6 Halo stories better than what the Paramount show gave us
3. Halo: The Flood/ Combat Evolved
The book The Flood adapts the events of Halo: Combat Evolved — the first game in the series — and further adds to the lore. This book picks up right where The Fall of Reach leaves off, with Captain Keyes and Cortana analyzing the first Halo ringworld. A massive fleet of Covenant ships is also in the system, but the prophet leading them forbids his ships from attacking the Pillar of Autumn for fear of damaging the Halo ring. The religious Covenant view the rings as holy relics and want to use their destructive power to engage the “Great Journey,” or pilgrimage to the afterlife.
The Autumn is able to destroy four ships while the Covenant try to board. Keyes has his technicians wake John up from cryo sleep to help defend the ship. Keyes also initiates the Cole protocol and tasks John with getting Cortana off the ship and preventing her capture by the Covenant. While John fights his way to an escape pod, Keyes flies the Autumn directly into the ring before escaping on his own lifeboat.
On the surface, a group of ODST’s led by Major Antonio Silva establish Alpha base as an operating center to conduct guerilla operations and rescue as many survivors from the Autumn as possible. Keyes lands on the ring but is betrayed by one of his bridge crew and captured by the Covenant. Meanwhile, John rescues several groups of survivors before conducting a rescue mission by boarding a Covenant ship called the Truth and Reconciliation to get Keyes back. After he is returned safely to Alpha base, Keyes tasks John with finding Halo’s control room so they can use the weapon before the Covenant, while the ODST Melissa McKay leads a group to the wreckage of the Pillar of Autumn to secure more supplies and vehicles.
Keyes, Sergeant Johnson and a group of marines try to recover a “weapons cache” deep inside a swamp on the ring. This is where they horrifically discover that a group of Covenant have been ripped apart by the Flood. For the first time in modern history, humans make contact with the terrifying parasitic hive mind with eldritch knowledge and power. Everyone save Private Jenkins and Sergeant Johnson, who is partially immune to the Flood thanks to his Spartan I augmentations, are infected and incorporated into the Flood horde. Recognizing that Keyes is the leader of the humans and thus has more extensive knowledge of the command structure, the Flood use him as a base to create a proto-gravemind.
John is able to find the control room and plugs Cortana into the system’s computer. A concerned Cortana urges John to find Keyes and warn him that Halo is not what they thought it was. While looking for Keyes, John finds the Flood as well as 343 Guilty Spark, a floating eyeball-shaped Forerunner robot that acts as the monitor of the Halo ring. Spark explains that John needs the activation index to use “Halo’s defenses.” He obtains it after fighting through ungodly amounts of Flood and returns to the control room to find an irate Cortana. She explains that Halo’s defenses will kill all sentient life as that’s what the Flood feeds on. John demands answers from Spark, who insists that lighting the ring is the only way to stop the Flood from infecting the rest of the galaxy.
The new mission objective for John is to destroy the ring before Spark can light it and kill everything in the galaxy. Activating a self-destruct sequence on the Pillar of Autumn would do the trick, but they need Keyes to do that. Unfortunately, Keyes is now part of a grotesque mass of bodies the Flood are turning into a gravemind, so he can’t be of much use.
In a bonus cutscene from the remastered version of Halo: Combat Evolved, we see a detailed version of Keyes’ indoctrination to the Flood. An incessant ringing noise plays in Keyes’ head while he struggles to remember who he is and what is going on. He thinks of his daughter Miranda and the night he conceived her with Dr. Halsey. He remembers Earth and tries to stop the millennia-old Flood hivemind from knowing its location. The Flood begins to speak to him, urging him to forget everything and that all his memories are now the Flood. Keyes refuses to go down easy and tells the beast that it will not have him, but it’s too late.
John finds Keyes in the jumble of Flood mass. He recovers the Captain’s neural implants by punching through his head. Alpha base is evacuated while John and Cortana make their way to the Autumn. Not realizing that the Flood are trying to use the Truth and Reconciliation to leave the ring and infect the rest of the galaxy, Silva tries to use the ship to leave Halo. Thanks to the efforts and sacrifice of McKay and Jenkins, the Flood is unable to make it off the ring and the ship is destroyed. At the Autumn, John and Cortana activate the ship’s self-destruct sequence. They make a dramatic escape on a longsword fighter in a nick of time.