Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1

by Michael Kotcher

  The pod jerked, the sensors indicated that the ship had locked its tractoring beams onto it and was reeling it in. Wouldn’t be long now.

  Within minutes, the pod was inside the ship’s cargo bay and after a heavy bump, the pod set down on the deck. Not waiting for someone to come to the hatch, for it could be hours before someone came down to check out their score, Tamara unhooked her datapad, grabbed the toolkit and then hit the hatch release sequence. With a hiss, the hatch swung open. Scrambling forward, she dove headfirst out of the pod and onto the deck of the cargo bay. Gasping, she breathed in the air as fast as her lungs could fill.

  The air quality wasn’t great, but it was by far a better gulp of air than in the pod. The bay smelled like industrial trash, engine oil and strangely, onions. Looking around, she saw an assortment of items stored in here. Barrels of coolant, fuel cells, and containers of other cargo that wasn’t labeled that she could see among other things were stacked haphazardly around the bay. Tamara was surprised that there was enough room in here for the pod, but it appeared as though an area had been cleared at the end of the bay, right by the cargo doors.

  Picking herself up, she looked at her hands, which were now covered in grime. She sighed in disgust and wiped her hands on her coveralls. She also noticed that the thermal paint was mostly gone from her hand. The Combat Heal wouldn’t have done that. Neither would a short few months in hibernation. Reaching with her right hand, she touched her face where the paint had been. The rash had cleared up, but she could feel a roughness on her chin, her lips, and her cheeks where she had wiped the paint. She took a deep, slow breath, trying to keep the frustration down. Her face was all scarred, chemically burned by the paint. The rash left behind from the paint, if left untreated, could make someone look as though they had a bad case of pox. The paint, if left on the skin, could burn through and cause serious, permanent damage.

  It was the hibernation sleep, she realized. The paint might have burned completely through her skin if left on her skin for that long. But the deep freeze had disintegrated the paint before it could do too much damage. Now, she just had some impressive burn scars on her hand and face and ear, but it was nothing a splash in a regeneration tank couldn’t fix. She’d just need to get her hands on one. On the upside, her face certainly wouldn’t match her Republic Navy dossier anymore. At least until she could get things fixed on some planet very far from Hudora.

  Moving through the stacks of cargo, and trying to stay out of a few puddles of foul-smelling goop on the deck, she headed for the nearest control panel she could find. Taking her datapad, she jacked it into the port and began a quick search to find out what she could about the ship, the owners, their special grid coordinates, the date, everything.

  She was rewarded by an alert on the datapad as numerous viruses moved to attack her software. Tamara shook her head. “Are you kidding me? Is this deliberate?” she muttered. It wasn’t. The computers’ firewalls were down and the system was infected with dozens of nasty viruses. Grumbling to herself, she tapped a few commands on her pad, releasing a few antivirus programs of her own devising which went to work on the infections. It would take a little while, considering how many viruses there were. Maybe the ship operators would thank her once her programs were finished cleaning out their systems.

  Of course, she was cleaning them out in other ways, too. Data started flowing to the screen on her pad. The ship was the Grania Estelle, a four-hundred thousand ton bulk cargo hauler out of the Destri-Juno Star System, a system about two hundred light years from Hudora. However, it looked as though it was currently in the hands of private owners and no longer under contract with Destri-Juno. Also, it looked as though the ship was at the far edge of the Hudora system near the hyper limit, about ten light hours above the plane of the ecliptic.

  That made her frown. The pod’s thrusters had accelerated her away from the station for about six seconds until the thrusters were empty. From there, she was on a ballistic course until the Grania Estelle picked her up. Going that far, she would have been floating free for… she blanched as the implications hit home. That couldn’t be.

  Two hundred forty-eight years. Everything she would have known was gone. All her family, her friends, her co-workers, subordinates, fellow Navy folk, all gone. Her knees buckled for an instant but she managed to keep her feet. Her breath was moving in and out so fast, her vision started to swim. It was the smell of the cargo bay that brought her back to herself.

