There were many things to absorb, filter and present to their homeworld on their return and there were those among the crew who would have preferred the more traditional approach of widespread plasma bombing. However, this was a research mission and they could wait until they had more information about this fascinating alien culture before obliterating it. 

As they looked down through their forest of aerials and dishes, the Hargons didn't know it but they were the victims of irony. Even as they monitored their prey on Legality, the Judiciary were looking right back. Their invisibility was merely an illusion for their technology was inferior to that of the Judges and their monitoring activities were, themselves, being monitored. 

 ***  

The offices of sliderds and massk stretched out like white cliffs across the main city square of Law. From the long lines of glass, half a million clerks could see thousands of police vehicles gleaming in the sun among the twirling and flashing traffic-control camera arrays. 

'There ought to be a law!' said Metz of Metz, Metz and Metz -a respected firm of solicitors employed by sliderds and massk to ensure social order. 'There ought to be a law and there isn't one!'

'Calm down, old man,' said his eye. 'You'll burst a blood-vessel in me if you keep getting excited. We've got the situation under control…'

'Pussies!' said Metz, unconvinced, and started running a nasal scan of the news archives. 'Something doesn't smell right and I pay good money for things to smell right.' 

He sniffed and squinted, squinted and sniffed, caught up in the sensory influx of information being funnelled into him digitally through his many cybernetic plugins. To a casual observer, Metz might have appeared somewhat spastic in his behaviour but, in fact, his brain was processing sound, audio, and text at a breathtaking speed. Even so, if there were no statutes about Hargon outreach ships hovering above Legality prying into the lives of her people, looking faster and harder through the use of plugins than any one before could have done was still futile. You can't find information that isn't there to find. There had never been a Hargon ship looking down on the planet before so there had never been a legal precedent. How the Judiciary should proceed was a mystery. Metz didn't like mysteries. 

'Pussies!' he shouted at his eye and his buttocks clenched defensively in case they were next to feel the sharp edge of his tongue. 

His secretary popped in for their quizzical sex appointment but, seeing he was so busy, raised one eyebrow, shuddered with pleasure, and left again. 

'No precedents,' he said at last with a sigh and relaxed back into his chair. 'We need a new law.' 

Now able to see across the room normally, Metz stared out at the milling police cars and jumped slightly as one of the traffic camera arrays exploded.  

'Ah,' he said, cheering up. 'Now that's something we do have a law for.' 

It was a welcome distraction from the question of the Hargon ship as Metz watched the Chronocopter appear over the stricken array that now smoked and blinked randomly. Temporal scans were being made and before long Metz unlocked his drawer and pulled out a yellow folder. Flicking through it he stopped at the page he was looking for and removed it.  

All the details were there: who blew up the camera, why he did it, and what his sentence was to be. Metz smiled to see that his rehabilitation would turn out to be so effective that, in his later years, he would become an engineer in the factories that produced the cameras.  

He flicked his ear. 'Cheryl?' he said. 

'Yes, Mr Metz?' 

'Inform Collection that Merlin of Quad has blown up a camera. They'll want to pick him up.' 

'Do we do small cases now, sir?' 

'No, normally we don't, Cheryl, but according to his files our bomber is going to have a secret life.' 

'Like a serial killer?' 

'No, more like a spy. He's going to be important to Legality. In fact, when the Hargons get the upper hand and start taking over, he's going to be running the resistance.' 

'How does it turn out in the end, sir? Will the Hargons defeat us or will law and order prevail?' 

'Thereby, Cheryl my love, hangs the tale. The folder isn't complete and I can honestly say that I've no idea.' 

'Is the Chronocopter on the blink again, sir?' 

'No, but we had to use the small one. The mothership is being refitted with new Anticipators. Oh, and Cheryl?' 

'Yes, Mr Metz?' 

'Did you just come in and have quizzical sex without me again?' 

'You looked very busy, sir, so I thought I'd better not disturb you.' 

