THE TERMINUS EXARCHATE

Statement of Intent

I combined the settings of Halo and Mass Effect to write this story but did not involve established characters from either setting. I also chose not to involve humanity- we are stuck on Earth in obscurity throughout. This story is about two separate sprawling collections of aliens which collide violently. The protagonist and narrator is a Batarian who works for his Covenant conquerors.

PART ONE: NARSOMPASI

Chapter 1-1

The Covenant had no practice with spycraft. Why would it have ever needed it? It had never negotiated with enemy states; it had never needed an institution to sort out what rivals were making credible threats and what rivals were simply blowing hot air. It had also never developed much interest in spying on its own people. The point of spying on your own people is to snuff out dissidence before it can grow and develop into violence, but the Covenant wasn't afraid of violence. On the contrary, the Sangheili were convinced that internal warfare, like external warfare, was basically something healthy. It didn't bother them that the Unggoy, for instance, might rise up. The Sangheili would put them down again, and this would prove Sangheili power and valor, and this in turn would affirm the noble Sangheili position and purpose.

This was the biggest cultural shock the Covenant Empire felt when it met Terminus and Citadel Space, the "Relay Ecumene." It couldn't understand the sheer effort we spent collating and concealing information, and the empire's incomprehension brought it to modest anxiety. My family, the B'Norai, were able to convince the conquerors of the Terminus Systems that we could help them build an intelligence apparatus to rival that of their new enemies. We explained to them how our family had always secretly represented the interests of the Batarian Hegemony in the Terminus Systems, and how the Batarians were acknowledged as the most accomplished spies of the Relay Ecumene.

We cartel-kin had not been wholly truthful. The Batarian Hegemony's record in the intelligence field was firmly second-rate compared to the Salarian Union's, and moreover the B'Norai family business was in fact a simple criminal enterprise with no contacts in the Hegemony's secret police whatsoever. But bereft of spies and analysts as it was, the Covenant could hardly have known better.

My family helped the Prophet of Sagacity create a new state institution, the Anuranite Lustration. In its first few years the Lustration proved its value to Sagacity by predicting the course of the Citadel Council's offensive on the Coreward Front, expunging the Insh'Teass heresy, and blackmailing several of Sagacity's long-standing political rivals on High Charity. The Lustration grew powerful enough to be resented. San'Shyuum feared an institution that might check their excesses, Sangheili grumbled that it was an insult to the regular military forces, and there was a general sense that Batarians were being given an awful lot of power for a species that was not yet entirely or even primarily within the Covenant fold. Regardless, we were proud of what we had created, and we were ambitious to do more, and the Prophet of Sagacity had blessed us.

Fifteen years after the Covenant invaded the Relay Ecumene and five years after they declared the foundation of the Terminus Exarchate, the Anuranite Lustration sent me to the planet of Narsompasi with four mandates: to establish general peace and order, to quell the native attacks on Yanme'e settlers, to repair and repurpose Narsompasi's shipyards, and, quite unrelated to my other three tasks, to judge the xenoarcheological expedition of the Sangheili Wul'Tazamuna. I traveled inconspicuously, boarding a freighter, accompanied only by my Kig-Yar aide Dir Ruz.

Narsompasi was a warm, wet world with one of the oldest societies of the Terminus Systems. Two thousand years before my arrival Salarian (or more specifically Lystheni) dissidents had fled their Union during the Rachni Wars and established a rural, self-sufficient society which strove for minimal entanglement with the rest of the galaxy. One thousand years before my arrival Prothean ruins were found, but the Narsompasikar had rejected the Citadel Council's requests for joint investigation and sealed the ruins off. Two hundred and fifty years before my arrival the Asari entrepreneur Talita Valzeshia broke Narsompasi's isolation and built three great spaceports, along with three great shipyards with which she equipped any power in the Terminus Systems with the resources to pay. Ten years before my arrival the Covenant had swept through the system without a fight, shut the shipyards down, and left behind a garrison of Jiralhanae gendarmes and a nascent Yanme'e hive. It was a long but thin history.

