A/N: As requested by the resident Chess Dragon, Militarist – the file on the Batarian Emperor.

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STG Report on the Batarian Emperor

Senior Agent Vessi to the STG Master

This is rapidly becoming tiresome.

Danith and I have been working together since we were inducted into the Task Group almost twenty years ago. To have us split up and running all over creation investigating Collapse-only-knows-what kind of lunatics is both dangerous and infuriating. Danith has zero sense of self-preservation. I love him like a clutch-brother, but that's the truth. Without me there he'll get his cranium ventilated in no time flat.

And the assignment? Did I sleep with your sister, perhaps commit some unknown offense against the SIX? Because this looks like you're flat-out trying to get me killed, and horribly at that.

Why in the turns of the Wheel would you want a report on the Batarian Emperor anyway? Are we suddenly planning to do something to the brutes after centuries of looking the other way? Or did they kidnap someone really impressive this time?

Do you have any idea of how flat-out insane the defenses of the Black Palace are?

I suppose it does not matter. At least I only lost an arm getting you this information. Well, that and three full cells. I hope it was worth it. And don't even think about giving me a cybernetic replacement, you'll be paying for full regrowth.

I might as well get on with it.

As with all reports, but especially ones where you get assaulted by bionetic nightmares, this document is REALLY not inclusive with details, but instead provides high-order information that can be queried in-depth at a later time, assuming you have the stomach to do so.

This file is classified… I don't even know. Let's call it Black-Collapse Nine. This is the first (and hopefully last) iteration of the file on this particular Emperor. Please note the file on the last Emperor also recommended not doing any more. I strongly affirm this.

Caution : Read FIRST:

I don't know why I go through this spiel.

As can be expected, I used some unconventional sources. While the LoZ was completely useless, the report was mostly done via nanospy inserts they provided into planted slaves. I also used orbital pentrometer surveillance devices, rumors, urban legends, the very rare eyewitness accounts of a rogue high-caste batarian we smuggled out, and flat-out assumptions.

Actually, a lot of flat-out assumptions. And guesses.

Additional unconfirmable information was achieved with bribes to some disgruntled Hegemon-caste survivors in the Black Rim working with (of course) Edat Kurass.

Unless you are extremely drunk or drug-impaired – which, come to think of it, would explain our most recent assignments – there is no way this file can be assumed to be anywhere near complete.

If you want to die in a horrible death, you can assume that this file a good read on his abilities. If you don't, assume that we barely managed to get away with any information at all as more of a warning rather than reliable tactical advice.

As a side note, this little jaunt cost us every single embedded agent on Khar'shan, a pair of corvettes, three cells of agents, a cell of War Specialists, and two Transcendentals who helped what shredded remains of my team survived. And my arm.

Infiltration of Khar'shan is difficult – approach to the Imperial City, much less the Black Palace is functionally impossible. Details can be found in the sub-files appended, but the high point had to be the moat of live black nano edged with laser tripwires connected to M/AM anti-tank mines.

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T'hanakur Venkarith Batar

Overview:

Formal Titles: Batarian Emperor. I'm not typing up the rest of that melodramatic drek.

Nicknames: This is a joke, right?

Race: Batarian. Theoretically. Let's just overlook the fact he can walk off anti-material shots to the head.

Age and sex: Male, believed to be twenty-seven. More than a ten-pack of offspring.

Wealth: In theory, he owns the entire Empire and all properties and wealth of the inhabitants. In practice, best estimates run in the range of seven to eight billion credits. Much of this is tied up in objects of art and other artifacts. The theoretical wealth of the art and other possessions of the House of Batar is at least another two to three billion credits.

Psychological Summary: There isn't enough space in the entire chart to show how fucked-up this creature's mind is. He is definitely a hard entry into the Omnicidal quadrant of Malevolent personalities. He delights in pain, suffering, blood, and death. Every action, every gesture, every word evinces his sincere belief that life in and of itself is some sort of aberration.

This is not a stable figure.

While I won't get into a long rant (I am not, after all, Danith or Anoleis) I will take a moment to describe exactly why his profile is so upsetting using an anecdote. The Emperor wears a robe of layered white silk trimmed in red. The reddish-orange color comes from the blood of a sacrificed batarian. He does not wear the same robe twice, it is incinerated at the day's end when he retires from court.

That means a batarian is murdered every day for the simple pleasure of dying the hems of a robe he literally throws away. Not even the cruelest krogan or most hardened Terminus criminals are that dismissive of life.

