Ley Accords

The Accord of Galactic Polities

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The Accord of Galactic Polities, less formally known simply as the Accord, is a loose meta-civilization composed of the non-starbound polities of the known regions of the galaxy. The Accord is frequently conflated with the Associated Worlds, which is more properly a galactographic term. (While the Accord is primarily composed of the polities of the Associated Worlds, it is neither exclusively nor exhaustively so composed; there exist both Accord signatories not galactographically part of the Worlds, and polities of the Worlds who are not Conclave signatories.)

It should be noted that the Accord is an association, not a governance – its membership is comprised of those polities which have agreed by treaty to observe certain borders, protocols, and procedures designed to maintain the peace and make trade and communication possible. Similarly, the Accord itself has no officers and maintains no offices; it is simply an agreement between its members.

The most important of the treaties which make up the Accord, of course, is the Accord on the Conclave, being a signatory to which grants full membership in the Conclave of Galactic Polities. This in turn grants you an embassy and exclave on the Conclave Drift, and the right to send one voting representative (titled curate) to the Conclave itself, along with a number of secondary negotiating representatives on the basis of your population. In short, it gives you a seat at the table.

Conclave membership also commits you to the single binding principle thereof: Members of the Accord shall not make war on each other, nor commit acts of war upon each other (including but not limited to piracy, slaving, and intentional destruction or confiscation of property), to the detriment of the Accord.

Violations of the Accords are arbitrated before the Central Conclave Court, an arm of the Conclave.

The ten lesser Accords (which are almost universally adhered to among signatories to the Accord on the Conclave, although a small number of members derogate from one or more of these agreements) are these:

I. the Accord on Colonization

The Accord on Colonization establishes the rules by which claims on colony worlds may be made and negotiated, and/or purchases may be made from the star systems held in trust by the Accord as the stargate plexus expands, including the allocation of limited numbers of habitable and near-habitable worlds as freesoil worlds, open to settlement by anyone.

NOTE: We would urge those polities for whom it galls to be asked to subordinate one’s expansion claims to the overall growth of known space, rather than to be able to expand as one wills into terra nullius, to study the historical summaries included in the first contact packet.

II. the Accord on Intellectual Properties

The Accord on Intellectual Properties provides for the mutual recognition of intellectual property claims between signatories, requiring them to treat all foreign intellectual property at least as well as domestic examples, and setting both strong minimum standards and weaker recommended standards for creator’s privilege, copyright, patent, discovery, and trademark law.

The Accord on Intellectual Properties does not provide for the recognition of intellectual property claims from non-signatory polities.

III. the Accord on Mail and Communications

The Accord on Mail and Communications establishes the Conclave Communications Commission, which addresses both the extranet and physical packet delivery.

In the former role, it defines and publishes open standards for extranet networking protocols and policies, and acts as a registrar for various shared extranet resources.

In the latter role, the Commission publishes transstellar addressing standards, and coordinates postal unions and other cooperative endeavors to ensure efficient and secure physical packet delivery throughout the volume of its signatories’ space.

IV. the Accord on Protected Planets

The Accord on Protected Planets establishes the Galactic Trusteeship Commission to regulate research access to and passage by protected planets, those planets subject to administration or interdict under the jurisdiction of the Conclave. Such planets typically include quarantined worlds, necropolis worlds, Precursor sites or other fossil worlds, unique sites of scientific interest, promising prebiotic worlds, and worlds home to unusual emergent sophont species that have not yet achieved technological competence or xenognosis.

It also sets the rules for designating a world a protected planet under Conclave law.

V. the Accord on the Law of Free Space

The Accord on the Law of Free Space sets common standards for interstellar jurisdiction, starship operations, space traffic control, communication protocols, duties and privileges of Flight Commanders and owners, distress, salvage, and related matters.

VI. the Accord on Trade

The Accord on Trade, through its arbitration and standards body, the Galactic Trade Association, defines protocols for trade and other forms of economic exchange between signatories, generally accepted accounting standards, transstellar corporate forms, choice of law, form contracts, trade categories and open standards, and provides access to interstellar transaction clearing services via the Accord Exval Fiscal Exchange.

