Hold the Star: Samair in Argos: Book 2 (72 page)

              Tamara sighed, scrubbing her eyes with her palms.  Putting her hands on the table, she glared at the lupusan one last time and then attacked the food again.  Konstantin didn’t bother her any more, he just stood and wandered off without another word.

              “All right, bringing systems online right now,” Tamara said, pressing the activation control.  The upgraded computer core was all hooked up and powered, just ready to accept programming.  Her code flowed into the systems and she nodded as she watched it.  “Things are looking good.  Program is coming online…”

              Eretria nodded, watching her display.  “How do we work with this computer system, ma’am?  Is it an AI like on the
Grania Estelle
?”

              “No,” Tamara replied, not taking her eyes from her displays, pressing a few keys.  “It’s not an AI.  It will respond to voice commands, it can answer questions and, most importantly, will be able to control the mining bots we’re building.  It will allow a great deal of automation in the mining op.  Step up production tenfold.”  She smiled.  “And we’ll step it up again once we get the kinks out.”

              “How many bots can this program control?” Eretria asked, frowning.

              Tamara tapped a finger against her lips.  “Um, forty at this time,” she replied, pressing two more controls. 

              “Forty!” Eretria gasped.  “When you set this up, I thought that it was going to be more like ten or fifteen.”

              Tamara snickered.  “Oh you small dreamer,” she said.  “You’d never be able to get enough materials doing everything with the people we have available.  We can get the teams working on building another shuttle so we can transport goods in and out of the gravity well.  EDI Transworks is not going to sit around waiting forever.”

              “How much can we transship with just the one shuttle, ma’am?”

              “Well, certainly enough to show good faith.  But if it takes several trips, then that’s what it takes,” Tamara said, shrugging.  “At least as first.  Once we get the second shuttle up, we can cut transport times down.  Though it does look as though we’re going to need to expand.”  She pursed her lips at that thought, then turned back to the program code.  “Looking good. 
Samarkand
mining system is now online.”  She stood.  “All right.  Let’s get those bots up and running.”

              They went out into the maintenance bay where half the team was working on the new mining bots.  They all looked up as the two women entered, but quickly went back to what they were doing.  Tamara could see six of the rather spidery-looking robots standing in a neat line as each one was completed, awaiting initialization and link up into the ship’s new controller system.  It looked as though two more were being completed, which as far as Tamara was concerned, was a good start.  Eight bots was a far cry from the forty she’d spoken of to Eretria, but they would be able to build more.  And these eight would be able to get a lot of work done and with only one worker keeping an eye on things, it would be cheaper and more efficient than doing the same work with the same number of organics.  This would free the techs up to work on other projects.

              “How we doing?” Tamara shouted to the room at large.  The others all looked up again from their work on the six bots. 

              “Looking good, Commander,” Kay’grax said with a waggle of his antennae.  “This one here is almost finished.  I checked on the others a few minutes ago.  Less than a minute for this one, a couple more for the others.”

              “All right,” she said, gesturing for them to continue.  They did.  Finally, Kay’grax walked to the various groups of the team and then nodded.  Tamara pulled her datapad and pressed a few controls.  A heartbeat later there was the sound of the bots powering up, all eight, and they rose to stand on their six spindly legs.  The spidery bots had laser cutter on the ends of two of their legs, tractors on the others.  Six maneuvering thrusters were evenly spaced around the main bodies of the bots, which would give them great maneuverability.

              “
Samarkand
, this is Tamara Samair.  Activate all mining bots on my authorization.  Code one-one-two-six-four-omega.”

              A male voice sounded from the speaker in her datapad.  “Acknowledged, Commander Samair.  Bots one through eight now active.  Ready for orders.”

              Tamara smirked and the others cheered.

Chapter 24

              The arrival of
Redcap Madness
back in the Seylonique star system after ninety-three days was one of surprise and pleasure.  Frederick Vosteros’s first cargo run on his new ship had come with a record success.  Bellosha had been more than willing to trade in goods from Seylonique.  Even Frederick knew the stuff from here was substandard, but compared to the very low level of technology on Bellosha, the goods he was bringing were many steps up.  Bellosha was barely above the hunter-gatherer stage; the planet’s infrastructure had collapsed during the Republic-Federation war two and a half centuries ago.  Bellosha had been the site of one of the more nasty battles, and unfortunately for the planet, a Federation cruiser had plunged into the atmosphere and crashed into the planet’s surface, less than three hundred kilometers from one of the largest cities.  The explosion and subsequent fallout had decimated the city and made the surrounding countryside unlivable.  Which had decimated the population when the fallout had covered the city in radiation.  When the biggest city on the planet had died and thousands of survivors were quickly stricken with various cancers and other radiation-related ailments, trade died off and the whole planet’s level of education, civilization began to die as well.  First it was slow, but by the time
Redcap Madness
arrived in system, there was little more than cottage industry, blacksmiths making iron tools, certainly no automotive transport, to say nothing of ships.  In fact, there was very little in the way of literacy in the people that Frederick and his crew met with.  They were, of course, more than happy to trade with him for the trinkets he brought with him from Seylonique.

