The Oncoming Storm (12 page)

And most of them are probably challenged by their subordinates, he thought. Assassination was a common way of moving up the ladder on a pirate ship. There was certainly no such thing as promotion for merit. He would have had to keep his men under tight control, but not too tight.

William looked round the bridge. “Why did their implants trigger? Why not simply blow the ship itself?”

“Good question,” Davidson agreed. “We did smash their datanet to hell and gone, so they might have tried to trigger the self-destruct and failed. Or there wasn’t a self-destruct in the first place. I can’t imagine pirates being very willing to sail under one.”

William nodded, turning back to the marine. “How many did we take alive?”

“Thirty-one confirmed pirates, we believe,” Davidson said as they left the bridge and headed down another corridor. Judging by the stains on the bulkheads, the pirates had been in the habit of urinating on the deck. “Fifteen slaves, all but two female, which we are holding in this compartment. They just can’t be trusted.”

“I know,” William said, as they stepped into the compartment. “Stockholm syndrome.”

Inside, a number of women lay on the deck, their hands bound behind their backs. It wasn’t fair or right to treat them as prisoners—they were victims of the pirates, rather than willing assistants—but he knew there was no choice. After so long as nothing more than slaves, the prisoners might have developed a kind of loyalty to their captors, just to keep their minds from cracking completely.

The two male captives had been pushed against the far wall, away from the women; the marines eyed them warily. It was quite possible, despite their obvious mistreatment, that they were pirates posing as captives in the hopes of escape.

Or that they were forced to partake in forbidden pleasures, William knew. It was the standard treatment pirates gave to prisoners who were too valuable to the ship to hold for ransom, or simply put out an airlock. Once they got their hands dirty, they knew they could never go home again.

“Have them all moved to Lightning,” he ordered bluntly. They’d probably have to be put in stasis, after the doctors took a look at them. Once the ship reached Cadiz, they could be transferred to a specialized medical facility. “Do we have anyone who might know anything among the prisoners?”

“Not as far as we know,” Davidson stated. “They all claim to be ordinary crewmen.”

“Have them interrogated, then transferred to stasis cells,” William said. “If they happen to know anything useful, we can follow up on it at Cadiz.”

The next hour went slowly as the investigation team carefully searched the pirate ship, finding very little apart from hundreds of pornographic datachips and plenty of evidence that the ship had been involved in dozens of attacks. Most of the main computer had been destroyed—that part of the self-destruct system had worked perfectly—and what remained was scrambled beyond immediate use. William watched as the damaged cores were removed from their compartment, knowing that the techs on Cadiz would have their work cut out for them. It was highly unlikely they’d be able to produce anything more than gibberish or standard operating files.

“None of the crew kept a journal,” Hobbes told William as he returned to the airlock. The marine brandished a little black book. “Or, at least, none we could use. This book details sexual conquests, rather than anything else.”

William wasn’t surprised. The military banned its personnel from keeping personal logs, knowing that enemy intelligence agents would try to access them in hopes of finding actionable intelligence. It was clear the pirates probably felt the same way too. If one of their crew had kept a journal, it might wind up being used against them. A note of a pirate base’s location alone would be disastrous.

“Add it to the evidence locker,” he said. He had no wish to read a sexual journal belonging to a pirate. “Can this ship be taken under tow?”

“The chief engineer believes it can be towed by one of the freighters,” Hobbes said. “But its hull is badly damaged. There won’t be much prize money.”

“There will be a baseline rate, if nothing else,” William pointed out. Taking a pirate ship out of commission alone was worthwhile. If any actionable intelligence was pulled out of the hulk, even on Cadiz, the crew would be in line for another bonus. “Besides, we can always melt the hull down for scrap.”

He smiled as the marines pulled their prisoners to their feet, none too gently, and pushed them towards the airlock. Some of the pirates looked panicky as they were shoved through the hatch, as if they expected to discover the airlock opened into empty space, while others just looked resigned. They’d had enough time, he decided, to come to terms with the fact that their reign of terror was over.

