Bassingford Medical Center,
City of Landing,
Planet Manticore,
Manticore Binary System,
March 1860 PD.
The attention signal chimed, and Alfred looked up from the case file on his display. He frowned, then sat back and tapped the acceptance key, and the com system’s computer-generated voice spoke.
“Incoming burst transmission from Captain Adelina Gomez,” it said. “No two-way link established. Do you wish to view the transmission?”
His frown deepened. Adelina Gomez was the CO of HMS Scepter, and Scepter had returned to her old stomping ground in Silesia four T-months ago. She wasn’t due back in the Star Kingdom for another five T-months.
“Display transmission,” he said, and a trim, brown-eyed senior-grade captain appeared on the display. Back when Lieutenant Commander Harrington had been Scepter’s ship’s surgeon, Adelina Gomez had been the battlecruiser’s executive officer. Both of them had risen in the world since, and he’d attended her promotion party when she made senior-grade and took over the ship.
“Hello, Alfred,” she said now. “This is in the nature of a heads up, because I knew you’d want to know. We got an emergency request for backup from the Biological Survey Corps team in Pankowski. I don’t know how much Jacques told you about their op on his way out, but it turned . . . messy.”
Alfred’s jaw tightened. As it happened, Jacques had told him quite a lot, although all of it had been strictly unofficial. Technically, the Star Kingdom listed the Audubon Ballroom as a terrorist organization. Because of that, the fact that the BSC routinely operated on intelligence the Ballroom generated was one of those little things the Crown—and the Navy—aggressively knew nothing about. In this instance, some of that intel had led the BSC to a ramshackle, beat up freight station in a poorer-than-rocks Silesian star system that seemed to be doing quite a lot of business.
That tended to happen when Manpower took over a remote station.
Trying to step on every transfer point in the slave trade network would have been a Sisyphean task, at best, especially in the Confederacy, which had become one of the primary markets for Manpower’s “goods” over the last several decades. But every little bit helped. Especially when said transfer point could be seized and used to mousetrap incoming slavers.
“Apparently, Manpower figured out something was wrong in Pankowski sooner than anyone expected,” Gomez continued grimly. “They hired themselves a mercenary outfit, loaded it aboard a ‘slaver,’ and sent it to find out what the ‘something’ was. Jacques got a little warning, courtesy of those people we don’t talk about, and called us in, but we couldn’t get there before the mercs. The BSC took heavy casualties, Alfred, including over a dozen from neural disruptors. You people at Bassingford are at least as good as anyone in the galaxy for that kind of damage, so we’re inbound with the worst of them.” Her nostrils flared. “Doc Crowder’s done his best to stabilize them, but it doesn’t look good. We’re still almost a full day out of Manticore orbit, but you probably want to go ahead and get the trauma unit spun up now.”
Alfred’s jaw tightened, and he reached for his com pad. But before he could enter a code, the system pinged again.
“Incoming burst transmission from Major Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou,” it said. “No two-way link established. Do you wish to view the transmission?”