Hold the Star: Samair in Argos: Book 2 (26 page)

              Then there was an assortment of personal files, his financial documents.  Apparently Cookie had been quite shrewd in his investments.  He had property on three different worlds, as well as a percentage of ownership in an oil drilling company on Aerilann and a salt mine on Topris.  Without getting a look at the books of others on the ship, she had no way of knowing, but it appeared as though Cookie was slightly more than comfortably well off.  Throw in his rather meager shares from the
Grania Estelle
that he’d saved over the past few months and it was clear that the man didn’t need to work again in his life if he had chosen to retire.

              He didn’t have that option now, of course.  But looking over his other documents, she discovered his last will and testament.  He’d left all of his assets to Vincent Eamonn.  The two apparently had been close for a long time, and now everything was transferred to the Captain’s name.  Tamara wondered idly what the man would do with the new found wealth.  She felt herself getting angry and immediately turned away.

              Running a quick search program, she started looking through his rather comprehensive and large file of digital photos.  He had pictures from everywhere, anytime he would set down on a planet, a station, another ship, mounds of digitals from aboard ship during parties, and just others of the various crewmembers over the years.  Finally, after what seemed like hours, she found the one she was looking for.

              The angle of the picture wasn’t the greatest, and it had obviously been enhanced.  It was a battlecruiser all right, similar in design to the old
Sextus
-class BCs she’d worked with back at Hudora, all those decades ago.  She’d also helped outfit one of the newer (for back then)
Demryn
-class battlecruisers before her arrest.  This one was certainly neither of those, in fact, it wasn’t a design she recognized.  It was bristling with turbolaser batteries and heavy lasers.  She couldn’t see the after section where the engines were, but based on the curvature of the hull, Tamara could tell that it probably had four, possibly six main drives.  It was hard to tell, but the ship was probably half the length of
Grania Estelle
.  Certainly more than a match for any of the warships she’d seen out here in the Argos Cluster so far.  It was difficult to pick out details, even when she pulled up her HUD to examine the photo more thoroughly.  Now she could pick out point defense clusters, rail guns and even a few missile launchers.  There was evidence of some damage and decay, but she couldn’t really tell how bad.  She’d need a much closer look and scans to get the full extent of her capability.  But the ship certainly
looked
impressive.  With some TLC and a few parts, even if there wasn’t much in the way of damage, she’d be a terror to have to tangle with.

              She made a copy of the digital and sent it to her own personal database for use later.  It wouldn’t help much, but at least she’d have a reference for later.  After that, she closed and locked up the database again, and switched off the terminal.  Stretching, Tamara rubbed her eyes and stood up.  She went over to the refresher and splashed some water on her face. 

Leaning on the sink, she looked at herself in the mirror.  She looked better than she had in a while, the bags under her eyes had faded and her skin had regained some color.  The device attached to her neck still shone in the light from the overhead, she could see its silvery tendrils snaking into her neck.  The skin around where the metal had inserted itself into her flesh had been raw and red for a while following the attachment, but now the skin had healed.  It was a little darker in places, perhaps almost a dull gray, but it no longer hurt.  Tamara supposed that was progress.  Turan had done some medical scans and she done her own with her implants and both concurred that she had healed nicely. 

Of course, there was nothing to be done about the device and its tentacles at this point.  Turan had agonized about it for days but had turned up nothing.  Scans indicated that the device would induce a lethal shock if any of the tendrils were cut, it was shielded against an electromagnetic pulse and it was a sealed unit, unable to be jacked in with.  Tamara wasn’t sure if this was a device intended ever to be removed from a victim, or if it was for a slave who would eventually would be killed.  The Guura promised that he would continue to study the device and look for any ways of removing it, but neither of them was terribly confident at this juncture.

Thirty-two more days in hyper.  Probably only two weeks or so before the Captain was well enough to leave his quarters on a more regular basis.  She supposed he might be well enough before then to run the ship from his quarters.  Hopefully he’ll be better at it than he had the last time he’d been locked away there.  Technically he wasn’t locked in there now, but the doctor had restricted him to his quarters while he recovered.  It would be weeks, probably not until they reached Seylonique before the clone leg Turan was cooking up in one of his vats would be ready.  Until then, Eamonn would be forced to move about the ship either on a stretcher, on crutches or on that hover chair Quesh had rigged up.  The chair wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was better than crutches.  And at that point she could return command of the ship back over to him and get back to the very important work of the engineering department.

