Louis Phillipe Armstrong sat on the ground with his back to a shipping container whimpering to himself, gingerly touching his right hand to his face every few seconds while his left arm held his legs to his chest. His nose had been broken at the protest—it was his first broken bone. But it wasn’t Louis’s fault, really. He’d arrived at the protest to peacefully yell at the men in the black and blue armor like everyone else. It wasn’t his fault someone in the crowd had thrown a stone over the picket line and the armored man had caught it and tossed it back. It wasn’t his fault the returning stone had clocked Uncle Reynold square in the forehead and knocked him to the ground in a bloody-faced mess. It wasn’t his fault the protesters around him had surged forth into the men in black and blue armor and tried to tear them apart. It wasn’t his fault the men in the black and blue armor had torn into their assailants with a ferocity he could tell had been brewing for quite some time, even if it was only with batons and fists. And it certainly wasn’t his fault that the ensuing fight had ended up causing most of the people who were only there for a peaceful protest to stampede away from the scene, stepping on and over poor little Louis Phillipe Armstrong. He sniffled again and held the collar of his green-striped T-shirt to his nose. The shirt’s collar had already been thoroughly stained through with the deep maroon of his own blood, but it’d also been drying fast enough for it to still be able to take in the drops that leaked out every minute or two. Louis looked up at the dome rising high over the suburb and- He sneezed suddenly and violently, and a clot of blood spattered itself on the pavement in front of him. Whimpering some more, he folded his legs back up and held them tighter with both arms. He’d wait a few more minutes before trying to make his way home—just in case the men in the black and blue armor were still taking their frustration out on anyone who got in their way.

                Louis heard low talking and looked over his left shoulder past the shipping crate he’d been leaning up against. He hadn’t noticed how quiet it had been until the quiet had been broken. Something about so much quiet after the riotous volume of the protest and subsequent brawl rubbed Louis the wrong way, like it wasn’t natural for there to have been so much and then so little so close together. His stomach growled. Uncle Reynold came limping around the corner, being propped up by one of the men in black in blue armor. This man had removed his helmet, and his thin, greasy hair was messed up to one side. They were talking in hushed tones; not quite urgent, but in a way that made Louis think he still wouldn’t have liked to have been heard speaking to the man in the black and blue armor.

                “Uncle?” Louis lifted his hand from his legs and made a cautious wave to Uncle Reynold. Uncle Reynold looked around, saw Louis, and smiled a tired, blood-stained grin.  He looked at the man who’d been helping him walk and tilted his head in a motion that clearly meant ‘can we sit down here?’ even to Louis. The man in the black and blue armor—he looked even older than Uncle Reynold, Louis noticed—grunted, and the pair hobbled over to where Louis was sitting. The man in the black and blue armor helped Uncle Reynold lean against the shipping crate to Louis’s left, held his hand while the man slid down to the ground, and sat crisscross across from them. He hit the ground with a hard clunk and grimaced; Louis was reminded of one time he’d hurt his butt sitting down too fast for a birthday cake and it ruined the experience of having the cake. He couldn’t remember whose birthday it had been.

                “Hey, Louis,” Uncle Reynold said.

                “Uncle,” Louis responded, trying to sound calm and relaxed in front of the man in the black and blue armor. He was neither calm nor relaxed. The man across from him was, and he was starting to smile a little.

                “I’d like you to meet Jillian,” Uncle Reynold told him, and motioned a hand to the man. “He’s from Misha originally. Came out here hoping to fight the smuggling rings. Far as his kind go, he seems alright so far.”

                The man in the black and blue armor furrowed his brow and frowned for a second, then shrugged it off. “Second lieutenant Jillian Houston,” the man said. He offered a black and blue armored hand to Louis. Louis looked at Uncle Reynold, who nodded curtly. Louis still hesitated before giving it a quick and cautious shake. “Seems your uncle here was the unlucky matchstick to this whole mess,” the man stated matter-of-factly. “I don’t want to scare you by saying he’s lucky to be alive, but…” He chuckled and looked at the ground. “Well, to be perfectly honest, he’s pretty lucky to be alive. Not from the rock that hit him—that did a number on him, sure—but for being unconscious when everyone ran for the hills. That’s not something everyone gets to walk away from.”

