“Would you like to know why you don’t mess with the folks in the orange jumpsuits?”

Here’s an illustrative anecdote to get you on board with why we lay persons as a general rule don’t raise our voices or encourage the ire of the admiralty or Company ruling class dressed in bright neon orange. Broadcasting their toxicity like a beacon.

When I was coming up through the Tourus mechanical engineering program, there were always stories about people who had done something awful like make an Admiral look bad in front of colleagues or had become too familiar and offered an ill timed barb in public. These poor folks become pretty easy to spot once you know what you are looking for. Both at the Tourus school and further along at the Mars Technical Institute. What you want to find is someone well out of synch with the usual age bracket, who knows, from experience, what they are being taught before the professors and instructors open their mouths.

See the orange oligarchs are the type of sociopaths that will refer you back to remedial instruction should you ruin their day. This means a person whom has all ready completed their four years of education at the Tourus, did well enough to be chosen to go to the Mars Technical Institute and do four to six more years there, depending on your specialty or generality. Getting hired, traveling the weeks or months to your newly minted job and then working for however long it takes to upset an Orange mafia bastard and get sent back to day one to do it all over again. No skipping ahead, no breaks, no winks or nudges. Day one – again. Sometimes if you’ve fucked up enough you are granted a long enough stint back on earth where you lose your innate ability to function in zero g, and then have to start the initiation process like a gods be damned chump.

Only for your offended Orange bastard to check in on your progress and get you tested on all of your practical work at the expert level because you know what you’re doing – and this is after all, a punishment. These orange fucks keep excessively detailed files on their offense taken, in order to ruin your life repeatedly. All that so that once you get out of the Mars base of operations they can swoop in at the last possible second to redirect your life and have you assigned to some black site based beyond Pluto with zero amenities and no chance for advancement. Pure. Fucking. Evil.

That’s why you don’t mess with the orange crowd, either that or they’ll push you out of an airlock to starve to death over a lengthy float in total vaccum.

Addendum: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.