Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 (93 page)

              “I need ten days,” Eamonn replied.

              “Ah, but you do not have ten dayz,” the zheen said back, his voice completely calm.  “You have only sseven.  Sso I ssuggesst you make the mosst of them and prove to me that I have placed my faith in ssomeone who can deliver.”  And the connection cut. 

              “Seven days,” Eamonn muttered.  “Better than nothing, I suppose.”  Pressing a control, he called down to engineering. 

              “Samair here,” Tamara answered after an irritatingly long moment.

              “Good news, Moxie, the engineering teams from the cruisers will be departing immediately.”

              “Yeah, so I noticed,” she answered.  “Looks like they got the message independently.”  She sighed.  “But they’re literally just dropping whatever they’re doing and walking off.  I have no idea what’s actually been done, so I’ve got half of the engineering department chasing down shorts and systems that are now off line.”

              “Well, there’s more,” he told her.

              “Oh, there always is,” Tamara replied.  “All right, what is it?”

              “We need to be ready for hyperspace in seven days.”

              “Seven days!” she exploded.  “Captain, that’s absolutely ridiculous.  I won’t even have the replicators up for three, bare minimum.”

              “That’s the amount of time we have, Moxie,” he told her.  “And this is a deadline I don’t think we can miss.  So, to use your words, bare minimum, what do we need to jump?”

              She sighed, though it was more a growl of frustration.  “Um, okay.  Well, we need full shield coverage on the hull.  I’ve got Xar and his team suiting up right now to see about that.  They need to clear the damage on the portside and then get emitters from elsewhere in the ship to cover the gap.  It’s going to lower the overall coverage, so our days of tootling along in the yellow are gone, at least for a while.  There are a few structural things we need to look at and I want to go over the power distribution network.”

              “Can you make the seven day time frame?”

              Tamara sighed again.  “I guess I’ll have to, won’t I?  Any word on when Quesh will be back?” 

              The Parkani was still out.  Apparently the multiple stun blasts that he took to take him down, not to mention the six or so more that the soldiers pumped into him to make sure he stayed down, had done some neurological damage to the four-armed engineer.  “He’s in the regen tank right now, though I think Turan is optimistic.  I can’t imagine he’ll be out of there and back to work before the seven days is up though.  And I don’t want to rush Turan.”

              “No, I don’t either,” Tamara replied, resigned.  “If it was scars or something, I’m sure Quesh would be sneaking out of sickbay in a day.  But neurological problems are something different.”  They couldn’t have the big male unable to work, especially if he’d lost feeling in his extremities or started shaking uncontrollably.  Might even require surgery.  But that was a doctor’s realm.  She wasn’t terribly familiar with the ins and outs of human physiology, to say nothing of that of a Parkani, but it was far more complicated and scary than anything she ever dealt with in the cockpit or on the Engineering deck.  Better to leave such things to people more suited.  “All right, I’ll get on it, Captain.  Samair out.”

              The next six days were a maelstrom of activity.  The entire engineering department, minus Quesh, who under Turan’s very stern eye was recovering in sickbay.  The butcher’s bill had been high, far too many had already died, and the Guura was determined not to lose another.  He’d been livid when he’d returned to his clean, ordered sickbay and found it a ransacked mess.  But he didn’t have time to turn the walls a deeper shade of bluish gray than he was, he had patients to save. 

              George Miller had taken Quesh’s place in the regen tank.  Three surgeries and two complete blood cleanses had saved his life.  However, he was far from out of the woods.  Turan was going to have to let him stay in the tank for a three more hours and then operate on him again, possibly
in
the tank of things went badly.  He’d been injected with a nanite solution which was working on his belly wound, but it was slow going.  He would be days in treatment and weeks further in recovery, but from a wound like that and the amount of time he’d had to sit and wait for treatment, the fact that he might pull through was a minor miracle.

              Getting the portside damage patched up so that they would transfer shield nodes over was a slow process.  Anyone who had
any
kind of EVA experience, no matter what department they were from originally had been drafted to help.  Twenty-five people were on the outside of the hull, with plasma cutters slicing away at the peeled edges of hull where
Ganges
had shot up the weapons and shield nodes.  It was a slow, tedious process, because once the hull sections were fixed, then came the task of either repairing or replacing the control lines and power conduits.  Hours were spent out on the hull as the exhausted crew repaired one section after another.

              Tamara wanted to be out on the hull, but she and her team were inside the ship, trying to nail down all of the “repairs” that Verrikoth’s engineers had been working on when they had abruptly left.  If she hadn’t known better, and truth be told she
didn’t
, she would have sworn that all these so called repairs were actually full blown sabotage.  Everything from power distribution junctions, communications busses, data transfer modules and more had been pulled out to be worked on.  Most of them had no need to even be looked at, much less fixed.  A simple diagnostic from any of the nearby terminals would have shown the workers anything they needed to know.  It was possible, Tamara reasoned as she and her team attempted to put everything back together, that either Verrikoth’s techs had very little in the way of actual experience in these matters, or were intending to pull all of these systems out for transport over to
Meghna
and
Kerala
.  Maybe the gear on
Grania Estelle
was better than what was on the warships.  That civilian gear based on replicated parts from two-hundred and fifty plus year designs might actually be
better
than what was being used on military ships here in the Cluster spoke volumes as to how far things had fallen.  But, the flip side to that coin was that if
Grania Estelle
’s gear was better, it started to give a more favorable outlook to getting out of this mess.  Sure,
Ganges
and her sister ships could easily outfight a lumbering bulk freighter, but against a properly built warship if what Tamara suspected was true, they’d be very hard pressed.