  Shaking her head to clear it, she looked back to her datapad. The operating system on this ship was a mess. Regular maintenance clearly wasn’t a priority, but then, it usually wasn’t for big freight haulers. Maintenance costs money and sitting around in a repair slip getting a tune up would be burning money even more quickly. It looked as though the ship was even older than Tamara was, now, and a lot of systems were on the ragged edge. This ship needed a serious overhaul and soon. She could feel herself getting excited about the prospect, finally a challenge worth sinking her teeth into. After eleven months in the brig and another two and a half centuries in an escape pod drifting through space, this was something she could work on, something real.

  That of course, presupposed the crew of this ship were willing to talk, willing to work with her. They’d picked her up, yes, but hopefully they weren’t slavers or other such… unsavory people. Of course, it was highly likely they were exactly what she feared they’d be, and she was unarmed and didn’t really know the lay of the land here on this ship.

  On that note, she pulled up a full schematic of the ship. She was big, which Tamara already knew, but it looked like three of the eight gigantic cargo bays were unused due to damage. The ship was a kilometer long, with the living spaces, recreation areas, and engineering and bridge sections all along the central shaft of the ship. Eight very large cylindrical cargo bays were arrayed on either side of the central section; they were easily over two hundred meters in diameter and extended about two thirds of the length of the ship along the spine. Further aft of the main section were giant fuel cells connected by trusses that led to the ship’s main sublight drives. Two hyperdrive engines were mounted by the main drives, one above and one below the sublight engines. The ship had a crew of eighty-four, but the actual roster of crew and their various jobs wasn’t on the main net. Apparently, the ship’s shields were a joke and what few emitters did function were nearing failure, four of the six main sublight engines were down, meaning the ship was incredibly slow even by a lumbering bulk freighter’s standards. And life support was functioning, obviously, but based on the smell many of the components needed serious overhaul, or better yet, replacement.

  One piece of good news. On her travails through the database, she discovered that this ship was equipped, at one time anyway, with a pair of class three industrial replicators. Apparently, one of them had been out of commission for about half a century, but the other still functioned, partially, since the crew jury rigged it to produce only basic components. Class threes could build quite a number of things, but required certain security codes to make things like weapons, military-grade items like hyperdrives, shields, computers and other replicators. Republic and Federation replicators worked under the same principles, as neither of the large governments wanted civilians or criminal elements to have access to those sorts of things. Without the codes, one still had access to civilian grade equipment, which, naturally, wasn’t as hardy. If you tried to hack the system, the replicators would lock down, and if you tried to bypass the lockouts without those codes, the control systems and computers that ran the replicator would wipe and all the computer chips would self-destruct. No danger to the foolish operator who tried to make something from the restricted list, but the chips would melt. Then the constructor system, which was a storage tank of engineering nanites, would for all intents and purposes consume itself, leaving nothing but an empty tank. Once a replicator was destroyed like that, there was nothing to do but pull it out and build another. It would be completely gone.


  Sadly, the database didn’t indicate the state of the second replicator or why it was down, but that was something she would need to discover. Perhaps she could barter her skills and the use of her security codes for a ride somewhere. However, she couldn’t risk the crew finding her as she was; unarmed, disoriented and alone. There wasn’t anything she could do about the alone part, and she wasn’t sure she could do much about the unarmed part either. She was a decent shot; it was a requirement in the Navy, especially for those in the starfighter squadrons. She’d kept up her shooting skills, more of a way to blow off steam than any desire to put a bullet in someone. But from what she’d seen of this cargo bay, there weren’t any guns laying around.

