First Principles: Samair in Argos: Book 3

by KOTCHER, MICHAEL

  Vincent only shrugged, but Stella looked doubtful. “Go,” Tamara said, making shooing motions with her hands. “Lots of work to do.”

  The AI smiled again and then pretended to curtsey, then vanished.

  “Well, finally, something to look forward to,” Vincent said, nodding.

  “A reason for hope, at least,” Tamara agreed. “Might even be back to normal functionality on these by the time we get started on the destroyer.” She tapped her temple. Then Tamara sighed. “It’s great getting the tech base upgrades,” she said, looking over at the captain, who had straightened himself out to be facing her desk properly again. “But Eretria’s right. We aren’t making any money on this job. And it’s a lot of hours to be putting my teams through. With overtime and all that, and the metals and fuel that we aren’t going to be compensated for.”

  “And the fact that the lovely Navy officers are trying their damndest to screw us over on the payment we did agree with…” Vincent commented darkly. “I’m almost sorry I found them in the first place.”

  She nodded. “We certainly can’t do restorations like this too many more times. In fact, I think we might need to hold off.” Then she smirked. “Unless of course, you happen upon a hull that we could salvage. Without a crew in it, begging for help.”

  His smile matched hers. “I know we don’t always agree on everything, Tamara, but I think I could get behind that.” He stood. “All right. I gotta get back to the old girl and crack the whip over Quesh and his teams to get that refit done. I need to load up on fuel and metal and then jump back for Heb.”

  “Well,” Tamara said, “Not counting the amount that we’re losing in restoring the Horus, we now have more than enough to finish our third defensive ship.”

  He sank back into the chair. “The escort frigate? Did we ever come up with a name for that?”

  She nodded. “Kay’grax named it. Mondragon.”

  “A zheen came up with that name?” he asked incredulously.

  She shrugged. “He said it had something to do with a fairy tale story he heard when he was just a larvae.” They both chuckled. “Something about a valiant insectoid warrior fighting against a fearsome fire-breathing dragon or some such. I’m sure you can imagine the tale.”

  He nodded, chuckling again. “Yeah, I’m sure I can. The name works though.”

  “And once the ship is out of dry dock, I’m shifting Leicasitaj over to the Mondragon as its captain. He’s got the most experience and I think he can handle it. We’ve got some new recruits coming in, but the people signing up for warship duty are coming in as more of a trickle than a flood.”

  Vincent shrugged. “We don’t have much in the way of warships anyway. And since we’re paying better than the Seylonique Self Defense Forces are, I’m actually surprised.”

  “Warship duty is warship duty,” Tamara said, pursing her lips. “It takes a certain breed. I think we’re approaching the end of what we might be able to reasonably expect to get from the local personnel pool for that.”

  “So where are you going with this conversation, Tamara?” he asked, trying to bring them back on point. “You mentioned that the Mondragon will be ready. Okay. So?”

  “I want you to bring Mondragon with you to Heb.”

  His jaw dropped. “Once we get Bay Eight fitted out to carry fighters, why would we need the extra firepower?”

  “Don’t be difficult, Vincent. We nearly lost Grania Estelle once to Verrikoth and his goons. And while I acknowledge having Mondragon won’t stop two light cruisers, it might make the pirate lord hesitate, giving you time to escape.”

  “And it will give your ship and its crew a good shakedown cruise and some experience doing a patrol.”

  Tamara smiled. “Exactly. And I think Ms. Stenlake will appreciate having someone to play with while she’s doing her own patrols and exercises.”

  He raised his hands to his shoulders in surrender. “All right, Tamara. You’ve sold me. Let Mister Leicasitaj know that he and his people will be accompanying my ship to Heb. Once the refits are done, of course.”

  “I’ll breathe a little easier knowing you’ve got someone watching your back.”

  He snorted. “A barracuda watching a whale.”

