The Battle of Panakut

Tapin Sul

No, I never had any doubts about following my CEO into interstellar insurgency. Sul Clan and Mellet Clan go back a long way. My father was Dardoll Mellet's CFO. His mother was Dardoll Mellet's CFO. Her father was Dardoll Mellet's CFO. You get the idea. I like to think that we're one of the reasons old Dardoll hit it off with Balaho-Clan. I like to think that in this galaxy crowded with overgrown oxygen-suckers, Dardoll had already developed some affection for us shorter peoples accustomed to more rarefied atmospheres.

The main difference between Volus and Unggoy is, of course, that Volus breathe ammonia, and Unggoy breathe methane. No? That's all the same to you? Then let's say that the main difference between Volus and Unggoy is that Volus are good with money, and Unggoy are horrifically poor. How's that? You understand the significance of that better?

Not that it's Balaho-Clan's own fault. Under the Covenant, most Unggoy were raised in a crushing peonage functionally indistinguishable from slavery. Funny thing about the Covenant: that peonage was not "usury." All sorts of commonsense ideas that are good for everybody were usury. Banks were usury. Stock exchanges were usury. Private equity firms were usury. But an indebted Unggoy infant, that was just the kid's proper place and purpose.

The Covenant's logic, if you can call it that, was that a lower caste indebted to an upper caste was the natural order of things; but that for an upper caste to be indebted to a lower caste would be a threat to social order and interstellar civilization generally. The San'Shyuum couldn't stand even the thought of that happening.

Let me go back a bit. I was lucky to have the job that I did. A lot of Terminus Volus were ruined when the Covenant came in. The extraction guys did good, because the San'Shyuum said that they were producers and not usurers. Jiq Clan in particular tonned it and became the wealthiest beings in the Terminus. But a lot of Terminus Volus were ruined. People I knew.

I did okay. CFOs of Krogan mercenary companies did okay. There were never enough Jiralhanae gendarmes, so the Covenant needed mercenaries, and those mercenaries needed to know that they were getting paid. So, Volus CFOs of Krogan mercenary companies did okay.

The Institutional Defiance Company, owned and primarily operated by Mellet Clan Krogan, spent the first fifteen years of the war doing the same kind of stuff it had done for centuries. Sometimes for the Jiralhanae gendarmes, sometimes for others. Then, Dardoll took a job from the Jiralhanae to crack some heads on an obscure mining planet named Martolla. It sounded typical. I didn't think anything of it, until Dardoll called me up.

"Kalip Sul!" he said.

"I'm Tapin."

"Which one was Kalip?"

"Kalip was my aunt."

"My mistake." You couldn't blame Dardoll. He'd had what? A hundred different Sul CFOs? And we're all wearing atmosphere suits all the time, so you can see why aliens think Volus all look alike. "Tapin Sul! How would you like to march alongside the greatest Warpath since the days of Shiagur?"

"How do you mean?"

"I'm taking the company in a different direction. I'd be proud to have the Sul Volus come along with me, but it would mean your assuming a risk of being devoured by Jiralhanae. If you don't want to be a part of it, I understand."

"What's going on? What's happened?"

"I've been talking with these Unggoy mutineers, and we're going to declare war on the Covenant together. Not just us. I've already talked to some other Warlords who are interested, and we're taking any alien willing to sign on."

"War on the Cov…" No, I'd already known that I worked for Tuchanka-Clan, I knew that wasn't the part of it I should find surprising. "Any alien?"

"Yes. Any alien. Salarians and Turians included."

I jumped on board. Why not? What would I have done otherwise? Those were hard times for Terminus Volus. Professional opportunity was hard to find.

And just like that, I found myself Treasurer-General of the Martolla Compact. It was interesting work. Everybody else in the Compact's inner circle was either Balaho-Clan or Tuchanka-Clan. Here's the thing Krogan and Unggoy have in common: they don't do subtle. That's the real reason they get along. The two peoples have not a grain of subtlety to split between them. I wound up doing more than just the financial stuff. I did a large part of the cunning stuff. Granted, the financial things and the cunning things always had a lot of natural overlap.

The easy example is the relationship the Martolla Compact had with the STG. The Salarian Union wanted to supply us with arms and information, to hurt the Covenant, our mutual foe. I was in charge of handling that. Martollan Krogan could wrap their heads around working with Terminus Salarians or Lystheni, but the STG… no, they still did not like the STG.

