Not Guidelines

“Listen up, you bastards! For the rookies and anyone who’s conveniently forgotten how we do this, here are the rules. Official loot – anything the client or the skipper wants – goes in the BLUE crates. Other loot of military value, in the GREEN crates. Plunder, in the YELLOW crates for distribution by shares, and make sure you’ve tagged it if you want it back, counted against your share. Booze and drugs – and anything that I might find suspicious – in the RED crates. Hiding something from blue, green, or red rates something ‘tween a flogging and a spacing. Hiding anything from the plunder gets you thrown to the tender mercies of the mates you stole it from. Now get movin’! We lift at planet dawn.”

– the supply sergeant of Kurek’s Drinkers,
linobir mercenary company,
paraphrases article X of their charter

Or Possibly A Landscape Feature

“You don’t want us to touch this one.”

“I thought you were the best demolitions company in the Worlds!”

“We are.”

“Then why can’t you demolish this?”

“I never said that we couldn’t demolish this. I said that you didn’t want us to demolish this. Look here – you see the very distinctive bevel on the trailing edge of the doorcog? That makes this a Stravage-Minepa Vault, and they build these to survive full-up planetary bombardments. You’re looking at twelve meters of hyperdense laminate armor, with the same again in two inner shells. You could fill this thing with conventional explosives and all you’d do is spoil the decor. Hell, let off a nuke in there and at most you’ll get a plasma fart for your trouble. Neither one’d make a dent on the outside.”

“So what would you have to do?”

“Well, for a start, I’d need someone at the top level of your government to sign a waiver holding Claithmat Annulments and all associates harmless for any adverse consequences of using dismounted starship grasers and high-yield antimatter charges on a planetary surface.

“That’s assuming you have control over the internal defenses – which are automatic and powered by a sealed-up reactor good for ten millennia or so after external power is cut off – otherwise we’re also going to need a promise of military commitment, or a mercenary budget. Demolitions is our specialty, not fighting a war against a supercomputer on a custom-designed killing field.”

“There must be some alternative.”

“Declare it a planetary monument?”

Thoughtful Wrath

“There are those, pacifists they name themselves, who proclaim that no man’s life is worth another’s; that it is better to die, or witness murder, than to take a life. And if one first grants that all lives have equal value in some mythical sense, this may make sense upon its face.

“There are those, the grovelers, who opine that life is far more precious than the liberty to live it. And so, that ’tis better to be the live dung-worm than the dead eagle, that it is better to live on one’s knees – or one’s face – than die on one’s feet, and thus so how much better not to slay in its defense? And for those timid souls who value their lives but little, whose satisfaction is mediocrity and whose ambitions are but embers, this may also be true.

“There are, too, those who claim that no property or possession is worth a life. And once again, for those whom life is worth infinity in the abstract but nigh-naught in the concrete, it indeed boots little to give away fragments of a life, however cherished, however hard-earned, however irreplaceable, for such small Flames surely quail to fill even their bearer’s body, much less invest the world about.

“But for the sake of the principle that these things embody, that man is a means, not an end; that none exist for the use or pleasure of another; that he who kills, or enslaves, or robs even the least among us, by whatever means, for whichever cause, commits a crime not only against his victim but rebels against the proper nature of rational beings itself —

“If the world chooses to deny this principle, gentle reader, we must drown the world in its own blood.”

– writings of Rhovallis, student of the philosopher Sardonyx,
fellow of the Schola of Vigorous Praxis