Chieftain Lirinus greeted me in Port Austral. He was accompanied by four Jiralhanae warriors, all of whom seemed to have been selected for large size and fearsome demeanor. They carried a variety of elaborate weapons covered in spikes. I was accompanied only by Dir Ruz, who carried his carbine rifle. The Jiralhanae all wore the crimson armor of the gendarmerie. Chieftain Lirinus was polite, but notably cold. His lieutenants were silent and seemed unhappy. I was compelled to ask if something was wrong.

"You tell me, Anuranite. Covenant authority on Narsompasi was divided enough already. The natives listen to me, when sufficiently encouraged. Queen Yalat does not. Her worker drones are always scurrying into lands where they do not belong. When the swamp-dwellers take offense and kill the worker drones, my pack must leave the cities to avenge the Yanme'e hive. The fighting is good, but it is also endless, and because of it I cannot properly control the spaceports. This has been my main problem. Then, to build frustration upon frustration, a Sangheili xenoarcheologist comes. He of course does not listen to me either. Now you come. You are supposed to represent the Prophet of Sagacity, but I have been stuck here for ten years and I do not know what your new institution's powers are in practice. I do not even know which of us is formally meant to take precedence over the other, although I know which of us has an army and which does not."

"There won't be any need for the two of us to be at odds."

Lirinus smiled. Jiralhanae smiles are never warm, they bare their fangs. "That is good to hear. So, how are you going to help me? Do you have the authority to impose some sense upon the Yanme'e queen? I do not. My orders bind me to respond to any attacks on her hive, never mind how recklessly she provokes the natives. I will tell you outright that it were up to me, I would save the Narsompasikar some trouble and glass the bug myself."

"My orders aren't so different than yours. The Exarch wants that hive to grow and prosper."

Lirinus growled in frustration. "Then we will both be here forever."

"Not necessarily. I suspect it's a problem of communication."

Lirinus looked at me like I was an idiot. "Communication."

"Sure. Look, on the one hand you've got the Narsompasikar swamp-dwellers, people who willfully reverted to primitivism and spent two thousand years not talking to anybody else. On the other hand, you have one lone Yanme'e queen, who cannot help but think differently than even the most cosmopolitan vertebrate. It is natural that these sides would speak past each other and fall into unnecessary conflict. There's enough land on Narsompasi for both, but we'll need to convince them to put in the time to talk to one another."

Lirinus scoffed. "No risk of that working. But if you want to try it, I won't stop you. I don't see how it could make things worse."

"So much for the swamps. What about the cities? What do we need to do to get the shipyards operating again?"

"Do you know how to build spaceships?"

"No."

"Neither do I. So, I'd say the first thing you need to do is find someone who does."

"There must be someone on Narsompasi. This was a wealthy, important manufacturing hub before the war. The people here are mostly Salarians. There must be a technically educated population to draw on."

"The Narsompasikar are proudly ignorant, the cityfolk only a little less so than the swamp-dwellers. Before our Covenant annexed this world Narsompasi relied on knowledgeable immigrants and expatriates to keep its industry churning." Chieftain Lirinus gestured to the cityscape around us. It seemed sprawling, but with no skyscrapers, the land being unfit to support structures past a certain weight. "You'll find that Port Austral, like Port Isola and Port Septentrional, is halfway abandoned. The expatriates fled, and it is a challenge to even keep the basic infrastructure of the three cities functioning. But I do still have the Valzeshia woman under house arrest."

I felt a sense of relief. "Talita Valzeshia? The Asari who built the shipyards to begin with? This is very good news! But why didn't she leave? She must have had the resources to go wherever she liked."

