Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 (3 page)

              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 reach 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.

              The pod jerked, the sensors indicated that the ship had locked its tractoring beams onto it and was reeling it in.  Wouldn’t be long now.

              Within minutes, the pod was inside the ship’s cargo bay and after a heavy bump, the pod set down on the deck.  Not waiting for someone to come to the hatch, for it could be hours before someone came down to check out their score, Tamara unhooked her datapad, grabbed the toolkit and then hit the hatch release sequence.  With a hiss, the hatch swung open.  Scrambling forward, she dove headfirst out of the pod and onto the deck of the cargo bay.  Gasping, she breathed in the air as fast as her lungs could fill.

              The air quality wasn’t great, but it was by far a better gulp of air than in the pod.  The bay smelled like industrial trash, engine oil and strangely, onions.  Looking around, she saw an assortment of items stored in here.  Barrels of coolant, fuel cells, and containers of other cargo that wasn’t labeled that she could see among other things were stacked haphazardly around the bay.  Tamara was surprised that there was enough room in here for the pod, but it appeared as though an area had been cleared at the end of the bay, right by the cargo doors.

              Picking herself up, she looked at her hands, which were now covered in grime.  She sighed in disgust and wiped her hands on her coveralls.  She also noticed that the thermal paint was mostly gone from her hand.  The Combat Heal wouldn’t have done that.  Neither would a short few months in hibernation.  Reaching with her right hand, she touched her face where the paint had been.  The rash had cleared up, but she could feel a roughness on her chin, her lips, and her cheeks where she had wiped the paint.  She took a deep, slow breath, trying to keep the frustration down.  Her face was all scarred, chemically burned by the paint.  The rash left behind from the paint, if left untreated, could make someone look as though they had a bad case of pox.  The paint, if left on the skin, could burn through and cause serious, permanent damage.

              It was the hibernation sleep, she realized.  The paint might have burned completely through her skin if left on her skin for that long.  But the deep freeze had disintegrated the paint before it could do too much damage.  Now, she just had some impressive burn scars on her hand and face and ear, but it was nothing a splash in a regeneration tank couldn’t fix.  She’d just need to get her hands on one.  On the upside, her face certainly wouldn’t match her Republic Navy dossier anymore.  At least until she could get things fixed on some planet very far from Hudora.

              Moving through the stacks of cargo, and trying to stay out of a few puddles of foul-smelling goop on the deck, she headed for the nearest control panel she could find.  Taking her datapad, she jacked it into the port and began a quick search to find out what she could about the ship, the owners, their special grid coordinates, the date, everything.

              She was rewarded by an alert on the datapad as numerous viruses moved to attack her software.  Tamara shook her head.  “Are you kidding me?  Is this deliberate?” she muttered.  It wasn’t.  The computers’ firewalls were down and the system was infected with dozens of nasty viruses.  Grumbling to herself, she tapped a few commands on her pad, releasing a few antivirus programs of her own devising which went to work on the infections.  It would take a little while, considering how many viruses there were.  Maybe the ship operators would thank her once her programs were finished cleaning out their systems.

              Of course, she was cleaning them out in other ways, too.  Data started flowing to the screen on her pad.  The ship was the
Grania Estelle
, a four-hundred thousand ton bulk cargo hauler out of the Destri-Juno Star System, a system about two hundred light years from Hudora.  However, it looked as though it was currently in the hands of private owners and no longer under contract with Destri-Juno.  Also, it looked as though the ship was at the far edge of the Hudora system near the hyper limit, about ten light hours above the plane of the ecliptic. 

              That made her frown.  The pod’s thrusters had accelerated her away from the station for about six seconds until the thrusters were empty.  From there, she was on a ballistic course until the
Grania Estelle
picked her up.  Going that far, she would have been floating free for… she blanched as the implications hit home.  That couldn’t be.

              Two hundred forty-eight years.  Everything she would have known was gone.  All her family, her friends, her co-workers, subordinates, fellow Navy folk, all gone.  Her knees buckled for an instant but she managed to keep her feet.  Her breath was moving in and out so fast, her vision started to swim.  It was the smell of the cargo bay that brought her back to herself. 

              Shaking her head to clear it, she looked back to her datapad.  The operating system on this ship was a mess.  Regular maintenance clearly wasn’t a priority, but then, it usually wasn’t for big freight haulers.  Maintenance costs money and sitting around in a repair slip getting a tune up would be burning money even more quickly.  It looked as though the ship was even older than Tamara was, now, and a lot of systems were on the ragged edge.  This ship needed a serious overhaul and soon.  She could feel herself getting excited about the prospect, finally a challenge worth sinking her teeth into.  After eleven months in the brig and another two and a half centuries in an escape pod drifting through space, this was something she could work on, something real.