Military Summary: Difficult to ascertain. Imagery shows him in an Imperial Guard uniform some three years prior to his ascension as Emperor. He is known to be extremely skilled in melee and archaic weapons combat, and is suspected to have the ability to pilot a battle-suit. Other information is of such low reliability that it is unimportant to mention.

Of note, however, is that he has survived several assassination attempts, including one using poisoned transuranic explosive rounds. While all batarians are tough, all sources indicate the Emperor is almost anomalously difficult to injure, much less incapacitate or kill.

Education: As standard with all Imperial-caste and Family, he went through at least eight years of schooling on roughly collegiate-level, mixed with military education. If rumors and what reports we have can be trusted, he maintains a very high level of interest and skill in oceanography. He certainly subscribes to dozens of scientific journals covering biotechnology, archaeology, crackpot theories about 'ancient gods,' and genetics.

Employment: I hate these fucking templates.

Significant Family: Two brothers, twenty-four cousins, sixteen sons, four daughters. A very large harem of Imperial-caste females, roughly two hundred. Several of these are believed to be sisters of his.

Overall Threat Rating: Black-Collapse-Nine, with enough Red-Flags and Black-Flags to equip a human rave party.

Historical Notes:

Constructing a coherent history of any Batarian Emperor is often difficult, as the Imperial-caste is buried behind layers of completely psychotic and paranoid defenses as well as a great deal of informational security and obfuscation.

So when I say this is conjectural, I don't mean in the sense of 'we're not sure if all the pieces are accurate.' It's more in the sense of 'I let a Manno write a history of war and all I got was a screed about the opportunity cost of military research.'

The Emperor (I'm not typing that ridiculous name more than once) was the second of three male children born to the previous Emperor. (He also had thirty-five sisters, which boggles the mind. Then again there is no word for 'sister' in batarian. Cretins.)

Little is known about his childhood – his first public appearance was when he was inducted into the Imperial Guard as a palace commander, and a pair of Hegemonic News pieces describing his actions during the earthquakes that struck the Imperial City fifteen years ago. At least during that time he seemed efficient and – oddly enough – far less cruel than the majority of Imperials, even proffering some assistance to rebuilding the Lower Circle section of the city where the lowest of the low-caste dwells.

Popular opinion seemed to think the eldest son would be chosen as Emperor, although repeated rumors stated Thrurkara was not a diligent worshiper of the Dark Gods. As it turned out, this was probably why he was later executed for heresy.

When the previous Emperor died, M'kathra – the former Emperor's brother and High Priest of the Dark Gods – traveled with all three of the male children to the Lake of Black. When he returned, the current Emperor had taken his robes of office and his staff.

He'd also jumped up in height a good third of a meter and probably gained eighty kilos in weight overnight. Vitamins, I presume. Perhaps elevator shoes.

His coronation was extremely gauche and melodramatic, even by outre batarian standards, including truly disgusting orgies (with batarian females and slaves, the latter of which were executed for not being enthusiastic enough), mass ritual executions of heretics (over five thousand), and live cannibalism. It also included various famous figures, such as Golo, the Engineer of Omega, Ganar Okeer, Shift, and several other unpleasant cretins that were ominous to see in an environment which is usually not only barred to aliens, but is grounds for instant execution just to have an alien see a member of the Imperial Family.

This has been Black-Flagged for immediate review. Absolutely nothing good can come of any cooperation between Okeer and Golo of all people, especially in connection to this bloody-handed lunatic.

His rule has been extremely volatile and contentious, ending with the hilarity of him handing the Hegemon over to the turians for the mess regarding their crèches, and paid a billion-credit indemnity to the humans for the so-called 'Damocles Incident.' He had severe disagreements with the Hegemon (who was markedly less moronic than most of his predecessors) and had traced back several rebellions and revolts to Hegemon backers. His response was hardly surprising, although I note he only handed over the male Hegemon-caste members to the turians.

The females were given to the low-castes to, and I quote, "use up."

As an aside, going over batarian cultural information is an excellent weight loss program.

Prior to the Hegemon mess, he'd been one of the most repressive and savage rulers to date, credited with the execution of over six million of his own people due to rebellions and revolts. With the collapse of the Hegemony into the Empire, he now rules a third of the worlds he once did, and all planets are now under the direct control and governance of the Imperial Guard.

The Imperial Guard has grown rapidly in size, and is now almost omnipresent throughout all of current Batarian Space. The Imperial Fleet has also grown and consumed most of the former fleet strength of the batarian navy and sector patrol fleet.

