“So now you have a pirate problem?” I asked.

“More like a rival faction problem” He corrected me. “And I thought your people called it something different?”

Ah yes. I remembered now. An ‘unlicensed trade and transportation complication’ was the term we were officially using. Part of being in a corporation instead of in a government or system power was that you got to name things the way they best fit your needs and objectives. So while politicians and bureaucrats jump through hoops to either fight or justify piracy in their sectors, we go all over the galaxy and rebrand it.

Yembo Interstellar was the leading faction in the appropriately named Yembo System. Things had been stable for a few cycles, but their rival, Yembo Blue Clan, figured that incentivizing a couple of pirates, or ‘unlicensed entrepreneurs’, to operate in the system might tilt things more in their favour. With Holzberger becoming a stain on the station wall and the security services overwhelmed with discontent over at Mitra Vision Outpost, Yembo Blue Clan decided it was time to act.

Arnoldo was the Security Advisor to whoever it was that ran the station, another bureaucrat part of the Yembo Interstellar. They had hired Elysium Corp. to provide consulting services which would, amongst many things, consolidate their position and provide security and safety in the system.

Almost everyone behind the controls of a ship regarded piracy as an inevitable part of life. Some people don’t take to well to mining space rocks for months at a time, or hauling 200 tonnes of biowaste from one end to the galaxy to the other. So of course there were bound to be some free spirited individuals who pursued alternative means of income. Who could blame them?

Many pirates were actually very nice people. They would interdict you and be very polite in requesting if you would be so kind as to power down your engines and allow your cargo to be scanned. If you happened to be carrying anything valuable, they would only take a fraction of it. No need to be greedy. And off you were, not a shot fired. In fact, they could be some of the loveliest people you could meet in the void.

There was always the exception, of course. The younger, dumber, more trigger happy alternative. Flying fast ships with no shields, high on whatever industrial glue they could get their hands on, screaming incoherently as they try to pull traders out of supercruise to steal cargo they couldn’t even carry.

I saw a wing of three of these clowns once, flying Eagles, trying to rob a Vulture. A Vulture, for those not familiar with that mass of weapons strapped to an engine, is as far as you can get from a ‘piratable’ ship. It’s got little cargo space, and what little it has is probably filled with ammunition. Needless to say, those pirates had a very short lived career.

You would think pirates would learn, but that kind of suicidal bandit plagues the whole galaxy. They are a pain to everyone, and gives the good pirates a bad name.