"Tell them to make it count."

Jorge watched as the lieutenant disappeared below the lip of the Covenant Corvette's hangar. Turning away, he slowly walked back to the slipspace bomb the crew of the Savannah had jury-rigged to destroy the Supercarrier orbiting Reach. The entire bay was quiet as a grave, which the Spartan-II found to be fitting for his last moments.

Calmly, knowing these steps would be his last, he walked to the panel crudely welded onto the Slipspace drive and began the activation procedure that Savannah's technicians had shown him. Jorge pressed two buttons and the cylindrical section of the drive began to spin up with a black-on-purple glow. Another button, and the energy rotated the rear section around its axis, projecting an enormous sphere of crackling purple that the Spartan recognized as the doorway into the other realm of Spacetime.

As the energy washed over Jorge, he felt a nudge at his feet. The supersoldier looked down to see his helmet, smudged and dirty. The orange-gold visor seemed to be looking up at him, begging him to be put back on. Jorge reached down and grabbed the helmet, pulling it back on his head. It felt good, and as he waited for the blackness to take him, the Spartan was at peace. Reach would be spared.

XXX

Another day, another hell-hole alien planet, thought Subject Zero.

The biotic looked up as another Geth dropship screamed through the air to dump more of the synthetics into the outpost at the top of the hill. Rounds pinged off the rocks covering her position as she glanced up at the fortified emplacement. This sucks, she thought, Fuck this shit.

Half an hour ago, the squad had landed near the broken research facility, and Shepard had ordered her to keep a watch on their backs while he and Jacob paved the way through the complex. In the bowels of the half-destroyed mountain tunnels, they hadn't found a single soul to greet them, until the husks showed up. Dozens of the techno-zombies had pulled themselves out of every crevice imaginable to assault the squad. Jack's Eviscerator shotgun had become her most prized possession at that point.

After a long trek through the tunnels, Shepard had lead them out into the open sunlight to find a squad of Geth waiting for them. The synthetics had put down heavy cannons pointing away from the door, as though they were going to use the facility as a base. However, when the squad arrived, the guns quickly swiveled around to face the small door, and the three of them were forced to take cover.

The big cannons were similar to the type used by colossus bots, so they thankfully wouldn't destroy the granite that made up their cover, but if one of the squad was caught in the blast, they'd be fried almost instantly. Commander Shepard shouted over to her, she could barely hear over the rifle fire.

"WHAT?!" she yelled.

"I said, lay down a shockwave on that right emplacement!" Shepard repeated, pointing to a low wall that several geth were hiding behind. He quickly ducked back behind cover as a round hit the rock near his helmet.

Jack looked up at the wall. The heavy cannons were focused on the Commander, so she had a free moment to strike. Concentrating on the energy within her, Subject Zero clenched her fist three times in the motion she had trained herself to make when she wanted to unleash hell. The nerves in her spinal cord fired, hitting the trace elements of eezo in her body in a specific pattern.

When she was finished, the biotic energy flew out from her and created a series of detonations like a freight train towards the geth position. When the purple-blue energy connected, the synthetics were thrown to and fro away from their cover, and like champion skeet shooters, Shepard and Jacob knocked the majority of them out of the air before they ever hit the deck.

Ducking back behind her cover, Jack smiled and pumped her fist to herself. Gravity's a bitch, she thought, and so am I.

XXX

Far above the fighting squad, the Normandy hung in low orbit of Circinius III, surveying the planet for any other threats. The Artificial Intelligence known as EDI filtered through the data available in an attempt to find the source of the geth dropships. The craft had managed to avoid the Normandy's sensors in a very familiar manner, making the AI very suspicious. She decided to alert Jeff "Joker" Moreau before continuing her analysis.

"Mr. Moreau, I'm detecting an anomaly in the Geth forces arrayed against Commander Shepard," said EDI.

"What kind of anomaly?" came the reply. EDI could "see" the pilot through her bridge cams, and his body language subtly changed to reflect the onrush of adrenaline as he queried for more information.

