Hold the Star: Samair in Argos: Book 2 (31 page)

              Tamara glared at her.  “Glad I amuse you.”

              The lupusan flicked her ears in amusement, put her tongue back in her mouth and hopped lightly down from the ladder, not even bothering to climb down.  Tamara, with a grunt, pulled herself out of the cockpit and then clambered down to the deck.  When she released the handholds on the ladder, her knees buckled and she nearly fell.

              A strong arm caught her and propped her back up on her feet.  “Watch yourself there, Samair.  You okay?”

              Tamara blinked a few times.  She felt wrung out, stiff and sore.  Sleeping in a cockpit for several hours would certainly do that, as well as the emotional turmoil she’d been subjected to only added to the strain.  “I’m all right.  Just stiff from laying in that ship for so long.  How long was I in there?”

              “You left the mess hall about five hours ago,” Saiphirelle said, shrugging again.  Her arm was still outstretched to catch the woman should she stumble.  “What are you doing down here, anyway?”

              “I thought I’d spend a little time in my fighter,” Tamara told her, waving her hand, and the lupusan security officer backed away a step.  She stretched, arching her back to try and loosen up.

              Saiphirelle glanced over at her, one ear back.  “Five hours in the cockpit?”

              Tamara didn’t look at her, she only shrugged.  “I needed some time.”

              “Uh huh,” the lupusan replied.  Clearly she wasn’t convinced. 

              “So other than waking up wrung out engineers,” Tamara asked, scrubbing her face with her hands, “what are you doing down here?”

              The lupusan grunted.  “We’re about fourteen hours from breakout, I thought you might want to take a look at the fighters we got taking up space in the cargo bay.”

              Tamara shook her head slightly.  “What?”

              “Hello? 
Grania Estelle
to Third Engineering Officer Samair?  Are you tracking?” Saiphirelle mocked. 

              “What the hell are you talking about?” Tamara demanded, startled by the use of her official rank aboard the ship.

              “I’m talking about the six pirate ships that are parked in the cargo bay, Samair,” the lupusan said patiently.  “Captain wants to know if we can use them, what their armaments are, and how hard it would be to train someone to fly one?”             

              Tamara rubbed her shoulder.  “Learning to fly it?  Unless they’re designed with some kind of weird, idiosyncratic flight controls, I could probably train someone in a matter of hours to fly one.”

              Saiphirelle blinked.  “A few hours?”

              “To
fly
one, my good Security officer,” the engineer replied with a smile.  “Take offs, maybe landing, and flying in a straight line.  Anything more than that will take a few weeks.  And we don’t have a simulator on board.  Or a big enough boat bay.  Or hell, even a decent auto-landing control system.”

              Saiphirelle shrugged.  “The damned pirates landed in the cargo bay. 
You’ve
landed in the cargo bay.  Why couldn’t the others?”

              Tamara chuckled.  “Oh, they could.  But the kids on this tub that can fly a shuttle aren’t combat pilots.  And yes, the shuttle pilots have landed in the cargo bays before, of course, so I suppose anyone flying one of the fighters could do the same.  But I know the captain.”  She grimaced, but she found she could say it wouldn’t feeling she needed to smash something.  Maybe…  No, not now.  “He might be content having a fighter escort, assuming we could find people to fly those things, but he’s not going to be fine with having one of his cargo bays being used to house fighters.  Not even a part of the bay.  Hell, he’s still covetous of the space
my
fighter takes up in the boat bay.”

              Saiphirelle flicked her ears in amusement.  “Well you’re right about that.  So what should we do?  If we could have an escort coming in, it might make things a little easier.  Might make people think twice about messing with us.”

              She sighed.  “I’m an engineer, not a fighter pilot.  Not anymore.”

              “That is just bullshit,” the lupusan replied with a slight growl.  “I remember what you did at Hecate.  Everyone does.  Don’t tell me you’re not a starfighter pilot.”

              Tamara nodded, conceding the point.  “All right.  Let’s go check out those fighters.”

