Admiral Volkas sat in his draconic leather chair in his offices.
His Aide stood nearby, a languid smile on his face.
A small, rough box sat on his desk, its reflection clear as crystal in the overly polished face of the dark hardwood from some dead world.
"Well?" He asked, his voice groaning up from a billowy chest, one decorated in medals.
"It's an apology, sir."
"From Rike Kala Ai'Dim? I don't believe it."
"I didn't, either, but it checks out."
"And after two years of open warfare? And five of silence?"
Arimistead Volkas was Admiral of one of the Free Humanic Fleets.
General Rike Kala Ai'Dim was just another Kalasar warrior. Sure they called him general, sure he was the only one in the Known Galaxies to purportedly rate the twenty stars.
But he was still a Kalasar. Navies and armies and campaigns or not.
"It would appear so, Sir."
"I don't believe it," Volkas repeated.
Rike's people, the Kalasar, had been until recently a slave race. Two thousand years ago, they had thrown off their chains and revolted.
Genocide had ensued. Universal.
The Kalasar hadn't had a chance. Workers and miners, they didn't have the military organization to withstand the Greater Humanic Empire.
If legend had it, some two-hundred years ago, from the ashes of a backwater, Ai'Dim, a Kalasar, no more than a child, had risen up and taken hold of the entire war, implementing tactics, manufacturing, technology and bringing the fight back against the humans, culling their armies by the billions.
The Kalasar started to gain ground.
Rike made a little name for himself.
Other humans, sympathetic to the plight of the Kalasar and emboldened by Rike's success, split off and began fighting alongside these strange and altogether backward people.
They began calling themselves the Free Humanic Fleets.
The two military machines integrated with varying degrees of success.
A notable failure was seen in Volkas.
He hated the Kalasar. He saw them as profit lost.
"Open it. Um, Sir." Urged his Aide, breaking the flow of Volkas's remembrance.
"Tell me again why this is important?" Volkas asked, lazily. A glimmer of a smile appeared on his face.
The Aide chortled, his silks wibbling over his porky roundels, "You remember Rike, don't you?"
"No." Volkas quipped, openly grinning across his desk, above the small wooden box. "Remind me."
"You and he had a little spat."
Volkas relished that spat.
It took place on the Hidden Garden. A capital ship.

"Dereliction of duty, dammit! And you're letting him off?" Rike had literally thundered. Up at the graying faces of the Council Court.
Volkas had smiled, petting the moustaches he wore back then. His lawyer stood near, purring.
Rike, an impressive figure, not an armchair general, still had burnt fur and skin grafts and a shredded uniform.
The Council Court had literally cowered.
"Volkas stands acquitted, Mister Kala."
Rike had brought furious hands, all thick-fingered and encrusted with the black muck of intership combat, "That's asinine! He ABANDONED my men! He took command of the loaner fleet! MY fleet! To do what?" Rike's voice had been extraordinary, Volkas remembered. Not even so much in its rolling bass, words each like thunderheads, a poetry of chaos and solid power, but that despite the strength underneath it, the one who hurled it around under the sunlit dome of the capital ship could do nothing by it.
For all its passion. For all the unrestrained glory that backed it.
"To! Do! What!" Rike hammered at them, the banister at his box cracked. It was steel.
Volkas piped up, "A tactical retreat. Calm down, boy, you're not a navy man - er - thing." Still smiling. Unafraid. Shouting would never impress him all that much. His lawyer hid his flat lips behind a hand.
Rike hunched there then, defeated, still sizzling in places on the outside, palpably smoldering inside. His back bent and bunched. Mental and physical pain playing through the knots in those hulking shoulders.
He had straightened. He had turned.
And he had done it.
"Arimistead, you sorry son of a bitch, if we ever deploy in the same theater again, I'll snuff you like a candle."
A banging gavel. For all its thinness, so much more meaningful than the bluster. Volkas feigned mild shock.
"That is quite enough, General Rike Kala! You are hereby dunned and held in contempt of court!"
Rike hadn't faltered though. His electric blue eyes, or were they gold? Or black? Had stayed locked on Volkas's.
"A new trial is to be convened..." the voice reedily went on, listing charges.
There was bad blood between the humans and the Kalasar. An open threat in a broken peace was punishable.
The Assessor finished his littany with, "Any words in your defense, General?"
"Yeah." Rike addressed everyone then, "Fuck you and everyone who looks like you." Then he hopped down from his dias and strode out into the gardens with an impossible amount of hostility. He left ashy prints from his bandaged footpaws.