  There were always opportunities, she was an engineer, after all, but according to the very spotty internal sensors, it seemed as though she would only have a minute or two before a pair of crew came in to inspect their prize. Rushing from the console, she raced around the bay, looking for anything that could be used as a weapon. Finding a meter long steel pipe, which had about a two-centimeter wide diameter, she grabbed it up. An improvised club wouldn’t match up against a pistol or stun rifle, but it might have to do. She didn’t have time for anything else and the crew had very unhelpfully left their gun cabinet in another part of the ship.

  The cargo bay door slid open, she could hear it rumbling on squeaky gears and she winced. Clearly, something else that needed fixing. She could hear two male voices speaking gruffly to one another.

  “So why are we down here again?” one asked.

  “Because the Captain wants us to check out the pod we picked up,” the other voice replied. The second voice had a bit of hissing and clicking that accompanied it. “You’re not that dumb, Ygris. Not usually anyway.”

  “What’s that smell?” the first voice, Ygris, apparently, asked.

  “It’s the pod,” the hiss-click voice replied. “Maybe it opened. Maybe there’s a dead body inside.”

  “Uck, really? I don’t wanna be dealing with no dead body.”

  “You think I do?” Hiss-click shot back. “I don’t get paid enough for this.”

  Tamara padded around the stacks, trying to keep out of sight, though at the same time she was looking to try and see these crewmembers. She peered around a pile of crates, trying to keep as much out of sight as possible.

  She needn’t have worried. The two crew were already past when she looked around the corner, so she couldn’t see their faces. Still, she could see enough. Both were wearing stained and patched blue shipsuits. The first voice, the one named Ygris, belonged to a man, tall, with a barrel chest and thick, powerful arms. He was balding and his pale skin was very pale, indicating that he probably didn’t leave the ship very often. There were no balconies to sun oneself on a cargo freighter.

  The other was bipedal, but he wasn’t human. He was a zheen, an insectoid race. Instead of skin, he was covered with a shiny purplish exoskeleton. His head was a flattened spheroid, with a pair of large compound eyes on the sides. His hands were three-fingered, each with a wicked talon at the end. Zheen could gain sustenance by eating, as humans did, by putting food in their mouths, but they could also ingest nutrients through a retractable proboscis in the palm of each hand. It made most humans very nervous to shake a zheen’s hand. The hissing and clicking was caused by his mouth parts moving as he spoke. Most zheen could speak Basic, but more than a few required a translation implant to speak to their human companions. Tamara had such an implant (as well as a few others), it was a tiny device surgically implanted in the base of her throat that allowed her to speak a variety of languages. Completely subcutaneous and unless she was using it, most of the time she even forgot it was there. Perhaps this zheen had one too, but he apparently wasn’t using it.

  “Wow,” the zheen said, checking the escape pod. There was a buzzing sound which Tamara realized was the zheen equivalent of a low whistle. “Look at this baby. The pods we make nowadays aren’t up to this kind of quality.” Glancing around it, he saw the open hatch. The zheen recoiled slightly. “Stinks in there. Air quality is really bad.”

  “Guess they didn’t always make things better years ago,” Ygris sneered.

  “No, moron,” the zheen replied. “It looks like this was damaged from the inside. Looks like someone shot it up then launched it. But this is weird. The sensors said the pod was sealed and now it’s open.”

  “Someone in there?” Ygris asked, his head cocked slightly to the side.

  “Not that I’ve seen.” The zheen’s antennae on top of his head were whirling crazily. “But I can smell another human. Was in the pod, scent’s still fresh which means she’s probably still in the cargo bay.”

  “How do you know she’s still in here?”

  “Because,” the zheen said, “we didn’t pass anyone in the corridor and the scent is still very fresh, only a few minutes old. Whoever was in the pod is still in the bay.” The zheen turned around. Tamara could see him. She had worked with zheen before, had been friends with a few. She wasn’t particularly attracted to them, but she could tell that this one was handsome, by his standards. His chitinous exoskeleton was glossy, had a deep purple color and very symmetrical features. His eyes were a lovely amber color, something that would make the females of his species go crazy for him. “Come out, come out!” he called.

