A Greater Interest: Samair in Argos: Book 4 (55 page)

              Things only got worse from there.  The assault transport, unmolested up to this point, launched shuttles.  They dove toward the gas giant, going into the upper atmosphere from the far side of the gas giant from the Kutok mine.  They skirted the defensive platforms and raced around the planet.  In short order, the shuttles had reached the gas mine and docked.

              The remaining ships managed a few more runs, but the damage accumulated was just too much.  On a high note, however, E-group (what remained) and the lightly damaged
Tsesuko
and her strike group managed to inflict serious damage on the pirate light cruiser. 
Equinox
and her one remaining corvette poured heavy laser fire into her port side, while
Tsesuko
and her escorts swooped in and pumped the same point with their own energy weapons, launching a volley of missiles to go with it.  A quartet of missiles slipped through the point defense and made it into the breach where they promptly exploded.  The combined force of the blast added with the secondary explosions from within tore the ship in half. 

The officers and crew involved in the sim cheered, but the victory was short lived.  More maneuvers, more attacks, slashing and peeling away at the flanks of the two cruisers and their rapidly dwindling escorts.  But increasing damage markers began to show on the defender ships as well.  A lucky and intense salvo from the heavy cruiser battered
Equinox,
punched through her hull armor, and a follow up severed a series of primary plasma conduits, which killed power to the engines and aft third of the already damaged destroyer. 

The sim ended with roughly the same outcome as the real engagement, but this time the gas mine was in enemy hands.  Follow up data provided by the sim’s computer indicated that the boarders on the gas mine had managed to disable the encryption for the controls to the defense platforms.  They couldn’t take control of them, per se, but they could blow them up.  Which they did.  At that point it didn’t take much effort to move in and take whatever quantities of the precious fuel they wished.  The miniscule number of defense ships couldn’t make a dent in the cruisers, not a serious one.  The remaining light cruiser arrowed forward, speeding straight at
Tsesuko
’s strike group, guns blazing.  The ship was relatively unharmed and in one firing run, in which the cruiser commander managed to maintain medium firing distance, he simply pounded on the lighter defender ships, reducing them to scrap.

One small highlight
, Gants thought bitterly. 
At least the First Principles ships got trashed just as much as ours did.  Only two corvettes remaining of our original forces and they were too small and weak to attempt to take on two cruisers on their own.

The chime to his ready room door sounded.  “Enter.”

The door slid open and a woman entered.  She stepped forward and the door slipped shut behind her.  “Colonel Gants.”

He looked up from the display, then pressed a control to deactivate it.  “Tamara Samair, as I live and breathe.  Come to gloat?”  He knew he was behaving badly, but he just couldn’t help himself.

But the woman shook her head.  “No, Colonel, I’m not.  I didn’t get to be up in space with the rest of the defense forces, but I remember that fight.  I remember hearing that ships crewed and commanded by people I knew had been destroyed.”  She looked away.  “It certainly wasn’t glorious.”

He glared at her.  “I never expected it to be glorious.”

Tamara gave him a wan smile.  “Yes you did.  All of us do that enter the service.  We all think that it’s going to be daring charges into the teeth of the enemy and then a string of victories to our name.  Of course, no one will die, no one that we care about, anyway.  Some nameless face that we can raise a glass to in the bar and tell how they died.”

He blinked and then frowned at her.  “In the service?  Oh, wait, I heard a rumor that you used to be in the Republic Navy.”

Tamara nodded, then sat herself in the chair in front of his desk.  He raised an eyebrow, but didn’t object.  “I did.  A very long time ago, Colonel.  I was a pilot and then an engineer.”  She smiled wryly.  “I still am, technically.”

The colonel looked at her for a long moment.  “Why are you here, Samair?”

“I wanted to see how you are, Colonel.”

“So you are here to gloat.”

“No, I’m here to see how you’re faring,” she corrected, leaning back more comfortably in the chair and crossing her arms.  “It was a difficult sim and things didn’t turn out as you’d hoped.  But we need to learn from this.  We need to shrug it off and learn from it.”

“Learn to be humiliated?”

Tamara shook her head.  “Learn not to make the same mistakes.  So that the next time they come here, and mark my words, Verrikoth
will
be back here, we can stab them in the guts and send them running.”

“Very lurid,” he said dryly.  “So I noticed you changed the sim.”

