It probably says something about my life that I expected the shuttle trip down to Abyz to be interrupted by explosions, falling and general mayhem. As it turned out though, we managed to land safely at the starport in Raddox, Abyz’s largest tourism-approved city, with the ship in one piece and everyone still onboard.

“You owe me a hundred gold pieces,” Fari said to Darius.

“Law of averages says I can’t win them all I guess,” Darius said.

“Wait,” I asked. “Were you two betting on whether I was going to jinx the shuttle again?”

“What do you mean ‘betting again’?” Fari asked.

“Yeah,” Darius said. “That’s a standing bet we have. Where do you think I get the money for half our dinners out?”

“I am not cursed!” I said. “And I don’t make ship’s crash.”

“Of course not,” Fari said. “It’s just a statistically unlikely streak of isolated incidents, which has clearly come to an end.”

“I’m willing to go double or nothing on her next flight,” Darius said.

“You know I was wondering why the other pilots were laughing when ‘the new guy’ got this flight,” Razawan, the shuttle’s flyer said on the private telepathic link we shared. For most of our missions we defaulted to talking on a Fari-provided and secured spell link. It made the crew of the Horizon Breaker seem a little creepy at times, since it looked like we were silently moving together, all with one mind, but looking scary often suited our needs too.

“Don’t worry Raz, she really doesn’t crash ship’s that much,” Darius said. “They mostly explode actually.”

I hit him, which wasn’t precisely fair as he wasn’t precisely wrong. I had a recurring string of bad luck with flying vessels. I’d have several different Aetherial casters check me out to ensure that I wasn’t carrying a secret curse, but it seemed like the disasters were all natural. Or at least natural for someone in my line of work. Crystal Guardians, even initiate-class ones, draw a much higher share of unfriendly attention than a normal traveler. In part that’s because if trouble doesn’t come looking for us, then trouble is making a grave mistake and we’ll find it first.

“Thanks,” Razawan said. “That makes me feel so much better.”

“Maybe you’re good luck?” Darius suggested. Feelings don’t translate over the telepathic link, but I could still tell that Raz had winced at that. There was no better method to jinx someone than to suggest they might be lucky to have around.

“Maybe we should let Raz get back to the Horizon Breaker?” I said, hoping to get him out of the inevitable bad luck blast radius.

“I’d be delighted to!” Razawan said. “I’ll keep the engines charged up for a quick evac if you need one.”

We all stood back as the aether thrusters on the shuttle lit up and propelled the craft skyward. I whispered a silent blessing to keep Razawan and the rest of the Horizon Breaker’s crew safe. It wasn’t a spell, I’m not at all talented with Aetherial anima like that, so the only force the blessing held was the weight of my good wishes. As a magical shield those wouldn’t protect them from a stiff breeze but sometimes the point of saying kind words is just to let the universe (and ourselves) hear them.

“This is going to be a nice safe mission though isn’t it?” Illya asked. “Or were you not being entirely honest with Captain Okoro?”

“I said this was going to be the safest investigation option we had,” I said. “I never claimed it was actually safe though.”

“Oh yeah, speaking of which, have you figured out how to sabotage her idea yet so she has to take us along?” Darius asked Fari.

“I’m still working on that,” my translucent friend said.

“And that should tell you something,” I said.

Technically we were on Phase 2 of our operation on Abyz. Phase 1 had ended about ten seconds after we exited the warp portal when Fari cast a long range scanning spell on Abyz which told us the planet wasn’t suffering any global catastrophes. The planetary spell web had reports of things like local sporting competitions and promotions for various tourist sites, instead of the global evacuation orders we’d been afraid we would encounter.

With ‘cataclysmic crises’ off our list of worries, we were free to turn to our second priority;  finding our missing Crystal Guardian and her partner. That’s where my team came in.

Normally I don’t get to poach Darius for a team since we have different specialities. The same was true with Illya who was part Gold team, aka our medics. Even Fari and I hadn’t been able to work together exclusively much since she was promoted to the Horizon Breaker’s Chief of Logistics and Tactics.

This mission was special though. Of the crew of the Horizon Breaker, I was the only one with skill at manipulating Void anima. That gave me an edge in infiltration missions that was hard to match. It also meant that I tended to work best alone. Turning myself invisible was easy. Hiding other people wasn’t hard either. At least for me. For them the experience was like being blinded and deafened, with even their supernatural senses being suppressed.

