The guns were Weighman 44:s, stun guns looking like short, fat, three-barreled shotguns.

  Three loads - sack, dart, and bouncer, one per barrel.

  Sacks were soft kinetic impact loads, bags of high-density polymer pellets that accelerated for half a meter, then yielded all their energy in one blow when they hit. Great at short range, useless beyond fifty meters or so. Felt like getting kicked by a loading mech, but nothing you couldn’t survive.

  Darts were slim, conductive needles, usually of copper-coated tungsten. They trailed a wire to a battery pack on the gun. Get hit, get shocked. Twenty thousand volts running through your body could make anyone dance the crowd-suppression jerky.

  Bouncers were dangerous. Forty-gram rubber loads, perfectly round, very elastic. Fired at five hundred meters per second, they could kill a man. Fired into a crowd, at leg level, they’d bounce around, shattering bones, knocking people over, doing damage.

  If things escalated to bouncers, the real guns weren’t far away. Seeing the Weighmans, I longed for a gun, any gun.

  But the marines had confiscated my Chimer, my pocket knife, and my warding drill. They’d even taken my com and Hao’s electronics kit. At least we still had our jackets, although I didn’t know how many of my wards remained whole. Should have checked that in the cell instead of blabbing.

  “Hands forward,” the leader, a lance corporal by the two stripes on his shoulder, said. He looked old, his name tag reading K. L. Radell. A family member. But it didn’t have to mean anything. If the Radells were a founding family, there’d be lots of them around, some less powerful than others.

  I held out my hands, allowing myself to be cuffed again, this time with reinforced titanium snaps, light and glittering. An alloy then. Likely to make it less brittle. I’d heard of people able to crack titanium rods.

  Behind me, Hao got her cuffs, then Maia. The marines were playing it safe.

  “Any chance you’d be here for the bribe?” I said. Clearly, they hadn’t been. The door had opened too fast.

  None of the marines replied. K. L. Radell looked positively grim.

  “What’s with the hostility?” I said, turning on my most charming smile.

  “I’ll enjoy seeing you spaced,” Radell said.

  Crudmucking great manners. Man wasn’t worth my charm. Then again, I didn’t have too much of it, especially with my mouth all numb from the analgesic.

  When he ignored Maia, I started to get worried.

  “Where are you taking us?” I asked, not hoping for an answer.

  “Magistrate,” Radell said.

  Which might be good or bad. A quick hearing meant that someone was willing to pay to have it expedited. We hadn’t. Nor would the port master, hoping to free the Bucket’s berth. We hadn’t been there long enough.

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  That left the people who’d attacked us. If they wanted a quick trial, it could be good. Likely, they’d figured out that we had a winning case, and wanted it settled before we realized how strong our position was.

  Not likely. I’d stick them for every last gram they could afford. Or almost. At some point, it would become cheaper for them to bribe the Raist to dismiss the case.

  “In here,” Radell said, shoving me sideways into an open door.

  A large, square room, five times five meters. Quiet. Smelled freshly cleaned, some kind of lemon detergent. Pale beige sound-absorbing carpet on the walls. A two-meters-high version of the Raist’s eyeball-on-a-stick on the far wall. Three seats behind raised, deep-green pulpits. A judges’ panel.

  Before them, two steel benches securely bolted to the floor, with shackles thick as my finger inset every meter. For the accused.

  Us.

  The sight made me lose my hunger, which was bad. When my gut quiets, things are about to fall into the void. This was no longer a nice, friendly trade fleet. Until I knew what was going on, I had to treat it like enemy ground.

  I sat down on the nearest bench, making sure to put my hands in my lap. Low enough not to be threatening, far enough away from the shackles to make securing me a chore.

  The marines didn’t bother securing me. Always count on human laziness. They had the stun guns, they had the better positions, why should they extend themselves?

  We waited in silence for what felt like five minutes, but was likely less. My sense of time is always pessimistic in these kinds of situations.

  The air smelled of mint, and sweat. The chocolate nutri-bar in my pocket had been flattened during the fight, leaking out through the cloth, overpowering the lemon detergent.

  Nothing happened.

  My heart hammered in my chest, heavy blows that traveled through my body with each beat. I hate having people with guns behind my back.

  I kept expecting being shot. No amount of logic arguments I could come up with made the feeling go away. In the end, I conjured a thread of force, tapping it against the warded armor plates in our jackets, trying to count the active wards by feel. I kept losing the count.

  A low chime sounded, a pre-recorded bell, something you could hear during meditation practice in a dojo.

  Three judges entered, in military fatigues. Two captains and a major. That was bad. A military tribunal was always bad. The captains looked unhappy. The major’s name tag read C. Radell. He looked crudmucking mad, lips tight, face pale.

  “You are accused of theft, piracy, grand larceny, and attempted murder,” he said, without even sitting down.

  Say what?

  “Sir?” I said.

  “Did you fail to hear or fail to understand?” C. Radell said. His voice was sharp, staccato, each word a minor explosion.

  “Fail to understand,” I said. “We just arrived. We were attacked in the cargo bay.”

  C. Radell glared at me.

  “Your accusers are the Ladrian conglomerate. They have a code-validated claim to the Bucket of Diamonds. They are within their right to attempt to reclaim their property by force.”

  A drop of sweat rolled down the side of my face. I was acutely aware of the guns behind my back.

  I could have demanded a code validation. It would have taken a few days, but the Raist would have a transmission tower. That’s what a legitimate trader would do, and demand a stay on the docking charges until the matter was cleared by the closest branch of the Fed Navy or any licensed bank validating our codes.

  Except that our codes were imaginary, the creation of Riina’s code-analysts aboard the Belithain. If they were checked, that would only strengthen the Ladrians’ claim.

  We were in a bind. A bad one.

  “Who’re we supposed to have murdered?” Hao said. Her voice was thick, like she had a bad cold.

  Fear. I knew how she felt.

  I didn’t need to ask who we were supposed to have killed. The original owners of the Bucket, of course. That’s the story I would have told, if I wanted to steal a ship. Dear magistrate Radell, our ship was stolen, our crew was killed, these are the pirates.

  C. Radell gave her a scowl that could strip paint from an armor plate.

  “You are accused of murdering Davan Radell,” he said.

  The name sounded familiar.

  Davan. D. Radell, a name tag dangling from a garish, red polymer jacket. Davan was Young Voice.

  C. Radell was uncle Caramon.

  Crud.