'Very good. That's all,' said Metz with a flick of his ear. Then he raised his eyebrow and let out a long sigh of delight. 

'I'm still here, sir,' said Cheryl and Metz flicked his ear again to cut her off. 

 ***  

'Basically, yes,' said his science officer, Brucey. 

'And, therefore, when it's time for us to take them over, they're going to know all about it?' 

'Potentially, yes -that's right. If our information is accurate then as soon as we do something of any interest to them, such as trying to obliterate them in order to obtain their minerals and technology, they may well be able to anticipate our every move and counter it.' 

'How? We're invisible to them. You told me so yourself. It's standard procedure.' 

'They've been bluffing us, I'm afraid, Commander. We've seen images of The Smeagol on T-Shirts at rock concerts so we're pretty sure of our facts. They've not attempted to make contact or fire weapons at us but they have a number of websites dedicated to us. We seem to be regarded by them as little more than curiosities -not a danger.'

 'That's crazy. We're very dangerous.' 

Brucey nodded in agreement.

'Everybody knows we're a force to not be taken lightly.' 

__________________________

'We can't, sir.' 

'And why can't we? We're Hargons. We can do what we like.' 

'Well, normally I'd agree, Commander, but we no longer have any plasma bombs on board.' 

'Generate more.' 

'We have no plasma weapon technology on the ship.' 

Daryl slapped his thigh. His sidearm was missing. 

'What's happened to our weapons?' 

Brucey examined a computer screen and tapped a few buttons. He scratched his head, frowned then raised a finger. 

'I don't know what happened, exactly, sir, but I do know when and that might be more important.' 

'Okay, when?' 

'The plasma weapons on The Smeagol left trace radiation signatures in the forward bulkheads. Even though we have no evidence of the technology in our data-banks, we can recall it distinctly so far. It may be that this changes.' 

'Why should it? We've had those weapons for centuries. We couldn't forget them.' 

'Which weapons do you mean, sir?' 

'You know, the ones with the blue flames.' 

'I'm sorry, Commander, you've lost me. However, I seem to have typed something here about plasma having irradiated the forward bulkheads.' 

'Is plasma dangerous? Do we need to medicate the crew?'

'I don't think so, but my message onscreen suggests that the plasma signature had been irradiating the bulkheads since the ship was launched but that the source of that radiation had vanished suddenly. I seem to have been suggesting that the timing of this disappearance was critical.' 

'Okay, I see. Well, when did it disappear, whatever it was?'

'Plasma may have been something to do with our weapon systems, sir, and I've put here that all traces of plasma disappeared when you suggested plasma-bombing Legality.'

'I thought I just said we should bomb them. I don't know what a plasma bomb is.'

'Nor do I,' said Brucey, 'but the timing seems to be a vital consideration. We may have had a weapon system based on plasma that disappeared the moment you mentioned using it on the planet. This raises some serious implications.'

Commander Daryl sat down by a console and rubbed his eyes.

'These aliens can hear what we're saying?'

'That's one, sir.'

'They can go back and change time so that our present is altered?'

 'That's the other one. We're at their mercy if they perceive us as a threat and decide to change our history. They could do anything.'

'Define “anything”.'

'They could fix it so that one of our parents was distracted and took a wrong turning just before they would have met the other. Then we'd disappear from The Smeagol having never been born.'

Commander Daryl and Science Officer Brucey watched each other for a while and, when neither had disappeared, concluded that -so far at least -Legality wasn't engaged in a fully-fledged temporal attack on them. Daryl sat for a long time, saying nothing, before typing on the screen next to him for Brucey's benefit, 'back me up.'

'Of course,' he said in a loud clear voice, 'what these people don't realise with their methodical legal system and respect for due process, is that we're from a culture where strong and violent impulses are highly praised. They probably think that by rewriting history so as to remove our plasma weaponry they've disarmed us? Isn't that funny?'

