“You have some serious explaining to do,” Taja told him. She pulled his head down and kissed him hard then released him and hustled over to where the Guura was with the wounded.
Tamara smirked, but didn’t comment on the kiss. “So what about the guards?”
He shook his head. “They stay for now, but I got an understanding with the boss.”
She blinked. “Commander Tyler was willing to work with you?” she asked, skeptical.
The captain shook his head again. “Oh, lords, no. He apparently has a boss and that’s the one I worked with. We have an understanding.”
“What kind of understanding?” she pressed.
He scowled. “The kind that keeps us alive and gets us out of this cargo bay. The kind that you don’t worry about.”
Now it was the engineer’s turn to scowl. “One of those deals.”
He sighed. “Yes, Moxie, one of those deals. One that hopefully will keep us from all being shot or sold off as slaves.”
She raised her hands up. “I’ve got to get to engineering and try to get this heap running again without replicators.”
Now he linked in surprise. “What the hell do you mean ‘without replicators’?”
Tamara met his gaze. “We were boarded. I was not going to let them fall into pirate hands, Captain. So I made a decision that they weren’t going to get them.”
He gritted his teeth and shook his head, slowly. “I told you before about what I thought about you making serious decisions concerning my ship, Moxie. I meant what I said.”
“Oh, so you’ll kill me now?” she demanded. “You’re going to throw me under the shuttle now?”
“You just destroyed critical components to my ship!”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “I kept it out of their hands,” she said, pointing in the general direction of the ships outside. “They can’t have that equipment.”
“That wasn’t your call,” he grated.
“No, Captain, it wasn’t,” she agreed, nodding, fury building. “It was yours. But you didn’t make a call about it. No one was doing anything. So I had to step up. And I decided that quick action was needed.”
“You could have called up to the bridge,” he pointed out.
“I could have,” she agreed. “And we both know what would have happened. You would have been so concerned about possibility of getting through this situation that you would have delayed the decision. The soldiers burst into the replicator bay less than a minute after I cooked it. There was no time to wait for the hemming and hawing from above. It’s over now, we have to deal with the situation.”
He glared at her. Then his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What do you have up your sleeve, Moxie? I know you. You planned for this.”
She shrugged. “Why, Captain, why would you ever think something like that about me?”
“Because you cheat,” he said flatly. “And I know that you wouldn’t have burned out all of my replicators if you didn’t have a way of starting them back up again.”
Tamara tried to look innocent, but her façade shattered quickly. She grinned. “Yes, I might have stashed a few things away. But the class threes and the e-rep really are gone. I did melt those down.”
He put a hand to his head, probably to try and stave off an oncoming headache. “You’re not making me feel better, Moxie.”
“Relax, Captain, you were right,” she soothed. “While I did slag the operational replicators, I did make replacement parts and a constructor matrix for the class five. It’s in the boat bay and I’ve got the other parts hidden away throughout the ship.”
He shook his head, as though she’d punched him in the jaw. He might have been less surprised if she had. “When did you have time for all this?”
“I did it while we were sitting at the orbital. Actually,” she corrected herself, “it was more while we were en route to the fueling station. It actually didn’t take all that long. I just hope I got enough things replicated to get the class five operational.” She shrugged at the glare he was giving her. “We were in a hurry and I didn’t know I was going to be melting down the main replicators a few days later.”
He sighed. “All right. Do your thing. Go gather everything up and get it operational. We’ve got a ship to fix.”
“Isn’t that my line?” Tamara asked, chuckling.
“Yes, but I’m the Captain, so I get to say it first.”
She bent at the knees, doing a mock curtsy. “What about the pirates?” she asked, dropping the volume of her voice. “The whole point of me melting down the replicators was so that they wouldn’t get them. I go and build new ones and that just defeats the purpose.”
He sighed. “Just get everything together, Moxie. Meet in the wardroom in two hours and I’ll explain our new… situation.”
“That sounds ominous,” Tamara commented, frowning.
He shrugged. “All about perspective, Moxie. Now go. I’ve got to talk with Turan.”
Working aboard the Grania Estelle was much different now. The spaces were still the same, save for the damage, but some of the seats were empty now. However, while the crew might have been thinned out a bit, Security having been gutted because of the boarding action, they weren’t short of bodies aboard ship. Verrikoth had kept seventy of his people aboard ship, forty of them to maintain “security” and the rest to assist in repairs. The engineers were skilled, though none of them had ever worked on a ship the size of Grania Estelle before, but Ka’Xarian and Tamara quickly snapped up their help.
