A/N: Tired now, so I'll probably not produce anything for a few days.
The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space
Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING
HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE
ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED
Beloved Jack, fierce Richard, and cunning Rachel,
If there is one aspect where Dr. Minsta is probably better served than myself in writing this research, it would be in the aspect of biology. I am not a medical doctor, and my understanding of salarians is strictly limited to what I've absorbed from reading several digests and extranet studies on salarian biology.
That being said, much of the information here was gathered by Ms. Lawson. She really is very flexible in terms of learning – I was not aware most humans had such formidable intellectual capacities. If she is anything like your average young human , then your fear of being overtaken by aliens can probably be set aside, as she would compare favorably to , well, a salarian!
I'm sure that will irritate you as well. In a few more days, we'll go onwards from Mannovai to Sur'Kesh, and we'll see how well Ms. Lawson handles the awesome size of the Reach.
Cerberus Thought for the Day: One must be ruthless to assure a given outcome. Mercy has never led to anything but vulnerability.
Salarian basic physiology
As stated in the history section, salarians are omnivorous creatures most closely related to earth salamanders. They are roughly humanoid, with a wide range of builds and heights, but most fall between 5 and a half to 6 feet tall, and are usually slender, weighing no more than a hundred pounds.
That is not absolute – I once had a run in with a truly-frightening minion of the Shadow Broker, a body-building salarian that stood well over seven feet tall and was built like a krogan – but very few salarians are heavily muscled.
The salarian skeleton is almost entirely made of cartilaginous materials, stiffened at the hips, shoulders, upper arm and lower leg with 'floating bones' that bind to the skeletal material by tendons. The cartilaginous material is highly regenerative, but the rest of the salarian body is not. They are extremely flexible, all of the joints being either double jointed or complete ball joints, and the bones have considerable flexibility when put under pressure. The salarian skull is also reinforced with some bone, as well as shock absorbing muscles and damping fluids. The spine is also bone, and shallow ribs encase the vital organs, although the chest is bowed inwards.
The salarian stands on two digitigrade legs, with enough spinal flexion to allow 240 degrees of walking motion. The legs hook back at the knee, the feet ending in a curiously clublike foot with three digits tipped with long claws. The arch of the foot is very high, with only the toes and the shank of the heel making actual ground contact, giving salarians both a light step and an almost mincing gait. The entire ankle and knee joint assemblies are merely radioulnar articulated joints, a pack of lumpy balls of cartilage linked together with many tendons and ligaments, much like the human wrist. This means salarians can make a number of flexible, unusual motions that other races cannot.
The salarian skin is very thin and semi-translucent, ranging in tones from pale white and cream down to dark black. The skin is very heavily lined with capillaries, and is rather fragile. Below the skin, the muscles are highly striated bundles of paired groups, roped together with bands of nerves that allow salarians astonishingly fine muscle control.
Salarian blood is green, and is the most remarkable part of their physiology. The blood is hemocyanatic and uses copper rather than iron to bind oxygen. This is about 15% as effective as iron (or bauxite) and leads to salarians not being able to support heavy muscle masses in most cases. However, there are also symbiotic organisms in the blood that bind to carbon dioxide and some blood toxins and produce additional oxygen directly into the bloodstream. As a result, even with the copper binding of oxygen, a salarian is often better oxygenated than other races when fully rested.
Salarians who do a great deal of physical labor tend to produce more dense concentrations of blood cells to carry oxygen, allowing them greater muscle mass in return. However, the stress this puts on the body appears to shorten the lifespan. Salarian muscle tissue is very quick-contraction in nature, allowing the salarian to take advantage of their reflexes, but it is not very strong, and without a firm skeletal structure, even strong salarians have the body strength of an below average human.
The salarian brain is perhaps the most developed of any Citadel species. It is heavily folded, even more than asari brains, and surprisingly compact, as it has no older evolutionary throwbacks taking up space in the slender skull. The brain stem actually travels down half the spine, and smaller nodules of brain material surround the base of the skull. These nodules work with the main brain mass to allow salarians to process multiple lines of thought at one time. Salarian neural complexity is extremely complex, with multiphase protein sheaths encasing most neuron cells and gilial cells. These sheaths allow each cell to store and recreate multiple synapse pairs on the fly – as a result, salarians not only posses photographic memories but can even model higher order mathematics (geometry, trigonometry and most calculus) in their heads with no difficulty.
