"Sit down, Rogers."

The magistrate's face was something resembling a stone slab, if a stone slab also had a big nose, thin, crescent lips, and thick-rimmed spectacles around a pair of beady black eyes. Rogers tried to picture this old, ruddy-looking man back in his marine uniform.

Rogers slowly sat down. "Come on," he said. "It's me, Rogers. You know me. Help me out here."

"Of course I know you," Tucky said as he moved to the other end of the table and sat down, adjusting his sash when it got caught on the edge of the chair. "Didn't you hear me call you a slick son of a b.i.t.c.h when the door opened?"

"I thought it was a compliment."

"It wasn't."

Rogers started to sweat. Well, continued sweating. He was going to need a shower and another change of clothes at the end of the day. What was Tucky's problem?

"Now I've got you, Rogers," the magistrate said. "And it's time for payback."

"Payback?" Rogers said nervously. "Payback for what? You and I were shipmates. We turned on the same beer light every day at noon. You came to my poker games. You bet on my virtual horses. You drank my whiskey."

"You watered it down," Tucky said. "Your poker games had one and a half decks, and your virtual horses were ridden by virtual crooked jockeys." He leaned forward, boring into Rogers. "You were a poor excuse for a sergeant, Rogers. You were sloppy, aloof, and conniving."

"Are we still on compliments or have we moved to insults?"

"You made that unit a disgrace!" Tucky's face reddened. "And you ruined my career!"

Rogers reeled. "What do you mean, I ruined your career? You were a military officer! Your only career was sipping brandy and relaxing in the Two Hundred Years' (and Counting) Peace! Come on, Tucky, you know better than anyone what the military is like."

"Don't play dumb with me," Tucky said.

Rogers frowned, thinking hard. What had he ever done to Tucky to upset him? Surely he couldn't still be hung up on . . .

"Yes, I'm still hung up on it. I spent three hours wandering the halls in my underwear, looking for my uniforms!"

Rogers guffawed, the memory coming back to him of the colonel's pink flesh as he padded through the hallways shouting at the top of his lungs. That had been a good day.

"That wasn't my fault," Rogers said, and for once, he wasn't lying. "The laundry clerk lost them all."

"Like h.e.l.l he did," Tucky snapped. "That prank had your name written all over it."

"I told you, it wasn't me. And you could have used the comm system to call someone to get them for you rather than running around the halls, screaming like a banshee."

Tucky's eyes narrowed. "My comm system wasn't working, and I had a briefing with Admiral Klein in twenty minutes."

Well, that had been Rogers' fault. Even though the laundry clerk had been the one to lose the uniforms, he'd told Rogers about it. Rogers just helped the scene along a little by meddling with the communication system. It had been just too good of an opportunity to pa.s.s up.

"You can't blame me for your busy briefing schedule," Rogers said. "Besides, nothing bad came of it."

"Nothing bad came of it?" Tucky spluttered, red faced. "They played the security vids over the mess hall display during dinnertime!"

That, actually, had also been Rogers' fault. Maybe he did ruin the colonel's career a little bit.

"But who deleted them afterward?" Rogers said. "Who did you come crawling to for that?"

Tucky waved the mitigation away with his hand. "The damage was already done, and you know it. And now that you're here, I'm going to see that you're repaid for every swindle, every dirty bet, every underhanded dealing you did in the 331st. It's time you got what you deserved."

Rogers ground his teeth, thinking. Tucky's word was iron in this situation. Even if he did get a fair trial-which he doubted he would, if Tucky was approving the jury-the magistrate had some discretion when it came to dealing with people in his jurisdiction. And, with them being on the outskirts of Meridan territory, Rogers was a long way from the central federation. By the time he ran through all the appeals processes, he'd have served out half his sentence, and his tongue would probably be swollen from all the salt.

Rogers was, in a word, screwed.

"So, here we are," the magistrate said. "I'm going to make sure this goes nice and quick. This station's jails are too comfortable for the likes of you. I want you doing hard labor ASAP. Do you even know what labor is? I don't remember you doing much work."

Think fast, Rogers thought. What do you have up your sleeve?

Then it came to him, and he couldn't help but smile.

"What are you so happy about?" Tucky asked, the barest hint of hesitation in his voice.

"Do you remember," Rogers said, sitting back in his chair, "that lovely lieutenant in personnel? What was her name? Namazi? Sharp as a tack, very pretty."

The magistrate's face went white. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about flirting with the very edges of the fraternization regulation," Rogers said. "Among other things."

Tucky snorted, though he did a very poor job of exuding confidence. "I don't know what you mean," he said. "I don't remember a . . . Namazi, or whatever. I'm a happily married man."

"And I am sure your wife would be very interested in how you look in a bra.s.siere and stockings."

