Hold the Star: Samair in Argos: Book 2 (6 page)

              Jax’s face contorted even further with rage; Tamara wasn’t sure how that was even possible.  He stood, pointed the remote at her, but stopped.  He looked as though he was about to activate it again, but apparently changed his mind.  He raised one booted foot and brought it down hard on her left forearm.  There was a loud
crack
of both bones snapping and pain surged through her again.  Still she couldn’t scream, only a low moan came out of her mouth.  But she could feel her strength returning, somewhat, but the pain from the beating and the shocks and now the broken arm was getting too much.  Her stomach heaved and she vomited.  Jax stepped back and avoided most of it.

              “Looks like this one needs to have some more time to think,” the Armsman rasped.  “Make sure she gets to sickbay.”  But he held up a hand.  “But you are not to touch her, boys.”  He squatted back down, making sure she could see him and hear him.  “And you, you murdering bitch, you want to get to sickbay?  You want to get help from the doctor?  You’ve gotta get there under your own power.  Nobody’s going to help you. 
Nobody
,” he said forcefully, an order to his men more than a directive to her.  With that, the Armsman turned and left the bridge.

              The crew watched the ghoulish sight of Tamara Samair stumbling down the corridors of the ship, her left arm held at a crazy angle, her face and arms covered with bruises, her shipsuit torn at the torso and legs.  She was clearly in a great deal of pain, but the two thugs behind her refused to allow anyone to help her, not even touch her.  When someone grabbed a comm unit to try and call sickbay, the guards didn’t interfere, but when one of the orderlies from sickbay bounded down the corridor, their guns were immediately drawn.

              “Armsman Jax ordered nobody helps her until and unless she can get to sickbay on her own,” the first one told the orderly.

              The man looked at the pirate guard in disbelief.  “This is ridiculous!  She’s in pain!  She’s injured.  She needs my help.”  He reached out to take Tamara’s uninjured right arm.

              “You touch her, doc, and I got orders to put you down,” the guard repeated, a tinge of glee in his warning.  “I will shoot you, make no mistake about that.”

              The orderly looked aghast.  “Why are you doing this to her?” he demanded.  “She’s done nothing to you.”

              The sound of a gunshot echoed through the corridors and the unfortunate orderly collapsed to the deck, a bloodstain growing larger on his chest.  He gasped, clutched at the wound and then fell back and was still.  Others who had gathered to watch the spectacle cried out in alarm, demanding to know what was going on.

              “Done nothing?” the first guard shouted in anger.  “That one’s done nothing?” he demanded, pointing his gun at the now blood-splattered Tamara, who had stopped for only a moment to look down sadly at the poor man who’d tried to help her and gotten himself killed in the process. 

              “She killed twenty-four of the Captain’s soldiers!” he roared, and the collective spacers shrank back from that.

              Tamara couldn’t help that smile on her lips as she continued to trudge forward, cradling her broken arm.

              “Good on you, Samair!” a male voice, Martinez, from the sound of it, came from within the crowd.

              The second guard stayed on Tamara, while the first plowed into the group of spacers that was crowding near to where he was standing.  In an instant, he had Martinez by the collar and dragged him out into the open.  Martinez was a big man, a cargo handler and his prowess on the docks as a brawler was well-documented.  He tried to fight, socking one meaty fist against the first guard’s jaw, causing him to stagger.  The guard raised his gun and fired three shots.  All three hit the cargo handler in the center of his chest and he went down, a look of utter surprise on his face.  Martinez was dead before he’d even hit the deck, blood quickly pooling around him.

              “No one jokes about that,” the second guard yelled, waving his gun around at the gathered throng.  “No one!”