His own actions he keeps as concealed as possible, mostly acting through the various court intermediaries such as his Hands and Eyes. The one hard fact we do know is he met with Okeer three times not long after the Benezia Incident, and that slaves with Imperial brands were found in both his labs and in the ship of the criminal clonelegger Saleon.

We're still attempting to trace that connection with not a jot of luck, and that cost me one of the teams that got killed. Whatever it involves is highly protected by the Imperial Guard. We know little else, even the League was unable to trace back much of his operations or activities.

If we are going to pay attention to rumor… and we probably should… the Emperor is distracted. Since the reduction of the batarian sphere to its smaller size, rebellions have been dealt with in an almost sane manner, with the last one only resulting in mass arrests and executions rather than setting the entire planet on fire from orbit. Logic would indicate that with fewer worlds you can't just go around killing them off.

Common sense would indicate applying logic to batarian behavior never works. If he's distracted, the question we have yet to answer is 'with what and why?'

Motivations:

I love these templates, sir. I'd just like to point out that we can't even figure out what in the Wheel he is doing, and our psychological modeling has been only slightly more effective than the models we used on Okeer, which is to say they didn't predict a fucking thing.

Aside from staying in power, attributing motivations to the Emperor is rather difficult as none of the few actions we do know about make any sense whatsoever. His contraction of the borders and his complete execution of most of the Hegemon-caste would seem to indicate he wanted more complete and tighter control over his people, yet in execution the Empire has become less draconian and repressive since the change.

We don't have good models for what could be his focus of attention, and galactic politics has never been something Emperor's paid much attention to, that was the whole job of the Hegemon-caste. To make things more confusing, he has spent more time in ritual trips to the Lake of Black, consultation with temple officials, and other religious mumbo-jumbo that has no possible outcome but to waste time.

Organizations and Affiliations:

Aside from running the Batarian Empire, he is also some level of priest and is involved in their religious temple services. There is constant (but unconfirmed) rumors that Aria has declared the Emperor her equal, and certainly the Circle of Shadows would not dare to cross him.

As usual, Anoleis is a cagey source for information, but he suspects at least three recent volus biotechnology startups with batarian researchers (high and Hegemon refugees) are actually backed and invested in by the Emperor. He can confirm he received a rather roundabout inquiry from the Vol Prime Court of Corporations about the steps required to allow the Emperor's representative to join the Noveria Court (which he of course denied).

Tactics:

Specific Tactical Methods, Ground Combat:

Fighting the Emperor directly is… extremely, almost fantastically, unlikely.

He lives at the center of no less than six concentric lines of defense, in a palace that was designed as a deathtrap and guarded by fanatics. He is heavily escorted every time he leaves said palace and is a paranoid's paranoid when it comes to planning for treachery.

That being a given, most of my recommendations are how to bypass his defenders. This is not entirely due to pragmatic reasons – my baseline analysis of why you are going to die in a shattered pile of flesh soon to be a tasty dish on his table is in the 'short-range' section.

As the voy-bird flies, the message is simple: Orbital bombardment. If you insist on doing things the Solus way, though, read on.

Long-range:

Sniping and remote detonated explosives are the very best methods for taking out the Emperor if you're too uruzshit to just crash an eezo transport on top of him. He has never worn any form of armor, and his crown is made of wood, which is not exactly known for stopping bullets.

However, his groundcar is a monster of a beast rivaling some turian war-trucks, and some lunatic has even sold them enough laser steel to armor the entire thing in it. Anti-material weapons in great numbers paired with drone-launched plasma strikes and preferably light artillery are the most likely to succeed.

Traveling in air or space makes him a harder target – in space he travels on a dreadnought, and when leaving or arriving in a gravity well he is flown down in a superheavy-destroyer boasting battlecruiser-level shielding and massive escorts. These ships are guarded constantly by both mechs and Imperial Guardsmen, so sabotage is unlikely to succeed.

Any direct attack must take into consideration his unnerving durability. I recommend silaris-core rounds or even some kind of railgun-launched M/AM anti-grain round. He has walked off AMR fire more than once.

Wearing a robe.

Medium-range:

Getting past his Imperial bodyguards is not going to be simple, they are equipped with weapons that we have been unable to successfully recover. Bionetic in nature, they are extremely effective and as my teams found out to their sorrow, out-range our own medium-range weapons. IG defenders will immediately call for airstrikes and AUGMEK backup, the window to strike and get in close enough for Protocol Twenty-six (suicide vest detonation) is less than ninety seconds.

