The only reason I wouldn't just alpha strike them now is the possibility of taking those ships later, holding the Dalatress hostage. She is absolutely certain that holding an enemy leader would force the opposition to bow to any demands made - why don't we just declare that we have her hostage, and demand an immediate unconditional surrender? It's exactly what she was going to do to us, except presumably it would actually work on the Lystheni.
Seriously, just get on the shuttle, force the Dalatress at gunpoint to record a message of her ordering the local troops to stand down, go home and broadcast another pre-recorded message of her confirming she's still alive and ordering them to surrender. They apparently can't function without her - they have to surrender, and we don't blow up a bunch of ships that are about to become our ships.
I'm not opposed to this, but consider:
She may well believe that all governments have a single cult figure they can't function without. BUT she is a salarian, and a salarian's useful adult life is only about 20-30 years. She may well have specifically taken precautions, before this very mission, to enable a stable transfer of power. I mean, it's not just that she might somehow get killed, but this mission is going to take weeks, she could have a heart attack and die or something.
BUT she would assume that we have taken no such precaution. She knows (from reading books, if nothing else) that asari are very long-lived, and may assume we have no expectation of needing a designated replacement.
In which case she could refuse us, knowing that if she dies someone else will carry on as the Maximum Leader, while
still believing that if she kidnapped Mira, Virmire would be leaderless and helpless.
Ok, been thinking on this. Specifically, why does the Dalatress think that our government would be crippled if she kills us? Likely, it's not just ignorance of how our government works, it's a lack of understanding of how our government works. She thinks that our people would have to go through an election process to replace us before the Virmerian government could even function. But why would she think this? My guess is because that's how the Lystheni function. The notion of a chain of command isn't something their society understands. All authority comes from the Dalatress, and without a Dalatress nobody has authority. When the Dalatress dies, Lystheni society temporarily breaks down.
Alternatively, that's what happens by default, and exceptions occur only when the Dalatrass has specifically prepared in advance for the need to make an exception.
But that implies that the Dalatress doesn't have a successor. But how could that work? Clearly she's not the first Dalatress of the Lystheni. Two options I can think of...
1. She has several successor candidates, but none declared as heir. When the Dalatress dies, they go through some kind of civil conflict until one comes out on top and the others are dead.
Alternatively, she DOES declare an heir, but only when she believes that she is dying.
2. There are no other Lystheni females currently alive. She is the only one, and only after her death will one be allowed to be born, or possibly cloned.
The population imbalance involved here wouldn't work. Even if all living Lystheni are tank-grown beings made artificially instead of being born live from eggs of a living Lystheni mother, just
imprinting ten million individual salarian males on a single Dalatrass would be effectively impossible. The Lystheni almost have to have an arrangement of 'stacked' feudal imprinting like that of the rest of the salarian species, just reproduced in miniature for their smaller population.
Both would match the sheer paranoia of the Lystheni, because it would mean that the Dalatress doesn't trust having successors for some reason. I'm leaning towards the second being true, because I don't think we've even seen any other female Lystheni as of yet
Even regular salarians tend to keep their (minority of very precious) females cloistered in positions of great security. Male salarians make up 90% of the species, so they have very little need to bring female salarians into contact with outsiders if they don't want to. So I don't think this evidence proves much.
And it would explain so much. The Dalatress acts like a spoiled child who expects to always get her way, and if she really is a spoiled child who always got her way then she just never grew up. Furthermore, no older Dalatress alive to serve as a role model, to pass down her wisdom and experience, would mean that she's never received more than a basic education - she wasn't raised to lead, she was just handed a leadership position in spite of not being groomed for it. Hell, if there's cloning involved that might really explain a lot, because the way Salarians bond at birth might mean that a clone maintains the loyalty and obedience of her predecessor's children.
I think you might be
right about the Dalatrass we know being a clone,
without being right about there being no other living female Lystheni.
However, I think it would be unwise of us to assume that the Dalatrass hasn't made any plans or precautions in case
she dies on this mission. Or for the scenario where we, hypothetically, try to kidnap and coerce
her. Again, the Lystheni are strategically stupid but tactically competent; their biggest mistakes have come from assuming we work like them. If so, they SHOULD be planning ahead for the contingency plans where we do to them exactly what they're considering doing to us.
