Hold the Star: Samair in Argos: Book 2 (63 page)

              “All the more reason to help,” Tamara replied.  “Especially if we intend to set up shop here.”

              “All right, I’ll talk to the technicians,” Eamonn said.  “See what they say.”

              “The admins will never go for it,” Xar predicted.  “If the power starts flowing smoother and the engineers seem less frantic?”

              Eamonn shrugged.  “Then we deal with it then.  Honestly, though, I think that if things start to move more smoothly and if the engineers can talk fast and claim credit, the admins won’t know and won’t care to.”

              Tamara chuckled.  “He’s probably right.”

              He puffed himself up.  “I, Ms. Samair, am the Captain of this ship.  I am always right.”

              They all laughed, even Tamara, who forced a chuckle.  The joke wasn’t as funny as it might have been months ago
.

              They continued on with the meeting, discussing other housekeeping items and areas of concern.  When the meeting broke up, Vincent spoke up.  “Tamara, would you stay a moment, please?”

              She nodded, sitting back down in her seat.  The captain waited until the hatch closed behind the others, then he looked over to her.  Stella remained seated on her perch on the table.  “What’s up, Captain?”

              “Now we come to the difficult part of the meeting,” Vincent said, looking straight at Tamara from his seat.

              “That’s ominous.”  She shifted to a more comfortable position.

              He shook his head.  “It’s not like that.  But, in twenty-two days, this ship is going to be loaded up and ready to roll for places not here.  Which means that I am going to be leaving the system.  Which means that I need someone here to take charge.”

              She sighed, rubbing the tips of her fingers on her forehead.  “And I’ve been selected.  Well from your point of view, it makes sense.  I have done this sort of thing before.”

              He nodded.  “You have.  And I know that you had expressed both a desire to stay on the ship, but also a desire for something more.  You told me once that you didn’t think that serving on freighters was how you wanted to spend your life.  Well, I need you now.”

              “I had a feeling that this was coming,” she said, a slight frown creasing her features. 

              “That’s because you’re smart, Tamara,” he replied with a smirk.  “And I don’t hire stupid people on my crew.”

              “But I won’t be
on
your crew anymore, will I?” Tamara pointed out.

              He sighed.  “No, Tamara, you won’t.  But that doesn’t mean you’re not one of us.”

              She chuckled, running her hands through her hair.  “Spare me the rallying of the troops speech, Vincent,” she said, using his given name.  “You need me, as you said.  I’ve got the know-how, the experience and the…” she paused and then grinned, “the moxie, to run things here in Seylonique while you’re off gallivanting.  But you know it isn’t what I want to be doing.”

              “You want to stay with us on the ship,” he said.

              “When you’re on a ship, you at least have some options.  If I’m stuck here in the system, I’m helpless when the pirates come knocking.”  She eyed him.  “And you know they will.”

              Another sigh.  “Yeah, they probably will.  But it doesn’t change the fact that I need you here to run things.”

              “There is nothing actually here, Captain,” Tamara pointed out.  “We have the fuel collectors that we’ve set up.  We have one working tug and one other under repair.”

              “Ka’Xarian reports that the second tug will be up and running in thirty-six hours,” the Captain interrupted.

              “Okay, so I’d have two tugs, the fuel collectors and no real place to conduct operations.”  Then she crossed her arms under her breasts.  “I also have no staff, no replicators, no fuel shuttles, and no money with which to get the things I need.”

              “I wasn’t just going to drop you off on the station and say good luck, Tamara,” Vincent assured her.  “You’d be taking your engineering team as well as a few of Corajen’s security officers.”

              “I want Corajen herself, leading up Security,” Tamara interrupted.  She saw the captain immediately begin to tense up, but she cut him off.  “Captain, I’m going to be building up and then running the industry and friendly port here for you.  The locals are unhappy with what I’m going to be doing and there’s a good possibility they might try something.  Which means I need a large number of security to keep a lid on things and I need the scary wolf to lead that contingent.”

              Vincent laughed.  “Corajen is the scary one?  I thought you’d say Saiphirelle.”

              “Oh, don’t get me wrong, Saiphirelle is certainly terrifying and I know she can throw down, but Corajen is a planner.  Saiphirelle will smash down the gates, and kill everyone in the house, but I think Corajen will blow the fuel line and then gun down anyone who survives the fire.  And it will all look like a terrible accident to the investigators afterwards.”

              Both of Vincent’s eyebrows shot up.  “Wow, that was both terrifying and amazingly accurate.  You don’t know either of them well enough to know that about them.”

              Her eyes twinkled.  “Captain, you think that no one but you can read people?  That I might not know about the two big guns in the security division?”

              “Fair enough,” the captain replied.  He paused for a moment, thinking, then he looked up at Stella.  “Get Corajen up here please.”

              Stella nodded.  A moment later, she nodded.  “She’s on her way back up, Captain.  Five minutes.”

              “Good.  Thank you, Stella.”  The AI nodded to him.  “I still have a ship to run, Tamara.  I can’t have you pillage absolutely everything you want.  There are limits.  You’ll have to get the rest of what you need from the locals.”

              Tamara sighed.  “I’ll need my engineering team, plus a few others.  I’ll need a class-five replicator.  Startup funds.  The tugs.  A shuttle to use for fueling ops.  And…”  She hesitated.

              Vincent eyed her.  “And…?”

              “A ship.”

              “A ship?  And where the hell am I supposed to get that?”

              Tamara shrugged.  “Same place you got those lovely tugs.  Same place Frederick Vosteros got his new darling.  Get it from the station.”

              “So I buy you a ship and… what?” he asked.  “Running a ship is a full time job.  If you’re doing that, then you’re not doing the job I need you for.”