              “Nope, not me,” the other female replied.  “My job was to get you on your feet.  I’m too much of a grunt to go sailing off in one of those deathtraps.  You go have fun.”

              Tamara chuckled and then, greatly daring, patted the lupusan on her furry arm.  “I will.”  The touch drew Saiphirelle’s gaze over to the human, first to the hand, and then up to her face.  For an instant, Tamara wasn’t sure if she was about to be attacked or not, and she withdrew her hand and the lupusan walked away, heading out of the boat bay without another word.

              Stepping into the cargo bay, Tamara observed the six pirate starfighters parked in the otherwise empty and cavernous cargo bay.  She sighed as she saw the scorch marks from the thruster burns on the deck and the furrows and dents dug into the decking by the ships’ landing gear.  Making combat landings into a bay that wasn’t designed for it was… risky.  Clearly the pirate pilots had some skill to go with that sense of reckless abandon.  They were all dead now, so it hardly mattered.

              The ships themselves were blocky and ungainly looking.  They were little more than rectangular solids, slightly wider at the aft end where there was a pair of engines, stacked one on top of the other.  Maneuvering thrusters were spaced out all around the ship’s fuselage, with a pair of weapon pods on the sides.  After a cursory look, she saw that the ships were armed with a pair of laser cannons, one on each side, and a pair of missiles, one in each pod.  They didn’t seem to be graceful or swift, but then they were not meant to win any beauty contests.

              The lack of wings or any serious counter gravity made them unsuitable for atmospheric flight.  They would literally fly like a brick in atmo, but that was fine.  Tamara was sure that the pirate Captain Verrikoth had other assault vessels that could operate just fine in planetary atmosphere.  He’d have to, considering the fact that the Argos Cluster wasn’t festooned with space-faring cultures.  So far, since her awakening from hibernation, she’d only seen three systems that had any serious amount of space traffic.  Which was strange, because in her day, the star systems were flush with ships, stations, with colonies all over.

              She checked over the outsides of all six of the ships.  They’d been used hard, and maintenance was clearly not the highest of the pirate’s priorities.  The ships had been sitting here in the bay, untouched, since they’d landed nearly three months ago.  Granted, there was nowhere for the ships to go, since the
Grania Estelle
had been barreling along in hyperspace.  She activated her HUD, bringing up the sensors and enhanced sight her implants gave her.  It took a few minutes of intense visual scans to determine that the hull and the engines were in good shape.  Most of what appeared to be damage on the hull was just carbon and sand scoring on the metal as the ships flew through dust particles or micrometeoroids in an asteroid belt.  Moving to the cockpit, which was a pilot’s couch on the very bow of the blocky ship, surrounded by an armor glass canopy that would swing upward.  Opening a small panel just behind the canopy, she saw the keypad used to unlock the ship to allow access.  There was a data jack to the right side of the keypad, the keys on which were labeled with the claw-like scrawl of one of the zheen languages.  Handwritten zheen, and in this case, her implants identified the language as kek’ses, looked as though scratches had been made into wood or paper by a claw.  Which in the early days was the way the zheen formed their characters, they didn’t bother with pens or stylus, and they would dip a claw into ink and write using the tip of a finger.  She studied the keypad for a moment and her implants tried to dig up more information, but she couldn’t spot anything.  There was no obvious set of keys that if pressed would open the canopy, no simple lock code.

              Tamara took a deep breath, pressed her thumb to the data jack and sent an impulse to the controls.  There were a series of lights on her HUD, text, in kek’ses, scrolled over the right side of her HUD as a series of decryption algorithms attacked the fighter’s security system.  It took less than a minute to decode the lock and for the canopy to open with a hiss.  She glanced inside, looking at the controls and the various interfaces.  It was designed for a zheen pilot, what with their compound eyes and segmented bodies.  In a pinch, or an emergency, Tamara thought she could probably fly this crate, but it wouldn’t be comfortable and she certainly wouldn’t be able to fly as intuitively as she could in her own fighter.

              But a zheen could learn.  Maybe there would one or two zheen aboard ship that would be willing to give it a go.