“Doctor,” he said, as Doctor Katy Braham entered the compartment. “What do you have to report?”

Doctor Braham—she had always insisted on being called Katy—looked grim. She’d been in the navy almost as long as William himself and she’d seen more than her fair share of horror, but she had always seemed optimistic. Not this time, William suspected. Pirate ships were always houses of true horror.

“All but one of the women will require extensive rejuvenation treatments as well as counseling,” she said bluntly. She never bothered to sugarcoat bad news. “The good news is that the sheer scale of their wounds implies they were definitely captives; the bad news is that they will probably have to be permanently supervised by female personnel until we reach Cadiz. Their . . . conduct will leave much to be desired.”

“They attempted to come on to the marines,” Hobbes put in.

“Thank you, young man,” Doctor Braham snapped. She glared at Hobbes, then switched her attention back to William. “They’ve had servitude beaten into them, Commander. It’s the only way they know to guarantee their safety. I don’t think they will ever return to what they were before they were captured.”

William winced. “Do we know who they were?”

“We’re running their DNA through the records now,” the doctor said. “But I would be surprised if we found a match. Their genetic patterns don’t suggest any high-tech world.”

They could have come from Hebrides, William thought. The pirates hadn’t wanted much from his homeworld, apart from food, drink, and women. And the planetary government had no choice but to send them whatever they wanted. Some of the girls had volunteered. Others . . . had been drafted. Can we take them home?

Doctor Braham cleared her throat loudly. “The two male captives have been beaten, quite badly,” she continued. “They were worked over by professionals. The damage was not extensive or permanent, but it would have been very painful. I think we can safely assume they’re not willing pirates.”

“Keep an eye on them anyway,” William ordered. Stockholm syndrome could strike any kind of captive, no matter how badly they were treated. And if the pirates had forced their captives to get their hands dirty . . . he shook his head. “And see if they memorized anything they can tell us.”

“I’ll have my staff supervise the transfer to Lightning,” the doctor said, as though she expected objections. “I think we will probably need to put most of the former prisoners in stasis. There’re too many of them for my staff to handle.”

“See to it,” William said. He sighed. Yet another problem. “But they will need to answer questions eventually.”

He took one final walk through the vessel, noting the sheer lack of maintenance that had contributed to her quick defeat, then returned to the shuttles as the crew prepared to leave the pirate ship for the last time. The female prisoners, according to Davidson, had experienced real problems with boarding the shuttles until two of the female marines had removed their own armor. Even so, the prisoners had shied away from them. The doctors had eventually resorted to sedating all of the pirates’ former captives, with the intention of leaving them out of it until the ship reached Cadiz.

“The interrogations will begin in thirty minutes,” Davidson informed him. Interrogating the former pirates was a marine chore. “Do you wish to witness?”

The honest answer was no, but William knew he should be there. “I’ll catch a cup of coffee and a shower, then join you,” he said instead. He was ruefully aware he stunk after spending several hours on the pirate ship. “Hold the interrogation until I arrive.”

He walked back to his cabin, showered, took a long drink of coffee, and then returned to Marine Country. The prisoners had been separated, ensuring they couldn’t come up with a shared story to tell the marines, although William would have been surprised if they’d managed to cooperate in any case. Pirates weren’t used to cooperating with one another, no matter the prize. He forced himself to look impassive as he walked into the interrogation chamber and peered through the one-way glass.

The pirate definitely didn’t look impressive, he decided, as the marines cuffed him to the chair and then attached a pair of monitors to his forehead. He was a young man, barely out of his teens; William suspected, despite himself, that he knew the boy’s story. Like so many others, he would have viewed a career in space as more glamorous than a life behind the rear end of a mule on the ground. And he would have rapidly found himself so desperate for work that he would have taken the first job that came along. It was sheer bad luck it had been on a pirate ship.

Young and impressionable, William thought. And desperate.

It was never a good combination.

