My name is Just Bear Li. Most people call me JBL or Bear; nobody ever calls me Just. I might tell you what my friends call me ... if I had friends.

I love the Black. I love the shrinking perspectives where all apparent immensities - starships, planets, stars, nebulae, galaxies - diminish each in turn to specks in a greater whole. Deep space is my home, more than Arcturus where I was raised, or the tiny Bubble where humanity pursues its brief, vainglorious ends.

I am an explorer, not a killer. I vowed to become an Elite explorer and trader without ever carrying a ship-borne weapon, without ever firing on another living creature. I fulfilled half my vow, flying half-way round the galaxy with neither shield nor gun. Then I started to trade in the Bubble and They - the pitiful robbers, scavengers and murderers that prey on the weak - came after me. After the third time that they destroyed my innocent ship, something in me changed. I invested all my hard-earned wealth in a Fer-de-Lance, to protect myself on the courier and scanning missions that I started to take on. I am still no killer: that is what I tell myself as I watch another interdicting scum boil into the vacuum - that isn't a person in there, just a metal carcass shooting at me. In any case, what choice do I have? And the fire-dance of death can be beautiful. And what does the Black care for their lives, or my vows?

Silence makes us poets; ignorance makes us philosophers. I love the Black; it is my home and my destiny.