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distressed mariner.
    “He killed my captain,” the man screamed in frustration.
    “And he’ll pay for it,” Jack assured him.
    Outnumbered and overpowered, the man broke down in tears, but he still cursed them one and all for standing between him and his captain’s murderer.
    Gunny arrived to lead him off. “I’ll get him drunk on Doc’s ignored supplies. That’ll at least start the healing. When he sobers up, he’ll be glad he’s not a killer. He isn’t, you know.”
    “He showed a pretty solid commitment to making a go of it if you ask me,” Kris observed, still trying to parse some of the old sailor’s curses. And she thought she’d heard them all.
    “I’ll double the guard,” Jack said. “Keep the ones keeping the bad guys in where they are. But I’ll add a full team in the next compartment to keep the sightseers and hackers out.”
    Which left Kris wondering if she ought to do something about the pirates sooner rather than later. King Ray had dragooned a retired Wardhaven judge into joining Kris’s crew. Being a hobbyist astronomer, she was delighted to be aboard.
    Kris had assumed the Wasp might be called on to pass quick and efficient justice on some minor matters. Capital piracy, murder, and slavery went quite a bit beyond Kris’s plan.
    And there was the requirement that any court chartered in Wardhaven follow the Ordinance of Human Rights that had been the cornerstone of the now-defunct Society of Humanity.
    Central to that was the ban on capital punishment.
    But not every planet had signed the Ordinance. Kris’s father had almost lost his chance to be Wardhaven’s prime minister when he’d used every stalling tactic in the politician’s handbook to keep Wardhaven’s signature off the Ordinance. Not forever, only long enough to hang the kidnappers whose mishandling of Kris’s little brother, Eddy, caused his death.
    With luck, the nearest planet would also not have signed the Ordinance. Longknifes did not like kidnappers.
    So while Doc healed the freed, and Jack kept alive the not yet dead, Kris led a scratch salvage-and-repair team through the wreck of the Compton Maru . Most were borrowed from the Wasp ’s crew, but the boffins supplied their own techs, and the Marines also provided their electronics and engineering specialists.
    And Kris donated most of Nelly’s time after the computer demanded a go at the mess Kris had made.
    Kris’s well-aimed twenty-four-inch lasers had made quite a mess of the Compton ’s bridge. Even when they patched the holes and glued an airtight bubble over the bridge, they also had to set up a string of lights.
    Anything that required electrical power was fried, right down to the smallest lightbulb. “Oh, can I have the ship’s computer?” Nelly said, as soon as pieces were identified.
    “You think you can get something out of this?” Kris said.
    “Everyone else on board has a hobby. Jigsaw puzzles are all the rage among the scientists. Pretty lame from my perspective. But that looks like it might be a challenge.”
    “Take all the pieces we find,” Kris ordered, “to the electronics lab. Maybe Nelly or one of mFumbo’s experts can make something out of it.”
    “Maybe a watch that runs slow,” Chief Beni muttered, but he gathered the scattered shards and boxed them up for transport.
    It was when they got their first look inside the shipping containers that matters got serious again.
    They were full.
    Since all documentation on them was in the now-defunct computer, that left folks to speculate on why a pirate ship had a full cargo.
    “Could they have winched the cargo containers off the ships they boarded?” Sulwan mused.
    Jack shook his head. “In zero gee, with only makeshift gear? It would be a whole lot easier to send the cargo off to wherever you were selling the ships.”
    Captain Drago nodded. “These pirates started off as mutineers. So where are their officers?”
    “They were pretty quick to murder the officers of the ships