So finished listening to the audiobook. It was alright, I guess. Although it did feel different to what I was expecting. I thought it would focus more on the attempt to kill Escharum and the defence of the Mortal Reverie; but that’s slightly glossed over. The focus really is on the various groups surviving in the wilderness under the suffocating Banished occupation.
What I liked:
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The Banished are not the good guys. The author does pull the punches and doesn’t lay into the Banished anywhere near as much as they deserve. But, I have to admit, they are shown to be evil and villainous. The one human collaborator we see is depicted as a vile traitor and monster.
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The UNSC characters hate the Banished and the Brutes. Again, it’s mostly because they’re doing and things to them rather than disdain for what they represent or contempt for their plans/goals. But they’re regularly cursing them, calling them bastards and wishing they could get vengeance on them. Which is good and it’s better than the game in that sense where it’s all very nice guy Chief.
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So that preview where the Brute and human are having the WW1 Christmas truce. It, doesn’t turn out too well. As in literally boots his corpse off the edge of the Halo wishing he’d killed him earlier at the end of the novel. 
What I disliked:
- Look I get it. You guys want to appease the Halo 5 haters. But if you’re not going to retcon it then the characters have to act and think as if this has mattered.
Basically they have very little interest in the fate of the wider galaxy. You’d be forgiven for thinking Cortana just controlled Zeta Halo and taking her down isn’t a galaxy changing event. For example the whole thing about them sending a message out to the galaxy for aid, well is that really wise if the Created are still a thing? How do you even know the UNSC is still there? The last we knew Earth was under Created occupation. This is why Infinity was on the run. So it’s actually really relevant and yet the characters don’t give it any concern.
Put it this way. If they believe Cortana/Created are gone then they should be saying things like “well we may be dead but at least we freed the galaxy from the evil AI”. You just beat Skynet. Why are you not making a bigger deal of that?
Basically exactly what I expected with all the characters having this tunnel vision and not acting like normal people.
Also the characters don’t appear to have any issues trusting their personal AI despite having had a massive AI rebellion. You just fought Skynet. It should bother you having an AI in your armour.
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Escharum tells you the battle with the Infinity lasted 4 minutes. That battle clearly lasts a lot longer and is far more costly for the Banished than is indicated. They say they’re outnumbered a hundred to one. Why nobody calls the Banished out on their bull about being great warriors is beyond me.
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I think it would have been better if like in Reach these heroes had directly aided the Chief. Instead as we’ll discuss below they send out a message to the wider galaxy which we probably won’t get an answer to until 2025 when the next Halo game is out. So you don’t know if their sacrifice was worth it and that kind of sucks.
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It doesn’t tell you anything new. No insight into the Banished or Endless.
Speculation:
I have questions.
So those beacons we visit in game can be used to send communications to the wider galaxy via a sequence. Which the heroes manage to do. So the beacons are already lit and “help” should be coming. They even use that word “sequence” to draw your attention to the mission in question from the game where you activate four of them.
Why didn’t the Weapon tell you that? If Chief doesn’t know a message has already been sent why would he not act on it when he was there? I find it difficult to believe she could have been oblivious to something that important.
Also, there’s a bit where the Spartans are in the catacombs near the Weapon and they do detect a UNSC signal. The Weapon contacted the Chief when he was in space, why would she not have contacted any of the other Spartans? Sure she’s meant to be a secret but they were clearly on their own dying for six months and she could have contacted them? Why would she stay on the golden path Cortana set out for her?
More generally, why hasn’t anyone arrived at Zeta Halo if that beacon has been sent out? It did remind me a lot of Halo Wars 2 where they try to send out a message for aid and that should have went wrong. So is it going to be that the Created go there.
Random trivia -
- Brute shots and energy bayonets seem to have been in the game at some point.
- There’s a lot of references to wildlife and hunting for food in the book. Definitely suggests this was meant to be a gameplay feature at some point.
- Harbinger is in and seems to have some sort of indoctrination ability. Like the guy is conscious but not able to control what he says.
- It’s possible given the cut scene from data miners where they detect a signal that help was meant to arrive at the end of the game but this was later removed. However that was something which couldn’t be edited out of the book.
