The Chameleon

“One day soon, we’ll light this entire galaxy on fire.”

The Fallow Cathaway was a trap. Looking at her there in dead space, floating, directionless, venting smoke, dark, it would have been easy to guess that the trap had sprung back on the trappers, but the Brindars were cautiously optimistic as they approached.

Eady Brindar was the mastermind behind the plot to ensnare the forces that had been raiding shipping vessels in the border systems, though she might not have wanted to lay claim to that title in the moment. Until they boarded her and saw what was what, the team had no guess as to the state of their bait ship. Of course, they were optimistic, after nearly two years of routine runs and a handful of false alarms, it had begun to feel to the Brindars like they were actually running a shipping outfit rather than an interstellar trans-governmental law enforcement effort to crack the growing piracy problem in commercial traffic between the Letters and the outer Trasp Protectorate.

After so many months, their own eyes could now confirm it: The Fallow Cathaway had finally been hit. What they needed to know now was how hard.

The rear cargo vault had been cracked wide open to space, the metals pulled, and given the size of the shipment, the perpetrators had likely employed multiple vessels, possibly a small attack group, as a single ship large enough to take on that much cargo and transfer it in deep space wouldn’t plausibly have been able to pin down the Cathaway, even as she was half-heartedly trying to escape, merely for show. This was a coordinated effort.

“Any readings?” Eady Brindar asked their honored guest, Kayella Prime, who was strapped in behind them, embodied, and monitoring their sensors.

“There is nothing,” the prime AI stated. “They must have pulled everything. We can assume the Cathaway is now a husk.”

“We hope he’s okay,” Del Brindar stated. “You know we’ll do everything we can.”

“He insisted,” Kayella stated. “Boggs is stubborn.”

“And resilient, no doubt,” Eady stated.

“You have no idea,” Kayella replied. “Even if I had the capacity to worry, my friends, I assure you I wouldn’t be worried.”

“Atmosphere?” Del Brindar asked.

“Doubtful,” Kayella stated. “I should go. It won’t be more than a few minutes.”

“Set us up a feed?” Del requested.

“Presently,” Kayella stated, unstrapping her body and heading for the starboard airlock.

They watched as Kayella prepped for the walk. The Brindars were a little surprised when she dressed in one of the spare suits adjacent the airlock, but after discussing it, they supposed the extreme cold of space would do Kayella’s artificial body no favors, even as it was unlikely to do her unique mind any harm.

She was shockingly skilled in astronautics, completing the short flight between ships with a powerful vault, a quick burn of her suit’s thrusters and a flipping rebound off the inner cargo hold’s wall that was enough to make any gymnast jealous. And then she stuck the landing on the inner hatch as though she were magnetized. True to her word, it took Kayella only seven minutes from their flight deck into the Fallow Cathaway’s lower quarters.

The feed illuminated a series of empty corridors and rooms, which Kayella negotiated with similar ease to the transit between vessels.

“No atmosphere,” Kayella reported. “I’m getting troubling thermal readings from the lower sections. It’s a good thing we got here when we did.”

“The reactors?” Eady asked.

“They must have intended to blow them,” Kayella stated. “Likely with as little charge as possible.”

“Why waste it on a dead ship?” Del stated.

“Indeed,” Kayella said. “I estimate we have about forty minutes. Though from the look of the place, it won’t take nearly that long to collect what little they left us.”

“Boggs?” Del asked.

“Standby,” Kayella said. “Heading to the bridge now.”

The Brindars watched the feed as Kayella pumped the door hatch and manually opened the bridge doors, revealing a sorry state of things. It wasn’t unexpected, but it was still a shock. Every last panel was open and picked clean, wires and clips exposed beneath the wall frames. And there, in the midst of the floating scraps of metal and broken glass was the body of Boggs—the prime himself—as lifeless and inert as the busted-up freighter.

“Clicking away,” Kayella announced as the video feed went black. “For security purposes.”

“Explain please, Kayella,” Eady Brindar asked.

“A prime’s processor is a piece of technology we strive to keep a closely guarded secret for these very circumstances. They’ll likely think they’ve done Boggs in. I’ll be the judge of that, and shortly.”

They listened intently as Kayella examined her partner.

“Well, they’ve opened his head like a clamshell,” she said. “Oh, old friend, what have they done to you?”

