Hold the Star: Samair in Argos: Book 2 (4 page)

              “I don’t want to hear it, Cookie,” the Captain said, starting to close the hatch.

              But the chef didn’t listen.  He shouldered his way inside, pushing the Captain out of the way.  Once inside, he shut the hatch behind him and dogged it closed.

              “I’m working to get the ship back,” Cookie said without preamble. 

              “Are you?” he asked, not really that interested.

              “I am,” he told him.  “And why don’t you care?”

              “What are you going to do, Cookie?  There are soldiers all over my ship.  The only two people that might be able to stand up to them are in the brig.  What can
you
possibly do?”

              The barrel chested cook cocked his fist back and socked the Captain in the jaw, knocking him sprawling.  Eamonn hit the edge of the table and bounced off, crashing into the chair, which knocked it clattering to the deck.  In an instant, the big man was back on his feet, blood trickling from his mouth, fists clenched.  With a roar, he lunged for the rotund chef, but Cookie was surprisingly nimble, dodging to the left and bringing his fist down on the Captain’s back as he flew by.

              Eamonn grunted, tripped and hit the deck hard.  But he wasn’t done.  Lashing out with one foot, he kicked Cookie in the knee.  There was an audible crunch and the man collapsed to the deck.  The captain got on his knees and moved to strike again, but he stopped when he saw the grimace on Cookie’s face and heard him laughing through the pain.             

              “Finally!  Some emotion!”  He gagged against the pain in his leg and Eamonn moved away.  “About damned time.”

              “Get out of here, Cookie,” Eamonn told him, going to the comm panel on the wall.  He pressed a control.  “This is the Captain.  I need a medical team to my quarters.  Cookie hurt himself.”  He cut the connection before anyone answered.  “I don’t need or want your help.  I don’t need or want you in here.  Just get out of here before I forget myself and let my control go.  Next time I won’t be so restrained.”

              The door chime sounded a few seconds later.  The Captain strode to the hatch, keyed it open and the two sick berth attendants rushed inside.  One of them immediately looked to the Captain, running a scanner up and down in front of the man.  Eamonn didn’t even look at him, just let him do his work.  His gaze was locked on the chef as the other medico helped him up and onto a hover stretcher.  The medic jabbed a hypo into Eamonn’s neck and he winced as the Quick Heal was injected.  A soothing coolness flooded through him, the pain from Cookie’s hit immediately eased. 

              “I’m so sick of everyone saying that because I’m a cook that I’m useless!” Cookie bellowed and the medico tried to calm him down as he was helping him up on the stretcher. 

              “You should be all right, Captain,” the medico reported after a moment.  “It’ll be sore for a few hours, but the bruising will go away soon.”

              “Thanks,” he muttered.  “Dismissed.”

              The man blinked, but nodded and hustled out of the stateroom, helping his comrade rush Cookie out and down the corridor, heading for sickbay.  The captain didn’t watch them go.  Once they were gone from his stateroom, he closed the hatch again and locked it.  Going to his small closet, he pulled out one of the cleaning bots.  Flipping a switch on one side, the floating saucer activated and whirred to life.  Releasing the bot, it whirred happily and began to work on the blood that had begun to congeal on the deckplate.

              The captain rubbed at his jaw, annoyed at the interruption and furious at Cookie’s daring.  For a few minutes, the chef had dragged him out from the depressive fog he’d been immersed in, but already Vincent Eamonn could feel that cool blanket settling back over him, dampening his emotions, turning that which was in sharp relief to a soft, fuzzed outline.  He stood there, watching the cleaner bot do it work, his mind blank, just simply watching.  A very small portion of his mind was whispering to him, saying that he should be feeling more than this, that he should be angry and storming down to sickbay to demand answers.  But that voice was being lost in the fog, muffled by that soft blanket.