Darius, Fari and a few other trusted allies were willing to work with me under those conditions, but even with practice and coordination they couldn’t perform at their full potential with that kind of a limitation in place.

Which isn’t to say having a support team wasn’t useful.

Fari was the Chief of Tactics for the Horizon Breaker for a damn good reason. She was naturally brilliant, and due to her unique circumstances had a better handle on Mental anima casting than anyone I’d ever met. She was vital to the operations of the Horizon Breaker and frequently had the task of coordinating the actions of the entire crew in real time.

I’d thought I would have to argue with Hanq long and hard to get her assigned to my team, but he’s almost insisted I take her along. The Horizon Breaker would function less efficiently without her onboard but having her with me gave my team a much higher chance of success. With her help, no one was going to ensorcell themselves into eavesdropping on our telepathic conversations, and no one was going to be able to casually read our minds.

Darius wasn’t a slouch in the Mental anima department either. He had a excellent reserve of Mental anima to draw on and he was quick and clever enough to use it well. Where he really shone though was in manipulating Energetic anima.

In part I’d brought him along because I needed him for the cover story we were presenting. The shuttle that dropped us off was independently warp capable, so we arrived posing as nothing more than ordinary tourists. Darius and I were a young couple in love, just like the thousands of other young couples in love that were visiting Raddox. Given that we actually were a young couple in love who hadn’t had a vacation in far too long it wasn’t exactly a difficult role to play.

As nice as the resort we checked into was though, the real reason I wanted Darius on the team was that there was only one person on the crew who had his ability to blow things up in a hurry even when “unarmed”, and that was Captain Hanq.

The mission, as I’d conceived it, was for me to quietly investigate Yael and Zyla’s disappearance. If everything went well no one would even be aware that anyone was looking for them.

The last time “everything went well” for me was “never” though, so when things got loud and unfriendly, I wanted to be able to call on some support that could be even “louder”.

That was also why I’d insisted on bringing Ilya on the team. One of my best skills is weaving shields. There’s relatively few things that can break a protective spell that I cast. No matter how good you are though, if you go looking for a fight you have to assume that you’re going to get hurt.

I’ve trained since I was six under a variety of tutors. Master Hanq taught me how to use nothing more than my raw physical strength, dexterity and speed, unaided by magic, to take out spellcasters more than twice my size. Master Raychelle taught me how to use my Void anima to make an absolute wreck of other casters and multiple opponents at once. For the last couple of years, I worked on refining everything they taught me and adding to my store of tricks techniques from anyone who was willing to work with me (or against me, you can learn a surprising amount from the right kind of foe).

Despite that (or maybe because of it) there wasn’t a bone in my body that hadn’t been broken multiple times. Without the healing magics of people like Ilya, I’d be a gelatinous mass of goo at best or (more likely) dead several times over.

Ilya had another purpose on the mission team though beyond the seemingly inevitable need to patch my broken body back together when things went poorlya.

I needed to be able to move around without drawing any attention at all. Invisiblity is great for avoiding notice, but sometimes the most obvious clue you can give your opponents is not being where they expect you to be.

We’d registered with Abyz immigration as a group of travelers out of Hellsreach, Darius’ old home planet. It made it easy to generate the proper identification, and fairly hard for anyone on Abyz to verify that the documents were faked. They could contact Hellsreach, but it was entirely under Imperial ownership with only a small population remaining on its surface to search for ancient artifacts. Everyone else had fled the artificial “war world” for the relative safety of life anywhere else at all.

That meant Abyz customs had no reason to deny us entry, but that irregularity could be noticed by anyone who was sufficiently paranoid and hooked into the Abyz global information web. While we didn’t know that there was anyone like that on the planet, past missions suggested it was always better to plan for that eventuality. Sometimes the troublemakers are dumb as a bag of bricks, like on Halli, but people who are that stupid probably wouldn’t have been able to take down Yael.

What we needed against a smart opponent, was someone to take my place and remain visible even while I was off skulking around. Between Ilya and Fari, we had a trick to make that happen.

Fari was a genius with mental anima, so she could pretend to be me pretty easily. What she lacked was a body or the Physical anima to manipulate one. That was what Ilya’s primary role was.

As a medic, Ilya had Physical anima to spare. Take a few drops of my blood and a suitcase full of enchanted medical quick-fix gum, aka “body parts in a bottle”, and, within an hour of checking into our rooms at the resort, our bathtub was home to an exact, if lifeless, replica of me. Add Ilya’s Physical anima so that it could move around and link the body to Fari’s gem and we had enacted, officially, the creepiest plan I’d ever come up with.