Keep in mind that we have zero data on if the Emperor himself has any capabilities at this range, but given he was an Imperial Guard officer at one point, it's likely he does. Aside from the above, keep in mind that at medium-range you are likely going to be in melee very soon given the batarian preference for that form of combat.

Short-range:

In theory, assuming you got past outer defenses and his bodyguards, you would have a chance to engage the Emperor with either radiological grenades, black nano dissimulat, high-explosives, or preferably a M/AM suicide vest with dead-pulse switch detonation backup.

Or all of the above, if you are a real go-getter.

So when I say there's no way you can survive short-range combat I am not being negative, merely pointing out that your exit strategy will involve you being dead. Any other kind of combat plan is so hilariously ill-advised and contraindicated that I pray if you do engage in melee you turn on your camera first so the rest of us can laugh.

I'll be direct. The other video we have of an assassination attempt on the Emperor has him block a seventeen-kilo mace with his arm and then knifehand a high-caste batarian hard enough that his organs split open. He then smashed in the skull of the next attacker with enough speed that we had to slow the video down before his bodyguards could even move.

I would not put a biotic krogan warlord in melee combat with this psychopath. An upgraded clone-unit war spec is not even going to make the Emperor smile cruelly before he splatters it all over the road.

Warning Advisory:

I have had seven hours to review the vast amounts of urban legends and hearsay about the Emperor. I can't prove any of it and some of it contradicts other things.

What I can say is the words of old Master Agent Jarah: "Any foe worthy of the STG's personal attention is usually a foe not worthy of personal engagement." This truism goes double for the Emperor for several reasons.

Leave aside defenses, bizarre ability to shrug off lethal wounds, and anomalous size and strength that came out of nowhere. The first reason why I am concerned is the Emperor's paranoid behavior would seem to indicate no assassination attempts would even get close to succeeding, but several have. This implies he is letting them.

It also implies he let us get away, and that he could care less. That isn't the way a sane mind thinks. His amusement at such attempts means he doesn't actually think he's in any danger. Granted, he could just be crazy enough to believe in his own religious garbage… except, so far, his amusement is justified given how effective any attempt at killing him has proven.

More than that, though, is the impact on our own reputation if we make an attempt and fail. The Emperor is politically savvy enough to make good use of that to cause the SIX and the Union in general a great deal of bother.

I would simply suggest long-range monitoring at this time.

Physical Abilities:

While we do not by any means have a complete listing of batarians or their Emperors, a fairly lengthy trawl of our records shows the Emperor is by far the most massive and one of the tallest batarians ever produced.

At his coronation he tore the spine out of a krogan captive barehanded, meaning he must have some very significant levels of bionetic augmentation. Based on his size and muscle mass alone, I can't stress strongly enough that any kind of direct confrontation is likely to end very badly.

Rumors and hearsay claim his senses are far sharper than most batarians, with him smelling poison in a dish about to be served to him when he was a guest of the Hegemon. More rumors and grainy video show him sparring with some kind of specially constructed close quarters combat mechs and denting metal with his bare hands.

Finally, we had some fragmentary video of the riots during the Hegemon incident where his ground car was struck by a spread of missiles. The entire car was engulfed in flames and the front of the car was wreckage. He was capable of kicking the warped and bent door off and walking away unhurt, while everyone else in the car – including Guardsmen in heavy armor – had been killed or critically injured.

So. Unnatural strength and speed. Unreal levels of endurance and toughness. None of this adds up to 'good for STG teams.'

Mental and Psychological Notes:

I'm so tempted to skip this, because the Emperor is sick even by batarian standards, and we all know what the SIU gets up to when they aren't pretending to be 'professional.'

PsyProf has about a dozen different workups on the Emperor, none of which were of much use by themselves. None of his earlier profiles match in any way with those after his coronation, and have shifted over time.

Mentally we don't have any kind of assessment on his intellectual level. Given his wide-ranging interests and subscription to various scientific journals, we can assume he has above average intellectual capacity for a batarian. He is known to speak several languages, which is almost unheard of for any batarian, and this implies he is also more mentally flexible than most of his people.

Psychologically, as I pointed out above, he is right on the extreme edges of the Omnicidal quadrant of Malevolent personalities. He delights in the pain and suffering of others. He engages in bloodsports for the sheer joy of ending lives. While he is capable of both political cunning and clever distractions – his handling of the Damocles incident, for example – his day-to-day mindset is fixated on cruelty for amusement's sake.

