Project Charon 1

by Patty Jansen

  Rex turned to her. His eyes lit up. "Really?"

  "Really." She would do her utmost best.

  When they walked away from the shop in the direction of the accommodation, Finn came with them.

  This was an unwelcome complication. Maybe Finn had been sent to keep an eye on her. She didn’t trust him.

  “Don’t you have to return to your ship?” Tina asked him. He wasn’t even in uniform.

  “Not yet.“

  Tina was going to say something about all personnel having to be on the ship when it was about to leave, but he knew she knew that as well. Something was going on.

  "We’re going to get some dinner," she said.

  “That’s all right by me. If I can come.”

  She wanted to say no, but couldn’t bring herself to.

  They went back to the accommodation and found an empty table at one of the surrounding eating-houses.

  It was not as busy as it had been the previous night, and Tina gathered that this was because the personnel of the warships had been called in.

  She asked Finn, and he told a vague story about the ships departing because they needed to close a route.

  “How much do you know about these pirates? Have you ever seen any?”

  “Everyone on board the ships gets shown vids. The ones that we’ve captured are all affected with a skin condition that makes them look like toads. Their methods are arcane. They will try to capture and board a ship rather than shoot it from a distance, and when they do board your ship, you’re gone. They fight like madmen, throwing themselves into battle based on the premise that their numbers are limitless.”

  “Are they limitless?”

  “I don’t know, but there are certainly a lot of them. Their ships are fast. They’re small and can sometimes evade detection.”

  He changed the subject and asked about the condition she had found her ship in, and suggested things for her to look at before she could sell it.

  "I'm a ship’s engineer, and I did work some time in a small ship yard," he said. “I know the things that buyers will look at. I can help you.”

  "So if you’re an engineer, why aren't you with your ship now? I have also flown on those big ships, so I know that leave gets cancelled the moment the ship is slated for departure. What are you still doing here?"

  He looked down. His mouth worked.

  He met her eyes, and there was a guilty look in them. He knew that she knew that his ship had cancelled shore leave.

  “You were not on shore leave, were you?”

  He breathed out heavily and shook his head. “I had a disagreement with my superior officer and they decided it was best if I didn’t continue my service.”

  “When did this happen?” He’d still been wearing a uniform last time.

  “I was officially released from service this morning.”

  “Because the ship is leaving.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you talk about what happened?”

  “It’s a long and very boring story and the details of my life are pretty sordid.”

  “You’re part of the Kaspari dynasty of Olympus?”

  He snorted. “You did some digging?”

  “A few things didn’t add up to me.”

  “Once a Perseus agent, always a Perseus agent.”

  “I was a biologist. I didn’t do any of the spying stuff. But it was obvious. If you tell me that you’re off duty and you’re eating alone without any other off-duty troops, I know something is up.”

  “I guess I’m a bad liar.”

  Rex was watching with wide eyes. It was good that he saw this, that the Force spat people out when they didn’t fit their narrow ideal of what their people should be like.

  Finn snorted again and looked at his hands. Just when Tina thought that he wasn't going to say anything else, he started, “Yes, I am that Kaspari." He wasn't looking at Tina or Rex.

  "You don't have to talk about it," Tina said.

  "I'm out of the Force, so I might as well."

  "Only if you want to. I'm not exactly in an easy position either. Neither is my life a paragon of virtue, and I understand if you want to keep certain things quiet."

  "I’ll soon have to return to my family. They’re already highly unimpressed with my efforts. They’ll probably say I’m only suitable to clean their lavatory blocks."

  "But you are an engineer. I looked it up." Tina briefly considered that he might have bought his way into the Force, but for all that she knew about the recruiting process, and all the bad things that went on inside those ships, hiring people without the appropriate skills was not a thing. When you were out there in space, the lives of thousands of people depended on the engineers. You made sure that they knew what they were doing.

  "Yes, I am. Not the kind of engineering that my family appreciates. My family doesn't really appreciate engineering at all. They prefer to leave doing the actual work to the lowly workers. They prefer to do shady deals over lavish lunches."

  "I get the feeling that you don't like your family very much."

  He laughed. "I thought I was hiding it well.”

  And then they all laughed.

  He shrugged. “Families… You don’t choose them. Mine sounds like a highly concentrated news report from the Gossip Channel.” He gave a wry chuckle.

  “Where do you fit in the family?”

  “I’m George Kaspari’s black sheep grandson. I’m the one they don’t talk about.”

  "So, can you tell me why you got dismissed?"

  "Honourably retired," Finn said.

  "Okay, honourably retired." Tina, too, had been honourably retired, because it meant less work for her superiors.

  "How familiar are you with engines?"

  "Not that familiar. If you're going to talk about engineering, you’ll have to do it in lay terms. I’m a biologist."

  "Okay. It was my task to do the part of the maintenance that releases fuel into the engine chamber. They wanted me to double the output. I told them that it was likely that would damage the engine, at the very least. At the worst, it would cause significant damage to the ship once the engine reached full capacity."