  Tamara sighed. These two seemed decent enough. She saw Ygris turn to try and spot the person his partner had detected. Neither were armed, though she knew that both of them could easily outmatch her in a strength contest. But there really was nowhere to run on this ship and she would need their help. Perhaps they could come up with an arrangement. She stepped out from behind the crates. “I’m here.”

  “Stowaway!” Ygris yelled, crouching down slightly into a fighting stance, his big hands clenching into fists. He whirled toward the sound of her voice. The zheen spun quickly, a holdout pistol aimed right at her. Tamara blinked, she hadn’t seen any holster for it. Maybe he kept it up his sleeve.

  “I’m not a stowaway,” she said, keeping her hands up, though one hand held her datapad. A subroutine was booted up, ready at the push of a button to cut the lights in the bay. Her thumb was right over the button. “I was in the escape pod. I want to thank you for getting me out of there.”

  “Liar,” the big man growled.

  She scowled at him. “Really? You’re really that dumb? You didn’t have a stowaway before, you pick up a derelict pod and now suddenly there’s a new person on board? Think.” Tamara didn’t usually use that tone with people, especially when she needed their help, but after the months of tension, the fear and disorientation of the long hibernation had dropped her patience to about nothing. She looked to the zheen. “My name is Tamara Samair. I was in that pod. I’d like to speak with your Captain. I want to try and make a deal.”

  “What do we do, Ka’Xarian?” the big man asked, his gaze shifting between Tamara and the zheen.

  The zheen chittered in annoyance. “I’ll watch her. You get on the line and call the Captain. Tell him what’s going on. And then get back down here.”

  Ygris looked at the other male. “You sure?”

  “Go. I’ve got her.” And without another word, the big man lumbered off, pulling a communicator from his pocket. He pressed a few buttons but apparently the communicator was broken, so he trudged through the cargo stacks for the comm panel on the wall near the main entrance.

  “So, Tamara Ssahmair,” Ka’Xarian said, his voice hissing on the first syllable of her last name. “That pod is Republic design.”

  Her lips twisted wryly. “You know your escape pods.”

  “I know lots of things. I’m the assistant Chief Engineer.” There was a touch of pride in his voice.

  “A proper job,” she said, nodding. “Though judging by the state of this cargo bay and what I saw in your computer systems, you could use some help.”

  One of Ka’Xarian’s antennae twitched, the zheen equivalent of a raised eyebrow. “You hacked my computer syst
ems?”

  Now it was Tamara’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Your computers? I would have thought on a merchant vessel like this that it would be the Captain’s computers.”

  Ka’Xarian emitted a stuttered hiss, the zheen equivalent of a laugh. “You amuse me, Ssahmair.” He lowered the weapon. “You say you wanted to make a deal? What kind of deal?”

  “One question first. The replicators you have on board, are they of Republic or Federation design?”

  He looked at her, his antennae straightening and then flattening in confusion. “What does that matter?”

  “It matters because if they are Republic, I might be able to help get this ship in better condition.”

  “Why would that matter?” he repeated, his voice was suspicious.

  She sighed. “I think that’s something that would be better if I discussed with the Captain.” She didn’t want to let it get around that she had the replicator codes. “But let’s just say that I have a way with machines. And from what I see, this ship needs a lot of help.”

  “And what would you get in return?”

  “I’d want free passage, room and board, and to get dropped off at a planet of my choosing, though I’d be willing to pick a place on your regular route. I assume you’re not going to planets well off the hyperspace lanes?”

  Ka’Xarian shook his head. “A couple, but for the most part, we tend to stick to the well-traveled routes. Keep away from the Republic or Federation patrols when we can.”

  “Running contraband?” she was amused.

  Ka’Xarian chittered. “Profit is everywhere. We can’t be choosy about where it comes from, not in these hard times.”