Rogers was treated with a lovely few moments of awkward silence as he let that sink in and watched the old colonel's face go just about as white as his hair. If there was one thing he had learned in his life, it was to always have a backup plan. And that backup plan usually involved having dirt on someone.

Finally, Tucky spoke. "How could you possibly . . ."

"That doesn't really matter, does it?" Rogers said. "Let's just say that the security cameras don't always turn off when you want them to, especially if someone else doesn't want them to. What are you, an A cup? B cup? You weren't the fittest of specimens."

Drumming his fingers on the table in a furious tattoo, Tucky licked his lips. "There's no way you still have that video."

Rogers shrugged. "You're right. I don't have it."

Tucky visibly relaxed.

"Because it's still stored on a little datapad I keep connected to the main computer of my ship, along with a whole host of other little vignettes set to transmit after a certain time period if I don't get to them."

Had the chair not been bolted to the floor, it would have flown backward as Tuckalle rushed to his feet. His face was dark red, and his eyes looked like they might be ricocheting off the walls at any moment.

"You can't!" he blurted. "You couldn't possibly!"

Rogers held up his hands. "It's not really in my control right now, is it? You're the one about to send me to the salt mines, far away from that datapad . . ."

"What if I got you a remote terminal?"

"I hear salt isn't very good for keypads," Rogers said, leaning back. "Turns the keys into pretzels."

The muscles in Tuckalle's cheeks bulged as he rhythmically began clenching and unclenching his teeth.

"It's not that simple," the magistrate said, sitting back down.

"Seems pretty simple to me," Rogers said. "Let me out of here or the entire Meridan network will be watching videos of you doing the two-step in a young woman's unmentionables. Come to think of it, you seem to spend a lot of time in various states of nakedness, Tucky. Are you a closet exhibitionist or something?"

Tuckalle scowled at him. "It's not just a question of simply letting you off the hook. All those records are already uploaded into the central databases. I couldn't remove them all if I wanted to. It's more of a question of authority."

"Whose?"

"Yours, actually. You have a military record, but you're not in the military anymore. You can't just go roving the galaxy, blowing up pirates-if that was even what you were doing there, which I doubt. So, even if we were to give you a medal and a parade like Officer Atikan said, we'd have to send you to jail for reckless vigilantism."

Rogers squinted one eye. "Reckless vigilantism? Did the MPF unionize or something?"

Tucky shrugged. "I don't make the rules, Rogers." He paused for a moment. "But I might be able to do something."

"And what's that?"

"I could reactivate your military service and backdate the reenlistment to before you went pirating."

Rogers laughed. "You want me to put the uniform back on? There are reasons I left, Tucky."

Those reasons were primarily driven by profit, of course. He wanted to explore and cheat the other populated systems in the galaxy, too. Except the Thelicosa System, of course. They were too good at math.

This was supposed to be his intersystem debut, not his reentry into the boring military! He'd learned enough tricks in the easygoing, post-Peace service to allow him to go big time and do things like, for example, knock over some pirates for what was supposed to be a huge sum of cash. There was no reason to keep running small amounts of contraband when he could . . . well, when he could make a huge mess of things and end up in jail on his way to the salt mines. Maybe this wasn't such a bad idea.

"Besides," Rogers said, despite his wavering opinion. "It was getting boring. Those new droids kept popping up and sucking the personality out of everything." It was also marginally more difficult to smooth-talk a machine.

Tuckalle shook his head. "That's the best I can do for you. I'll put in the minimum commitment of three years, and once you're done with that, you can go back to whatever it was you were doing. I'll even put you back in the 331st."

Sitting back in his chair, Rogers folded his arms and chewed his lip while he thought. The peacetime military wasn't really a military as much as it was a giant fraternity. What else were a bunch of people out on a s.p.a.ceship in the middle of nowhere supposed to do but drink and gamble and horse around? The Two Hundred Years' (and Counting) Peace had left plenty of room for filling leisure time with interesting activities.

And Rogers had been a powerful prince in a vast kingdom of debauchery. As an engineer, he'd spent most of his time in rooms that officers rarely wanted to go, and as a sergeant, he had just the right amount of clout without all that annoying "responsibility" that came with being an officer or senior enlisted. What would be so bad about revisiting his old stomping grounds for a while?

"You're sure you could get me back into my old unit?"

"If they don't scuttle the ships when they find out you're coming back, yes."

Another stint in the military. It didn't seem so bad. And what was his alternative?

"Tucky," he said, "what's the maximum sentence for, ah, reckless vigilantism?"

"Five years," Tucky said.

Rogers stood up and saluted.

Speedb.u.mps The unnatural smoothness of Un-s.p.a.ce travel came abruptly to an end as the warning lights went off inside the transport shuttle and the normal rules of physics came back into play. Rogers shook his head as his body got used to its own g-forces again and stood up. Out the port-side window of the small, cramped shuttle he could see the 331st Anti-Thelicosan Buffer Group in all of its relatively obscure glory. The ships, arrayed in a rainbow pattern at the very edge of the Meridan system, looked vigilantly toward Thelicosan territory, awaiting-quite futilely, he was sure-the next attack.

