Prologue

Plari Pox sat in his office at his computer, typing up a mission specification. A holo-image of a sunset in the gas fields on Melia, his homeworld, hung on the wall in front of his desk. He used to look up at it when taking a break from his work; it made him calm and gave him a small touch of home. After he had made a career working for the Galactic Union, he had decided to move back home and settle down. Few Melians chose to work for the Galactic Union, and even fewer managed to make a career out of it. He would make his parents proud if he, their seventh son, came back a public servant for the Union.

He had just finished typing and was looking for errors when Dopopega came into his office.

Chairman Dopopega, Plari's superior and head of galactic security, had given him sole responsibility for contact with a special unit, known as the Keepers of the Peace or the Peacemakers. They were handpicked by Dopopega himself; few knew about their existence. They were to receive a new mission and it was Plari's job to work out the details and transmit it to the team. He felt this was an important job, even though he knew it wasn't really him giving the orders, he was just reformatting what Dopopega had told him. Nonetheless, this was his first assignment as contact for the Peacemakers, so he was doing his best to impress Dopopega.

Dopopega was serene as usual. He didn't say anything, instead he walked around in the office. He examined the blue mineflower in the corner; he inspected the holo-image of the gas fields. Then he looked at Plari with concerned eyes.

"Hello Mr. Chairman, I'm almost done", Plari said. The chairman sometimes dropped by just to check up on his work. Was this another one of Dopopega's unannounced visits, he wondered.

"Good. Your flower needs watering. Have we gotten any more intel on the facility?" He thought Dopopega looked worried.

They had not been able to contact their informants on the Velusan home world for over two weeks. Dopopega knew that, which led Plari to assume he really was worried. He had never seen the chairman worried before—he had never seen a Linoran show much of anything before.

"No, still nothing, sir. Do you think the Peacemakers will be able handle it?"

"Yes. They have to."

"I wish we could do something. I wish we could give them something to work with. What we have here, to be honest, is crap, sir. Completely meaningless. They won't have any idea what to expect when they go in."

The chairman scratched his left hand. Plari thought that maybe he had misjudged him, he didn't seem worried at all, now. But he was almost sure he had seen something when Dopopega entered his office.

"If the Velusans indeed have started manifacturing banned weapons—"

"Core destabilizer bombs." The Linoran calm was getting to him. They had a way of expressing themselves which made everything they said sound clinical, as if they were just fooling around inside a big laboratory and all this was just one of their experiments.

"—yes, they must be stopped immediately, without the parliaments involvement. Having weapons of that magnitude circulating the galaxy without our control would be... unwise." He said this as if he was talking about what he had had for lunch the day before.

"The parliament doesn't know?!"

"They don't."

"But I thought everything goes through them?"

"Bringing this to the parliaments attention would do more harm than good."

"Shouldn't they know about this?" he said as he pointed to the document on his computer screen.

"If we did inform them, all the memberplanets will know the Velusans are developing core destabilizer bombs."

"Yes, that's the idea."

"What would happen the next time, say, the Kantorans got upset? Until now we've been able to block their fleet from attacking their neighbours. But if they had access to core destabilizer bombs we wouldn't be able to stop them. Do you see the problem?"

Plari stroked his chest with one of the tentacles on his left hand. This was a new line of thought for him and he was not sure he agreed. The parliament were the ones making all the decisions; they were supposed to know everything, how else would they be able to make the right decisions. He wondered how often Dopopega had done things without telling the parliament. In Centria, a spacestation in the Linora cluster, the existence of the Peacemakers were mostly a rumor—and Dopopega wanted to keep it that way. Maybe there were other things happening that the parliament had no idea about.

Centria was built by Linora, Earth and Ilian Prime when the Galactic Union was first founded. Since then over a thousand members have joined, making it the biggest union of worlds ever to exist in known space. The delegates from the member worlds form a parliament where issues are supposed to be discussed in an orderly fashion. That seldom happens. The parliament's proceedings are often riddled with chaos: members screaming at each other, people storming out, and sometimes it even comes down to outright violence, using chairs and short parliament members with thick skins—known as the Naans—as weapons.

The Galactic Union, despite seemingly irresolvable differences, have made the galaxy a safer place and have had a dampening effect on the number of wars waged throughout the galaxy. The members of the Galactic Union have an agreement to pool their military resources when the need arises to solve disagreements among member worlds, or solve conflicts with non-member worlds. This makes everyone think twice before starting a war not approved by the Union.

The chairman stood up.

"Come to my office after you've transmitted the orders."

"Yes, sir."

"And don't worry about the team, they've pulled off far more difficult assignments than this one. Ben Reeper has never been one to disappoint."

Dopopega walked out of Plari's office. "More difficult assignments", the chairman had said. Plari couldn't conceive anything more difficult than the assignment he was about to transmit to them. But he trusted Dopopega, after all, Dopopega had run security for over forty years.

Suddenly Dopopega's head popped into the doorframe.

"Don't forget to water the flower."

Plari looked at the mineflower. He looked back at the door; Dopopega was gone. Plari fluttered with his tentacles, as he usually did when he felt agitated.

He activated the quantum encrypter and pushed the “Send” button. Then he leaned back, took a deep breath, and let his eyes rest on the holo-image of Melia.