Spectre Wars
From FABT
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 Kaaysha T'vevo, the first of the traitor spectres and the one responsible for sparking the Spectre Wars.
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17 June 768 CE - 9 April 1346 CE | ||||||||||||||||
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Council victory
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- "The Spectre Wars are perfect material for romance novela or spy novels. Not large enough to be considered actual wars, these conflicts were a rampancy of defection, delusions of grandeur, power struggles, rising and falling thralldoms, and espionage. Important people died, trials were had, and changes were made. The Council doesn't like to talk about it, and whenever the topic is brought up...well, we'll just say it's a discussion best not had in pleasant company. The Krogan Rebellions overshadow much of it anyway, and our early wars with the Terminus Systems and the later Eden Prime War are topics far more subject to debate. As it is, the "Spectre Wars" were nothing more than media fancy. They were shadow conflicts, and those that didn't concern the Council aren't worth mention either."
- — A turian academic in response to Khalisah Bint-Sinan Al-Jilani's question regarding the conflicts.
The Spectre Wars were a series of conflicts between the Citadel Council and, at times, rogue members of the Special Tactics and Reconnaissance branch of the Citadel, that also included the Terminus Systems, mercenary organizations, and at times, varying state actors of various involvement that started with the First Spectre War in 768 CE and ended with the Fourth Spectre War in 1345 CE. Following the bloody aftermath of the Krogan Rebellions, a series of resulting crises shook the Citadel Council to its core, which was already severely weakened in its power and influence by their sixty year conflict with the defunct Tuchankan Empire. The Turian Hierarchy, while new to the galactic scene, had invested a large amount of its resources and manpower to fighting the krogan, and before their membership on the Council, had just recovered from a civil war. The resulting power vacuum from the collapse of the krogan empire left large swathes of the galaxy up for grabs, and the Council's weakened stance had many former Council and krogan territories dreaming of independence. The Terminus Revolutions broke out in 765 CE, only a year after the Rebellions had ended, but were not yet large enough to constitute a threat to Council power in the region, and so the asari, with the help of the turian military, began to try and reconsolidate power in the region, providing aid to former krogan-occupied worlds and trying to bring their former colonies that were conquered back into the fold. However, another problem was beginning to arise, this issue taking root deep within one of the organizations the Council had founded during the war.
The First Spectre War began in 768 CE and lasted just over a month, by far the briefest of the conflicts. Kaaysha T'vevo, a veteran spectre and one of its first members, attempted to rebuild a criminal empire she had led during her days as a gang leader in the city of Illium on Thessia, before being conscripted by the Justicar Order and then kicked out due to her abusing her power and becoming a spectre. Her attempts to expand her criminal network led to her vastly abusing her spectre authority, utilizing it to bribe politicians, establish drug and arms distribution networks with rising Terminus revolutionaries, and even recruit fellow spectres into her organization, among them two quarians, a hanar and four salarians. Eventually, after years of working behind the scenes utilizing an alias, Kaaysha exposed herself when she led an attack on Port Hanshan on Noveria, capturing the port and proclaiming the "Queendom of Kaaysha". The Council's response was to seal off all outbound communications from the planet to keep public knowledge of the event contained, and a salarian STG task force blockaded Noveria to stop any ships from landing or leaving. After repeatedly ignoring warnings by Kaaysha to lift the blockade, she had half the population of the port culled in a massacre. Finally, wanting to remove the threat Kaaysha posed, the turians came forward and offered to dispatch their own forces to retake the port, and offered up seventy of their best special forces operators to be sworn in as spectres and sent to apprehend Kaaysha and her traitorous ilk. The operation was approved, and three companies of turian marines, led by the Valiant Seventy as they'd later be named, deployed and surrounded the port. Four of Kaaysha's seven spectres were killed, with the other three and Kaaysha surrendering and being taken into custody, and the rest of Kaaysha's forces dispatched with ease: the turians suffered relatively light casualties by comparison. The four surviving spectres (Kaaysha, Ezyn'Kannos, Caegirn Dalorn and Patarth Tuhe) were all tried at a trial on the Citadel, and then separately tried and convicted by their respective governments. Out of the four of them, only Ezyn was saved capital punishment, with the quarians choosing to exile him instead.
