“Oh, but what I would not give to have even a single company of Prometheans here right now.”
— Monitor 343 Guilty Spark
The Battle of Installation 04 was the name given to a series of skirmishes between the UNSC and the Covenant on the surface of the Forerunner construct Installation 04.
Background
Following the UNSC's disastrous defeat at Reach and the loss of a third of her tech staff, the UNSC Pillar of Autumn made an apparently blind jump through Slipspace from where they would then make their way to Earth. In reality it was planned by the AI Cortana, using coordinates found in an artifact found on Sigma Octanus IV.The Autumn and the approximately 1,100 humans on it were followed through the slipspace jump. Upon arriving in orbit above the planet Threshold on September 19, 2552, they were intercepted by the pursuing Covenant vessels which had arrived before it.
Space Battle
“Cortana, all I need to know is did we lose them?”— Captain Jacob Keyes
“I think we both know the answer to that.”
— Cortana
The Prophet of Stewardship ordered the vessels Undiminished Entelechy and the Purity of Spirit, to conduct short range scans of Ring once the Autumn was there. The Undiminished took aboard several Forerunner constructs and a wealth of knowledge from Installation 04's outlying archives. The Supreme Commander Thel 'Vadamee ordered the ship be torched as the Flood boarded the ship, posing a serious threat to the rest of the fleet.
The Undiminished crashed on the ring and the crew ended up dead. The Ring's damage control system and environmental remediation systems quickly caused plant growth to take over the ship.
The Autumn managed to destroy four of the Covenant vessels and forced one, the Truth and Reconciliation to retreat for repairs. As Covenant forces began boarding the ship, Captain Jacob Keyes ordered Thom Shephard to release Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 from his Cryo-chamber. Shephard was later killed by a conduit explosion. His friend, Sam Marcus, was working in the observation tower overlooking the Cryo-chamber when he was killed by a Sangheili Major.
John-117 then proceeded to the Bridge of the Pillar of Autumn, where he was joined with the shipboard AI Cortana. After the MAC cannon was disabled due to an anti-matter charge, Keyes initiated Cole Protocol Article 2, and evacuated the ship. Carrying Cortana, John fought his way through the rapidly decaying Pillar of Autumn. He then evacuated to the recently discovered Installation 04 aboard the Bumblebee lifepod Lima Foxtrot Alpha 43. The pod's descent systems failed in mid-flight and the following impact killed all of the Marines on board, except for John-117.
The dropship pilots, led by Foe Hammer, decided to take their Pelicans down instead of evacuating in the lifeboats. After dealing with a few Covenant hostiles, they successfully reached their ships and escaped the Pillar of Autumn.
Captain Keyes flew the Autumn most of the way to the ring manually and then abandoned the ship to crash on Halo, leaving it under the control of some subroutines Cortana left behind for that very purpose. Unknown to him and his bridge crew, they were followed by a cloaked Sangheili that planned to capture him, but Keyes detected the Sangheili on the way down and killed it personally by pulling a corporal's pistol out of his holster and firing on sight, leaving every bridge crew member in the pod speechless. The rest of the Covenant boarders abandoned the Pillar of Autumn as it went down. The ship crash landed in a desert on Halo mostly in one piece but was damaged beyond repair and with no hope of ever taking off again.
Seizure of Alpha Base
Meanwhile, a battalion of ODSTs and Marines led by Major Antonio Silva and Lieutenant Melissa McKay "helljumped" to Halo in their Human Entry Vehicles. Once on the ground, the ODSTs made contact with Major Silva and established a temporary headquarters. Silva then instructed McKay to capture a Covenant-held butte that Silva's AI had projected during his descent. The rest of the battalion stayed at the headquarters' established landing zones, allowing Pelican Dropships to pick up troops for the aerial assault on the butte. The Covenant then staged an assault on the Helljumpers, sending hundreds of Ghosts and later, Banshees. The Marines fended off the attack, killing more than 50 Sangheili, including a Zealot, but suffered twenty-three killed and sixteen wounded. McKay lost only one Marine, while the fourth company lost a few more performing an aerial assault on the butte.
