Dragh'Ar Ghon the Arbitrator

By Carrie Cole ©12/2009

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A Return to Earth

As his space vessel drifted silently in the orbit on the dark side of the blue and green backwater planet's moon, the Arbitrator mused about his current situation; it had been a while, but he had chased another badblood to this god-forsaken place. It had been thirty yautja years, but one hundred twenty ooman years. The badblood had been his third assignment and was slated for execution. It had taken him a while to capture the badblood because he was a seasoned hunter. The yautja was guilty of mating with an ooman and siring not one, but two pups with the female. It was against yautja code to do anything of the sort and the punishment was death; it was also unfortunate for the ooman and the pups, they had to die also. Killing the female and the young were two things that he had detested, but he was Arbitrator and he had to do his job. The yautja had fought well to protect his family, but in the end the love that he had for them caused their demise. The hunt had been difficult, but he had prevailed and brought back the badblood's head.

The oomans of the planet were a pitiful a pathetic race that had worshipped his kind. The yautja were gods and the oomans had served them thousands of ooman years with the chiva, as chosen vessels, sacrifices to fuel the hunt, pyode amedha.

Chiva, he thought as he remembered his own almost forty-four years ago, he was just sixteen in yautja, but sixty-four in ooman years. He let out a low pleasing growl as he thought about his youth; granted he was still young, by yautja standards, but not so young and wild when he was a young blood. Chiva had been the turning point in his life; many spoke of the test and its significance in the life of a young male, but it wasn't until he had experienced it and had lost a hunt brother in the process of taking a hardmeat queen, did he come to understand how the hunt was an integral part of his life and his existence. For over forty years, he lived for the hunt, so much so he had made little time to sire the number of pups that was common for a male of his status, a mere dozen was all he had made time to sire when he should have had close to eighty; and those who he had mated with were choosiest of females of high ranking. He was highly honored and frequently sought after, but rarely found, for he was always with his first love, the hunt.

Now, looking on his computer panel at the slowly swirling green and blue backwater planet that was shrouded by a white mist of atmosphere, he sighed. So long it had been and he wondered how the planet had changed and how far the oomans had advanced. When he was last on the planet there was no sign of technology and he was sure when he arrived things would be somewhat the same. This time he was not coming back to backwater planet as a hunter but as an Arbitrator from the Ma'thau clan; he was hunting one of his own that had become badblood. To break the code of the yautja was to break the law and he was there to bring back or put to death those that broke the yautja law. He thought about his position and smiled just lightly, he never thought that he would ascend to the level of Arbitrator; he thought he would live and breathe the hunt until he died, but fate had chosen another road for him and he had followed fate, which led him to this point in his life.

He enjoyed his job and he did it quite well, which was a obvious because he has been chasing badbloods for a little over forty years and he had never loss an assignment; he always finished each job completely. When he was not chasing badbloods he was hunting and honing his skills there would always be the hunt when there was nothing else. His current assignment was to bring the badblood back alive, something he preferred to doing instead of killing another yautja. If the assignment was that of execution, the yautja would be killed on site, and he had to bring back the head as proof. He didn't like decapitating his own kind, to him it felt all wrong, but he never questioned the elders, council or yautja law, he just did his job.

Checking the diminishing radium geothermal signature from the badblood's vessel, the Arbitrator had concluded that yautja's craft was somewhere in the northwestern hemisphere of the planet. It wasn't always this easy to track vessels, but over the years yautja technology had improved and space tracking had also improved which kept the hunter's trail fresh for the Arbitrator even though it was months old. Trilling in approval with his timely arrival, the Arbitrator slowly moved his ship into the blue and green planet's orbit; he would do another tracking to closer pinpoint the location of the vessel and would probably have to do several more trackings to know exactly where the craft had landed once he got into the planet's atmosphere.

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