It only took a short while longer to reach the closest hangar bay. So far, the confusion of the battle and her change of clothing had fooled everyone. Security was much more lax now; engineering teams were apparently being given free reign of the station for damage control duties. Finding those coveralls might have been the best thing she could have done, she mused.
This was hangar bay twenty-two, one of the civilian bays on the lower section of the station. The station itself was two hundred levels tall, cylindrical, with administration and other offices on the top sections of the station, merchant/cargo in the middle and engineering and reactor sections at the bottom. The spidery-looking shipyards were arrayed out around the station, all of which was in a very high orbit of Hudora Four. This bay, however, was one of the civilian ones, not like the larger military ones on one of the higher levels. The bay housed three shuttles, one of which was down for repairs, Tamara could see one of the Felser-228 engines in pieces on the deck and grimaced at the reduction in her options.
She supposed she might be able to get that shuttle up and running, simply cutting that downed engine out of the loop entirely, and try to take the vessel out on one engine. But this was what she would have called a Bad Idea, because a ship like that would draw attention. And since there wasn’t any real reason why a ship like that would need to be used; the station wasn’t losing atmosphere, yet, a shuttle trying to land on the planet on one engine would draw a lot of notice. And since she was a very “popular” person in this system because of her arrest and trial, having customs or planetary security particularly alert to her transport probably wouldn’t be smart.
She hustled over to a large coil of fiber optic cable, where she could see a pair of goggles had been abandoned. Quickly, she pulled them on. Smiling, she saw a patch of black thermal paint on the deck that had been spilled from an earlier job. The stuff was terrible on skin, it caused a horrendous rash if not cleaned off, but she decided some mild skin irritation was preferable to getting hauled back to prison. Casually, she dipped her left hand into the paint, then rubbed some on her ear lobe, and then on her cheek and nose, as though she had accidently wiped her face or scratched an itch and transferred the goop there. It would alter her looks, hopefully enough to fool anyone looking directly at her. Wiping her hand on her pant leg, she looked around for an opportunity.
There was a crowd of people walking up the ramp into the second shuttle, the one in the center of the bay. They looked like dignitaries, judging by the fine clothing and worried expressions. Apparently, they had overridden standard Navy procedures and commandeered one of the shuttles here to go down to the planet during an alert status. Normally, procedures called for all shuttles to be locked down until the battle or crisis ended, but it seemed that someone was unable to wait. Or, rather, someone had the necessary pull to authorize a dangerous shuttle flight back down to the planet.
Which was perfect for Tamara’s needs. Now, all she needed to do was get aboard that ship. Which had its own set of problems, since everyone on that shuttle was familiar with her trial and knew her face very well. The dirty mechanic would have to get on board the shuttle and be inconspicuous for the entire trip down to the planet, then from there Tamara could slip away into the crowd and work out how she was going to get off planet.
She started forward, going to take a roundabout route to the shuttle, and come up the ramp into the shuttle with the flight crew. A hand grabbed her arm and something hard was shoved into her ribs. “I don’t think so, bitch,” a hard voice bit into her ear.
Islington. “Took you long enough,” she said, keeping her voice low. Her stomach filled with ice. Bile rose in her throat. A glance showed a gun in his hands and another quick look at the crowd in front of her showed that no one else had noticed yet. “I could scream.”
“You could,” he answered, amusement in his voice. “Then I’d shoot you and say that the gun went off accidently. A misfire. And of course you were trying to escape, so I’d be a hero and you’d be dead.”
“Then why aren’t I dead?” she asked, as he started to lead her out of the hangar bay.
“Because I and the Captain have decided we want you dead, but we don’t want the long, drawn out drama of an investigation. Better that you should be killed in a way that won’t trace back to us.”
That didn’t sound good. But there was nothing she could do, he wasn’t moving that gun from her and the grip on her arm was like iron. Tamara was never much of a fighter, she always considered hand to hand combat something the Marines were there for. Now she was deeply regretting not getting more training. Well, any training after Basic all those years ago.
They walked out of the hangar down the corridor. He pulled her into one of the lifts and once the door closed, he released her and gave her a shove to the far side of the lift. He took a step away as well, putting a good distance between them.
“Where are we going?” she demanded.
He shrugged. “You’ll see.”
“The suspense is killing me.”
One of his eyebrows shot up. “That’s an interesting way to put it. If the captain didn’t have such a good plan, I might oblige that comment.”
The lift came to a halt, and when the doors opened, he gestured with his free hand, the gun never wavering. “After you. To the left.”
Tamara sighed. Stepping out, she started to go left when she felt him right behind her, again, the weapon pressing against her back. No doubt he was using his body to shield it from view.
They walked for about five minutes down the main corridor, then turned into a more secluded area. This section, and the room they were now in, was on the outermost edge of the station. Now she was really starting to get nervous. There wasn’t an airlock here, but she was sure if Islington really wanted to he could find some way of pitching her out into space. Freezing to death while all of her extremities burst and her lungs turned inside out wasn’t her idea of a “good death”. In fact, Tamara didn’t plan on dying anytime soon, despite what Islington had in mind.
