“The marines are boarding the asteroid,” Lieutenant Graves told her. “No resistance so far.”
“Good,” Kat said. She keyed her console, accessing the live feed from the marine combat suits. “Let’s hope it stays that way.”
She wondered, as she watched the marines make their way deeper into the asteroid, just who had originally built it. The designers hadn’t attempt to spin the rock to generate gravity, something that would have been a dead giveaway if someone took a careful look at the asteroid; instead, they’d installed a fairly basic gravity generator. They’d probably assumed, and they hadn’t been wrong, that the rock would hide the energy signature. The prisoners looked a fairly degenerate lot, clearly terrified. Their former captives were in a very bad state indeed.
“Get them to sickbay,” she ordered, although she knew the marines were already doing the best they could. “And make sure you keep an eye on them.”
“Four hundred captives,” Lieutenant Graves reported, once the asteroid was swept from top to bottom. “And fourteen ships.”
“The ships might come in handy for something,” Kat said. She wondered, morbidly, if she could train enough locals to operate them before the Commonwealth finally gave up on the Theocratic Sector. Perhaps she should ship them directly to Asher Dales. William would be able to make use of them. “How many of the pirates claim to have been conscripts?”
“Seventy, so far,” Lieutenant Graves said. “They’ve been separated from the others.”
“Good,” Kat said. “Perhaps they’ll want to stay here instead of going back home.”
She sighed, inwardly. Pirate conscripts could not expect a warm welcome when, if, they got back home. That was something that was going to have to change, particularly if the Royal Navy found itself running more and more antipiracy campaigns. A conscript who believed that the best he could expect, when he got home, was being flung into jail was one who might commit himself wholly to the pirate crew. She had no sympathy whatsoever for anyone who chose the pirate life, and it was terrifying to see how many sociopaths and monsters pirate captains managed to recruit, but an unwilling conscript was a different story.
As if we didn’t have enough problems, she thought. But where do we draw the line?
“The bad news,” Colonel Dagestan said, two days later, “is that this base was not supplying the Theocratic Navy.”
“I figured as much,” Kat said tiredly. Two days of watching as pirates were interrogated and their ships and base dissected had taken their toll. “Did we locate any clues as to their real base?”
“No,” Dagestan told her. “If any of them know anything useful, they’ve managed to keep it from us. We even offered to up the reward, and they still had nothing to say.”
And they’d sell out their own mothers if the price was right, Kat thought. And the prospect of dying on a penal world had to concentrate a few minds.
She took a sip of her coffee. “So . . . what were they doing here?”
“Apparently, the Theocracy left the base alone in exchange for them harassing our shipping, back before the war,” Dagestan said. “They largely abandoned the base for a few months, after we crushed the Theocracy, then came crawling back. We’ll probably discover that the Theocracy’s records relating to the base—and the smuggling—were destroyed during the occupation.”
Kat looked up. “Smuggling?”
“The smugglers were shipping in technology, apparently,” Dagestan said. “Much of it was civilian-grade, but still effective. The trade slowly shut down after the war began.”
“As we clamped down on tech transfers,” Kat guessed. The Admiralty had wanted to crack down on tech transfers for years, but no one had made any progress until war was formally declared. There had been too many people with a vested interest in continuing the transfers, despite the risk of material ending up on the far side of the Gap. “Did we capture anyone with links to the smugglers?”
“Not as far as we know,” Dagestan said. “It will take weeks to interrogate everyone completely.”
“And then ship the survivors to a penal colony,” Kat finished. “What about the base itself?”
“It’s in good state—surprisingly good state for a pirate base,” Dagestan said. “I’d actually suggest keeping it, if there were any value in doing so. But it’s really too large to move somewhere more effective.”
Kat nodded, slowly. “We might be able to make use of it,” she said. “Particularly if there is an attempt to set up an interstellar authority for the sector . . .”
She met his eyes. “Have the base swept one more time, then transfer everything that might be useful to the freighters. We can use their supplies to fill the hole in our inventory. Then shut down the fusion reactor and everything else. Power it down completely. Once it’s dark and cold, we can rig up a warning system to keep everyone else away.”
“Or we can just leave a ship on duty to intercept anyone who happens to return,” Dagestan pointed out. “There will be pirates out there who won’t know that we captured the base.”
“I don’t think we can spare the ships,” Kat said. She’d taken a major risk pulling so many ships away from Ahura Mazda. There was no real danger of the planet being captured while she was gone, unless they’d significantly underestimated the enemy fleet’s size, but there wouldn’t be many ships to respond to a crisis anywhere else. “Maybe one ship . . . I’ll think about that.”
“Yes, Admiral,” Dagestan said.
Kat felt an odd pang in her heart. He sounded just like Pat, when he was politely disagreeing with her. Perhaps she should have asked for someone different . . . No, she was being silly. She couldn’t go through life rearranging her