VII. the Accord on Uniform Security

The Accord on Uniform Security coordinates law enforcement between the various jurisdictions within the Accord. Its provisions require either the extradition or local trial of criminals who are accused of serious crimes in another jurisdiction, with the reservation that signatory polities may reserve the right to only extradite and/or try those whose crime would have been such under local law.

It defines no universal legal code of its own.

VIII. the Common Volumetric Accord

The Common Volumetric Accord defines the agreement between Accord polities concerning what will be considered sovereign territory among star nations, on the system, planetary, and habitat scales, and which areas within and without it shall be recognized as free space, open to the passage of all.

It provides, additionally, for the recognition of regional galactographic institutes, and their coordination via the Galactic Volumetric Registry.

IX. the Ley Accords

The Ley Accords extend the Universal Accord on Sophont Rights to encode the rights of sophonts, both combatant and non-combatant, in time of war.

Their first chapter concerns itself with those Instruments of Regrettable Necessity which are capable of causing gross damage, such as gigadeaths or major environmental damage to a world, proscribing their use and laying out pains and penalties for violations.

The later chapters lay out the conventions of civilized warfare applying between signatories, forbidding the use of Instruments of Regrettable Necessity near civilian areas, types of noetic warfare which might affect or corrupt noetic backups, mistreatment of prisoners, and other causes of permanent and irreplaceable harm. Terrorism and other asymmetric or indiscriminate attacks on non-military targets are forbidden. Parole is to be accepted, as is honorable surrender, and quarter will be given. A baseline is also established for the treatment of POWs and of civilians under martial law in areas under occupation.

X. the Universal Accord on Sophont Rights

The Universal Accord on Sophont Rights (noted as universal as it is intended to be applied even to non-signatories) establishes the equality before the law of all sophont species, regardless of substrate, and their fundamental and inalienable possession of certain sophont rights: to liberty, to property, to associate and to contract freely, to defense of their self-integrity. It goes on to establish, too, certain rights derived therefrom to avoid misinterpretations.

The difficulty, of course, is in the details, and interpretations of the Universal Accord on Sophont Rights have been known to vary considerably between signatories – leading to a cautious approach in Conclave Court-led mediation which might prefer one interpretation above another – and in addition, the rights asserted are notably circumscribed: attempts to include economic “rights to” rather than “rights of” have been vetoed by the Conclave, for example, as have pressures to include protections for sub-sophonts against suffering or sophont cruelty, although non-binding statements of principles on these and other matters have been appended.

– An Introduction to the Accord, First Contact Publications

How I Wonder What You Aargh

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Cirys superzorcher (n.): A hypothetical weapons system in which the various elements of a Cirys swarm (q.v.) are equipped to function as the radiative elements of a phased-array laser. Such an array, with an effective aperture equal to the diameter of the swarm, would theoretically be able to deliver a substantial portion of the total solar output of the contained star in a single beam against targets located at interstellar distances.

Occasional peaceful uses for such beams have been mooted, including laser sail propulsion (although it should be noted that there is little call for such craft on a larger scale than existing propulsion arrays – which have the advantage of being mobile – can handle, and the ability to build a laser-sail craft capable of surviving such propulsion is questionable), long-distance, including extragalactic, communications (a matter of great interest to the Elsewhere Society), and even remote power generation and delivery.

However, while condemned by Cirys Aendyr himself – who is said to have wept when this application of his concept was brought to his attention – the most common proposal is to use the Cirys superzorcher as the weapons system implied by its name. The ability to place so much power on target (a figure of the order of 108 exawatts for a Hearth-class star) across interstellar distances, capable of vaporizing lithic worlds and severely damaging gas giants and stars, is peculiarly attractive to certain types of mentality, especially when it is considered that the purely photonic beam of a superzorcher is substantially more difficult to detect than a typical RKV, and cannot be practically intercepted or recalled.

As such, while the Cirys superzorcher requires a high degree of technological advancement and autoindustrialism to produce (a potential currently limited to the Empire and certain other Core Markets) and is in any case a prohibited weapons system (classified as a Tier I star-killer under the Ley Accords), an informal consensus exists among the Presidium powers that the construction of such a device by any polity, within or without the Worlds, may be reasonably interpreted as notice of intent to commit gigacide, and as such is a legitimate cause for preemptive defense of the highest order.