                “Damn lucky, and damn straight,” Uncle Reynold said, smiling. He reached down to pull his T-shirt up, then over his head, then off. His lean chest was so bruised it reminded Louis of the consistency and color of grapes. He wiped his bald head with the shirt, moaning lightly when he grazed the wound on his forehead. He inspected the shirt carefully after he was done rubbing his skin with it. “This is gonna need a couple loads in the wash to get all that out, I think. Martha’s not gonna be happy.”

                The man in the black and blue armor exhaled suddenly—it was probably a sign of amusement, Louis decided—and turned back to Louis. “So, kid, what’s your name?” Uncle Reynold opened his mouth to speak, but the man in the black and blue armor whose name Louis had already forgotten shot a hand out faster than Louis had time to track. “I’m asking the kid, buddy. Nothin’ against you, but hear me out on this.” He hadn’t even turned to look at Uncle Reynold while he’d spoken. “What’s your name?”

                Louis looked over at his uncle again, fully aware of the fact that his glance was the closest thing he could do to asking for approval for speaking with the man in the black and blue armor. “Louis, it’s ok to talk to the man,” Uncle Reynold said quietly after a moment. “Do you wanna be a man yourself?” Louis nodded. “Then you’re going to have to talk for yourself as well. Talk to him now and if it goes well I’ll see if we can get some yogurt later.” Louis smiled at that and nodded again. Yogurt was good, and he’d heard from his classmates earlier that day that a shipment of a bunch of dairy products had just come in the previous evening.

                Louis turned to face the soldier, gripping his curled legs tighter than ever. “I’m Louis,” he ventured. The man in the black and blue armor smiled, then made a small spinning motion with his right hand that meant ‘what else?’ “I’m in year 4 of school at Lafayette Middle School and my best friend is Christian Harolds and my favorite color was blue until you guys showed up then I had to change it to green and my favorite food is my mother’s meat pie we only get on holidays.”

                That seemed to interest the man in the black and blue armor. “My favorite food’s a pumpkin pie we used to have every harvest season back on Misha. My mom wasn’t much of a fan of it, but my grandpa made the best pie in the countryside. My favorite color was orange when I was your age because I really liked that type of pie, but it changed to white eventually. Something poetic about purity and cleanness, I think. Like the sun when you look at it from space, or the stars.”

                Louis perked up a little when his mind gave him an obvious question to ask. “Your sun or mine?”

                The man smiled and leaned back a little. “Well, suppose it’d be mine I’m thinking of. But we all share the same stars at night, so there’s that that ain’t so different.” He nodded to himself and looked down, then back up. “You mentioned your favorite color was blue until we came. Why’d it have to change?”

                “When you guys showed up everyone in class would always look at me funny when I said my favorite color was blue. It didn’t used to be like that and nobody ever told me what was wrong with blue, just that it only started when you guys showed up.” Louis caught himself and realized he’d been pouring his heart out to this stranger. Confused at why he’d been so willing to talk, he retreated a small degree. “And green’s a fine color. I like green too.”

                The man in the black and blue armor sighed like it was the thousandth time he’d had to sigh for the same reason. “Look, Louis.” He paused and looked over at Uncle Reynold. Louis glanced up at his uncle just long enough to see the man give a serious nod. Louis looked away. “I gotta ask, since everyone I ask this question to has a different response and they’re all interesting to hear. Do you know why we showed up?”