He walked her up to the inside of the outer hull, up to a hatch. Her eyes widened in terror. No. No, no, no, no, no. “An escape pod?” she demanded, whirling around. “I’m not getting in there.”
“Yes, you are.” The lieutenant seemed very sure of that. “You can either get in there on your own. Or,” he lowered the gun, but still pointed it at her, “I can put a round in your thigh and then you can get in there.”
Her breathing was becoming very shallow. She did not want to get in that escape pod. In there, her options would drop to nearly zero and the fact that Islington had brought her here, to this particular escape pod meant he had most likely tampered with it. Or knew that there was something wrong with it, or a hundred different possibilities. Her fists were clenching and unclenching and the smile on his face was getting bigger and nastier.
“I will… not… get in that escape pod,” she repeated, her voice shaking.
His smile didn’t move one inch. The gun fired. It felt as though someone had slugged her hard in the left leg with a length of steel pipe. The feeling of a red hot poker stabbed into her thigh, just above the knee. The bullet punched through and out the back of her leg. Tamara screamed and collapsed to the deck, clutching her leg. “You bastard!” she shrieked.
“I did warn you,” he replied. He tossed her his belt. “Tie this around the wound like a tourniquet. It’s not going to take long before you bleed out.” Gasping, she stuffed a rag on each side of the wound, then put the belt around the wound and pulled it tight, cinching it up. Blood had pumped from the wound, but it had slowed considerably once she put on the belt. “Now, get up off your whining ass and get inside the pod.”
Breathing hard, sweat pouring down her face, she pulled herself along the deck to the hatch. Pulling herself to her feet, she grabbed the handle on the hatch. Pressing the appropriate controls, the hatch hissed and then popped open, swinging on well-oiled hinges. The inside of the pod looked clean, well-maintained. It wa
s designed to hold six people, three on a side like in some passenger cars on liner ships. She knew that a standard pod had enough foodstuffs on board for six people for a month, medical supplies, a toolkit, duct tape, and a distress beacon which would automatically activate once the pod was launched so that rescue forces could locate the occupants. The pod was also equipped with hibernation equipment, to put the occupants in survival sleep for months, and sometimes years if rescue was known to be a long way off.
She turned to look back at the lieutenant. The gun was pointed at her, unwavering. He was apparently unconcerned about the noise the gun made when fired. “Get inside, bitch,” he said.
Tamara started to climb inside the pod when he shoved her in, hard. She stumbled over the knee knocker and crashed into the cushions inside, her leg exploded in pain. She lay on the bottom of the pod, her back against the small window on the far side from the hatch. Her breath came in small gasps, she could feel herself losing consciousness.
She looked up to see Islington pointing the gun in the pod, though not at Tamara directly. “No, no, no!” she shouted. An instant later, he started firing. Bullets hit the inside of the pod, ricocheting off the inner panels, off the electronics, missing Tamara by inches in some cases. She curled into a ball, screaming in terror. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and eventually the fusillade of bullets ended. Miraculously, none of the shots had hit her, but the inside of the pod was wrecked. Fortunately, it didn’t look as though the hull of the pod was compromised, though that was a very close thing. But the internals were shot, literally, in this case, but most of the panels were dark.
The hatch swung closed and sealed. A few seconds later, there was a loud clunk of the magclamps disengaging and then the heavy press of the pod’s thrusters burning, as the pod shot away from the station at maximum speed.
Her head was swimming and the acceleration of the pod wasn’t helping the nausea. Pulling herself over to the back of the pod, fighting the pressure of the inertia, she pulled down the medkit from where it was velcroed to the bulkhead. Popping the small kit open, she saw a number of vials of Combat Heal, a nanite solution with a cocktail of drugs used for fast recovery from injuries on the battlefield. Taking one, she pressed the injector into her injured thigh, above the injury. It stung, but she could immediately feel the pain ease. It would take a few hours for it to truly kick in and start repairs, but now she could think clearly. Undoing the belt, she cleaned the wound with a bottle from the medkit and then put patches over them. It would keep them from bleeding while the Combat Heal did its job.
Grabbing the toolkit from another small compartment, she started to take a look the damage. As she’d feared, the electronics were damaged and in some cases blown out completely. Taking a USB cable from the kit, she attached her data pad and opened up one of the command files she had uploaded from her personal database. The computers on the pod were not great, they were only really meant for life support and maintaining the distress beacon, but they didn’t need to be. They were sophisticated enough for Tamara’s program to decompress and run.
The program worked quickly, which was no surprise. After about ten minutes, the functions began to come back online, rerouting around the damage or blown out systems. She checked the status feeds on her datapad screen. Life support was operating, but only at 8%. At that rate, she would be out of air and heat within two days. The beacon, however, was completely blown out. It would take a lot of work on the hardware to get that back up, but there was no guarantee the circuit boards weren’t completely shot. If that was the case, she might be able to jury rig something, but it would be crude and without any backups. About the only thing that was still working properly was the hibernation system, but she shied away from that. Tamara had no desire to go so sleep for who knew how long.
