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.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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]