"This was not a Salarian world, any more than our Covenant is an Unggoy empire. This was Valzeshia's world, and her possessiveness has not yet abandoned her. Speak with her at your leisure. Why not? But I can tell you what she will say. Narsompasi's cityfolk are too panicked and ungoverned now for any profitable heavy industry. The conflict in the swamps disturbs them. They leave Narsompasi out of fear of the Yanme'e. Those who do not leave riot and run guns to the swamp-dwellers. I do not have the forces to suppress dissent in the cities, at least not without shedding such blood that it would effectively snuff the cities and their shipyards out for good, because my warriors are too preoccupied- preoccupied with defending the same Yanme'e hive which is to blame for all the dysfunction in the first place!"

"Then we're back where we started. I'll talk with Queen Yalat and convince her to make amends with the swamp-dwellers."

Chieftain Lirinus sneered at me for a moment. Then he thought better of it and nodded. "I hope that you succeed. But I will not pretend to expect it. You are one Batarian and," he gestured to Dir Ruz, acknowledging my aide for the first time, "you have brought with you nothing but one Kig-Yar sniper. It is not enough force. This world is too remote and backward for the Prophet of Sagacity's favor to carry you far. There is one more thing I'd like to know. Did your leaders give you any instructions or information regarding the irritating Sangheili xenoarcheologist Wul'Tazamuna?"

"No," I lied.

"So be it. Anuranite, I know that I have been curt with you, and I regret it. I am not frustrated with you. I am not even frustrated with the Salarians of Narsompasi. My frustrations are with Queen Yalat and her single-minded determination to goad the swamp-dwellers into killing her own drones. My frustrations are with the Exarch's sponsorship of Yalat, which compels me to enmesh myself in this trifling police work of babysitting Yanme'e. Above all else, my frustrations are with the Sangheili who have relegated my pack and the rest of the Jiralhanae into the gendarmerie in the first place." His voice rose. "We should be at the Coreward Front! We should be at war with the Turian Hierarchy! We are meant for pitched battle, with real armies!" His four lieutenants behind him shifted and growled in agreement, and one of them even broke into an angry howl. Lirinus raised his hand, and the howling Jiralhanae went silent. Lirinus nodded to me. "We must remember that you are not the cause of our frustrations."

I nodded and bowed in farewell to Chieftain Lirinus. After a moment's hesitation, he returned the gesture.

Lirinus agreed to requisition a Spirit dropship so that Ruz and I could travel to meet Queen Yalat. We flew over boundless blue-yellow marshland. The Spirit was piloted and captained by Jiralhanae, but the gendarmerie crew was mixed. Ruz found another Kig-Yar to chatter with. One of the gunners was a Salarian auxiliary, recruited locally from Port Austral. I gave him some ruxxia to open him up and try to get a sense of Narsompasikar attitudes.

"People don't like that I took this job. But they tolerate it. Times are hard. You get by how you can. And I'm only gunning down Lystheni in the wilderness. It's not like they have me lighting up Port Austral."

"Do the Narsompasikar distinguish between the different castes of the Covenant? Do they regard the Jiralhanae gendarmes and the Yanme'e colonists differently?"

The gunner looked a little nervous. He didn't understand exactly what my position was, but he knew that I represented the Covenant. Then again, he represented the Covenant too. And I was Batarian, not any of the unfamiliar invader races. He took another swallow of ruxxia.

"Absolutely. The Jiralhanae don't want to be here, and they'll leave eventually, and people know that. The cityfolk, I mean. The Lystheni in the swamps don't discriminate, they just shoot at anyone they consider an invader. Me included, now. I guess that's fair enough."

"But what do the cityfolk think of the Yanme'e?"

"The Yanme'e are, you know, they're giant aggressive bugs, and everyone hates them, Jiralhanae included. And the Yanme'e want to stay. They probably will stay. I think the cities on this planet are just going to disappear."

"What do you mean?"

