The ship had once been a freighter with the unlikely name of Lubbock Lights, plying the Asteroid Belt, picking up ores mined by the rock rats and carrying them back to the factories in Earth orbit and on the Moon. Lars Fuchs and his ragtag crew of exiles had seized it and renamed it Nautilus, after the fictional submersible of the vengeance-seeking Captain Nemo.

Over the years, Fuchs had changed the spacecraft. It was still a dumbbell shape, rotating on a buckyball tether to provide a feeling of gravity for the crew. It still could carry thousands of tons of ores in its external grapples. But now it also bore five powerful lasers, which Fuchs used as weapons. And it was armored with thin layers of asteroidal copper fixed a few centimeters outside the ship’s true hull, enough to absorb an infrared laser beam for a second or more. Nautilus’s fusion propulsion system was among the most powerful in the Belt. Speed and maneuverability were important for a pirate vessel.

In the ship’s cramped bridge Fuchs leaned over the back of the pilot’s chair and scowled at the scanner display.

“It is a freighter, nothing more,” said Amarjagal, his pilot. She was a stocky, stoic woman of Mongol ancestry who had been with Fuchs since he’d fled from the mining center at Ceres to take up this life of exile and piracy.

“With a crew pod?” Fuchs sneered.

Nodon, the ship’s engineer, had also been part of Fuchs’s renegade team since the earliest days. He was rail-thin, all bone and sinew, his head shaved bald, spiral scars of ceremonial tattoos swirling across both cheeks. A menacing black moustache drooped down to his jawline, yet his dark brown eyes were big and expressive, soulful.