The Dancer Prince
Chapter 11
Written by Ambassador Yrishna Wolf.
Ambassador Yrishna Wolf awoke from her quarters in the Ambassadorial suite C-9 Alpha slightly dazed and confused. Indeed the events of the day before had only served to make what had been an entire journey back home to Segan Sovereign Space a very bizarre event. The entire ride on the passenger liner had been an even more confusing state of affair, she felt she had been in a long dream like none others. She also remembered the events which had occured after she had been essentially kidnapped from the passenger liner. The bright lights, the tall man with blue and silver hair, the reciting of all the different branches of the organization whom she had only known to say "Military Diplomacy." Ambassador Yrishna Wolf thought a second about what it meant, and turned her head and pulled out a book from her small but valuable library.
Finding the page she was looking for in the book, she read to herself aloud the parts and bits of the Segan Monarchy's military history which were most important, "On the third year of the Quadaz god Qrakesh, the Segan Monarchy's top military leaders began to employ the term for diplomats who centered their diplomatic attention abroad on the Monarchy's foreign military needs as military diplomats. Although they answered to the Foreign Diplomatics Corps, they essentially also answered to the Military, and served as a liaison between the two to confirm that the interests of both the Diplomatics Corps and the Monarchy's military organizations were in synchronization. Too often in history, the Segan Monarchy learned had the military acted independent of the diplomatics corps when the two should have progressively strengthened together."
Ambassador Yrishna Wolf stared at the book's lines again as she closed the book. She had uttered "Military Diplomacy" with an absolute absense of understanding at what the words had meant. Not only that, she had acted illogically, and irrationally under the circumstances. She had been kidnapped, but she had no way to prove it to herself or to others. The passenger liner showed no records of it being stopped by a Cardassian warship, much less of it being boarded. Yrishna wondered why she had uttered the words in the first place... there wasn't just an absence of understanding, there was a plain absence of everything. Nothing seemed in place, but everything did at the same time, she glanced over her view port, staring at the immobile stars. The moment she stared at them, she knew whatever she had joined, she had been destined to do it, one way or another.
It was customary for her to check her subspace mail after she had gotten dressed, and this was no different a day in that manner. After having garnered a simple Earth clothing, she walked over to her glass and wood desk, and sat on her side of it. Her chair felt almost foreign as she had not sat upon it for many days, but she soon regained her comfortable stance within the chair. She had a leg drawn close to her body, with another free and gliding back and forth under the chair. With one finger on the mobile library control access and retrieval system, she went and burried herself in diplomatic related work, until she found one from an unknown ID. She accessed it and found that it required a password, stumped, she looked at the LCARS for a few more moments. The past few days had been weird, almost surreal and as she typed her customary password, she was promptly rejected. Frusterated, she typed in another, and older code which was again rejected. She had little patience for computers, and as she typed military diplomacy a third time, she found she had cracked the note.
"Diplomacy and the Military are one," so stated the man with the blue and silver streaks, " Thus we need a skilled person to unite us in our goals and in our causes. The military shouldn't undermine the work of diplomacy, and once the military is called in diplomacy shouldn't undermine the work of the military. The strong link which is required by the military and diplomacy to work together must be accomplished through skilled hands, yours. Undermine that which opposes us, and you shall allow for the military to accomplish diplomacy's goal. Without the restoration of the true lineage, we cannot continue to exist and we will have doomed ourselves to extintion. You understand your mission, if not now you soon shall, it is no longer safe to continue this communication, this is Strategic Command out."
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It was night again, the time of the day which scared Youri Rosbourg the most. When darkness came, the prison guards were given free reign over the prisoners. Whatever rights the prisoners had during the day disappeared very quickly as night came. The day seemed to be all right to Youri, all right under the circumstances. While the work they had to do was difficult, as dilithium didn't easily break into its crystals, the whip didn't often fell upon the workers. It was at night that made his nightmares. He regularly heard the sounds of distress moans, blood curdling groans, and agonizing screams that came from the cells around him. He had been saved once by a unexpected visit from one of the high ranking officer of the enemy officer, and a second time because he had fainted before the actions which haunt him day and night had occured to him.
Ever since he had left the palace, defeated, Youri's body as well as his soul had been broken. His arrival at this rentention camp, as the Segan Popular Union called it, had succeeded in breaking what was left of him. Around the camp's guards, it was known that Youri, or "Gerard" as he was known in this camp, was a both a wimp and an easy target for just about everything. Youri cringed, he had humiliated himself and his family, and worse more he continued to do so. He bit his lip hard, drawing a small amount of his blue blood as he held back tears which he had been wanting to shed for 3 years. On this camp, there was no crying, and no laughing. Youri threw his face closer to his body, not wanting to hear any more screaming, it was too much for him. It was like this, his face drawn towards his body, his hands protecting ears that he fell asleep.
The crack of the whip, landing on his bare back, made Youri jump awake with a scream. Around him, others were being awoken in the same manner. The guards laughed around him as Youri stood up, his face looking down at the floor as he had been instructed to do. He had no will to resist this morning, nor any other and the scars which were on his back were no doubt appaling. The guards walked out, and a few minutes later other prisoners did the same. As Youri walked out, looking around the court yard where 2000 other men were camped out in the facilities created for one third that number began to come out. They were allowed a generous five minutes where they could converse, but mostly console one another. The blank eyes around the group signalled those which had been violated the night before, and in some places the dead were dragged out and put into a pile in the middle of the courtyard for everyone to see.
His Majesty the Prince Alexander Rosbourg ran down the corridor which led to the turbolift, calling for the CONN before his servants could follow him. He wasn't allowed to go up to the bridge of the vessel, but who was going to tell him otherwise aboard this ship. As the heir to the throne of the Segan Monarchy, and his father the leader of it, he didn't feel he had to answer to anyone. In fact, Alexander didn't even answer to his father, as this trip showed. He had been expressly forbidden by his father to go where he was going, but he wasn't about to be stopped by the father he hated. He had remembered the look of happiness and full content his father after he had signed an alliance with the deplorable Styx. Alexander may not have liked what the family of Youri Rosbourg had done to his own, but he hated even worse the idea of the Styx leading the Monarchy.
When they had arrived on Chinon, Alexander was sorrowed by the sight of dead soldiers on the main streets of the capital city. His father, on the other had showed a sense of pride at the damage his troops had created. He and his father had never gotten along, and ever since his mother had died at the hands of the Monarchy, they had been further irreconciliable. Alexander felt the turbolift come to a stop, and he stepped out, looking at the small, slightly cramped flight control of the Mary Rosbourg Class destroyer. The engine shifted a bit as the ship pulled out of warp and entered impulse as they approached the desert planet of Trafalgar. Alexander watched as the red, orange, yellow planet grew on the viewscreen, and paid close attention to the entire conversation on the bridge. He brushed off the questioning glance the Captain gave him as he entered and sat in one of the chairs on the bridge, he had a purpose here and intended to fulfill it. He wanted to be sure that his father was indeed re-using the concentration camps that had been inactive since the First Great War, he in the end wanted to be sure that his father... no longer was his father.
