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  Szas exchanged a long look with her alien colleague. Although the Electorate’s human citizens were in theory coequal with their Paom’ii comrades and there was no reason a human commander couldn’t exercise the authority normally expected in a ship’s captain, in practice humans and Paom’ii serving together shared decision-making in a sort of dual command. Of all the great powers that participated in the Coalition of Humanity (or partially participated, in the case of the Velarans), only the Electorate represented two allied species. The alien Paom’ii held many of the Electorate’s high military posts and executive government positions, which meant that human commanders such as Captain Szas had to consider Paom’ii interests alongside their own in any major decision. However, the Electorate’s humans outnumbered their Paom’ii allies and drove most of the nation’s industrial and financial activity. Meritor Pokk gave a small side-to-side waggle of his head, which Elena took as a sign of ambivalence … although she was not entirely sure.

  “We are sorry to hear that,” Szas said after giving the meritor a chance to speak if he had anything to say. “However, I regret that our itinerary is already set: We’re scheduled to return to Meliya at the end of the week. Diverting to Bursa is just not something we can do.”

  “Pegasus-Pavon is a Velaran corporation,” said Elena. Well, half-Velaran, anyway; her family’s shipping line enjoyed dual corporate citizenship in the Principality of Bolívar. “And many of Carmela Día’s crew are Velarans, too—these are your citizens who have gone missing. Surely a small change to your itinerary would be understandable in these circumstances.”

  “It is our duty to protect Velaran trade and render assistance to Velaran citizens in danger whenever we can,” Meritor Pokk acknowledged. “But your account makes it clear that Carmela Día is missing in the Terran Caliphate’s territory, not our own.”

  “Which means that we’re outside our jurisdiction,” Szas added.

  “So? Other nations operate in Zerzura without restriction: Dremark, Aquila, or Montréal, for instance. Pirates are enemies to all nations.”

  “I can’t speak to the diplomatic agreements in place between other powers, Ms. Pavon,” said the captain. “All I can tell you is that Electorate warships visit Caliphate space under very specific conditions. Unless we receive a distress call or actually observe a vessel under attack, our hands are tied.”

  They can’t very well send a distress call if they’re missing! Elena wanted to point out. Instead she replied with a small frown of disappointment, and tried a different approach. “Oh. That’s unfortunate, but I understand. Since you can’t look into Carmela Día’s disappearance directly, could you ask the Zerzuran fleet what they’re doing to find our ship? I have to imagine that if you let Marid Pasha’s commanders know that you know about the situation and that the Electorate is concerned about what happens to its citizens in this part of space, they might allocate more resources to the search.” And a pointed question or two from a Velaran captain might remind the Zerzurans that someone else might see the need to step in and straighten up the mess in their sector, she added to herself.

  “We are not empowered to present any new diplomatic initiatives,” said Meritor Pokk. “Perhaps you should address your concern to the Electorate consul in this system?”

  “I’m not asking you to negotiate a new treaty. I merely thought you might say a word or two to your counterparts in the Caliphate’s Zerzuran fleet to let them know you’re paying attention.”

  The Paom’ii officer straightened up, drawing his shoulders back and clacking his bill sharply at Elena. “Do you mean to imply that we are not taking this matter seriously?” he said in a flat tone.

  Szas shot Elena a look, and set a hand on the Paom’ii’s shoulder. “I think, Meritor, that Ms. Pavon simply does not appreciate the limits of our authority in Zerzura and assumes we can do more than we are already doing. A simple misunderstanding.”

  “A simple misunderstanding, of course,” said Omar Morillo, rejoining the conversation. He stepped in front of Elena, and pointed over toward the terrace’s entranceway. “I hope you’ll forgive me for interrupting, but Mr. Smith and his wife are saying their good-nights, and I know you wanted to see them before they left.”

