In Halo: New Blood, Buck is left wondering whether his former teammate Gramps’ death during the Fall of Reach was “for a noble cause or to pave the way for someone else’s noble cause,” which I thought would be funny if parsed as NOBLE cause, considering that NOBLE Team and Buck’s team had a brief rapport in New Alexandria and maybe even elsewhere (though Buck would be unaware of how Gramps’ death had helped, if at all).
Furthermore, NOBLE Team did actually sacrifice themselves for a noble cause, and a comparison has been made to Star Wars: Rogue One. Both are side stories about small, specialized teams that ultimately contribute to the discovery and/or destruction of a major location/event in their respective main series.
As a lore fan, what I’m wondering is whether there are other similar “noble causes” carried out in the Halo Universe, where a small team contributes to a major finding of sorts. For instance, I originally thought that the transmission that led Cortana to Unyielding Hierophant could have come from friendly UNSC forces who had died trying to discover the station (turns out I was wrong, as the transmission was from Covenant forces). Or perhaps a group of ONI spies had uncovered the location of Eridanus Secundus during the Insurrection, leading to the Spartan’s first official mission, Operation: TALON (I was wrong about this too, as it turns out an Innie had made a deal with the UNSC and relayed info about the freighter that would lead them to the base).
So are there any sort of possible small side stories out there like this?