The Second Spectre War came just three years after the end of the Terminus Revolutions in late 815 CE. Ezyn'Kannos, having served as an advisor to Drecuns Tanculus during the Revolutions and continuing to serve as his bodyguard briefly after he became the first Ruler of Omega, eventually left Tanculus and married an asari mercenary by the name of Ril'phiya Sabuve who had also served Tanculus, and the two of them would have a child. Ezyn yearned for the power he had tasted whilst under Kaaysha's command, and finally decided to act on it. Acquiring low level support from Tanculus, and utilizing contacts Ril'phiya had acquired establishing the Omega chapter of the Thessian Rangers, Ezyn made plans to get vengeance for his exile and carve out his own kingdom. He also reached out to his niece Cuna'Kannos, who had only been born nineteen years after Kaaysha's rebellion, and joined the spectres when she was 23. Ezyn reached out to his niece eight months later and arranged to meet, and ever since that meeting, Cuna had been using her power to help Ezyn avoid the numerous Council attempts to have him assassinated. Using her spectre resources, Ezyn managed to smuggle himself and Ril'phiya's best men onto Rannoch and then planned out a series of hits on the quarian judges who had sentenced him to exile. Meanwhile, Cuna curried favor among a few like-minded individuals who were miffed at the turian majority who had taken over the spectres (which had occurred in response to the First Spectre War, with the Council believing the turians to be more trustworthy agents). Cuna and these six spectres left for Thessia, where they proceeded to hunt down the judges who had sentenced Kaaysha, before moving onto hunting down the ones who sentenced their salarian comrades, and finally the Valiant Seventy. Whilst Ezyn enjoyed success on Rannoch and managed to hunt down and murder all the judges who sentenced him, Cuna had been under surveilliance ever since her initiation; a contingency in case Ezyn desperately reached out to her. The Council had chastized the quarian government for allowing Ezyn to go free, and Cuna and her people were ambushed attempting to leave Armali. Most escaped, but one was captured, and gave up her co-conspirators, including Ezyn's involvement. The Council alerted the quarian authorities, but Ezyn escaped before they could capture him. Knowing that the quarian and his friends would only pose a threat if allowed to go unchecked, the Valiant Seventy were once again utilized to hunt them down and eliminate them. The quarian government however chose to deal with Ezyn personally, and dispatched a unit of Tecr'fer to aid in the search. The Tecr'fer tracked down Ezyn on Omega, but by then he had gotten suspicious and managed to slip away with his wife. Learning of the Rangers' involvement in the attack on quarian soil, an additional three units of Tecr'fer were sent to Omega and together they assaulted the organization's Omega headquarters, killing or arresting everyone within and slipping away before Tanculus' men learned of the attack, falsifying evidence at the site to point the blame towards a rival PMC. After eight months of being pursued across the galaxy, the Valiant Seventy and Tecr'fer finally teamed up and cornered Ezyn and his wife, who had by now hired more assistance from the Thessian Rangers, on the planet Sanctum. A shootout took place in the city of Vulpes, after the Council managed to convince the Thessian Rangers on Hyetiana to call off their support of Ezyn, but after hours of fighting, Ezyn's wife managed to escape and Ezyn himself was cornered. With no way out, he chose to kill himself rather than be captured again. His body was confiscated by the Tecr'fer, and reportedly flushed out an airlock on the way back to Rannoch. Cuna and her people were never found and remained at large, and the search was called off nearly a year later.