"The dropships are evading my sensor scans," she said flatly, "Their patterns seem to indicate a known form of stealth technology."

"'Known form?'" asked Joker, "Is there a way to counter it?"

"Data is incomplete," EDI replied, "but initial analysis suggests that their stealth technology mirrors that of the Normandy."

"So, 'no,'" Joker said, sighing to himself, "Anything else we can do?"

EDI took a millisecond to view the datafeeds again. There was a small spike in gamma rays just north of the destroyed research facility.

"There may be a hidden geth base 2 kilometers north of the Commander's current location," she told the pilot, "Shepard may wish to investigate, if only to stop the arrival of more reinforcements to his location."

Joker nodded before hitting the groundside comm channel, "Commander, we've got a problem."

"Can it wait?" came the Commander's reply, "We're kind of busy down here."

"EDI's been analyzing the dropships," said Joker, "and she thinks that they may be using a version of the Normandy's stealth technology."

"That's not something I want to hear," said the Commander, his voice booming in the cockpit.

"How do you think I feel?" asked Joker, throwing his hands up, even though the commander couldn't see them, "Good news is that there may be a base just north of your location, if you can get to it, then you can kick the geth off the planet for your trouble."

"Much better, Shepard out," came the reply.

Joker sighed and rubbed his face for a moment before returning to the delicate task of piloting the Normandy. EDI spent a few runtimes observing him while she continued her analysis of the data from the planet. Everything seemed normal to her sensors, but Geth Dropships continued to deliver troops seemingly from nowhere, and, despite her guess from before, she was still unsure of exactly where they were coming from.

Suddenly, her sensors were overwhelmed with a massive energy spike, and it wasn't coming from the planet. She directed one of the ship's exterior cameras to look at a spot 15 kilometers away, and the AI witnessed something no being, organic or synthetic, had seen in this galaxy. It was a strange cyclone of purple-white light rimming what could easily have been mistaken for a black hole.

"Mr. Moreau, anomaly off the starboard bow!" she said through the cockpit comms, and she brought up the external camera's feed in her normal holotank. The AI watched as Joker did a doubletake at the screen before saying anything.

"What is that?" he asked, incredulous.

"Unknown," came the reply, "energy readings are off the scale."

"Activating stealth drive," Joker said as he pushed a few buttons on his console, "let's hope they won't still see us."

XXX

Jorge looked into the strange electroluminescence of Slipspace and saw an opening. It had only been fifteen minutes since he'd consigned himself to his fate aboard the Ardent Prayer, and the Spartan was confused as to the sudden exit from the field that had ripped the Long Night of Solace into thirds. The middle section of the large ship began to eject orange, crimson, and purple plasma as systems all over it exploded from containment losses; Jorge had watched the display of energy and color with a certain sense of relief that he wouldn't have to personally kill every covenant soldier aboard the wrecked ship.

Now he was wondering if his acceptance of his end had been too early, as the opening in slipspace grew larger, showing a predominantly green planet in their path. The Spartan contemplated his odds of survival in a covenant ship he knew nothing about, with mostly-fried engines and a very dead crew, versus a broken pelican with some amount of survival equipment in it.

Choosing familiar UNSC tech over the Covenant equivalent yet again, Jorge began scrambling past the still-active slipspace bomb into the cockpit of the pelican. The thruster gimbal had been shot to pieces only minutes ago, but he reckoned that if he could at least get the dropship out of the hangar, his chances of surviving a planetfall would go up significantly.

The pilot's seat was a tight fit for the big S-II, but he managed to spin up the engine just as the covenant corvette broke fully into realspace. Unlike most slipspace exits, this one struck him like the hard thump of entering atmosphere, and Jorge wondered just how close the ship was to the green planet as he put the pelican to full throttle.

Not very much happened, as the UNSC ship had taken much more damage than the Spartan had originally thought, but before he had time to react, Jorge was thrown into his seat as the corvette rotated in space and the hangar door pointed towards the planet below. The massive gravity of the world took hold of the pelican and pulled it out of the hangar, backwards.

