Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 (91 page)

              Eamonn nodded in complete understanding.

Chapter 29

              “All right everyone calm down!” Tamara shouted, holding her hands up over her head to signal quiet.  Ka’Xarian and both of their engineering teams stood just behind her as she addressed the crew.  Taja stood opposite Xar, on Tamara’s left, wholeheartedly supporting the engineer’s role as leader.  Things hadn’t changed much in the hour or so since the pirates had taken the Captain away, the one notable exception being that they had found an exposed scrap of metal that was sharp enough and thin enough to cut the plastic bindings off the wrists of the crew.  The heavier metal ones would require a key, or some sort of proper cutting tool, which meant that the lupusan sisters would be bound for a while longer.

              Turan didn’t have time to deal with any “leadership foolishness” as he called it, he had patients to try and save.  Their captors had left them alone in the cargo bay, deaf to all of Turan’s pleas for medical assistance or access to sickbay.  It seemed that if any of the crew were to die, it would suit the pirates just as well, that many fewer they would have to deal with later.

              “We’re trapped in here!” someone yelled, fear evident.

              “Only for the moment,” Tamara replied.  “I’ve got a few ideas, but none of them are going to amount to anything if we all panic.”

              “You’re not the captain!” the same voice came back. 

              “She’s in charge!” Xar bellowed. 

              “Says who?”  The murmurings in the crowd increased at this sentiment.

              “The captain left her in charge!” Taja yelled, adding her voice to the din.  “We’re still alive, so shut up and listen to her!”
              “Not because of her!” someone else yelled from the safety of the crowd.

              Tamara just threw back her head and laughed, hands on her hips.  The crowd in front looked angry that she would dare to act this way in such a dire situation.  When she calmed down enough, she looked at them, sweeping her gaze over the ones that she could see.  “I’m hearing a lot of complaints from people hiding in the back.  No one coming forward.  But you know what?  You’re right.  I’m not the captain.  He did leave me in charge, but since you seem perfectly content to ignore that, fine.”  She waved her hands, as though shooing them away.  “Go.  Kill yourselves.  I’m not going to try and stop you anymore.  I’ve got a few people that seem to want to try and band together and save this ship, but the rest of you… Just go.  Save me the time and effort of trying to get you to fall in line.  I’m trying to find a way to help Turan and get us out of here and back into the ship proper.  If you can’t or won’t help, then I don’t want you.”  She touched Ka’Xarian and Taja on their shoulders and then turned away, showing the crowd her back. 

              “What are they doing?” Tamara asked the two in an undertone, not looking back.

              “They’re breaking up into groups,” the zheen replied, his large compound eyes able to see the group without turning his head too much.  “About a third of them are hanging back, but the rest seem to be coming in our direction.”

              “Good.  Taja, go over to them, keep them calm.  I’ll be over in a few minutes.  Xar, have somebody keep an eye on the malcontents.”  She nodded and the two of them walked off.  Tamara turned and looked upward, as though she was examining the ceiling of the cargo bay.  In actuality, she was accessing her HUD and using her implants to get into
Grania Estelle
’s computer network.  Stella was carefully keeping herself walled off and Tamara didn’t want to disturb her.  So far the AI was doing very well at keeping to the “shadows” of the mainframe, basically only keeping the fusion reactor stable, but staying out of all the other systems.  But Tamara didn’t need Stella’s help in this case.  After months of working on the ship and its computer systems, she’d built herself all sorts of back doors in case she needed to access them.  In case of a situation just like this one.

              Tamara used her implants to access the ship’s internal cameras and did a quick survey of the ship.  It wasn’t damage so much that she was looking for, though she mentally catalogued what she saw for later.  What she was looking for was a headcount; the number of invaders aboard the ship.  For the most part they were zheen or human, about a sixty-forty split, her implants helpfully informed her.  Going through every compartment (that had cameras) she got herself a firm number.  Eighty-nine.  A damning number.  There was no way they could take on eighty-nine invaders, only four less than the whole crew complement, and that was including all the wounded.

              But a closer inspection revealed that only about forty were the heavily armed boarders, the rest were technicians meant to keep the ship’s systems running.  It looked as though they were beginning to tear out the blown components on the port side and another team was working on the sublight engines.  One of the main propulsion units was still online, and it looked as though they were getting a second close to test-firing.  Checking the external feeds, she also saw another ten on the outside of the hull in EVA suits doing damage assessment on the hull.  It looked as though they were clearing away the worst of the battle damage and checking out the shield nodes on the starboard side to move to the now unshielded port side.  They weren’t looking to build more, just to extend shield coverage over the whole ship, to allow the ship to jump to hyperspace.  Tamara approved of this, but that wasn’t her problem right now.  Right now she was trying to figure out how to get everyone out of this giant mess. 

              “What do we got?” Xar asked.

              “Eighty-nine in the ship, ten more out on the hull,” she replied, grimacing. 

              The zheen hissed.  “Well that’s just wonderful.  How many of them are troopers?”

              “About forty,” she admitted, “but from what I could see, it looks like just about all of them have a sidearm of some sort.  I don’t think we’d get very far, especially with our heavy hitters out of the game.”  Tamara gestured to where Corajen sat, miserable, still shackled next to her unconscious sister.  They didn’t have anything to get those manacles off of her and she couldn’t fight with them on.

              “What can we do?” the zheen asked, clearly concerned.  “You know we’ll support you.”

