#benem

The Sith pureblood glared down at him, the crimson face and red-irised eyes focusing intently on the creature. He watched the Nikto start to squirm as the warmth, the comfort, the sense of security was sucked from the room by the Sith’s use of the Force.

“Send him in,” came an accented voice from the intercom. The Nikto pressed a button on his desk, and the doors to the major’s office opened.

The Sith entered, finding a bald, scarred, and wrinkled man in a clean Imperial army uniform calmly filling out forms. As the Sith rushed forward to stand at the front of the desk, the major slowly stood. “Lord Andranash. To what do I owe this visit?” he asked, extending a hand.

The Sith’s hand did not extend in return from beneath his black cloak. “To your poor excuses for soldiers, major, who ran roughshod over my personal holdings in their conquest of Endiak Four.”

Benem cracked a smile, which shakily rose up one side of his aged face. “Oh, were those your estates, now?”

The Sith was less amused. “This was not secret information. You knew they were my holdings, and yet I receive a frantic holocall that a battalion of your low-birth filth and alien brutes are tearing down my buildings for wood and helping themselves to my slaves and wine cellars.”

Benem shook his head. “Say no more. I’ll make sure the reports speak glowingly of your contribution to the Auxiliaries’ morale and conquest efforts.”

Lord Andranash clenched his teeth. “I think you should provide the apology due to someone of my station from someone of yours, Major Benem.”

The major nodded and licked his teeth. “Well, I think that your holdings on Endiak Four were personal holdings, not possessions of the Sith Empire, and as such, they are entirely likely to be pillaged for use by the Imperial war machine. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.”

This clinched it, and a gauntleted hand swept out from the robes and clenched, and Benem flinched and stiffened upright, jaw clenched and swallowing desperately.

“I am the Sith, and I am the Sith Empire, you wrinkled little procurer of alien mercenary filth.”

“You don’t want to do this,” came the scratchy, gasped reply from the major.

The Sith pushed him down into his chair, which shot backward from its position to slam into the rear wall of the office. “If you want your life, you had better adopt a more supplicatory tone, Major,” Andranash said.

Benem wobbled back to his feet. “Do you have any idea how many kriffing ‘alien brutes’ you’re standing in the center of, Lord Andranash? Just on this ship alone. And do you know how many credits are in escrow for them if anything happens to their kindly kriffing employer? The one major in the Imperial military that sought to put those misfits to work? Whoever kills me, or whoever disassembles the Auxilia, they get to stare down hordes of kriffing freelancers that are suddenly out of work except for one last bounty on the person or people that ended their easy ride.” Benem found his footing once more, and started stepping around the desk toward the Sith. “And we’re talking an obscene amount of kriffing money. Enough to make a kriffing zeltron blush. Enough to turn a Chiss the color of a virgin devaronian that just heard what my alien brutes have been doing to your kriffing slaves.”

“I don’t care how many knuckle-dragging idiots you have--”

“Nah, you wouldn’t, because you’re a big strong Sith lord, right? So scary. That lightsaber’s a beaut’, right? Except that it’s shiny and new and doesn’t even have a proper grip on it. That thing, it’s the silver rattle you give to babies around here that can move stuff with their minds. It’s a kriffing toy, not a weapon. It probably makes three different realistic kriffing battle sounds. So you’ll have no problem cutting your way out of a ship full of people that would love to shoot you down, because it’d be the last paycheck they’d ever need.”

“You’re an overconfident prick, major.”

“Well, that’s about all I have going for me, isn’t it?” Benem shouted, raising his arms into the air. “I do the same kriffing thing all you Sith do with all the fresh meat you get from Korriban. I take a bunch of overconfident kriffing teenagers with plenty of wrath and no kriffing smarts, and I manage to point them toward the enemy before they explode. You, though, you get a Dark Council seat, you do this long enough and well enough. I don’t have that option. I have no future in ordering around regular army washups and bounty hunters, right? They’re never going to make a moff, or even a general, out of me.” Benem sneered at the Sith and took a step back. “Everything I do, I don’t do out of a chance of advancement, or power. I do it because I love my Empire. It’s just a sandbox for you people, innit? I mean, I’ve left things in the refresher with a better combat record against the Republic and Jedi than that lightsaber. But to me, the Empire is my life. It’s all that’s between me and the kriffing debutantes of the Republic. But I’ve taken too much shrapnel to be out there shooting, so I help the Empire by taking all the kriffing wreckage of the army, and all the waste of kriffing gametes from Hutt space, and I gently coax them toward the enemy before they kriffing explode. This time, they exploded on your estates on some backwater. So now you want to throw my life away, and yours, and all the good this project has done because some alien filth did things to your slave harem that you and that shrivled kriffing lightsaber never could.”

Lord Andranash had reclined into his normal stance of quiet superiority, arms folded behind his back, as Benem ranted. When it was clear the major was done, he simply said, “This will not stand.”

Benem shook his head. “Of course not. That’s why in a minute, we’re going to march out of here, and I’m going to apologize so that everyone can overhear it, and humbly explain how this will never happen again, and that of course we’ll be more careful with Sith holdings offworld. And it’s obviously going to work well, because you’re never going to come back here again. Right?”

There was a moment of silence before the Sith nodded. “You’d have made a grand Sith if you had the gift, major. And if myself or anyone else with a real spine didn’t butcher you like livestock on Korriban.”

“Thank you, my lord,” Benem said with a venomous smile. “If anyone asks about you, I’ll tell them how reasonable you were and not even mention how much it looks like you have deflated scrotums all over your face, you useless moneyed kriff.”

The Sith smiled thinly. “Big scowls for the crowd,” Benem said to him, before opening the office door.