by Patty Jansen
For a long time, an uneasy silence lingered in the kitchen.
The only sounds were the ones Tina made while cutting up roots and cooking cactus fruit until it turned soft, and then putting it through the blender.
“Is it true what you said, that you may have to sell the shop?” Rex said after a long while.
“I don’t want to, but there may not be another option.”
“So what did that man want? I didn’t quite understand that.” He sounded apologetic.
“When I started the shop, I needed money to buy the land and the buildings. It wasn’t much, but I didn’t have any money, so I went to a creditor. He now wants to be repaid.”
“Can he just do that?”
“He can. He has to give notice and I have to find someone else.”
“Isn’t that what loan brokers are for?”
“They are, but it won’t be so simple. At the time I bought the shop, people thought Gandama would be the next Peris City and that a lot of people would come here. Houses were worth a lot more than they are now. I’m going to have difficulty finding someone who will take over a loan that’s more than the shop is worth.” And that was if she could find someone at all.
“If you can’t find someone, then what?” His eyes were big with fear. Like this, he was so much still a little boy.
Tina shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m going to talk to some people in town tomorrow. You’ll have to look after the shop.”
He nodded and for once didn’t protest.
Rex didn’t say much during dinner and afterwards said he would do some more work. It had been a long time since Rex had done that, but Tina held back her smart remarks about it. He was shaken and it showed.
She went back into the shop, too, and retrieved her computer from the drawer and went through the books. But a chunk of money big enough to repay the loan—or even just the difference between what the shop was worth and what lenders would offer—remained elusive.
She interrupted her search to take Rex to bed.
In the specially adapted bathroom, she took his harness off, took the limbs off the attachment points that were installed in the endings of the arms and legs he never had, and then his pad and the containers that collected his waste. The urine had leaked a bit and the skin had again become red. She’d have to replace the container, but replacement parts for the harness were not easy to get. She’d better put in an order now, and maybe the part would show up in a few months’ time.
She washed him and oiled his skin and then she gave him a clean pad. Leaving the harness and the limbs in the bathroom, she carried him to his bed. Like this, he was still very much her baby. Then to think that having babies was Dexter’s idea and she had never really wanted them.
Evelle had probably borne the brunt of that. She had been a difficult child from the beginning. Never wanted to sleep, never wanted to eat what was on offer, or at all, never wanted to listen. Had tantrums like Rex when she was eleven. Had the boobs and batting eyelashes to match.
She did well at school, but the moment Tina walked in that door from work, Evelle started poking figurative needles under her skin.
They’d sent her to the Federacy Force’s officer’s school to cool her down. She had gone straight into the Flight Division after that.
By now she was probably on her way to becoming a hard-nosed captain in the Federacy Force. So father, so daughter.
“Would you really find a job somewhere?” Rex interrupted her thoughts.
Tina was already sorry that she had told him about this. It was not fair to burden him with more worry. Things were hard enough for him in life already. This was her task to sort out.
“I will see what I can do. I’m sure there is a solution.” Hopefully, if she kept repeating this to herself, she would find a solution. “Whatever I do, you will always come first.”
He nuzzled her while she carried him from the bathroom through the hallway.
Rex still slept in the same crib she had used for him as a toddler. She had tried a big bed, but he tended to roll around and had been very distressed when he fell out one day and she hadn’t heard him until morning.
She lowered him in the crib and pulled the sheet and a thin blanket over him. He often got cold outside the harness because his skin was so soft and pale.
Tina had kept his room free of invading technology. Already, there was so much metal and electronics in the house to help him. The bedroom should stay simple and calming.
One day, there would be a robot to help him out of bed and put him in his harness, but for now, she would have to do it for him.
She turned off the light in his room and walked down the hallway with a feeling of doom coming over her. Now she would need to figure out how to keep the roof over their heads.
She sat at the messy desk, her head in her hands.
All her carefully laid plans to make sure Rex could survive without her were falling to pieces. She had built the shop so that he would have an independent income. When there was a downturn, she had made up for the shortfall in security equipment sales by selling cactuses. Her plan was to pay off the loan within ten years, and then, before any potential creditors knew she had a secret reserve, access that money and buy the rest of the equipment Rex needed.
She did not want to access that reserve—besides, it would be impossible to get any money out within three days.
What else could she do? Use her reserve anyway and get a better-paying job?
A corner of a yellow envelope stuck out from under a couple of boxes. A few weeks ago, she had received that strange letter from Jake Monterra asking her to work for him. Jake had worked under her in the Perseus Agency’s research facility at Project Charon, fifteen years ago.
Back then he had been shy young man, just out of training. Command told her that they employed him because he was a hard worker, but she never saw any evidence of that. Oh, he did the work and was a not a bad young man, but reality didn’t match up with his excellent credentials on paper. Of course it wouldn’t be the first time that had happened.