They waited as she hmmmed and even seemed to huff. The primes seemed almost human at times to the Brindars.

“There’s considerable damage,” Kayella stated emotionlessly. “They likely thought this was sufficient to destroy him and probably figured that if it wasn’t, the imminent explosion would.”

“The reactor?” Eady Brindar asked.

“Precisely.”

“Can he be salvaged?” Del Brindar asked.

“He’s not a cargo ship, Mr. Brindar,” Kayella answered. “His mind should be intact; though I’ll need to completely reconstitute his body. It’s a total loss. How much he remembers is likely a function of how soon they destroyed his cerebrum after boarding.”

“Any sign of the other bots?”

“Negative,” Kayella stated. “I’ll have a cursory look around for anything useful I could pull in the next few minutes, but our window is closing.”

“Thermals show temperatures rising below the cargo hold.”

“I have your readings,” Kayella stated. “I’m well aware. I have Boggs now as well and am on my way out. Standby to put some distance between the two ships as soon as I board.”

Kayella had control of the situation, far better than the Brindars realized. She arrived in their starboard airlock, seemingly empty-handed. She told them, nearly to the second, how much time they had before the reactors in the Fallow Cathaway went critical. She suggested a bearing that set them on a course for the outer Betas, where she and Boggs had a robotics lab prepped so that Kayella could reconstitute her fellow prime.

The ship had been a total loss. Whatever data they’d hoped to collect from the Fallow Cathaway was either stolen when the pirates had stripped the vessel or would soon be lost when she blew. They’d expected no less, though. This criminal cartel wasn’t careless. Primes didn’t concern themselves with chasing petty criminals. These cargo pirates were a serious concern for the outer Battery, and they were proving themselves to be quite good at what they did.

Kayella had warned the Brindars—reconstituting a body for Boggs, from scratch, would take her weeks, if not months, and she would not be pulled away from that task to help in their pursuit of the pirates. Eady Brindar wasn’t about to refuse the help of the primes for any reason, though. She’d also given the Protectorate a long timeline and the Lettered Systems Interstellar Union no timeline at all. They’d both opted for a private military contractor agreeable to both governmental unions, as tensions had been growing along the inner boundary systems, and for the first time in their hundreds of years of peaceful coexistence, conflict seemed possible if the parties weren’t careful. The Brindars were a careful choice. The primes were an added bonus.

Eady Brindar was more than happy to give Kayella her time to work. The Brindars returned to monitoring incidents in the common commercial lanes between the Betas and the Alphas, focusing closely on the barrier worlds on the Letters side of the Trasp Protectorate. That was where most of the ships were getting hijacked. The predictive models, still, were failing, presumably because the pirates had the same information as the carriers did as inputs. They never hit where and when they were supposed to, and by the time the Brindars realized they’d struck again, they were long gone, along with the merchandise.

“They will be caught,” Eady Brindar consistently told system governments and the representatives of the Letters Union and the Protectorate. It was less Eady’s personal conviction than the reality that neither government had any better solution, as they understood that taking matters into their own hands would raise tensions along the lines.

The individual ship runners were much more concerned than their governments. Stories were spreading throughout the barrier worlds. These pirates were without mercy. Human crews had disappeared in their entirety. Nobody knew whether they were dead, abducted, or had been absorbed into the pirate fleet—hundreds of capable engineers, pilots, and ship hands.

As they waited for word on Boggs, the Brindars fell back into the old pattern—waiting for word of a strike, only to arrive too late to be of any help, and then learning what little they could from the husk of a ship or debris field left behind.

It was nearly four months before Kayella pinged.

“He’s awake,” she told the Brindars. “We are ready to be picked up at your earliest convenience.”

When they arrived at Kayella’s makeshift robotics lab, she had already cleaned the place out, down to the tools and the hardware she’d used to reconstitute Boggs. Del Brindar asked more out of curiosity about what had happened to the gear than to glean any information about the primes.

“Melted down,” Kayella responded. “I suggest you inquire no further.”

It was the only time she’d gotten testy with either of the Brindars or their crew. Boggs himself seemed far more cheerful.

“We have them,” he told the Brindars. “They are far more sophisticated than we’d guessed. They are more trappers than hunters—spiders, not wolves.”