Salarians do not nurse their young, and as such, have no mammary glands nor nipples.
The salarian metabolism is much faster than other races, with the salarian version of ATP having nineteen times the efficiency of ATP mitochondria in humans and asari. Salarians also have a glandular system with a wide array of adrenal and renal functions, capable of flooding the body with a potent array of enzymes, adrenaline, and endorphins. This allows salarians to reach truly amazing levels of speed and fluidity in a short amount of time.
The salarian nervous system is extremely complicated, with a well developed nervous system and neural coordination bundles (like a human cerebellum) , packed with climbing fibers and a fluid-balance system that ensures salarians rarely if ever lose their balance.
The salarian immune system is linked with a lymph-like series of veins that wind in and out of the salarian bloodstream, connecting with a liver-like organ and a triple pair of filtering organs that serve a similar function to kidneys. The blood of salarians is filtered for toxins at all times, moving through the system at key points, making most salarians very resistant to disease and toxins.
The salarian heart is , like an asari's heart, three chambered. But salarians have two of them , one in the upper chest and one in the lower torso. The salarian lung is singular, a large sac that lines the entire back and sides of the chest, and is comprised of air-trapping pockets and mucous membranes.
The salarian digestive system is simple, a muscle-constricting and acid filled stomach, leading to a tube that absorbs minerals and exiting through the cloaca.
Salarian senses
Salarian senses are hypersensitive, and significantly better than other races. Salarian eyesight is far superior to human or even turian eyesight, allowing them to perceive not only full color but UV and infrared radiation. Salarians can also see most powerful electromagnetic fields with the naked eyes.
The salarian horns are actually ears, hollow structures filled with sound-conducting fluids and lined with directionally oriented sensor hairs. Salarians can pick up and track multiple sounds and fix their exact bearing and distance from as much as a half mile.
Salarian smell is predator level, and salarians can track a being by scent in even low concentrations, and the nasal passages have concentrations of olfactory sensory cells in concentrations that rival that of genetically bred bloodhounds. Likewise, their sense of taste is well developed.
They lack the arahal, or the asari ability to feel electrical energy on the winds, but they have other senses the asari or humans do not. They can track and feel minute vibrations , on the air or under ground, and they seem to have a natural sense for direction.
On the whole, salarian senses combined with their very fine motor control mean they can do feats other races simply cannot. How much of this is natural and how much of it was initiated by breeding experiments of the clan families is unknown.
On the balance, however, and given the research we've been able to do into salarian evolution, I can say that the salarians are almost certainly modifying themselves in such ways. The utter control the dalatrasses have over most breeding insures that if they wish to make themselves into a given state, they have the technology and ability to do so. Salarians are constantly pushing for trans-mortal changes, and I believe they have a long range breeding program that will eventually result in salarian super soldiers.
Salarian reactions and agility
Salarians have very fast reflexes, and almost unrealistic levels of agility and dexterity, owing to their final muscle control. As a result, salarians are not only blindingly fast, but are capable of feats of mobility that would leave lesser races gasping to keep up.
A salarian's nerve system is overlaid with neural coordination bundles packed with climbing fibers. These are reflex-stimulus structures – you humans have a bundle in your cerebellum that aids in balance and coordination. The salarian body is literally stuffed with them, and they act involuntarily but with voluntary overrides.
In effect, salarian reflexes are nearly perfect. Most can make a mockery of attempting to attack them in close quarters – connecting would do some real damage, but only the very fastest combatants can have a chance of doing so. Their hand eye coordination is so astounding that it must be seen to be believed, as salarians can make shots with pistols that would challenge a turian sniper, and salarian snipers are so deadly that even krogan hesitate when targeted by them.
As if this were not enough, however, the salarian senses are tied directly into this system of reflexes. Sounds, motions, and even air pressure are enough to trigger reflexive avoidance and maneuver. I've seen salarians laughing as they dodge the enraged swings of a priestess's biotic sword, watched them outmaneuver drell assassins while mockingly offering tips before one-hit killing them, and outrun light armored vehicles.
Salarians make for astounding pilots , drivers, and ranged combatants, and their reaction times are only enhanced by the complexity of the salarian brain.
