Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 (24 page)

“Dead?” the Parkani asked, his voice low.  “Dead?  Who would be dead?  You. 
We
picked you up in that dying escape pod.  Another few days, possibly a month at best, you would have suffocated when the power failed.  The captain set up a good deal with you and we all benefited.  But don’t you think for one moment you would have lasted without us.”

Aside from the twitter of the computer systems, the drone of the equipment and the whine of the blowers, engineering had gone completely silent.  All of the workers were either staring at the two combatants in horror, or were desperately trying to remain invisible.  No one dared step forward and try to intervene.

But for some reason, Tamara’s mouth wouldn’t stop.  Her brain was frantically stomping on the brakes, but that order was not getting to her lips.  “And so because you made a mutually beneficial decision, I’m suddenly I’m to be treated like a low-level engine wiper?”  She knew that was completely unfair and irrational of her to say, but the words kept pouring out. 

“Get out of here, little girl,” Quesh growled.  “Before you get hurt and the Captain has to take me to task.”

She stood there, fuming, hands clenching and unclenching.  There was an insistent beep coming from one of the consoles and one of the techs gingerly pressed the button.

“This is Bryione in cargo bay four.  I’ve landed and I’m waiting for a team to get down here and unload.”

Quesh blinked, one minute ready to commit murder, the next a consummate professional.  “Copy, Bryione.  I’ve got a team on their way to you now.”  He nodded to Starkey, who was standing near the main hatch, just behind Tamara.  The man scampered off, taking four people with him.  The Parkani turned his white hot glare on Tamara.  She had been wrong.  He hadn’t calmed down one iota, he just hadn’t let his fight with her interfere with his job.  “So, what’s it going to be?  You going to show me and mine the respect we deserve and stop acting so damned superior?  Or are you out of here?”

Tamara could hear booted feet in the passage behind her, approaching the room.  She opened her mouth to speak, but a voice interrupted her.  “What in the
hell
is going on here?”

Quesh spoke before anyone else could.  “Nothing, Captain.  Sorry for the disruption.  Just a little disagreement, but I think that’s been all sorted out.”  He looked to Tamara, who simply stood there.

The captain turned to her, his angry gaze turning from his chief engineer to his passenger.  “Well?”

She swallowed hard, forcing her hysterical, angry words back down her through to drown in the bubbling acid in her stomach.  “Yeah.”  Her face immediately brightened.  “Yes.  It’s all fine, Captain.  I’m sorry for what I said, Chief.  I’ll get down to bay four and help out Starkey.”

“Thanks, Samair.  That boy might make a right mess of things without someone there to keep an eye on him.”  But his glare had not diminished in intensity.

              Tamara left, heading off down the passage toward cargo bay four.  The captain turned to his chief engineer.  She couldn’t hear what was being said as she was walking away, but she was sure she wouldn’t like it.

             
What the hell was that?  Yes, I may have sounded a bit condescending and I suppose I might have deserved what Quesh said to me, but I shouldn’t have to put up with that.  They need me.  They can’t fix up this ship without me, my replicator codes and hell, my experience.  Quesh is pretty good at his job, but he’d be a second-shift lieutenant back at the shipyard. 

             
Tamara stopped and mentally checked herself.  She leaned one hand against the bulkhead. 
But I’m not
at
the shipyard anymore.  This isn’t my turf, not my command.  This is Captain Eamonn’s ship.  These are Chief Trrgoth’s crews.  What is the matter with me?

             
Straightening up, she took a few deep breaths to try and settle her nerves.  Her chest was tightening and it was a serious effort to get a full breath.  Turning, she changed directions, heading away from bay four and toward sick bay.

Chapter 8

              Sick bay was far less crowded nowadays.  Only two patients were still being held here, holdovers from the raid on the ship, rotating through regeneration therapy.  Their wounds had been horrible, one man was shot multiple times in the chest, puncturing his liver, stomach and lung and had been barely clinging to life when Turan had got to work on him.  The other, a woman, had been raped and beaten, her throat nearly crushed.  Both of them were recovering physically from their wounds, and Turan had been doing his best to try and talk with them about it.  Neither was really willing to open up, the woman, Sylvia, especially had withdrawn into herself.  She had spoken to no one, though on one occasion when Ka’Xarian had come to visit her, she had gripped his hand in a crushing grip.  His antennae had flared in a flash of pain, but he hadn’t said anything.  The two of them had just sat in silence for a long while before the zheen had to return to work.

              The good doctor was doing his rounds, seeing to the two patients before returning to his small desk.  The Guura was quite pleased with the way things were going, though the toll had been considerable.  Even one death in his sickbay was intolerable to him, but in his heart he knew that he wasn’t perfect.  He knew that people under his care would die, especially if the ship was attacked again. 

