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

damage.  As she’d feared, the electronics were damaged and in some cases blown out completely.  Taking a USB cable from the kit, she attached her data pad and opened up one of the command files she had uploaded from her personal database.  The computers on the pod were not great, they were only really meant for life support and maintaining the distress beacon, but they didn’t need to be.  They were sophisticated enough for Tamara’s program to decompress and run. 
                  The program worked quickly, which was no surprise.  After about ten minutes, the functions began to come back online, rerouting around the damage or blown out systems.  She checked the status feeds on her datapad screen.  Life support was operating, but only at 8%.  At that rate, she would be out of air and heat within two days.  The beacon, however, was completely blown out.  It would take a lot of work on the hardware to get that back up, but there was no guarantee the circuit boards weren’t completely shot.  If that was the case, she might be able to jury rig something, but it would be crude and without any backups.  About the only thing that was still working properly was the hibernation system, but she shied away from that.  Tamara had no desire to go so sleep for who knew how long.
                  She looked out the window.  Off in the distance, she could see the main drives of the various ships.  They were far too distant to make out their shapes, much less watch maneuvers, but she could still see some of the light show.  Tiny pinpricks of light swung around in various directions, formations and colors moving in and out of each other, with bright flashes occurring when damage was taken.  Missiles and turbolasers lanced back and forth between ships, but it looked like little more than light show from the window of the pod.  It gave her something to relax her eyes on when staring at electronics started to make her eyes cross.
                  Turning back to the damaged circuitry, she rolled up her sleeves and got to work.
     
                  Two days of toil hadn’t produced much.  She had repaired the beacon, mostly, but it was still a delicate thing.  It would only function for a few hours before the control relays burned out for good, and once it was activated, it would broadcast continuously and couldn’t be turned off without destroying it.  But the life support systems were another matter entirely.  The carbon-dioxide levels were rising, the scrubbers were nearing max impedance and were about to fail.  Tamara could already feel the beginnings of hypoxia, a headache that wouldn’t go away along with the light-headedness and fatigue.  She knew these symptoms would only get worse as the deadline approached, as she suffered from increased carbon-dioxide poisoning and decrease in oxygen levels.
                  There was little more she could do.  From what she could see out the porthole, the battle had not diminished in the last two days.  If anything, it had increased in intensity.  She had counted the arrival of the lights of no fewer than eight new drive signatures in the last few hours.  The light show had increased as more weapons fire was exchanged between Federation and Republic warships.  The pod’s porthole was pointed away from Hudora Station as its engines had accelerated the pod away, so she couldn’t see if the station had taken any damage, though after two days of fighting, she had to assume that the station was no longer intact.  Her trajectory was pointed away from the fighting, above the plane of the ecliptic, so she was heading out on a constant velocity away from the station.  It might be best to just light it up now before she was lost for good.
                  Pressing the activation key, her datapad indicated that all was working well, that the beacon was transmitting on the emergency frequency.  There was