Project Charon 2 Patty Jansen (readict .TXT) 📖

was getting to be more independent, and he sometimes feared for what his future might bring. He might accidentally stumble into a difficult situation.

“He just moves so quickly with all the technology,” Thor said. “I have trouble getting my hands on stuff so that I can catch up with what he’s doing.”

Tina hadn’t even tried. While Rex was working in his workshop at Gandama, he’d been constantly talking to other people.

“Don’t you worry what Jens gets up to occasionally?” Tina asked.

“All the time. He’s a good kid. He got a good scare when he discovered that lab and lost his friend, and he knows this is serious business. But I often worry that he’s still a kid and will do something dumb.”

“What about girls?”

Thor snorted. “He’s a bit young for that sort of thing, isn’t he?”

“I don’t think so.”

How easy would it be for Jens to eye the girls. His father couldn’t even see what he was doing.

“Does Rex get up to that sort of thing? You know…”

“We have a girl in our crew the same age as him. You know Rasa. I suspect there might be something going on there.”

“And you object?”

“I don’t object as much as I don’t want him to get into trouble.”

Thor laughed. “I suspect that without this kind of ‘trouble’ neither of the two boys would exist.”

True. “But Rex is so young. He’s just a boy.”

“They grow up quickly. Just as well. It’s not a kind world. Frankly, the boys could do a lot worse than messing with girls.”

Also true. “I just don’t want him to suffer for silly mistakes.”

“Jens is my mistake. His mother is a bitch. He shouldn’t have existed if I’d had half a brain. Yet he’s the best thing in my life.”

The sound of a door opening came from within the apartment. Jens and Rex came into the living room.

Jens looked from Tina to his father. “Why did you stop talking? Were you talking about us?”

“Of course we were,” Thor said. “Because teenage boys are the most important people in the world.”

Jens snorted. Rex met Tina’s eyes. He was much less a little boy than his friend. Yes, they grew up very quickly.

She should probably let go of her moral panic at the thought of him having sex with a girl. But she was still serious about not letting him blunder into parenthood in the way she had. If she still could.

They had breakfast and then started making plans.

The first trouble was convincing the others that she should go alone. Rex didn’t want to hear of it, but she said she’d thought about it a lot and Rex was simply too tall, too visible and too memorable for anyone guarding the entrance to the agricultural section not to notice.

“A middle-aged woman is invisible, especially an ugly, wrinkled middle-aged woman wearing a tool belt. If I say I’m coming to fix something, no one is going to ask questions or suspect I’m up to something. I can easily poke around and pretend I’m lost. That’s not so easy when I have this gleaming, strong, threatening companion with me.”

“So now I’m too awesome,” Rex said.

“You are a lot of things, but ordinary and bland is not one of them.”

“But what if someone discovers you and locks you up?”

“It’s a last resort, but one way to discover where prisoners are kept is to become one.”

Rex, Thor and Jens all protested at the same time.

“You can’t do that, Mum,” Rex said.

“I can, because I have you. Because you can get into their computer systems. Before I go, I want you two to find out how to disable their systems, and when I give the go ahead, do it.”

Rex protested. “So you just want me to sit here behind the computer? You’re not exactly making use of my awesomeness here.”

“Listen to the second half of the plan.”

“It had better be good.” But she could hear in his voice that he was enjoying himself.

“All right. I go through the agricultural entrance. But we all know something sinister is going on in some of those chambers. I am going to ‘accidentally’ blunder into them, and I’ll record the experience. You are then going to create a ruckus by sending those recordings to whoever you think will get angry about it.”

“That’d be the entire station,” Thor said.

“The more people, the better. If you couldn’t motivate those scientists to speak out, we’ll do it for them. Then they can back up my recordings with their knowledge. Whatever I record, you’re going to spread it through the entire station using your awesome knowledge about hacking things. So, basically, we’re going to make sure Artan is so busy putting out fires in the station population that he’s less likely to notice that his position is compromised in a lot of different ways.”

“I don’t know about that,” Thor said. “That man is extremely dangerous.”

“I have no intention of coming face to face with him. He doesn’t know me. I’m just a random maintenance technician and, if I’m asked, I will be a station resident looking for a friend who went missing. I’ll be using my second ID.”

Rex exclaimed, “No, Mum, you’re not going alone! He’ll put you into one of those tubes.”

“Do I look like I want to turn into a toad? I’m probably worth far more to him alive than dead.”

“But only if he knows who you are.”

True. Well, there were risks. It was not to be helped. Tina was going to enter the “dark zone” of the station through the docks area by pretending to be an emergency maintenance technician. Thor said he had some friends who might be able to provide her with suitable clothing and other outfits.

She would make sure that the tool kit would contain a few items that could be used as weapon and she would make sure she’d carry some under her clothes as well. One that she particularly liked was a testing rod that you probed into narrow spaces to test the health of connections.