Brucey looked puzzled but he glanced at the order on the screen and nodded, 'It's hilarious, Commander. What can they be thinking?'

'Well, I don't know that but what I do know is that we have the Alphatron aimed at their whole sector of space and ready to vaporise every rock and plant, every person and time machine, in it. I know that I may have been all talk when it came to using these plasma weapons, whatever they are, but not when it comes to aliens breaking our timeline in a brazen act of war. I think I might have never used a plasma weapon but surely you'd agree that now they've taken them from us I have no choice but to deploy the Alphatron?'

Brucey shrugged and looked at Commander Daryl for a clue. Daryl nodded fiercely.

'Ah, yes, commander,' said Brucey at last. 'We can't let them get away with their bold effrontery but surely we don't want to bring about our own destruction too by using the Alphatron?'

'We can't allow alien invasions of our ship and our lives without proper due legal process to stand. Besides, if our history has been changed so as to remove plasma from our ship and our minds, who knows if we're really the same people we were before? We're just possible versions now. We've degraded and traduced. I say we blow the Judiciary to pieces even if we perish in the flames along with them.'

'But sir!'

Commander Daryl scanned an assessment of Legality's lack of a law concerning aliens monitoring them from ships in geostationary orbit and smiled. He tried to sound more serious than ever, though, as he went on:

'No, I'm sorry, Brucey, but my mind's made up. I've got no choice. Any judiciary that acts without laws to support their illegal interventions is corrupt and in need of immediate reform.'

'But what's to stop the Judiciary from simply doing the same thing to the Alphatron?' he said. Daryl looked surprised and annoyed and did a throat-cutting motion with his finger to stop him doing any further damage.

__________________________

In an unanticipated squaring of irony, the watchers of the watchers were themselves being watched.

Leagality's star Proxima Canem had a cosmically average system of planets including the usual pair of flatulent gas giants, one with rings, the other with bows, plus a trio of rocky inner worlds in addition to Legality, named Mercy, Charity and Donut for reasons that no one living on any of them could remember.

Circling their sun (called, imaginatively, The Sun  by all planetary inhabitants, except the ogorotangs of Donut, who didn't understand the question and tried to headbutt the galactic surveyor as a means of softening him up for eating later after becoming suitably putrescent; fortunately he was a veteran of Friday night gigs in Chatham and escaped relatively unharmed) at a jaunty angle to the ecliptic, in addition to the orderly globes there was also a scraggly asteroid belt.

Looking like nothing so much as a hugely stretched-out version of the sort of wispy beard that pallid youths of a technical disposition with light and soap aversions are prone to growing to cover world-class acne, the asteroid belt was officially known as The Asteroid Belt  by the inhabitants of Legality, who along with a passion for law and order had elevated bureaucracy and uninventive naming to levels previously undreamed-of.

Unofficially, this ring of unprepossessing rubble was referred to - by those who occasionally thought about things that weren't in their job descriptions - as the Chastity Belt. There were two reasons for this: firstly, it was thought by those responsible for making laws governing the distribution, behaviour and aesthetic attributes of space-borne objects to have been formed when a cosmic cataclysm caused the destruction of a putative fifth rocky planet of that name; and secondly because its inhabitants were felt to be uniformly unattractive to the opposite gender - and to each other - to such a degree that sexual activity involving other people was pretty much out of the question for them.

For there were indeed inhabitants of that sparse rocky region of space, who had been legislated out of even the lowest cubicles in Law and the other great cities of Legality: hordes of tech support staff, nerds and geeks, unable to cope with the atmosphere of corporate bullshit or the personal hygiene demands of Legality's elite, had emigrated to the rocky rings (itself an affliction suffered by many of Legality's leading lights, thanks to a diet largely lacking in moral fibre) to live.

