Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1

by Michael Kotcher

  “Why are we doing this?” she asked bluntly, without any preamble.

  He shook his head, blinking. “I don’t follow. We’re talking.”

  “No, you great idiot,” she fumed, pacing around in a circle. “Why are we going after the crew from the Emilia Walker?”

  He ran a hand over his scalp. I knew this wasn’t going to be fun. “We’re going after them because I’m not willing to leave them to the mercies of the people in this system.”

  “We don’t know there’s anything sinister in their motives,” Taja pointed out.

  The Captain gave her a look of disbelief, raising an eyebrow. “Really? You really think that the locals will treat them well, patch up their ship and send them on their merry way?”

  That brought her up short. “No,” she admitted. “But that doesn’t justify going in there.”

  “I disagree.”

  “What about the rest of us?” she asked, glaring at him. “You’re risking one hundred and twenty-four lives to potentially save what, ten? Maybe? Our lives, the ship, everything on the very slim chance that we can get them out?”

  He nodded. “I know what that sounds like, especially with you using that accusatory tone. But I’m not willing to just leave them behind.”

  “When did this start?” she demanded, utter frustration in her voice and on her face. She balled up her fists, raising them to her jaw level for just a moment. Then she opened her hands and ran her fingers over her face before turning to look at him again. “I can remember three other instances where we turned away and left people to their fate. Worrying more about us than strangers. Your family over strangers.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “It made me sick inside.”

  “No it didn’t!” she spat. “I was there with you, Captain. I remember exactly how sick you were. Relieved would be a much better word to describe your feelings, not ‘sick’.”

  He leaned back on his hands and looked up at her. He was tired, they were going into a very dangerous situation in the next few hours; he was fully prepared to admit that. He didn’t want to fight with Taja right now, though he knew that she wasn’t going to let this go.

  “What do you want from me, Taja?” Eamonn asked. “You tell me. You seem to have all the answers. Yes, in the past, I was relieved that my ship and my crew, my family, as you so helpfully pointed out, had managed to escape from some deadly situations.” Taja made a face. But he continued. “The ship is finally up to spec in most places, and we’re starting to get some money coming in.”

  “Yes!” she exclaimed. “We are.” She came and sat down on the bed next to him. He sat up, putting his elbows on his knees. “And getting involved in this... this… craziness is just going to jeopardize everything.”

  “It might already be too late,” he pointed out. “If the engineer’s sabotage really does some serious mayhem over on the fueling station, the locals might think that we’re involved.”

  “Oh great,” Taja complained.

  “And yes, I think there’s a degree of risk.” She eyed him and he chuckled. “Fine. A large degree of risk. But I gave my word to Captain Vosteros that we’d work together. I’m not just going to leave him and his people hanging.”

  “You don’t even know if he’s alive!” she hissed. “And since when did we care about the crew from another ship?”

  “Since now!” Eamonn snapped. “And not every ship and every crew, but that one. I gave him my word we’d help and I’m not going to walk away.”

  “Stupid male pride,” Taja growled, anger rising.

  He stood up, walking over to the tiny lavatory. He took a glass from the side of the sink and filled it with water from the tap. “If that’s how you want to see it. And I think I’m done having this conversation.”

  She sat there for a long moment, watching him drinking the glass of water. She could see him clenching and unclenching his free hand, so Taja knew that he wasn’t totally calm. But she knew he wouldn’t budge. He was set to this course of action and now, so were the rest of them. “Fine. Sleep well.” The small woman stood up and went to the hatch, pulling it open and walking out, leaving it open.

  He sighed. Setting down the now empty glass, he went to the hatch and closed it. Pressing a control, he heard the locks click shut. Letting his head droop again, he leaned with one hand against the hatch.

  “She wasn’t happy,” Stella’s voice came from the overhead.

  He wasn’t even startled. He knew that the AI liked to eavesdrop on private conversations, a habit she’d grown into. Most of the time she truly didn’t care about the things the crew talked about and just ignored them. But on his orders, she did listen in on and record any conversations that dealt with the safety of the ship.

