A sole metallic wheel chair rolled slowly onto a circular metal plate in the middle of the floor. When the chair stopped, buckles reached up from the floor and wrapped their high tensile fingers around the wheels. Once the chair was securely affixed, the plate began to rise. A circular hatch above flowered open to let the plate through, stopped and silently unleashed the chair and its occupant.

The man in the chair couldn’t move. He was a prisoner; a man condemned to death. The chair was not only his transportation but also his prison and executioner. The chair had his head immobilized with skull screws, so Jeremiah Kratz looked around with his eyes. He was trying to see the people that had put him here. The people that with sentencing him to death were also killing themselves.

The chair slowly wheeled forward. These models were always programmed for a sense of drama. Not only was the bulky wheelchair a sentient machine, it was also a useful tool for building suspense. The Alliance of the Twelve Suns knew how to hold an audience.

The Alliance of the Twelve Suns or Twelve Suns as it was commonly called was a governing body. The twelve suns that gave them their name where the twelve stars that had life sustaining planets. The Twelve Suns actually ruled a much larger area of space, but most of the planets were dead and either used for strip mining or prison colonies. Their rule was based on a system of economics where industry swayed politics and the military was there to protect their interests. Common human rights were quickly forgotten in the face of the industrial despots.

Jeremiah grimaced to himself. Industry had put him in this mobile prison that would soon be his executioner. It didn’t really seem like seventeen years since everything started to develop. He was just a small time industrialist himself. He was allowed to keep up his business as long as he didn’t dabble in the larger markets. His business was a small manufacturing company. The big product he made was a laser charger.

He’d originally designed the charger to be used in mobile medical packs. He took the liberty of tearing a standard pack apart, rebuilding it for higher capacity and universal equipment acceptance. He started small, but word spread quickly. The chargers ended up becoming high demand items, and he stepped up his production. Those days were good. Those were the days before trouble.

The trouble didn’t even start with the local Marshall’s visit. He just asked Jeremiah for one of the cartridges to try in his laser pistol. A week later, Jeremiah got orders to produce these in bulk for the Marshall and his deputies. Jeremiah thought this was fine, after all, the Marshall himself had asked for the chargers. He never thought he was crossing an invisible line.

Word spread to people that had a vested interest in keeping the corner of the laser charger market, supplying not only the local police but the military units that a despotic government was forced to keep. The Teegis Corporation sent word to the authorities that its market was being invaded. They wanted an end to the competition, especially competition that created a better product.

Naturally, the authorities wanted as little friction as possible. The first notice was polite. Jeremiah complied. He stopped selling to any police force, and went back to selling to civilians. He ended up selling almost as many in the private sector. Even at his old numbers, he was making more than enough to keep his wife and children living a comfortable life. He was surprised how his sales had stayed up. He guessed that people in the community were actually in support of him and decided to patronize his chargers.

A plan began to for in Jeremiah’s head. If it worked here, it could work in other cities. He loaded up a small briefcase full of chargers and headed by jet shuttle to the next largest town. He had meetings with a few general distributors. The meetings went well. He left with an empty briefcase and a pocket full of promises. He hoped the trip had been worth the expensive price of the ticket.

The return trip home was what changed his life. He stepped out of the jet shuttle and headed toward a taxi. Two men asked him to get into their car. Jeremiah refused until he saw the face of his wife within the car. He agreed.

The ride in the car went nowhere near his house or factory. The story these men and his wife told him destroyed the man that was Jeremiah Kratz. These men were members of the Kiltron resistance, a very small faction that fought against the total control of the Twelve Suns. They believed that a government that wasn’t responsible to the people it governed was no government at all.

They’d intercepted the transmission to the local Marshall to destroy his home and factory. The last order was to kill everyone present. The Kiltron had swooped in before and rescued Jeremiah’s wife and children. The employees were told to run and never return.

It seemed that all the extra orders Jeremiah had thought were good faith business and a belief in community had actually been a means of profit. The people he’d sold to turned around and sold the chargers to the police forces and different resistance and militia groups. After a small skirmish, the Inquisitor from the Twelve Suns arrived. She was to investigate all insurgencies and try to decide who or what caused the problems that led to violent conflict. She noticed the cartridges, and it was only as matter of time before they were traced back to Jeremiah. The greed and self interest of a few had cost his family their lively hood and doomed the workers that depended on him to run for fear of being associated with him.

