^ ^ Actually the Fall of Reach and Halo Reach have been merged as one by Bungie. So here is what happened with both of those being combined. warning a lot of writing. By 2552, many of Humanity's Inner colonies have been destroyed by the Covenant. In a move of desperation, ONI Section 3 orders the execution of a secret plan to capture a Covenant ship using the Spartans. The ship would be taken to the Covenant home world in order to capture a Prophet and then use the Prophet as a bargaining chip to negotiate a truce. Every remaining Spartan-II - with the exceptions of Gray Team, Kurt-051, Jorge-052, Maria-062, the original Red Team, and Black Team - boards a specially outfitted Halcyon-class light cruiser known as the UNSC Pillar of Autumn, which is under the command of Captain Jacob Keyes. The Pillar of Autumn moves out towards the edges of the system to make a Slipspace jump to begin the mission. This plan, however, is interrupted when a massive Covenant fleet of 314 ships enters the Epsilon Eridani System. Captain Keyes orders the Pillar of Autumn back towards Reach, but John-117 convinces him to allow the Spartans to continue their mission by finding a damaged Covenant ship to capture and take to Covenant space. Reach's fleet, with about a hundred ships and twenty Orbital Defense Platforms on hand, engages the Covenant fleet, but takes massive losses. However, the Super MAC platforms manage to repulse the initial Covenant assault. The Covenant return and land troops on Reach with the objective of destroying the generators for the Super MACs, the only things which are stopping the Covenant. At the same time, the UNSC realizes that the UNSC Circumference, a Prowler, is still docked at a station orbiting the planet of Reach just before its fall and has not initiated the Cole Protocol. John takes Linda and James to deal with the Circumference, while the rest of the Spartans are sent down to the planet to defend the MACs' power generators. John's team crash-land their Pelican on the station which the Circumference is docked on and move towards the NAV data. However, James' thruster pack is hit by a Needler shard and explodes, sending James flying uncontrollably into space, where he presumably dies. John and Linda proceed to the Circumference, where they find Sergeant Johnson and his Marines, including Jenkins and Bisenti, also fighting to wipe the data. With John's help, the Marines are successful, but Linda is shot by five separate plasma blasts. The humans fall back to the Autumn; Linda is clinically dead because of the extensive wounds she receives, but is placed in a cryotube in the hope that she can be resuscitated. John then puts himself in cryosleep shortly afterwards. Doctor Halsey then contacts Pillar of Autumn and tells Keys about the fragment for Cortana she still has and how it could save humanity with the data it has ( on the Halo rings ) Keys agrees and takes the ship back into orbit to a dock near castle base to wait for Noble team and to make much needed repairs on the ship. Noble team soon arrives the fragment of Cortana is delivered onto the ship before it escaped back into orbit. The surface of Reach is overrun. The Spartans who John sent to the surface are presumably overrun and all slaughtered. Without the generators, the Super MACs fall silent and are destroyed by the Covenant, who soon begin glassing the planet. The remaining UNSC ships are almost all destroyed in the battle as they try to escape. Meanwhile the Pillar of Autumn, manages to break though the Covenant fleet as Cortana plotted an exit vector in compliance with the Cole Protocol, though not completely at random. She now joined up with her fragment from Noble team had decrypted Forerunner glyphs found by John-117 on Sigma Octanus IV. The NAV coordinates led the Pillar of Autumn to what the Covenant had been searching for: Halo, an extremely sacred Forerunner artifact. The ship then goes into slip space towards installation 04.