Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 (7 page)

              His lavender eyes flicked to the guards.  “So, decision time, girlie.  Either you’re off to your room, or you’re off to a cell.  Your choice.”  Both of them uncrossed their arms, loosened their guns in the holsters. 

              She felt a knot tighten in her stomach.  He was being polite, and his demands were reasonable, but she knew better.  That commentary about the charges that were racking up was a clue as to his intentions.  She suspected that the cost of that
Perdition
might be a bit higher than she had initially expected.  But she was in no position to argue.  And he was right.  She had no real freedom, nor did she have a platoon of Marines to watch her back.  Ka’Xarian was friendly with her, but she suspected that he would stand back and let the captain work if he was forced to choose between them.

              “Let’s go,” she said, forcing cheerfulness into her voice.  “Deck eight, you said?”

              The captain smiled back at her.  “There, see?  Wasn’t a hard decision after all!”  The guards moved to flank her after a gesture from the captain and the three of them trotted off to deck eight.

              Deck eight was dark.  The glowpanels on the bulkheads were out.  The smaller ones on the ceilings were active, though most were very dim, a few couldn’t sustain illumination.  The entire deck seemed to be this way.  And Tamara also noticed that the gravity plating under the floor panels was a little erratic.  One step, she felt as though she might float away at any second, the next step, she felt as though fifty kilograms had dropped on her shoulders.  The entire deck was filthy, she could hear the noise of the life support fans rattling in their ventilation ducts.

              “This is the best you have?” she asked the guards.

              One of them grunted, but said nothing else.  The other didn’t even bother to speak.  They arrived at the room and one of the guards hit the button on the door panel to open it.  The door slid open, stopped halfway, inched open a little more and then stopped completely, about two-thirds of the way open.  The guard gave her a broad grin.  “Inside.”

              Grimacing, Tamara moved forward and peered into the room.  Sure enough, she could see a dinner-plate shaped housecleaning robot hovering by the wall.  It was cleaning the century worth of filth and grime from the very small cabin.  The bot used sonics, force fields and mini-tractoring beams to scrub the dirt clean.  The bed at least was ready for use, she noted.  She turned to make some quip to the guard, but the man just shoved her roughly inside.  She stumbled and managed to twist herself to fall on the bed. 

              The man sneered and the door slid shut.  Funnily enough, the door had no problem
closing.
  She sighed.  The bot seemed to be functioning properly, though she would have to dump its bin shortly.  Tamara sat up, rubbing her face.  One thing had been made completely clear to her: she wasn’t a passenger working off her trip with some repairs.  She wasn’t a prisoner, per se, but she certainly wasn’t lounging in the lap of luxury with a thousand friends. 

              It was too much.  After eleven months in jail, the scorn of her former friends and peers, watching the dissolution of the career she’d spent a lifetime building, her injury, Islington’s parting gift of the escape pod to find herself here, in “protective custody,” she just couldn’t hold it together any longer.  Tears began to form in her eyes, blurring her vision.  She tried to blink them away, but more came.  A sob escaped her throat and for a few moments, she indulged in the release.  Tears didn’t help.  But for a few moments, she reveled in self-pity, cried until her throat was raw. 

              Finally, gulping, she got herself back under control.  She
hated
crying.  She sniffed, wiping her eyes on her coverall sleeve.  Which she discovered wasn’t a great idea since the sleeve was covered with grease.  Tamara chuckled, as she now knew her face was covered with a black smudge.  Getting up, she went to the refresher.  It was a complete mess.  The toilet looked functional, however, it also looked (and smelled) as though the previous user completely lacked the knowledge on how to use one.  It also appeared as though hygiene was optional, if the room and this (nasty) refresher were any indication.  She walked to the sink and then laughed at her own reflection.  She was, quite simply, a complete mess.  Turning on the tap, gray water poured into the basin and went slowly down the drain.

              “Great.”  Well, she had wanted to keep busy.  Pulling out a wrench, she kneeled down and set to work on the plumbing.

              An hour later she was finished.  It wasn’t perfect, but the local plumbing was flushed out and clean water was flowing through.  Stripping off her very dirty clothes, she stuffed them into the laundry machine (a combined washer and drying machine) and got into the shower.  She climbed into the shower and let the water run over her head and down her back.  Tamara stood there, she wasn’t sure how long, but she didn’t care.  Just the feeling of the hot water helped sooth her jangled nerves.  It also took a while to get cleaned up, what with all the dirt and grease on her from the work.

              Once she was out, dressed in her now clean clothes, she felt better, but she was still exhausted.  Despite his tactics, the captain was right.  She needed sleep.  Laying down on the bed, her brain immediately crashed and she fell into a dreamless slumber.

              Six hours later she woke, feeling better.  Tamara pulled herself to her feet, went into the refresher and splashed some water on her face.  The cold water snapped her back into focus and cleared her mind.  This situation wasn’t completely hopeless.  Sure, it was a lot worse than the one she
thought
she was in, where she was just a passenger doing some work for the ship and captain.  But it wasn’t prison. 

              But if the captain decided it should, it would very quickly turn
into
a prison.  One that she might very well never get out of.  So, Tamara decided as she stared at herself in the mirror, tossing the towel on the rack above the toilet, what she really needed was some help.  She couldn’t count on the crew, not yet.  Perhaps, over time, she might be able to forge some useful relationships, but that took time and there were no guarantees.  Anyone who might be friendly, or even friends with her might balk if the captain started throwing his weight around, or threatened to throw
them
and their jobs off the ship.  Tamara didn’t think he would kill any of his crew members, not just for helping her, but he certainly would fire them and maroon them on the nearest habitable planet, whether it had a spaceport or not.  So she couldn’t rely on them, and while yes, it was her life on the line, it was their livelihoods as well.  No, she couldn’t rely on the crew.

