Senior Analyst Shelby, of HSS Impeccable

The Senior was getting a little depressed....first it had been reality disfunctions and ghosts from another dimension, and now it was spider pirates who looked like something out of a late night comedy sketch on some bizarro holonet.....but they were actually hijacking Earth flagged ships now, so Human Security Services was in the thick of things, like it or not. The trouble was, they were active in the ill-defined zone of frontier space where no government actually wanted to claim jurisdiction. And since they looked so silly on the news, with their bandannas and parrots and peg-legs, Frontier Affairs was having trouble selling the whole thing to the electorate as a real problem. In fact, some of the late night comic shows were loving it all....the hosts got to talk like pirates...Argh, Matey, shiver me timbers! Ar-har-har....etc...the studios were already looking for more swashbuckler scripts....and now Lt. Willowby had come up with the brilliant idea of sending Analysis Staff to Xanadu, to attempt some sort of negotiations with the Nomad Lizards and the Imperial Insects....to try to present a united front to hundreds of freebooters with no organization of their own? How was that going to work?