Nemesis

The streets of Omega were littered with filth and stinking refuse. Humans and vorcha begging in the gutters, vermin fighting over pitiful scraps. Duplicitous elcor and volus merchants cheating and scheming in the open air markets, krogan and turian thugs wandering freely through the crowds

It was enough to turn his stomach. For all its boasts to the contrary, Omega was really no better than any part of Council space. A degenerate stew of mixed cultures and species, barely distinguishable from what could be found polluting the lowest wards of the Citadel itself. Even the batarians who lived here were a feeble sort: the worst of the dregs of the lower castes. Escaped slaves, exiled heretics, lesser sons of merchants and mongrels. Mercenaries and thieves; almost none with any loyalty to the planet of their origin.

Ka'hairal Balak looked forward more and more each day to the moment when High Command would give the order to take Omega in the name of the Hegemony. The Nebula had been left untouched for too long; control of the systems' relay network connections was too important; and Omega itself had been left to rot in so-called independence for too many years.

All worlds needed leadership, and Omega was no exception. It needed a firm guiding hand to lead it towards greatness, not the indifferent neglect of the self-styled Queen of Omega. What claim could any asari have to Omega, half a galaxy or more away from the slumbering spires of Thessia? The asari were soft and weak, ill-suited to the position of power in which they found themselves.

No, Balak knew that this state of affairs simply could not last. One day the Hegemony would reach out an armoured fist and take Omega for itself. The sooner the better, for all concerned. Some species could not be trusted with freedom: Omega itself was proof of that.

And when the glorious day arrived, he hoped and prayed to the spirits of his ancestors that he would be chosen to serve on the front lines. He let himself imagine the sound of infantry marching through Omega's streets, and the smell of smoke as the asari's nightclub burned to the ground, and he found he could almost smile.

In truth, in the years since Balak had sworn his oaths of fealty to the Overseer the war against the turians had not necessarily developed to the Hegemony's advantage.

We're completely fucked now, was the less diplomatic way Balak's old CO had put it, in the aftermath of the retreat from Torfan. Those turian bastards have us by the throat and they're going to squeeze hard. The man had been drinking heavily, slurring his words, swaying on his feet, blood-shot tears in his three remaining eyes. But Balak had found it hard to disagree with his assessment.

(He'd still reported his superior to High Command for treason at the first opportunity, of course. He wasn't an idiot, and the mere fact that something was true didn't mean it should be said out loud. And the Overseer had been particularly anxious to find traitors, at the moment in history. Somebody had to be blamed for what had gone so wrong.)

Nonetheless, in the privacy of his own thoughts, Balak could admit that things looked bleak for the Hegemony. They had been outfought at Torfan, and they had been outmaneuvered by the turians' spies and diplomats in the years that followed.

But he trusted in the plans of the Overseer and his advisors. More than that, he had faith in the genetic superiority of his species. Forged through struggle and adversity, refined and cultivated through years of careful breeding. Whatever the whims and vagaries of chance, the stronger civilization would always win out in the end. The very laws of evolution, of natural selection, proved that to be so.

Let the old order quake and struggle as it might: the destiny of the batarian people would not be denied.

Balak had been a child when the war began in earnest, still in training.

Strange to think that it had been almost twenty years now. How much the galaxy had changed since then.

In hindsight, armed conflict between the Hierarchy and the Hegemony had always been inevitable. The turians were too proud, too greedy, for peaceful coexistence to have been possible. And the Council were too weak and cowardly to be trusted to defend what was the batarians' by right. Only through strength could the Hegemony defend itself.

The immediate spark had seemed almost inconsequential, at the time. The discovery of a minor space-faring race, somehow undetected for all this time, living on systems that clearly fell within the batarian sphere of influence. That meant a dozen new worlds to settle for the Hegemony, that meant more breeding stock for the slave corps.

He hadn't suspected then that the turians would choose to intervene. Why would they?

The new worlds were of little value to them, far off in the Traverse as they were. The species living there had little in common with their unexpected protectors, other than the two missing eyes that the priests taught was a certain sign of spiritual degradation.

But intervene they had. He didn't care to speculate as to their motives; didn't waste time listening to their self-serving justifications after the fact. Who knew what dark motives stirred the hearts of the turians?