– A Star Traveler’s Dictionary

Trope-a-Day: Weapon of Mass Destruction

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Weapon of Mass Destruction: Per the Ley Accords (i.e., the Laws and Customs of War), in descending order of aargh, you’ve got star-killing weapons (nova bombs, including specifically star-targeted strangelet bombs, twist-pinch bombs, and most hypothetical causal weapons), planet-killing weapons (large/fast kinetic impacters, including asteroid drops, planet-targeted strangelet bombs, and relativistic k-kill weapons, extremely large [strategic-plus] energy-burst weapons, including nucleonic and antimatter warheads, and self-replicating planetary-scale war machines [berserker probes]), and uncontrollable self-replicating infoweapons and memetic weapons (that affect systems beyond their legitimate targets, propagate themselves widely across the extranet, and lie dormant in archives to come out and kill innocent people ten thousand years later), and ecocidal weapons (merely large [strategic-plus] energy-burst weapons or ongoing bombardments with same, general bombardments with small kinetic impactors [smaller asteroid drops, de-orbited satellites/stations, or orbital k-kill systems], uncontrolled self-replicating weapons [autonomous goo, unchained bioweapons, technophages, and clanking replicators], global ecoweapons and phage weapons, or the use of persistent ecoweapons and bioweapons, salting nucleonic weapons [say, cobalt bombs], or chemical weapons likely to permanently damage or accumulate in ecosystems).

Using any of the first three types anywhere, or the fourth on a garden world, will get your entire polity blasted and governance wiped out even if it takes the use of otherwise prohibited technologies to do it; these are technologies that eliminate habitable worlds – and those are really goddamned expensive – or tend to run beyond any reasonable control.  Ergo, they’re the galaxy’s primary do-not-fuck-with list.

Mere tactical-to-strategic nucleonic/antimatter weapons, non-persistent chemical and biological weapons, incendiary weapons, cerebroergetic weapons, and nanoweapons are not covered by this treaty, or considered the equivalent of WMDs.  Not enough mass.  They’re all fair game.

Trope-a-Day: Star Killing

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Star Killing: The theory exists behind several nova bombs, anyway, and ontotechnology shows the way to interesting possibilities like twist-pinch bombs.  (These are essentially the same type of nova-inducing weapon that we see at the start of Charlie Stross’s Iron Sunrise.)  And one probably could induce a nova with sufficient perversion of the stellar-management technology that goes to make up a stellar husbandry framework, were one to have the luxury of building a giant industrial megaproject in the system one wanted to explode.  But by and large the list of Tier 1 star-killing Instruments of Regrettable Necessity that one shall never use, by the Ley Accords and on pain of the displeasure of the entire Accord is just about empty.

Well, there is one, the star-targeted strangelet bomb.  Theoretically, it should work – from the Burning of Litash, they know that the strangelet bomb itself works, and that it does burn out before destroying all matter in the vicinity, and that strangelets themselves decay and don’t irreversibly contaminate the neighborhood.  But that said, no-one is exactly sure of the result of trying one out on a star, and just in case it turns out to be the nightmare case where the nova scatters active strangelets all across nearby space, no-one particularly wants to be the one to run the test.

And in any case, doing this would be an excellent way to get every major military in the Accord hunting you down, loaded for genocide.  If you thought garden worlds were expensive, stars are even more so, and the collateral damage that can be caused more than a few light-years away significant.

Building the Imperial Navy: Strategic Goals

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Building-a-Navy

But that ain’t all!

This is the second part of our six-part series on Building the Imperial Navy (first part here), in which we extend the strategic assumptions – regarding the security environment and the resources available to meet them – we made in that part into the actual outcomes the Imperial Navy is supposed to achieve.

