Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1

by Michael Kotcher

  “Chief Engineer?” he guessed at her rank.

  Tamara shook her head. “Engineering Third Officer.”

  “So you said you’re not really looking for implants. What are you really looking for?” he asked, interested.

  “Replicators,” she replied, crossing her arms under her breasts. “Anything class four or above.”

  The man chuckled. “Haven’t had working replicators on this station for quite some time, ma’am. Had a bunch once, even a class seven, if you can believe it. But that was back in the Republic days. A few were stolen, the rest were either broken or they just stopped working.” He paused, thinking. “I think the last one we had, a class five, broke down about forty or so years ago.”

  Tamara nodded, a small smile on her lips. “I don’t suppose it’s still on the station.”

  “Matter of fact, it is,” he said. “Up on level three, ring section. In the back of hangar bay twenty-two.”

  “Thanks,” she replied. “I think I’ll wander that way later. But for now, I’m looking for new designs for an L-type heat exchanger. The ones we have on our shuttles wear too easily. Had to replace them twice in two months.”

  “An L-type? Yeah, those were notorious for their short shelf lives. Let me think.” The man nodded to himself. “Your best bet would be to yank the whole system out and replace it with a modified class-F. I have a few things that might interest you. Come over here and we’ll take a look.”

  “So how are we looking?” Eamonn asked, entering Taja’s small office. She was seated at her desk, her terminal activated, datapad in hand. She looked up as he entered and smiled.

  “Hey,” she replied. “I was going to call you in about an hour. But the prelim figures from the sales are good. We’ve got a twenty percent return over projections on those ingots. Profits on this run are going to be great. Shares are too.”

  He smiled at her. “That’s what I like to hear. Any chance they might be interested in a more permanent arrangement?”

  Taja shrugged. “I’ve asked around and I’ve gotten a few bites, but nothing to write home about. Nothing yet. The station is reasonably self-sufficient. And while there’s a good amount of industry here, so far no one’s willing to trust us. But once they see the goods keep pouring in from our holds…” She trailed off.

  “Good. Keep at it. I’d like to try and set up some sort of permanent run based around here. If someone here is willing to pay us to stay in the vicinity, I’d like to do that.” He sighed. “Give us a sense of permanency rather than this endless, less profitable wandering.”

  Taja smirked. “Yeah, I hear the crew likes it here.”

  “Bars and brothels,” he replied. “For the males and females, it seems. There’s also things to do, people to see, stuff to buy. Everybody wins. And since other ships are coming through here all the time, better chance of hiring on new crewmen if people decide to leave, or if we decide to get another ship.”

  “You’re really thinking about doing that?” she asked. “Build another ship?”

  “Moxie’s convinced me,” he replied. “Nothing as big and grand as this old girl. But maybe something small. Something along the lines of the Emilia Walker.”

  “I can’t believe you keep talking about them,” Taja said sourly, setting down her datapad. “They screwed us. Or more precisely, they screwed you.”

  “You don’t believe they’re going to show?” he asked, smiling.

  She gave him a look. “I know they aren’t. And I just checked the bridge feeds, so I know they didn’t just show up so you could trick me into betting with you.”

  He held a dark hand to his chest. “I’m wounded, Taja. Truly hurt. It also appears I’ve become predictable in my old age.”

  “In your dotage,” she replied, smiling fondly at him.

  “Good thing I have you around to help me lace up my boots.”

  “Good thing.” Then her smile faded. “You really do think they’re coming, don’t you?”

  He sighed, leaning against the desk, looking over at her. “I want to, Taja. I really do. I want to believe that there are some good-hearted and like-minded souls out there who really are interested in making a few credits together. If we can band together, we can get more contracts. Hell, we can get contracts. Earn a reputation for our collective work and even be able to line our pockets a bit.”

  “But a light freighter like Emilia Walker can’t haul nearly the amount of goods we can.”