- It is stated that the Banished hate humans after Cortana destroyed their planet. This includes many Banished culling humans their ranks. Now, I do wish the humans would point out that it’s a little rich given how many human worlds got laid to waste by their people. More than a little hypocritical and never mind shifting blame for your own stupidity.
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There was about two weeks between the signal being sent and the Master Chief waking up. It is not a big problem that no reinforcements arrive during this period. After all, it takes time to prepare and arrive. I think of a passage in the encyclopedia about the Sword of Sanghelios.“With the sudden emergence of a formidable Banished presence on Zeta Halo their greatest challenge appears to lie ahead.”
In addition, there is a question about what happened to the Infinity. If the ship was really destroyed, the Banished would show the images of the ruins to the Master Chief or other survivors.
I personally hope Roland can make a miracle.
I’m very satisfied with the portrayal of Spartan IV characters and Jega’Rdomnai in this book.I hope to see them in DLC in the future.I want to really kill this malevolent and cute Sangheili from the first person perspective.
It took them a few hours to muster for the attack on the Ark. Halo has never been overly concerned with things like logistics as the Banished clearly demonstrate with that massive fleet they conjured from thin air. So I don’t see why they wouldn’t have shown up if a message was out.
I am more annoyed that 343 continues to act as if the Banished have always been there and don’t need to explain how a galactic super power went under the radar for decades. Now all the characters just think of the Banished as a normal thing. Never mind putting the cart before the horse; they’ve thrown their luggage into the mud.
Also since it’s related, the Spartans say Atriox plan to build Brute civilisation on Zeta Halo is a great idea. It is not;
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The ring is infested with flood. You brought the last surviving members of your species to die out of ignorant pride and hubris.
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The ring houses The Endless and who knows what else. They are not your friends. You’ve brought the last surviving members of your species to die.
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The ring is controlled by Forerunner machines that could, once they fix themselves, kill the Banished presence. You’ve brought the last surviving members of your species to die.
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Humans and elites might try to kill you to stop you holding a Halo ring. Chief personally kills thousands of Brutes during the campaign and that’s just one Spartan.
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Firing the array will kill the people on the Installation. This makes it useless to them.
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Brutes can’t control Forerunner technology so it’s worthless to them.
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An artificial habitat won’t have any raw resources that they can use or mine to sustain an interstellar civilisation.
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Such a blatantly nationalist goal would not be what the non brute members of the Banished signed up for. They would recognise that Atriox is a dirty liar who is only using them as canon fodder for his new Empire. It should fracture the group.
It’s because they don’t want to make the Banished look stupid or weak.
I really feel like the book was pointless; it didn’t seem to commit to anything and barely answered any questions which seemed to be what the book was intended to do. Kelly Gay is a extremely creative author and that can be seen in their other Halo novels, Rubicon Protocol seems like a bare bones teaser that actually made me say “is that it?” when I finished it. Compared to the other novels; it seems like Kelly had little to no creative freedom as if 343 has no idea where they were going with it and didn’t want to commit to any narrative they would have to come back to later, this of course results in a story with little to no meaningful substance; sure the Banished are depicted as brutal and cruel quite successfully, but what was their aim? there’s just hints at their goals which leaves more questions than answers (once again; seemingly the opposite of the book’s purpose):
why bother with Zeta (and try to take a weapon that would kill them as well as their enemies)? why trust (or bother with) the Harbinger?
How did the Banished learn about the Harbinger?
How did the UNCS’s best ship get wrecked so quickly?
Where are Lasky and the HUNDREDS of Spartans (and thousands of personnel) that were on Infinity?
What is the fate of the other Spartans in the campaign other than stone?
who is the mysterious prisoner at the tower? (probably Griffon but you would at least expect the book to confirm that before the end).
Why should I care about these people? (seriously, while I can’t say the characters were completely devoid of personality; they were pretty simplistic and their development took place mostly in-between time skips).
