Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 (10 page)

              But on top of the fuel costs there was a question of pay.  Everyone on board was owed compensation of some sort.  Tamara was being paid with room and board as well as the
Perdition
fighter once they were done with work on the
Grania Estelle
.  But if the ship didn’t make its runs, the crew would desert because they wouldn’t work for pennies for long. 

              A problem for later, Tamara thought to herself.  For now, they still had work to do.

              After three days, the portside power grid was much improved, over twenty-five percent replaced.  It was a bitch in some cases to get to the conduits to pull them and replace, but they were getting it done.  The work crews were moving a bit slower than Tamara was used to, but she was impressed at their learning curve.  Quesh’s teams were good people, but up until now they hadn’t gotten the chance to truly develop their skills. 

              Tamara was busy sitting off by herself.  Quesh and Ka’Xarian had a good hold on the teams, giving her time to work on other projects.  She was working on two different things, a third maintenance bot to help with the scanning, cleaning of the compartments and minor repairs and her software project.  Anytime someone came close she would change the display on her computer.  It wasn’t time yet for them to see what she was working on.  The coding was coming along well, but it wasn’t self-regulating yet. 

              The captain came into the cargo bay, walking over to where Tamara was working.  She looked up from the bot, her hand still bolting down the circuit board she had just replaced.  “Captain,” she said in greeting.  “What brings you down here?”

              “My ops officer tells me that power drain is reduced by over thirty percent,” he commented, sitting down on the crate across from Tamara.  “The leak on deck two that’s been there for a decade has been fixed.  I was losing a good portion of fuel to waste.”

              “Glad to help,” she said, grunting as she extracted her hand from the bot’s innards. 

              “So why are you doing this, Moxie?” he asked after a moment.  “And it isn’t just for the fighter there, though I know you do like it.”

              She reached back inside, making sure the wires were connected properly.  “Well, Captain, I know she’s your baby, but this ship is a deathtrap.  The teams have done a great job with the power grid and the EPS conduits, but that’s just the start.”  She looked up at him.  “It’s my butt on the line too, Captain.  I’d like to survive to get to where we’re going.”

              The captain sighed.  “I would get insulted, but it’s true.  There just haven’t been the resources to fix things properly.”

              She quirked an eyebrow at him.  “I haven’t gotten resources from anywhere else.”

              “Yes,” he said patiently, “but until a little more than a week ago, I didn’t have you and a fully functioning replicator.  I had to purchase parts from anyone who could make them.  And there just wasn’t the money for that.”  For the first time since she’d met him, the unflappable captain was depressed.

              Tamara nodded, brushing a tendril of hair out of her face.  “I understand.”

              “Do you?” he asked, getting angry.  “Things aren’t all shiny and neat like they were two hundred years ago.  We don’t have the ‘might of the Republic’ backing us up.”

              She chuckled.  “Neither did I.”

              “Oh, of
course
you didn’t, Moxie,” he said mockingly.  “You were Republic military.  Don’t try to deny it.  You bearing and your mannerisms all but scream it.  That, with your ability to access the replicator codes means you were an officer.  A fairly-high ranking one.”

              Tamara stopped working for a moment and stared at him.  “You’re right.  I was in a member of the Republic Navy.  I was a Commander, in charge of a shipyard.  And yes, I had access to all the fancy toys and trained crews.  And then, because a pair of officers didn’t like that I was snooping around their smuggling operations, they fabricated lies to have me arrested for their crimes.”  The captain looked skeptical.  “It’s true, though I know you have no reason to believe me.  I was about to be convicted, stripped of my rank and tossed in prison.  If the Federation hadn’t attacked Hudora just when they did, I would have been.  And I probably would have died in prison and you would have no one to fix your ship.”  She stopped because her hands were shaking so badly, she nearly caused the bot to slip off her lap.  Cursing, she pulled it back up and settled it back so she could continue working.

              “Why did you abandon your posting?” he asked, his voice a bit gentler.

              “I was going to lose my whole life’s work,” Tamara said, amazed at how calm her voice sounded.  “My friends and colleagues all abandoned me as the court martial dragged on for months.  My reputation was trashed, my honor dragged through the mud.  The two officers did a brilliant job of framing me for their crimes.  No one would believe me, there was damning evidence everywhere.  My family abandoned me.”  Her face darkened.  “Thankfully my folks died when I was younger, but my brother and sisters completely distanced themselves from me.  Wouldn’t do to be associated with a criminal.”  Her voice was bitter.

              The captain nodded.  “That’s hard.”

              “They’re all dead now,” she said quietly.  “Probably have been for a long time.  Their children, their grandchildren.”  She had never said the words aloud, not even to herself in the quiet and solitude.  “Even the Republic is a bare shadow of what I once knew.”

              “I’m surprised you don’t want to go back there,” the captain said conversationally.  “Probably a lot better digs than this old girl.”  He patted the crate.

              She shook her head.  “No, the Republic I knew cast me out.  But for a quirk of fate, I would no longer be an officer, I’d be nothing but a convict.  No one dared stand up for me except those who were ordered to do so.  I owe the Republic
nothing
.”  She was getting a bad taste in her mouth.  It wasn’t until that moment that she decided this.  She hadn’t allowed herself to think about such things until now.  She was already starting to regret bringing herself here to this frame of mind. 
Damn him.