Salarian Weaknesses
The salarian body is clearly engineered as a high response, high speed and high agility platform. I am sorry but I can't think of it as a body so much as a damned abomination. While other races have played with transasari (or, I suppose in your case, transhuman) concepts, only the salarians would actually proceed down this path.
Thankfully, nature's spirit does not allow herself to be profaned in such a galling manner without the proper recompense.
Salarians are not strong, nor do they handle physical damage very well. While they can flood their bodies with endorphins and natural painkillers when hurt, and adrenaline to boost their strength, even the toughest salarian can't take more than one or two serious wounds before collapsing. The high metabolic rate and naturally high blood pressure salarians have works against them when they are hurt, and their ability to produce adrenaline in life-or-death situations can be exhausted in pitched battles.
Salarians are almost immune to most poisons and toxins, and many diseases, but they have high vulnerability to some forms of alkaline substances that disrupt their body chemistry. Additionally, salarians don't handle sedatives well, as the salarian body ends up having mismatched rhythms and can go into systemic shock.
Salarian organ systems have no redundancy – perhaps, if they were engineered, this is the salarian parsimonious desire for clean efficiency. The result, of course, is that salarians who are hurt are usually incapacitated. A human shot in the arm or leg is hurt but can still fight. A krogan will regenerate it in seconds, turians have plating to deflect it and asari can usually compensate with biotics. Salarians, on the other hand, are usually down for the count. Even a strong punch can knock one out.
The flexible nature of the salarian frame lets them withstand explosions better than others, but becomes a liability in any contest of strength, and a lethal drawback when exposed to heavy biotic physics attacks like slam. Salarians cannot handle G forces very well and make poor fighter pilots, despite their excellent hand-eye coordination.
Salarian reproduction
I'm sure Dr. Minsta would have appreciated the chance to prate about salarian "infidelity", but the salarian reproductive method is actually quite boring to me.
As I stated in the psychology section, salarian females go into heat around age fifteen, and undergo additional heats every two months until they are in their very late 30's, at which age they finally lose their fertility. During the heat, they exude mating pheromones to attract male salarians.
The male's sexual organs are fairly standard, an erectile sheath leading from the equivalent of testicles. Salarian males keep these tucked within the body until sexual activity is likely, unlike human and krogan males. The female sexual organ is part of the cloaca, which is also used to evacuate solid and liquid wastes from the body. Quite primitive, and I'm frankly astonished the salarians haven't engineered something more … elegant. Or at least, less messy.
Each female has various egg clutches within her body. The ovaries are much larger than in other races, fist sized, and will produce eggs regularly until around 37 or 38 years of age. Each ovary (and there are six) produces about 20 eggs. Each egg must be fertilized separately, and once an egg is fertilized by a male, enzymes lock the cellular surfaces of all other eggs to that male's sperm. As a result, a female usually requires at least four to six breeding sessions with multiple males to fertilize the entire clutch.
Eggs grow rapidly into metastasis within a day of breeding, doubling in size every four hours, and are "laid" in clumps on the third day, again (ugh) through the cloaca. The eggs are encased in a slimy sac of nutrients and protective enzymes – highly poisonous to everything on Sur'Kesh, and probably not very tasty to anything else either. The eggs absorb the nutrients, drying out and soldifying in two days, and take another five months to grow to full size, erupting into salarian newts.
Salarian life cycle
A newt is an apt name, as upon hatching, the legs are fused together in one mass, and the eyes do not work. Over the first six months of life, the legs separate, the eyes develop fully and open, and neural activity starts up around the first week. Even with modern technology and great care, something like 40% of the eggs laid do not develop to full term, and must be destroyed.
A salarian male child takes about 12 years to grow to physical maturity, a female takes about 15. However, salarians develop much faster mentally. By the time they are nine months old they can usually walk, talk, and read, and by three years old are capable of understanding basic math, spatial relationships, and logic.
At around maturity, salarians undergo a growth spurt. For males, the penis develops, and for females, the ovaries activate, and she goes into her first heat.
Males do not have any other noticeable physical changes until they are around 40 years old, at which time the body simply begins to break down. Some salarians have lived past this stage – the more fit and healthy a salarian is, the more likely they are to live longer – but few males live much past 50. Females go barren at around 37 or 38, moving into the realm of politics fully, and usually begin breaking down at about 45.