You might ask, well, why couldn't an Unggoy talk to the STG? Shouldn't an Unggoy be free of prejudices regarding the races of the Relay Ecumene? Interesting thing. Martollan Unggoy were full-on enthusiastic in adopting the prejudices of their Krogan allies as their own. "Eugenicist! Sterilizer!" I once saw an Unggoy scream at a random Terminus Salarian who had nothing to do with the STG. "We should've let the Rachni take you all!" He said we; I kid you not.

Another cunning thing I handled was our backchannel with the Jiq Clan, the Covenant war machine's largest supplier of Terminus-sourced raw materials. I'd known a few Jiq Volus since before the war started, so that one kind of naturally fell within my purview. Do you know how the Jiq came out of the war so well? The Terminus Exarch went to Gulsar Jiq and said "I can give you access to one of two labor pools. Desperate and cheap Unggoy peons, or stolid and expensive Lekgolo colonies. Which would you prefer?" And Gulsar did the smart thing. He took the Lekgolo, which did cost him more to start with, but I don't think that Lekgolo are even psychologically capable of mutiny.

The Jiq realized something. They realized that every time one of their competitors' Unggoy-operated mining colonies rose up and declared for Martolla, it made the Exarchate a little more dependent on their own Volus-Lekgolo operation. So, the Jiq started passing us arms and information, just like the STG. In exchange we hit their competitors, while leaving their Volus-Lekgolo mining colonies alone. We hadn't really wanted to hit those anyway. Te-Clan is scary. Tuchanka-Clan is scary too, but Te-Clan is something else.

I'm trying to remember how long it was between the foundation of the Martolla Compact and the start of the Citadel Council's Rimward Offensive. Five years. I think it was five years. Then the Batarians and the Hanar broke the Sangheili on the Rimward Front. That started what the High Charity faithful termed the "Utter Disintegration."

With the Rimward Front free, the Asari, Batarians, and Hanar could slam the left flank of the Central Front. The Sangheili on the Central Front broke, too. High Charity ordered the Sangheili on the Coreward Front to fall back and retreat before the same thing happened to them. That went awkwardly, because Sangheili are all crazy and they all want to die gloriously more than they want to win.

As the Sangheili fell back, they ran into the Jiralhanae gendarmes. Rarely, very rarely, the Sangheili and Jiralhanae put their heads together and tried to figure out how they were going to turn things around together. But more often than not, the Sangheili and Jiralhanae would just shoot one another. The Covenant tried to hush that up, but the whole galaxy knew.

It went like that for two more years. The Martolla Compact swelled, even more than we had been before, because more and more fence-sitters saw the way the wind was blowing and joined up with us. A virtuous cycle took shape. Every Citadel victory on the Fronts led to a boom in Terminus native support for the Martolla Compact, which we leveraged to hit the Covenant's supply chains harder. That made it possible for the Citadel Council to drive the Fronts even further back, which led to yet more Terminus native enthusiasm for us, and so on.

By the end, we even had a few rogue Jiralhanae with us. I don't think we ever had any rogue Sangheili? Maybe there were a couple.

Panakut. Okay. The critical thing that happened in the last year of the "Utter Disintegration" was Panakut.

Before I tell the story of Panakut, I want to be clear about this up front: I don't know why the Yanme'e did anything that they did, and I have no idea what they're up to on Heshtok now.

Right. It started when my Jiq contacts, who were just about ready to go ahead and finally switch sides, connected me with a Yanme'e envoy. It didn't have a name. "I am a Tahrasp-male," it explained. Only their queens have names.

The Tahrasp-male represented, intuitively enough, Queen Tahrasp. Everybody in the Terminus knew that Queen Tahrasp was the one who convinced the Terminus Exarch to seed Yanme'e hives along the relays. Everybody hated the Yanme'e, and everybody hated Queen Tahrasp.

"My Queen is loyal to the Terminus Exarch, her true friend," the Tahrasp-male told me. "He is a good man who has done his inadequate best. But my Queen can no longer be loyal to his Covenant. It is clear now that his Covenant's vision, a galaxy of caste, is but a beautiful mirage. Caste isn't in you. It's sad, but it isn't in any alien. We don't know why nature gave caste to the Yanme'e alone, but it did, and the Yanme'e cannot war with nature forever. Queen Tahrasp offers to join the Martolla Compact. Accept her offer, and she will bring the other Daughters of Palamok with her."