Tamara sighed and turned from the mirror.  Grabbing a towel, she dried off then replaced it on the towel rack.  She went back into the main room of her cabin and sat on the bunk.  She activated the tablet she’d brought in, plugging it into the jack on the wall.  A ship’s status feed popped up, but what she really wanted was to see Stella.

And the AI didn’t disappoint.  “Are you all right, Tamara?”

The woman smiled.  “I am.  I’ve missed you, Stella.  It’s been a long few months.”

“It’s not been two months, Tamara.  I wasn’t gone that long.  Though it certainly felt like an eternity in that box.”

Tamara let out a chuckle.  “Yeah, I know exactly what that feels like.  I hope that neither of us ever have to go through that again.”

Stella cleared her throat, the sound coming through the tablet’s speakers.  “Any idea what we might find in Seylonique?”

“Hopefully a grateful people willing to reimburse us for the work we did on the
Kara
, some friendly faces and some new crewmembers waiting to be hired.”  Tamara lay back on her bunk, resting the tablet on her chest.  “Oh, and hopefully they’ll give us some slack when we want to mine some asteroids and set up our fuel collector in their Jovian.”

“They have one?”

Tamara shrugged.  “According to the star charts they do.”

“Then I would like to propose a toast,” Stella said, a wineglass appearing in her hand.

The woman laughed.  “You’re too young for wine.”

The wineglass disappeared, replaced by a cup filled with what looked like juice.  “Better?”

Tamara saluted her from her prone position.  “Much.  A toast you said?”

“To greener pastures and a break with bad luck.”  The AI raised the cup and then drank.

“I’d drink to that.”  She wished for a glass of that wine Stella had pretended to hold, but that was all right.  Maybe the toast would be prophecy.  Maybe Seylonique would hold all the answers they needed, have those pastures that they wanted.

Book 2: Hale Returns

Chapter 9

              “Coming out of hyperspace now,” Tricia Remmen, the woman seated at the helm reported.  There was a small jolt as the ship returned to normal space.  “We have cleared into the Amethyst system.”

              “Report,” the captain ordered.

              “No sensor contacts immediately within range,” the sensor operator reported.  “Nothing within ten light seconds.”

              “Hyperdrive powering down, sir,” the engineering watch called out.  “Drives on standby.”

              “
Ravage
is half a light second off our port side.”

              “Very well,” Commander Duncan Harth replied.  “No sign of the
Grania Estelle
?”

              “No sir,” the reptilian domak, Ensign Droven said, peering at his console.  “Strike that, I’m detecting two ships in system, about three light hours from our position.  One of them has got to be a freighter, a big one based on the readings I’m getting.  The other looks like a warship, roughly destroyer sized.”

              “Confirm that,” the XO demanded harshly.  He looked from his own seat on the bridge.  The domak ran the scans again. 

              He nodded.  “Confirmed, sir,” he said in his gravelly voice.

              “Maintain Condition Three,” the commander said, rising from his chair.  “XO, with me in the conference room.  Remmen, you have the bridge.”

              “Aye, sir,” the helmswoman replied.

              The two men left the bridge for the conference room, closing the hatch behind them.  Harth sat down at his normal chair at the conference table, Kamerov sitting only a seat away.  “So what’s the plan, sir?” he asked.

              Harth frowned.  “Well, given our speed, we should have beaten them here by about twenty or so hours, give or take.  I want to spend no more than thirty-six patrolling this section of the hyper limit.  I’m going to detach
Ravage
and have her run out about ten light minutes from our position.”  He pressed a few controls on the table’s console at his seat and immediately a holographic projection of Tran, the captain of
Ravage
appeared. 

              “Sir?”

              “Tran, good.  How’s
Ravage
doing?”

              The younger officer grimaced.  “Well, Captain, she’s a Republic ship, at least down in her guts and her hull, but this ship was completely used and abused by those pirates.  We got the critical systems up and running again but the interior…  Well let’s just say the former crew of this ship had rather lurid tastes.  We had to scrub out every one of the crew quarters with bleach.  And then we ran cleaner bots over the whole ship.”  The man wrinkled his nose.  “I still can’t get the stench out of my nostrils.”

              Harth nodded.  “I saw the reports.  I’m just glad everything works.”

