For every force that pushes forward exists a force that pushes back; so true as the night exists to soothe the weight of the day, or that there’s a sun to a moon. Balance measures the difference between those opposites; everything in the universe is like that. That’s a rule.

That’s why, when the hegemony of a place is established by a fascist government that dictated their conditions as a natural law, a force to quarrel with subjugation will be born—as the bustling heat does it with the static cold. That’s how wars begin and how sides decide who’s an ally and who’s an enemy.

That happened to the Markabian Imperial Army. For centuries, the Army had been holding almost an entire continent under their control, and there were always been upheavals here and there. However, about fifty years ago, the first movement that really meant something more than a simple commotion to the Empire appeared. The malcontent civilians had started a small revolution.

At first, the way to oppose the regime had been through public manifestations or street art, with signs that had the Army’s coat of arms—a white horse standing on its hind legs, with laurel wreaths at its sides acting like a pair of wings—crossed out with what pretended to be blood; or with the horse redrawn with leafless wings, and a corpse lying beneath it. There had been also graffiti with phrases far from poetic, but with a clear message: ‘The Imperialists eat dog shit!’ for example, or: ‘To the hell with those bastards!’

Up until then, nothing that had not happened before in history.

But the movement had planted the seeds of the revolution in many people, and months later, confrontations between rebels and the military had tripled. Once the firsts retaliations were overcome, beyond the injured, the deceased, the missing ones, and the detained, the rebellion had gained adepts; causing even the desertion of many soldiers that ended up joining it, among others who were distanced from the militia’s path.

By then, old ways of protest had been pushed aside, and even when once in a while a new not-so-flattering message dedicated to the Empire would appear on the walls of a building, the rebels had adopted more serious belligerent methods to echo their discontent. The leading group, formed in its majority by former soldiers and armed civilians, broke into the Army’s smaller bases. By assaulting transport trucks on the route, they’ve got themselves some guns, increasing their striking power. That’s how they caught the pejorative nickname of the Rowdy Ones.

The opposing forces had begun their game; and as it was said before, everything in the universe is a matter of balance.

Of course, the balance could favor one side and decline the other, there was no clause guaranteeing both sides would be under the same conditions.

The Rowdy Ones were a pushing force, true; but a small one. It survived because its leaders kept hiding and weaving strategies, as a spider weaves its net. Whereas the Markabian Imperial Army was savagely powerful, and their nets were not those of a spider but those of a whaling ship.

Night had fallen, and the drizzle had become rain. The multicolor shining of the neon signs crammed in the street, narrow and full of small shops, got blurred in the fog and water drops.

Dressed in a dark slicker with a hood so big he barely saw his way, Rigel Beta walked through bikers and mopeds, vendors, and passersby that rushed to get cover before the rain would turn into a storm. Most of them were using their purses or hoodies over their heads; looking ahead was like seeing a sea of caps and plastic bags that kept shaking.

Taking a little detour, Rigel got into a dark, slender alley behind a fry bread stand, where he was received by a wet soil smell and a man dressed in a slicker as dark as his, with the head hidden in the shadows. None of them seemed very interested in seeing each other’s faces.

“I’ve been waiting more than an hour,” said the man, clearly upset, but he tried to keep his voice down. “What is it this time?”

Rigel took a folded paper out of his pocket and handle it to him.

“This was printed in your studio,” Rigel said. “You’re the only one who works with that type of ink in the area. Next time, think twice before taking the savings of some idealist students.”

The man unfolded the paper; it was a pamphlet.

If you want the Faculty of Archeology to say ‘ENOUGH!’ to the tyrannical regulations of the Markabian Imperial Army, help us gather signatures! We want a fascist-free University, and we want it NOW!’

Indeed, it was one of his prints. Then, he noticed there was something hand-written on the back of it:

Tomorrow. 2000 hours. Big shipment. Samuel Villa.

The man ripped the note into shreds and threw them in the gutter for the water to take away.

“Perfect,” he whispered. “I’ll pass the tip to the group and—”

But when he lifted his eyes, Rigel was already gone, lost among the people running in the street.

The rain got heavier.

Colonel Rigel Beta was a tough, rigid man that served the Army; a man that had chosen a life in the military because he believed in discipline, not because he liked the governing his superiors provided. But he was also an idealist, and above all, he loved freedom. That’s why he used to help his adversaries, the Rowdy Ones. Because peace and order, his top priorities, were things beyond the emblems and parties someone was attached to, even his. And in his opinion, in many cases justice was on the side of the Rowdy Ones and not on his side.

