Migrant Fleet

The Migrant Fleet, known to its people as the Flotilla, was the massive collection of starships that became home to the quarians after they were driven from their homeworld by the geth. It consisted of roughly fifty thousand ships housing some seventeen million quarians in total, so vast that it could take days for the entire Fleet to pass through a single mass relay. Some of its vessels dated back three centuries to the original flight from the geth.

A people in exile#

The Migrant Fleet was the largest array of spacefaring vessels in the known galaxy, a flotilla of fifty thousand craft holding more than seventeen million quarians. It rarely welcomed outsiders, for any risk to the Fleet was a risk to the entire quarian species. Few who were not quarian had ever set foot inside its ships. Quarians seldom left except to go on Pilgrimage, though ships sometimes departed individually to pursue their own goals on missions lasting days or years before returning. As Tali'Zorah described her culture, "Home is a state of mind."

The Fleet was broken into various clans, sometimes spread across several ships, and each vessel had long been retrofitted to house as large a crew as possible. Over time the quarians thinned out ships they could no longer use, pooling their credits to buy and convert new ones. Because ships were so precious, stealing one was a capital crime.

Life aboard the Flotilla#

Conditions aboard every vessel were extremely cramped. One cruiser, the Idenna, carried a quarian population of nearly seven hundred, where a comparable Alliance cruiser would hold only around eighty crew. Space was at a premium, and the cargo holds of freighters were converted into small living compartments, often lined with colorful fabrics to make them personal and to reduce noise. Captains were eager to increase their crews, since a larger complement raised their status in quarian society.

At the heart of the Fleet lay three Liveships, enormous vessels regarded as incredible feats of aerospace and agricultural engineering that provided much of the quarians' food. They were positioned at the center of the Flotilla and heavily defended, for the loss of even one would starve millions. Quarians served volunteer rotations aboard them, growing such foodstuffs as keleven, a high-protein bioengineered celery.

Every quarian custom served the continued survival of the Fleet. Chief among them was the Pilgrimage, a rite of passage in which young quarians ventured into the wider galaxy, returning with a gift of value to earn a place on a ship's crew. The Pilgrimage also served as a safeguard against inbreeding and a chance to see galactic society. Apart from it, quarians typically spent their entire lives shipboard. Their reluctance to admit outsiders, who carried an unacceptable risk of contagion, left them insular and little concerned with the galaxy beyond the Fleet. Where the Flotilla arrived, the quarians strip-mined local worlds for resources and were often hired quietly by corporations, practices that made their approach an unpopular prospect.

Government and military#

In theory the Migrant Fleet remained under martial law, with a ship's captain holding the final say over disputes, but in practice the quarians were quite democratic. Each ship had an elected civilian council to whom the captain often deferred, and overruling that council without good reason was grounds for a captain's removal. Representatives from every ship served on the Conclave, the civilian government that made the Fleet's day-to-day decisions about resources, course, and policing.

Overseeing the Conclave was the Admiralty Board, five quarians empowered to override its decisions, after which the entire Board had to resign or face arrest by the quarian military. This rule ensured the Admiralty intervened only in the most dire circumstances; in three centuries it overrode the Conclave only four times. Outside its internal politics, the quarian navy was small but highly aggressive, for it guarded the ships that safeguarded the future of an entire race. If the intentions of approaching vessels could not be established, the navy would shoot to kill.

The four fleets#

The thousands of ships of the Flotilla were organized into four groups, each commanded by a member of the Admiralty Board. The Patrol Fleet, made up mostly of light frigates and fighters, managed navigation, internal security, and disputes between ships, and in war guarded the flank of the Heavy Fleet; it was commanded by Admiral Shala'Raan vas Tonbay. The Civilian Fleet comprised all the quarians' civilian ships and the Liveships, forming the majority of the Flotilla, under Admiral Zaal'Koris vas Qwib Qwib.

The Heavy Fleet was the main military force, comprising every vessel suited to sustained combat, including heavy frigates and advanced fighter squadrons, under Admiral Han'Gerrel vas Neema. The Special Projects arm was a collection of research vessels responsible for many of the Fleet's technical breakthroughs, commanded by Admiral Daro'Xen vas Moreh.

The war for Rannoch#

By 2185 the Fleet's long-term survival was in question, as the quarians lost spaceworthy ships faster than they could replace them. That year, Commander Shepard and Tali'Zorah traveled to the Flotilla so that Tali could answer charges of treason. The investigation revealed that her father, the admiral Rael'Zorah, had been secretly rebuilding geth aboard the lab ship Alarei in an attempt to find a way to control them, a project that overran and cost him his life. The affair deepened a heated debate already dividing the Fleet between those who wished to fight the geth for the homeworld and those who favored colonizing a new system.

Before the Reaper invasion of 2186, Admiral Daro'Xen's teams developed countermeasures from Rael'Zorah's research that crippled geth ships in combat, and this edge persuaded the Admiralty Board to vote in favor of invading geth space to reclaim Rannoch. The quarians armed even their civilian ships and opened the war with precision strikes that drove the geth back to the Tikkun home system. When the geth accepted upgrades from the Reapers, however, the war turned against the Fleet, which began to sustain heavy losses until Shepard intervened. Depending on Shepard's decisions, the campaign ended in one of three ways: the destruction of the Migrant Fleet and the doom of the quarians, the annihilation of the geth and the reclamation of Rannoch, or a hard-won peace allowing the two races to coexist. If the quarians survived, the Migrant Fleet joined the allied forces in the battle for Earth.

Notable vessels#

Among the Fleet's known ships were its three Liveships, the Rayya, the Chayym, and the Shellen, which fed the quarian people and lay at the heart of the Flotilla. The Rayya was the birth ship of Tali'Zorah. The lab ship Alarei was where Rael'Zorah conducted his fatal geth experiments. The Neema was the vessel Tali joined after completing her Pilgrimage, taking the name Tali'Zorah vas Neema, and was also the home ship of Admiral Han'Gerrel. The Idenna, a decommissioned cruiser, was attacked by Cerberus, an event that exposed how vulnerable the Flotilla truly was and lent weight to those who urged the quarians to seek a new home or to retake their old one.