Troy Denning - Shadows of Reach

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Gallery Books

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Cover design by Alan Dingman

Cover art by Chris McGrath

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Denning, Troy, author.

Title: Shadows of reach / Troy Denning.

Other titles: At head of title: Halo

Description: Gallery Books trade paperback edition. | New York : Gallery Books, 2020. | Series: Halo | Based on the bestselling video game for Xbox

Identifiers: LCCN 2020028886 (print) | LCCN 2020028887 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982143619 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781982143633 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Halo (Video game)Fiction. | GSAFD: Science fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3554.E5345 S53 2020 (print) | LCC PS3554.E5345 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028886

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028887

ISBN 978-1-9821-4361-9

ISBN 978-1-9821-4363-3 (ebook)

For Elliot Courant

This story takes place in October 2559, a year after the events of Halo 5: Guardians, as the AI Cortana retreats into the Domain, then resurrects a host of Forerunner Guardians and uses them to impose martial law on interstellar civilizations across the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.

0217 hours, October 7, 2559 (military calendar)

UNSC Owl Insertion Craft Special Delivery

Insertion Run, Continent Eposz, Planet Reach

T he situation monitor on the forward bulkhead remained in blackout mode, waiting for the Owls hull temperature to drop far enough to deploy the nose cameras. It didnt matter. John-117 had inserted onto dozens of glassed worlds during his thirty-four-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-bottomed 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 holdout factions still clinging to their hatred of humanity or a lost hope of transcendence. 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 a 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 two-kilometer descent into the ruins of CASTLE Base to recover the assets Dr. Catherine Halsey needed to save galactic civilization, again, from a rogue AI.

Cortana.

Two years ago, Cortana had been Johns 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 Cortanas 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 wasnt a bad neural lace or hypnotic suggestion or anything like thathe was just

He checked his heads-up display for the GO TIME.

ETA twenty-seven minutes. Enough of a window to get himself sorted and focused. John had known before their last battle together that Cortana was descending into the final stages of rampancya sort of inevitable AI schizophreniaas her mind literally outgrew its neural matrix after seven years of existence. But with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance, he had allowed Cortana to 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 gone off the rails then, and John had made some decisions he regretted. Worse, he had dragged the rest of Blue Team into the mess along with him, going AWOL to uncover the mystery of Cortanas rebirth and rescue her from what? Herself?