The first indication of trouble for the Fallow Cathaway had been a drop in communications several hours after Boggs detected a mysterious sound on the hull that he was never able to investigate to his satisfaction. Before he had gotten to the bottom of that little puzzle, coms went down. Shortly after that, the sublights began to lose power. Then, more little bumps against the hull and a gradual decrease in power.

“Mines,” Boggs suggested. “Most likely derived from a Trasp innovation in the Medi-Austin system.”

The Trasp cloud harvesting operation at Medi-Austin, Boggs explained, used a unique kind of space mine that was designed to catch empty automated ships returning to the system to reload. But Medi-Austin’s unique combination of electromagnetism and radiation often resulted in ships spiraling out of control and eventually losing power and going missing.

The pirates had adapted these small, nearly indetectable mines to act as a kind of net. Rather than catching and redirecting ships that had gone out of control, they were catching functioning ships and shutting them down, pulling them into their web.

“And much like a spider’s web,” Boggs explained, “the more the Fallow Cathaway struggled against the power drain, the more she entangled herself. But they never suspected I was a prime when they boarded, and now, I have their M.O., and, I have a plan to stop them.”

Boggs went into intricate detail, not merely describing the incident, but rendering models that displayed the methodology of the pirates—the six-vessel attack force—how they closed on a hobbled ship and husked her to the hull plating.

They used a combination of bot labor and human coordination, commandeering the Fallow Cathaway’s workbots and trashing Boggs as soon as they determined they might struggle to reprogram such a sophisticated clone, as they thought him to be.

They were not a powerful fleet, according to Boggs. In fact, the sum of the six vessels—two commercial riggers, a large cargo carrier, two mid-sized cruisers, and a scout ship—this micro-armada would be no match for a single military frigate in close quarters. The trick would be getting that pirate fleet into close quarters.

Boggs had it all mapped out.

“We will build a trap decoy—a ship with a shell that looks and acts exactly like a fat, defenseless target,” he told the Brindars. “And we will drive it around like we did with the Fallow Cathaway, inviting a strike. The shell—the false hull—will insulate the frigate within from the effect of the mines. When the pirates approach in close quarters, we will jettison the outer hull and disable their ships with the superior weaponry of the frigate within.”

“Like a kind of chameleon,” Del Brindar added, scratching his chin and nodding his approval.

“After we have them,” Boggs continued, “we can interrogate the perpetrators to reveal the extent of their network—buyers, collaborators, corrupt officials looking the other way. I am confident we can bring this network to its proper conclusion and stamp out this unfortunate chapter in the sector’s expansion without it metastasizing any further.”

“What were these pirates like?” Del Brindar asked Boggs. “What do you think was motivating them?”

“In a word, they were professionals,” Boggs replied. “Task-oriented, calculating, and singularly focused on the acquisition of cargo. I believe they were motivated by greed, one of the simplest and oldest of human motivations.”

Kayella grimaced.

“You disagree, love?” Boggs asked.

“Tell me again there’s simplicity in any human motivation, Boggs. Please, start at the simplest part.”

“Well, we shall see, perhaps, when we catch them, precisely how complex they are.”

In a way, it was fortunate for the Brindars that the pirates had destroyed the Fallow Cathaway. It was much less of a challenge to ask the interested parties for a new ship with the old ship absent from the picture. They needed a frigate and a framing team—even an old ship would do, Boggs insisted. The fight would be the easy part; the difficulty would be happening upon the spider’s web again.

The Brindars approached the Trasp. It wasn’t simply that they had a more robust collective of patrol vessels designed for the public defense, but Boggs had an engineering challenge to put before them, and nothing was quite so compelling to the Trasp than a problem to be solved with some combination of ingenuity and metals. A ship within a ship that needed to look like a different kind of ship? That was a request no Trasp shipwright could pass up. Even the politicians, pragmatic and parsimonious as ever, grinned as they protested at the expense—a necessary showing of their careful stewardship of public funds, followed by a quick approval. “Worth it, ultimately,” they declared, “as long as it removes a growing threat permanently.”

Boggs assured them the plan was both sound and well worth the cost.

The Trasp repurposed an aging frigate for the Brindar Group and assigned them a berth in the Mitrikol Shipyard orbiting Loris—far enough into the inner half of the Protectorate that they could safely work on their clandestine project without word getting back to the Lettered Systems.