"Port Austral isn't that old, neither are Port Isola or Port Septentrional. They were built to support the Valzeshia shipyards, and now the shipyards are gone, so what's the point? People are leaving. They'll keep leaving. Narsompasi will go back to the way it was, just Lystheni savages. Except now there will be giant aggressive bugs, too. At least I'm getting ahead of things. Learning enough about the Covenant to make my way in it. Sorry. Our Covenant." He finished the ruxxia. "All together, all as one on the Great Journey. Hey, we're here."

You would have thought from the way the gunner talked that Lystheni weren't Salarians. I found that strange, and I thought about it as the dropship made its descent. Yanme'e build underground, so when Queen Yalat came to Narsompasi she had gone looking for a relatively dry, elevated area. She had found a small patch of hills dead in the center of the planet's largest continent. We were very, very far from any of the spaceports, and surrounded by sprawling wetlands. I had no doubt that without Chieftain Lirinus' support Yalat's position would be indefensible.

I entered the hive's dark tunnels alone, leaving the Spirit and its crew parked on the surface, with Ruz there to keep an eye on them. The hive had seemed unremarkable from the air, and indeed the burrowing had been constrained by flooding concerns and it was in fact relatively unimpressive by the standard of other Yanme'e hives, but it was the first Yanme'e habitat I had ever visited and so to me, as I descended, the habitat seemed to be built on a startlingly grand size and scale, although the light I had brought was not very strong and I could only see a short way. Yanme'e worker drones scurried tirelessly in the tiny burrows, carrying food and equipment from place to place. I was met and escorted by six wingless males. I knew that for many miles outside of the hive soldier drones would be patrolling the treetops, stretching from the hills into those marshlands which the Yanme'e had marked for expansion.

At last, the males brought me to my destination, the hive's unlit central chamber. The walls were lined with rank after rank of utterly motionless soldier drones. A two-ton six-legged being raised itself up before my dim light and gave an oddly elegant bow of greeting. I bowed back. My six escorts spoke in perfect unison. "We introduce Queen Yalat, Daughter of Palamok and Mother of Narsompasi."

I wondered if I should have taken Ruz with me into the hive, just so that my aide could have formally introduced me. "It is an honor to meet you, Queen Yalat. I am Qelet B'Norai of the Anuranite Lustration, an eye and ear of the Prophet of Sagacity."

"Welcome, Qelet B'Norai of the Anuranite Lustration, eye and ear of the Prophet of Sagacity. I appreciate the goodwill meant by the Terminus Exarch when he asked your institution to aid my hive, and the goodwill your institution expressed in its agreement."

I'd expected Queen Yalat's manner of speech to be much stranger than it was. The translator modified her screeching and clicking into a smooth, regal voice. While I found her language overly formal, I suppose that would have been just as normal in a monarch with a vertebra. Were I not looking at Queen Yalat, standing at ease in the clammy darkness, her sharp chelicerae opening and snapping shut, I might have forgotten that our kinds were so unalike. The translated voice did not give me comfort. I think that I would have preferred it if the translator had made Queen Yalat's voice as foreign and terrible as her form.

Yalat continued. "I must confess, however, that I do not fully understand why the Exarch believes that I need aid. Everything here is going very well. I apologize, for you have come a long way and I am not sure that there is really any work for you to do here."

I frowned. This was not what I had expected. "The reports the Exarchate has received describe regular assaults upon your hive by the swamp-dwelling Narsompasikar, and Chieftain Lirinus has confirmed these reports."

"Yes, everything goes as intended."

"I'm sorry, I afraid that I don't understand."