I asked my Jiq friends what they thought. "Gulsar thinks that Tahrasp is telling the truth," they said. "Gulsar thinks that she really does want to declare for Martolla along with Jiq Clan."

This didn't feel like it was something within my own purview anymore. I brought the Tahrasp-male to Dardoll and the Deacon. Neither of them liked it.

"Before my own time, Mellet Clan jumped into volcanoes to put the Rachni down," said Warlord Dardoll Mellet. "Did they do that only for me to turn around and befriend a slightly different swarm of insects? But perhaps I am old and close-minded. Babquit, am I speaking unjustly? Your people have known the Yanme'e for longer than mine."

"No," said Deacon Babvus Babquit. "Like the Unggoy, the Yanme'e have long slaved for the Covenant as coolie labor. Unlike us, they have never seen anything wrong in it. The Yanme'e drones are contemptible. The Yanme'e queens are treacherous. Our Compact stands to lose far more than it stands to gain by tying itself to the Yanme'e hives."

"My Queen understands," said the Tahrasp-male. "She expected you to say these misguided things. She wants you both to know that she bears no hard feelings about it all. She wants you to know that she really does like aliens, though you are all so pitiable. And she wants you to know that three weeks from now Great Cheiftain Argurus intends to personally lead his Jiralhanae gendarmerie in an assault on Panakut. I offer you the exact timetable of the Jiralhanae assault and the exact disposition of Argurus' forces."

Babquit and Mellet looked at the data disk which the Tahrasp-male had produced. "Why would you tell us that?" asked Babquit. "We turned you away."

"Aliens are so pitiable," said the Tahrasp-male, "and yet my Queen's sisters are all so pitiless." And without warning it dropped dead, right there in front of us. Supposedly Yanme'e envoys do that whenever they think that there is nothing left to be said.

I let Jiq Clan know what had happened. They freaked out. Gulsar got off of Ilium the very next day.

I also let an STG guy know what had happened. "Interesting," he said. "Would you mind sending me a copy of that data disk the Yanme'e drone passed on to you? The Group ought to be better able to appraise its reliability than your people." I took him up on that suggestion. A little while later, I got a message back saying that the STG figured the Tahrasp-male's information was most likely solid.

Dardoll worried that the whole thing might be a trick. "I should trust what the STG says? The Salarians might well be conspiring with the Jiralhanae against us!"

I doubted it. Jiralhanae don't do subtlety any more than Krogan or Unggoy.

Babquit talked him into going for it. The risk of a trap was great, but the reward of capturing or killing Great Cheiftain Argurus outweighed it. By then that ape was the only thing holding the Covenant's occupation of the Terminus together.

Argurus hit the Terminus Krogan world of Panakut exactly the way that the Tahrasp-male's information said that he would, down to the last detail. We were ready for him.

Or Babquit and Mellet were ready for him, at least, along with several million of their followers. But fighting the Battle of Panakut was very definitely outside of the purview of the Martolla Compact's Treasurer-General. I watched it all unfold from a safe distance, together with Yilyit Firfir. He was the Martolla Compact's number two Unggoy, basically, right under Babquit.

"This battle will see the birth of the Unggoy Nation," said Firfir, with a fervent look in his eyes. "The Forerunners' designs be manifest."

Some Martollan Unggoy never doubted in the Great Journey for an instant, even with all the bitterness they held toward the San'Shyuum who had brought it to them. Firfir was one of those.

For all its importance Panakut wasn't the largest battle of the war, or even close to it. It happened far too fast for that; it was all over within just a week. Panakut wasn't at all like Etzik-Las, where for over a year the best of the Sangheili were pitted against the best of the Turians, each army continually reinforced and armed with the most sophisticated weaponry their respective civilizations had to offer. On Panakut, both armies were under-equipped. Both armies were raggedy, quite frankly. Both armies were something like one-third Unggoy with cheap little plasma pistols.

But our Unggoy with cheap little plasma pistols were fighting for something, y'know? Like Firfir said. They were fighting for their Unggoy Nation.

