Miranda's fears, or more specifically, her predictions, had come to pass. John hadn't lied to himself or diverted his expectation at the time. It was simple, whatever was in the Prothean ruins needed to be found, and he didn't have any forces to protect their only known exit.
So down and in was the only option, he would deal with Cerberus if -when- they came. They'd been moving at a steady, if cautious, pace for two hours. The halls, according to Miranda, were almost a carbon copy of images she'd seen from Ilos; where Shepard had discovered the Prothean-made relay which had blocked the Reapers return for a time.
Occasional long-faded carbon scoring splashed along sections of the metalloid-ceramic ground and walls, told the Spartan of an age-old battle having taken place here. He surmised that the defenders must have pushed their attackers out; otherwise, this place would be in a far more miserable state, and whatever was here to be found, likely would never have been here otherwise.
Once more, John pushed the idea of Miranda being an impediment to the back of his mind as he glanced to his right to see her shaking off a shiver from the damp chill in the air. She had dried off from her body-heat at least two hours earlier, but she was surely tired from their battle in New Carthage, and subsequent running gunning incursion into the Cerberus held northern territories. Her depleted energy was clearly giving her trouble fighting the cold, despite her strong-willed effort to not show it.
This simply wasn't the kind of op that she should be involved in. She was a stealth specialist, or an infiltration specialist, or perhaps even more simply; a strategic coordinator.
He glanced at her, and at the Mattock she'd switched to -to conserve the remaining MA5D ammunition- and the way that she held it comfortably. John's lips pressed together, and he hefted his own Mattock slightly and silently frowned at it.
The weapons of this world were not to his liking, and it reduced his engagement possibilities. Their physics and systems functionality didn't stack up to any of the weapons which he was accustomed to. They had a small inbuilt battery unit mounted on their micro-mass effect generator with an element zero tablet.
The energy was virtually endless, for all regular functional purposes, and it powered the mass effect generator. That generator, in turn, used precise fields to cut out grains of the internal block of unique steel-brass alloy and then accelerate the pallet down the barrel.
Every weapon had nearly invisible laser sensors mounted in their cowling like a targeting laser. The laser, however, wasn't in the visible spectrum, and its sole purpose was to coordinate the internal mass effect accelerator. It guided and conducted a tunnel of mass free space to the surface that the laser sensor targeted.
The concept worked similarly as the Mass Relays; once more showing John how terrifyingly impacted the technology of this reality was by the galactic transit system, that even weaponry would be designed around it. But where the tunnel of mass free space between Relay and Relay was stable, the ones projected by weaponry were not.
Not having a receiving relay to stabilise the tunnel, it degraded the further from the weapon it was. According to the internal sensor data, the tunnel terminated nano-meters from the surface of whatever was targeted, so that the pallet could impact before the law of conservation performed its handiwork of making the projectile harmless.
The result was an entire galaxy of weapons which traded operational effectiveness for convenience of design, and it was a system which grated on John's nerves. He ceased pressing his lips together and briefly turned his mind inward. He wasn't an engineer, and he didn't have a hand in the design of any specific weapon that he was familiar with, but he was going to put his mind into that process as soon as possible to equip himself with a broader range of options.
