The room was sparsely lit, only furnished with a simple wooden table and two chairs. An old worn unlit gas lamp stood on the edge of the table. The man in the military uniform sat in one chair, his head down looking to his boots. He couldn’t have been older than forty. Old enough to explain the weariness on his face. Young enough to still remember naïve-unfulfilled dreams of his youth. His hands grasped the edges of the chair’s armrests until one could hear the wood slants under the cheap cushions creak in pain. Opposite of him, a tall man with white hair gently nodded his head, as if knowing the right moment to gesture some kind of acknowledgement. The right balance of listening and interrupting that only a seasoned man of the cloth could learn over years of experience. The kind of instinct that had become second nature as the ‘verse had become more and more lawless as the rumblings of another war brewed across all the frontier outposts.

“And do you feel remorse at all?” asked the tall man. It was almost a laughable question after what he had just heard being confessed. It was a story so disturbed and violent that it bordered on the surreal. He would have laughed, thinking the tale was a product of a wild imagination, had not the strange visitor kept such a stoic face the whole time. But the faux mask of total control could not disguise the pain in his eyes.

“I’ve served the Alliance for twenty years now. But it was when I was on an outpost planet about a week ago that I realized what I had become. I had been there before several times, it was a known trouble spot. There was a local mayor in town; he was doing a lot of talking. Things lots of people didn’t want to hear. Or more frightening to some folks, he said things that lots of people started to repeat themselves. He was against unification, thought it would only bring hardship and pain to the outer rim planets like his. In retrospect, he was right, ahead of his time. But that wasn’t my job to decide right and wrong. At least that’s what I thought.