THE BATTLE WON
A week after planetfall of the first Alliance troops, Torfan's major settlements were fully pacified and the population remaining within them fully disarmed. General Petrovsky was installed as Provisional Military Governor, moving into the palace at Davran on the same day that Sak'davran and his family were transferred off-world to the prisoner of war camps on Sidon. Priority was given to resuming economic activity, and pay was increased by fifty percent among manufacturing and mining workers in an attempt to insure continued production. The moon's place within the Alliance supply chain was small, yet important enough to warrant such measures.
Casualties had been staggeringly high for the Hegemony. As much as a quarter of the adult batarian population had been killed or severely wounded in the fighting, and in a matter of mere days. That these deaths included the most prestigous soldiers in the entire batarian order of battle was a clear indication to many of the direction the war was going. The damage to the collective psyche of the colonists of Torfan continues. Alliance casualties were extremely low, a thousand put out of action 'permanently' to use the terminology of the day, and only a third of these were deaths. This figure includes the hundred and thirty killed attacking the command bunker under Major Kyle. In fact, of all the groundside battles fought by the Systems Alliance during the Second Verge War, Torfan had the smallest casualty rate of any battle in which casualties were taken.
THE AFTERMATH
Batarian resistance to Alliance occupation did not end with the formal surrender of Torfan's Governor. Troops refusing to surrender or unaware of the order to surrender were able to evade Petrovsky's notice well into July, and by then, many of the arms they had possessed had been dumped for use later. Non-violent resistance began days after the humans' victory as well, a movement led by the mothers and wives of dead batarian militiamen forming the centre pivot of efforts. Despite increased pay and benefits on offer by the new military government to keep production going, a general strike was called at the end of June. Food stores built up before the invasion were seized and redistributed, and the barricades went back up to prevent the Alliance garrison from retaking them.
Media interest in the invasion grew quickly. Chiefly, the attack had been the first major military action for a month and a half at least. The complete lack of news regarding the war, despite continued and full mobilisation, led to a frenzy among both human and non-human media once word was passed along that something had happened on Torfan. The existence of the protest movement added fuel to the flames, as the destruction of the refugee town of Haven was brought to the fore as the singular act of brutality to represent all the others. Even before they knew her name, Shepard was dubbed 'the Butcher' by the Mothers of Torfan. The Alliance countered with images and video of the slaves rescued from the warehouses, as well as significant documentary evidence recovered pointing to a huge slavery operation on the moon. This solidified a large amount of public support within humanity behind the invasion, and behind its mastermind, Alice Dennison. Among aliens however, to whom slavery was poorly understood and not universally reviled, the reaction was far more mixed.
July 1st saw the leaking of Lieutenant-Commander Shepard's full suit telemetry data, including the full vid recording. The source of the leak has never been discovered, and as many as fifty seven people had enough access to accomplish it. Select moments were put up on popular extranet streaming sites, and the full combat sequence of Shepard taking on the Firstborn alone remains one of the most popular videos in the history of the medium. Citadel talk shows were immediately critical, claiming that the leak was a deliberate attempt to show the valour of a murderer; the leak also revealed that Shepard had authorised the airstrike that destroyed Haven. Among alien circles, only turian militarists came out in favour of the N7, and she has become something of a fetish figure in niche parts of the turian extranet.
Pressure built on the Alliance Government to make some sort of official statement. Consul Taro's official war policy was that no operational information was to be given out to the press even in the aftermath of successful attacks, to prevent the enemy from studying them. This was deemed entirely unsatisfactory by both the more pacifist elements of the human press as well as Citadel news media. Although the distraction from preparations for their own offensives was welcome, the negatives in polling spiked over the weeks following the leak. Having been forced into this position by Dennison, Taro ordered Minister DeBankole to threaten her with an array of audits if the leader of the opposition did not do something to deflect the heat. Begrudgingly, Dennison agreed.
Using her extensive media contacts, Dennison turned discussion about Torfan away from the atrocities and towards Shepard's feat of soldiery. This was accomplished at no small cost. Further strategic leaks were made; the identity of the unit Shepard fought as the Firstborn being the largest. ANN military affairs commentator Christian Desouza could not help but reflect that the Lieutenant-Commander was the Angel of Death, the last plague of God come again to reap the lives of the first born of the oppressive batarians. The moniker stuck. 'The Angel of Death' replaced 'The Butcher of Torfan' in human media as the frame of reference for Shepard, and both were used in turian and asari media almost interchangeably. Humanity had a new hero.
