Roslyn grimaced. Clearing that off her face and fixing her eyes and lips in a neutral expression, she turned back to Jackson.
“I can guarantee immunity for anything we discuss,” she conceded. She didn’t necessarily want to—the woman across the table had kidnapped dozens of people and fed them into a bioweapon lab for human testing, after all—but she’d trade that for finding the damn lab.
“I have no control over your existing sentence from the Sorprendidan authorities,” she told Jackson. “The Royal Navy doesn’t have that authority.”
Roslyn could manage it with the Warrant she carried, but if she could get through this mess without using that, she would.
“If your evidence is useful, I will ask that the locals reconsider the time before parole hearings, if nothing else, and consider your cooperation,” Roslyn promised. “I cannot do more.”
The interrogation room was silent for a good minute, then Jackson bowed her head.
“Fine,” she conceded. “Sit down, ‘Mage-Commander.’ And start whatever recordings you need. I’ll tell you as much as I can.”
Roslyn took the seat. Just sharing a room with Jackson made her feel dirty. She was going to need to shower after all of this.
“We’re already recording,” she told Jackson. “Tell us everything.”
The human trafficker nodded, inhaling as she marshaled her thoughts.
“The most likely person for what you’re looking for is a contact who went in our files as Six-Eight-Three-One,” Jackson noted. “I met her twice, both times she introduced herself simply as R. Tall woman, blonde. Mixed ethnicity, skin tone much like yours.”
“Mars-born,” Roslyn concluded. That fit the profile for Ulla Roxana Lafrenz, at least.
“She was paying well below market rate for cargo,” the trafficker continued, her tone brushing calmly over what cargo meant in this case. “But she didn’t care about condition, and having a local purchaser buying in bulk was handy initially.
“It got harder as she wanted larger numbers and a greater variety. Normally, we focus on quality cargo—young and attractive. She wanted samples of every age and health we could find.”
Jackson shrugged.
“Turns out that a lot of middle-aged sick people will jump at chances for jobs and new starts even more readily than kids will.”
It took every scrap of self-control Roslyn had not to pin the other woman to the wall with magic—or her fists. The callous disregard for the lives Jackson had ruined—dozens, even hundreds of people sold into slavery or delivered to Lafrenz’s experiment—beggared belief.
“How many.”
The two words Roslyn ground out didn’t sound like a question to her, but Jackson got the point.
“Hard to say; I wasn’t involved at that level of—”
“How many,” Roslyn growled.
“Several hundred. No more than five.”
“Dear god,” the Mage-Commander whispered, staring at the utter monster sitting calmly across from her. “You kidnapped five hundred people for them without asking what they wanted them for?”
“Over three years,” Jackson countered. “It wasn’t like R walked up to me and asked for a statistically viable random population of five hundred cargo in the first meeting! She was our largest on-planet client, but…”
The trafficker cut herself off before admitting that “R” hadn’t even been the majority of her business, but Roslyn picked it up. Against even a small planetary population, several hundred missing people a year was nothing, but the scale of the woman’s operation was horrifying.
“You said you could give me names, account numbers, locations,” Roslyn said flatly. “Start.”
“I don’t know R’s name,” Jackson conceded. “But I did learn the names of several of the subordinates I dealt with. There were four regular contacts, named Iole Man, Kane Unkle, Miluse Shriver and Iracema Jain. Not all of those might be real names, but they should give you a starting point from records, yes?”
“Keep talking,” Roslyn said shortly. The more the woman said of value, the more she was going to be able to justify this to herself at night.
“They picked up a new boss shortly before I got arrested, just after the war ended,” Jackson continued. “I met him once, damn pretty man but no soul in his eyes.”
That was rich, coming from Jackson.
“I wasn’t supposed to know his name—he was introduced to me as ‘C,’ but we overheard a few phone calls and got the pieces. They called him Connor ad Aaron.”
Even with Roslyn already exercising ironclad self-control not to violently injure the woman in front of her, that made her jump. She’d hoped Connor ad Aaron was dead. He’d been somewhere in the fortifications at Hyacinth when Mage-Admiral Jane Alexander had destroyed them, after all.
The rogue Mage had been a member of the Republic Intelligence Directorate and the mastermind behind kidnapping Alexander—and Roslyn.
“Names don’t help much,” Roslyn pointed out after a moment. “Anyone can say their name is anything. Locations. Details. If you don’t know where the damn lab is, Ms. Jackson, I’m not sure we’ve done much other than make me ill.”
The criminal chuckled.
“Such a squeamish stomach for a naval officer,” she replied. “Are you bothered by little old me?”
“I am bothered, Ms. Jackson, by the effort it requires not to kill you where you sit,” Roslyn said calmly. “I have faced battlefleets unarmed and Republic combat cyborgs in my underwear. Please stop wasting my time.”
The interrogation room chilled again as Roslyn held the other woman’s eyes until Jackson finally looked away. Roslyn wasn’t sure the criminal knew how deathly serious she was being, but her point appeared to be made.
“There were supposed to be individual new drop-offs each time,” Jackson said quietly. “After the first eighteen months, they stopped being quite so careful, though. There were six repeated locations. They didn’t always use those six, but they kept showing up, so I think they had to be convenient to the lab.”
“Ensign, get us a map,” Roslyn told Killough. A moment later, a holographic map of Nueva Portugal appeared between the two women. “Show me, Ms. Jackson. We’ll take the account numbers afterward—those might come in handy as well—but I need those locations.”
26
“Did she help?” Bolivar asked as Roslyn and her escorts left
