In the office of the Interstellar Security Council, Thanos lifted his head from the towering pile of documents, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and sighed. But the secretary who pushed open the door brought in yet more files.
Most documents related to interstellar security work were stored in specialized devices capable of holding enormous amounts of information. Devices like the ones before Thanos had already piled up into a mountain, making it clear just how busy he had been lately.
In fact, Thanos had been working overtime for an entire week. Judging by the situation, he might have to keep doing so for even longer. Physical and mental exhaustion meant little to a Titan, but Thanos only wanted to figure out one thing—where the hell had all these cases come from?
Thanos casually flipped through one of the nearby devices. One holographic projection after another popped up, the text a complete mess and the images enough to make anyone's head spin. But Thanos knew he could not expect better. Even if every agent in the Security Department had four legs, three of them would have run themselves off by now.
Most of the seven cases displayed in the files were regional wars. Generally speaking, interstellar security matters included mediating wars, but only large-scale conflicts. Small regional frictions were neither managed nor manageable.
Yet the battlefields were not some remote backwater. They were all borders of long-established, developed civilizations around the Ring Sector. Though they were border regions, they were prosperous civilized star zones, not those desolate dark galaxies constantly trading claims of sovereignty.
Logically, after tens of thousands of years of development, the situation there should have been quite stable. There should not have been any border disputes at all.
But these cases involved either the assassination of