LAST EDITED ON Oct-09-01 AT 01:43 AM (EDT)

It astonishes me that, despite the fact that the United Galactica has all but collapsed and hundreds of civil wars pepper our corner of this galaxy, most of the actual people live in the same tranquil, bucolic, circumscribed lifestyles which dominated what historians have taken to calling the Golden Age of the Galaxy. The Galactica, and its guardians like the Wedge Defense Force, kept things peaceful and prosperous for so long that now the good people of the Galactica believe this peace and prosperity to be their birthright and are quite happy to let the chaos of civil disorder roll over them without a murmur.

My life is so different from that of these people that the comparison can scarcely be made, much less explained to any of them. They exist on a thousand scattered worlds, each wealthy and contented for the most part, with crime and injustice kept well below the common plebe's sensors. Oh, there are a few malcontents, the incompetents who escape the conformity-inducing school systems and public mental health facilities and turn to crime. These are brought to heel in good time, a week, a month, perhaps a year. They make up ninety percent of all crime in the galaxy and give the common people the pleasant illusion that order is being maintained.

Of the remaining ten percent, nine is organized crime. Although this phrase dredges up images of the Hutt families, the Orion clans, the Sicilian Mafia and the New Japan Yakusa, just as much of this is run by corporations, or even the government, as is run by the 'entrepeneur.' Thanks to their backing, they usually remain untouchable except under extreme conditions. The price for their invulnerability, of course, is a relative lack of ambition; they don't upset the apple cart, they take no chances, and when you get down to it there is not a lot of difference between a Mob kneecapper and a little league baseball coach, mentally speaking.

That makes up ninety-nine percent of all crime, and if that were the end of it you could simply let the organized nine percent handle the unorganized ninety and dispose of the police entirely. It is that last one percent that keeps the police agencies of the galaxy in business, which routinely makes the nightly news and provides entertainment for the bovine intelligences of the small-town Milky Way. That last one percent is myself, myself and a few lone agents like myself, scattered across the many star empires of the Perseus Arm. We are the rats in the wainscotting of society, and while some of us are content to nibble at the cheese hidden in the cupboard, some are rabid and sneak out to bite the hand which unwittingly feeds us. The two traits we all share are the unwillingness to live by society's rules and the intelligence to remain outside society's grip.

Society used to have more rats, back in the pre-contact days of each planet, when the rules were looser, just as the old wooden and concrete buildings had more rats than the steel towers and orbital habitats of today. Today it takes a special kind of rat to find the joints, to skip from world to world and law to law without being caught or, worse yet, becoming part of the system. Only a stainless steel rat can survive in such a society.

It is a proud and lonely thing to be a stainless steel rat- and very nice work if you can keep it. Unfortunately sometimes even a stainless steel rat gets caught, and so I was, brought down not by a police officer or an outraged crime lord but by, of all things, bill collectors. Now, in order to work off the debts held against me, I am employed by a secret agency to solve the kind of crimes I once committed, bringing the truly dangerous to justice and lowering the boom on those who hold themselves above the law.

I have been a thief, a con artist, a smuggler, a hacker, and many other things in my short lifetime. Never, however, had I considered for myself the possibility of being a -hero-...

2344
STAINLESS STEEL WEST

a story possibly coming to you by Kris Overstreet

(And no, the Redneck isn't in it. At all.)

-Redneck

Red wizard needs money badly...
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