“Let’s see what we find,” Roslyn replied. “Keep pushing forward.”
The lights were now picking up a set of heavy security doors. Clearly designed for standard transport trucks, they were easily large enough for all three vans to have come through at once.
They were also now closed and sealed. Roslyn considered the doors for a moment, then turned to Mooren.
“Standard civilian security. Do you have this?”
“Of course,” Mooren replied. “Fast or clean, sir?”
“Fast,” Roslyn said immediately.
Exosuits completely encased their wearers from head to toe. They were very bad at transmitting body language, but Roslyn somehow picked up the Marine’s amused glee at that order.
“Fall back; sticky grenades,” Mooren barked. She lifted the grenade launcher and aimed carefully. Eight single shots followed, the grenades sticking to the door as their name implied.
The Staff Sergeant glanced around, checking her people’s distance.
“Fire in the hole!” she announced—and all eight grenades detonated simultaneously in the white-hot flash of thermite explosives.
Most of the door fell backward, away from the Marines. The exosuited troopers were already moving when the metal crashed to the concrete floor, leading the way into the main target of the complex.
As soon as Roslyn stepped over the wreckage of the door, she knew that Mooren was right. They were definitely in the wrong place. The facility was definitely illegal—concealed, defended with restricted weapons, etc., etc.—but it was a shipping-and-storage facility.
Not a laboratory.
“Well, that’s been an annoying waste,” Roslyn muttered. “I guess we finish the job, since we’re here.”
“Spread out,” Mooren ordered. “Sweep for security and anyone in charge. Herbert, are you airborne?”
“I am,” the pilot replied. “Watching the exits. No one has made a run for it yet, but… What’s the call?”
“Commander?” the Sergeant asked.
“Call in the Guardia, Lieutenant,” Roslyn ordered with a sigh. “Track anyone who emerges, and pass the chase off to the locals. We appear to have broken a smuggling ring…not a secret ex-Republic lab.”
“Damn. I suppose that’s still a win?” the Lieutenant asked.
Roslyn looked around the massive, automated racks containing hundreds of containers of likely illegal guns and drugs.
“I suppose,” she conceded. “But it’s not helping our victims.”
24
“Sir, I think we have someone who wants to talk to you,” Knight’s voice said drily over the tac channel. “We’ve found the offices. They’re mostly empty, but one gentleman was sitting waiting for us.”
Roslyn hadn’t been expecting that.
“Sergeant?” she asked Mooren.
“We’re secure if you want to go chat with the locals,” the Marine replied.
Herbert hadn’t spotted anyone leaving, but the facility was almost entirely empty. The defenders who’d ended up gassed had likely been planning to provide cover for an evacuation rather than to truly hold off Marines for an extended period.
“Most people left through the casino and we have no ability to separate them from the crowd,” Roslyn noted. “Why would someone stay?”
“Either they figured we were going to ID and catch them anyway, or they think they’re invincible,” the Marine told her. “Or both.”
Roslyn snorted.
“Well, I guess I’ll find out,” she told the Marine. “Knight, flip me a waypoint? This place is big and confusing.”
“There you go,” Knight replied. “Do we have any good news, sir?”
“There’s no people in those containers,” Roslyn said grimly. “That was my first concern.”
Despite everything the Protectorate—and the Republic, during its existence—could do, sex-slave trafficking was a continuing problem. Most of the victims were teenagers from worlds across human space, convinced they were signing up for a better life somewhere else.
Some went to the Core, some to the Mid and some to the Fringe. The point wasn’t so much supply and demand, as Roslyn understood it, as to separate the victims from any potential support structure they knew of.
The Protectorate would deal with the organized criminals running guns and drugs, or evading taxes and tariffs, but they reserved their harshest punishments and most dramatic efforts for the human traffickers.
That thought carried Roslyn across the underground warehouse to the office, where Knight’s fire team gestured her to an office they’d barred shut. Knight herself was standing guard over the door, though the wires from her armor to one of the warehouse consoles suggested she was multitasking.
“What have we got, Corporal?” Roslyn asked.
“John Doe, wanted to speak to our commanding officer,” the Marine replied. “He was calmly sitting in the office when we arrived and hasn’t moved. He’s acting like he’s in control of the situation, which strikes me as particularly nervy.”
“Indeed,” Roslyn murmured. “Well, let’s go see what he has to say. Back me up, Corporal? You’re a far more visible threat than I am.”
“Can do.”
The two women entered the office in step. Knight remained by the door, turning her blank faceplate to focus on the prisoner in a clear glare.
The office was much nicer than Roslyn had expected. Unlike the concrete floor of the rest of the warehouse, it had been carpeted in a thick, soft material she didn’t recognize. The walls were decorated with what Roslyn suspected were original art pieces by Sorprendidan artists, and a pair of cat statues sculpted from a glittering local black stone stood on either end of the desk.
The man behind the desk stretched languidly, like one of the cats the statues depicted, as Roslyn approached. He was a dark-haired and stunningly pale-skinned man dressed in an all-black suit and wearing silver rings on all of his fingers.
“At last, some decency and etiquette,” he observed. “You invade my place of business, abuse my people, damage my facility and you don’t even have the grace to greet me in a timely fashion.”
He shook his head.
“The galaxy has gone so downhill. Now tell me, whoever you are, how exactly are you planning on justifying this blatantly illegal invasion of private property?”
“It isn’t private property if it doesn’t exist,” Roslyn replied with a chuckle. “This entire facility is missing from all official records. That’s questionable enough, Mister…”
He glared at her in silence.
“And that questionable suffices for probable cause, given the use of a