She shrugged.  “You were expecting things a certain way, so I changed them.  But only in ways that I think the pirate lord will use in the future.  He allowed his forces to get spread out the last time, unable to cover one another and the FP ships managed to tear them up fairly well before most of them were lost.  Next time, I suspect he’s going to try something with a little more finesse.  He’s going to try formation work, maybe not exactly like what I used, but he’s going to want to make sure that his forces work together.”

“I see.”

“But you managed your forces quite well, Colonel,” Tamara said approvingly.

He scowled.  “Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not.  Your numbers and strengths weren’t enough to try and meet the pirate forces head on, so you changed tactics.  Breaking into three speedy formations to slash at the escorts first and then the flanks of the formation, it was very good.  If not for a few strokes of bad luck, things might have turned out differently.”

“Like Greer’s snafu?” 

“Among others.”  The she looked sheepish.  “And I
did
increase the turbolaser fire on the cruisers by six percent.  Enough to make a small difference but not so much as you’d notice until after.”

He shook his head slowly, wanting to be angry, but then ended up chuckling.  “I
knew
you were a cheat, Ms. Samair.”

“If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough,” she said in explanation, leaning back in the chair a bit.  “That’s what we used to say in tactical school back in the Republic Navy.  I’m sure that the sentiment lives on here in Seylonique.”

“I may have heard it once or twice before.”  Tamara hesitated.  Gants’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, then his face relaxed in exasperation.  “What?”

“…And I may have had the fire control on all the ships managed by a pair of AI’s,” she admitted impishly.  “Nasir and Apogee were interested in joining the excitement.  So I brought them in to be part of the op force.”

He snapped his fingers.  “I wondered why it was you needed the
Samarkand
so close to the shipyards.  So with those two controlling the gunnery on the pirates, I’m imagining a great deal more of their fire was hitting my forces than normally should have?”

“A good deal more, yes,” Tamara replied.  “Though I will say that we didn’t really see any of the cruisers really cut loose with their weapons during the real battle.  They really didn’t need to.  So the levels of fire that your ships were experiencing, as was
Tsesuko
’s group, in case you think I was showing favoritism, was about thirty percent heavier than we actually saw during the battle.”

“So it was much harder.”  It wasn’t a question.

Tamara shrugged.  “Plan and train for the worst.  That way you can be pleasantly surprised if the real enemy turns out to be less than you expect.”

“’The more you sweat, the less you bleed’ you mean?” he asked wryly.

“Exactly.  So let’s go over things,” Tamara said.  Then she backed down a bit.  “If you like.”

He eyed her for a few seconds.  “I heard what happened with the councilor.  About them restricting your company’s defense fleet.”  He looked as though he was going to say more, but he ended up looking away.

She shrugged.  “I’m actually surprised that it took them as long as it did.  Or after the first fight out at the gas mine that they would be willing to let me continue building warships for FP at all.”  She grimaced at that, knowing where she was sitting and whom she was talking to.

Clearly Gants wasn’t offended because he just waved his hand dismissively.  ”
I’m
surprised that you were willing to help ou with the repair and refit of
Leytonstone
after that battle.  I know that we got the fusion reactors from you.”

“I didn’t want the system to lose its biggest defensive asset because I had a beef with the governing council,” Tamara told him.  “Though I will admit I was worried that you, or if not you then whoever the council replaced you with, were going to get it into your head to exact some retribution.  Even with the new defensive ships I had built by the time, this ship would still have rolled over us.  Though I think I flatter my people when I say that they would have made you regret it.”

“But with this ship…”

She chuckled.  “It’s a big beautiful ship, Colonel.  I don’t have the proper anatomy for us to compare sizes.  Let’s just say that FP would have been in a very bad way had you decided to take us on.”

He bridled a bit at her comment about comparing sizes.  Gants took a deep breath, making a decision.  “All right then, Ms. Samair.  What did we do wrong?”

“If it’s all right with you, Colonel, we should go over everything.  What went right, what needs tweaking and what definitely went wrong.”

The door to the ready room slid open and his steward, Perkins, stepped inside, pushing a small cart.  A carafe of coffee, a pitcher of water, and several covered boxes were on the cart.  “Colonel?” he asked, gesturing to the cart.

Gants nodded.  “Coffee, please, Perkins.  And if the stories I hear about Ms. Samair are true, you should pour one for her as well.”

