A/N: I'm starting the Salarian section, but I still have some work left to do on the asari piece, based on feedback. I apologize for the very long length, but as it turns out this took DAYS to write, because so much of it is new material that one must come up with from scratch.
There's a lot of influences in here – sixties revolutionary culture, Starship Troopers, a bit of neo-Platonic thinking, psychosomatic planning, and of course, a touch of Three Kingdoms bickering. It's probably also not a good sign that most of this was written to the background accompaniment of Orochimaru's Theme, is it?
The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space
Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING
HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE
ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED
Dearest Jack, clever Richard, and lovely Rachel,
I've arrived safely on Mannovai, and with the help of my friends in the University of Sur'Kesh, have already amassed a staggering amount of historical data. Agent Lawson is attempting to learn something of the art of being seductive without relying on one's body to do so, but she remains a dull stone in many regards, despite her intellect and fierce skills. Still, her background in analysis helps when I must sort through this morass of trivia – salarians are so savage and yet fussy about the events in their history!
Minsta's work, while certainly interesting, was almost ham-fisted and certainly inelegant when it came to describing my race. Do not think such a droll document sums up the asari. There is no mention of the many rituals and ceremonies that define the life of the least of us, nothing about the relationships between mothers and daughters, no indication of so many aspects of our culture. As a guide to familiarity with asari, it lacks the touch of true experience.
Asari, however, are used to such brusqueness from creatures who live a span of time that wouldn't even be sufficient for an asari to master her craft. Salarians, with their blazingly short lives, are more complex and nuanced. The keyword you must incorporate into your understanding of salarians is awareness. They are aware, of every second, on many levels that not even the finest asari minds can comprehend.
Salarian history, of course, is something that truly requires a deep and open understanding of the nature of the species in question to grasp what is significant and what is merely gilded pride, or even mere happenstance. One could argue that, despite the reshaping of human morality and society that was inflicted on you by Emperor Ardiente and the Manswells, that human history even at this late date is still shaped by events such as World War II or the inability of China to master it's inward-looking focus. Such is it with the salarians as well.
I will of course provide an overview of salarian history, but I will try to indicate those points and people that truly altered the flow of their narrative. It is not enough to recite dates and dry facts, with salarians you can feel a glimpse of what it must be like to be an asari, when in the span of a single human life three or even four salarian generations pass.
Salarian culture is hyperactive, polymorphic and yet anchored on concepts that haven't changed in thousands of years. It's languages are complex and laced with mathematics and logical precepts in a way that shows the bend of salarian thinking. And salarian religious concepts are perhaps more influential in their daily lives than with any other race.
I will attempt to enlighten, but it is your choice as to if the light of my words falls upon the waters or the hands.
Trellani Thought of the Day: A system that doesn't encrypt it's footer messages and yet has root access to every outgoing message could carry protoformed VI hacks through your entire network. You should really secure that.
Prehistory
The earliest salarians were salamander like creatures dwelling on the rich, wide rivers of the Mantha Forest in central Sur'Kesh. Sur'Kesh is a tropical planet, with two continents – Ikkune, or 'core', and Irukka, or 'beyond'. Ikkune is a large, heavily forested continent with lush jungle between three huge river vales that spill into the sea. Irukka is a long chain of massive mountainous isles that was once a shield mountain range before it began to subsume into the warm oceans.
These early salarians were clever little creatures, and their cousins, simka, still can be found today. Doglike and agile, with quick reflexes and masterful senses of sight and smell, they were engaged in a vicious evolutionary contest with heavier, larger mammalian creatures. The salarians were forced to rely on their minds and reflexes in the dangerous environments of the Mantha Forest, and were able to survive by dint of preying on the children of their competitors.
A series of tectonic events has been postulated for a global rise in sea levels, with many of the forests becoming wetlands and swamps, tilting things in the advantage of the proto-salarians. However, the lizards were never amphibious, and ended up mostly living at the edge of the established wetlands, living on insects and carrion, while mammals starved from the destruction of the vegetation they depended upon.
It is interesting, and even a touch humbling, to realize by what simple chance there may have never been salarians. And perhaps I am merely fanciful to wonder what would have taken their place if not for that surge in the sea. But the salarians thrived, and as the oceans slowly receded, they needed higher rates of locomotion. Thus, by about half a million years ago, salarians reached a fairly upright stance, and shifted from insect eaters to full time scavengers and carrion feeders as their mass grew.
There is a great deal of archeological evidence (most of it curated neatly away in salarian museums) that some precursor race prior to Protheans tampered with salarian development at some point, but that effort did not yield the expect results and the project was abandoned. It is sad to consider what loss of function must have been entailed, but the fossil record shows salarian brain size increased four-fold by 300,000 years ago, while the jaw structure was significantly altered from that of a scavenger to an omnivore.
The reasons for this were fairly simple – a purely carnivorous creature of that size would have swiftly grown to become an alpha predator. Given the fragile ecosystems of Sur'Kesh, this would have almost certainly lead to explosive growth followed by starvation and mass die offs. Additionally, if the ancients were attempting to breed sentient beings, then records indicate that omnivores are the most likely candidates. With the dubious exception of the vorcha, no sentient race has ever been recorded that is not either herbivorous or omnivorous. (The reasons are complex and this is not a study on evolutionary sociobiology.)