  “No, but what they can carry, they can get it to where it’s going faster,” he countered. “Which means they’ll be more likely to get high value goods with even a priority or two on the bill. If we’re both based from here, we could make three runs to other systems in the time they could make five or six. The individual shares would be smaller, but taken as a whole…”

  “And if it’s known that we’re working together and that both of our ships are in good repair and that everyone gets paid, others might want to join.”

  He nodded. “That’s right. That’s really what I want. Joining together as a group will keep people like those bastards on Hecate from pushing us around. Though we’re going to need someone to run this whole affair. I certainly am not going to do it. I’m a ship captain.”

  Taja smiled, though there was steel in her eyes. “Don’t even think about dumping that on me,” she warned. “If you think I’m staying behind while you go gallivanting, well, you would not like the conversation we’d have if you left.”

  He raised his hands in surrender. “Don’t worry, love. You stay with me.” His communicator beeped. Pulling it out of his pocket, he flipped it open. “Yes?”

  “Captain, we have an incoming comm from Commander Samair,” Kutok’s very precise voice answered. “It’s on an encrypted frequency.”

  He frowned, now deeply concerned. “Trouble?”

  “I don’t know, Captain,” the comm officer replied. “She just said she needed to speak with you immediately.”

  He tipped his head to the side. “All right. Are we secure?”

  He couldn’t see her, but he knew that the hak’ruk nodded. “Yes, Captain. Comm lines are secure.”

  “Then put Moxie through.”

  He heard her sigh. He knew that Kutok hated his little pet name for the Engineering Third Officer. “Very good, Captain.”

  There was a crackle of static. “Moxie, is that you?”

  “I’m here, Captain,” Tamara replied, her voice pitched low.

  “Well, you have my attention,” he said, holding the communicator at chest level, upping the sound on the speakers so Taja could here. “Is everything all right?”

  “We’re all fine, Cap,” she replied. “But I have a purchase that you need to make. I don’t care how you do it, but you need to make it happen. And it probably would be a good idea if you could make sure the locals don’t know why you’re doing it.”

  “Okay,” he said slowly, not really understanding. “What am I buying?”

  “A replicator.”

  “We have replicators already, Moxie,” he reminded her patiently. “Thanks to you.”

  He could hear the grin in her voice. “Not like this one. It’s a fixer-upper, I’ll admit, but if I can get it working…”

  “What’s so important about this one?”

  “It’s a class-five,” Tamara said, excitement flooding her voice. “With a full database.”

  “I understand,” he said, feeling a clutch of anticipation in his chest. “What’s the condition? Is it in use?”

  “Its offline,” Tamara told him. “And it is in pretty bad shape. According to a source and a few other people I spoke with, it hasn’t been used in sixty or so years. It’s just sitting in the hangar bay.”

  “So it’s junk?”

  “Not once I get my hands on it,” she replied. He grinned.

  “So I’ll need to add it to a list of junk salvage to buy.”

  “That would be my advice, yes.”

  “All right, Moxie. I’m on it.” He
sighed. “You’d better be right about this.”

  “Captain Eamonn,” she said, hurt. “When have I ever steered you wrong?” And then she cut the connection.

  He chuckled. “Kutok, are you still there?”

  “Here, Captain,” she replied instantly.

  “You know, it’s rude to eavesdrop.”

  She chittered. “Captain, you pay me to eavesdrop.”

  “Right. Call down to the boat bay. Get a shuttle prepped to take me, Taja, and a security officer over to the station. We’re going on a purchasing trip.” He nodded to Taja, who shut down her terminal and stood up, putting her datapad into its holder in her belt.

  “Understood, Captain.”

  An hour later, he, Taja and the lupusan Saiphirelle stepped off the shuttle onto the hangar deck. Taja had linked in with Tamara and they had compiled a list of junk for “salvage” which consisted of a lot of useless scraps, a few bits and bobs that Tamara had found in various collections on the station, and two of the dead replicators, an old food replicator and the class five she had found earlier.

