Many Terran strategic analysts consider the Thorgons the greatest threat to the security and existence of the Empire. Controlled by a genetically-bred soldier species, it's an aggressive, expansionist government that's attacked the Terran Empire on more than one occasion. Only the skill, dedication, and fighting spirit of Humanity has kept the Thorgons at bay - and next time, even that may not be enough.
Thorgon control of the Hegemony (actually an empire, pure and simple) depends on two things: military might and genetic engineering. The Thor-gons themselves have a monopoly on armed force within their empire; they're as aggressive against discontented subject species as they are against external foes. The Thorgons have also embraced the idea of biological manipulation. They constantly upgrade the Thorgon genome, incorporating useful traits from newly-discovered species, and find new ways to breed desirable traits (greater lifting strength, docility, obedience) into their subjects. According to some Terran scientists, the Hegemony's long-range goal is to breed all conquered species to fit specific societal niches.
The Thorgons govern their "Hegemony" in the fashion of a military bureaucracy - a Central Command Council (CCC) consisting of high-rank ing military chiefs, genetic planners, and economists makes all major policy decisions, passing directives designed to ensure the enforcement of those decisions down to lower-ranking government functionaries. Individual Thorgons advance through the hierarchy according to ability, as measured by tests. (Terran Intelligence Command has obtained some evidence indicating the scientists in charge of testing skew the results to ensure the CCC favors their views.) Most conquered planets have a military governor appointed by the CCC; a few native governments that quickly capitulated to the Thorgons have maintained some degree of home rule.
Highly rigid and regimented, Thorgon society has a place and a purpose for everyone. The authorities eliminate persons without an important job to do. Worlds the Thorgons rule through native puppet governments, such as Kalisha, generally enjoy better conditions, though the threat of a total Thorgon takeover always exists. Over time most subject governments become as paranoid and repressive as the Thorgons themselves, forcing rebels to contend with both local and Thorgon security forces.
While Thorgon culture emphasizes efficiency and ability, in practice things don't work nearly as well as they might wish. Innovations rarely occur and take hold only slowly. Most scientific research (aside from genetics and weapons development) receives little support. Industrial production wastes staggering amounts of raw materials and finished goods because factory managers only want to maximize output. Due to the lack of environmental safeguards, many Thorgon worlds are slowly but surely becoming uninhabitable. Expansion keeps the system going - the Hegemony settles or conquers new planets each year - but eventually that won't be enough.
The Hegemony's expansionism poses particular problems because the Thorgons (like their Ergon forebears) are experts at terraforming and biosphere engineering. With a fraction of the effort they put into military preparations, the Thorgons could make many of their worlds into lush paradises. But terraforming takes time - decades or centuries - and does nothing to satisfy the ferocity that dominates the Thorgon soul.
The Thorgons have uniformly poor relations with all neighboring societies. They consider weaker states ripe subjects for conquest, and stronger states potential threats they must neutralize and destroy. They have cooperated with the Ackalians in the past, but only because they find the bLshoth ("Four Eyes") useful tools. Their aggressive stance toward foreign affairs lacks subtlety; they make little use of covert operations and propaganda.
The Thorgons were created as soldiers, and their military remains the most important public institution. Configured for offensive action, with an empha sis on combat hovercraft and a fearsome vehicle called a warstrider, the Thorgon Army is one of the best in the Galaxy at planetary assault, raids, and pitched battles. They enjoy less success when fighting guerrillas, or when they must go on the defensive. To stop guerrillas, they usually hold civilian populations hostage - or just sterilize large regions which might shelter insurgents. On the defensive against well-equipped troops, the Thorgons keep trying to counterattack, even when they should retreat.
