Within ten minutes after entering the Felicia, Thandi was thanking whatever gods there might be for the fact that Ruth was with her. Without her, the stealthy attack would have turned almost instantly into a straight-up boarding assault—with no possible end except the destruction of the ship. Thandi was still quite sure she could have defeated Templeton's gang—even had she been alone, much less with the Amazons at her side. But so what? The religious maniacs would have simply blown up the Felicia once they realized they were overmatched.

The problem was simple, and one which Thandi should probably have foreseen. Lieutenant Commander Watanapongse had, after all. Granted, Watanapongse had a lot more experience dealing with slavers than Thandi did. Marines simply weren't called for when dealing with slavers, except under rare circumstances. Slaver crews were too small to put up any significant resistance, once they were overtaken by a military vessel. So, they usually surrendered outright.

Although... that depended on the identity of the arresting vessel. The navies of most civilized powers subscribed to the theory that the slave trade constituted an offense against humanity. The Solarian League had certainly taken that position for centuries, and had pursued an official policy directed toward its eventual eradication for just as long. The Solarian approach was based on an entire network of interlocking bilateral treaty agreements with its independent neighbors, coupled with bureaucratic fiat within its own territory or that under the jurisdiction of the OFS. Since it would have been extremely difficult to get a significant number of independent systems (especially those already keeping an uneasy eye on Frontier Security) to agree to allow the SLN to police their space on any pretext, the treaties in question were negotiated on a basis which granted the SLN authority to intercept slavers flagged to the independent systems only outside the smaller nations' territorial space. And although League law equated slavery with piracy for its own citizens, which made it theoretically punishable by death, the fact was that the Solarian League had never executed a single slaver whose ship had been seized under one of the treaties. Solarian nationals had—on rare occasions—been sent to prison, sometimes for quite lengthy sentences. But the League as a whole was too "enlightened" to actually impose the death penalty, even in relatively extreme cases.

In the case of those who were not Solarian nationals, the options were even more limited. The ships themselves were impounded and destroyed, but since the other parties to many of the treaties didn't equate the two crimes in the same fashion (officially, at least), the most the League could often do was return "alleged" slavers to their systems of origin for trial.

Over the years, however, slavers had discovered that there were some exceptions to that nice, safe arrangement. Specifically, there were the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven. Manticore's implacable hostility to the genetic slave trade had been a part of the Star Kingdom's foreign policy ever since the days of King Roger II, whose youthful infatuation with the Liberal Party of the day had left its mark in several ways even after he assumed the throne. The original Republic of Haven had been just as disgusted by the practice, and even the People's Republic, for all its myriad faults, had retained that disgust and a hostility which fully matched that of Manticore. In fact, the one solemn interstellar accord to which both star nations were signatories and which had remained in effect throughout all of the tension and even outright hostilities between them was the Cherwell Convention.

The provisions of the Cherwell Convention were quite simple. All signatories to it endorsed the equation of slavery with piracy... and prescribed the same punishment for both. It was the most stringent of all of the League's anti-slavery treaties, and, unlike any of the others, it was multilateral, not bilateral. All of its signatories agreed that the naval forces of any of its signatories had the right to stop, search, and confiscate merchant vessels transporting slaves while sailing under the protection of their flags. And, even more importantly, that they had the right to try the crews of those confiscated vessels for piracy.

Despite the official provisions of the Cherwell Convention, the rigor with which it was enforced in practice varied widely from one star nation to the next, even among those who had officially signed onto it. Both the Manticorans and the Havenites were ruthless about it, and the death penalty was often applied immediately to slavers caught in the act. Even if the slavers were not executed, they were invariably sentenced to much longer prison terms than was the Solarian norm.

By and large, the Andermani Empire tended to follow the same policies. On the other hand, the Silesian Confederacy's treatment of captured slavers and pirates was a sour joke in the starways. The Confederacy had signed the Cherwell Convention only under the threat of Manticoran military action during the reign of Queen Adrienne, and as often as not, the criminals were released almost immediately by a corrupt governor.

