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

cargo hauler out of the Destri-Juno Star System, a system about two hundred light years from Hudora.  However, it looked as though it was currently in the hands of private owners and no longer under contract with Destri-Juno.  Also, it looked as though the ship was at the far edge of the Hudora system near the hyper limit, about ten light hours above the plane of the ecliptic. 
                  That made her frown.  The pod’s thrusters had accelerated her away from the station for about six seconds until the thrusters were empty.  From there, she was on a ballistic course until the Grania Estelle picked her up.  Going that far, she would have been floating free for… she blanched as the implications hit home.  That couldn’t be.
                  Two hundred forty-eight years.  Everything she would have known was gone.  All her family, her friends, her co-workers, subordinates, fellow Navy folk, all gone.  Her knees buckled for an instant but she managed to keep her feet.  Her breath was moving in and out so fast, her vision started to swim.  It was the smell of the cargo bay that brought her back to herself. 
                  Shaking her head to clear it, she looked back to her datapad.  The operating system on this ship was a mess.  Regular maintenance clearly wasn’t a priority, but then, it usually wasn’t for big freight haulers.  Maintenance costs money and sitting around in a repair slip getting a tune up would be burning money even more quickly.  It looked as though the ship was even older than Tamara was, now, and a lot of systems were on the ragged edge.  This ship needed a serious overhaul and soon.  She could feel herself getting excited about the prospect, finally a challenge worth sinking her teeth into.  After eleven months in the brig and another two and a half centuries in an escape pod drifting through space, this was something she could work on, something real.
                  That of course, presupposed the crew of this ship were willing to talk, willing to work with her.  They’d picked her up, yes, but hopefully they weren’t slavers or other such… unsavory people.  Of course, it was highly likely they were exactly what she feared they’d be, and she was unarmed and didn’t really know the lay of the land here on this ship.
                  On that note, she pulled up a full schematic of the ship.  She was big, which Tamara already knew, but it looked like three of the eight gigantic cargo bays were unused due to damage.  The ship was a kilometer long, with the living spaces, recreation areas, and engineering and bridge sections all along the central shaft of the ship.  Eight very large cylindrical cargo bays were arrayed on either side of the central section; they were easily over two hundred meters in diameter and extended about two thirds of the length of the ship along the spine.  Further aft of the main section were giant fuel cells connected by trusses that led to the ship’s main sublight drives.  Two hyperdrive engines were mounted by the main drives, one above and one below the sublight engines.  The ship had a crew of eighty-four, but the actual roster of crew and their various jobs wasn’t on the main net.  Apparently, the ship’s shields were a joke and what few emitters did function were nearing failure, four of the six main sublight engines were down, meaning the ship was incredibly slow even by a lumbering bulk freighter’s standards.  And life support was functioning, obviously, but based on the smell many of the components needed serious overhaul, or better yet, replacement.
                  One piece of good news.  On her travails through the database, she discovered that this ship was equipped, at one time anyway, with a pair of class three industrial replicators.  Apparently, one of them had been out of commission for about half a century, but the other still functioned,