‘Halo’: Here’s Why Covenant Needs Cortana

We’re halfway through ‘Halo’ season 2 and the show is finally adapting the ‘Fall of The Reach’ storyline. While fans pointed out that the storyline is much different than the one shown in the games and books, just like the rest of the series, we decided to take our time to explain one important difference, Covenant’s focus on Cortana and why Makee decided to risk her life to capture her.

Cortana is barely seen in season 2

We know that Cortana played a bigger role in season 1 as she was both a means to control Master Chief and an incredibly valuable asset that Halsey once described as being the next step in humanity’s evolution. Cortana spent several episodes merged with Master Chief and we’ve seen that she was not your typical AI as she could comprehend the concepts of sadness and loyalty and even felt some semblance of loyalty toward Master Chief.

Even though the two were separated we knew that Cortana was never simply deleted she was too valuable to get rid of and Ackerson recognized her worth and so did Covenant.

Why didn’t Ackerson evacuate Cortana?

In episode 3 we’ve seen Ackerson running simulation after simulation regarding humanity’s odds to win the war against the Covenant. Especially if The Covenant happens to target Reach. Ackerson was aware that it was only a matter of time but he decided to gaslight the Spartans and the lower command of UNSC due to his own ulterior motives.

He explained to Jacob Keyes that humanity would fight, but they wouldn’t win so their focus was on evacuating important assets off the world so they don’t fall into the wrong hands. However, we’ve seen that the Covenant stole one-half of the artifact while storming Visegrad, and who knows what happened to the second half. Presumably, Ackerson evacuated it as he was last seen handling it.

When Halsey and Soren reached Cortana’s chamber they surprisingly found the AI where she was last seen, Cortana manifested and told Halsey to run as Makee grabbed the device holding her. Cortana is a rather strange asset to leave behind, taking into consideration that Ackerson decided to take Mjolnir armors that Spartans conventionally wear into combat. Without that armor, Spartans are barely better than regular humans as we could see in episode 4.

Now it’s clear that Ackerson never wanted to give a fighting chance to humanity as he took all assets that humanity could utilize in the fight. We know that Master Chief could generate powerful shockwaves by interacting with the artifact, and he could also kill legions of Covenant forces in his armor – those objects were taken away. It’s as if Ackerson wanted to help the Covenant by leaving Cortana behind. So Ackerson is either a saboteur, or this Cortana that stayed behind was fake, but he is not stupid.

Cortana is the biggest database of human knowledge if you know how to use it

Now naturally Makee obviously wanted to take the artifact but she still decided to take Cortana since it was the second-best thing she could come across. Cortana has all the human knowledge even some classified UNSC information that no one but Ackerson and a few higher-ups knew. Obviously, if Ackerson was performing in-depth simulations of the potential outcome of the battle, it’s clear that he had to feed as much info into Cortana as possible, highly accurate information that’s up-to-date.

Having such an AI in your service would be devastating for the opposite side, imagine knowing enemy positions, supplies, capacities, protocols, routes well just about anything.

The second reason why the Covenant would want Cortana is due to her former connection with Master Chief, the two were “two souls” sharing one body at one point in time so whatever John saw or knew regarding the artifact, Cortana did as well, and Cortana has much better memory than your regular human, even the blessed one.

The map that Master Chief and Makee projected on Raas Kkhotskha was incomplete, so perhaps Covenant can utilize Cortana to find out more. It’s likely that they will never be able to use her, except if they decide to hack her which would be near-impossible, but still, it’s dangerous for them to have her and somebody will be losing sleep over it.

It’s likely that Cortana will find a way to win this attack for humanity as she also has a perfect opportunity to sabotage the Covenant. As I’ve mentioned at the beginning Cortana is not your classical AI, she developed quite a unique loyalty, let’s just hope she stays loyal to humanity.

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