This admission seemed to lower Queen Yalat's evaluation of my intelligence. She took a more condescending tone. "It is a little counterintuitive, but if the Lystheni stopped attacking my hive, I would no longer be able to seize their land, at least not at my current pace. It's all in the interaction of my Deed of Settlement with the duties of Chieftain Lirinus' gendarmes. You see, the Deed says I am entitled to settle and fortify the lands of those who have not accepted the Great Journey, namely the heathen Lystheni. The tacit implication is that if I do one I am expected to do the other, but that is not actually stated. I am fully entitled to settle lands without bothering to defend them myself. This interacts in an interesting way with Lirinus' charge to avenge martyrs of the Covenant flock, which makes no distinction between my Yanme'e drones and beings with vertebrate instincts of self-preservation. The combined effect is that the fastest way for me to expand the hive's territory is to let parties of worker drones range out into Lystheni territory, accept that they may be slain, and in the event that they are, demand that the Jiralhanae displace the Lystheni responsible."

I felt a pit in my stomach. "Whatever worker drones you leave unprotected may be avenged by the Jiralhanae, but they are still gone."

"Yes, what about it?"

"They're your children, I would have thought their deaths might upset you."

"I have had somewhere upwards of one million children and cannot think about this in the same sentimental style that you might."

"But even just pragmatically, it seems like a loss for you."

"Less of a loss than a cost, the cost of gaming our Covenant's legal system."

"This is the legal system I am bound to enforce! You are just openly telling me that you are flaunting its loopholes to sidetrack all our Covenant's military forces on this planet? To bog them down in unnecessary wars?"

"So far as I am concerned the wars are necessary, but yes, lawman of the cartel-kin, that is what I am telling you."

"But… you have soldier drones of your own! Why don't you use them?"

"Because they might lose. They are not one-fifth as fearsome as the gendarmes."

My mouth was dry. I wanted to leave those awful tunnels. "I had assumed the strife in Narsompasi's swamps was the product of some miscommunication or misunderstanding. I did not realize you were intentionally escalating conflict between the gendarmes and the swamp-dwellers."

"I see! Well, I'm sorry that your reports didn't fill you in properly. I certainly am intentionally escalating the conflict, and I don't think there's any miscommunication or misunderstanding involved. My messages to the Lystheni are clear and devoid of any ambiguity which would be subject to cultural confusion. 'BEGONE. THIS IS YANME'E LAND NOW. TRESPASSES AGAINST THE HIVE WILL BE MET BY COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT.' I believe they comprehend my words fully. Of course it does not stop them from trespassing against the hive, but I am always able to petition the Jiralhanae and the swamp-dwellers' trespasses are always duly met with collective punishment, so it is all very straightforward. The swamp-dwellers' messages to me are equally simple and legible. 'MONSTROUS RACHNI DEVOURER, WE WILL DRIVE YOU FROM OUR WORLD.' Of course, when I first heard that message, I did not know what a Rachni was, but I looked it up, so now everyone is on the same page."

"Queen Yalat, I must bid you to stop provoking the native Narsompasikar and focus on fortifying what lands you have already taken."

"Why?" She suddenly drew herself up and opened her chelicerae wide. I thought for a moment that she might swallow me whole. I thought that I could see the hundreds of still and silent soldier drones beginning to twitch. "On what authority?"

"By the authority and blessing of the Prophet of Sagacity, who charges the Anuranite Lustration to bring order and contentment to all the faithful. You must see how it harms our Covenant on Narsompasi for you to tie Lirinus' gendarmes down in these swamps! It makes it impossible for him to bring order to the spaceports, and thus impossible to reopen the Narsompasi shipyards. We need warships if our Covenant is to bring the Citadel Council down! And Lirinus cannot be expected to stay on Narsompasi and babysit your hive forever. In the long run, you must make peace with the Narsompasikar who were here before you- you do not have the soldier drones to defend yourself without the Jiralhanae! You already have what land you need!"