              What they could trade him, was, of course, more problematic.  They didn’t have electronic banking, so there wasn’t any hope of setting up a credit system.  But, they did have a fair amount of precious metals that the locals had no use for, which Frederick and his fiery cargo specialist were quick to snap up.  They also traded for a fresh fruit, vegetables and other foodstuffs.  The locals made an excellent vodka that was fermented from a type of root tuber that Frederick quite enjoyed, so he bought several kegs of the stuff.  Perhaps there might be a market for it back in Seylonique.  Within a week, his crew had been able to get some down time, they filled up the holds, and were ready to head back.

              Fuel had been a problem.  He’d been running his ship on helium 3 and of course, the people of Bellosha didn’t have that there.  The system had a gas giant, which was on the small size, comparatively, and had a much thinner atmosphere than the ones in Seylonique, with a much lower level of particulate density and, most importantly, helium 3.  The ship didn’t have a helium 3 collector like Vincent Eamonn’s big bulk freighter did, but she did have very efficient power systems and his engineers were good about saving fuel.  They were only down to sixty percent fuel load, which meant they had more than enough to make it back to Seylonique for refueling.  But that would run him very low, lower than he was comfortable with.  It was dangerous, running down his reserves this far, but until they could get a collector in system here, even a low-efficiency one, there was no choice.

              But now they were back.  He was looking forward to selling his cargoes, getting a few days of liberty, and even catching up with a few people.  He wondered if Samair was still in the system.

              “Cap’n, weez gotten some serious itemz on da ssensorz,” Hikroon, his zheen sensor operator reported.  The zheen’s strange buzzing patois amused Frederick, and it annoyed the rest of the deck crew.  However, Hikroon was more than capable in his duties.  He had studied hard of all the technical manuals, and had asked for help and training time, even when the ship was in hyper.  This had seriously impressed Frederick so he encouraged this behavior, helping and training the zheen when his own duties allowed.

              The captain activated his display.  “What are you seeing, Hikroon?”

              “Lotsa consstruction goin’ on round da inna gass giant,” the zheen replied, tapping a few controls and refining his view.  “A framework ah boxez, lookss like dere is a fuelin’ sstation bein’ put tagetha.”

              He nodded slowly.  “Why do you say that?”

              The zheen turned his head to his boss, waggling his antennae with frustration at the man’s apparently density.  “Boss, dah structure is in low geossync orbit of dah gass giant.  Dere be no udda reezin to be puttin’ a sstation dere unless you gonna be minin’ gass.”

              “Makes sense,” he replied.  “Taja,” he called to the cargo specialist, using the internal comms.

              “Yeah?” she called back from the cargo area. 

              “Get up here,” he said.  “There’s some building going on and I want you to take a look.”

              “On my way up.”  A few moments later she was there.  “You said something about some building?” the tiny cargo specialist asked, slightly confused.

              “Yeah,” Frederick replied, pointing to his display.  She squeezed into the cramped bridge and squinted at the display.

              “What the hell?” Taja exclaimed.  She pointed.  “Well, that’s clearly a station of some sort.  Its position above the gas giant suggests it’s going to be a really huge collector.  Actually,” she said, pursing her lips, “I think it’s going to be a full-on mine and refinery.  Bring up helium 3, presumably along with deuterium and other things.  Refine out the crap they don’t want, and then store the materials they do.”

              “Like you say, that’s a
big
facility,” Frederick noted.  “I wonder how much they intend on being able to refine?”

              Taja shrugged.  “Certainly several orders of magnitude more than the regular fuel collectors can do,” she replied.  “How much more, I don’t have a clue.  More than any of the ships we know about would possibly need.”  She frowned.  “Maybe they’re looking to expand military operations here?  Or sell to other systems?”

              “All plausible,” Frederick said.  “That’s Samair’s ship,” he said, pointing to a blip on the sensors, which was helpfully labeled as
Samarkand
.  “Looks like she got things moving pretty quickly.”

              “Cap’n,” Hikroon piped up.  “I’m detecting mining activity on two near asteroidz.”

              They looked at the sensor feeds.  The two very large rocks, one nearly a kilometer across, the other slightly less than half that were swarmed by miner bots, looking like they were chewing it apart.  They were hauling the chunks of rock they were harvesting to a pair of orbital smelters that were holding position outside the asteroid field, a few light minutes from the gas giant.  From the smelters, the processed materials were being loaded by other bots onto four shuttles that were holding position nearby. 

              “This is quite an operation here,” Frederick mused.  “I’m impressed.”  He nodded to the helmsman, though his back was to the captain, so he couldn’t see.  “Take us in system, Champ.  To the orbital.”

              “On the way, Captain,” the man replied, working his console.

              “Tamara!” A shout came across the maintenance bay and the engineer looked up from her work on the new replicator.  They were up to four replicators now: two class threes, a class five and an e-replicator.  And all of them were running full blast.  The newest class three had been brought online only a few minutes earlier and Tamara was just watching to make sure that the device could manage the new workload.  Once this one was up and ready, she would tear down one of the others for maintenance.  It was annoying that so far no one else had full access, but she wasn’t sure she could trust anyone else on the ship with this kind of authority.  Not that she had the ability to give anyone else replicator access, but still, it would be nice to be able to train someone else to be able to service and initialize the replicators and take the job off her plate.