              Soon it was just a very soft hiss at the edge of his consciousness.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

              When the stretcher arrived in sickbay, Turan came over to where the orderlies were transferring the rotund cook from the stretcher to one of the medical beds.  “So, I’m guessing by the look of you that it didn’t go well.”

              “What didn’t go well?” Cookie gasped, his face contorted with pain. 

              “Your little chat with the Captain,” the Guura replied as he checked out the readouts on the bed. 

              “How did you know about that?” Cookie muttered, gritting his teeth.

              Turan tsked, more of a snort through his small trunk.  “Please.  I know all about it.  Ka’Xarian came in here to talk with me about it.  I didn’t know how long the meeting was going to go for, and I really couldn’t justify leaving.  But he filled me in on the highlights.”  He pressed a button and some status indicator changed.  He nodded in satisfaction.  “We’ll need to do some surgery to fix that,” he pointed to the knee, “But you should be fine in a few days.” 

              Cookie sighed, laying back.  “I really thought that would work.”

              “Xar told me that you didn’t want Taja getting in a fight with the man.  And then you go in there and punch him?” Turan asked, puzzled.  “How does that make sense?  I know my understanding of human motives isn’t always perfect, but that doesn’t track.”

              Cookie chuckled wryly, but his face was ghostly pale.  “I thought it would work.  And he insulted me.  I decided that a good hit was what he needed.  What
I
needed.”

              “You’re usually so level-headed, Cookie,” the doctor chided, injecting him with a painkiller and seeing the man droop with relief as the agony in his knee eased.

              “You’ve met the man,” Cookie returned, his voice starting to slur a bit.  “You know how hard-headed he is.  I figured something drastic needed to be done.”

              “Yes, yes,” Turan said, distractedly.  “I’m sure it was perfectly dashing.  Rest now.  When you wake up, you’ll feel better.”

              Cookie only nodded and was soon unconscious.

              Turan sighed, which came out as more of a light blat than the noises humans made.  He started issuing orders to have the man prepped for surgery.  Two orderlies came forward to take care of the man.  In hindsight, perhaps transferring him from the stretcher to the bed wasn’t the smartest move.  They needed to move him over to the surgical theater anyway, this was just another step.  Another blat.

              “Can’t believe the old fool actually punched the captain,” came a deep voice from behind him. 

              Turan turned around, giving a small smile to the Chief Engineer, who was laying on his bed, datapad in one of his four hands.  “Wish I could have seen it,” the Guura admitted.

              “Me too,” the Parkani said, continuing to laugh. 

              The hatch to the cell unlocked and swung open.  Tamara was laying on the bunk, facing the bulkhead.  She turned and sat up painfully as she did so.  Her legs and the tops of her feet were sore and ached.  She was concerned that she was getting an infection since she had started to feel feverish over the last few hours.  A quick scan from her implants was confirming it.  There was nothing she could do about it, however, being locked in the cell and she knew that shouting for help from the guards would prove fruitless.  She would get no medical attention or anything else until Gideon Jax decided that she would.

              “You’re looking like hell, Prisoner,” Jax’s voice came from outside the cell.  “You can get up.  It’s reward time.”

              Tamara gingerly pushed herself up and stood.  Her legs immediately wobbled and her head swam.  Apparently the medical issue was more serious than she’d anticipated.  She stumbled forward, leaning heavily on the edge of the doorjamb.  Breathing hard, she stepped out. 

              There he was, the bastard, standing just outside of easy range of her fists or feet, smiling at her.  That smile wilted quickly and turned to a frown.  “You really do look like hell, Prisoner.  I think our first stop is going to be sickbay, rather than your quarters.”  Behind him, another of the pirate soldiers stood, holding a lump of cloth in his hands.  At some unseen signal, the other man handed the cloth to Jax, who in turn, tossed it to Tamara.  Breathing heavily, she leaned over and picked it up.  It was a terrycloth robe, which she quickly slipped on.  It was about four sizes too big, but she didn’t care.  It helped with the chill, but she still shivered. 

