Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 (14 page)

              They could still shoot, which was a thought that worried the captain as he sat in his chair, just waiting.  Minutes passed and no new attacks came through. 

              “They’re moving off,” Tamara reported.  “The freighter has recovered the shuttles and they’re all heading off.  We should be clear now.”

              “How far away are they?”

              “Over a light second away now,” she said.  “And the distance is opening.”

              The captain leaned back in his chair, letting his head lay back on the headrest, letting out a very long breath.  “We made it.”

Chapter 5

              “So what do you have for me, Quesh?” the captain asked, seated at his conference table in his wardroom.  All of the department heads were here.  Unsurprisingly, everyone looked completely worn out.

              The Parkani, seated further down the table, crossed his upper arms over his chest, laying his lower ones on the table, palms down.  The injury on his arm had been wrapped up in a bandage, but his skin, his clothes and the bandage were covered in grime and smudged with grease.  He had a number of tiny cuts on his fingers and on one arm.  His face was blackened with soot, from the fire that had broken out in engineering when the fuel lines were severed. 

              “Well, Captain, we’re in trouble,” the big alien replied gruffly.  “I can’t think of any other way to say it.  We’ve got hull breaches in the engine spaces, the fuel lines are cut, two of the fuel tanks are breached, I’ve got microfractures spreading like arachnid webs at least two whole frames away from the weapon strikes.  The engines are completely off line, shield generators are trashed, and it looks like the hyperdrive is offline.”

              The captain shook his head, rubbing the lower half of his face.  “All right, give me the rest of the news, because I know that’s not all.”

              George Miller looked at his captain.  “Of our eighty-four crew and one passenger, seventeen are dead, and twenty-two injured.  Doc’s treating them in sickbay.”

              “Which explains why he isn’t here,” the captain clarified, though no one else had said anything about the man’s absence.  “What else?”

              The ops officer looked around the table, then quickly lowered his eyes and consulted his datapad.  “Well, they made off with a lot of our stores.  They cleaned out about a quarter of Cookie’s pantry and trashed about a quarter more, took about half of our cargo consignments, three 50-K containers of fuel, oh, and let’s not forget, replicator two.”  That last was followed by complete silence in the wardroom.

              The captain spun his chair back and forth.  “Quesh, tell me.  How long will it take to get the engines back up so we can get to Instow?”

              The engineer shrugged.  “It’s a week, probably, Captain and that’s just getting the engines back.  We’re going to have to patch a few things and reinforce the engine mountings.  It won’t be pretty and it won’t last very long, but it should be good enough to get at least one of the main drives back up so we can get to Instow.  But I gotta warn you, Captain, the damage we took is severe.  We’re not going to be able to get underway again for a long time.”

              “How long?” he asked, his voice very quiet.

              “Months, Captain,” the Parkani answered.  “At least.  And that depends on how cooperative the Instow folks are.  I think we have enough power to keep the replicator running, with the good Miss Samair’s assistance, but even still, we’re stuck here for a while.”

              The captain leaned back, covered his face with his hands, then ran his fingers through his hair and then sat up.  “All right.  Quesh, get with Moxie and get started on engine repairs.  We need to get out from the hyper limit and closer in system.  Everyone else, you’re at Quesh’s disposal.  If he needs you for something, unless I’ve told you different, you’re his.”  The Parkani nodded, too tired to make light of the situation.  “I’m going down to sickbay to see my injured crew,” he said, standing.  “Everyone else…”  He trailed off and waved his hands in a shooing motion.  The room quickly cleared as they all stood and hastened out.

              Sickbay looked like a charnel house.  The ship’s infirmary was filled with people, at least double what the small area was equipped to handle.  According to George’s report, twenty-two people were in here, with injuries ranging from cuts and lacerations to gunshot wounds to plasma burns.  People, the crew of this ship, were lying on beds, on the floors and seated in chairs.  The sickbay on the
Grania Estelle
was only designed to handle up to ten people at a time so the room was now stuffed to the gills with people.  A secondary triage was being set up in a nearby sleeping compartment, but due to the damage it was taking longer than expected to get things set up.  The freighter’s doctor, also, was running himself ragged to try and attend to the sheer number of patients.

