Hold the Star: Samair in Argos: Book 2 (19 page)

              Another few seconds and it was all over, the other zheen was eviscerated without landing a single hit on either of the attackers.  He had hissed in terror but hadn’t even thought to activate his communicator or fire off his gun.  He couldn’t see anything and the roars had temporarily disoriented him.  He stood no chance. 

              The two lupusan stood panting for almost a minute after the last of the pirates was dead.  Finally, Corajen stepped over to the console which, thankfully, was still active and reactivated the lights.  When they came back on, Security looked like a horror show.  Blood, both green and red was splattered everywhere.  The deck was thick with it from the four different bodies.  Both she and Saiphirelle were drenched in the stuff and her sibling was busy licking her forearm, which was clear of blood, trying to get the zheen fluid off of her tongue.

              “Disgusting,” Saiphirelle muttered, continuing to lick her forearm.  Finally, she gave up and grinned at her sister.  “Now that was fun!” she crowed.  “I haven’t done a dark ambush in
ages
and ages!”

              Corajen grunted, chuckling.  “We’ve been out of touch for a long while.”  She flicked her muzzle in the direction of the next compartment in the rear of this one.  “Get in there and get proper weapons.  Bring me my rifle, if it’s still in there.  Armor too.”

              “Right,” Saiphirelle replied, grinning wider.  “Finally!  More proper fighting!  No more skulking around in that damned metal box, no more behaving ourselves with the crew, no more waiting for orders.  Just kill, kill, and kill!”  The lupusan was as happy as Corajen had ever seen her.

              “Just remember we’re only killing the pirates,” Corajen reminded her, checking the internal security feeds.  “You leave the rest of the crew alone.”

              “Yeah, yeah,” Saiphirelle replied, her voice floated back from the next room.  There were the thumps and metallic sliding noises usually associated with the armory cage doors being opened and weapons being taken out and checked.  Less than two minutes later, Saiphirelle came back into the main room, wearing her full body armor but no helmet, a bandolier of magazines across her chest and a rifle in her hand.  She held a second rifle by its sling, another bandolier, and a mass of armor by several straps.  She handed it over to her sibling, going over to the hatch once Corajen had taken the gear and began strapping it on.  Saiphirelle looked out into the corridor and seeing no one, stepped out and picked up the datapad and the two discarded weapons, then went back inside.  With a sigh, she grabbed one of the bodies and easily hauled it over to the side of the compartment, out of the way.  She moved on to the second as Corajen continued strapping on her own armor.  By the time she had all of the corpses piled up against the bulkhead, Corajen was finished and checking the chamber of her weapon.  Nodding in satisfaction, she then strapped on a needler pistol to the front left side of her armor and slid the stunner into an empty holster under her right armpit. 

              “Ready to go?” Sai asked.

              Corajen nodded.  “Gotta clear the berthing areas,” she said.  “And we’ve gotta move quickly before they get organized.  We were a bit loud taking care of those four.  That was probably a mistake.  Hope it doesn’t bite us in the ass.”  She pressed a few controls and all of the displays in the Security department switched from active to a standard screen showing “Locked”.  “Let’s get moving.”

              As they began to jog down the corridor, Saiphirelle said, “If anyone is going to do any biting, it’s going to be us!”

              “And here we go,” Quesh whispered to himself.  He pressed the control on his display, which activated the interference pattern throughout the ship.  A quick check showed that it was online.  All communications throughout the ship were now completely blocked.  No one could coordinate with anyone else.  This was both a good thing and a bad thing, he mused, looking over his shoulder.  The two guards that had been here had casually walked out the doors of Main Engineering, heading to other parts of the ship.

              “Where the hell are they going?” he wondered aloud.  But then a window opened on his display and he cursed.  The shields were acting up.  “Damn, the power grid.  Starkey!  Get on the grid.  Even it out and keep an eye on it!”

              “Copy, Chief!”