                Louis looked back at the man in the black and blue armor. “Mom says it was to keep the peace and fight crime. Dad says it was to take control of our city and stop us from leaving. Uncle Reynold…” He looked up at his uncle again. Uncle Reynold nodded at Louis again with a gentle, beaten smile. “Uncle Reynold’s been saying you guys came to take away freedom. He’s been saying a lot about you guys being the bad guys and about how the whole system’s turning bad and there’s nothing we can do about it because we’re still trying to set up our city and even with the Americans gone you guys are just the same.” He paused for a moment, then hid his face in the crook between his folded legs and covering arms. “I don’t know who the bad guys are. But one of you guys threw a rock at Uncle Reynold. That’s something bad guys would do. I think.”

                There was a long silence between the three humans, and eventually the man in the black and blue armor sighed that long sigh of his again, like he’d been tensing to receive a blow and had weathered it without as much pain as he’d expected. “Fair enough.” He paused until Louis pulled his head out of the darkness of his own embrace and looked up at the man in the black and blue armor again. “Would it interest you to know why I think I’m here?” Louis nodded slowly. “Y’know, just because you seem to have everyone’s perspective but mine.”

                “Louis’s a smart kid,” Uncle Reynold spoke up unprompted. “And I’m not too dull myself, though after today that might not be the case.” The two men laughed lightly, and Louis smiled a little. His uncle was a funny man, even if he was always getting into trouble.

                “True enough,” the man in the black and blue armor said. “So, there’s two angles to the question. There’s the ‘why are we here,’ and there’s the ‘why am I here.’” He paused and smiled, shaking his head back and forth like he’d remembered an old joke neither Louis nor Uncle Reynold would be likely to understand. “I’ll start with the first one. The short answer is we’re here to make sure the new shipping laws get followed and everyone who captains a ship off-world is cleared to do so. The long answer is a little more complicated than that. I could—”

                “Why?” Louis hadn’t realized he was going to ask the question, but after the word had left his mouth, it only felt natural.

                “Why what?” the man in the black and blue armor asked.

                “Why do you have to make sure anyone who’s a captain is…” Louis paused, trying to remember the word the other man had used. He gave up after a few seconds and tried to hide his embarrassment. “Why do you need to check on all the captains? Can’t you do that from Misha; just send them a video message or something?”

                “That, kid, is a fair question.” The man in the black and blue armor leaned forward an inch in the same manner Louis had seen his dad and uncle do when they had poker nights on Sunday evenings. “It’s a bit of a long story, but…” the man in the black and blue armor glanced around at their surroundings conspiratorially. Nobody else was in sight, and Louis knew the docks well enough to know this corner of the storage yard didn’t get much traffic. Nothing but crates and cranes and empty pads hoping to be filled. “I think I’ve got the time. And if I don’t, I can say this was my lunch break.” He smiled at his own wit, then went on. “About ten years before you were born, this whole system was ruled by the planet Earth. We’d all gotten here because Earth had taken a portal frame and flung it through space for two hundred years and then sent ships and scientists and soldiers and colonists through it when it got here, all while Earth was still floating in the darkness, getting further and further from the safety of its old sun. The Americans were the people who ran the show from Earth, and it was their soldiers on every rock we settled in this system. Still following?”

                “The Americans were the bad guys,” Louis said without thinking.

                “Kind of,” the man in the black and blue armor said. “They were in charge. Everyone’s the bad guys when they’re in charge. You ever think your mom or dad’s the bad guy for a moment because they sent you to time-out or something you didn’t like, then you realized that was stupid when the time-out was over?”

                Louis genuinely smiled at the man for the first time since he and Uncle Reynold had sat down. “All the time,” he said with a good amount of mirth in his voice.