Futile, he thought, for two reasons. One, the attack wasn't coming. The Two Hundred Years' (and Counting) Peace was pretty ironclad, thanks to all the legal treaties and checks-and-balances placed on the several signatories. And two, if the attack did come, it wouldn't matter much. Thelicosa was a powerful human system-most had resettled there from their colony on Mars, which had made all of them pretty rough around the edges-and the 331st wasn't called the "Speedb.u.mps" for nothing.

At the center of the formation was the aptly-if-uncreatively named MPS Flagship, the control center of the whole group, like a giant flower surrounded by the buzzing insects that were the fighter patrol. Various heavy gunships, cargo transports, medical ships, and other specialty craft lay splayed out in s.p.a.ce over the long crescent that made up the 331st. The shuttle in which Rogers was riding made an easy turn, fired up its conventional engines, and zoomed toward the Flagship.

"She's a beaut, isn't she?" Rogers asked the pilot as he leaned in the slightly raised gangway connecting the c.o.c.kpit with the pa.s.senger bay.

"She's a warship," came the terse reply. "Take your seat and fasten your seatbelt, please."

"Oh, come on," Rogers said. "You're docking with a ma.s.sive warship that has a magnetic hook. I'd create more turbulence by jumping up and down."

"Please don't jump up and down."

Rogers stopped jumping up and down and rolled his eyes. The pilot had been like an ice cube since the moment he'd stepped aboard. Pilots in general were always a little screwy, but this was the first he'd met that didn't want to talk your ear off. c.o.c.kpits got lonely.

Not for the first time, Rogers wished he had been able to take his own ship. But the engines needed enough work that he'd have to wait to get to the dry dock on the Flagship to fix them, if they were salvageable at all.

"So, what's the game of choice nowadays in the fleet?" Rogers asked, still standing in the gangway. "Holo-carving? Gravitational darts? Good old poker?"

"I wouldn't know," the pilot said. He made a couple of quick corrections on the control panel and spoke some jargon-riddled pilot-speak into the communication system. He received similar gibberish in reply and seemed satisfied. The Flagship took up the whole of the c.o.c.kpit window now, its dull gray surface washing out the colors of the shuttle's interior.

"You don't play games?"

"Not while I'm on duty."

"That's the best time!"

The pilot turned and regarded Rogers with something between confusion and contempt. He pointed mutely to the pa.s.senger compartment, and Rogers sighed as he turned around.

"Might as well have a droid as a pilot," Rogers said under his breath as he sat down and fastened his seatbelt. Crossing his arms, he grumpily looked out the window and watched as the docking bay swallowed the tiny shuttle like a whale swallowed plankton, padded clamps fastening around the hull like baleen. As Rogers had suspected, the whole procedure was as smooth and automated as it had been when he left the military. Seatbelts . . . pfuh.

Speaking of droids, Rogers couldn't help but notice that the docking bay had quite a few of them running around. Almost humanoid, their tin-can bodies moved around on either a wheeled base or a convincing pair of bionic legs with the knee joints reversed to offset their heavy torsos. Some of them wielded welding torches or wrenches, and some others had their data extension cables plugged into consoles operating cranes and various machinery. Rogers had expected to see some of his old engineering troops running around, but there was barely a human in sight.

"d.a.m.n," Rogers said. "Shinies everywhere."

The pilot cleared his throat.

"What?"

"I'd thank you not to use that term on my ship," the pilot said. "I don't tolerate racism."

"Racism? They're droids! They don't have a race."

The pilot made some final adjustments on the control panel, and Rogers felt a rush of air as the pa.s.senger stairway extended down to the docking bay floor.

"Enjoy your stay," the pilot said coldly.

Shaking his head, Rogers collected his meager belongings-most of his stuff was still on the Awesome and he hadn't been allowed to retrieve it-and made his way down the plank and through the docking bay, carefully avoiding any contact with the droids. Not only did they creep him out a little, but they were boring.

According to Tuckalle, his orders had been transmitted to the Flagship, but he didn't tell Rogers much more than that. The first stop, of course, would be the supply depot. He'd need to be reissued everything from uniforms to hygiene supplies to flashlights and tools for his engineering duties. The supply depot had always been his favorite place; it was where he moved the best contraband and where he had the most friends. Of all the people on the ship he wanted to keep happy the most, the supply clerks were of the highest priority, which is why Rogers never, ever gambled, swindled, or dated any of them.

The manifest technician monitoring personnel entry and exit from the ship wasn't actually a manifest technician at all. It was a droid, plugged into the central computer system via a cable that extended from its torso to the wall, and it held up a shiny steel-alloy arm to indicate that Rogers was to wait.