              It was something to keep in mind.  Of course, right now, under the thumb of pirates, it would be highly unlikely that she would have the opportunity to build a warship to take them on with, but it might be something doable for the future.  A project she would keep tucked away for now.

              Three days into the seven day deadline, they were finally getting the first of the shield nodes moved over to the port side.  “Xar, how are we looking?” Tamara asked from the main control console in engineering. 

              “Seating the node now, another hour to make all the control connections and then we’ll be ready to power up,” he replied, his voice sounding pleased.  “I’m happy with the way it’s fitting in, we should be good.”

              “Glad to hear it,” Tamara replied.  “I know we’re all running on empty.  We’ve got three more of these to do in the next four days.”

              “I know.  We’re all going to be absolutely dead by the time we’re done.”

              She ran her hands through her short hair, uncaring about the dirt she’d just run through it.  “I know.  And I’m also wanting to look to get Engine Four back up.  It’s the least damaged of the disabled ones and I think we can get it running at about fifty percent.”

              “That’ll be good,” the zheen said.  “I’m used to having a good deal of thrust in the old girl.  Being back down to one engine, well, sucks.”

              Tamara laughed.  “You’ve been hanging around me too much.  I’ve spoiled you.”

              “Yes, Tamara, you have.  If I wasn’t already mated…” he drawled good-naturedly.

              “Oh, and if I was just a century younger, I’d give you a run for your money, Xar.  Get back to work.  Call me when you’re ready to power up.”

              “Copy that.”

              “Moxie!  Where are we?” the Captain bellowed as he walked into Main Engineering.  Crewmen scrambled to get out of his way; no one wanted to cross the Captain when he was in this kind of mood.

              “Captain, good to see you,” she grumbled, wiping her forehead.  As he approached, Eamonn noticed that she looked exhausted.  In fact, everyone in Engineering did.  Bloodshot eyes seemed to have been issued out to all the workers here.  About a quarter of the diagnostic screens showed items in the red, but he didn’t look too closely, not really knowing what everything was indicating.  “I’ve got the second shield node installed, we’re just tuning it now.”

              “So where does that leave us?” he asked again.

              She sighed, running her dirty hands through her greasy hair.  “Once this node is up, we’ll have full shield coverage.  But, we’re back down to thirty-four percent, because of all the power problems and movement of all the other generator nodes.  We’ll be up to Red Six once we jump.”

              The captain put his hand to his forehead, rubbing his temples with his long fingers.  “Back down to Red level six?  You’re killing me, Moxie.”

              “I’m killing you?” she demanded as her thin veneer of patience snapped.  “You and your Lord are the ones killing me and my teams!  We’ve done three weeks of work in six days.  Six!  You don’t like the way my teams are doing things, we’ll stop right now.”

              “Don’t push me, Moxie,” he warned.  “I know you and your teams have been killing themselves for the last six days and I do appreciate it.  And if we had a choice, I would give you more time, but I don’t.  I do not have a choice.”

              She took a long deep breath, stamping down hard on her frustration.  “I know, Captain.  I’m just used to being able to operate under a reasonable time frame.  It’s been a long time since I’ve needed to work on a very short one like this.  Not since before my big sleep.”  Tamara shook her head.  “But I don’t think we can keep going at this pace much longer.  I have to check over the hyperdrive to make sure that’s still working.  Diagnostics on the computer say it is, but I want to physically check it over for any problems.”

              “Yes, do that,” Eamonn said, sourly.  “The last thing I need is for the drives to not spin up when we get to the hyper limit with four or more warships with us.”

              Tamara blinked several times, trying to get the fatigue out.  “I’m on it, Captain.  Give you a progress report in a few hours.”

              “Commander, I’ve noticed something odd in the last few days,” the sensor operator said as Tyler walked over past the man’s station.

              “What is it?” Tyler asked.  Any time his sensor operator went out of his way to get his attention, it was usually something he’d want to know, even if he didn’t necessarily wanted to hear it.

              “There are three ships that are holding at about two light minutes away, but they’re keeping their distance.”

              “What kind of ships?  More merchants?”

              The officer shook his head.  “No, sir.  They look like warships.  One of them is big enough to be a frigate size, though it’s still not as large as
Ganges
.  The other two are corvettes, though they look to be of different designs.”

              Three warships.  Smaller than the ones in his flotilla, but faster than his own ships, especially now that
Ravage
was assigned to protect and watchdog the Captain’s newest acquisition.  They might be able to race in, fire off a few missiles and turbolasers and then dash away before
Ganges
and the other light cruisers could adequately respond.  Light cruisers were best of both worlds, in Tyler’s opinion.  They were big enough to trash lighter ships, but fast and maneuverable enough to keep those same smaller ships honest and dance around much bigger ships.  Of course, if offered the opportunity, he would of course take command of a heavy cruiser or battlecruiser.

              “What are they doing out there?”

              The sensor officer just shrugged.  “They’re part of the system defense forces.  As far as I can tell, sir, they’re just out there loitering.  I think they’re just keeping any eye on us, but they’re not advancing.  They were coming after us hell bent for leather when we took Target One.  But after that, they pulled back and have just been holding position relative to us.”

              “I’ve detected over twenty transmissions between the frigate and the orbital, Commander,” the comm officer piped up.  “Haven’t cracked their encryption, but I imagine it’s just status reports on us based on the frequency.  They’re transmitting at regular intervals.”