In freefall, Jorge had nothing to do but hold on as the dropship spun about in the increasingly thickening atmosphere of the new world. Keeping his head cool, and using what motions he could with what remained of the Pelican's stabilization gear, Jorge managed to point the cockpit of the pelican on the horizon, and friction began to heat up the thick underside of the damaged craft.

He did what he could to stabilize the pelican, and it began a bizarre sort of glide towards the planet's surface, with its stubby wings providing only a fraction of the lift required to fly.

As the craft was buffeted around, and the altimeter showed no signs of slowing, the Spartan realized that despite his reluctance to leave behind his equipment, and his gun, the odds of surviving the fall from space were rapidly diminishing. After a moment to set a distress beacon and open the rear cargo door, Jorge lifted himself from his seat to enter the rear section of the pelican. Wind whistled past the open door and the slipspace bomb, pushing and pulling him around the cargo area. The S-II hobbled over to the emergency kits to see if there was something, anything, he could use to slow his fall to the planet below. The only thing in the craft was a standard AE-12 parachute, designed for a normal pilot.

Jorge quickly determined how much weight the parachute was designed for, versus how much he actually weighed. The results would not be pretty, but the Spartan hoped that his enhanced durability would mitigate the amount of damage he would undoubtedly receive.

The pack wouldn't fit over his shoulders, so Jorge did the next best thing, he grabbed as many of the straps as he could, and used the Mjolnir armor controls to lock his fist into place, just in case he was knocked unconscious. Parachute in hand, the Spartan edged his way past the now-dead slipspace bomb, and leapt from the craft.

He was easily 10 miles from the surface of the world, and the lack of anything around him meant that Jorge could turn and look back at the crashing ships. The Long Night of Solace was plummeting towards the unknown planet, its exposed decks catching fire in the atmosphere. The corvette, Ardent Prayer, was in considerably better shape, though it still fell like a rock towards the planet.

Jorge turned back towards the surface of the world and angled his body like an aerodynamic surface. With a little luck, he would be able to angle for a body of water or some trees to slow his fall after the parachute deployed, because while the pack was strong enough to not break, its surface area would not slow him enough to make a safe landing anywhere else.

XXX

"EDI, what exactly are we looking at?" asked Joker's voice through the comms. Commander Kirk Shepard paused in his assault on the geth fortification to look skyward. In the milky grey sky, he could just see a black spot of whirling energy near where his HUD told him the Normandy would be.

EDI's smooth voice continued their conversation, apparently oblivious to the fact that he was listening. "It looks like... a ship," she said, "unknown classification, and heavily damaged. Magnifying available image."

On his HUD, Shepard could see a small view of what they were looking at appear in an unobtrusive place. The "ship" was almost nothing like he'd ever seen. For a start, it was purple, and its flowing lines resembled something like a salarian craft, or perhaps the Destiny Ascension, but it seemed much bigger. Of course, to his navyman's eye it was also very broken, as though the front and rear sections had been sheared off, so there was no way to tell how big it really was.

Jacob pushed forward into the gun emplacement, biotically throwing two synthetics into the heavy walls before gunning down a third with his heavy pistol. He looked back at the Commander, then followed his gaze skyward, holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun. The ex-marine's jaw dropped to the ground as he saw the speck that was the strange ship begin to grow in the sky. At the rate it was approaching, Shepard could tell it was in total freefall. His HUD's computer calculated the trajectory as it fell, and a destination appeared on the ground just north of their location. The Commander grinned under his facemask.

"Looks like that crash is going to do our job for us," he said before spotting something else in the sky. Upon receiving input from his neural lace, his HUD magnified on a smaller flaming object beneath the massive ship. The Commander could barely make it out, but it looked very much like another, fully intact ship. This one was significantly smaller, and shaped like an eel, its atmospheric resistance pushing it in the opposite direction of the bigger ship.

