AUTHOR'S FOREWORD: Apologies for the delay in Battlefield-Mass Effect story updates, but I had to get my ideas for a Dragon Age fiction onto paper, so-to-speak, so I went and did that for the past while. More or less regular updates will resume for this, Battlefield 2183, and Battlefield 2157.
Also, thank you for the many kind reviews! If you like it or hate it, please don't hesitate to drop a review.
THE VERGE CONFLICT:
Second Verge War; Anhur Campaign (2176)
Three and a half months after the superlative Systems Alliance victory over the combined forces of the Batarian Hegemony and the Terminus pirate lords under Elanos Haliat, humanity began its colony-hopping strategy to seize the batarian exclaves across the galaxy. The culmination of several planned strategies for the deployment of human forces in the event of war, the campaign on Anhur was perhaps the most hard fought of all the planetside campaigns that would take place during the Second Verge War. June of 2176 would see a massive invasion force enter the Eagle Nebula for the pacification of the colonies there, of which Anhur was the most heavily populated and most strategically important.
Another factor made Anhur stand out among all the other series of battles in the war; the opponents. The colony was not officially a world of the Batarian Hegemony until near the end of the fighting, and the Alliance would face resistance primarily from an coalition of batarian confederates and human dissidents. As such, the brutality of the fighting was remarkable. Very few prisoners of war were taken, and at least one of the Alliance combat units would be accused of war crimes by the campaign's end.
The consequences of the campaign would reach far and wide. The Systems Alliance would prove itself capable of seizing and holding enemy colonies with large populations, while the Hegemony would understand that it could not successfully aid isolated outposts of its people. The defeat of the slavers would send ripples throughout independent colonies all over the galaxy, which human intelligence services and mercenary warlords would exploit with equal glee. The balance of power across the so-called 'free worlds' of the galaxy would be overturned and rebuilt, and all because of a single campaign.
PRELUDE TO BATTLE
After the fighting at Elysium, and the subsequent operations to lock the Hegemony into a total war, the Alliance pressed its advantage hard. The Verge is a web of relays and systems, connections between clusters being more complex than in most of the rest of the galaxy. With their navy severely weakened, the ability of the batarians to defend all their colony worlds was catastrophically undermined. Together, the Alliance Navy and Army attacked and secured the outer sphere of batarian colonisation directly. Some twenty garden or near-garden worlds fell into human hands in a matter of months, despite orders for their populations to fight to the death. These successes can be attributed to factors beyond simple superiority in warship numbers. Alliance propaganda measures had hit the morale of the outer colonies particularly hard, as direct control from Khar'shan was weaker than within the inner sphere of batarian territory.
However, success brought further problems to the table for the Alliance. The main front now lay directly against the formidable fixed defences of the Kite's Nest itself, with its arrays of space stations guarding passage to the batarian homeworld through the relay jumpzones. These had no small amount of firepower to bring against any aggressor that might attempt to pass. Behind them, the colonies in the cluster and others accessible only via the Harsa relay were entirely safe. Assaulting such a position would require a determined effort, one that could not be stripped down by military needs elsewhere. Although within striking distance of victory, the Alliance would have to deal with every other menace to its colonies before being capable of launching the blow that would end the war. Alternative plans to reduce the need for an all-out attack were laid out and preparations began, but these were years from readiness.
Added to this problem was the exclave batarian colonies. As the Batarian Hegemony had been an associate member of the Citadel for centuries before humanity's rise, many of its colonies were Council grants in areas not directly connected to the rest of batarian space. In addition to that, batarians represented a significant part of the population of many 'free' colonies, worlds shared between two or more species under the auspices of galactic law. These represented a significant threat to the war aims of the Alliance. If left to their own devices, they would immediately become bases for the Terminus pirates, whom were still quite happy to launch hit and run attacks against human bases and colonies. If left unmolested for months or years, they could possibly even raise fleets to go on the offensive. It was militarily and politically unthinkable to allow such eventualities to come to pass. They would have to be taken as a matter of necessity.
However, the Alliance had other motivations for undertaking such a strategy. As humanity now lay largely outside of the Council's good graces, the prospect of further colonies being authorised had shrunk. Humans were leaving Earth at an unprecedented rate, helped in no small part by the 2176 Military Land Grants Act, which parcelled out land in return for military service in addition to pay as an incentive for recruitment. Prestige also demanded expansion, as humanity's sense of self was threatened by the sanctions from the Citadel. However, in reality, the rest of the galaxy's political leaders had privately come to terms with the notion of humanity's rise, and so expected them to seize and recolonise batarian exclave worlds. The asari in particular saw the Alliance as an something to be nurtured and guided, rather than kept down as they had attempted to do with the batarians over the previous centuries. While the Alliance's consuls found such an attitude insulting, they also found it useful. Recolonisation was to be the guiding principle until near the end of the war.
Anhur itself was chosen as the first target for reasons only tangentially related to the broader conflict. A joint batarian-human world, it had been suffering with unrest for several years before. Both species inhabited all strata of society, from the corporate elite at the top, to the service, agricultural, and factory workers at the bottom. Normally, this would not be a particular cause for alarm, but the leaders of the colony had proceeded to sign their own death warrants with a move that could not have been more ignorant of the general mood in the Alliance. Threatened by the cheap and slave labour from both the Hegemony and the Terminus Systems, the corporate congress that ran Anhur's government abolished the minimum wage. Slavery was imposed overnight on some 60% of the populace. Public opinion both on and off-world was outraged, and the Anhur Rebellions began in earnest, plunging the world into a brutal civil war. A war, it is important to note, where the battle lines were not necessarily drawn along the lines of race. Batarian slaves rebelled as often as their human counterparts, and batarian corporate leaders dominated alongside humans.
To the government of the Alliance however, the situation fit directly into the war they were about to face. The Rebellions broke out a mere month before the attack on Elysium, and the Hegemony provided many weapons to the slavers there in that time. Unable to do anything directly for fear of tipping off the batarians to her plan, Consul Taro engaged the Eclipse mercenary company out of Illium to aid the emancipation cause while she ordered the preparation of an invasion. Originally, worlds closer to human space were to be the first targeted, but the political ramifications of ignoring Anhur's strife would have been crippling. The notion of humans enslaving other humans with the aid of the enemy struck the Consul as an act of the highest treason regardless. Humanity would strike down the traitors with all the force she could bring to bear, and send a message to the galaxy in the process.