The Brindars spent the months their chameleon was being constructed flying between Mitrikol and the outer Lettered Systems, where the pirates had been active, hitting several large shipping vessels, each of which were laden with rich assets—bots, both consumer and commercial grade; industrial equipment and computers; raw metals, manufactured nanomaterials; graphene; drones; and network satellites—all manner of valuables that could be moved in the outer systems for hard currency with little trouble. This made it somewhat difficult to predict what sort of runs they would need to undertake to give them the best hope of springing their trap.

They spoke with several of the executives from the other cargo carriers running lines in the Letters and Indies to get a sense whether they had detected any patterns to the pirates’ mode of operating. The answer seemed to be no initially, but Eady Brindar, convincing as ever, talked each of the executives into pooling anonymized data so Kayella could calibrate a predictive algorithm that would narrow the window in which their chameleon would be hit. Still, it was largely a guessing game that would end only when luck dictated.

When the work on the chameleon was finally done, Boggs recalled the Brindars to Mitrikol to see the finished ship. It was a feat of engineering only Trasp shipbuilders were capable of bringing into being in such a timeframe.

When the Brindars arrived back at the Mitrikol Shipyard, there wasn’t a hint of the frigate Tusk. In fact, the chameleon was so convincing that Del Brindar mistook it for the Christine Starlight—the heavy freighter the Trasp shipbuilders had been using as their model for the project. They’d even manufactured hull scrapes, several patches, and paint around the cargo doors that so accurately mimicked years of wear, that Eady Brindar thought the shipwrights must have pulled the doors from a similar E-Class freighter.

The tour of the inside of the vessel was similarly impressive. She truly was a cargo carrier. Just like Fallow Cathaway, too, she would be expected to execute genuine cargo runs, so as to appear as rich a target as possible. For this purpose, the Trasp had bisected the chameleon into two breakaway cargo compartments that would be recoverable following the completion of the chameleon’s mission.

The Brindars, the primes, and the Trasp government oversight officials were all delighted with the end product. The only disagreement among the parties resulted from the lead engineer presumptuously entering the ship into the Trasp registry as The Chameleon, as everyone had been referring to her. “I just figured that was what you were going to call her.”

“We probably shouldn’t give the game away in the name,” the Trasp official stated, when their tour was concluded. “It’s an odd name for a freighter.”

“Chameleons hide. Camouflage,” Kayella stated. “The chameleon metaphor was actually Del Brindar’s framing as Boggs was explaining the concept. We considered that correcting Mr. Brindar on the mistaken animal behavioral model would be pedantic. There are far better models of aggressive mimicry like the angler fish or certain species of katydids.”

“Speaking of pedantic,” Del Brindar said.

“I believe what Kayella is trying to say, Mr. Brindar, is that the name wouldn’t give the game away, so to speak,” Boggs said. “I quite approve of the name as registered. If anything, it may distinguish it and catch interest.”

“Not nearly as much as the cargo she carries,” Kayella added,

“which is principally what will draw our pirates to her.”

“Chameleon it is then,” Eady Brindar stated. “That’s what we’ve all been calling her anyway.”

The Brindars took possession of The Chameleon and the T.S.P. Tusk hidden within her. They were also given a small arsenal of tactical weapons—missiles, rails, strikebots, and a range of warheads, both designed to destroy and disable. A Trasp liaison officer, also joined the already considerable force of well-trained mercenaries the Brindars commanded. Del Brindar, along with Boggs himself and a pair of multi-use model workbots would pose as The Chameleon’s regular crew.

From the moment they set out from Mitrikol, it was inevitable the Brindar Group would meet the pirates out in the field. They were confident but uncertain, mostly about how long they would have to wait to enact their plan. The Chameleon was bound for the Lettered Systems, where she would pick up her first load and begin the long wait.

Complacency during their long waiting game was the main adversary of the humans involved in the operation. Del Brindar, aboard The Chameleon was a leading candidate for most bored by virtue of his isolation from human companionship. Offsetting this, though, was his responsibility for the cargo logs, a job a law officer like him was having to learn on the fly. He did visit the Tusk regularly as well, taking regular meals with Eady, fully prepared to fly out to The Chameleon’s bridge on the sound of first alarm.

Eady did once ask Kayella how she and Boggs combatted boredom on such a tedious mission. “We don’t experience excitement the way you do,” the prime AI told her. “Thus, we don’t experience tedium in the same way either. We struggle to understand human valuations of many experiences other than by comparing like for like.”

