THE VERGE CONFLICT:
Second Verge War: Battle of Torfan (2178)
"As our moment of triumph approached, the batarians turned once again to the tactics of the terrorist, in contravention of all natural law and against all principles of civilised warfare. Words like genocide, mass murder, and war crimes are thrown about without any regard for the circumstances we were facing. We were merely responding in kind, in the only currency the Hegemony seemed to respond to. Of all people, Shepard understood this best. She saw their depravity first hand. - Nozomi Taro, Consul of the Systems Alliance, 2180 Interview
I hope God forgives us, because the batarians may never do so. - Alice Dennison, Leader of the Alliance Parliamentary Opposition, 2179 Hearing on Military Ethics
Eight years after Mindoir, a year and a half after the lightning victory on Anhur, the war at last came to Torfan. It would be brought by one Lieutenant Jane Shepard, an Alliance Navy N7, under the command of the Army Biotic Assault Team led by Major Warren Kyle. The hour of vengeance for all the suffering of humanity's outer colonies had tolled, and would fall upon the batarians of Torfan like a hammerblow. For humanity, it was a glittering triumph, a warning to the rest of the galaxy about what happens to any group that threatens the safety of her people. For much of the rest of the galaxy, it was the startling realisation that they had invited wolves into their midst, but also that their potential was great. The batarians for their part would not hear of the battle until after open hostilities had ended, but it was a huge strike against their pride as a species. In the Terminus, the consequences would be felt for a long time, not least in the lead up to the Reaper War.
Shepard would accomplish a spectacular feat of individual soldiery in the face of overwhelming odds, yet this would come to pass as a result of multiple violations of the established laws of war and at a cost of tens of thousands of batarian lives. For the first time in the Verge Conflict, civilians would be targeted deliberately rather than as a means to an end. This was of dubious military necessity, despite the civilians engaging in slavery. The entirety of an elite Alliance unit would be wiped out in the process as well, dying in the line of duty to allow their fellows to arrive from orbit.
Torfan was to be a minor battle by the standards of the war. Only two Alliance Army taskforces from a single legion were to be dropped. Only two Alliance Navy combat groups from a single fleet would be deployed in space. Hegemony forces were limited to a single company of External Forces and badly armed volunteers organised in secret. The most crucial part of the battle would be a company-scale action. Yet the name of the small, barely habitable moon would ring out across the galaxy. Its association with the lengths that the Systems Alliance were willing to go for security and victory would push humanity to the very brink, and then towards her apex. The Citadel's attitudes would change too, both towards humanity and towards its own policies on warfare. The fighting would make a legend.
Jane Shepard. The Angel of Death. The Butcher of Torfan.
Anhur was the end for the Hegemony's grand strategy. Any potential for offensive action by its agents, the pirates and the mercenary companies was dismantled in its aftermath. The batarians' attempt to breakout of the Viper Nebula during the battle failed utterly when the Alliance Eighth Fleet broke it. This freed up one fleet for expeditionary purposes. 2177 was to become a hell year for the batarians. Field Marshal Cassandra DeRuyter and Admiral Petra Hunt led a blitz campaign around the galactic core in the Terminus Systems. Deeper in Terminus space, Alliance intelligence operatives caused further damage to the batarian cause when they successfully assassinated the commodores of the Anhur Protection Forces' former fleet, that had fled from the battle. This fleet then fell into the hands of Aria T'loak in obscure circumstances, removing the Hegemony's most important asset outside of the Alliance blockade.
To add to their problems, the Hegemony was beaten back from the Yuki Cluster, an 'interface' region of space that was close enough so that non-relay FTL travel between batarian space and the Skyllian Verge was possible. Troop Command Columbia thus had successfully occupied one of the Hegemony's inner clusters, though this was by far the least productive for their war efforts and so was strategically unimportant once the threat of naval breakout had been eliminated. By 2178, the Hegemony had no vectors to take the fight to the Alliance and its pirate allies had been rendered entirely combat ineffective, fleeing from Eclipse. However, the Alliance remained unable to challenge the Hegemony for the rest of its territory, and the standoff across the relays continued. Both sides would work to break it however they could.