              No one moved forward to help Tamara as she continued down the corridor, but once she and her guards were far enough along, they moved forward to see about their fallen crewmen.  There was nothing to be done for either of them, even if they were rushed to sickbay immediately.  But that didn’t matter.  These men were crew and they weren’t just going to be left in the corridor like carrion on the side of the road.  Perhaps Turan might be able to do something for them.  Strong arms lifted both of the bodies and the group carried the two fallen men after Tamara, careful not to interfere with her walking.

              The banging again.  Always the damned banging.  Would he never get any peace? 

              Vincent Eamonn sat up in his bunk.  The banging on the hatch continued and it was clear that whoever it was had no intention of stopping.  He tried ignoring it, but eventually the staccato continued and increased in both tempo and ferocity to the point where it sounded as though rail gun slugs were hammering the door. 

              Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore.  Getting up from his bed, ignoring his lack of clothing, he was wearing nothing more than a t-shirt and boxers, he went to the hatch and keyed it open.  “What!” he demanded of the person on the other side.

              Taja stood there, looking stricken.  “I wondered if you were going to answer,” she said, blinking at the liquid fury on his face. 

              He glared pure ice at her.  “What.  Do.  You.  Want?”  He was very precise with each of the words, but his tone was frozen helium.

              “I can’t believe you,” Taja started.  “I can’t believe you care so little for what happens aboard your ship.  To a ship and crew that you claim to care so much about.”

              Eamonn just shook his head and started to close the hatch, but Taja put her hand out, stopping him as her palm hit the metal.  “I just thought you’d like to know that the pirates just killed two members of the ship’s company.  Martinez from Cargo and Silva from Medical.”  Without another word, the tiny cargo specialist turned sharply on her heel and marched off down the corridor, leaving the captain to stare at her. 

              The captain didn’t speak, he just closed the hatch.  But instead of returning to his bunk and his depressed fugue, he sat down at his table and activated his display.  A few keystrokes and commands and he brought up internal sensors.  He replayed the events captured on the internal camera feeds over the last twenty-four hours, speeding past otherwise normal events and watching more carefully to anything that seemed to be of interest.

              Repair work.  A goodly number of the pirates were using cargo bay two as a gym area, with a running track around the edge and a firing range set up in the middle.  Why anyone would be willing to run around an area that people were shooting in was beyond him, but they seemed to be fine with it.  Strong reinforced metal barriers had been erected to protect the ship and the passersby that might move behind the shooters, so he guessed it must be somewhat safe.  He detected his own people’s work there.  And while he might be willing to guess that Xar or Quesh or even… Moxie… might be willing to make those barriers weaker than they appeared to hope that the shooters practicing might accidently blast one of their fellows, if there was one thing these thugs seemed to be proficient in, it was weapons.  And therefore, if they were going to be popping off shots in the cargo bay, they’d know that they would need a very strong barrier to protect them and would double check all of the engineers’ work.

              And there it was.  Approximately twenty-seven minutes ago, the cargo bay doors to the bay opened, completely without warning and everyone and everything inside the bay was blown out into space.  The captain had mixed feelings over this.  On the one hand his heart soared watching all those pirate bastards getting the deaths they so richly deserved.  But on the other, his stomach churned at the sight of those same poor bastards behind blasted out into the void, out into the crushing fields of hyperspace.  Hard vacuum was a fear every spacer shared.  Once the pirates were outside the barrier of the ship’s shields, they would be completely unprotected from the massive stresses of faster than light speeds.  Of course, they’d most likely be dead from asphyxiation before that happened, but there would be nothing left of them.  They would be vaporized in an instant.

              But he got control of his stomach and forced himself back to the situation at hand.  He pulled away from the display, slapping his hand on the controls to switch off the streaming images.  He stood up from his chair, crowing at the deaths of so many of the pirate soldiers.  Eamonn even allowed himself to dance a little jig in exultation.  Once he had finished, he went to the port and stared out at the tachyon wash over the shields as the ship continued on course.

