“Mr. Rogers,” he said smugly. “It seems you’ve reached the end of your tenure on our ship. I won’t say we’ll be sad to see you go.”

“Oh, really?” Rogers asked, giving an exaggerated frown. “I was expecting a lot of tears and hugs.”

“Still waiting for clearance, sir,” said the docking tech. “Shouldn’t be more than a minute or two.”

The officer—an ensign—nodded and put his hands behind his back in what Rogers thought was a very arrogant pose. His uniform was just as crisp as everyone else’s Rogers had seen, and he even wore a small disruptor pistol at his side. What use he’d ever have for it, Rogers had no idea. The last thing anyone in the modern military ever expected to do was shoot a gun.

“You mind telling me what’s happening?” Rogers asked.

“I think you know.”

“Yeah, I spend all of my breath asking questions I already know the answers to. I hope to one day metamorphosize into medical paperwork.”

The ensign scoffed. “You’re being taken to Magistrate Tuckalle for your trial and sentencing. After that, you’ll probably spend the rest of your life in the salt mines on Parivan if you’re lucky.”

Rogers shifted uneasily, eyeing the hatch like a poison viper. The name of the magistrate sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t remember where he’d heard it before.

“That doesn’t sound very fun,” Rogers said.

The ensign looked mildly offended. “What do you mean? Have you never been to Parivan? It’s a great place. I was born there. That’s why I said if you’re lucky.”

“I guess you’re a real salty sailor, then, aren’t you?”

“That joke,” the ensign said, “was in very poor taste.” He raised his eyebrows up and down rapidly, grinning like a fool.

“Please stop talking.”

“Anyway, I was only saying that you’d spend the rest of your life there because it’s got great real estate prospects. Once you’re done with your community service, you’ll probably want to stay.”

Rogers frowned. That didn’t make any sense. Were they charging him with the theft of a Meridan ship or weren’t they?

“Community service?” Rogers asked. “Not jail time? What kind of war crime are you charging me with?”

“War crime?” The ensign looked genuinely confused. “What are you talking about? We’re not at war. Yet, anyway. We picked you up for littering.”

“Wait . . . Littering? You mean you didn’t arrest me for . . .” Rogers swallowed what would have been an astronomically stupid confession. “You mean that’s it?

“Well, sure,” the ensign said. “You dropped a cargo crate in the middle of open space, then blew it up. We try to keep a clean system around here, you know. You can’t just go dropping your garbage wherever you feel like it, even if it was in the middle of that refuse heap.”

He must have been talking about the debris from the space battle. It certainly had looked like a garbage dump by the time the MPS Lumos had shown up.