The Third Spectre War took place in 832 CE. Having adopted an alias and vanished from the grid, Ril'phiya and her daughter Nasanha Kannos remained in hiding on Illium, and thus presented no threat, nor intended to be one. Elsewhere however, Cuna'Kannos, who had by now adopted the new name of Rora'Sell and commanded The Trespassers, a PMC that prided itself on recruiting only former military, and whose leadership was comprised of ex-spectres, including herself, had begun to make plans for a third conflict. Cuna wanted to avenge her uncle's death by striking at the heart of the Council, and whilst she attempted to use her network to find Ezyn's wife and daughter, she was unsuccessful in her efforts, and chose to progress alone. Cuna spent many years building up the assets she needed, and eventually found herself ready to act. Her first act was to spark a war with the Thessian Rangers, who she learned had abandoned her uncle. Their six-year long war saw the Thessian Rangers completely exhausted financially, and out of spite, Cuna forced the CEO to sign over her remaining stakes and assets in the company over to Cuna, allowing the Trespassers to absorb what was left of the Rangers. Cuna then visited the CEO personally and killed her in her own home (although the Rangers would never again be as strong as they were, the future dissolution of the Trespassers allowed them to rise again many decades later). With the Rangers eliminated, Cuna and the special forces division of the Trespassers, known as "the Defunct", began to hunt down the Tecr'fer and Valiant Seventy operatives involved in the pursuit of Ezyn. One by one, they were killed, either by car bomb attacks that were blamed on Terminian terrorists, in their homes, by poison, by torture, etc. Eventually, only twelve of the remaining Valiant Seventy remained and one Tecr'fer agent before the STG realized what was happening and placed the remaining survivors into protective custody. Driven by a blind need to kill however, Cuna and her Defunctors raided the villa they were being held at, killed the STG operatives, and managed to kill six more Valiant Seventy before they fought back. The Tecr'fer agent was injured before Cuna and her men were forced to retreat due to nearby police being dispatched to their location. Knowing that Cuna was behind the attack, the Council commissioned another spectre initiative to hunt down and eliminate her. Their lives at risk, the remaining Tecr'fer and Valiant Seventy agents merely commanded the operation from the safety of the turian frigate Anthem's End, while a group of thirty or so spectres and a dedicated battalion of marines serving on the frigate were put in charge of waging the war against Cuna. The war went on for the better part of three years, with the Council forces fighting desperate and bloody skirmishes with the Trespassers, and even several pitched battles. By this point the Trespassers were a military unto their own, possessing tanks, aircraft and military-grade munitions, and even a small fleet of obsolete Revolutions-era warships purchased from an Omegan fleet market. Eventually the Council was forced to call upon reinforcements to deal with the Trespassers, although it wouldn't truly escalate until Cuna, after the death of her female quarian lieutenant, ex-spectre and lover Shaeno'Ciris during a battle with one of Anthem's End's raiding parties, retaliated by using napalm cluster bombs to collapse the side of a mountain on Trategos, causing an avalanche that buried the trading port of Melatos, killing 900 asari settlers. This led to a full-scale escalation of the crisis, with the Council deploying another forty spectres and handing over the operation to the Turian Hierarchy. Eventually, the war ended when Cuna, realizing the war was lost, launched a last ditch attack on the Anthem's End. When the raid failed, Cuna and her forces took the nearby turian settlement of Satilia on Nimines hostage. In exchange for peace and allowing her to walk away, Cuna would not execute the civilians. Forced to let them go, they agreed to the terms, and Cuna and her Trespassers escaped, vanishing from the public eye. While the Council denounced the Trespassers as a terrorist organization and attempted to get a court order to seize its remaining assets and freeze them, Cuna was two steps ahead and had the company's shares liquidated and its remaining assets transferred to a bank on Illium, beyond the Council's authority. With the Council unable to reach Cuna, the war ended in a stalemate.
