Free Martial Law 1: Patriotic Treason by Christopher Nuttall Page B

was pulling away from the planet. I checked the log and it had an open window to depart, but I took the shuttle after it anyway. System Command probably had a reason for it. There was no reason why the freighter couldn’t continue its journey after we’d inspected it, either. The concept of opening a departure window had been outdated centuries ago.
     
    “Hail them,” I ordered. “Tell them to heave to and prepare to be boarded.”
     
    “Done,” Alice said. The freighter’s drive seemed to increase in power. “There is no response.”
     
    I stared. The freighter was trying to outrun us. They didn’t have a hope…unless they managed to reach a safe distance from the planet’s gravity well, where they could open a wormhole and vanish. I ran through the calculations quickly. If they managed to stay ahead of us for three more minutes, they could wormhole out and we’d never see them again. What the hell were they carrying that was so important?
     
    “It must be illegal weapons,” Alice murmured. “What else could it be?”
     
    I wanted the Captain to give me orders, but even if I called the Jacques Delors directly and asked for orders, the Captain would tell me that I was in command. He’d given me the responsibility and I couldn’t shirk it. It would have been easy to hesitate long enough to let the freighter go, but I remembered the battle on Terra Nova and shuddered. I wasn’t going to let more illegal weapons loose if I could help it.
     
    “Pursuit course,” I said, engaging the drive. The shuttle leapt forward as if it had been stung by a bee. Under such orders, I could ignore most safety regulations and I took a hellish delight in skimming closer to another freighter. “Alice, charge weapons; prepare to engage.”
     
    “Aye, sir,” Alice said. I was astonished that there was no sarcasm in her tone. She seemed confident that I could handle the task without prodding. “Lasers ready, sir; shields deployed.”
     
    I nodded. On the face of it, we were engaging a behemoth, but the freighter couldn’t hope to outrun us, or even destroy us if we were careful. I looked down at the manifest from System Command and frowned. It didn’t list any weapons at all, but that proved nothing.
     
    “Transmit a sterner warning,” I ordered, still puzzled. They might escape, but not without us taking a bite out of them. Maybe I was being foolish, but I wasn’t going to allow them to escape so easily, whatever they were smuggling. “Tell them to stand down their drives at once or we open fire.”
     
    “Signal sent,” Alice said. There was a long pause. I was starting to wonder if I would have to fire into the vessel, or perhaps try to force-board them, before the drive field flickered out of existence. “They’re standing down their drives now.”
     
    “I don’t understand,” I muttered, wishing – again – that I could consult the Captain. I tapped a key, sending a full data download to the Jacques Delors, but the Captain probably wouldn’t issue any different orders. The ball was still in my court. “Prepare to dock.”
     
    The mystery was solved the moment we stepped onboard the small freighter, weapons ready. The Captain was surrounded by a group of unregistered men, their faces tired and desperate, pleading for mercy. I didn’t understand until we took their biometrics and compared them to System Command’s download; they were all listed as wanted criminals. Somehow, the Captain had managed to move over two hundred criminals onto his ship to transport them out of the system. I sent a signal to System Command, asking for reinforcements and a crew for the ship, and then searched the remainder of the vessel. We found several women and children, hidden away in various sealed compartments, but none of them were on the wanted list. I wondered if they were kidnap victims, but they seemed unhappy to see us. One attractive blonde even tried to kick a Marine in the groin.
     
    Once the