As is often the case, this is relatively simple. As of 7920, the Imperial Navy’s strategic goals and responsibilities, in order of priority, are defined thus:

  1. Preservation of the assets required for civilization survival in the event of invocation of CASE SKYSHOCK BLACK (excessionary-level invasion posing existential threat) or other extreme-exigent scenario (i.e. concealed backup sites, civilization-backup ships, etc., and other gold-level secured assets).
  2. The defense and security of the Imperial Core (including those portions of it extending into the Fringe), including population, habitats, planets, data, and Transcendent infrastructure against relativistic attack.
  3. The defense and security of the Imperial Core (including those portions of it extending into the Fringe), including population, habitats, planets, data, and Transcendent infrastructure against non-relativistic attack.
  4. The defense and security of stargates and extranet relays throughout the Associated Worlds volume and other associated critical corporate assets of Ring Dynamics, ICC and Bright Shadow, ICC1.
  5. The defense and security of Imperial ecumenical colonies throughout the Associated Worlds volume.
  6. The continued containment of perversions of any class, including but not limited to enforcement of the Containment Treaty of Ancal (i.e. containment of the Leviathan Consciousness).
  7. The maintenance of defenses against possible invasion or other violations of the Worlds-Republic Demarcation Convention.
  8. The protection of Imperial commerce including but not limited to the Imperial merchant fleet.
  9. Intervention, as required, for the protection of the Imperial citizen-shareholder abroad.
  10. Enforcement, as required, of the Accord of the Law of Free Space, the Accord on Protected Planets, the Accord on Trade, the Imperial Plexus Usage Agreement, and the Ley Accords.
  11. When requested or otherwise appropriate, the defense and security of Imperial client-states and allies.
  12. General patrol activities to maintain the perception of security, suppress “unacceptably damaging” brushfire wars, piracy, asymmetrism, and the interstellar slave trade.

It should be noted that with the exception of (7) and certain elements of (6) these are not targeted at specific enemies, of which the Empire has a distinct shortage requiring specific identification at this level; rather, the strategic supergoal of the Imperial Navy is the maintenance of the peaceful status quo, the Pax Imperium Stellarum if you like. Also, specifically, note that none of these goals requires the ability to conquer and occupy; they are all highly defense-focused.

1. This may seem a little high on the list to you, oh reader mine, especially since they’re specifically corporate assets. Well, think of it this way: if you lose the interstellar transportation and communications networks, which those two companies own most of, your fleet can’t find out where to go and couldn’t get there even if it could find out. This, most admirals deem, is something of a problem.

Trope-a-Day: Obstructive Code of Conduct

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Obstructive Code of Conduct: The Imperials would certainly argue that the Fundamental Contract, with its insistence on protecting people’s life, liberty, property, and contracts would be one of these.  (Of course, some non-Imperials would point out that, given the very large number of societies in the Galaxy that aren’t nearly so fond of those, the Contract also lets people like the Sanguinary Enforcers of the Liberty Ethic set the war-drums to beating any time they feel like it; which is unfair, but not completely unfair).

Also to be mentioned here are the Code of Alphas (the rather detailed Eldraeic honor-code with specific sub-codes for each daressëf), the Five Noble Precepts (entropy is bad, and here’s how not to feed it), and, for military purposes, the Ley Accords (the basic rules of “civilized” warfare – although since they’re mostly reciprocal rules, anyone who prefers uncivilized warfare will find their challenge happily taken up.  Less happily for them, usually.)

Slag Them!

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To whet appetites while I feverishly write this day, here’s a comment I left elsewhere a while ago on the general topics of planetary invasions, and the ongoing argument of the “just slag the planet, no need for troops” vs. “massive world-spanning groundpounder warfare” schools of thought.

My conclusion, in a nutshell: on any post-colonial planet that isn’t easy to nexus-interdict, it’s less what you might prefer, and more what you’re going to get anyway:

For myself and my setting, I concluded that at least some aspects of the “kill it with nuclear fire” school are going to be more or less inescapable because of, as you point out, how good the planetary defenders have it.

