Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1

by Michael Kotcher

“I understand, Captain, I really do.” Turan looked apologetic. “I can patch together the physical wounds, but trauma to the mind? It’s a lot simpler to break people than it is to fix them again, Captain.”

  “I know, Turan. I know. You’re doing excellent work. You keep at it and you make sure you get some rest too.”

  But the Guuran shook his head, as the captain knew he would. “I have patients who need me, Captain. I haven’t got the time to rest.”

  The captain only looked at him for another moment before nodding. “I understand. Do what you can. I’ll be back to check on you in another few hours.”

  “Yes, Captain.” Without another word, Turan turned back to his patients.

  The captain made his way back out, making sure to speak with his people as he left. He gave them soothing words, clasped the hands of the men and women as he went by. They all nodded in appreciation, gave weak smiles to his broad one when they could, if the pain wasn’t too great.

  Soon he was outside the sickbay, leaning both hands against the bulkhead, breathing heavily. So many dead. So many hurt. In less than an hour, so much had happened.

  Patching together the fuel lines had turned out to be a bitch of a job. Tamara was one of four people in EVA suits, floating outside the hull, but inside the blasted area at the hit near engineering. The damage was near complete in this area, there wasn’t much to fix so much as to cut away the damaged and twisted conduits and components and bring in replacements. Right now, they were in the middle of cutting out the damage. She and the others were slicing off the worst bits, placing them carefully into containers to be brought back inside to feed the only remaining replicator. It was difficult work, though. While the hole was large, and they had cut away the worst of the jagged bits, the damage had ripped through clear inside the hole, down in the inside of the hull. Which meant that in order to reach the extent of the damage they had to reach through at very difficult angles to cut the lines free.

  “Might even be easier to just detach that section of hull,” Tamara mused.

  “Why?” came the question.

  “Because while it’s a pain to cut these pieces loose at this angle,” she explained, “imagine how much of a bitch it’s going to be to install the new stuff?”

  “Damn,” one of the techs, a young woman named Mairi exclaimed. “You’re right, Tamara.”

  “Damnation,” another tech, a man named Jenkins replied. “It is going to be a massive ache to try and hook up the new fuel lines. But have you ever done a full separation of a hull section?”

  “I have,” Tamara replied, smiling. “It’s a tedious project. But it’s better than trying to actually cut it loose with plasma torches.”

  “Damned right,” Mairi replied. “This is taking forever to get the ragged edges off the hull,” she agreed. “I say we do it.”

  “That’s up to the Chief,” Tamara replied, cutting away another piece of the fuel lines. “But if it helps, I think that’s the better option.”

  The Chief agreed. So, Tamara’s team pulled out of the hole and set to work on the hull itself. Massive plates had been bolted together to the interior ribs and connecting frame, and then welded together to form a single, smooth outer hull. It would be a long and tedious job to first cut the welding to that particular hull section and then to uncouple it from the interior frame, but it was a much simpler job than trying to slice through the hull plating itself. The outer seals were far thinner than the full thickness of the hull plating, which were strong and sealed tight, which meant that it would take considerably less time to slice through them.

  It took nearly seven hours to uncouple the hull plating, but strain as they might, they couldn’t pry the heavy plate loose from the hull. Deciding that they would need an alternate approach to this problem, they retreated back inside the ship, bringing the scraps of hull material and couplers along with them.

  Quesh was waiting for them at the airlock, inside the ship. “What happened?” he demanded, all four hands on his hips. He looked exhausted, as he knew that they did also.

  “Can’t get the plate off, Chief,” Mairi replied, shucking her helmet as they all entered the inner door of the airlock and into the ship proper.

  “What the hell do you mean you can’t get the plate off?” the Parkani raged. “You cut the welds? You uncoupled it?”

  “Yes, Chief we did,” she answered a bit nervously. She was sure he wasn’t going to hit him, Quesh wasn’t that type of male, but if we was angry enough, who knew? “We had pry bars and we still couldn’t get it loose.”