She smiled at the steward.  “Yes, please.”  He was already handing her a steaming mug.  She breathed in the scent.  “Oh, that’s lovely.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” the man replied, giving a small bow.

“You’re going to get him all puffed up, Samair,” the colonel replied, as Perkins poured him a cup.  “Thank you, Perkins.  But I think we two can manage on our own.”

“Of course, sir.” 

              “Oh and Perkins?” Tamara said as he was about to step back out.

              “Ma’am?”  He looked back.

              “I know what it is that the government issues to the Navy for grub,” she said, gesturing to the open boxes of food and the carafe.  “And you, sir, set a very fine table.”

              He beamed, flushing with pleasure.  “Why, thank you, ma’am.”

              “If you’re ever hard up for work, give me a call.  I can always use a man with your talents.”  He toasted him with her cup and he flushed deeper. 

              “Ma’am.  Colonel,” Perkins said and then he left, the door whispering shut behind him.

              “Poaching, Samair?  Really?  You’ve been here only a few minutes and you’re trying to steal my steward?” Gants said, shaking his head.

              She shrugged.  “He pours an excellent cup of coffee, Colonel.”  Tamara took another sip. 

              “Should we get started then?” Gants asked.

Chapter 18

              “This is it, people,” Tamara Samair said, enthusiastically, addressing the personnel of First Principles, Inc, the Navy personnel, the Councilor and her entourage, even the couple of reporters from S-Int that had shown up in the outer system.  She was seated in the copilot’s couch aboard
Moxie-2
, watching the ballet about to unfold. “Spin Day.  I know we’ve done this sort of thing before, it’s old hat for you.  So what do we do?  We scale it up.  So,
Samarkand,
this is your show.  Everyone else, get comfortable.”

              And the show began.  Tugs under automated control moved into position around the molten ball of steel.  Ten of the small, blocky ships moved into a formation equidistant around the the equator of the ball of metal.  The plan was to spin and flatten out the ball of metal so that it would be on a plane edge on to the sun, to lessen the effect of any solar radiation and, in theory, speed cooling.  It wouldn’t be much, but even cutting a couple of weeks off the cooling time would benefit in the long run.

              After about a half hour of maneuvering, the ships were in position and ready.  “Activating tractoring beams,” Nasir’s gravelly voice announced.  On sensors, the ten ships suddenly had a blue line, then a cone connecting them to the image of the metal ball.  “Beginning rotation.  Maintain fire from heaters, adjust as necessary.”  The heat had to be maintained and adjusted as the metal was spun, in order to keep it from cooling too quickly.

              The tugs started to move, ever so slowly, never breaking formation, all of them under the control of the AI.  Tamara wasn’t worried about his precision, she knew that the engineering AI could handle the job.  After a few minutes, they started moving faster and the sensors registered that the ball was starting to move. 

              “How long do you think it will take, Ma’am?” the pilot asked from the next couch over. 
Moxie-2
was holding position a good distance apart; Tamara wanted to be sure that she was well away from where the action was, as well as staying out of the regular shipping lanes.  It wasn’t all that hard, space was big and there were plenty of places a small ship like this one could stand off and still see the work.

              “Not really sure, Mike,” she said truthfully.  “I know that the disks we spun up for the walls of the slips in the shipyard didn’t take more than a few hours to actually stretch once the spin got going.  This one is considerably bigger.  I could guess, but I’d be just that.  Three or four hours maybe to get it going, and then after that two or three more to get up to size.”  She shook her head and shrugged.  “But I really don’t know.  Nasir’s got it though.  He’s got to start it moving slow to make sure it doesn’t wobble and deform, but once he really gets it going it won’t actually take that long to expand to the size we want.”  She she sighed.  “It’s just the weeks of waiting for it to cool that will be a pain.”

              He glanced over at her.  “Anxious to get started, Ma’am?”

              She snorted, looking over at him.  “Mike, I understand that I’m your boss.  I get that.  But we spend a fair amount of time together, and everyone calls me either Ms. Samair or Ma’am.  Do you think it might be possible that you could call me by my name?”

              The man looked horrified.  “I’m not sure, ma’am.  It wouldn’t really be proper.”

              Tamara smiled at him.  “When have you known me to be doing things that were proper?”

