THE LEADERS
Nozomi Taro, "The Tiger",Consul of the Systems Alliance
By mid-2178, Consul Taro was on the cusp of becoming a living legend almost without parallel.
She had thrown back the batarian aggression, punished the Terminus barons for their complicity, liberated Anhur from slavers, seized the Verge to sate humanity's wanderlust, and held off all attempts by the Citadel to moderate the scale of her ambitions through sheer shock at her success. The elections of 2177 had been a complete victory, delivering a solid majority to her own political party and a supermajority to the "War Coalition" consisting of the Labour Party, the People's Party and Terra Firma. The Consul possessed more personal power than any human being in history, a combination of fear, love and awe in equal measure keeping it that way. Although she was not the only person who had foreseen the war to come, she was by far the most effective advocate for its prosecution.
And yet, Taro's final gambit was yet to be played. The Consul was well aware that the conflict would not end until the Hegemony itself was ended. To this end, she had made extensive preparations. The batarian exiles were courted, organised, armed, and eventually colonised on a new garden world, Shan'kharit. Everything and anything that could de-legitimise the government on Khar'shan was gathered, spun and thrown at the galactic media in the most sensational terms possible. Plans for a post-war settlement involving alliance between humanity and the batarians were 'leaked' at convenient opportunities, particularly after great victories, to the end of assuring the galaxy that genocide was not her agenda. Privately, she knew that slaughtering those on Khar'shan would have been far easier. Her surviving diaries paint a picture of a woman certain of particular realities, convinced that it would come to a kill-or-be-killed scenario, that the Hegemony would never surrender unless those loyal to it were all dead.
The political barriers to complete victory were joined by military ones. Since the early Alliance offensives in the Verge, a stalemate existed across most of the front. This was not an unusual occurrence in galactic warfare due to its nature, but it was an intolerable one. Long before the war, Taro had ordered extensive studies at how best to break deadlocks of the kind now faced by the Alliance, particularly those that might be faced across the Verge. It was to avoid such a stalemate that the attack on Elysium had been turned into an ambush, rather than simply repulsing the batarians as they came in-system. That had been highly successful, but not so much so that the path to Khar'shan lay open. The preparations paid handsome dividends, augmented by practical experience in the Yuki Cluster.
By July 2178, Taro had the means to slip a knife between the ribs of the Hegemony, straight into its heart. Her ultimate triumph awaited her command, one that she was eager to give.
Kesrak Ar'dra, Arch-Hegemon of the Batarian Hegemony
The Arch-Hegemon's position in 2178 had stabilised to a large extent from the dramatic falls of two years previous. Although his empire had lost forty percent of its inhabitable worlds and thirty percent of its industrial capacity, the majority of military production and the resources to feed it remained save behind the 'Verge Wall' of fixed defences guarding the relays into the rest of batarian space. With the loss of the Yuki Cluster, all news from outside the Hegemony was cut off, and civilian life actually improved as no grand offensives could be launched. The Arch-Hegemon was supremely confident that his schemes involving the kidnapping and enslaving of colonists would provoke humanity into a foolhardy attack against the Verge Wall, whereby the Navy under his cousin could counterattack. He ordered the fixed defences prioritised alongside capital ship production. By 2178, the Hegemony would be ringed with steel, and would possess no less than ten dreadnoughts, half of which were of the new Fang of Khar'shan-class.
With plentiful work and no information to upset them, the lower castes settled into new and productive lives, a boomtime that had not been seen in decades. However, the noble classes found the situation entirely unsatisfactory. The memories of their relatives being targeted for nuclear annihilation by Alliance missile frigates were fresh and painful. Every month that passed where the Alliance did not fall into Ar'dra's trap, more and more nobles joined the party in favour of an all-out offensive using the strength being built up behind the Verge Wall.
Historians are divided as to what effects such an attack would have had. Certainly, dreadnoughts are very well suited to forcing relay passages, and if concentrated against one of the four relay passages guarding the front, they could have overwhelmed the defences before the Alliance reserves could react. However, intelligence on the strength of the Alliance Navy waiting for them was non-existent. No one on Khar'shan could tell where the weakest part of the line was, just as no one on Earth could. Attacking was a huge gamble, one that the government was not willing to take without first whittling down the enemy by drawing them into a trap.
Ar'dra saw to it that the disgruntled nobles were suppressed, albeit with the least amount of bloodshed possible. After the purges, almost all of those left were, or had been, staunch loyalists. Discontent among his core support was a great concern, balanced only by the temporary support of the masses. Luckily, with the Navy and Army firmly under his control, the Arch-Hegemon thought himself in well-positioned to survive. Considering that his regime would outlast the war, there is much evidence to suggest that he was right. However, there was nothing that the Arch-Hegemon could do to stop the oncoming attack on his core systems. Even if he could have discovered the strategy by which Taro intended to undo all his preparations, the Hegemony simply no longer possessed the capacity to stop her.
Humanity was coming, and her greatest enemy knew it not.