  “Damn,” he swore, slapping the bulkhead, scowling. Then he brightened. “What about your ship? We could rig a tow cable and pull it free.”

  Tamara was dubious. “I suppose it could,” she hedged. “But it isn’t designed for that kind of stress. The whole thing might rip apart. It’s a fighter, not a tug.” Then she brightened, running a gloved hand through her sweat-soaked hair, pulling off the sweatband. “But, you have a shuttle in the boat bay that could do it. In fact, there’s another project that we’re going to need that shuttle for.”

  The Parkani was nodding. “All right. You get something to eat and then we’ll talk about the shuttle. But we’ve got some work to do on the boat bay before we can work on the shuttle. There’s that gaping hole in the doors to deal with.”

  Tamara smiled. “There’s always something, isn’t there, Chief? Don’t worry. I think we can get that taken care of. But you’re right. I could use something to eat.”

  The mess hall was a much more somber affair now than it had been only a day ago. With so many of the crew dead or now in sickbay, there were simply fewer people coming in to eat than there had been before. Those who were here now were not sitting and having lively discussions, playing cards or even reading books. Many who came into the mess hall simply took a tray of food from the line and then found themselves a seat. Coming into the mess, Tamara saw a few groups of people simply sitting around and eating. She stepped into the line and picked up a tray.

  Cookie spotted her and gave her a nod. “Good to see you, Tamara.”

  She smiled at him. “And you, Cookie. I know why, but it’s hard to see this place so quiet.”

  The man nodded again. “Yes. With so many people hurt or… gone, I see the only way this getting better is when people start coming back from sickbay.” He sighed. “It was terrible, girl. Just awful.”

  Tamara nodded. “I know. I wish I could say it’s all over, but we have a lot of work yet to do to get us moving to Instow.”

  “We need to move quickly, girl. Those bastards did a good job of cleaning out our stores. We’ve got about twenty days of food left, which isn’t great.”

  She took a piece of the bread to go along with the stew. Tamara nodded in acknowledgement. Breathing in the vapors from steam, she grinned. “Smells fantastic, Cookie. But you’re right, we need to get a mountain of work done in a very short period of time.”

  The normally very even-tempered chef was displaying signs of worry. “Are we going to make it?”

  She gave him a grin and a conspiratorial wink. “Don’t worry, Cookie. I’ll see you right.”

  His expression didn’t change. “I want to believe you, girl. I truly do.”

  “Well, let a girl get some food in her. I can’t work miracles on a completely empty stomach.” Her mock indignation couldn’t mask her smile.

  He barked a laugh. “Get on with you. And I expect to see some miracles.”

  She sat down and dug in with a vengeance. The stew was indeed very good, as she knew it would be. The food situation concerned her. Grania Estelle was not equipped with any food replicators, and with the theft of a good portion of Cookie’s stores, the crew was looking forward to short rations in order to survive long enough to make it to Instow. Which meant the faster they could get the ship working, the better chance that they’d all be able to get through this and back on their route again.

  A few minutes later, she finished her meal and bussed her
tray back to the dish area. With a wave to Cookie and the other servers, she left the mess hall at a brisk pace, heading to engineering to speak with Quesh. Time was now a precious commodity, one that they couldn’t afford to waste.

  “I want to bring my team with me,” she said to Quesh a few minutes later. “It’ll be a small team, me, Mairi, Pip and Rory. We need to get the shuttle in the boat bay working. And to get to it, we need to walk around the ship from airlock three through the hole in the boat bay doors.”

  “Wait,” the Parkani said, rubbing one side of his face with one hand, “You want to do a spacewalk on the outside of the hull, all the way from airlock three to the boat bay? And then what? Seal the doors?”

  Tamara shook her head. “Ideally, we would fix the doors, but we simply don’t have the time. What we’re going to do is get inside the bay and fix the shuttle. From there, we’ll fly it out the hole and when we need to land, we’ll land in cargo bay one with my fighter.”

  “There’s no room in bay one, what with your ruddy great fighter sitting in there.”

