Mortuary ships

A rather unique aspect of turian culture, mortuary ships are space vessels designed to transport the remains of the turians' honoured dead between Palaven and its colonies for burial. They come in three classes - frigate, cruiser and carrier - and each is equipped with specialised stasis pods which utilise powerful mass effect fields to protect the bodies of the deceased from bacteria and overheating while in transit. As turians are traditionally buried alongside their forbears on the worlds of their ancestors, these ships serve the purpose of transporting the deceased from their place of death to their ancestral homeworld for burial.

## Categories

### Frigate

Frigates are small vessels capable of landing on planets. They will transport only a small number of deceased at a time, sometimes only one body. They are often used by the great houses of the empire to transport individual family members for burial, many of whom own private mortuary frigates with personal spirit priests to attend to the deceased. They are also used in the transportation of deceased high-ranking officials, such as primarchs, duarchs and generals.

Perhaps the most scientifically advanced and aesthetically beautiful example of a mortuary frigate is the *THS Aeternus*, House Victus' private mortuary ship. The *Aeternus* is famous for having carried the bodies of:

* Primarch Adrien Victus in 2219 CE
* Fabia Victus and her immediate family (Jonas Sparatus, Matien Victus, Laurentia Korilius, and Lysia Marnek) following their murders in 2224 CE
* Iacoba Victus, the Conjux Domina of Adrien Victus, in 2293 CE
* Primarch Fidellion Victus in 2337 CE

The ship would also take part in flyby aerial displays at military parades during the reigns of Primarchs Adrien and Fidellion Victus of Palaven, and Primarch Valexien Victus of Bostra. It was later decommissioned and replaced with a more advanced version bearing the same name. The original ship was donated to the Imperial Museum on Palaven for preservation purposes.

### Cruiser

Capable of carrying up to 300 bodies at a time, cruisers service the rank and file of the empire's populace. A family can book passage for a deceased relative aboard these ships, effectively renting a stasis pod for them in the ship's specialised cargo hold. These ships travel all over the empire. When travelling through the Attican Traverse and Terminus Systems, they are accompanied by a small military escort of frigates and a single cruiser to deter pirates. As cruisers are not capable of landing on planets, the bodies of the deceased are transported by shuttle down to a planet's surface.

### Carriers

Carriers are dreadnought-sized vessels that possess no weapons. They are used by the turian military to transport the remains of its soldiers during wartime. After remains have been transported back to Palaven, the families of the deceased may claim them for burial. Colonial families will often book further passage for their fallen relatives aboard a connecting mortuary cruiser bound for the family's ancestral burial site. Like cruisers, carriers cannot land on planets, requiring that the bodies of the deceased be transported by shuttle down to a planet's surface.

During the Reaper War, the Reapers captured several mortuary ships and turned them into processing ships, repurposing the dead inside them to produce even more reaper troops. As such, many of the empire's primarchs took the difficult decision to have the dead cremated where they fell, to stop the Reapers from repurposing their corpses for use against the living; this choice sparked widespread fury across the empire, due to cremation being a turian cultural taboo reserved for traitors to the empire and criminals whose crimes are considered morally vile. Primarch Adrien Victus was forced to repay reparation to the families of the dead to keep the peace, explaining how he would have rather been burned than turned into an undead weapon, wielded by the enemy to destroy the empire he loved.