112 Chapter 107

The meeting with the Council went nearly as bad as I could imagine. The only saving grace is we're not currently at war with them just near war. Although given the Salrians propensity for preemptive sneak attacks, being in an open war would probably be better. If I thought these tensions would be a long-term problem then I would have pushed harder for a peaceful resolution. However, any pre-Reaper agreements or hostilities are going to be moot during and after the Reaper War.

Whispers of Shepard's suicide mission past the omega 4 Relay just reached me. Meaning that in less than a year the full-scale invasion of the Galaxy will start. The completed modified crucibles should protect the Krogan DMZ and the Perseus Veil. So after migrating the Shadow Broker network onto the Vault and the Vault into the Perseus Veil, I felt confident that I and the Krogan, Geth, and Quarian homeworlds would survive. Although, surviving like a cockroach after a nuclear blast was not and is not the goal. What a depressingly low bar to call "avoiding total genocide of all intelligent life in the galaxy" a success.

I tried to help the Citadel races with early proof and warnings, but it's all fallen on deaf ears. Even the testimony of a live Prothean didn't help. Most people don't believe it. Most of the people who do believe think it's a future problem. The portion of people who believe the Reapers are an immediate threat are so few that they don't have the power to meaningfully prepare. The galaxy won't be as blindsided by the invasion, but only by a little. With my early warning failing, I started two new plans to save the galaxy from itself.

The first project I uncreatively called Project Exodus. This project is targeted at evacuating colony planets into more populated systems. There are a lot of colonies, but the vast majority of them have a population below 5 million. This makes them too small to logistical defend. Their local militia is tiny and the colony itself isn't valuable enough to devote the needed resources to defend it long term. On the other hand, the colonies are too big to easily evacuate. Just moving the population is an incredibly difficult task, but also finding them somewhere to go makes it near impossible. To ease these difficulties, I tried to encourage an early migration. With almost a year to start a mass migration, the first step was a massive propaganda campaign. It played off the fears of rising dangers in the outer colony systems. That made colonists more receptive to moving back into major systems. The first step pushed them out of the colonies the 2nd step pulled into the major systems. Using my corporate assets, I started a hiring spree. Creating millions of job listings while only hiring from colony applicants.

All of the new jobs weren't just for Project Exodus they were also for my second project. Project Secret Savior was my way of protecting Citadel systems while avoiding political squabbling. My new workforce would be assembling new crucible to safeguard a limited amount of Citadel systems from the Reapers. However, given how resource-intensive the new crucibles are I still needed to prioritize and ration where they were being built. The first ones to be built were in the homeworld systems of the Citadel races built in this order Elcor, Volous, Turian, Asari, Human, Hanar, and finally Salarian. The general explanation behind the order is races that pose a larger threat to galactic stability and the Legion are at the end of the list. Humans are chaotic and unpredictable. The Hanar are religious extremists, and if they ever got too much power they would start a holy war. Finally, the Slarians, because they are the most directly antagonistic toward the Legion and they can't be trusted to honor an agreement. After the homeworlds were protected I had planned on building in systems by order of population, but this turned out to be too ambitious. As the Reapers would arrive before the Hanar's crucible was anywhere close to being finished.

As extensive as my work with the Citadel was my work the Batarian Hegemony was even larger. The Batarian Hegemony has been relatively quiet after the attack on Eden Prime. Piracy is at an all-time high, they have had more than few skirmishes with the Alliance, and there have been a few attacks that were for the Reapers. That said it was far from all-out war. However, that was only because they were actually at war with themselves already.

The Batarian Caste system is best described as overly complicated, but it is loosely a four-tier system. From the top down its nobles and priest, warriors and merchants, laborers, and slaves. An even larger divide began to develop as the almost entirely indoctrinated ruling class made increasingly erratic demands of the working class. I have to imagine that without proper orders from a functioning Reaper the indoctrinated Batarians were just trying to cause chaos and make the Reaper invasion easier. This chaos is the only explanation I have for how successful the slave/worker revolt has been. It should have died before it could ever begin, but it picked up some unexpected momentum. Nonetheless, that momentum wouldn't be enough for the revolt to last.

For the revolt to be successful they needed outside help. I hadn't been sure if it was the best idea to help. It might have been a lost cause and a waste of resources. I was undecided until I found the slave demographics. The slave caste was roughly one-third of the Hegemony population and of that half was non-Batarian. The non-Batarian slaves were primarily Asari, Human, Turian, and Salarian. The other races for some combination of availability, upkeep, and aggressiveness made up a very small portion of the slaves. Finding this out I changed my mind and decided I would help.