  Brilliant, Elena, she told herself. She knew very well that Paom’ii took everything personally, but she’d allowed her frustration to show. Meritor Pokk probably wouldn’t physically confront her over one sharp remark, but he’d remember the offense and he might hold it against her—or her family—in the future. She was lucky that Szas and Omar were on hand to deflect Pokk’s ire. “Oh, yes, I did need to talk to him,” she said to Omar, taking advantage of her assistant’s little ploy. “Please excuse me, Captain, Meritor.”

  The Paom’ii studied her coldly for a moment, and then finally nodded. “We understand. Good night, Ms. Pavon.”

  “Good night, Ms. Pavon,” Captain Szas added. “When we find the right opportunity to raise your concerns with the pasha’s government, we will. You have my word.”

  Smiling, Omar took Elena’s arm and led her away from the Velarans. He made sure they were a good twenty meters distant before he said anything—Paom’ii had very keen ears. “Were you seriously about to get into an argument with the Paom’ii?” he whispered. “You are aware of how that turns out, aren’t you?”

  “I didn’t say anything that bad. He was the one reading too much into it.”

  “That’s what they do, Elena. You’ll have to watch your step around that one now.”

  “I know, I know.” She shook her head in disgust. “I’m done here. Let’s go.”

  They left the party without any good-byes, slipping out through an interior hallway that led to the hotel’s elevator bank and then to a spacious landing pad on the other side of the building. Omar summoned Elena’s luxury flyer, and joined her in the rear seat when the vehicle alighted before them. “Home, please,” he told the pilot.

  “Right away, Mr. Morillo,” the pilot replied. He lifted off and set a course for Elena’s penthouse apartment on the other side of Mersin; while she spent only a few weeks a year in Dahar, she maintained a full-time residence and household in Zerzura’s capital system.

  Elena stared out the window at the pasha’s palace, brightly illuminated by colorful spotlights above the striking cliffs of its mountaintop. The Founding Day gala left a bad taste in her mouth, even though she’d attended hundreds of events just like it across a dozen worlds in her thirty years.

  “Care to talk about it?” Omar asked her after a moment.

  “We’re going about this all wrong,” Elena said, waving a hand in the general direction of the pasha’s palace. “The Zerzurans are fucking useless, and so are the Velarans. No one within fifty light-years has got half an idea of what to do about what’s been going on in this sector, and it’s going to put us out of business. What do the pasha’s admirals think is going to happen to Zerzura’s economy if Pegasus-Pavon stops carrying their trade? I tell you, I’m not writing one more ransom check. It’s time to take matters into our own hands.”

  “I see,” said Omar, his tone guarded. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

  “Whoever stole our freighter has a hundred thousand tons of enriched rare earths on their hands. The ship’s valuable, but so is the cargo—if they can find a buyer. So let’s figure out where they intend to sell the freight.” Elena nodded to herself, seeing the idea take shape as she talked. “We’ll put our people into the commodities markets in all major systems nearby, and we’ll watch for ores that match Carmela Día’s load. Then we’ll hire private investigators—or just pay the damned system police if that’s what it takes—to identify the sellers, find out who they got the ore from, and find out who those people got the ore from, all the way back down the chain until we find whoever it was who seized our ship.”

  “If the criminals are smart, they’ll break the load into smaller lots—it would look suspicious if a Carmela-sized lot suddenly appeared all at once on an exchange.”
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  “Which means that we’ll have a better chance to catch at least one of them in the act of turning our cargo into cash,” Elena said.

  “That’s going to be expensive,” Omar warned. “Especially if we have to pay off officials to get access to exchange records.”

  “Paying insurance and ransom is already ruining us. I’d rather spend that money to solve the problem by identifying the bastards who are behind this and shutting them down. It’s going to be cheaper, a lot cheaper, in the long run.”

  “What do we do if we develop some actionable intelligence from all this?”

  “We lead the pasha’s agents to the bad guys if we have to drag them there kicking and screaming,” Elena said grimly. “And if that doesn’t work, we’ll find someone else who can deal with the problem, or we’ll outfit our own privateers and see to it ourselves.”

  “‘Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute,’” Omar observed. “I have a feeling it’s going to be more complicated than you think it will be.”