              Doctor Turan was not human, he was a member of the Guura species.  The Guura were an amphibious species, their home planet of Gom Rayan being over ninety percent water.  He was quite tall, extremely slender, with a very long neck.  His head was proportional to the rest of his body, and his face was a mix between a series of overlapping scales and a rather elephantine like trunk of only about ten centimeters in length.  He had very long gills on his very long slender neck, as well as lungs in his thin body.  Guura were a rare species to see out in the void, most preferred to stay either on their home world, or one of their colony worlds, but like in every society there were anomalies that liked to travel, to break away from the norms.  Doctor Turan was one such individual. 

              He had studied his tradecraft at a very small medical school on Gom Rayan, learning about primarily his own species, of course, but that had never been enough.  Of course there was always work to be had, people to be healed, research to be done, but he had always felt a bit stifled in the waters of home.  So, much to the disappointment of his family, he booked passage on a freighter two years after his studies had been completed on Gom Rayan and began his trek across the stars.  He stayed aboard the light freighter, the
Juniper Freeze
, for the length of his three year contract, working as a medic aboard the small ship.  He learned a great deal about humans, since the crew of sixteen was all human, save him.  Those three years had opened his eyes to the idiosyncrasies and patterns of behavior of humans, their violent tendencies and their amazing capacity for ingenuity and kindness.  He respected them and found himself growing fond of these crazy creatures.  When his contract on the
Juniper Freeze
had ended, he had signed on at Urulaan Star System, as a doctor on Mining Station Four for a three year term.  Here he was exposed to a plethora of species, people of all types coming in and going out, the regular mining crews, the shiftless vagabonds, the con men, transients, freighter crews, and of course the civilians on the station itself. 

It was a crazy time.  He had learned a lot, done much research, and even had his first exposure to truly modern medicine.  The station had been equipped with a full surgical theater as well as over two dozen regeneration tanks for serious health issues and injuries.  Turan had read every scrap of information he could get his hands on, studied every piece of equipment, spoke with every medic, doctor, nurse, paramedic, even folk healers among the citizens, anyone with the tiniest scrap of knowledge.  Turan was determined that while he would inevitably lose people in this profession, it would not be because he didn’t know enough.

Which was why the captain was so gratified to have him among the crew now.  When he had hired the good doctor on seven years ago, he’d had to admit he was a bit wary about hiring on a Guuran, but the tall being had quickly earned his spot.  He’d even befriended the irascible Parkani engineer, which was no small feat in and of itself. 

“It was simple,” Turan had reported, when the captain had found the two of them in the mess hall, sharing a meal.  “The cranky bastard had an infection in his liver and an ache in his joints.  I bet him that I could cure both if he let me.  If I was right, he’d sit down and talk with me.  And if I lost, he’d get to punch me right in the chest.”

The captain had laughed at that, since Quesh was renowned for his temper.  If he’d hit the good doctor, it was very likely he could have killed him.  The captain was more than a little impressed with Turan’s spunk.  And his competence, as it turned out.  Quesh had undergone a quick dunk in the ship’s regen tank and taken a handful of pills and within two days, the pain in his joints was gone, and the infection had cleared right up.  The Parkani felt ten years younger and for the first time that the captain had known him, had actually been laughing and joking with Turan.

When the captain arrived in sickbay now, however, the Guuran was not laughing and joking.  His very light blue skinned arms were splattered in blood, as was his apron.  He was busy, working on a man’s stomach, digging out a bullet that had lodged there.  His hands moved delicately, deliberately.  The captain nodded in satisfaction.  This was no sawbones he’d hired, this was a fully-qualified doctor and surgeon.  A good many of the people in this sickbay would owe their lives to that Guuran. 