It was freaky watching Fari do her disturbingly accurate impersonation of me, but it really gave me the creeps when she and Ilya released their hold on my doppleganger and it dropped onto the bed like a discarded doll.

“Ok, I know what nightmares I’m going to be having tonight,” I said, looking at the perfectly still version of myself.

“Are you really sure you want to go through with this?” Darius asked.

“We have worked under invisibility veils together before,” Fari said.

“Yeah, but this isn’t going to be a straightforward investigation,” I said. “I’m going to need to break into all kinds of places and do it really fast. We don’t know how much time, if any, Yael and Zyla have left.”

“Let it be noted that I hate this plan then,” Darius said. “And that you better come back to us, with or without Yael and Zyla.”

“I will,” I said. “But I’m not going to give up on them either. We’re critically short of Crystal Guardians as it is. We can’t afford to lose two good ones.”

“Or a great Initiate Guardian either,” Fari said.

“I’ll come back,” I said. “Just be sure to stay safe yourselves. When I call for the cavalry…well you know how that tends to go.”

“Oh, before you go, one second,” Fari said and slipped back inside my doppleganger. Ilya recast her part of the spell and my double rose back to life.

Before I could turn invisible and head out, Fari hopped off the bed and hugged me.

“I never get to do that,” she said and stepped back to give me a thumbs up.

“You all are the best,” I said and drew the three of them into a return hug, with Ilya looking a little confused by the show of affection.

Then I disappeared.

This was going to be hard enough and they didn’t need to see the tremors that shook my hands. The center of my chest had taken on the familiar chill of peril and it was deep enough and cold enough that I knew something big and terrifying was waiting for me.

We left Halli and the corruption there behind us the moment the Imperial dreadnaught that  Hanq had called for arrived. Fari gave them a compressed memory dump with the names, dates and verifying records for each of the false trials the Magistrate had presided over during her tenure. I guessed there’d be around a dozen or so Imperial High Court judges who were going to be very busy in the months to come, not to mention a similar number of private penitentiary companies that were going to be greeted with the news that they were no longer in business and several thousand people who would be tasting freedom again for the first time in far too long.

For as tempting as it was to stay and make sure that was all sorted out properly though, I felt a surge of eager anticipation when the Horizon Breaker jumped through the portal to warp space.

“Your danger sense acting up yet?” Darius asked as we scrubbed down to get the grime from Halli out of our skin.

“Yeah,” I said as I scoured his back with a rough washcloth under the hot water. “It went off as soon as Fari told us about Yael’s letter.”

“What’s she like?” Darius asked, stepping out of the spray of water and letting me get underneath.

“Yael?” I asked. “The last time I saw her, we fought off a warlord armada together. She was only an apprentice then and there was only one person I saw who lasted more than three seconds in a fight with her.”

“You?”

“I wish. If we’d fought she’d would have splattered me across a disturbingly wide area,” I said. “No, it was one of our enemies, a girl named Zyla.”

“Is this the same Zyla who’s been partnered up with her since then?” Darius asked, rubbing me down with some industrial strength detoxifying soap.

“The same, although I believe Yael is technically Zyla’s parole officer,” I said.

“How long of a parole period is it?”

“Just a year before she could apply for a review,” I said. “Xyla was instrumental in helping us stop her father and she worked pretty hard after that to make amends for the things she did too.”

“So why is she still on parole?” Darius asked.

“She gone review yet,” I said. “Last I heard, Zyla had a few gray marks on her record for how she handled some of the situations she and Yael had been in and she wasn’t willing to stand in front of the parole review board until they were cleaned up.”

Darius followed me out of the shower and passed me a towel so that we could dry off. I felt the tingle of a small spell on it and gave him a quick kiss. With his talent at manipulating Energetic anima, it was a trivial effort to enchant a towel to be warm and fluffy. Trivial but still appreciated.

“That makes sense,” he said. “But it sounds like you think there’s more going on there?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t kept in touch with them that well, I’m just wondering if it’s a question of Zyla holding herself to an unrealistic standard or if Yael’s been encouraging that brand of craziness in her.”

“Yael’s a Guardian isn’t she?” he asked as he pulled on his pants.

“Yeah, but she’s probably the tightest wound Guardian I’ve ever met,” I said, pulling on a fresh set of my combat robes. In theory I was safe onboard the ship, but I like to be protected by both theory and heavy duty environmental spells whenever possible.