After a few moments, Kirk's attention was torn away from the oddity as the destroyed larger craft finally impacted the surface of Circinius III, leaving behind a massive explosive cloud.

Joker's voice came through over the comms, "Energy readings normal Commander, whatever that thing was, it completely obliterated the Geth base."

"I copy, Joker, send the Kodiak for a evac and a sweep," Shepard replied before directing his squad, "Alright, everybody, mount up. It's time to clean up some Geth."

XXX

Parachute deployed, thought Jorge as he hung upside down from the chute's straps, Now what?

The surface of the world was approaching fast, and Jorge was still looking for a decent landing zone. The forests directly below him looked enticing, but he could also see large patches of rock jutting up through the foliage. Hitting one of those would likely stop the S-II dead, which would hurt.

He looked further towards the crashsite of the Long Night of Solace, in between his location and the burning wreck, Jorge spotted a small lake. Even though he was a mile up, he decided that it would likely be his only option for survival, especially when the beacon in the pelican appeared on his HUD in roughly the same direction.

The lake's dark blue water suggested that it would be deep enough to catch him, and as the Spartan pulled on the straps to aim himself as best he could, he unlocked his armored gauntlet. The earlier precaution would cause him to overshoot if he held on, since the chute was not very good at steering, especially with the harness not properly attached. Looking down, Jorge calculated his current velocity based on the tiny shadow he could see of himself on the ground. He would have to let go at a precise moment to land in the center of the lake.

3...2...1, Jorge thought as he let go of the parachute. The nearly unbreakable kevlar weave of the cloth instantly fluttered and dropped with him as soon as there was no anchor weight, but the big Spartan-II's lack of air resistance meant he was rapidly pulling away from it.

As he sped towards the ground, Jorge was relieved to see that his calculations had been correct, and that he would hit the lake dead center. He set about increasing pressure of the Mjolnir armor's gel layer to maximum, and locking the liquid crystal layer as much as possible before he hit the surface of the water. He would sink like a stone, but the suit would keep him alive long enough to get to the edge of the lake.

The Spartan watched as the water rushed towards him, when a craft sped by at a velocity close to the speed of sound. Jorge didn't even feel a thump as his helmet smacked into the door of the shuttle, knocking him unconscious.

XXX

"What the FUCK?!" shouted Jack as the Kodiak shuttle rocked from the side impact. The door next to her had bent inwards like an antique can of sardines, ruining the normally air-tight seals of the craft.

"Pilot, are you trying to kill us?" demanded Shepard into his comm as he banged on the door between the cockpit and the passenger area.

"Something hit us, sir!" said the pilot as the craft slowed, "I didn't see a thing on the scopes."

"Whatever it was, it's in the lake now," Jacob said as they kept flying. He had opened the other door. The wind whipped past him, threatening to tear him out despite his deathgrip on one of the shuttle's interior handles.

The Commander joined him at the door to look back. Ripples in the lake were spreading out from the center. Whatever had hit them must have been big to make that much of a splash.

"We'll be fine," came the pilot's voice over the comms, "I'll drop you off at the LZ and do a systems check. Then I'll radio the Normandy for a lower fly-by to pick us up."

"Wilco, pilot," replied Shepard, as he got back in his seat. The shuttle was almost at the crashsite, and as they put down, the Commander took a quick look at the damage to the opposite door. The impressions from the impact had a the vague shape of a head and shoulders, with a brown, red, and yellow smear of paint transfer. That's odd, Kirk Shepard thought as he looked at the bent metal, but he quickly removed the thoughts from his mind as he readied for the sweep of the impact site.

XXXXXXX

Thank you for starting with me on this new journey into both Mass Effect and Halo. As the narrative flows into being, I hope to capture as much of the wonder, action, adventure, comedy, drama, and wry self-depreciation of both of the series that have inspired me to write this story. I will answer any questions posed to me in a review or message as best I can on the next update's footnotes. I hope that you all enjoy reading this story as much as I have enjoyed writing it.