Ultimately it just felt like a directionless teaser for something else, Important questions regarding the campaign were not answered and sometimes outright skipped like the vast majority of the battle for the Reverie which was apparently extremely important yet the only details we get are the before and ending of the battle (and also apparently the majority of the soldiers and spartan were fighting in the open for some reason instead of within the ship so no wonder they lost). There are much more interesting things in the book that were merely mentioned and not explored such as the assassination attempt on Escherum which would have given substance to why he attacked the Reverie and cracked down on UNSC so harshly other than just saying “we tried to kill him now he mad”. I get that it’s supposed to be from the perspective of a small group of survivors and their experience at the hands of the Banished, but realistically for the purpose of the book; it shouldn’t have been, there were no truly meaningful characters, there should have been banished characters used to explain more about the story (Gorian doesn’t count, he was a cardboard cut out and we learned nothing about Je’ga). So yeah; it was directionless and didn’t fulfil its purpose, sorry for the rant.
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@Kiwibazooka5176
Yeah it really didn’t add anything.
Like yes, there is a lot more emphasis on them establishing Brute civilisation on a Halo ring (full of Flood, it’s a dumb idea) and that they really do blame humanity for Cortana and Doisac (which is dumb because the Brutes would all be flood food or killed themselves by Halo without Cortana). Annoyingly no character challenges them on the hypocrisy of this since Brutes has destroyed hundreds of human worlds and deserve no pity. In game you have to read a lot into the one line Escharum gives on Cortana and then some of the other ambient dialogue. It is there but it’s really not clear and even here it’s being ambivalent. That’s more a clarification than anything else.
A central problem is that they’re trying to tell the story without explaining the context and you can’t really do that without elaborating what’s gone on since Halo 5. For example, the UNSC is in a weak state because the Created occupy/occupied all of its industrial worlds. Which is complete supposition and guesswork by the way since the game does not bother to tell you this and creates doubt on how much reliance you can place on Halo 5. Because they don’t bother stating this and leave it vague you’re left wondering “well, UNSC should handily be able to crush a few Brute clans”. It’s all just a confusing mess.
Plus one thing I noticed. Was Doisac and it’s moons literally the only Brute planet? The way they talk about rebuilding what was lost and all that you would be forgiven for thinking this but I assumed they would have colonies from the Covenant? I mean how are they a threat if this is just a butch version of the Quarians from Mass Effect? Another reason living on a sterile habitat is a dumb idea…
I feel like I wasted my time reading this book. It added nothing to the Xalanyn, Escherum and Atriox were merely mentioned, and only one dead Spartan found in the game had significance. Lasky and Palmer had nothing to do with the book. It really feels like 343 does not care at all about Halo fans. It didn’t even explain anything about Cortana.
I think the book was clearly meant to be a prequel to read before Halo Infinite and got delayed until almost a year after the game. Potentially because the game kept changing and they really wanted it to mirror certain parts of the game. Like there are zero spoilers of note in this book when you consider how irrelevant the Harbinger was to HI story in the end.
Even then certain things are extremely different. In this Despondent Pyre was free and planning to eject the Banished with the sun monitors having just slept through the whole thing. Whereas in game Cortana locked DP in the Conservatory and was very clearly in charge of the ring prior to the battle. Plus the personality is entirely different and there’s a different sub monitor character.
In practice the game came out a year after Infinite when people want to see the narrative pushed forward and want some closure on all the various mysteries and for some of the blanks to be filled.
What we get is a regurgitation of stuff already in Infinite. Yes, it does spell certain things out much more clearly like the hate for Cortana leading to anti human sentiment in the Banished, and it does set the tone of the Human/Banished conflict better because you aren’t seeing this from stoic Chiefs POV.
Look, if it’s a soft reboot then and you assume I know nothing then 343 has to reintroduce the UNSC, Covenant, Forerunners and Banished. Let us know the state of the Galaxy and then go into the mystery of Zeta Halo. If it’s a sequel to Halo 5, well we need an update and closure on that massive situation. What they do instead is abruptly tell you everything with Halo 5 isn’t relevant anymore, don’t give you any updates and then presume you’re all caught up on your existing lore so don’t need to reintroduce anything. So you’re caught in this weird place of being presented with mysteries whilst not being sure about what’s just been retconned and no longer relevant. For example, is the Fate of Earth actually a mystery because we see it occupied by the Created but it’s never stated to have been liberated or are we supposed to assume that because our characters don’t dwell or ask this question that we just are not meant to dwell on it.
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Slipspace travel takes weeks without forerunner drives. The trip to the ark took three weeks. It’s more than believable that it would take a while to get there considering they could literally be on the opposite side of the galaxy
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They send the message to UNSC because tey were deseperate to spend the rest of their day on the Halo alone. At this point, if killing Cortana didn’t end the Created, they are nothing to do for humanity.