As colleagues, they were not close. Tina didn’t even think she had spoken to him specifically about her concerns with the project, and she had spoken to a lot of people. He just seemed too young and innocent to burden him with her concerns.
And here he was, writing to her to consider working for a new agency.
Tina couldn't imagine what prompted him to contact her now. It should have been clear to all that she had no interest whatsoever in returning to the employment of the Federacy Force, and that the Force probably wouldn’t want her anyway.
The message had come from Kelso Station, with no further identifying details, meaning that it had probably been sent from some secret location by way of Kelso, where it had been made to look as if the message originated there.
There was no Federacy Force base on Kelso. It was a commercial station.
At the time she had dismissed his communication as just another scheme for him to get a cut of whatever employment incentives they had going on. Likely the Force needed new recruits, and he had thought an easy way out was to re-employ the ones who had already worked for the Force. Easy for him to earn a bit of money.
But was that really all there was to it?
From her memory, employment schemes and recruitment drives went on constantly. But at the Perseus Agency, the secret arm of the Federacy Force, they never had much to do with such things, nor did they have much opportunity to contact people outside the Force. The official line was that no one was to know where the Perseus Agency’s headquarters were.
He would have had to make an effort to send her that. And for what? She bet the Agency’s employees were excluded from the recruitment drive’s benefits anyway.
Or maybe she was wrong about that.
Whatever the reason, in light of what was happening now, she might need to rethink her position. Ask what he wanted. If it was a return to space, then no way, but some jobs could be done remotely.
Gah, she’d make some tea before starting.
On the way to the kitchen, she came past the open back door.
On nights like these, when the desert chill bit into exposed areas, the cactuses would huddle up against the back wall of the house. Tina had to put pavers at the bottom of the steps to keep them from forming an impenetrable barrier into the garden. They didn’t like the pavers. But for some reason, tonight, they had all remained under the pergola near the back fence.
That was odd.
Tina ducked into the kitchen to turn the kettle on and went out the back door.
The night was clear. The breeze had almost died and the sky was ink-black with a clear band of twinkling stars. Cayelle had three moons, and two of those were visible over the roof of the house. But they were both small and neither produced much light. The larger moon had not yet risen.
A faint glow to the north marked the location of Peris City.
It was too dark to see the jagged rock peaks on the horizon that were normally visible over the back fence.
Janusz’s house stood to the left, but she also couldn’t see it from here.
Tina inspected the area around the back door. Armoured armadillos would sometimes break into the back yard. Big and heavy, they couldn’t climb, but they could dig and were strong, so they sometimes pushed over fence posts that normally kept them out. They could destroy a crop overnight, and they loved cactuses.
But no armadillo, nor any sign of one, materialised.
Yet the cactuses were distraught. Something bothered them out there.
Maybe it was the light. She turned off the outside light and turned on the light in the pergola.
Something really big—a shadow too dark to make out—ran from the area that was her mini-research station and vaulted the fence.
Holy crap, what was that? It looked like some kind of monkey. Except she didn’t know any local creature that looked like that. None of the desert creatures reached above her knee.
Heart thudding, Tina grabbed hold of a broom and walked down the path. She wasn’t selling the cactuses, and would certainly not let anything eat them either.
The cactuses had already started moving towards the back of the house.
Underneath the pergola, she found a container with a syrupy substance. Some of it was on the ground, and trails of the stuff over the ground showed that the cactuses had been attracted by it. Tina scooped some of it up with a rock and sniffed it. It smelled like syrup.
What was it doing here?
It could contain poison.
Janusz didn’t like the cactuses, because he said they attracted armadillos. But she didn’t think Janusz would poison them. He’d had almost fifteen years to do so and never had. Had the monkey-creature left the container behind?
She took the container to the back steps of the house. Then she rolled out the hose and cleaned any trace of the syrup off the tiles.
Best to be sure.
It was disturbing, especially since Simon Fosnet had offered her so much money for the cactus collection. Maybe someone was trying to scare her into accepting his deal.
She didn’t understand why he wanted them, because if he needed money for his medical treatment—whatever was wrong with his skin—then he needed to sell them first.
She should find out which collector he planned to sell them to, since they were very clearly hers, and reputable dealers would recognise her stock.
Tina was about to go back into the house when another sound echoed through the desert night—the squeak of the roller door that led into the side of the storeroom.
Someone was in the shop.
Shit. The activity out here was just a decoy.
Tina dropped the hose and the broom, looking around for a better weapon.
The only thing that remotely qualified was a shovel. She had a gun—long unused, and when had she last serviced the thing?—but she kept it at the back of a locked cupboard in her bedroom.
