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Section: The Batarian Hegemony

Chapter 1: Intro & Geography

Laying to the Galactic southeast of the Systems Alliance, the Batarian Hegemony is a pale shadow of the nation it once was considered to be.

Centuries ago the Hegemony was considered to be far more powerful than the Alliance is in the current day. Tightly allied with the Turian Hierarchy, with several members of their species in the Spectre Corps, it seemed to be a mere matter of time before they received their invitation to become the fourth official Council species.

Their decline wasn't the rapid collapse of the Krogan Empire or the Quarian's Federated State. It was a slow, gradual, altogether painful affair that left their entire culture embittered towards the galaxy at large. Wars, both of violence and of economics, sapped the limited resources of their territory. Trade embargoes forced them to rely more and more heavily on black market goods from the Terminus, which they were then further punished for dealing with.

Withdrawing their ambassador after the Alliance's seizure of the Skyllian Verge, things only grew worse as internal politics saw them left without an elected Hegemon for nearly three decades. The failure of state-sponsored pirates and terrorists to break humanity's colonies in the Verge further humiliated Khar'shan.

It wasn't until the Blue Sun War began in the Terminus that things seemed to improve for the Batarian nation. In less than a year the exiled nation saw its territory expand by nearly thirty percent, and its economic prospects explode as simplified trade routes with Omega and better access to the Dark Rim. But with the good comes the bad, as such rapid expansion has heavily unsettled a culture that had only just settled after the upheaval thirty years prior.

Only time will tell which factions emerge from the political infighting that has only just begun, and just how powerful the Hegemony will be.

Khar'Shan

The Batarian home-world is not terribly dissimilar to Earth. It lays only slightly farther from a star that burns hotter than Sol, leaving it in roughly the same band of habitability. The gravitational pull is nearly equivalent, and a single moon produces regular tides upon its small oceans. The largest difference is those smaller bodies of water, resulting in a world slighter more arid than our own.

Most of Khar'shan's largest cities lay near river deltas, but are carefully managed so at not to intrude on valuable farming space. The nation-states that once dominated the planet are now little more than administrative areas for civil services and mean little to nothing in the planet's day to day operations.

The planetary, and Hegemony, capital of Khar'shith was created to replace the old capital shortly after they received their embassy on the Citadel. As a sign of wealth and power as the Hegemony entered its golden age, the city was built in the desert beside the granite plateau that holds the Five Pillars of Strength. Its creation necessitated one of the largest building projects in planetary history, with massive aqueducts that stretch hundreds of miles required to provide the population with water, and equally long maglev rail lines to haul food form the coastal cities.

As a symbol of culture and excess it was wonderfully successful, but in more modern times the population is dwindling. The costs to maintain the infrastructure required simply to keep the inhabitants fed and hydrated have only risen as the decades and centuries pass, and the Hegemony can no longer easily afford the expenses to do so.

The city remains a symbol, though now one of the despair and decline of the nation it was built to rule. Nearly a third of its buildings, including many opulent highborn mansions, now lay abandoned. Even the recent expansion of the Hegemony will likely not save the city from being reclaimed by the desert, as only the Patriarch's council still meets in their chambers there. The remaining governmental agencies have returned to more conveniently located cities nearer to the equator.

Currently the world has a population of roughly eight billion, of which perhaps one in eight are enslaved.

The Hegemony Serpent

If the Galaxy where to be viewed from directly above, as if it were a two dimensional structure, the Batarian Hegemony might resemble a serpent slowly uncoiling itself. Its core worlds surround Khar'shan and are located to the galactic 'southeast' of Sol and Arcturus, but from there its territory curves, following the edge of the galaxy before broadening out in the Dark Rim and far reaches of the Traverse.

In overall numbers the Hegemony is a fairly large nation, controlling nearly double the worlds of the Systems Alliance, though numbers alone do not tell the whole story as we will explore below.

Inner Colonies

The Hegemony's inner colonies are spread out across three stellar clusters, one of which includes Khar'shan. In terms of overall population just this region alone has more living Batarians than there are humans in the galaxy. At first glance this would lead one to believe that the Hegemony is still a first rate power, however closer examination reveals the cracks in its power base.

Many of the worlds and system near Khar'shan are strangely low in resources, particularly the critical element zero. While many insist this is nothing more than poor luck on the part of the Batarians, Hegemony archeologists insist that there is evidence of extensive mining far in the region's past, far older even than possible Prothean activity.

Regardless of the reasoning, the end result is that many of the Hegemony's prominent worlds have lower qualities of life than one might expect given the nation's size, particularly for the lower caste. Another consequence is a far greater willingness to colonize 'marginal' worlds in a quest for rare materials, particularly eezo.

This region of space holds three primary relays. The most recently, and reluctantly, opened leads directly to Alliance territory and is constantly guarded by both fleet assets and battle-stations. The second was activated shortly after the Hegemony was discovered by the Citadel, and was opened after Batarian and Turian explorers confirmed that it lead to an unremarkable system near the Hierarchy's borders, and only a few days FTL travel from another that lead to the Citadel's main hub.

The final relay leads to the galactic rim, and was the first discovered and activated by Batarian explorers in the early days of the Hegemony's expansion era.

Edge Colonies

The so called 'edge colonies' are scattered along the edge of the galaxy, clustered around mass relays. Most were settled solely to provide stopping over points where ships could discharge their drives safe from criminal interference, and are barely habitable even by the Batarian definitions of the term.

There has been increased government interest post-war, with several expansion programs being put into effect in order to allow far greater numbers of ships to rest and refit as they make the trip from the Hegemony's heart to the Dark Rim.

The Dark Rim

Before the discovery of the Skyllian Verge by Salarian teams, the Dark Rim was considered to be the main area of Batarian expansion. It was, and has, remained a long, difficult process, as the gangs and pirate bands that claimed the region in the wake of the Krogan Rebellions were loathe to surrender their valuable worlds, often leading to intensive fighting to secure them for Batarian growth.

Expansion slowed noticeably as the Hegemony's golden age waned, and money once used to entice highborn to shift their interests was now being desperately spent to improve the core worlds situations. In more modern times the region has come back into focus as a critical staging area, first for operations against Vosque and the Blue Suns, and then as bases from which they could secure their hard worn territory.

The Traverse

The aftermath of the Blue Suns war has finally given the Hegemony inroads into the Attican Traverse, though they likely would not have requested that said territory be located so far from Khar'shan. Currently their control over much of the space is limited to the patrol patterns from their fleet, with the pirates and independent colonies retaining their territory and worlds.

While some are entrenching and preparing to fight, most are already beginning to emigrate to be closer to large colonies like Horizon for protection both from the Hegemony, as well as the Alliance and its own moves from the other direction.

Currently the only real gain the Hegemony has realized from its movements into the Traverse is the fact that they've secured superior trade routes to Omega. In the long term Citadel experts predict that the Hegemony's economic core could actually shift to the new territory, particularly if they secure the entirety of the Black Rim from the pirates and warlords who inhabit much of that region.