Whatever their reasons, the decision had inflicted misery and defeat on the batarian people for too many years. Balak's own father had lost an arm and a career at Indris, fighting the flagships of the turian fleet. He'd been one of the lucky ones even then.

Arterius was the name of the Spectre responsible for it all. Saren Arterius. A name that would live in infamy, for as long as there was a Hegemony to remember it.

Balak repeated the oath to himself once more and frowned, unhappy with his wording.

There would always be a Hegemony, of course. To even think otherwise was … well, some treason was not safe to commit even in the privacy of one's thoughts.

Balak was in a particularly foul mood this morning.

His days on Omega weren't solely dedicated to brooding on the war, however it felt at times. Thoughts of retribution and revenge on the Hegemony's enemies could only keep him warm and fed in a strictly metaphorical sense. For his more mundane needs, the galaxy required credits.

So he had a job, of sorts. A way to keep the credits rolling in: acting as bodyguard and enforcer for a local batarian merchant. Well, a type of merchant. A criminal, to be precise. A gangster, albeit of a rather unimpressive kind.

It would have been one thing if the merchant had stuck to honest trades, selling ordinary goods like eezo or slaves. That was what his caste was bred for, after all. Yet slaves were cheap and plentiful, and eezo was rare and difficult to obtain. Which meant that the neither was particularly profitable, once the usual rules of supply and demand were accounted for. So the man also maintained a lucrative side business in red sand smuggling, among other intoxicants, in gambling rings and high-interest loans.

Balak had no sympathy for the red sand addicts he sometimes saw lying slumped in Omega's alleys. But he had little respect for those that sold such products either. Narcotics like red sand made you weak, dependant. Which is exactly what the Council wanted them to be. Even selling the drugs made you complicit in their attempt to undermine his people.

Yet none of this was the direct cause of Balak's mood.

Interesting times had come to Omega. The former leader of the krogan Blood Pack was dead. Murdered in his base by a team of asari commandos, or so the rumour went. None of the people spreading that particular rumour could agree on the asaris' motives, naturally. Perhaps he had merely been killed by a rival, or injured himself in a bout of unthinking blood rage.

What mattered was that Garm was dead, and the Blood Pack was in disarray, Garm's former lieutenants scrambling over the wreckage of his kingdom to assert themselves as his heir.

It was the perfect time to expand, or so Balak had tried to argue. To seize new territory for themselves. But his employer had thought otherwise. Where Balak had seen opportunity, the other batarian saw only risk.

It wasn't just the varren and krogan that he was worried about. The salarian brothers who ran the Eclipse mercs on Omega were also seeking to expand, perhaps even gearing themselves up for war against Aria herself. With the Blood Pack so reduced, Eclipse was the most powerful group on Omega, except - perhaps - for Aria herself. And the Queen of Omega was said to be in a furious rage these days, for reasons nobody could seem to fathom, exiling old advisors and executing others.

Strike, he had urged his employer. The man might have been a degenerate criminal, but he was a batarian, and better he rule than a pair of greasy salarians or that asari. With luck, and bold moves, who knew what would be possible? No one had ever won a war by surrendering.

But his advice had fallen on deaf ears. His employer had even started talking about pulling out of Omega altogether, falling back to one of the colony worlds while the other gangs fought it out. It had been a shameful display, one Balak had found demeaning to even witness.

Balak could overlook many failings, he had discovered. But he drew the line at cowardice.

Sixteen years after it began, the armed phase of the conflict had resumed in earnest.

Balak hadn't been a child anymore. He'd seen it coming, this time. They all had.

The human worlds had seemed to be on the edge of open revolt. The turian forces stretched overly thin across their newly seized worlds. Surely it had been the ideal moment to correct what had once gone wrong.

But appearances had been deceiving. The humans hadn't acted the way High Command had predicted; the Hierarchy's troops had fought harder than they'd planned; the Council had been more biased in their support of the turians than they had feared.

At the Battle of Indris, the Hegemony's fleets had fought the Hierarchy to a virtual stalemate, despite the turians' superior numbers and delusions of tactical prowess. But it hadn't been enough. Moral victories never were.

Indris had been the only full fleet engagement of that period of the war. With its colonies cut off and its ports blockaded, the Hegemony couldn't spare any more ships in pitched engagements. So instead they'd been pushed slowly backwards, one world at a time, losing everything they'd gained in the initial surge. Losing territory they'd paid for dearly in blood and lives.