              They sat there in uncomfortable silence for a long time.  After a few moments, saying nothing, Tamara returned to her ministrations on the bot.  Finishing the work on its inside controls, she closed up the access panel and picked up a can of grease from the crate next to her.  Opening it, she applied the grease inside to the bot’s four manipulator arms, specifically the several joints.  After several minutes, she wiped the grease from her hands onto a rag and nodded in satisfaction.  Taking the bot from her lap, she set it on the deck.  Taking her datapad, she connected the access cable to its upper port.  Running a diagnostic program, the bot soon whirred to life, its repulsors lifting it up off the deck.  Tamara directed it to begin work on the outer wall of the cargo bay and with a cheerful whistle, the bot flew off.  It didn’t have a personality, she hadn’t programmed one, but she had given the bot the ability to simulate it, as though it was glad to get to work, to get to its job.

              The captain was shaking his head.  “It never ceases to amaze,” he said, gesturing toward the three bots working at various things around the bay.  One was splicing and repairing fiber optic cables at a busted open junction, a second, smaller bot was cleaning the decades of filth from the bulkhead around the door, and now, this third one was flying up to the door mechanism, scanning, cleaning and making small repairs on the gears.  “I’ve never seen so many working bots even if there are only three.  For the longest time, we only had two.  And they broke about a year ago and we couldn’t fix them.”

              “They do a mountain of work,” she commented, shaking away the shadows.  “I’ll try and get a few more going by the time we get out of hyperspace.  I’m going to stop in on the company working on life support.”

              He nodded vehemently.  “Yes, you do that.  I would very much like to continue breathing.”

              Tamara raised an eyebrow as she stood up.  “So would I, Captain.”

              Days passed.  The work continued.  With five days yet to go before breakout, the crew was in high spirits.  When Tamara woke on that day, she could tell that something was different.  Ever since she had arrived on board, after getting out of the completely fouled air of the escape pod, she had noted that the air on board the
Grania Estelle
was a bit… ripe.  But now, with bots going over the various surfaces of the ship’s interior, cleaning off the filth and with Quesh’s team completing more and more upgrades in the life support, the atmosphere seemed a clearer.  It wasn’t as though they were all standing on a beach, breathing the cool sea air, but it was a vast improvement.

              One of the teams from the EPS repair group had been retasked.  Huge spools of fiber optic cable had been replicated and were now being used to reconnect and repair the various computer systems.  They had done a good job of restoring the ship’s circulatory system, to use a biological term, and now they were beginning work on the ship’s nervous system.  There was a lot of rewiring to do, decades or longer of jury rigging needed to be undone and then redone properly.  The ‘good enough’ mentality was slowly being eroded, though Tamara suspected that it would take a lot longer to truly break the crew of that.  The wiring was a long, tedious process, one which Tamara joined in with a gusto, but it was one that needed doing.  The teams would grumble about the job, but seeing their passenger working just as hard as they were, harder in some cases, tended to keep the grumbling to a minimum.

              The hull breaches, fractures and pinhole leaks were a problem.  The bots, over a dozen now, had done an excellent job so far of mapping out the amount of damage on the inner side of the outer hull, repairing what small holes they could and simply marking the big breaches for proper repair later.  Quesh and Xar had gathered together with the captain and Tamara to discuss the best way to approach this very large project.  Xar had gone back to supervising the various teams working on the conduits and the fiber optics, indicating he would keep those projects moving forward apace.  The captain had no more crew to spare for this project, or rather, no crew that could do the work.  Quesh could only spare four of his people to start on the breaches.  This suited Tamara fine.

              “We’re going to have to start slowly,” she said.  “Do any of those techs have EVA experience?”

              Quesh shook his head.  “No.  Only about five out of my whole crew do, including me and Ka’Xarian.”

              Tamara sighed.  “Great.”  Then she forced herself to brighten.  “No problem.  We’ll just go slowly, do a little at a time.”  They looked over the holo showing the three dimensional image of the
Grania Estelle
.  The holo showed an incredible number of hull breaches over a wide range of the ship.  The three cargo bays showed breached and the inner section of the ship showed numerous small breaches.  The port side was the most affected, as though the ship had been pounded with small meteors and until it had scraped against a much larger rock.  Tamara was interested to find out how all the damage had happened, if it was in one event, or if the bulk of it happened over time.  It didn’t much matter as far as the repairs went, but would give her a better understanding of what had happened to the ship.  Was this a sudden event or a gradual decline?

              Tamara and her small team gathered in the first area, all wearing EVA suits which had seen better days.  They were patched and shabby, but Tamara had gone over every suit and pronounced them sound.  They had their helmets on, but the face shields were still open.  “All right,” she said to them all as they stood outside the hatch to the depressurized section.  “We’ve set up a temporary airlock, so on my order, they’re going to depressurize this compartment and then we can go in there.”  She pointed to the next compartment.  “Everyone make sure your atmo tanks are connected and in a moment, seal your helmets.  You should get a heads up display on the inside of your face shield showing the suit integrity.  Make sure everything is in the green.  Nobody gets cute.”  Tamara swept her gaze over the small group.  A few of them frowned, one squirmed uncomfortably.  “If at any point your suit breaches, you announce it and we’ll get you out.  I don’t want anyone trying to be a hero.  We start slowly and then we work up.  Make sure you have your welders and cutters.”  Everyone either patted the equipment on their belts or nodded affirmative.  “All right.  Grab the patch plates and we’ll go.”

              “Just the patch plates?” one of the techs asked.  “Those are barely three centimeters thick.”

              “Right,” she said.  “We’re just concerning ourselves with sealing the compartment so that we can use it again instead of having to go all the way around the ship to get to the next section.  Once we’re out of hyper, we’re going to get out on the hull and do external repairs.  We’ll fill in the holes that we’ve already closed on the inside with the patches and then weld the plate metal over the outside.  It won’t be as good as pulling up the whole section of the hull and putting down new hull plating, but it’ll be sufficient for your needs.  This is a cargo ship after all, not a battlecruiser.”  That got some nods and chuckles.  “All right.  Seal your helmets and let’s go.”