Passkey

Passkeys are a class of gravitic weapon developed by the Jiralhanae. They fired slow-moving rifts of gravity strong enough to throw a man into the air. Short-ranged and far less lethal than other weapons, Passkeys had one useful feature: the gravity rifts passed straight through barriers. A Passkey could disable a vehicle's crew or throw a fortification's defenders into complete disarray in the moments before an assault. The vehicle or the fortification could then be taken relatively intact.

The Passkeys nearly passed into extinction in the centuries after the Great Immolation. By the time Doisac rebuilt the industrial power to even think about mining new Tyrkal deposits, Covenant weapons were flooding in from outside traders, reducing the Jiralhanae's reliance on their own designs.

The most notable Passkey was designed by a ministry paragravity engineer, who had only a passing interest in weapons design, and desired to test some newly-discovered principles of Forerunner micro-impeller drives. The weapon wouldn't just disable the crew of a vehicle, it would launch even a Scorpion tank into the air. The prototype was noted by his superiors, and awarded to Warmaster Anotatus after he pledged his tribal confederacy to the war against Humanity.

The Passkey was passed on to the Warmaster's champion, Alleucchus, who dubbed it the Howler. Reportedly, this was not a compliment. Alleucchus is reputed to have said that he "wanted a weapon with bite" and that if he was to go into battle with such a short-ranged weapon, he'd prefer a hammer.

After the champion Alleucchus fell in the Battle of Actium, the Howler passed to his successor, Kroptus, who prized it and used it to terrifying effect in the Siege of Siberia Prime and the Fall of Reach.

The Passkey shares some conceptual similarities with the Forerunner weapon-tool dubbed the gravity wrench, as well as the gravity rifle, both of which use targeted paragravitic gradients in an offensive capacity.