She stepped away from the door and gestured politely for the man to go in. He eyed her for a second, clearly unsure, then stepped through the door and the hatch closed behind him. “Corajen got you a lupusan bodyguard?”
Tamara chuckled, holding up her three fingers. “She got me three.”
“You trust them?” His tone indicated he certainly didn’t.
“I trust Corajen,” she replied. “She wouldn’t hook me up with bodyguards that couldn’t be trusted. She said they went on a hunt together and that was all she needed to know.”
Vincent nodded. Lupusan were strange creatures, with alien ways of thinking. They formed bonds during their predatory activities, and a lupusan hunt was among the most powerful, allowing the wolves to do what they did best, work together to bring down a prey animal. If Corajen said that they’d gone on a hunt and they could now be trusted, then they could be trusted.
“So what brings you here?” Tamara asked, slightly concerned. “As I understood, we weren’t meeting up with the Republic Commodore and Commander for three more hours.”
“No, you’re correct. But I wanted to come over and get a full on update on all the company’s activities. I’ve been out of the system for a few months and I wanted to get up to speed on things.” He shook his head in disbelief. “But you’ve gotten a huge amount of work done. I am impressed.”
She bowed her head briefly in acknowledgement. “Well, these are all things that Stella can get for you,” she pointed out. “I mean, she’s an AI, she can pull up all the pertinent data and parcel it out into a proper report for you. I imagine she’d have it ready for you in a few minutes.”
“I understand, but Stella isn’t my Chief of Operations. She’s my ship AI.”
Tamara nodded. “All right. Well, as you saw, we expanded the yard and built up a mining station to take over those operations from us on this ship. Ops over there have expanded as well, they’re bringing in lots of useable metals. Fuel operations on the Kutok mine have expanded again, up to twelve sectors for processing and refinement.”
Vincent nodded. “That’s all good news there. I assume that the demand has increased as our supply has?”
“Yes. Even the government has decided to get with the program,” she said, smiling a little. “Metal and fuel.”
Vincent grinned. “Excellent. I hope you’re not giving them wholesale prices after the unpleasantness of a few months ago.”
“Not entirely, no. About one point above that, though. I don’t want the admins getting pissed off at me because they think I’m gouging them on materials.”
“I understand. Just so they know we haven’t forgotten.”
Tamara smiled. “That was the idea. So, we started on a third defensive ship, an escort frigate. I went over the numbers with Eretria, Galina and Nasir, and we knew that as of that time, there wasn’t enough in the budget to be able to afford it.”
He frowned. “Then why build it?”
“Because we need it,” she replied. “Especially if the pirates show up.”
“You wanted to build a bigger ship, one that we can’t afford, with personnel we don’t have to crew it, to deal with pirates with much greater firepower.” He leaned back in the chair, rubbing his forehead. “I’m confused.”
Tamara sighed, leaning her elbows on the desk and folding her hands. “Vincent, that ship will have just shy of twice the firepower of one of the corvettes. Can it stand up to Verrikoth’s light cruisers? Most likely not. But without it, our defensive and offensive punch is considerably less. Besides, I didn’t commission it to go headlong into a hopeless fight. I commissioned it to potentially escort freighters going to nearby systems.”
He raised an eyebrow, intrigued. “To pay for protection?”
She nodded. “That’s the thought, anyway. Whether it will work out, I don’t know. Maybe if Grania Estelle and those two new freighters I’m building decide they’re going to Heb, or the next system over, that ship could fly along with them, for a modest fee.”
“Yeah, talk to me about those freighters,” he said. “Are you trying to expand the cargo transport side of this company?”
She shrugged, smiling. “While I’m certainly not adverse to the idea, no. We were already elbow deep in the frigate when we got a message from not one, but two different companies wanting us to build a freighter for them.”
Vincent chuckled. “Oh, I bet the admins were thrilled about that.”
“I didn’t ask the admins,” Tamara said. “It isn’t their business. We’re licensed to build ships; we have facilities, the personnel and the plans. All we needed was a client. And we got two.”
“Who are they?”
“Well, the first one was led by an old spacer who’s been stuck groundside for the last three decades. He’d managed to scrape up half a million credits, which apparently was enough to convince a group of land owners with some terrestrial mining interests to throw in with him.”
“They got a name?”
“They’re calling themselves Light in the Woods. I guess they deal in natural gas, petroleum, oil and they even have themselves a serious platinum deposit.”
Vincent frowned, rubbing his chin. “And how did they come up with Light in the Woods?”
She shrugged. “Damned if I know. Not my business why they’d come up with that name, but hey, if it makes sense to them, good on them. They could call themselves the ‘I Hate Tamara Samair Society’ but as long as they’ve got the credits, I’d be fine with that.”
Vincent threw back his head and laughed. “So long as they’re willing to shell out those credits, you mean.”
“Well, yeah, that was understood.” She leaned back. “Anyway, they wanted a ship. Apparently word of your first trip to Heb had made the rounds and their thinking that they might be able to make a profit selling their goods to the people there.”