Unlike the Hargons, the nerds didn't try to be invisible, but they achieved far greater success on that score by being completely overlooked. Their constant efforts kept the technical colossus of Legality functioning, delivering and implementing edicts on everything from the exact number of bobbles on tea cosies and permissible length of nasal hair in funeral directors to the potential war crime of preventing an entire species from achieving existence via temporal meddling.

As long as things worked, computers computed, networks networked, taps tapped and coffee machines coffed; the legal elite was happy to ignore the existence of the techno-underclass, turning a blind eye to the occasional illicit liaison between second-class preceptors who sneaked out for a quickie in the belt, sometimes known as 'getting off on a technicality'.

But the technologists didn't ignore them. Having wired, wormed, hacked, intruded, extruded and via various other verbs infiltrated their way into every aspect of Legality's civilisation, they spent a lot of their time watching it in a clandestine and slightly grubby manner, looking for smutty, amusing or -though this didn't happen much -'cool' things in between fixing the temporal regulators, edict propagators, pro bono dissipaters and coffee machines.

One of the more unsavoury specimens was The-Bruce, a genial game show and server host who had fallen on hard times after The Banishment of Accents Not Heard South of Watford Act of 2199 shut down his karaoke career. Although his unkempt appearance belied it, The-Bruce was a stickler for detail, which was why his name included a hyphen: he was 'The-Bruce' so that he shouldn't be confused with Robert the Bruce who was obviously a Robert, possibly a Bob on a dark evening, but not even in broad Glaswegian could he be mistaken for a Bruce, which made the name a mystery. Whatever the reason, The-Bruce had found it good practice not to be mistaken for anyone famous but dead, as some punters had a tendency to want to reassert the latter when confronted with a very-much-alive alternative.

'Hey pal, canna ye spare us a tenner fur a cuppa tea?' slurred The-Bruce at his computer screen, absent-mindedly dropping a half-full bulb of McEwans Super-Strength into his lap, upside down; gelatinous urine-coloured liquid oozed out and formed a quivering sphere poised delicately above his crotch.

The-Bruce was watching the proceedings in the sliderds & maask offices via an illicit sensory pickup stuck to the sole of Metz's shoe. Mostly he just got a close up view of the plush carpet, but every now and then bits of chair leg and desk swung dizzily into view, and once, to The-Bruce's delight, there had been a terrific view of Cheryl's patent leather pumps trembling on the carpet as she popped in for her quizzical sex appointment.

But he could hear everything going on in the offices of Metz, Metz and Metz, and thanks to a temporal snoop satellite, he had a fuzzy image of the bridge of the Hargon lead ship too.

'Yon Brucey is a right strapping bairn, reminds me of maself in ma younger days, but with wurrse hair. Suits you sir,' commented The-Bruce. Leaning closer to the screen, and accidentally bumping his crotch into the suspended globule of McEwans which soaked in immediately, leaving a wet patch that would have been quite embarrassing if he ever met anyone in person, The-Bruce gasped in amazement as the realisation struck home with all the force of a wet haggis lobbed by a champion caber-tosser.

'It fookin' IS me!' exploded The-Bruce, recognising the evenly-spaced dents on Brucey's forehead caused by a well-remembered close encounter with a knuckleduster wielded by the young and pre-vegetarian Meat is Murder back in junior melée training. 'But ae dinna remember bein' a Hargon. Well-gone many a time, I'll grant ye, but nae some imperialist basturt wi' a fookin' big spaceship fulla guns 'n a duff invisibility rig.'

Realising that something was clearly very wrong with time, space and/or spacetime, The-Bruce mentally ticked Option D (all of the above) and decided that it was time to stop being a passive observer and to take a direct and dirty hand in events.

Grinning evilly and only dribbling a little, The-Bruce booted up his Temporal Warp Anomaly Transmitter and set its coordinates for the offices of Metz, Metz and Metz, muttering, 'ye smartarse gits canna fook wi' The-Bruce nor wee Brucey The-Bairn. It's time tae get twatted.'