The Cerberus Files : Tactical Addenda, Opposing Forces

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Jack,

I've been busy reviewing the entirety of your planned third-string options. Vigil's capabilities are quite impressive if he can build out something of this nature in a short amount of time. That being said, if your gut instincts are right about how Shepard is going to react, we may need such emergency fallback options.

Then again, she just pasted Okeer. Jesus Christ. Can we at least make the attempt not to piss her off?Because I don't like our odds if we do, regardless of whatever tripe comes out of Mr. Dunn's mouth.

I've also read the two reports Minsta's daughter put together. She shows a distressing lack of the ability to discern why we do not bother going into the gory details, as these don't really help us a whit in planning what to do and also do nothing for keeping your lunch down.

At least she didn't include video, like Brooks did with her hanar write-up.

I'll admit the NDC file was well-done, and the Unseen Cloud was clearly a stellar effort – but the SIU was not the sort of thing a young girl should be having oversight into collating the research on, Jack. What in the hell were you thinking? She did a good job in identifying what they do, but it's obvious she still hasn't got any more spine in her than her limpid father does.

Thank God she didn't put two and two together and start asking pointed questions about why no one has obliterated the batarians. Having the realization that the salarians and asari have probably left them to their devices to be a check and a drain on humans, elcor, and volus would not go down well with her sheltered upbringing.

Ah, well. Civilians.

I've been pulling together what data we have on the salarian operational forces. The STG really doesn't count at this point, at least not when it comes to truly 'black ops' – that would be the League of Zero, the semi-mythical AIs that supposedly watch over the Salarian Union.

They make most of the other opposing force groups look like children playing.

While the League is not as openly… disgusting as the batarians, they are incredibly hard to detect, much less stop, distressingly more dangerous and chillingly competent. For all of their macho bullshit, the SIU is simply not scaled enough to do any real damage on a galactic level, much like the Deathwatch. The League, on the other hand, is very dangerous, and more than that, possibly uncontrolled.

It doesn't really help that I've spent the past day or two racking my brains and I can't even figure out how to kill one of their operatives and make it actually stick. We don't even have the first clue where they are, and even Vigil can't find them.

As always, I'm looking at them from a military – or at least, tactical – standpoint. I won't touch on the moral, ethical, and other issues raised by their existence, much less what the hell they do to people. I could, but to what point?

It's not like we were much better.

Origins of the League

I'm afraid this is going to be a touch lengthy, Jack. It's important to understand how the League even came about, both to understand why they're so dangerous and to grasp how compromised the SIX are.

Learning about the League has made some of the more extreme reactions of the SIX understandably pragmatic instead of merely sociopathic.

Salarians are good at being cagey about their history, but we have the advantage in the background of the League being extremely well-known history. However, I must point out that this should be caveated – what we take as 'history' is assuming that salarians haven't left out parts of the story.

Given that they had some kind of bad experiences with AI long before the League of Zero came around, I'm surprised it was ever formed. Then again, it is pretty clear the formation was certainly not at the behest of the SIX.

At any rate, the history as we know it is, for salarians, bracingly straightforward.

When the salarians and asari first met on the Citadel, when humans were still stabbing each other with pieces of metal, both races were (understandably) wary. Prior to this point, there was no STG – the various intelligence agencies of the three salarian nations had been combined into a single, large-scale organization known as the Ever Alert.

Supposedly, the Ever Alert were the main, driving reason for peace on Sur'Kesh – their intelligence and sabotage skills were so feared that they could shut down entire armies. The Ever Alert did not answer directly to anyone, not even the SIX – but they were also fiercely apolitical and utterly neutral. The Ever Alert dominated salarian political and economic discourse until the discovery of the Citadel.

The Ever Alert's high command was often consulted by the dalatrasses of the SIX, and the meeting with the asari was no different. Many threat analysis projections were probably conducted by both sides, even as asari and salarians probed each other's intentions and capabilities.

