Project Charon 1

by Patty Jansen

  The next morning she contacted Simon Fosnet. He was not impressed that she couldn’t have the money in time for him.

  “I thought I was pretty clear. I said three days.”

  The vid from Peris City was blurry, but Tina had the impression his condition was getting worse.

  “Yes, but I need a little bit more time.”

  “My offer for your collection still stands.”

  “Thank you, but I’ve checked with other people. The cactuses are not worth that much, because they don’t all belong to me.”

  “Oh?”

  “The rarest ones are on loan from someone else, and because there have been some break-ins, I have returned them to their owner, since I’d hate for them to get stolen.”

  His face was so badly affected with the growths that it normally didn’t show emotion, but now it displayed an expression of surprise.

  Ha. He’d hoped she would cave on the cactuses after the intimidation team he’d sent. But she was not going to give him the satisfaction of complaining to him about the raids.

  The rest of the day, she and Rex packed the most valuable stock into boxes which she then drove to the outskirts of town to a storage unit. Rex even came to help her, and didn’t complain about having to have his harness disassembled to fit into the truck.

  She left a variety of items on the shelves, but to the familiar, it would be obvious that this stock was easily replaced, second-hand, superseded and worth little.

  She debated boarding up the windows, but decided that the usual bars across the door and windows would have to do, because boarded up buildings screamed burn me down to looters and other miscreants.

  It even occurred to her that when she finally owned this piece of land, she might replace the ramshackle construction with a nice new building if there was any money left over. The lack of construction work around Gandama meant that builders could be hired cheaply.

  That night, she sent a message to the administration of Kelso Station.

  I am the legal owner of a ship docked at your facility. I am about to visit the station in order to sell the ship.

  She gave them all the details.

  She immediately received a long document with terms and conditions that were more familiar to her than she liked to admit. The memories of her old life were everywhere. With Rex travelling with her, she might even have to tell him about some of them.

  Chapter Eleven

  Tina wrapped up all her outstanding orders and sent messages to her regulars that she would be away. Then she secured enough medicine for Rex. This was harder than it should have been, because the hospital was not in favour of her taking Rex on this trip—after having smelled the possibility that she might pay for his care—and she had to find another clinic that would sell her what she needed. She got the nurse to teach her to do the injections.

  She had some reading to do. Things had changed a lot in the world of space travel and for the people who lived in the space stations. You needed permits for everything, and needed to book accommodation ahead of time. She got the permits, needed to renew her citizenship and apply for a number for Rex, and booked her accommodation. The prices were ridiculous.

  But once she’d sold the ship, she would have plenty of money.

  Then Tina was left with one painful task. She collected the truck from the shared equipment shed. She drove it up to the back fence of the yard. When she opened the back gate, the cactuses in her yard had all moved close to the house.

  Tina had to wrestle her way through the prickly mass to get to the hose. She turned on the tap and made a trail of water across the ground from the house into the truck. The bottom of the truck bed did not hold that much water before it started running out, but it was enough to lure the cactuses up the ramp and into the truck.

  Then Tina drove her precious load out into the desert.

  If she was going to leave them, she might as well leave them in a safe place, away from the town where armadillos hung around. She’d leave them in her secret place where she knew they would survive and where she would be able to find them when she came back.

  Out on the rocky trail, driving slowly because no one came out here, Tina remembered the roughness of the place that had attracted her to this planet in the first place. The rock formations were just majestic, even in the hot midday light. There were still a lot of wild cactuses, huddled in groups between rocks, because this was where moisture congregated when it condensed on the cool stone at night.

  As she came past, a number of them started following her.

  She was sure that this had something to do with the load in her truck, but her research had so far failed to unveil how these things communicated with each other. In her early years with the Federacy Force, she had studied many of the biological life forms on settled worlds, but these crosses between plant and animal truly had no parallel anywhere in the universe.

  About an hour’s drive out of Dickson’s Creek, there was a valley full of strange rock formations. It looked like a giant hand had reached down from the sky and deposited random piles of giant marbles. The rocks were all of a pale yellow colour. It made it look like the entire valley was a field of budding mushrooms.

  The sky was deep blue, and the rocks that bounded the valley were pink. The sand in between the rocks was white. Here and there grew some strange looking plants, like palms with thick bulbous trunks. Tina had checked them on previous occasions, and found them to be proper plants, not ones that moved like the cactuses, which seemed to be restricted only to the area around Gandama.

  The most important thing about the valley was that if you looked in between the rock stacks, you'd find little bits of water.

  The stacks were often taller than a house, and because each rock was round and quite big, there were huge gaps between them, big enough for a person to enter.

  It was inside these piles that she had found most of the cactuses, in the dazzling sunlight that fell between the boulders, that created patterns of golden light and shade that could confuse and disorient a person.

