2211: Precipice of War: Alliance-Hegemony Relations
In the decades leading up to the Verge War, most people in the galaxy would describe relations between the human and batarian governments to be "the worst diplomatic relations of any two Council members". This is incorrect. Diplomatic relations between the Alliance and Hegemony are not poor.
There are none to begin with.
During the Enlightenment, the representatives of the batarian government rubbed every human that met them the wrong way. The impression given was not pleasant; they came across as arrogant, and openly looked down on the human newcomers. In addition, the caste system and the brutal tyranny of the nation caused much consternation among the human populace. Past experiences with such governments had taught the collective human conscience that they could not be trusted.
Then, in 2174, the Alliance found out about the slave trade within the Hegemony.
The public backlash was enormous, and immediate. Protests, and in some cases riots, formed on Earth and every colony, demanding something be done. Some even supported war with the regime, though logic prevailed in that argument; the Systems Alliance was nowhere near ready to fight a minor Terminus power, let alone a government that had been building up its power for three centuries.
However, this did not mean that nothing was done. Parliament immediately withdrew the representatives that had just been sent to Kar'shan, and forcibly removed the batarian embassy on Earth. Not stopping at severing diplomatic ties, Parliament also withdrew recognition of the Hegemony as a sovereign nation; so far as the System's Alliance is concerned, batarian space has no government, and is as lawless as the Terminus.
Nor was this backlash limited to the human government. Without exception, human businesses and corporations boycotted Hegemony worlds. While the rest of Citadel Space quickly received the benefits of medi-gel and human-built colonization equipment, the Hegemony was forced to buy such things second hand. Although some batarians gave great offers to the Alliance entrepreneurs to open in Hegemony space, few accepted; most refused to deal with a government that dealt in slavery on principle, and those that did usually went bankrupt as their human costumers deserted in disgust.
The batarian leaders were incensed; the other races had presented difficulty with them, but never had an entire people so blatantly spit in their face before. Immediately, the Hegemony demanded that the Council force the Alliance to acknowledge the Hegemony and open economic ties. The politicians on the station, however, did not interfere; they declared that it was the Alliance's decision with regards to their acknowledging the Hegemony's sovereignty or not, and they had no say in the matter.
They also added that the Alliance had done nothing to warrant war, and would not tolerate an attack on the fledgling nation. Disgusted, and with their hands bound, the batarian leaders had no choice but to accept the stinging blow to their pride.
As the decades passed, the Alliance continued its unofficial policy treating all Hegemony personnel as "persona non grata"; essentially, they were not allowed within Alliance borders, and all humans travelling the galaxy large made a point of ignoring them. Until the outbreak of war, the only humans that acknowledged the existence of Hegemony officials were the Alliance ambassadors to the Citadel, Anita Goyle and later Donnel Udina, and whenever they dealt with their batarian counterparts, they always began their dealings by tilting their heads to the right; according to batarian body language, such a gesture indicates that the one making it believes him/herself higher than the recipient, and is often used as an insult. This practice has driven the batarian ambassadors to the Citadel to extreme frustration.
Such was the hatred the Alliance gathered from the Hegemony that soon pirate and slaver raids on human colonies became less of an unofficial policy and more of a way to vent their hatred for the humans. However, because of Alliance naval doctrine, and the ever increasing size of its navy, these raids met with limited success in the initial attacks starting in 2182, and quickly dwindled to disastrously ineffective as the years passed.
There was one raid, however, than is forever burned in the minds and souls of all Alliance citizens, human and alien alike; The Amaterasu Massacre.
A small colony with only two major cities and less than 1 billion people, Amaterasu was, while not unsuccessful, not particularly lively either. Its biggest claim to fame was the planet General Williams retired to after his service to the military ended, and his family remained there for several generations. While it did receive a regular military patrol, it was farther from a relay nexus point than most human colonies, meaning that any military intervention would be slightly longer in arriving than other colonies.
In 2104, the slavers based on the planet Torfan decided to take advantage of this fact. Working for months, the largest such organization outside the Terminus systems worked out every detail of their plot. As soon as the path of the mass relay jumps was clear, the small armada they had gathered sped through the path, managing to avoid alerting the still incomplete fixed gun line, and made it all the way to Amaterasu without alerting anyone to their presence.
By the time Systems Alliance forces appeared in system, the damage had long since been done; the capital of the planet had already been ransacked, and tens of thousands had been taken by the slavers who, while they had left the planet, had not yet used the mass relay to escape. When the human warships moved away from the relay, the slavers made their move; they had hidden in dark space just within the system, running at minimum power requirements, and had jumped past the Alliance guard and escaped the system before the human sailors knew what had happened. As they reached Torfan, they slapped each other on the back, and congratulated themselves on the success of one of the most daring slaving operations in recorded history.
What they did not realize was that the electronic warfare VIs on the battlecruiser SSV Monongahela had, in the brief moment before their escape, hacked into their ships' data bases, revealing their base of operations, numbers, and defenses.
In the planet's capital, there was chaos. Tens of thousands had already been kidnapped, and many other were killed or wounded. Many women on the planet, particularly the handful of asari residents, had been raped, repeatedly. A great deal of the infrastructure had been destroyed, and would take years to rebuild. All of this paled, however, when Alliance scout teams opened the doors of the first of three hospitals…
Due to the massive baby boom that had been occurring in the human population, numerous hospitals had to be built with the single function of delivering newborns. Nicknamed "baby factories", these birthing centers brought many hundreds of infants into the galaxy every day. Vast rooms holding the newborn babies were often used as an image to showcase the future the Alliance had in the galaxy.