  “No, Stella, she wasn’t,” he agreed. “And to be honest, neither am I. But I’m too tired to talk about it. Good night.” He went to his bed and climbed in.

  The AI paused for a moment. “Good night, Captain,” she said finally.

  The morning brought a lot of worried glances and nervous conversations. When Tamara entered the mess hall, the tables were full of crewmembers in for breakfast, but very few were actually touching their food. Shaking her head with a sigh, she stepped into line at the galley, taking a tray. Helping herself to eggs, bacon and some ikin-fruit, and coffee of course, she hustled away from the serving line before Cookie could come out of the kitchen area and glare at her. They hadn’t spoken to one another since their harsh words on the orbital and neither seemed in the mood to try and mend fences.

  Tamara plunked herself down at one of the very few empty seats near the middle of the room, next to Saiphirelle, two bulky men from cargo and one of the life support techs. None of them were eating, though the lupusan’s tray was empty. Everyone else was looking at each other and making low conversation, as though they were afraid of letting their words be heard by the officers or worse, Stella. Tamara dug into her eggs with a will, making little noises of pleasure at the excellent fare.

  “How can you eat so much?” one of the cargomen asked. He wasn’t a small man, in fact he was powerfully built, with a barrel chest and tree trunk like limbs. Most likely he was more than capable of packing away the food, but the atmosphere of the galley could best be described as grim.

  She shrugged. “I just got up and last night I was busy doing maintenance on the port sensor array. EVA work is exhausting.” She took a bite of bacon, washing it down with a sip of coffee.

  “No, I meant right now,” he clarified. “We’re flying toward certain death.”

  “I didn’t sign up for this,” the life support tech, a round woman named Farille Garet told them.

  “Me neither,” one of the other cargo loaders chimed in.

  Tamara sighed. “No, what you signed up to do was follow the Captain’s orders,” she reminded them. “It’s written into your contract. I know it was written into mine.”

  “That’s bullshit!” the first man declared, slamming a meaty fist into the metal table. “This is a cargo ship, not a battlecruiser! What the hell does he think he’s playing at?”

  The lupusan growled slightly, made worse by the subsonics that she applied to her voice. All of the others immediately felt their blood run a little colder at hearing that, feeling the primal fear generated by an angry predator. “He thinks, and so do I, that he’s the Captain,” Saiphirelle said slowly, her claws digging into the metal of the table, making curlicues of metal from the furrows. “And that as Captain, he doesn’t need to explain his motives to the rest of us.”

  “The hell he doesn’t!” the big man replied, refusing to let it go. “He’s only Captain because we let him be.” Saiphirelle stood, and so did he, unwilling to be intimidated. “You don’t scare me, Saiphirelle. You and I both know you’re not going to kill me. The Captain would throw you off the ship. And we both know you’re a good little lapdog, aren’t you?”

  “You’re really trying to get her to kill you, aren’t you?” Tamara asked idly, taking another bi
te of bacon as the lupusan seethed. She was far less calm than her sister Corajen, even on the best of days.

  The man turned a wild, frenzied eye to her. “Always got a smart-ass comment, don’t you, Commander? Always gotta put someone in their place.”

  “If they’re being an arrogant asshole, yes,” Tamara replied, pushing aside her tray and standing up.

  Now most of the mess hall had grown very quiet as everyone moved to clear a space for the three of them. Would he be stupid enough to attack either of them? Would Saiphirelle attack him? “He’s going to get us all killed!” the cargoman said again.

  “Come on, Frank,” his buddy said, realizing the situation his friend was in. “Let it go. Calm down. This isn’t the place for this.”

  But Frank appeared to be beyond reason, beyond willing to keep quiet any longer. “No. This is the perfect place. I’m not willing to take this death ride with him at the control. He’s lost it. And he’s going to drag all of us down with him for the sake of another crew.”

