Project Charon 1

by Patty Jansen

  The plants were indeed magnificent, big healthy specimens, with healthy lobes in brilliant green, not the red-tinged scrawny things in the back yard in Gandama. Tina had thought those ones looked healthy, but they had nothing on these.

  And for the first time since leaving, it looked like Rex was enjoying himself.

  Tina had booked accommodation in a place near the spaceport. This was another place she hadn’t been for a long time and looked nothing like she remembered.

  They had been given a room on the twelfth floor, but since Tina pointed out issues with getting into the lift and negotiating a set of steps in order to get to the room, she managed to get a room on the ground floor. The room had a little garden, and Rex wanted to go outside. His harness could only fit through the narrow screen door sideways—the width of this thing was becoming very annoying— and she managed to twist him around and push him through. It was hot work and she realised that she would have to do the same to get him back inside again.

  That was too much to face before dinner, so she decided that she was going to pick up a quick dinner in one of the surrounding eating-houses.

  As she walked through the hall of the accommodation, a news flash came over the screen in the hall.

  The attack on Pandana has left the other stations in the area vulnerable to the enemy. The military forces at Charon have been left unprepared and understaffed. For now, everyone in the area has been advised to leave.

  A few people stood watching this, but most ignored it.

  A chill crept over her. A big conflict was clearly going on, but no one spoke of who or what they were fighting out there in deep space.

  And she was taking Rex with her to travel back to that world?

  Another thought: Dexter and Evelle were still alive, weren’t they?

  In her mind, she saw fragments of a broken station floating through space. She might have lost contact with both of them, and she might call Dexter an arsehole whenever she got the chance, but wishing him dead was an entirely different matter.

  Evelle, too.

  One day, she intended to make it up to her.

  Tina bought some food at a stall and took it back inside. Everything about this place was new and alien to her. Fifteen years was really a long time.

  When she got back to the room, Rex had discovered the outside camera views that allowed him to look out onto the city. He had an eyepiece that could enlarge sections of his vision, mostly to look at very small things, but he was wearing it now and studying the projections in great detail.

  For the moment, he was commenting on all the things he saw, his voice excited. He briefly looked over his shoulder when she deposited the containers on the table but for once did not seem particularly interested in food. He continued to talk about all the things he saw.

  He pointed at a dot in the sky. “Look over there, that's an X model, do you see it?"

  “Dinner is here.”

  "You're not even listening to what I'm saying."

  "I have to think about a lot of things," Tina said. "Like keeping you fed and cleaned. Come over here so I can change you."

  That got his attention, and he reluctantly submitted to the procedure of being dismantled and having his private parts cleaned. The day in the warm bus had not done the skin on his backside any good.

  She worried about the upcoming trip. How would Rex really react to the claustrophobic corridors and cabins of the space stations and ships? He was used to being outside. He wouldn’t have his freedom. Quite a large area of the station and the ship would be totally off limits. How was she going to keep him occupied?

  Chapter Thirteen

  The shuttle wasn’t due to leave until mid-morning, but Tina was glad that she got up early, in the pale light of the morning while it was still cool.

  Getting to the shuttle was a hassle, and that was an understatement. The bus that took them from the terminal did not have enough room for Rex’s armour, so the only way to make their flight, for which Tina had paid dearly, was to take the armour off, and take Rex separately onto the bus.

  She had to carry him, and to be sure, a boy with no arms and no legs got a fair bit of attention from the other passengers. Unfortunately, the problems didn’t stop when they left the bus, because the contraption didn’t fit in the shuttle either.

  Because the safety harnesses in the shuttle seats were designed for people with arms and legs, it didn't fit properly, so Rex had to be put into some sort of bag structure that could be put on a hook on the wall. The flight attendant showed Tina how to put it on.

  She wrestled Rex into the bag in the narrow space, while the people who had to sit on the chairs she was using waited in the aisle, which meant other people couldn’t get through and some were making comments like Please hurry up, other people want to get to their seats, too.

  When she finished, it turned out that some other occupants in bags already hung on the wall. None of them were over a few months of age.

  Rex’s mood did not improve with having to share the space with a number of noisy babies.

  Tina got a seat one row back from the wall. It looked kind of ridiculous, the row of all the small babies with small heads and Rex with his adult sized head and face that he would have to shave sooner rather than later.

  The flight attendant had at least been considerate enough to give him the spot next to the window. But the people facing him looked very uneasy.

  Tina offered to swap seats with one of the couple.

  "I'm his mother," she said.

  The woman said, ”Oh. I don't understand why they didn't put you with him."

  Well, Tina didn't understand why the shuttle didn't have provisions for people like Rex, but that aside.

  The woman was keen to move to Tina’s seat so that Tina could be with Rex. Or be the one to listen to his unimpressed muttering.

  But finally all the passengers were seated and strapped in, and they were ready to go, and his mood lightened a little.

