Hold the Star: Samair in Argos: Book 2 (49 page)

              “Well?” Frederick asked, looking a little nervous.  “What do you think?”  It seemed important that Tamara like his choice.  Taja stood a step or two away, gazing at the ship.

              Tamara shrugged.  “It looks very functional, a lot like the
Emilia Walker
.  I would guess a ship that size wouldn’t need a crew bigger than ten.  Probably eight, if everyone works on loading and unloading cargo in port.”

              Frederick nodded, running a hand over his hair.  “Yeah, that was about what I was thinking.  Taja was thinking of coming along to act as my cargo specialist and purser, freeing me up a bit to do the day to day operation of the ship.”

              Tamara glanced over at the shorter woman, who was pointedly not looking at her.  Apparently, the view out the armor glass was particularly riveting.  She only shook her head and turned back to the captain.  “So, do you have access to the ship?  Can we go aboard and check her out?”

              But he shook his head.  “I’m afraid not.  We need to have someone from station admin to come down and let us in.”

              “For legal reasons?” Tamara asked.

              Taja shook her head, finally turning back to face them.  “No, they’re the ones that have the access codes to the ship.  We can’t get in without them.”

              Tamara snorted.  “Oh, please.  If there’s any power left on the ship and assuming that the control system is in some sort of language that I can read, I’ll get us in.  That part isn’t a problem.  Do we know who the previous owners were?”

              They both shook their heads.  “What about the admin person who let you in?  Actually,
have
you been aboard before?”

              “Only once,” Frederick said.  “About a week ago.”

              “And the person, human?  Zheen?  Lupusan?”

              Taja nodded.  “I see where you’re going with this.  She was human.  She used a data key, similar to the one Eamonn uses aboard the
Grania Estelle
.  She inserted it into the access panel at the docking port airlock, a few lights lit up and then the hatch slid open.”

              Tamara nodded, frowning in thought.  “Yeah, then I don’t think this should be a problem.  Unless the ship is of some weird construction, like hak’ruk or something, I should be able to get inside without an issue.  Are you concerned about getting in trouble?”

              “Aren’t you?” Frederick asked, surprised.  “I’d have thought since your captain is trying to get in good with the locals, that you wouldn’t want to cause trouble.”

              “All right then,” Tamara replied.  She gestured.  “Call admin, tell them you’d like to make another look at the ship, you’re considering a bid.”  She frowned again.  “I gotta tell you though, even if it’s completely scrap, they’re not going to want to let it go for probably anything less than a million.  And that’s if it’s just stripped down to the bare metal, with no computers, no drives, no reactor.  Start adding those things in, price goes up.”

              “I’ve secured funding for a loan.”

              Tamara blinked.  “How the hell did you do that?” she asked.  Then she looked down.  “Sorry, that’s not my business.”

              Frederick shrugged.  “No, it isn’t, but I’ll tell you anyway.  I’ve been here before.  Four times in the past two years.  Ran myself up a decent amount of credit here, and stashed it away.  Certainly nowhere near enough to buy the ship, or even put a significant down payment on it, but enough to get the collateral for a loan.”

              “Then admin shouldn’t have any problem getting someone down here, especially if they think they’re going to make some money off of you,” Tamara replied.

              “No, I don’t suppose they would.”  He pressed a button on his wrist communicator, a new one, Tamara noted, and spoke into it.  He carried on a conversation for a few moments, stepping away from the two women for a few moments.  It seemed to be a polite affair, there was no yelling and cursing, no anger. 

              While he was doing that, Tamara turned to Taja.  “So, got yourself a new Captain,” she said idly.

              The fiery young woman’s eyes blazed.  “Don’t you talk about things you don’t understand, Tamara,” Taja said angrily.  “You don’t know anything.”

              She shrugged.  “I’m just saying, it’s awfully quick.  And with another captain.”

              “He…  He was there for me when Vincent wasn’t,” Taja said, looking away, the fire dying down, if not out.

              Tamara just looked at her for a moment.  “I see.”

              “I’m surprised that you stayed,” Taja said bluntly.  “You more than anyone had reason to get the hell off that ship.  You hate him!”

              “That’s my business.  And right now,
Grania Estelle
is the only ship I’ve seen so far with the industrial capacity to be able to get things done around here.  And I’m not just going to abandon the people on that ship.  Yes, the Captain and I have our problems.  But that’s between me and him.”

              “So, I see you got
yourself
a new Captain,” the other woman spat.  “Or should I say, you got yourself my old one.”

              “Now you’re just being petty, Taja,” Tamara said, refusing to rise to the bait.  “I’m not sleeping with him.  You know that.”

              Now it was the smaller woman’s turn to shrug.  “I don’t know anything,” she said.  “I left.”

              “Right, you did.”

              Taja looked back, eyes flaring again.  “Why are you here?  Why are you looking to help us?”

              Tamara looked at her for a long moment, not speaking.  She glanced at Frederick Vosteros, who was continuing with his call to station admin.  “Because we all just got a very raw deal, and a lot of good people got killed.  Those of us that made it are scarred by the whole ordeal.  I just think that we need to…”

              “Get along?” Taja asked, her voice dripping acid.  She turned from the armor glass and crossed her arms under her breasts.

              “Look out for one another,” she said.  “But if you’re so sure you don’t want my help, fine.  I’ll go tell Frederick that you don’t want me here.”  Tamara shrugged, finally letting the anger boil up.  She was sick to death of dealing with all the damage resulting from the pirate situation.  “I wouldn’t want you to think that I was stealing your Captain.”  She stepped away and walked to where Frederick was standing, still talking into his communicator.

              “I’m sorry, hold for just one moment,” he said.  He pressed a button, muting the pickup.  “What’s up?”