The new meat-light diet of the ancient salarians meant that they slowly lost mass and bulk over the next geological periods, eventually ending up as rather clever fishers, eating wild fruits and some light hunting of small, fat-rich animals such as river lizards and mannosk (an animal much like oxen but adapted to river life).
Ancient salarians organized themselves into rough hunting packs, usually several hundred males protecting a few dozen females. Even then, the ratio of male to female was skewed, and much of today's salarian society probably traced back to savage, unthinking battles between competing packs of hunters.
These ancient salarians, even then, must have been devastatingly swift. The fossil record is inexact, since so much of the salarian skeletal mass is cartilage, but there were several such bodies found preserved in swamp tar that showed the same limber carriage, elegant limbs, and unique hook-horned heads as modern salarians.
First Salarian Sentience
Salarians began experimenting with basic tool use around two-hundred thousand years ago, mostly sticks and the like, but the oldest 'complete' set of stone flake-style implements dates to less than ninety thousand years ago. (Please note that humans experimented with the Oldevai tools nearly two million years ago – human technological speed only reached impressive paces after the rise of writing.) They mastered fire nearly seventy thousand years ago, and simple packs slowly began to form hunter-gatherer associations.
These ancient tools were not universal – some tribes had lesser implements – but they spread rapidly, and with the control of fire began moving from living in forest clearings to making their own. The salarian nest was several heaped layers of stones and mud, forming crude ziggurats – a shape of building they prefer even to this day. There may be some innate psychological safety in such shapes, or perhaps racial memories. (Ms. Lawson suggests kidnapping a few and performing psychological batteries. If you chose to indulge in such casual barbarity instead of looking for records of deep asari melds with salarians, then please, take them from the Terminus Systems. I have no wish to deal with STG thugs ruining my morning tea.)
By sixty thousand years ago, salarian hunter packs had ranged far across the core, penetrating into the Yin-Slath Jungles and the Coreai Swamps. They'd mastered slings and spears, as well as heavy bows made with the flexible horns and gut from the heavy mannosks. At some point, following the mannosk herds lead to them beginning to experiment with domestication, and finally primitive agriculture with the mannosk acting as motive power.
The first primitive permanent encampments sprang up around this time, along with increasingly complicated tool uses. The early salarians were inspiringly clever in their innovations. Their stone age tools were elegant, clever, using double-serrated edges and flexible wood, cunningly carved into sliding tubes, to perform their hunts with. Even as savages, the salarians would settle for nothing but the best technology.
First Salarian Cultures
Sadly, given the fascinating nature of prehistoric salarians, contemporary historians pay little attention to them. The jungle and wet nature of Sur'Kesh also works against truly ancient archeological research, as any non-stone artifacts rotted away long ago. Most hard information the salarians have, or care to share, is from the first flowering of salarian culture, some nine thousand years ago.
The earliest rise of such cultures seems to be at the meeting of two huge rivers, below a great bluff of stone that thrust up like a large hand from the waters. This was called the Reach of Sur'Kesh, and even today is the holiest site on the planet. Towering almost four hundred feet into the air and honeycombed with natural, rolling caverns and tunnels carved by ancient vulcanism, the Reach was a fortress created by the hand of nature.
The Reach, in those days, was built around with river crossings, campsites and primitive, wood-paved roads, lacquered with certain resins and mineral salts from the river outflow. Even then, the salarians prized organization and understood the need for paths of travel. The early tribal cultures even had primitive toll systems, bartering fish and salt for furs and meats from those moving inland from the river delta.
These early cultures were mostly hunting and gathering bands, who met at the Reach to practice primitive religious ceremonies. Eventually, this became a series of pilgrimages, a mix of social gathering, religious gathering, and bartering. These early salarians developed a written and spoken language, ancient Kurki, which is the root tongue for all salarian languages.
The river valley was where agriculture was first practiced year round, and eventually some salarians began settling down permanently, carving homes out of the rock cliffs. Sadly, most of the goods this culture produced are no longer extant, but the salarians recorded much art and history on these walls, and in vast cliff carvings around the base of the cliff.
The cultures (known as the Dawn-age Collectives) were four or possibly five large tribal structures, that eventually came to see the Reach as neutral ground, but battled incessantly among themselves for hunting, females and land. The culture that ended up settling around the Reach were brokers and traders, raising crops and fishing and trading tools, grains and the like to the far ranging hunter-gatherer tribes.
The Severing
This amazingly stable culture managed to survive for almost 500 years. Wars were confined to the tribes, never brought within the confines of the Reach, and with this stability, the Reach began to grow wealthy. Acting as the center of trade and power, it's open air markets and temples marked the beginning of real civilization. Written histories and art, carved fish-scale displays and fine weapons were all available here.
However, each tribe began to covet the increasing wealth and power of the Reach, while the Reach itself began training primitive militia. As the Reach salarians began to work metals such as bronze, they kept these superior weapons for themselves. The Reach leadership, a collection of religious tribal leaders who also acted as kings, formed a united council and concentrated power in the hands of a few influential families, mostly those with fleets of fishing boats or large croplands.
