Hijackers!
Dark Matters, Book 1
The pirates know what to steal. They just don't know why.
Piracy is nothing new in the Alyosha expanse. This is different. When a passenger ship is hijacked, Civil Enforcement Bureau agent Viltri Thiza and his team are sent to investigate. The attack looks like another job by a small pirate crew until the evidence connects it to other hijackings across neighboring sectors. Someone has been feeding independent criminals exact intelligence: which ships to hit, where to find them, and which seemingly ordinary pieces of cargo must be surrendered afterward. Then one of the pirates keeps something he was supposed to turn over. Suddenly the people behind the operation aren't just collecting stolen property. They're eliminating loose ends. As Thiza's team follows the trail from pirates to corporate offices and beyond, the scattered thefts begin to reveal their real purpose: restricted technology is being smuggled into Alyosha aboard ordinary vessels and recovered through staged hijackings. Solving the hijackings is only the beginning. Finding out who ordered them may be considerably more dangerous.