How Space Piracy Works (And A Note On Moons)

Poul Anderson, "The Moonrakers," see here.

The Interplanetary Political Background
The Incorporated State governs Earth.
Malcontents colonized and terraformed Mars.
Mars mines the nearby asteroidal mineral wealth.
Martian misfits colonized the asteroids, where small private companies became the Chiefdoms.
Most of the asteroids became the independent Free Worlds.
Mars ceased trade with the Free Worlds, which resorted to piracy.
The Free Worlds sell pirated goods on Earth or on the Martian asteroids, then buy necessities from Earth.

Stages of The Piracy
(i) Asterite boats ambushed drone ships, cut their way in with lasers, disconnected the autopilots and appropriated the captured ships.

(ii) Drones were replaced with ships capable of accelerating all the way. Asterites, unable to intercept such ships, used spies to learn the homing signals that would make the autopilots follow the pirates' ships.

(iii) The signals were made top secret but then asterite agents in the Martian companies inserted course tapes that took the ships elsewhere.

(iv) All relevant personnel were replaced. Then some loading personnel planted time bombs in engine rooms.

(v) The guilty loaders were fired. Then the pirates began to scatter cosmic gravel in the paths of Martian ships. Some of the gravel destroys ships' engines, enabling the pirates to match speeds and also to claim that they are salvagers, not pirates.

The Problem
If armed men travel on the ships, then the pirates will come armed. Going out of the ecliptic plane would be too expensive. There is a continuing problem of what to do, as in Anderson's "Margin of Profit."

Moons
The Martian moons, far from hurtling through the sky, are "hardly visible" (p. 153) from the surface.