Political tensions reached a head around 8500 years ago, when the out-land tribes decided they were going to claim the Reach for themselves, once and for all. Tired of being forced to live a subsistence lifestyle, yet unwilling to form cooperative groups with the skills and determination to create their own towns, these tribes were more opportunistic militant bands than rich tribal cultures. Cruel and rapacious, they bartered their females as if they were fish, and became violent and arrogant, embracing a combat based, honor-based culture of weakness being seen as a perfectly valid reason to kill.
Some of this immoral – or perhaps, anti-moral – stance is still seen in many salarians. Historically, salarians have never openly declared war, seeing it as a stupid surrender of advantage.
The ancient tribes were too specialized – some depended on hunting, others on fishing, others on trapping or logging – to succeed in a group endeavor without the skilled coordination of the Reach culture, but they convinced themselves they could just take it over through military conquest.
The resulting war was a catastrophe. Fire, corpses and massive amounts of fighting destroyed the tribes, ruining the crops and pillaging much of the outlying settlements around the Reach. The Reach forces, armed with bronze scale and swords, could hold their own in battle, but the Reach was very heavily outnumbered by seven to one. Worse, most of the Reach inhabitants were soft compared to the hard, wild tribesmen. Finally, with the ugly reality that the Reach was pinned by rivers, they could be laid siege to by the outlanders, who could hunt to supply themselves even as the Reach starved.
The shaman-kings of the Reach decided the best way to win was not through force of arms, but rather through subterfuge. Using valuable gifts and emissaries sent under the cover of darkness, they promised each of the three largest tribes that the Reach would surrender to them if they were able to stop their fellow tribes from ransacking the city and killing it's people. They suggest that, indeed, the lesser, weaker tribes were a threat to the stronger three tribes, and that a single winner would embrace a new era of control and power for the tribes.
This enough probably would have reduced the enemy to manageable numbers, as the three decided that the only way to ensure they would be on top would be to obliterate their rivals. But the salarian mind is more devious than mine or yours.
Seventeen other salarians volunteered to carry false messages through the night. They knew they would be captured and killed. The messages they carried were purportedly to the three large tribes, stating the Reach would ally with the larger (and more organized) tribes if they in turn fell upon and destroyed the smaller tribes.
As might be expected, the ruse worked brilliantly. The smaller clans attempted to swarm the larger tribes, who were already fighting for the right to rule. Battles erupted all along the battle and siege lines, as driven by greed and fear, they turned on one another.
The result was a savage free for all, turning in a slaughter of most of the tribal armies, and ending with a cold-blooded massacre of the many of the survivors by the Reach. The tribes, shattered, fell back to their hunting grounds, but the Reach leadership decided to take a drastic effort to secure their livelihood, and continued to attack.
Many of the tribes who didn't take part in the attack, seeing the bared might before them, retreated to the southern mountains, choosing to live off the land. The tribes that fought, on the other hand, managed to regroup near the coast, swearing revenge on the Reach.
As a result, over the next couple of centuries, the Reach identified and kidnapped as many females from the hostile, out-land tribes as they could, using assassins to kill off powerful tribal leaders, and reduced the tribes to shadows of themselves. The Reach civilization, absorbing the remains, centralized their government around the four shaman-kings of the Reach and unified salarians, expanding outward from that point. What remained of the tribes fled far from the Reach, eventually building boats and fleeing over the sea to the islands of Irruka.
Salarian Iron Ages
The Reach empire (the ancient name for it was literally Ulkana, or "Reach Empire) grew rapidly in the 800 years that followed, slowly advancing through iron ages. I use the term 'iron ages' as familiar to you, although the salarians would term it the Age of Intrigues.
However, it can't be argued that this is when the salarians began using iron, and the control of forging iron by the shaman-kings of the Reach meant that, even as tribes began rising on the outskirts of the empire, they were suborned and conquered by the Reach.
Expanding their road network, the Reach Empire eventually controlled almost three fourths of the central continent, ignoring those primitives who chose to well in the rough mountains, building cities as they went. Salarian life expectancy at this point was barely twenty five years, so an accounting of the achievements of individuals was meaningless.
The Reach Empire grew so rapidly that they soon outstripped their ability to grow food. With females gathered in a central location and children kept safe from rampant warfare, the salarian population grew very fast, and sanitation and logistics began to affect the Empire. The fisheries were depleted, the soil began to fail, and even the hunting grew sparse.
The empire tried several methods to counter this, but most ended up in failure as there was no real understanding of the underlying systems and problems with the Empire. The balance of power shifted precipitously between those still with fertile lands and those without, and as the situation worsened so did internal infighting.
The mountain tribes, removed from the center forests,were less effected by this, as their diet depended more on coastal fishing and hunting in the mountains. Additionally, their much smaller population was more diffused among the mountains and did not overstress the environment as much. They kept their distance from the Reach Empire and tried to just endure day by day, building a culture with a hard-core edge of grim survivalist thinking and utterly immoral pragmatism.