              She nodded, smiling.  “Very true.  Which is why I will not be running the ship.  I’m going to need you to hire a crew.”

              “Really?  So I’m hiring a crew for this ship now.  And what the hell do you need a ship for anyway?”  He looked exasperated, but still interested.

              “I’m interested in hearing this too, Tamara.”  Stella was staring at her with rapt attention.

              “We need to be mobile,” Tamara explained.  “I’m not saying I need something as big or elaborate as the
Grania Estelle
, but I need a platform to work from that isn’t on the station.  They don’t like us, they don’t trust us, and the feeling is mutual.  Plus, I don’t want to have to deal with all new and improved security and economic regulations that will inevitably fall on us when they decide they’ve had enough of our interfering.  Having a ship means that we can move around the system, working on the gas mine, the mining projects, anything else we need.  Hell, we can bug out if pirates show up.”

              “You sound like you’ve give this some thought, Tamara,” Vincent said, his lips quirking as he tried to suppress a smile.  “Especially for someone who didn’t know she was going to be doing this even an hour ago.”

              “Oh, don’t bullshit me,” Tamara shot back.  “I suspected the minute Stella suggested the gas mine that you were going to need someone to build and then oversee the operations here in the system.  I knew that out of your current crew, I was the only one who had the experience you needed to accomplish the goals you were thinking about.  So, I started coming up with a list.”

              Stella looked pleased.  “What kind of ship were you thinking, Tamara?”

              Tamara gave her a lightly scolding look for changing the subject.  “I was thinking about this one here,” she said, pulling out her datapad from her pocket.  She pressed a few commands and then the “enter” key.  The three monitors on the bulkhead behind the captain’s chair lit up, showing images of the ship she had in mind.  Vincent stood from his chair, looking at the images there.  “The
Samarkand
.”

              The ship was, in his mind, ugly.  It was a trio of rectangular boxes, one on top of the other, the middle one wide and long, the top about half the size of the middle.  The bottom was two thirds as long as the middle, and just as wide.  The ship was propelled by one main engine about half again as large as one of
Grania Estelle
’s and it certainly wouldn’t be fast.  The ship was one hundred and fifty meters in length, tiny by comparison to the bulk freighter.  The top box contained the bridge and officer staterooms.  The middle had crew berthing, the galley, mess hall and another room, which, according to the plans had been used as an exercise room.  All of these were in compartments running along the center.  On the sides, the middle area also contained cargo bays.  The lower box contained engineering spaces, environmental plant, and a secondary cargo bay. 

              “It’s a lot more claustrophobic than
Grania Estelle
,” Stella commented.

              Tamara shrugged.  “This ship is designed to run big cargoes.  That ship is a medium sized hauler.  It’s slower than that convoy of ships from Ulla-tran, as well as
Grania Estelle
, but I don’t need it to be speedy.  I need it to have plenty of room to work, a decent power plant and room to hold workers.  It just turned into a repair ship.  Or rather, a construction ship.”

              “What about the tugs?  And the fueling shuttle you were asking after?” Vincent asked.

              “I’m going to turn the lower bay into a boat bay,” Tamara explained.  “It should be plenty big enough to house those three ships.  Possibly one or two more.”

              “All right, I’ll leave you Shuttle one,” he said.

              “Oh great,” she groused.  “You’re leaving me the one that’s going to be down for maintenance?  What about Three?  Three just got done with her most recent sixty-day maintenance overhaul this morning.  And you’ll be in hyperspace anyway; you won’t need the shuttles until you get there.”  He hesitated.  “Come on, Captain.  You know I’m right.”

              “All right,” he said, after almost a long minute, and after clenching his jaw.  He waved a hand at her.  “Shuttle Three is yours.”

              Tamara nodded.  “Thank you, Captain,” she said gracefully.  No need to gloat, it was in fact a very minor victory.

              He rubbed his temples, sitting back down in his chair.  “All right, tell me about this ship.  What’s wrong with it?”

              Tamara shrugged.  “Decay, just like a lot of the ships that are in mothballs here.  The crews rode them hard, didn’t deign to lower themselves to doing things like routine maintenance and when things finally got so bad the ship couldn’t fly, they dumped it. 
Samarkand
has been tied up to a docking port for about twelve years, completely untouched all that time.”

              “What’s the asking price?” Eamonn asked.

              “Seven million,” Tamara replied softly, looking down for an instant.  Then she looked up and met his eyes.  “Seven million,” she repeated.

              “Seven million?  Are you kidding me, Tamara?” he demanded, getting out of his seat and stalking about.  “I have seventy thousand in an account, Tamara.  Seventy…
thousand
.  I need twenty thousand for operating costs and payroll.  That leaves fifty.  Fifty thousand is
not
seven million.”

              “I’ll take the fifty thousand,” a voice spoke up from the now open hatch.  Corajen stepped inside and all of them turned to look at her, even Stella.  She gave them a flick of her ears and a wolfish smile.  “You wanted to see me?”

              “Yeah.  Come in and close the hatch.”  Vincent waved her in.  “Sorry to call you back in.”

              “Nah,” she said dismissively.  “It’s no bother.  I was just going to check on that crop of newbies, let them know I’m still watching them.”  She flashed them that evil grin that scared so many people.  Stella looked nervous, the captain just nodded but Tamara laughed.

              “See, Captain?” Tamara said, gesturing to the Chief of Security.

              He quirked his lips.  “Yes, Tamara, you did.  Well, Chief, join our little cadre here.”

              She plopped down in one of the chairs.  “Okay, tell me what’s going on.  Because she’s acting all squirrely,” she pointed to Stella, “You look grumpy,” she indicated him, “and Samair looks a bit smug.”