When it became blatantly apparent that not only were the asari far more powerful than the Salarian Union in terms of ship numbers and technology, but also (to salarian eyes) nearly immortal and possessed of biotics, the leadership of the Ever Alert saw them as a threat. Despite strong arguments made to the SIX, however, the Ever Alert was not permitted to deploy to act as it saw fit, nor even to prepare for eventual asari betrayal.

While the Ever Alert did not answer to the SIX, and had extensive resources of their own, they didn't have the level of power or assets to wage total war across the gulf of space. The SIX refused to allow the Ever Alert to take command of the salarian military and even suggested that further resistance would have the three nations rethink their stance on the Ever Alert's independence.

At the time, the SIX was under the misconception that the asari could read minds, due some translation issues, and felt any proactive movements might touch off a completely unneeded – and possibly fatal – war. The Ever Alert felt instead that waiting was weakness, and when they were ordered to stand-down – and threatened with being outlawed – the most extreme members took independent action of their own.

The very best of the group were reformed into another group, the League of One. Devoted to ensuring the survival of the salarian species, this new body drew on the skills of the Ever Alert as well as a host of private consulted operatives, without consulting the SIX.

While asari and salarian anthropologists studied one another's culture and savants worked out translation tables, the League of One focused on penetration of the asari computer networks. While asari are decent computer programmers, they were no match for the League, which, even at this early date, was using arrays of powerful VIs and sophisticated hacking tools.

Curiously, the story splits here. The 'public' version was that when the asari and salarians agreed to work together, the League rebelled against the SIX. The SIX attempted to deploy the Ever Alert to stop them, but the League, being the best of the Ever Alert, killed most of the group in pitched covert strikes.

The STG was formed from existing private organizations, retired Ever Alert, and other elements to stop them from unleashing some kind of genocidal virus on the asari and killing them all.

I'm not a virologist, Jack, but even I can see a big problem with this. The League were all described as tech-savants, computer programmers, ghost-hackers, and other mostly military and technical types. None of them were biochemists, and back then, the salarians did not even express much interested in bio-chem.

Also implausible would be the timeframe and opportunity – while the asari and salarians no doubt found ways to conduct certain biological analysis, working up a plague of that nature would take years and hundreds of test subjects.

More than that, the salarians were still recovering as a species from the Collapse Plague and its deleterious effects. Salarians did not first experiment with serious genetically recombinated plagues for a thousand years.

So how could a bunch of hackers somehow come up with a virus to genocide a race they had been in contact with for less thantwo months?

They didn't.

The 'true' story was hard to find, and we mostly got lucky by stumbling across references in a facility that Kai and Pel struck belonging to P. That crazed nut, it seems, has been doing his own digging into events. Not surprising, given that he likes to troll the Council races… but worrying in that we are now one.

Anyway, the League of One, this version goes, had hacked into asari net-spaces and discovered the Council of Thirty drawing up plans to genocide the salarians using conventional attacks if the salarians became problematic. This did not distress them. Indeed, the fact that the asari saw salarians as a threat was rather reassuring to the twisted salarian mind.

What did alarm them, however, was the fact that – somehow – the salarian data-net had been penetrated to such a degree that the asari already knew almost everything about salarian defenses, the location of Sur'Kesh, and had even begun breaking past the security of the Reach Research Compound.

How did the asari do this, given the salarians were better hackers? Hell if I know, Jack – but it makes sense the salarians kept it quiet. And it worries me – if the asari had these capabilities back then, how much good is the Silver Legion in its protection of humanity?

Whatever the tools used, the results were unacceptable to the League of One.

When the SIX declined again a request from the Ever Alert to conduct preemptive strikes, the League of One engaged in building computer hacks and viral attacks on the networks of the SIX that seemed to come from asari sources.

When the asari denied these attacks, calling for a meeting to hash out issues and discover who was behind this, the League penetrated the asari comm network and transmitted faked distress calls from asari vessels claiming to be under attack by salarians. They tied the fakes to an asari ship currently being escorted by salarian ships to perform science analysis on nearby stellar clusters, then hacked and locked out the comm systems of the asari ship.