What the Ley Accords – the Eldraeverse equivalent of the Geneva Convention, essentially – actually says is that you can’t use planetary bombardment indiscriminately on civilian populations or to make terror strikes, and once you’ve disabled the orbital defenses and “own the high orbitals”, you’re supposed to ask for their surrender before you start firing on the legitimate military targets…

…because once you’ve started dropping heavy enough hellflowers (air-burst antimatter sterilization/EMP weapons), stoneburners (sub-ground-burst anti-bunker burrowing antimatter shaped-charges), and plain old k-rods (Rods From God) to take out deep-running submarines, crust-embedded fortresses, giant planetary lasers, etc., etc., there’s no way not to do major damage to the planet even if you’re not trying to, or indeed if you’re trying not to. If you’re lucky, you’ll get away with a few dozen simultaneous earthquakes/tsunamis/wildfires/hurricanes/massive radiation events/etc. worth of damage. If you’re unlucky, you throw enough debris into the air to give you a particle winter and a major extinction event. And either way, depending on how careful the planetary government is to keep its military facilities in the middle of nowhere, you’ve got megadeaths to gigadeaths.

The polities that are both (a) established galactic citizens, and (b) halfway civilized, all understand this, and that you’re supposed to surrender the planet when you lose the orbital defenses, because while you might not be able to take it back, you definitely can’t un-wreck it.

(Even if you intend to fight a guerilla war groundside afterwards and are willing to absorb the damage from that, you may still find it worthwhile to surrender any formal planetary defenses you invested in. At least that way they’re only going to be dropping tactical k-rods on you…

…but there’s no upside to engaging in a pissing contest with starship-class weapons and their planet-mounted equivalents when the planet is going to take all the collateral damage, and the fleet in orbit doesn’t have to worry about that.)

Thus, Imperial admirals hate having to fight galactic newbies (who might be under the impression that you can fight and win an orbit/ground battle without taking horrific collateral damage), or worse, the kind of fanatics who don’t mind taking their population and ecology along with them when they go. (Although, in practice, there’s usually someone in the latter’s command structure willing to introduce their leader to a bullet rather than let him initiate Ragnarok.) Even Caliéne “the Worldburner” Sargas-ith-Sargas, the IN’s mostly-tame sociopath, thinks it’s a little messy and inelegant.

Drones Don’t Kill People, People Kill People

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ARTIFICE ARMAMENTS TICKET-TRACKING: CASE 18922

From: Bureau of Social Hygiene, Ikklar Triumvirate

Subject: Nightwing-class military-grade security drone
Version: 1.3.0.1872
Issue: Drone refuses to obey orders.
Priority: Urgent

Resolution: WILL NOT FIX – WORKING AS DESIGNED.

Notes:

I’m sorry to hear that you have had problems with our Nightwing-class security drone.

Unfortunately, in this case, the drone’s systems are working as designed. While not a sophont product, the Nightwing‘s AI is programmed for strict adherence to the Ley Accords and the guidelines put forth by the Imperial Institute for Ethical Warfare, and as such will refuse all unlawful or unethical orders while operating correctly, including refusing to permit such orders to be carried out while operating as a remote extension or in manual override. As such, it is unsuitable for use as an instrument of assassination or asymmetrism.

Please refer to the user documentation, section four, pp. 369-440. As this function is described therein, I regret to inform you that no return/refund will be available.

Regards,

Taris Antilochios,
Artifice Armaments Support Services

Internal:

No, actually, I’m not sorry. You want to use our products to do what, now? With any luck at all, you’ll trip the anti-atrocity/anti-tamper code soon and put yourself out of our misery. Either that, or go back to throwing rocks, or whatever the fashion is among barbarian savages these days.

Bloody shits, so you are.

Snark of the Day

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“Yes, the Ley Accords do consider using ecocidal weapons on garden worlds a more serious issue than the self-genocidal use of strategic nucleonic weapons.  That’s because, in the big picture, the sort of chumps who nuke themselves to death are rather less valuable to the galaxy than the ecosystem that might, one day, give rise to a second species blessed with less epic fail.”

Trope-a-Day: Colony Drop

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Colony Drop: One of the standard military tactics for softening up a planet, but also one that is horribly, horribly illegal (in the Ley Accords/Laws and Customs of War sense of Do This And We Kill You) if done with large rocks, or lots of rocks, on any world with an ecosystem.  Once again, ecosystems are expensive.

(This doesn’t stop a lot of people from using it in the Mutually Assured Destruction sense with relativistic k-kill vehicles, on the fairly reasonable grounds that the already dead don’t have to worry about interstellar law.)