  Just think of it, he had never even been to Peris City, let alone to the spaceport, and his interest in technology was such that he keenly watched all the different kinds of craft parked at the dusty spaceport. He even knew the names of some of the models, so for a while the talk was all about that. He wanted to know what models she had flown. It was the first time that he had shown any interest in her previous career.

  They didn’t speak a word about their dusty house and the shop, but Tina missed the cactuses already. She wondered if they had survived the lonely night in the desert or if the armadillos had ripped some of them to shreds already. Or if the collectors were looking for them.

  Finally the shuttle was ready; all the luggage was stowed, including the components of Rex’s harness—and Tina kept a close watch on where the crew put those—and they were ready for takeoff.

  The trip only took two and a half hours, but the station orbited in such way that departure was only possible during certain windows, and the shuttle did not deviate from those.

  It was a long time since Tina had felt the pressure of rumbling engines and the pressure on her chest from being taken out into space. Of course a passenger shuttle was very different from a private craft, especially a military one, since those usually had more powerful engines. But the feeling brought back a lot of memories nonetheless.

  Rex was mostly silent during take-off. Not that the engine noise allowed people to talk freely, even if some of the babies had different ideas. The infant hanging next to Rex had gone bright red in the face.

  But it wasn’t long before they came into familiar territory for her: to see the horizon recede, the sky turn dark and the limb of the planet appear as a hazy blue arc through the window.

  Two of the planet’s moons appeared above the horizon.

  Rex looked at them. They would normally be seen tumbling through the sky at nighttime, chasing each other across the firmament at crazy speed.

  Had she ever seen the full round moon on Earth, he wanted to know.

&
nbsp; Tina hadn't, but Dexter had. At some point during this trip, they were going to have to talk about Rex’s father and his sister. Rex knew that he had a sister and that she had a function in the military. He didn’t know any of the circumstances that had led to their breakup and Tina’s departure from the Force. When he was a child, she had simply told him that she no longer wanted to stay. That answer would not satisfy him as an adult.

  Why had she left space?

  Why had she given up a successful career?

  What was it about people that they would sometimes deeply betray those who trusted them?

  She wasn’t looking forward to these discussions.

  In any case, he seemed to enjoy the trip so far, and mentioned the bright speck at the horizon that was Kelso Space Station long before the announcer made the comment that they were about to arrive.

  Tina almost didn't recognise the shape of the station. In her time, Kelso had been a simple one-ring structure, hovering over what was a backwater world, where there was no customer base for a large trade hub in orbit.

  In the time since she had last visited, the station had grown two new rings, and by the look of things, the location of the spaceport had been changed. They now used a central system, where all the ships docked at a post attached to the axle of the ring structure before moving them out of this position to a docking rig, making it possible to dock and undock more than one ship at a time. This was more common in larger stations, and Kelso was no longer a small station.

  She wondered what all those people were doing here. Besides some mining, Cayelle was not a popular world, and its deserts did not contain desirable export products. Unless you counted sentient cactuses.

  When arrival at the station was imminent, the ship went into a holding pattern that was also very familiar to her.

  While circling the station, she looked for places where private ships would be docked. The shuttle port, to the left, she could clearly see from her window. The new port included lots of rigs and structures off the main rings where various ships and mining technologies were on display.

  Two large ships were docked at the outermost rig. At that size, with that space-weathered surface, they could only be Federacy warships. She had never served on them, but she thought—from distant memory—that this was a Norway class vessel. So, these huge, serious warships came to Kelso these days?

  What were they doing here?

  Again, she thought of the group of young people from Gandama. Was the Federacy increasing its presence in this area?

  From this distance, she couldn’t make out a specific shuttle docking area for the much smaller private ships but she assumed that her ship was somewhere out there amongst all those little specks and tubes that glared brightly in the sunlight.

  In all, she was impressed with the size of the place and a little intimidated. Somewhere in the back of her mind she realised that it might not be that easy to find her ship. The port master would certainly know, wouldn't he? Then again the man who had been port master in her day would probably have retired and there would probably be a port office with more than one employee to deal with this many ships.

  And then it occurred to her that she had not received anything except automated replies to all her messages to the Port Authority and the fuelling station. Any ships that looked like they had been abandoned, if their owners couldn’t be contacted, were usually sold to the highest bidder at regular auctions. What if they had sold the ship off, because they deemed that they could no longer contact her? Dickson’s Creek was such a backwater, she wouldn't be surprised if messages didn't always reach her.

  The ship might not even be here anymore.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kelso Space Station.

  The shuttle docked with a soft clunk, and an automated voice started a prerecorded message to welcome all new passengers, telling them to make sure to take all their belongings with them and all that sort of stuff. Most of the people got up from their seats and started collecting their things, some of which had managed to move quite a bit during the trip. Because they all got up and queued in the aisle, Tina couldn't get through to the back where Rex's harness was stored.

