Julio Olajun packed his suitcase in a flurry of movements, small trickles of sweat beading on his ample forehead. Soon after receiving news of his men’s failure, he called some of the higher-ups in the cartel for help. After many long hours of discussion, with multiple different people, the message was clear: “Get lost.”

  The men upstairs were not going to bail him out of this one. Considering the enemy's strength, it was uncertain if they could even do so. Olajun was mostly on his own.

  “Get a move on, Julio! What’s taking so long?” Rodrigo said as he stuck his wiry frame inside the room, his friend’s eyes blazing with impatience. Julio had always been the slick-talking, charismatic member of their little duo. He could convince anyone of anything, while the mighty Rodrigo seemed able to win any fight. Right up until he’d finally lost. The recent failures by both men had put their relationship on ice, but Rodrigo had still decided to stick with Julio and help him prepare to leave. Now, even the thin man’s loyalty was thinning, and Julio needed to keep himself from snapping back bitterly at his ‘friend’. Instead, he huffed back as calmly as he could: “I’m almost done. Have patience. They cannot have tracked us down so soon.”

  Both men planned to take an extended vacation to the Outer Rim of the Empire and wait for the heat to die down. Rodrigo had wanted to run immediately after getting back, but Julio had vetoed him. In addition to his pleading with the higher-ups, the fat man had gathered some of his most valuable possessions and called in as many favors as possible. He hoped to shore up his empire as best as he could, trying to ensure that something remained for him when he finally returned. Thus, it was late at night when he finally stepped out of his home, walking toward the Hovercar with Rodrigo and two of his most faithful goons in tow. They took off, cruising through the cityscape before leaving the metropolis and jetting off into the Akkadian countryside.

  The elite of the Empire often retained small private spaceports on their estates in the countryside. Some of them were happy to rent out these ports to well-paying customers, choosing diplomatically not to ask about who their renters were or why they wanted to use a private spaceport. This was one of the most reliable, if expensive, ways to smuggle banned goods to and from civilized areas without alerting the police or military. The Hovercar was moving to one such spaceport, built into the side of a hill. They landed inside one of the wide-open hangars, getting out and unpacking their belongings. The moment they opened the trunk; however, they heard a loud voice: “Stop where you are!”

  The criminals froze. Rodrigo’s hand twitched toward his blaster, yet he was stopped by the glowing yellow sword at his throat. Behind them, a blue-eyed, silver-haired man stepped into the moonlight, flanked by two men with their blasters raised and aimed. The man folded his arms and grinned at the criminals, saying, “I bet there’s more than one stolen item in those bags of yours, gents. Sounds like grounds for a citizen’s arrest to me.”

  His two sidekicks moved forward, handcuffing the criminals and setting the goods aside. Olajun gnashed his teeth at the man, raging: “We will be out of jail by sunrise!”

  The old man’s grin widened as he responded: “Oh, I don’t know about that. There’s a certain police captain who’d be very interested in seeing you fellows locked up for quite a while. He let me take care of you personally, to make sure you fellas didn’t have any forewarning we were coming. He doesn’t know who he can trust for sure, you know? But once I deliver you to him, I suspect you’ll find he has a cell ready and waiting. He’ll make sure you see your day in court.”

  The criminals could only snarl.

  …

  Vincenzo Marcovi sat at the head of a long oak table, poring over the work on his SmartPad, writing messages, reading reports, and directing his criminal empire as best as possible from his current location.

  He was inside a chrome metal room at the heart of a fortress in a remote portion of Tryptar. It would have been safer to leave the planet, but this place was the seat of his Family’s power. Leaving it would invite a rival to unseat him, especially over a seemingly minor matter like this. He’d heard about the failed assault on the Pioneer’s compound and learned about their association with a Delta class fighter. That man could be a threat to Marcovi theoretically, so he’d taken precautions, but he wasn’t anywhere close to panicking. Even though these new enemies had made contact with the Hardgrave female, there was no guarantee that she’d learned of his involvement with the death of her parents. Even if she had, and the Pioneers decided to cause problems for him, he was confident in his protections.

  The Pioneers were very protective of the data on their people, but Marcovi had managed to dig up what he could. Captain Hideo Peralta was a well-decorated retired Pioneer, publicly Delta class and broadly well-liked by his community. What Marcovi couldn’t figure out for the life of him was what a man like that had to do with this situation. The crime boss had figured out what was happening with the Epsilon class fighters. He’d already known about Daniel Hardgrave, and it hadn’t been challenging to obtain the personnel list for his expedition. The group compositions of that expedition were harder to find, but he’d managed to get solid descriptions of the E class fighters from his men and the security cameras around the scenes of both battles. His people had managed to match those descriptions with six names on the personnel list, then ran a background check on those men. Nothing of interest. They were all from humble families on manufacturing or Outer Rim worlds.

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  Obviously, these men were associated with Daniel Hardgrave, probably members of his squad on the expedition. Somehow, they’d managed to discover the abduction of their friend’s sister, decided to help him out, and tracked her to the Sinachros’ compound. All within a few days. It was almost inconceivable. How could these greenhorns figure out what Marcovi had done, launch a complex assault, and also beat back his own strike group’s assault? Sure, he’d put that strike group together at the last minute, but they were still filled with powerful fighters he’d kept on retainer. These rookies had beaten them back with tactics, supplies, and powerful reinforcements. All these facts pointed to serious connections.

