RUNNING WITH ARGENTINE
By William Lee Gordon
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2016 Medsabi LLC
All rights reserved.
Medsabi Publishing
Celina, TX
Table of Contents
FORWARD
CHAPTER ONE
The People’s Republic of Chezden
CHAPTER TWO
Trust
CHAPTER THREE
Physics is Fun
CHAPTER FOUR
Behind the Scenes
CHAPTER FIVE
Cabal
CHAPTER SIX
The Point of No Return
CHAPTER SEVEN
Discovery
CHAPTER EIGHT
Reshuffling The Crew
CHAPTER NINE
Can I Buy You A Drink?
CHAPTER TEN
An obvious Forgery
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Real Life Is So Much More Fun Than School
CHAPTER TWELVE
Crew Recruitment Made Easy
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
An Unlikely Rescue
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I’m In It For The Prophet
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Assessing Needs
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Playing Nice
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Fool’s Gold
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
You’re A Peach
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A Chance Memory
CHAPTER TWENTY
A Tall Tale
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Making A Plan
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Conspiracies
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Revelations
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
All About Asperia
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Shut Down and Shot Down
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Prime Suspects
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Stymied
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Dig Deeper
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The New Normal
CHAPTER THIRTY
Lady Luck
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Chief Engineer Carlton West
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
A New Mission
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Friend or Foe
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
A Mystery
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Vetting A Savior
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Unexpected problems
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Insight
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
A Shady Deal
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Meeting a Lord
CHAPTER FORTY
You’re Not Paranoid if…
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Prisoners
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Separation Anxiety
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Escape
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Command Decision
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
On The Run
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Unexpected Allies
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
In Hiding
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Dealing With A Bully
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Playing Hardball
CHAPTER FIFTY
Another Mouth to Feed
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Another New Mission
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
The Sole Survivor
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Extinction Event
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Getting Focused
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Only In It For The Money
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Living in Horror
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Two For The Price of One
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Knock On The Door
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Tested
CHAPTER SIXTY
Coming Home
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
To The Victor…
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Salute The New Officer
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Discoveries
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Wonders Abound
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
A Small City
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
The First Death
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Mystery, Revelation, and Denial
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
A Solution
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Misty Dreams
CHAPTER SEVENTY
The Haunting
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
An Observation
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Time Keeps On Slipping...
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
Manipulation
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
Virtual VR
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
Higher Education
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
Farewell
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
The Reins Of Power
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
The Message Never Sent
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
Argentine’s Secret
CHAPTER EIGHTY
The Night Before Nightmare
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
Full Disclosure
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
Lucid Insanity
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
Another System Entirely
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
Into The Fray
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE
Who’s In Charge?
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX
Nightmare
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN
Sacrifice
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
Being Grateful
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
Retirement
CHAPTER NINETY
The Final Message
Preview or Purchase Other Books
William Lee Gordon
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Books by
William Lee Gordon
Running With Argentine
(Watch a visual flyby of the mystery ship they discover)
My Friend The Emperor
Here Comes Earth (series)
Book I: Emergence
Book II: Destiny
Book III: Diaspora
For more information
and to register for New Release notification
visit the website at:
www.WilliamLeeGordon.com
FORWARD
(Take a visual flyby of the ship that Argentine and his crew discover)
The universe is incredibly old…
Galaxies started forming over 13.8 billion years ago. There are now over 100 billion of them that we know of…
Inside those galaxies, stars began to coalesce… and through all those billions of years new stars have continued to form… Any given galaxy can hold 100 thousand million stars.
Around many of those stars, multiple planets form. And on a percentage of those, life emerges.
Each star can support planetary life for billions of years.
Each of those planets is capable of sustaining tens of millions of generations of life.
Each of those lives forges its own story.
So there are potentially a tri
This story focuses on one.
CHAPTER ONE
The People’s Republic of Chezden
An Obscure Uninhabited
Star System
No one ever called First Officer Francis ‘Frank’ Argentine by his given first name. The last two people that tried it had gotten a rude awakening.
The first one had backed off and apologized. The second had taken umbrage and accepted the first officer’s challenge to dance.
It had cost them both two days in the hospital, but the result was that no one ever again called him Francis.
Actually, no one called him Frank either. Everyone on the ship called him First and everyone else called him Argentine.
He was a tall, almost ruggedly handsome man; or at least his features were mostly symmetrical and his face didn’t carry any disfiguring marks.
What you wouldn’t realize unless you knew him was that this stocky, relatively quiet man with the piercing blue eyes had the heart of a teddy bear.
That’s not to say that he loved, admired, or respected everyone and everything around him; most of the time he hid his good nature quite well.
“You know it’s going to happen someday,” said Chief Engineer Carlton West. “Someday I’m going to pop that pompous SOB right in the mouth. I don’t know how you’ve controlled yourself this long.”
He was either talking about Captain Samuel Underhill Kerry or the Political Officer, Ernest J. Bloomington. It didn’t really make any difference; they were both pompous jerks.
“And what good would that do you?” asked Argentine. “They’d just ship your butt off to Macklin and you’d spend the rest of your life in a small cell. Either that or they’d decide to save money and just space you.”
As was typical when Chief West was on a roll, he didn’t relent easily.
“They don’t have any money to save,” he responded. “And besides, isn’t Macklin prison in the Fargo sector?”
He had a point on both counts.
The Fargo sector had gone dark a month ago.
The rest of the Republic hadn’t had any communication with it and there had been no traffic coming out of it.
The rumor was that it had seceded from the People’s Republic of Chezden.