Under orders from Major Silva, Melissa McKay led her team of ODSTs in an assault on Alpha Base. They fought their way up a ramp spiraling up the butte, while the Covenant attempted to eliminate the humans by raining plasma grenades on them. Meanwhile, Silva began loading troops onto the Pelicans for an aerial insertion onto the butte, halted briefly by the Covenant attack.
After fighting their way up the butte, McKay's team was halted by a rockfall. However, a door set into the side of the butte allowed access, and McKay used a rocket launcher to detonate a large number of Covenant explosives, wiping out any Covenant inside. Once inside, they rode a lift up to the surface, where they found that Silva had arrived and had eliminated the remaining Covenant.
Betrayal
Upon arrival on the ring, Captain Jacob Keyes, a Marine fire team led by Corporal Wilkins and the surviving command crew were able to fend off Covenant troops, who were attempting to capture them. However, one officer, Ensign Ellen Dowski was beginning to crack, and wanted to surrender to the Covenant. Believing that she might stir up similar thoughts in the Marine fire team, the team tied her up and left her to surrender to the Covenant herself. However, upon discovering that the gulch they landed in was a box canyon the humans were captured and executed by the Covenant, save for Captain Keyes, who was taken for interrogation.Rescue of Stranded Survivors
“It's a mess, sir. We're scattered all over this valley. We called for evac, but until you showed up, I thought we were cooked.”— Staff Sergeant Johnson to John-117
After crash-landing on the ring, John-117 found that he and Cortana were the only survivors of his life pod. John headed out to get away from Covenant patrols, and after a brief skirmish with one of the small Covenant patrol, he found a group of survivors under attack in a nearby structure. John killed off the Covenant attackers and helped the survivors, including Sergeant Johnson, fend off three more waves of Covenant forces before Echo 419 Foe Hammer finally arrived to pick them up. Witnessing three more lifepods flying overhead, Cortana had Foe Hammer disengage her Warthog for John to find the survivors. He was joined by PFC Fitzgerald who manned the gun and a Marine in the passenger seat.
After making his way through an underground forerunner structure and another brief skirmish with Covenant forces, John found another lifepod abandoned and with no sign of survivors or bodies. However, in the nearby forerunner structure at the of a cliff, John-117 found the missing survivors under attack by Covenant. After clearing out the structure, Echo 419 went to picked up the survivors.
After an encounter with two Covenant Banshees, John-117 found another group of survivors at the top of a hill fending off Covenant attackers. With the help of John-117, the marines killed off the Covenant forces, including those that were dropped off by another Spirit Dropship. After the fight, Echo 419 managed to land her Pelican and to pick up the survivors.
John located the last group of marines hiding in a rock formation and helped them fend off several waves of Covenant forces. With the area secured, Echo 419 picked up the marines as well as John. At the same time, Cortana, having hacked into the Covenant Battlenet, discovered that Captain Keyes was alive but had been captured by the Covenant. Chief and the survivors returned to Alpha Base to plan a rescue mission for the captain.
Raids on the Truth and Reconciliation
“The enemy has captured Captain Keyes, and are holding him aboard one of their cruisers, the Truth and Reconciliation.”— Cortana
The UNSC launched a mission to recover their captured leader, Keyes, who was being held aboard the CCS-class battlecruiser the Truth and Reconciliation. Under the cover of night, John-117 and a squad of ODSTs boarded the ship via its gravity lift. After fighting through the maze-like corridors, the team captured the ship's command center. The ODSTs stayed behind while John-117 went ahead and freed Captain Keyes and several other Marines. When they returned to the bridge, however, they found that the ODSTs had been slaughtered by Stealth Sangheili. Furthermore, Echo 419 was under attack from Covenant air patrols and was unable to pick them up. In order to escape, John and Keyes hijacked a Covenant dropship and used it to return to Alpha Base.
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