              “Most of it, sir,” the man replied ruefully.  “Weapons are up, but the missile launchers are trashed.  The bastards shot off just about all their magazines anyway.  We’ve got one missile left.  One.  And the launchers are wrecked.  I had a team go over them, see if we could get even one tube operational, but no go.  We’d have to yank the whole thing and completely replace it.”

              “How about fuel?”

              “Down to seventy-two percent of reserves,” Tran reported without hesitation.  Clearly the man was prepared for the question.  “I’m having the engineering teams go over the shields and hyperdrive again though now that we’re back in normal space.  We were starting to develop a tremor over the last three days and shield strength was fluctuating.”

              “What happened?” Harth demanded, frowning.  “I thought your systems checked out.”

              Tran nodded.  “Yes, sir, they did.  But then we made a jump through hyperspace for a couple of weeks.  A lot of those repairs were done on the fly.  I need to go back over them and iron out any of the kinks.”

              Harth sighed.  “How long?”

              Tran shrugged again.  “My teams said they’ll have preliminary estimates for repair within two hours.”

              “Are you still operational?  My plans were to have the ships split and cover this hyper limit at ten light minutes distance.”  If
Ravage
was going to be down for the count, it wouldn’t put
too
huge a crimp in things, especially since all they were doing at this point was waiting for the
Grania Estelle
to show up, but if there were serious problems he needed to know now.
              Tran looked to the side for a moment, apparently checking something outside of the pickup range for the transmission.  “Yes, Captain,
Ravage
is still combat capable.  My shields are only at sixty-five percent and I can’t risk a hyperspace jump, but sublight engines and weapons are online.  My heavy laser cannons and sensors are good to go.”  He grimaced.  “Certainly enough to deal with what we’ve spotted in this system.”

              Harth knew that the corvette wasn’t in the best of shape, most of that being his fault, but he knew that Tran was working his people hard over on the smaller ship.  “Well, we spotted the two ships out there and for now we’re going to stay away.  When
Grania Estelle
shows up, we’ll evolve the plans more from there.  For now, keep on the repairs and let me know if you need anything.” 
Legacy
had her own replicator, a class three, as well as a machine shop for spare parts.  Harth had also made sure his ship’s cargo bays were stuffed with spares before departing the fleet back in Republic space.  Now not everything they had would be compatible with a corvette, a much smaller vessel than his heavy cruiser, but they could retrofit some things and make them work. 

              “Aye, Captain, I’ll keep you updated.”

              “Good.  Keep an eye out, Mister Tran.  Good hunting.”

              “You too, sir. 
Ravage
out.”  And the transmission ended.

              “Time?”

              “Coming up on forty hours, sir,” Kamerov replied.  Harth had retired from the bridge of
Legacy
to his ready room, which really wasn’t more than a compartment away, but it gave the illusion of separation from the bridge.  The XO stood before the Captain’s desk, his hands clasped in front of him.  “What are your orders, sir?”

              Harth sighed, his eyes drifting to the status display before him.  He didn’t really see it, the colorful display showing a diagram of
Legacy
and slowly scrolling text indicating status.  It was just something that caught his attention that his eyes were looking at.  He cleared his throat and looked away from the screen to the man standing before him.

              “Sorry.  We’ll give it another hour and then we’ll head in system.”

              Kamerov looked uncertain.  “What are we going to do there, sir?  If we’re chasing the
Grania Estelle
and she doesn’t show, then what?”

              “I’m not sure, XO.  If she doesn’t show up here, she could potentially be anywhere.”  He let out a deep breath.  “They could have changed course during the trip and headed off in another direction.”

              Kamerov frowned, pulling out his data pad.  He tapped a few controls for a moment or two and then his frowned deepened as he stared at the results.  “Well, assuming they didn’t just flip one eighty and head straight back to Ulla-tran, which I don’t think is likely, there’s only two serious possibilities that the freighter would most likely try for.”

              Harth leaned forward in his chair.  “Which are?”

              “The more likely is Tyseus,” the XO said.  “Decent industry, large population and a fair few system defense ships.”

              “Wait, how do we know about the ships in Tyseus?” Harth interrupted.  Republic records back at the fleet had been sketchy at best about the conditions of the various systems out here in the Argos Cluster, to say nothing of the warship activity.