She looked out the window. Off in the distance, she could see the main drives of the various ships. They were far too distant to make out their shapes, much less watch maneuvers, but she could still see some of the light show. Tiny pinpricks of light swung around in various directions, formations and colors moving in and out of each other, with bright flashes occurring when damage was taken. Missiles and turbolasers lanced back and forth between ships, but it looked like little more than light show from the window of the pod. It gave her something to relax her eyes on when staring at electronics started to make her eyes cross.
Turning back to the damaged circuitry, she rolled up her sleeves and got to work.
Two days of toil hadn’t produced much. She had repaired the beacon, mostly, but it was still a delicate thing. It would only function for a few hours before the control relays burned out for good, and once it was activated, it would broadcast continuously and couldn’t be turned off without destroying it. But the life support systems were another matter entirely. The carbon-dioxide levels were rising, the scrubbers were nearing max impedance and were about to fail. Tamara could already feel the beginnings of hypoxia, a headache that wouldn’t go away along with the light-headedness and fatigue. She knew these symptoms would only get worse as the deadline approached, as she suffered from increased carbon-dioxide poisoning and decrease in oxygen levels.
There was little more she could do. From what she could see out the porthole, the battle had not diminished in the last two days. If anything, it had increased in intensity. She had counted the arrival of the lights of no fewer than eight new drive signatures in the last few hours. The light show had increased as more weapons fire was exchanged between Federation and Republic warships. The pod’s porthole was pointed away from Hudora Station as its engines had accelerated the pod away, so she couldn’t see if the station had taken any damage, though after two days of fighting, she had to assume that the station was no longer intact. Her trajectory was pointed away from the fighting, above the plane of the ecliptic, so she was heading out on a constant velocity away from the station. It might be best to just light it up now before she was lost for good.
Pressing the activation key, her datapad indicated that all was working well, that the beacon was transmitting on the emergency frequency. There was nothing to do now but wait and hope.
Several hours later, Tamara drifted back into consciousness. A red alert light was blinking and her datapad was screeching warnings about dangerous carbon dioxide toxicity levels. Her head was a mass of pain, throbbing with every heartbeat, but she was too tired to even move. The air was frigid, but her impaired mind couldn’t recognize that it was because the life support was on the brink of failure. It was getting more difficult to keep her eyes open.
As her eyes closed for the last time, she saw an automatic update scroll across the screen as the hibernation system activated.
Her eyelids slid shut and she knew nothing more.
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Book 1 – The Unknown
Chapter 1
Consciousness slowly returned, though it took a long time for her brain to remember how things worked. Her eyes slowly opened, her vision was blurred, several minutes passed before she could see clearly. She took a long, slow breath. The air was stuffy, apparently the carbon dioxide situation hadn’t improved much. She still had a whopper of a headache, and her limbs were extremely heavy. Tamara started to move when a burst of unimaginable cold rushed through every nerve ending in her body. It was as though she had been dropped into a bath with a water temperature just above where the water would be completely frozen through. She could move, but not well. She tried to scream, but her muscles contracted faster than her control, meaning that the air just sort of wheezed out of her.
Several long moments later, Tamara unfroze enough to relax and lay back down. She swiveled her eyeballs to the left, where her datapad still lay. The screen was off, but that didn’t surprise her. Once the pod activated the hibernation systems, all other electronics and other unnecessary systems would switch off to conserve power. It took what seemed like an eternity, filled with that same electric freeze where she had to move extremely slowly to r
each the datapad. After an excruciatingly long time, she managed to press the activation key. As the pad activated and a pre-programmed subroutine spun up, she reached over to where the medkit was still located on the seat next to her. Grabbing an injector with the proper wake-up call meds, she managed to get it to her leg and depress the activator. Within moments, the deep freeze began to thaw and she could finally move without her body acting as though it was fighting through frozen water. As regular muscle control returned, she also noticed that her leg had completely healed. The Combat Heal did work wonders.
Picking up the datapad, she checked her situation. Things weren’t good. Life support was just about used up, and as she suspected, CO2 levels were very high. This pod would be unlivable in under two hours. Islington would have his revenge soon.
She coughed. “What do we have here?” The proximity sensors activated, showing on her datapad. The sensors weren’t great, it was an escape pod, after all, not a warship. It wasn’t required to have the greatest sensor suite, just to be able to determine if a ship was approaching.
Tamara blinked several times, trying to clear her vision. It did clear, sort of. The sensors had detected a large sized vessel approaching, a cargo ship of some sort. She couldn’t tell if it was a military or civilian vessel, but that hardly mattered at this point. If it was a Republic vessel, she’d be tossed in prison. If it was a Federation vessel, maybe some sort of deal could be made. It was also possible it was from an independent star system, in which case, she might be all right.
Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 Page 2
