Rex knew stealing his father's royal starship would probably constitute high treason—even for the heir to the throne of Canis Major—but that was tomorrow's problem. Kings were just bureaucrats with better hats anyway, and Rex had actual talents: finding weird space junk nobody cared about until he made it fashionable. The pirates who intercepted him three days into his unscheduled sabbatical hadn't counted on Rex deploying the escape pod. To be fair, neither had Rex until approximately four seconds before he did it.

The pod—being royal and therefore absurdly over-engineered—didn't so much crash as firmly introduce itself to the surface of the nearest planet, a rock so insignificant it didn't even merit a dot on imperial star charts. After seventy-two hours of Rex trudging around and cataloguing various species of alien nothing, his scanner pinged. Jackpot. Buried under purple sand in what looked suspiciously like an impact crater was a glowing green orb that, once excavated, made Rex feel like he'd simultaneously chugged twelve espressos and been told the universe actually did revolve around him.

As the artifact's glow turned his helmet into an extremely expensive nightlight, Rex had one of those rare moments of clarity usually reserved for monks or people experiencing near-death hallucinations: sometimes you had to commit light grand theft starship to find your true calling. What his moment of zen failed to include was awareness of the figure watching from the ridge, mentally calculating the exact trajectory needed to separate Rex from his fancy new bauble without having to say please.