              That of course, presupposed the crew of this ship were willing to talk, willing to work with her.  They’d picked her up, yes, but hopefully they weren’t slavers or other such… unsavory people.  Of course, it was highly likely they were exactly what she feared they’d be, and she was unarmed and didn’t really know the lay of the land here on this ship.

              On that note, she pulled up a full schematic of the ship.  She was big, which Tamara already knew, but it looked like three of the eight gigantic cargo bays were unused due to damage.  The ship was a kilometer long, with the living spaces, recreation areas, and engineering and bridge sections all along the central shaft of the ship.  Eight very large cylindrical cargo bays were arrayed on either side of the central section; they were easily over two hundred meters in diameter and extended about two thirds of the length of the ship along the spine.  Further aft of the main section were giant fuel cells connected by trusses that led to the ship’s main sublight drives.  Two hyperdrive engines were mounted by the main drives, one above and one below the sublight engines.  The ship had a crew of eighty-four, but the actual roster of crew and their various jobs wasn’t on the main net.  Apparently, the ship’s shields were a joke and what few emitters
did
function were nearing failure, four of the six main sublight engines were down, meaning the ship was incredibly slow even by a lumbering bulk freighter’s standards.  And life support was functioning, obviously, but based on the smell many of the components needed serious overhaul, or better yet, replacement.

              One piece of good news.  On her travails through the database, she discovered that this ship was equipped, at one time anyway, with a pair of class three industrial replicators.  Apparently, one of them had been out of commission for about half a century, but the other still functioned, partially, since the crew jury rigged it to produce only basic components.  Class threes could build quite a number of things, but required certain security codes to make things like weapons, military-grade items like hyperdrives, shields, computers and other replicators.  Republic and Federation replicators worked under the same principles, as neither of the large governments wanted civilians or criminal elements to have access to those sorts of things.  Without the codes, one still had access to civilian grade equipment, which, naturally, wasn’t as hardy.  If you tried to hack the system, the replicators would lock down, and if you tried to bypass the lockouts without those codes, the control systems and computers that ran the replicator would wipe and all the computer chips would self-destruct.  No danger to the foolish operator who tried to make something from the restricted list, but the chips would melt.  Then the constructor system, which was a storage tank of engineering nanites, would for all intents and purposes consume itself, leaving nothing but an empty tank.  Once a replicator was destroyed like that, there was nothing to do but pull it out and build another.  It would be completely gone.

              Sadly, the database didn’t indicate the state of the second replicator or why it was down, but that was something she would need to discover.  Perhaps she could barter her skills and the use of her security codes for a ride somewhere.  However, she couldn’t risk the crew finding her as she was; unarmed, disoriented and alone.  There wasn’t anything she could do about the alone part, and she wasn’t sure she could do much about the unarmed part either.  She was a decent shot; it was a requirement in the Navy, especially for those in the starfighter squadrons.  She’d kept up her shooting skills, more of a way to blow off steam than any desire to put a bullet in someone.  But from what she’d seen of this cargo bay, there weren’t any guns laying around. 

              There were always opportunities, she was an engineer, after all, but according to the very spotty internal sensors, it seemed as though she would only have a minute or two before a pair of crew came in to inspect their prize.  Rushing from the console, she raced around the bay, looking for anything that could be used as a weapon.  Finding a meter long steel pipe, which had about a two-centimeter wide diameter, she grabbed it up.  An improvised club wouldn’t match up against a pistol or stun rifle, but it might have to do.  She didn’t have time for anything else and the crew had very unhelpfully left their gun cabinet in another part of the ship.

              The cargo bay door slid open, she could hear it rumbling on squeaky gears and she winced.  Clearly, something else that needed fixing.  She could hear two male voices speaking gruffly to one another.

              “So why are we down here again?” one asked.

              “Because the Captain wants us to check out the pod we picked up,” the other voice replied.  The second voice had a bit of hissing and clicking that accompanied it.  “You’re not that dumb, Ygris.  Not usually anyway.”

              “What’s that smell?” the first voice, Ygris, apparently, asked. 

              “It’s the pod,” the hiss-click voice replied.  “Maybe it opened.  Maybe there’s a dead body inside.”

              “Uck, really?  I don’t wanna be dealing with no dead body.”

              “You think I do?” Hiss-click shot back.  “I don’t get paid enough for this.”