This however, caused problems because there was intense friction between the two crews. Grania Estelle’s crew wanted to fix up their ship and get underway, as did Verrikoth’s people, under Quesh Trrgoth’s leadership and with him in sickbay, under Ka’Xarian and Tamara. However, Verrikoth’s people believed that because all of them now worked for the Pirate Captain, they were the ones in charge. More and more confrontations began to crop up between the two crews, with the security troopers having to step in more than once to “mediate”. What that meant in strict terms was that the pirate engineers would not like how something was being done by the freighter crew and would go running to the security troopers. The troopers, meanwhile, would approach the freighter crew who were not “following orders” and sort the whole mess out. Usually with threats and menacing behavior. Then the freighter crew would follow orders until Tamara or Ka’Xarian would inspect what was being done and then order them to stop and start the job over, to do things their way. This in turn would aggravate the pirate crew and the cycle would repeat. By the time Tamara and Ka’Xarian arrived at the wardroom for the senior officers’ meeting, the two engineers were beyond frustrated. They came to the meeting fully intending to vent their concerns to the Captain to get him to get things back to normal.
He had news for them, however. “All right, all right,” Eamonn said, raising his hands in a warding gesture and then waving them to their seats. “Everyone has been bitching about the other crew being aboard and you know what? I’m tired of listening to it. I know they have their own ways of doing things. We just have to suck it up and deal with it for now.” At the angry looks shot his way, he only sighed, looking exceptionally tired. “Yes, I know it’s a bad situation. But we deal. We’re still up and running and Captain Verrikoth is allowing us to continue on aboard ship. It’s a much better deal than we might have had otherwise.”
“A better deal?” Taja spluttered. “This isn’t a deal, this is slavery.”
Eamonn shrugged. “It’s the best deal we could get,” he repeated. “From now on we’re no longer an itinerant trader. We’re a dedicated runner in Captain Verrikoth’s fleet.”
“A pirate fleet!” Corajen raged, slamming a fist into the table.
He speared her with a glare. “Would you prefer the alternative? Anyone who resists is shot. Anyone still alive gets sold as slaves or put to work in Verrikoth’s asteroid mines in his home system and worked to death. That is if no one is interested in purchasing a few plea
sure slaves.” That got a universal shiver around the table. No one wanted to think about that. There were more than a couple of planets in the Argos Cluster that accommodated that kind of commodity, and the crew was more than happy to never visit those places.
“So this is the way it is,” he said, bringing them back to the subject at hand. “We are now running under Verrikoth’s banner. Serinda, I’ll have an update for your communications and for Grania Estelle’s ID signature that I’ll need you to upload immediately.” The woman nodded soberly. “He’s assigned the corvette Ravage to escort us on a semi-permanent basis. That’s two-fold, I’m sure. One, to make sure that we have safe passage but also to make sure we go where we’re told. In addition to that,” he looked to the lupusan, “Your security forces are being ‘augmented’ by thirty of Verrikoth’s soldiers.”
“Thirty?” the lupusan demanded, growling, her ears flattening to her head. “That’s insane! I only had twenty to start with and including me and Saiphirelle, I have four. Am I getting my deputies back up to full strength again?”
Eamonn sighed, but nodded. “Yes, Corajen, you are, but you’re going to have to coordinate your efforts with him.”
“And what about the engineering teams that are fucking with my engines?” Tamara snarled. “They need to be gone, Captain. We have entirely too many people trying to make decisions in Engineering. We start to work on something and then Engineer Nomat comes over and demands we stop and explain exactly what it is we’re doing. In five different cases he’s had my people stop and pull apart some no-brainer repairs and now our whole overhaul schedule is shot to hell.” She threw up her arms in frustration before gripping the arms of her chair so tight her knuckles turned white. “Essentially we’re about four days behind in getting the shields back up to full coverage and we still only have one working sublight engine. That of course doesn’t address the hull damage or the thousand other things that need fixing.”
The captain only shook his head imperceptibly. “Work it out, Moxie. I’ll speak with Captain Verrikoth and see if we can get those teams removed, but he wants his people involved in all areas and he wants this ship up and running again in short order. He said something about some parts that could be transferred over from his modified merchant ships, I’ll get with them as well and see what they’re offering. Maybe they can goose things forward.”
“What about cargoes?” Taja asked, her voice hard. “I’m getting the impression that our Lord and Master is going to want us to be hauling what he wants us to and nothing more.”
Eamonn nodded, rubbing his temples. “Yes, Taja, that’s correct. Six of our eight cargo holds are going to be reserved for Verrikoth’s goods. The remaining two are ours to fill with whatever we want. On the off chance that his stuff doesn’t fill those six bays, we can fill up the remaining space.”
“And are we working on spec again?” she pressed.
