A shockingly smart and devastatingly cruel crew track, hunt, raid, and kill the biggest threats to peaceful ships. -- LatinoThor
They called themselves Dragons, for the ancient tradition marking hazardous seas with, Here There Be Dragons. Their territory was astonishingly vast for what encounter logs suggested was one ship. The last records in the surviving black boxes stated that one ship was seen, but that didn't mean that just one ship was there.
Authorities were slower to act about the attacks, since the Dragons were routinely attacking bands of pirates bothering the Alliance shipping lanes. The Dragons were selective, picking the worst offenders who killed passengers and crew to get what they wanted. Some of their first targets were those who blew up the ship and used any survivors in livesuits or life pods as target practice.
Authorities only knew their name because they announced themselves before their attacks. When one black box revealed that the Dragons were also Humans... there was even less inclination to track them down and apprehend them. Not even when the space pirates were "licensed privateers" from an antagonistic polity in the Edge Territories.
It took the claim that one of the Dragons' victims was an innocent trading ship for the organisation to warrant an investigation. Shipping lane patrol vessels cautiously entered the space through which the Dragons operated. They had weapons, it was true, but they also had orders not to open fire unless it was their only hope of escape. They did everything they could to appear non-hostile.
The Dragons assessed them just as much as the Shipping Patrol was assessing them. The Dragons wanted to be sure it wasn't a trap, and so too did the Shipping Patrol. Only once terms were established for parley did the truth come out. These were Humans rejected by the antagonistic Human Polity for being too cruel, too violent, and most importantly, both of those towards the wrong kind of people[1]. They were all of a similar sort, people trained to be specifically violent, yet they also possessed morals enough to know that the privateers were not doing the right things.
They were not fit for any Human society but the one they'd made. They were wrecked by their training, with instincts to respond with violence first, and think about things later. Their polity had destroyed them psychologically. Therefore, they got revenge by destroying their polity's revenue stream.
They predated on the privateers. Only the privateers. They had evidence against their alleged rulers. Recorded transmissions, orders, and footage. The Dragons had a very small fleet, but they knew how the privateers worked. They knew the tactics, strategy, timetables, shift rotations... all the important parts.
All of this, they shared with the Shipping Patrol officers. Which lead to them asking for asylum from their leaders. The Shipping Patrol could not release these Humans into Alliance space. Even the Humans realised that they were unfit for civilisation. They still needed somewhere safe where they could remain in a safe state whilst others dealt with the offending polity.
Fortunately, Humans are Deathworlders and there are plenty of planets that Humans find paradisiacal that others would avoid for being too dangerous. They were given the planet and what therapists could actually help Deathworlders broken into default cruelty. Their first action for the Alliance was to assist in a severe rebuke of their parent polity to the point where the entire empire of three planets collapsed and surrendered to all Alliance terms.
Pax Humanis was born.
[1] Otherwise known as the people of high social status within the polity in question.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / cobracz]
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