“So wound up that she’s likely to make mistakes?” he asked.

“No, just the reverse,” I said. “She and Zyla are both ridiculously skilled with Aetherial anima. Watching the two of them fight was like watching master gamesmen at work. It was all plans with plans and maneuvers that come out of nowhere and should never work but somehow turn out in their favor anyways.”

“Could the two of them have had a falling out?” he asked.

“Maybe?” I said. “That would explain why they’re both out of contact but if Yael had seen that coming she’d have left more information in her message.”

I leaned in to bury my face in his hair and drew in a nice long breath. It was a little weird, I’ll admit, but I loved the smell of his hair. When I held the embrace a few seconds too long he put his hands over the arms I wrapped around his chest and hugged them until I relaxed and let go.

“You’re going to be careful on this one right?” he said. Despite the phrasing and tone of voice he used, it was a request not a question.

“As much as I can be,” I said.

“And you’re going to come back to me?”

“Always,” I said. We both knew it was a statement of intent more than a promise. The Horizon Breaker had been very successful in the two years we’d been a part of its crew but  even so we’d lost people, and come close to losing each other a few times too. In fights like the one on Halli, I still had a tendency to show off and not take things seriously, but that was a situation where we were dealing with an opposition so far below our weight class that we would have been in more danger from excessive worry than from anything they could do to us.

In this case, I had no idea what kind of opposition we were up against, but excessive worry didn’t seem like it would be an issue.

Once we were dressed, we joined Hanq, Fari and the other team leads in the Captain’s briefing room.

“We’re going to be arriving at the planet Abyz in sixteen hours,” Captain Hanq said. “Officially our reason for visiting is to convey a diplomatic parcel to the Imperial Ambassador there. The parcel is part of the yearly budget discussions and contains an offer from the Empire to assist Abyz’s efforts to renew and revitalize it’s main orbital station.”

I winced. We were going in undercover. That was good in the sense that I’d get to be in the vanguard but bad in the sense that we’d have to be restrained and tactful in how we looked for answers. I’d been trained in a lot of things, but restraint and tact were areas I was still working on.

“Our true purpose will be to ascertain the whereabouts and status of these two Imperial personnel,” Hanq said and called up holo-vid representations of Yael and Zyla in the center of our conference table. The scrying bowls in front of each of us changed and a book appeared which listed the vital information for each of our missing persons.

I watched the other team leads take in the relevant details and saw more than a few force themselves to hide their surprise. Rescuing a Crystal Guardian wasn’t an everyday mission and everyone at the table had been with the crew long enough to know how tough the “non-standard” missions we took on could be. One-by-one I saw them glance over at me and I could only shrug and try to look like I had a handle on things in response.

“We’re going to be very limited in our investigation though,” Fari said, taking over the briefing as Captain Hanq often had her do. “Abyz has tight restrictions on immigration and tourism. Apart from the primary spaceport and a half dozen resorts, off-worlders are barred from the rest of the planet.”

“What about Imperial inspectors?” I asked. Worlds that tried to bar Imperial inspectors tended to be worlds where the corruption was obvious enough to be visible from space, but a few of them were paranoid for other reasons.

“Inspectors have full access, but it takes a month to ‘acclimate’ them to the planet,” Fari said.

“Toxins in the air?” Tym, the other Black Team leader asked. “Is this another cesspit like Halli?”

“No, supposedly its beautiful there,” Fari said. “Very safe too. The whole planet is bound up in fate magics.”

There was a round of collective cursing from everyone at the table.

Aetherial anima dealt with many different immaterial qualities of reality. My danger sense, for example, drew on my Aetherial magic stores. Precognition spells, illusion casting and all sort of other unique and interesting effects could be created with Aetherial anima but the most basic use for it was fate binding.

In theory a fate spell simply altered a number of random events so that a given overall effect the caster desired occurred. Rather than shooting a lightning bolt at someone like an Energetic anima caster could, a fate binding might cause an electrical power line to fray and land on the caster’s enemy. Or they might get caught in a particularly bad thunderstorm and struck naturally. Or a hovercar from the Lightning Fast Delivery company might run them over.

Fate magic was, generally, imprecise which made it lousy for achieving very specific ends but excellent for encouraging broad trends, or executing attacks that were incredibly hard to see coming. As a Void caster I had some level of protection against it since I could devour any anima that touched me, but that wouldn’t necessarily help when a Lighting Fast Delivery hovercar was barreling down on me.