Then everything had fallen apart at Torfan.

Balak had left two cousins behind on Torfan, their bodies rotting in the squalor and mud below the moon's surface with so many other soldiers of the Hegemony.

Granted, he hadn't particularly liked either of his cousins - a pair of mewling idiots, in his opinion, barely qualified to lead the divisions they had been granted - but that simply wasn't the point. They may have been useless, but they were family: bound together by ties of blood and honor. His cousins had been heirs to the very first Overseers; born into the highest castes of princes and priests. Their forefathers had been on Khar'shan to watch the first raising of the Pillars of Strength, back in the distant age before the first rockets lifted batarian civilization up into the heavens. It wasn't right that some upstart apes could just cut them down in the dirt like they were nothing.

The Battle of Torfan had been four years ago now. Four long years of turian diplomats whispering poison into the ears of the Council; while their new allies grew stronger and more fierce. Nurtured like a pack of angry varren, scores of wild biotics like the Butcher herself bred only to wage war against the Hegemony. Four long years of waiting for the Primarchs' next blow to fall.

Waiting, but not waiting idly. That was why he and his men were on Omega, in a way. That was why he suffered the indignity of posing as second to a lower caste criminal who, back on on Khar'shan, he'd have sooner seen in the stocks. Because High Command hadn't let those years go to waste.

His squad had been stationed out here for months. One of dozens of special forces divisions scattered around the Terminus Systems and on the fringes of batarian space. Some day soon open fighting with the turians would resume in earnest, and when it did the Overseer intended to be ready. However the enemy schemed, the Hegemony's forces would not be surprised again.

When the next phase of the war began in earnest, the Hierarchy would not find the Hegemony's forces as ill-prepared as they had been four years earlier. Never again would they let their military strength be isolated and routed at a single point of weakness. Instead, the Primarchs would find that the war would be fought on more fronts than they could have imagined.

As soon as the fighting began, officially neutral worlds like Omega and Mannoval would raise the standards of the Hegemony as batarian external forces seized control of their capitals. Orbital strikes and conveniently timed nuclear accidents would cripple settlements that had thought themselves safe from the fighting. Privateers would swarm key relay terminals, disrupting both communications and the flow of crucial supplies. And turian colonies would be made to bleed all across the galaxy. Long overdue redress for the blood spilled by batarian patriots during the past two decades.

And until then, no matter how little he liked it, Balak would wait. Revenge, like a fine wine, would taste all the sweeter with the passage of time.

It had been weeks since they had received even routine messages from High Command. They couldn't be communicated with directly; surprise and stealth were the greatest assets. Direct radio broadcasts could be detected, even if the military's ciphers were unbreakable, and quantum entanglement protocols were prohibitively expensive. Even third party couriers or extranet communication could not be trusted: it was too easy to imagine an agent being compromised, or a crucial piece of infrastructure being suborned.

The only safe method was the dead drop, the ancient tool of spies and intelligence agents the galaxy over. So each week Balak toured the markets, covertly checking pre-arranged spots for new missives from Khar'shan or secreting his own return messages in others. And so slowly but surely, orders trickled one way, while status reports and updates trickled slowly the other way. All undetected by the turians and their operatives.

But for weeks now, nothing had arrived. No instructions, no change of plans. Not a thing.

So it was something of a surprise, that morning, to find something waiting for him at the drop point.

New orders, at last. Balak allowed himself a brief second to fantasise that the war for Omega was about to begin. Today would be a good day to … but no. The war would not resume in earnest today. Not on Omega, anyway.

Still, orders were orders. Balak waited until he was safely out of sight of any onlookers before he studied the message in earnest.

It was not what he had expected. No news of overt turian movements, no suggestion of exploiting the current chaos on Omega. Instead there were reports of trouble on Solem's Redoubt, a colony world in the Attican Beta cluster, one of the few worlds the Hegemony had been able to wrest away from turian control in the last decades. A world the Hierarchy hadn't seem too concerned about winning back, but one that military intelligence had nonetheless flagged as crucial to the war effort. And no wonder, when the surface of the world was covered with Prothean ruins.

