund's first novel set in the Halo-verse simultaneously laid the foundations for the origins of the SPARTAN program, gave us all our first in-depth look at the man under Master Chief's helmet, and blew readers away with the intense, desperate battle against the Covenant that led the Pillar of Autumn to Halo. First Strike is even better in almost every way, and lets newcomers to the novel series jump onboard. Whether you're a rabid Halo devotee looking for more info or a complete newcomer to the game and the characters, you'll find it hard to put down.

Meet up with old friends in Halo: First Strike.

Nylund's got a gift for translating Halo gameplay into page-turning reading. You can actually see how each section of the game could appear as a Halo 2 single-player mission, and the talented writer even works in multiplayer Halo with flashbacks to early SPARTAN training missions and nods to "Red" and "Blue" teams of SPARTANs. Yes, SPARTANs, plural. Which leads us to our first major plot point—Master Chief's got MJOLNIR-armored company in First Strike that could conceivable carry over into Halo 2's storyline.

The novel, which is broken up into eight major parts—Section 0, "Reach" through Section VII, "Harbinger"—, opens on the planet Reach (natch) before the first Halo game, as Master Chief and his team of two dozen or so SPARTANs are sent to avert complete disaster: the loss of humanity's last major military outpost other than Earth itself. The action early on focuses on Fred (each Spartan has a number and a single first name they use mostly when talking to each other), a SPARTAN that leads a team to defend the planet's power generators while Master Chief leads another team to events depicted in The Fall of Reach. Needless to say, our heroes are completely outnumbered and things don't go well. This section ends when the Covenant open up their big plasma guns and start glassing the planet from orbit, with Fred's surviving SPARTANs and their creator, Dr. Halsey, still on the ground. We'll catch up with Fred and the Doctor later, along with a few other SPARTAN survivors.

Can Master Chief stop the Covenant invasion?

We then shift to the hero if Halo 2, the Master Chief—SPARTAN-117, John. John and Cortana are aboard the Longsword fighter they used to escape the destruction of Halo, and they're hunting for survivors as well as some way home (their ship is too small for a Slipspace drive). Dodging the Covenant fleet that's appeared in the system, they find a few marines hiding in a Pelican and some floating cryopods from Pillar of Autumn, but even with the Pelican no one can get back to Earth. So, in a titular theme that will recur throughout the novel, Master Chief decides to lead all of the survivors in a first strike against their enemies—they must capture a Covenant ship and get Cortana's Halo data (and mankind's first-ever look at Covenant starship tech) back to Earth, pronto. The Chief's team fight their way onboard, and with the help of Covenant Engineers (a non-combatant species of alien that ignores humans and only concentrates on fixing technology) take control of the Ascendant Justice, which will be their main base of operations for much of the book. From there, they return to Reach when a signal arrives indicating there might be survivors after all.

The author also has a knack for characterization, and shows it off to great effect here as this group that's been through at least as much fighting as Master Chief himself assemble to take the war to the enemy. The non-SPARTANs encountered along the way include: the good Dr. Halsey, who, along with some of Fred's team, survives the battle for Reach; Sgt. A.J. Johnson, the marine so tough even the Flood couldn't kill him; Polaski, the Pelican pilot that soon trains up on Covenant dropships and is more than a little reminiscent of good ol' Foehammer; Locklear, whose external "hu-ah" attitude hides some serious PTSD and a crush on Ms. Polaski; Admiral Whitcomb, a stalwart commander in the mold of Captain Keyes; Lt. Haverson, an intelligence agent who bristles at being under the Chief's command; and, of course, Cortana, who gets to explore the architecture of a Covenant ship and show why she's Master Chief's most powerful ally in the fight to save humanity. The chapters from Cortana's point of view are especially cool, as Nylund describes the thought processes of a powerful A.I. in ways that both make sense and don't get too techno-jargony.

Meet new Covenant units.

Once the action hits Reach, the already fast-paced First Strike really kicks it into overdrive. What about Master Chief's original mission to capture a Covenant leader? Why did the Covenant fail to utterly destroy Reach, as they had with every other conquered human world? What alien secret did the Halo-builders (perhaps) leave behind, and why do mankind's alien enemies want it so badly? How do the Covenant discover the location of Earth, and what can Master Chief and his ever-shrinking supporting cast do to stop them?

These questions and more are answered amidst vividly depicted space battles, harrowing fights against a horde of never-ending Covenant enemies, and salivation-worthy details of the Halo epic you won't find anywhere else. And, if you've skipped the first two Halo books (for shame) or even don't know anything about Halo at all, First Strike is a thrilling military sci-fi action read that's the perfect place to start digging into this rich universe. Here's hoping Nylund gets another chance to visit it again soon.