Chapter Eleven
To say that I was angry would have been a world class understatement. As I stood over the unconscious pirate captain I struggled to control my temper. His face was completely relaxed from the effects of the needler darts and if anything he looked peaceful and innocent. But looks could be deceiving.
Before questioning him I had decided to wait and see what an initial sweep of their ship turned up. In their hold we found the cargo from their latest victim still secured in its shipping containers. There was no trace of the other ship’s crew however. I had relayed the container serial numbers and a general description of the contents to Morgan via an encrypted hyperchannel transmission. It took him only a short time to get back to us. The cargo had been stolen from a transport named the Lucky Lady sometime within the past thirty-six hours. The ravaged ship had only recently been discovered by the authorities who had also made a far more gruesome find—the entire crew had been murdered. For whatever reason, these pirates were not interested in trafficking human cargo.
Such senseless killing was something I had never been able to understand. But I didn’t need to understand it to know that it needed to be stopped.
After he filled me in on the history of the cargo we had recovered, Morgan asked me how we managed to come across it. There was no way to avoid it at that point so I told him. I thought he was going to have a stroke when I explained how we had set ourselves up as a decoy to draw the pirates into attacking us. Because I knew he would have tried to talk me out of it if he had known, I had purposefully neglected to mention my little back-up plan to him.
I let him rant at me for a few minutes before I finally had to cut him off and remind him that, while I loved him like a father, this was something I felt I needed to do. Eventually I was able to calm him down when I pointed out that not only had we recovered the cargo, but that we had also captured the pirate ship and the crew responsible for the attack without a single loss.
Before signing off, I gave him our coordinates and told him to arrange for the nearest Fleet ship to be dispatched to take the pirates into custody. We would be leaving their ship adrift with its crew locked aboard once I finished interrogating the captain and wouldn’t have the time to bring the ship in ourselves.
That had been more than an hour ago. Since then the search teams hadn’t turned up anything else of interest, although they were still looking. In addition to the teams scouring the ship, Mark and Ian were busy trying to download information from the ship’s navigation system. We were hoping that we might be able to learn the location of the pirates’ base of operations, but they had found something odd during their search through the flight recorder files. For some unexplained reason, there were several sections of the recorder’s files that were blank. Mark had been able to determine that they hadn’t been erased, but he couldn’t explain why the data was missing. It was as if the unit had simply recorded nothing during those periods, which should have been impossible. As far as they could tell the system hadn’t been tampered with, which left them at a loss to explain the discrepancy. It was a minor mystery that we would solve later if we could. If not, Morgan would have specialists from the Agency examine the system.
Our discovery of the hijacked cargo had given me the beginnings of an idea. If we managed things properly we might be able to work our way into the pirate network far deeper than we could have hoped. But I needed the answers to a few things first. And the pirate captain was the key.
I had just gotten myself in the proper frame of mind to deal with this piece of human garbage when the door to the infirmary opened. I glanced up to see Bruce Stone enter escorting one of the pirates. The pirate’s wrists were cuffed behind his back and Bruce had him by one arm as he roughly pushed the man ahead of him. The pirate seemed a little wobbly on his feet and one side of his face looked swollen.
Doc Jacobs glanced up from where he was just finishing up with Lucky. He had brought down the swelling of his face and had just re-socketed his loose teeth. Treatments with a dermal regenerator had faded the bruise on his face until there was only a pale yellowish-brown blotch on his cheek.
“What’s wrong with him?” Doc asked Bruce.
“Broken jaw,” Bruce stated simply. As if on cue, the pirate swayed in his grip and gave a low moan.
“Put him on the first bed,” Doc said. “I’ll get to him in a minute.”
Bruce frog marched the pirate to the indicated table and none too gently pushed him down and began strapping him securely in place.