  The two humans were dressed in their shipsuits, each carrying only their datapads, though the Captain had a gun up his sleeve and a knife in his boot and Taja had concealed a tiny holdout pistol in her belt. The lupusan carried much more in the way of overt weaponry, she was a security officer after all. A pulse rifle was slung over her back, a pulser on her thigh and then of course she had her own natural weapons. With her watching their back, only the very brave or the very stupid would try and hurt them.

  A short, plump man dressed in a shipsuit was waiting for them. He rubbed a hand over his bald pate as though he was nervous and then beamed as the trio approached. “Captain Eamonn, so good to see you again!” he boomed, arms outstretched.

  “Ranius Trent,” the Captain replied, a bit less enthusiastically. “Always a pleasure. It’s been a long time.”

  “How long?” the man asked. “Four years?”

  “I think it was just over five.”

  “Ah, how the years go by. So, I understand that you’re in the market for some salvage.” His eyes glittered. “Why ever do you want it?”

  The Captain shrugged. “Melt some of it down, use it for hull plating. There are some components in the electronic stuff that could be reconditioned and reusable. I’ve got some shorts in my computer systems that some of these would work well with.”

  All perfectly reasonable. And even likely, given the state of repair of the ships out here in the Cluster. But Trent had seen the scans of the Grania Estelle, as well as what he could see of Eamonn’s shuttles. They were all in excellent shape, far better than Trent had seen out in the Cluster for quite some time. It could, of course, be that his engineers were wizards would could spin spells with their spanners. But Trent had done business with Eamonn before. He was a wily character and Trent knew the man was up to something. But, the stuff he wanted was junk. If he could get it off his station and some credits in his coffers, so much the better.

  “I’d like to take a look at what I’m buying, of course,” Eamonn said.

  “Of course,” Trent replied. “I have your officer with the items in the other bay. Let’s head over there and then we can talk business.”

  Tamara was awaiting them, looking over the bins she had filled up with the items she was pretending to care about. There was the food replicator in one of the bins, as well as scraps of metal, broken electronics, servos and actuators from several worker bots along with other things. She looked up as they approached, and nodded. “So I’ve gone over all these things again, for the most part they look okay. I like the electronics on these two,” she pointed to the food replicator and the class-five still bolted to the bulkhead. “I think they’ll work well with the computers in the sensor array. There’s a lot of good hull material here, I think we can get that section in level eight repaired properly.”

  Trent watched the byplay between the two of them, noting their facial expressions and body languages. Both of them seemed mildly interested in this purchase, the woman at the Captain’s side, the cargo specialist, seemed reasonably eager, though she was watching Trent warily, probably gearing up for a haggling session. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but Trent was suspicious. Those replicators had been bolted to the bulkheads in the station for a very long time, neither of them had functioned in decades. No one wanted them and all of a sudden, Captain Eamonn and his engineer did. They didn’t work, why would they want them? But, as he thought about it further, it was just junk taking up space in his station. The sooner it was gone, the happier he would be.

  “So then,” he said, rubbing his hands together, “Let’s talk business shall we?”

  The shuttle landed in the boat bay aboard the Grania Estelle an hour later. They’d managed to secure the parts and scrap, though Trent had gouged them for an extra ten percent. But, if Moxie was right and she could get the replicators functioning again, they would already have paid for themselves. He was restraining his own enthusiasm, because as yet the new toys didn’t work. And until they did, all he had done was transfer from scrap metal and components from the station over to his ship.

  Then he looked over at the woman in question who was going to reclaim that scrap. “You did good today, Moxie,” he said, smiling.

  She nodded, then leaned her head back against the shuttle bulkhead. “Yeah, I guess I did. Lucky for us the station people didn’t know how to work with what they had. Hopefully the two replicators aren’t beyond saving. The food replicator should be easy enough. The class-five?” She shrugged, “That will take some serious work.”

  He eyed her. “You don’t sound terribly enthusiastic about that.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. I mean, I am jazzed about it. A class-five is a serious boost. And the databases on both of them will help me augment what we can do aboard the ship.”