              “We got the updates from
Fury
a few months ago, sir, about the comings and goings in the Argos Cluster,” Kamerov replied.  Harth nodded, remembering.  “And then we went through
Ravage
’s databases and found a lot of information.  Some of it confirmed what
Fury
already had.  A lot of it was on things that
Fury
hadn’t found.”

              “How many ships in this defense force at Tyseus?”

              Kamerov consulted his datapad.  “Seven, looks like.  A light cruiser, four frigates and what looks like three corvettes.  They have another ship, a destroyer in a docking slip, but its several months from being ready.”

              “New construction?”

              The XO nodded.  “According to
Ravage’s
logs, it seems as though that ship, along with others across the Cluster, were commissioned by a consortium.  Which, according to the logs is just a front to insulate the local star systems from who is actually commissioning the ships.”

              “Wait, ships?”

              “Yes, sir.  We’ve seen some of them already.”  Kamerov looked to the commander.  “The pirate cruisers back at Ulla-tran, sir.”

              “Wait, pirates are commissioning ships to be built all over the Cluster?”  Harth looked appalled.  “Industrious bastards, aren’t they?”

              “Yes, sir, but the bad news is they’re smart as well as industrious. 
Ravage
only had records of three such places within the Cluster with ships under construction.  Tyseus, Hecate, which we already knew about, and one other.”

              Harth sighed, leaning one elbow on the desk.  “Skip the theatrics, Lieutenant.  Just tell me.”

              “Yes, sir.  Volarus, a planet about three hundred and twenty light years from here.”  Kamerov checked the datapad again.  “It’s a bit of a hop, but we could get there without too much trouble.”

              Harth nodded slowly.  “Pirates building up a fleet out here technically isn’t our concern,” he pointed out.  “And given the level of tech out here, they don’t really have much that could threaten our borders.”

              The XO shrugged.  “Not our own fleet, no sir.  And not in most single-ship engagements against Republic warships.  But how many pirates have you ever heard of, sir, that fight fair?  Or one on one?  They tend to fight in packs.  And even if they’re using modified merchant ships outfitted with cannons or missiles like we saw at Ulla-tran, they’d still be a terror against civilian merchant shipping.”

              “Which isn’t really our concern out here, XO,” the captain replied.  He held up a hand.  “Yes, they’re a plague, a blight that should be stamped out, but cleansing the Argos Cluster of a pirate menace is not part of our orders.  We’re here to find that damned freighter and report back to the Admiral.”

              Kamerov looked chastened.  “Yes, sir.  I understand.”

              “This isn’t Republic Space, Lieutenant.  Hasn’t been for a long time.  And even though
Legacy
could very probably cut a swath through the pirates out here, is that really in our best interests?  I mean, okay, we fly to Volarus or Tyseus and take out the yards in orbit there.  Sure, we get the ships and the pirates have two less in their little flotilla.  But what about the people on those worlds?  You said yourself that intel suggests that the locals don’t know who they’re building for.  And if we start destroying real estate, killing those shipyard workers, all that’s going to do is stir up animosity against the Republic, making it even harder for us to get anything done out here.”  Harth smiled a little, taking a bit of the sting out of his words.  “I know it’s frustrating, Lieutenant.  I don’t like the idea of just leaving those ships out there for this pirate gang to use.  But we have our orders.”

              “Yes, sir.”

              “So you told me of one of the likely destinations for
Grania Estelle
, Lieutenant,” Harth said, bringing the conversation back to the beginning.  “What was the other?”

              “Oh, Seylonique, sir.  According to
Ravage
’s records, sir, there’s some space industry, but the locals are pretty stand-offish.  They have a battlecruiser in orbit there, but it’s seen better days.  Still, it’s more than a match for anything else out here.  Might even give us a run for our money, sir.”

              The captain raised his eyebrows.  “A battlecruiser, huh?  Can’t say I’m in a terrible hurry to go up against one of those.”  He shrugged.  “If the locals don’t really like outsiders too much, I can’t imagine that the
Grania Estelle
would be stupid enough to stop there.  Not without invitation, anyway.”

              “Yes, sir,” Kamerov agreed.  “That’s why I think that Tyseus is much more likely.”

              Harth rested an elbow on the desk, tapping his lips with his forefinger.  He nodded.  “Yes, I agree.  Get back to the bridge, have navigation begin a jump plot for Tyseus.  We’re going in system a bit, we’ll show the flag and then we’re going to head out.”