  “It was a remora that shot out Grania Estelle’s engines back in Ulla-tran, Vincent,” Tamara pointed out, reminding him of the pirate corvette. “I’d really like to not lose our biggest and only hyper capable transport vessel.”

  “As the one who is continuing to captain of that ship, I completely agree. I’ve been boarded by pirates twice before, I have no desire to do that again.” He sighed heavily, blowing air out in a huff. “I don’t think I’ll be lucky enough to survive the next experience.”

  Chapter 14

  “I need to get transport over to the orbital,” Theodosia said. She was seated in her small cabin aboard Horus, speaking over the comms. A good portion of repairs had been completed and the crew was able to move back aboard ship, something that made the officers breathe a bit easier. The crew wasn’t quite as happy about it; they had enjoyed a week of liberty aboard the orbital station, then spending several days in transit back to the yard. The crew was rotated to the station, getting seven days of liberty and a little more than two days in transit. The commodore, however, never left the ship, with only a few trips to Grania Estelle for her physio therapy. She was walking again, needing only a cane to help hobble around with, having refused to continue using the hover chair.

  Tamara looked up to the display. “I can accommodate that,” she said. The “requests” that the Commodore had been making over the last month had been rapidly degenerating into orders. “I have a cargo ship on a supply run heading over to the orbital in a day and a half, you can hitch a ride on that.”

  But McConnell was shaking her head. “That simply won’t do, Ms. Samair. I need one now; I have a meeting in three days. Waiting an additional day and a half will make me miss the meeting.”

  Tamara stared at her. The Republic officer still had no currency with which to purchase anything and the deal for the data files only covered repairs, room and board. Anything else that any of the crew wanted would have to be done using any resources or bartering that they could. Most of the crew had made the best of it, a few of them taking on odd jobs to pay for beer money and other trinkets. But the Commodore made increasingly imperious demands as the weeks went by and now Tamara was out of patience.

  “Commodore, I appreciate your position, but that cargo ship is the soonest I have something heading to the orbital. I have a ship I’m working on repairing, your ship, I might add, and that is among my highest priorities. You making a meeting that I assume doesn’t directly affect me since this is the first I’ve heard of it is not my problem.”

  McConnell gritted her teeth. It was clear she wanted to come down hard on Tamara for refusing her request. “Ms. Samair, you don’t seem to understand. I need to get to the orbital. I cannot miss this meeting.”

  Tamara nodded slowly, a dazzling, professional and ultimately false smile on her lips. “I completely understand, Commodore, but I simply cannot help you out any sooner than that. You’ll simply have to reschedule.”

  “Why are you acting this way?” she demanded. “I’m in need of your assistance.”

  Tamara frowned. “I’m acting this way, Commodore, because I have a business to run and only so many ships and shuttles. And they are all in use, until the cargo ship opens up in a day and a half.”

  “There must be something you could shake loose,” McConnell pressed. “I see shuttles swarming all over the yard here. One of them must be able to get me to the orbital.” She seemed quite certain of that.

  “This is not your station, Commodore. You don’t give orders here. I do.”

  “Captain Eamonn is the company owner,” McConnell shot back. “And he ordered you-…”

  “He ordered me to fix up your ship and to make sure you all had a place to live and sufficient nutrition. He said nothing to me about provid
ing rides to the orbital.” Tamara crossed her arms over her chest. “And you don’t have him here to try and bully, Commodore. He departed this morning, heading out for the Heb System. And as I said, all of the ships and shuttles are in use.”

  “Then I need access to your long range communications,” she demanded, putting the full force of her command presence in to that statement. “I want to call him.”

  “And that’s just not going to happen, Commodore,” Tamara replied. “I have better things to do than hold your hand and cater to your every whim. The only thing I care about right now is getting your ship fixed up and getting the next ship into the dry dock. I’ve got another order for a cargo ship to be built for a civilian company.”

  “You are unbelievable!” McConnell raged. “It’s a simple request!”