“The discoloration will fade in an hour or so,” Doc told Lucky as he examined his face gently. “Just remember, no solid food for the next ten minutes until that tooth sets. After that you’re good to go.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Lucky said as he hopped down from the padded table. Glancing over at the swollen face of the prisoner Bruce was strapping down, Lucky did a double take.
“What happened?” Lucky asked.
“He tripped,” Bruce said as he snugged the last belt tightly in place, making certain that the pirate couldn’t move.
“Shame,” Lucky commented, then exited the infirmary humming to himself.
It was only then that I recognized the pirate as the same man who had pistol whipped Lucky at the gangway hatch. As I looked at his face a little more closely I saw an elongated bruise along the side of his jaw which bore a striking similarity to the shape of an assault rifle stock.
Bruce noticed my look and straightened to face me.
“Will there be anything else, Sir?” He stood quietly at attention, waiting for my response.
I looked at the pirate for a long moment before I turned back to Bruce. “No. Just make sure that the rest of the prisoners are secured so there aren’t any more … accidents.”
“Yes, Sir,” he said, inclining his head slightly.
Doc stepped over to the prisoner as Bruce followed Lucky out of the room.
“That’s a broken jaw, alright,” Doc said after a brief examination. “I bet that hurts like hell.”
The pirate looked up at him miserably.
“Doc,” I said. “I’d like to get started over here as soon as you can free yourself up.”
Doc took a moment to study the bio-monitor panel on the side of the bed as he checked the pirate’s vitals.
“The injury’s not life threatening and his condition is stable,” Doc noted. “You don’t mind if I come back to you after we’re done with your captain, do you?” he asked the restrained pirate. The pirate closed his eyes and resumed whimpering.
Doc stepped up beside me, leaving the pirate to bemoan his misery alone.
“Bring him around,” I said.
Doc loaded a hypo gun and pressed the pneumatic injector to his shoulder. Almost at once the pirate leader began to wake up. His eyes fluttered open and quickly cleared. After a few moments he came fully to his senses. The relaxed, innocent expression he had worn while unconscious was suddenly replaced by a cruel and arrogant one as his personality asserted itself on his features. He struggled against the restraints but could do nothing more than wriggle helplessly.
“Release me!” he snapped.
I folded my arms and narrowed my eyes at him.
“You’re not in any position to make demands.” The hard edge in my voice sounded strange even to me. I was working very hard to keep my temper in check.
The pirate locked eyes with me for several moments then stopped straining against the restraints. I could see by the belligerent look in his eyes that he was not giving up, only waiting to see what would happen.
“You and I are going to have a little conversation, Captain,” I said. “There are a number of things I need to know about your operation and you’re going to fill in the blanks for me. If not, things are going to get very unpleasant.”
I was prepared for any number of reactions, but I didn’t expect what actually happened. After staring at me for a few seconds he started laughing.
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“Who are you? Gilead Intelligence? You don’t scare me. You’re not going to do dick! Gilead has rules. Stop wasting your breath and just get me my lawyer.”
Whoever he was, the pirate wasn’t stupid. He must have realized that only a well trained, well equipped group could have laid such a trap and overpowered his crew so quickly. What galled me was his attempt to hide behind the laws of my kingdom.
“You’re right,” I said. “Gilead does have rules. We believe in justice. Right now I’m interested in justice for the transport crew that you murdered when you stole their cargo.” My voice had taken on a calmness that seemed in sharp contrast to the seething anger I was feeling. From the corner of my eye I saw Doc watching me carefully. He had been around me long enough to know what it meant when my voice dropped this way.
The pirate captain sensed the shift in my mood and looked at me warily.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the pirate said. “We bought that stuff off another ship a couple of days ago.”
So it was going to be the hard way after all.
“Do you know what this is?” I asked, indicating the machine he was strapped into.
Craning his neck, the pirate looked back at the complex mechanism behind him and the transparent dome suspended over his head.