The Solarian League's practice varied a great deal, depending primarily on the specific unit which made the arrest. More precisely, on the political connections which that unit had with one or another of the various power blocs in the League. Some captains, those who were effectively in Mesa's political pocket, were as notorious as Silesians for releasing captured slavers. Others—Rozsak being one of them, especially since his assignment to work with Governor Barregos in Maya Sector—enforced the available penalties with as much harshness as possible.

At one time, the standard response of slavers about to be overhauled was to jettison their "cargo" into space and then try to use the absence of slaves as proof of their innocence. In order to put a stop to that practice, the star nations who had signed the Cherwell Convention had adopted the "equipment clause" first proposed by Roger II. In effect, the equipment clause stated that any ship equipped as a slaver was a slaver, whether she happened to have a "cargo" aboard at the moment or not.

Many of the Cherwell Convention signatories, including the Andermani Empire, simply seized the ship and sent its crew to prison when exercising the equipment clause in the absence of actual slaves. The Star Kingdom and the Republic, however, had adopted the official position that a slaver crew found without a living cargo would be immediately tried for mass murder and, if convicted, executed by the same method: ejection from an airlock without benefit of space suit. Death by decompression was... pretty horrible.

Nor was it possible to conceal the fact that a ship was a slaver. That was what the "equipment clause" was all about, because the nature of her "cargo" was such that any slaver had to be designed differently from a normal cargo hauler or legitimate passenger vessel. The old shackles and chains of the slave trade on Earth in pre-Diaspora days might no longer be needed, but the design of the ships themselves, with their multitude of security measures to forestall any slave revolt, was simply impossible to disguise.

That was true even leaving aside the peculiar design whereby hundreds—sometimes thousands—of unwilling human beings could be ejected into space. It would be impossible for a small slaver crew to physically manhandle thousands of people into airlocks. So, the ships were designed to flood the slave living compartments with powerful (but not lethal) gases, forcing the slaves into large cargo holds where the big bays could be opened to space.

That design was somewhat obsolete, now, at least anywhere near Manticoran or Havenite space. Too many Manticoran and Havenite captains had started the quiet practice of immediately executing any slavers found aboard a ship equipped for that kind of mass murder—whether the "cargo" was still alive or not. The official rules be damned. Even the occasional Solarian captain in those regions, barred from such direct and forceful action by his own government's policies, had adopted the policy of handing the crews of such ships over to the closest Manty or Havenite captain. After all, both the Star Kingdom and the Republic were treaty partners, weren't they? What happened to criminals after being duly delivered into the custody of one of the local governments was hardly the arresting captain's business, was it?

And, besides, the method of execution was such poetic justice.

As it happened, the Felicia did have the design which enabled the crew to jettison its cargo. That much was obvious to Thandi within five minutes. There could be no other explanation for the number of large cargo holds they passed through after entering the ship. Empty cargo holds, with very wide bays—and with no passageways connecting to them wide enough to move large items of cargo.

Clearly enough, Princess Ruth understood the purpose of the peculiar design. Her thin face was tight with anger.

"We'll fix that, " she muttered. A moment later, moving with the sureness of an expert, she had the panel removed from the nearest instrument console and had her own mini-computer plugged into it. Ignoring Thandi's hiss of warning, Ruth's fingers started working the keyboard.

Shortly thereafter, the princess unplugged her unit. She didn't bother replacing the panel.

"Those won't work any longer. The bastards can't jettison anybody. And I disconnected the controls to the gas units, while I was at it." She glanced at Thandi's skinsuit. "The gas wouldn't bother us, of course, but if the slavers released it—"

She didn't need to finish the thought. Wincing, Thandi nodded. The gases used to drive slaves into the jettison holds were only technically "nonlethal." More precisely, they were nonlethal so long as the victim could move away into cleaner air. Trapped in compartments with no way to escape, most of the victims would die eventually. And die horribly, too, in an even worse manner than being jettisoned into space. Slavers themselves wouldn't voluntarily kill anyone that way, because they'd have to clean up the multitude of corpses—not to mention vomit and other excreta left behind. But in these circumstances, if Templeton's gang got desperate enough, they might do it as part of their suicide pact.

"Can you disconnect whatever setup they've got to blow the ship?"