              But as it turned out, there was only one zheen who was willing to strap himself into a pirate starfighter and chase the deep dark with her, the young engineer Kay’grax.  But Ka’Xarian stepped in almost immediately and quashed the idea.

              “Tamara, be serious,” he said, irritated.  “You of all people know just how short-handed we are on the engineering shifts.  I can’t spare him to go gallivanting off in an untried starfighter.  Hell, we can’t honestly spare
you
.”

              Tamara sighed.  “I know, Xar, but think about it.  I can get out there and run interference if there are any mild threats out there.  But a freighter this big being only defended by one fighter?”

              He zheen’s antennae bobbed.  “It worked at Hecate.”

              “We were desperate at Hecate,” she countered.  “And let’s be honest, we barely got out of there as it was.  If I had someone flying wing with me…”

              He made a sharp blatting noise, a zheen snort.  “You’re really going to tell me that a complete greenie like Kay’grax is going to pop into a cockpit and suddenly he’ll be a competent fighter pilot?  Can he even pilot a ship?”

              Tamara gritted her teeth.  The younger zheen had been particularly evasive about that.  He own knowledge of zheen body language coupled with the other information her implants were giving her at the time had clearly shown that the engineer had been anxious about that question when Tamara had posed it to him.  He hadn’t lied, per se, but it was clear that Kay’grax had very little experience in piloting a craft, any kind of craft. 

              “No, I don’t think he can.  I’d have to put him through Basic Flight even before I let him touch the controls on a starfighter.”  She sighed heavily, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand and then hurriedly dropped that hand when her hand brushed the disrupter there.  “Damn.  Well there goes that idea.”

              But the zheen shook his head.  “No, I don’t think so, Tamara.  Once we get things stabilized here, get our watch sections up to snuff and by the stars get more people, take the little bug out and give him wings.”  Tamara smiled, raising an eyebrow at her friend’s wit.  He chittered.  “I know.  Smart, skilled, handsome
and
a poet?”  He laughed harder.  “My mate Xaaka never stood a chance!”

              Tamara threw back her head and laughed, putting a hand on the zheen’s arm.

              Tamara worked for a few hours on the fighters, doing little more than a proper survey of the machines, marking places that needed repair or replacement.  The fighters themselves were a bit boring and boxy for her tastes, but she was used to aerospace fighters.  These ones were meant for space only.  They would do the job, she knew, but she preferred a bit of versatility in her ships, as opposed to a more specialist role like these.  Perhaps they’d been designed for the attack on Byra-Kae.  It was unlikely that the pirates would be needing to drop fighters into atmosphere when assaulting the Republic defenses there.  Once they smashed or captured any ships, destroyed or boarded any orbitals or space stations, the pirates could just sit in orbit and enjoy the spoils.  And if the locals on the ground started to get uppity, Verrikoth could just lob a few rocks down on the planet’s surface to shut them up.  So in that sense, she supposed these ships made sense.

              Tamara sat down on the deck and wiped her forehead, sighing as she felt herself wipe a blob of grease on her skin.  Pulling out her datapad, she pressed her thumb to the data jack and uploaded all the specs, flaws and repairs she’d listed from her implants to the datapad.  Damn, she hated the fact that she could no longer interface with the rest of the ship.  She couldn’t interface with Stella.  For years now, decades, she’d had that edge, that convenience.  And now, for the foreseeable future, at least, it was lost. 

              She sighed.  Turan had been occupied with other serious injuries to do any serious research into getting rid of the disrupter on her neck.  Tamara had been trying to do some work on her own and had thus far been able to map the tendrils that were wrapped all around her brain stem and into her brain itself.  It was of small use, since they already knew it would kill her if they tried to remove or cut any of the tendrils.  The use of destructor nanites to eat the tendrils or the device itself wouldn’t be fast enough to prevent the foul thing from sending out a lethal shock.  There was also the very real danger that the nanites might not be so discriminatory in what they ate, given the speed in which they would need to work.  Tamara had no desire to have a large chunk of her head to be gobbled up by a host of rampaging nanites.