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Agents of Chaos

2411.5
Assignment of Alpha Tau Lord Alzene to Grand Lord
"And Chaos shall ever reign!" they chanted, as the ex-Grand Lord Tazlok grinned sheepishly at me.

I was in the Temple of Lords, as Lord of the research sect Alpha Tau. I had just been voted in as the Grand Lord by the sects residing on homeworld, and I was feeling sick.

The qualification of homeworld residency certainly lessened the number of sects voting, as each individual ship and colony represented at least one sect, while the homeworld was definitely a buyers market for real estate. Thousands of sects yearly were leaving homeworld, bound on Colony Ships for other planets, or on war ships teeming with weaponry.

Grand Lord was the sort of position most of us stuck on homeworld dreaded. We have had number of abandonments early in our colonizing days, so those Lords voted Grand Lord are now required to hold office for 1 year minimum, and can keep the office as long as they want. No one has kept the position longer than required.

The outgoing Grand Lord couldn't head for his ship until giving a good report on conditions throughout the Fazrah Anarchy. Outsiders may call us an empire, but we are an anarchy for sure.

Until ole Tazlok gave me his 5 day briefing and current maps, I hadn't realized the extent of chaos in our politics. Except the Grand Lord, most us have no knowledge of the activities of Fazrah as a whole, or even of Lords on homeworld itself.

I had an instinct that I wasn't going to be able to pawn this job onto another lord in a year. Call it paranoia, or just good sense. Good sense tells me I better figure out how these wars started, and who are these allies Tazlok told me about. I don't think Tazlok has told me enough.

I know quite a bit about research, and I know that at Alpha Tau our best research was during peacetime. During wars, all the Lords were unwilling to pay us anything for non-military technologies, and were willing to pay more than usual for good weapons and propulsion. Normally wars were run(so Tazlok had told me at least) by the Grand Lord paying all the ships a royalty to fight, from which they bought equipment and such from all the planetbound sects.

Looking at the total research program, my Alpha Tau group was only involved in Sensors research. I frowned. It looked like Tazlok had been paying science teams to research whatever caught his fancy that day or week. He had 4 seperate items on his research agenda. That'll be my first change.

Back when I was just a research lord, yesterday that is, I remembered how many great research ideas were started by silly things my son Jacob said to me. Six years old and he's a better assistant than anyone officially under my lordship.