Borbala Ferank

Borbala Ferank was the retired matriarch of the Ferank family, one of the greatest criminal houses of the batarian homeworld, and one of the hundreds of batarians who answered the Andromeda Initiative's call to settle a distant galaxy. Listed in the ship's manifest as a former security officer, the old smuggler joined the Sleepwalker maintenance crew aboard the ark Keelah Si'yah, reviving from cryostasis at intervals across the six hundred year voyage to help watch over the cryopods and keep the vessel's systems running. Wiry, ruthless, and unsentimental, she carried the instincts of a lifelong schemer into a new galaxy where she swore she could not imagine an honest living.

A crime matriarch of Khar'shan#

The Ferank family ranked among the greatest on Khar'shan, with deep interests in illicit trade, red sand dealing, and every other lucrative vice. Born practically an aristocrat in a society that placed enormous weight on caste, Borbala amassed titles such as the Queen of Smugglers and the Knife in the Dark. She was old but wiry, with a chartreuse complexion and red chin markings, and a lifetime of attempts on her life, many of them by her own relatives, had left her resistant to a great many poisons.

Her family tree was a tangle of betrayals. A niece once tried to murder her over a shorted shipment, only to be killed by one of Borbala's nephews and later by Borbala herself. She bore seventeen children and killed some of them for one reason or another. In the end four of her sons removed her from power, gouging out her lower right eye and trading her, sealed in a crate, to quarians for a pair of old terminals and a single shoe as a joke. She was not angry that they had moved against her, only disappointed that they had let her live, for she felt she had raised them to be better schemers than that.

The break came because Borbala had genuinely tried to leave the family business. An avid painter herself, she had urged other batarians to use their ships and influence to spread their culture, to kindle a renaissance of art and music rather than rely on guns. Her people did not take kindly to the suggestion, and her own sons turned on her for it. Even after they drained her accounts, she recovered enough to gather a cache of goods she judged would be precious in another galaxy.

Aboard the Keelah Si'yah#

When she joined the Andromeda Initiative, Borbala smuggled her nest egg aboard the ark Keelah Si'yah: a crate of roughly fifteen hundred cryogenically frozen fish drawn from across the old galaxy, meant for anyone homesick for a familiar taste, along with a quantity of red sand. Officially a former security officer, she took her place on the Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 maintenance crew, the rotating shifts of colonists revived now and then during the long crossing to tend the ship.

The Keelah Si'yah carried drell, hanar, quarians, volus, batarians, and elcor toward Andromeda, and Borbala's crew was roused when failing computers and a rising death toll among the passengers demanded attention. True to batarian custom she had little regard for the dead and would have airlocked the bodies, but the team's physician insisted they might be needed. She traded barbs constantly with her teammates, especially the talkative volus Irit Non, and was paired by the team leader Senna'Nir with the drell analyst Anax Therion to search the ship for a saboteur and comb its security feeds for leads.

The plague and Anax Therion#

As Borbala and Anax worked, it became clear the ark was dying. A pathogen was spreading through the passengers, later named the Fortinbras Plague, and the ship suffered wild swings of temperature, failing shields, and the debris of space hammering its hull. Borbala armed herself from a bridge locker, hauled corpses for autopsy, and ranged through the cargo holds for the supplies the others needed, repeating her grim refrain that she could make fish, or weapons, or even scarce element zero happen when a cure required it. She recognized old acquaintances among the crisis, including a slow-witted drinking companion named Jalosk Dal'Virra, and defended him against accusations even as tensions over race flared aboard the ship.

For all her cynicism, Borbala spoke of death as the greatest pirate of all, sparing no one, with the only true defeat being surrender before the blow ever fell. Over the course of the ordeal she and Anax grew genuinely fond of one another, trading stories true and false, and Borbala came at last to confess the real reasons behind the loss of her eye. When the worst had passed and the perpetrators brought to justice, the old matriarch slipped back into her cryopod with the drell's help, bargaining for a home wherever the Pathfinders judged fit for batarians, and the two parted with unexpected tenderness.