“He in there?”

  Raze nods. He and three dozen other soldiers are guarding the thick metallic door to the prison cell deep in the bowels of the Moby.

  “Is he stable and lucid?”

  “As well as he’s ever gonna be. Want me to go in first? Loosen his lips a bit.”

  “Not yet. I’m gonna give him a chance to do the right thing first. Open it up.”

  Raze puts in a forty digit code. After twenty seconds of unlocking sounds the door opens. The room is spacious for a prison cell. Has to be, otherwise the medical equipment wouldn’t fit. Strapped down tightly to a cold blue bed is a Krint male. The last week and a half of personal sacrifice seems to have been working. He’s got some meat on his bones. Still a little underweight I’d reckon, but it’s a start. According to the file he’s young. Barely fifteen by human standards. Bad time to be forced into something like this. Too old to be ignorant of the gravity of the situation, too young to fully understand why this needs to be done.

  His name was translated to me as Four. Apparently he was the fourth child of eight. Now he’s the only one left. There were seven holes in his chest when we found him. Would have been fatal if not for modern medicine. Patched the kid up in half an hour. Still lost a lot of blood. Synthesizers are doing the hard work but the body still has a real marathon ahead of it.

  “So, I hear you had something to tell me.”

  He turns towards me with big, orange eyes. Voice is as sad and pathetic sounding as he looks.

  “I didn’t think they’d actually send the captain. Isn’t this dangerous?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if it was. The Union has been around for a very long time. We know what we are doing. So, what is it you wanted to say?”

  He hesitates. Guess he doesn’t feel fully safe just yet. I know a trick that usually works.

  “I’m gonna have a snack.”

  Crunchy Crunch Bar. Popular across the galaxy. I’m told the name is a lot more eloquent in the original language. A kind of sticky bitter caramel coated in these little sickly sweet crunchy candies. Not my favorite, but popular with kids. I bite the bar in half and make a real show of chewing it thoroughly. Seeing a supposed superior eat always gets the Krint hungry. I toss Four the other half and he doesn’t wait to chow down. Judging by his face this must be his first.

  “Feel better? I know the hospital food is bad and brig food even worse.”

  “I am used to nothing.”

  “Oh I’ve been there before. Trust me, after a while the idea of even slight hunger pains will be a nightmare.”

  Four starts trying to chew the plastic wrapper. Think I’ll just take that away. I got a few more treats. Maybe I can get him to eat more later.

  “Tell me, why do your people wait for Kings to eat before you do? I still haven't gotten a straight answer.”

  “It is an old tradition. From before even my grandfather’s time; when the Krint had no Kings.”

  “Before your modern society? That is old. Still Tribal?”

  “From what I've heard, yes. Our history is still told in tales and myths. The concept of a school did not reach us until the Union.”

  “So how does this relate to the Festival?"

  “In the olden days, our Kings were but men among us. The leader of each tribe was the one who could collect the most food. They were the strongest, the smartest and often the most dedicated to us all. For their work, they got to eat first. The best of them would eat a portion that all others would follow, ensuring everyone got to eat that day. If there was plenty, they ate little.”

  “Then came the time of Kings. And let me guess, they weren’t the ones who got the most but the ones who owned the land where the most grew.”

  Four nods. Tale as old as time. Why work for your own livelihood when you can convince others to do the hard labor for a fraction of the reward.

  Stolen story; please report.

  “The festival kept going. What’s the catch?”

  “What the Lords ate, we hate half.”

  “Oh, so it’s lords now?”

  “Leaders to Lords to Kings and finally the Prime King above all. I’m sure it sounds silly.”

  “Bud, if I even attempted to explain some of the forms of Government humanity tried to make work your brain would fall out of your skull at the sheer stupidity. I wanted to walk out of an airlock when I learned what Subprime Lending was.”