Vincent nodded, staring at the front of the desk before lifting his eyes to meet Tamara’s. “Well, if we have more ships going to Heb; that can only be good, right? Get some serious commerce going.”
“I think so too. Groger, that the name of the wolf who wants the ship, he seemed really excited about the idea. I guess he’s been missing being out in the Deep Dark for a long time.”
“Another lupusan, huh?” Vincent asked.
“They make up thirty-two percent of the local population, Vincent,” she reminded him. “Humans are at thirty-five, with zheen making up the next largest percentage. We’re going to see a lot of those three races here.”
“All right, so that’s one client. Who’s the other?” Tamara was silent for a long moment. “What? What…?” His tone got lower and suspicious.
She sighed. “A group of humans working in a steel mining foundry down on the planet. Apparently, they’d been working in the business for something like two decades and had squirreled away every single credit they could, living on nutritional supplements and noodle soup cups for years. I guess,” she said with another deep breath, “that they were tired of working for someone else, especially some big corporation, and they all up and quit. Then we arrived, and some of the crew left the ship.”
Vincent nodded. He crossed his arms over his chest. “I think I see where this is going.”
“One of the former cargomen on Grania Estelle, Neville Corvan, met one of the guys in a bar. They had some drinks, got to talking, and the rest is history.”
“Corvan,” the captain said, stroking his chin. “That was one of Taja’s least favorite people. After me, I suppose.” His expression grew dark.
“Slacker?” she asked. “I wasn’t really familiar with all the cargo people.”
He nodded. “A bit. She had to really keep on him to make sure he was pulling his weight. I was actually happy to be rid of him. I guess if he convinced these guys to buy a ship from us, I’m happy to hear his name again, though I’ll be surprised if they will be happy to work with him, once things get going.” He chuckled. “Oh, so what did those guys call themselves?”
“Which was?” he asked, a grin on his face.
“Cosmic Expedited Freight,” she said.
He grimaced. “Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.”
“No, but the changes Eretria made in the design will make the ships go quickly enough and carry slightly more cargo, so it make sense from that perspective. I wasn’t happy about the changes at first, but she sold me on them,” Tamara admitted.
“So, two new ships.”
“Yes, Captain,” she said, emphasizing his rank. “They’re not company property, but once other companies start seeing our ships out there bringing goods back and forth, it can only help. Keep on waking up the people of this system; get them out of that lethargy.”
“You’ve done good work here, Tamara,” he said. At her raised eyebrow, he hurriedly went on. “I mean it. You’ve exceeded my expectations.”
“Well, there’s more.”
“More? You just landed a huge pile of credits on me, with the certainty for more, considering how much fuel we’re going to be selling those two companies and now you’re telling me there’s more in the works?”
Tamara just grinned. “Well, you’re either growing or you’re dying. And I made an executive decision, one that I’m sure is going to get me yelled at. But I moved forward on it because I think that there’s only so much bad blood we can stomach.”
His gaze turned suspicious. “I’m not sure I like where this is going.”
“The Leytonstone.”
“Oh, hell, no,” he said, slapping his hand on his knee. “What did you do?”
“Vincent, that ship was the only reason we came to this system,” she reminded him. “We came here for protection. In the process-…”
But he cut her off. “In the process, Tamara, we’ve set ourselves up with an incredibly profitable business. You’ve built up more infrastructure than I’ve ever thought possible. Ships and a gas mine. And those bastards over on the orbital got scared. They have it in their little greedy minds that we were going to come in and push them off their comfortable little pedestals. So they sent that very ship to shit all over us. You were there, Tamara!”
She sighed. “Yes, Vincent, I was there. So were you. Good people died that day.”
“And we emerged victorious,” he shot back. “Now I agreed with you that we couldn’t board the ship. And once they restored power and started limping back to the orbital, honestly, I was happy to see them go. And now you’re going to help them fix it up?”
“I’ve already done it,” she told him.
He was on his feet. “What the fuck do you mean you already did it?”
“Sit down, Vincent,” she said coldly. “You put me in charge of Operations with this company. I didn’t want the job, you guilted me into it. And now that I’m here, I’m going to do the best job that I possibly can.”
“And how…” he sputtered. “How the hell does fixing up a warship equate to ‘doing the best job you can’?”
Tamara pointed to the chair behind him. “Sit!” she barked.
The hatch popped open and Viktoriya’s red and brown furred face poked in. Tamara shook her head but the guard didn’t leave until the captain sat himself down stiffly in the chair. Once he was sitting, Viktoriya nodded slightly and slipped back out, closing the hatch behind her.
“The whole reason we came to this system was because needed protection from the pirates. You, Taja, Cookie, Xar and Frederick Vosteros came up with that plan,” she reminded him. “You all came up with that idea. And I’ll admit, it was a good one, considering the situation we were in. And knowing that eventually Verrikoth is going to figure out where we are, where Grania Estelle is and knowing that the defensive assets in the system probably can’t stand up to his flotilla, that ship is what’s going to save us in the end, Vincent.”