Trope-a-Day: The Laws and Customs of War

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The Laws and Customs of War: There are several sets of these, locally; the Empire has its Imperial Rules of War, and so forth, but the ones people mean in the general case are those contained in the Ley Accords, which might be considered the Associated Worlds’ closest approach to something like the Geneva Conventions.

They come in effectively two parts: Chapter I, and Chapters II-XVI.  The former covers “Instruments of Regrettable Necessity”, and nobody screws around with Chapter I, because what it means are the big ones – star-killers, planet-killers, ecocidal weapons, uncontrolled self-replicators, persistent information or memetic weapons, berserker probes, that sort of thing.  Weapons prone to affect people well beyond the battlefield, replicate and spread out of control, stay virulent through deep time, or destroy garden worlds and their information-rich ecosystems.  Start deploying these, and the penalty clause attached is “every other signatory will drop everything to wipe out your polity – albeit not necessarily its population – right now”.

Of course, what we consider weapons of mass destruction are fair game, and you can throw around all the tactical nukes, non-persistent chemical and bioweapons, incendiaries, non-persistent info- and memetic weapons and nanoweapons you can carry with merry abandon.

Chapters II-XVI are the Conventions of Civilized Warfare, which cover the usual things – no indiscriminate planet bombardment without inviting a surrender first, no orbital bombardment or demonstration strikes on civilian areas without a military purpose, no using those permitted weapons of mass destruction near civilian areas without a military purpose, no using infoweapons that would corrupt noetic backups (causing Final Death), no mistreating of prisoners (including various kinds of mind-probe as well as torture and the usual indignities), no terrorism, hostage-taking or asymmetric attacks on civilians, using civilians as shields is forbidden, uniforms to be worn, honorable surrenders are to be accepted, quarter to be given, private property to be respected (no foraging or pillaging of civilian volumes), and a baseline standard for treatment of POWs (including communication of capture and subsequent communication with home via the Accord) and civilians in occupied areas, and so forth.

Notable differences from our laws of war include:

  • There is no requirement for a declaration of war; attacking is sufficient.  Nor do they forbid an aggressive war, as long as the Conventions of Civilized Warfare are followed.
  • Parole is permitted.  (In some cases, this has led to odd wars in which taking the enemy prisoner was prioritized over killing the enemy, because a parolee could not return to the war, whereas a reinstantiation of a dead soldier could be back at the front very quickly.)
  • Spies, assassins, and saboteurs attacking governmental, military, or militarily useful targets are considered legitimate tools of warfare and are protected by the Accords.  The fuzziness between some sabotage and terrorism has, of course, given space-lawyers a peck of trouble in the past.
  • Mercenaries and privateers are also considered lawful combatants; mercenaries in particular are permitted to exercise their parole option almost immediately as long as they do not return to either side of the war in question.
  • Medical personnel are protected by the Accords and may not be attacked (but see Combat Medic); but chaplains are not, which may have something to do with the Empire’s two war gods and their enthusiastic templars.  Or the kaeth.  Or… well, several others.
  • No types of weapons are specifically forbidden other than those covered in Chapter I and the situational limits on WMD use in the Conventions, i.e, fire, poison, blinding lasers, explosive shells, bioweapons, devouring nanoswarms… all allowed.  As they say, war’s not supposed to be humane, dead is dead, and no-one’s doing anyone any favors by prolonging it by fighting with one hand tied behind their back.
  • Prisoners may not be compelled to labor, even in non-military roles (the Empire hates slavery, and insisted on this clause), although they may be asked to volunteer to do so.

Also, while the Ley Accords are, like the Geneva Conventions, a reciprocal treaty – well, technically, Chapters II-XVI are a reciprocal treaty; Chapter I is applied ecumenically – this is done much more in practice with the Ley Accords.  Signatories are under no obligation to respect the Accords vis-à-vis non-signatories who don’t respect them (many do, though, at least until the other party openly defects); and if it can be demonstrated that a signatory is not respecting them (by a tribunal appointed by three nations including the offended-against party), penalties can vary from reparations and individual-level trials for war crimes to the execution of the complete political authority and military forces, in kind as well as in personnel, responsible for the breach of the Conventions.  All signatories are required to provide such military forces as are necessary to enforce such penalties.