Compared to many galactic powers' fleets, the Thorgon Navy is relatively small, with an emphasis on dreadnoughts (and similar large ships), carriers, and transports. The Terran Empire estimates the Hegemony possesses roughly two-thirds of the ships and naval personnel of the Imperial Navy. By Terran standards the Thorgons waste starships with a shocking casualness; since they view the space fleet as an auxiliary to the ground forces, they seem perfectly willing to lose a squadron to gain a foothold on a target world. If possible, they overwhelm opponents with large forces of fighters and light attack craft from their carriers while capital ships make short work of comparable (but often less heavily-armed) enemy vessels. Interestingly, Thorgon spacecraft often have non-Thorgon technicians and specialists aboard to do jobs the Thorgons themselves don't train for. In at least two cases the non-Thorgon crews have successfully mutinied, defecting to Terran or Mon'dabi space.
The Thorgons have no exploration service. The Army garrisons border systems and sends missions outward to reconnoiter nearby worlds, but the notion of ongoing research and exploration for its own sake strikes the CCC as incredibly wasteful - especially since the Secret Police can steal scouting reports from civilizations foolish enough to do it themselves.
Almost a separate military service, with its own starships, troops, and fighting vehicles, the Thorgon Secret Police strikes fear into the heart of anyone who even thinks about rebelling against Thorgon rule. Tasked with ensuring that Thorgon society follows the CCC's glorious plans for the future evolution of the species, the Secret Police also effectively functions as the "private army" of the Hegemony's genetic planners and scientists.
Within the Thorgon Hegemony, Secret Police officers have unlimited access - no one, not even CCC members, may conceal information from them if they have a valid reason to request it. Only foreign diplomats have some semblance of privacy (but the Secret Police monitors them covertly). The Secret Police don't have a separate psi division, but as the Thorgon geneticists improve the overall psionic potential of the species, the best results of their experiments automatically find themselves assigned to Police duty.
Unfortunately, espionage tactics that work in Thorgon space aren't always as successful among aliens. Some Secret Police intelligence-gathering oper ations have been truly comical - like their attempt to use remote-controlled robot duplicates of key Imperial officials to gain access to sensitive data.
The Thorgons view the worlds of their empire as sources of raw material and slave labor, so they rarely bother to take any sort of proper care of them. A few of the more interesting or important ones include:
Located in the coreward regions of Hegemony space, Lokatha is a key military outpost. It lacks an atmosphere, so the inhabitants live in domed cities, but that means no air or cloud cover to interfere with orbital-range emplaced weapons, planetary shipyards, and other facilities. Human analysts predict that if the Hegemony launches another assault on Terran space, there's a 60% chance it will come from Lokatha.
A perennial sore point in Terran-Thorgon relations, New Patagonia was once a far-flung Human colony world. The Thorgons captured it during the Galactic War, and by the time the Imperial Navy retook it, they had moved all residents to another world and used orbital bombardment to reduce all of its facilities to rubble. According to the scraps of data the TIC has gathered on the subject since then, the Thorgons took the former New Patagonians to an unnamed world in the Razarka system and used them for genetic experimentation. The reports describing what the Thorgons did to the New Patagonians are so shocking the Empress had them sealed.
A recent conquest, Urlaru lies on the very rim of the Galaxy. An old world, drying and cooling as its atmosphere gradually becomes too thin to breathe, it's inhabited by a morose species resembling large, hairy spiders. These beings reportedly accepted Thorgon rule with fatalistic resignation.
That fact, in and of itself, would interest only xenobiologists and xenosociologists. What makes the Terran military and quite a few explorers prick up their ears are rumors of a huge complex of ruins halfburied by sand in a large desert basin in the planet's southern hemisphere. According to some garbled reports from agents in the Hegemony, Thorgon scientists have dated some the materials from the complex to about two billion years ago, far before the current inhabitants of Urlaru (or most other life in the Galaxy, for that matter) evolved. Naturally the Thorgons want to keep any ancient technical secrets hidden in the ruins for themselves, but plenty of other governments and people (including the Terran Empire) may be willing to take the risk of sending covert archaeology teams to study the ruins.