Singh pointed to the screen. “Someone is messing with our comms system,” he said. “We found out about it because Lady Aria’s messages haven’t been reaching Palamar. Instead, they’re being bounced to some unknown recipient. That made us look more closely at our whole transmission cycle.”
“What did you find?” asked Belis.
“Our whole system is being spoofed,” said Singh, with a grim expression. “We thought we were in regular contact with interstellar flight control systems, but none of our messages have been getting out. Everything has been faked by some local comms server.”
“How long has this been going on?” demanded Belis, bending over to look at the screen more closely.
“At our best guess, the last four hours.”
“Can we get a message out? Let the local military know we’re still here?” she asked.
Singh looked unhappy. “I’ve tried, and no luck so far. As far as I can tell, the nearest system thinks we jumped into warpspace a few hours ago. No one knows we’re here, and we have no way of telling them.”
Captain Belis straightened. “All right. Sound the alert. I’m going to the command deck. Singh, transfer your station to the command deck and join me as quick as you can. We’ll need to make top speed to the nearest system with a military outpost.”
She walked swiftly out of the comms center.
Griggs raced to catch up to her. “Captain, what does this mean?”
“Best-case scenario, some space anomaly is just randomly bouncing our messages around.”
“And the worst case?” Griggs asked.
“Pirates.”
***
By the time Captain Belis reached the command deck, the crew of theArguswas on full alert. Although they weren’t military, they were a seasoned crew, and the atmosphere was one of tense attention but not panic.
“Unidentified ship detected,” said the XO. “She was hiding in a nearby debris field.”
“Scan.”
“Appears to be a modifiedKingfisherclass corvette, ma’am,” replied the XO. The image of the ship appeared on the main screen. The unidentified ship was an elegant, sleek killer.
“Armed to the teeth, Captain,” the XO said. “Way past standard specs.”
Captain Belis digested the bad news then squared her shoulders. “Open hailing frequency.”
“Since you appear to have figured out our little comms game, we thought it was time to say hello,” came a cheery voice over the speaker.
“Voice patterns modified,” warned Singh. “Probably for anonymity.”
“Who am I speaking to?” Captain Belis demanded.
“Oh, there’s no need for you to know that, I think,” came the reply. “What youdoneed to know is that my lovely ship is more than capable of blowing you to smithereens, as the saying goes.”
“You are threatening an act of piracy.”
“Oh, I know that,” was the breezy reply. “We are pirates, after all.”
A murmur of voices on the command deck was abruptly stilled by the raised hand of Captain Belis. “What do you want?”
“Your cargo, of course! Delivered via your hauler to my cargo bays.”
“We are carrying life-saving medical supplies to an outbreak on Narula. Without these supplies, thousands will die.”
Griggs blinked.
