Project charon 2, p.8
Project Charon 2, page 8
He continued, “That was until some dickhead switched on the high-intensity laser while I was working on it. Burned my eyes. I was thirty three. They retired me after that, but I didn’t want their pity, so I struck out on my own. Learned to do the work without my eyes.”
He was a brave fellow. Tina liked him.
When Thor and Jens had gone, Tina did some research on Jackson Hirsh. Pictures from his time in the Federacy Assembly showed him as a friendly-faced man with a thoughtful expression. He was supposed to look like a toad now?
His employment record showed that he’d been a public servant for his entire career. He’d never been in the Force, never been to Project Charon or even Pandana. He wasn’t listed in any need-to-know lists for Federacy Force research, or indeed any kind of advice or emergency council.
But her very last check delivered a surprise: he’d been at the meeting where Dexter had passed his materials to the pirates.
Well, that was interesting, although he looked to have been there as admin staff, and there was no record of meetings that involved him, and indeed his name was never mentioned in any of the meeting’s reports.
Very interesting.
Tina got up to make some tea.
The one stray goose was waddling down the hallway, looking for a way back into the cabin where it could hear its companions. Tina went to open the door. It waddled through and flew on top of the cage.
Tina shook some grain into the bird feeder and opened the door when the four geese in the cage were crowding around the tray. The fifth goose joined them.
She noticed some spots on its back.
Strange. Tina was sure all geese were completely white. It must have brushed against something dark, because there were some golden spots on its back. Now she was worried because it looked like oil, and she hoped to hell nothing up there in the sloping roof cavity of the cabin was leaking, because a lot of the vital driving and stabilising mechanism of the habitat’s rotation system went through there.
“Have you noticed any drops of oil on the floor in the last few days?” she asked Finn when she came back into the cabin.
“No, why?” Finn asked.
“Just keep a lookout for any.” Damn, she hoped that mechanism wasn’t going to blow up, too. That would make their trip to wherever extremely unpleasant.
Rex had ensconced himself inside the navigation cubicle with the computers.
“I’m going to make some tea,” she announced.
He nodded, not looking up from the screen.
“What are you doing?” Tina asked him.
“Checking out some of the stuff Jens showed us.”
“Getting into satellite recordings?”
“I don’t know. I’ll see what I can find.”
Tina went to the kitchen at the back of the cabin.
“Security is pretty lax,” he commented a bit later. “It’s easy to get into a lot of stuff.”
“Don’t get us into any more trouble than we already are,” Tina warned.
“They don’t even use double-checking protocols.”
“I find that hard to believe.” That was pretty standard for security procedures even on the backward world of Gandama.
“I’m not kidding. Come and have a look at this,” he said.
She went into the cubicle, where he had flipped out the table so that he could use it as a stand for his projector.
It displayed a long list of what looked like a supply order. Tina was familiar with those, because you needed to fill those out if you wanted to buy something in the Force. That sort of information was not normally open to the public.
This one contained all manner of chemical components.
“What is this?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but it says ‘confidential’ at the top.”
It did, too. Tina wondered why a supply order for chemicals was confidential. They were pretty standard lab supplies. “What would they do with this?”
But no one could answer that question.
Chapter Twelve
Before having a very late dinner, Tina went to the Ship Supply office to check with Rasa. The floor of the room had been turned into a camp, with sleeping mats and even blow-up mattresses spread over the floor. They were all placed in neat rows with room to walk in between. The people’s bags sat on the seats where people waited during the day. People sat or lay on their makeshift beds. Two children in pyjamas made their way out of the room carrying a small bag with what Tina assumed to be toiletries.
Tina found Rasa close to the side of the room, sitting on a mat, talking to a middle-aged woman and a man Tina assumed to be the woman’s husband.
The couple both looked up when Tina approached, and Rasa, with her back to the door, turned around.
“It’s my turn,” Tina said. “Go back to the ship to get some dinner.”
“I’ve already eaten. The people here are really nice. They’re all from the ships and they all know each other and help each other—Hanna, this is my captain, Tina.”
“Hi.” The woman smiled at Tina, a bit awkward.
Rasa got to her feet. “You don’t need to take my spot. This is what the junior crew does. These people are all junior crew or passengers who have agreed to sit here in return for a cheap fare. Captains don’t wait here.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, sure. You see those men over there?”
Rasa glanced over her shoulder at the men who stood on either side of the door, as if they were waiting. They were big burly types and, although not in uniform, looked and acted like guards.
“They’re keeping an eye on everyone in here. I’ve already seen how they stopped some older boys harassing a younger one. They don’t want trouble. They don’t want fights to break out here. It’s safe. I haven’t seen any pirates. No one has talked any of that kind of stuff to me. No one unfriendly leastways.”
So Tina returned to the ship, where she found Rex and Finn together in front of the computer.
