Free Hold the Star: Samair in Argos: Book 2 by Michael Kotcher

side.
                  Taja stood there, looking stricken.  “I wondered if you were going to answer,” she said, blinking at the liquid fury on his face. 
                  He glared pure ice at her.  “What.  Do.  You.  Want?”  He was very precise with each of the words, but his tone was frozen helium.
                  “I can’t believe you,” Taja started.  “I can’t believe you care so little for what happens aboard your ship.  To a ship and crew that you claim to care so much about.”
                  Eamonn just shook his head and started to close the hatch, but Taja put her hand out, stopping him as her palm hit the metal.  “I just thought you’d like to know that the pirates just killed two members of the ship’s company.  Martinez from Cargo and Silva from Medical.”  Without another word, the tiny cargo specialist turned sharply on her heel and marched off down the corridor, leaving the captain to stare at her. 
                  The captain didn’t speak, he just closed the hatch.  But instead of returning to his bunk and his depressed fugue, he sat down at his table and activated his display.  A few keystrokes and commands and he brought up internal sensors.  He replayed the events captured on the internal camera feeds over the last twenty-four hours, speeding past otherwise normal events and watching more carefully to anything that seemed to be of interest.
                  Repair work.  A goodly number of the pirates were using cargo bay two as a gym area, with a running track around the edge and a firing range set up in the middle.  Why anyone would be willing to run around an area that people were shooting in was beyond him, but they seemed to be fine with it.  Strong reinforced metal barriers had been erected to protect the ship and the passersby that might move behind the shooters, so he guessed it must be somewhat safe.  He detected his own people’s work there.  And while he might be willing to guess that Xar or Quesh or even… Moxie… might be willing to make those barriers weaker than they appeared to hope that the shooters practicing might accidently blast one of their fellows, if there was one thing these thugs seemed to be proficient in, it was weapons.  And therefore, if they were going to be popping off shots in the cargo bay, they’d know that they would need a very strong barrier to protect them and would double check all of the engineers’ work.
                  And there it was.  Approximately twenty-seven minutes ago, the cargo bay doors to the bay opened, completely without warning and everyone and everything inside the bay was blown out into space.  The captain had mixed feelings over this.  On the one hand his heart soared watching all those pirate bastards getting the deaths they so richly deserved.  But on the other, his stomach churned at the sight of those same poor bastards behind blasted out into the void, out into the crushing fields of hyperspace.  Hard vacuum was a fear every spacer shared.  Once the pirates were outside the barrier of the ship’s shields, they would be completely unprotected from the massive stresses of faster than light speeds.  Of course, they’d most likely be dead from asphyxiation before that happened, but there would be nothing left of them.  They would be vaporized in an instant.
                  But he got control of his stomach and forced himself back to the situation at hand.  He pulled away from the display, slapping his hand on the controls to switch off the streaming images.  He stood up from his chair, crowing at the deaths of so many of the pirate soldiers.  Eamonn even allowed himself to dance a little jig in exultation.  Once he had finished, he went to the port and stared out at the tachyon wash over the shields as the ship continued on course.
                  Several hours later, the