  We chat just like this a bit. Doesn’t matter the planet, the government sucks. The best of them are a necessary evil. The worst are just plain evil. Taxes by any other name would still leave your ass just as sore. Four starts to joke, to laugh, to get all buddy buddy with his captor. I had him another Crunchy bar and he eats it without realizing I haven’t even bitten into mine yet. He may be an alien fuzz ball, but he’s still a kid no different than me not too long ago. Ok, maybe a bit longer ago than I’d like to admit.

  “-and after all that, we never got our pay. But Seven got away with the Lord's favorite daughter.”

  “Sounds like your buddy was the real winner. They on this rig?”

  “His wife is. And their two remaining children. I miss him a lot.”

  Well, that’s one way to kill the mood. I’m going to assume all his stories end like that.

  “So, what did you want to tell me?”

  Four looks away again. He thumbs the wrapper in his hand. Must be trying to find the right words.

  “I’m… I’m a terrorist.”

  “Want to say that more carefully? Translators can only do so much.”

  “No. I came onto your ship with the intention of killing as many of my own people as I could. I wanted to hurt the traitors to the Prime King. To make them pay for abandoning their homeland. To… to…”

  “And is that why we found you half dead in a ditch? Not exactly a great move if you wanted to hurt people.”

  “That wasn’t the plan. I started to question things. I started seeing my people grow fat from plenty. Plenty our Kings so willingly denied us. And the others, they didn’t take me asking so well.”

  “And they tossed you into the closest hole in the ground they could find after getting the old prison special.”

  Four nods. He grabs his chest where the biggest holes once were. The pain may be largely gone, but a memory like that sticks with you.

  “What was the plan then?”

  “Inside my body is a compound. Right in front of my heart.”

  Four points to a spot on his chest very far from where the stabbings were. A bit lower and to the left of where I’m used to thinking a heart should be.

  “When the time came, I was to stab myself right here. Then, another of my brothers would stab themselves as well. We would allow the chemicals to mix as we bleed. The reaction would create an explosion. Not a large one, but if surrounded by the traitors in an airlock or some other vulnerable place, big enough to make it worth it.”

  Not a terrible plan. In the rush getting people on board, personal scans would be limited. Any kind of metallic explosive would be easily found. A foreign internal chemical from a race we have limited biological knowledge of would be easy enough to fly under the initial radar.

  “Is there anything else to the plan I should know?”

  Four shakes his head in the negative.

  “Alright then. Here, put these cuffs on. I know they are uncomfortable, it’s just a formality. Can’t have you on the bridge all willy-nilly after all.”

  “The, the bridge? I don’t understand.”

  “Well don’t you want a front seat view when we reach the trade off? Not every day you get to see millions react to a new home.”

  “We are to arrive so soon! We need to act now. To stop my brothers before-”

  “Already done. We arrested them days ago.”

  And there’s the look of shock and confusion I never get tired of.

  “How long have you known?”

  “Oh we suspected this from the start. This isn’t the Union’s first mass relocation like this. It’s not even our hundredth. Of course finding you was a huge lead. Our lead Medical Officer reported the strange chemical in your chest and the rest fell into place. You aren’t the first to try something like this, after all. Mass scanning a population is something we don’t do lightly. When it’s necessary, though, we can check a man's balls for cancer from a lightyear away.”

  Four is stunned. Everything he thought he knew crumbling before him. Then he laughed, a deep, knowing laugh that held back tears of both pain and joy.

  “We really aren’t anything special, are we?”

  “None of us are. You know Humanity was no better not too long ago. We had early detractors as well. The difference for us is just that they didn’t win out. The real paradox of this big mostly empty black void we call home is that every single one of us is so unique, we loop back around to all being exactly the same. A rainbow of endless colors that when you step back far enough all look beige.”

  “All this time, I thought the Prime-Kings were just short of Gods. What a lot of wasted time.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up too much. You're out of it now. That’s what matters. And so are all those kids growing fat and happy.”

  “What will happen to them? The other terrorists.”

  “We’ll just send them all back. It’s up to the Prime King they love so much to figure out what to do from there.”

  “And me?”

  “Oh I got plans. First of those being getting you out of here. Think you deserve to see what you almost died to stop, then almost died to save.”