“From Guardian Clearborn’s note we know that they were investigating an anomaly in the Fate bindings themselves,” Hanq said. “She indicated the need for care due to the possibility for a cascade failure in the spell matrix and advised us to restrict our investigation to ensuring that a planetary crisis hasn’t been triggered.”

“How much damage are we looking at if there is a cascade failure of the fate bindings?” I asked.

“Abyz bills itself as a ‘Paradise Planet’,” Fari said. “And they can support that claim largely thanks to the fate bindings. Check out their crime and accidents statistics.”

I looked at the scrying pool in front me as the personnel reports on Yael and Zyla changed to a datasheet on Abyz.

“Did they forget to fill in their numbers here?” I asked.

“Nope,” Fari said. “The Imperial Ambassador’s seal is on these. They’ve had no accidents and no violent crimes since their induction into the Empire.”

“That’s not possible is it?” Darius asked. “What would you power that many Fate spells with?”

“According to the Queen’s senior staff, the ley lines on Abyz are naturally unbalanced towards conversion to Aetherial anima and are exceptionally suited to fate spells,” Fari said.

“And has anyone ever confirmed that?” I asked.

“The fate spells were in place before Abyz joined the Empire,” Fari said. “The few efforts that were made to probe them resulted in partial collapses and so the research was called off.”

“That’s why Guardian Clearborn advised us to avoid tampering with the binding spells,” Hanq said. “Abyz is home to over six hundred million people, and another sixty million tourists. The fate bindings are their primary safety net. If they fail, we’ll be looking at a backlash that could kill all of them.”

“What are our mission parameters then?” I asked.

“Our primary goal is to preserve the lives of the people on Abyz,” Hanq said. “Guardian Clearborn was concerned that if they went missing it might be due to an event severe enough to trigger a cascade failure. We need to make sure that’s not the case and have a contingency plan in place in case it is.”

“And if everyone there is happy and healthy?” I asked.

“Our secondary mission is to locate and assist Guardian Clearborn and her assistant,” Hanq said.

“What about catching the bad guys?” I asked.

“We don’t know that there are any bad guys here,” Hanq said. “Its entirely possible there was a natural disruption in Abyz’s ley lines that caught Guardian Clearborn’s attentions. It’s also entirely possible that her failure to stay in contact is due to perfectly normal difficulties encountered in pursuit of the case.”

He waited a moment to make sure that the official message had been conveyed, before continuing.

“We are not idiots however, so we’re going to assume that there are bad guys at work here until we have proof otherwise,” he said. “Guardian Watersward, please assemble a team for deep infiltration.”

I looked at my former mentor and smiled. I’d already been thinking of that exact idea, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be a fan of the team I had in mind.

The problem with following the rules, is that they can lead you to all kinds of places you don’t want to go. I pondered that as I waited my turn for sentencing. It was an annoying thought to chew on but at least it was better than chewing on the stench that wafted off the slime cauldrons which lined every office and corridor of the headquarters of the Supreme Magistrate of Halli.

Halli was a minor little backwater on one of the many edges of the Crystal Empire. If it had been just two star systems further from the core it would have been outside the jurisdiction of the Crystal Guardians and therefore not my problem to deal with. As one of the Crystal Empress’s sworn defenders though, I was duty bound to investigate all claims against any planetary government that involved the violation of the Imperial Rights granted to all of the citizens of the Empire.

In practice that usually involved showing up, telling the offending party or parties to knock it off and dragging one or two of the principal culprits back for trial before an Imperial Court. It wasn’t a smooth or stress free life that I led by any stretch of the imagination but it was interesting and rewarding in its own ways.

Standing in the sentencing line that lead to the Magistrate’s theater left me questioning those rewards though. On the positive side, I had power and privilege and loved ones who’d been with me for years. On the other hand there was the stench of Magistrate’s hall coupled with the fact that no matter how much I wanted to, I was not allowed to call down an orbital strike and obliterate the facility and everyone inside it.

“Prisoner ‘Mel Watersward’, step forward and receive sentencing,” the bailiff said.

I smirked. The Magistrate was about two minutes away from giving me all the evidence I needed and if I was really lucky she’d push the issue just a little farther than that.

The bailiff pulled me forward onto the rusty steel scaffolding that ran across the room to the platform that was suspended over the bubbling vats which packed the lower levels of the Halli Central Justice building. The catwalk swayed as we walked and with the lack of railings I was pretty sure more than a few defendants wound up in the slime smelting pots below before charges were even read against them.