“What do you do then with all the time?”

“Just that, as it happens,” Kayella told Mrs. Brindar. “Boggs and I have been engaged in a discussion about the relative beauty of statuary. A debate really, about our rankings of the twenty thousand most beautiful statues in the human historical record, such as we two have access to. Doubtless many of the most beautiful works have been lost, either to history itself or in our access to what history we know.”

“Why twenty thousand?”

“The debate over ten thousand got too contentious for either of our liking.”

The mercenaries, meanwhile, spent many hours trading secrets with the Trasp commandos on deep-space combat and incursion tactics. Initially, the months-long discussion had begun as a debate about the mission’s plan of attack once The Chameleon was engaged and evolved into an extremely productive tactic sharing program with information passing between the seasoned field officers in the Brindars service and the younger, academy-trained Trasp soldiers.

Nearly seven months into the operation, on their thirty-seventh cargo run, this one between Nevis and Beta-Aurelius, the Chameleon was finally attacked while on approach to make delivery of a shipment of processors common to environmental management of megacylinders.

Boggs registered the sound of the mine striking the false hull of The Chameleon while, conveniently, Del Brindar was visiting Mrs. Brindar for dinner aboard Tusk. The AI retreated from the bridge of The Chameleon to the inner stronghold of the T.S.P. Tusk, reporting all systems prepared to meet the assault. The well-practiced strike teams hardly needed to think, reporting to duty stations properly geared-up in a matter of minutes.

“Show time,” Eady Brindar said, grinning.

The small pirate fleet appeared, jumping into the ship’s proximity six-strong a matter of minutes from the moment The Chameleon went dark. The pirates came in closer, approaching cautiously, on odd vectors that would have tested countermeasures had weapons systems for that outer shell been operational. Again, as Boggs had witnessed, they seemed to be professionals.

Aboard Tusk, the primes had weapons systems prepped to deliver crippling blows, tracking each incoming ship with defensive missiles ready to launch at the springing of the trap, each armed with electromagnetic payloads sufficient to disable the pirates’ vessels in the same way their mines had disabled their victims.

“Say when,” Eady Brindar said to Kayella.

“Allow us to do the honors,” Kayella stated.

They’d all watched the sims and trained for the moment. Thus, the only party surprised by the suddenness of the attack was the small flotilla of pirates. The Chameleon split in two, an instant puff of fog engulfing the ship’s interior. For a moment, it looked into the pirates like this freighter had somehow self-destructed in two clean pieces and a cloud of smoke. It happened so fast none of them could see the frigate or track the missiles in time to deploy countermeasures or deviate from course. All six were struck flush and overpowered by a massive surge of electrical energy.

By the time they were all disabled, only then was the old Trasp battle frigate Tusk visible. And she wasn’t taking any chances. Kayella was surgical, targeting engine systems and taking out their attack cruisers with several large incendiary bolts, mercilessly opening their only capable offensive ships to space.

Kayella brought the boarding parties around, depositing the strike teams on the pirates’ hulls one by one, time being of the essence. The pirates were known to be deadly and well armed. Confusion, coordination, and exacting precision were among the force’s most important advantage, and they executed their meticulously drilled battle strategies to the letter.

Hulls were breached, sections of bulkhead electrified to shock the occupants, sections vented, stun grenades deployed, strikebots inserted to subdue resistors, non-lethal weapons used to incapacitate and capture. In three instances, when resistance with conventional weapons became heavy, targets were taken out quickly with incendiaries and lethal bolt rounds.

All was going flawlessly to plan until the forward team on the second cruiser called back over the open coms channel. “We’ve got kids in here, Tusk. Be advised. There are children aboard.”

The operation had been set in motion, and the decision was to continue it as planned. Boggs and Kayella both calculated that aborting the assault teams’ strikes on the pirate vessels mid stream would lead to greater casualties, including casualties on the Brindars’ teams. Orders were given to minimize harm to the minors aboard the pirate vessels. Many of the Brindars’ officers were current or former law enforcement, experienced in dealing with delicate situations endangering the welfare of children.

The Brindars and the primes took all six ships with only seven casualties, all adults actively firing on their strike teams. They took no casualties of their own in commandeering the pirate fleet, and they were fortunate to have been attacked in a system where the laws were ambiguous enough the Brindars had options.