"He sure was an angry young man, wasn't he," Volkas chuckled.
"And it never abated."
"Oh no?"
"No," said the Aide, "It brought him more court marshals. He's gained and lost more general's stars than have been issued by any sun-farers since the whole war started."
"Goes to show," Volkas said, drawing the box to him, "The Kalasar are inept. What sort of navy would keep a beast like that on its rolls?"
The Aide only smiled, his face distant.
"I'll tell you. A navy of misfits and morons." He flipped open the little lid, "Now, what do we have here?"
Inside the cheaply constructed box was a small papyrus tube with gilded gold.
"This checked out?" Volkas snapped, brows coming down.
"Of course," said the Aide. A little metal, some small swatch of organic compound, wood, but no viral or bacterial evidence, even before routine irradiation. No detectable explosives.
Volkas's face relaxed. His lopsided smile, partly scars and nerve damage, resurrected itself from neath the cloud of suspicion as it passed.
Pudgy fingers, all bedecked in rings, lifted the tube. Something slid out of it. Another tube, darker, banded in red plastic.
The papyrus was a letter, written in a clear hand.

Admiral Arimistead Warner Volkas, Warder of Light,

I wish to issue an official apology.
Over many years and many more battles
I have come to realize that my dislike
of you was unfounded.
You are a true friend to my kind and
your deeds are indelible upon our
shared history.
May our races join and may we find
common stead in the realms of light,
those you so stolidly preserve.

In acknowledgement of your breeding,
your intelligence, your worth, I have
presented you with a gift.
A cigar. A traditional tobacco blend
from my private reserves.
The leaves and seeds have been lost
these many Standard Revs.
But, with you, I would share this
priceless treasure.
May you think on your deeds, both
great and small, and where you might
travel from here.

-Rike Kala

Volkas put the letter back in the box and lifted the cigar.
"He's trying to curry favor. He wants something."
The Aide hmmed, eyes hungrily locked on the delicacy in his Admiral's hands.
"Sad state of affairs -- sad place to be, when you have to come and grovel to your enemies."
The Aide hmmed again in agreement.
"Well. To my deeds." Volkas said.
He opened a large drawer in his desk and retrieved a heavyily filligreed torch, filled with centuries old brandy and lit by flint. The Aide stood at his shoulder now, hoping to enjoy the cigar even if it would only be second hand.
The Admiral pressed the cigar against his teeth, nibbling out the back and spat.
The small brass and gold torch flicked to life in his other hand. He brought the flame near.
He puffed. Held the sweet smoke in his jowels.
He was about to comment on what a fine cigar it was, indeed, when the black-powder buckshot round hidden inside went off and blew his face out through the back of his skull.
The aide shrieked and fell to the floor, ineptly dodging the morsels and splash that had been his senior officer's head. Chunks thudded heavily against amethyst panels and hung from the emerald overhead light.
The Aide scrabbled and slipped in something he couldn't quite bring himself to recognize.
There was a second piece of paper. Eyes even with him as he brought himself level with the desk.
The Aide's fingers stained it bloody and he read:

Fuck you and everyone who looks like you.

Rike

He raised a shout, one that brought a general alarm that was quickly drowned out by air raid sirens and bombers screaming and thumping overhead.
When the human spies Rike had planted in Volkas's staff brought him photographs of the aftermath, Rike had chuckled, and then ordered all of Volkas's fleet, assets and finery scuttled and sold for slag.