              “What is it?” she called seeing Kay’grax hustling over to her.  The young zheen had proven himself to be a capable and hard-working engineer, truly an asset for her team.  Of course, her team had expanded since first starting.  She had started with ten, plus herself, Kay’grax and Ms. Sterling.  Now there were thirty, with ten under Eretria and twenty under Tamara’s supervision, with Kay’grax as her senior specialist.  He wasn’t quite up to running his own team yet, but he was getting there.  The boy had a knack for power systems and environmental systems. 

              “There’s an incoming transmission from
Redcap Madness
,” he said, mandibles clacking.  “Apparently, they want to speak with you.”

              She smiled.  “They do, do they?  All right.  Come here,” she beckoned him.  He trotted forward.  She handed him her datapad.  “Keep an eye on the diagnostics.  Make sure the readings stay steady.  They fluctuate more than five points in either direction, you come get me right away.  Understood?”

              Kay’grax nodded.  “Understood, ma’am.”

              She clapped him on the shoulder and walked to her office, closing the door behind her.  She sat at her desk and activated the comm display.  “Samair here.”

              Frederick Vosteros’s smiling face appeared on the display.  “Tamara, it’s Frederick.”

              She beamed.  “Frederick, welcome back.  How was Bellosha?”

              He shrugged.  “Not bad.  Not much in the way of industry, and I have some rather eclectic items to try and sell here, but who knows?  They might go for it.”

              “That’s good to hear.”

              “I see you’ve been busy,” he replied, gesturing.

              Tamara smiled again.  “A bit, yes.  Gotten a good start on the gas mine, though we still have about a year’s worth of work at the pace we’re moving at now.  Not enough trained people.  Still building up the number of mining bots we’re using, working out where to put everything and just putting everything together.”  She rubbed the back of her neck.  “But that’s all to be expected.  Are you going to be in system long?  Love to catch up.”

              “I plan to be at the orbital in four days,” he said.  “And then we have to refuel and resupply, sell the cargo and pick up another one.  Probably four or five days in port.”

              “Where are you headed?” she asked.

              He shook his head.  “Not sure.  That depends on the cargo I find.”  Then he frowned.  “Not that I really want to talk shop, but is there any chance I can get one of those fuel collectors?  I don’t like running my ship nearly down to fumes on a straight cargo run and not many of the surrounding systems can give us what we need.”

              Tamara nodded, smiling.  “Yes, sir, I think that is actually something I can help with.  I’ll even give you a good price on it.  I’ll sell it to you at cost.”  She mentally went through her current inventory.  The current collectors were only supplying just enough fuel to cover operations and the sales to the orbital.  In fact, she was going to need to increase production until the actual gas mining station went active.  She sighed slightly then quickly tried to hide it with a smile.  “That won’t be a problem at all.”

              “Good.  So care to meet up for a drink or dinner on the station?”

              “I’ll have to get your collector assembled,” she said, thinking aloud.  “Round up the parts, get the labor on it, and then get it loaded… Give me a week.”

              He nodded.  “Sounds good.  Look forward to seeing you.  Got some stories to swap.”  And he cut the connection.

              “How the hell did you do all this, Tamara?” Frederick asked, beaming.  “I mean, I’m gone for just under a hundred days and you get the beginnings of a serious station built.  You’ve got miners and a ship and bots.  What the hell?” he asked.

              She laughed.  “The hardest part is the paperwork,” she admitted.  “It’s been a while since I’ve been in a position to actually herd this sort of gaggle of kittens, but…”  Tamara laughed.  “I enjoy it.  It’s actually… therapeutic.”

              “Okay.  So how long until the gas mine is up and running?”

              She sighed.  “Well, all told, probably a year to fourteen months.  But I’m getting the lower section of the station done in, well, sections.  For the moment it’s just going to be a giant washer hanging in the atmosphere of the gas giant and there will be some twenty separate collection and secondary refining modules.  They will suck in the gasses and other particulates, go through a first stage refinement and then pump them up to the primary refineries in the upper section of the station.  We’ll have that ready to go in about a month.  Just the first one.  Remember, there are going to be twenty.”

              “But how do you do all this with the people you have on hand?” he asked.  “You said you only had about thirty-five people in your employ.  A station the size you want at the speed of production you wanted, there’s no way that could be done.”

              She nodded.  “You’d be surprised, if you’re dedicated enough.  We busted our asses out here, I paid a lot of over and double time and my techs made every deadline.  That’s right.  I’m in the process of hiring on two hundred more souls for the work.  A few local companies have decided working for me is the best way to do things.  We’ve had some business arrangements and I need personnel, so for a small share of the profits, I get a host of new labor.  They’ll need some seasoning, of course.  I’m going to put them through a pretty hardcore training regimen, those that make the cut get to work for me in space.  The rest can work on the ground.  I’ve got a project that needs tending and not everything can be done up in the Big Dark.”