“I told you she wouldn’t want to come,” Finn said without looking up from the screen.
“At least she can’t accuse me of not offering.”
“Those offices are the safest places to be in the stations,” Finn said. “If she has to be somewhere in the station, that’s the best place.”
Tina didn’t agree but there was no point in arguing. She made some tea and watched Finn and Rex from the bench in the cabin. Whatever they had found sounded interesting, though, so she looked over their shoulders.
Rex had broken into another database, and had pulled up maps of the vast station, with areas where the public was allowed to go and areas where they weren’t. This was not a heat scan, but a highly detailed map of the sections of the station and all its rooms, labelled with their functions. She spotted the hospital that Thor had spoken of, and the school.
Rex and Finn had also discovered an area that might function as the pirate control centre on the third level of the school, which contained a staff meeting room. It was well within the closed section of the station. They had managed to intercept a number of messages that originated from this area—a room on the upper floor—which appeared to be instructions about operations of the station and the delivery of goods. Exactly what was being delivered wasn’t clear—Finn suggested chemical supplies necessary for operation of the air scrubbing plant. It seemed at least someone had an interest in keeping the station operational.
Which, in a station this size, was not a small undertaking and required a certain level of organisation to achieve.
It was a good sign, right?
“Do you see anything that supports the theory that they’ve turned the other half of the station into a prison or holding pen?” she asked Rex.
He shook his head. “We don’t have that type of heat scanner.”
“Where did Jens’ data come from?”
“He said a hacked satellite. I don’t know where to find that data.”
But they intercepted a news channel. Apparently, the pirate leader called Artan used Aurora as a base.
There was also quite a lot of discussion of disagreements between factions, “shipworlds” as Thor called them, although the term seemed to belong to the romantic world that her parents had grown up in as settlers on Tirkala. Whatever they were called, the pirates held autonomy of these small units in very high regard.
Artan’s actions were breaking down this autonomy. Many of the older pirate groups were not happy.
The entry page of the news service had what looked like a permanent feature on the pirate leader Artan. His pirate-sanctioned biography listed information from his time at the Assembly. A petition for autonomy of Palinda, a world where a lot of technology was developed. A proposal for redefinition of the scientific good. She could see what Finn meant about his ideas being too radical for the stodgy Federacy Assembly.
He’d been a product of the restrictions of the political bureaucracy, not that this justified violent action against the Federacy. Not at all.
And the devotion of his fans within the pirate world bordered on religious. The news bulletins even contained children’s poems written for him. They were about freedom. What was this lack of freedom they were supposed to have had under Federacy rule? Was it worse than having many people go missing, lacking supplies or being unable to leave the station?
With the promise of new ship supplies some time in the future—whenever Rasa got to the front of the queue—they needed to finish up the old ones, and dinner consisted of an odd combination of prepacked meals, because it would be a waste to let it go off or discard the packages. Also because Tina didn’t feel like going out again and buying food.
Then she spent a restless night thinking about Rasa and her easy-going personality that made her friends with everyone. She worried about Rex and what sort of world he was going to grow up in if pirates with few morals were going to play a major role in it.
The ship was very quiet when the engines were off, and she was left listening to the creaks and clicks of the station and the movement of ships docking and undocking. Thor had said that he could hear it when a large ship docked. She could believe it.
The geese chattered in the cabin across the hallway. It was surprising how much she noticed the absence of Rasa, who had shared the cabin with her for the past few days since they stowed the habitat.
Somehow, she had a feeling that someone was watching them and laughing at their terrible efforts to hide themselves.
She got up early in the morning, sick of tossing and turning, and found Rex already in the kitchen. He had extended his harness even further, and now he was much taller than her, a truly impressive sight of gleaming metal machinery. If anything good had come out of this hare-brained trip, Rex’s newfound confidence—the fact that he was now independent and no longer needed to rely on her—was the best. He’d found inner peace and lost his angry reaction to everything.
When Tina commented on the tallness of the harness, he said that he wanted to get some weapons extensions, so that he could make use of its full capabilities. He was still learning new features.
Tina felt cold at the idea that her son was turning into a fighting machine. He was too young to face violence.
They left the ship to see how Rasa was doing and whether she needed anything. The crowd still stood at the gate into the docks, hurling questions at Tina when they passed.
“I wonder if these people ever get what they want?” Rex asked after they had cleared the checkpoint.
“They’re probably so hopeless that waiting here is all they can do.”
It was a world that was strange to her. She knew these things happened, because she had travelled to stations where she had seen these people return day in day out to the same area, hoping that someone would give them a job, a lift off the place or scraps of food.
It had never been clear to her what stations usually did with these people. She wouldn’t be surprised if they were being shipped off to a planet as soon as the opportunity arose. But there was no nearby world to Aurora.
Once in the Ship Supply office, they saw that the makeshift beds had all been cleared and the waiting had resumed.