Normally, such uprisings would be put down immediately. Warships like this one would have been sent to brutally suppress the secessionist. The problem was that parts of the fleet were starting to go dark too. But then that was to be expected when nobody had been paid for five months.
The People’s Republic of Chezden was falling apart.
It’d been a long time coming. The People’s Republic was not large as far as stellar empires go; it claimed to encompass a thousand stars but everyone knew that only a little over eighty of them were populated.
170 years ago a lunatic named Syed Franklin had wandered into this sector of space from up spiral. He had found a relatively peaceful association of planets involved in mutual trade and quietly pursuing their own prosperity.
In other words, he’d stumbled across a bunch of parochial rubes that were more concerned with their own families than they had been in any political machinations.
With such naïveté and only an insignificantly small percentage of the population paying attention, he had proceeded to take advantage.
Syed’s political rise followed the usual course for such oppressors. There was no single revolutionary moment, but rather a long slow succession of incremental victories over individual and planetary rights.
Sowing dissent and manufacturing grievances he had quietly started turning the factions against each other.
Finally, violence had broken out.
This, of course, had required a much stronger government… and if the people had to give up some of their freedoms to ensure their safety, so what?
Eventually he would create and foment outside threats to add to the internal turmoil.
Throughout all of this his popularity kept rising. He had actually managed to convince the majority that he was simply warning them of these previously unnoticed injustices in their society, not causing them. Since that same majority had paid little attention to the political world around them… it wasn’t difficult.
It would be impossible to say when Syed actually took total control, but the People’s Republic of Chezden was founded 154 standard years ago.
It had been a living hell ever since.
ΔΔΔ
By the time Frank Argentine was approaching adulthood there weren’t many attractive career options.
He didn’t have any family connections but he was big enough and athletic enough that the military would consider him. Not only would this insure him of a government job but it helped satisfy what he thought of as his patriotic duty.
After all, he’d grown up with all the propaganda about serving the People’s Republic.
It hadn’t taken him long, however, to figure out that it wasn’t really a republic, and that the people had very little to do with it.
By then he was fully trapped into a career that he belatedly realized he despised. His only consolation was that many of his fellow arms men were just as disillusioned.
So he survived.
Like everyone else he had played the game. Right at three years ago he had found himself assigned as First Officer to the People’s Republic Ship, Pelican.
At first, he’d thought the promotion would make his life easier. He’d quickly discovered, however, that when a ship was captained by a political appointee, a first officer’s life was pure misery.
Not only did he have to run the ship, but he also had to put up with the ineptitude of the Captain and the insane ramblings of its Political Officer. Their constant interference and conflicting orders had made running an efficient ship all but impossible.
About a year ago he’d had an epiphany…
An epiphany that had made his life much easier.
Trying to be loyal to both the Captain and the Political Officer was not only leading to a non-battle worthy ship, it was turning his stomach. So he’d decided he owed his allegiance to neither.
And he was prepared to break all the rules to protect that non-allegiance.
Now, when the Political Officer asked if one of his insane proclamations had been carried out Argentine responded with, “Yes sir. Your new policy has been implemented and the men are carrying out your wishes!”
When the Captain had ordered another round of needless uniform inspections Argentine had said, “Yes sir. I’ll start implementing them immediately!”
When the Captain and the Political Officer inevitably issued conflicting orders, instead of trying to please both, he played them off of each other. He would purposely carry out the Political Officer’s orders in front of the Captain or vice versa.
“Yes Captain. I know you ordered all department heads to attend your daily briefings but Political Officer Bloomington countermanded that order because it interfered with his Political Education classes. Quite frankly sir, I’m not sure the political officer really respects you.”
“Minister Bloomington, I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you this but the Captain has suggested that his authority exceeds yours. I hope I’m not speaking out of turn, sir. But I thought you should know.”
Argentine had half expected to be caught in his gamesmanship right away. It was a true reflection of how disillusioned he’d been that he really hadn’t cared.
Amazingly enough, the crew had enrolled in the unspoken conspiracy and backed him up no matter how absurd his gamesmanship grew.
He’d even overheard some of the crew complaining about his fictitious uniform inspections… within earshot of the captain.
It had really become quite fun.
Frankly, even with the crew’s help, Argentine was amazed that he’d gotten away with it for as long as he had. But since the captain rarely inspected the ship and the political officer never left the Officer’s
Deck it hadn’t been too difficult…
And it had certainly made Argentine’s life easier.
Of course, he’d needed some overt help to pull it off.
That’s where Chief Engineer West came in…
They’d been friends ever since Argentine had caught the chief requisitioning three times the replacement parts he’d needed, and four times what he’d been allowed. Argentine new that it wasn’t necessarily an unusual practice and that many of the parts could be sold on the black market, but the chief had been vociferously unapologetic. He’d insisted that if he didn’t order parts in triplicate he might not even get one, and yes, extras that were sold allowed him to bribe supply officers, and others of more ill repute, to get the parts that otherwise he never would have received at all.
In the end it was all he could do not to laugh. The Chief was still loudly proclaiming his virtue when Argentine had just walked away shaking his head.
His other real friend on board was Astrogator Samantha Parker.
‘Sami’ was already onboard when Argentine had been assigned to the P. R. S. Pelican three years ago.
She had fascinated Argentine…
Not because she was attractive, which she was in a weird ditzy sort of way. She was lean but not skinny. She had overly large blue eyes and blond hair… at least she was light complected and the short stubble on her head looked to be blond. Like all astrogators, she kept it very short so she could wear the yarmulke-like skullcap that let her interface with the ship’s astrogational computer.