The Batarian Hegemony itself would not learn of the defeat until after the war came to a close, as it remained cut off from the rest of the galaxy by the Alliance's blockade. The news that a single Alliance soldier had ordered the execution of an entire settlement, and went on to defeat the cream of batarian nobility single-handed, was viewed with complete disbelief among most loyalists at first. The shock of it has been attributed as a factor for the batarians' post-war isolationist attitude until the outbreak of the Eden Prime War, when the External Forces were involved in the Terra Nova Incident.
Torfan itself remained a hotbed of protest, as Petrovsky ignored the movements while media interest in the place persisted. However, once the Battle of the Kite's Nest began, he moved immediately to crush resistance to the occupation. Ringleaders were arrested, the barricades stormed by public order military police units of the Thirteenth Legion, the food stores that sustained the strikers confiscated. Looking at starvation, and with nowhere else to go, the protest movement collapsed. Workers took up their posts once again, and at double pay. Petrovsky had used the stick, and the carrot was twice as alluring to many of the batarian dissidents having felt its sting. The population of the moon was young, and many were beginning to start families of their own in the aftermath. The mood for open resistance disappeared.
Despite this, hardliners never gave up the fight. Motivated primarily by revenge rather than any coherant political doctrine, or any particular loyalty to the Hegemony, terrorist acts against the human occupation forces continued for years. Petrovsky's tenure as Military Governor saw no less than twenty three gun attacks, four grenade attacks and one vehicle-borne improvised explosive attack on his soldiers and Alliance installations. The latter was against the bunker complex that Shepard had fought to take, now the expanded headquarters of Alliance Army operations for the world. Petrovsky's successors did not fare much better.
In late 2183, Shepard was declared MIA and presumed dead, and the Shepard Memorial was constructed on the site of the bunker's old landing ground. This sparked off the first open protests in four years, but these quickly died down as Torfan's garrison was reinforced as part of the Alliance's preparations for the coming Reaper War. However, when Shepard returned in 2185, renewed protest action turned quickly into riots, as massed mobs attempted to storm the site of the memorial to extinguish the flame of remembrance and to destroy the statue of Shepard as a winged victory.
Torfan was largely spared the atrocities of the Collector Crisis, but the Reaper War saw most of the population of the colony harvested for use as troops by the synthetics. Many batarians from Torfan would eventually fight on Earth and other human colonies as 'cannibals', an ironic and horrifying twist of fate. The Reapers made a point of partially demolishing the Shepard Memorial, and erected a strange idol of their own nearby designed to rapidly indoctrinate any organic remaining nearby. The post-Reaper era has not been kind to the moon; with Alliance resources stretched thin, it was occupied by batarian rebels for nearly seven years, until it was retaken by the Alliance in 2193. It remains under military government to this day.
Colonel-General Oleg Petrovsky served as Provisional Military Governor of Torfan until 2179, when the first political reactions to Torfan began in earnest. The Alliance Parliament's Hearing on Military Ethics of that year examined the possibility of war crimes charges against him, both as the commanding officer of the entire expedition and as Shepard's technical superior for the mission. He answered questions fully and truthfully by all accounts, a man vindicated in his own mind by the necessities of war. Thanks largely due to cooperation between the Navy and Army to obscure where the full military responsibility for the mistakes of the invasion lay, as well as Petrovsky's results in the field both on Anhur and on Torfan itself, no formal charges were ever brought against him for his actions on Torfan. In fact, the brutality and efficiency of his operations were deemed to be fully in keeping with accepted military doctrine of the time and circumstances in which he had found himself.
Petrovsky's enemies did not forget or forgive however. Between the end of the Second Verge War and the 2182 election, he continued to serve as the commander of the Thirteenth Legion, headquartered on Eden Prime for the defence of the Attican Traverse from the newly established border with the Terminus Systems. In 2180, human and turian forces participated in the Grand Exercise together for the first time, and Petrovsky was sent as the highest ranking Alliance Army officer in that cooperative effort. It appeared for a time that he was to rise to lead Troop Command Columbia. However, in 2182, pressure within the government with the coming election saw him removed from command entirely, as less aggressive military policies began to become more popular. Confederalists and greens despised Petrovsky, a symbol of overly centralised government to the former, and a murderer to the latter.
Petrovsky retired from the Alliance military, and became supreme military commander of the growing Cerberus forces in the Terminus in early 2183, just as the geth attacked Eden Prime. He directed the small fleet and army of the independent human colonies in that region of space in support of Alliance efforts to defeat the geth, helping to open the way to the Perseus Veil in a mere month as opposed to the projected time of three months. Cerberus forces became heavily engaged during the Collector Crisis, both with the Collectors themselves and with Citadel forces. Petrovsky wisely used the chaos and confusion of the events of 2185 to expand Cerberus' territorial domain. The start of the Reaper War proper saw him attack and occupy Omega, removing the unreliable Aria T'loak from power there, until the battle that saw him defeated at last.