              “A point, Ma’am,” he replied, looking back to his controls.  “And I know the government types and the Navy people and what have you don’t like your way of doing things.  Upsetting the mango cart and all, the established way of doing things.  So far it’s worked out pretty well for you and the rest of us who follow you.  But you haven’t been cheating your customers, or cutting safety corners or screwing over your workers.  And despite what some of the newsies might imply, you’re not… I mean.”  He looked flustered.

              Tamara looked puzzled, though she had an idea of what he was referring to.  “I’m not what, Mike?” she asked gently.

              The pilot looked away, gluing his gaze to the display in front of him, showing the ever accelerating (albeit slowly) ring of tugs around the metal ball.  He was quiet for a long moment, but Tamara didn’t rush him.  She had a feeling he would speak if she just stayed quiet.  She only hoped that the guards in the next compartment would keep quiet long enough for him to say his piece.

              Finally, it seemed as though he made some sort of decision and he spoke.  “They fall back on the same arguments and insults that people tend to use when a strong woman shakes up the establishment.  Calling you… an impure woman.”

              A laugh forced itself unbidden from her throat.  “An impure woman?  I don’t think I remember being called that before.  That has got to be the most old-fashioned insult ever directed at me.  And I’m almost three centuries old!”  She laughed again.

              “You know what I mean, Ma’am,” the man replied awkwardly, face flaming.  “That you’re some kind of whore, that could have only achieved what she has by sleeping with anyone, man, woman, or alien, that she needed to to get to the top.” 

              “That still doesn’t explain why you won’t use my name, Mike.”

              He squirmed a bit on his pilot’s couch.  “It… it just doesn’t seem right.  You’re my boss and you pay me to do a job.  Getting all familiar… well.  It’s just not proper.”  He gritted his teeth.  “And because of those terrible things that they call you, I feel wrong trying to refer to you as too familiar.  I don’t want it to look as though I’m not being respectful.”

              “Well, I thank you for your gallantry.  But in private, or at least here on the ship, please call me by my name.  I get insulated from any sort of really friendly presence because of my position.  Would you do this for me, please?”

              It amused her that the man actually took a moment to think about it.  “Yes… Tamara, I think I can do that.”

              She was grinning at him.  “That really hurt, didn’t it?”

              He shuddered, then smiled.  “More than I can express, Tamara.”

              Finally, after hours of waiting, the expansion was noticeable.  The tugs had pulled back from the flattening disk but would occasionally latch back on and give the disk another nudge, always in complete unison.  It wasn’t long before the disk was up to a proper speed and expanding on its own.  The tugs backed off but stayed close.

              “Looking good,” Tamara muttered to herself.

              The disk had already reached a diameter of eleven kilometers and showed no sign of slowing down.  It passed thirteen, then fifteen kilometers, and at eighteen, the next phase of the show began.  Nasir had another dance of the tugs start slowing it down and right on cue, the heaters deactivated.  It was impossible for Tamara to tell with her Mark One Eyeball that the expansion was slowing, but the sensors were clearly showing a 0.05 percent decrease in the rate of expansion.  And that rate of deceleration was increasing.  The tugs continued to keep pace with the leading edge of the disk; all of the tugs activating their tractoring beams simultaneously but only for a fraction of a section each time, putting just the barest amount of friction on the edge of the spinning metal.  Over the next two hours, the dance continued and all parties not directly involved watched in fascination as inexorably, the metal shield finally stopped growing in size and came to rest.

              “Final count, twenty-two point four kilometers in diameter,” the lupusan AI reported over the comms to the assembled audience.  “Current thickness is one point six four eight kilometers.  I expect some degree of contraction, which I will monitor closely over the next few months as the disk cools, but it shouldn’t be unmanageable.  Thank you all for your patience and your attention.”  Nasir signed off.

              Tamara slumped back into the couch in the main compartment, having retreated there hours before to get more comfortable.  All of the guards, save Viktoriya, had piled onto the couch near her, as well on on nearby chairs to watch the display.  The sisters told stories of their time in the army, of bivouacking in terrible places: the desert on the southern continent on the habitable world, the forests of Vimera (which had bugs the size of dinner plates, and snakes that could eat a lupusan), and on the fever island of Cotalina.  Calvin, not to be outdone by a pair of wolves, told a ridiculous tale about how he and his platoon had chased an oxcart with an atomic bomb in the cargo area through the passes of a mountain for a week, as the ox was so frightened of the platoon of soldiers it kept running until finally, the ox twisted its ankle on some loose stones, allowing Calvin (the hero of the story, of course) to leap atop the wagon and yank on the reins, bringing the beast to a stop.

