Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1
Read Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 Online
Authors: Michael Kotcher
Pursue the Past
Samair in Argos, Book the First
By: Michael Kotcher
Copyright
:
All characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2014 by Michael Kotcher
Cover art by Jade Taggart (FoxGirlJade on deviantart.com)
Dedication: This is my first published book and I would like to dedicate it to my family and to Mo, my editor. Both encouraged me to get off my duff and get my ideas to words and my words out there, and I hope I’ve made them proud.
Commander Tamara Samair sat in the court martial, waiting for the members to return. She was in her Navy dress blues, as was everyone else in the courtroom. Her lawyer was seated next to her, completely at his ease, though she had no idea why. The prosecution team across the way was looking rather smug. And the commander who was doing the prosecuting kept shifting eyes their way, as though challenging her lawyer to look back. He never took the bait though, keeping his eyes on either his paperwork or on the front of the courtroom.
Tamara seethed. This trial had been going on for eleven months now and with each day that passed, those two had been in the court, boring holes in the back of her head. Captain Horace Bythe and Lieutenant Oliver Islington were the two other officers (along with Tamara) in command of the Hudora System shipyards for the last six years. In the year before her arrest, Tamara had begun to notice at first a slight, then a much more marked, decrease in supplies and funds and had begun to investigate why the sudden decrease in inventory. Just as she was starting to get close to finding out where the resources were going, suddenly Naval Investigation Service arrested her for smuggling and theft. And the two of them were grinning at her as the security officers slapped cuffs on her.
Eleven months later, and it had finally come to this. The court martial was the culmination of humiliation, a humiliation that Bythe and Islington were sure to remind her of at every available chance. Just before her arrest, she had just received her promotion to Commander, and now, she was in danger of being thrown in a prison colony for the rest of her natural life. The amount of funds and equipment stolen was enough to put the guilty party away. And of course, enough was found in her bank accounts and in her personal storage to make sure that she went away. Bythe and Islington were nothing if not thorough.
The arrival of the six members of the court martial brought her back to the present. Tamara stared straight ahead at the Judge’s bench, not allowing her gaze to shift even one millimeter in any other direction. She could feel the looks that Bythe and Islington were sending her way, as well as the many other stares she was undoubtedly getting from others in the courtroom. Tamara refused to submit to the crush of emotions. She would hear the decision and then she would hold her head high, no matter the outcome.
“All rise.” With a practiced movement, Tamara Samair rose to her feet, smoothed out the edges of her jacket. Hands at her sides, she resumed her forward-facing stare.
The judge turned to the members. “Have the members reached a decision?”
A female captain stood. She was in her middling years, her short hair streaked with gray, but she was still youthful. However, there was no twinkle of mirth in her eyes as she turned to the judge. “Yes, Your Honor, we have.”
“Would you please read that for the court?”
The captain opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. The deck jerked so violently beneath them all that everyone was knocked aside, many lost their footing entirely, sprawling unceremoniously to the deck. The lights flickered and alarms sounded. Emergency red lights ignited and the klaxons certainly got everyone’s attention, if being tossed to the floor hadn’t already.
“Battle stations! Battle stations, all hands, battle stations!” a voice came over the public address system. “The station is under attack. All hands, report to battle stations!”
“Court is adjourned,” the Judge declared loudly, picking himself up off the deck. “All of you, report to your posts! MPs, detain Commander Samair and return her to the brig.”
Two very large MPs immediately appeared at her sides. Her face still a ceramic mask, she held out her hands, and a pair of cuffs were attached to her wrists. “After you, Commander,” one of the men said, gesturing.
Without a word, Samair turned and marched toward the door, aware that both Islington and Bythe were still in the courtroom, pretending to assist others out before they would leave themselves. They glanced at her as the MPs led her past them, but didn’t say anything, didn’t betray their feelings in this case.
The attack had saved her, but it wouldn’t forever. Federation forces were attacking the station but the Republic Navy would drive them off. And when they did, the court martial would resume and the members’ decision would come down. This was simply a stay of sentencing, not a commutation of sentence. They knew it. She knew it. There was no reason to get angry, not yet.
The cell was familiar; she’d spent the last eleven months here. Except for a very small locker for her uniforms, a narrow bunk bolted to the wall, a sink and a toilet, the room was bare. Tamara wasn’t allowed to decorate the walls, but she had no desire to do that anyway. Other prisoners were contained in the station’s brig, but no one as high profile as a Republic Naval Commander. She sat on the bunk, still in her dress blues, wincing every so often as the attack on the station continued. The lights would flicker every so often and the hull and the deckplates would shiver, every time the station took a hit. Nothing as vicious as the initial hit, clearly the defenders had raised the station’s shields, but each hit was taking a toll. Not being allowed access to any of the station’s computers, she had no way of knowing what was going on, but that was something she had learned to expect in the last eleven months.
She had been in charge of the station’s engineering teams, as well as supervising officer of the nearby shipyard complex. Her track through the Republic Navy had been first through the standard Navy track, then up through fighter command flying starfighters, then after a serious crash and a year in the hospital and rehabilitation, she had transferred to the Naval Engineering Corps. From there, she had worked her way up the ranks, earned her stripes and eventually earned the rank of second in command of the Hudora station.
“Things aren’t going well, Commander,” a voice from the door stated. She looked up. Lieutenant Islington stood there, clearly visible through the bars of the cell. There was a force field in place as well, to prevent any chance of her escaping or to prevent her giving or receiving anything through the bars as well.