Master Chief arrive on Halo Zeta some weeks later, so it’s normal that nobody have arrive. We don’t know at what speed the mesage was send or what system he will reach. The Created would be surely really quick to understand it, but the UNSC, after the Created dominaiton, would need more time to understand it and prepare a force rescue.
As for the AI in the armor, they aren’t “clever AI” like Cortana or Rolland, so they won’t betray their Spartan
Also, it’s said that the crew detect a UNSC signal in the Halo fondation, so it’s mean the Weapon try to contact them, but failed. MC was surely most easy to contact because he was in space.
Chief was in a freshly repowered-up Pelican with a full suite of comma equipment. The Spartans on the surface had malfunctioning armour and active Banished jamming
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Yeah they put a lot of emphasis on the slow deterioration of the Spartan core and their lack of munitions and air support.
Now, I am still not sure why thousand to one casualties aren’t creating issues for the Banished. Most soldiers don’t march into certain and futile death. For mercenaries they’re oddly fanatical with all these human wave assaults they launch. 
Consider how many enemies you kill in the campaign over two days. Let’s call it 2000. So a thousand a day for one Spartan and leave out things like him destroying the Gbaarakon as outliers.
So if there were a hundred Spartans on Infinity then they should be killing 100,000 Banished soldiers every single day. 700,000 a week and so on. I believe this is not a sustainable rate of losses for the Banished. So the notion of slowly degrading Spartan armour seems unlikely. They should have killed all of the Banished on Zeta Halo before the paint chipping got serious.
Even if a Spartan only achieves a tenth of what Chief can you’re still talking an absurd rate of attrition and only where the rest of the UNSC presence does nothing.
Even if most of that is Grunts and Jackals that’s a lot of dead Brutes for a species that we are shown should be in the same position as the Quarians from Mass Effect after they got their Homeworld destroyed. They should not be willing or able to take these losses. If they are, well they’re idiots and should get what they deserve.
Really the Banished should have gotten cut to pieces by that many Spartans and veteran UNSC divisions. As opposed to a bunch of pirates used to their enemy not fighting back or having guns. Really, Banished units would start surrendering as the UNSC outmanoeuvres and outfights them. The story only makes sense if you assume the Banished have like a billion guys and are all fanatics willing to pile their corpses ten deep before the Spartans; which is not on brand for the “small pirate mercenary enclave”.
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First, the question is if what happen when we play Master Chief really happen in the “story”. Halo is a fps game build to kill a lot of ennemi, I would find normal that the “real Master Chief” in the “story” don’t kill so many of them. In the book, I don’t remember than even Master Chief kill so many aliens.
Then, Infinity had a hundred Spartan and thousand of soldiers, but they don’t all made it to the ground and a lot where killed in the ring explosion. In the Reveri, I think they were ten or twenty Spartans. So all of this Spartans suvivor, separated and without support, would be really more easy to kill for brutes and elites
Why weren’t most of the Banished army and fleet destroyed in the ring explosion? Surely they would have been concentrated around the Silent Auditorium since that was their target. A similar explosion destroyed most of the Covenant Fleet at the first ring and they weren’t parked right next to it. Very convenient for only the UNSC to be negatively impacted by this. Lot like how the Created get brought up as a reason why humanity is weakened despite the Brutes getting their homeworld destroyed and most of their population killed…
If we start arguing the game ain’t canon and we should apply realism. Well, one 50 cal bullet can kill an armoured Brute from a Km away so you don’t actually need Space Marines to kill these Xenos. Most enemies are one shot and one kill in the books. The UNSC should have fleets of swarm drones and AI guided artillery that should be demolishing any barbarians who use wave assault and melee weapons. So I am actually being conservative with a Spartan killing a thousand a day because your basic marines should be mowing the Banished down with machine guns. If we bring realism into it then the Banished definitely would not be winning.
But aside from that. No Chief really does kill that many enemies because the games are canon and we see him do these things. He really can kill a few thousand Banished a day.
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Them 'Vadamee’s forces had significant numbers survive the destruction of Installation 04. The Installation 07 slips pace incident would have been quite different
It should be much worse.
