Spectre 117 (Halo & Mass Effect Story)

Chapter 4: Welcome To The Normandy, Chief!

(Disclaimer: I do not own Halo or Mass Effect)

09:30 Hours, February 21th, 2560
SSV Mt. Everest
Undisclosed Location in Earth's orbit

A few days have past, Chief has started getting used to improvements in the Alliance. New weapons, armor, everything.  He still kept Cortana a secret so that he wouldn't lose her again.

Chief spent the first day taking a look around the ship, wanting to get a feel for how Human ships worked now. People stopped and stared in muted awe everywhere he went, but he was used to it by now. Once he had a rough idea of the ship's layout, he spent most of his time in the ship's firing range, familiarizing himself with all the new weapons.

A firing instructor was more than happy to assist, on the condition that Chief posed for a holo that the instructor can send to his son. Chief wasn't the most photogenic soldier, but hey, it was for the guy's son. He grinned and bore it as the instructor took the holo.

After that, he was trained in how the new firearms work. First off, they can be 'folded' into more compact forms when not in use, allowing soldiers to carry more weapons into battle with them.

It was practically a dream come true for the Chief. More guns meant more ways to win a fight. The standard marine was able to take up to four weapons into battle with them at a time: an assault rifle and a sniper rifle on each side of the upper back, a shotgun on the lower back, and a pistol on either thigh. The ammo feature was a plus too. Once 'Mass Effect' technology was incorporated into firearms, ammunition was no longer an issue. Guns' ammo compartments were filled with blocks of hard metal.

From what he learned, shards of metal the size of sand grains were carved off the block and fired at the target at lethal speeds. Since a single block in each weapon was usually enough to last a mission, scrounging for ammo was no longer an issue. The tradeoff was the weapons would overheat if fired continuously for too long, and it would take a few seconds to cool if it did. Chief was impressed. Human technicians have come a long way since the MA5C.

The Spartan and the AI decided that they should spend their time next learning as much as they can about what happened after Chief went into cryo. There was one subject in particular the Chief wanted to know about; Halo.

Both Chief and Cortana were surprised to learn that the home cluster of Humanity and the Covenant races has been labeled 'the Forerunner Cluster' by official Citadel star-charters. The reason for this surprised the two even more; it was the only place in the entire known galaxy where Forerunner ruins and relics could be found. Chief was deeply confused by this. The Forerunners were supposed to have an empire that spanned the entire galaxy. The Halo array was supposed to span the entire galaxy. They did some more digging into the subject and found that, while two of the seven halo rings were destroyed, the other five were still out there somewhere. There are absolutely no records of any of the new alien races having ever encountered anything like Halo.

Cortana theorized that the other five rings were each behind a dormant mass relay, a theory that seemed plausible since, even with the mass relay network, experts say that less than one percent of the entire galaxy has been charted and mapped, let alone explored or discovered. It did little to comfort the Chief. Halo was too dangerous to allow to simply drift in space, waiting for a sentient species dumb enough to either release the Flood or activate the failsafe that would turn every species in the galaxy capable of calculus into piles of goo. Not to mention it still left the question why Forerunner ruins weren't found in other places in the galaxy.

On a lighter note though, many worlds with Forerunner ruins have become very popular tourist destinations among the new aliens. Apparently selling t-shirts and Forerunner-inspired knick-knacks was where Humanity was getting much of its funding these days.