Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

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