“It’s not that simple,” the magistrate said, sitting back down.

“Seems pretty simple to me,” Rogers said. “Let me out of here or the entire Meridan network will be watching videos of you doing the two-step in a young woman’s unmentionables. Come to think of it, you seem to spend a lot of time in various states of nakedness, Tucky. Are you a closet exhibitionist or something?”

Tuckalle scowled at him. “It’s not just a question of simply letting you off the hook. All those records are already uploaded into the central databases. I couldn’t remove them all if I wanted to. It’s more of a question of authority.”

“Whose?”

“Yours, actually. You have a military record, but you’re not in the military anymore. You can’t just go roving the galaxy, blowing up pirates—if that was even what you were doing there, which I doubt. So, even if we were to give you a medal and a parade like Officer Atikan said, we’d have to send you to jail for reckless vigilantism.”

Rogers squinted one eye. “Reckless vigilantism? Did the MPF unionize or something?”

Tucky shrugged. “I don’t make the rules, Rogers.” He paused for a moment. “But I might be able to do something.”

“And what’s that?”

“I could reactivate your military service and backdate the reenlistment to before you went pirating.”

Rogers laughed. “You want me to put the uniform back on? There are reasons I left, Tucky.”

Those reasons were primarily driven by profit, of course. He wanted to explore and cheat the other populated systems in the galaxy, too. Except the Thelicosa System, of course. They were too good at math.

This was supposed to be his intersystem debut, not his reentry into the boring military! He’d learned enough tricks in the easygoing, post-Peace service to allow him to go big time and do things like, for example, knock over some pirates for what was supposed to be a huge sum of cash. There was no reason to keep running small amounts of contraband when he could . . . well, when he could make a huge mess of things and end up in jail on his way to the salt mines. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea.

“Besides,” Rogers said, despite his wavering opinion. “It was getting boring. Those new droids kept popping up and sucking the personality out of everything.” It was also marginally more difficult to smooth-talk a machine.

Tuckalle shook his head. “That’s the best I can do for you. I’ll put in the minimum commitment of three years, and once you’re done with that, you can go back to whatever it was you were doing. I’ll even put you back in the 331st.”

Sitting back in his chair, Rogers folded his arms and chewed his lip while he thought. The peacetime military wasn’t really a military as much as it was a giant fraternity. What else were a bunch of people out on a spaceship in the middle of nowhere supposed to do but drink and gamble and horse around? The Two Hundred Years’ (and Counting) Peace had left plenty of room for filling leisure time with interesting activities.