                “Right, well, there you go,” the man in the black and blue armor noted with a swing of his hand. “It’s always easy for the bad guys to be whoever the guys running the show are because when the show goes south it’s all their fault.” Louis made a confused look and tried to understand the phrase. “Sorry, forgot y’all got different expressions,” the man in the black and blue armor said with a laugh after an equally confused pause. “When we say something ‘goes south’ it means it’s going bad. Not going well. That’s all.” Louis considered asking the man where that phrase had come from, but he looked over at Uncle Reynold and saw an amused look on his face, so Louis assumed his uncle had known the phrase and he could ask about it later. “Right, so, the Americans. Up until around twenty years ago, they ran everything. The longer it went on, the more times they had bad apples among their soldiers and cops—” The man in the black and blue armor paused again, and Louis didn’t realize for a moment that he was waiting to see if Louis had understood the phrase ‘bad apples.’ Louis nodded for him to continue like his mom would sometimes do. “Well, every group of people’s gonna have some people who really just like being mean. Most folks are pretty decent on their own. But not everyone is. And as time went on, more and more folks started hearing stories about the mean ones because the mean ones kept popping up. American soldiers stealing food from homes, American police locking up someone’s business for no reason, American governors telling good people to do bad things. That type of stuff. Well, after a couple hundred years of that going on, the number of people in the system had grown big enough that they all got so pissed off at the Americans they blew up the portal frame that connected us to Earth. Then they hunted down and found and blew up every other portal frame they could find that led back to Earth at all. Even the really small ones you could only send a radio signal through. And it took a generation, but the folks who were tired of Earth calling the shots won, and we destroyed all the portals back there. Probably.”

                Uncle Reynold scoffed. “Probably?”

                “Well, to be frank, we’ve been operating for the last couple decades under the assumption that no word from Earth means they can’t get a word to us, which is a really stupid assumption to make, but without any evidence to the contrary there’s not much we can do but hope and keep our eyes peeled in the meantime.” The man in the black and blue armor shrugged. “What can we do?”

                Uncle Reynold nodded thoughtfully. “Not much, I suppose.”

                “Not much at all,” the man in the black and blue armor agreed. “So, take the system that was ruled by Earth, and take Earth out of the equation. Suddenly you have an entire system of people who don’t know who’s in charge. All the Earthers with their guns and ships are still here, but as best we can tell they don’t have any contacts back home because we got enough of our people on their ships when the first shots were fired that we knew where to look for every portal and the ones we missed all had the same signals coming from them that we could track and destroy them with. So, what do you do with all the Earthers and their guns?”

                “You tell them to surrender or you’ll blow them the hell up,” Uncle Reynold said. He was smiling. The man in the black and blue armor was smiling too, but his smile seemed sadder somehow.

                “Yeah, we could’ve done that. And some of our guys tried it. But most of the time whenever we told the Earthers their options were to give up everything and trust us or die for it, a lot of ‘em chose to die. And they had guns, so when they chose to die they often killed a bunch of people in the process.” He grinned and nodded his head at Louis. “And that’s definitely a bad guy thing to do.” Louis nodded vigorously. He didn’t quite notice how enraptured he was in the man’s story, even if it was just a retelling of the same old story he’d heard a hundred times before from a hundred different sources. “Well, the people who led the independence war decided they’d change their tune a bit. They told the Americans that there was a third way out. They contacted the highest-ranking American leader still in the system—Admiral Willis Woolsey, I think his name was—and they asked him if he’d like to talk. He said he would, so the two sides got together and came up with an agreement. Admiral Woolsey told the rebels he’d surrender the entire American army and navy in the system to them, but in exchange they’d need to find some way to incorporate all the Americans into the new society. The rebels shook his hand and promised to find a way to do it. They declared the war was over, then started sending out messages to everyone in the system telling them to hold elections and send their new leaders to Misha. The rebels built a fancy new capital building in the Mishan capital city of Armstrong and they—”

                “My last name’s Armstrong,” Louis interrupted. “Like the astronaut.” He smiled at the man in the black and blue armor. He was proud of his name, even if it was technically unrelated to the original Armstrong.

                The man in the black and blue armor paused, then hunched over in thought for a second, then lit up like he’d remembered something. “Shoot, and you said your first name was Louis?”

                “Yeah.”

                “Now that is funny.” The man had a chuckle to himself. Uncle Reynold looked at him in confusion, then looked down at Louis and shrugged. “Sorry, just reminded me of something. There was a musician on Earth way back before the Terran Ejection who I think shared your name. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him is all.”

