Project Charon 2 Patty Jansen (readict .TXT) 📖

here had better get out of our way, then.”

“Haha. This is nothing to joke about.”

“I’m not joking. You’re lucky they didn’t show your face as well or say anything about my highly recognisable companion. Keep your head down and don’t look so tall and impressive.”

“Are you jealous now?”

“I don’t want us to be singled out.” Because the danger was not in people recognising them but in security cameras recognising her facial profile. Their system security might not be the most modern, but surely the station would have that basic security feature?

But as soon as she and Rex came to the ground floor of the atrium, a lot of cheering went up from near the lifts. A group of people was congregated around a screen.

“What’s that about?” Rex asked.

“No idea. I hope something unrelated to us.”

They crossed the hall, but even while they passed the checkpoint into the docks and walked the corridors, they noticed a lot of people talking excitedly to each other. People were coming out of doors and getting together in groups. Voices were raised and there was lots of clapping on shoulders. It was disturbing that some of these people looked like pirates.

What was the news? That Kelso Station had been destroyed? That the pirates had invaded the Federacy Assembly?

The upside of the mysterious good news was that nobody paid attention to Tina and Rex as they passed through the corridor.

She turned away from any place she thought a camera might be hiding.

There were so many pirates around all of a sudden. She had never seen that many in this station before. Had they come out of the closed half of the station?

The pirates and associates talked excitedly in groups and many went in the same direction as Tina and Rex: in the direction of where the ships were moored.

Tina waited for a moment to let a big noisy group of them go past, but they just kept coming, and they didn’t look at her and Rex at all.

“Something has definitely happened,” she said.

“You don’t say.”

“I wonder what it is.”

“It looks like something is going on in this station, and everyone is rushing to have a look.”

It was a distraction, and distractions were useful for trying to get away. But it came at the wrong time. Rasa was still in the office, and Tina couldn’t see—without knowing what was happening—how they would be able to use the distraction.

She increasingly felt that Finn had been right about the danger of coming here. Aurora was a very high-profile location on the pirates’ map. But if she admitted she’d been wrong, Finn would probably gloat over it all the way to Olympus. And that was an awfully long time to listen to his gloating.

Still, more and more people came out of doors and passages and went in the same direction.

The route to the ship went through several lift foyers that gave access to different sections of the docking structures, some for small ships, some for residents of the station, some for large ships. In the largest of these halls, many people crowded around a lift door, watching a screen that hung above the exit.

Many of them were pirates making no secret of what they were, in full outfit. Some wore badges on their jackets, presumably showing to which shipworld they belonged.

A number of them also were people with warty skin. Tina did notice that the interaction between the shipworld pirates and the warty pirates was sparse. They didn’t often stand together. They didn’t talk to each other.

“It seems it’s mainly pirates,” Rex said. He could see over the heads of the crowd. “It looks like they’re celebrating something.”

The giant screen on the wall was now showing a live projection of a ship being docked at the station. This was definitely Aurora Station. The umbilicals were in place, and station staff were opening the access tube doors.

“That looks like a Federacy ship,” Rex said in a low voice.

It did, too. Not just that. It was a Federacy Force warship. She wasn’t sure of the type, because a portion of the ship was obstructed by the station structure, but the top half of the Federacy’s crest with the Great Deer constellation was visible on the side.

Tina and Rex got stuck in the crowd, because it was so busy it was impossible to get through. The people around them talked excitedly. From the conversations, it was clear that most were sympathetic to the pirates. The rumour went that the pirate fleet had captured a Federacy Star Fighter. It was the first time it happened, and such a prize it was, too.

“I hope they will let us see inside,” one of the people around them said.

“How many crew are in the ship?” someone else asked.

“Yes, how are they going to deal with those people?”

Someone else said, “They’ll probably have a public punishment.”

“No, they’ll give the crew to the farm.”

Farm? What farm?

The press of bodies around them grew more intense as people continued to come into the hall.

Several of the warty people took up position behind them.

“Don’t look behind you,” she told Rex in a low voice. “They might recognise us.”

She still felt the prick of their gazes in her neck.

The lift door opened, and people started cheering. A single man came out, raising his hands, balled into fists, above his head. He wore a metal-studded jacket of dark leather, a broad pirate belt with fearsome trophies like an axe and a knife with a huge blade, and knee-high boots. His face was unrecognisable as human, his skin dark red and warty. Long tentacles dangled from the line of his jaw.

He gave a loud cry.

People in the hall cheered.

“What’s he saying?” Rex asked. He held up the display on his arm with a translation function enabled, but the shouts and cheers from the crowd yielded nothing except a squiggly line across the display.

A small icon popped up in the corner. “It says it has a positive identification.”

“Huh, so it does. You’re getting the hang