Prelate Plan

	It had been an audacious plan. A single light cruiser against an assault carrier. Outmatched in arms and armor, the Prelate had known one thing for certain: Spear of Light would never survive the fight. But the genius of his strategy was accepting the inevitable destruction of his ship and turning it to his advantage.
	The Prelate had visited Duraan’s system once before, on one of the many training missions that had kept him far from home. Back then he and his inexperienced Jiralhanae crew had been surprised at just how rapidly Duraan’s red dwarf star had degraded their cruiser’s shields. But the Prelate had filed away this miscalculation, as he did with all his missteps, as a tool for self-improvement. Years later, when he had wracked his brain for the best place to spring a trap, his memories of the red dwarf’s powerful storms, as well as Duraan’s small, poorly armed settlements, quickly sorted this planet to the top of the list.
	Like most plans, this one had variables the Prelate couldn’t control, the biggest of which was the Half-Jaw himself. The red dwarf could do only so much to degrade Shadow of Intent’s defenses. For the Prelate’s gambit to work, he needed the Half-Jaw to throw everything he had at Spear of Light—to so desperately want to kill the Prelate here and now before he could do any more harm that he would be willing to expend Shadow of Intent’s many advantages in a single devastating blow.

-Halo: Fractures, pg. 179-180 (Halo: Shadow of Intent)