Had Zachary been a Solly, that alone would have been enough to infuriate her. Unfortunately, the Navy was only one example of the pernicious effect of siphoning more and more of the available resources of government into the clutches of bureaucratic entities subject to only the weakest of legislative oversight. But what Zachary found even more objectionable as someone who was not a Solly was the way in which the League bureaucrats made foreign policy without ever bothering to consult with the League’s elected representatives. And probably the worst of the lot in that regard was the Office of Frontier Security.

The OFS had originally been conceived as an agency intended to promote stability along the League’s frontiers. It was supposed to do that by offering its services to mediate disputes between settled star systems which were not yet part of the League. In order to provide incentives for quarreling star systems to seek its arbitration, it had been authorized to offer security guarantees, backed by the SLN, and special trade concessions to those systems which sought the League’s protection.

No doubt the OFS’ creators had anticipated that the agency’s operations would smooth the inevitable gravitation of such single-system polities into the benign arms of the League. But whatever they might have intended when the OFS was first authorized five hundred T-years ago, what it had become since was an arm of naked expansionism. These days, the OFS manufactured ‘requests’ for League protection. It didn’t worry particularly about whether or not the people making those requests represented local governments, either. All it cared about was that someone had requested ‘protection’—often against a local government, in fact—to offer the necessary pretext for its intervention. And there had been occasions when no one at all had requested OFS intervention. Instances in which the OFS had sent in the League Gendarmerie to enforce protectorate status… purely in the interests of safeguarding human rights, of course.

Over the centuries, the Office of Frontier Security had become the Solarian League’s broom, sweeping the small, independent, poverty stricken star systems along the League’s periphery into its maw, whether they chose to be swept or not. To be completely fair, which Zachary admitted she found it difficult to be in this instance, most of the worlds which were dragged into the League eventually found themselves far better off materially.

Eventually. The rub was that in the short term their citizens were given no choice, no voice in their own future. And anyone who objected to becoming a Solly was ignored… or repressed. Worse, the OFS was no more immune to the temptations of graft and corruption than any other agency run by fallible human beings. The lack of any sort of close legislative oversight only made those temptations stronger, and by now the agency was in bed with powerful vested interests, using its power and authority to create “sweetheart deals” for favored interstellar corporations, shipping lines, or political cronies and contributors as it reorganized the “protected” worlds under its nurturing care. There were even persistent rumors that some of the OFS administrators had forged connections with the Mesan genetic slavers.