Huntress: Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 5 by Glynn Stewart

Author:Glynn Stewart [Stewart, Glynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faolan's Pen Publishing
Published: 2022-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

If there was another shoe to drop, it was still hanging when the two capital ships settled in near the cluster of impounded freighters and Milani’s shuttles started moving people around.

After that, the details began to fall into place with speed.

“They up and left about a day before you arrived,” the Captain of one of the large haulers told Kira. Yoshi Sakata was an elderly man of Japanese extraction, with thinning white hair crowning fiercely sharp eyes.

“A handful of nova fighters appeared, and they started to become agitated,” Captain Sakata continued. “We all had a few soldiers aboard, but up to that point, things were…”

He pursed his lips as he sought a word.

“Polite-ish?” he concluded. “We were under their guns and we were definitely prisoners, but they’d interned everybody heading to Samuels from the Apollo-Brisingr Sector. There are rules for handling neutrals when you do that, I suppose.”

“Expectations, at least,” Kira told him. She was appearing to the merchant captain as a hologram projected by Milani’s suit, allowing them to have a conversation despite her never leaving Deception.

“Indeed. Once those fighters arrived, though, there was about a day where they were quite agitated. Then a Commodore Vanessa Rivers got on the radio with everyone and told us she was releasing us all on the condition that we not nova to Samuels for at least seventy-two hours…and that she was going to guarantee that we kept that condition.”

“Her people locked out your power plants,” Kira concluded, based on Konrad’s guess.

“Exactly.” Sakata shrugged. “She had a pocket carrier group. I have an eighty-kilocubic freighter with a pair of light guns to discourage pirates. Whatever her techs wanted to do on my ship, we couldn’t stop them.”

“And everyone else was in the same boat,” Kira said. “Did you get a good look at what this ‘pocket carrier group’ consisted of?”

Sakata smiled.

“I may have, I may have,” he observed. “But that seems like it would have some worth to everyone, wouldn’t it? I have to fly the Corridor, Admiral, no matter what happens in this little tiff.

“If I’m going to irritate a star system government that I have to work with, it should probably be worth my while, don’t you think?”

Kira sighed. The Admiral of a mercenary fleet had no legs to stand on when complaining about other people being mercenary.

“Fine,” she told him. “Name your price.”

Sakata had clearly been expecting at least a bit more pushback and had to think for a moment. Kira, on the other hand, knew that Samuels was on the hook for anything she had to pay him.

“One hundred thousand Samuels pounds,” he finally said.

“Done.” Kira glanced over at the holographic link to Deception’s bridge. “Smolak, make the transfer.”

The coms officer flashed her a thumbs-up, marking it as done.

“A pleasure to do business with someone reasonable,” Sakata told her. “Shinohara’s sensors are nothing special, I must admit, Admiral, but I will forward you our full scan information on everything we saw of the carrier group.

“We saw a carrier and two destroyers here, though there was also a cruiser present when we arrived,” he noted.

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