Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 (76 page)

              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 probably 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?”

              He sighed heavily.  “I don’t know, Stella,” he replied.  He rubbed his nose and then slapped his hand lightly on the table.  “I honestly just don’t know.”

              “So what do we have?” Ka’Xarian asked to the group at large.  They were aboard the shuttle in the fueling station’s main hangar bay, the one place where the zheen was sure that the locals wouldn’t be listening.  He swept the shuttle for monitoring devices every day, using a few toys of his own design and was sure that no one was listening.  They’d discovered a few bugs and removed them, and judging by the dirty looks station security had been giving them indicated they were aware their surveillance wasn’t working.  It didn’t mean they would stop, Xar knew, but it did mean that he would need to keep up with his own countermeasures.

              “I’ve found the survivors of the
Emilia Walker
,” Sally Duncan, one of Xar’s power techs spoke up.  Sally was tall for a human woman, dark skinned with a frizzy mop of hair.  She was arguably the most serious member of the
Grania Estelle
, though some argued she and Kutok were tied for that particular honor.  However, there were few aboard who could run a reactor like she could, which was why Quesh and Ka’Xarian valued her as part of the team.

              “Where?”

              “They’re being held on Deck Four, section two-twenty,” she replied sourly.  “Which is as bad as it can get.  From what I can tell, the compartments they are being held in are right up against the outer hull.”

              “Which means that if we can locate exactly where that is, someone on the outside of the hull could cut through and get them out,” Jesma reasoned.

              “Yes, someone could,” Lorcan Hughes said.  He was a heavy worlder who had the short, square and stocky build characteristic of those born on higher gravity planets.  “But as soon as you breached the hull, the atmo would get sucked out into the void and kill anyone inside.”

              Jesma shrugged.  “So then we pull the shuttle up to the side of the hull, extend a sleeve and get seal.  Then we can cut them out.”

              But Lorcan was shaking his head.  “Yeah, that would work, but there’s no way Hana and his people wouldn’t notice us flying right up to the hull of the station where we have no business being.  They’d probably just shoot us before we got anywhere near the station.”

              “So what’s the alternative?” she demanded.  “Storm the cells from within the station?”

              Now it was Ka’Xarian who was responding in the negative.  “With just us?  We wouldn’t get near that part of the station.  We could try a few tricks with the computers, maybe even spoof them for a while, but it wouldn’t be enough.  Even if we made it all the way to the shuttle and managed to launch, once we were in open space, the pinnaces would come for us.  I doubt we’d be able to launch a cyber attack on the pinnaces.”

              “Be nice if we could,” Lorcan replied.  “I’d need to get a look under the hood of one of them in order to try.  We need to see the hardware and what kind of software and firewalls they have.  It could be done, potentially, but they’d have to come in to the station and we’d need access to really try.”  Then he sighed.  “I suppose it might be possible to attack them remotely, but we’d only get one shot.  Once they detected an intrusion, we’d be on lockdown and its game over.  Unless there’s something else going on to distract them, like a battle going on outside.”

              “Captain’s a tough bastard, but even he knows our ship is no match for the locals.”

              “So it’s over then,” Jesma said, slumping onto one of the passenger couches.  “We can’t get them.  If we try, we’re dead or ending up just like them.”

              The all just sat and looked at one another, no one having anything else to add.  Finally, Ka’Xarian spoke up.  “Fueling ops will be completed in six hours.  Then we go out to the gas giant, drain the collector, pick it up, and then head back to the ship.”