They separated the adults from the children, bringing the bulk of the pirate fleet to the desert flats on Danisport in the boundary systems between Trasp space and the Letters. It was the first opportunity for anyone to interrogate any of the pirates in the syndicate, and, in addition to the pirates themselves, they’d managed to subdue two of the ships quickly enough that the pirates hadn’t completely destroyed their navigation computers. It was a trove of data.

They spent seven weeks out on the plains of Danisport, meticulously collecting intelligence and combing through the data they gathered from the ships. They worked the pirates from the bottom up, so that by the time they sat to interview the fleet’s leader, Dinar Macomber, they already knew the answers to the questions they intended to ask.

“Why talk to me then?” Macomber asked.

They had him in the briefing room aboard Tusk—the Brindars and both primes—the four of them seated across the table from Macomber like a committee.

“More data is always better than less,” Kayella stated. “Perhaps you will provide a perspective we hadn’t considered yet.”

“Perhaps I will say nothing.”

“From a law enforcement perspective, it is of no consequence to us,” Boggs told him. “Your fate is sealed. Of the many jurisdictions that could claim primacy over your crimes, we have the final say where you will face military tribunal. The evidence we’ve collected is incontrovertible that you were the leader of this fleet, that you stole, abducted, murdered, and terrorized across nearly a hundred systems on an industrialized scale. You will be tried, and you will be executed. Your testimony is unnecessary.”

Macomber shrugged. The Brindars had predicted as much. He’d had weeks to come to terms with the state of things out in that makeshift desert prison camp they’d erected for the pirates. Hearing the obvious stated aloud was no shock to that hardened criminal.

“All that said,” Del Brindar stated, “it’s possible we could make you more comfortable in the meantime.”

Macomber smiled. “So glad to hear you are concerned by my comfort. Warms the heart, mister.”

“It’s less about concern than willingness to negotiate for whatever you might be willing to share with us in your own self-interest.”

“Do I strike any of you as a man concerned with comfort?”

“You strike me as a man who enjoys taking from others,” Eady Brindar said. “I have some idea about who you are.”

“You are warmer than your husband, Mrs. Brindar.”

“We have been discussing you,” Kayella stated. “Or rather, the history of your kind and where you fit.”

“My kind?”

“Pirates.”

Dinar Macomber laughed. “Pirates? Is that what we are?”

“You suggest you’re something different?” Eady Brindar asked.

“Seems that is exactly what you are.”

Macomber shook his head, laughing. “Such a lack of vision. No imagination, you people.”

“In fact, we have studied the historical patterns of piracy quite meticulously,” Kayella replied. “There’s a considerable degree of variance in the behavior and economic and cultural environments that spawn such movements. In addition to a vacuum of formal power and an appropriate geographical playing field, so to say, there’s also always a large underserved economic minority with low social upward mobility and usually a perception of oppression. Over the ages, pirates have ranged from libertarian rule-breakers as privateers, even freedom fighters, to ruthless murderous savages who thieve opportunistically for financial gain and power. We slot you comfortably into the latter category Mr. Macomber, not through any random assessment of our liking, but by your own behavior, objectively categorized. We don’t deem you a pirate, sir. Your deeds do. If you prefer the term warlord, it would similarly apply.”

“A warlord with spaceships,” Del Brindar added.

Macomber crossed his arms and laughed. “As I said, a lack of imagination. I am no warlord, fools. I am a king.”

“You still believe we don’t know the extent of your network,” Boggs stated. “We know about your outpost, your burgeoning pirate world. You laugh, I suspect, only because you believe you still have hope. But you may consider asking yourself why, if help were indeed coming, you are still imprisoned here by a small group of private security specialists without even a sign of your loyal subjects coming to rescue you.”

Macomber glared across the table at Boggs.

“We could just as easily have spoken to you last week,” Kayella continued. “We chose to speak to you today because we were awaiting word from Denera, the little hidden planet you’re referring to as your kingdom, no doubt? We were updated by the Protectorate yesterday evening on the joint raid, executed by the Trasp and Letters defense forces. They have evacuated every last person from your little world, Mr. Macomber. The children have been put in protective custody, just as the children in your fleet have. They will be given proper homes and rehabilitated, and the adults will either be prosecuted or resettled, according to their culpability. To the extent you were ever a king, your kingdom is no more.”