Jeremiah’s gratitude for his family’s life and his own led him to setting up a small manufacturing facility for the Kiltron. He produced his laser chargers, but he further developed the design to make it even more useful than before. He also started developing his own laser pistols and rifles to be used by the various resistance movements that were involved with the Kiltron.

The new chargers were eventually captured in small skirmishes. The design was similar enough to his old chargers that the Twelve Suns were able to make a connection. It was then that a bounty was put on his head. He was a hunted man. Not only did that make life hard for him, but it put all the Kiltron in even more danger than usual.

Because of this unjust hunt, Jeremiah Kratz decided to start mapping the different resistance groups, trying to start getting two or three different groups to work together. He used the contacts the Kiltron already had and new contacts that were developing with the distribution of his weapons and chargers. He knew that the concerted efforts of the different resistance groups had be small and look coincidental. He didn’t want more attention than he was already getting.

Every place he hid was discovered. Every escape or get away was getting closer and closer. Jeremiah decided to move a great distance to a place that the Twelve Suns would not look for him. He moved to the Elias system. A dead system under the protection of the Twelve Suns but stripped of all its resources hundreds of years before. He settled in with many of the Kiltron. They planned the destruction of the Alliance of the Twelve Suns.

The plan was simple. Build a space armada and attack when they didn’t expect it. The big problem was all the ships and weapons needed for such an undertaking. All of the available planets were stripped, but Jeremiah had picked this system because of its proliferation of asteroid belts.

Asteroid mining was difficult and not remotely profitable for the time and money it took, but if you were a group of resistance fighters hiding out in the middle of no where with nothing else to do, it was a gold mine. All the minerals and ores they needed were present. The ships were designed after stolen starship plans. Certain differences were made. No large ships were produced, mostly self contained one and two person fighters that were able to jump into hyperspace. Several medium sized ships that were glorified gunboats. The fleet was agile and powerful with out the need for excessive man power. All they needed was a good diversion.

“And here I sit,” thinks Jeremiah. Being sentenced for theft, fraud, treason, and murder. Murder is the only one that really hurts him. He is responsible for murder. The explosions and the attacks were brutal. Innocent people were almost always killed, and he did order many of those attacks. He kept telling himself it was the price of war, of freedom, but he couldn’t accept that. He knew that being put to death was justice for those that survived their loved ones.

“No more time for self pity,” he quietly said to himself as the wheelchair rolled onto the dais overlooking the capitol city of the Twelve Suns. Flanking his execution vehicle were the men that sent him to death. The chief industrialist, political dignitaries, and military leaders. Perhaps half of the most important people in the Alliance of the Twelve Suns. All here for him. But as they would have their justice, so he would have his twice over.

“You are being given the chance to utter your last words,” one of the chancellors hissed out in joy.

Jeremiah knew anything he said would be twisted and reverse spun to make him look foolish, to make the cause he’d adopted look small and weak. He decided on the truth instead of some pompous spit in the face of authority. “I wish to apologize to all that have died in this war. I’ve done what I have for my family and everyone else’s. Let justice be served.” His voice cracked a little from the stress. He only wanted it to be over.

It was. It was a death meant to be humane and painless. At least the Twelve Suns had achieved that much in all their years of dominance. They also achieved the death of every living creature on the platform. The cessation of Jeremiah’s mental functions triggered all of the small organic implants. A rush of natural chemical explosions hurled poisonous barbs for nearly a hundred meters. The power of the explosion ripped apart his body, as the barbs passed out. All organic and hidden deep in his tissue; the living death in his muscle’s and organs were undetectable by most means, especially the standard prisoner exams. Only non organic or large traces of unusual organics were ever investigated. This fault on the Twelve Suns part allowed Jeremiah to be an executioner even in his death.

At the same moment, hordes of starships dropped out of hyper space, catching a slack jawed military that couldn’t believe what they’d just seen on the holo-platfroms around their ships. The Navy of the Twelve Suns had little time to react. The extra seconds could have saved them with their vast numbers, but the attack was too sudden and violent. It was timed too perfectly with the execution. Justice was swift and final.