              Redfaced from laughing, Tamara asked, “So why didn’t you just shoot the ox?  I mean, the poor beast and all, but there was a nuclear device!”

              Calvin blinked, drawing out the tension.  “Well, Ma’am, I couldn’t risk it.  Those mountain roads were fearfully narrow and I was afraid if I shot it and it panicked, or reared, it would tumbled over the edge and the device might go off, or crack the casing or a hundred other terrible thing.  So we just had to keep chasing the big beastie until finally he got too tuckered out to run.”  More laughter.

For long hours, there really wasn’t much to see, other than the tugs moving around the metal ball.  Once it got going, though, it moved quickly and they were all impressed.  Tamara had known what to expect and the giant metal disk still made her nod in appreciation.  “Going to be a lot of work, building that thing up.”

“Why build it, Ma’am?” Kiki asked, looking over at her principle.  “Just to do it?”

Tamara shrugged.  “That’s certainly
a
reason,” she replied.  “But it isn’t
the
reason.  Or even the biggest reason.  It biggest reason is to protect the gas mine from orbital bombardments.  Secondary is to provide a place that the crews and their families can live out here, without having to take a transport all the way back to the orbital.  Encourage people to come out here from the planet, stay here if they come in from other systems.  More trade, more people, more coins in the coffers.”

“More money?” the wolf asked. 

“And it
is
a good idea,” Tamara said.  “If we can make a place that’s safe for people to come out, more will.  And if money happens to be the by product of that, well.  I’m willing to make that sacrifice.”

Calvin gave a low yowl, the others yipped.  Even the dour Viktoriya huffed a laugh.

“She actually did it.  I can’t believe it.  That wrench-turning little chit actually managed to spin that great plate up.”  Carriger Hroth sat in her suite watching the news footage, not really wanting to listen to the talking heads prattle away about what they thought of this venture.  They didn’t understand, so they were trying to find explanations anywhere they could.  They were talking with “experts”: men and women with engineering degrees from notable schools who had never left the classrooms or the research labs, people who had never actually done anything practical with their lives, were judging Samair and her company. 

“The idea that this is a practical project, something that could actually bring profit to this system is absolutely ludicrous,” a zheen mathematician had said only a few minutes before.  “A gigantic plate made of steel, is… well, it’s an impressive achievement.  But it’s just a waste of resources, effort and time.”

“But you have to admit, Zovek,” another person on the show, a human male, replied, “That considering all the heights that Tamara Samair and by extension her company, First Principles, have aspired to, they’ve succeeded beyond everyone’s expectations?”  He shook his finger at him.  “Who’s to say that they won’t do the same thing again here?  I’m certainly willing to give First Principles the benefit of the doubt.”

“It’s ludicrous,” the zheen commentator shot back.  “There is nothing that they could actually build that would make the expense worthwhile.  And you mark my words,” he shot back, shaking a mauve, blunt finger of his own, “that woman and that company will be hitting up the government, or rather the taxpayers for money once that big plate cools.”

“Mute!” Carriger snapped and thankfully the sound shut off.  “Idiots,” she snarled at the display.  Narrow-visioned idiots who couldn’t see anything but their own ideology and stars forbid anyone complicate their ordered and tidy little worlds with anything so crass as new ideas.  Yes, it was a twenty-two kilometer metal plate.  It was important, that plate.  For the protection it was provided, yes, but also for what was going to be built upon and under it.

But that was months away.  A degree of prep work would need doing so that once the plate was cool enough to work on, they could hit the ground running.  If she knew Samair, and the she-wolf was certain she did, a great deal of material and equipment was already in the pipeline.  One of her aides had overheard a conversation about “giant engines” which only made sense.  A slab of metal that size would need massive thrusters to maintain its position above the gas mine and to keep its orbit from decaying lest it plunge into the atmosphere.

Then there would be the weapons batteries.  The big heaters, the battleship-grade turbolaser and heavy laser batteries, would be converted from temperature-control devices to their original function: defensive platforms and the councilor had no doubt that additional gun batteries would be constructed and put in.