He just sat there, staring at her. “That ship, our salvation? That ship nearly ended us a few months ago, Tamara. Ended us. They attacked and broke your ship, shot down nearly all the fighters and it was pure luck that we survived the attack. Their haste and stupidity allowed us to win. They sent a paper tiger after us and even then it took all we had to bring it down.”
“We couldn’t just take the ship, Vincent. I couldn’t. They managed to get the ship’s power restored and they started the long trip back to the orbital. But by that point we had nothing left. We had seven Aploras and one Delphon left. Cavalier was trashed; we barely got back to the mine for rebuilds. Yes, we could have landed the birds to rearm and refuel and send them back out, but eight fighters didn’t have the punch to take down that ship.” She eyed him. “And in order to take the ship, we’d have had to murder the crew and all of the soldiers aboard. The battle at that point was over. We had our own wounds to lick and I wasn’t willing to take it further.”
He took in a deep, shaking breath. “So what did you do for them?”
She looked at him, defiant. “I sold two milspec He3 reactors, the upgraded power conduits, a dozen A2 replicators, metals and fuel.”
He sat and fumed for a moment. “All right. So you help them fix up that ship. They bring the battlecruiser to its former glory. What’s to stop them from just flying here and either blasting us into oblivion or forcing us to bend a knee?”
“I’m sure they might consider it,” Tamara conceded. “But I thought about it too. Which is why I hard-wired the reactors with a fail-safe.”
He blinked. “What fail-safe?”
“Eretria, Nasir and I worked it into the base code of the reactors,” she explained. “It’s physically programmed into the components, burned in so that a simple wipe of the computer system won’t get rid of it. I got the idea from the pirate rigging that they did when we were on course for Amethyst. Remember? Our course was locked for Amethyst.” He nodded. “But we got the failsafe into every component in those reactors. When the ship receives a specific signal, the reactors will immediately scram, shutting down completely. The ship will be suddenly dark and ballistic, running on battery power.”
Vincent just stared at her, dumbfounded. Then he chuckled. The laugh bubbled up into his throat until he was giving a full-throated guffaw. “I love it!” But then he sobered. “But what if they find the failsafe?”
She shrugged. “We were subtle about it. That’s not to say that they couldn’t find it, but they’d have to know what to look for, first of all, and then they’d have to think to look in the components themselves, instead of in the software which is where it would be easier and more obvious to look.”
“Very good work, Tamara. I can’t say I’m not still concerned that they might try to come after us,” he said, worry plainly etched in his face.
Tamara nodded, raking a hand through her hair. “I can’t say I’m not either. But as far as the battlecruiser is concerned, I think we’ll be all right. And I’d rather have the ship online and ready when Verrikoth comes a-knocking.”
He grimaced, tapping two fingers on the arm of the chair. “I can’t say I can argue with that,” he admitted. “I’m just not comfortable with the admins having that ship under their command.”
“I wish there was a better option,” Tamara admitted. “But there really isn’t.”
“If you were in command…”
But she held up her hands and shook her head vehemently. “Oh, no. No, no, no. Captain, I’m an engineer, not a command officer. I took command of the Cavalier because we literally had no one else even remotely trained for the job. We’ve got a small corps of officers being trained at the Kutok mine on simulators and in classrooms, and then they get swapped with crews on the Cavalier and the Maitland. I’m cycling the crews and officers, other than the captains, through the ships. I w
ant to get everyone trained up so I’ll have people ready when the frigate is operational.” She shook her head. “But a battlecruiser takes several thousand crew to run properly. And we simply don’t have people trained for that.”
“I can appreciate that.” Then Vincent’s eyes narrowed. “That’s really why you’re building that other ship, isn’t it?”
“It’s certainly one of the reasons,” Tamara admitted. “But honestly, a pair of corvettes, a frigate, and two squadrons of starfighters could not stand up to a fully operational battlecruiser, even if we all fired missiles in one monster salvo.”
Vincent shook his head, as though there was a small, irritating fly buzzing around his head. “So I’m confused. We’re pinning all our hopes that this failsafe of yours is going to act as a deterrent? They don’t even know that it’s there.”
“Very true, so as a deterrent, it won’t work. What I’m hoping is that because I’m the one, or rather we’re the ones providing fuel, metals and credits into the local economy that they won’t risk losing popular support with the citizens.”
He pursed his lips but then shrugged. “Somehow the idea of the people keeping the admin council from running roughshod over anything they see as a threat doesn’t seem like the best strategy.”
Now it was Tamara’s turn to shrug. “Then that’s what the failsafe is for. And once that ship is dead in space, all of the company defensive ships will tear that battlecruiser to bits. Tugs will come in and tow the burned out hulk into one of the construction slips. Then I will hold the biggest press conference and demand the arrests of all of the admin council, showing that they yet again cannot be trusted and that they were willing to attack and kill their own citizens for no reason other than they were willing to work for a huge corporation. A corporation that is willing to build up infrastructure, create jobs, build up the economy and bring in foreign goods. Hell, sell domestic goods in other systems.”
Then she nodded, tapping a fist on the desk. “Which reminds me, we need to talk about some refits to the Grania Estelle.”
First Principles: Samair in Argos: Book 3 Page 33