Project Charon 1

by Patty Jansen

  She’d discovered she was pregnant while staying in a dingy hotel in Peris City, and she’d gone through a pregnancy marred with health issues. Rex was born in a clinic in Peris City. Tina still remembered the horrified look on the nurse’s face.

  She brushed the dust off the control panels. It was a bit more than dust, too, because her hand came away black from some kind of mould that grew on all the walls.

  She reached for the compartment that held the earpieces, found one still inside and attached it to her ear. Then she turned the main switch on.

  A familiar humming sound went through the craft. The lights on the control panels flickered into life. The screen in front of her said two percent charged.

  Well, she couldn't expect any better than that.

  She tested the radio. An automated voice in her ear said, “Kelso Station Control. State your intentions.”

  That worked.

  She turned on the radar and navigation, which also appeared to be working, although she would definitely want to subject the system to some tests before declaring it safe to fly.

  She turned on the on-board AI. A male voice sounded through the cabin. “Hello there, this is Benny. I hope you’re having a wonderful time. How can I help you?”

  Tina cringed. She forgot she’d installed that swanky voice. She replied in military curtness, “Check status.”

  Benny was silent for a bit, and then he said, “Oh dearie me, I have many updates that need to be installed and will need thirty-two hours to do that. Until that time, my function shall be quite impaired. Do you want me to go ahead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mum, who are you talking to?” Rex asked at the door.

  “Just the onboard AI.” She needed to change his voice to something less embarrassing.

  “Oh. He sounded like some playboy.”

  “I’ll update him.”

  To be honest, she was surprised that the system started up at all. At least it looked like she had a functioning ship which, frankly, was more than she had expected. "We’ll spend a few days cleaning this all up and getting rid of all this rubbish, and then we’ll be fine."

  "We?" Rex said from near the door.

  "You can help if you want."

  "I can't get through the door."

  And that was another problem.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  She knew only one way to solve the problem of getting Rex into the ship: she needed to take his harness apart and reassemble it inside.

  She retrieved a blanket from inside and spread it out on the floor. Then she helped Rex onto it, and took off his arms and legs.

  The body of the harness needed to come off, too, because with it, he was too heavy for her to carry.

  While all this was happening, a number of homeless urchins came a bit further down the passage to watch while Tina took off the protective swaddling around the bottom of his body.

  Rex didn’t like that.

  “They're laughing at me," he said, lifting his head to glare at them.

  "Just lie still, and I can do this quickly."

  "I'm ridiculous. I look like a baby.”

  Tina rolled him in a blanket, a sorry stump of a human being, just a body with a head.

  She carried him into the ship, and when she came back for the harness found that two of the young urchins were looking at it.

  "Scoot," she said, flapping her hand.

  The boys took a few steps back, but she wasn't sure if they understood.

  She picked up one half of the harness, noticing by the harsh light how worn some of the joints were.

  She removed his pad and emptied the container into it and wrapped up the sides. She carried the resulting heavy parcel to the nearby recycling chute, enveloped by the associated smell.

  The boys giggled. “Does he, like, poo in there as well?” one asked.

  The other boy chuckled. “Like a baby.”

  “He’s much bigger than a baby.”

  “What would you do if you were born without arms or legs?” Tina snapped at them.

  “I’d be dead, miss. I got no one to get me one of those walker things.”

  “Well, then, don’t laugh at other people. Go somewhere else. Scoot.”

  While she walked back to the ship’s entrance, one of the boys elbowed another in the side. That boy, easily the youngest in the group, came forward. “Miss, if you have a moment.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “We can work for you, if you need any help.”

  “That’s a bit rich, after insulting my son. I suggest you take yourself off somewhere else and stop bothering us.”

  The boy retreated. He looked disappointed.

  She watched until the group had walked so far down the walkway that they disappeared around the curve.

  She carried the other half of Rex’s harness inside, refreshed all the pads inside, attached the empty container, and lifted Rex back into the harness. Once he was in, he checked that everything was working, and walked a couple of lumbering paces up and down the hall.

  It was barely wide enough for him, and he wouldn't fit in any of the cabins.

  Anyway, they could get started.

  Tina went back outside in the hallway, filled a bucket with water, and put in some of the soap that she had bought. She set up Rex to clean the walls and floors and sweep the dust off the seats. He found a complete stash of squirrelled-away canteen supplies in one of the cupboards, as well as a blanket and some spare clothes.

  "Do you think that girl was living here?" he said.

  "Yes, she was. That's what people do when they don't have a home."

  “What do you mean—don’t have a home?”

  “Not everyone is lucky enough that they can afford a place to live.”

  He frowned. "That means she has no family to look after her?"

  "Some people don't. It sounded like she ran away from an abusive stepfather."

  His face looked disturbed. "Then we just kicked her out of her home."