Halli had once been the haven of a Warlord named Ney. It was the stinky jewel in his crown for two reasons; first, it was home to a rare form of goo that held destructive enchantments extremely well. Weapons fabricated with Halli-slime were more damaging than standard military gear by a noticeable margin. The slime was self-renewing too, in fact it was hard to come to Halli and not wind up splattered with the disgusting stuff at some point or other. It was pretty much everywhere.

For Warlord Ney’s purposes though the prime benefit of Halli was that it lay off the standard trade routes so most of the work done there was invisible to his rivals. The warlords he fought with knew he had a hidden base to work from but were never able to locate it, at least not before one of my predecessors found Halli and brought down Ney’s reign entirely.

Once Halli was accepted into the Crystal Empire, a new government was put in place, one that answered to the people of Halli and agreed to abide by the Imperial rules of conduct towards its citizens and neighbors.  That practice worked better in some place and worse in others, with Halli being one of the “worse” places.

In Halli’s case, the Empire had simply failed to provide the oversight needed. Over twenty years ago, in the wake of the Galactic War, there’d been a million systems that joined together to form the new Empire. The Crystal Empress and the Prime Crystal Guardians had been at the spearhead of that and while they were inhumanely powerful, even they had limits in terms of how many problems they could deal with at once.

People often make the mistake of thinking the Crystal Empire formed during the few months of galactic scale warfare where the Empress swept the old Warlords outside of the star systems that make up the Empire. That was just the beginning though. Even two decades later, the Crystal Empire is still being built from the remains of the violent and lawless era that preceded it.

It’s not a perfect Empire, but it wasn’t meant to be. Perfection is something we work towards, not something we are. Usually that means striving to be better and looking for ways to improve what we do and who we are. With situations like Halli though, it’s more a matter of deciding if there’s anything left worth salvaging or if we should just burn it all to the ground and start over.

I was ruminating on that as the bailiff and I arrived at the central platform for my “sentencing”. The Magistrate was sitting above us on a separate platform. To her left and right a dozen bodyguards lounged in various states of inebriation. None of them were too drunk to fight, but it also wasn’t likely that any of them would have to thanks to the anti-armor turrets that were trained on the defendant’s platform.

If the guards decided to shoot me, I’d be facing about a dozen bolt casters that could punch holes in steel plates. If the turrets opened up, the platform I was standing on and everyone within about fifteen feet of it would be reduced to a fine mist unless they had personal shields that were stronger that starship armor.

I noticed the bailiff was quick to leave me alone on the platform.

The wimp.

“This one looks like she’ll fetch some coin,” the Magistrate said. “What are the charges against her?”

“Conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to incite rebellion and falsifying official documentation,” the bailiff read for a safe distance away from me.

“Ah, good a Class 1 felon,” the Magistrate said. “Any signs of mental deviations?”

“No,” the bailiff said. “The arrest was clean. No resistance and no delusional claims.”

“Good,” the Magistrate said. “The Zera Asylum is behind on their payments, better that we keep them out of the bidding on a good catch like this. What about witnesses, where’s our case against the convict?”

“I’m still here Magistrate!” the same witness the prosecution had called in the last three cases said.

“Do you have enough authorizations left this month Gurge?” the Magistrate asked.

“This will tap me out,” he said, “But I think it’s worth it.”

“You’re probably right,” the Magistrate said. “Enter your account.”

I saw Gurge type a code into a holodisk before beginning his testimony. Witnesses in trials on Halli couldn’t be paid for their testimony, but they could be reimbursed for the time away from work. Apparently many such witnesses worked on ludicrously profitable short term jobs right around the time of their testimony. Authorizations for such jobs were at a premium though since there was only so much demand for witness testimony to go around.

You’d think that would breed for a better class of witness. One capable of recounting their testimony in a compelling and convincing manner. Sadly with Gurge that wasn’t exactly the case.

“I was approached by that woman there,” he began and pointed at me. “to overthrow the Halli government and kill the senior government officials in the process. She said she was a member of the Devil’s Brigade and that she could use a strong guy like me when the time came.”

Gurge continued to spin an elaborate tale about the offer I made him and the incredible resources I had at my disposal. By the time his tale was done I was kind of wishing I was the person he described. I mean she had a fleet of cloaked warships at her disposal and was going to take over Halli and the whole empire if she wasn’t stopped!

