Geoff knew there was trouble from the moment he saw the commander walk into the flashing lights of the cockpit. Flashing lights were never a good sign, he had learned throughout the time he had spent in the UNSC, which wasn't that long. He began to overhear parts of the conversation between the pilot and Mira. He heard the occasional word; [i]Fleet, Covenant, land, risk.[/i] He glanced up at the commander, and knew what was required. He stood, and prepared to jump. He hadn't even finished thinking about what hell could possibly be on the ground below before he saw the others start to jump, and followed suite. "Helljumpers will never know what it feels like to do [i]this[/i]." He said over the COM.

Aria could spread herself across hundreds of systems, monitor hundreds of things and still have plenty of space left in her processors. However, she was surprised that she hadn't detected the plasma shooting straight at the ship, and gutting it. Many compartments got damaged, and as she opened the communications software a second bolt of plasma was already slicing into them. She knew the ship was going to go down. Aria even knew that nobody was going to make it to the escape pods. She only had thirty seconds. She had to act quickly to survive. Quickly, she enacted the Cole Protocol on the ship, then began to tear herself apart, pushing herself into each of the escape pods' computers. Twenty seconds later, she programmed a virus to destroy what was left of her programming on the ship, and ejected all of the pods of the ship, sending them all hurtling toward the ring at high velocities. She kept in touch with herself using each of the escape pods' COM units, but struggled to keep them all aligned on a course of which they would survive the transition into atmosphere.