  “You know perfectly well that it is a far from simple request, Commodore,” Tamara replied calmly, though the fire was building behind her eyes. “You ran the military assets in a star system. You know that there are times when things are balanced just so. I am not going to disrupt my build schedules just so you can meet some people out on the orbital. You’re more than welcome to take the cargo shuttle. But that is all I can do for you. Good day, Commodore.” She pressed a control and cut the connection, seeing the other woman about to fire back with another comment.

  She sighed. “I don’t need this right now.” There was already a delay in getting one of the shipments of metal from the mining station and she simply could not afford to redirect one of the Testudos or shuttles for a trip all the way to the orbital. “Nasir?” she called.

  His image appeared in her display. “Yes, Tamara?”

  “Get on the line with everyone flying an FP company ship, shuttle or tug. Under no circumstances are they to divert course to pick up passengers unless they get explicit orders from me. Anyone who does is going to find themselves out of a job and dropped off in the middle of the jungle. Make sure they understand this, Nasir. I am not going to have that woman trying to do an end run around me.”

  “Understood, Tamara. Sending out the message to everyone now.”

  “Damn that woman!” McConnell shouted, taking her stylus and throwing it across the room. It crashed against the bulkhead, snapped in two and made a metallic clinking sound as the pieces clattered to the decking. Theodosia had spent the last hour trying to convince anyone with a ship to give her a ride to the orbital. And no one would agree to help her. All of them were apparently more afraid of Tamara Samair’s wrath than they were of a Republic Commodore. She’d threatened and cajoled and nothing had worked. Unfortunately, she didn’t have anything to offer the pilots, nothing in the way of monetary compensation, which only made things worse. Samair had boxed her in. There wasn‘t anything she could do about this.

  Theodosia pressed a control, routing a call through the station’s comm array. She could send a message to Vincent Eamonn on the Grania Estelle, but it would be hours before he responded and even longer for the response to reach her. By then it wouldn’t matter anyway, even if he decided to countermand the orders of his Chief of Operations, which he might not even be willing to do. And if he was, by the time his orders even made it back to the yard, she might miss the meeting anyway. There was nothing for it now. She was going to have to contact the members of the admin council and reschedule the meeting.

  The door alert chimed. “Enter,” she said. A moment later, Brianne entered the cabin.

  “Any luck?” the Secaaran asked.

  “No,” she replied in utter frustration. “And now I have to contact the admins on the orbital and see if they will change the time of the meeting. The soonest I can get a ship is a day and a half from now.”

  Brianne nodded. “Do you think they will accommodate you?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not sure. The idea of setting up basing rights here in Seylonique is a good one. It’s certainly something that I think they should look into, especially since Byra-Kae fell to those animals.”

  “But will they believe the threat, Commodore?” Brianne asked. “As far as we know, nothing has ever come into this system to bother them. We’re the first Republic ship to actually jump into this system in over a decade. Fury and Wayfarer never came this way. They always went through Ulla-tran. The rest of our ships were patrolling outward from here, but the courses they plotted always managed to avoid this place.”

  “Probably because of their battlecruiser,” McConnell explained. “I checked the ship’s logs that were containing information from the patrol ships. About sixteen years ago or so, one of our ships, the Otacon, came into the system on a routine patrol, a ‘show the flag’ kind of thing. Her captain must have been a bit belligerent toward the locals and they used that cruiser of theirs to chase Otacon out of the system, with the warning that any ships from the Republic entering the system without invitation from that point forward would be fired upon and destroyed. My predecessors apparently took the threat seriously.”

  “Little did they know that the battlecruiser was decaying as time went by, growing ever more decrepit,” Brianne put in.

  “Right.” One of the status feeds that the Commodore had managed to get a hold of was a repair report on the Leytonstone. She probably wasn’t supposed to have it, but she’d managed to finagle it from one of the bureaucrats working for the admin council, claiming that she was working with them and could she please see it. The paper pusher was only too happy to fall all over himself to please and a few minutes later she had access to the feed.