              It wasn’t anything serious, thankfully, but it was something that needed tending to, especially if they were going to be bringing the ship up to max speed in a short while.  They definitely couldn’t have any kind of fluctuations in the shields with the kind of energies and stresses travel through hyperspace would put on them.  At best, a ship with that sort of problem would be forced to make a crash translation back into normal space, most probably suffering moderate damage.  At worst… well, plenty of ships had been lost because of similar problems.

              “Showing a six point seven fluctuation in power through the starboard EPS conduits,” the engineer reported.  “Might have been the pirate techs when they started the repairs back at Ulla-tran, Chief.  Damned sloppy work.  Didn’t notice it when we were cruising along in the Red.”

              Quesh nodded.  “No, and with as low a power level as we were pumping into the shields, it didn’t really register.  But we’ll notice that.  Starkey, you stay put.  McNair!  Lorcan!”  He bellowed to two of the techs, one a female human, the other the male human who’d helped rescue the survivors from
Emilia Walker
.  “Get over to the starboard section, and double check the distribution nodes.  We’ve got to get this fluctuation under control.  Starkey will direct you.”

              “Got it, Chief!” the blond haired McNair called.  “Come on, you,” she called to the big man, who immediately trotted along behind her.

              Now that they were gone, Quesh checked the status of the transfer.  He had a good portion of bridge controls under his command, and if Xar had done his job, Environmental control would be isolated from the rest of the ship.  Someone would have to physically go to the Environmental spaces to control the air and the heat.  But there was still a little ways to go.  The bridge wasn’t completely locked out, a few more minutes were yet to go.

              “Come on,” the Parkani whispered, his voice completely lost in the tumult of Main Engineering.  “Little bit faster.”  He kept one eye on the progress of the transfer, while keeping his other eye on the other diagnostic displays.  That, of course meant that he had to keep looking up every few seconds to check his surroundings in the compartments.  He couldn’t afford to let himself get bogged down in any of the details for too long and miss the big picture.  At least not until the ship was free of pirates.  At that point, the deck division, or what remained of them, would be able to take back their actual responsibilities and he could get back to the very important work of running Engineering.  His engines and shields and power distribution hubs needed some very serious attention.

              Another fifteen minutes and enough of the bridge controls would be transferred that there would be nothing anyone outside Main Engineering could do.  He kept glancing up to check the compartment, but most of his attention was focused on that transfer macro on his display.  The seconds ticked by.

              Kutok stepped onto the bridge, her multiple legs clicking against the metal of the deck plates.  Serinda was there, leaning back in her chair at the communications console, feet up, reading from her datapad.  The hak’ruk gave a short huff of annoyance, but it was a fond one.  Both females got along very well, though Kutok was a great deal more fastidious in her personal habits than Serinda, though the young woman was by no means sloppy. 

              Kutok had only returned to duty three days prior, her injured arm healed and the new cloned hand attached.  It was still a bit… off.  She was still going through physical therapy to relearn how to use this hand, it would develop a slight tremor if she tried to do too much in the way of typing or fine manual work with it for too long.  It was getting better, though, and Turan was pleased with her progress.  Pleased enough to release her back to full bridge duty, something that Kutok was grateful for.  

              Emotionally, however, Kutok had not really recovered from her injury and violation on the bridge.  She wanted the pirates, especially one Armsman Gideon Jax to suffer for what he’d done to her, to all of them.  Already bitter about the capture of the
Grania Estelle
, then having to go through the humiliating ordeal on the bridge, then the indignity of the insults, culminating in being shot by that… man, Kutok had strayed to a dark place.  For much of her recovery and rehab, she spoke very little.  Normally a friendly, if a bit stiff, and loquacious sort, Kutok had retreated into herself and simply seethed.  Her friends and colleagues, those who had not been outright slaughtered during the boarding, perished from their injuries, or killed in the massacre had tried to comfort her, tried to draw her back out of her shell.  But she wasn’t ready for that.  Having been violated so profoundly, there had been numerous times when she’d wished for death.  Wished that Jax had shot her in the head or thorax and simply done her in, rather than maim her as he had. 

