Project Charon 2 Patty Jansen (readict .TXT) 📖

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