While he has obviously never been interviewed, the statements from his Mouth and those given by his Hands and Eyes indicates that he is dismissive of Citadel law. He gave away the Hegemon-caste, planets, and money because he didn't have the time or interest in dealing with the turians or humans, not because he felt he was in any danger.

If we're making completely unsupported guesses, I would suggest his mental state is probably unstable due to how he was raised and the disgusting fabric of batarian daily life. What has augmented it to the levels he now shows must be linked to whatever rituals are done at the Lake of Black when they make a new Emperor. Investigating that further isn't even impossible, it's fractally stupid – the defenses around the Lake of Black make the ones around the Black Palace look like something vorcha came up with.

All in all, this is, as the turians put it, a broken-skull lunatic. The only positive thing the Emperor engages in is music, as he is a talented gyrist (one of their instruments) and has written several intricate and moving pieces that have achieved wide acclaim inside and outside the Empire for their emotional complexity and nuance.

The fact that the Emperor can make such music while sitting on a bench made of bioformed and reshaped female batarians is the dichotomy we cannot solve.

Notable Allies:

The Emperor traditionally does not engage anyone, but like other Emperor's in the past, he has a small number of beings he appears to tolerate. Ganar Okeer tops this list, as he has been a guest of Batarian Emperors for centuries. Golo of Omega, Shift, and, on occasion, Aria also fall into this category.

Edat was cagey about what information he gave us, but he implied the Emperor has contacts – deep ones – with elements of the pirate and slaving rings in the Black Rim and the Traverse.

Curiously, given the batarian's interest in biotechnology, there has never been any contact between the Collectors and the batarians.

Political and Social Notes:

A summation of the Emperor's political views is almost as stomach churning as his preferences in bedmates. Bluntly, the Emperor is a cruel autocrat who sees the entire Empire as a sandbox to indulge his sense of sadism upon. Anything that doesn't disrupt that is for the most part ignored.

Since the Damocles incident, direct batarian action in slaving, raiding, piracy, and clonelegging has fallen off to almost nothing. On the other hand, sponsored pirates and 'new' pirate outfits composed of exiled high-castes with strangely new cruisers has jumped up four hundred percent. It is likely he is moving to create a system that allows for more believable plausible denials in such actions.

This raises the question of why, as no other Emperor seems to have cared much about Citadel outrage, and it took the asari unleashing an Ocean of Nightwind on the batarians to get them to stop raiding Republic worlds. PsyProf feels the Emperor is merely distracted, as many Emperors are, by expanding his family and his religion.

Except previous Emperors had similar distractions and never cut their realm down to a third of its former size. To me, that implies he is preparing for something. Industrial production is up, military training and conscription rates are up, and he is buying more and more materials from Aria that make no sense, particularly magnetic bottle and shielding equipment.

This takes on frightening overtones when you compare to the exhortations of the Wheel Priests for us to invest more in magnetic shielding without saying why.

Socially? Please. The Emperor has no social life as he barely sees anything in the galaxy as his equal. Aside from his interactions with his own caste and family, he rarely if ever even bothers engaging the larger galaxy from anything other than official statements.

As such, gaining any insight as to his relationship with his family is difficult to obtain for the same reason any other information on him is.

The Emperor would appear to prize sheer power and lethality, at least when it comes to dealing with non-batarians, as Okeer, Golo, and Shift are all bad, mad, and dangerous to know. Might I also point out that any strike on the Emperor runs the risk of also running into one or more of the above, which takes the odds for success from 'statistically impossible' to 'are you on elcor drugs?'

– STG – STG – STG –

Warnings:

The following advisories are considered mandatory reading.

Combat of any kind is not only contraindicated, but currently forbidden. There's no way we're going to kill this thug without doing something that will piss-off the Council, like smashing a bulk freighter into that ugly palace of his. Any other combat approach is a waste of time, agents, and appetite.

Increased communications monitoring and intercepts are critically needed: The only action any cell should be taking is finding methods by which we can obtain more information. We are operating in the dark when it comes to the Black Palace and the Lake of Black, and that is simply not acceptable.

League of Zero support is ineffective, recommend use of Eyes of Khar'shan-style operatives: The LoZ nanoware was curiously useless inside the Black Palace, all of it deactivating instantly. The LoZ 'meat-puppet' could not explain why this was so. I recommend hypnotic programming of planted slaves that could be routed to the Imperial Palace – the Emperor seems to prefer asari and turian slaves, engagement of outlying independent colonies such as Zurst or Ilium would be the best places to start such an operation.

The fact that the Emperor has reduced me to suggesting such atrocity should only fill you with shame, as it has me.