  “We won’t know until we try,” she told him. Then she pulled out her dataslate and started making notes about what she would need and how she’d pay for it all.

  7

  CSS Decisive, Bursa System

  No one aboard Carmela Día needed Sikander’s assistance—the pirates had left no one alive.

  “God is Truth,” Sikander murmured aloud, staring at the vid feeds from Decisive’s boarding team in sickened horror. One whole bulkhead of the destroyer’s bridge displays had been repurposed to show him the helmet-cam imagery from the teams searching the derelict, drifting dark and cold ten kilometers away. “What sort of monsters are we dealing with?”

  Amelia Fraser did not respond to his rhetorical question. She stood beside him, her face fixed in an expression he’d never seen on her before: eyes narrowed, jaw clenched, cold fury radiating from every pore. She tapped the comm device on the arm of the tactical station. “Boarding team, XO. Where are you, Mr. Herrera?”

  “The mess deck, ma’am,” Jaime Herrera replied. His voice was muffled somewhat inside the helmet of his vacuum armor, but Sikander could hear the flat anger in the gunnery officer’s tone. “It looks like they rounded up most of the crew here before they … did what they did.” In the vid window that represented Herrera’s personal cam, Sikander saw a gloved hand with a flashlight come into view. The harsh beam struck tiny frozen sparkles from bits of dust and debris drifting in the airless room, illuminating a nightmarish scene.

  At least a dozen bodies floated in the compartment, spinning slowly or snagged in place by a table or some small fitting on a wall. Men and women, young and old, each dressed in a working spacer’s shipboard jumpsuit and staring sightlessly at the Aquilan boarding party who’d discovered the scene of their murder. Bullet holes surrounded by dark rings of frozen gore marked most of them; blood splatters on the bulkhead at the aft end of the compartment hinted at where they’d been shot.

  “It looks like someone made a fight of it,” Herrera added a moment later. He pointed his flashlight at the body of a dark-haired woman whose jumpsuit was marked by at least four or five gunshot wounds; she still clutched a small mag pistol in one pale hand. “I hope she got one of the bastards.”

  “Secure any bodies that are at risk of drifting away and continue to the bridge,” Fraser said to Herrera. “We might find logs or manifests that will be helpful in identifying the victims.” Sikander noted that his exec hadn’t bothered to suggest that the boarding party might discover survivors. All the airlocks and interior hatches stood open to vacuum; a random assortment of clutter and discarded tools that hadn’t quite been carried out into space when the ship’s atmosphere had vented still drifted in the silent passageways.

  He looked away from the awful scene the first boarding team had discovered to a view that showed the drifting wreck with Decisive’s launch alongside. At this range the destroyer’s hull cams couldn’t miss the damage scarring the freighter’s warp ring and drive plates—Carmela Día had been crippled by K-cannon fire before she’d been boarded. “How many, Mr. Girard?” he asked quietly.

  “Twenty-two, sir,” Michael Girard replied. The youthful lieutenant looked like he was about to be sick. Eight years ago, he’d faced the terror and panic of a pitched space battle beside Sikander on the bridge of the cruiser Hector, and come through hell with the right to hold his head high; it took a lot to shake him. “That’s the registered complement, though. It’s possible they might have been a little shorthanded for this run, or they might have been carrying a handful of passengers. We won’t know for sure unless we find the log.”

  “Accounting for them all won’t be easy,” said Fraser. “If they were blown out an airlock at ten or fifteen meters per second a couple of weeks ago, the bodies could be scattered over thirty or forty thousand kilometers by now.”

  “I know, but we’re going to recover as many as we can,” said Sikander. “We’ll find some of them, at least, and I have to imagine that it would be better for the families to know for sure what happened to their loved ones.” He sighed and shook his head. In Decisive’s previous patrols under his command, they hadn’t encountered anything like the sort of massacre that had evidently taken place aboard Carmela Día. On their first deployment they’d found an abandoned system lighter, a much smaller ship whose crew was simply missing. Then, on the deployment just before Decisive went in for refit, they’d responded to a distress call from a container ship whose engines had been disabled by pirates who simply removed the most valuable cargo units while leaving the crew more or less unmolested. Today’s grim discovery was an entirely different sort of crime scene. It’s murder—pure, brutal murder, he told himself. And the animals who did this are still at large.

