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At her command the map changed once more, highlighting several of the attacks in purple for a moment. Then the image changed to various lists of names, one name on one side followed by dozens of others next to it. "These attacks were always the most violent, leaving no survivors who could identify them."
"Which would include my people," Luther growled, leaning his head forward. "So we really are dealing with a rogue sector fleet? A fleet answering to someone above and beyond their own leaders?"
"Calling it a sector fleet is a bit of a misnomer," Quinlan said cautiously, taking over the screen for a moment. Six cruisers the size of a Consular class popped up, followed by an even dozen converted freighters and a single squad of mixed UGLY and CloakShape starfighters. Then the ships' images changed, becoming whatever everyone could guess were patrol routes. Several of them overlapped each purple dot.
"They aren't that powerful a group, a sector flotilla or squadron would be a better description. But…yes. The evidence against them is particularly damning. This shows the flight plans of the ships and how they could intersect the locations of the various attacks.
"However, these attacks have also served to cover something else. The violence of them, leaving no survivors like that, covered the fact that in other attacks other pirates took prisoners. That is the second aspect of this pirate campaign, a massive slave taking operation," Quinlan finished bluntly.
"What?" said one the counts, sitting up abruptly as did the others in the room save Aayla, whose eyes narrowed dangerously. "Surely someone would have noticed people were disappearing."
"Here we run into the first evidence that someone in the Holonet Relay System is on the take," Komari said heavily. "Reports were sent from the star systems where these attacks came from to the sector capitals, which sent them all off to Coruscant. But many of the initial reports have disappeared somewhere in the HRS relay, and what few reports have been sent on to Coruscant are simply gone."
Looking on as the map changed once more, Dooku slowly nodded. "And because all these attacks occur on the edges of the sector, the sector governors would be leery of following up on them on their own, especially if they didn't understand the size of the problem…"
"Exactly, Master Dooku."
"How do we know the crews attacked were taken rather than killed?" asked one of the starfighter pilots.
"Unlike the wreckage left behind by the rouge privateers, there were a distinct lack of body parts and other remains in the wreckage of these attacks," Quinlan said, shaking his head. "I investigated several of the wrecks myself. There were no biological remains."
"The next bit of information was very much a needle in a haystack sort of thing. Only by combining the manifests of every ship did we get this clue." Once more Komari took up the tale, the image of the map disappearing into dozens, then hundreds of ship manifests. A moment later most of the manifests highlighted yellow, then a few lines on each highlighted red. They began to enlarge in turn, allowing each line to be read easily.
After the last line finished enlarging one of the starfighter pilots hissed, and Aayla's eyes narrowed once more. Sensing Harry's confusion she reached out through their bond to explain. "It's called a distributed energy emitter, Harry. It's one of the most important parts for starfighters. The part is also used on a lot of commercial vehicles, but combine it with the rest you see and they might be building or refurbishing starfighter or freighters."
"Bits of parts here, bits of parts there have disappeared from those ships and not been seen in the local black markets," Quinlan said, shaking his head. "I looked particularly closely, since these parts would have been very decent sources of money. Alone, none of these supplies are enough to raise concern, but put together they paint a bad picture."
That list was replaced by a blue one, most of the parts on it naming things Harry recognized. They could be part of putting together primitive weapons systems, and those are a lot of energy cells, and oh my word, enough gas magazines for a small army. Another list was more mundane, but the number of supplies on it was worrisome. Parts needed to create or maintain a space station or hazardous environment dome, and a lot of them too.
"What we have here is someone organizing a slaving ring on a scale that is without precedent to my knowledge, and which might or might not be building up a private army," Komari finished bluntly.
"So what are we going to do about it?" said one of the starfighter pilots, equally bluntly. "While we now know what's going on, that doesn't really give us many options to deal with the real source of this plot."
"We can try to discover who was blocking the reports from getting to the Senate," Quinlan said hesitantly. "But we would need Senate approval to pull the relay reports, which is just not going to happen soon, and probably not without our doing so getting back to whoever is involved. We're talking about trillions upon trillions worth of material and slaves, and racketeering money here."
"We could move against the privateers, that is, the defense force involved, couldn't we?" Harry asked from where he sat in the far back of the room. "If we lay the evidence of their wrongdoing in front of their political leaders, at least we can force the parent governments to disavow them, and then we can move against them physically with the backing of whatever other forces that the Daedalus sector has available."
"No. Doing so might warn them just like going after their spy in the relay. I'm afraid if we don't want the privateers, as you put it, to get away, we will have to act directly against them. And doing that will no doubt warn whatever group is organizing all this that we are on to them," Dooku replied.
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