"Do they do a better job than Officer Dinkle?" Wufei asked sourly. He was still angry at the man. The blockade shouldn't be such a joke. It was there to stop smuggling in and out of Freeport, and detain criminals and pirates escaping the law to hide there. The contraband it was primarily checking for was weapons. Freeport had been declared a lawless zone since long before Wufei was born, and stopping the circulation of guns in such an environment was deemed the first step to pacifying it. Except so far no government had ever gotten to that next step. They just tried to keep the worst of the scum from leaving the colony and the more dangerous contraband from entering.
"Don't knock the boys and girls of the blockade," Duo admonished lazily. "It's a shitty job. If it makes you feel better, they're a damn sight more careful about what comes out of Freeport than what goes in. That means there's only very few people in the 'coming in' section, and most of those are concentrated on the big cargo ships to make sure we're not slipping in Gundanium or suit parts or something. Officer Tiny Winkle is just some poor shmuck who's waiting for his tour of duty to end so he can go back to Earth, feel some gravs under his feet, get drunk and get laid."
"That is no excuse. If all prison wardens were so lax, every penitentiary would be a war zone."
That got Wufei a rare old glare. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Freeport was a penitentiary to start with, but that lasted for all of ten years. And that was eighty three years ago! Fuck's sake, we get that all the time. Penitentiary this, prison that, like every guy aboard is still an escaped convict or something. All the prisoners they had there to start with died of old age already. If they were lucky. Not that it matters a shit anymore."
Freeport colony: a notorious den of pirates, smugglers and thieves. Wufei persuades one of its denizens, his one-time ally Duo, to help him catch a killer hiding there. Agent Chang thinks he knows what to expect from this case, from Freeport and from Duo Maxwell. He couldn't be more wrong.
My notes: The amount of detail Maldoror_Chant has put into thinking up the anarchist Freeport Colony is insane. It feels like a real science-fiction setting, the kind that deserves to be in a movie somewhere, like, file off the serial numbers and get to it already. It's also possibly the closest that Gundam Wing will ever get to Cowboy Bebop and the feel of the wild west in space.