Rigel had not deserted as some of his former comrades had, a few years ago, when parting ways with the military seemed to have been a fashion fever no more significant than having worn shaggy hair or long sideburns. Good for those who had jettisoned their taste for medals and joined the resistance, he used to think, but as much as the attitude was praiseworthy to him, he had his own thoughts about it.

He was of the mindset that the Rowdy Ones grazed anarchy, and because order, as a concept, was such an important thing to him, he didn’t consider casting off from an institution like the military that, putting aside the complications carried by their regime, had proven to be capable of maintaining social stability for a very long time, to be a good idea.

We could argue that Rigel’s personal situation was peculiar and a little bit contradictory, but what situation in the life of a soldier was not? ‘If you want peace, prepare for war,’ said the motto. Humankind had shown they sometimes need harshness to be efficient, and while rigor-based stability was not something Rigel weighed, after all, it meant stability.

Even if he had his disagreements with the Imperial Council, the fear of falling into anarchy kept him in the military ranks. The secret lay in observing which side justice pointed out in a particular situation, letting himself be guided by what he thought was the right thing to do.

Rigel determined when to give a hand to the Rowdy Ones and when to stay out of conflict. He kept a special consideration for them that he didn’t keep for the military; perhaps because the Rowdy Ones were the minority, and the others had a lot in their favor. “Even the Empire’s disadvantages have its advantages,” Marie, his ex-girlfriend, used to say, and she was right.

And the best help Rigel Beta could offer those who were at a disadvantage was Information.

There were others in the military playing both sides, others like him that resist the temptation of showing their middle fingers to their superiors and send them to bury themselves where the sun does not shine. He had six of those men in the System Department, Empire’s core center of information; and through them, Rigel had access to his superiors’ plans.

His duty as the detective colonel in the Criminal Division was handy when he needed to leak information. Spending much of his day in the field, investigating crime scenes, Rigel could disappear from the military radar to meet his contacts inside the rebellion with more freedom than if he were confined to a barracks. And thanks to his men in Systems, no traces of his sneaks were left behind.

Sometimes, the security cameras of a place spotted him talking with a subversive; other times, a satellite caught him entering dubious places. If that happened, before that evidence could reach someone, the guys from the System Department filtered them, did some computer magic, and voilà! Rigel disappeared from what might expose him.

After many years of keeping information and giving it to the opposite side, Rigel Beta realized that his trade as a spy suited him better than his actual rank. He was more fascinated by the taste of the adrenaline when trafficking information than to spend the entire day at a crime scene. He was reconsidering what Marie had said when she ended their relationship.

“You’ve got an addiction: it is knowledge,” she had said back then.

To which he had replied: “Knowledge is power.”

“I know, but it also corrupts you,” she had stated. “Maybe you’ve mastered your temper to slip under the table one thousand secrets without even flinch, but you don’t master your true thirst. You may not see it now, Rigel—when you don’t want to see something you don’t see it even if it’s standing on top of your nose—but that passion of yours for meddling in whatever, hides your dangerous obsession to have everything under control.”

Rigel Beta was a good man; of course, he was. He was an idealist, sure. He was obsessive and pig-headed; oh, for crying out loud! Absolutely!

But how not to be when he had access to so many secrets? When there was so much to be seen and so much to hush about? How not to be that way when the investigation of a crime opened a mystery box full of horrors?

Even more so with what he discovered on his last mission.

He’d been assigned to investigate the crime of six archeology students in the South Tropical Canyon. And everything had shown that his work would roll under the normal parameters: recollection of the evidence, body autopsies, the forensic analysis; criminal—or criminals—profiling, and their capture. Case closed.

None of the officers had expected to find an abandoned complex hiding behind the walls of a cave; and in this place, among thousand things, a giant old computer.

Rigel had delegated the murder investigation to his subordinates, Snow and Froia, and he went full-on checking what was in that underground place. Meanwhile, technicians at the System Department had put their hands and minds into working on the computer found there.

The machine, full of monitors and panels, all inactive, had many signs of erosion on its shell; although the real problem was underneath it. Whatever caused the electrical overload that had busted the fuses in that lab, it had also burned the machine circuits. Experts had put all their effort into saving the information left in its matrix, and they managed to extract from it more data than they had initially thought was possible.

Now, knowing that the painstaking work was almost done, Rigel got close to one of his allied technicians.

“I want to see the content of this thing before anybody else,” he said.

That same night, Rigel Beta received under his house’s door a closed folder with a copy of the final report.

When he read it, his bushy eyebrows rose and his small black eyes almost popped out of their sockets. What he had in his hand was more astonishing than everything they had discovered until that point.