Sadly, the reality of our meeting was a lot less exciting that that. It went kind of like this (our scene begins in a rundown spacer’s bar on Halli named “Mun’s”):

“Man, aren’t the import tariffs here a pain?” Gurge, aka the random guy sitting next to me, asked without any other lead-in.

“Eh, what are you gonna do?” I replied.

“I heard some folks might try to get the bums in charge kicked out,” Gurge said.

“More power to ‘em,” I said.

“Want to go back to my place?” he asked.

“Nope.” I said.

“You’re under arrest for sedition,” a uniformed guard said about fifteen minutes later. “Please state your name and planet of citizenship.”

“She said her name was Naru and she’s from Yedo,” Gurge said from behind the guard, making up both a name and a home planet that had nothing to do with me. I’m not sure “Yedo” is even a real place.

I went along quietly from there because the whole reason I’d been hanging out in the dive where I found Gurge was so that someone would arrest me. I hadn’t expected it would be as easy as “be in the wrong spot and look like a foreigner” but I’d decided to see how literal our informant was being.

Since there was still the outside possibility that the arrest was a result of Gurge’s trumped up charges and delusions, I stayed the night in the local jail cell and listened to the tales of the rest of the people who were there with me.

The other prisoners were all as new to Halli as I was, but the guards were more than willing to let us know what we’d gotten ourselves into.

It turned out that even slime has its limitations and thanks to the demand for it, the Halli slime colony had been over-harvested. They tried raising prices to make up for the dwindling supply but there were other alternatives so the buyers went elsewhere.

That’s apparently when the Magistrate decided that if they couldn’t sell slime, they’d become slime and start selling people instead. The Crystal Empress has this little rule about slavery being illegal though – to the point where active slave traders are on the short list of targets that I’m allowed “unrestricted judicial authority” in dealing with. That’s not exactly the same as saying I can kill them on sight, I still wind up before a review board if I do, but that’s one of the easier conversations to have with an Imperial judge.

The Supreme Magistrate of Halli found a clever loophole around that prohibition though. She never sold anyone into slavery. She just transferred convicted criminals to penitentiaries owned by private companies and received a “processing fee” to cover the transference costs. The private companies then put the convicted felons to productive use for the duration of their incarceration.

The difference between that arrangement and slavery was a slim one at best and was made completely irrelevant when the “felons” were falsely accused and convicted.

“The evidence is clear,” the Magistrate said. “We sentence the defendant to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Next case.”

“Oh, you’re not done with me yet,” I said.

“Guards, remove the convict and bring the next case in,” the Magistrate said.

“Do you need to see anymore of this?” I asked. The question wasn’t directed at the Magistrate. It was meant for my commanding officer, and childhood mentor, Captain Hanq Okoro of the Crystal Empress’s ship the Horizon Breaker, formerly “Master Hanq” when he was teaching me to fight and before that “Warlord Okoro” when he ruled a couple of star systems and fought against the Empress in the Galactic War.

Whenever I think of how strange my path through life has been, I just turn and look at my old teacher and see that it could be so much weirder.

“Oh, I saw enough of this place about five minutes after you landed,” Hanq said. “Fari, do we have recordings of the other trials that came before Mel’s too?”

“Of course sir,” Fari replied. Knowing my best friend, I was pretty sure she’d not only recorded the trials over the telepathic link that she established for me, but at this point had also raided every spell web and ship’s memory cluster on the planet.

“Shall I bring them in then?” I asked.

“Who are you talking to?” the Magistrate asked.

“Hush,” I told her. “I’ll get to you in a second.”

“I will not be spoken to like that!” the Magistrate said. “Guards, get her out of here.”

The bodyguards on the platform with the Magistrate stirred but it was the regular guards that jumped at their leader’s words.

“I’ve got warrants ready for basically everyone in that building with you except for the convicts,” Hanq said. “Take them all down.”

“No fair, she has a headstart!” Darius said. “Give us thirty seconds to get ithere at least!”

I loved Darius. We’d been together for the better part of two years and had somehow avoided driving each other completely insane. Technically his talents lay in working with mental and energetic magics but as far as I was concerned it was his abilities to understand me and put up with my particular brand of craziness that were his real magic powers.

Which wasn’t to say that we weren’t a little nuts in our own way. I was part of “Black Team”, basically the infiltration wing of Captain Hanq’s crew. Darius was part of “Blue Team”, basically the engineering and enchanting wing of the crew. Both teams had combat roles in a lot of the missions that we engaged in, so there was a bit of a running competition between the two groups, to the point where, though I loved him dearly, there was no chance in hell I was going to hold off on starting with the arrests and let the Blues catch up with us.