His fleet probably would have pulled back from the ring due to the Flood threat and were not dragged into Slipspace like skittles down the toilet.
It wasn’t just slip space, per the audio logs the Silent Auditorium explodes and this is what makes the massive hole in the ring. Which is precisely where the Banished fleet was before they got wrenched into slip space. That is far more destructive, especially when you consider the size of Zeta Halo and that anything smaller than a Dreadnought probably wouldn’t survive being yanked about like that.
All the debris and wrecked ships would be dragged in. Be like shrapnel the size of skyscrapers ripping through the fleet.
So no, the Banished fleet and army should have been destroyed since they had a lot more stuff in the vicinity of the explosion. For example, Atriox probably brought an army into the Silent Auditorium and they certainly would have died instantly in the explosion. Likely most of his “loyal” and “elite” warbands would have been killed since they would have been tasked with accompanying the “Warmaster” (it’s embarrassing 343 try to compare him to Horus, the Legions would easily have exterminated his pathetic species. Even the lowest Ork Warboss stands higher.).
It’s silly that the Banished emerge from their situation as the greatest force in the Galaxy.
We saw no prometheans in the book or in the game, so I supposed they just vanish when the weapon trapped Cortana in the Auditorium. So Atriox wouldn’t need to bring an army, he certainly prefer to focus his force against the UNSC.
I also don’t like the created being elimintaed so easily and the Banished being so powerfull, but this is the story. Lets hope some day we will have a better explanation
We see a crashed Guardian and there’s no suggestion Prometheans switch off without a master.
In fact, before the Didact took over they seem to have just carried out whatever their last standing orders were thousands of years after they given. This isn’t the droid army from Star Wars.
Plus in Rubicon Laskey says the Bansihed fleet is between them and their target. That target exploded. So they were closer to the blast radius. So should have taken more damage but curiously emerge unscathed.
Why would he go alone? If he knew the Silent Auditoriun would explode he wouldn’t have went in the first place. So of course whatever Banished were at Silent Auditorium would have died. The depiction is that he arrogantly thought he had Cortana beat and was not going to destroy the ring.
Yeah it’s incredibly silly. The Contingency is a lot more dangerous than the Great Khan and I wouldn’t even put the Banished in the mid tier crisis level.
I don’t think they will give us real answers because they don’t have any. 343 clearly think Atriox and the Banished are a winner so they have to inflate their prominence in the story. The fact it’s laughable making a generic Brute Warlord Chiefs nemesis is a bit lost on them. Like, Chief has killed hundreds of thousands of Brutes and saved the Galaxy a few times. What is a generic Brute Warlord but another carcass for the maggots?
I don’t mean he go to the conservatory alone, but obviously a lot of Banished weren’t in the blast zone
The Silent Auditorium is a colossal structure that you can see for miles. You would need tens of thousands of soldiers to secure that structure. If he didn’t need the army why bother bringing it? The purpose was a direct assault on Cortana as revenge for Doisac. So he would have dumped all his armies and fleet at the Silent Auditorium; which then exploded with enough force to shatter a continent sized Halo ring. Before everything got dragged into slip space.
That’s a catastrophic event that should have caused monstrous casualties to the Banished Fleet and Army.
To suggest that: “well Atriox had all these ships and armies but he deliberately withheld them from the ring because he knew they were in danger of being destroyed by being close” doesn’t make any sense.
If they were not close to the ring they wouldn’t have been dragged through in its slip space bubble. He has no reason to hold back the Fleet and Army since from what we see in the cutscene he thought he had won and was there to gloat. So the likely scenario is that they were clustered on top of the SA and so we’re dragged through the slip space portal.
Again, 343 want to sell the threat posed by the Banished but it makes no sense because these events should have been far more devastating to the Banished than the UNSC.
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Earth was not destroyed. Doisac was.
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The Banished brought thousands of ships and parked them on top of a Halo which exploded and got shot through slip space. The UNSC lost a handful of warships and a few thousand guys.
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Given that the Banished talk of rebuilding their civilisation on the ring that strongly implies this is all the Brutes left in the Galaxy. Whereas humanity has several hundred planets. Again, they’re Quarians.
The scenario they paint should have been utterly devastating for the Banished and left them crippled and dying. Instead they’re meant to be this terrifying force and the greatest threat Chief has ever fought?