  A lot of stories circulated about this valley. If Janusz were to be believed, a father and son had once gone missing here, about thirty years ago, and they had never been found. “The place is haunted,” Janusz said.

  Other people had told her their communication wouldn’t work in the valley—which wasn’t true, although reception could be a bit dubious—and they had seen strange lights and heard strange noises. All those reports were unproven, of course.

  But Tina liked the valley. She used to come here with Rex as a baby when he refused to go to sleep, and she would just put him in the truck and drive him around the desert and show him the magical places, even though he was far too young to understand their beauty.

  Today, she was here to ensure the safety of the cactuses. People who could find this place would either be locals or have an interest in the desert.

  She stopped the truck in the middle of the rough track that went through the valley. Once the rush of air and the hum of the engine had stopped, a blanket of silence fell over the area. The air was hot and pressing.

  Tina let down the back gate of the truck. “Out you go.” She said it more for herself than because she thought they would understand.

  The cactuses moved down the ramp onto the dusty ground. One or two started towards the nearest pile of boulders.

  The wild cactuses that had followed her remained at the top of the ridge. They appeared more rugged to her, with some of them damaged from armadillo attacks. Others had dead branches.

  Her cactuses all remained together in a group. They did this when they were unimpressed with the situation. Tina almost felt guilty leaving them to their own devices, even if they had originally come out of the wild before she started breeding them. Some of these half-plant-half-animal creatures were hundreds of years old. She made a short recording of how they all stood in the desert.

  With sadness in her heart, she climbed back into the truck and drove home. She hoped s
he’d be able to find all the cactuses again when she came back. If they were smart, they’d disperse and hide. People were dangerous. The cactuses were much better off out here than in some warehouse under the care of someone in Gandama who knew nothing about them.

  Then there was the last of the packing up to do. Tina cleaned the shop floor and windows, so it would take a while before the place started to look dusty and abandoned. She took all her information off the computers: the latest financials, the customer database with everyone’s addresses, security system types and passwords. She put this information on a datastick to take with her.

  She did the same with all her research data from the cactuses, including information about the breeding, and where she had found the cactuses.

  Then she locked the shop’s storeroom at the front and the back.

  Standing in the shop, Tina remembered all the things she had experienced here. Putting Rex in his harness for the first time, and watching him learn to walk. She remembered his laughter and squeals when he realised he could jump and use his pincer hand like a bat to hit balls.

  This was where Rex had unpacked his birthday presents, and where he had done his schoolwork.

  She remembered him raging about the kids at school for the short time that he went there and, mostly quietly, working away at reading through some information about electronics.

  “Are you ready with the shop yet?” he asked from the door.

  “Almost. Can you take all our stuff to the truck?”

  He went into the hallway and picked up both of their packs at the same time. Rex’s medicines alone weighed quite a bit.

  He gave her a sideways glance that said, See, I can be very useful.

  Yes, the harness made him stronger than a normal human being, even if he was less agile.

  Tina followed him outside, realising with every step that she might have secured her business but, when she came back, the building might not be here.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was time to go.

  Rex didn’t fit in the cabin and he didn’t want to be disassembled to fit, but he was happy to sit in the back tray with the bags. He was smiling.

  But Tina’s heart ached when the vehicle pulled away from the shop—all dark and shuttered up. She was prepared never to see the building again, but she hoped nothing would happen while they were gone.

  Janusz watched from behind his gate, stone-faced. Tina hadn’t told him where she was going other than a vague story about a medical visit to Peris City. The fewer people knew, the better. Especially Janusz. He would start snooping around when he knew for certain that she wasn’t going to be back for days.

  The hamlet of Dickson’s Creek receded in the rear-view mirror. Soon all she could see was a cloud of dust that followed the vehicle down the road.

  The bus to Peris City left from the town centre in front of the bank. When they arrived, it was already waiting, although none of the passengers had climbed on board.

  It was busy in the central parking lot, with people doing their shopping after work. The sun was still hot, its glare blinding.

  Tina parked as close to the bus as possible. Janusz had told her to drop the keys at the bakery, so someone from Dickson’s Creek could later pick the vehicle up.

  They joined the queue for the bus, whose doors were still closed.

  The passengers belonged to a varied group: older people who would be travelling to see friends, visit children or go to medical appointments, and men or women travelling alone who might go for business or job opportunities. A group of adolescents Tina couldn’t place were a few years older than Rex, and they seemed to be travelling together but without being part of an organised group.

  Rex hardly came into town, and he attracted a bit of interest. It was only a small taste of what was to come.

  The driver came out of a sandwich bar and opened the door so that passengers could get on, but immediately there was a problem: Rex’s harness didn’t fit through the front door.

  The driver had to take out a side panel so that he could be lifted inside, by Tina, with help from the driver and another man, since walking steep and narrow stairs was also not one of his capabilities.