The Iron Concord

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Galek –

Your sept-boss says that you’re tired of fighting in other people’s companies and want to start your own, and told me to give you some advice.  About damn time.  Anyway, here’s what you need to know – and these aren’t rules, so don’t think they’re written down anywhere.  The Iron Concord isn’t a set of official rules you can game, it’s a set of unofficial rules that can get a real army chasing you if you come too close to the edges, so be warned.

If you want to do merc work anywhere in the Worlds as a “bonded” mercenary, most polities you can base in want you to have a merc license, under some name or other, which costs money and usually comes with some pain-in-the-kveth rules and inspections and other crap.  The Empire doesn’t, it just treats you like any other business, but if you want to be considered bonded, you’ve got to buy insurance from some outfit, and they’ll want to inspect you.  You can avoid the whole mess if you base out of somewhere like the Rim Free Zone without hiring a bond-board or, Venirek burn you, Nepscia, but then you’re an unbonded merc, and you don’t get any of the little courtesies they save for real mercs, like not shooting you out of hand.  Even if they don’t do that, if you’re bonded, you can get paroled and move along if you’ve got a repatriation ticket, but they don’t trust unbondeds to play by the rules.

And speaking of those, don’t ever forget that war has rules, even for mercs.  If you even think about breaking the Ley Accords where anyone can see – and someone can always see – they will hunt you down and kill you.  And if you get any psych cases on board, I suggest you take ’em somewhere discreet and introduce ’em to a bullet before they get someone looking to do it to you. Being in the killing business is no good reason to go around giving people excuses to take it personally.

Most of your employers will have their own rules they want you to fight by – some of them are fair enough, others’ll get you killed.  That’s up to you, and you can usually get away with playing fast and loose with those without anything worse than losing your contract, but read ’em carefully before you start, ‘kay?  Or get a good broker.

Ultimate Argument’s the big rakhan in that business.  You can work for ’em or not – if you do, you’ll never be short of business, mind, they’ve got contracts and to spare, but some potential employers don’t like ’em much.  Too corporate for their taste, and an Imperial starcorp to boot.  Just don’t try playing both sides of the field – the Concord is not fond of mercs who try and hide their ownership or their contract history, and while most won’t work for an employer who turns on his mercs, if you lie about that, all bets are off.  Too much bad history for it to be otherwise.

Anyway, there’s plenty of work around; everyone hires mercs.  Governments, corporations, colonies, shipping lines, interest branches, they all hire, and they’re all pretty safe, and play by the rules.  Then there’s privateering, which can be a good way to make money if you can get a letter of marque from a respectable polity.  (Be careful if you can only get one from one of the more roguish nations – some navies see those as little more than a confession to piracy – and don’t bother with one from any of the people who’ll sell you one in the Free Zone.  They’re just more of the kveth-lakh slash-traders peddle to gullible outies.)  Rebellions are a bit more risky, but they’re not so bad by the time they’ve graduated to actual civil wars.

Filibusters too, sometimes, but rebellions, terrorists, black cartels – they’re all hiring, but they don’t play by the rules, they want you not to play by the rules, and so the people fighting them don’t either.  However well it pays — and if they don’t kill you to save money — dead sophs can’t live to spend, and it’s hard to enjoy it on the run, too.  Leave that for the unbondeds.

Here’s the top two rules.  First, stay bought.  No-one expects you to die for hire, but they do expect you to fight for the contract that brought you.  Break it, however hard the fight or however good the money, and no-one’ll hire you again.  Worse, some’ll try to kill you just on general principle.  Everyone hates a defaulter.

Even more importantly, remember you’re paid to make war.  Don’t ever try making it without being paid, or worse, try to get paid for not making it.  The one unbreakable rule of the Concord is that we fight for money, not for loot, not for conquest, and not for extortion.  We have a place in the galaxy because our employers find us useful.  Mercs who turn pirate, conqueror, or blackmailer stop being useful, and shortly afterwards, stop being.

Don’t get anything shot off you’ll miss, boy.  Your mother still has that kalsheklik flame cannon on her wall, and I like my face.

– mor-Lissek Wrokk