                “Huh, really?” Uncle Reynold seemed genuinely interested. “I’ll have to look into that.”

                “Yeah, good stuff I’ve heard. More of a shockwave guy myself, but I had a buddy on the ship out who was big into that kind of old music.” He shook his head gently, still smiling. His thin, graying hair flopped back and forth a little. “Sorry, got distracted. So Earth got cut off and the new system quickly put together a government and everyone had elections and the war ended and the Americans retired in peace and everyone lived happily ever after. Except that’s not how stories work, because the vast majority of time, even if a story does have a before and an after, there’s always an after after the after, if that makes sense.” It didn’t, but Louis pretended it did. “So everyone set about making new rules about how the system would run. It was chaos at first—there was some piracy, a lot of old ships still had guns strapped to themselves, and every now and then some big tragedy would happen.” The man in the black and blue armor looked over at Uncle Reynold, who was fidgeting with the overalls he’d had to unhook to put his shirt back on. “The massacre on Washington Station. The bombing of New Hope on Festus. The asteroid impact on Remus’s dark side. The Battle of Bufang.”

                Uncle Reynold smiled grimly at the last mention. “That one shook Orleans to its core.” He sighed. He looked down at Louis. “Your mom was the saddest I’ve ever seen her after that. Even after marrying your dad, she was hopeless on the inside for a while. Took having you to break her out of it.” Louis looked at his uncle and thought about that. He’d only ever seen his mother happy or angry. He couldn’t imagine her sad, except that sometimes he could hear her crying in her bedroom. He never opened the bedroom door when she was crying.

                “So things were pretty hectic for a bit,” the man in the black and blue armor continued. “We did everything we could to make the system into a new republic, and we kept getting bruised for it. And that, my friends, is where we come in.” He opened his arms in an expansive, hug-inviting gesture. Louis didn’t even entertain the idea of trying to hug the man, but he did notice he was internally amused at the idea of it. “The new government with no name formed the System Corps. They did everything in their power to try and make it clear that the soldiers and police they recruited were from everywhere and working for everyone. They shot down any attempts at new system nationalism—nobody really wanted a repeat of America and the People’s Republic, after all—and they made a flag design to fly over the capital that everyone could work with. Seven worlds around a yellow star and a red star, with a gradient of black and blue in the background. I signed up the moment I heard the System Corps were being made because I wanted to be a part of it and I didn’t even bother to find out that I’d get shipped out here to Kennedy—sorry, Orleans, until after I was already in deep.”

                “Put some respect on the name, buddy,” Uncle Reynold told the man with a harmless smile. It wasn’t harmless.

                The man chuckled. “Sorry, still getting used to the idea that people can’t agree on what to call a planet. It’s a conundrum for sure.” He sighed that half-relieved, half-still-braced sigh again. Louis made a mental note to start counting how many times he’d done that. “Well, the System Corps went up, and the government made its play for power. Everyone already just assumed the government was in control, so for the first little bit nobody objected to having new troops in black and blue taking up stations around the system. Then the government started debating what to use the troops for. At first they were just there to help whatever local city governments with whatever they needed. Then they got new orders to start looking into smuggling rings. Rumors about people getting kidnapped and having all kinds of unpleasant things done to them by bad people. They cracked down on drugs and started making people pay taxes whenever they bought stuff. It was the taxes one people really didn’t like.”

                “Yes,” Uncle Reynold hissed a little, “just the first in a long line of indignities the good people of Orleans would be better off without.” Louis looked up at his uncle and could tell for the first time he was starting to get genuinely angry with the man in the black and blue armor. He wondered why that was.

                “In all fairness, if there wasn’t a system government to pay taxes to, somebody else would probably be collecting them. A local protection racket, organized crime, maybe a local government with a lot of guns if you got lucky and whoever had the guns was a good guy or something. But there’ll always be a taxman as long as there’s people to tax.”

