Geth Armory: Arsenal of the Synthetics

The Geth Armory was the name that organic merchants, soldiers, and requisition officers attached to the weapons and armor manufacture of the geth, the synthetic collective that drove its quarian creators from Rannoch in the Morning War. Few details were ever known about how the geth actually produced their equipment, since geth space remained closed to outsiders, but the products themselves spoke plainly enough. Geth weapons and armor ranked among the finest in the galaxy, extremely difficult for organics to find and, when found, without equal in several respects. The Armory's pulse weapons served as the standard armament of the geth military, its heavy armor lines clothed high ranking krogan warlords, and its rarest products passed into legend, including a sniper rifle whose true origin no one could settle.

An arsenal without factories#

No organic power ever documented the foundries, assembly lines, or design councils behind geth equipment, if any such things existed at all. What crossed the frontier were finished products, and those products carried the unmistakable signature of their makers. Geth weapons shared the appearance of the geth themselves, with glowing components, smooth rounded edges, and a shiny chrome finish, as though weapon and wielder had been shaped by a single intelligence to a single standard.

That standard was formidable. Geth weapons were largely superior to organic designed counterparts, and they were accurate to a degree organic manufacturers could not match, a quality attributed to adaptive fire control technology built into the weapons themselves. Geth armor showed the same edge. The materials the geth used in construction gave their armor lines protective qualities that the products of celebrated organic firms struggled to equal. The price of that excellence was inflexibility. Weapons of the Geth Armory did not accept the modifications and upgrades that organic soldiers routinely fitted to their arms; a geth weapon arrived complete, and it stayed as it was made.

Morlan and the Citadel trade#

For all their quality, Geth Armory products were extremely difficult to obtain, and the legitimate trade in them ran through a single narrow channel. A license to sell Geth Armory goods was available from Morlan, a salarian merchant who kept a stall in the Lower Markets of the Citadel Wards. A buyer who secured that license opened the door for suppliers elsewhere to stock the line; the requisition officer aboard an Alliance warship, for instance, could trade in Geth Armory goods once the appropriate license had been purchased.

Even outside that licensed trade, individual pieces occasionally surfaced far from geth space. Merchants such as the Systems Alliance requisition service were known to offer the occasional Geth Pulse Rifle, and in the later years of the war against the Reapers, examples of rarer geth weapons circulated through commercial arsenal suppliers. Every such sale moved a weapon whose makers had never consented to sell it, which perhaps explained both the scarcity and the demand.

The pulse rifle and the geth military#

The signature product of the Geth Armory was the Geth Pulse Rifle, a compact, highly accurate, high powered energy pulse assault weapon. When discharged, the weapon manifested briefly as a sharp cyan beam ending in an electrical discharge. It served as the standard infantry weapon of the geth military and was standard issue to many geth units, including Juggernauts, Shock Troopers, and the common platforms that made up the bulk of geth ground forces.

The pulse rifle announced itself to the wider galaxy in blood. During the geth assault on Eden Prime, the opening stroke of the war that followed, the weapon demonstrated a particular affinity for ripping through kinetic shields, evidenced by the death of Corporal Richard L. Jenkins, cut down in the first moments of contact. The body of another Alliance soldier killed in that campaign, Nirali Bhatia, had been so heavily damaged by pulse weapon discharges that the Alliance was believed to have withheld it from her family for research into better defenses against geth pulse technology.

Pulse technology was not confined to the rifle. The same principles extended to the armament of geth recon drones, and may have been related to the Siege Pulse, the devastating mass accelerator cannon mounted on Geth Armatures and Colossi. Later examples of the pulse rifle, encountered during the quarian mission to the failing star at Haestrom and afterward, fired a rapid stream of high energy phasic slugs and proved very effective against shields and biotic barriers. Two anomalies set these weapons apart from ordinary assault rifles. Their mass effect field generation followed a sine curve, giving the weapon a variable rate of fire, and their slugs were lighter than the standard rounds of an M-8 Avenger but traveled encased in a phasic envelope.

Plasma, ferrofluid, and rotary fire#

Beyond the pulse rifle, the Geth Armory produced a family of weapons that shared little with organic arms design beyond the trigger. The Geth Plasma Shotgun was a three barrelled weapon that fired miniature but potent cluster rounds of superconducting projectiles at longer range than standard shotguns. A two stage trigger allowed either quick fire from its capacitors or a charge and release attack that electrified the projectiles as they left the weapon; on impact the rounds fragmented, electricity arced between the pieces, and the surrounding air flash converted into conductive plasma, overloading shields and barriers and inflicting massive trauma on unarmored targets.

The rifle that Alliance marines called the Javelin abandoned solid ammunition altogether. It held a reservoir of ferrofluid, magnetically drawn into the firing chamber and expelled at lethal speeds. Like a high pressure water jet, the ferrofluid cut through nearly anything it hit with so much heat that the shot resembled a beam of light, and it left terrible wounds.

For sustained fire, the Armory built the Geth Spitfire, a heavy assault weapon with a rotary barrel that delivered enormous punishment in short, controlled bursts. Its principles carried over into the Geth Plasma SMG, a smaller weapon modified to take thermal clips; holding down its trigger accelerated the rate of fire, rapidly depleting the heat sink in exchange for nearly continuous fire.

Armor for the clans of Tuchanka#

The Geth Armory's armor production found its most visible clients not among synthetics but among krogan. The Armory produced three heavy armor series, Rage, Berserker, and Battlemaster, distinguished by their colored highlights: red for Rage, green for Berserker, and light blue for Battlemaster. Thanks to the geth materials used in their construction, these suits stood among the finest heavy krogan armor ever fielded, without equal in their protection against tech and biotic attack when set against the celebrated Predator and Colossus lines of organic manufacture.

On Tuchanka, a handful of higher ranking krogan wore the Rage series, typically without its distinct helmet, and the krogan Kureck, an enemy of the biotic convict Jack, wore the same. Gatatog Uvenk, a clan leader who sat on the ruling council of clan Urdnot, was one of the few krogan to wear a modified variant of the Battlemaster series. That warlords of a species famous for its contempt of machines trusted their lives to geth manufactured plate said more about the Armory's quality than any merchant's pitch.

The Widow question#

One weapon hovered at the edge of the Geth Armory's catalogue without ever settling into it. The M-98 Widow, an anti materiel sniper rifle of fearsome power, was referred to in some accounts as being of geth origin, yet the mobile platform Legion was the only geth unit ever seen wielding one. The rifle appeared visually distinct from confirmed geth weapons such as the Javelin, which argued against a common maker.

The deepest clue came from the geth consensus itself. Among the archived memories of the Morning War that the geth preserved from the original uprising, one record showed a geth unit picking up an M-98 Widow from the battlefield. When Commander Shepard observed that the weapon looked a great deal like the sniper rifle Legion used to carry, Legion replied only that it was "an efficient model." Whether the Widow was a geth design, a quarian design adopted by the geth in the war against their creators, or something else entirely was never established, and the Geth Armory, characteristically, offered no answer.