Major Jonathan Kyle was the only other survivor of the reconnaissance force sent to Torfan aside from Shepard herself. The experience broke him. Not having the protection of rank as Petrovsky had, or the protection of fame and glory as Shepard did, the 2179 Military Ethics hearings placed a portion of the blame for the airstrike on Haven on his shoulders, along with the deaths of his biotic troops in a foolhardy frontal assault on a fixed position. This conclusion largely ignored key facts, such as the presence of an apparent gap in the defences, and the Alliance Army steadfastly defended Kyle to the bitter end. No charges were brought against the Major either, but his confidence in the Alliance had been totally smashed. He believed his biotic soldiers, most of them still teenagers now dead, had been betrayed by the top brass. His own exoneration was merely to cover their own asses, and he saw the whole thing as an indication of gross bias against biotics in human society.
He retired honourably from the Alliance military almost as soon as his part in the hearings over Torfan were over, and set about gathering like-minded biotics to his side. This group soon became a cult-like organisation, promoting isolation of biotics from the rest of humanity in a separate culture, drawing in many individuals whom did not wish to join the Alliance military and whom were not rich enough for the best treatment of biotic side effects. Several terrorist incidents were connected to the 'Father Kyle Group' in 2183, and Admiral Hackett dispatched the SSV Normandy commanded by Shepard to talk her former comrade-in-arms down. She succeeded. Kyle received psychological aid, while his followers were transferred to the Ascension Project on Yandoa, where he would eventually join them. There, he lived peacefully, until the arrival of the Reapers on that world in 2186. He remains missing, presumed dead.
Lieutenant-Commander Jane Shepard became both hero and anti-hero, a name known across the galaxy. To most humans, she was the sword that cut down slavers and invaders by the dozen, an exemplar of human achievement against foreign tyranny. To turians, she was either a madwoman or an object of nearly sexual fascination, a soldier who did her duty without question or hesitation despite impossible odds. To the asari and the salarians, she was a warning, that humanity's rise could not be restrained, but rather should be nurtured and controlled in equal measure. To the batarians, she was the incarnation of every atrocity committed by humans against their culture and people.
Shepard herself loathed the publicity her actions had brought her, at least at first. Unable to participate in the Battle of the Kite's Nest due to extensive debriefings, she missed the last fights of the Second Verge War and regretted it loudly. Her participation in the 2179 Parliamentary Hearings was extremely hostile, and many senators were gravely and directly insulted as they attempted to question her actions on Torfan. Fortunately for both her career and the galaxy's future survival prospects, both Consul Taro in government and Alice Dennison in opposition rowed in behind her, crushing any notion that she would face criminal charges or civil suits for her conduct.
However, mandatory counselling revealed that Torfan had scarred the soldier deeply. Shepard had recurring dreams of fighting there for months afterwards, dreams that occasionally returned years later. While she was still fit for service, both the controversy of her continued place in the Alliance Navy and her own psychological state required some decisions to be made as to her future. Alliance High Command was lucky enough to have a ready alternative to hand. Coming from a military family, Shepard had no shortage of mentors and friends to fall back on at this time. Seeing such a fine person go to waste was not an option for Admiral Hackett, her ultimate military superior.
Shepard was promoted to Commander, and assigned as Executive Officer of the cruiser SSV Tokyo under Captain David Anderson, an old friend of her family. In this role, it was intended she would be groomed for eventual promotion to a flag command of her own. As XO, she would both participate in ground missions and put her hand to the wheel in commanding a space vessel, the ideal compromise both for her own sake and for the public image of the Navy. She served under Anderson for four years aboard the Tokyo, before he was granted the command of the new stealth frigate SSV Normandy, a ship she herself would command mere days afterwards. It was during the first combat flight of the Normandy that she would intervene in the first phase of the First Battle of Eden Prime, the catalyst for the Eden Prime War.
The body of Captain Sasko Char remained in an unmarked mass grave nearby Haven, alongside those of the rest of his unit, for ten years, until after the Reaper War. Batarian rebels, having taken control of the moon, exhumed all the bodies of the Firstborn and placed them in a tomb under the central square of Davran City. He was portrayed as a victim rather than a victor or slaver, a batarian noble sent to look after the interests of the lower castes on Torfan in a time of need. During the Great Upheaval of 2184, this image was largely destroyed by waves of highly effective Alliance propaganda, including tapes of his abuses recovered from Torfan. Regardless, Hegemony loyalists continued to believe in his piety and courage, reviling Shepard for murdering him and his men.