Except they couldn’t find Rasa in the queue. Rex looked around over the heads of the many people.
“Can you see her?” Tina’s heart was thudding. Something happened to Rasa. They shouldn’t have left her overnight.
But then Rex said. “There she is, over there, in that room.”
To the side of the main waiting area was another room behind a wall of glass. Inside the room stood easy chairs and screens to watch the news. People sat talking to each other in a relaxed fashion, while someone in a station authority uniform circulated around with a computer.
“It’s some kind of VIP area,” Rex said.
“How did she end up there?”
Rasa spotted them, got up from her seat and came to the door. “Come in.”
The room felt fresher and smelled nicer than the large waiting area. Food sat on the table, and the smell of coffee hung in the air. Real coffee. Not that fake stuff.
“You want some?” Rasa said.
Before Tina could reply, Rasa went to a little bar in the corner, where she helped herself to three cups of coffee, some biscuits and pieces of toast.
“How did you end up here?” Tina asked.
“Contacts,” Rasa said.
“How do you get contacts when you live in the docks at Kelso Station?”
“Are you kidding? That’s the place you get contacts. The docks. Everybody who travels through comes through the docks. People who travel have money. If you help them, they’re happy to help you out. They have these wonderful rooms, but what’s the point of it if they can’t share and they can’t boast about their existence.”
“So what? You helped someone? What with?”
Rasa held up another device. “I’m in the line for two ships now. Yes, I’m being paid for it. You said we needed money. People who want to leave stations and are frustrated have money. All you need to do is smile at people and win their trust.”
Tina was beginning to feel distinctly duped. Everyone on this trip was smarter than she was. And Rasa was really good at this stuff.
“Anyway, I won’t need to stay here very long, because it will be our turn soon. They gave me a list of all the papers they said we needed to sign and told me how much it costs to supply the ship.
“And how much is that?” Deep dread settled in Tina’s stomach, because the subject of money was one they hadn’t covered up to now.
Rasa said, cheerfully, “Five thousand credits.”
“You have got to be kidding.”
“No, that’s what he said.”
“I don’t have that much money. I don’t have near that much money. At Kelso this costs less than half that amount. That is just a rip-off. And clearly just because you are in this area, and sitting here like a rich person, so they think we have lots of money. I am not paying five thousand credits because I don’t have five thousand credits.”
As she spoke Tina lowered her voice more and more but other people were listening. Eventually one of the men said, jerking his head at the crowded room on the other side of the glass wall, “That’s what they pay out there, too. It’s the going rate for this place.”
Tina stared at him. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No. I wish I was, but I’m not.”
Right.
Finn was going to have to pay if he wanted to get out of here. Which, clearly, he did.
She said to Rasa, “I’m going to talk to Finn. Stay here.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Rasa put a biscuit in her mouth.
“Come on, Rex.”
But Rex wasn’t listening at all. He stared at the wall screen. He said in low voice, “Mum.”
Tina turned to the wall screen and saw her own face from an ugly, poorly exposed photo taken many years ago when she still worked for Project Charon.
The announcer said, “The situation at Kelso Station has worsened, with the Federacy now taking control of the station again. They have captured our freedom fighters, and have executed a number of our brave soldiers. We are aware that the traitor we came to capture has escaped the station, unfortunately. If you have seen this woman, please do not talk to her or engage her, because she is considered dangerous. She is in possession of important information that may determine our survival. Contact the authorities straight away. If you are watching this, hand yourself over to authorities in orderly fashion. You will not be able to leave this station alive otherwise.”
Tina turned away from the screen. People were still watching the announcement, and she didn’t think any of them had recognised her. Yet.
“We’ve gotta get out of here,” she said to Rex.
Chapter Thirteen
“Mum, that was you on the screen,” Rex said, while he and Tina walked down the stairs from the Ship Supply Office to the entrance to the docks.
“So I noticed.”
“They said you were dangerous.”
“All these people here had better get out of our way, then.”
“Haha. This is nothing to joke about.”
“I’m not joking. You’re lucky they didn’t show your face as well or say anything about my highly recognisable companion. Keep your head down and don’t look so tall and impressive.”
“Are you jealous now?”
“I don’t want us to be singled out.” Because the danger was not in people recognising them but in security cameras recognising her facial profile. Their system security might not be the most modern, but surely the station would have that basic security feature?
But as soon as she and Rex came to the ground floor of the atrium, a lot of cheering went up from near the lifts. A group of people was congregated around a screen.
“What’s that about?” Rex asked.
“No idea. I hope something unrelated to us.”
They crossed the hall, but even while they passed the checkpoint into the docks and walked the corridors, they noticed a lot of people talking excitedly to each other. People were coming out of doors and getting together in groups. Voices were raised and there was lots of clapping on shoulders. It was disturbing that some of these people looked like pirates.