Asari warships came in, weapons hot, from FTL and demanded the salarians surrender, literally seconds after the League of One's virus attacks on the asari ship destabilized its warp core, destroying it. The salarians protested their innocence and the asari opened fire.

After a very short fight, however, the asari broke off combat, standing down and transmitting that they had just been commanded to stop by the Council of Matriarchs. Somehow, the asari had figured out the distress call was fake, and a close investigation of the wrecked asari vessel discovered it had been sabotaged.

The Ever Alert were summoned by a furious SIX, demanding answers. When several high-ranking members of the Ever Alert failed to show up, one of the asari suggested this was possibly some kind of internal plot.

The story gets vague at this point, Jack, but we know that four weeks later, the STG had been formed, the Ever Alert disbanded, and the Union was battling the League of One. It took them a full year to kill the group off, working with the asari where needed, and the last one of the League died trying to trigger some kind of bomb aboard the main asari command ship at the Citadel.

The willingness of the salarian dalatrasses to kill their own kind without hesitation to preserve the alliance won the asari over, leading to the formation of the Citadel Council. Most of the Ever Alert who were not vetted and allowed into the STG were executed, and many of the private intellect services used by salarian corporations were heavily restricted at this time.

Nothing else is heard about the League for almost three centuries, except vague rumors that they all didn't die. We still have no idea who (or what) built the AI frameworks, or where the League obtained its vast resource base from.

However, given the near psychotic paranoia of the Ever Alert, and the fact that to prevent issues with compromised agents the Ever Alert had assets distinct from the Union, these resources – and possibly, the AI frameworks themselves – were likely already around when the League of One formed.

The first hint of the League of Zero was during the so-called Little Rebellions, when the STG Master of the time rebelled against the SIX and attempted, with the Wheel Priests, to remove them from control of the Salarian Union.

We aren't entirely clear on the outcome. What we do know is that something hacked the defense systems of Sur'Kesh – all of them – and forced the parties to talk instead of engaging in open warfare.

The League of Zero has only rarely acted since then, at least in direct clashes. Instead they make very heavy use of nanoaugmented throwaway agents, VI daemons, and digital penetration. Yet their influence is extremely heavy.

They were instrumental in shattering krogan defense networks during the Rebellions, shut down the ability of the Starfive turian separatists to engage their FTL drives when they were fleeing from Turian Space, and smoothly countered every single volus attempt to penetrate or subvert the Salarian Union's financial markets.

Ultimately, however, the danger comes from their agents. Each one is a nightmare of black nano and technologies we can't match – they've been using ghost-hacked operators with onboard nanofab tech and medical systems since before such things were even invented by asari or salarian tech labs.

The Existence of the League

Based on what little we know, the League of Zero are nineteen redbox AI reproductions of the original League of One, linked to some kind of Prothean nanofabrication facility and possibly a Prothean VI. They've demonstrated that they aren't even remotely like living beings anymore, and the few clashes the Silver Legion had with them resulted in entire teams going mad and burning out in seconds. Whatever AI technology they are using is far superior to anything we have or even know of – despite being online for centuries, none of the League have gone rampant.

The physical location of the League is equally unknown. The Ever Alert used several super-long-range scoutships equipped with prototype technology to make one-way trips deep into the red-band of FTL ranges, where a ship could not possibly have enough charge endurance or fuel to return. It is believed the League used some sort of Prothean vessel to reach a star system beyond conventional FTL – certainly we have fragmentary evidence they have one functional Prothean warship, which was capable of outdistancing even long-range STG scouts.

The League does not answer to the SIX, the STG, or the Wheel Priests, but takes 'requests' from all of them. The League is curiously in support of the SIX and sees the STG as (at best) irritating amateurs.

The Goal of the League

Defining the goals of a bunch of immortal AI beings is difficult at best, but they seem to be mostly concerned with the preservation of the salarian people. They differ strongly from the STG and the SIX in that the latter two only care about preservation of the SIX, their power structure, and the Salarian Union, while the League clearly doesn't care about the politics.

