"A Tom Doherty Associates book."

Humanity has expanded beyond the Sol System. There are hundreds of planets we now call "home." The United Nations Space Command now struggles to control this vast empire. After exhausting all strategies to keep seething insurrections from exploding into interplanetary civil war, the UNSC has one last hope. At the Office of Naval Intelligence, Dr. Catherine Halsey has been hard at work on a top secret program that could bring an end to all this conflict...and it starts with seventy-five children, among them a six year old boy named John. Halsey never guessed that this little boy would become humanity's final hope against a vast alien force hell-bent on wiping us out. This is the story of John, Spartan-117...the Master Chief, and of the battles that brought humanity face to face with its possible extinction.