That was her only thought now: the gun.
Very quietly, she crept through the garden, back to the steps to the door.
The kitchen was dark, but she knew the way. Lucky she kept chairs out of the way because of Rex.
She made her way into the hall, where it was pitch dark. Her bedroom was the first door on the right. She tiptoed into the room, all the while listening for sounds in the workshop. But it was quite a distance away.
She pulled out her trusted old Fireseed301 from the back of the cupboard.
It was the only thing she had kept from her service in the Force. Her personal weapon, now much superseded, but the chamber was full, even if it would take a few minutes for it to charge up enough to fire.
Tina took the battery out of the charging pack—she could still do this with her eyes closed and without making a sound—and slipped it into the into the bottom of the handgrip.
A tiny green light flashed on the control panel.
No matter the pride she used to take in her weapons training and her better-than-average hit rate, she was a biologist, not an experienced fighter, and she’d only ever fired it in anger at some stubbornly invasive armadillos—and hit them, too.
But even her rudimentary military training was more than most people had received, and right now, it was all that stood between the attackers and the safety of her house.
She was not going to let them harass her, and if they thought a middle-aged woman with a disabled son was going to be easy prey, she was going to give them every reason to reconsider that opinion.
She made her way down the hallway to the workshop, putting her feet down carefully so that the floorboards didn’t creak. The door to Rex’s room was open, and when she passed, she heard the rustling of sheets. If he was awake, she hoped he’d remain quiet.
She arrived at the door of the workshop and peered into the darkness, listening for any sound.
Then Rex said, “Mum, what's that? What is going on?"
Someone took in a sharp breath inside the warehouse. Next there was a crash, probably of the display stand near the door into the shop. Yes, it was the display stand, because Tina could make out the piece of white foam board that displayed a selection of tiny microphones on the floor.
And the silhouette of a person, backlit by the faint light that came in from the door to the shop. Someone scrambled to his feet, bent over to gather whatever he had dropped.
She lifted the gun.
The ready light blinked on.
But Tina couldn’t see anything in the pitch darkness of the shop. The Fireseed was only effective against living beings, because its beam vaporised water inside soft tissue. She wasn’t going to waste a shot when she couldn’t see.
Scuffling and stumbling noises came out of the dark as the intruder moved. The roller door at the back of the workshop was open. She guessed that was where the intruder headed.
She lifted the Fireseed so that the tiny screen of the electronic sight displayed the rectangle of the opening.
She waited.
And waited.
Was the intruder smart enough to realise what she was doing?
No. Something moved in the opening.
Tina held her breath. Come on, come on.
The intruder jumped out the back door and ran into the yard.
Tina fired the gun. The white laser beam crossed the dark space and hit him square in the back.
He yelped but kept running, disappearing into the yard.
She ran to the entrance. Damn. He was wearing armour. Judging by the sounds, he was scaling the back fence.
Tina debated whether she would give chase when she heard a familiar sound that haunted her from the past.
The charging of a plasma gun was a sound you never wanted to hear in a conflict, and one you were unlikely to forget.
Chapter Five
In two steps
and half a second, Tina had backed away from the door and had jumped inside the workshop.
Just in time. A white-hot beam of plasma hit the outside wall next to the door. Its blinding light lit up the yard and the inside of the workshop—where she could see that the intruder had pulled drawers out of the cabinet that held boxes with smaller items: clips, connectors, chips and that sort of thing.
Tina pulled down the shutter behind her, knowing that the next beam might well hit the door and would simply vaporise it. In fact she didn't understand why they hadn't already done that. Maybe it was just a warning, although there was never anything “just” about plasma guns. Especially not this one. It sounded suspiciously like a Q-blaster. Where had these criminal bandits even obtained a weapon like that? And what business did they have firing it at her? What were these people looking for? Not cactuses, clearly.
She pressed herself against the wall next to the door, heart thudding.
There were least two people, the intruder and the one with the Q-blaster. She had to be smart. As research officer, she had never received extensive military training, a subject of continuous hilarity amongst the “real” military. But she had taken pride in performing above average for the small amount of training she had received.
One thing she remembered clearly: don’t rush into doing anything stupid. Most of the time, brain power trumps fancy weaponry.
Another thing she also knew: you didn’t argue with a Q-blaster. The training officer, a tall, hard-faced and clean-shaven man who took no bullshit, had said about them, “If you see one of these babies, get out of the way quick smart and leave the fighting to the combat units.”
She remembered wondering, what if there were no specialised combat units?
Every class of recruits had that special person stupid enough to stick their neck out and voice those questions. In her group, it was an innocent-sounding woman who had been appointed as a medical officer and was probably a lot more knowledgeable than she sounded, at least about subjects other than combat.