The first two guards reached the platform I was on and pulled out standard issue stun sticks. A talented caster could replicate the effects of one easily enough, but the stun sticks made it much easier to invoke so that even relatively weak and untrained troops could take down superior foes.

That of course assumed that they could hit their foes in the first place.

I was kind to them. No broken bones, no torn ligaments, just gentle holds and a simple spell to rob them of the energy that they needed to stay conscious. I couldn’t afford to hold back like that against serious opposition, but the armed forces of Halli seemed to be composed of swaggering idiots and poorly trained cannon fodder.

“Just so you know,” I said, “you are all under arrest.”

“Who are you to arrest us?” the Magistrate asked. I saw anger, fear and confusion warring on her face. I also saw her bodyguards getting up as their interest was peaked.

“I am Guardian Mel Watersward, of the Crystal Empire,” I said. “I accuse you of high crimes against the citizens of the Empire you have sworn to protect. Come along peacefully and you will be treated honorably.”

I’m not sure anyone on Halli had reference points for either “peaceful” or “honorable” but I had to make the offer anyways.

“A Crystal Guardian?” the Magistrate asked. “And you’re going to arrest all of us?”

“Technically I’ve already arrested you,” I said. “The only question now is whether I’ll need to use force to bring you into custody.”

“You’re one girl,” the Magistrate said. “Even if you are one of the Crystal Guardians, I have a planet full of troops at my disposal and the Empire is very far away. You’ve made a grave mistake coming here, one that I don’t think we can let you walk away from. Kill her.”

I heard the rotary motors of the anti-armor turrets that were pointed at me spin to life. In response, I raised a shield that was, as it turns out, significantly stronger than starship armor. That meant the sustained barrage accomplished nothing except to charge me up with the energy I leeched from away from it.

“You poor dear,” I said to the Magistrate. “You got two things wrong. First I’m not alone.”

Two of the other squads from Black team emerged from the shadows when I nodded my head.

“And second,” I waited a moment and heard the series of explosions I was expecting. “Your troops have no vehicles or equipment to fight with. In case you’re wondering, that means your reign here is over. The Empire’s going to shut Halli down completely, put you in a nice Imperial run facility, spring all the people you “convicted” and then arrest everyone that you’ve ever done business with.”

That didn’t go over too well with the Magistrate or her bodyguards. With the regular forces added in that put the odds at three-to-one against us. Sadly, that meant the next few minutes were disappointing ones for pretty much everyone.

The Halli forces were disappointed when they woke up (later) and found that despite numerical superiority they hadn’t stood a ghost of chance against us.

Black team was disappointed because there just weren’t enough targets to go around. We kept poaching each others arrests to the point where it got almost comical and people were escaping because we were “helping” each other with the arrests too strenuously.

Blue team was the most disappointed of all though. By the time they arrived there were so few targets left to capture that Black team’s victory was already assured.

“You could have saved at least a few for us,” Darius complained when he arrived.

“We did!” I said. “There were like four or maybe even five that got away!”

“Bah! You caught seven of them yourself!” he said.

“Well, they kind of…fell onto my fists repeatedly,” I said.

“Oh yeah, please try that one at the Captain’s debriefing,” Darius said. “I really want to see you sell that to him.”

“We may be skipping the debriefing,” Fari said. “We just got a communique from Guardian Clearborn.”

“Yael sent a message?” I asked. “What’s up?”

“It was an automated note,” Fari said. “It was scheduled to send in case she went missing or someone killed her.”

“We’re going to treat this as a Guardian down scenario,” Hanq said. “I want everyone back on the Horizon Breaker asap. I’ve got an Imperial dreadnaught inbound. It’ll be here in four hours. They’ll take over this situation and I want us to ready to move then.”

Four hours was pretty quick, but I had to wonder if was even possible for us to move fast enough now. Crystal Guardians, particularly fully trained ones like Yael as hard to stop much less take down. In Yael’s case she had a special advantage too. Zyla. The daughter of an immensely powerful warlord and a Guardian-class caster in her own right. Between the two of them, they should have been able to handle almost any threat that came up.

That hadn’t been the case and given that Yael had a note setup to cover their disappearance, they’d known how bad it would be even when they first went into whatever mess they discovered.

I looked out to the stars that awaited us and felt a chill run through me. Whatever else was true, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy.