Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1

by Michael Kotcher

  “But to what purpose? One or two good shots to the engines and we’re done. It would be weeks of repair and rebuild in a hostile system.”

  He was on his feet, pacing around the compartment. “But we need to do something!” he demanded. “We can’t just sit here.”

  “Why do you care so much?” the lupusan asked, genuinely curious. She didn’t seem the least bit threatened or perturbed that the man was stalking around like a caged animal. Though the predator in her couldn’t help tracking his movements by sight, sound and smell. “They aren’t our crew. Hell, we barely knew them. Just another freighter crew.” She eyed him. “Is it because they owe us?”

  He stopped and gaped at her. “What?”

  She started to nod, slowly. “That’s it, isn’t it? They owe us for all those parts and labor from the wrench teams and you’re upset about not getting what we’re due.”

  His incredulous look turned irritated. “That isn’t it. That isn’t it at all.”

  She chuckled. “Captain, you’re not known for your altruism.”

  “That’s because I don’t shout it to the heavens, ‘Look at me! Look at how good a person I really am!’ like a lot of those hypocrites do,” he countered. “I try to help out where I can.”

  “Then why?” she asked again. “It isn’t likely that Emilia Walker could ever really pay us back for the services rendered, even if they joined up in full partnership with us. Are you trying to buy them out?”

  “No,” he growled, turning away, leaning one hand against the bulkhead. She didn’t push, knowing he’d speak when he was ready.

  “Captain, what are you thinking?” she asked after several long moments had stretched out without him speaking.

  “It was that damned engineer,” he muttered, but her sharp ears easily caught it.

  “Who, Quesh?” Corajen asked, genuinely confused.

  He turned back to her, a look of irritation on his face. “No, not Quesh. You’re being deliberately thick. Moxie.”

  “Samair?” the lupusan asked, her ears flicking as her confusion level rose. “How does she work into this?”

  The captain began to pace, running his hands over his scalp. “She changed everything. When she came here, the ship was barely holding together and in some cases was actually falling apart.”

  “Right, and you worked out a deal with her to fix us up.”

  He nodded. “And my ship came back to life. Sections that no one had even seen in years were rebuilt, refurbished. We have full shields, an upgraded reactor, more weapons, hell, I can even fill the cargo holds.”

  “And how does that relate to our current situation?” He sighed. “What?” she asked.

  “Hope.”

  “Hope?”

  “Yes, hope,” he snapped. “For the very first time, we were up and running. We weren’t just barely surviving, skating by on luck and not a little skill. We were moving. Hauling. We were even making money. Lots of it.”

  Corajen flicked her ears again. “Still are, if memory serves.”

  He grunted. “And then she so easily talked Vosteros into accepting our help and then bullied him and me into joining forces.”

  “I’m sorry, so you’re trying to save Vosteros and his ship because Samair bullied you into it?” she asked, smiling.

  “No,” he replied, glaring at her. “I’d given Vosteros my word we would help him.”

  “So?”

  “So, my word is actually good, which is why I rarely give it.”

  “So it’s a pride thing?” She snorted. “Men. Typical male bullshit.”

  “If you’re just going to insult me, you can leave,” he grumped.

  Corajen grinned evilly. “Oh, I’d love to see you make me.” They locked gazes until she yawned and looked away after a moment.

  “I suppose there was a degree of pride,” he conceded after some thought. “But it was more than that. They came here, to this system, because of us. Because of me.”

  Finally, the lupusan nodded. “I understand. They came here because you said to come. And now the locals have them.”

  “I can’t just leave them, Cora. I can’t.”

  Corajen sighed, shifting her position in the chair. “I get where you’re coming from.”

  “But George was right, damn him,” he growled. “The big girl can’t stand against the defense ships.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “I don’t know,” the captain admitted. “But I think we need to have more heads working on this than just yours and mine.”

  “So long as there are no suicide charges,” she warned.

  He nodded. “I don’t want to die, either. But I won’t just turn away and leave knowing I did nothing.”

  The wardroom was full for the first time in a long while. All the department heads where here. Stella was sitting cross-legged on the table, just over the holo projector, checking her fingernails, a thunderous expression on her face. She had been determined to charge to the rescue of the Emilia Walker.

  “All right,” the captain began, addressing the room at large. “I will not be taking the ship in and trying to make a daring rescue against all odds.” There were collective sighs of relief at this. After the initial euphoria from the Captain’s bold announcement had faded, the fear had set in. The grumbling and the whispers had quickly followed.

  “But neither am I about the leave the Emilia Walker and her crew to rot. We’re going to do what we can to get them back. I want ideas.” He gestured for the others to speak. “The floor is yours.”

  He looked around, but no one was willing to be first. The captain saw that both George and Kutok had decided to attend. He had not made attendance compulsory, despite the tradition on a ship that a summons from the Captain constituted an absolute imperative. He had asked them to attend and made sure that they understood it wasn’t an order. And still they came anyway.

  Quesh sighed, laying all four hands on the table. “Well, we can’t take the ship in, but what about a shuttle?” he asked, breaking the ice.

  Eamonn straightened; Stella perked up a bit, though the expression on her face had turned sour. “That sounds promising,” he said. “What can we do with one of the shuttles?”

  Quesh and Tamara exchanged glances. “Well, Captain,” the chief began, “it’s a shuttle, not a battlecruiser, so there is a limit. But we can upgrade the armor, shields and power systems.”

  “Make it more like a combat dropship or an assault shuttle,” Tamara agreed. “Could probably hook up some weapons too.”

  “We’d lose about a third of the cargo space,” Quesh admitted.

  “Might even be as much as half,” Tamara disagreed.

  The Parkani nodded. “Fine. But we could still fit all of your security people on board.” He looked over at Corajen, who was across the table.

  She nodded back. “We’d need specs. I’d want to know exactly how much room it had, what the exits were like, etc,” she said, ticking points off on her fingers.

  The chief nodded in agreement. “We’ll mock something up for you this afternoon.”

  Tamara looked around and then spoke. “But that wouldn’t solve the underlying problem.” She locked gazes with George, who had leaned back in his chair, arms crossed.

  “Do enlighten us,” the captain replied, letting out a long breath.

  She frowned at Eamonn, but continued. “They’re going to see us launching that shuttle. And unless we can secure the Emilia Walker’s crew and escape to the hyper limit before they can catch us, we’d still get attacked by the system defense forces.” Tamara sighed. “And we can’t win that fight.”

  “So you’re saying there’s nothing we can do,” Corajen replied. It would have been easy to make that statement sound angry, but it was just a statement of fact.

  “I’m saying,” Tamara said calmly. “That there’s going to be very little we can do that won’t lead the locals straight back to the Grania Estelle and the very combat situation we are trying to avoid.”<
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  “So we do nothing then?” Saiphirelle demanded. “I thought we were going to help, not cower here in fear of what might happen.”

  “We can’t stand up to the defense ships here, Saiphirelle,” Tamara shot back. “I’m sorry, but we can’t. And nothing we can slap together in a few days is going to do the trick either.”

  “What would?” the snarling lupusan asked, ignoring the look and the growl she was getting from her sister the security chief.

  Quesh and Tamara exchanged another glance. Tamara shrugged. “A squadron of starfighters,” the Parkani said, looking up at the overhead, at the ducts and the pipes. “Maybe four or five assault shuttles. A purpose-built warship or two.”

  “None of which we have,” George spoke up.

  Murmurs spread around the room as people recognized the predicament.

  But Saiphirelle wasn’t finished. “But Stella thinks we can do this.” She pointed a clawed finger at the AI, who nodded.

  “Stella is a child!” George roared, slapping a hand on the table. The AI looked as though she would murder him and was about to speak, but he cut her off. “I’m sorry, Stella, but you are. You’ve been in only one combat engagement and that was against forces not as strong as these. And even then we barely escaped!” He glared at the lupusan. “And you know it. You were the one who attached the bomb to the load of gadolinium when Ganges was chasing us.”

  She started to rise, a growl low in her throat, fangs bared. But Corajen placed one clawed hand on her sister’s arm and the light furred female dropped back into the chair, her gaze never leaving George’s face. Her temper hadn’t receded at all, but she was controlling that rage. “Better be watching yourself, foolish boy,” Saiphirelle hissed.

  “No one is threatening anyone,” the captain said idly, as though the comment was of no importance. No one missed the order in his tone. “Now,” he said after a minute, as the lupusan sat back, her lips covering her fangs again. “I’d like to try and come up with some sort of solution here; any kind of solution. So I want ideas, no matter how stupid, reckless or inadequate they sound.” Eamonn said to them all. “We are going to rescue the Emilia Walker and what’s left of her crew. So I want to hear what you’ve got. Even you, little girl,” he said, smiling at Stella, who bristled and then stuck her tongue out at him.

  Over an hour of ideas thrown out and thrown back. The meeting actually degenerated into a shouting match at one point and the captain called for a break. Nothing they had come up with so far had even the remotest chance of working and they were all tired of rehashing the same arguments. The captain sent them off, back to their departments to think on it and perhaps get some ideas from other sources. Yes, the officers were the ones who ultimately made decisions, but insight and inspiration could come from the most humble of sources.

  The captain caught a conversation on his way to the mess hall. A small group of crewmen, a mix of cargo people and some of Quesh’s engineering team were arguing as they were coming out of the mess. They parted for the captain as he came down the corridor the other way, all of them straightening up as he passed. Several of them acknowledged him. “Hi, Captain!” one of them said. He only nodded, though and then they continued their argument as they walked.

  “Oh, that is the stupidest idea yet,” one of the cargo handlers said derisively. “Stealth suits? Where the hell are we going to get those?”

  “From the replicators,” the engineer replied. “They can build anything and Commander Samair has the proper codes.”

  “You’re an idiot,” another of the engineers told him. “Even if we could build them, it would take the class five for that and it’s still just a hunk of corroded metal. We haven’t even started refurbishing it yet. That’s a good week of work right there. The freighter crew hasn’t got that kind of time.”

  “It’s still a good idea,” the first engineer grumped. “Besides, we were talking about if it was possible. No one said anything about time!”

  “What the hell did you think we were talking about?” the cargo handler spat, his voice carrying down the corridor, even though they were all out of his sight now. “The captain needs viable alternatives, not pipe dreams.”

  “I don’t hear you coming up with anything,” the grease monkey complained.

  The captain chuckled to himself and entered the mess hall. He was greeted by the aroma of one of Cookie’s stews and he quickly grabbed a tray and stepped into the chow line. There were only a few people in front of him, who when they saw him immediately insisted he cut the line to the front. The captain did not wait in line with the rest of the crew! He laughed good-naturedly and obligingly stepped to the front of the line. One of Cookie’s mess attendants ladled some of the hearty stew into a bowl, tossing a pair of crusty rolls and another small bowl of salad onto the captain’s tray. He thanked the man and wandered off, leaving the mess hall entirely. Normally, he stood on privilege and had his meals delivered either to his stateroom or the wardroom, but today he decided it would be best to allow himself to be seen by the crew. And he didn’t need to be waited on hand and foot. (Not that it wasn’t nice, most of the time.)

  Twenty minutes later he sat at the wardroom table, empty food bowls pushed away. He’d bus them back to the galley later, but for now, he was getting back to the main problem at hand. The crewman’s idea about stealth suits was a good one, but the other crewman’s comment that they couldn’t build said suits was also valid.

  But there was another problem. His own ship couldn’t sit here forever. Taja had already closed the deal on several contracts from the orbital, which meant that he needed to get the ship moving. Not that he was terribly concerned about that right now, as most of his attention was focused on the problem with the Emilia Walker.

  “Am I kidding myself here?” he asked to the room. Here was no one in the room, but he didn’t mind. “There doesn’t seem to be anything we can do for them.”

  Stella appeared on the table’s holo projector and sat down. “I don’t think that you are, Captain,” she said. “You’re trying to help those people. We’re trying to help those people.”

  “You’ve never even met them, Stella,” he pointed out. “Why do you care about them?”

  She sighed. “Why does anyone care about anyone else?” she countered. “I mean, it would make so much more sense, from a safety perspective, to just ignore them and all other ships and just continue on our merry way. If we only worry about our own ship and our own crew we’d probably be better off.”

  “Until the pirates eventually catch up to us,” Eamonn said. “Then it would be nice to have someone else who might be willing to watch our back.”

  “So is that your answer, Captain?” Stella asked. “You want to have someone to have your back?”

  “That’s my answer,” he replied. “But what’s yours? You haven’t really answered. In fact, you made an argument for not helping out the Emilia Walker and the others. You were all for going after them a short time ago. What changed?”

  Stella leaned back, resting her hands on the table, as though she was actually leaning on the hard surface. “I still think that we can get in there and take them. But I’ve gone over the sensor data we had for the pinnaces and what Ka’Xarian sent over to us from the shuttle’s sensors from the attack. I’m a little more apprehensive about charging into the fray, I’ll admit,” she said ruefully. “I got a little over excited.”

  “But you still want to go over there?”

  “Maybe it would need to be a combination of things,” the AI mused. “We can’t just go over there, cannons blazing. We’d get into a fight and the pinnaces would swarm me under. But what about going over there to collect our crew, collector and fuel? We would have had to do that anyway.”

  “Right,” the captain said, leaning forward, putting his elbows on the table. “So that can get us in position.” He paused, then nodded. He pulled his communicator out of his pocket. “Taja, it’s me.”

  “Yes?” She sounded bored. She pro
bably was. After yanking her and her crews off of their loading jobs, the cargo division had been sulking in the common areas, the cargo bays and their quarters. Taja had actually refused to speak with the Captain, since he offered no real explanation, no apology to her, even after the reasons for his action had gotten around the ship. At first, Taja had been concerned, thinking that the ship was about to come under attack or pirate ships had been sighted in the system. But when the truth came out, that the Captain was looking to play hero, she had been beyond angry at what he had done to her loading schedules.

  “I know I pulled you off cargo loading. Go ahead and resume. Get everything on board that we purchased from the orbital.”

  “We’re not going after the ship?” she asked, confused.

  “We still are, but we’ve been acting suspicious enough by cancelling loading ops halfway through. If the locals ask, tell them we had an injury or something aboard the ship. Tell them the Doctor had a safety seminar. I don’t care what you tell them, but I know you know what to do.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Taja told him and signed off. He sighed. She’d already been making him pay for this act of altruism and brotherhood with angry comments and rants, but he had steadfastly ignored her. She wasn’t angry at him for wanting to save another ship and its crew, no she was upset the he had just left all their cargo to sit in the orbital’s hangar bays. In a more candid moment, the fiery woman admitted she was terrified by the prospect of leaping into battle. She was a cargo specialist, not a soldier. He’d try to find a way to make it up to her at some point in the future.

  “Okay, so we gather up our cargoes and fly the ship over to the fueling station. Xar and his team can try to locate the Emilia Walker’s crew and maybe cause some mayhem over there,” Stella said, getting excited.

  “Slow down there,” the Captain admonished. “I have no doubt that Ka’Xarian could cause some havoc over there, but he doesn’t even know to do it. And we can’t just call him and tell him.”

  Stella looked down at the table. When she looked up, utter despair was etched on her face. “We’re not going to be able to save them, are we?”