Salarian life span
Just in my own life, I've seen the average age of salarians who die go from the late 30's to the late 40's. This doesn't sound very impressive, until you compare relative lifespans. Humans went from a life expectancy of about 70 to around 150, which is more than double – however, if you adjust for poverty, for colony life, and the like, almost a full third of humanity dies before 70 even today. Only the rich, powerful, and successful reach 150, with most middle class humans having about 90 pain-free years of living before another 15 or 20 years of decrepitude.
Salarians only increased their lifespan by 25%, but this is true of almost all salarians, regardless of economic status or location. Furthermore, they don't experience any real slowdown or effects of aging until a few months before death.
On the surface, the salarian life span is quite limited, and any improvement seems like it's a good thing. However, there is a dark side to this. What I am about to tell you is – well, was – a state secret of the Asari Republics. About thirty five years ago, the Council of Matriarchs gained intelligence suggesting salarians were experimenting on asari captives. I was part of the Royal Strike Force engaged to go after the suspected laboratory, and what we saw there was absolutely sickening. The salarians had captured asari – mostly Eclipse members, a few red sand addicts, and at least one outcast – and had been engaged in research into asari regeneration and our ability to cap our DNA with telomerase. This substance is what determines how many times a cell can divide before it wears out, for lack of a better word. Salarian cells , like asari cells, reproduce rapidly. But in salarians, their enormous metabolic rate ends up killing cells off almost as fast as they reproduce, and they burn through them in a few short decades.
It looks like the salarians have been working on extending the salarian lifespan. Not by leaps and bounds, but sustainably and slowly, and in a way that wouldn't attract too much attention. We asari destroyed the labs, but we were unable to tie the researchers back to the actual Salarian Union, and the STG turned up nothing in their own investigation.
Salarians and disease
The interlinked salarian immune system, combined with the constant blood filtering, means that salarians have a very strong resistance to most diseases. The two that continue to affect them the most are the Soft Rot and the Collapse Plague.
Soft Rot is a skin disorder, caused by parasitic organisms infest the skin , forming colonies of acidic mold between the skin and the muscle. Painful and disfiguring, Soft Rot ends up eating away at muscle mass and producing enough toxins to kill a salarian in short order. It can be combated with powerful antibiotics and broad-based antiseptic purges using injections under the skin, but it grows very rapidly and can kill in a handful of days.
The Collapse Plague is not actually a plague, but a fungal prion that is inhaled through the lungs. These misfolded proteins enter the salarian bloodstream and cause blood cells to debond with the copper in the blood. The result is large amounts of copper in the feces and urine, and the loss of the blood's ability to carry oxygen. It leaves a salarian disoriented from organ shutdown (due to copper poisoning) and lack of oxygen, and swiftly leads to brain damage and death.
There is no known cure or vaccine for the Collapse Plague, which first erupted during the Collapse. It is believed to be caused by decaying egg piles or salarian corpses , which is one reason salarians are so picky about funeral rituals.
Salarians and modifications
Given salarian fragility, it should come as no surprise that cybernetics are very big with salarians. Most salarian soldiers , at the very least, go for implanted kinetic sheathing, armor plating, sometimes a complete arm replacement with gyro-balancers if they are snipers.
Salarians will sometimes sacrifice one eye for a cybereye, especially ones that can see in spectrums salarians cannot, or that includes cameras or other useful hardware. Salarians often invest heavily in biomedical systems, including medigel injectors and nanorepair paste, as well as complete nanosurgeon systems to stem internal blood loss.
Salarian senses are good enough they rarely need augmentation, but some salarians have swapped out most of their natural muscles, one group at a time, with artificial myomer, giving them much greater strength than normal salarians.
Salarians, as a rule, dislike bio-augmentation that relies on actual biological components. I'm not sure why, but it's worth noting that there aren't even any salarian companies doing work on this front.
Salarian body disorders
Aside from sickness, salarians sometimes have a nervous system disorder called "Shego's Fire". Shego had this affliction herself in later life, giving it a touch of holy reverence, but it is completely debilitating.
The disorder is caused by a slow breakdown of neural lining, followed by neural degeneration across the entire brain and nervous system. In the early stages, the effects are minor – tremors, the occasional missing memory. But when it hits the late stages, the mind begins to go. Eventually, psychosis and paranoid ravings set in, along with gruesome savagery and bouts of wild, uncontrollable anger and fear.
There is no good treatment for this disease, other than hoping the salarian dies before it runs it's course.