Disappointed Halsey remains Hitlerised (or is that Halsey'ed now?). I remember Frankie responding to our concerns about this characterisation in the earlier books, explaining that this was part of her story arc, but I'm yet to see any efforts to add some balance.

Every character in the Kilo-5 seems convinced that Halsey somehow orchestrated the Spartan II program single handedly, that she was the evil brains behind it who tricked the UNSC into kidnapping children and brainwashing them into super soldiers. This narrative was asserted way back in Glasslands, to which all of us rightly responded that it's nonsense to ignore the fact that her actions were sanctioned, and in fact encouraged by the UNSC and she did not act alone. It's frustrating to see that no effort was really made to address this fact, with only Naomi acknowledging it briefly at the end.

I'm really not a fan of how they've hijacked Halsey's character to be the boogie man of the UNSC, even going so far as to retcon her diary and recode her words of concern and sympathy for the SIIs as capricious and delusional. (I doubt i'm alone in this, so it's troubling to see 343i insist on heading in this direction).

Aside from this though, my problem with Mortal Dicta is that it's plot just seemed lacklustre. At the end of the day, Kilo-5's mission was to capture a single covenant ship, not even a big ship. The whole time I was reading it all I could think was that if this were a Nylund book, a task as simple as capturing a single covenant ship would've been handled in less than a chapter, with the team moving on to pursue a considerably more ambitious objective (e.g. destroying the Unyielding Hierophant, the battle of Onyx etc). It might seem shallow of me but I just expect something grander from a Halo story.

The book didn't really do anything to push the universe forward, I assume this is because they didn't want to step on the toes of Halo 5, but with no real mention of the Chief, the Arbiter, Blue Team, Infinity, Requiem (aside from passing references), it's hard to feel like the book really meant anything.

And still too many "as the humans say" lines.

But really, apart from the Halsey-hate, it wasn't a bad or unenjoyable book, it just didn't really meet my expectations for an entry in the series.