The War of the Pretenders is often considered part of the Spectre Wars for its involvement of Cuna's great grand-children and the Trespassers, Ril'phiya and her daughter, and the rise of many prominent new figures in the conflict who claimed to either descend from outlawed/executed spectres, or claimed to be those executed spectres. Perhaps the most prominent was the asari claiming to be Kaaysha, who spun up the elaborate theory that she had, in fact, once more been recruited by the asari government to work as an intelligence operative. She claimed that her "execution" had been to satisfy the Council, while the asari government continued to utilize her "quite mercilessly." She came out and announced this fact in 1114 CE, knowing that the lack of public knowledge of Kaaysha's existence, let alone her execution, would convince enough people to believe it was true. Fearing an intelligence leak, the Council officially denied the impostor's claims, and established another task force to look into her. By now all of the remaining Valiant Seventy and those involved in taking down the rogue spectres were long gone, so entirely new spectre operatives were put in charge of the investigation. Just four years before, the Terminus-Attican War had broken out, with the Trespassers themselves providing logistical and financial support to the Terminus invasion forces. Cuna herself had passed away in the over two and a half centuries that had passed since the Third Spectre War, and successive generations of her children and grand-children had taken over the PMC, as well as successive generations of her lieutenants. By now, four of her great grand-children, two asari, a turian and another quarian, now ran the Trespassers as partners. Despite Cuna's death, the knowledge of what she did had been passed down over her many generations of offspring, and they had been brought up to one day continue her struggle. With the outbreak of the Terminus-Attican War, the eldest son of Cuna's grand-daughter, Brutso Kannos, saw an opportunity. While the Council were focused on waging a proxy battle to kick the Terminus out of the Attican Traverse, the Trespassers would meet with the impostor and arrange to support her. At the same time, several more would-be successors to dead spectres began to rise up, each with increasingly elaborate stories on how they escaped custody. At the same time, Ril'phiya and her daughter were finally tracked down and recruited by the Trespassers against Ril'phiya's will. Brutso told Nasanha of her father, and upon this, Nasanha became the fifth partner of the Trespassers, quickly demonstrating a shrewd and intelligent mind. As for the numerous other pretenders, they too made their mark on the war, gathering supporters behind them. However, while they shared common cause, few were eager to work together, mostly in it for the fame, fortune or power. While some hired mercenary companies to fight for them, others hired drell assassins to kill off their rivals. In one case, a war between four mercenary companies, now known as the War for Northumbris, took place on the planet Northumbris where five pretenders hired five mercenary companies (the Silver Phalanx, Dread Battalion, Winged Chevaliers, CyclOps and the Thresher Irregulars) to fight the other. The war broke out into the streets of Northumbris' capital city of Bervarra, and eventually drifted out to encompass most of the planet. The war was a confusing mess: some companies switched sides, some companies splintered into smaller factions, each led by one man more ambitious than the other, some CEOs tried to outplay those who hired them or sold them out, and some even had defections: amongst all of this, drell assassins prowled the streets, eliminating one faction leader after another only for that leader to be replaced by another who was either more indecisive or more bloodthirsty than the last. The Northumbris authorites were paralyzed, lacking the equipment to fight off the mercenaries who had turned the streets they policed into a war zone. Instead, citizens, as well as police officers looking to help their community, invoked their right to bear arms and formed the Northumbris Filthfighters militia and took the fight to all five companies, hoping to oust them all. Peace was only restored once the turians dispatched a fleet to restore order, deploying an entire division of marines, an armoured battalion and a company of Armiger Legion to cast out the mercenaries. In the end, three of the five pretenders was dead, one other was arrested for terrorism and another ran and gave up on his aspirations, only to be hunted by the Winged Chevaliers company he hired looking for their payment and killed when he couldn't produce it. As for the Filthfighters, their actions led to the passing of the Filthfighters Defense Act across Northumbris, which dictated, in law, their right to bear arms when the police or military had proven themselves inefficient.