Given their interference with other races, however, they are also clearly not accepting other alien life forms as anything but lethal threats. A large part of their doctrine appears to be long-term preparation for the extermination of all non-salarian intelligent or sapient life, as this is the most logical step of ensuring salarian safety. Their primary focus appears to be destroying the Thirty and the hanar, and everything else is secondary.

Finally, and perhaps most ominously, the League of Zero is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of AI technology, redboxes, and ever more invasive combinations of nanotech and cybernetics into the framework of something like Von Neumann architecture. Our most conservative estimates state the League could possibly have the capacity to create self-replicating war machines and possibly even infective nano-aug sequestration agents that would allow them to dominate anything and everything within the next thirty to fifty years.

It is this, along with the data on the Alteration Framework, that drove the High Lords of Sol to invest in NOVENSILES, which includes counter-agents to this sort of thing. That doesn't make it right, Jack – but it gives us some idea of the stakes that drove them there.

League Membership

The League of Zero is only the nineteen AI systems. Despite having thousands of agents and operators, it is important to remember that all of these are linked to an AI. There is no method to hide actions from them – if we take out a combat team, they know immediately. If a spy penetrates security and we kill him before he can escape, they still have the data.

There are still gradations of units, however. The most basic are civilians – both salarian and alien – unwittingly hosting a nano-augmentation system. This system is very lightweight, powered by conversion of long-term fat resources, and consists of some kind of nervous monitor array that records everything a being sees or hears. The second component is a tiny burst transmitter that uses nano-laced iron in the skeleton as an antenna, and transmits regularly.

Jack, we have no idea how many millions of people are infected with this – you were there when we finally figured out they had it and damn near a fifth of Cerberus itself was infected. The nanotech is not hard to remove and isn't EMP hardened – but it seems easily spread and even medical scans won't pick it up if they don't know exactly what to look for.

This is the least physically dangerous part of the network, but the most dangerous in terms of what it can find.

Some infected in sensitive or important positions are further augmented, with some kind of bonded serotonin and dopamine emitter in the brain (for humans, other aliens have similar devices in them). This is a long-term, very subtle but effective method of conditioning targets, and it tends to make them spend lots of time reading documents, reviewing technical information, and basically exposing themselves to lots of classified data.

Combat agents appear to be custom-built flash-clones of various races (not just salarians) with extremely heavy levels of cybernetic and nanonic upgrades. A lot of this cyber has been identified by Vigil as definitely Prothean, with bits he can't identify, but suspects may belong to a cybernetic race known as the zha'til that the Protheans destroyed. He cautions that the zha'til were an entire species of organics that combined with AI and went rampant and their technology was certainly superior to that of the Protheans.

Elites are always salarians, each one a genetically superior copy of the original League of Zero's body, fitted with the finest and most dangerous combat cyberware. It was assumed for a while that these beings WERE the League, but we know now they exist on hardware and these things are just remote platforms. Even so, they are very dangerous.

As far as I can tell, the League isn't open for others to join. Vigil reported that the League attempted to hack him and he slapped them back, after which they very respectfully inquired if he was open to working with them to remove 'illogical and primitive fodder/races' from the galaxy. Vigil's reply was negative, and the conversation seems to imply that they don't offer membership to anything that isn't an AI.

I'd keep a close eye on EVA – and the AI the Alliance has, EDI – if I were you, Jack.

League Combat Doctrine

Jack, we've both seen some extreme examples of combat atrocity. Hell, I've committed some. But at the end of the day, most such things are either to send a message or because you're in a hurry.

The League literally sees non-salarians as dangerous infectious diseases, and acts in kind. Their combat doctrine? Overkill. Extermination. Speed.

League assault teams are blindingly fast, with impossible reaction times and unnatural marksman skills, but they use weapons with high collateral damage aspects and do not bother worrying about innocent lives – including salarian ones. Worse still, their physical attacks are always combined with devastating infowar attacks and in some cases, feats of combat engineering that terrify.

Clouds of hundreds of thousands of omni-drones, hacking service mechs and even industrial equipment to attack bystanders, destabilizing fusion reactors, playing havoc with water, sewage, or other survival systems – all of these are gambits they use.