              Several hours later, the hammering on the door started again.  Eamonn, startled out of a sound sleep, the most sound sleep he’d had since his ship had been taken, angrily threw his covers aside and climbed out of his bed.  He zipped into the shipsuit he’d draped over the chair and pulled on his boots.  He hustled to the door and keyed it open.

              Once the hatch opened, however, he was not greeted by an irate member of his crew, there to bitch him out yet again.  No, he was staring down the barrels of a pair of assault rifles, held by a pair of enraged pirate soldiers, decked out in their body armor and helmets.  They weren’t wearing power armor, but the garb they had would stop a bullet or two.  And the rifles they bore were no joke.  His anger immediately burned away to be replaced with icy fear in his belly.

              “What seems to be the problem?” he asked lamely.

              “Move,” one of them ordered, twitching his weapon fractionally, to indicate Eamonn should exit his quarters.  He quickly did so, keeping his hands clearly in the open, hopefully giving the two soldiers no excuses to shoot him in the back.

              “Where are we going?” he asked after a while.  They walked down the corridors of the ship and when they came to junctions where they wanted him to turn, one of them would grunt or would poke him with the barrel of his rifle to indicate direction.

              “Shut up,” one of the guards ordered, jamming the end of his weapon into Eamonn’s back, hard.  “You don’t speak.”

              Eamonn stopped, turning to face them.  “I am the captain of this ship-…” he began.

              But the pirate guard only barked an angry laugh.  “You’re the captain so long as Armsman Jax allows you to be.”  He stepped forward, putting his ugly scarred face right up to Eamonn’s, glaring pugnaciously.  “And the longer you waste time arguing out here in the corridor, the more likely I am to shoot you and take my lashes from the Armsman for being bad.  I know he’s not going to mourn
your
death.”

              The captain’s eyes widened at the bald-faced threat.  Without another word, he turned and started walking again.  “So where
are
we going?”

              “Cargo bay two,” the man replied, as the two guards kept pace with him.

              Eamonn started.  “Cargo bay two?  The pirate workout area?”

              One of the men emitted a dangerous growl, but neither of them answered his question.  He was unsure if they knew if he knew about what had happened there.  But Eamonn didn’t actually know how the bay had been depressurized and vented out into space.  It was unlikely that it was an error and the way that these two were acting, clearly there was a deliberate act of sabotage by the crew.  A sinking sensation was spreading as Eamonn thought about this further.  But it was too late at that point to think any further, as they had arrived at the cargo bay.

              He gasped and rushed forward as he entered the cavernous cargo hold.  The doors had been secured again and the bay aired back up.  But it wasn’t the secured room that made his mouth dry up and his heart thunder against his ribcage.  He only made it three steps before the guards behind him grabbed him by the shoulder and muscled him back.  He fought them, but they were too strong.  One of them punched him in the jaw; it seemed as though their favorite tactic to subdue an individual was to hit him.  It had the beauty of simplicity.

              Eamonn’s head swam from the blow to the head, but a second later he recovered.  A rough shove from behind propelled him forward and he stumbled and nearly fell.  A few clumsy steps later allowed him to regain his footing and he brought himself back up to his full height, walking proudly forward into the cargo bay, his head held high.  He didn’t know what the pirates, or more specifically, the Armsman had in mind in here, but he knew that whatever it was, he, Eamonn, wasn’t going to like it.

              The ice in his stomach changed almost immediately to acid.  Quite a number of his crew were here in the cargo bay, as were six of the pirate soldiers, not including the two shoving him from behind just now.  Armsman Gideon Jax was there as well, but his customary smug smile was gone from his face.  He looked as though he was a container of barely controlled fury.  It didn’t, however, look as though he was upset to be here in the room and nor did he appear to want to leave.

              “Good, you’re here,” Jax said, speaking to the captain without preamble.  “You will bear witness.  You all will,” he barked, raising his voice to the room at large, though everyone was very close nearby.  There was no way anyone could fail to hear him, even those crewmen who appeared to have been roughed up on their way in here.