              She put her hands on the sides of the sink and sighed deeply.  She wasn’t a warrior.  Oh, yes, she could fly a starfighter and fire upon and kill other pilots if that was what was required, but in a situation like this, she was out of her element.  She couldn’t fight them.  Not head on.  They had numbers, weapons and a superior lay of the land.  What did she have?

              “I’m smart,” she said slowly.  “And a smart woman doesn’t rely on someone to save her.  She plans ahead and does it herself.”  A slow smile began to spread over her scarred face.  She grimaced at that.  One of her jobs in the upcoming weeks would be to stop into the
Grania Estelle
’s sickbay and have a look at their medical equipment.  Fixing her face and hand would take some skin abrading and then a dunk in a proper regen tank.  While she wasn’t
too
vain, looking at the horrible chemical burns from that thermal paint every day wasn’t really something she wanted to keep doing.  Perhaps that disguise wasn’t the greatest of ideas after all.  She shook her head.  No time to worry about that now. 

              So, back to problem one.  She needed help.  She couldn’t count on the crew and there was no one here in this time who would even know her much less help her.  That meant she would have to go by a different route.  That smile was back.  But in order to get the help she needed, she was going to need some things from the replicator.  Specifically, she would need a data core, an interface and some time.  It would take some doing, but she could make this work.

              But for now, she would have some time before they would come to get her from this room to get back to work.  Taking out her datapad and a multitool, she went over to the wall terminal.  All cabins and rooms on the ship would have a terminal imbedded in the wall for public address or in case of emergencies.  Unfortunately, in this room the terminal was broken, most likely quite some time ago.  She didn’t worry about that.  Perhaps later, once the repairs were moving at a good pace, she could have this terminal replaced.  No, for now, she just unscrewed the casing, exposing the wires and chips beneath.  Taking out a USB cable, she connected the pad to the port under the casing.  In seconds, she had access to the ship’s computer systems.

              Nodding in satisfaction, began to maneuver around inside the ship’s network.  It was almost pathetically easy.  Certain areas, like life support, reactor control, the captain’s private server and the purser’s server were firewalled, though she had the tools to crack those open.  But Tamara had no interest in attacking any of those things.  No, she was looking for a more private place to work.  She was looking for a section of the network that hadn’t been used in a long time, where no one would think to check on.  It was easy enough to find.  She found various sections of five different subsystems that had huge sections of open space.  It would be a chore to make sure that her work in the computers did not go noticed by the crew.  It would get more and more difficult as more repairs were done on the ship, though at that point, she could get herself some separated data cores and do her work independent of the ship’s net.

              She opened a few of her compressed files, then began working on the coding that she would need to get her some badly needed help.  This would be a project, starting the coding basically from scratch, but she had no alternative.  Besides, she relished the challenge. 

              Three hours later, the guards pressed the door chime and then opened the door, not waiting for her acknowledgement.  But they caught her only laying on her bunk, playing with her datapad.  Her head was pointed at the door.  She twisted around to see them.  “Oh, there you are.  What’s for breakfast?  A girl could starve to death in this place.”

              The guards exchanged a glance.  Apparently, Tamara realized, that they expected to catch her asleep, or perhaps in the refresher, or maybe even doing something they could complain to the captain about.  Seeing her awake, obviously cleaned and just as obviously somewhat refreshed caused them both to frown.  Her room was also totally clean now and the housecleaning bot was powered down, sitting on the deck next to the refuse container.

              With a grunt, one of the guards flicked his chin in the direction of the hallway.  Tamara sighed.  Clearly, the guards were not around to make friends, or even
speak
to their subject.  She supposed she couldn’t blame them, she thought as they escorted her down the corridor.  When one was trained in security and guardwork, it wouldn’t do to get too comfortable and familiar with someone you might need to shoot on orders from your superiors.

              They arrived at the mess hall, which was one of the biggest community rooms aboard the ship.  It was a place of gathering, though never did the entire crew gather here all at once.  Some of the crew had to remain on duty, so it was always in shifts that the crew come here to eat.  There were rows of tables, situated in lines away from the kitchen area.  The kitchen was operated by three cooks, one was working the griddle, another was taking fresh-baked bread out of one of the ovens, and the third was working the line, giving food to the crew.  They were a well-oiled machine, moving the crew through the line and on to floor to eat.  They were making a variety of eggs, serving fruit tarts and griddle cakes.  For the non-humans in the crew, of which it seemed there was about a third, there were more regional dishes with a reasonable degree of success, based on the looks Tamara could see around the room.  It seemed that, unlike many of the systems on the
Grania Estelle
, the mess hall was one that had been kept up. 

              It only took a few minutes to get through the line, and grabbing some silverware, she headed to the nearest open seat.  The table was empty, and judging by the looks she was getting by the other crew members in the mess, it would probably work better to not try and make new friends right now.  They weren’t
exactly
hostile, but it was clear that she was an outsider and not a particularly welcome one either. 

             
That will change,
she told herself as she dug into her breakfast with abandon.  The food was good, but that was to be expected.  She didn’t think that the captain would scrimp on grub for the crew, not if he wanted to keep them happy.  With a ship this size and cargo capacity and the level of maintenance on the ship, it was very likely that he could afford to spring for fresh food.  After all, if the crew got unhappy enough, they would leave.  The captain couldn’t threaten them all, and then he would be stuck with an empty ship.  So spending the credits to give them a little bit of happiness was well worth it. 
He seems to be a good leader,
she grudgingly admitted.  Though she was not happy with his threats toward her.