“Must have,” Esmay said, feeling sick at the thought. Four preschoolers, the age she had been when—she pushed that away but was aware of a deep rage stirring to action. The person who had had the sense to put this cube in the lifeboat—who had thought to switch to full-mode recording—had also quickly shot vid from the children’s records. So they knew the children’s names, and had faces to go with them. Two girls, sisters. Two boys, cousins.
“The vid quality is good enough that we should be able to read the insignia on those uniforms, see if intel has anything on them. Faces—we may have them in the file somewhere. And that’s the most audio we’ve ever had from raiders. Interesting accent.”
But all Esmay could think about was the children, the helpless children. She turned the orange and blue toy over and over in her hands.
One by one, the rescue crews located and retrieved the bodies.
“We’ve got too many bodies,” the team chief said. “How many were on the merchanter’s crew?”
“So some raiders died,” Solis said. “I’m not grieving.”
“These men have been stripped—not like the others. Would the raiders have stripped and dumped their own dead?”
“Unlikely. Stripped, you say? Why these men?”
“Dunno, but there’s no ID on them at all. We can take tissue samples, but you know what that’s like—”
“No fingerprints, retinals?”
“Nope. All burned. After death, the medic says; they died of combat wounds.”
Solis turned to Esmay. “Ideas, Lieutenant?”
“Unless we’ve stumbled into some local fighting ground . . . no, sir.”
“The merchanters look like ordinary spacers,” the medic said. “Light-boned, small body mass . . . merchanters nearly always run with low grav because it feels good. Varying ages—the cook was two years older than the captain, all the way down to the kid.” The scrawny teenager who’d been in a fight before he was shot. “But these others . . . they could be Fleet, except that they don’t have Fleet IDs. Look at the muscular development—and their bone mass indicates regular hard exercise in a substantial field, at least standard G. Even though the raiders burned off the fingerprints, we can see enough callus structure on the hands that’s consistent with weapons use . . .”
“Assuming it was the raiders, why wouldn’t the raiders want them identified? If their primary target was the merchanter—which seems obvious—and they left the crew identifiable, what was it about these?”
“Don’t know. Military, not Fleet . . . a Benignity spyship, maybe? A probe from the Guernesi? But—why would the raiders care if we knew that? Unless they’re from the same source—but that would imply that these are their people, and we’ve already said they probably aren’t. About all we can be sure of is that they weren’t merchanter crew.”
“We can’t do a genetic scan?”
“Well, we could—if we had one of the big sequencers. The forensic pathology lab at Sector would have one, but that still doesn’t tell you much. Maybe a rough guess at which dozen planets the person came from, but the amount of travel going on these days, it’s less and less accurate. I’m running the simpler tissue scales here . . . but I don’t expect anything to come up. If someone reports missing persons, and has their genome on file, that would do it.”
“We’re finding less each sweep,” Solis said. “Time to move on. This jump point has how many mapped outlets?”
“Five, sir.”
“All right. We’ll hop to Bezaire, where the merchanter was headed, and report to Boros on what we found. I don’t expect to find any trace there—we’d have noticed it when we were there before—so we’ll have to let HQ decide if they want us to check each of the other known outlets or send someone else. Prepare a draft report for Sector HQ, and we’ll pop that onto the Bezaire ansible when we get there. Include a recommendation to interdict this route, and a request for surveillance of all the outlets . . . not that it will do any good.”
Shrike popped out in Bezaire’s system, and Esmay oversaw the signal drop to Fleet Sector HQ. Scan reported no traces matching that of the Elias Madero . . . no other ship of that mass had been through in over a hundred days, according to the Stationmaster.
“I told you that before.”
“Yes, but we have to check.”
“The Boros Consortium local agent wants to talk to you.”
“No doubt.” Solis looked grim. “I want to talk to Boros, as well. We’ll need a real-time link.”
“Not . . . all of them?” The Boros agent paled.
“I’m sorry,” Solis said. “Apparently the ship was captured—there is evidence under imminent threat of heavy weapons—and although the crew had been promised safe exit in a lifeboat, they were instead killed.”
“The . . . children?”
“We don’t know. We found no children’s bodies, and we know the crew had concealed them in one or more core compartments.”
“But—but who—?”
“We don’t know yet. We’ve sent the data we have back to headquarters; someone will figure it out, I’m sure. Now, about the deceased—”
The agent drew herself up. “You will of course release the remains to Boros Consortium, for transmittal to the families—”
“I’m afraid we can’t at this time. We have positively identified all adult crew personnel and one apprentice, but it’s possible the bodies bear additional evidence of the perpetrators. We must continue to examine them.”
“But—but that’s outrageous.”
“Ma’am, what was done to these people was outrageous. We must find out who did it, so that we don’t have more of this—”
“What was done . . . what was done?”
“There was . . . mutilation, ma’am. And that’s all I care to say until forensics is through with the remains. I can assure you that all due care will be taken to return remains to family members as soon as possible.”
When the crew remains and the other debris had been transferred to the courier that would take it to sector HQ, Shrike went back out on patrol.
“We don’t try to pursue?”
“No. Not our job. We can’t tangle with three armed ships, and we have no idea where, besides Bezaire, that jump point leads. Someone’s going to have to explore it blind. The trail’s cold, and growing colder. We did what we could—we have hull signatures on the raiders, or close to, we know what happened to the crew—”
“But not if there were weapons aboard—”
“No. But I’d say it was a fair bet that there were. We’ll just have to keep eyes and ears open.” He looked at her with what might almost be approval. “You’re asking good questions, though, Lieutenant Suiza.”
Chapter Nine
Barin returned the sentry’s salute as he came to the access area for the Gyrfalcon. At last, he was going aboard a real warship, to a proper assignment. Not that he would have missed the time on Koskuisko, and meeting Esmay. He quickly turned his mind from that painful thought—meeting her was one thing, but their relationship now was something he could have missed quite happily. But this—since he’d been out of the Academy, this was his first regular assignment, and he was more than happy to get it.
As he expected, when he reported aboard he was called to the captain’s cabin. Captain Escovar . . . he had looked Simon Escovar up in the Captains’ Lists. Escovar was a commander, with combat experience at Patchcock, Dortmuth, and Alvara; he had, besides an impressive array of combat decorations, the discreet jewels that denoted top rank in academic courses ranging from his cadet days at the Academy to the Senior Command and Staff Course.