  “We’ll need the orbiters,” Fraser suggested. The ship’s launch was currently engaged with the boarding operations, but the two orbital shuttles were available. “We’ll cover more space that way, and it’s really a job for small craft anyway.”

  “Do so,” Sikander ordered.

  Girard glanced over at Gunner’s Mate Waters, the petty officer of the watch. “Pass the word for Orbiter One and Orbiter Two crews to report to their boats for recovery operations.”

  “Aye, sir,” Waters answered. He keyed the ship’s intercom, speaking in a subdued tone. “Attention, all hands. Boat crews, man your boats for recovery operations.”

  “Decisive, this is Lieutenant Shah. We’ve reached engineering control.” The Kashmiri lieutenant’s face appeared in one of the windows of the boarding team’s display as Shah reversed his cam to show his face. He led the second of the boarding teams currently searching the derelict freighter. “Chief Ryan’s looking over the power plant now, over.”

  “Decisive actual,” Sikander answered, keying the comm panel. “Have you found any of the crew?”

  “No, sir. There’s no one here, and it looks like the systems were secured before they left.”

  “How bad is the damage to the drive system, Mr. Shah?”

  “It does not appear to be serious, sir. We’d have to replace the damaged drive plate for full acceleration, and I don’t know if there are any spares on board. I have to imagine that replacement drive plates wouldn’t have been left behind. But I think she’d run well enough with reduced acceleration on the undamaged plates, assuming Chief Ryan can get the power plant online.”

  “Very good, Mr. Shah. Have Chief Ryan restore power if she’s satisfied with the condition of the generators. Your work will go faster with atmosphere and gravity.”

  “Yes, sir. I will keep you advised of our progress. Shah, out.” Shah switched his camera back to its external view, returning to his work.

  “Are you thinking about bringing her in?” Amelia Fraser asked Sikander.

  “I see no reason to leave her out here, and we can spare a small prize crew for a few days. Besides, we need to pick up parts at Bursa after the trouble with generator two.” Sikander tapped his comm panel again, switching to the last of
the boarding parties. “Ms. Worth, what’s the status of the cargo? What were they carrying?”

  “Some sort of refined ore, Captain,” Zoe Worth replied. She led the team searching the cargo holds. “Four holds are still full of the stuff, but the fifth is mostly empty. If I had to guess, I’d say the attackers didn’t have a ship anywhere near big enough to take off the whole load at once.”

  “Very good, Ms. Worth. Make sure you check the lifeboats and emergency stores, too. I doubt you’ll find anything, but it’s worth a look.”

  Amelia Fraser frowned in thought. “You know, Captain, it occurs to me that the pirates who looted this ship know perfectly well they left behind eighty percent of the cargo. They might be coming back for the rest … in which case we could be waiting here for them to return.”

  “I’d certainly like to catch up with the people who did this,” Sikander said grimly, considering the suggestion. Of course, it might be weeks or months before someone comes back for more of the ore. And we won’t be able to report that we’ve found the ship until we see if the attackers return to the scene, which means that anyone expecting Carmela Día won’t know that she was attacked … and we’ve got a schedule to keep. He shook his head in reluctance. “Setting a trap is a good idea, but I’m not sure that we can spend our patrol waiting for them to come back. We’re expected in Dahar eventually. Let’s take a look at some sort of trap operation later, though—I believe you might have something there.”

  “Yes, sir.” If Fraser disagreed with his decision, she didn’t let it show. “Who do you want to appoint as prize captain? Amar?”

  Sikander thought it over for a moment. The opportunity to command one’s own ship, even if it was just a bulk freighter for a voyage of a day or two, was something that any junior officer would kill for. “Zoe,” he decided. “She’s junior for it, but we’ll escort her into port. I’m just worried enough about our generator that I think I’d like to keep our chief engineer on board Decisive.”