[quote][b]Posted by:[/b] hobojones1122 [quote][b]Posted by:[/b] Arok2091 [quote][b]Posted by:[/b] hobojones1122 ok well I love the halo books and have read them each about 4 times now but I read that this book is about the Gray team and that it takes place DURING the games...? I'm a little confused because if you go through all the books and do the math you find out that there starts out with 33 Spartans after they are augmented but then they lose Sam when they get their first suits and Kurt goes MIA to train the Spartan IIIs so that only leaves 31 left. Then during The Fall of Reach and The First Strike you find out that 3 Spartans go on the Space Station to take care of the Nav comp. which leave 28 left and it makes mention that Fred has 26 Spartans in his squad when he goes to the ground battle which leaves only 1 Spartan left out there some where that was never apart of the original mission to steal a covenant ship... so unless this book takes place BEFORE the actual fall of Reach then I don't understand how it could be possible... I mean I thought about after wards when Fred, Will, and Linda get back to earth after their rescue in The First Strike being the Gray Team but then that really wouldn't make sense because The Ghosts of Onyx covers their story... so please, if anyone could help me figure this out then could you please do so? [/quote] We were never given an exact number of Spartan-II's that survived the augmentation, it just said roughly half. We also were never told exactly how many Spartans made it to Reach and how many perished there. But yes it is safe to assume that it takes place before the actual Fall of Reach because the book is called the Cole Protocol which was a protocol used to not let the Covenant find Earth and that protocol has been around since the Covenant first made contact with the humans.[/quote] well actually if you turn to page 61 of The Fall of Reach you will find a passage that tells you exactly how many Spartan IIs survived the augmentation... "Not everyone had been lost. John glanced around the launch chamber: Sam, Kelly, and thirty others still stood at attention in their black dress uniforms. They had made it unharmed trough the last-mission wasn't quite the right word. More or less." and if you turn to page 12 of The First Strike you'll find a passage that tells you exactly how many Spartan IIs went to the surface of Reach during it's fall... "He activated his motion sensors, boosting the range to maximum. His team appeared as blips on his heads-up display. With a sigh of relief he saw that all twenty-six of them were present and pulling into a wedge formation." and as mentioned in both The Fall of Reach and The First Strike John, Linda, and James go on the Space op at Reach... so if you do the math then there is only one Spartan out there during the fall of Reach that was never there... but then it still contradicts itself because later in The Ghosts of Onyx on page 172 of the large print you find that there are two other Spartans beside Sam and Hurt that went missing or were confirmed dead and they were Randall and Sheila who both went MIA before the fall of Reach so they couldn't have been there either meaning that there is an extra spartan that was not there in the beginning... don't get me wrong, I want to read this new book too it's just that I noticed all thes contradictions and needed to tell someone about it...[/quote] Yea it's been a while since I read those books so I guess I forgot that. Well no series is perfect so it only makes since that something this big would have its contradictions. But for all we know Gray Team could just be one person. I know that it never said in the books how many people had to be in a group to make it a team.