When Red Storm creative director Christian Allen (of Ghost Recon fame) joined Bungie last year, we speculated that he'd be working on a Halo-themed squad game. Lending further credence to our mutagenically induced prescience, EGM's Quartermann rumor column reports that Bungie's first game post-Microsoft will be a third-person Halo prequel "chronicling early skirmishes between the ODST troops and the Covenant" (read: no Master Chief). They're not sure if this is the same as Peter Jackson's mysterious Halo project, though it would appear that they're hiring a team specifically for that. EGM says that Microsoft will be ready to reveal all once the hype-train for Gears of War 2 has come to a halt.