Across the sea, the old tribal remnants had forged themselves into a very different sort of culture, one dominated by females instead of males, due to the scarcity of females that had managed to evade the Reach's kidnappers to flee across the ocean. The islands had their own natural resources, including vast fields of edible seaweed and almost inexhaustible fish stocks, as well as the animals on the islands. Secure from any attack from the mainland, they were able to build in peace, but the ignominious defeat they had suffered at the hands of the Reach Empire in the old days still burned brightly, and their culture, while female dominated, still was full of male honor systems and vengeance killings. Thus, even as the Reach began to fall apart, these seagoing cultures added to the problem, raiding the coastline and even plundering the coastal cities.
The Collapse
At some point about 7500 to 7200 years ago, the Reach's ability to feed it's people was destroyed by a series of events happening contemporaneously. First, there was a large drought, which made the rivers fall, killed most of the crops, and ruined what hunting was left in the area. Second, the island tribes conducted a vicious series of raids, focusing not on military targets but on food storage facilities. Having learned from their earlier defeat, now it was these island outcasts who were the ones using spies and saboteurs.
But most devastatingly, the population had simply outstripped the technology of the time to feed. Humans, I believe, had a social scientist named Malthus who once predicted the same fate for your kind, but your ability to grow food and thus attain food security was always ahead of your growth rate. Not so for the Reach. With depleted soil and droughts, with much of the Empire scattered over an enormous area and no real way to preserve food for transport to other parts of the Empire, the Reach came apart. Starvation killed millions of salarians, the dead overwhelming the living.
The next 1500 years were a dark-ages for the mainland salarians. The island tribes stole what they could and withdrew, but much history, art, and beauty was lost in these dark times. Goddess only knows how the salarians survived this time, but eventually a hard core of them did. It had an effect on their culture and their outlook, I believe, one that many who seek to understand salarians fail to grasp. Most think of them as sneaks, as spies, as mere manipulators. But above that, salarians are survivors, driven by a need to defy chance and fate by their intellect and creativity.
Salarians were shaped by this period of want, confusion and loss. Even today, they refer to the Collapse as the blackest of times, a curse used only when something is truly dire. "By the Collapse" is to refer to the utter failure of foresight and planning, the surrender to chaos and anarchy.
Over time, what survivors there were began to slowly band together. Living in small communities lead by a small group of females, these bands slowly began clawing their way back to civilization. It was hard, as they had to use their minds to try to find ways rejuvenate the area, and they had neither any guaranteed food supplies nor the ability to repel raids from the coast.
And yet, between a mix of harvesting river mud and using manure they were able to grow small plots of various grains and plants for consumption. But there was no large gatherings of people on the mainland, and the islands, being much poorer places to grow things on, deliberately limited their population. It seemed for a long time that eventually the last of the Reach cultures would die out, and civilization would be nothing but rude primitives subsisting on the fringes.
The Rise of the Daltriana
Salarians might have toiled in mediocrity for ever if not for the rise of the single most influential salarian in history. As I said, salarians in the ancient days died early, and tracking individuals is hardly productive, but one stands out.
About six thousand years ago, one of the females of the Tribe Salar decided she wanted to be the chief of the tribe. Her name was Shego, and her tribe was nothing special, being one of the broken remains of the original tribal cultures driven into the mountains by the Old Reach Empire. But Shego was brilliant, even for a salarian, and was able to maneuver herself into a place of power in small steps. First, she dominated her tribe, using the power of being the only mature, egg-laying female and leaving military matters to the males while she dominated everything else.
Next, she daringly implied a neighboring tribe was stronger, teasing and dispatching one of her daughters to a third clan implying they could work together to bring down their allies. Her timing in the message was deliberately off, and the other clan attacked their target first, blunting their response to the attack of the Salar. In the aftermath, she absorbed the other two tribes, but did something startling. Instead of a council of elders and shamans, she made a tribal council of elder females.
Calling herself the Daltriana ("she who knows"), Shego began commanding in earnest. The old histories don't state why males, usually aggressive and unruly, listened, but they did. It's a pity Shego was born a salarian, she would have made a brilliant member of the Thirty.
Her stratagems of subterfuge (triple crosses, the use of young females to proud tribal males to gain their allegiance, poisoned river water used to incite enemy forces to drink wine her forces had drugged hours before) were unmatched. With nothing more than guile, iron will, and the ability to out-think and out-plan her opponents, in the 24 years of her reign, the northern tribes had swelled into a massive band of unified warriors under the command of the dalatrasses, the mothers of the lines.
Here it is necessary to illustrate one of the hinge points of salarian history. This event is where the salarians began, fully, to eschew concepts of honor and violence for espionage. They'd used it before, but it was Shego who would let no word be given of an attack until it fell upon the enemy. It was the Daltriana who would form the Silent Step, the first known secret agents of the salarians, masters at disguise and language.
Shego encouraged research, and was interested in plants and herbs. Restless and brilliant, when not incapacitated by egg-laying she was tireless in finding ways to expand the reach and power of her followers. Shego protected those who found new methods to farm, to trap fish, to harness primitive wind powered millstones to provide finer wheat. It was Shego who reached out to the island tribes to trade with, bringing strange fish and spices back to the mainland along risky sea-bound and coastal trading routes.