“It’s called a neural assayer,” I said as I lowered the dome into position. “It’s actually a very useful device for treating brain trauma. But it has other applications as well. For example,” I nodded to Doc who moved to the operator’s station and turned the machine on, “right now we’re mapping your neural pattern.”
His eyes went wide as the machine’s scans sent tingles along his scalp. “What are you doing?”
“Like I said, we’re making a map of your brain activity. Once the machine has analyzed your neural pattern, we can set up a harmonic resonance field. That’s when things get interesting. I don’t understand it completely myself but what it does is make the subject very susceptible to suggestion. Essentially, we shut down your conscious mind and you’ll answer anything we ask with complete honesty.”
“You can’t do that!” the pirate snapped.
“Why do people keep saying that to me?”
“But this is illegal,” he insisted.
I brought my face to within centimeters of his.
“I can’t think of anything I hate more than slime like you hiding behind laws that were put into place to protect the innocent,” I said quietly. “And for the record, you’re right. This type of interrogation isn’t strictly legal. Fortunately, we’re light-years away from Gilead space.” I straightened and looked at Doc Jacobs. “How’s the mapping going, Doc?”
“All finished,” Doc said.
I looked back down at the pirate who had started struggling against the restraints again.
“By the way,” I said. “I’d hold very still if I were you. I understand that it’s tricky enough just balancing the harmonic field properly. If it’s not done right ... well, let’s just say you’ll live but you’ll need someone to cut your meat for you for the rest of your life.”
“You’re crazy!”
“No, but I am pissed off,” I said through clenched teeth. “Which is not a good thing for you.”
“Wait! You don’t have to do this,” the pirate said. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“Oh, I know you will,” I said.
I gestured to Doc and he made an adjustment on the console. The pirate’s expression slackened immediately, his eyes taking on a glazed look as he stared unseeing into the distance.
Unlike the dire side effects I had warned him about, the truth was that the procedure we were putting him through was actually quite harmless. I simply wanted to scare the living hell out of him. He was correct however about this method of obtaining information being illegal. Anything we learned through this type of interrogation would be thrown out of court. The reasons had more to do with the technical prohibition against compelling a citizen to testify against himself than from any concerns for the person’s safety. But these pirates were not Gilead citizens and any information I learned from him was not going be used in a trial.
“Now, Captain,” I said as I pulled up one of Doc’s rolling exam stools and sat down beside him, “I’m going to ask you some questions. You will answer my questions truthfully and in detail. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” he said, sounding almost mechanical.
“Let’s begin with your ship ...”
It was more than an hour later before I was finally finished questioning him. His name was Ryder Sloan, and for the past two years he and his crew of ruthless brigands had grown rich by hijacking cargoes from unarmed transports. By the time I was finished with him I was even more disgusted than I had been before. I felt dirty, like I had been soiled simply by my proximity to this human cesspool. In spite of everything I had been through when I was kidnapped and sold as a slave, it was still difficult for me to believe that human beings could be so inhuman. The atrocities he revealed were enough to earn him and his crew the death penalty several times over. But the most unnerving part of what I learned came when I realized that he didn’t have the slightest bit of remorse over what he had done. He was a complete sociopath who had no empathy whatsoever for anyone else.
It was not his sadistic acts I was interested in however, but what he could tell me about the pirate network, or the Brotherhood as he called it. During my hour long interrogation I learned that the pirates were far more organized and informed than we had first suspected. Not only had the Brotherhood supplied Sloan with the stolen sub he had been using to wage a terror campaign against commercial shipping, but he was also given detailed information about specific ships and their cargoes to help him plan his acts of piracy. While this confirmed what we already suspected, the one critical bit of new information I learned was the identity of his contact: Mr. Smith.
