M-98 Widow: Anti-Materiel Sniper Rifle

The M-98 Widow was an anti-materiel sniper rifle, a single shot weapon of such power that armory manuals treated it less as a marksman's rifle than as portable artillery. Weighing 39 kilograms, it was issued to sniper teams for assault missions against armored vehicles or krogan, targets that shrugged off conventional rifle fire. The kinetic barriers generated by standard military field generators, adequate protection for vehicles against most infantry weapons, were far too weak to stop a Widow round. For years the rifle's crippling recoil kept it out of organic hands almost entirely: among the crew that gathered aboard the Normandy SR-2, only the geth mobile platform Legion could wield the recovered example freely, though in some accounts Commander Shepard carried it as well.

Design and stopping power#

The Widow belonged to a class of weapon built for equipment rather than personnel. Its designers assumed targets that ordinary rifles could not touch: armored vehicles sheathed in kinetic barriers, and krogan, whose redundant physiology let them absorb fire that would kill most soldiers outright. Against both, the Widow delivered. A single round carried enough force to defeat the barrier output of conventional military field generators, and sniper teams brought the rifle on assault missions precisely because it could open armored targets that the rest of their equipment could not.

That power came with severe costs. At 39 kilograms the Widow ranked among the heaviest weapons a soldier could bring into the field, and it chambered only a single round between reloads, so a shooter had to make each shot count. Marksmen accepted the tradeoff because of what that one shot did. The rifle was accurate and deadly at extreme range, effective against armor plating, kinetic shielding, and biotic barriers alike, and its heavy rounds retained their killing power even after punching through thin walls, portable ballistic shields, and layered armor plate. Armorers classed it as a step beyond lighter precision rifles such as the M-97 Viper, which had been designed around speed of fire rather than raw force.

A rifle no human could fire#

The Widow was never designed to be carried and fired by a human. Even the modified, man-portable configuration that eventually circulated could only be carried by a human, not safely fired: the recoil of a single shot would shatter an ordinary human's arm. Period accounts, including armory research records, attributed the original design to the geth, the synthetic race whose metal frames could absorb forces no organic body could. Whatever the truth of that attribution, the only geth unit ever known to wield the rifle was Legion, the unique mobile platform that traveled with Shepard.

Shepard's own history with the weapon began aboard a disabled Collector cruiser. While sweeping the vessel, the squad recovered a modified Widow among the Collectors' arsenal. What happened to it next varied with the telling. In some accounts Shepard, conditioned to soldiering or infiltration at a level far beyond an ordinary human, took up the rifle personally and made it a signature arm. In others it passed to Legion, whose synthetic frame handled the recoil without modification, and no one else aboard the Normandy could use it at all. Another Widow was later found abandoned aboard a derelict Reaper, leaning against a railing in the dead hulk, its owner nowhere in evidence.

Remaking the Widow for the market#

The rifle's reputation created a commercial opportunity that several research firms found irresistible. They spent a considerable fortune attempting to redesign the Widow, aiming to retain what their documentation called the geth weapon's firepower while reducing its recoil enough that the gun could be fired without breaking a nonsynthetic's arm. The effort consumed years of trial and error before one company finally produced a usable model and rolled it out to the galactic market. Kassa Fabrication was among the arms dealers who carried the new production rifle.

The redesigned Widow arrived in time for the Reaper War, and it appeared on some of that conflict's most desperate battlefields. During the Reaper assault on Thessia, an asari sniper held an elevated overwatch position with a Widow as the defense of the asari homeworld collapsed around her, and Shepard's squad recovered the rifle from that ledge. Cerberus took a more systematic approach to the weapon's demands. Its Nemesis snipers received customized implants specifically so they could withstand the Widow's crippling kickback, and the combination turned an already dangerous specialist into a shooter capable of inflicting instant death, supported by high grade scanning equipment that kept the sniper hidden behind cover between shots.

The Black Widow#

The Systems Alliance developed its own derivative of the rifle, designated the Black Widow. The variant traded a measure of the original's single shot force for endurance: it could fire three rounds before reloading where the M-98 managed one, and it carried a larger ammunition reserve besides. Each individual shot still struck with roughly the force of a full sized marksman rifle such as the M-92 Mantis, which left the Black Widow among the most destructive precision weapons in service while forgiving the occasional miss in a way its parent design never did. Between the original, the market redesign, and the Alliance variant, the Widow line ended the Reaper War as the standard against which heavy sniper rifles were measured.