Lieutenant Venoya Haral, Major Bannon's assistant, piled the items on the table. Bannon himself was in the morgue, working on the recovered bodies. "All these things were all marked and recorded in place," she said to Esmay. "Now we need to know what they tell us about the crew and the raiders."

"Didn't Boros give us a crew list?"

"Yes, but crew lists aren't always dead accurate. Someone gets sick or drunk and lays off for a circuit, or someone's kid comes along for the ride."

"Children?"

"Usually. Commercial haulers often have children aboard, especially those on stable runs like this. We haven't found any juvenile bodies yet-which doesn't mean anything either way. They're smaller, and less likely to be picked up. We're still missing five adult bodies, including the captain. Let's see." Haral started sorting items into classes. "ID cases . . . put those down at that end. Grooming items. Recording devices . . . aha." She started to pick it up and shook her head. "No . . . do things in order. But I can hope that this recorded something useful."

"Here's a child's toy," Esmay said. It was a stuffed animal, in blue and orange, well chewed by some child. She didn't want to think about the fate of those children on the merchanter. She had to hope they were dead.

"Good. Stick it over there, and anything else that looks like it belongs with children. Where was it found?"

Esmay referred to her list. "In the back pocket of a man whose shipsuit read 'Jules Armintage.' "

"Probably picked it up off the deck where some youngster dropped it. How was he killed?"

Esmay looked back at the list. "Shot in the head. Record doesn't say with what."

"The major will figure that out. Oh, here's something-" Haral held up a handcomp. "We might get some useful data off that, if they used it for anything but figuring the odds on a horse race.

Didn't you have background in scan?"

When they had catalogued the items, Haral began examining them. "You don't know how to do this yet," Haral said. "So I'll give you the easy stuff. See if any of those cubes have data on them.

They're pretty tough, but the radiation may have fried 'em."

The first cube seemed to be a record of stores' usage by the crew over the past eight voyage segments; it listed purchases and inventory levels, all with dates. The second, also dated, was from environmental, a complete record of the environmental log covering thirty days six months before.

"One of a set," Haral said. "But it gives us some baseline to go on, if you find the one that should've been running when the ship was taken. It suggests they blew the ship, but there's not enough debris."

"It was found in . . . caught in the crevice of a lifeboat seat, the record says."

"Um. Someone tried to take the environmental log aboard a lifeboat, and the lifeboat was blown.

That makes sense. They may have put all the logs aboard it."

"What would that be, on a merchanter?"

"Environmental log, automatic. Stores inventory. Captain's log-how the voyage was going, and so on, and might include the cargo data. Accounting, which would definitely include the cargo data, pay information. Crew list, medical-pretty sparse, on a vessel like this with a stable crew.

Communications log, but some merchanters put that in the captain's log."

Esmay slotted the next cube into the reader. "This looks like communications. And the date's recent . . . fits with the ship's last stop. Elias Madero to Corian Highside Stationmaster . . .

to Traffic Control . . . undock and traffic transmissions and receptions."

"Good. Let me see." Haral came over and peered at the screen. "This is really good . . . we can match this against the records at Corian, and see if anyone tampered with the log. Wish they'd put it in full-record mode, but that does eat up cube capacity. Let's just see how far it goes . . ."

"Elias Madero-you get your captain to the com. You surrender your ship, and we'll let the crew off in your lifeboats." The voice coming out of the cube reader's speakers startled them both.

"What is that-" Haral leaned forward. "My God-someone had the sense to turn on full-record mode when the raiders challenged them. No vid yet, but-"

The screen flickered, changing from text to vid. A blurry image formed, of a stern man in tan-Esmay thought it might be a uniform, but she couldn't tell. Then it sharpened suddenly.

"Got the incoming patched directly to the cube recorder, instead of vidding the screen," Haral said. They had missed a few words; now another voice spoke.

"This is Captain Lund. Who are you and what do you think you're doing?" A shift in the picture, to show a stocky balding man who was recognizable from the crew list Boros had supplied. It was definitely Lund. The recording continued, including Lund's off-transmission commands to his crew.

Haral paused the playback, and sat back. "Well, now we know what happened to this ship . . . and we know they had kids, and hid them. Question is, did the raiders find them? Take them?"

"Must have," Esmay said, feeling sick at the thought. Four preschoolers, the age she had been when-she pushed that away but was aware of a deep rage stirring to action. The person who had had the sense to put this cube in the lifeboat-who had thought to switch to full-mode recording-had also quickly shot vid from the children's records. So they knew the children's names, and had faces to go with them. Two girls, sisters. Two boys, cousins.

"The vid quality is good enough that we should be able to read the insignia on those uniforms, see if intel has anything on them. Faces-we may have them in the file somewhere. And that's the most audio we've ever had from raiders. Interesting accent."

But all Esmay could think about was the children, the helpless children. She turned the orange and blue toy over and over in her hands.

One by one, the rescue crews located and retrieved the bodies.

"We've got too many bodies," the team chief said. "How many were on the merchanter's crew?"

"So some raiders died," Solis said. "I'm not grieving."

"These men have been stripped-not like the others. Would the raiders have stripped and dumped their own dead?"

"Unlikely. Stripped, you say? Why these men?"

"Dunno, but there's no ID on them at all. We can take tissue samples, but you know what that's like-"

"No fingerprints, retinals?"

"Nope. All burned. After death, the medic says; they died of combat wounds."

Solis turned to Esmay. "Ideas, Lieutenant?"

"Unless we've stumbled into some local fighting ground . . . no, sir."

"The merchanters look like ordinary spacers," the medic said. "Light-boned, small body mass . . .

merchanters nearly always run with low grav because it feels good. Varying ages-the cook was two years older than the captain, all the way down to the kid." The scrawny teenager who'd been in a fight before he was shot. "But these others . . . they could be Fleet, except that they don't have Fleet IDs. Look at the muscular development-and their bone mass indicates regular hard exercise in a substantial field, at least standard G. Even though the raiders burned off the fingerprints, we can see enough callus structure on the hands that's consistent with weapons use . . ."

"Assuming it was the raiders, why wouldn't the raiders want them identified? If their primary target was the merchanter-which seems obvious-and they left the crew identifiable, what was it about these?"

"Don't know. Military, not Fleet . . . a Benignity spyship, maybe? A probe from the Guernesi?

But-why would the raiders care if we knew that? Unless they're from the same source-but that would imply that these are their people, and we've already said they probably aren't. About all we can be sure of is that they weren't merchanter crew."

"We can't do a genetic scan?"

"Well, we could-if we had one of the big sequencers. The forensic pathology lab at Sector would have one, but that still doesn't tell you much. Maybe a rough guess at which dozen planets the person came from, but the amount of travel going on these days, it's less and less accurate. I'm running the simpler tissue scales here . . . but I don't expect anything to come up. If someone reports missing persons, and has their genome on file, that would do it."

"We're finding less each sweep," Solis said. "Time to move on. This jump point has how many mapped outlets?"

"Five, sir."