              He rubbed his forearms as he sat, trying to fend off his weariness.  He did truly need to get to bed, but he was loathe to leave if either of his patients needed him.  His assistant could handle any of the myriad of bumps and cuts that the crew managed to accumulate during the course of a day.  He started to rise, knowing that dropping from exhaustion wouldn’t help his patients any.  He was walking to the main hatch of the sickbay when he nearly collided with someone.

              “Oh, I’m sorry, Doctor,” a woman’s voice said.  It took a moment to get his bearings. 

              “Oh, Tamara!” Turan exclaimed.  “I’m so sorry.  I didn’t see you.”  He looked at her, taking her all in.  “You’ll forgive me, but you look terrible.  What is it?”

              She looked extremely uncomfortable.  “Do you…”  She hesitated.  “Do you have somewhere we can talk?”

              Inwardly, he sighed.  He
was
exhausted, but it was clear that she needed help.  Who was he to turn her down?  “Of course.  We can go into my office.”  She followed along behind, a bit meekly, he noted.  He led her through the sickbay into his very cramped office.  It was so tight there was barely any room for the small desk and two chairs.  He sat behind the desk and gestured her to sit in the chair.  “Now,” he said, folding his hands on top of one another on the desk.  “How can I help?”

              Tamara stayed silent for a long moment, but he didn’t push.  He waited patiently and eventually he spoke.  “This is very difficult for me.  But I need to know what’s going on with me.”

              “All right.”

              “I’ve been having trouble sleeping, nightmares and just now I got into a huge fight with Chief Trrgoth in front of the entire engineering team.  The Captain had to intervene in the end.”  She sighed.  “It was so bad I was afraid I might deck him.”

              Turan chuckled.  “I don’t think that would have turned out so well for you, he has a remarkably dense head.  Though I admit the look on his face if you slugged him would have been priceless.  But I suspect you would have broken your hand.  Parkanis, especially one as active as Quesh are very tough.”  He smiled gently at her with his small mouth.  “What was the fight about?”

              She lowered her gaze.  “I was commenting on how impressed I was at how well Quesh and his crew had kept the ship running as well and for how long they had until I came along.  I was genuinely impressed.  He took it wrong and perhaps I was sounding a bit condescending, and the fight escalated from there.”

              Turan nodded, a knowing twinkle in his eyes.  “Yes, he can be a bit prideful.”

              She looked up at him.  “But I just lost it, Doctor.  And I forgot.”

              His head bent to one side in question.  “You forgot?”

              Tamara nodded.  “Yes.  I completely forgot that this was the
Grania Estelle. 
While he was thundering away at me for being a condescending bitch, I’m hammering back at him for questioning my competence and my skills.  But it wasn’t so much what I said, it was what I was feeling.”  She hesitated.

              “And what were you feeling?”

              Her eyes blazed again.  “I felt like I was standing in one of the command rooms on Hudora Station.  And that he was some ship driver questioning me and my teams aboard the shipyard.  I completely lost track of where I was.  And I knew I should shut up about the whole thing, admit my mistake and move on, but my mouth just wouldn’t stop.”

              “How long has it been since you talked with anyone?” he asked gently.

              “Talked?”  She shrugged.  “I haven’t.  Cookie and I chatted a few times, but nothing about anything important.  Very little about my past.”

              “Cookie?” Turan asked in surprise.  “That’s a good start.  He’s a good man and a good listener.  And the fact that you came to him and then me indicates that you’re at least thinking about this.”

              Tamara nodded slowly.  “Back in the old days you had to get bi-annual appointment with the shrinks.  The Navy was very specific about those kinds of things.  They didn’t want people with access and command of serious hardware to go cuckoo.”

              “And how long has it been for you since you had one of these mandatory appointments?”

              “Now?” she chuckled.  “About eighteen months.  I’d get smacked pretty hard by HQ for it, but I’ve been under arrest and in the brig for a year.  And now I’m two and a half centuries out of time.  So I imagine I’ve probably been officially pronounced dead.  Not that that really matters.”

              Turan smiled.  “No, probably not.  I imagine it probably isn’t something that happens very often.  But let’s get back to you.  I can give you a few things, but I’m not really set up to dispense large amounts of head meds.  The things I can give will help a bit, relax a few things in your mind, help you sleep a bit better, but honestly, the best therapy would probably be to talk about it.”

              She nodded.  “I imagine with the war and the reduction in sizes of the Federation and the Republic, medical science has probably declined a bit in the independent space lanes.”

              “Sadly yes.”

              “Thanks, Doctor.  I will take the meds if you’ll trust them to me.  And I’ll try to find someone to talk to.  Perhaps Cookie.”

              He straightened out.  “And what about Quesh?”

              She sighed.  “Yeah, I really made a mess of things.  I don’t know if he’s going to want me anywhere near his engineering teams now.”

              Turan shook his head.  “No, I imagine he’s going to be fuming for a good while.  It might be a good idea to stay out of his way for a while.”

              But now Tamara was shaking her head.  “I need to be there to help out with the rebuild of the bow sensor arrays.  I’m needed with the replicators and the installations.”