This makes defense against them very difficult, as many worlds rely on VI management of everything from GTS defenses to producing meals. One LoZ op hacked turian food processor units making military rations to taint them with levo sugars, killing well over five hundred turians before the source was discovered. When engineers went in to the facility to fix the problem, the system combined various chemicals and biological products to produce an explosion that killed over sixteen hundred people and sickened more as levo sugars and proteins leached into groundwater tables.

The League engages in levels of cold-blooded murder and needless violence seemingly based on whim, with some operations being almost bloodless and others becoming massacres. It doesn't help that they often use hacking and other tricks to place blame on such attacks on other parties, which is made especially true when they use flash-clones of turians, humans, or asari as the attacking agents.

League Equipment

Most League operatives under the AIs' control seem to depend on a library of common weapons that match the race of the flash-clone, either obtained locally or using replicative nano from their own bodies. Given that the majority of them have full and distressing levels of black nanonics, the fact that they use 3D printing systems to generate weapons, armor, explosives, and whatever else they need should not be unexpected.

There appears to be no physical links between the League agents and wherever the League itself is – we suspect they've developed a QEC network like our own to remotely control forward production facilities, probably in the Traverse or the fringes of the Black Rim. As long as they're careful, it is very unlikely we could trace this back.

Rarely, as I mentioned earlier, there have been sightings of a possible Prothean warship. Vigil states the grainy images of such a vessel match the Prothean version of a combat-capable troop invasion ship, and that the League might have a full armory of proton, particle, and heavy anti-particle beams to play with along with Prothean bionetic armor. We haven't seen any clear evidence of such.

Then again, the most savage League of Zero attacks seem to focus on the asari and hanar, and end in massive explosions, so such weapons may be used without us knowing.

League Tactics

A warning, Jack – a lot of this is sadly unverifiable, using my gut and what bits of data we have correlated. Ezno did an operation trying to counter a League assault on an SA AI research facility and was completely overmatched, but his observations are useful.

I believe that the League operates its forward units in cells that each stem from a central control base that produces clones, equipment, and ships. These bases send out 'base' agents with 3D printing nano and set them up in the regions they wish to target. The base agent then creates more clones, with all attacks only being able to be traced back, at best, to the base agent.

The League of Zero has noted op-tempo differences in small-scale and large-scale operations – specifically, they tend to run dozens of even smaller ops, but will cease all other ops when it's time to launch a big one. Vigil believes they have limited bandwidth to control forces in the large-scale, and the most useful data from this is when we see small-scale ops drop off, we know a big one is coming.

Most League agents are plainclothes flash-clones until the time of the op itself – there is almost no real way to pick up who is an agent. Only rarely do they deploy in a more conventional manner – armored drop-pods that split apart to not only reveal the dropped agents, but the pod itself splits into small, heavily armed combat drones.

League forces do not bother with retreat, as killing them is only killing a terminal point. They cannot be broken, do not have 'morale,' and are completely immune to being shaken by superior forces. Their aiming and combat skills are all at the very highest tier of capabilities, with even the most mousy looking clone capable of killing multiple elites in a dreadfully short amount of time.

League Elites are often equipped with some kind of nano-regenerative suit of black nano, meaning heavy weapons, flame units, or plasma is required to put them down for good.

We haven't seen any operations (yet) involving space combat, although twice they've boarded ships – using vorcha flash-clones with cybernetic modifications that allowed survival in vacuum and some kind of specialized cancer that prevented the vorcha from regenerating and rejecting the cyberware. This capability is extremely distressing as there's literally no warning before vorcha monstrosities are tearing through a space vessel.

League Operations

The League, as I said, sometimes accepts suggestions from salarian authorities, but for the most part is completely independent. That shapes their operations into three rough categories.

First, INDIRECT ACTION ops are subtle attacks on the economic, military, and industrial capabilities of all non-salarian races, using non-military means such as hacking, as well as the gathering of large amounts of restricted data for future planning. These can mimic anything from fake Unseen Cloud financial hacks to framing up opposing intel agencies for break-ins to direct criminal hacking. Some elements of this appear to be in the furtherance of obtaining funds, resources, and raw materials.