The captain went through the room, stopping to speak to everyone, making sure he kept out of the doctor’s way, out of his assistant’s way.  There wasn’t anything he could do for them, he was no doctor, but he could be seen among them.  He could give them encouragement.  He helped out for a while, acting as one of Turan’s assistants, fetching water, administering some small amounts of medication, under strict supervision of the doctor himself.  He stayed there for over three hours, seeing to his crew and making sure that
he
was seen.

Finally, after all that time, Turan came over to see him.  He left the cargo handler Sylvia, who he had been sitting and chatting with, holding her hand.  She wasn’t better yet, but he had managed to make her smile.  “Good to have you here, Captain,” the Guuran said wearily. 

“What’s the butcher’s bill, Turan?” he asked, keeping his voice low. 

The doctor removed his gloves, tossing them in a nearby sink.  He took a deep breath, letting it out in a soft trilling noise that was common to his people, a sound of frustration.  “Well, Captain, aside from the seventeen already killed in the boarding action, we had twenty-two in here, wounded.  Three have already died and I think four more might join them.  We simply do not have enough facilities to save them all.”  He rubbed his palms together.  “The rest, well, they will recover, physically.  But more than a few, especially the women, were brutalized and violated.  I have eight cases of rape among those who weren’t killed afterward.”  Another trilling sound.  “I’m doing what I can for them, Captain, but they’re going to need therapy, time and comfort.  Some of them are very badly shaken by the trauma.”

The captain nodded.  “We’ll do our best with them.  Only so much that can be done, especially with the ship in shambles as it is.  I need all of Quesh’s people moving as quickly as they can.  We have to get in-system and to Instow soonest.”

“I understand, Captain, I really do.”  Turan looked apologetic.  “I can patch together the physical wounds, but trauma to the mind?  It’s a lot simpler to break people than it is to fix them again, Captain.”

“I know, Turan.  I know.  You’re doing excellent work.  You keep at it and you make sure you get some rest too.”

But the Guuran shook his head, as the captain knew he would.  “I have patients who need me, Captain.  I haven’t got the time to rest.”

The captain only looked at him for another moment before nodding.  “I understand.  Do what you can.  I’ll be back to check on you in another few hours.”

“Yes, Captain.”  Without another word, Turan turned back to his patients.

The captain made his way back out, making sure to speak with his people as he left.  He gave them soothing words, clasped the hands of the men and women as he went by.  They all nodded in appreciation, gave weak smiles to his broad one when they could, if the pain wasn’t too great. 

Soon he was outside the sickbay, leaning both hands against the bulkhead, breathing heavily.  So many dead.  So many hurt.  In less than an hour, so much had happened.

Patching together the fuel lines had turned out to be a bitch of a job.  Tamara was one of four people in EVA suits, floating outside the hull, but inside the blasted area at the hit near engineering.  The damage was near complete in this area, there wasn’t much to fix so much as to cut away the damaged and twisted conduits and components and bring in replacements.  Right now, they were in the middle of cutting out the damage.  She and the others were slicing off the worst bits, placing them carefully into containers to be brought back inside to feed the only remaining replicator.  It was difficult work, though.  While the hole was large, and they had cut away the worst of the jagged bits, the damage had ripped through clear inside the hole, down in the inside of the hull.  Which meant that in order to reach the extent of the damage they had to reach through at very difficult angles to cut the lines free. 

“Might even be easier to just detach that section of hull,” Tamara mused.

“Why?” came the question.

“Because while it’s a pain to cut these pieces loose at this angle,” she explained, “imagine how much of a bitch it’s going to be to install the new stuff?”

“Damn,” one of the techs, a young woman named Mairi exclaimed.  “You’re right, Tamara.”

“Damnation,” another tech, a man named Jenkins replied.  “It is going to be a massive ache to try and hook up the new fuel lines.  But have you ever done a full separation of a hull section?”

“I have,” Tamara replied, smiling.  “It’s a tedious project.  But it’s better than trying to actually cut it loose with plasma torches.”

“Damned right,” Mairi replied.  “This is taking forever to get the ragged edges off the hull,” she agreed.  “I say we do it.”