Free The Blue Marble Gambit by Jupiter Boson

an alien planet,
they'd try to get a visa. Stealing
technology was impossible - they'd try to get export permits and buy it
legally. They were suffocated by
their own warped and self-imposed perceptions of the rule of law. You can't survive that way."
    Trina
fixed me with her golden eye. Her
green eye was on the instrument panel. “So you don't believe in right and wrong?"
    "Let's
just say I have a modified sense of those concepts. Being right and dead doesn't do you any
good.
    She
turned two new eyes on me. Well,
the same gold and green eyes, but with a new expression. "How did you get into the Fist?”
    I told her, very briefly, about my experiment with modern piracy. Flitting about in a space kayak. Hiding out in a stray asteroid. Dodging a system-wide hunt by EarthCop.
    She
sat back and her skin flicked to a natural golden glow. "That was you ? Skybeard? The Space Pirate?? You're not dead!”
    "No. The battle
was faked. A public demise is
another requirement for Fist Agents, sometimes known as Fingers. Earth is too law and order; the populace
wouldn't stand for the knowledge that the best and brightest criminal minds of
the last century have not only avoided punishment, but have actually been
rewarded for their nefarious talents."
    I was watching her carefully for her reaction. Would she
scream? Refuse to go along? Demand to file a protest? Start a petition? Found a
support group?
    That
gold green gaze held me in its sights. Her skin was in a slow swirl ; her hair slowly
turning a deep red. Her eyes
glittered. Piracy was having an
effect on her, but not the one I'd feared. I began to think of plunder.
    "How
good were you? As a pirate? I read the stories, but I
mean how good were you really?"
    "I
was . . . Adequate ." No need to brag, but I was a shade better than
adequate.
    "How'd
you get caught?"
    "Why
would you think I got caught?"
    "You're
here."
    "You
don't think I voluntarily came in, for the good of my fellow man?"
    "No."
    "Ah. Fair enough. Well, I didn't get caught, exactly. I was tricked." I explained that by
the time I'd hit my third ship, EarthCop was in an uproar; at the time there
hadn't been a real criminal in centuries. Soon I had accumulated a series of convictions, all of them happily in
absentia. I continued prowling and
looting, never once harming a single human while focusing on those ships that
advertised themselves as pirate-proof - 'diz Astor proof,' as they called it.
    Trina
licked her lips at me. They bore an
intriguing zebra pattern.
    "Go
on," she whispered.
    I'd
been on the vids every night; there was even a children's show based on
me. My actions gained attention
elsewhere, too, though I didn't know it. The Fist. At first, as a
courtesy, they worked with EarthCop to arrange a series of simple traps. These were tests; had I been captured, I
would have been left to the Justice system, to the inevitable brain-wipe and
reprogramming or imprisonment.
    But
I didn't fall into those gradually more sophisticated traps, and finally -
unknowingly - passed the tests. The
Fist then decided it wanted me, designed better snares, and found to its
surprise and chagrin that even with its best efforts it couldn't catch me.
    That
was unprecedented, and it made the Fist really want me. So they sent me a message. They could have reached me by a variety
of electronic means - although no one knew where my secret base was, or where I
was at any given moment, an open transmission would have reached me. But instead they chose a more elegant
means, one more in keeping with my anachronistic tendencies.
    They
sent me a letter. On real paper.
    Addressed
in a flowing calligraphy, I found it in the haul I pulled from the
interplanetary liner Armstrong's Article . It was signed by my
own dear old uncle Admiral Beaugeste Fairchile , and it started off by
congratulating me for my piracy, then proposed a meeting under a flag of truce
and guaranteed by his personal honor.
    Honor. Another long-outmoded concept, a
hallmark of that