"I may not have the soldier drones to defend myself without the Jiralhanae, but the Jiralhanae are here! I may have what land I need, in terms of base survival at least, but not yet what land I want! I do what I do by the authority of the Terminus Exarch, governor of the swallowed-yet-undigested worlds, who blesses and protects the Yanme'e pioneers, who charges us to go forth and be fruitful. He awarded me a Deed of Settlement, by which I am Mother of Narsompasi. So far as I am concerned, my mission carries as much authority as yours. The hive will spread until it encompasses all lands which I covet. I covet many lands, but please rest assured that it will not take forever! I do not want the hive to spread over the entire world, or even this entire continent. I am not a madwoman. At our current rate of progress, I will possess all the land I want in only one more decade. After that, Lirinus can go off and fight the Turians like he wants. But until then, he is staying here and clearing out Lystheni for me, and you, that is the Anuranite Lustration, will not help him shirk his charge."

"The Council War could be over in a decade! Our Covenant needs the shipyards operational now!"

"It is not my purview. My purview begins and ends with the expansion of my hive. And if I am not mistaken, your orders are not to restrict me. Your orders are to help me."

"It is true, but I have other orders which cannot be accomplished if you are going out of your way to make trouble!"

"I am not going out of my way to make trouble; trouble simply happens to be in my way! And it can hardly even be called trouble! This is the process, the process is working, I will not halt it." Queen Yalat drew herself down and took a moment to calm herself. "Out of courtesy and fellowship, I will help you with your other orders if I can. What exactly are your other mandates?"

"As I said, to bring order and to reopen the shipyards!"

"Then I am sorry. I cannot help you on either count. The fighting is necessary for my hive's growth, and I do not know how to build spaceships. I regret that you have come to Narsompasi with orders which are in contradiction."

From there the conversation continued a while, but only in circles. Queen Yalat categorically refused to pause Yanme'e expansion. Eventually I felt there was nothing more to be gained in persisting, and I made the long return trip to the surface. The over-bright sun and stifling humidity of Narsompasi's surface, which had earlier felt unpleasant, now came as a happy relief. The bored gendarmes barely noticed my return. Only Ruz perked up and came to me, to learn how the meeting went. I filled him in quickly.

"The best thing for Narsompasi and the Covenant would be to simply withdraw Lirinus' support, to tell him that he is no longer bound to retaliate against the swamp-dwellers on Yalat's behalf," I concluded. "That way Yalat would be forced to make a real peace, or she and her hive would all be killed by the natives, but either way we could get to work on the shipyards. The shipyards are what really matter."

Ruz nodded, but didn't say anything. I often thought things through by explaining them to Ruz. He had become used to it.

"Out of the question, though," I added. "Orders are orders. We are not to sabotage Yalat. We are to help her hive grow. The Exarch would have me shot if he heard that I was interfering with his sponsorship of Yanme'e colonization, no matter how stupid his notions are. What's best for Narsompasi and the Covenant is not what's going to happen."

Ruz spoke. "What are we doing, then?"

"The first thing is to see whether getting the shipyards operational is even possible." I went to the Spirit dropship and called Chieftain Lirinus with the dropship's communicator. "The Grand Communicator!" Lirinus bellowed. "How did it go? Has Yalat given her hand, or whatever limb serves as the Yanme'e equivalent, to the natives in fellowship? Can I tell my warriors that there is at last peace in the marshes of Narsompasi?"

"Not yet," I admitted. Lirinus chortled meanly. I think that he tried to be patient with the Anuranite Lustration's intervention on Narsompasi and that he tried to be patient with me, but he did not always succeed. Still, I thought that he would make a more valuable partner going forward than the Yanme'e. "I'm taking you up on your offer to visit Talita Valzeshia now. Where exactly is she?"

Lirinus gave me the coordinates of the mansion in which she was held under house arrest, near Port Isola. I thanked him, ended the call, and ordered the Spirit dropship to take me to Port Isola. As it took off, I looked down again at the blue-yellow wetlands. Their charm was lost on me. I wondered how the Yanme'e and Narsompasikar could possibly think this bleak swamp was at all worth fighting over. I swore.

My new friend, the Salarian gunner, heard me and grinned. "I forgot to tell you. Welcome to Narsompasi! You'll get used to it."