  As a result, Tina and Rex were the last ones off the shuttle. The crew needed to unpack Rex’s armour, Tina needed to put it on and then they needed to wheel all their luggage out of the craft.

  By the time all that was done, most of the other passengers had left, and only the crew still stood around the exit tube.

  In fact, the officers standing around were joking with each other, and were surprised to see some final passengers coming out.

  The appearance of Rex caused some raised eyebrows.

  The customs officers took Tina’s ID and asked her some questions. Where she was going, what she was doing at the station, and how long she was staying.

  Once, long ago, she would have sailed through these types of checks. She would have had a pass that let her through the fast lane. One look at the badge on her chest and they would have known she was from the Perseus Agency, and those people were treated with utmost respect. Now she was just another citizen, and the process felt humiliating and unfamiliar. She didn’t like it.

  Somehow, she had to restore some of her former identity passes. Ex-service personnel had certain privileges, even after they left the Force. She should see what she could still access.

  Rex studied the gadgets held by the officers closely. He seemed to have overcome the embarrassment of having had to travel with his armour off, and his curiosity took over, even though the officers gave him strange looks. Tina almost snapped at them, Have you never seen a person in an exoskeleton before?

  Some of those people used to work at the docks, Tina remembered. Most of them had been involved in accidents. Didn’t they have accidents anymore? Was space really so discriminating that only able-bodied people came here?

  The officers studied Tina’s and Rex’s civilian IDs, wanting to know where Gandama was, and sounding incredulous that someone from there would come up here. But finally they let Tina and Rex through into a long corridor with bright ceiling lights into a hall with lifts around the perimeter.

  First they needed to find their accommodation. According to Tina’s memory, the accommodation quarters were close to the entrance of the spaceport. But the only exit from the hall was into a long lift that went into the weightless part of the middle of the station.

  She had forgotten about that. The spaceport was not in the same place it had been before. They entered the station in a different place. She might as well be on her first visit here.

  It was busy in the spaceport, and the lift was crowed. Once they left the hall, everyone inside the lift slowly became weightless. Rex had to hold himself onto the side, but his size made him awkward and he couldn’t stop his harness bumping the woman next to him. She gave him dirty looks.

  Once they were in the space station’s main hall, Tina recognised where they were, even if much had changed there, too.

  The somewhat old-fashioned and dingy hall had been replaced with a modern open commercial area with shops and restaurants and many of the station’s authority offices. They came past the trade office, the military office, and the Port Authority office. She would have to visit that one later.

  They arrived at their accommodation, indicated by a sign in garish pink neon lights that said The Weary Astronaut. Even when booking the service, Tina had found it a strange name, since hardly anybody still used the quaint word astronaut anymore.

  People streamed in and out of the main door through the establishment’s dark lobby, out the lifts, past the desk and into the commercial passage. Some guests went out a glass door in the back of the lobby, where Tina could see a dining area with faux plants made to look like a garden, with tables and chairs like outdoor furniture.

  The lobby itself was small and every bit of wall space was covered in old-fashioned posters of humanity’s first forays into space. The Mars landings, the first commercial space statio
n and, heavens! the first Moon landing.

  “Wow.” Rex stopped to look around.

  Tina went up to the desk and gave her name. They had received the reservation, and they gave Tina an access card.

  In the lift to the top floor of the establishment, Rex said, “I thought you said that this place was expensive?”

  “It was expensive.”

  She hated to think what cheap places would have been like. As it was, Rex barely fitted through the corridor, which was dark with scuffed lino floors and scratches along the walls where people had tried to move large objects.

  She opened the door to the left, and stopped in the doorway.

  The room was barely big enough for the two beds that stood in there. Just a tiny space was left between the wall and the beds, barely wide enough for a normal person to walk, let alone someone wearing an exoskeleton.

  "I would have expected a bit more comfort for my money," Tina said. It was clear this room would never do.

  Once they put their luggage down, there wasn't even enough space to walk. "I'm going back to the reception to see if they have anything better," Tina said. She shut the door again and, with Rex following, went back into the lift.

  A group of people had arrived at the reception. They were all quite young, and spoke with a tone of bravado that made Tina sure that they were military personnel of some description, even if they did not wear uniforms.

  She and Rex had to wait until they had all been allocated rooms. They stood in the corner of the tiny lobby area, trying to keep out of the way of people walking into and out of the place. Some of them knew the group that was checking in, and lots of noisy greeting ensued.

  Two people walked past, one of them wearing an exoskeleton like Tina had never seen before. It allowed the wearer to walk normally. It was dark blue and gleaming. Little lights lit up along the legs and in the hips as the various parts engaged.

  Tina couldn't even work out whether the person wearing it was disabled. It looked like an arrangement that people would wear just for fun. The man’s steps were bouncy, almost soundless, none of this clonking and creaking that Rex’s harness made.