It was Smith who had arranged for him to purchase the ship he now captained. It was Smith who supplied him with the flight plans, crew rosters and cargo manifests of target transports. It was Smith who supplied the assault rifles and space armor that allowed the pirates to so easily overpower the transport crews. It was Smith who sold them replacement weapons when their torpedo inventory ran low. And it was Smith who purchased their stolen cargo after they hijacked the shipments. For a time that had even included the transport crews. Recently however, Smith had stopped buying human cargo. Since Sloan did not want to be bothered with feeding and maintaining prisoners until he could find someone willing to pay for slaves it meant the crews of the ships he captured had to be disposed of. The one condition Smith insisted on was that no witnesses were ever left behind. It was up to Sloan how he managed that, but on this point Smith was unwavering. For the pirate captain the decision was simple. If Smith didn’t want prisoners they were of no value. And blaster clips were cheap.
When I had learned everything I could from him I had Doc deactivate the assayer. The pirate’s eyes cleared at once. He blinked a few times and darted his eyes around the room before they settled on me. Although he had no control over what he revealed under the machine’s influence he could remember everything. I had wrung him dry of every bit of information I could think to ask about the pirate organization. He knew that I had learned enough to have everyone in his crew executed but, instead of fear, what I saw in his eyes was burning hatred.
Let him hate me. After he and his men were picked up by the ship Morgan was sending for them he would find that the time he had spent with me was only a preview of what was to come. Since Sloan and his crew were not Gilead citizens they were not entitled to the same rights as my subjects. Because of their acts of piracy they were going to be treated as terrorists. And as long as they were not being held in Gilead territory, my operatives had a certain measure of latitude in how they conducted their investigations. The pirates were going to be interrogated
at length by experienced intelligence officers who were far better at getting information from their subjects that I was. They wouldn’t stop until they had extracted every last dirty little secret each of the pirates had. While I had strictly forbidden the use of torture, the opportunity to collect valuable intelligence from them was too great to pass up. The pirates would be transported to a facility that was maintained by the RIA on a small moon outside of Gilead territorial space. They would be held there and questioned until I decided what was to be done with them.
Although I disliked resorting to this type of legal subterfuge, I was fighting to protect my people and I was determined to do whatever I could to stop these bastards. But I was going to have to keep an eye on things. We were walking a fine edge here and it would be easy to step over that line into darkness. As evil as Sloan and his ilk were, I could not let them turn us into monsters in our quest to put an end to their evil.
I stood and made my way to the comm panel on the infirmary wall and called the cargo bay.
“Did you get everything you wanted from our guest?” Lucky was asking me a few moments later.
“And then some,” I said. “In fact, I learned enough to put together our next play. In order to pull it off I’m going to need you to get their cargo transferred to our ship.”
“We’re just about finished putting the cargo bay back together,” Lucky said. “As soon as we’re done I’ll start bringing their containers aboard. Are we going back to our original plan?”
“More like the backup plan to our backup plan,” I said.
“I didn’t know we had a second backup plan.”
“I’m still working out the details,” I admitted. “Let me know when you’ve gotten everything loaded. As soon as you’re finished I’m going to call a staff meeting to fill everyone in.”
“Will do. It shouldn’t take us more than an hour or so.”
I had just closed the comm circuit when the infirmary door slid open and Morgana entered.
“One day you’re going to have to tell me how you do that,” I said to her.
“Do what?”
“Show up just when I’m about to call you.”
“Oh, that. It’s part of my job description. Always anticipate what the Captain needs and be ready with it even before he knows he needs it. ... So what do you need?”
“Your ear,” I said. “I want to bounce an idea off of you for something I have in mind.”
I often took my ideas to Morgana before I shared them with anyone else. She would listen objectively to whatever I said and give me an honest and perceptive critique. She also had a devious little talent for being able to identify a person’s weak spot and knew just what buttons to push to get the reaction she wanted. By the time Lucky finished transferring the pirates’ cargo to our hold, we had hammered out all of the details to the plan I had come up with. If everything worked out, the pirates should actually end up extending us an invitation to join their Brotherhood.
Either that or they would kill us.