  "She’ll find another place."

  "I don't like those boys outside. They look like they could cause trouble for a girl by herself."

  "Oh, urchins are used to that sort of thing. They know how to keep themselves safe."

  But Rex, in his usual innocence, managed to penetrate a corner that made her uneasy. Station authorities were rarely kind to these abandoned children. She had heard stories that they regularly rounded up all of them and forced them to undergo radiation that made them infertile. Authorities said they did it to prevent misery, but it also rendered the girls suitable as sex slaves that could be abused and traded with impunity.

  Who knew what abuse the girl Rasa had fled? The tattoo on her arm might be a mark of previous ownership.

  And now she was thinking about this poor girl instead of her own problems of having to sell the ship and getting the money so that she and Rex could survive.

  And yes, Rex was right about it, but what could she do? She couldn’t be responsible for the survival of the entire human race. She had a hard enough time looking after her own survival.

  Rex was occupied cleaning, and while Benny’s updates were running she might as well have a look for any information that hadn’t been on the ship’s systems when she left it. She checked all the system’s folders and data storage, but found little that shouldn’t be there.

  She did find a statement of her previous finances, which included her retirement allowance and what the Force called an “Exit package”. The retirement allowance was still in an account somewhere. She was only allowed to take it out at the age of sixty and that was a decent while off yet. The exit package was partially still in the account. She had only withdrawn two thousand credits of it—to visit the planet—and had been unable to access her account from Gandama because the bank staff were just too incompetent.

  A bit less then eight thousand was left over.

  That money was hers and would go a distance towards paying the hotel so she didn’t have to p
ut it on credit to be sorted out later.

  She noticed Rex looking over her shoulder.

  “Anything important?” he asked.

  “A bit of money. Not terribly much, but it will help, if I can get it out.”

  He frowned. “Who’s Alethia?” He sounded suspicious, in a don’t-tell-me-I-have-another-sister way.

  “Alethia means truth in old Greek. It’s the name of the ship.”

  “Oh.” He gave her a sheepish look. “Did you name it?”

  “No. Ships are registered with their name. It’s part of their registration. It takes a lot of effort to change it.”

  But she had liked the ship’s name a lot. The truth. That’s what she was going to tell.

  When she left, she had taken all the sensitive documents and had left them in a document box on Kelso, with a note for someone from the agency to pick them up. She wondered if the agency had ever retrieved it.

  She wondered…

  Every time Agency personnel went on a mission in civilian space, they received three fake identities, in case they needed to stay undercover or use any of these boxes. They would designate one identity as the one allowed to pick up the box’s contents. This identity could be used by other people and would be destroyed afterwards.

  Tina checked in the general population database, and there was still a person called Louise Metvier. The other identities also remained intact.

  It didn’t look like the identity had been used. That could only mean no one had touched her data. And that could only be because someone—Dexter—would have kept her information from reaching civilised space.

  Why? Was it only because he feared missing his performance indicators? That seemed a dumb reason.

  Maybe she should check and take her documents out and forward them to the Federacy Force command some other way. It was probably too late, but at least she would have done the right thing.

  Another item on the to-do list.

  While she wiped down the control console and kept an eye on the status of the system scan, her thoughts went to her work with the project.

  When she had arrived, the retiring biologist had shown her the secret of the project: a tear in the fabric of space that the small station had already been researching for a few decades, very carefully and with great secrecy. A tear in the fabric of space meant something was on the other side, and those old scientists were keenly aware of the danger that this other side might pose when exposed to the human universe.

  The area showed up brightly in most frequencies. But it was small, and space was bent around the tear such that bodies—like planets, moons, and space stations—wouldn’t be sucked into it. They’d thought it was a mini black hole but, when they developed telescopes that penetrated the barrier, they found it wasn’t.

  Tina had come onto the project to look at strange phenomena in plants grown at the station in experiments and for consumption by the crew. She had found evidence of interference by alien life, which wasn’t uncommon, but was trying to trace it, when a cloud of dust exploded from the tear.

  It could only mean that there was pressure, something on the other side. Another universe? A wormhole?

  She had wanted to report it, to warn everyone of any potential danger. The cloud had lingered in space for about an hour until it had dispersed so much that she could no longer see it. Whatever it was, those particles were alien and dangerous and the project should withdraw.

  The project’s command, a hardline officer by the name of Bartlett, had wanted to hear none of it, because he had his own productivity goals in mind. The Force’s upper command had been questioning the need to have the station, because they hadn’t produced anything useful in over thirty years. He thought they could use some of their other discoveries, because…who knew? Dexter had defended him, and Tina had not been able to make him understand the danger. The relationship had already been frosty, but that argument just blew it out of the water.

  Rex was talking to someone at the door.

  "What's going on?" Tina asked.

  "They want to know if you want to purchase cleaning services," he said.