  “But…” he prompted.

  “But,” she replied, taking a deep breath. “I like my job and my team and even you.” He growled at her mockingly and she swatted his arm. “But running freight isn’t what I envisioned doing with my life.”

  “You don’t think it’s a worthwhile pursuit?”

  “Now you’re putting words in my mouth. I was on ships since I was born, in fact, I was born on a freighter, the Hyacinth. I joined the Navy when I was eighteen. Went through the Academy, went through flight school, did that for a few years, then got on the engineering track and made command level in only a few years after that. I was in charge of a shipyard. I built warships. I was the one making things happen.”

  “And now being an Engineering Third Officer is a, what? A demotion?”

  Tamara sighed. “I don’t know. As I said, I’m enjoying my job very much, working with my team, trying to build up a tech base from what we have now to what I’d like to see. And it is exciting work.”

  “But it isn’t enough.”

  “I’m used to the Navy way of doing things. You’ve been great about getting us what we need to fix up the ship, or fix up others and I do feel good about the work we’ve done. It’s a lot like what I’m used to. And this just, well…”

  “Isn’t the Navy,” he finished. “I thought you were done with the Republic, with the Navy because of what it did to you.”

  She took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. “I know. I said that and I meant it. I still mean it. But I think I still miss it.”

  The Captain watched her for a long moment. “All right. Let’s get all this crap down to the cargo areas and then hit your rack. I know you’ve been up for a while and your shift isn’t for another eight hours. Get some sleep.” He frowned as she grimaced. “What?”

  “What?” she replied. “Oh, nothing. Sure, I’ll do that.”

  “What is it?” he pressed.

  She shrugged. “I don’t sleep well. Though I think that with all the work I’ll be doing to get those replicators up I should be able to exhaust myself enough.”

  “You just can’t sleep?”


  Tamara shook her head. “I keep having nightmares. About my last day before I slept through all those years.”

  He’d heard about that and Turan had shown him the video. He wasn’t sure how many people had seen that video, but he was fairly sure that Tamara would explode if she found out that someone other than the doctor had viewed it. He wasn’t even sure she knew the doctor had it and he sure as hell was not going to be the one to tell her.

  Tamara gasped, sitting bolt upright on her bunk, clutching her chest and breathing hard and fast. Her throat was raw though she didn’t remember screaming. Throwing off the covers, she padded into the bathroom and turned on the faucet. She splashed some cold water on her face and then leaned on the sink hard, staring at her reflection in the mirror, willing her breathing to return to normal.

  This one wasn’t as bad as those that had come before. It wasn’t terribly different than all the others, but it wasn’t as sharp somehow, not quite as terrifying. She had come awake when she always did, when the pod depressurized and she couldn’t breathe.

  [Why does this keep happening to you, Tamara?] Stella’s text came through on her implants’ HUD.

  Her breathing back under control, Tamara grabbed a towel. “I don’t know!” she yelled, scrubbing her face with it and then throwing it against the bulkhead. “He’s dead! I survived! He can’t hurt me anymore and I’m so far away from him and anything he could ever do or have done to me! Why does he keep haunting me?”

  [I wish I could help. I worry.]

  Tamara sighed and then leaned over and picked up the towel, hanging it up on the bar. Then for good measure she pounded the bulkhead with her fists, screaming in purest rage and despair. She continued to attack the metal wall without hesitation, even as her knuckles split and blood covered it.

  [Tamara! Stop! You’re damaging yourself!]

  But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Tamara couldn’t see the metal, what she was seeing was Islington’s face, as though he was there, laughing at her, mocking her. Her screams escalated until there was a banging on her door. Her brain started taking over again, the rage fading. With the rage came the pain. Her knuckles and hands had been beaten bloody, torn down to the bone. Her wrists throbbed and pain radiated down from her fingers and hands to her elbows. Her hands slowly came open, shaking uncontrollably.