He tipped one hand back and forth. “We get a standard salary in contract from Verrikoth for moving his goods around.” He picked up his datapad and sent them all a file containing the contract he had signed with the pirate leader. He had found it odd that a pirate, someone who lived outside the law, one whose word was flexible based on his personal needs, would want someone working for him to sign a contract. Eamonn suspected it was so that he, the human worker, would feel as though this was a more legitimate business arrangement and not try to weasel out of it. That his own honor would hold him to working for a pirate organization.
And judging by the bulging eyes by the senior officers around the table, it was clear they were impressed by the amount that Verrikoth had indicated he would pay them for their services. “If this pirate captain is truly going to pay us these figures, I’m willing to go for it,” Taja said grudgingly. “But I won’t run slaves,” she added quickly.
“And you think I would?” Eamonn thundered. “Do you think that I want any of this? That I want to have complete oversight by a pirate and his thugs? I made this deal to save your life. All of your lives! Doing things this way isn’t what I want. But if we do things this way, I get to keep my ship and my crew and bills get paid. That is why I took this deal. That is the only reason I took this deal. Don’t question me on it again.” He gritted his teeth. “If there was any way for me to get out of it, I would take it. We were doing well. We had the ship fixed up and we were finally starting to bring in good money until we got to this system and all this bullshit fell on top of us. I did what I had to do to get out from under it.”
The room had gone completely quiet. “All right, get back to work. We have a lot to do and it seems like Captain Verrikoth isn’t going to give us a lot of time to do it.” They all stood, but he remained in his seat. “Taja, Corajen, Moxie. You three stay.” The others filed out, they three sat back down, neither of them looking happy.
He took a deep breath, making sure to make eye contact with each of them. “I’d be talking to Quesh if he was out of sickbay, but he isn’t. Once he gets out, I will have this conversation with him as well. But this is the way it is for now. We work for Verrikoth. I know you all don’t like it; you’ve made that abundantly clear. But that’s the way it is. He’s keeping his soldiers aboard the ship to make sure we all behave, but honestly, once we get those engineering teams off the ship, I believe we’ll have reign to act as we always have. He wants us making runs for him, cargo as I’ve been told. I’m sure more than a little of it will be things he… acquired by extralegal means.” He sighed again, scrubbing his face with one hand. But when he put his hand down, his face was no longer tired and frustrated. It was determined and forged in iron.
“You don’t like it. I understand. I don’t like it. But what you all need to understand is that, frankly, that’s not important. You’re all upset by this. Honestly, at this point, I don’t care.” He ignored the stunned looks on Tamara and Taja’s faces and continued. “Do your jobs. We’ll get the ship fixed back up, haul some cargo and hopefully get out of this mess. I don’t know how that’s going to happen, but I do know that it will. So, in the meantime, you all have work to do and I don’t want any of you, or any of the crew to be going behind my back and undermining my command or trying to get us all killed. I get the slightest whiff of mutinous talk and I will be having another conversation with you three. Because I’m going to assume that it was one or all of you three that caused it.”
His face softened a bit. “Now, that’s that. Go, get out of this damned wardroom and start getting this ship running smoothly again. I’m going to get those engineers off the ship so you can get things done.”
The three of them got back up from their seats and filed out, but the temperature of the room had not risen back to a normal level. There was a distinct chill in the room. Eamonn sighed again as they filed out, his gaze on the table before him, though he wasn’t really seeing it.
“Captain, I need to speak with you about the teams aboard my ship,” Eamonn said a short while later.
Verrikoth’s antennae began to whirl slowly. “I am not going to like lisstening to thiss, am I?”
“It’s like this, Captain, the security teams are fine. We need to have a force like that on board,” he lied, but he knew he would get nowhere asking for those to be removed. “But the engineering teams are causing a headache for me. To be honest, my own people can get the Grania Estelle up and running much faster if your teams will just let them work.”
“Your teamz are not working with mine?” the zheen asked, his voice syrupy sweet.
“The two groups are butting heads,” Eamonn told him frankly. “And right now, rebuild and repair schedules are all shot to hell because of it. And to be honest, you don’t need to have your people over here. Bring them back to your own ships, I know you have a lot of repairs to do on your cruisers. I ask that you trust me to get the work on my own ship done.”
The zheen stared silently at him for a long moment. “Yess…” he said, drawing the word out in a hiss. “I do have a lot of repairz to be done to Meghna and Ker
ala. Very well. The engineering teamz will return. But I expect your sship to be ready for hypersspace in a week. One week.” He raised a hand, one chitinous finger raised. “Do not dissappoint.”
“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.”
Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 Page 71