Note: Welcome back to the land of the Mass Effect! This is the fifth chapter that focuses on the Batarian Hegemony. The current run for this set is about (update: 20210624) seven chapters. We are starting to see some of the original plans of Humanity come to fruition, why fight your enemy when they could simply be poked and prodded from afar with a proverbial stick?
Note 2 - Technology: Just addressing a comment I have seen a few times about the laser trajectories, I think these comments assume that the lasers themselves are the turreted type usually seen in science fiction. I haven't really spent much time talking about ordnance and how the ships are built, but I should, and will soon. Essentially SRC ships have their main laser weapons mounted spinally, this is *much* more powerful, which is why the dreadnought version at high power is able to, after piercing a hull, create powerful secondary effects by literally setting *air* on fire. The downside of course, is that spinally mounted guns depend very much on proper trajectories to aim them, otherwise they are useless.
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Citadel's Will
Rumours were swirling on the Extranet. Of course rumours tended to swirl all the time, this was the Citadel after all, where rumours carried more weight than most ambassadors. But to the Turian Councillor, this was a problem nonetheless. These rumours pointed to a persistency to problems that he had come to expect from everything to do with this new "Human" species.
He first encountered this new Human Effect two weeks after the fool Meirix had burned his entire sector fleet, not to mention three other Citadel dreadnoughts, on a pyre of his own aggrandizement. Persistent extranet discussions began surfacing of the Citadel Council suffering a crippling defeat in the Attican Traverse. Everything from Batarians to Bogeymen-Collectors were blamed for the loss, and it appeared the only thing all rumours tended to agree on was that the tragic loss arose due to Turian ineptitude.
He could, unfortunately, not even fault the latter. For all intents and purposes Meirix had been a model soldier of the Hierarchy, he had been one of those rare multidisciplinary generals who transferred *into* an entry level front-line position after having already established himself as a promising engineer. Throughout his career, the old boy had fought with distinction, and from the very beginning was recommended for promotion over more senior, and more decorated, soldiers due to his bravery, daring and intelligence. So when the the need for an able, front-line Exploratory-Sector Primarch arose, Meirix, then an Admiral in the Traverse with many victories against persistent Batarian incursions, was the first to be suggested.
It was only upon requesting the full files from Blackwatch that Councillor Arterius realized the reason that the Council of Primarchs preferred not to discuss the Meirix situation. It appeared that upon his elevation to Primarch, the old boy had morphed from a daring front-line commander to a politician. Instead of putting his efforts into the full exploration and defence of his sector, he had preferred instead to play at being a diplomat with the various Citadel species, going as far as to manoeuvre the transfer into his jurisdiction of a series of Batarian pirates which he used as a special deniable strike force.
It was no wonder that the others refused to talk about him, it wasn't that the Hierarchy never had promoted Primarchs developing delusions of grandeur and turning into politicians, nor was it that the Turians never made deals with individual pirate crews. But the fact that an entire pirate fleet acted essentially as the personal problem solver of a Politician-Primarch would create horrendous diplomatic repercussions that the underfunded Hierarchy Diplomatic Corps could simply not paper over. Even more unfortunate for the Hierarchy, the normal method for dealing with a politicking Primarch, i.e. pulling the internally disgraced soldier from the front on the next rotation with a face-saving ambassadorship, failed dramatically.
Of course nobody could predict the arrival of a new species. It had been more than forty generations since the last true call for Total War, and that was against a known opponent with known technology, and known territory, so it was perhaps understandable that Council of Primarchs had not seen the need to address the issue directly. An acrimonious recall was never without problems, especially when they involved a Primarch who had turned to politics; things always looked bad from a propaganda and unity perspective.
More to the point, even if the Citadel could predict newcomers, aside from the Rachni, all newcomers had been easily integrated. Particularly successful was the Turian creation of the Volus client state, which turned out to be a stroke of masterful diplomacy for the Hierarchy. Since then, every single species was either too small to challenge the Citadel, or like the Yhag, simply confined to their home planet in a sort of system-scale prison. So Meirix was almost culturally *obliged* to turn the new race into a client. Who could have predicted a newcomer that would fight back? Especially one that could fight a full Council fleet on even footing.
And was that not a surprise? Ever since the old boy had gone down with his ship, analysts had been working on the aggregate data pack and full recording from Meirix's dreadnought. Here, Councillor Arterius at least held some respect for the lost Primarch; he had done his duty as a soldier by forwarding the logs of his entire fleet, as well as his own contingency plans without any modification. The preliminary analysis from the data had been a dose of welcome news to everyone, and brought a sigh of relief to High Command.
Together, the data had shown a reasonable chance of a draw in the last battle if Meirix had simply favoured a more fluid battleline, one that used more daring flanking movements. While this had been obvious in hindsight to the legion of analysts, the old boy had probably been too busy politicking to think about strategy in detail. This was borne out from reports of the only subsequent engagement in system 315 where a brave reconnaissance flotilla managed to inflict losses dramatically more extensive on a similar composition.
But the problem of these rumours remained. Untreated, they would continue to undermine Turian authority and drain morale, not only of the frontline troops, but all the client species that the Hierarchy depended on for the day-to-day operations of the fleets. It would have been easier on societal coherence if these Humans had actually attacked into Citadel space, or if that fool had just not involved the other two Council species' fleets. Then, the Turians could simply have mobilized and gone to war without informing the rest of the Galaxy and solved this problem.
But as it stood now, offensive fleet movement would, by the need for unity, include Salarian and Asari observers (at least), which was unfortunate; Turian fleet handbooks going back generations had given nothing but examples of interference. Not only that, the logistics of fielding mixed formations deep in the Attican Traverse would be a challenge in itself. The Salarians could most be counted on to provide mainly for themselves, though for many logical reasons they would, of course, hitch on to Turian supply columns.
The problem lay mostly in Asari fleets, which tended to be based on individual republics and powerful Matriarchs. While the latter remained powerful forces politically and economically, no Asari republic ever developed an industrialized military in the same way that the Salarians, much less the Volus-backed Turians had. This meant that Asari fleets were essentially single-use; any damage to the fleet would take centuries to rebuild. Very rarely did a Salarian, or even a Turian, manage to live long enough to see a full Asari fleet being built from start to finish.
And why would they need to? He was bitter now. Between the Krogan, and then the Turians themselves, the Asari had never truly faced a threat big enough that forced them to develop a military-industrial complex. He certainly wasn't the first Primarch to feel this way, and for the majority of his life he had simply accepted it as the way the Galaxy worked. But with the Asari buried in their diplomatic war of words against the Salarians they were no longer at the forefront of Galactic discussions, leaving the Turians to deal with the rumours themselves.
While the Hierarchy was able to overlook the lack of Asari assistance in combating harmful rhetoric, to add insult to injury, the most successful of recent Asari diplomatic missions was to the Batarian Hegemony, an opponent that had cost many Turian lives over the past millennium. So it was with the most polite of smiles that he completely shut down special-envoy Irissa and Councillor Tevos's suggestion that the Asari would be inviting the Batarian Hegemony back into the Citadel Government in an alliance against the "Human" threat.