                Uncle Reynold didn’t object, but he didn’t look happy about what the man in the black and blue armor was saying. Then he spoke up anyways. “You know, this is why people throw rocks at you.”

The man in the black and blue armor laughed a tight, brittle laugh. “And that’s why sometimes people get fed up with having rocks thrown at them and throw them back!” His laughing faded a little when he looked over at Uncle Reynold, but when Louis looked up he saw his uncle was smiling again. He wasn’t sure if it was a real smile or his dad’s ‘please go to bed’ smile. “Well, all that said, that gets us to your original question, Louis. You asked why we were here.” Louis nodded again, starting to get a little tired of the man’s talking and relieved that he hadn’t forgotten what he was talking about. He did look like he was getting on in years and Louis remembered his Great Aunt Rachel had turned stupid before she died two years ago. “Here’s the politics of it. Say you have this big new fancy system where there’s a couple hundred ships floating around, all at different speeds going to different places with different crew with different ideas for different reasons and your one job is to make everyone feel like the future is bright and they’re going to be safe. Then say you have a few tragedies. Terrorist incidents, crime waves, pirate skirmishes. That kind of thing. Louis, if you just saw your world end and the new world that popped up in front of the old one said you were going to be safe and then you saw nothing on the news but news about how unsafe everyone was, would you feel safe?”

                “I don’t think so,” Louis said after a moment. He thought about the idea. Then he wondered if he was ‘safe’ in the way the man in the black and blue armor meant. He pressed his hand to his cheek in thought, then reeled back in pain when his pinky finger accidentally grazed his broken nose. He decided he probably wasn’t safe, but that that was probably alright for now. It wasn’t his fault his nose had been broken.

                “Exactly,” the man in the black and blue armor continued. “If everything kept blowing up all around the system, nobody would feel safe. Everyone in the system government knew it. Most people on the ground also probably knew it, even if nobody was saying it. So the government looked at all the cards in their hand—” Louis took a second of sudden satisfaction at understanding that phrase because of how many times he’d watched his dad’s poker games from afar—“and they laid out all their options and had a big long chat with themselves about what to do. And it took a while, but they put together a system constitution and a grand plan for how the new system would work. And the plan they came up with—”

                “Is tyranny,” Uncle Reynold interrupted sharply. The man in the black and blue armor looked over at Uncle Reynold, just the slightest bit startled out of his monologue. “The second it passed the legislature on Misha it got broadcast across the system and there’s not a planet in the system who doesn’t know you Achirdian lot decided it’d be the simplest option to put shackles on the rest of us while you run the show.” The man in the black and blue armor raised a hand slowly, but Uncle Reynold had gotten started on one of those rants of his that didn’t tend to stop unless he finished what he’d been saying or fists started flying. “We bled and died under the Americans for centuries while they spread their exploitative rot across the system and all we ever wanted was to be left alone. When Earth turned white our people came here to work American mines hoping that someday they could kiss the stars and stripes goodbye forever and live under a sky with no banner—unless it was a banner they’d made themselves. My great grandfather came to Orleans—mark that, Orleans—because his first wife had been beat to death by an American cop in Nouveau Brest for looking too happy on some other man’s bad night. My grandfather died of starvation because American rationing rules forced a shipping slowdown that stopped a load of yeast we’d ordered from New Oslo because some other American captain hadn’t filed a paper with the right bureaucrat before setting out. My father is dead because nobody else had the balls to take a bomb and get close enough to the Orleans portal frame to destroy it, and he was a patriot like you will never even know.” The man with the black and blue armor’s eyes widened slightly, as if seeing the rage in Uncle Reynold’s passion for the first time. Louis had seen it enough times between Uncle Reynold and his wife to know there was a real fire burning in Uncle Reynold’s heart right now. He could tell the passion was reaching its peak because his uncle’s buried French accent had started slipping into his speech—most of the world of Orleans had a small whisper of the old accent in some word or another here or there, but even Louis knew Uncle Reynold had long cultivated the accent as a sign of planetary respect that should only be deployed to draw a line between the people of Orleans and everyone else. At least, that’s how his uncle had explained it to him at the time.

