The Imperial Adjunct

The Imperial Adjunct was quietly seated in one of the boxes reserved for visiting dignitaries. His face was full of contempt as he watched the ceremonies graduation progress, bored with its seemingly slow pace. He zoned out. It had been his fifth this month. Each year, he had fewer recruits willing to volunteer for the elite Advance Guard that was comprised of the Supremacy's fiercest warriors. The youth of the Ten Kingdoms, once the most courageous fighters had become weak and decadent as the wealth and trade had prospered in the Denubian Galaxy. The Ten Kingdoms were no longer willing to just sacrifice their children to the imperial war machine. Instead, the Kingdoms were willing to buy or bribe their citizens' way out of their service.

Twenty years ago, ten percent of the Imperial force was comprised of officers and men from those realms, the product of colonization efforts started thousands of years before. Now, the Imperial Adjunct calculated that their contribution had dropped down to at only five. The worst were the Doomites. The biggest drop off was in the ranks of those much sought after soldiers, prized for their determination, cunning and strength. The Korrinite king had his own ambitions and had resorted to paying off the Emperor with lazon in order to keep his forces close to home. The Imperial Adjunct, more than anyone else, was surprised to see the only heir to the Korrinoth throne on his list. He could not remember the last time he had such an important personage to retrieve, and this particular volunteer certainly made no particular sense.

The last decades had been hard of the Drulian Empire; it was struggling to maintain its hegemony. The growing independence of the Ten Kingdoms was a perfect example of the tenuous hold that the Imperials sensed was slipping. More and more, they were acting like an independent entity. Their High Council was overseen by the pragmatic leadership of King Bhorn, a man known for his persuasive manner. Bhorn, however, was not the real threat. Thirty some odd years ago, the Demon King had seemingly appeared out of nowhere – bringing more and more planets into his own sphere of influence. At first, his arrival was heralded. He had been a prudent ruler; using Korrinoth's vast resources as a tool to forge bonds with almost every non-Drule planet bordering the Empire. He used diplomacy instead of fists and had done much to increase trade and colonization. His plans had proved fruitful, filling his coffers. In turn, his tribute to the Empire also increased. He gave but did not take; a relationship that pleased the Imperial Throne to no end. But lately, things had changed

The Demon King was not content in the small role he was playing on the galactic stage. There had been whispers in the Supremacy that the total domination of the Denubian Galaxy was his real goal, though few thought that the crude backwater world of Korrinoth could actually accomplish their ruler's desires. They had misjudged the rough edged, brilliant warrior-king as he took down the worlds he had befriended, one by one. Arus had only been the beginning. Once, it had been the most technologically advanced world in the Denubian Galaxy. Now, it lay in ruins. Its people were huddled in underground cities or in caves. Most of the other worlds quickly came into line, fearing the devastation that the Demon King would bring with his seemingly endless army of men and androids, and more terrifying, the robeasts created by the Wyvern witch called Haggar. No, it was not the aging Bhorn who was a threat, but the Demon King called Zarkon.

The Imperial Adjunct wondered if it was such a good idea for the Emperor to take the young charge under their wing and teach them their strategies. He could certainly see a rebellion in the future; the boy using all he had learned against them. It would have been wiser to take him as a court hostage, a probably useless gesture. Korronites were not known to come to blows or compromise for their own people. Even after the battlefield had quieted, they left their own to die with the enemy. They truly lived by the motto of survival of the fittest. A captured man, not having the wits or the resources to affect his own escape, deserved his fate. The Korronites had many worthwhile traits, but compassion and pity was not to be listed among them.

The Imperial Adjunct had arrived three days ago, eager to collect the files of his perspective new officers. He had been handed fifteen slim ones, and one that was contained in a large portfolio. He watched the Commandant hand it to him after scratching out the name of Carris out and penciling in the name of Lotor, House of Daibaza'al. He looked at the weight of the file with some amazement.

"Are you always so thorough when an Imperial Crown Prince comes to the Academy?' The Adjunct asked with interest as he picked up the heavy folder.

"No. The file speaks for itself. I think you will find it illuminating." The Commandant seemed nervous as he handed it over to the man. The Adjunct felt that the Commandant wanted to say something more.

"Hazar is looking forward to having him on the bridge. It is rare to get such a young officer trained in the art of warmastering. Does he show potential?" The Adjunct asked expectantly.

"Potential, yes. But I wish to note that he is also adept at engineering and piloting. Perhaps it would be best for all of us to keep him off the bridge and out of planning committees. He might best serve the Empire in the engine rooms." The Commandant slowly said, careful to choose words that would not mention his true fears concerning the youth. Charak, his Master of Arms, had warned that the boy could call the bloodlust at will, a crime punishable by death.

"Engineering officers are a dime a dozen, everyone puts that down as their first choice. Every student that graduates an Academy can sit around and read dials. I do not think such an assignment would please either the Emperor, Hazar or the Demon King" The Adjunct looked at the Commandant, rankled by the suggestion.

"Read the file and then tell me I am wrong." The Commandant snapped back.

"I am sure it will prove fascinating." The Adjunct replied back as he scooped up the files.

"You are invited to sit with me in the Royal Box tomorrow." The Commandant offered.

"No thank you. I get my fair share of royals as is. I find that polite conversation can only get you into trouble with them" The man, the Commandant noted, had a perpetual scowl on his face. He seemed one of those efficient types that were devoid of any personality, another cog in the Imperial war machine.

This, of course, was not exactly true. The Adjunct's personality was often subsumed by the demands of his job. It was often difficult to place the hodge podge of green, hormonal teenagers in positions of use. He actually was a good natured fellow, a psychiatrist by training. He understood the mentality of the youth he placed. He was just tired of coming back to the battle cruisers, year after year, only to discover that the previous year's placements were either dead or exhausted from the growing demands of the Empire. The majority of them would be returning to their homelands after their five years of service were up, bringing back whatever rank they had attained. The service did set them apart from their peers. This alone, unfortunately, was not a very powerful inducement to join for any but the most ambitious. Some would stay on, promotion being more rapid in the imperial service. Warfare was an excellent catalyst to jump starting a career. One was lucky to make captain by forty if one's sole career path was serving a planetary force. Hazar, the young commander he was about to deliver the recruits to, was only thirty when he was put in charge of the Advance Guard.

The Adjunct made his way back to his hotel and threw the files on the small desk in the room. He was exhausted. The last month had been one jump after another; quickly going from one Academy to another in hopes of collecting recruits. Only last week had he been on that desolate world of Korrinoth. He had picked up his "tribute" from the Command School of Firos, their finest institution. Though their training was far cruder than that received on Neraku, they had been a much fiercer lot. Next month, he needed to return to pick of the remainder of them. Zarkon, as usual, was being stingy with his cadets and he found many of the more promising ones mysteriously on training manuevers when he had arrived.

The Adjunct did not like going to Korrinoth. He felt the hot stares of its peoples as he walked down their streets. Their feline eyes seemed to be everywhere, and no matter what, a stranger felt like prey walking down their dark streets. He remembered the shuttle pilot pointing out the Demon King's fortress as they flew over the outskirts of Sorrinoth, the capitol city, The magnificent structure reminded him of the ruins he had seen on Hestos, so long ago in his youth. Its effect on him was the same, sending shivers up his spine. He wondered if the architect knew that its design was based on the temples erected to the gods of the Wyverns. He only briefly glanced at the structure. The pilot stating they could come no closer without risk of being shot down.

He rung up the concierge and asked for a masseuse to be sent to his room. He had not thought of anything more than a massage until the man asked him he whether he preferred a man or a woman.

"A woman." The man said with a smile. He leaned back in his bed, waiting for her arrival. There were times he forgot that he was in the realms of the Ten Kingdoms were pleasure was so easily obtainable.

He watched with some interest as two men set up the table and left. A pretty young girl, probably a teenager herself entered the room. She looked sadly at the older man who had already begun to undress. He lay down on the table, not saying a word. He sighed, her small hands were not powerful and her massage was ineffective. He quickly summed up what he thought the concierge's question had only hinted at.

"Are you a free Drule? " He asked. He was a careful man and he did not want to make a mistake.

"No, sir." He turned around and looked at the girl's face. Her skin was unlined, unlike his wife of twenty years. The temptation to touch her was great.

"You look like a free born Drule. How have you come to this place?" She looked down at him, her face burning with shame.

"My friends and I did something stupid. We stole from a store and were caught. It was only some cosmetics." Tears were welling in her eyes. The Adjunct assumed that few asked how she had come to serve them.

"For something so little." The man gave an incredulous look.

"The store belonged to a noblewoman." The girl answered him, eyes filled with sorrow.

"It was this or death in the Arena." She claimed her friends chose the later. The tears were now flowing freely. He gathered the towel around him, hoping to hide his arousal at their sight. "I was sold at the slave auctions last month."

"I am certain that you brought a high price," He said as he moved to wipe away her tears. She pulled away at those words. His kind eyes were no longer there. His lips were now slightly parted and the tip of his tongue now slowly passed over his lips. His hand opened her flimsy robe. She was as firm and tender as he imagined. Grabbing her wrist he dragged her to the bed and took her forcefully. She screamed, and the other two men came back into the room to make sure nothing more than a simple ravishment was occurring. The man was right. She had been an expensive purchase and warranted some protection. The man looked over his shoulders as the other men watched, not really caring as he plunged into the young thing below him. The girl, still new, had still not learned to accept her fate. They would beat her afterwards. She needed to learn how to make the hotel guests happy.

After he finished, one of the men took the girl away while the other one packed up the table. The girl was still crying when she left and the Adjunct was starting to feel pangs of guilt.

"Life is harsh in the Ten Kingdoms. You condemn a girl to slavery for a minor theft. Youth do foolish things, some of them should be forgiven." The Adjunct went to put on a robe.

"You are one to talk. You gave her a rough ride. We were debating whether to pull you off of her." The man said, noting the slight derision in the modern Drule's voice. He was going to remain silent. The man was obviously an Imperial guest and his manager would not take kindly to a complaint. Still, he hated what the man thought of his people. They were not so uncivilized as to take a young girl like that. The Imperial Drules treated them like dirt.

"You believed the lies of a bitch. She tells the shoplifting story to every fatherly type. Some of the kinder ones take pity on her and leave it at a massage." The man paused. He told the Adjunct that she belonged to a gang of thieves. She was with them when the killed a man for his purse. She was no innocent. She deserved prison, but why make the taxpayer pay for her crime. "At least, her sale fills the state coffers which keep my taxes low." The man gruffly said as he packed up the table. The Adjunct sighed. He could not blame the girl for trying. The man was right, he had been out of control. He was surprised at how rough he had been with her. She was young and did not understand Drule men, especially the ones from his world. Tears, if anything, aroused many of them. Her exotic looks had also added to the mix. Her pinnacled ears and those dark irises, surrounded by milky white only made her seem so much more mysterious. And her body, so firm to his touch, had practically begged him to violate her. He was going to be there for a couple of more days. Perhaps, he would call her back. She definitely needed some discipline. She had lied to an Imperial officer. Her behavior should not go uncorrected. The thought brought a smile to his lips. He had been in the Ten Kingdoms too long. He was starting to act like a savage.

The man went over to the desk and looked at the pile of files he needed to sort through. Every year, he asked for them to be digitalized, but the Commandant kept to this antiquated system. He called up the list that Hazar's aide Mongo had sent him of available positions. As usual, there were far more than he could easily fill. He could already hear Hazar berating him. He spent the next several hours going through the thin files. He actually enjoyed reading their files, Neraku, save for the nobleman's children, trained the Ten Kingdoms best and brightest. There was not an incompetent in the pile. Hazar, he thought happily to himself, would be more than pleased with this year's class.

There was only one file left to go through. He looked at the file and shook his head. He had only seen a few others that were even comparable and those cadets, if he remembered, did not have good outcomes. He slid the papers out, one report after another describing the young man's insubordinate behavior. He had been hospitalized no less than five times. Other less serious trips to the medical center were almost too numerous to note. All of them, save a broken leg that happened after an accident on an obstacle course, had all resulted from measures to discipline him. The boy, the Adjunct surmised, was trouble.

The psychologist's reports caused him even greater consternation. He accused the boy of suffering from many personality defects. He was arrogant to a fault. He was temperamental, and when angered, could fly into sudden fits of rage. He had hospitalized no less than twenty students during his Academy years, but to be fair, they had usually tormented him first. They Adjunct noted that the attacks decreased as the boy aged. Either he had gotten himself more under control or the other students had learned to keep out of his way, something that the reports failed to answer. Those were his obvious weaknesses.

His strengths, however, were many. It was obvious that he was a gifted student. His grades were exceptional in most areas. The skill that would interest Hazar the most, his ability to strategize and to efficiently deploy resources for their maximum effectiveness, were highly developed. He was also fearless, but not in a total reckless way. This was important, many officers failed to deliver the final blow in the end, fearing for the safety of their men. Countless times, an enemy had escaped because an officer had faltered by failing to pursue a retreating army. The boy did not make that mistake. He totally decimated the enemy.

Lotor was also an excellent judge of when his forces were overwhelmed. The cadet, in his battle simulations, had always retreated at the proper times. The Adjunct noted that the boy had never died in the required simulations, never once. The man tried to recall when he had ever seen such a pristine survival record. The boy, he noted, had an excellent sense of self-preservation. Lotor's instructors noted that he had been disappointed in his defeats, but never demoralized. He also knew how to turn a battle around, usually through the art of deception.

The youth's written papers reflected the political philosophies that were employed by the Demon King. Most notably, how total warfare was necessary to subdue a recalcitrant population. This was at odds with the Supremacy in general. The Supremacy tried to preserve as much of the population and the infrastructure of any planet it was conquering. Zarkon, it seemed, cared for only the natural resources he and its animal population. The Korronites, the man well knew, were the undisputed experts in two things; strip mining and hunting.

The psychiatrist did not need a birth certificate to tell him that the boy was a half-breed, his picture told the tale. He noted that the boy's mother was a human and curled back his lip a little. This fact alone should have made him a dullard, he thought. It was true that the boy was handsome, it was well known that the unions with humans tended to produce startling beautiful offspring. The boy looked more like a pleasure slave than a warrior. On his last trip to Korrinoth, the Adjunct had spotted many of these children on streets, human female slaves having become the latest status symbol of wealthy. Their Demon King, he mused, was a trendsetter. Still, the thought of a Drule mating with a human was almost too much to bear. True Drules, he noted, would have never done anything so disgusting as to mate with such an inferior species; again showing the low levels that the people of the Ten Kingdoms had sunk to. Their depravity, at times, shocked him. The Adjunct poured over the youths medical records, sure he had missed something. There was something about those golden eyes, they would have even stood out on Korrinoth, such was their intensity. It was the dental records the proved the last clue. All Drules had pointed canines. They were necessary for two things, eating and mating. The well developed upper canines were no shock, but the lower ones pointed to a close connection to Wyvern blood. It explained the rage and those haunting eyes. It was bad enough he bore the Mark of Jain, but that gene mutation was well distributed among the upper classes of his people too and would cause little alarm. The teeth, however, pointed to a much closer association with that mostly extinct and volatile race that would make many of the Modern Drule keep away from him. He was being assigned to the Kiros, Hazar's command ship. He would have put the boy somewhere else, but in this he had no choice. THat ship was mostly manned by Modern Drule; the boy was going to feel lonely amongst ten thousand souls. The Emperor was clear the he be under Hazar's command. The boy, it seems, had pleased him with a remarkable display of swordsmanship. He shook his head, royals were so easily impressed with a piece of steel. He wondered out loud how many degrees of separation were between him and a full blooded Wyvern, he hjoped for at least six, maybe eight to be safe.

He poured over the boy's records again. He found one unusual omission. The boy had spent his entire time in the warmastering program, even had time to complete the piloting one, but had not been ranked in swords. Strange, since the Emperor himself had gushed on about it. A lesser adjunct would have missed this small fact, swords were rarely employed by the Imperial fleet and were generally not taken into consideration when chosing a slot. The outdated customs that regulated their use mostly confined themselves to the more far flung parts of the Empire and the ritualized law courts that were found among certain castes to solve their own internal differences. It was rare to see them used and considered quite a spectacle whenever they appeared in the Imperial Arena on Drule. In fact, the practice was so antiquated that the Emperor only employed one champion to represent him if a sword challenge was made. Yet, the backward Korrinoth's were masters at the art and the boy should have been ranked. In fact, he should have dominated the program but the page was blank save some graduation requirement. He noted that he should make a follow up on this when he had the time, but he was on a tight schedule. He still had two more Academies to visit on Neraku before the transport with the recruits departed.

The words of the commandant ringed in his ears. He put the boy down as an engineering officer, it seemed the safest thing to do. If Hazar wanted to move the boy up to command, let the blame fall on his shoulders if the boy screwed up. Usually, the gruff commander let him be. He had bigger concerns that a few new recruits, most of them were fairly useless for the first year or two. The engineering officers were the lucky ones, deep within the space carrier's bowels no harm usually came to them. The pilots and infantry officers had a far higher casualty rate. He was doing the prince a favor.

The Adjunct finished up his recommendations. He turned to the video com station and through a series of relays he was patched into his home. It was a terribly expensive thing to do but he longed to talk to his wife and see his two children. There was not much to say, but the family was thrilled to see each other's faces again. He told them how much he loved them and that he would be home soon. His yearly leave was coming up and he could barely wait to see them again.

He shut off the monitor after throwing out his last words of affection. He then called the concierge. He was in the mood for another massage.