Batarian Hegemony

The Batarian Hegemony was the government of the batarians, a four-eyed people native to the world of Khar'shan who chose to isolate themselves from the rest of the galaxy. Hostile to the Systems Alliance and harboring simmering resentment toward humanity, the Hegemony was viewed by the powerful Council races as an ignorable problem, a rogue state that pursued its rivals through deniable terrorist actions rather than open war. The Terminus Systems were infested with batarian pirate gangs and slaving rings, fueling the stereotype of the batarian thug, though most ordinary batarians were forbidden to leave their own space by a ubiquitous and paranoid government.

History and self-imposed exile#

When the batarians achieved spaceflight they discovered concealed Prothean ruins on Bira, a moon of Verush, which allowed them to develop faster-than-light travel; it was a point of batarian pride that the earthquake-damaged ruins gave them less to work with than other races had. The Citadel Council granted the batarians an embassy roughly a century after first contact, but batarian aggression provoked repeated crises over the years, from the ancient bombardment of the salarian colony Mannovai to the annexation of the asari colony Esan. The decisive break came in the 2160s, when humanity began colonizing the Skyllian Verge, a region the batarians were already settling. In 2171 the Hegemony asked the Council to declare the Verge an area of batarian interest; when the Council refused, the batarians closed their Citadel embassy and severed diplomatic and economic relations, becoming an inward-looking rogue state.

Conflict with humanity#

Following its withdrawal, the Hegemony funneled money and weapons to criminal organizations that launched brutal raids on human colonies in the Verge, such as Mindoir. This campaign culminated in the Skyllian Blitz of 2176, an attack on the colony of Elysium by batarian-funded pirates and slavers. In 2178 the Alliance retaliated with a crushing assault on the moon of Torfan, long used as a staging base by batarian-backed criminals, after which the batarians retreated into their own systems and were rarely seen in Citadel space. The batarians blamed humanity for their troubles, claiming they had been forced to fend for themselves, and humans bore the brunt of batarian antagonism through scams, slave raids, and terrorist attacks that the Hegemony covertly supported while publicly distancing itself.

Government and society#

The batarian government, the Hegemony, remained hostile to the Systems Alliance but beneath the notice of the powerful Council races. It was speculated to be autocratic or totalitarian, with the homeworld of Khar'shan still divided into competing nation-states, and its Department of Information Control ensured that only government-approved news crossed batarian borders. Batarian society placed extreme value on social caste and appearance, and effective caste status could even be purchased on an ongoing basis. Slavery was integral to that caste system despite being illegal under Council law, so deeply ingrained that batarians regarded the Council's anti-slavery stance as discriminatory; their feared slave rings raided remote colonies and implanted captives with control devices. Despite their isolation the batarians continued to supply linguistic glossaries to the galaxy, and their language became a lingua franca across the Terminus Systems.

Military#

Little was firmly known about the batarian military. Citadel sanctions had reduced the Hegemony to a paper tiger that fought through deniable terrorist actions rather than the wars of its heyday, and by the time human colonization of the Skyllian Verge began its capacity had weakened to the point that it could not prevent that expansion. The Hegemony did not trust private industry with its hardware, relying instead on the vast nationalized Batarian State Arms, an institution infamous for waste and corruption. Its fleet operated at least one dreadnought and, as a non-Citadel race unbound by the Treaty of Farixen, possibly more, alongside smaller vessels such as the Hensa-class cruisers. The military included a brutal special forces division, the Special Intervention Unit, whose training was so harsh that a related program run by former operatives recorded a mortality rate as high as eighteen percent, as well as the Batarian External Forces.

The Reaper War#

When the Reapers invaded in 2186, they entered the galaxy near the heart of batarian space and quickly advanced on Khar'shan, and the batarian response was fatally uncoordinated. Decades earlier, in 2163, the Hegemony had recovered the billion-year-old Reaper corpse known as the Leviathan of Dis from Jartar and secretly studied it in hopes of reclaiming the batarians' place in the galaxy; this allowed the wreck to indoctrinate the science team and prominent officials. When the invasion came, those indoctrinated officials sabotaged the Hegemony's defenses and broadcast misleading messages, letting the Reapers easily conquer batarian systems and crush their navy. The Reapers converted captured batarians into the husk-like Cannibals and deployed them across the galaxy, while survivors fled as refugees into Alliance space. Surviving batarian forces ultimately took part in the war effort against the Reapers, though their participation had not yet fully earned the trust of Alliance soldiers.