Dinar Macomber turned and spat on the floor of the briefing room. “You can’t kill me. You made me. You’ve made a thousand others like me. Clean one planet and think your job is done? Believe this is a broad, broad galaxy. You want my statement, Brindars? My children will kill your children, and if they don’t, my grandchildren will. There’s nothing you can do or say to stop it. The forces you serve have already gathered the tinder. We will not suffocate in the smoke, and we will not die in the flames. One day soon, we’ll light this entire galaxy on fire.”

Eady Brindar looked Macomber dead in the eyes. “I’m going to be in the room when they put you to death, Dinar. I owe it to the families of the people you killed—the captains, crew, and passengers. And I’ll tell them how you died like you lived, a scared coward who preyed on people who were weaker than he was and then slinked away into the darkness. There’s only one king in this galaxy. He doesn’t murder, and he doesn’t loot.”

Macomber turned his head again and spat.

That was the end of the interview.

The Brindars and the primes remained out in the desert on Danisport till the various authorities from the Letters and Trasp Systems arrived to take custody of the prisoners they were holding. During that time, they agreed that they should travel to Denera together to take a first-hand account of the outpost for their final reports. Over the course of those final weeks holding those pirates, there was much discussion among the four principal investigators and their junior staff about Dinar Macomber and the people who’d taken up with his forces. The word Del Brindar kept coming back to—the one he used in his final assessment—was unsettling. They were all left with a sense that something big had changed out there. More than economics, more than culture, more than collegiality among the growing systems in the Letters and boundary worlds. Something about what they’d thought about humanity had been shaken. A warlord like Macomber had been an extinct specimen from a branch of humanity they thought they’d left behind, yet somehow, across thousands of lightyears and nearly as many thousands of years, here, again, was that same old familiar yet now unfamiliar face, a haunting face, laughing at them, spitting on the floor, seething with contempt even to the moment of his own execution.

The reports from the child welfare services, both Trasp and Letters, spoke of a special kind of intransigence none of them had seen before. One former foster mother spoke of the two children she’d hosted as the, “Nastiest, vilest, spittingest, bitingest, most foul-mouthed pair of human beings I’ve ever had the misfortune of meeting, and the elder of the boys was six.”

The Brindars and primes arrived on Denera to an eerie calm. Heat ringed that shadeless world with a special sense of unrelenting hellishness. It persisted all day until the sun set.

The Trasp had cleaned the place out completely. Every salvageable good those pirates had commandeered to build their kingdom had been stripped from the planet’s surface and was on its way back to the Systems to be auctioned to cover the cost for the pirate army’s subjugation. All that remained of the once-bustling renegade outpost numbering in the tens of thousands were makeshift huts of stone and mud and a great number of pop-up shelters in such poor shape they held no value.

“I cannot fathom such an existence,” Eady Brindar stated. “Where did these people come from?”

Neither Del nor the primes had a satisfying answer.

“Who knows what drives the minds of criminals?” Del finally said after a long silence. “We’ve all seen enough crime in our lives to know.”

“This was not a society of criminals, love, but something else—an entirely criminal society. How does such a thing come to be?”

“There was a time in your development when such a society was the rule and not the exception,” Boggs stated.

“It tells me something must drastically change,” Kayella added. “I will state as much in my report. This bodes poorly for the future stability of the sector. Suppression will only work for so long. Macomber was correct about that.”

After walking in the heat of the day through the remains of the main settlement, the foursome approached a large, open, circular courtyard that lay on the edge of the plains the pirates had used as their makeshift airfield. That was where the Brindars and primes had parked T.S.P. Tusk for their survey of the pirate city. The dusty courtyard was a flat, dirt gathering place ringed by stones, in the center of which, was a dark, metal obelisk slightly taller than the four figures inspecting it. At waist height, there was an inscription, dulled by the oil from hundreds of fingerprints touching the monument almost ritually on their way to rob and murder hundreds of victims in the dark obscurity of space. The inscription read: “Our kingdom is out there for the taking.”

“I know you do not believe as we do,” Eady Brindar said to the primes, “but Del and I are going to pray for the victims, for their families, and for the children of these criminals who have been led astray. You may join us if you like.”

The primes declined politely, standing quietly outside that broad dirt circle, on that empty planet, observing, waiting in silence, and contemplating the prospect of two ephemeral beings speaking to the rising wind.