Ascendant Justice

Ascendant Justice was a flagship-class Covenant cruiser. Covenant flagships are rarely seen. These behemoths are covered by plasma turrets and are filled with many of the Covenant's best troops. These ships also carry an unusual amount of engineers, presumably to keep the ship running and battle-capable for far longer than it could otherwise. These ships are the backbone of the Covenant armada. They are the ships that carry the military command personnel and give out orders during battle.

The flagships carry a very different weapon than most of the Covenant capital ships use. It fires a very small beam of energy, theorized to be plasma or light, at tremendous speed. It cuts through all known UNSC ship defenses and can literally cut ships to pieces, though the Covenant seem to simply target a ship's reactor core which destroys the whole ship. This weapon has a very extreme range and can be fired while the flagship isn't even in the midst of battle.

This type of ship was seen at the Fall of Reach in 2552. Thermal and intrusive scans were unable to gain any significant information on it's full armament.

The Ascendant Justice was a Covenant Flagship, one of the ships in the Fleet of Particular Justice, and probably used to command large fleets. It appeared in Halo: First Strike. It had seven plasma turrets and was noted to have three thousand Covenant personnel, mostly Engineers, along with quite a small crew of combat personnel, a light company of Grunts and only a hundred Elites, when its size was taken into consideration. There were apparently enough Engineers on board to merit them having an access tunnel of their own. The Master Chief noted that he "hadn't seen anything like this on the Truth and Reconciliation," and that it was "armed like a ship of war... yet had the support staff of a refit vessel".

This ship was present at the destruction of Installation 04, and was hijacked by surviving UNSC forces, among them Master Chief. The ship was, in turn, used against the Covenant, and was responsible for the destruction of the battle station Unyielding Hierophant, delaying Earth's inevitable doom. Prior to its sacrifice, the ship also helped rescue survivors from Reach, more specifically, from ONI's CASTLE Base.

It's Slipspace generators were placed on the UNSC Gettysburg, which was gutted in the Battle of Reach, making the Gettysburg the fastest and most accurate ship in the UNSC with regards to Slipspace travel.

The future Arbiter was mentioned as "the Guardian of the Luminous Key" and "the incompetent who...lost Ascendant Justice" at the end of First Strike, and the High Prophet of Truth instructed Tartarus to "let his fate match the magnitude of his failure". Although not the head starship of the Covenant forces that pursued the Pillar of Autumn to Installation 04, Ascendant Justice obviously was of great importance to the Covenant for Truth to issue such a severe punishment as witnessed in Halo 2.