Thoughts of Blood and Empire

[Guest Laarell]

Anger burned in the Orion woman as she moved towards the turbolift, and though one of the causes was familiar, the precise circumstances were not. If Laarell had ever been quite so angered at the Al-Ucard bitch -- excepting, perhaps, when she'd been bitten or when she'd received death threats from her -- she could not recall it. The crew was being taken for a lot of fools by Victria and her kind, and Laarell was powerless to stop it.

 

Laarell always suspected that the bloodthirsty whore was up to something, it was true. However, most of the time she suspected that Victria was merely... posturing, setting herself up and gathering "allies" for whenever she planned to make a move -- either for her own good or the sake of her people's little terrorist movement. But as annoying as Victria's usual methods of enthralling men through feeding upon them and regularly reproving her worth to Corizon might have been, they rarely resulted in the Excalibur having a prison outbreak of dangerous criminals and looking at the open gun-ports of an Al-Ucard battle-cruiser.

 

Even if Victria hadn't intentionally arranged for or allowed the prison-break attempt, Laarell still suspected that she had something to do with this hell-forsaken mess. Frankly she wondered if there would be any objections -- aside from Corizon, which would indeed throw a wrinkle into her fantasy -- if they offered to jettison Victria along with her beloved freedom-fighters.

 

Laarell glared at the closed door of the turbolift, muttering when she realized she'd forgotten to actually give the lift a direction. One thing was for certain, furious Al-Ucards or not, she refused to stand by and watch them hand over the Scorpiad guests to those bloodthirsty psychotics. She wasn't exactly the galaxy's biggest fan of the overgrown arachnids, but she felt like the Federation had a real chance here. A chance to actually make some progress with the Scorpiad instead of maintaining this tenuous entente which had become the status quo since the Camelot Accords. Somehow, the Orion suspected that turning over Scorpiad military personnel to hostiles who would probably have a carapace-cracking party to welcome them... might put a wrinkle in her hopes.

 

Sighing with frustration, she exited into the corridor. This situation really couldn't have been much worse -- neither Excalibur's nor the whole mess between the Scorpiad and their former "protectorate" worlds -- if that was the right term for their former servants. Everyone was at each other's throats, sometimes literally, and the everything that seemed to have "Scorpiad" or "Al-Ucard" or "Eratian" tied to it was a powderkeg in a sea of fire.

 

Frowning, she walked towards the Commandant's quarters. It was hard not to be sympathetic to, well, all sides, at least on paper. The Scorpiad, for whatever injustices they had committed over the span of their incredibly long-lasting empire, had a certain tragedy about them that she couldn't quite place. This fracturing of the Scorpiad was something like watching a monument to former, great glories crumble into pieces before a coming storm.

 

And as much as Laarell disliked the Al-Ucard, their plight too would appeal to anyone in the Federation with any sense of democracy: at least superficially, they seemed to be everything that the Federation flag stood for -- searching out freedom, release from oppression by an imperial power, seeking out autonomous rule for their people.

 

Laarell thought back on her own time on the rainy, dark world, when Morningstar had first happened upon it. Some of the crew had gone out to examine the local market and culture; theirs clearly had not been a world to be fazed by a first contact with the Federation. It had seemed like such a normal cultural examination at first... but that was before Corizon had been abducted. Confused for a slave -- that "lesser", canine species on the planet, as she recalled, though the name escaped her. Laarell never heard many of the specifics of that whole incident. She'd never asked, and suspected nobody else on the ship had, either.

 

Her frown darkened. After that, their experience with the Al-Ucard had gone downhill -- and things didn't seem to be looking up much now. Laarell sighed. While in theory the liberation of the Al-Ucard and their kin seemed to be a good idea, it wasn't even her personal hatred of Victria which made her disdain the thought of aiding them. She'd tried to gather some sympathy for them when they'd first come aboard, she really had, but their methods of securing their freedom and general manner didn't inspire much pathos. And perhaps her disdain for them was more deeply-engrained than she consciously had realized. Once freed, where would the Al-Ucard feed? Would their liberation guarantee terror for neighboring worlds, the Gamma Quadrant -- hells, even the Federation? And for that matter, what of their slaves, the species which Corizon had been mistaken for? Somehow Laarell doubted their freedom would be parceled with that of their vampire keepers.

 

She stood by her original diagnosis: this situation was an absolute disaster. Steeling herself, she stopped in front of the Scorpiad's quarters, wondering exactly what she was going to say to the Commandant when that door opened. This was not going to be fun.