              “I’m sorry,” she told him.  “I just got a call from the ship, I have to go and deal with another brush fire.  We’re going to have to reschedule this.”

              Frederick nodded, though his eyes narrowed ever so slightly, flicking from Tamara to Taja, who stood there with a scowl on her face.  “I understand.  Is this something that you might be able to take care of today and still come back here?”

              Tamara shrugged.  “Probably.  But I would recommend just you, me and the admin person take the tour, Frederick.  Your cargo specialist is apparently holding a grudge against me for some reason.”

              He looked to Taja, his own scowl forming.  “I can send her away now.”

              But Tamara shook her head.  “Doing that will just piss her off.  Give her a couple of hours to cool down and then call me.  I’ll be on the station.”  She looked straight at him.  “Don’t bring her,” Tamara told him, gesturing to where the cargo specialist stood.  “I am not going to put up with her issues right now.  We all went through hell, Frederick,” she said, relenting a bit, “And I know we’re all dealing in our own ways.  And I can also understand if you don’t want to deal with
my
issues either.  You can get yourself another engineer if I make you uncomfortable.”

              “You’re the best I’ve seen, Tamara.  You rebuilt my ship once.  If I can get your help again, I’d like to,” he replied.  “If you would help me, I’d appreciate it.”

              Tamara nodded.  “I will.  And thank you.”  She nodded again to him and left.  As she did, she heard him get off the call and then go over to where Taja was standing.  They spoke in whispered voices and after only a few seconds and Tamara intentionally quickened her pace.  She didn’t want to be around while they fought.

              Tamara wandered through the shops on the mezzanine back in the main Hub.  She avoided the glitzy vendors or ones that provided goods or services that she’d seen in a number of systems.  The mezzanine here was similar to the one on Ulla-tran; the section she was wandering through sold electronics: datapads, communicators, computer components, monitors, control systems, but no replicators.  Nothing really of any serious interest.  Oh, there were a few things she saw that she felt she could fix, that she could recondition, perhaps even resell for a tidy sum.  But none of those things really interested her. 

              Shaking her head, Tamara continued along on her perusal of the components on the shelves in the stores here.  There were a few mildly interesting pieces in one store that she picked up and scanned with her optics, saving the information in her implants for later use.  The storekeeper kept an eye on her, but since she wasn’t damaging the items, he didn’t say anything.  This could prove useful and profitable in the future, but for the most part she was just wandering and killing time. 

              Thinking of the junk she was seeing here brought her mind back around to Frederick Vosteros.  The man absolutely refused to quit.  She’d gotten to know him a bit over the last few months, ever since her release from the brig aboard
Grania Estelle
, when she had been acting Captain aboard the ship.  She was proud of him, working to secure himself a new ship and a new crew.  Her smile soured a bit when she thought of Taja, but she wasn’t going to blame Frederick for her actions.  Taja had her own problems and demons and what she decided to do with her life was her choice.  That wouldn’t stop Tamara from assisting the good Captain with securing that ship.  And she made a promise to herself to do what she could to help him get that ship up and running, even browbeating her own Captain into helping.  Perhaps it wasn’t too late to look into that cooperative idea after all.

              That brought her thoughts to the cooperative itself.  How would that work, anyway?  Assuming Vosteros could get that ship and assuming he could crew it and Tamara could get it running properly, all that did was get another ship into space.  Granted, that was a good thing, but how would Eamonn and Vosteros be able to work cooperatively?  If they both worked for the same corporation, that would be simple.  Or if they joined up, used Seylonique as a base of operations and did circuits in the nearby star systems to ship cargoes, that could work, but they would need someone to run the home office, as it were.  Tamara was the first to admit that while her experience and skills did run in those circles, what with her having run the shipyards at Hudora not all that long ago, she wanted to be aboard ship, fixing things, traveling.  The need to stay in one place and mind the store really didn’t appeal to her, not right now.  In fact, she’d have thought Taja would have been perfect for that sort of job; bringing in ships and cargo, selling them at huge profit, buying new cargoes a low cost and shipping them back out again.  Two ships really wasn’t enough to make a shipping empire, but it was certainly a start.  Perhaps there was someone else that could run things here.

              Which lead to other thoughts, ones more maudlin in nature.  Seylonique was certainly one of the more advanced star systems that she’d seen in the Argos Cluster ever since she’d been rescued in that pod, but it was utterly defenseless. 
Leytonstone
, as it was, was a joke and a bad one at that.  If Verrikoth was still out there, and there was every reason to believe he was, he wouldn’t be fooled by the charade the locals were trying to pull.  By that matter, even if it hadn’t been a charade and the battlecruiser had been fully operational, one ship couldn’t adequately defend an entire star system.  It couldn’t be everywhere at once and if the attackers came in from a vector opposite her,
Leytonstone
might be way out of position to try and repel them.  Hell, it would have trouble defending just the main planet and the orbital station from attack, especially if Verrikoth, or one of the other pirates in the Cluster, was to come here with several ships.  Verrikoth had had several, losing his corvette to that Republic heavy cruiser, but he had three light cruisers of his own.  One their own, they couldn’t stand up to a battlecruiser, but they were fast and agile, more so than even a powerful battlecruiser.  They’d have to nip at her a little at a time, trying to stay out of
Leytonstone
’s effective weapons’ envelope while taking potshots at her stern to try and knock out her main propulsion.  A battlecruiser might not be as light and airy on her feet as a light cruiser, but if any of those ships got too close or the bigger ship was able to get a step ahead and pounce, its impressive armament of heavy lasers, turbolaser batteries and missile launchers would quickly reduce
Ganges
and her sisters to scrap metal.