Eventually, the Trespassers decided to get directly involved. Offering their services to the remaining pretenders, they agreed to help them on the provision that they worked together. Brutso didn't care if they were who they claimed to be, only that he could use them to wage war on the Council. As a symbol of their return to the fold, Brutso managed to bribe the security at a turian naval facility and deployed a team of Defunctors who then destroyed the Anthem's End, which was poorly guarded due to it being mothballed. This got the Council's attention as Brutso intended, and they doubled their efforts to find and eliminate the remaining pretenders, unaware of the Trespassers' involvement. Five months pass with no word, and the Council believes the Trespassers have gone to ground again, only for a bomb to go off in the Council Chambers, killing one of the councilors and wounding another. Evidence is discovered of Terminus involvement, and the Council, who had been sitting on the sidelines beforehand of the Terminus-Attican conflict, declared war on the Terminus Systems and sent alliance overtures to the Attican Pirate's Alliance. It was discovered too late that the Trespassers had staged the incident as a false flag measure to drag the Council into war with the Terminus, Brutso relying on the Council making a knee-jerk decision and knowing full well what they'd do given the high tensions with the Terminus at the time. The Trespassers continued to pour resources into helping the Terminus Systems win the war, while continuing to launch attacks against key Council infrastructure, including weapons factories, resource plants, and civilian installations. The War of the Pretenders dragged on for another ten years, although it would eventually be a Council victory. Despite Brutso's best efforts, the Council possessed resources that far exceeded his own, and once they learned his strategies, were able to counter them. An armstice was signed that ended the Council's involvement in the Terminus-Attican War, allowing them to turn all their resources towards combating the Trespassers. Operation Sinful Conduct saw the Council waging a multi-front war against the Trespassers that gradually wore them down. Brutso initially believed retreating into the Terminus would grant him safe harbour as it did with his great grandmother before him, but the Council this time simply dispatched spectres and special forces teams to continue the war instead. By the end of it, Brutso and his brother had been killed, Nasanha and Ril'phiya fled back into hiding for good, and the remaining two partners who ran the Trespassers filed for a split-up of the company, leading to the creation of the Chethyus Goodsisters and Emovamey Trespassers offshoots. As for the woman claiming to be Kaaysha, she remained with the Chethyus Goodsisters, which was run by the asari sister of Brutso who wanted to someday continue their war. Of her, the Council was able to discover that she had been a civilian who had been present at Port Hanshan when the real Kaaysha captured it centuries ago, and that it was likely she had been brainwashed to believe she was Kaaysha by Kaaysha herself as a contingency for when she was captured or executed. The remaining pretenders were either arrested or also faded into obscurity, never to rise again. With the end of the War of the Pretenders, so too did the last of the spectre traitors. Many spectres joined the Trespassers during the war, but they were either killed in battle or formally renounced their title and joined either the Goodsisters or Emovamey Trespassers.
The fourth and final Spectre War lasted but a year, and it was a dismal affair. Taking place in 1345 CE, two centuries after the War of the Pretenders, the Fourth Spectre War was merely a bloody conclusion to what was a pointless series of primogeniturally driven conflicts. Finally emerging from irrelevance, the Chethyus Goodsisters, led by the impostor-Kaaysha (now identified as Narisme Gadequa) and Zellikzia Kannos, were fresh from having absorbed the remnants of the Emovamey Trespassers, who had been wiped out when they trespassed (ironically) on the turf of the powerful drug cartel known as the Talons who operated on Omega, sparking a war that the Trespassers eventually lost, with Zellikzia's former partner and sister, Usheenes Kannos, being tortured by the turian cartel and beheaded, with her head being tossed into an Omegan sewer, never to be seen again. Driven by a delusional belief that she could achieve victory, and egged on by the equally delusional ravings of the indoctrinated Narisme, Zellikzia took the Goodsisters and, in trying to follow her brother, attempted an assassination of the Council. Citadel Security received intel of the hit before it happened, and the Council was put into protective custody. War was declared on the Goodsisters, and after a few of a few pitched battles in which the Goodsisters were defeated each and every single time, they were finally cornered at their headquarters on Garvug. Surrounded and with nowhere to escape, Zellikzia attempted to surrender. In her madness, Narisme kicked Zellikzia out a window out the top of the skyscraper, sending her plummeting to her death and she ordered the Goodsisters to fight on. They instead stood down and abandoned Narisme entirely. Narisme attempted to commit suicide by overdosing on red sand, but even that failed as she failed to ingest enough, and she was captured and later convicted of treason. And with Narisme's arrest and Zellikzia's death, the Fourth Spectre War ended on a whimper, and so too did the Spectre Wars.