                “May I continue?” The man in the black and blue armor smiled amiably and raised his eyebrows an inch.

                “As you were, mon ami,” Uncle Reynold sneered mildly and leaned back against the shipping container. Louis hadn’t even realized how hunched forward he’d been in the midst of his animated tirade. Louis noticed he was leaning forward too, but he didn’t want to look like he was mimicking his uncle’s every move, so he relaxed and sat crisscross like the man with the black and blue armor was.

                “So I know I kinda started this whole conversation saying the bad guys are whoever happens to be in control,” the man in the black and blue armor resumed cautiously, “so I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending we’re not at least to some degree the next iteration of the Americans.” Uncle Reynold waved a hand dismissively, but something in his face told Louis it was a sign of respect for the admission. “But we’re also not here for the same goal the Americans were here for. They were here to make sure the interests of America, nebulous as they were, were kept secure. They kept the worlds of our system connected with fortified portals and they used those connections to ensure control. When we broke their control, we did it in a way that we couldn’t just pick up the pieces and use it for ourselves. Bar a few privately-owned ones the government is keeping close tabs on, most of the portal frames in the system were destroyed in the independence war. The technology has been dead for centuries and the number of its relics still in the system can be counted on your hands.” The man in the black and blue armor held his hands outstretched, wiggling his armored fingers. “The new system government couldn’t achieve control over all the planets of the system through strength alone, because we wouldn’t have the method of deploying the strength we’d need unless everyone wanted us to do it. And—” he motioned lazily at Uncle Reynold— “as your uncle here was so willing to show us, not everyone wants to be controlled.”

                “Seems you’ve finally taken some notes worth taking,” Uncle Reynold told the man in the black and blue armor. “I don’t suppose your government would be willing to read those notes?”

                “They knew this type of thing would happen before they sent us out here,” the man in the black and blue armor replied with a mournful sigh. “We all got proper training in crowd control and non-lethal enforcement as a matter of course.” He paused for a few seconds, looking lost in thought. Then he raised his right arm and looked at it. A small panel lit up on his forearm, and Louis saw a clock display itself. “I’ll try and wrap this up,” the man said under his breath. He glanced up at Louis and stared intently at him. Louis nervously looked at Uncle Reynold, but he was staring at the stars beyond the city’s dome. “Louis, the reason we are here is to establish control. But we’re not doing it with soldiers on the ground who beat people up for no reason. We’re here to make sure the years that followed the American defeat don’t repeat themselves. The more technology people have, the higher the stakes are if that technology gets abused, and there are no higher stakes than what people do in the vacuum of outer space. The government’s plan is to make sure that at any cost, the shipping routes are controlled. The system government knows that it’d be stupid to try and exert control everywhere over everyone. If you do that, you get nonstop riots, rebellions, terrorism, sabotage, and everything else that eventually crippled the Americans. What happens planetside is of little concern to the system government because the system government is too busy concerning itself with running the entire system. Why we’re here now is to make sure that anyone who captains a ship flying the routes between the planets passes fair mental health and civic duty tests, agrees to fly efficient routes at reasonable speed limits, and has a backup chain of command that also clears the tests the captains have to clear. That’s it.” The man in the black and blue armor leaned back and sighed again—Louis counted it as the fifth such sigh he could remember, and he wondered how these two men kept physically leaning into things as they spoke without him noticing they were doing it. “Does that make any sense to you, Louis?”

                Louis considered it. He hadn’t quite followed everything, and some of the words the man in the black and blue armor had used were too big and strange to garner any recognition. “I think so?” he told the man, obviously hesitating.