  "Why did they ask you to do this?"

  "Because the pirates have extremely fast ships. Much faster than ours. Ours are too big and take too long to reach maximum speed. We have smaller, faster ships, but none are here. The superiors wanted a shortcut to make our ships faster. I told them that things didn't work that way, and things went downhill from there. They accused me of trying to argue with my superior. I explained the argument to them, but in the end they just didn't want to listen. I suspect they’ll get one of their lackeys to do it anyway, and probably in another few months time we’ll hear about the SS Stavanger’s demise. That is if we hear about it at all."

  Tina shivered inside. Because that was exactly the way she had been dismissed, for arguing with a superior. Even if that superior was her husband, and if the path that he insisted on was truly suicidal.

  But she didn't want to talk about that, so she asked him, “What are you going to do now?"

  He shrugged. "Look for a job, I guess."

  “You said you worked with small engines?”

  “I have.”

  “Could you check out my ship? I can’t pay, but I’ll buy your food.”

  “That’s a deal.”

  "How good are you with weapons?"

  "I'm okay. But I need to have a weapon first and I don’t.”

  Tina thought of the magnificent Federacy gun in the display case in the pawnshop. "Other things can be used as weapons."

  "Yeah, I guess."

  "Rex and I need protection. We would appreciate it very much if you could hang out with us, at least until we’ve sold the ship. A lot of people have been bothering us, and I'm not sure what’s going on."

  “What sort of people?”

  “Young men mostly, trying to sell us things or services we don’t need.”

  "So you're finding the ship
in a less desirable condition than you expected?"

  “Not necessarily. If I can get it refuelled, it will work, but it’s a bit dusty. We spent most of today cleaning. It's amazing all the black stuff that will grow on the walls when you're not there. We also had a problem with a squatter."

  “Oh, they’re everywhere. I hope you didn't have too much trouble getting rid of him."

  "Her, actually."

  His eyebrows flicked up. “What did you do?”

  “I told her to be on her way, but she came back, with her geese.”

  He laughed. “Geese?”

  “Yes, seriously. They’re quite vicious.”

  “Well, good on her. If she’s got the animals defending her, that’s probably why she’s still alive.”

  “She said something about being afraid of gangs, and so I let her stay in the access tube. I presume she’ll keep people away from the ship. She’s the same age as Rex. I guess I’m just a big softie and I felt sorry for her. I should have reported her to the authorities.”

  “Heavens, no. The stations can’t afford to keep prisoners. Most of these girls get sold off as sex slaves and are never heard from again.”

  “By the authorities?”

  “Oh, they wrap it up in different words. They call it employment, but that’s essentially what happens.”

  They finished their meal. Finn insisted on paying, and went to his accommodation. Tina watched him go.

  “What are you doing, mum?” Rex asked. “Do you want him to come and work for us in the shop?”

  “Would you like that?”

  “Yeah. He’s fun. He can be my uncle or brother or something.”

  Except Tina wasn’t sure there would be a shop to return to.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  After Finn left, Tina and Rex went up to their room. Tina wasn’t sure how to tell Rex about the things she had learned and the suspicions growing in her mind.

  For the first part, down the hallway, they walked in uneasy silence.

  Then Rex said, “You said you went back to the ship?”

  “Yeah. I forgot something.”

  “Oh. And the girl had come back?”

  “She had. She said she was afraid of the gangs in the other parts of the station.”

  They reached the door to their room, and Tina opened it, letting them into the slightly musty smell of well-used accommodation.

  Then Rex said, “Did you get your thing?”

  “I did.”

  “Where is it?”

  Tina showed him the device.

  “Whoa! Do they still use those? I thought the Federacy Force used the most modern stuff.”

  “They do, but this has sat in a locker for fifteen years.”

  “You’re kidding. It’s the same one you put in?”

  “It is.”

  “They weren’t interested?

  “Honestly, I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Tina let out a deep sigh. “I don’t know that it was such a good idea to come here.”

  “Why not? Didn’t you want to sell the ship?”

  “Yes.” She did. Now she wasn’t sure that was such a good idea, either. If it was no longer safe to return to the shop—and how could it be, when the lender would know where she was and would keep coming back for his money, which was his right to ask?

  “But?” And Rex was far too smart to be happy with simple answers.

  Tina sighed and sat on the bed. “For one, there’s your father. You know I don’t like talking in a bad way about him.”

  “You say that all the time and then you follow it up with half an hour of ranting about how selfish he is. Look, I’m used to it. Just tell me he’s an arsehole.”

  Tina cringed. He was probably right. After what he had done, it was impossible for her to talk about Dexter without letting her opinion of him shine through.

  She blew out a breath. “I met someone who told me that after the project we worked on was closed, he started a company that may have connections to the pirates.”

  “What’s up with these pirates, anyway? Are they the same ones we had in Cayelle?”