              It was the pity that was the worst.  Everywhere she went on the ship, her fellow crewmembers looked at her with pity and compassion in her eyes.  It stung and it burned and she hated it.  While they all had the shared experience, no one really understood.  Even Tamara Samair, who had been brutalized more than any of the crew simply didn’t understand what Kutok was going through, not that the engineer woman had been in contact with the hak’ruk female. 

              Kutok was a very guarded and private individual.  She was very proper and polite, liked things just so and in their correct place.  There was a certain degree of sloppiness that she’d become accustomed to as crew aboard the
Grania Estelle
, though she
never
allowed herself to stoop to that level.  But the escalating arguments on the bridge that led to her maiming had caused a bit of a rift within herself.  On the one side was her normal, very proper self.  On the other was the dark creature who was willing to take a life, even that of murderous bastard like Jax.  She had great difficulty dealing with this, for up until that moment, Kutok had considered herself a female of peace.  Others, mostly males, would drop to the level of murder and violence, but she was above all that.  Never before had she been in a position where she was pushed so hard, stressed so much that her mind would
ever
turn to thoughts of violence like that, but suddenly, there she was, raising one taloned appendage, ready to strike.

              And now she was back on that same bridge, weeks later, coming to assume her watch and knowing that either Jax or one of his cronies would be up here, if not for the whole shift than for at least a portion of it.  And she would have to deal with them being here.  The hard part about it was, deep down, she didn’t know if she could.  She didn’t know if she was strong enough to find that well of peace within her again to rise above the inevitable taunting that caused her blood to boil so.

              “Hello, Serinda,” she said, stepping very precisely over to the communications station.  A proper lady such as herself
never
skittered.

              The young woman looked up from her datapad.  “Kutok,” she said, beaming.  Taking her feet off the console, she pulled a sani-wipe from her pocket and swabbed the console.  It helped a little, but there was still a small smudge from where her boots had rested on the metal.  “I’m glad to see you.  It’s been… quiet.”  Her eyes flicked to one side, and Kutok trained her own black eyes there.  Humans couldn’t see her optical appendages through the black carapace, but they were there.  She wasn’t blind, or one of those beings that was forced to “see” by means of echo location.

              Where Serinda had been indicating was one of the pirates, one of the zheen, leaning against the far bulkhead.  Like all the pirates, he was wearing a gun, two in fact, a rifle slung over his shoulder and a pistol belted just below his thorax.  His lilac colored carapace was burnished to a high sheen on his left side, but his right was stippled and rough, as though he’d been through a fire.  One of his antennae was scorched, giving further testimony to this theory and his head was also roughened with similar blemishes.  He would be considered weathered by his own people’s standards, by human standards he was positively ugly.  By Kutok’s… he was filth, best to be rushed off to prison where he would rot and be quickly forgotten.

              His mandibles clacked at her arrival, and he emitted an ugly shrill humming, his people’s equivalent of a wolf whistle.  All of the zheen had taken bets about which one of them would get her alone and have their fun with her, as she was similar to them, but exotically different.  Kutok intrigued the pugnacious zheen and her standoffish and outright rude attitude toward them only encouraged them to harass her.  So far, no one had succeeded in getting her alone, but it looked as though with Serinda’s imminent departure, her luck in spurning or outright fending off the zheens’ advances might finally have run out.

              She turned away from him.  “Anything to report?” she asked Serinda, who had stood from the console to vacate it for her.

              The woman shrugged.  “Nothing significant.  No incoming communications.  No sensor readings.  No nothing out there.  We’re still in the void, engines are offline.  Engineering parties have completed their outside work and are coming back in now.  Chief Trrgoth reported an hour ago that they should all be in within the next fifteen minutes.  I’ve been keeping an eye on them.  They’re almost all in.”  Serinda’s eyes kept swiveling over to glance at the zheen, whose antennae were flicking nastily.  He was rubbing his fingers together, making a strange squeaking noise, made all the more menacing because it sounded so innocent.