Kalan knew that he had a reputation as someone whose ship you wanted to be on if you could work the miracle to make it happen. So, he wasn’t worried about finding enough people to man the Zeren ship. The problem was that he was going to have to talk to all of those people and make decisions about them. Kalan hated that part. He hated it so much that he’d rather run a light crew than go through the misery of dealing with all of those people. Yet, no matter how he turned the problem over in his head, he couldn’t see a way around the problem. Even a skeleton crew for the Zeren ship would be at least a dozen people. Kalen made a mental note to give the ship a name so he could stop calling it the Zeren ship. He rubbed at his temples as yet another thing he needed to do rose to the top of his consciousness. Sighing, he found a lift and took a ride to the administrative floor.

The administrative floor was home to everything from planetside governmental offices to representatives from other planets, although not too many of those. Kalan knew there were mega-stations out there the size of minor moons that had full-blown embassies in them. Cobalt 7 just wasn’t big enough, well-trafficked enough, or powerful enough to justify such things. A fact that he suspected was going to work to his advantage on this occasion. He made his way toward the office of the Interstellar Court. He’d never had to go there before on his own behalf, but he had visited it on two prior occasions to provide testimony. It was a lightly staffed office that consisted almost entirely of two clerks and a magistrate that Kalan assumed had committed some transgression to be sent so far from anything interesting.

Despite being stationed in a relative backwater, though, the magistrate still wielded a truly terrifying amount of power, assuming there was enough evidence. Kalan just had to hope that the magistrate would decide that this issue warranted bumping whatever else was on the agenda. Kalan presented himself to the clerk who was at the front desk. The middle-aged woman gave him the professionally disinterested look of someone who had heard it all before. The more he talked, though, the more interested she became. When he finished his very abbreviated and sanitized version of events, she gave him a big smile.

“Oh, you just wait right there, son,” she said. “I expect the magistrate will want to see you immediately.”

While Kalan had kept his voice low enough not to carry, the clerk didn’t bother to do the same. So, a quick glance around revealed half a dozen people trying to kill him with hateful glares. It seemed pretty clear that they had all been waiting for some time to see the magistrate. While Kalan could understand their frustrations, he didn’t feel at all bad about jumping the queue. He was on a clock to be on his way. So, he was ready to capitalize on any opportunity that presented itself that would hasten his progress toward that goal. Plus, he wouldn’t have been able to skip the line if they had truly pressing or even interesting problems to present to the magistrate. The clerk came back about a minute later and indicated that he should follow her. She led him to an office, announced him, and then told him to go right inside. He did as he was told.

The person in the office wasn’t who had expected. The last time he’d been in to see the magistrate, the person in question had been a bitterly disappointed elderly man who was clearly riding out the last years of his career. The much younger man sitting behind the desk seemed a lot less like someone punching a clock and phoning it in. That wasn’t necessarily bad for Kalan, but he wasn’t sure that it was good either. The old magistrate would have ruled in his favor just because it was convenient and would stick it to a sovereign government. Kalan had no idea what this man would do. Kalan immediately dropped back into his default when dealing with the unknown. He became polite and neutral. The magistrate glanced up and nodded at a chair that sat in front of the man’s desk. Kalan settled into the chair and quickly scanned the room for anything with a name on it. There wasn’t anything, not even a nameplate on the desk. Odd, thought Kalan.

“Captain Rinn,” said the man. “I am Magistrate Kahn.”

“Magistrate,” said Kalan.

The man tried to give Kalan a hard look, but it was a pitiful showing. Kalan had been stared down by the leader of his people, one of the most dangerous people alive, and he hadn’t blinked. He wasn’t sure if the magistrate thought the look would make Kalan sweat or get him to confess to something, but Kalan met the hard look with a calm, neutral, and patient expression. The magistrate’s expression soured a little at the colossal failure of his hard look to elicit any response, so he went for a different tactic.

“Monsell,” said the magistrate.

Kalan continued to look at the magistrate with the same expression, not sure what the man expected from him. It wasn’t a secret that Kalan had crossed paths with Monsell in the past. As far as Kalan was concerned, the man might as well have studied his face after saying the word butter or wormhole. When it became clear that Kalan wasn’t going to spontaneously volunteer any information, the magistrate leaned back in his chair.

“I don’t like you, Rinn.”

Kalan said nothing. He considered the man for a moment, then rose to his feet. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” said the magistrate, leaning forward eagerly.

“For you wasting my exceedingly valuable time with whatever this petty power play was meant to accomplish,” said Kalan, before turning to the door.

“Who the hells do you think you are?” demanded the magistrate, shooting out of his chair. “You don’t turn your back on me, you insignificant little piece of…”

Kalan just looked at the man. The magistrate’s mouth snapped shut, and he started to visibly tremble.

“I’ll be filing a formal complaint with your superiors,” said Kalan, and pulled an innocuous piece of tech out of his pocket. “I wasn’t sure what to expect, so I took the liberty of recording this meeting.”The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The rest of the blood drained out of the magistrate’s face. Kalan was bluffing, of course, but it was a bluff based on an intuition. The device was nothing more than a communication device that he’d grabbed off the Ankala Rising so that the ship could contact him at great need. Fortunately, it looked like something that might be able to record a conversation. The magistrate’s reaction was telling, though. He’d clearly pissed someone off to end up here. In fact, he’d probably pulled something like he just tried to pull with Kalan on someone a lot more important. With that black mark in his past, though, it would likely only take the accusation of some kind of impropriety to end the man’s career. The way the magistrate stared at the device like he wanted to rip it out of Kalan’s hands said it all.

“You can’t do that,” said the magistrate.