  Tina said that they were, and went on to explain in a few sentences what she had learned or surmised: that the pirates had obtained alien material that imitated and infected living tissue, and that they had been allowed to spread this material for years.

  “Was that because they didn’t read your message?” Rex asked.

  “Well, I don’t want to give myself that much credit, but things might have been less bad if they had read it.”

  This raised the question: did an impartial body in the Federacy Force prepared to listen to her story still exist?

  She told Rex that some people in Gandama—whom she had personally seen—were infected with the alien material, and that this would gradually turn them into something less than human. And for some reason, they wanted her cactuses.

  “But why?” Rex asked.

  “I don’t know. I think it came about because I wrote a paper about them, but I have no idea how they plan to use them.”

  “By making a cactus army that zaps you with spikes if you come too close?”

  Tina gave a wry chuckle. She wished it was funny, but in reality, everything was possible. Even a cactus army.

  “So isn’t the answer simple, then? You shouldn’t give them the cactuses. Tell Janusz not to let anyone take them.”

  “I let them loose in the desert.”

  “Then no one will know where they are.”

  “I don’t know. I did it because they would be safer, not because I thought they would be protected against any kind of theft.”

  Rex frowned at her, and then she realised he didn’t even know that the owner had offered to exchange them for the shop.

  His eyes widened when she told him. “But why?”

  Tina blew out a breath. From his perspective, it would have been so easy.

  “There must be something in the cactuses that is worth a lot. At first I thought he might want to sell them to collectors.”

  “That could still be true. Some collectors are really crazy.”

  That was true and they had even seen that since coming here.

  “Why didn’t you give them to him? It would have solved our problems.”

  “I didn’t think so, and I still don’t think so. He wouldn’t sign any kind of document that proved ownership of the shop if I gave him the cactuses. I didn’t trust him. It was more because of that, than that I didn’t want him to have the cactuses. We need the income from the cactuses to survive, but if I’d believed giving them to him would get him off my back, I would have.”

  “But you mentioned my father. I still don’t get what my father has to do with this.”

  “I’m not sure if he has anything to do with the cactuses in particular, but he was involved with a meeting between people from Project Charon and a commercial interest. At that meeting, an exchange of material took place. It’s believed that this material then made it to the pirate fleet, because the pharmaceutical company experimenting with it recruited people allied to the pirates to be their test cases. Your father was involved with a betrayal of the agency and the Force.”

  “Betray the Force? Why would he do that?”

  “Your father only ever wanted two things: money or power, preferably both. And he was impatient and didn’t like rules, even if those rules were sometimes very sensible. Maybe he didn’t know that the person he sold the samples to was allied with the pirates. It’s quite possible. But he definitely knew that he wasn’t supposed to sell the material.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No. Maybe he’s stuck at Pandana. Maybe with the pirates.”

  “Would he have turned into one of those…” He made a wriggling movement with his pincers to indicate the warts.

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” The thought made Tina uncomfortable.

  Rex asked the next question that Tina didn’t want to hear. “What about Evelle? Is she wi
th the pirates, too?”

  “I don’t think your father and your sister are in the same place anymore. And they haven’t been for a long time.”

  "She’s thirty, isn't she?

  "Yes, she is, and should be old enough to hold her own rank in the Force.”

  Then Rex said, “I wonder what my sister looks like.”

  “You can find pictures of her in the Force’s systems.”

  Tina had looked at them, barely recognising the pixie-like creature with the short spiked-up hair.

  “What if they were both in trouble?”

  “They could be, but in that case I don’t see what we could do. I can’t live with what-ifs. If they contact us, I’d have to think about what to do. It’s not like your father has ever been nice to me or you. We don’t owe him anything.”

  “What if there was no one else?”

  “Well…” Tina took in a deep breath. What if people who were infected had made a threat to Dexter or had offered him something he wanted? More money and freedom to do research would sway him to at least attend a meeting. Yes, he was greedy, but he would spend that money on research, not on himself. For all the bad things she could say about Dexter, he wasn’t the sort of person who wasted a lot of money on frivolous things.

  It wasn’t that much of a stretch to think that he’d been swayed by promises for funds and facilities, that turned out to be too good to be true, and he’d realised too late. Possible that he’d been dumb rather than malicious.

  She had almost been taken for a ride by the lender and his “medical” condition. He’d wanted the cactuses. Anyone except her would have just given him the collection to retain her business.

  But people had betrayed her before, so she was cautious.

  And another thought: how long had this been going on?

  Her marriage to Dexter had never been particularly close, but it worked until he began to push his work in directions that she thought were questionable. At one stage, he even wanted to use an agency ship to send people into the rift. That was just stupid. She told him so, and he got angry. It wasn’t just a disagreement, but a fight that had scared her.

  He told her not to be ridiculous. Then he accused everyone of being too timid, and said sometimes you needed to make sacrifices in order to move forward. They’d been hanging around this rift for over thirty years. Wasn’t it time that something was done?