                “Say what you will about order and safety,” Uncle Reynold said without looking away from the stars beyond the dome, “it’s all just tyranny to me. Sure, it’d be nice if you didn’t have soldiers on the ground randomly killing us like the Americans did. And it’d be nice if you didn’t send us a governor we didn’t select ourselves. But it’d also be nice if you didn’t put a collar on our shipping, slow every ship down to a snail’s crawl, and tell us to be grateful that we never punished the Americans for their crimes.”

                There was a solid minute of silence between the three figures. “You’re not entirely wrong,” the man in the black and blue armor said at length. “It is a tyranny. You’re right. But I look at what the alternative is. I see Remus’s far docks shattering in a spray of dust and rock, and I see flashing gunfire in the corridors of Bufang’s dining district, and I see an improvised explosive tearing a hole in a dome on Festus and letting an entire city under construction die of asphyxiation because they didn’t know not to trust their own neighbors and I can’t help but think it’s worth it. It’s not even that it’s a necessary evil, it’s that it’s the evil we chose.” He paused for another moment. “Mr. Armstrong, I know you have a fair few reasons to distrust us, and we have a fair few reasons to distrust you. But you can’t just cut the system government off like we cut the Americans out of the picture. We’re you. Your elected officials sit in Misha’s capital building coming up with the plans we’re here to enforce. If we’re tyrants, it’s because your people wanted them to be. The vote from Orleans in favor of the shipping lane legislation was unanimous.”

                Uncle Reynold spit on the ground, then moved to stand up. “And they’re traitors to their people. But I suppose that would only be natural after spending half a decade on one of your ships waiting to get there.” He held a hand down in front of Louis’s face. Louis took it, and his uncle hauled him to his feet. Louis’s nose still ached. “Mark my words, I will see the day Orleans lives free of tyrants for good.”

                The man in the black and blue armor shook his head sadly. “There will always be tyrants, Mr. Armstrong,” he said. “The only difference is right now we get to choose them, and in a world without that tyranny, people are free to engage in tragedy. Maybe we can afford that tragedy someday. But for now…” The man in the black in blue armor stood up and adjusted the rifle Louis had only just seen had been slung across the man’s back the entire time they’d been talking. “For now, this system is still young and fragile. It can only take so much tragedy before it would break in a way that would be very, very hard to repair.” He extended a hand to Louis. “It was a pleasure to meet with you and to speak with your uncle, Louis. And I’m sorry about his forehead and your nose. If you need any medical bills paid for over this incident, you know where I’m stationed. I’d like to help.”

                Louis looked up at his uncle again. His uncle shook his head and sighed. “That’s awfully decent of you, tyrant’s puppet,” he told the man. Louis took the phrase as cautious approval, and he shook the man’s hand.

                “And thank you for having a civilized conversation with your oppressor, would-be terrorist,” the man in the black and blue armor replied. He was smiling, and after a drawn-out moment, Uncle Reynold huffed a loud exhale and shook the man’s extended hand as well.

                “Keep your collars to yourself,” Louis’s uncle told the man before turning to limp towards the residential district. “Louis, your mother’s probably worried sick,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Let’s get you home.”

                “Ok,” Louis said. He didn’t move. He looked over at the man in the black and blue armor whose big words and high ideals he hadn’t quite understood. Louis wondered if he was still the bad guy. Then he decided that bad guys don’t offer to pay for people’s medical bills, so the man in the black and blue armor was probably alright, even if he was the one in control. But he also knew that Uncle Reynold wasn’t a bad guy, because bad guys are the ones throwing rocks, not the ones getting rocks thrown at them. Louis thought that maybe neither of them were the bad guy, and that was a strange thought, because someone had to be. “It was nice to meet you,” he told the man in the black and blue armor.

                “Go on, kid,” the man said with a smile. “Don’t keep your uncle waiting. But thanks for the long lunch break.” He was still smiling, and Louis noticed he was smiling too. He waved goodbye and ran off to catch up with his uncle, then slowed to a walk to avoid irritating the nose that it wasn’t really anyone’s fault had been broken.