Shego died at the age of 58, a staggeringly old age for any salarian, much less back in a day before antibiotics or proper sanitation. She left behind nineteen daughters, each of which took the title of dalatrass, and the Northern Tribes began the march to the south. They pushed back the old Reach survivors far enough to establish crop lands, even taking the northernmost cities of the old Reach Empire before settling into place and seeking power by dint of trade.
Ergohai, Maithan, and Soluthus
The three groups of salarians – Reach Empire survivors, struggling to rebuild; outcast tribals on the Ikkune islands, expanding their sea empire; and finally, the daughters of Shego, seeking to return to civilization – defined the true historical era of the salarians. They formed three empires, each engaging in subterfuge, spying, trade, limited war, even full out invasions in some cases.
Ergohai, the 'new' Reach Empire, was the most advanced and cosmopolitan of the three, building in the remains of the old Reach. Careful about food stocks and obsessed with technological advancement, Ergohai was less numerous than the other two, but had well-defended walled cities that were hard to attack. Still lead by shaman-kings, Ergohai ended up being, once again, a center-point for trade between the three empires, but was a morass of espionage as well.
Maithan was the ocean-going culture of tribals that fled the Reach early on. Like the followers of Shego, they had a female-dominated society, and they were the most warlike and violent of the empires. They saw Shego's people as cousins and would trade with them freely, but most hated the Reach and warred with them incessantly, using raids and terrorism to contain their growth.
Thus, it was Soluthus, the new group of tribes forged into a nation by the hand of Shego and her daughters, (ah, how very familiar to me, and probably utterly strange to you) that held the balance of power. Soluthus wanted Maithan to grow, to farm, make tools, and be able to provide a neutral meeting area, while the mountains the ancient tribes fled to, while not allowing them to grow much food, provided a new boon – rich deposits of iron and gold.
The ocean empire of Maithan were the only ones capable of producing fish, as well as link the wide-flung cities of Ikkune. Additionally, the threat of attack from the Ergohai kept Maithan from threatening Soluthus.
This elegantly balanced dance endures up to this day, although there is no hostility between the nations now. The Ergohai remain the explorers of society, manning the salarian fleets and are the first to want to colonize, to explore, to pull away. The Maithan remain cosmopolitan, sophisticated and scientific, always pushing development and further organization. But it is the Soluthus, those children of the Salar Tribe, the descendants of Shego, that embody the manipulation and balance of the race.
Shego's influence led to the dalatrasses becoming the center of salarian politics. As the empires grew, the tribes slowly lost their individual flavor and customs, melting into the national mindsets that enveloped them.
Salarian Dawn of Discovery
The cessation of most open war between the nations led to the need for increasing levels of innovation, as the salarian birth rate was extremely high. The nations were forced to work together to create new methods of agriculture, aquaculture, and to advance the life sciences to a large degree. 4500 years ago, they began to set aside national conflicts, even cooperate, in the name of science and learning.
Called the Dawn of Discovery by the salarians, this age was where they played a continual gamble with the lives of the race against their own wits. Vast academies, called 'uloi', were set aside, funded by salarian governments and businesses. Salarians devoted their whole lives to incremental and fundamental shifts in their understanding of the world, themselves, and all within it.
They rapidly pioneered technology that let them explore the seafloor, creating huge farms of kelp and seaweed, while they engineered a huge bay 80 miles long and 200 miles wide to act as a single gigantic fish farm. They grasped electricity and embraced hydrodynamic power quickly, being one of the few races that did not despoil the natural beauty of their world. Industry was always cutting edge, yet no salarian would be happy with anything but the highest efficiency.
It also lead to rapid advances in war-fighting – they achieved the use of advanced weapons and even biological warfare worryingly fast. And they used such at the drop of a hat, when they needed to, when negotiations failed. And yet, despite these petty skirmishes, peace continued to build, until even these minor fights faded.
The increasing cooperation between the nations as they fought to master their world lead to ever higher amounts of espionage, as the nations competed to ensure they were not overtaken by the achievements of the others. At the same time, it also lead to increasing ties between the nations of a friendly nature, as learning and discovery brought out something incredible in the salarian spirit. Eventually, this lead to one of the wonders of the galaxy.
I have seen many great monuments by all manner of aliens. The incredible Sha Titans of the Dust Age turians, the endless citadel-mounts of the Bangshuk batarian dynasty, the almost impossibly huge Great Wall of China on your earth – all of these raise the flaps of ones skin, to make one feel small, tiny and perhaps even a bit scared. The unity of the asari has always been mighty and our core strength, but I for one have never allowed myself to forget that other races can demonstrate equally strong unity at certain times.
But never have I felt so humbled as when I gazed upon the Sparak, the ancient city of scholars on Sur'Kesh. Girdled by walls a hundred feet high, it was vast circle almost sixteen miles across, filled to the brim with narrow streets and towering concrete ziggurat-towers. Here, millions of salarians were born, lived, learned, discovered, and died for their race. They had no wish or hope to leave, they were slaves in a way, sacrificing their entire lives, and their children's lives and how many generations we may never know, to science. To ensure the Collapse would never come again.
Their mantra, carved in the ancient text of the earliest salarians, was simple: knowledge is possibility, ignorance is death. They strove to bring together the finest minds of the entire planet, to bring together the best of what it meant to be salarian, to find the answers to what lead to war, to the Collapse, and to stop it from recurring.
They sought as well to not just define 'survival through knowledge', but unity through understanding. They wanted to be so valuable, in effect, that no salarian would have to kill another again. To drive entropy and chaos into rout, to bring order to anarchy.
In a thousand short years the Sparak drove development, pushing salarian technology from swords to laser weapons. They grasped techniques other races could not develop without computers and robots, such as precision surgery and genetic manipulation. They bred themselves to be leaner, to be smarter, to be ever faster and more capable of sensory input, until they were little more than flesh made lightning and brilliance given physical form.
Do not dismiss the salarian, pretty Rachel, simply because they seem frail at first glance. You have seen what their soldiers can do. They are not tough, but they never miss. They are not strong, but they can out-think, outrun, and out-dodge you or me by a factor of six. They plan for every possibility, and then for that which is impossible, and then plans beyond that. They think faster, capable of maintaining upwards of five separate lines of thought at once. They react faster, their outrageously over-tuned nervous systems allowing them feats of agility unmatched by any other race, even the drell, and their very physiology lends them flexibility that is equally unmatched.
The Sparak's might brought about an immense change in the world of the salarians. Challenged by the knowledge and influence of the scholars, the priest-kings of Maithan slowly lost their grip on their own people, and eventually a council of dalatrasses took up much of the workings of government from them. Once the last of the aggressive males was no longer deciding political policy, the way was clear for the Salarian Union to be born.
3100 years ago, the nations of Ergohai, Maithan, and Soluthus signed a treaty of mutual cooperation, creating a framework of government that would lead the entire planet into the future. It divided Sur'Kesh into 'tiers of influence', led by dalatrasses, that met to determine a group of three who would speak for all salarians.
War ended utterly and completely, and even internal espionage, although still rampant, at least became less lethal. The uloi were made holy ground, never to be attacked or to be shelter for or against military forces, dedicated solely to the advancement of the race. Many of the most powerful espionage agencies fragmented, becoming mercenaries, working for salarian corporations or private interests.
But the most skilled of the spies unified themselves into a group known as the League of One, dedicated to ensuring the salarian people did not destroy themselves or that any one nation dominate the others. The League prevented and stopped wars, leaked information between nations that defused tensions, and took out aggressive leaders or those stirring hatreds.
The League had the "Six Rules of Approach", which are often quoted by salarians even today, as a kind of defining charter of what the League embodied. The rules were simple, but I include them in this history as the best way of defining exactly what salarians are.
The first rule: Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have. Salarian history shows this concept repeatedly, the betrayals of the earliest Reach Empire against it's tribal foes shows it.
The second rule: Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy, for then they have no idea of your true power. The switch from military force to espionage and assassination was cited as key example of this rule.
The third rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. The salarians became masters at attritional, asymmetric psychological warfare. Knowing assassins were there to take you out if you went against the wishes of the dalatrasses was more nerve-wracking than actually being attacked.
The fourth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. The salarians believe that every attack the enemy can't answer to with an immediate response must come from sources that don't allow such responses in the first place. Salarians reject solutions that leave the target no choice but to fight, rather trying to sow chaos and uncertainty for as long as possible. An attack that is too successful leaves the target no constructive alternative but direct combat.
The fifth rule: Exhaustion, be it political, economic, or social, is the most potent weapon. The salarians never want to fight foes at full strength, rather preferring them already fatigued and weakened by the time the first heavy blows fall.
The sixth rule: A tactic that requires too much time becomes a risk. Salarians believe the faster and quicker actions are undertaken, the more successful they will be because they offer less reaction time.
These rules are simple, but they shape how the salarians approach the universe, and offer insights into the next portion of their history.
Salarian Information and Space Age
The unity found by the drawing together of nations and cultures lead to further advancements. Always looking for better ways to do things, the brilliant and multitasking salarian mind didn't need augmentation the way other races did, but eventually, they also created computer technology, and from there, realized the potential of such things. Some three thousand years ago, the salarians began their love affair with the computer.
Salarians began to computerize and automate everything they worked on, driving the creation of VI's early on and AI's not much after that. However, these early AI's were very unstable and ended up in stage I rampancy very quickly, leading to the Salarians destroying them and banning further research. Given the salarian attitude towards knowledge, for them to ban a line of research was extremely out of character for them. I find myself wondering if there was more to the AI conflict that is in the histories, but it is difficult to be sure of anything given salarian propensity to alter their own views of their past and to eliminate facts that might challenge the rule of the dalatrasses.
What is known is the salarians began explorations of space some three thousand years ago – well over three hundred years before we asari were able to begin such. Early salarian ships were powered using gigawatt ion drives and multi-stage fusion drives, achieving very high fractions of lightspeed. The mysterious relay at the edge of the Sur'Kesh system drove the salarians mad, but they had no way to activate it at first.
It took the salarians about eighty years of sublight travel before they stumbled onto a system with both Prothean ruins and eezo. In fact, the salarians found the wreckage of an old Prothean shipyard, blasted to pieces in some ancient war but still chock-full of various artifacts and, most importantly, the Prothean VI known as Verment. Badly damaged and suffering a loss of data regarding what happened to the Protheans, it was able to catapult salarian science and understanding of mass effect physics forward a hundred fold.
The second wave of salarian exploration was utterly titanic, nearly a full nine percent of the race flung outwards in exploration and colonization ships, scrambling to locate eezo and build up a knowledge of the universe. An early foray into a nearby system resulted in the salarian vessels coming under attack from an automated defense system from a long-dead alien race, and the salarians began to arm their vessels and work on warships.
Salarian exploration teams used scout ships with huge fuel reserves and powerful FTL engines – indeed, the FTL drives of the salarians were more primitive than those of my own people when we met, but had three times our range. Salarian scouts discovered many planets, and often were hesitant to open new mass relays without knowing what was on the other side. Rather, they would use FTL to explore a wide range of space, opening a new relay only when existing stars they could reach were all cataloged.
Salarian scouts thus managed to observe volus, elcor, and even humans in this manner. There is fragmentary evidence that salarian wide-arc scouts entered Sol around 550 AD, and there are multiple human, volus and elcor skeletons on display at the Salarian Museum of Exploration that date from far before your race was known to others. There is very good evidence that the salarians monitored humanity and the volus for hundreds of years, taking captives and monitoring developments. The salarians deny this , of course... but they deny everything.
What the salarians might have planned to do with such knowledge is moot, as they discovered the Citadel and the asari soon after.
Salarian Discovery of Citadel
Less than a century after my own people found the open flower of the Citadel, the salarian scout teams arrived. At first, there was a standoff – both my people and the salarians nervous and ready to fight. But neither of our races was overly aggressive, and within a few weeks we began to understand each others languages and the salarians sent dalatrasses to speak with the matriarchs on the Citadel.
Our discovery that the salarians had two sexual aspects lead to great amounts of confusion in the language, as we were trying to grasp a concept not seen on Thessia. We had, of course, found evidence of such things on other worlds, but most asari paid no mind to that just as most humans 'know' there is asexual reproduction but see that in terms of one-celled organisms dividing, not sentient beings.
It became apparent that the asari had only a few trump cards. We were already in control of the Citadel, and we had powerful jump drives, faster FTL drives, and more powerful weapons, as well as our biotics. But the salarians had more advanced technology in literally every other avenue, from shields to sensors. The Council of Matriarchs must have run the numbers and applied their wisdom to finding a peaceful coexistence, as I am not sure asari would have won such an early fight.
That being said, the formation of the Citadel Council was more of a collusion between the Circle of Dalatrasses and the Council of Matriarchs both deciding such a thing would help them retain power rather than any meeting of the minds. The Council formation was the first and last time the salarian dalatrasses left Sur'Kesh en masse. The High Dalatrass, Shiron Ergohai, met with High Matriarch Lidya T'Armal in closed quarters in what is now the Citadel Tower but was back then called the Needle.
What words, I wonder, were spoken, between these creatures, one ancient, one barely twenty five years old? Ah, but to have been there, to have seen the dance of words and subtle threats and even more subtle offers. The asari left no record of what happened, but Shiron had a journal of her experiences, and implies she linked in a non-sexual manner with the matriarch, and in her words, "Our goals and that of the blue aliens were not so different. We are both mothers, both fearful of the dark between the stars, both burdened with the leadership of our people into a future we have no information on."
The salarians, as a gesture of trust, offered a display of the intelligence their signals and scanning operators had been able to gather on the asari remotely. The asari were horrified to realize than in two short years, salarians had been able to hack through asari systems on the Citadel to access records on Thessia itself. They realized they were facing a race that, if push came to shove, could do a great deal of damage to them.
The salarians, for their part, were equally worried and concerned about the asari ability to link and meld, which was a very high violation of the only privacy most salarians had, which was their thoughts. It lead to uncomfortable situations among the two races, and the League of One, distrustful of the asari, began investigating them further.
Unfortunately, these investigations lead to the discovery of certain asari contingency plans in case of war with the salarians. Alarmed, and with a cultural misunderstanding of how asari looked at war, the League decided the asari needed to be neutralized. The League, formed in the days where the survival of the race was the highest stake possible, did not attempt to find ways to neutralize the plans the asari had, or to prepare for war. They decided the asari themselves were the issue, and drew up plans for the literal destruction of the entire asari race. The creation of the pulse inhibitor, and salarian money and investment in the salarian biotics program, stem from this initiative.
The League prepared to initiate their masterstroke, finally informing the Dalatrasses of what they had learned. The Dalatrasses, who had drawn up the same kind of plans to destroy the asari in case they proved to be warlike, disagreed with the need to destroy the asari. Thus far, all was peaceful.
The League attempted to do so anyway and the Dalatrasses responded by assembling a group of skilled assassins and other espionage assets. Dalatrass Shiron gave them their duty – "I have for you a special task" – and the STG was born.
The STG and the League engaged in fighting and assassinations for years, before the League was crushed utterly. (Well, almost utterly. It's the belief of some that the so-called League of Zero are cybernetic AI reconstructions of the League of One.) The salarians cleverly used this infighting as a way to convince their asari allies of their sincerity. My people were of course, with our ideas of unity, deeply moved by the fact that the salarians would kill their own people on behalf of maintaining peace with aliens, and as such, the newly formed Council was a group of equals, rather than one or the other dominating.
