Project Charon 2 Patty Jansen (readict .TXT) 📖

from it. Whether it’s an animal or plant, it needs nourishment and light provides the energy to turn that nourishment into tissue.”

When she was doing experiments with the material, one of the things that worried her was the material’s unlimited capability to grow and morph into different types of structures. Given enough light and nourishment, a simple dish with a few specks of dust would produce an incredible amount of tissue in a short period.

She told him about her experiments with Project Charon and how she had first become concerned with the repeated health problems of the people who worked there.

“Do you know that almost no one of the workers there is still alive, apart from you?” he said in a low voice.

“What happened to the others?”

“They died of infections, even after they were promoted out of the Force, and many of them simply disappeared. Of course we know that some of them have gone to the pirates.”

“Dexter,” Tina said.

“That is the rumour, but I’m not sure I believe it.”

“How so? Do you have any evidence?”

“There is no evidence to the contrary. There is no evidence that he went to the pirates.”

“But he sold the material to them.”

“He sold the material to a company that he might not have been aware was allied with the pirates, and there are some records that say that he regretted his choice.”

“After he was expelled from the Force.”

“As it always goes.”

Tina wasn’t sure how much she believed this. Dexter and remorse didn’t go together well. As far as she knew, Dexter had arranged the meeting knowing full well that external companies who wanted to buy the rift dust might not share the Force’s ethics and aims. It would have been stupid of him not to think of the consequences.

“When’s the last time you saw Dexter?” she asked.

“I’m not entirely sure,” Arkady said. “Remember, I was never in the Force and didn’t have much contact with any of them, other than that I became interested after my brother met his fate.”

“Did you see Dexter after that?”

“I never met him personally, but as a scientist, he was part of some virtual communities where I’m also a member. He burst onto the scene, strutted around exuding a lot of confidence that he was going to solve all the problems in the world, and then he vanished. That was soon after my brother disappeared.”

Tina had lost contact with Dexter a few years later, after he paid for Rex’s first harness. She’d been angry with him and hadn’t kept up the correspondence. Now she felt that maybe she should have. She’d barely read his sparse remarks about what he was doing, back when he might still have hoped the split was temporary.

Arkady continued, “But Dexter is just one of the Project Charon employees that we’ve failed to locate.”

“Jake Monterra,” Tina said.

“He’s at Kelso Station.”

“He’s associated with the pirates. He’s also still alive.”

“That’s all I know about him. The pirates are very secretive, and if you’re close enough to them that you can see what they’re doing, your life is in grave danger. We don’t want to give ourselves away, so it all has to be done in secret. It’s not that we don’t have any information at all, but that we don’t know how true some of it is, and it’s impossible to check the sources. We can’t act on rumours that turn out to be untrue.”

“A true scientist,” Thor said. He had been silent during most of the discussion. “I think you are all far too careful. I get frustrated with you lot. Meanwhile these people get away with capturing civilians and military personnel and turning them into giant grey octopuses.”

Arkady left not much later.

Tina liked to pretend that losing Evelle was nothing to her, that all those arguments in their unit at Project Charon were worth nothing, and that it was perfectly normal for fifteen-year-olds to run away from a safe home. That it wasn’t something about her and her terrible skills as a mother. That Evelle was just very independent at a young age and nothing would have kept her home.

But at night, she could still see the moment Evelle walked out the door. She had done it before, and Tina thought nothing of it at the time.

Only much later had she heard that Evelle had taken a shuttle to Pandana where she had signed up while lying about having permission from her parents.

They were about to go to bed when Rex announced that he’d received a message from Finn.

“Is anything wrong?” Tina asked.

“He says he managed to crack a private channel and that’s why he could send a message. They’re still within view of the station. He says Rasa is telling him to unfold the habitat because she’s ill all the time. Apparently the geese escaped twice and they’ve already spent hours trying to vacuum the poop and feathers from the cabin.”

“Sounds like a lot of fun.”

Chapter Twenty-One

As usual, Tina slept poorly because the sounds and smells of the room were unfamiliar to her.

She thought about how Finn and Rasa were getting on with each other and how Finn was dealing with five geese in zero gravity. The ship wouldn’t be able to fold out the habitat since they needed to be able to return to the station quickly. Rasa wouldn’t like it because she suffered with motion sickness. She had suffered this at the start of the trip, too. At least Tina hoped it was motion sickness and had nothing to do with her activities with Rex in the closed shower cubicle.

After a night of tossing and turning, Tina got up early and snuck out of the room without disturbing Rex.

Thor was already up. “Tea?” he asked.

It was uncanny how he was able to figure out who entered just from listening to her soft footfalls on the ground.

Tina took tea from him. He sat at the table. While drinking tea, they compared notes for bringing up teenage boys. He said Jens