  “Oh, please, that bay is massive. There’s just a lot of crap in there. You’ll need to get some of the cargo workers to shift the cargo in there over to bay two,” she answered. “I know the doors in bay one are working and I know that that bay can hold atmo. It’s going to unbalance the load a bit, I admit that, but since we’re not moving anyway, it hardly matters.”

  The Chief harrumphed. He nodded. “Makes sense. And even when we get an engine back up, we’re hardly going to be tearing off across the system. All right, get on it. I’ll clear it with the Captain. But remember, you’re going to need to bring whatever you need with you. We can’t open the hatch into the boat bay, remember. And it’ll be at least a half an hour to get any kind of parts to you.”

  She shrugged again. “We’ll just have to figure it out. But we can’t stand around jabbering about it.”

  “Go,” he repeated. “I’ll talk to the Captain.”

  “Why the boat bay?” the Captain asked a few minutes later. They were sitting in his wardroom, he and the chief, discussing their status as a whole. “I can understand wanting to get the shuttle operational, but isn’t that somewhat of a low priority?”

  The chief shook his head. “No, Captain, in fact, it’s something of a high priority.” At the Captain’s disbelieving raised eyebrow, he waved his hands in surrender. “It’s true, Captain. We need the shuttle for two reasons. First, we need it to assist with external repairs, for right now the hit we took to the engineering spaces. Once we get those fixed, we need it to help with the engines.”

  “Can’t you just use teams in EVA suits?”

  “Of course, and we will have that. But having the shuttle right there would be perfect if we have any issues with suits, or if, stars forbid, someone should go Dutchman.”

  The Captain nodded grimly. Flying free, falling away from the ship and drifting off into the deep dark was on every spacers’ nightmare list. The Chief’s suggestion made perfect sense. “So it’s a safety thing?”

  “Partly. Also, we can keep parts right there on the shuttle to simply offload and install to fix the damaged sections or later the engines themselves. But that’s not the biggest reason to get it.”

  The Captain sighed. “All right. What is it?”

  “Even using all the junk in cargo bay one, we’re going to fall well short of the materials we need to fix the ship. Even just getting enough metal to reskin the hull isn’t going to be found in there. So I think, and I’ve spoken with Samair about it, that we should send the shuttle out with a small crew to rope and asteroid and bring it back.”

  The Captain blinked, surprised. “Okay, I’ll admit, I’d never thought of that possibility.” In normal practice, the Grania Estelle bought what they needed (what they could afford) from the various planets they visited on their trade cycle. There weren’t too many societies where the ship went that had vigorous space facilities. Which meant that every time they flew through those star systems, there were all those resources just floating around, waiting to be plucked. He mentally kicked himself. All those opportunities, wasted. “But the problem isn’t just metals, Quesh. Our fuel supplies are desperately low. Yes, I’ve looked over the numbers myself. When the hydrogen and water supplies run out, the reactor scrams and we have no power. And then we’re dead four days after that when the place gets too cold and the air gets too toxic.”

  The engineer nodded. “I’ve got some of my boys patching up the holes in the fuel tanks, but yes, I know that isn’t going to fix the fuel problem. But maybe there’s an ice ball out there we could pick up.”

  The Captain sneered. “An ice ball? You’re insane. The likelihood we could even find one is unbelievably small. You’re hanging all our fates on a ‘maybe’? A very tiny maybe?”

  Quesh sighed. “No, Captain, I’m just saying it’s a possibility. But in any case, we need the materials. As soon as you and I are done here, I’m going back to the engines, see if I can’t coax some life back into one of them. Even a little thrust would help.”

  “Then stop wasting time lying about, Chief,” the captain scolded good-naturedly.

  The Chief growled at him, got up from the wardroom table and left.

  “How are we all doing?” Tamara asked, sometime later, as she and her EVA team trekked across the hull of the ship. The small team were all tethered together, and their boots were magnetized allowing them to keep a firm grip on the hull. No one was rushing, they had eight hours of life support in their suits, so it paid to take their time and not stumble, lose grip and go tumbling off into the void. They had trained for that in zero-g in the cargo bay, but no one wanted to test their safety procedures on the outside of the hull.