              He let out a breath.  “Then let me speak with him.  I would recommend giving him some time to cool down before you speak with him again.”

              “I’ve worked with Parkani before.  I’m not worried about him.  I just don’t want to accidentally say something insulting again and spark another fight.”

              “But were you in a position of authority over those other Parkani?” he asked shrewdly.  She nodded.  “Then you’re in a unique situation here.  He
does
need you, he needs your skills and your replicator access.  But you need to understand that
he
is the Chief Engineer, a position he has worked extremely hard to attain and to keep.  He won’t step aside for you, and after today he most likely will be very sensitive having you around.”

              “Right.  I guess I’ll try to lay low for a while.  But we
do
need to get the sensor array back up and running.  And they
do
need me for that.”  She stood up.  “Thanks, Doctor.  Now, that I’ve taken up your time and disappeared from my duties, I’d best get back and right quick.”

              “You want the meds?” he asked, standing as well. 

              She started to refuse, but then nodded.  “I’d probably better.  I don’t need another meltdown, especially not with the Chief.”

              He chuckled.  “Come on.  I’ll get them for you.”

              The sensor rebuild went well.  Quesh stayed away from the EVA teams, and Tamara avoided him.  They broke apart the long antennae and squat nodes of the sensor arrays and fed them into the replicators for breakdown of materials.  That alone took two days.  Two days of back-breaking tedium.  Three teams were in the cargo bay cutting apart the array into small chunks which were then winched up onto hover pallets and carted off to the replicators for breakdown.  The breakdowns themselves didn’t take all that long, usually only a half hour or so for each part, and then once the whole thing was cut up and broken down, then the replicator began churning out new parts.  With a few of the firmware upgrades that Tamara had programmed in, they were able to build slightly better hardware than the
Grania Estelle
was previously equipped with.

              After the first array went online and the starboard side sensors came up, the bridge crew reacted like someone who has had a bright light flared in their eyes after having been in the dark for so long.  They flailed about at their consoles, trying to distinguish between items on the displays, unsure of what to do, working their consoles with the skill of a first-time operator.  It took a bit of practice and a deal of fine tuning (using the shuttle to calibrate the sensors) but they were getting there.  Once the port-side sensor array was installed and calibrated, the deck division threw a party in the mess hall, with a round of the Instow’s Jovian Ale for all hands, deck, cargo and engineering.  There was still a huge amount of work to be done on the ship, but for the first time in decades, if not longer, the old girl was no longer blind, inching along to avoid hitting anything.  With three engines online and the bow sensors back up, things were starting to look good.

              And that’s when it changed.

              “Captain!  I’ve got a sensor contact.  A hyper footprint!” George Miller cried, a week after the sensors had been completed.  They were all still getting past the last of the teething issues, but George had proven to be a quick study and was turning out to be a fine operations officer, more so that before since now he had decent equipment to work with.

              “Where?” the Captain demanded, looking over from his seat on the bridge.

              “Edge of the hyper limit, from the direction of Malabar,” he answered immediately.  “Two contacts.  They’re moving in this direction.  They’re accelerating… moving at about point zero five light.”

              “Not sprinting across the system, but not exactly lumbering along either.”  With the engines rebuilt as they were
Grania Estelle
could get her own velocity up considerably faster than before, but she would never be able to match a warship, even if
all
of her drives were back up.  “Any more information yet, George?”

              “No, Captain,” he replied, still studying the display.  “They’re on the other side of the system from us, coming over the top of the plane of the ecliptic.  If they hold speed and assuming they brake down to make orbit here at Instow, they’ll be here in six days.”

              “Two ships coming here,” he said, thumping the arm of his chair lightly with one fist.  “That’s probably not good.”  He pressed a key on the control pad.  “Engineering, this is the bridge.  We have ships incoming from the hyper limit from Malabar.  What is the status of our hyperdrive?”

              It took a moment for the answer to come back.  Quesh sounded frustrated, harried and exhausted.  “Captain, it’s still down.  Other than clearing out the obvious damage, the drive is still down.”

             
Damn.
  “Any idea how long until it’s back up?”

              There was a sigh.  “Captain, to be honest, I’m not sure.  A week?  Maybe.”

              “Well, we’ve got a pair of ships that just entered the system, Quesh.  No idea who they are or what they want, but after out last encounter here, and the welcome we got down at Terminus, I think it might be best to get the hyperdrive back up so we can get out of here.”

              Another pause.  “Captain, I need to see you.  In person.”

              The Captain looked around, but everyone was avoiding his gaze.  He sighed.  “All right Quesh.  The wardroom.”

              “Be there in five minutes, Captain.”

              The Parkani came into the wardroom right when he said, the Captain was already seated in his normal chair at the head of the table.  Quesh clearly wasn’t happy.  He was dirty and exhausted, his top arms were cross over his chest, and his lower arms were resting on his hips.  Without invitation or preamble, he pulled out one of the chairs and collapsed into it.