  He'd considered the possibility that their connections extended to Peralta alone and discarded it. While he was a capable agent, the Captain likely wouldn’t have been powerful enough to arrange all of this. It had to be someone connected to both the original E class group and the reinforcements who’d swept in to help them. Someone, possibly another veteran, with respectable monetary power and human connections. He’d looked for the names of Peralta’s commanding officers over the years, only to come up empty. Either he couldn’t find them, due to the Federation’s data security, or the names he could find led nowhere. He tried looking for any direct connections the E class rookies could’ve had with Peralta. Nothing there either. It was a baffling situation; one he’d eventually left to his subordinates as he attended to other business.

  He’d told Cominski to go underground until all of this blew over, though the man was likely compromised as an asset. Unfortunate, but Marcovi realized that his problems had ballooned far beyond losing that chess piece. Even as he tried to focus on his other work, his mind wandered to this current conundrum. Whatever mystery contact these Pioneers had, he or she was probably pretty important. It wasn’t that unusual for documents relating to very powerful Pioneers to be thoroughly hidden by the Federation, so as to always keep their true strength a mystery. No one knew the true extent of the veteran core they had at their disposal. If one of Hardgrave’s associates had connections to someone truly dangerous, the whole Family could be in danger.

  One man in particular had caught his eye, and Marcovi eventually put aside his work to pull up a file. Markus Haraldson’s weathered face stared back at him, blue eyes gleaming with intelligence. He was one of the E class soldiers’ fathers, and there were a couple of things that made him suspicious. There was hardly any data on the man’s life, with significant gaps in his career history that were especially disturbing. Not to mention the sheer aura the man seemed to have in all his photos. As Marcovi stared at the file, serious worry crept into his heart.

  “Hello, sir? Sir?”

  Marcovi startled and turned toward the voice of his head of security. Ruby red eyes, set within a well-tanned face, stared back at him, these features mirroring his own. However, this was where the similarities ended. Where Marcovi’s face was lean and hawklike, this man’s face was strong and blocky, with a square chin and squashed nose. While his own head had a full head of gleaming dark hair, this man had dark brown hair shorn very close to the scalp. Marcovi was only very distantly related to this serious-looking bruiser, a man by the name of Flavian Alare. Alare wasn’t a native to the Empire, having grown up in Anarchic Space under the umbrella of the Khazari clan.

  The Imperium was very protective of the Enhanced they raised up within their military. They were very interested in keeping such people from falling into a life of crime and causing trouble throughout the Empire. It was one thing to tolerate a few Zeta class fighters getting up to some mischief, but the moment you had a Gamma class soldier going on a crime spree you had a much more serious problem. They monitored their most capable fighters, giving them cushy government jobs when necessary and doing everything possible to keep them in line. However, if a powerful Enhanced stepped out of line in a serious way, the Empire would do whatever it could to smite them down. It was the ultimate system of carrots and sticks, and it did a lot to keep some of the most powerful fighters in the galaxy under the aegis of the Imperial government.

  That left the Empire’s criminals in a difficult quandary when it came to obtaining powerful guards. Bribing current or ex-military men to come into their fold wasn’t impossible, but it usually only worked on the weakest Pioneers. Even if they did get someone stronger to work for them, that relationship couldn’t be anywhere close to long-term. If it were, the wrath of the government would usually come down upon them like a hammer. The military and the police were two different beasts entirely. Any local criminal organization would be annihilated if the true powers of the Empire got involved.

  Things were a bit better if the Empire’s criminals wanted to raise up their own elites, but not that much better. The materials useful for creating the Enhanced were highly restricted. Even getting Codex tech wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. And if the Empire caught an organization raising fighters beyond a certain strength threshold, there would usually be hell to pay.

  Thus, if criminals wanted truly powerful manpower, they needed to look elsewhere. Anarchic Space solved most of these problems. There was no central government out there, and there were a variety of ways that Psionic materials could be obtained there as well. The Khazari operated primarily within this area, training up their own elites and sending those men to help bolster their subsidiaries within the major principalities. Flavian was one such elite, and he’d been working for Marcovi for a short time.

  Marcovi studied the man carefully, certain he couldn’t trust him fully. His reliance on the Clan for high-powered manpower was a part of how that organization asserted control over him, after all. The crime boss eventually opened his mouth and responded to the Enhanced man’s questioning: “Yes? What do you need me for, Flavian?”

  The man gave him a military salute, which Marcovi found ironic, before responding: “All clear, sir. No enemies in sight. And I have an ability that helps me see through camo, so you don’t need to worry about that.”

  Marcovi nodded, then turned to the other men who flanked the ‘soldier’. These two, at least, were under Marcovi’s direct control. A Delta class ex-Pioneer whom he’d managed to get for a few jobs, by the name of Jack Glaucon, and a Delta class he’d trained up from birth named Ricardo Marcovi. Jack was getting on in years, while Ricardo was in his mid-forties. Now, Vincenzo looked to them for their opinions. They nodded to him silently, indicating that his head of security had been honest, insofar as they were aware. Flavian noticed this interaction, yet gave no indication that it bothered him. Marcovi was about to dismiss the trio when he paused, suddenly thinking of something. He picked up his pad and showed it to the men, asking: “Do any of you know the man in this picture?”

  Ricardo and Flavian were predictably clueless, but Jack went pale with understanding. Marcovi looked at him quizzically, and he whispered in a hoarse voice: “I think I do.”

  He turned to look his boss in the eye, saying: “Is that man your enemy?”

  Marcovi questioned him impatiently: “Who is it?”

  “The Noxera of Gadobra.”