Leaning forward in his chair, Turnez indicates to the maps of the local areas explored.
The fact that pirates were operating in this area is a fortunate discovery. We have destroyed their ships and neutralised the base in the sector rimwards of our position. I imagine the hegemony are aware of these pirates and have been hunting for them. For the time being, I think as long as we are careful to leave no traces when we attack, we could mask our operations by making them look like random pirate attacks. We could hit some lower level targets as well as some of the military targets. With any luck, the Hegemony will put those higher stakes attacks down to the pirates becoming more bold.
Turnez pauses, and sits back in his chair.
It is a double edged sword though. Eventually, the hegemony will want to find and flush out the pirates, which may well mean that their patrols increase. That will have a knock on impact for us. And of course, the hegemony may have already started to increase patrols to deal with the situation. There was an attack that we witnessed towards the end of our accounting mission. Though the pirates didn’t seem too powerful, I doubt the hegemony would tolerate them for long.