  “You need to shut your mouth,” Saiphirelle warned, her ears flat to her skull, the cords in her hands standing out even through her thick fur.

  “Oh, of course,” he said, continuing to plow forward. “The officers want to keep the common crew under control. Don’t think. Don’t have an opinion. We know what’s best for you and the ship. Well I say in this case they’re wrong. In this case, they need to hear what we have to say!” The last sentence was delivered in a shout that carried throughout the mess, and Tamara could see that his words were having an impact.

  “Stella,” she murmured. “You better get the Captain on the horn. He’d better make an appearance and right quick. Saiphirelle and I are trying to contain this, but he’s going to have a mutiny on his hands if he doesn’t do something.”

  “Yeah!” someone in the crowd said. “I didn’t sign up for this! I’m here to make money and haul freight. I’m not a soldier!” More mutterings of agreement.

  “Everyone needs to just calm down!” Cookie boomed from the galley. He walked out from behind the serving counter, holding up his hands for calm.

  “All right, let’s all go about our business,” Saiphirelle said, stepping forward toward the cargo man and pushing him lightly on the shoulder.

  It was the wrong thing to do. “Don’t you touch me!” the man shouted. Taking two steps forward, he crashed into the lupusan, and they both went down to the deck in a tangle of limbs. Suddenly, everyone was shouting and a dozen bodies went into the pile either trying to break it up or else getting hit themselves in the process. It was pandemonium.

  An eternity passed and security finally arrived, led by the Captain himself. Corajen and three of her security officers decided the simplest way of dealing with the problem was to simply open fire. Armed with stunners they simply began firing into the pile of brawlers. It took a moment for the gathered crowd to realize what was happening, but after more than a quarter of the inhabitants of the mess hall were hit with stun blasts and had collapsed to the deck, they started to clear out of the way of the armed security personnel. Finally, the chaos ended and security started pulling the unconscious crewmembers out of the pile.

  Once the room was situated, no one was allowed to leave. The Captain stepped up. “All right!” Eamonn bellowed to the room at large. “Someone better tell me what the hell happened here!” There was a silence, as no one dared speak. “Anyone thinks that this is a big joke, you could not be more mistaken,” he warned.

  “An argument broke out, Captain,” Tamara said, moving through the crowd. Despite having been standing right at the epicenter of the fighting, she had somehow manage to contort her body and escape the brawl before the crush of the mob closed in. “Things got out of hand and suddenly we had a brawl.”

  “What the hell started it?” he demanded.

  “You did, Captain,” Frank said, pushing his way through the crowd. He had a serious shiner forming on his jaw from where Saiphirelle had clocked him (he was extremely lucky she hadn’t torn his face to shreds) and he was holding his left arm tight to his ribs. But he was defiant. “When you decided to put the good of strangers over the good of your own crew!”

  “Horus,” the captain said, addressing the cargoman by his last name. “You’ve got quite the mouth on you.”

  The man shook his head. “Don’t change anything,” he said between gritted teeth. “I didn’t sign up to die in some daring rescue of people who aren’t crew.”

  “You signed up to follow my orders!” the Captain shouted. “You can’t do that, if anyone can’t do that, you can get the hell off my ship!”

  Silence reigned in the mess hall. Finally, the Captain turned to the lupusan beside him. “Get this sorted out and then clear this deck. I want everyone either back at their stations or in their quarters.” He glared at the assembly. “I will not have anyone brawling on my ship!”

  Corajen nodded. “You heard the man,” she said, putting a growl and subsonics into her voice, making everyone in the room flinch. “Move!”

  They moved.

  “Captain,” Tamara said, coming up to him as he was just about to turn and leave the galley. “The crew, well, they’re scared. They’re not cowards.”

