“All stop,” Roman ordered. “Put her on the main display.”
He sucked in his breath as the image appeared in front of him, a long, swan-like starship spinning helplessly in space. The White Swan liners were ships the Federation’s rich and powerful took on holidays, sailing from star system to star system while enjoying the finest in food and hospitality. Roman had grown up hearing stories about how passengers were treated on such liners, stories that hadn’t grown much in the telling. A third-class ticket on the liner would have cost more than he made in a decade. And now one of those liners was in front of his ship, its white hull marred by the dark scars of direct hits where energy beams had burned into the hull. She was dead in space.
“Helm, take us on a slow circuit around the ship,” Roman ordered. If it was a trap—which looked increasingly unlikely—they’d spring it. “Sensors…report.”
“Apart from the distress beacon, the ship appears to have lost all power and atmosphere,” the sensor officer reported slowly. “There may be safe locks within the ship preserving some of the passengers and crew, but we can’t detect them at this distance.”
And they might well have run out of air, Roman thought. What the hell were they doing in this system, for God’s sake?
“Hold us in position,” he ordered. He keyed his intercom to the Marine channel. “Major Elf, are your men ready to board the stricken ship?”
“Aye, sir,” Elf said. She sounded the same as always, but he knew she must be as hungry for vengeance as he was. Pirates and Marines were natural enemies; the latter were often the first to see what the former had left of their victims. “Request permission to launch.”
“Permission granted,” Roman said. “Good luck.”
It took the Marines two hours to search the liner Harmonious Repose, out of Harmony, but they’d sent back images from their combat suits as soon as they entered the torn and battered hull. It was a sickening sight. Space combat was normally clean and sterile, yet the pirates hadn’t been content to loot the hull and kill the passengers. They’d boarded, stormed the ship, and captured every surviving passenger and crewman. The male crew had been taken down to the ship’s gym and summarily shot; the female crew had been raped, then shot. The liner’s captain had been found, mutilated and castrated. There were no survivors.
For a time, Roman had held out hope that some of the passengers may have found refuge in a safe lock. But Elf reported that the pirates had burned through the armor and taken the passengers.
The mystery deepened when Roman looked up the service record of Harmonious Repose. According to the Federation Shipping Register, the Harmonious Repose had been in the Harmony System a few months before Admiral Justinian had launched his attack on Earth and had never been seen since. ONI’s report had assumed that the liner—like other commercial ships in Admiral Justinian’s territory—had been pressed into service as a supply ship. But the evidence now suggested otherwise.
It made no sense.
Why would Admiral Justinian allow a starship with wealthy passengers—and no military capability—to travel through the badlands of space? And, come to think of it, what was it doing anywhere near The Hive?
As the ship’s computers had been destroyed, ostensibly by the pirates, Elf’s Marines had to do some digging to find the ship’s emergency datacore. Her best computer specialist used Federation Navy codes to break into the system. It wasn’t particularly informative, at least on the surface, but the intelligence team working on the datastream uploaded by the Marines were able to draw some conclusions. The liner had been berthed in Harmony for the first two years of the war, and then she’d been pressed into service—finally sent on a route that would have, eventually, taken them out of Justinian’s territory. The standard shipping logs, which should have held a full explanation, including a reason for their flight, hadn’t been updated in years.
It was almost as if the ship had been retired, and then brought out of retirement for one last mission.
The forensic teams turned up another riddle. The ship’s official crew had, of course, been listed in the Federation Shipping Registry. It didn’t entirely surprise Roman to hear that most of the crewmen located by the Marines—their DNA sampled by remote drones—weren’t on the crew manifest. Even odder, some of them had been Federation Navy personnel in the Harmony System who had—presumably—signed up with Admiral Justinian. Was he looking at the remains of an escape attempt, or something else? The handful of passengers located by the forensic teams—killed in the attack, Roman assumed, as wealthy passengers could be ransomed back to their relatives—were people he assumed would have supported Justinian, those who could be identified at all. And they’d clearly followed communication security protocols. They hadn’t written anything down about their mission, as far as the Marines could tell.
Under normal circumstances, Roman knew, the ship’s hulk would have been towed to the nearest planet and the Federation Navy would begin a full investigation while notifying the relatives of the murdered crewmen. That was hardly a possibility at the moment, not with two warlords in the area who wouldn’t be inclined to cooperate with the Federation Navy. It was possible that they could use the liner as a source of spare parts, but that would mean transporting her to the Golden Hind and the Fleet Train when Admiral Mason arrived. But that would have to wait.
“Elf, deactivate the distress beacon and pull back your teams,” he ordered. Unpowered and silent, the hulk wouldn’t be detected unless a patrolling ship literally stumbled over it. The odds were vastly against discovery. “We’ll keep the records, perhaps relay them to the warlords if they are disposed to cooperate, or inform the shipping companies once we leave the sector.”
“Understood,” Elf said crisply. “We’re on our way.”
“The admiral won’t approve of sending any kind of notification to the warlords,” Janine’s voice whispered through his earpiece. “We are at war with them, you know.”
Roman nodded sourly. “I wasn’t going to send them a message with an ID header,” he told her. “We’ll have to leave it until we leave the sector, or unless our presence is discovered. The hulk can wait…”
“Captain,” the sensor officer said. “I’m picking up a single ship in the system, heading away from us!”
“Show me,” Roman ordered.
A red icon blinked into life on the display.
“Why didn’t you pick it up sooner?”
“They were lying doggo,” the sensor officer reported. “They only just lit up their drive.”
Roman did the math in his head. Elf had deactivated the distress beacon three minutes ago. The enemy craft had lit its drive just after it would have heard the distress signal terminate, tipping them off that someone had found the wreck. Distress beacons were designed to remain operational unless the hulk was completely vaporized.
“Helm, bring us about,” he ordered. “Take us in pursuit.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Federation Navy’s position on piracy is quite clear. All pirates, regardless of their motivations, are to be interrogated—using truth drugs and brain probes—and then executed. Taking pirates alive is strongly discouraged. Rumors that some pirates have made deals with Federation Navy crewmen have been strongly denied.
FNS Midway, The Hive System, 4095
Roman gripped his command chair as Midway picked up speed, running the tactical position through his head, again and again. In many ways, this reminded him of what the Federation Navy had endured at the Battle of Jefferson, where their survival had depended upon crossing the mass limit and escaping into FTL before the enemy battered them into dust. The pirates, on the other hand, might not know that someone was chasing them; they might not even realize they had been detected.