  “Fine, Boss.” Mairi, unsurprisingly, was only three steps behind her, lugging a container of tools along behind her.

  Pip, the youngest among them, trudged along behind Mairi, pulling a crate of electronics and other parts. No one knew what his real name was, when he had signed on to the crew he had only given the name Pip, no surname, and the Captain had accepted. He was young, perhaps barely twenty years of age, thin and wiry, but there was an aura about him, something foreboding. He had done nothing to warrant such a feeling, he was always polite and usually had a smile or a joke, but it was his eyes. People could not usually maintain eye contact with him for long periods without feeling a chill.

  He didn’t seem to mind, however. Pip wasn’t a particularly brash or outgoing, though judging by his choice of career and where that particular career had led him might contradict that opinion slightly, but he was a very self-effacing man.

  The man bringing up the rear, Rory Porter, was a more experienced spacer, one who had been plying the space lanes for over ten years now. He was in his early thirties, balding, but lean and well-muscled. Up until now, he had been confined to the interior of the ship for engineering and repairs. This was only his second spacewalk, fourth if you counted the three repair jobs he had done accompanying Tamara on patching some of the hull breaches and just earlier in the day when they had gone out to work on the fuel lines.

  Still, the Chief had decided that Tamara’s experience was sufficient and that she was able to judge their effectiveness as a team. Up until this point, Tamara had been taking small steps with her small team, but with the clock ticking now, this was the time to move in leaps and bounds.

  They reached the blasted doors of the boat bay. “All right, kids,” Tamara said, stepping around where the metal had ruptured and burned inward. “This is where it gets tricky. We need to get inside without getting slashed or speared by the sharp and ragged metal. I’m going to anchor this here,” she held up a heavy electromagnet anchor, a ten centimeter thick disk the width of her hand, which had a heavy duty handle on one of the flat sides. Setting it on the hull, she twisted it and a green indicator lit up, as did a matching one on her HUD. She tugged it; it didn’t move. “All right. That’s secured.” Taking the connecting line, she attached the hook
to the handle. “I’ll stay up here to make sure it all stays on, you kids, in the hole.”

  They gave her rather nervous looks, Rory looked slightly sick. From their perspective, standing on the hull, the breach in the boat bay doors looked like a massive pit ringed with spikes and blades, leading down into the darkened boat bay. Their skinsuits didn’t have attitude jets or anything that could steer them around and since there was no gravity where they were, simply jumping at the hole would cause them to fly completely over it and out into space until they were jerked up short by the tether. That would cause them to bounce back, straight toward the anchor, which wouldn’t help.

  “So,” Tamara said, looking at Mairi, who was the smallest of them. “What we’re going to do, is have Rory throw you into the hole in the boat bay.”

  “He’s going to what?” she demanded. Mairi looked rather unhappy about this plan.

  “And then,” Tamara continued, as though Mairi hadn’t spoken, “You’ll be holding onto a lot of slack in the tether line. Once you reach either a handhold or the far bulkhead,” she pointed, “you’ll either clamp on with the other anchor, or you just loop the line around it. Once that’s done, we’ll use the line to climb down inside.”

  “Great, so I get to fly?” Mairi looked rather put out by this, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “Hey, you’re the one who didn’t want seconds at dinner,” Rory joked.

  She laughed. “You’re the one who didn’t leave any for me to take.”

  Tamara chuckled. “All right, we’re on the clock, people. Mairi, in the hole.”

  She moved to the edge of the hole, Tamara having sorted out the tether line situation and handed it to her, the line coiled in the young woman’s hand. Demagnetizing her own boots, she slowly began to float. “Okay, Rory. Throw me in.”

  The big man chuckled. “I would make a comment here, but I’m not going to.” He stepped up to her, gripping her upper arms in his much larger hands.

  “Thank you, Rory. Just do it already.” Tamara’s voice brought them back to the task.