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matter to me and my Marines.”
    Around Kris, a few Marines pumped air. “Ooo-Rah.”
    Beni must have put Kris on a hot mike on the other side, or the damage Kris had done made all mikes hot. Her remarks raised a mumble of comments, most of which were obscene and biologically improbable. One was repeated several times. “Why don’t you just go away and leave us alone?”
    “I’ve considered leaving you alone,” Kris said.
    That got a lot of happy noise from the other side.
    “But I’d hate to leave this big hulk drifting as a hazard to navigation.” There was also the matter of prize money for the Wasp ’s crew, but that didn’t sound like something that would move a pirate to repentance.
    “I could just blast the bow off the ship, leave it here, and tow the rest of this hulk to a port.”
    There was a long silence. Around Kris, Marines followed that option to its obvious conclusion. . . and grinned.
    It took those on the other side a bit longer to think it through. “Where would that leave us?” finally came from someone.
    “You would be left all alone.”
    “Until someone picked us up or we died.”
    “Considering how far out you are,” Kris said, thoughtfully, “I suspect you’d be long dead before anyone happened by.”
    “You’re just going to hang us anyway.”
    That was what Kris wanted to do, but that wasn’t the law in human space. “Few planets have capital punishment,” Kris pointed out, generating frowns from her Marines.
    “You going to take us to one that don’t?”
    “I will take you to the nearest planet with a recognized court system. Cuzco, I expect.”
    “Do they have capital punishment?”
    “I honestly don’t know.” NELLY, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.
    YES, KRIS.
    The negotiations went on like that for the next hour. In the end, they all surrendered, and no shots were fired.
    “You didn’t want any of your Marines hurt,” Kris pointed out to Jack.
    He nodded, then shook his head. “Would have been nice to send a few of them to meet their maker.”
    “We killed the worst of them. The bridge crew was fifteen strong when the fight started.” Only parts of three bodies had been recovered from the wreckage.
    Every ship’s officer excepting the engineer had taken the brunt of a twenty-four-inch laser. . . and come up the worse for it.
    Which left a certain young Navy lieutenant with what the brass euphemistically called a few “leadership challenges.”
    She had forty-seven former prisoners that were in pretty bad shape. They needed medical care, and they needed it quickly.
    She also had thirty-two new prisoners, all of whom were loudly expounding on their innocence. . . to the no one who was listening. . . from the confines of a hastily expanded brig on the Wasp .
    And Kris had a very damaged hulk, which turned out to have a very full load of expensive cargo. Leaving her with a lot of questions about how that had come to pass.
    Her first two problems said get gone from here. The third left her reluctant to abandon what she’d done. There was also the problem of the Compton Maru being the scene of several crimes that were greatly in need of investigation.
    Kris was saved from the first problem. The health of the pirates’ prisoners improved as Doc did a couple of miracles. The Wasp ’s corpsman, widely rumored to have been a board-certified MD before his alcoholism cost him dearly, stayed sober and did good. He racked up bushels of good karma as more and more legs passed from likely candidates for amputation to just in need of careful and tender care. Several of the tough old sailors recovered with amazing speed.
    Which led to the next challenge that Kris really should have seen coming.
    Onally MarTom slipped a meat cleaver from the mess and tried to use it to part the hair of one of the brig’s new denizens.
    Fortunately, a Marine interrupted him.
    Kris was there only a second behind Jack while the Marine was still struggling with a surprisingly strong and very