Salarians and the Expansion
The Salarian Union expanded rapidly after the discovery of the Citadel, opening mass relays more frequently since the asari had indicated they'd found nothing dangerous so far. Salarian colonies sprang up like weeds, scattered far and wide, and the more challenging the task of terraforming the more willing the salarians were to take up the challenge.
Unhappy salarians of all clans and nations found new lives on these colonies, free of most of the political chaos of the home world. At the same time, salarian companies began doing booming business with the asari, and expanded their markets to the colonies of both races.
As the asari and salarians explored, they stumbled across new races. The salarians, already aware of the volus, ensured a peaceful reception when that race managed to breach their home system, and the volus were followed by the batarians, elcor, and hanar. These races were young and the salarians and asari technological level was centuries beyond theirs. As such, these races were not raised to the Council, and were manipulated and controlled as much as possible. Humanity, at the very edge of their FTP range , was ignored.
The union of salarian espionage and asari manipulation was very simply unbeatable. Until the emergence of quarians, no race discovered by the salarians or asari had anywhere near the technological strength of the first two races. The quarians were more advanced in some areas than even the salarians, but their small population and focus on internal affairs sidelined them from the start.
Salarian corporations expanded rapidly, proving adept at combining technology from multiple races into new and improved technologies no one had thought of. The use of heatsink emissions to power hand-held weapons electrical requirements, the development of nano-articulated suturing wire, the development and deployment of the FTL comm drone – these were all salarian inventions.
Several frightening precursors to the Rachni war occurred just before their release – rebelling mercenary groups, corporations that were co-opted by asari spies, the increasing financial ability of the volus – all of these were threats to the Salarian Union.
Uplift, Disaster, and Recent History
Having had several brushes with forces too strong for them to easily handle, the salarians wanted to create a race of loyal soldiers who would do the heavy fighting for them. It was in this vein that they started relationships with the krogan, slowly uplifting them towards a recovery from their nuclear dark age.
Sadly, it was also the salarians who discovered the rachni, in their continual exploration of mass relays. History from this point is, of course, known to everyone – the widening tide, the overwhelming assault. The krogan, hurriedly uplifted fully, thrown into battle, suffering staggering losses. The discovery of the turians, the Krogan Rebellions... having lived through the tail end of some of it, I find myself unwilling to rehash what is already well known. You know it all anyway, and my perceptions of it would no doubt clash with yours.
The emergence of your people caught everyone by surprise, but in hindsight, I remember clearly that the salarians had eerily accurate translators for multiple human languages mere weeks after first contact, and that they were able to provide top-notch medical services for a race that no one else knew existed when the Citadel Relief Team landed on Shanxi. Proof positive, I'd say, that your stories of "gray aliens" with large eyes and slender bodies were actually far-flung salarian scouts.
In a way, that reality – that salarians look for each advantage – is key to grasping their history. Taking away from recent history any insight into the salarian mindset is difficult, because increasingly the salarian government has ensured that most aliens do not see or know much about salarians. They strive to make themselves somewhat aloof, intellectual, even friendly in a cool fashion, when in reality they are calculating monsters.
Amusing. I find myself echoing the sort of bland, hateful admonishments towards those different than me that I derided Dr. Minsta for. Yet I do so for very different reasons. Asari are not perfect, nor are humans, turians, volus, krogan, or any other race. But the salarians have shaped themselves into a cold species, a species of spies, analysts, assassins, and mad scientists. You have never heard salarian music, or seen salarian art – they keep it for themselves. Salarians present one face to the galaxy and another to their close kin, and they follow the whims of dalatrasses more concerned with the survival of their clutch than the cost to others.
I can see handsome Richard's brows drawing together in perplexed fury even now. What difference is my dislike of salarians and accusing them of being selfish, deceiving monsters is there from Dr. Minsta's distaste for the social dance of siari and reeichu, and the fact that we asari see ourselves as better?
I could answer, why else would an asari be in your ranks if she was not herself also a bigot? I could answer, why else would you tolerate the alien in your ranks unless you knew she was even more hateful than you? The difference is so subtle, in that I can hate and despise and still admire and understand and even praise.
But I will not answer in that fashion, but rather more bluntly. The asari may be threatening, but we could not bring ourselves, when the time came, to bring down the ax. We hesitated at genocide for the Rachni. We agonized at the use of the genophage for the krogan. We cringed at the loss of the quarians and cried for fallen, torn Rannoch. We wept at the dead of Shanxi. We see ourselves as better...yet we feel empathy and we wish that we could make all as one.
We are threatening to you because we could change what is to be a human, not because we plan to kill you.
The salarian? He sees you as either an opportunity to make a profit, to learn from, to use, or as a danger. That is not to say there are not friendly salarians...or salarians not so devoted to the race. But they are rare, and all too often, mavericks in their culture. Rarely are they chosen to breed...
Ah, but that's physiology. I have rambled long enough, let us now regard the twisted morass that is the salarian mind.