Treuten Teradoc

"What Empire? We are the Empire?"

- Teradoc

High Admiral Teradoc was an officer of the Imperial Navy who established himself as an independent Warlord during the breakup of the Galactic Empire after the Battle of Endor.

Imperial service
"He was diligent in his duties and virulently anti-Rebel, but beyond that unremarkable."

- Winter Retrac

Before Endor, Teradoc was assigned postings that generally kept him away from the Core Worlds, and he was not regarded as one of the Empire's most prominent commanders. If he had any particular reputation, it was centered on his pronounced hatred of the Rebellion, but even so, he does not seems to have attracted intense scrutiny from Alliance Intelligence. He is known to have achieved the position of Admiral&mdash;and probably High Admiral of Sector Group, since loyalists like Ysanne Isard were subsequently prepared to accord him this title&mdash;but currently available evidence does not even indicate whether he was a career military officer, or a political Regional Governor who held a military title by virtue of his status as Imperial plenopotentiary within a Sector.

Nevertheless, Teradoc was regarded as a competent commander. His rimward duties meshed well with his temperamental opposition to the Rebellion, and there is at least one reference to a naval battle group under his command tasked with specific duties against Alliance forces, though it is not clear whether this force represented his entire command, or even if its creation definitely pre-dated Endor.

Teradoc avoided the defeat at Endor&mdash;he was not among the senior commanders summoned to join the fleet in Modell Sector in anticipation of the destruction of the Rebellion&mdash;and the New Republic's officially-sponsored Essential Chronology would later claim that he acted to establish himself as an independent warlord almost as soon as news of the defeat was known. There is some uncertainty surrounding this claim, however: whereas the original Essential Chronology issued in 25 ABY claimed that Teradoc established his fiefdom on the edge of the Deep Core, the revised text released by the Galactic Alliance after the Yuuzhan Vong invasion placed his territory on the Mid Rim, and other sources suggest than he remained loyal to the New Order hierarchy until 6 ABY.

Nevertheless, Teradoc certainly increased in prominence and and independence after Endor, and within a few months, members of the Cabal regarded him as a "warlord" who was offering military protection as an alternative to dependence on the fleet forces answering to the "Interim Emperor", Grand Vizier Sate Pestage. Significantly, Teradoc was named here alongside Admiral Harrsk, who was already openly aggregating territory in defiance of the Coruscant regime: over the next eight years, these two commanders were often paired together as leading representatives of the group of warlords, Imperial fleet commanders who had used their military forces to forge independent despotes&mdash;a perception apparently first voiced by Imperial leaders, but eventually also shared by citizens of the New Republic.

Emergence as a Warlord
"Teradoc had the gall to say to me that he'd only lend me toys if I would promise they would not return broken!"

- Ysanne Isard

The fall of Coruscant to the New Republic was regarded by New Republic Intelligence as the catalyst for Teradoc's assertion of full independence&mdash;if only because there was no longer any clear central authority for him to answer to. He was still prepared to cooperate with the former de facto Empress, Director of Intelligence Ysanne Isard, now based on Thyferra, but in these relations, he seems now to have regarded himself as her equal, or even her superior: he gave her TIE Fighters in return for bacta shipments, and during the Bacta War, he loaned her an Interdictor Cruiser. But Teradoc refused to supply Isard with fighter pilots for combat against Rogue Squadron, and when the Rogues destroyed the Thyferran squadrons she had assigned to his ship, he tauntingly accused her of careless incompetence, and withdrew the Interdictor back to his own territories.

Subsequently, Teradoc is recorded using the title "High Admiral of the Mid Rim"&mdash;a style which the Essential Chronology claims was his own invention, but which indicates that he was laying claim to military authority over a sizeable Oversector, legitimate or otherwise. True, Teradoc could not match the power of Warlord Zsinj, who now controlled a third of known space, and whose military and territorial power rivalled that of the New Republic, but in 8 ABY, when Zsinj was defeated by Han Solo at Selaggis and destroyed at Dathomir, Teradoc made a move Rimwards to conquer his former territory.

Although the Essential Chronology suggests that Teradoc was successfully driven back by the New Republic, it seems that he did capialize significantly in terms of territory and perhaps even more so in acquiring Zsinj's fleet forces, denying them to the legitimate Imperial leadership that was now operating on the Outer Rim. It is not certain what role Teradoc played during the subsequent campaigns of Grand Admiral Thrawn and the successful thrust to recapture Coruscant by forces loyal to the Imperial Ruling Council, but in 10 ABY, New Republic sources claim that when Palpatine revealed his own survival and launched the major offensive code-named Operation Shadow Hand, Teradoc and his forces were quickly reintegrated into the Imperial chain of command.

Leading warlord
"... and you, sir, are no Grand Admiral Thrawn."

- Gilad Pellaeon

With the fall of the "Dark Empire" and the destruction of Byss, Teradoc once again became an independent warlord: his main rival was still Harrsk, who had more warships of the heaviest classes at his command, and perhaps more territory under his control, but Teradoc was now the single most powerful Imperial commander in terms of the overall strength of his military forces, and his position was sufficiently credible that he secured the services of Thrawn's former flagship captain, Vice Admiral Gilad Pellaeon.

With Pellaeon as his fleet commander, Teradoc built up an impressive force of more than seventy Victory-class Star Destroyers, painted blood red and known as Crimson Command; his opinion of the larger and individually more powerful Imperial-class Star Destroyer, regarded as the premier capital ship of the Empire by most other commanders, may be indicated by his willingness to make a gift of one such vessel, Invidious, to Leonia Tavira. Teradoc may, in fact, have inherited both his main military resources and his overall strategy from Zsinj, who had commanded the single most powerful Sector Fleet before Endor, and who had used a fleet of Victory-class ships to guard the Iron Fist at Rancor Base; but Teradoc now removed his forces from their former rimward deployments to a base in the Deep Core, a massive series of fortified asteroid redoubts in a desolate star system&mdash;although in his emphasis on concentrated fleet forces rather than extensive territorial deployments he was once again following Zsinj's lead.

By 12 ABY, however, Pellaeon was growing disillusioned. Teradoc had grown enormously fat, and rather than engaging directly with the New Republic, he was indulging in a feud with Harrsk that only reduced both fleets' ability to strike back against the Rebels. In the course of this raiding warfare, however, Pellaeon negotiated a battlefield truce with Admiral Daala to compel Teradoc, Harrsk and eleven other warlords to put aside their differences and attend a meeting on Tsoss Beacon; but when they failed to reach any agreement amongst themselves as to how to continue the war, the chamber in which the warlords were arguing filled with toxic nerve gas and all of them choked to death. Surprisingly, the obese Teradoc was the last to die from the poisonous fumes, sitting in his chair continuing to wheeze and cough long after the others were dead.

Teradoc's forces were subsequently amalgamated with those of the other warlords to form part of the unified Deep Core fleet which participated in Daala's campaigns. Most of his ships were probably ultimately withdrawn by Pellaeon to the Outer Rim, where they were integrated into the forces of the Imperial Remnant.

Behind the scenes

 * Teradoc was created by author Kevin J. Anderson, and only actually appears as a character in Darksaber, but he is first mentioned in Children of the Jedi, and he also mentioned in Michael A. Stackpole's novels The Bacta War and I, Jedi, in both of which he supplies the female villainess with an important capital ship.

Appearances

 * X-wing Rogue Squadron: Masquerade
 * X-wing: The Bacta War
 * I, Jedi
 * Children of the Jedi
 * Darksaber