  “They? Who is it?”

  “Some company. They’re wearing all the same shirts.”

  "Can't they see we're doing it ourselves?"

  A voice came from outside, and a young man said, “We can clean your ship so that it looks new, so that you can get the best possible price when you list it for sale."

  "Thank you very much, but we are not selling. Please leave us alone.”

  The young men retreated, and Rex looked at her, surprised. "We are not selling?"

  "Of course we are, but I have no idea how he knows this, which means someone must have told him. Hopefully now he thinks he's got the wrong ship and they’ll stay away.”

  Rex’s frown deepened. "Do you think someone is watching us?"

  "I am certain of it." Who or why remained a question. She just hoped that they wouldn’t get any bolder than this. First Finn, who knew who she was, then the men who followed her, then she happened to run into Jake and his insistence she work for him, then the urchin in the ship, and now this.

  The rest of the day was spent scrubbing, wiping and turning the tired dusty-looking vessel into something a little bit more respectable.

  Slowly, the smell of disuse vanished, too.

  Benny came back online, and Tina let Rex have some time with him by giving him the task to copy all the financial stuff and erase it from the ship’s systems. Whenever she walked past, Rex would be laughing. Benny really was hilarious. She pitied the new owner to have to deal with Benny’s extensive knowledge of swear words.

  But then Rex surprised her by saying, “Mum, do you know that you can get from this onboard AI into the dockside computers?”

  She didn’t believe him but, when she looked over his shoulder, found it to be true. The screen in front of him displayed all kinds of information about the ship that should not be available to them, including options to turn on and off communication and power. They worked, too.

  “How did you do that?” Tina asked him.

  “When you go into the AI’s control module, there is an option for base umbilicals control and when you go there, it connects with the dockside computer. It looks like it’s a menu that the ship defaults to because the original control modules were superseded and the ship’s onboard AI is not ready to handle those.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “From all my unreliable friends all over the Federacy.”

  “You talk about getting into computer systems?”

  “They talk about that a lot, because they have nothing else to talk about. It’s not like we can talk about girls or going out.”

  That was kind of disturbing. She didn’t like snooping on Rex and the online communities he was in, but if she’d known that some of them were hackers, she might have told him to be careful—which would have had exactly the opposite of the desired effect.

  At the end of the day, she went through the reverse process of taking Rex out of the harness and carrying him and the pieces through the door separately.

  Fortunately, this time there were no urchins or other people to bother them; but a lone security officer walked past, raising his eyebrows at her.

  He said, “Hmm. An owner turning up to retrieve their possessions doesn’t happen often.”

  “It’s a fully functional ship. This is a docking port. The ship will fly out of the dock.”

  “Good luck with that. The Property Retrieval Authority loves getting rid of things.” He laughed and continued on his patrol.

  That had been the bane of commercial stations even when she was in the Force. Sooner or later, even the most well-organised station turned into a graveyard for abandoned and superseded junk that no one came to pick up but that no one could legally dispose of, either because the owners couldn’t be contacted or because they had put in place protections that didn’t allow the station to seize the property and sell it off.
/>   That was what the Property Retrieval Authority did. Study like a hawk when those protections expired. She had just barely rescued the ship from their fingers.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “You go ahead,” Tina said to Rex when they arrived at the start of the commercial passage. They had navigated back to the lift, into the central docking hall and through the maze of passages that led to the commercial area. Shops lined both sides of the passage, the accommodation was at the end, and there was not much that Rex could do except linger at the shops. She should trust him a bit more not to make every possible mistake.

  He frowned at her. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to the Station Storage Office to check if I left anything in a locker on the station. It’s not very interesting and I won’t be long. I’ll meet you back at the hotel. Feel free to look around. Just don’t spend any money.”

  “Oh. All right.” He smiled.

  In reality, she wasn’t allowed to take a second person to the agency locker. She might not work there anymore, and the locker might have been abandoned, but she’d adhere to protocol.

  She watched Rex on his way back to the accommodation and then set off.

  A quick ride in the elevator to the next level brought her to another busy passage, this one with all the business offices and things like medical practices.

  Most of the citizens who lived at Kelso were either employed in closed-system agriculture or rare-earth mining from asteroids. As with any station, many also provided services for the people living at the station or the visiting ships.

  Civilian stations also attracted a fair amount of illegal activity.

  Ahead in the corridor a number of people hung around in small groups—not the type of people that Tina would voluntarily engage with. Most were quite young, shabbily dressed, and sported a varying number of things that could be used as weapons.

  The use of guns and knives was prohibited by any except authorised people, but gangs had taken to carrying things like clubs and belts studded with metal. Any of those could be used as a weapon.

  She walked in between the groups, ignoring them. None of them paid her any attention. And then she realised that they were all standing in front of the place she was going.