Kalan thought the magistrate meant it to come across as an order, but it sounded a lot more like pleading.

“Of course, I can. I suspect I could beat you half to death in this very office. I bet the only thing your superiors would do is send me a gift basket and ask for a statement about how I defended myself from you.”

The grimace that crossed the magistrate’s face told Kalan that his ridiculous, hyperbolic statement was a lot closer to true than even he’d thought. This guy must have stomped all over someone’s toes to be that out of favor, thought Kalan. Still, that’s good for me.

“What do you want?” demanded the magistrate.

Kalan wanted the man a whole lot more desperate before he dangled even the possibility of hope in front of him. So, he said nothing. He let the silence fill the room until it was bearing down on the magistrate like a physical pressure.

“From you?” Kalan finally asked. “Nothing. Watching you lose your position in the Interstellar Court will be more than enough for my needs. I’ll find an honest magistrate to handle my legal matters.”

“I have a family,” said the magistrate.

Kalan gave serious consideration to actually beating the magistrate half to death for that wildly self-serving declaration. Something of that must have shown through in Kalan’s expression because the magistrate shrank back.

“You have a family,” said Kalan. “And did it ever stop you when someone said they had a family? Did you even care?”

The magistrate looked down at his desk.

“Answer me,” said Kalan in a voice made of chipped ice. “Those weren’t rhetorical questions.”

“No,” said the magistrate in a hoarse whisper.

“Well then, let it never be said that I didn’t take my cue from the example of an honorable magistrate of the Interstellar Court.”

As Kalan turned back to the door, the magistrate’s fragile will shattered.

“Please. Please don’t do this. I’ll lose everything!”

“You deserve to lose everything.”

“Just tell me what you want! I’ll do anything. Anything!”

Kalan glanced over his shoulder at the magistrate. The man was leaning over his desk, a hand outstretched to Kalan, breathing hard, and his eyes wild with animal panic. Kalan feigned indecision, letting the fear simmer inside the magistrate. Finally, heaving a very put-upon sigh, he pointed to the chair.

“Sit,” he commanded.

The magistrate dropped back into his chair. Kalan walked back over to the desk and dropped the data crystal the Ankala Rising had made of the Zeren ship’s recent records on top of the pile of paperwork that sat there.

“I only want two things from you. First things first, I want you to do your damn job. I was a victim of attempted piracy. My crew was assaulted. A Zeren navy ship committed the act well outside of Zeren space. I’m claiming the ship under Interstellar Law.”

The magistrate’s eyes went so wide it was comical. “You seized the ship? How?”

Kalan leaned down so his nose nearly touched the magistrate’s nose. “I was almost as angry then as I am now.”

The magistrate jerked his head back like he thought Kalan might just try to bite his eyes out. Kalan pressed a finger down onto the crystal and continued.

“Here are the records from the Zeren’s ship, sealed under the Interstellar Court encryption. They’re unaltered and, I think, will provide you with all the evidence you need. It’s pretty clear to me that you don’t care about those pesky legalities, but I don’t want to have to revisit this issue in the future. So, you’re going to review the data. You’re going to file the data. Then, you’re going to issue a judgment. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said the magistrate. “You want me to find in favor of you.”

“I’ll let the evidence speak for itself on those terms.”

The magistrate frowned at Kalan but picked up the data crystal. He slotted it into a dedicated console branded with the seal of the Interstellar court. There was a brief pause, after which the console verified the data had been sealed under the proper encryption. After another ten minutes, it verified that the data was an unaltered copy. Kalan had a limited grasp of how data verification like that worked, but the Ankala Rising had assured him that it was very, very accurate. He took her word for it. With the decryption in place and the data verified, the twitchy, frightened magistrate started reviewing the data. At first, he was just giving it a cursory look, spending more of his time looking at Kalan for signals than actually reviewing the records. After a few minutes, though, the magistrate had forgotten all about Kalan. He was moving through the records as fast as he could mentally process what he was seeing, his mouth hanging open in naked shock.

“This is beyond flagrant,” said the magistrate, managing to conjure what seemed like genuine indignation. “A Zeren naval vessel that far beyond their borders and attacking a civilian ship in unclaimed space? Outrageous. Simply outrageous!”

For the next half hour, Kalan just sat back and watched as the magistrate logged evidence, wrote a judgment, and declared the ship’s seizure lawful. A writ of ownership, both physical and digital, was issued to one Kalan Rinn and linked with his existing identity. The magistrate even went a step further than Kalan had expected and issued a fine against the Zeren government with so many zeroes attached to it that even a system government would feel it, assuming they ever paid. Kalan thought it was unfortunate that the man hadn’t spent more of his time and energy behaving like this. If he had, Kalan wouldn’t be preparing for the next thing he was going to demand of the magistrate.

“The fine is mostly symbolic,” said the magistrate. “A way of letting them and everyone else know how seriously we take these kinds of breaches. They’ll pay something, eventually, after they negotiate it down with the upper court. As the primary victim, you’ll see a piece of whatever they eventually pay, but it’ll probably take a decade or two before that happens.”

Kalan shrugged. He’d never expected to get anything more out of the Zeren government than the ship he was legally stealing. It wasn’t billions of credits out of their budget, but it was millions of credits of equipment and all of that shipboard data. That was the real prize. The thing that would help buy him and those he cared about sanctuary in Ikaren space. Kalan gathered up what he needed, including the now decrypted data crystal. The Interstellar Court had a copy in their records now, and nobody breached their data security. He gave the magistrate a flat look and the man abruptly remembered how this conversation began. Sweat started to bead on the magistrate’s forehead.

“So, one last piece of business to take care of,” said Kalan.