  “I know exactly what kind of people my crew are, Moxie,” he said menacingly. “Right now, I thought I would see a group of spacers committed to helping out their fellows; a group of people who were out for more than just to make a quick credit.” He glared around. A few of the crew look ashamed, others simply embarrassed. One or two, like Frank Horus, simply glared back at the Captain, defiant. Eamonn turned and left the mess hall, his long stride quickly outpacing the rest of his crew as they exited the mess hall.

  “Down!” Xar hissed, ducking low. Bullets zinged overhead, peppering the bulkhead. He fired back with the stun pistol, missing twice, but he forced the man firing at him to duck back behind the bulkhead.

  “Whose idea was this again?” Vakkon asked, hiding just behind his boss, crouched behind a crate.

  “Mine,” the engineer replied, firing again, but again hitting nothing but metal. The lights flickered overhead, this time only coming back up to about a quarter of their previous brightness, which was annoying, though his eyes easily compensated for the difference.

  The station was in utter chaos. It seemed the operations crew had started to tear out sections of their command consoles from the network to set up isolated stations, by wiping the databases and restoring systems with clean backups. The problem was that the knock-knock was designed to counter that by imbedding itself in the hardware, anywhere it could possibly find. And if any part of itself survived, it would replicate itself again in the new station forcing a full system scrub and then another reboot. It would take hours to fully cleanse the system, far longer than Ka’Xarian and his people needed to get the Emilia Walker’s crew and get out of here. Or so one zheen fervently hoped.

  The plan had been simple, get as far as they could without drawing too much attention, which seemed to work well. The six of them had hustled through the corridors of the station, amidst crewmen running in all directions or others trying desperately to access panels and computers in the various compartments. They had no time to waste on people in the corridors; even the security personnel seemed at a loss of what to do and since Ka’Xarian and his group moved with utmost confidence, the security officers just waved them through.

  Right up until they reached the compartment just outside where Vosteros and his people were being held. They were only being held in crew quarters; a guest suite meant for two, but since there were only three and they were in fact prisoners, no one was much concerned for their comfort. A medic came to see them every twelve hours and there were two guards outside the door armed with guns, but aside from that, the prisoners were generally left to their own devices. Aside from two meals a day, bland nutritional supplements, they were left alone in the room. There were no computers, no power outlets, no ducts or vents large enough for them to crawl through. These �
��guest” quarters were really as close to a brig as possible.

  The two guards outside the door, however, were not content with Ka’Xarian and his crew coming in to see the prisoners. They didn’t waste any time. When they saw Ka’Xarian approaching, they simply pulled out their guns and fired. Only the zheen’s very quick reflexes had saved him and the others from being shot. They dove for cover, while the guards slipped around the corners of the corridor. The guest suite was located at the end of a T junction and each guard went to either side of the junction, which allowed them to only need to lean out and fire.

  Ka’Xarian hissed in frustration. Why was this always so easy in the holo-vids? Action heroes in the vids never had to deal with intransigent guards who wouldn’t come out from behind cover. And of course he and his people weren’t properly armed to deal with this kind of problem. Plonall (the red scaled lizard biped Gekken) and Sion (the wiry human), the two security people from Grania Estelle were equipped with assault rifles and sidearms, as well as stunner pistols, and his own people had stunner pistols taken from the shuttle. But that was it. No grenades. No explosives of any kind, really. No breaching tools to cut through bulkheads. He mentally kicked himself. If he had actually taken the time to plan, he and the others might have come up with a more viable way to rescue the Walker’s crew with something better than “Let’s walk there, shoot the guards and walk back in the confusion.”

  Plonall moved up from his place further down the corridor, squashing his body up close to Ka’Xarian. His carbine held close to his chest, the lizard looked at the team leader. “Get ready to move, sir,” he hissed then brought himself up to one knee. Xar came up as well, both of them pointing their weapons down the corridor. The guards took that moment to peek around the corner. Xar missed (again) but forced his target back, but the Gekkon shot his target dead, a hit straight through his exposed eye. There was a curse and then the sound of booted feet on metal decking as the second guard slumped to the deck.