  Rex didn’t say anything through the ordeal, but there was thunder on his face whenever he caught the attention of the group of adolescents, who hid their curiosity poorly.

  Rex had to stand at the back of the bus, too, because there wasn’t enough room in between the seats for him to occupy a normal seat. Tina wanted to sit on the control box next to him, but the driver would not have it. All passengers needed to be safely restrained—Tina with a seatbelt, and Rex with luggage straps.

  This was not a good start, but true to his word, he said nothing.

  Tina ended up in a seat next to one of the adolescents, a young man from Red Peak, another small farming community close to Gandama. He told her that he and a group of friends from school were going to sign up for the Federacy army.

  “Do people still do that?” Tina asked. It was how she had joined herself, since her family had also lived in a farming community.

  “They were advertising for people to join. The pay is good, and they teach you a trade. I was just bored at home, annoying my parents. Not much else to do on the farm. The robots do all the work and Dad looks after the robots.”

  “Were they recruiting for a particular reason?” Tina asked, thinking of the news segment she had seen in the care home. When she joined, the Federacy had been expanding their services.

  “The recruiter didn’t say anything special, just that there would be training and if you signed up you’d travel to a lot of places. Seems like a good way to do it. I don’t have any money to travel otherwise.”

  He seemed disturbingly innocent. Tina had been a bit older when she signed up. Surely she hadn’t been so gullible?

  The bus took the best part of a day to get to Peris City. Since it was now mid-afternoon, most of the trip was at night. Because of its three moons, the night on Cayelle wasn't particularly dark. The moonlight, a sickly kind of grey, turned the landscape colourless. Peris City lay in the mountains, in a landscape even drier than Gandama, where the main industry was mining.

  Tina stared out the window, watching the mining installations whizz by with their processing plants, big mountains of rocks and loading stations. Most of the mines were day and night operations and brightly lit work sites stood out in the night.

  She thought of the first time she’d travelled to Gandama on the bus, broken, with a disabled child she had mixed feelings about, and looking for a place to hide from the world. She had found it in the backwater of her security item shop in Gandama, where there was no direct connection to the Federacy and where she thought no one would bother to come looking for her.

  The place had grown on her, but there were times that she hated the person she had become, cutting herself off from everyone, including Dexter and Evelle. Evelle would be a fully fledged captain by now, out in deep space, flying the ships and helping the Force’s logistics. And she would say about her old mother, She lives in Gandama out of Peris City on Cayelle. It’s sad.

  Tina had seen recent photos of Evelle, but when she thought of her daughter, she could only remember her red-faced, screaming obscenities at Tina in the hallway of their unit at the staff quarters at Project Charon.

  Tina knew mothers weren’t supposed to feel this way, but it had been such a relief when Evelle got into the Federacy Force boarding school at that horrible age of fifteen, when she’d done her utmost best to make sure her family hated her.

  She had almost succeeded.

  Still, Tina had tried to contact her to say that her parents had split up, and later that she had a little brother. But Evelle had never replied.

  Rex was now the same age. Tina glanced at him sideways. He had fallen sleep, and the pale moonlight lit one half of his face. He had been so good and mature the last few days. She was proud of him. One day, he would be able to live independently, and it was all
because he was a smart kid with a good heart, even if he could sometimes be a little shit.

  Not like Evelle. He was nothing like her.

  They came to the outskirts of the city when it was starting to go light.

  Peris City was the pearl of the Kappa-665 system, plainly known as Kappa, a solar system that included Cayelle and four uninhabitable planets. Built about fifty years ago, the city was pretty much in its original design, with the circle-and-spoke approach to planning. The residential areas were still on the outside, and the spaceport was at the end of one of the spokes.

  By the time the bus stopped there, most of its other passengers had disembarked. Space travel was expensive and people who lived in Gandama had no reason to do it, because they wouldn’t know anyone to visit and had no business at the stations.

  But the group of adolescents also got off here, which meant that they’d gotten a space placement. That was definitely odd. From Tina’s memory, they didn’t usually send new recruits into space straight away. It must mean that they really needed people.

  The uncomfortable thought of hearing about an attack on Pandana returned. She hadn’t been following the news. When you lived on a planet, stuff that happened in space quickly became irrelevant. She had enough trouble keeping up with politics on Cayelle.

  Tina remembered Peris City as a worn grey dust bowl, but the modern airport precinct they entered was nothing like her memory. Clean streets with neat paving, glass and concrete buildings, bright signs, shopping malls with stores selling brands she had never heard of, huge warehouses with electronic gadgets.

  Things had changed a lot.

  To be honest, it frightened her. What if Kelso Station had changed as much and she didn’t recognise the place?

  “Look at the plants,” Rex said. It was the first thing he’d said since they had left. Hopefully this meant that his bad mood had gone, because Tina felt in no state to deal with that.