  At this time, the battlecruiser was actually in better shape than it had been when an attack had been launched on FP property, seven months earlier. Three of the six sublight engines had been installed, and all three of the milspec fusion reactors had been put in and power was coursing through the ship’s veins. The hull armor was repaired, but there was still a large amount of weapons and shield nodes that needed to be replaced. There was about another month’s worth of work left to get the ship up and ready for shakedown. The Commodore was nodding in appreciation. It was a fine ship and in fact she was envious. She couldn’t be more proud of the destroyer that was doubling as her flagship, but to see a full-on capital ship, a battlecruiser nonetheless, in the hands of an independent star system, a ship that was levels of magnitude better than what the Republic had seen fit to provide her with filled her with pure, unfiltered emerald envy.

  If only I’d had that ship at my disposal when that bastard of a pirate ‘lord’ showed up with his flotilla. That battle would have turned out quite differently of that I’m sure.

  “Well, by the time Horus gets out of the dry dock, so will the Leytonstone,” Theodosia commented, looking at her Flag Captain. “Which means that if they want us out of here, there wouldn’t be much we could do to resist.”

  “Horus is more maneuverable and has better acceleration than a battlecruiser,” Brianne argued.

  “Of course, but a ship like that will be much better in the way of endurance. We couldn’t outrun them forever and if we jumped out they would have fulfilled their purpose. And we’d get mauled if we tried to close in to attack. We might, and I stress might, have a slight edge in the reach of our turbolasers, but we only have the forward battery. If we weren’t careful, they could close that small difference in range and tear us apart.” She frowned, then nodded. “Which is all the more reason to try and establish good relations with the admins now, before that ship is ready.”

  Brianne nodded slowly. “It does make sense. I hope you have a plan for when the battlecruiser is actually up and running. Because you know those politicians are suddenly going to change their minds once they think they’re dealing from a position of strength.”

  “Oh, I know it. I’ll just have to play things by ear and try and set up the best deal I can,” McConnell admitted. “Something that they’re going to feel is in their best interest; something they won’t want to abrogate.”

  Brianne looked doubtful, but didn’t say anything.

  Things continued movi
ng forward. The two cargo ships were loaded up with goods and were headed out. There was a good deal of fanfare at the send off, and the press was making them a feature. “Businesses to the Stars” was the headline and reporters had interviewed the ship captains as well as the home office investors. All of them were hopeful, excited and had nothing but good things to say about the builders and people at FP, Inc. One of the ships, the Awakening, made for Bimawae, carrying a load of farm equipment, hoping that they could sell to the farmers and the government. There was a corn and wheat crop that would be a month away from harvest by the time Awakening arrived and the company stood to make a killing. The other ship, the Silver Dawn, would be travelling to Heb, flying in convoy with Grania Estelle and Mondragon, bringing along a load of machine parts.

  Grania Estelle, meanwhile, was bringing two cargo holds full of He3 fuel, as well as three more of processed metals for construction. The other two bays were loaded with a variety of cargoes, bought from local vendors; things like air cars, farming equipment (Awakening’s crew wasn’t the only one who wanted to make a profit from agriculture) and another load of power conduits for the local power grid (these were constructed by FP). The grid had been mostly completed when Grania Estelle had departed Heb the last time, but the local government had requested the Captain bring more on the next trip.

  Tamara and the Captain had sat down with Nasir and Stella to set up some sort of currency exchange. The likelihood that the people from Heb would continue to be able to pay in volatile compounds was slim, though all four had agreed that trying to get at least some of the payment in foodstuffs was a good idea. And it seemed as though with more ships making trips between Heb and Seylonique there needed to be a conversion between currency, and Tamara had suggested getting on the comms with Silver Dawn’s Captain and purser while the two ships made their way to the hyper limit, get her involved. They’d work it out, Tamara was sure.