For the Hegemony, this meant the use of extreme tactics. Arch-Hegemon Ar'dra may not have had any fleets or armies that could directly challenge human military power, but he did have an asset left, one he gained as a direct result of his enemy's success. Under the direction of General Gadnalak, the Batarian External Forces had long prepared for such a situation. Stay-behind troops disguised as civilians had been organised from the start, perhaps indicating the General's lack of faith in his leader's abilities as a result of the trust shown in Elanos Haliat. When the Alliance occupied the Verge in 2176 after the Battle of Elysium, these forces remained dormant. The General also remained behind, though this is assumed by the fact that his troops remained organised rather than demonstrated by any evidence. However, by the end of 2177, the Arch-Hegemon had managed to message his commander. A suicide mission by a batarian frigate managed to transmit a message over the extranet, a propaganda film with an encoded set of orders.
Civilians began disappearing all over the Verge within days. Some were collaborators, some were relations of high value Alliance personnel, most were simply vulnerable to kidnapping. At first, few people realised there was any connection between the kidnappings, as they were geographically dispersed. This did not last long. Children began being removed, and by the latter third of 2177, there was a general panic in human colonies and occupied batarian worlds across the Verge. Speculation as to their fate was rife. The Alliance Consuls were increasingly under pressure.
The batarian intents were three-fold. One, they intended to terrorise the populations of the Verge and embarrass the Alliance. Two, they required money for payments to mercenaries. Three, they needed to continue the fight in the most effective way possible to bring humanity to the negotiation table. Both Ar'dra and Gadnalak believed that negotiated resolution via the Citadel was the only solution available, though the former embraced the possibility only as the next move to continue the broader conflict. In order to fulfil these goals, the External Forces begin to sell the captives on the black market as slaves.
Consul Taro ordered a full review of cargo traffic from the regions affected by the Defence Intelligence Directorate. This led directly to the Theshaca Raids, a series of small attacks by the Alliance First Legion on the moons of that world as well as extensive monitoring of FTL trajectories from its drive discharge orbits. Karla Haider, now a colonel in the Defence Intelligence Staff, successfully analysed the pattern against a large number of possible locations. Eight pirate anchorages were discovered and interdicted by Alliance Navy combat groups. Yet the slaves were nowhere to be found. Those that had already been sold were intercepted in the Terminus by Alliance or mercenary agents, but these were too few to represent the bulk of the kidnapped. However, there was only one habitable world with enough cargo traffic to hide this activity in the cluster; Torfan.
This represented a serious problem for the Alliance. Torfan's defences were unimpressive, its armed forces even less competent than that of batarian conscript armies, its ecology only just able to support complex life without terraforming intervention. It had been colonised by the batarians in 2160s during the scramble for territory, and it was among only three batarian exclaves not occupied by the Alliance Army. This distinction arose from two sensitive political issues. First of all, the governor of Torfan was a known batarian subversive, able to keep his position in the years after Mindoir due to his impeccable breeding alone. The Arch-Hegemon had tried to have him assassinated at least seven times, making him a likeable figure even among humans. Secondly, Torfan had become a refugee 'safety valve' world for batarians escaping Alliance occupations across the inner Terminus and in the Attican Traverse. Camps were set up all over the planet to house the refugees, and there was much traffic in space as a result. This presaged Torfan's post-war role as a minor spacehub.
Both of these situations made any intervention on Torfan a very risky proposition politically. The Alliance government was very sensitive towards Citadel opinion as their own plans for the next stage of the war progressed apace. The Consul was satisfied with having destroyed the slavers' transport infrastructure, but the subjects of the slaves already taken and the External Forces soldiers remained on the table. Fiery debate began behind the closed doors of the parliamentary committees on defence and colonial affairs. Questions were asked about why there had been no strike against the moon, why was the Consul refusing to attack slavers. The truth was related to Taro's own plans for the war, plans that would bear fruit in the future but were entirely secret at the time. Thus, it would not be the government that forced the issue to a head, but the opposition in a masterstroke of political manoeuvring.