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 it sat closer to portable artillery than to a marksman's rifle. 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 one among the squad, though a Commander Shepard trained as a Soldier or Infiltrator could carry it as well. (Mass Effect 2; Mass Effect 3)

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. (Mass Effect 2)

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. (Mass Effect 2; Mass Effect 3)

A rifle no human could fire#

The Widow was never designed to be carried and fired by a human. Before its later redesign, the recoil of a single shot could break an ordinary human's arm. Both the Normandy's research notes and later market descriptions called it a weapon of the geth, the synthetic race whose metal frames could absorb forces no organic body could. Whatever the truth of that attribution, the geth seen wielding it in Shepard's company was Legion, the unique mobile platform that traveled with the Commander. (Mass Effect 2; Mass Effect 3)

Shepard's own history with the weapon began aboard a disabled Collector cruiser. While sweeping the vessel, a Shepard trained as a Soldier or Infiltrator could take a Widow from the Collectors' arsenal as one of three specialist weapons on offer. Separately, talking with Legion about upgrades opened research into a Widow for the geth itself, and Legion, whose synthetic frame handled the recoil without modification, was the only squadmate who could use it. Another Widow was later found abandoned aboard a derelict Reaper, leaning against a railing in the dead hulk, its owner nowhere in evidence. (Mass Effect 2)

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. (Mass Effect 3)

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. (Mass Effect 3)

The Black Widow#

The Systems Alliance developed its own derivative of the rifle, designated the Black Widow. The Alliance wanted to cut the original's reload time without giving up its stopping power, and the answer was to let the rifle fire several rounds before it needed a fresh thermal clip. Heavy for a sniper rifle, the Black Widow made up for its weight in firepower, and it forgave the occasional miss in a way its parent design never did. (Mass Effect 3)