The conflict has a minor legacy. Whilst the third, fourth and fifth wars mostly involved a generational cycle of vengeance and delusion, the first and second directly involved changes to the spectres that inherently changed who they were and how they operated. As a lesson of the first and second wars, the Spectres remained as an organization, but with drastic changes. While they were allowed to operate above the law, they could no longer call upon Council resources to do so, and only the Council themselves could appoint new spectres, as opposed to the Justicar-inspired conscription that the spectres had reserved the right to do during the Krogan Rebellions. The recruitment process was also changed: before the wars, spectres were chosen from a recruitment pool within the military, and were largely chosen at random. With some revisions to the Spectre's Creed, spectres now had to go through a vigorous vetting process in order to even be considered, and after that, they had to have another veteran spectre, chosen by the Council, to observe their training and evaluate them. Only once the Council was convinced the spectre was worthy would they be appointed and sworn in. This not only vastly cut down on the amount of spectres being recruited, which shrunk the size of the organization by a factor of a hundred, it also ensured that mistakes such as hiring former criminals with such an unreliable history would never happen again. Nevertheless, while this drastically made the spectres more reliable, it did not entirely eliminate treachery. In 2183 CE, Saren Arterius, one of the Council's best agents, went rogue and started a war (sometimes but erroneously called the 'Fifth Spectre War' for this very reason) that eventually saw the Citadel itself attacked for the first time in the Council's history, although another spectre was what helped to bring him down. Another spectre, Tela Vasir, worked discreetly for the Shadow Broker, an act that led to the deaths of numerous civilians on Illium and could have reflected badly on the spectres and the Council, although she too was also eventually killed by the same spectre who brought down Saren. As a result of Saren's war, the Council restricted the spectres even further: whereas Spectres didn't have to report to the Council, they now had to report in regularly, and were only granted specific areas in which they could operate, one which had to be approved by the Council first: this was observed in 2185 CE when Shepard was limited to operating in the Terminus Systems only, although his circumstances granted him special conditions that ensured he did not have to report to the Council (as his operation was not sanctioned by them either, and they did not want to give the impression that it was). Following the Reaper War, a division of the Spectres called Spectre OPSCOM was also formed to further regulate the spectres, which served as a leadership for the organization and helped to monitor the whereabouts and doings of all spectres at all times. While these changes occurred after the Spectre Wars, the wars and the lessons learnt from them were used as precedent for these further restrictions.
The Spectre Wars were largely kept secret from the public for centuries, with events such as the War for Northumbris and the conflicts between Council forces and the Trespassers being framed as pirate crackdowns. The members who participated in operations against rogue spectres, such as Tecr'fer and pro-Council spectres, were sworn to secrecy, and were not allowed to even inform their own families of what they had been doing. The Port Hanshan massacre was blamed on Terminian extremists, which allowed the Council to further justify its suppression of insurrectionist elements within Outer Council Space prior to the outbreak of the Terminus Revolutions. The truth of the Spectre Wars wasn't declassified until 1900 CE, eight centuries after the last war took place. Few governments took notice, and the reputation of the spectres was unhindered, largely in part to the distant nature of the conflicts, and their irrelevance to the current state of the galaxy at the time: by that time, anyone who had taken part was long deceased or retired, and the spectres had been "cleansed" of its rogue elements.
Many conflicts since have been argued as being the Fifth Spectre War, but either weren't considered relevant enough or didn't introduce enough change to the spectres. The Eden Prime War is often argued as the Fifth Spectre War, and is by far one of the most commonplace choices, as the conflict involved one spectre (the first human spectre) being sent after a rogue turian spectre, with the latter having killed another spectre in the process. The War on the 89th Shadow Broker is also minorly considered due to its involvement of, again, two spectres (one pro-Council, the other rogue) being involved, but due to Tela Vasir's relatively minor involvement in the entire conflict, this is granted less credibility as a claim. A Fifth Spectre War was also argued as having occurred during the Dominion Civil War at the Battle of Red and Black, where loyalist (reds) and separatist (blacks) spectres fought each other. While definitely one of the largest spectre-on-spectre conflicts in the galaxy, far dwarfing any other that occurred during the Spectre Wars, it is considered simply a smaller part of a larger civil war, and due to the differences between Council spectres and Dominion spectres, is often overlooked. As such, no official Fifth Spectre War exists, with the closest being the Eden Prime War, and as such, the Spectre Wars are still considered to have officially ended in 1346 CE.