Oliver Islington was a thin, rat-faced man, with beady eyes and an insincere smile. He was unswervingly proper to superior officers, but he was a terror to the enlisted and those of junior rank. Also, he had the favor of Captain Bythe, the commanding officer of the Hudora station, which meant that few people were willing to try and complain or report any of the infractions that all knew Islington was guilty of. Also, there was the fact that the lieutenant was very good at blackmail and he knew where a lot of skeletons were buried.
He also despised Tamara Samair. After she rebuffed his lust-filled advances in her first week here, for which he was guilty of a flagrant violation of regulations, he tried to get her alone in her quarters. He did, but after his first advance and hearing the scuttlebutt about his prowess and his activities, she set up unauthorized surveillance equipment in her quarters. Shortly after arrival, where he tried to push things further, she made sure to record everything. He was bigger and possibly nastier than she was; Tamara wasn’t a brawler, she was an engineer. She made sure that the footage was broadcast, in real time, to every vid screen, phone, tablet, and other video device on the station. In thirty seconds flat, security showed up at her quarters to take Islington into custody. He spent sixty days in the brig on bread and water after that little stunt. His humiliation had been broadcast for all to see and what was more, someone had stood up to him and won. Islington couldn’t have that. It was shortly after his release from the brig that he and Bythe had started their work on bringing her down.
And now they had. “Glad to see that you’re entertained. But then, it took both you
and
the captain to humiliate me, whereas I was able to take you down alone.”
The lieutenant shrugged. “I did sixty days of confinement and that was it. It was a slap on the wrist. You on the other hand, are looking at fifteen years of stockade time at least.” His grin was vicious. “Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bitch.”
“That’s
Commander
to you, worm,” she said, getting to her feet. “I haven’t been convicted yet.”
“Oh, sorry,
Commander
,” he said, sarcasm dripping. “I’m
so
sorry I wasn’t following regulations. But I was right, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bitch.”
Tamara sighed. He was baiting her and she knew it. A glance through the bars told her that no guards were nearby, which was probably why Islington would risk calling her names, even now. “Is there something you wanted, Lieutenant?”
“I wanted to see you hang for this,” he admitted. “Sadly, the Republic doesn’t hang thieves. Too bad you never killed anyone. I would have loved to have gotten you for murder.”
“Yes, too bad my lack of killing anyone inconveniences you.”
He shrugged, the smile never leaving his face. “Oh well. The knowledge that you’ll be fighting for your life in prison is enough. I imagine the ladies in there will
love
being able to have someone like you licking their boots.” He paused, leering. “Or other things.”
“Go away, Islington,” she said, sitting down on the bunk. She leaned back against the bulkhead and closed her eyes. It wasn’t very comfortable, but it was all that was there. She had no chairs in the cell and she didn’t feel much like laying down. “You bore me.”
Without another word, he turned and walked away. She didn’t look at him, but Tamara knew that he wouldn’t be able to help just one last look back at her, just to try and glimpse one sign of weakness, that her armor had cracked. Tamara refused to give him the satisfaction.
Four hours later, Tamara knew that something had gone wrong. Or rather, the right things hadn’t happened. The deckplates still continued to shiver every so often. The lights still hadn’t come back to a full, steady illumination. And after four hours, she was beginning to get concerned. The system defense forces here were formidable, Hudora was a major shipbuilding facility, after all. There was a standing force of two battleships, six battle cruisers and more than two dozen support units at any one time. That was a large allocation of resources and a defense stiff enough to make anyone pause. If after four hours, the station was still taking hits, and regular ones at that, then that meant that the attacking force was very large and very heavy.
Which Tamara supposed could be a good thing. Not that she wanted the shipyard to be destroyed, or the fleet elements guarding it, but every second the battle lasted was a second longer before the sentence came down.
A particularly savage hit must have struck the station because the floor rocked, strongly enough to toss her out of her bunk and onto the deck. There was an electric crackling noise and then, silence. Tamara looked up from the floor and saw that the force field had dropped. She sprang to her feet and inspected the door. The last hit had jarred the door loose, though the lock hadn’t quite popped. I few good kicks should take care of that.
She could see the line drawn on the ground in front of her now. An irreversible line drawn that would determine her destiny. If she crossed it, she would forever be a fugitive, until eventually the Navy caught up with her and brought her back in chains. Or, she could not cross the line, and end up in chains anyway. She stood there for a long moment weighing the options.
Then she crossed the line.
Two kicks later, the door had popped open. It took only a little elbow grease to shove the door open and then she was out in the corridor. She easily slipped past the guard station; they were gone, off at battle stations. Grabbing a datapad she saw on the desk, she quickly decoded the lockout and brought up the main screen. She scrolled through the personal nonsense the guard kept on the datapad. She erased it and then began her own coding.
Tamara knew she wouldn’t have long, but she wouldn’t need long. She only needed a few minutes to write a quick program to access her personal database. A few minutes later, she had it, and uploaded the program to the station’s nearest Wi-Fi node. An instant later, the program she had written accessed the database, went through the identification and handshake protocols, then her identity confirmed, began streaming files into the datapad.
The datapad didn’t have an infinite amount of memory space, but the programs she had stored in her personal database were mostly compressed data streams anyway. She wasn’t looking for a particular program, she was getting all of her files which would come in handy later. Two minutes later, she was hustling down the corridor and out of the cell block.
It didn’t take long to get to a control console. She’d ditched her uniform for a pair of work coveralls she’d found in an empty locker room. They fit, sort of, but they were far less conspicuous than her dress blues. So far, step one was going to plan: get out of the cell and get into the population of the workforce here.