Nations weren't why I had joined the Martolla Compact, myself. I'm a good Terminus Volus. I've never been to Irune, and I've never wanted to be part of the Volus Protectorate. I liked the Terminus the way it was back in the good old days, with every planet out for itself. That was what I had wanted. To bring the good old days back. But you can never really do that.

Panakut. Right. Argurus came in exactly the way that the Tahrasp-male's information said that he would, and we lit the Jiralhanae up.

But the spaceships in that battle were even more raggedy than the soldiers, right? We were the scum of the Terminus, and they were the Jiralhanae gendarmes. Nobody on either side was coming in with those sleek Hanar-Huragok dreadnoughts. It was just thick metal tubs with engines strapped to them, plinking at each other.

I had thought that Argurus might call a retreat. He must have seen that we outnumbered him, must have put it together that we had somehow seen him coming. But the Jiralhanae troopships just plowed straight on ahead to Panakut. Argurus sent a message to old Dardoll, who was on the ground awaiting his enemy.

"Dardoll Mellet! I want to meet you, Dardoll Mellet! We have torn at one another for seven years, but all without ever speaking! That is not the way that things should be! I want to meet you, Dardoll Mellet! I am going to rip out the heart of that puny disobedient Unggoy Deacon as a warm-up, and then I want the galaxy to watch as the greatest of all Jiralhanae tears the greatest of all Krogan into pieces! I want to meet you, Dardoll Mellet!"

Argurus wasn't clever enough to call a retreat, but he was clever enough to adjust his plan of attack. The Jiralhanae didn't go straight for Panakut's spaceports, the way they had originally planned. If they had, the anti-aircraft batteries we had set up would have ended the groundside battle before it ever started. They dropped Scarabs outside of the spaceports and cleared landing zones for themselves in the countryside.

There were eight different groundside theaters. I'm not going to go through and describe each theater independently. What I'll say is that, overall, it always looked to me like we were winning. And we always were. I've talked to people who understand this stuff better than I do, and they say that the Battle of Panakut was only ever going to go one way. We had the numbers and they didn't, plus we outmatched them being-to-being anyway. Their Jiralhanae were roughly equivalent to our Krogan, but our Unggoy were better than their Unggoy, and our miscellaneous other peoples were better than their miscellaneous other peoples.

But that's overall. Kassatir Theater, which revolved around Panakut's biggest spaceport, was hairy. And that's where Argurus, Babquit, and Mellet all were. Only one of the three of them made it out.

The day after it was all over, I stood on a hill behind old Dardoll and Yilyit Firfir as they addressed a great crowd of Terminus peoples. The two of them were surrounded by camera drones. Dardoll held something in his hand. He raised it up.

"Do you see this gravity hammer?" Dardoll asked the crowd. "This was Great Cheiftain Argurus' hammer. Now it is my hammer."

Thousands of deep Krogan roars, shrill Unggoy cries, and other alien calls rolled together, all cheering. Dardoll looked down at Firfir and nodded.

"The Deacon has passed," said Firfir, his voice hoarse from grief. He drew himself up and spoke with resolve befitting the new leader of the Martollan Unggoy. "His visions live. His vision of an Unggoy Nation with its capital on Martolla. His vision of a true Great Journey, a Great Journey purified of High Charity and its hypocrisies. And his vision of equality and true comity between all peoples. We, all of us together, shall bear these visions to fruition. The Forerunners' designs be manifest!"

I didn't really appreciate it at the time, but this was a critical time for all of Balaho-Clan and all of Tuchanka-Clan, even those that weren't in the Martolla Compact. It was Firfir who would decide that the Unggoy Nation should accept association with the Citadel, and it was Firfir who would somehow get Mellet to convince the Krogan that they should put the past behind them and do the same. Nations. I don't know. I still don't know what was wrong with the way the Terminus was back in the good old days. But the Krogan and the Unggoy both wanted nations.

Old Dardoll spoke up again. "We're coming for Ilium next. And after that?" Warlord Mellet glanced at a camera drone. "I hope the High Prophets are watching this. Diligence. Intrepidity. Sagacity. From their flying mobility scooters on their flying city. They think they're safe out there, out on High Charity past the Haivattan Gate." He looked curiously at Argurus' hammer, as if trying to decide how it might work. He pressed a button and smashed the gravity hammer against the ground. The impact made a small crater. "They'll learn."