Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 (80 page)

              “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 bite 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.

              The lizard didn’t wait, instead breaking cover and sprinting for the T junction.  Xar and Vakkon were right behind him, the others staying behind cover and watching their backs.  Reaching the junction, the Gekkon stomped on the guard’s throat with a strangely satisfying crunch, ensuring the man was dead.  There was no sign of the second guard, but down the corridor he was hiding in, there was an open hatchway about fifty meters down.  Apparently the death of his comrade had caused his spine to evaporate.

              “Do your thing, sir,” Plonall said, sweeping the corridor with his eyes and the muzzle of his weapon, keeping the stock tight to his shoulder.  Corajen had trained him well, it seemed.

              Xar wasted no time.  Going up to the door, he pressed the button to open.  It beeped, but the door didn’t budge.  Checking around the panel, feeling as though a bullet or blaster shot was about to hit him in the center of his back thorax at any second, Ka’Xarian forced himself to calm down.  He wasn’t a soldier, that was obvious, but he wasn’t supposed to be.  There was a problem in front of him, a closed door, it was up to him to open it.  The quick and dirty method was out, no explosives, so he’d have to get it open by other means.  Besides, with prisoners inside, he wasn’t sure explosives would have been the best way anyway.  Turning back to the dead guard, he rifled through the man’s pockets, looking for an access card, data key, anything.  His search turned up nothing.  There was no handprint or retinal scanner in the access panel.  Humming to himself slightly to try and get his head in the right space, he pulled a multitool from his belt pouch and set to work removing the panel from the wall.

              There was a burst of static from Plonall’s communicator, but the zheen ignored it, focusing on his task.  “Don’t want to rush you sir,” the Gekkon said, drawing out the last word.  “We’re going to have company real soon.”

              “Just keep them off me for a few more moments,” Xar hissed back. 
Just a stuck door.  No problems.  You’re back on the
Grania Estelle
, we’re just trying to get to some crewmen who are trapped in a room because the door won’t open.  That’s all we’re doing here.
  He stripped a wire and then made another connection, pulling out another one in the process.