It seemed that all transmissions from Solem's Redoubt had ceased abruptly two days ago. His orders were to jump to the colony, placing it under martial law if it still stood, with authorization to use lethal force if necessary. If the colony had fallen, his orders were to avenge it. Either way, he was to investigate the reason for the radio silence and ensure that the Prothean ruins remained secure.

Not quite the heroic mission he'd signed up, he reflected. If he'd wanted to be a colonial administrator, he'd never have volunteered for special forces training. It promised to be onerous and unglamourous work.

But the prize...

When espionage and diplomacy ended and fighting began once more, Balak knew that the odds would be stacked against them, whatever the official line. Units like his own would harass and delay the turian forces as best they could, but special forces and surprise raids would ultimately only slow down the aggressor. Mastery of the lost powers of the Prothean Empire was the secret to winning the war against the turians. And master that legacy the batarian people would, whatever it took.

It was a point of pride for all true batarians that they had clawed their way up into the galaxy against the odds. Not for them the easy paths of the asari or the turians: stumbling their way into unearned knowledge. The secrets of the Protheans hadn't fallen easily into their laps. They'd had to struggle and fight for every scrap of knowledge; and that struggle had made them strong.

Balak had been hearing rumours for some time of work on a secret weapon that would change the tide of the war. There were always rumours, of course, but this time around they seemed more substantial. Both the almost officially sanctioned channels and Balak's own private contacts were in agreement. The Hegemony's best scientists were working on something unlike anything anybody had seen before. Something that had been found in the Hades Gamma cluster almost two decades ago. Something that officially did not exist, had never existed. Something that had been lying dormant for millennia, waiting for its rightful masters to arrive.

And who knew what scrap of Prothean knowledge might be found under the ruin's on Solem's Redoubt? Perhaps the final thing necessary to unlock the secret of the mysterious weapon that would break the turians once and for all.

Balak scanned the briefing again, wishing that intelligence had been able to gather more information before the colony had fallen dark. As it was, there was very little of substance. Only isolated reports of colonists acting oddly, strange sightings and rumours of the most ridiculous kind.

Geth, beyond the Veil? Preposterous. The geth were a quarian problem. The Hegemony had never had the need to meddle with AI - servitude and menial work was what lower castes were born for, after all - but had they chosen to do so, they would never have shown the weakness necessary for their own tools to rise up in rebellion against them.

But the quarians were fundamentally a weak people, just like their turian cousins, unfit to command even soulless machines. Weak, insular, and self-absorbed. And these were flaws that their synthetic offspring had inherited in turn. In two centuries the geth had never shown any interest in expanding beyond the borders of the old quarian systems.

No, Balak knew that the turians, not the geth, were the most likely source of trouble. They always were. Perhaps the Hierarchy had not been as willing to let go of this world as it had initially seemed. Not that it mattered.

Balak sought out his second, an ordinary looking young batarian who glared at him resentfully when he tracked him down. Barely showed the proper respect due to a superior, while doing just enough to avoid showing the level of disregard that would necessitate a duel of honour.

Days earlier, Charn had almost started a fight with a visiting Council Spectre in the middle of the promenade. Balak had been furious when he'd heard the news, his anger only slightly mollified by the amusing thought of Charn having to bow and scrape before one of Aria's elcor enforcers. Officially, of course, the elcor were barely sentient: two-eyed, dull-witted brutes not even worthy of joining the Hegemony in servitude. But unofficially, well. Charn was Charn.

We're here on Omega to be the Hegemony's hidden blades in the dark, he'd hissed at his second when they were alone. Hidden. That means not getting into eye-counting contests with the first Council lackey to wander through.

Charm had wanted to argue, Balak knew: had been waiting for him to try. But instead his inferior had flicked his eyes away deferentially, acknowledging his place.

Balak knew Charn dreamt of usurping his position: that was simply the way that the galaxy worked. It was how Balak himself had assumed command, seizing control after his old CO had been executed by firing squad all those years ago. And Charm was normally a competent second; competent enough that Balak could look beyond his hints at insubordination. But Balak could trace his bloodlines back to distant cousins of the Overseer himself, while Charm's veins carried the blood of peasants. Charn simply wasn't a threat.

"Have the men assembled within the hour," he ordered him now. "We have a world to reclaim."