              “Yes, definitely sickbay,” the Armsman said with a nod.  He gestured and the other soldier stepped forward to assist the woman.  Tamara shook him off.  Standing proudly, she began the trek from the brig to sickbay.  If her gait was a trifle slower than it normally was, she didn’t mind.  She would
not
be dragged through the ship again.  Never again, if she could help it, wincing internally as she remembered that the last time she
couldn’t
help it.

              “I’m glad to see that you didn’t lie to me,” Jax said conversationally.  “Though I admit it is a bit annoying, what you told me about the replicator codes.”

              She nodded, though she didn’t look at him.  The corridors were empty so far.  Thankfully, sickbay wasn’t too far from the brig, in fact, it was on the same level, only six sections up the corridor.  “Normally the codes would be given to officers or non-comms in the military.  The firmware would be updated with the new codes by Republic personnel who have the required ones, but there were command protocols that needed to be used to do that.”

              “All right, we’ll table the codes for the moment,” Jax decided.  “What about the implants?  I hear scuttlebutt that you could make them.”

              She shrugged.  “I’ve never actually done it before, but yes, it shouldn’t be that difficult.  I wouldn’t be the one to put them in you, though.  Turan would have to do that.”

              “What would that entail?”  His tone was slightly amused, but there was a thread of genuine curiosity.

              “Well, there’s an injection of nanites that you get that pave the way in your nervous system, clearing out any of the crap in your veins and arteries, fix any of the minor problems people accumulate over the years.  Takes about a day for that to take effect, but after it’s done, you’ll feel like a million credits.  After that, the doctor gives you another injection of both material substrate and constructor nanites, which then build the things and ‘install’ them in your nervous system.”

              “Material substrate?” he pressed.

              “Organic materials and other things that your body doesn’t normally produce so that the nanites have what they need to build your implants.  It doesn’t hurt.  In fact, you’ll be under during the process.  Once they’re done, the nanites are flushed out of your system in a matter of hours.  Takes about a week afterward for the swelling to go down and then it’s just a matter of getting acclimatized to the implants.  You’ll have headaches for a while as you get used to working with the HUD and the other functions.  You can’t ever really turn them off, though I suppose you could if you really wanted to.  But if you do that, what’s the point of having them in the first place?”

              He nodded slowly.  “Good, once we get you back in order that will be your first order of business.  I and my men will be outfitted with neural implants.”

              “You would trust me to build implants for you to use?” Tamara replied, skeptically, trying to control her breathing and clutching the robe tight.  She felt herself shivering and couldn’t control it.

              Jax gave a small chuckle, making Tamara shiver.  “Oh, I trust you to try and slip one by, to try and kill me or my men, or both.  But I want you to be aware of what will happen if you do.”  He grabbed her arm roughly and pulled her to a halt.  “I’m not going to hit you with another blast,” Jax told her, as she flinched in anticipation and fear.  “Not now.  But what will happen is that members of this crew will start dying.  And perhaps you don’t think I’ll do it.  Perhaps you think I’ll be squeamish.”  He gripped a hand on her jaw and forced her face upward so that she was looking him square in the eyes.  “I think the airlock might start to get some use.  And while I know that I need a good portion of this crew to keep the ship moving, I don’t think I need
all
the crew.  I have a surplus of eighty crewmen right now, because I don’t believe that the cargo division or the deck division need to be at full strength.  And I will make them all suffer.”

              She swallowed hard.  Her implants were active and while the HUD flickered a bit due to the interference from the device on her neck, the scan features were still active.  She could detect his pupil dilation, tone and timbre of his speech and a number of other factors, all of which pointed to the same conclusion: he wasn’t bluffing.  Eighty people?  He’d kill off all but twenty, leaving those poor beleaguered souls to watch their comrades die and then have to run this massive ship all by themselves.  All the while, the relative safety in numbers rapidly dwindling as the number of pirate soldiers aboard the
Grania Estelle
would remain the same.