Spectre 117 (Halo & Mass Effect Story)

Chapter 13: Dr. T'soni

(I do not own Halo or Mass Effect)

08:48 Hours, February 27th, 2560
Science Camp
Surface of Therum
Knossos System, Artemis Tau Cluster

"SON OF A BITCH!!!" Joe yelled at the top of his lungs as his meager cover endured yet another pulse blast from the armature.

He, along with Ashley, Tali, Wrex and Garrus, were hiding behind a crate. The five of them would pop out of cover and unleash hot mass accelerator rounds on the armature in between pulse shots, but nothing they did seemed to do so much as damage it. Then again, damaging it wasn't really their job.

Their job was to draw its fire while Chief, Fives, Echo, and Kaidan did the real work.

The plan was that Kaidan and Echo would use their tech skills to disable the armature's shields and then Chief, Arbiter, and Fives would open fire until the armature's shields recharged. Kaidan would then disable them again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

However, the addition of Geth infantry, the hoppers in particular, were complicating things.

The troopers were fairly simple to deal with under normal circumstances. They were your standard rank and file infantry; they saw an enemy, they shot it. Nothing fancy about them.

The hopper, however, was unlike anything the squad had ever encountered before. It wreaked havoc on the team's tech by constantly firing off EMP blasts that shorted out weapons and shields. The laser it shoots from its eye certainly doesn't help matters. Worst of all, it was jamming their motion trackers.

The Chief had to deal with radar jammers multiple times throughout the Human-Covenant war, but it was just a little metal ball that could easily be smashed. This time, the radar jammer was an annoying little pest that hopped in every which way around the squad, making itself very hard to hit. This, to say the least, annoyed The Chief greatly.

The hopper continued to leap from one end of the battlefield to the other, mocking the organics and their pitiful attempts to hit it. It landed on top of the crate that Chief, Fives, Echo, Arbiter, and Kaidan were using as cover, with the intention of shooting them with a quick laser before hopping to another spot.

It peaked its head over the edge and took a pot shot at the SPARTAN-II.

His shields were already down, but his armor was thick and did an admirable job of repelling such blasts, muck like it did with plasma in the great war. The hopper leapt away.

Or rather, it tried to.

Thanks to superconducting fibrification of his neural dendrites, Master Chief's reflexes were roughly 300% quicker than that of most humans. The hopper was apparently unaware of this.

In fact, as the SPARTAN-II's hand grabbed the hopper's ankle in mid-leap, its logic processors and internal organic capability database were all scrambling to determine how and why this human's reflexes were approximately 294.42% faster than most humans'. It was the Geth equivalent of yelping out 'How in God's name did you do that'?

Chief looked on as the hopper's limbs were frantically grabbing at the soil, trying to gain traction in an attempt to get away.

Not likely...

The SPARTAN-II's hand was essentially a bear trap around the hopper's ankle, and appropriately enough, it looked just like an animal trying to get out of it. Kaidan didn't need orders from the spartan to pour some shots into the Geth hopper's torso. With the hopper dead, the squad breathed a sigh of relief once their motion trackers cleared up.