“The corpsman did a quick medical check,” Davidson said as he entered the compartment. “There are no medical issues, nor any interfering implants. It’s unlikely he knows anything of substance.”

“We’ll see,” William said. It was impossible to say in advance what would serve as a clue to lead the navy to the pirate base. The pirate might have seen something that would fit in with another piece of information from a second pirate. “I . . .”

He broke off as Hobbes began the interrogation.

“These devices,” Hobbes said, “allow us to monitor your brainwaves as you respond to our questions. Should you try to lie to us we will know about it. If you try to lie to us repeatedly, we will put you in a lab and access your memories directly. This process tends to result in the victim becoming brain-dead. Do you understand me?”

The prisoner nodded, rapidly.

“Good,” Hobbes said. He stepped backwards and smiled. “Where were you born?”

“Roslyn,” the pirate said.

William watched with growing impatience as Hobbes slowly built up a baseline on the pirate’s brainwaves. It was the closest humanity had come to a perfect lie detector, he knew, but it wasn’t entirely perfect, even without the problem of separating between subjective truth and objective truth. And it could be fooled by a set of implants, if the pirate had been deemed important enough to have them. Instead, it was starting to look as though he knew nothing beyond his duties. The pirates certainly didn’t bother to tell him where they were going or where they were based.

The odd piece of data, however, concerned two men who had joined the pirate crew as senior officers, then died with the other officers. Surprisingly, they hadn’t joined the pirates in their games, even when they’d had new victims for their pleasures. Instead, they’d just alternated between the bridge and their cabin while the captain fawned on them. The pirates had suspected the newcomers were actually paying their wages, such as they were. But their commander had always discouraged questioning.

“They didn’t mind if we destroyed our targets,” the pirate explained, frantically. He seemed almost desperate to help the interrogator now. It was the only way he could hope to keep his life. “We got paid anyway.”

William and Davidson exchanged glances. Pirate economics were haphazard at the best of times, but there were some understandable principles. A destroyed ship, her cargo smashed to atoms, was worthless. The pirates wouldn’t be able to take her cargo to one of the poorer worlds, a place where no one would ask questions, and sell their takings. They wouldn’t even be able to have fun with the crew. And they would have to replenish the weapons they’d fired. The bastards would lose money on the raid.

“That’s odd,” Davidson said. He seemed to want to say something, but held his tongue. “We need to bring this to the captain’s attention.”

“Yes,” William agreed. He’d noticed that Captain Falcone and Davidson spent a great deal of time together. It wasn’t uncommon—the captain could hardly confide in anyone else—but she seemed to take it to excess. “And we will, once we’ve interrogated the remaining prisoners.”

He sighed as he looked back at the prisoner, who was currently outlining some of the raids he’d seen. It was the same story, he knew; once seduced, the pirate had nowhere else to go. But William was damned if he would feel sorry for the idiot. He could have walked away, even gone back to his homeworld. Instead, he’d made the choice to stay with the pirates and join in their atrocities wholeheartedly.

“I hope the bastard chokes on Nightmare,” William said bitterly. “Or that he gets killed on the surface.”

“He might well discover he’s a very small fish among sharks,” Davidson agreed. His tone was expressionless. “The very worst of the Commonwealth can be found there.”

William nodded. It wasn’t death, he knew. Or at least it wasn’t immediate death, meted out by his own hands. But it was close enough.

“They were happy to destroy the ships?”

“Yes, Captain,” Davidson said. “They still got paid.”

Kat frowned. She’d been sitting in her office, writing the first report on the encounter for the Admiralty, when the XO and Davidson had requested an audience. But their report was unbelievable. What sort of pirate actually took losses on his raids?

But one of the lessons she’d had to endure from her tutors bubbled up in her mind. “The government can subsidize a service from taxpayers’ money, even though the service is operated at a loss,” he’d said. “Sometimes this serves a practical purpose. The service is necessary . . .”

She looked at her XO. “Someone is subsidizing the pirate operations,” she said. “The two strangers on the ships might well have been working for the Theocracy.”