DIRECT ACTION are military-style assaults on targets of opportunity. Shipyards, power plants, transport nexi, tourist attractions – the more casualties and the more infrastructure damage accomplished, the better the op. The asari are fully aware of the League being behind most of these, but given that the SIX have made distinct efforts at stopping the League and failed, do not hold it against the Union itself.

Most direct action assaults are actually used to plant additional observer agents into a planet in the chaos. They tend to mask these by attributing them to other forces – terrorists, separatists, slavers, and the like – but occasionally will not even bother with that, such as the destruction of the drydocks at Menae in Turian Space.

I remain baffled as to the ultimate goal of these senseless, brutal attacks, but I can stack the dots – each attack has ramifications that make rebuilding in that area expensive and difficult.

ZERO TOLERANCE deployments are when the League plans a killing strike against a target. The League engaged in this regularly during the Krogan Rebellions and again during the Unification Wars, each time to destabilize the targets prior to committing mass atrocity. The last such attack was against the volus in 2181, the destruction of the orbital trade station around their moon, killing a staggering six and half million volus civilians and costing nearly a trillion credits of economic, environmental, and financial damage, as well as making many aliens withdraw from the nearby Vol Prime trade station.

Another fairly recent attack a year ago was against the Yhur-hu pirate group operating in the Silver Rim and preying on salarian trade vessels. The attacks stopped suddenly, and STG investigators found the entire Yhur-hu fleet dead in space with atmospheres fouled by poison, and savage massacres of every Yhur-hu outpost and base. Their main operation on Hanal was destroyed when two large bulk haulers were FTL-plotted into the capital at top speed, killing four million people and rendering the world a nearly sterile wreck. The blame was planted on the Altor pirates, their key rivals, and resulted in the STG taking that group apart.

No one noticed except us that most of the abandoned Altor pirate equipment and resources vanished as the STG finished the group off.

Final Thoughts

On the surface, I suppose, the League is not as bad as the sickening excess of the rapist Nightwind, or the more grotesque and outrageous violations committed by the SIU.

Yet in terms of danger, they are the most dangerous group out there. You could have a League of Zero plant in your ranks right now – maybe one of the flunkies who brings you dinner – and wouldn't know it. They can be literally anyone, anywhere, and the amount of data they must have access to is staggering and frightening to think about.

It's clear to me that the League is positioning the Salarian Union to be 'safe' before they proceed with their genocidal master plan. After all, the salarians cannot fight off an enraged galaxy. They've done so with alacrity and managed to make most intelligence organs blame many of the atrocities they've committed onto others, who respond to outrageous claims by actually doing something horrible.

The League has been curiously quiescent in recent days, however – actually, their activities have slowly been tailing off since the Battle of the Citadel, and it is likely they are preparing for the Reapers just as we are. That worries me, I think, because it implies they think the threat is very eminent.

The League's AIs are completely illegal, and on paper, the Salarian Union has disowned them. I suspect the League has incriminating blackmail evidence on the SIX (and perhaps other figures) and uses this to avoid retaliation, but their ability to keep things hidden and place blame on others has not worked on Vigil.

That being said, Jack, no one else has a Vigil to reveal the real culprits behind these attacks, and I worry the League's genocidal tendencies may actually try to allow the Reapers to critically weaken non-salarian races before they would act to oppose them. On the other hand, the very illegalities they consist of, not to mention the fact that their outlaw status makes them fair game, means they have to spend a great deal of effort fending off attacks.

I'm sure I could go into greater detail – but the point, I think, is made. In chess, one cannot ignore the field of play to focus on individual pieces. The strategies needed to win are less about what the pieces do and more about how to combine them to thwart the enemy.

Likewise, the mere existence of the League is probably why the asari haven't been more aggressive in getting the upper hand in their long-range clash with the SIX, and certainly explains why the Council races have taken such a hard line against most AI research.

If we can get Vigil to localize these robotic, undying monsters, we should obliterate them from the galaxy.