When the Alliance retook Torfan for the second time in 2193, his body was exhumed a second time and burned, his tombstone smashed to dust, and those whom had dared to raise him up as a hero figure hunted down and killed. The post-Reaper era remains one of chaos, and the Alliance has no tolerance for the ghosts of old enemies rising to strike at their prestige and honour.
Governor Kemen Sak'davran and his family were interned on Sidon until 2179, when they were returned as the last prisoner/slave exchange between the Alliance and the Hegemony, the peace treaty between them secured by his freedom. Although a dissident, and possibly a traitor, Arch-Hegemon Ar'dra found Sak'davran even more untouchable than before, as he was hailed as the last true defender of the batarians' Skyllian holdings. This was quite a feat considering he was one of the few planetary governors to formally surrender to the Alliance during the Second Verge War, but it mattered little. To the lower and middle castes, the most important thing was that he had defended the lives of their kind first, in full accordance with his obligations under the Holy Pillars.
With huge public support at a time when the Arch-Hegemon's position was in severe doubt, he was granted his family's old holdings on Khar'shan itself, ruling over the second largest continent as the governor of the most populous batarian fief in the entire Hegemony. As on Torfan, he concentrated on improving the economic situation of his territory, which he succeeded with as long as his support for Ar'dra remained unwavering. However, in 2183, the Terra Nova Incident brought him into conflict with the Arch-Hegemon once again. The attempt to drive an asteroid into that world struck him as completely insane, a sure invitation for the Alliance to respond with genocidal force. Why Ar'dra and his high command would sign off on such a plan was completely unknown to him at the time.
However, by 2184, he knew why. It was Sak'davran who passed on intelligence via an Illium information broker that Ar'dra had been experimenting with an ancient Reaper corpse connected to the Leviathan of Dis legend. Thus began the Great Upheaval, or as it is known in human history, the Third Verge War. The Reaper artefact itself was kept inside the Great Ziggurat of Khar'shan, directly below Ar'dra's residence. That the man was indoctrinated was thought to be obvious to the Alliance, and increasingly to the independent batarian government on Shan'kharit.
Sak'davran would live just long enough to see the Hegemony fall, and the beginnings of a new batarian state take shape, but died of a heart attack in 2185 during the Collector Crisis. His son succeeded him, but died himself during the Reaper invasion of his homeworld.
Alice Dennison's political career rocketed due to the events of Torfan. Many of those who could not believe a fiscal conservative capable of supporting hardline military action were disabused of that opinion almost immediately. Polling for her People's Party spiked on the larger border colonies almost immediately, and at the expense of her immediate political rivals. This was not without cost however. Her support for Shepard had been an unplanned thing, forced upon her both by circumstance and by the manoeuvring of the Tiger, Consul Taro. Some of her more anti-human business partners broke ties with her corporations in the months following the Alliance victory, in protest at what they saw as an expansionist policy. Dennison had never advocated isolationism or supremacism, but found herself painted by hostile aliens as doing just that. Her personal opinion of Shepard's conduct was not glowing, at least partially as a result of these business losses.
The end of the Second Verge War brought new political possibilities to the Alliance, and of all people, Dennison was eager to exploit them. However, she was not the only person positioned to take advantage. By the election of August 2182, the Alliance public were in disarray as to what they wanted their future to look like. It had been almost four years to the day since victory, the batarians were too weak to contest Alliance dominance of her own space, the Citadel looked like granting a seat within a lifetime, and the Terminus opened up its own possibilities. The vote splintered. No party won an outright majority, and Dennison was forced into coalition with DeBankole, now leader of his own party having succeeded Taro.
The new administration was three months old when the geth attacked Eden Prime, and the priorities of humanity shifted once more towards war. Dennison would play her part in the fighting to come, assuring that the Alliance would lack for nothing as far as she could make it so, facing down scepticism and outright hostility from the Citadel powers, and promoting further ties with the Quarians. Without Torfan, it is quite possible that one of humanity's most capable economic and political minds would not have helped lead during the greatest war the galaxy could ever see.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: A few smallish spoilers for other stories in the Battlefield series, but nothing earth-shattering.
With this and the next part, the Battle of the Kite's Nest, we've reached the beginning of Battlefield 2183's storyline, but that story is not yet complete. I can't really start writing up battles for the Eden Prime War until I finish that, because I would have to spoil hugely to get the job done.
So, if I haven't finished 2183 by the time I've finished the Kite's Nest writeup, perhaps you guys would like to see a writeup of the First Contact War? Non-spoilered for BF2157 of course. Tell me in reviews or PMs if that's something you'd enjoy reading.
Hope you've enjoyed this so far!