To the slavers, it was an opportunity to curb the population of what the batarians were increasingly considering a pest species.
At each of the three hospitals within the slaver occupied zone of the capital, the Alliance soldiers were met with a sight pulled straight from the depths of hell; virtually every single infant in these medical centers had been ritualistically impaled, their tiny bodies nailed to their small beds by pre-prepared spikes. A scant few still clung to life, and were saved with emergency surgery, but the vast majority had long since passed on. Many of the marines present, almost all of them veteran soldiers, fell into hysterical weeping at the sight. Others flew into an uncontrollable rage, and had to be restrained by their shell-shocked comrades.
The news of the attack, and the whole-scale slaughter of the younglings, spread like wild fire across human space. For almost a generation, those in the Alliance believed they had finally escaped such atrocities, and that they and their children were safe within their homes. However, fear and grief quickly turned to rage. The citizens demanded that those who had committed this atrocity be found, and brought to justice.
To the amazement of the galaxy, however, the Alliance did just that in a matter of days.
Livid that such a crime could have occurred under its watch, the various branches of Alliance military cooperated on an unprecedented level with the information the Monongahela had gathered, and within days, a third of the Alliance fleet, including the Everest and the Fiji, were headed toward Torfan.
After stealth frigates had arrived in system and jammed communications, N7 and Cerberus Special Forces infiltrated the main base on the moon, liberated the captured slaves, and shut themselves and their freed hostages into the main fallback position of the fortress. Then, the battle fleet arrived in system, and annihilated the unsuspecting, uncoordinated slaver fleet in orbit. Marine and tank forces than landed on the moon's surface, and surrounded the slaver base. Just when the batarian defenders had rallied, the ships in orbit unleashed as massive tech attack, cutting communications and disabling all heavy weapons emplacements. With this, the order to advance was given to the ground troops.
At this point, any semblance of organization in the attack dissolved. While the plan called for hard points in the slaver line to be taken first, followed by a general attack, every single Alliance soldier charged pell-mell into battle, in the manor of the old human wave tactics. Although casualties were high, in some areas up to 35% of the units involved, the soldiers pressed on, shouting "Remember Amaterasu" as their war cry. In the end, the swarms of vengeful marines spilled over the defenses, and slaughtered 85% of the slavers in brutal hand-to-hand combat; the vast majority of batarians killed at the Battle of Torfan fell from combat knives, monomolecular swords, omni-blades, and even rocks. The few survivors were gathered together, and had their eyes gouged out; batarians believed that the soul passed out of the body through the eyes, and removing them before that point would mean the soul would remain trapped in the corpse and decay along with the body. When some Hegemony officials protested the action, Parliament responded by making it an official policy; any batarian slaver captured by Alliance personnel was to be "eternally imprisoned", with the sentence being carried out on the spot.
To the Alliance, the Battle of Torfan was the righteous, and unquestionably justified, vengeance against those whose crimes were beyond description, let alone forgiveness.
To the rest of the galaxy, it was a shocking realization of how far the Alliance could go when provoked, and the power they wielded when focused on a goal with single-minded determination.
To the Hegemony, it was yet another blow to their ego, and action that made the later human settlement in the Skyllian Verge completely unacceptable. The leaders of the criminally insane government began to draw up plans for the invasion and subjugation of the Systems Alliance; more soldiers were drafted into the military, slaves were secretly fitted with explosives to be used as living bombs, and they even broke the Treaty of Farixan; four new dreadnoughts began construction in secret in the deepest part of batarian space.
At least, they thought it was done in secrete.
Little in the galaxy could hide its scent from Cerberus.
oo-00-oo
Now for those of you who are questioning the brutal nature of the Alliance Torfan counterattack, please remember: Paragon does not mean "nice to absolutely everyone at all times". Take the Overlord DLC, for example; when you find out what the person in charge of the project did to his autistic brother in the name of science, the "Paragon" option is to pistol whip him and verbally assassinate him and every aspect of his character.
THAT was the PARAGON reaction to the treatment of ONE person.
Now imagine the reaction to the blatant, pre-meditated murder of a few thousand newborn babies.
Also, the reason for the large casualty count on Torfan in canon Mass Effect was because the Renegade Shepard fed his troops into the battle with no regard for their lives so long as they got the results he wanted. Here, those soldiers charged into the fight without any hesitation, even when their superiors were actively planning an attack that would end as few of their lives as possible. They weren't sacrificed in the name of the ego and success of one man or woman, they were enraged to the point where they no longer cared if they died so long as the slavers were defeated.
Now, some fun facts.
Ashley and Sarah Williams achieve some fame in their childhood for saving the lives of their newborn sisters, and seven other infants, during the raid on Amaterasu by hiding them in a janitor's closet.
Ka'hairal Balak was the son of one of the slavers on Torfan at the time of the Alliance counter attack, who was taken alive, and had his eyes removed. The trauma of what his father endured never left him.
The Salarian STG and Asari commandos, from 2204 onward, secretly cooperated with numerous N7 and Cerberus raids on other slaver stations throughout the galaxy.