              Tamara chuckled, looking back down again, putting one hand on the purple carapace of Ka’Xarian’s shoulder.  “It wasn’t your support I was worried about, my friend.  It’s what to do.  Simply charging out into the corridor isn’t going to do anything.  I can override the lockouts and get us out of the bay here, but then what?  The hallway’s got six guards there, they’d cut us down without a second thought.  I can get into the engineering feeds and cause some mayhem there, but what’s the point?  The minute someone figures out what’s going on, they either vent the bay,” she jerked a thumb to the huge external bay doors, “or the soldiers just come in the door and hose us down with bullets.”

              “We can’t wait,” the zheen argued.  He pointed.  “Turan’s patients are dying.”

              Tamara glared at him.  “Yes, Xar, I know that.”

              He bowed his head a little.  “Sorry.  I know you do.”  He buzzed loudly.  “I’m just so frustrated at this.”

              She nodded, releasing his shoulder.  “I know.  I am too.  Hell, we all are.  One minute we’re bumbling along, hauling the mail, the next we’re fighting pirates and losing the ship.”  She sighed, running one grimy hand through her hair.  She grimaced at the hand, but there was nothing she could do about the grease she’d just smeared into her hair.  Xar hissed at her in laughter.  Tamara glared at him, but her eyes twinkled in shared mirth. 

              “I just don’t know, Xar,” she said.  “I don’t really know if there’s anything we can do until the pirate bosses decide what to do with us all.  Nothing that won’t get us all shot anyway.”  A red light flashed on her HUD.  “Hold on.  Another shuttle incoming.”

              The zheen growled.  “Great, more troops.  Maybe they’re going to stop messing around and just kill us all.”

              Tamara laughed.  “I’m not really sure what I’m hoping for at this point.”

              Twenty minutes later, the bay doors opened and a single figure walked through.  All heads turned to look as Captain Vincent Eamonn entered.  Taja broke through the crowd and ran to him, flinging herself into his arms, locking her arms around his neck.  He chuckled and squeezed her tight.  “Glad to have you back,” she whispered into his neck. 

              “Missed you too,” he replied, setting her back down.  She reluctantly let him go and turned back to the others.

              “Good to see you, Captain,” Tamara told him, walking up with Ka’Xarian at her back.

              “You too, Moxie.  Get everybody up.  We’re back in business.”  His face was a blank mask, his tone flat.  “Later.  I’ll talk to senior staff in a few hours.  Right now, you and the techs get to engineering and get up to speed down there.  You,” he turned to Taja, “get some people to help Turan get all the wounded to sickbay.  And for goodness sake, get those chains off of Corajen before she hurts herself.”

              “You have some serious explaining to do,” Taja told him.  She pulled his head down and kissed him hard then released him and hustled over to where the Guura was with the wounded.

              Tamara smirked, but didn’t comment on the kiss.  “So what about the guards?”

              He shook his head.  “They stay for now, but I got an understanding with the boss.”

              She blinked.  “Commander Tyler was willing to work with you?” she asked, skeptical.

              The captain shook his head again.  “Oh, lords, no.  He apparently has a boss and that’s the one I worked with.  We have an understanding.”

              “What kind of understanding?” she pressed.

              He scowled.  “The kind that keeps us alive and gets us out of this cargo bay.  The kind that you don’t worry about.”

              Now it was the engineer’s turn to scowl.  “One of
those
deals.”

              He sighed.  “Yes, Moxie, one of
those
deals.  One that hopefully will keep us from all being shot or sold off as slaves.”

              She raised her hands up.  “I’ve got to get to engineering and try to get this heap running again without replicators.”

              Now he linked in surprise.  “What the hell do you mean ‘without replicators’?”

              Tamara met his gaze.  “We were boarded.  I was not going to let them fall into pirate hands, Captain.  So I made a decision that they weren’t going to get them.”

              He gritted his teeth and shook his head, slowly.  “I told you before about what I thought about you making serious decisions concerning my ship, Moxie.  I meant what I said.”

              “Oh, so you’ll kill me now?” she demanded.  “You’re going to throw me under the shuttle now?”

              “You just destroyed critical components to my ship!”

              She crossed her arms over her chest.  “I kept it out of their hands,” she said, pointing in the general direction of the ships outside.  “They can’t have that equipment.”

              “That wasn’t your call,” he grated.

              “No, Captain, it wasn’t,” she agreed, nodding, fury building.  “It was yours.  But you didn’t make a call about it.  No one was doing anything.  So I had to step up.  And I decided that quick action was needed.”

              “You could have called up to the bridge,” he pointed out.

              “I could have,” she agreed.  “And we both know what would have happened.  You would have been so concerned about possibility of getting through this situation that you would have delayed the decision.  The soldiers burst into the replicator bay less than a minute after I cooked it.  There was no time to wait for the hemming and hawing from above.  It’s over now, we have to deal with the situation.”

              He glared at her.  Then his eyes narrowed in suspicion.  “What do you have up your sleeve, Moxie?  I know you.  You planned for this.”

              She shrugged.  “Why, Captain, why would you ever think something like that about me?”

              “Because you cheat,” he said flatly.  “And I know that you wouldn’t have burned out all of my replicators if you didn’t have a way of starting them back up again.”

              Tamara tried to look innocent, but her façade shattered quickly.  She grinned.  “Yes, I might have stashed a few things away.  But the class threes and the e-rep really are gone.  I
did
melt those down.”

              He put a hand to his head, probably to try and stave off an oncoming headache.  “You’re not making me feel better, Moxie.”

              “Relax, Captain, you were right,” she soothed.  “While I
did
slag the operational replicators, I did make replacement parts and a constructor matrix for the class five.  It’s in the boat bay and I’ve got the other parts hidden away throughout the ship.”

              He shook his head, as though she’d punched him in the jaw.  He might have been less surprised if she had.  “When did you have time for all this?”