***
In a hurry, I exited my office, a short, stubby, and kind of awkward man to my right. Grant Michaels, his name was. He was a rather mean man, and had never made as much as a nice gesture, never even said a nice word, to myself. In fact, he'd been rather abusive to me. But now his planet was under attack and they needed our help, and who do you think he came through first.
Me, and the Germanican Grays, of course.
A waste of time. I wasn't going to help him, not after what he's put me through. I wouldn't dare do it. Plus, it was probably a trap of some sort to give him an advantage over me.
Didn't matter. He wasn't going to get any help out of me.
"I'm sorry," I lied, repeating what I must have told him two dozen times,"We are busy at the moment and cannot help you. Besides, Vadaar is a wealthy planet. You have everything you need there, we have nothing you don't."
"Damn you!" the little man shouted, whipping around towards me and pulling a blaster out of his pocket. "This is nothing like we've ever encountered before, and we can't handle it alone. We need you!"
I almost laughed at his attempt to extort me into helping Vadaar, but I knew that would only make him angrier and didn't. Instead, I simply let my two bodyguards, who were trailing behind us, pluck it from his fingers.
"Please don't do this Grant, it's not easy to say I can't help. Believe me, if me and the Grays could we would, but we're stretched too thin right now as it is," I told him, trying to calm him down. The lie felt good, as if I was taking a warm bath after a hard day of working under Germanica's hot sun.
"Damn you..." Grant snarled back at him, "Help us you bastard..." the hate was almost seeping from him. If he was got madder he'd likely explode and spew hatred all over the place.
"I'm sorry Grant, we can't," I repeated. I turned to my guards. "Escort this man to his ship please, and have a pair of Cloakshapes escort him back to Vadaar."
"Yes sir," one of them replied, a rather husky chap named Vance, "Come along you," he ordered grant, grabbing him by the neck and turning him towards the hangar where his ship, a brand new Sorosuub Yacht, was parked.
After being assured he was in hyperspace I did an about-face and returned to my office. Sitting down in my large, black well padded executive's chair, I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. Twice a day for the past four days either Grant or another similarly ranking government official from Vadaar showed up and pestered me to send part of our fleet to go assist them with something until I had them thrown out.
And it wasn't just Vadaar. For the past month representatives of all sorts of planets had been coming to him, begging for the exact same thing, to send out a detachment of Germanican ships to help them.
I smiled as I remembered what Leonodas had said about him only a few days ago, "Come on, let's kill him. Scum like Grant doesn't deserve to live."
Right now it felt like the way to go, but he knew it wasn't the right thing.
That's why he was putting up with him.